And now the servants of the system began to melt away. Through side entrances and alleys the secret policemen began to scuttle out. When the great crowd surged forward, those few caught in the courtyards of the prison were trampled underfoot.
Carole Yates found herself swept down one of the green-painted corridors. All around her men tore filing cabinets from the walls and emptied their contents through shattered windows. Thick wads of ribbon-tied records were seized by the crowd below and thrown onto blazing fires in exultant contravention of their red stamp: To Be Preserved Forever.
She fought her way through the mass of men at the entrance to the basement rooms as prisoners were handed up across the heads of the crowd, shaven, gray-clad figures, some still trailing chains.
Punching, scratching, fighting with her elbows, she followed him as he was passed across the heads of the crowded men. Only in the courtyard could she reach him, lead him to a corner, lower him down into the oil-stained snow and hold him in her arms.
In the courtyard of the most dreaded prison in the world she rocked him slowly in her arms. “You’re safe, darling,” she whispered. “The Kremlin’s burning. The people of Moscow have risen.”
She stroked his tom mouth and bruised cheeks. “I will never part from you again, Alexei,” she said, using the Russian form of his name for the first time. “Wherever we go, we go together.”
“And wherever we stay?” he forced the words through swollen lips.
“And wherever we stay,” she said turning, on her knees in the snow, her arm cradling his head, as the exultant crowds roared and chanted around them and the first flames illuminated the dark, dark passages of Stalin’s Lubyanka.
A FAR LONGER TRAVAIL
Chapter Forty-Eight
Like some foul cloud the smoke hung above the rooftops. In the dawn, flames and the energy of hate and fear had burned out. From every mound of rubble wisps of smoke rose and faltered. Exhausted men slept beside the dead as the snow fell in some soft pacification of the fury that had been visited upon Moscow.
Encircling the city eight regular Russian divisions, withdrawn from the Transylvania border, awaited the order of Natalya Roginova to advance.
In her speech to the great assemblage in the Oval Room at Archangelskoye, President of the Russian Republic Roginova referred, for the first time, to “the former Soviet Union.” While leaders of the one-time vassal states of the Russian Empire applauded, she revealed to the world the new political shape of one-sixth of the earth’s surface. The newly constituted Republic of Russia was to stretch, as it had for 200 years, from Leningrad to the Pacific Ocean. The new Republic actively rejected political, military or economic responsibility for any of the autonomous republics of the former Soviet Union. It proposed, however, the closest possible links with the Slav nations of the Ukraine and Belorussia. It specifically renounced any military interest in the states of Eastern Europe. The enormous military power of the Russian Republic was, however, available to provide military advice to those nations which requested it.
Then, to a stunned Western world, she announced the new Russian-Japanese State Treaty. In return for the vast resources of Japanese technology and capital, the Russian Republic was to supply energy, raw materials and military assistance in the most far-reaching program ever agreed between two nations on earth.
“What power on earth,” she asked, “can menace our Rodina, united in this new commonwealth of nations, our great resources linked to the capital and talent of our Japanese neighbor?”
At a simple ceremony on the eve of the first Christmas to be publicly celebrated in Russia since 1917, Natalya Roginova laid a wreath on the grave of Igor Alexandrovich Bukansky. Her efforts to trace Lydia Petrovna and Bukansky’s child had been unsuccessful. Rumor reported that they had fled to the West.
Surrounded by her ministers and a group of senior Army officers she had stood in the biting wind while a single trumpeter played a lament. Before the party filed away, the snow was already recovering the grave.
Perhaps the wheel of fortune is too naturally warped to run true. But I am completing the last pages of this book, where I first conceived it, in the de Nerval château in central France. My mother’s blue-leather traveling trunk lies before me. She had carried it and her child, myself (with old Sophie de Nerval’s help) hundreds upon hundreds of miles across Russia, to the refugee camps which were set up on Russia’s borders during the last agony of the Soviet Union. In one of these camps she died, still a young woman, but not before she had collected accounts, memoirs, copies of diaries from others who had fled and survived the Sovietschina.
I owe to the obsessions of a snobbish old woman my de Nerval name. But I owe, too, to that same Sophie de Nerval, my discovery of the papers my mother had collected. Where else would the old lady will the trunk but to that château in France where she imagined, rightly or not, she had been conceived?
I close the tattered leather trunk before me. In my hand I hold one last scrap of paper. I will include this, too.
The night before she had begun her long journey to the West, my mother received a package from a hospital orderly. The last memoir written by my father, Igor Bukansky, was placed in the trunk. The contents of the letter accompanying the memoir, she never revealed. Only the words on a separate scrap of paper:
Copyright
Copyright © Donald James 1982
The right of Donald James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1982 by HarperCollins.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.