“My husband…” she said, starting to cry. “Misha! Mishenka, where are you?”
“I’m sure he’s fine, I’m sure you’ll find him. But please, child, let me help you. I know of a small hospital not too far away,” I said, nodding in the direction of my very own place.
I ripped away part of my sleeve, and with this scrap blotted at the blood seeping from her mouth. I prayed that she’d merely broken a rib, that there was nothing more serious damaged within her.
“I can’t leave!” she said almost in panic. “What if he’s lying somewhere? What if he’s hurt and he needs me?”
“Let’s just get you taken care of first. Let me get you to the hospital and I’ll come back and look for your Misha.”
Her eyes welled with a torrent of tears. “But-”
“Come along, the hospital’s just down several streets, just this way.”
“Wait, you can’t mean the hospital run by one of them, do you?”
“Them?” I hesitantly asked, fearful of the answer.
“Yes, them, the Romanovs, I’ve heard it’s run by one of their stupid cow princesses.”
“Why… yes… of course…” I managed to mutter.
“No,” she pleaded. “No, I won’t go there. Haven’t you heard, don’t you know? It’s the talk of the neighborhood.”
I felt a greater pain than any whip or sword could inflict as I inquired, “Know what, my child? What are you talking about?”
“That hospital is for officers and aristocrats only. They say they won’t help any of us!”
“No,” I gasped as if the wind had been knocked from me. “No, I’m quite sure that’s not true.”
“Yes, it is! I heard it from one of the strike organizers. He told us all about it, all about a babushka who went there for help. She was so sick, and all they gave her was dirty water!”
“No!”
“Yes, this striker told me he’d seen it all with his own eyes, that the Romanovs gave this old babushka dirty water with poison and she died the very next day, writhing in pain!” exclaimed the girl. “I won’t go there!”
And with that the girl, painfully clutching her side, hobbled off. Within moments she had disappeared, leaving me paralyzed with grief and with only one shocking thought:
Dear Lord, when and how had we come to be so widely hated?
Chapter 26 PAVEL
There were all these papers and leaflets and booklets and pamphlets being passed around by all the different parties, the Social Revolutionaries, the Social Democrats, the Liberals, the Marxists, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, and so on, this one preaching for a democratic bourgeois republic, another for a constitutional monarchy, still another for a complete socialist revolution. As for me, in the months after we killed the Grand Duke, well, I realized I was a complete Nihilist, the old-fashioned kind. I wanted everything gone, tsar and prince, merchant and factory owner. Death to them all. And all power to the people. That sort of thing.
It was none other than Dora Brilliant, our beautiful bombmaker with those deep, dark eyes, who helped make everything so clear to me. We met that fall near Konny Rynok, where horses were traded, and ducked into one of the many traktiri, the cheap cafes scattered about. Each one of the places in the area was fancied by different pet lovers, one by horse traders, the next by dog owners, and so on. The one we slipped into was full of bird sellers, and so as not to seem suspicious Dora and I made a pretend of turning to the icon and its red lamp by the door and crossing ourselves. Several small yellow Russian canaries twittered in a cage up front, and tables of canary lovers huddled about, drinking tea and arguing about the best grains to feed their treasures, ways to teach song, and so on and so forth.
Dora and I moved directly to the rear of the place, and I ordered a glass of hot tea loaded with four sugars, while she got a tea with two sugars and a slice of lemon, plus a nice white serviette for her lap. Dora, always so sad-looking, so forlorn, took a sip of her tea, and then pulled a piece of paper from her worn leather purse and nearly smiled.
“Here, Pashenka, this is for you,” she said, using the cozy form of my name.
“What, a present?”
“It’s a catechism-you must repeat it daily.”
I looked at her, sure that this was some kind of joke, and repeated exactly what I had learned at one of our recent meetings, loudly whispering, “Christianity is the religion of slaves.”
“Yes, but this catechism is you,” she insisted as she pushed the paper across the table to me.
“What are you talking about? Don’t you know how dangerous it is to tease a bear? Is this some kind of test?”
“Please, just read it to me, Pashenka. It’s The Catechism of a Revolutionary, by Bakunin and Nechayev.”
And though words were not my specialty, and though it took me time to pronounce many of these fancy terms, tears nearly came to my eyes as I began to read and understand what was written.
Keeping my voice hushed so no others could hear, I said, “ ‘The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion-the revolution.’ ”
Dora said, “Do you see what I mean? Is this not you?”
A cool tingling feeling crawled up my spine, and I nodded quickly. Nothing had ever described me so… so completely. I felt these words not just in my ears but deep inside me.
“Only one thing,” I commented. “I still have my name: Pavel.”
“Well, from now on you have no family name, you are simply that: Pavel, a man of the people.”
“Right,” I said, liking the sound of that. “My family, my wife, my village-they are all gone.”
“Your entire past is over-nothing, no more.”
I nodded strongly, and continued: ' ’Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, the Revolutionist has severed every link with the social order of the civilized world-with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose-to destroy. He despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality of his time, its motives and manifestations.’ ” I took a deep breath and asked her, “What does this ‘manifestation’ mean?”
“Ah… it’s like showing something, like bowing to the Tsar, like bowing to him is a manifestation of your respect for him.”
“Ach, the Tsar-k chyortoo!” To the devil, I exclaimed, and then read on. “ ‘Everything which promotes the success of the Revolution is moral, everything which hinders it is immoral. The nature of the true Revolutionist excludes all romanticism, all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.’ ”
I put the paper down and looked away. I looked through the months and I looked through my memory to that past January. Everything that was sweet, anything that was tender, and all that I could ever have felt for another person died with my wife and unknown child there on the pure white snow. And what was reborn in this shell of my body was dark and black and hateful.
Dora poked at me, asking, “So what do you think?”
I nodded. “Yes, these words… they are me, one hundred percent me.”
“Then will you do it?”
“Do what?”
“We are succeeding,” began Dora, carefully choosing her words. “We are being energized. It’s no longer we Revolutionaries leading the movement but the common working men and women of the factories and the simple field peasants, all wanting more than just a few crumbs and more than a disgusting hovel to live in. Everywhere- everywhere!-they are striking and marching, tens and even hundreds of thousands of them. The Revolution is growing with each day, but…”
“But?” I asked.
“We are in great danger of failure, Pavel. We are too many groups, too many ideas, too many voices. Our great wave of dissatisfaction is about to break into a million drops on the rocks rather than crash as one onto the
