Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

For the first time he had lost his temper with Jaques, piqued by the unfairness of her assumption that the fault lay with him. She had no right to reprimand him, he told her, when comrades were being tortured and killed at home in the struggle. What did those derelicts in the bar know about conditions in Russia? Had she heard the rubbish they were talking? Had she even been out of the house recently? For months he had been living like a hunted animal, shunted from one hiding place to another, harboured by brave workers who risked discovery and torture just so as he could get to Paris; to the great party abroad which would help build the revolution. And what did he find? A bunch of squabbling relics, Narodovolets most of them, who were twenty, no, thirty years behind the times. Well, he was fed up of running. He wanted to work, to continue the fight, not sink into the slough like the ones in the bar. “Words without deeds was death” and so on. It had been quite an outburst.

After Jaques had ordered him to go to bed he lay awake for an hour, fretting in case he had overstepped the mark. But in the morning, he had been provided with new luggage, a change of travelling clothes and an address in London. He was to catch the noon boat train from the Gare du Nord. The person he was to contact in London was situated at 30, Holford Square, Pentonville: a Dr. Jacob Richter. He was to bear greetings from his cousin Jaques and to tell him that the wine was excellent. He was also to give her warmest greetings to Frau Richter. En fin, his wish had been granted. He was on his way.

* * *

The two railway journeys and the boat crossing had taken over ten hours. It was a wearisome journey, and he had deliberately disobeyed his instructions by spending some of the English money he had been given in Paris on the small luxury of two glasses of rum on the boat. Once in London, having been warned not to loiter in the echoing cavern of the railway terminus, a favourite pick-up point of the British secret police, he lost no time in hailing a horse drawn cab on the street. Carefully enunciating the address of his destination to the sullen cab driver, he climbed into the creaking hansom and had sat back, determined to enjoy the luxury of being driven through the city.

Just as in Paris, he felt unsettled by the sheer size of the city’s buildings. Everything was so colossal, so alien, compared to home. Even Odessa was not as big as this city. It was as if he had been transported into a future, where the very stones proclaimed the monumental confidence of the ruling class. Steadily, the traffic became more congested until they broke out into the maelstrom of a square, one side of which was dominated by a tall stone column. At the base of the pillar he had glimpsed the outline of a pair of carved lions and had smirked at this imperial conceit, for huddled against the old bronze flanks of the lions lay the unmistakeable figures of sleeping humanity. As the cab continued to traverse one side of the square, he saw more figures, clustered around the base of the column like the unburied fallen of some battlefield massacre. This scene of desolation disappeared as the carriage swung left behind tall buildings and began making its way up a narrow side street. Gradually he became aware of the sound of a great tumult, as if the invisible battle had been carried by its own momentum into another sector of the city. Excited cries and shouts, quite unintelligible to his ears, were growing in volume, mixed with the neighing of horses and the rumbling of carts. The cab slowed down to a walking pace and then, blocked by an obstruction ahead, stopped altogether. Peering through the cab’s small side window he saw that they had reached a night market, but a market of such dimension and dynamism that it beggared anything that even Petersburg could have boasted.

Muttering, the driver climbed down from his seat and strode off into the crowd, leaving Trotsky to take in the scene around him. Stacked boxes of fruit and vegetables were arranged in serried ranks, starting at thigh height out on the narrow pavements to almost ceiling height inside the wholesalers’ warehouses. Everywhere, there was light: yellow light from the tall street lamps; white light from new electric lamps inside some of the premises; blue light from the naphtha flares and red light from the coals of the braziers of the street traders. It was as if night had been turned into day, there not being enough hours of natural daylight to turn a respectable profit. To the left and to the right of him he saw mountains of food, standing untended less than half a verst from the square full of hungry tramps. Under the glare of the lights he noted that many of the fruits and vegetables seemed to lose their distinctive colouring, so that the subtle differences in hue were lost between cabbages and lettuces, marrows and celery.