Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

At this point Trotsky had reached into the depths of his torn coat pocket and produced the bullet which he passed it to Mukhin, along with the revolver ordering the old man to load the gun and spin the magazine. As Mukhin was doing so, Trotsky had reasoned with Shrentzel that the odds that were being offered him to survive were far more favourable than would be offered to them, or to any union agitator, in the event of their capture. He then calmly and politely asked the traitor to commence his confession.

By this time Shrentzel was in such a state, alternately weeping and wailing, that no sense could be made of what he said. So, with a theatrical sigh of regret, Trotsky had taken the revolver back from Mukhin and without any visible hesitation, raised it to the nape of Shrentzel’s neck and pulled the trigger.

Alas, it had been Nesterenko, regular officer in the Okhrana, who had been sent underground by Peterhof to rid the region of its nest of revolutionary pests, and not Shrentzel. Years later, during his last summer of exile together, he had told Alexandra why he had done what he had done. She had despised him for his confession in the same way she had come to despise him for so many things. How could he have been so stupid as to ever suspect her brothers of betrayal when the real traitor had been in the room all along, entertaining them with his stupid songs? Confession, he recognised, was the coward’s way out; like telling Mukhin to switch the bullet for an empty cartridge. Yet, for all that, and in just the same way, it had proved effective. It had been the last confession he had ever made to her; the last, he promised himself, that he would make to any woman, and he had made it knowing that it would drive her even further away from him.

So much the better, he told himself now. At that point he had already decided to leave, to go west and rejoin the living world, and that she would not be coming with him.

Marriage to Alexandra had been an economic and practical convenience to both of them, he reasoned. The two and a half years they had spent together as man and wife had served their purpose. It had certainly saved Alexandra, for without him and their daughters to live for, he doubted that she would have survived exile. And he had not been a bad husband: he had never beaten her, nor had she ever been hungrier than he had been. In fact, with his work, first as a book keeper (it had not been his fault that he had been sacked for mistaking ‘poods’ for ‘pounds’) and then as a literary critic, they had lived better than most exiles. He had not taken to drink, as some of the others had done, nor let their desperate situation drive him to thoughts of death; neither had he given up the struggle. On the contrary, it was she who had sunk into torpor, seeing his relentless persistence as another example of what she called his “arrogance”. Increasingly she had blamed him for their sufferings and the fate of her family, for Grigori, Illya and Mariya had all been arrested in the round-up of the Nikolayev cells. She could never forgive him for their sentences, no matter how much he reasoned with her. As for their daughters, it was better that the two girls grew up safe in the steadfast love of one parent than in the sullen company of two.

The truth was, by that time he had become sick of his wife, and sick of himself for remaining with her. Sick of Alexandra’s moody silences that had once been mistaken for mysterious aloofness. Sick of her slack stretched breasts that had lost their shape after the feeding of the two children. She had let herself go; she had let the sentence of four years’ temporary exile break her spirit; that was what had been so unexpected. Certainly, they had shared some hard times at Verkholensk, but he had been able to read; brushing the cockroaches from the pages of Kapital and discovering the French authors, like Maupassant and Flaubert. Moreover, he had established himself as a published writer, and had once more attracted the attention of the party abroad. He had gone on, gone forward, had taken up the challenge; while she had just given up. He could have forgiven her sudden ageing, could even have helped her if she had let him. But to give up, just like that? He had despised her for it, all the more so because it had been she who had once appeared so strong, so certain.