Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

Madame Wrenskaya rang the bell.

“What is it you expect me to write?” she asked as they sat waiting for the maid to come from the back of the house.

Chapter Eighteen

Saturday 17th February

Berezovo, Northern Siberia

Ordinarily Colonel Izorov did not work on a Saturday morning but the bad dream he had had the night before had shaken him. It was not one of his usual dreams that repeated themselves at times of stress, where he was looking down into the shallow grave to see the little girl’s torso, white as ivory against the dark Siberian soil, cuffed and collared in red and brown, the murderers having hacked off her head and hands to prevent identification; nor the dream about one of his own men kneeling in the watchtower, propped up by the rifle in his mouth and the back of his blown clean away; or the memory of the woman’s body hanging from the rafters of her gornitsa, purple of face and tongue protruding, and where had the ladder she must have climbed got to? No, this was a new dream, and all the more alarming for its ordinariness and matter-of-fact depiction of his own death.

He had been crossing a street, he did not know where; it was a big street with people on the board walks but nowhere he recognised, and a figure dressed in dark robes with a veiled face like in pictures of the Prophet had approached him from his right hand side. Dimly aware that the figure posed a threat to him he had turned to face it but he had been too slow and it had produced a gun, and fired at him. He had felt the punch of the bullet in his chest knocking him off his feet. As he lay upon the ground trying to loosen the button on his holster, watched by an audience of silent onlookers he saw the figure approach with what seemed agonising slowness. Lifting the weapon again so that he could see the perfect circle of the end of its gun barrel, the figure had shouted, “Mama!” and fired directly into his face. He had been aware of everything, the flame and smoke and the heat of the bullet as it met his cheek and the red then black flashes as the bullet entered his brain. Cursing and shaking he had woken himself, rolling out of bed and cowering kneeling on the floor protected by the bedroom’s darkness as he gathered his wits. So convincing had the dream been that it had taken a minute for him to accept that he had not genuinely been attacked.

The dream had upset him and after relieving himself and washing his face he had spent a fruitless half hour lying beside his gently snoring wife, trying to fathom what it had meant. Who was the assassin, what make of gun had they been carrying and why had they shouted “Mama”? Where was the street? And why, and this he realised was the most worrying question – why had no one come to his aid?

Eventually he fell asleep again but when he awoke hours later he was still haunted by the memory of his nightmare and perturbed by his failure to divine either its significance or its cause. With the exception of the continued presence of the prisoner Trotsky, the town had return to normal after the excitement of convoy’s presence. There had been no riots or bloodshed; Skyralenko had reported that all the prisoners were now safely back in their cells in the prison, Dr Tortsov’s threat to declare a quarantine had come to nothing and even the Kavelin/Kuibysheva scandal seemed to have been settled in a civilised fashion. The previous evening he had not eaten any rotting fish or drunk bad liquor, so what was ailing him?

At length, finding that he could not settle at home and knowing instinctively that work offered an effective escape he dressed and set off for the uchastok, determined to shake off the dream’s clammy hold on his spirit. His unexpected appearance in the Charge Room sent ripples of consternation through the policemen on duty, and gave birth to rumours of an imminent wave of arrests. These rumours ultimately spread as far as the public bar of the Black Cock where the news that the Chief of Police was at work in his lair caused unease in more than one guilty breast, and reinforced his reputation for dangerous unpredictability.