By the afternoon of our first day of travel, we had come to a village that I had known we would pass through, and I suspected that Iuda must have known it too when he chose the rendezvous. From Dmitry, however, I saw no sign of anticipation.
I dismounted and tied up my horse outside the familiar woodsman's hut, from which leaked a stench that I could not distinguish as being real or part of my guilt-ridden imagination.
'What town is this?' asked Dmitry, still utterly ignorant of where we were.
'Desna,' I said, conveying by both tone and look the significance of what I was saying.
He pulled a face to indicate that the name meant nothing to him, but he saw by my expression that he should think more deeply. Then it dawned on him.
'Oh, I see,' he said, respectfully.
We went into the hut. Little had changed since I had last been there, two months before. The French had been this way on their retreat, but the hut had nothing inside that would be of use to them. The stove still stood against the far wall. The chair that had been in the middle remained as well, knocked over on one side.
Maks' body was slumped in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall as if he sat, wearily, his head tilted back, watching Dmitry and me as we looked around. Whether it had been placed there or fallen like that by chance I could not tell. His legs were bent almost up to his chest and one arm rested upon his knee; the other hung loosely by his side. Thankfully, his body was too far decayed to leave any clear residue of the wounds that had been inflicted at his death, although I was now familiar enough with how the Oprichniki operated to be able to make a pretty good guess. The cloth of his breeches hung close to his shin to give a hollow impression of what remained of the withered flesh beneath. Only his hands and his head could be seen outside his clothes. His hands were shrivelled and old. His face was decayed beyond recognition. Unlike Vadim, Maks had had no beard to remain after the rest of him had rotted away. Only his spectacles gave any evidence that confirmed for me what I knew to be true – that this was Maksim Sergeivich. They hung off his nose and one ear – the other having long since lost the integrity to support them – the metal rim sinking into the yielding, dead flesh of his cheek.
We stood in silence for a few moments. More than once I sensed that Dmitry was about to speak, but each time he thought better of it. He was wise to do so.
'We should bury him,' I said at length.
'Yes,' said Dmitry in a way that expressed strong agreement, where none was needed. 'I'll see if I can find some tools.' He walked away, leaving me a few more precious seconds with my abandoned friend. Moments later he gave out a hushed shout.
'Aleksei! Look at this.' He was kneeling down looking at the wall just by the doorway, an area that would be covered when the door was open. I knelt beside him to see what he was looking at. It was textbook positioning for a message. A shaky hand had scratched the following into the wood:
Maks had been here and left this mark on the evening of the twenty-seventh of August. I had known as much – that had been only the day before I had met him here. The 'П' was, however, the more interesting part of the message. 'П' meant that, somewhere nearby, Maksim had hidden a letter.
CHAPTER XXI
IT DIDN'T TAKE US LONG TO FIND THE LETTER. THERE WERE NOT many places where it could be hidden in such a rudimentary structure. Maks had slipped it between one of the beams supporting the roof and the wooden roof itself. One had to be looking for it to find it.
It was addressed to me – dated the twenty-seventh, the same as his scratched message. There were about half a dozen sheets, covered on both sides with Maksim's small, precise handwriting. I read it aloud.
'My dear Aleksei, 'If you are reading this letter, then I must apologize for not having waited longer for you to arrive. As you will understand once you have read this, I am very much in fear for my life and perhaps for even more. In communicating the circumstances specifically to you, Aleksei, and (I hope soon) in committing myself to your custody I intend at least to ensure that I die with some vestige of my reputation intact and also to die by a method whereby my soul might be saved. I can see your expression of surprise to learn that either of these should be of concern to me, but let me assure you that the former always has been. The future of my soul is a question that I have only recently begun to realize is worth asking.
'I shall remain here for four days. I have told Dominique where I am and she will, I hope, tell you and only you. If you have not arrived within that time, then I shall be forced to move on. The possibility that either Dmitry or the remaining Oprichniki should find me here is too dreadful to risk. I shall head south to Tula and on then to my mother's. You know where she lives. I shall not write here where that is in the hope that my omission may protect me from any others who might read this. Once I have seen her and, with luck, my sisters, then I shall attempt to leave the country for ever. I shall not be happy to make my home in France. It has become less and less the country I thought it to be.
'You are, I know, well aware of my interest in the republics of both the United States and France. We have happily discussed the matter often and I know that, at least on general principles, your views and mine have often coincided. Where I am certain that you will find no sympathy with me is that as a result of these principles I decided some years ago to make an active effort to support republican France. It was when I was captured at Austerlitz that I first began to work for France. I see the cynical curl of your lip, knowing that you would tell me that at that time the republic was no longer a republic since by then it had an emperor. Though Napoleon had indeed become emperor, though Austerlitz was fought on the anniversary of his coronation, I still believed that he and those around him did what they did for the sake of enlightened, republican ideals. Even today I still believe it.
'After my capture I was persuaded – willingly persuaded – by, in particular, a French colonel (whose name is best kept secret), who convinced me that by helping them, I could ultimately be helping Russia itself to become a republic as great and as powerful as France or America ever could be. I was returned to Russia as though I were a freed prisoner-of-war. In reality it was an act not of liberation, but of infiltration.
'So you see, Aleksei, for almost the whole time that I have known you, I have been a French spy, but believe me, that is the only matter on which I have deceived you. You may regard that as small consolation, if consolation at all, but in everything I have ever said to you, in every matter of opinion, of strategy and of friendship there has been no veil of pretence between us, nor between me and Vadim or Dmitry. The Maksim you have known has been the true Maksim in all aspects except this one tiny issue of allegiance. Men of different political colours and even of different nationalities do not have to be at war with each other, and even when they are they become enemies not out of choice but out of circumstance. Their friendship can be rekindled once the smoke of battle has cleared. If I had been born French then, although we might not have become the friends we once were – that I hope we still are – I would at least have retained your respect. That is not to say that I am blaming my treason on an accident of birth. I would not choose to have been born French rather than Russian. My affiliation has always been to ideas rather than to states. My hope was to take an idea born in France and see it flourish in Russia.