of
Mendel hailed it and climbed in.
“Where to, sir?”
“The Taurida Palace.”
“Half a ruble.”
“Twenty kopeks.”
“The price of oats is up again. Can hardly feed the horse on that…”
Oats and more oats, thought Mendel. Prices were rising, the war was disastrous. But the worse, the better: that was his motto. The coachman, decided Mendel, was really a petit bourgeois with no role in the future. But then in Russia there were so few real proletarians on the Marxist model. Nine out of ten Russians were obstinate, backward, greedy, savage peasants. Lenin, with whom Mendel had shared sausages and beer in Cracow before the war, had mused that if the peasants did not accept the progress of history, their backs would have to be broken. “Cruel necessity,” muttered Mendel.
Mendel was grey with exhaustion and malnutrition. It was hard to sleep, hard to eat on the run—yet somehow this existence suited him almost perfectly. No family—but then children bored him. Marriage—yes, but to Natasha the Yakut, another dedicated comrade whom he met only sporadically. Always on the move, he could sleep as easily on a park bench as on a floor or a sofa. Lenin was in Switzerland and virtually the entire Central Committee—Sverdlov, Stalin, Kamenev—were in Siberia, and he was almost the last senior veteran of 1905 on the loose. But Lenin had ordered: “You’re needed in Piter: escape!” He had sent Mendel a hundred rubles to buy “boots”—his false identity papers.
All that mattered was the Party and the cause: I am a knight of the holy grail, Mendel thought, as the sleigh approached the domed portico and splendid Doric colonnade of the Taurida Palace, where the bourgeois saps of the talking-shop parliament—the Imperial Duma—now held their absurd debates. But before the sleigh was there, Mendel leaned forward and tapped the padded shoulder of the coachman.
“Here!” Mendel pressed some kopeks into the coachman’s mitten and jumped off. Cars stood with their engines turning outside the Duma but Mendel did not approach the palace. Instead he limped into the lodge attached to the guardhouse of the Horse Guards regiment next door. An old Adler limousine with the crest of a Grand Duke, bearing a Guards officer and a flunkey in court uniform, stopped and trumpeted its horn.
The gateman, simultaneously bowing, buttoning up his trousers and holding onto his hat, ran out and tried to open the gates. Mendel glanced around and knocked on the dusty door of the cottage.
The door opened. A ruddy-cheeked doorman in a Russian peasant smock and yellowed longjohns let him into a dreary little room with a stove, samovar and the fusty atmosphere of sleeping men and boiling vegetables.
“You?” said Igor Verezin. “Thought you were in Kamchatka.”
“Yeniseisk Region. I walked.” Mendel noticed the doorman had a pointed bald pate the shape and color of a red-hot bullet. “I’m starving, Verezin.”
“
“Any messages for me?”
“Yes, someone pushed the newspaper through the door earlier.”
“Someone’s coming tonight.”
Verezin shrugged.
“Where’s the paper? Let me see. Good.” Mendel threw off his coat, checked the back window and the front. “Can I sleep?”
“Be my guest, comrade. The sofa’s yours though I might bed down myself there in a minute.” There was no bed in the dim little room and the doormen took turns sleeping on the sofa. “So how did you escape?”
But Mendel, still wearing his hat, boots and pince-nez, was already stretched out on the sofa.
There was a rap on the door, and the doorman found a teenage girl in a gleaming fur coat, undoubtedly sable, and a white fox-fur stole, who stepped hesitantly into the room. She was slim with a wide mouth and exceedingly light grey eyes.
“I’m in luck today!” joked Verezin. “Excuse my pants!”
She gave him a withering look. “
“Get inside, milady,” joked Verezin, bowing like a court flunkey. “With that coat you should be going in the main gates with the field marshals and princes.”
Mendel stood up, yawning. “Oh it’s you,” he said, aware that his voice was his most impressive feature— deep and sonorous like a Jericho trumpet. He turned to Verezin. “Could you take a walk? Round the block.”
“What? In this weather? You’ve got to be joking…” But Mendel never joked—except about the gallows. Instead the little man looked pointedly toward the stove behind which his “bulldog”—a Mauser revolver—waited, wrapped in a cloth, and Verezin hurriedly changed his mind. “I’ll go and buy some salted fish.” Pulling on a greatcoat, he stomped outside.
When the doorman was gone, Sashenka sat down at the wicker table beside the stove.
“Don’t you trust him?” She offered Mendel one of her perfumed Crocodile cigarettes with the gold tips.
“He’s a concierge.” Mendel lit up. “Most doormen are Okhrana informers—but when they sympathize with us they guard the safest safe houses. So as long as he doesn’t turn, no one would look for a Bolshevik at the Horse Guards headquarters. He’s a sympathizer and may join the Party.” He blew out a lungful of smoke. “Your father’s house is under surveillance. They’re waiting for me. How did you get away?”
“I waited until everyone was asleep. Mama’s out every night anyway. Then I used the Black Way into the courtyard and out through the garage. Streetcars, back doors, shops with two entrances, houses with courtyards. They never expect a girl in sable and kid boots to outwit them. You trained me well. I’ve learned the codes. I’m getting good at the craft. Like a ghost. And I’m fast as a mountain goat.”
Mendel felt an odd sensation, and realized he was happy to see her. She was sparkling with life. Yet he did not give her the hug he wanted to give her. The child was spoiled enough already.
“Don’t get overconfident,” he said gruffly. “Comrade Snowfox, did you deliver the message to the safe house?”
“Yes.”
“Did you collect the pamphlets from the printing press?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they now?”
“In the apartment on the Petrograd Side. Shirokaya Street.”
“Tomorrow they need to reach the comrades at the Putilov Works.”
“I’ll do it. Usual arrangements?”
Mendel nodded. “You’re doing well, comrade.”
She looked so young when she smiled, and by the dim lantern of the mean little room Mendel noticed the little shower of freckles on either side of her nose. He knew from her quick replies that she wanted to tell him something. He decided to make her wait.
Her intensity made him feel like an old man suddenly, conscious of his skin like porridge speckled with broken veins, of the strands of grey in his greasy hair, of the aches of his arthritis. That was what exile and prison did for you.
“Dear comrade,” she said, “I can’t thank you enough for your teaching. Now everything fits. I never thought the words ‘comrade’ and ‘committee’ would excite me so much, but they do. They really do!”
“Don’t chatter too much,” he told her sternly. “And watch yourself with comrades. They know your background and they look for signs of bourgeois philistinism. Change the sable. Get a karakul.”
“Right. I feel that I’m a cog in a secret world, in the universal movement of history.”
“We all are, but in Piter at the moment you’re more important than you realize. We’ve so few comrades,” said Mendel, inhaling his cigarette, his red-rimmed eyes half closed. “Keep reading, girl. You can’t read enough. Self-improvement is the Bolshevik way.”
“The food shortages are getting worse. You’ve seen the lines? Everyone is grumbling—from the capitalists who come for lunch with Papa to comrades in the factories. Surely something will happen now?”
Mendel shook his head. “One day, yes, but not now. Russia still lacks a real proletarian class and without
