Twelve

'So, why did you throw the snowball at me?'

'I didn't,' I replied with a self-assurance that I couldn't have expressed to her before. 'My friend did. I was trying to stop him. I wanted to apologize.'

'That was an odd way to apologize. You seemed to enjoy it. You must love confession.'

I went over to her and kissed her shoulder. 'It's good for the soul.'

She pushed me away with a polite, professional firmness. 'And why did you care if I got hit by a snowball?'

'I don't like winter.' It was a simple answer, but the truth went much deeper, back to the cracked ice of Lake Satschan and the winter of 1805.

'Can't be much fun living in Moscow then.'

'I don't live here; I'm from Petersburg. I'm just stationed here.'

'Soldier, eh? Where's your uniform?' she asked, not bothering to point out that Petersburg is even colder than Moscow.

I countered her question with another. 'Are you French?'

She laughed. 'Do I sound it?'

'Dominique is a very French name.'

'It's really Domnikiia. When I started out, everything French was so fashionable.' It could not have been many years since she 'started out'. She smiled thoughtfully. 'Less so now. And what's your name?' She saw my surprise. 'You don't have to tell.' But her look of childlike disappointment meant I did have to.

'Aleksei Ivanovich.'

'Lyosha.'

'Some people call me that.' No one called me that any more. It was a common enough nickname for an Aleksei, but it had never seemed to suit me since I'd joined the army.

I paid and left. I used to pretend that I really had gone because I felt the need to apologize. I'd certainly felt guilty afterwards, but not so guilty that I hadn't visited her again during that winter, perhaps three or four times before we were posted out west once more in March. On many other days I had felt the desire to visit her, but had resisted, instead wandering along nearby streets, teasing myself with how close I could get without going in.

Now, in August of 1812, I was doing the same thing again. All through the retreat, from Poland, through Lithuania and through Russia, I'd known that going back to Moscow meant going back to Domnikiia.

And here I was. I'd wandered the streets and I'd sat on the bench and now was my chance to leave.

I went in.

The lounge was as I remembered it. The front door had only just been unbolted and I was the first customer of the day. Half a dozen girls were scattered about, trying to look provocative. Domnikiia stood with her back to me, talking to a colleague whilst once again brushing her long, dark brown hair. I slipped my arms around her waist and whispered in her ear, 'Remember me?'

She turned round. It was not Domnikiia. Whoever she was, she tried to remember me from the dozens upon dozens of faces that must have passed before hers. She saw from my expression that I'd made a mistake and became torn between her feminine instinct to slap me and her professional instinct to offer encouragement.

'No, but I'm sure I will,' she replied, the professional side winning out as she put her arms around my neck.

I pulled away from her. I tried to say something about being terribly sorry, but under the circumstances, it was quite out of place. My eyes darted around the room for help. They fell upon the real Domnikiia, who was descending the stairs.

'Aleksei Ivanovich!' She greeted me with more convincing enthusiasm than I've heard from many a hostess at many a Petersburg party. But it was, I supposed, just a skill she had acquired, much like the ability to remember my name after so many months.

She came closer and whispered in my ear, 'Lyosha. Have I grown so old since last time, that you cast me aside for Margarita Kirillovna? I like my soldiers to have experience rather than youth; but most soldiers see it the other way round.'

'I'm sorry, Margarita Kirillovna,' I said to the girl whose back looked so like Domnikiia's. 'I mistook you.' I felt Domnikiia's hand leading me away and up the stairs and I gladly went with her.

Her room was little changed of itself – the same bed and the same dressing table – but summer made all the difference. The windows were open to let in the air and the shutters were closed to keep out the sun.

'You can have Margarita if you want,' said Domnikiia. 'She's new, but very popular.'

'I'm sure any custom she gets is only because people mistake her for you,' I told her.

'You don't have to flatter me, you know.'

Afterwards, she seemed less rushed than on previous occasions. She peeped out the door as I began to dress.

'No hurry,' she said. 'The salon's empty. The army's out of town and the civilians are too scared to do… much. Why are you in town anyway, my non-uniformed officer?'

I avoided the question. 'You have a very good memory.'

'What? Because I remember your name and your nickname and that you're a soldier and that you don't wear a uniform and that you think you know I'm really Domnikiia not Dominique? I just give you what you want.' She smirked. 'You guys don't want to be fucked, you want to be noticed.'

'Think I know? So you're not Domnikiia?'

'I might not be,' she replied with the same confidence. Then her tone relented as she put her arms round my neck. 'But I am.' After a pause, she continued. 'Trade for Dominique is picking up though.'

'How do you mean?'

'When I started out, everyone wanted anything that was French, so everyone wanted Dominique. But over the past year nobody likes the French, so nobody wants Dominique.'

I had to smile. 'These politicians just don't think about the effect they have on commerce, do they?'

'Exactly. Next time you see the tsar, you tell him. But nowadays everyone wants to screw the French, so everyone wants to screw Dominique.'

I laughed. 'And who did I just screw? Dominique or Domnikiia?'

She giggled. 'I still reckon you wanted it to be Margarita.'

She paused. 'I don't know. What about you? Was it Aleksei or Lyosha?' I gave no answer and she changed the subject. 'So what's the news from the front?'

I was astonished at her impudence. 'I can't tell you that.'

'Oh come on. No one would know anything if it wasn't for loose-tongued soldiers in brothels. It's tit for tat. You tell me and I'll tell you.'

'And what are you going to tell me? You said yourself there are no soldiers in town.'

'There are other people with tales to tell.'

I guessed she was bluffing, but it did no harm to reveal what she could find out elsewhere. I told her about the defeats at Vilna and Vitebsk and Smolensk, told her the official line that the French would be stopped before Moscow, not much more.

'So, what have you got to tell me?' I asked.

'Oh, nothing.'

'Tell me!' I said, rolling her on to her back.

'You going to interrogate me?'

Looking down at the tantalizing smile on her lips, it was a tempting suggestion, but the very idea brought back memories I fought to suppress. I tickled her. She giggled uncontrollably. Evidently she was very ticklish, but then, of course, that's what I would like her to be. She was, in her own way, a Potemkin village – a façade behind which I might only find disappointment if I ventured to look.

'All right! All right, Lyosha,' she exclaimed through her laughter, 'I'll tell you.' She took a moment to get her breath back. 'The only interesting things I've heard are from Tula.'

'So what's going on in Tula? Something at the munitions works?' I asked. Tula was of immeasurable importance to the war. Without that city, our supplies of ordnance and ammunition would quickly dry to almost nothing.

'Not in Tula,' replied Domnikiia. 'From Tula. There's stories of some sort of plague. Thirty dead in Rostov. Fifteen in Pavlovsk.'

Plagues were always exaggerated. When I was young, my grandmother used to tell me old folk stories about plagues, and I'd quickly chosen to be as sceptical of them as I was of the other, less earthly tales that she told. But as I'd grown older, I'd come to put more faith in my grandmother's word, on this issue at least. The last big plague to hit Moscow had been in 1771, not long before I'd been born, and a vivid memory for my grandparents and my parents, even from the safe vantage point of Petersburg. In total, a third of the people of the Moscow oblast had died. As far as I could tell, that figure was no exaggeration, though others that I had heard were. When I witnessed the plague for myself, whilst fighting south of the Danube, the mixture of rumour and fact was much the same. This new story of plague would have more than a seed of truth in it. Both towns mentioned by Domnikiia were on the river Don, one of the great arteries that run between central Russia and the Black Sea, and it wasn't unusual for disease to be carried up the river by boat. The numbers seemed unusually concentrated – but that was probably part of the process of news becoming rumour.