Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

It will not do, she told herself sternly. Anna Christianovna is right, I have already travelled too far down road to becoming a town spectacle like Irena Kuibysheva, just because someone has thrown me some affection. How pitiful I must be! There is nothing that Anton Chevanin can offer me that I do not already possess, and nothing that I can give him that he will not willingly dispense with as soon as he grows a little older.

She sighed. She envied Anton his delusion that all one needs is love to sustain one’s life.

Whereas, she thought, all the world knows that love is like the appendix. It is quite possible to live without it, once one has survived its removal.

She must think about the future, she told herself. Vasili had promised her that they would travel to the South in the summer. She had confidence in his word, although she did not dare to believe that he had been serious about looking for a new practice there.

How wonderful that would be! she thought. We could start a new life in the warmth, in a big city where the sun shone every day, where life was eventful and we could enjoy the company of a wide circle of intelligent friends. But I must be practical and accept that it will never happen. We shall have an enjoyable holiday, nothing more.

The sound of movement upstairs disturbed her thoughts. Lifting her head she listened to her husband moving above her.

Vasili has awoken from his nap, she thought. He will want his cup of tea.

Laying aside her sewing she went into the kitchen to speak to Katya.

Sitting at her writing desk in her home on Menshikov Street, Olga Nadnikova, wife of Pavel Stepanovich Nadnikov, laid down her pen and read through the brief invitation she had written to her friend Lidiya Pusnyena summoning her to join her for coffee at the Hotel New Century the following morning. It was the first of three, or possibly four, notes (she wasn’t sure about the Doctor’s wife) that she had set herself to compose that day. Satisfied with her wording she set the invitation aside and selected another sheet of note paper. She had no qualms about adopting a brusque tone with Lidiya, who relied heavily on her for direction in all things, but the invitation to Raisa Izminskaya required a more considered approach.

Mindful that Raisa was a closer friend to Tatyana Kavelina than to herself, she dipped the nib of her pen into the inkwell and began to write.

The events of the previous Sunday had proved to be an epiphany for Olga. Seeing the author of all her disappointments, Illya Kuibyshev, sprawling face first on the ground had given her great satisfaction, but it had been the response of the onlookers, including those around her on the Mayor’s dais, that provided the moment of enlightenment. Disarmed by drink and satiety they had laughed long and loud; not just because of Kuibyshev’s misfortune but specifically because it had happened to him. They had showed their true feelings: they despised him as much as she did. Kuibyshev might be the richest man in the town – he was probably the richest man in the whole Tobolsk region – but their coarse jeers were public proof that he was neither liked nor feared. And if he was neither liked nor feared, and if certain arrangements could be bent to her satisfaction, then he was vulnerable.

Looking around her at the group assembled on the dais, and at the crowd of onlookers that had been waiting on the boardwalk to witness the arrival of the convoy of special prisoners, she had committed to memory a mental list of the laughing faces and had taken care to write their names down as soon as she and Pavel had returned home. This list of names, now annotated with asterisks, ticks, crosses and addenda, now lay on the writing desk beside the sheaf of notes she had compiled since that fateful moment. Her campaign plan was almost complete.