Grigori spoke to a boy his own age and told him what had happened at the Narva Gate. As the demonstrators learned what had happened to others, they grew angrier.
Grigori stared up at the long facade of the Winter Palace, with its hundreds of windows. Where was the tsar?
“He was not at the Winter Palace that morning, as we found out later,” Grigori told Katerina, and he could hear in his own voice the bitter resentment of a disappointed believer. “He was not even in town. The father of his people had gone to his palace at Tsarskoye Selo, to spend the weekend taking country walks and playing dominoes. But we did not know that then, and we called to him, begging him to show himself to his loyal subjects.”
The crowd grew; the calls for the tsar became more insistent; some of the demonstrators started to jeer at the soldiers. Everyone was becoming tense and angry. Suddenly a detachment of guards charged into the gardens, ordering everyone out. Grigori watched, fearful and incredulous, as they lashed out indiscriminately with whips, some using the flat sides of their sabres. He looked at Ma for guidance. She said: “We can’t give up now!” Grigori did not know what, exactly, they all expected the tsar to do: he just felt sure, as everyone did, that their monarch would somehow redress their grievances if only he knew about them.
The other demonstrators were as resolute as Ma and, although those who were attacked by guards cowered away, no one left the area.
Then the soldiers took up firing positions.
Near the front, several people fell to their knees, took off their caps, and crossed themselves. “Kneel down!” said Ma, and the three of them knelt, as did more of the people around them, until most of the crowd had assumed the position of prayer.
A silence descended that made Grigori scared. He stared at the rifles pointed at him, and the riflemen stared back expressionlessly, like statues.
Then Grigori heard a bugle call.
It was a signal. The soldiers fired their weapons. All around Grigori, people screamed and fell. A boy who had climbed a statue for a better view cried out and tumbled to the ground. A child fell out of a tree like a shot bird.
Grigori saw Ma go facedown. Thinking she was avoiding the gunfire, he did the same. Then, looking at her as they both lay on the ground, he saw the blood, bright red on the snow around her head.
“No!” he shouted. “No!”
Lev screamed.
Grigori grabbed Ma’s shoulders and pulled her up. Her body was limp. He stared at her face. At first he was bewildered by the sight that met his eyes. What was he seeing? Where her forehead and her eyes should have been there was just a mass of unrecognizable pulp.
It was Lev who grasped the truth. “She’s dead!” he screamed. “Ma’s dead, my mother is dead!”
The firing stopped. All around, people were running, limping, or crawling away. Grigori tried to think. What should he do? He must take Ma away from here, he decided. He put his arms under her and picked her up. She was not light, but he was strong.
He turned around, looking for the way home. His vision was strangely blurred, and he realized he was weeping. “Come on,” he said to Lev. “Stop screaming. We have to go.”
At the edge of the square they were stopped by an old man, the skin of his face creased around watery eyes. He wore the blue tunic of a factory worker. “You’re young,” he said to Grigori. There was anguish and rage in his voice. “Never forget this,” he said. “Never forget the murders committed here today by the tsar.”
Grigori nodded. “I won’t forget, sir,” he said.
“May you live long,” said the old man. “Long enough to take revenge on the bloodstained tsar for the evil he has done this day.”
“I carried her for about a mile, then I got tired, so I boarded a streetcar, still holding her,” Grigori told Katerina.
She stared at him. Her beautiful, bruised face was pale with horror. “You carried your dead mother home on a streetcar?”
He shrugged. “At the time I had no idea I was doing anything strange. Or, rather, everything that happened that day was so strange that nothing I did seemed odd.”
“What about the people riding the car?”
“The conductor said nothing. I suppose he was too shocked to throw me off, and he didn’t ask me for the fare-which I would not have been able to pay, of course.”
“So you just sat down?”
“I sat there, with her body in my arms, and Lev beside me, crying. The passengers just stared at us. I didn’t care what they thought. I was concentrating on what I had to do, which was to get her home.”
“And so you became the head of your family, at the age of sixteen.”
Grigori nodded. Although the memories were painful, he felt the most intense pleasure from her concentrated attention. Her eyes were fixed on him, and she listened with her mouth open and a look on her lovely face of mingled fascination and horror.
“What I remember most about that time is that no one helped us,” he said, and he was revisited by the panicky feeling that he was alone in a hostile world. The memory never failed to fill his soul with rage. It’s over now, he told himself; I’ve got a home and a job, and my brother has grown up strong and handsome. The bad times are over. But nevertheless he wanted to take someone by the neck-a soldier, a policeman, a government minister, or the tsar himself-and squeeze until there was no life left. He closed his eyes, shuddering, until the feeling passed.
“As soon as the funeral was over, the landlord threw us out, saying we would not be able to pay; and he took our furniture-for back rent, he said, although Ma was never behind with payments. I went to the church and told the priest we had nowhere to sleep.”
Katerina laughed harshly. “I can guess what happened there.”
He was surprised. “Can you?”
“The priest offered you a bed-his bed. That’s what happened to me.”
“Something like that,” Grigori said. “He gave me a few kopeks and sent me to buy hot potatoes. The shop wasn’t where he said, but instead of searching for it I hurried back to the church, because I didn’t like the look of him. Sure enough, when I went into the vestry he was taking Lev’s trousers down.”
She nodded. “Priests have been doing that sort of thing to me since I was twelve.”
Grigori was shocked. He had assumed that that particular priest was uniquely evil. Katerina obviously believed that depravity was the norm. “Are they all like that?” he said angrily.
“Most of them, in my experience.”
He shook his head in disgust. “And you know what amazed me the most? When I caught him, he wasn’t even ashamed! He just looked annoyed, as if I had interrupted him while he was meditating on the Bible.”
“What did you do?”
“I told Lev to do up his trousers, and we left. The priest asked for his kopeks back, but I told him they were alms for the poor. I used them to pay for a bed in a lodging house that night.”
“And then?”
“Eventually I got a good enough job, by lying about my age, and I found a room, and I learned, day by day, how to be independent.”
“And now you’re happy?”
“Certainly not. My mother intended us to have a better life, and I’m going to make sure of it. We’re leaving Russia. I’ve saved up almost enough money. I’m going to America, and when I get there I’ll send money back for a ticket for Lev. They have no tsar in America-no emperor or king of any kind. The army can’t just shoot anyone they like. The people rule the country!”
She was skeptical. “Do you really believe that?”
“It’s true!”
There was a tap at the window. Katerina was startled-they were on the second floor-but Grigori knew it was Lev. Late at night, when the door of the house was locked, Lev had to cross the railway line to the backyard, climb
