Bassanda and the Bolshevik Revolution, Ch. 49

The Kremlin falls

June 1919

They came onto the roof under a sprinkle of fading stars in a moonless sky, facing west, across Ballyizget’s Kremlin Square below, at the top of the steep staircase. They came with rifles up, quartering the roof in different directions at the same time, looking across the rooftops, and fanning out to search between and around the shadows of the various structures—scaffolding, winches, air vents—that reared up from the gritty tar underfoot. Across the roof, against the eastern parapet, there was a small iron landing, evidently providing access to an exterior fire escape.

Michael stepped to the western parapet, and looked down into the Square—there seemed to be growing crowds of people, lit by occasional torches or lamps, converging like tributary streams in front of the Palace, and a growing sound of chanting voices.

He heard Dara give a short involuntary wordless cry, and whipped around to look east. Silhouetted against the sky, against the first faintest paling of the coming dawn, he saw Ivanovich against the parapet over the alley that divided the Kremlin from the next building. Instinctively Michael raised his rifle, a sense of peace coming over him as the sights settled on the Russian’s chest. Dara was in a half crouch a few yards to his left, her kukri drawn. But both froze when they realized what Ivanovich was carrying.

There came a clanging of hobnailed boots against iron gratings, and Jamshid appeared, rising up into view from the fire escape on the eastern wall—he raised the Sergeant’s Webley and aimed at the Russian’s head. But even as Michael watched, Jamshid suddenly raised his muzzle to the sky and took his finger off the trigger, opening his hand palm outward. Behind Michael and Dara, the basmachi were ranged in a semi-circle behind Jamshid, themselves with their hands held wide open and empty away from their sides.

Incongruously, Ivanovich was smiling. There was a pistol hanging at his side, held loosely in his right hand, but that was not the source of his aura of invincibility. For in his other arm, he held a bundle, wrapped in a cloth. In that sudden shocked silence, Michael heard the thin, mewling crying of a baby. Across the tarred roof, he met Ivanovich’s eyes, black holes in a pale face against the reddening eastern sky.

The Russian smiled, more widely. “Yes, Angliski—or should I call you ‘comrade’ Or, ‘papa’? Though your woman did not survive interrogation, she did endure long enough to be delivered of this brat; premature, of course, but of a certain primitive vitality—it might survive, were it to receive expert medical care, perhaps from someone like yourself? It would appear, after all, that you might be its…father.”

He held the tiny baby—Michael’s son—high against his chest. Yezget gasped audibly, as Ivanovich turned and began walking pacing steadily, though slowly, directly toward Jamshid. The Sergeant’s Webley came down to the level.

Ivanovich spoke in a conversational tone.

“Of course, if one of your feral associates should attempt to shoot me, or otherwise interfere with my escape, I could not vouch for the little thing’s survival, were it to be dashed to the ground here, or tossed to the street below. I’m told that squirrels and cats can fall safely from great heights, but I’ve heard no such folklore about newborn infants. Particularly mewling squealing undersized infants like this one.”

He raised his own pistol and pressed its muzzle into the baby’s tiny chest.

“Step aside, deviant. Interfere with me, and I’ll kill this infant and then I’ll kill you.”

Jamshid moved sideways, but the pistol’s big black muzzle continued to track the Russian, pivoting like the turret of a battleship.

Ivanovich looked at him with contempt and raised the infant higher, clutching it like a shield in front of his chest; nevertheless, Jamshid began sidling forward, moving like a dancer, feet rasping in the grit and trash of the asphalt roof.

“Don’t even think it, you pidorak pederast. No matter where your bullet found me—if a peasant faggot like yourself could aim straight, at such a time—I’ll still pull this trigger and send this spawn to meet his mother. Ask your Angliski commander if that’s what he wants.”

Dara was suddenly, incongruously, across the roof, flanking Ivanovich on one side even as Jamshid did on the other. Arriving at the fire escape, with just two upward steps to take him over the parapet, Ivanovich pivoting, backing toward the iron stairs, his pistol still pressed against Michael’s son’s tiny chest.

Ivanovich tsk’d, but, his gaze now locked on Michael’s, did not see Dara’s eyes begin to glow with a silvery iridescence. The Russian spoke over his shoulder.

“Oh please, you foul little androgyne. I have no interest in your delusions of peasant magic. You are no adept; you are just a damaged psychotic prone to fantasies of power and redemption. You are nothing—you’re an appliance, cannon fodder, not even worth raping before discarding.”

Yezget came from behind, stepping forward and outward at Michael’s left shoulder. Ivanovich flicked his eyes toward him, the pistol unyielding in his grip.

“Don’t speak, traitor. We took you out of those foul hills, gave you a start at an education in realpolitik, gave you the opportunity to leave your disgusting pagan heritage behind—and you repay Mother Russia by betraying her with this pack of mongrel hounds.”

