Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

A cold draught from under the bedroom door made her shiver. Reaching down, she drew up the blankets that had been kicked to the bottom of the bed during their lovemaking and covered herself. Her husband’s embraces had been, as usual, urgent and clumsy and she marvelled how he could still be excited by her perfunctory responses. The very predictability of his advances bored her. Lying beside him, she recalled Madame Kavelin’s description of how Leonid, her husband, made love. (“It is like he’s climbing a mountain. One hand here, one knee there. The next hand here…”) It was the same with her poor Tolly, except that the pig kept his trousers and boots on. Perhaps it was the same with all husbands. She could ask Irena Kuibysheva…

The invisible weight beside her began to snore softly as a cold trail of semen starting to trickle down the inside of her right thigh. Quickly reaching beneath the blankets, she wiped it off with her hand. Bringing her wet fingers up to her nose, she sniffed them and then with great deliberation smeared the seed across the back of her husband’s shirt. He gave a sleepy grunt of protest.

Father Arkady could say what he liked about giving and sharing, she thought, it was all lies. There was only one law: the law of supply and demand; all the rest was for fools and virgins. Yes, Irena Kuibysheva would know; about Kavelin anyway. One thing was certain, that young lady did not have to put up with any nonsense just to prepare her own husband for a dressmaker’s bill. If anything, it would be the other way round. Illya Kuibyshev, Leonid Kavelin, Pavel Nadnikov; they were all the same. Big men in a small town who thought they owned everybody. Hard men while they were flaccid but oh so pliable when they were hard. They didn’t own Matriona Fiodorovna Pobednyeva, that much was definite.

Pulling the bedclothes up to her chin, she wriggled further down into the bed. Although she could not admit it to anyone – they were, after all, bloodthirsty terrorists and traitors – the whole business of the convoy’s arrival was very exciting. Doubly so because she had been sworn to secrecy and knew that she was the only woman in the whole town who was aware of what was approaching up the Great Tobolsk Highway. How she was longing to see the faces of the other councillors’ wives when the time came to meet the convoy!

She had already sketched out in her mind an exact order of events. Captain Steklov’s troops would be drawn up on either side of Alexei Street in their best parade dress uniforms. Behind them, the townspeople would be jostling and craning their necks to see what they could. The prisoners would be marched in chains down the centre of the boulevard, guarded by Colonel Izorov’s men until they reached the dais that would be erected in front of the town hall, upon which would be sitting the elite of Berezovo. Kuibyshev, Kavelin, Nadnikov, Izminsky; they would all have their seat, but pride of place in the centre of the raised dais would be given to His Excellency Mayor Anatoli Mikhailovich Pobednyev, her Tolly, and herself. Once the miserable prisoners had been assembled before them Tolly would rise and, resplendent in his dress uniform, the mayoral Sash of Berezovo carefully visible between the fur edges of his coat, deliver his speech. Following that, the prisoners would be marched away to their cells and he would lead her into the Hotel New Century for the official banquet. She would be the only woman on the dais; Tolly had promised her that. It would be nothing less than a personal triumph.

She grinned to herself in the darkness, recalling how he had first discovered Colonel Izorov’s little conspiracy. She had woken in the middle of the night to find her husband’s side of the bed empty. At first she had thought little of it and had tried to get back to sleep but when he had not returned after twenty minutes she had become concerned and, grumbling, had risen from their bed and had gone to look for him. She found him downstairs and… The sight that had greeted her eyes still made her giggle. There he had been, dressed only in his night shirt and wearing his best hat, striking dignified attitudes in front of the living room mirror. She had thought that she would die from laughing, her sides had hurt so much! But listening to his sheepish explanation, she had realised that their hour had come. The name of Pobednyev would be forever linked in the annals of Berezovo with the reception of the exiles. They might even have a street named after them, who knew?