Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

Still crouching, he inched forward until he could peer around the corner. Anybody looking for him would expect to see his head at head height; a vague shape appearing momentarily at thigh height would be questioned as a trick of the moonlight. Half obscured by the wall, it would not automatically be taken to be a human face.

The landing was empty. His eyes, grown accustomed to the dark, told him that there was no obstacle between himself and the head of the stairs. Nevertheless he looked again, lowering his body until he was on all fours; his fingers and knees alert for the slightest movement, or vibration, on the boards beneath him.

Nothing.

Satisfied that the coast was clear, he reached slowly behind him and groped for the boots. His fingers found the comforting fur of the kisys. Drawing them to him, he rose from his knees and silently crept to within three paces of the head of the stairs. This time he lowered his whole body until he lay completely flat on the floor, knowing that he must present the smallest silhouette to anybody who might be watching from below on the ground floor. With an infinite slowness, he began to crawl.

He was within an arm’s length of the top step when it happened. There was a sharp clicking sound close to his ear. Staying completely still, he closed his eyes as his brain raced, trying to distinguish it from all the other sounds it had recorded. Had it been the sound of a safety catch being eased off? Or the swivel arm of a rifle sling striking against the barrel? If he turned his head to the right, would his eyes, half blinded now by perspiration, see the muzzle of the rifle of the waiting police guard who had all this time been watching his progress from the shadows? So tense was he that he became conscious of the slightest sound: the drumming of the blood in his ears; even the rasp of his beard brushing against the collar of his coat as he, ever so slowly, turned his head.

The landing was still empty.

He began to believe that he had imagined the sound and told himself that his brain was playing tricks with him. It was time to get on; if he delayed any longer he risked missing the rendezvous with Goat’s Foot in the churchyard. He lay there for a moment longer, the floorboards hard and uncomfortable against his ribs. Then, licking his dry lips, he began once more to edge himself cautiously towards the head of the stairs.

Click! Click!

This time it had come from below him; a light rattling sound that made him scowl in the darkness as, at last, he recognised it. The horn buttons of his overcoat were grating along the floorboards. Raising his body slightly, he crawled the remaining inches to the top step and peered down from the head of the stairs into the gloom of the entrance hall. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust themselves to the new darkness. When they had done so, the first thing that met his gaze was the open door of the admissions office. No light shone from within. The dvornik had gone off duty.

He had memorised the layout of the ground floor by heart. After the dvornik’s desk, the area of greatest risk was the room directly beneath his own: the sleeping quarters of the hospital’s two attendants. To the right of them lay the public ward; empty since the removal of a body of a patient – a drayman, he had learned – who had died of blood poisoning following an accident. To the left of the attendants’ room was the operating theatre. A corridor ran the length of the building opening up into the hallway above which he now lay. To the right of the admissions office was a smaller room where the Hospital Attendant sat. Next to that was the storeroom. Left of the hallway was the office of the hospital’s Administrator, its doorway in the corridor opposite the operating theatre.

To the best of his knowledge, only three living bodies were in the hospital: himself and the two attendants. He had earlier sat in the darkness of his room listening to their desultory drunken conversation through the floorboards below him, ever vigilant for another voice. Eventually it seemed that sleep had overcome them. If there was a guard down there he had not indicated his presence, nor had he been addressed once by either of the two men.

The probabilities of risk, he decided, were still in his favour.

Standing up, he once again retrieved his new boots. He had left his old pair at the foot of the bed, adding what colour he could to the image of a man fast asleep. Such touches were worthless in themselves but, when added together, could give him perhaps an extra hour’s start. Whatever chance he had of a successful escape lay in the meticulous care and attention he had paid to minute details.