Yezget did not otherwise respond, but he looked thoughtful, and he seemed to be whispering or chanting words under his breath, even as he took two more lateral steps, away from Michael, his gaze upon the Russian. An audible hum—almost like the electrical field of an approaching thunderstorm—began to grow around him.

Ivanovich looked at Michael. He took one backwards step onto the iron staircase that led over the parapet and down the fire escape. Though he moved casually, and seemingly showed no exertion, the baby began to cry, a thin wailing cry.

Michael began to move. The Russian took another step upward. Now his head and shoulders were silhouetted, blackly, against the flaming sky to the east. He held the infant, who had ceased squalling and was now ominously quiet, even more tightly against his chest. Jamshid, Dara, and Yezget, themselves ringed by the basmachi, were now ranged in a tightening triangle around Michael and Ivanovich, who still held Luzja’s son. Dara’s eyes were silvery iridescent disks, the iris and pupil completely obscured; as the first rays of sun lifted above the city’s rooftops to the east, her eyes took on the sky’s reddening tinge.

To the other side, Jamshid’s Webley was still leveled at the Russian’s head, and he seemed somehow, without visible movement, to have shifted markedly closer to Ivanovich: now at virtually point-blank range.

Ivanovich took the final step and stood, balanced on the parapet

“So, Angliski, I think it comes back to yourself and myself, as it seems our fate has brought us together this one last time. Only this time, I hold not only the historical advantage but, dare I say it, the autobiographical?”

Yezget’s chant grew still further—it seemed to be ringing off the reddening sky overhead. And now it seemed to take on additional reverberant harmonics that sounded as if they were echoing back from the growing-pink horizon to the east.

“After all, if this young man, this son of yours, is to have any appreciable biography of all, rather than the briefest existence of birth and then a double orphaning, it would behoove your companions and yourself to recognize my tactical advantage…”

Michael straightened and stood still. He was not smiling, but the sudden shift in his stance and aspect made him seem taller. The light of the eastern sun lit his face with a golden glow. In turn, Ivanovich’s hypnotic recitation stuttered to a halt “… were you…uh, were you to… to, uh, fail to grant me and, and your son…safe, uh… egress.”

Michael spoke. Even as he did so, Jamshid—still keeping the pistol at the Russian’s head—looked toward Michael, whose words rang with a clarity like church bells at dawn.

“You don’t understand, Boris Mikhailovitch. I had a son once before, and he died. I was unequal to it. I failed his mother, and I failed his memory. And it broke my mind. I tried to die, over and over again. But… it didn’t take. The universe had other plans for me—and for you.”

There was a silence. Ivanovich, against the parapet, stared at Michael as if he had forgotten the baby in his arms, despite the Webley pointed at his face, the shamanic chant that was now loud enough to virtually shake the roof under their feet, and the growl rumbling low in Dara’s throat, on all fours, as she arched her back like a cat coiling to spring.

Not smiling, but with complete peace in his face, Michael held out his hands, palms up.

“You and I are already dead. The only final deciding factor is the particular random instant when fate falls.”

Ivanovich was frozen, staring. The chanting and growling halted as if cut off with a knife. In the silence, there came a sudden twittering of early-morning birds. He twitched, and suddenly raised the baby high overhead.

Dara pounced, a blur that moved so fast the eye could not follow her, but for a moment she seemed to be a great black cat, fangs bared, claws extended, in a great spring toward Ivanovich’s throat.

Jamshid’s Webley roared, and a gout of blood spurted from the side of the Russian’s head, spinning him sideways. Even as he stumbled, he dropped his pistol, and clutched the baby with both arms, pivoted toward the four-story drop to the alley below. Time slowed.

Except that, even as the Russian’s arms clenched and he pivoted to hurl the baby over the parapet and to the street below, Yezget, fifteen feet away, whirled one arm in a circle like a dervish. Ivanovich was spun further, like a top, back toward the roof’s center, and Dara, in mid-air, snatched away the child, enfolding it in her arms, dropping to the tar and rolling them both away.

Dara was never sure, afterward, who had shouted aloud—it almost seemed as if the horizon itself had done so—but she found herself crouched on one ear, the baby in her arms. She looked up, and saw Ivanovich, stunned, flat on his back on the roof, with Jamshid kneeling on his chest and the Sergeant’s revolver jammed between the Russian’s teeth. It was a frozen tableau, with only the sound of the infant’s crying in her ears.

Yezget had sunk to his knees, overcome, but now he staggered to his feet, though his head hung with exhaustion; his gasping for breath was loud.

