Fall of Giants

The servant hefted his sledgehammer, touched it to the prop to get his range, swung backward, and struck. The prop flew through the air. The hinged platform came down with a bang. The three men dropped, then jerked, their fall arrested by the ropes around their necks.

Grigori was unable to look away. He stared at his father. Pa did not die instantly. He opened his mouth, trying to breathe, or to shout, but could not do either. His face turned red and he struggled with the ropes that bound him. It seemed to go on for a long time. His face became redder.

Then his skin turned a bluish color and his movements became weaker. At last he was still.

Ma stopped screaming and began to sob.

The priest prayed aloud, but the villagers ignored him and, one by one, they turned away from the sight of the three dead men.

The prince and the princess got back into their carriage, and after a moment, the coachman cracked his whip and drove away.

{VI}

Grigori was calm again by the time he finished telling the story. He dragged his sleeve across his face to dry his tears, then turned his attention back to Katerina. She had listened to him in compassionate silence, but she was not shocked. She must have seen similar sights herself: hanging, flogging, and mutilation were normal punishments in the villages.

Grigori put the bowl of warm water on the table and found a clean towel. Katerina tilted her head back, and Grigori hung the kerosene lamp from a hook on the wall so that he could see better.

There was a cut on her forehead and a bruise on her cheek, and her lips were puffy. Even so, staring at her close up took Grigori’s breath away. She looked back at him with a candid, fearless gaze that he found enchanting.

He dipped a corner of the towel in warm water.

“Be gentle,” she said.

“Of course.” He began by wiping her forehead. Her injury there was only a graze, he saw when he had dabbed away the blood.

“That feels better,” she said.

She watched his face while he worked. He washed her cheeks and her throat, then said: “I’ve left the painful part until last.”

“It will be all right,” she said. “You have such a light touch.” All the same, she winced when his towel touched her swollen lips.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Keep going.”

The abrasions were already healing, he saw as he cleaned them. She had the even white teeth of a young girl. He wiped the corners of her wide mouth. As he bent closer, he could feel her warm breath on his face.

When he had finished he felt a sense of disappointment, as if he had been waiting for something that had not happened.

He sat back and rinsed the towel in the water, which was now dark with her blood.

“Thank you,” she said. “You have very good hands.”

His heart was racing. He had bathed people’s wounds before, but he had never experienced this dizzy sensation. He felt he might be about to do something foolish.

He opened the window and emptied the bowl, making a pink splash on the snow in the yard.

The mad thought crossed his mind that Katerina might be a dream. He turned, half expecting her chair to be empty. But there she was, looking back at him with those blue-green eyes, and he realized he wanted her never to go away.

It occurred to him that he might be in love.

He had never thought that before. He was usually too busy looking after Lev to chase women. He was not a virgin: he had had sex with three different women. It had always been a joyless experience, perhaps because he had not much cared for any of them.

But now, he thought shakily, he wanted, more than anything else in the world, to lie down with Katerina on the narrow bed against the wall and kiss her hurt face and tell her-

And tell her that he loved her.

Don’t be stupid, he said to himself. You met her an hour ago. What she wants from you is not love, but a loan and a job and a place to sleep.

He closed the window with a slam.

She said: “So you cook for your brother, and you have gentle hands, and yet you can knock a policeman to the ground with one punch.”

He did not know what to say.

“You told me how your father died,” she went on. “But your mother died, too, when you were young-didn’t she?”

“How did you know?”

Katerina shrugged. “Because you had to become a mother.”

{VII}

She died on January 9, 1905, by the old Russian calendar. It was a Sunday, and in the days and years that followed it came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Grigori was sixteen and Lev eleven. Like Ma, both boys worked at the Putilov factory. Grigori was an apprentice foundryman, Lev a sweep. That January all three of them were on strike, along with more than a hundred thousand other St. Petersburg factory workers, for an eight-hour day and the right to form trade unions. On the morning of the ninth they put on their best clothes and went out, holding hands and tramping through a fresh fall of snow, to a church near the Putilov factory. After the service they joined the thousands of workers marching from all points of the city toward the Winter Palace.