“Then, at the end of 1918, his wife became ill. All four parents were still alive and all dependent on him. He convinced himself that he needed the extra rations, and from there it was a short step to buying coupons he knew were forged. Which made him an enemy of the revolution.
“He was caught almost immediately. And he sat there in my office, frightened of course, but not without dignity, and he said, ‘What would you have done in my place?’ And I had no answer for him. Or rather, no answer that would have been relevant. It didn’t matter what I would have done—how could my principles as an individual determine the rightness of his actions? He’d done what he thought was right.”
As Komarov paused and reached for his glass, Caitlin felt sure he could still see the man in question on the other side of his desk. “What happened to him?” she asked after several moments of silence.
“Oh, he was shot that evening. My duties as a Chekist were clear. That is the point. For a long time, I carried on interrogating prisoners like a policeman, treating them as people, because only in that way can you begin to understand their motivation. I hadn’t realized that motivation was now beside the point and that I could no longer afford to treat our enemies like people. The strain was just too much. Because they had principles, too, and theirs often seemed as consistent with who they were and where the revolution had taken us as mine were with who I was. It was impossible. We could have turned the prisons into endless seminars on political philosophy. Everything seemed arbitrary. Everything but power.
“I had the power, so my truth was the one that counted. I believed in that truth; I believed I was right, and that had to be enough.”
“We can never be certain,” she said tentatively.
“No, but we must act as if we are. So many comrades refuse to take that responsibility. ‘Power is the only truth’—that’s what they say. It sounds convincing if you say it loud and often, but it’s nonsense. Power may be essential, but it isn’t a truth. If we want a victory that lives up to our dreams, we can’t afford to forget the truth, so we simply have to suspend it. We have to split ourselves, keep the truth—in all its complexity—safe in the back of our minds, while we act as if there’s only the one simple gospel and one right way to do things. And since, when we choose our one and only truth, we are also choosing to condemn those who think differently, we must take the responsibility on our own shoulders and not pretend that history is making our choices for us. That’s one form of cowardice. The other is refusing to choose because all that means is that you’re passing the burden of choice to someone else.”
She gazed at him through the smoke from her cigarette. Was he testing her? she wondered. Did she deserve to be tested? “I understand,” she said. And she thought she did. “But what if the cost is too high?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
He wanted to hear her say it, she thought. For her sake or his?
“Take men like Arbatov and my husband,” she said. “They supported and fought for the revolution, but now even people like them refuse to abide by your simple gospel. Doesn’t that make you wonder whether we’ve narrowed the path too much, whether we’re closing the door on too many people? On too many ideas?”
“That is the danger,” he agreed.
“Well, how do we avert it? When I’m working at the Zhenotdel, I feel positive. There are plenty of days when it feels like one step forward, two steps back, but generally speaking, I feel that we’re still breaking ground, that month by month we’re still opening doors.” She paused to stub out her cigarette. “But lately I’ve begun to feel that all this is happening in some sort of cocoon. And that when the day comes for us to break out, we’ll find that the rest of the party has been moving in the opposite direction. And the rest of the party, being much stronger than us, will first set aside our work and then forbid us from spinning any more cocoons.”
His grunt sounded appreciative.
“But giving up won’t get us anywhere,” she went on. “So we put our fears aside and go back to work. What else can we do?”
“You could walk away,” Komarov suggested.
“Because this isn’t my real home?”
“Because you seem to believe—wrongly I hope, but maybe not—that the struggle for women’s rights in Russia over the next few years won’t get the priority you think it deserves. Maybe somewhere else it will.”
“Maybe.” Was he giving her some sort of warning? Or just being honest? “But leaving would feel like failure,” she said. “This is where we made the breakthrough, where the future seemed so full of hope.”
“Seemed?” he said. There was more sadness than accusation in his tone.
“Sometimes I fear so,” she conceded. “Sometimes I don’t.”
He gave her a wry smile. “I know what you mean.”
Piatakov opened his eyes to see Chatterji squatting by his side. “It is time to go,” the Indian told him.
He half-walked, half-slid down to where Brady was gazing through his telescope. The moon was high now, the lights of Charjui on the western bank mostly extinguished. The width of this river still astonished Piatakov; the Moskva, the Neva, were streams by comparison. Above their heads the iron bridge blocked out half of the star-filled sky.
“Stealth or force?” he asked the American.
“Stealth, I hope. There have been four or five Chekists sitting around on the quay all day. There’s at least one there now; someone lights a cigarette every so often. But the way I see it, with the moon over there, this bank will mask us for most of the crossing. Once we get nearer, we’ll have to play it by ear.” He stood. “Ready, Durga?”
They slid the boat into the water and clambered in. The hull creaked, but the bottom was bone-dry; Chatterji had stolen well.
The Indian sat in the bow, Brady in front of him at the oars. Piatakov lolled in the stern, wondering how Czar Alexander had felt on his way to meet Napoleon in the middle of the Neman River.
A slight breeze seemed to be following the water downstream. “The mighty Oxus,” Brady drawled softly.
The current was stronger than it looked, but the American’s shoulders were equal to it. He kept the boat close to the bridge on the downstream side, counting off the piers as he passed them in a satisfied murmur. The moon was hanging directly above the upper reaches of the river, loosing a cascade of silver toward them. Like a magic carpet, Piatakov thought.
Soon they were roughly halfway across, both shores looking distant. Piatakov aimed the telescope at the bank they were moving toward. There were several boats at the quay, but they were still too far away for him to pick out theirs.
“Fourteen,” Brady muttered. “Eleven to go.” He was breathing heavily now, and stopped rowing for a minute or so to flex his shoulders and massage his forearms. “Your turn, Sergei,” he said, just as they heard the fast-swelling drumbeat.
A train was coming. The American cursed and took up the oars again. They had drifted more than fifty yards from the shelter of the bridge, and Piatakov could hear the rumble deepen as the approaching locomotive abandoned solid ground and ventured out onto the iron lattice. Soon he could make out the orange glow from the firebox and the pulse of smoke gathering moonlight.
They were still some way downstream from the bridge when the train passed overhead, a line of unlit cars behind the locomotive. As far as Piatakov could see, the driver was staring straight ahead and hadn’t noticed the small craft below. “I don’t think so,” he said in answer to Brady’s inquiring look.