Yezget heard the crunch of Michael’s boots in the silence, broken by the singing birds, as he stepped to Yezget’s side and crouched down beside him. Under his knee, Ivanovich’s eyes were defocused, though the Russian was still breathing and appeared to be conscious. Michael said something quietly under his breath, and Yezget raised his head and nodded slowly. He got to his feet and stepped a few feet away, but kept the revolver trained at the prone Russian’s head.

Dara stood, holding the child. It had stopped crying, but she could hear its quick breathing and feel those breaths on her cheek. She gestured to the basmachi, and Ranbir Singh and Emir Basha hurried forward, slinging their rifles and manhandling the Russian to his feet, keeping a grip on his collar. The wounds in his head and neck were still running blood, but his eyes had focused and Dara knew that he was aware.

Jamshid was crying. Michael embraced him for a moment, and said a few words in his ear. Still crying, Jamshid nodded nevertheless. Michael came closer to Dara, who still held the baby, and gently pulled back the burlap that covered his son’s face. Michael smiled, and Dara heard the baby laugh. Beyond, the basmachi had handcuffed Ivanovich, and Michael seemed to have forgotten the Russian’s existence.

From beneath their feet, in the grand hall under the peaked roof, there came a roaring of male voices. The scattered rifle shots, lessened, died away. Yezget, nearest the door that led down the steep stairs from the roof, still gripping his carbine got painfully to his feet, kneed open the door, and cocked his ear, listening as if to sweet music. He turned his head to look at his three comrades, and Ranbir Singh and Emir Basha gripped Ivanovich by the arms, holding him against the roof’s parapet. Incongruously, in the waxing pink light of dawn, Yezget was smiling.

He said, “We have won. Those are ours, in the parliament room. The Kremlin is ours. We have won.”

Without shifting her eyes from their prisoner, Dara moved closer to Ivanovich, but likewise spoke, in her turn, to Michael.

“We have won. We have the chance now to clear the last of these scum. We have a chance, now, to redress the Cossack wrongs. We can save our people, and our families, and…” she suddenly faltered, and, incongruously, there was a sheen of tears in her fierce eyes, “and our friends. We can make sure that scum like this cannot harm anyone anymore, ever again.”

Ivanovich was impassive, but there was a smirk in his eyes nevertheless—eyebrows arched, the outer corners of his cold blue eyes crinkled upward. Despite his pinioned arms, and the rivulets of blood that coursed down his neck and soaked the collar of his fatigue jacket, he still seemed to be in command of the situation. He ignored all the others and spoke solely to Michael. His voice was full of cold and remote disdain.

“You simply do not comprehend historical inevitabilities, Englishman. Tsarist, Bolshevik, Orthodox, Marxist—these are temporary fads, useful for purposes of strategic advantage but ultimately of no lasting historical import compared to the epochs-long sweep of the Slavic peoples’ history, to the inevitable tides of continuity and change which have united the peoples of the first races, those races born to rule. Imperial greatness is inevitable and unavoidable and it is a scientific truth. Therefore, any expedient, any temporary alliance, any convenient untruth, is justifiable if it serves the greater historical inevitability of those who are born to rule. You never learned that, and neither did your woman. Of course, for her, it is too late now.”

Michael was silent. His head was down. Dara watched his pensive face, desperate for him to respond, but he said nothing. Cradling Michael’s son still in her arms, she flicked a glance at Jamshid, who met her eyes with a troubled expression. She looked in the other direction at Yezget, who was staring at Ivanovich’s face as if at a particularly repellent denizen of the natural kingdom—a cobra or shark, perhaps.

Michael, head still cast down, sighed deeply. But then he looked up, and his eyes brightened, and he smiled. Ivanovich looked over Michael’s shoulder, and suddenly his eyes were full of fear. And a new and unexpected voice spoke from behind them, from the direction of the stairs that led to the building below.

“Your world is not inevitable, Colonel. Indeed, it is unattainable and unsustainable. We have shown you that before, and we will show you again.”

Dara whipped her head toward the sound, and then straightened, her eyes alight. Jamshid was standing, but now there were tears running down his cheeks.

Without turning to look toward the speaker, Michael looked straight into Ivanovich’s eyes. He said simply,

“You’re wrong, comrade,” and finally he turned to look.

Across the rough shingles of the flat roof, the sun rising behind her, came Cecile Lapin, her hair piled on her head, her trousered form and wide shoulders outlined in red-gold light.

And with her, one arm around Cecile’s neck and bruises on her face, as thin as a victim of famine, but with eyes alight and smiling, came Luzja. She limped, and once she almost fell, but she never took her eyes from Michael’s face, and he in turn felt as if everything on that roof had faded to a blur, with a roaring in his ears, as he looked into her eyes.

Lapin spoke again, as if continuing a long-deferred intellectual debate.

