'I know what you mean,' I said.
'So remember me when you kill them. And Fedya too. Think of us and don't show any mercy.'
I had no time to reply. We had arrived at her 'home'. It was a shantytown, founded in a churchyard a few blocks to the north of where Natalia had found us. Rough tents and awnings had been set up to accommodate perhaps fifty or sixty people. Around the periphery, a sort of market had formed, selling basic foodstuffs and clothing along with more prestigious items that had no doubt been pilfered from nearby houses. While I could not begrudge them the sale of the valuables left behind by evacuees who had no further use for them, I had seen in Natalia and saw now in the others an emaciation which told me they should not be storing up gold in exchange for food, but quite the reverse. Clothing too, though now it seemed like a source of income, would be sadly missed in the winter months in a town two-thirds consumed by fire, even if the French did leave.
She led us through the marketplace to a central area divided up into small cells by rough curtains of thin linen. She took us into one of them, where a man, aged around fifty, sat cross-legged on the muddy floor, tapping nails into a pair of boots. Around him were scattered a few rudimentary possessions, and on the other side of the cubicle a sheepskin marked the position of their bed; a roughly tied bundle of cloth serving as a pillow. On this, we laid Dmitry.
'This is my father,' said Natalia. 'He's a cobbler,' she added unnecessarily.
I held out my hand. 'Aleksei Ivanovich.'
He held out his in return. 'Boris,' he said. 'Boris Mihailovich.'
'Aleksei is an officer,' said Natalia proudly.
'Then I'm sure he would prefer it if you did not announce the fact too loudly, my dear,' replied Boris Mihailovich. He held out the boots to her. 'Now take these back to Lieutenant… whoever it was, and make sure you get from him what he promised.'
Natalia took the boots and scurried off. Throughout my life I had, I hoped, served my country and served my superior officers, but I had never had to work in the way that a valet serves his master or a cobbler serves his customer. The contrast between Natalia's desire for the death of every Frenchman in Moscow and her willingness to take money off them was one that I had not experienced; at least not from that side of the deal. Did Domnikiia, I wondered, harbour the same ambiguous feelings towards her clients? I hoped that, with one exception, she did and I believed truly in that one exception and in its being me, but I would have given much to be with her then and to hear her reassurance that it was so. I would have given much to be with her, whatever she chose to say.
'How's your friend?' asked Boris, inclining his head towards Dmitry. His face was filled with warm curiosity. The whites of his eyes were a jaded yellow and he had to squint to focus on me, but I have rarely looked into a face in which I felt such an immediate trust. The question was not conversational, but asked out of genuine concern for a man to whom he had never spoken. He had picked up a new pair of boots to work on and sat hunched over them, his eyes close to his work with the short-sightedness that is the mark of expertise in a true craftsman. When he spoke to me, he glanced upwards, the wrinkles gathering across his forehead like waves in the sea, stopping at an abrupt line to leave the bald dome of his head smooth and unperturbed.
'He's badly burnt, but I think he'll be all right.' I leaned over to Dmitry. He was breathing more normally now. The burns to his face, hands and forearms were painful, but not deep enough to kill. 'We will leave you before nightfall.'
'No, no, no. Leave us when you will, but there is no rush. I love my Natalia as much as I did her mother, but a daughter can never be a son. My son, Fyodor Borisovich, was a soldier too. He died at Smolensk. He was eighteen.' He paused, lost in the memories of his son, then he reached over to a pile of rags beside him, slipping his hand underneath.
'Here,' he said, pulling out his hand and bringing with it a bottle of vodka, half full. 'I cannot drink with Natalia like I could with Fedya.' He opened the bottle and put it to his lips, drinking no more than a gulp. He wiped the top. 'I'm sorry I have no glasses,' he said as he handed the bottle to me.
I sat down on the ground, stretching my burnt leg out in front of me in hope of easing the continuous, dull pain. I deliberately drank as much from the bottle as he had; no more and no less. I offered the bottle back to him with a smile and an utterly heartfelt 'thank you'.
'No, you drink as much as you please,' he told me. 'I'm sure my daughter has been too polite to tell you, but you look appalling; worse than your friend over there.' I recalled how Dmitry had been shocked at my appearance the previous evening. The night's activities could have done me no favours. But at his mention of Dmitry I remembered that my friend was in greater need of a drink than either myself or the old cobbler. I held the bottle to his lips and he swallowed the few drops that fell into his mouth. He coughed a little and muttered something under his breath. I tried to force some more of the spirit between his lips, but he held them shut and turned his head away.
Once more, I offered the bottle back to Boris Mihailovich. He took another small swig, before handing it back to me. 'You drink it, Aleksei. Fedya can drink no more, so you should have it.'
I took a gulp, taking more pleasure in it than I had the first, feeling the fire trickle down my throat and through my chest before spreading like a fountain around the walls of my stomach. I took a second gulp and felt the same feeling of refreshment. I knew that the man was giving me the last of his supply, that I should be grateful and abstemious, but I could not. I took gulp after delicious gulp until the bottle was dry.
If he was upset to see the last of his vodka drunk, he did not show it. He merely smiled the smile of an old man who enjoys seeing in others the enjoyment of pleasures that he can no longer appreciate for himself.
'Were you at Smolensk?' he asked. I nodded. 'Tell me about it.'
And so began a long day of me recounting every war story that I knew. I told him of distant campaigns, like Austerlitz, and of the more recent battles at Smolensk and Borodino. I always spoke as if I had been just a regular soldier. He needed no stories of espionage and the Oprichniki, simply good honest tales of soldiery of the sort that he knew his son had been involved in.
As I spoke, he continued to mend boots, able to listen and to work without one activity in any way interfering with the other. Sadly, he had only three pairs in his pile and, once they were mended, there was no more work for him to do. During our conversation Natalia returned. She had the money she had received for the one pair of boots that he had given her, plus two more for him to deal with. He made quick work of them, listening throughout to my stories, and as I spoke, Natalia also sat beside us on the floor, enraptured by my words, basking in the illusion that her brother was once again with them.
Towards mid-afternoon, Boris sent his daughter away to fetch some food. She returned with a loaf of bread and, miraculously, some butter. Dmitry was in no condition to eat, but they shared the food with me as though I was a part of their family. Once again, my heart told me to restrain myself, but my hunger was victorious.
My leg, it turned out after I had gingerly rolled up my trouser leg to inspect it, was not too badly burnt. Dmitry had snatched me out from the burning stairway after only seconds, so the heat had not penetrated too deeply. All the hairs on my shin and calf had shrivelled to nothing. The skin was red, but still intact. It would easily heal. I was certainly in a far better state than Dmitry.
By evening, I had shown my missing fingers and told them a much sanitized version of how I lost them. I had turned Dmitry's head to show them the scar on his cheek and tell them the story behind that. I would have loved to tell them of the brave heroics of a young ryadovoy I had met at Smolensk named Fyodor Borisovich, but I could not. Even if I had met him, I doubt I would have remembered him, and I could not bring myself to lie to these people – even to flatter them – on a matter so close to their hearts as that.