Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

From her earliest recollections, Madame Wrenskaya had lived by the dictum that a father’s stinging palm and the policeman’s knout were but one and the same thing and that the Home and the Empire were inextricably linked. The problems facing both were essentially the same; they differed only in magnitude. Both demanded a sense of responsibility in their governance: a level headed acceptance of duty; an unobstructed and purposeful vision of the way ahead. And the two pillars upon which each edifice stood were the same, whether it was a Tsar’s palace or a modest household: the maintenance of order and the application of discipline. To be sure, there were other keystones without which neither estate could hope to prosper: loyalty; solvency; sobriety and, within reason, ambition. But it was those two pillars that between them provided the only sure foundation for public or private life. The erosion of either one would weaken the other.

Nothing had caused her to change her view. The lower orders were as unruly children; it was simply a matter of keeping them in their place and safe from harm. Just as the country had been ruined by weakness and vacillation among its ruling class, which had in turn given rise to the corrosive nonsense twaddle about ‘rights’, so a household would inevitably founder without a firm hand to control the excess appetites of its servants. For proof, one had only to mark the dramatic improvement in the behaviour of their housemaids following a beating. It was true that the girl might be red-faced and sullen for a day but it would be a long time before she was slow to obey her mistress’s commands or neglect her duties around the house. And woe betide her if she had misbehaved herself on a day when the Professor had visited his club in the evening, for then the thrashings were twice as severe.

Madame Wrenskaya’s bloodless lips twisted into a thin smile at the memory of the Professor’s heavy tread upon the stairs on those nights and the way his large frame had filled the darkness of her bedroom doorway.

“Vasili,” she would purr. “Dear, dear Vasili. I am afraid you will have to discipline Gaila. Yes, you must! She spilt berry sauce on our second best tablecloth tonight. The stain will never come out. No, Vasili, it must be tonight. I’m sure she did it deliberately.”

The bed would shift beneath his weight as he sat on its edge and her nostrils quiver as she caught, mixed with the aroma of cognac and cigars, the faint smell of the expensive oil with which he dressed his hair.

“She’s a bad girl. A wicked girl,” she would whisper insistently and feel the spectre place a moist kiss upon her warm forehead and the bed shift once again as he rose and left her to go in search of his instrument of punishment.

Her gnarled fingers clenched the blanket draped across her lap as she recalled with pleasure hearing him roar like a lion up the darkened stairwell to the attic, where his unsuspecting victim lay sleeping the sleep of the weary in her rickety trestle cot. And then his footsteps climbing upwards through the house in Moscow, echoing on the uncarpeted boards of the topmost landing until he had finally reached the crude stepladder that led to the servants’ quarters and to the warm smell of startled flesh. Then he was far above her and the door of the attic room was crashing open and she could hear the shouting and the pleading amid the noise of furniture being thrown aside and cheap ornaments breaking as he chased and closed upon his quarry. Often, when they were cornered, they would scream for their mothers; especially the young ones. Either their mother or their father (if they had one) or their God (if they had one). Sometimes, in the last seconds before the beating began, they even called out to her for help, but to no avail. Then came the sounds of descending blows, clearly audible despite the three floors in between. And, after the blows, the mysterious rhythmic creaking of the floorboards punctuated by the girl’s groans and their master’s rough curses; words such as he had never used with her in all the years of their marriage. And long, long after, having washed himself clean, the return of the Professor to her bed where she would allow him to stay until daybreak; listening to the sobbing in the darkness above her, as he slept in her arms; secure in the knowledge that order had been restored.

“Ah well,” sighed Madame Wrenskaya, wiping the last trace of tears from her eyes, “that was all long ago and best forgotten.”

The Professor had been dead for over forty years and she had lived on, to be married and widowed a second time and left stranded in this awful town. Ever since the death of the wretch Wrensky, her life had been plagued by one inefficient servant after another, as if the whole class had conspired with the Devil to take its revenge upon her.

Catching a fleeting glimpse of a lanky figure passing the open doorway, she called out sharply:

“Mariya!”