There was no madness in my listening to the voices of my departed friends, only pleasure. Even when they were alive, I could at any time have conjured up their voices and their opinions. I had encountered few problems that could not be alleviated by a simple question along the lines of 'What would Maks think?' or, just as often, 'What would Marfa think?' Now, with Maks and Vadim at least, it was the only chance I got to hear them. Even if it was madness, it was a madness I would gladly choose.
I slammed my bottle of vodka down on their table with my left hand, making clear for them to see the wounds that I had earned on the Danube. 'Have a drink on me, why don't you?' I suggested. Whether it was my generosity or my manifest war wounds I do not know, but their mood towards me warmed a little.
'Where did that happen?' asked the older one, once he'd poured himself a vodka, indicating my missing fingers.
'In Bulgaria – Silistria.'
'In a battle?'
'That's right,' I lied, but I couldn't prevent the true story from forcing its way into my mind.
It had not been in a battle, but in a gaol. After Prince Bagration had decided to abandon the siege of Silistria, myself and a few others were sent into the city to spy. We'd split up, and I found myself staying in a hostel, with half a dozen or more men to a room, all of them locals. It was handily located right against the city wall, so all I had to do was drop messages out of the window at an appointed time – midnight each night. One of my comrades had simply to creep over, pick up the message and take the precious information to Bagration.
I don't know if it was me or the courier who got sloppy, but on the third night, it wasn't his hands that the small piece of paper, covered in Cyrillic and wrapped round a stone, fell into, but the hands of a Turkish patrol. There was nothing of much interest in it, even if they could break the simple code and then read the Russian, but they had seen which window it fell from.
Minutes later, Turkish soldiers – Janissaries – rushed into the room. It was easy enough for me to work out from their conversation what had happened, but the problem for them was that there were seven of us in the room. Any one could have dropped the message – and I'd made sure that none of the others had seen me go to the window.
So the Turks rounded us all up and took us to the gaol and used their best methods to persuade the spy to confess. I didn't, despite losing two fingers.
I forced myself back to the present. That much of the story I was happy to tell to most people. That's what I'd told Boris and Natalia. The details of what went on in the gaol, I never told. But to these two and today, I didn't even feel the urge to tell the basic story.
'I don't suppose you saw much of the French round here,' I said instead.
'No, not many,' said the younger man. 'The only Frenchman you'll find around here is old Napoleon, up at the crossroads.' They both laughed.
'I saw him,' I said. 'How long has he been there?'
'Since just after the battle,' the redhead continued. 'He wandered into town and we showed him some true Russian hospitality.'
'Was he a deserter, or just lost?' I asked.
'How would we know,' replied the old, bald man. 'We don't speak their language. We were just happy to do our bit for Russia.'
'So that's been what – two weeks?' I asked.
'Nearly,' said the younger. 'Now that the cold has set in, he'll be up there till spring.'
'Won't anyone cut him down?'
'Not while he's doing his work,' said the older.
'His work?'
'He's keeping the plague off us. They had it terrible in Tula.' His withered lips were sucked into his toothless mouth as he spoke.
'That was in the summer,' said the other man, evidently more thoughtful. 'It had died down long before we hung up Napoleon.'
'Are you going to take him down then?' came the reply, to which there was no response. Leaving the body hanging there kept away the plague, along with, no doubt, tigers, Turks, elephants and Englishmen, none of whom would have been seen in these parts since 'Napoleon' began his vigil at the crossroads. The one creature which it would not keep away was the very thing that I was due to meet that evening.
I set off back to the crossroads, leaving my horse in the village, with the plan of being there well before the appointed time. I trudged back along the road, listening to the creaking snow beneath my boots and feeling the cold wind in my face. The low crescent moon cast just enough light to see the whole landscape around me. Looking back over my shoulder, the little village glowed warm and inviting out of the darkness. I would have loved to stay and natter away the evening over a vodka with those two locals, to stay out of the cold and forget why I came to the village in the first place, but I could not. A serf can sit and remain in one state until his master tells him what he must do next. A freeman must be his own master.
Occasionally, the wind blew up a tiny snowstorm and I could see nothing beyond the scrabble of whiteness before my eyes. It would only last a moment. No new snow was falling and so, in the dim moonlight, I could see nearly as far as I had done during the day. At the crossroads, the snow showed traces of a few more pairs of feet having passed that way, but little else. The body of 'Napoleon' still hung from its noose and swung gently in the breeze, warding off all those alien terrors that might otherwise have dared to visit the little village of Kurilovo. There was less snow on his body than there had been earlier. Presumably the waning heat of the sun had been attracted to his dark uniform enough to melt a little of the snow that covered him. Any such thawing could only be superficial. After two weeks of the Russian winter, this Frenchman would forever remain frozen to his heart – or if not for ever, at least until spring.
I walked around in a wide circle, keeping respectfully distant from the corpse at its centre. My movement was partly in order to keep warm, but also to patrol each of the four roads that approached me. All of them remained empty for a long time. It must have been a little before seven that I saw the figure of a man approaching from the south. He first became visible next to the coppice I had noted earlier. I could only assume that he had been concealed somewhere within it.
As he approached, I continued to keep an eye on the other three roads which fed the crossroads. This was the most dangerous moment, when I could be blocked off along all four paths, leaving my only escape route across the impassable, snow-covered fields where I could easily be run to ground. There was no sign of anyone else. Each time I looked back towards the coppice, the figure approaching me was a little closer. Soon, it was clearly recognizable as Iuda.
When he arrived, I was a few steps away from the centre of the crossroads. He stood still, looking directly towards me, right beside the hanging man whose feet swung lazily in the breeze at about the level of Iuda's waist. Looking into Iuda's cold grey eyes, it was not difficult to believe that he was just as dead as the cadaver that hung beside him and that what now animated him was not the soul of a man, but the will of the devil.
'Good evening, Aleksei Ivanovich,' he said.
CHAPTER XXIII
'GOOD EVENING,' I RESPONDED, STEPPING TOWARDS HIM.