Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

“That’s better,” she said approvingly as she held out a copy of the script to him. “Take this, but try not to refer it too much. You should know your words by now.”

With as brave a smile as he could muster, he took the script from her, not noticing as he did so that she had taken care to change her clothes. Her skirt, which had been a sombre black, was now a pastel blue and her Sunday blouse of stiff white cotton had been replaced by one of a more feminine grey silk. More interested in his own condition, he waited until she had turned away and walked languidly back to her place on the sofa before he leaned over and replaced the book in the gap on the bookshelf beside him.

Thoughts of the flesh were not far from Dr. Tortsov’s mind at that moment as he gazed along the two rows of sweating, well-fed faces that lined the private luncheon table, but it was feelings of surfeit and disgust rather than carnal desire that rose within the good Doctor’s breast. He watched the Mayor’s wife, sitting at the top end of the table, wave a half-eaten drumstick in emphasis to support the point she was making to the mournful looking priest opposite her. He did not doubt for a moment that the Mayor’s wife had regretted what she had done. That much had been evident by her distress earlier in the lounge.

This is how the Devil snares us, he thought. First he gives us the opportunity, and then he lets us get on with it, secure in the knowledge that we will make bad choices due to our human frailty.

Signalling to Fyodor Gregorivich, who was hovering nearby, Dr. Tortsov allowed his glass to be refilled. There was enough alcohol on the table, he reckoned, to keep even the carpenter Ovseenko afloat for a fortnight; enough food to feed Gleb Pirogov’s family for a month.

“There is more joy in Heaven over one lost sheep, Dimitri Borisovich,” he said to Skyralenko, who was sitting next to him, “than in the ninety men that are not lost.”

The Prison Director smiled glassily at him and winked.

Much of the chronology of the events that had led to the current crisis remained obscure to the Doctor. On the previous afternoon the Mayoress had witnessed Leonid Kavelin and Madame Kuibysheva descending the stairs together from the upper rooms; that much he had learned from her confession. He had also learned that, thrilled by the scandal, the Mayoress had rushed to tell her news to her friend Madame Pusnyena, in strictest confidence. This puzzled the Doctor greatly. Why on earth hadn’t she kept quiet about it? She could have pretended not to see, or remained silent about their shenanigans. What possible good could it do for Kavelin’s adultery to become common town gossip? And why – and this was the second puzzle – why did the Mayoress believe that Madame Kavelina would be more upset by the fact that she (the Mayoress) had witnessed her husband’s infidelity than about the transgression itself? That made no sense at all to him. Women would forever remain a mystery.

He had further gathered from Madame Pobednyeva’s emotional confession that, rather than call on her privately, Tatyana Kavelina had bided her time and waited until she could confront Irena Kuibysheva in person when she joined the other civic dignitaries at the pre-luncheon reception in the hotel’s mezzanine lounge. Then, according to the Mayoress, there had been a scene worthy of Sarah Bernhardt herself, culminating in Madam Kavelina’s ringing challenge to her husband. She refused to sit at the same table as That Woman; he had to choose between them as to who should stay and who should leave. Quite sensibly, in the Doctor’s opinion, Kavelin had told her be quiet and to go home. This was the third puzzle. Why was Leonid Kavelin’s choice considered so wrong? Chivalry had its place but Kavelin was a business man and could not afford to offend the town’s richest man, even in absentia, by demanding that his wife remove herself from the luncheon.

Everything had stemmed from that one act of malice: Matriona Pobednyeva telling what she had seen; Lidiya Pusnyena inevitably betraying her confidence; Tatyana Kavelina hearing of her husband’s infidelity (that had also been inevitable); the confrontation with Irena Kuibysheva in the mezzanine lounge; her husband, forced to choose publicly between her and his mistress, bundling her out bodily through the swing doors and ordering her to return home: everything. Even Father Arkady’s refusal to bless the food because there were now thirteen at the table, which in turn had sent Fyodor Gregorivich into paroxysms of despair, could be laid at the feet of the Evil One.