When Vasily Romanovich Kashporov walked up the stone steps that wound through the elevated gardens, he’d been unsure of what he would find. Life had taken a sideways jolt for everyone in Warwick, but his life, in particular, was spinning off madly into he knew not what.
The last few hours had been eventful ones. First there’d been the prison breakout, and then the show trial in the gym and a bloody execution. The gang of prisoners, led by Vasily’s peers, had first taken over the prison and then overrun the whole town of Warwick. Though Vasily had escaped in the first breakout with the rest of the prisoners, he’d not taken any part in the coup. The leaders thought of him as just a useful idiot.
After the mock trial, the leaders chose Vasily to be the keeper of two men they’d locked away in a jail cell as “enemies to the revolution.” They’d chosen Vasily specifically because they believed him to be loyal, and if not loyal, then too stupid to be of any harm. But he was neither loyal nor stupid.
He was, however, in danger.
He’d plotted an escape with the two men who, he hated to admit, were now almost certainly dead.
The first of the two men was an old citizen named Lev Volkhov. Lev had been his mentor, as well as a revered elder and teacher in the village. The other man was a friendly traveler he knew only as Clay.
The three of them had attempted their own prison break in order to escape the dangerous power grab that was evident in the town’s insurgent revolution.
After Vasily had set them free from their cell, the plan had been for Lev Volkhov and Clay to leave through an external door at the rear of the prison while he, Vasily, gathered Clay’s backpack and exited through the prison’s hallway system into the courtyard that led to the town.
At least, that was the plan. The second prison break, unhappily, had happened concurrently with the arrival of outsiders—paratroopers sent by someone to support the coup attempt in the town. It seemed like things might have gone horribly wrong for Volkhov and Clay.
Vasily had witnessed the show trial and the brutality of the takeover, and right then and there he’d made a decision. He was impressed by the old man and the traveler, and he’d decided that his best hope for freedom was to throw in his lot with them.
There were politics involved, as there always are. But there were also the sheer instincts for survival, and in that moment, the two had become fused into one force, and from that point the young man moved with a singular purpose.
He knew more about the kind of politics involved, and the way those politics linked to survival, than anyone in the village other than Volkhov. This was because Vasily—although almost no one knew it or suspected it—was probably the foremost expert on the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in all of Warwick. He’d been introduced to the works of Solzhenitsyn during long tutoring sessions at the hands of Lev Volkhov and had taken the Russian author’s words to heart. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, detailing the ongoing communist threat against the world, and this work, written by his countryman, he believed sincerely.
This great man, this winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, this sufferer from the Soviet Gulag, had warned America—the stated enemy of his own country—to be wary of Russia. In the Warning to the West, Solzhenitsyn, speaking of the forces of social change in America, and of the ongoing threat of Soviet communist hegemony, had said, and Vasily knew it by heart…
“They are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat—one which has never before been seen in the history of the world. Not only in the history of the country, but in the history of the world.”
Solzhenitsyn had warned America of everything that the old man Volkhov had said when he’d addressed the crowd gathered for his show trial, in the moments before being summarily convicted by the gang.
It was Solzhenitsyn who’d once said, “One word of truth outweighs the world.” Vasily had heard the old man speak that truth in the simple word… No.
Vasily had also read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, as had most of the boys in his school, but he hadn’t let it end there as most of the others had. Wanting more of this truth that outweighed the world, he dove deeper. He read more about his supposed country of Russia in The Gulag Archipelago, and in the Red Wheel books. He’d read Solzhenitsyn’s short stories, like Matryona’s House, and unlike the other boys in his school, he had cried, only a few years back, when he’d learned of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death.
This was the secret life that Vasily Kashporov led, one of books and of the mind, and this is why he chose truth and freedom over any of the other options being offered to him by men of every age who wanted and abused power.
Walking away from the prison, he’d heard the gunshots, and he knew that he was now alone, save for the man who was in this house to which he’d been sent.
Lev Volkhov, before he was killed, promised Vasily that his nephew, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Bolkonsky, would ‘know everything’ and would know what to do next. Volkhov had ordered Vasily to go to Pyotr and not to look back. Vasily respected his old friend enough to do exactly what he’d been told.
He knew the house, and found it easily, and had climbed the steps with trepidation, not knowing whether the gang might have already arrived, or if its inhabitant had already cleared out. There was fear in his heart, cold and brittle like ice, as he raised his hand to knock on the door.
Pyotr opened the door and saw the young man standing there with his face pale from the cold and fear. He grabbed Vasily by the shoulders and guided him into the house and then through the hallway and into a tiny room near the back. An earnest fire snapped in a fireplace, sending shadows of the two men leaping onto the walls. Pyotr poured the young man a cup of coffee, black, bitter, and strong, from a pot on a stove, and pointed him to a chair by the fire. They made introductions as the cup was handed from one set of hands to the other, but such things were unnecessary. Everyone in the town always knew everyone else as a matter of course, or seemed to.
Pyotr had a million questions, and he spoke in rapid-fire Russian, but Vasily was too shaken to respond immediately.
“What was the shooting, Vasily?” Pyotr asked. “Who was shot? I heard so much shooting…” He let the implications of his question hang in the air like the cold. “The whole town’s been turned upside down since the trial. I cannot believe it! Mikail shot Todd point blank. And right in the head! And in front of everyone! And then these soldiers fall out of the sky. What kind of thing was that? I’m worried sick about Lev. How is Uncle Lev? Have you spoken with him? Is he ok?”
Vasily brought his eyes up to look at Pyotr, and in the look he tried to say what he feared he could not. He waved at the older man to slow him down, and then dropped his head to his chest. He drew in his breath slowly. He knew that the news that he carried was dark and would hurt Pyotr. “Only English, Pyotr. Only English now. Please. I’ve come from the prison. It’s not good. I don’t know it, but I do know it… Lev Volkhov and the man called Clay are dead. There would have been no shooting if they had escaped.” Vasily looked up again and into Pyotr’s confused eyes. “The shooting was too fast and too soon. They cannot have gotten to the fence. They are both dead, I know it.”