And yet it was one more drop of humanity than I had managed to save that day.
I had no immediate desire to find Vadim and Dmitry. I would have no problem explaining to them why I had returned, against Vadim's instructions, without Maks, but I did not relish the doubting voice in my own head that I knew I must hear as I told them. Though why should I listen to that voice now? It had been happy enough to keep a cowardly silence back in Desna. A man's conscience shouts so much more loudly in the past tense than it ever manages to achieve in the present.
If I was not to see Vadim and Dmitry immediately, then there was only one other place in Moscow that I could go. My intention was simple enough. However cowardly and however shocking it might seem, those souls that were now fleeing the city were acting wisely, and I was going to ensure that Domnikiia would be one of them; to ensure that she had a safe place to go and to give her enough money to provide for her food and travel as she made her way there. At the back of my mind was the fear that the abandonment of Moscow might be the furthest thing possible from her inclination. As I pushed my way through the crowded streets, fending off those citizens unfortunate enough to be travelling on foot and pushing away the blindly searching hands of soldiers who lay dying on open carts, I realized that the city would soon be full of French soldiers; rich, victorious and, above all, amorous French soldiers. Domnikiia could make more from them in a day than she had done of late in a week from the crushed Muscovites. Would she, I wondered, find more popularity as the homely, French Dominique who could remind them of their sweethearts back in Paris or as the exotic, erotic and, most importantly, vanquished Russian Domnikiia? But I was, as I knew well by now, no judge of a Russian's patriotism. When I arrived, she was preparing to leave.
Although it was past one o'clock, well into the brothel's normal trading hours, I arrived to find the door closed and locked. I stepped back into the square and threw a stone up at Domnikiia's window. The window opened and out popped the head of Margarita Kirillovna.
'We're closed,' she snapped.
'Margarita!' I called. She screwed up her eyes as she tried to recognize me. 'Is Domnikiia there?'
Her head disappeared and the window closed again. I waited. Minutes later, I heard the bolts being drawn back at the door. This time, the face that half peeped outside was Domnikiia's. I went over and tried to kiss her, but she smoothly avoided it, beckoning me hurriedly inside and bolting the door behind me. Within, I encountered one of the most beautiful visions of chaos I could ever have imagined. The salon was a mélange of beautiful girls packing their beautiful clothes into trunks, which, though relatively plain, somehow managed to assimilate the beauty of what was going on around them. There were eight girls working at the brothel, and although I had a heart only for one, I had eyes for them all. In their demure, controlled, professional allure they were a temptation to the most puritan of men. In their natural, girlish panic their charm was only augmented by their vitality.
I followed Domnikiia up to her room, where a large trunk took centre stage, half filled with clothes. Margarita came back and forth from her room, adding new layers of attire to the trunk, and as soon as we entered the room, Domnikiia strode over to her wardrobe and began to do the same. She had not spoken a word to me since I had arrived.
As she passed me, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me, but this time it was I who aborted our kiss. I had not seen before, since it had been hidden by the door earlier and by her avoiding my direct gaze since, that she had bruises on her right eye and on her high, round cheek. Her upper lip was split just below her right nostril and though it was not a fresh wound, it still oozed blood from where she had reopened it trying to smile. On her jaw I could also see, now I looked closely, the faint bruising of where she had been held by a large, brutal hand.
Although the very conception made me for a moment despise myself more even than I did her assailant, I felt a thrill of attraction for her run through me that was greater than anything I had felt towards her before. Her beauty was accentuated, not hidden, by the vulnerability endowed upon her by those wounds.
I kissed her lips as lightly as I dared, not wanting to hurt her physically, but neither wanting to suggest any diminution of my passion for her as a consequence of these blemishes.
'Who did this to you?'
'I asked you who Dmitry was,' she replied acerbically. 'I found out.'
'He did this?' I tried to sound disbelieving, but just as I was in my heart of hearts unsurprised by the discovery that Maks had been a spy, so I was unsurprised to find that Dmitry could treat a woman like that for his own ends. I'd never known him do it in the past – but there was no inconsistency I could find between the action and what I knew of his character. 'He wanted to know where Maks was, I suppose.'
She didn't answer, but buried her face in my chest and began to cry. Her self-imposed silence so far had been out of fear that she would be unable to control herself. Now she had told me the one important fact that she had to convey, she indulged herself in the pleasure of the abandonment of self-control, and indulged me in the pleasure of being her comforter. Yet she still had one more thing to tell me.
'But I didn't tell him, Lyosha,' she let out through her sobs. 'I didn't. I didn't.'
I could find in my heart no blame for her for having betrayed Maks to Dmitry, and so I was happy to allow her the deception, both to me and to herself. For me it was a relief that she had had some unarguable justification for telling Dmitry. I had pushed to the back of my mind the suggestion made in Desna by Filipp that Domnikiia had helped them, but it had worried me. Even now, though, I had underestimated Domnikiia.
'I told him,' said Margarita, still shuttling back and forth between her room and the trunk.
'Why?' I asked.
Margarita looked up from the trunk, slightly surprised. Then she gestured towards Domnikiia with her eyes before looking back at me. 'Wouldn't you?'
After a few moments, Domnikiia pulled away from me and continued with her packing.
'Where are you heading to?' I asked.
Domnikiia was still unwilling to talk, so Margarita answered for her. 'Yuryev-Polsky.' It was a sound choice; 150 versts to the north-east and well off the route that the French would take even if they did march beyond Moscow. If they were to go any further, it was generally assumed, it would be north-westwards, towards Petersburg. If the fall of Moscow did not precipitate the fall of Russia then the capture of Petersburg – so the French would reason – most surely would.
'Do you need money?' I asked, taking from my pocket a wad of banknotes, which I had intended to give to them – well, to Domnikiia at any rate.
'No,' Margarita replied, then, realizing she sounded ungrateful, added, 'but thank you. Pyetr Pyetrovich is taking care of all of us.'
I tried to show no reaction to the name. Pyetr Pyetrovich was the owner of the building in which I now stood and – in effect, if not in law – the owner of Domnikiia, Margarita and the other girls. On the few occasions when I had met him, he had seemed most amiable and to be completely understanding of my reasons for visiting Domnikiia. But, just as the girls themselves would change their personalities to please the tastes of the client at hand, I'm sure that he would be all things to all men, so that he might gain their custom.