“And once again, as it is now it was over a decade ago, Boris Mikhailovitch, it is over. Through all your lies, and those of the Tsar, and all the tsars, and all the generals and all the profiteers and all the politicians and all the murderers and all the torturers—you have lost again. Yet, down through the ages, we know that we will have to fight again, and again.

“But for today. For this avatar. For this turn of the Wheel. This time, Boris Mikhailovitch, this time it is over. For now.”

There was a silence. Ivanovich’s disdainful expression did not change, but something seemed to be dying behind his eyes. The smirk seemed frozen, and his look shifted, seemingly involuntarily, toward Michael. Dara went to Luzja, tears running down her face, and held out her son to her. The two embraced, together holding the child.

Michael stepped closer and looked into Ivanovich’s eyes, as he had once looked into the eyes of his other son, dying all those seeming aeons ago, in the rich man’s house in Melbourne, or into Dara’s, months before, after he had been drowned and revived, in the hospital tent in the Dardanelles, into Luzja’s eyes in the cells under Ballyizget’s Kremlin, where his old life, and old self, had died—and, perhaps, been reborn.

He met Ivanovich’s eyes, and he saw the last light extinguished.

“You’re an empty shell now, brother. A plaster statue and a failed empire: empty, falling to dust within.”

There was another silence, until from below there came, again, a swelling of rifle shots, first isolated and growing into a swelling thunder. Ranbir dropped Ivanovich’s arm, swinging his rifle around in parade rest across his chest, and looked down toward the Square. But he, too, smiled, and said in thickly-accented Bassandan,

“No, Captain Baba—it is no risk. It is our friends and comrades and the people, and they celebrate the liberation of the City. We have won.”

He came back to Ivanovich’s side, now holding his rifle’s stock in one hand, at his side.

“Baba—we have won.”

Dara ignored the congratulations, not taking her eyes from Ivanovich. She slid her kukri from her belt, and spat into the gritty dust of the tarred roof. The thunder of celebratory rifle shots died away.

“Captain, if you don’t want to waste a good bullet on this scum, say the word, and I’ll end this.”

But Michael did not reply. Indeed, though it seemed all present were hanging on his words, he allowed the silence to grow, and Jamshid became aware of the calling of the morning birds. Luzja, holding her son in her arms, Cecile and Jamshid together supporting her, was staring only at Michael, as if unconscious of anything except his face. Yezget stood to one side, and he seemed to be listening hard, as if willing himself to remember every detail of this quiet conversation.

Finally, looking at Ivanovich, Michael replied to Dara.

“No. We will not kill him. Otherwise, what next? Who do we kill next, in order to prevent such beasts causing greater suffering in the future? Such thinking will never end. We cannot live, or die—or kill—with rage.

He stepped still closer to Ivanovich, looking directly into his eyes, startled to discover how slight of stature his enemy was: as close as this, the Russian seemed shorter, thinner, and…lesser somehow.

“We will not kill from anger. We will not kill from hatred. We will not kill except when we truly have no other choice. If we must, we will choose this, and this only: to prevent greater suffering.

“But this time, now, is no longer such a time. This time, we have a choice.”

The last light died from Ivanovich’s eyes. He dropped his gaze and his shoulders slumped. He seemed to shrink.

Michael turned to look at Lapin. “Now it is time to build. To heal. To make your country and our sense of our selves, and our future, strong. So that we can resist. So that we do not again to succumb” he indicated Ivanovich “to lesser things like this.”

He pivoted to step away.

And at that moment, as Dara and Yezget turned their ears to the swelling celebration of victory from the Square below, as Jamshid stared at Michael as if he had never seen him before, as Michael turned to go to his son and the mother of his son, Ivanovich raised both hands, handcuffed at the wrist, and twisted the revolver out of Michael’s holster. He seemed to be moving in slow motion—though Michael’s allies seemed to move even more slowly.

Dara dove forward—it seemed to her to take forever—and brought up the kukri.

But she was too late. The Webley roared, muffled by the proximity of bodies. For another moment, shocked by the proximity of the heavy-caliber explosion, all froze.

Michael turned his head to look down at Ivanovich, and saw the huge hole in his own lower left side. Incongruously, he smiled, slowly leaning forward. Ivanovich’s dead eyes widened in fear.

Michael spoke.

“Goodbye, Dharma twin. I will meet you in the Bardo.”

And he collapsed, like a tree—a tall old-growth pine in the Bassandan Alps to the north—falling in slow motion to the tarred roof.

Yezget was frozen in shock, gazing down at the body. Singh and Basha, likewise shocked, nevertheless moved; one grabbed Ivanovich by the throat while the other, shouting with fury, unshipped his rifle, swinging it up to bear on Ivanovich’s chest. But Dara stopped them.

“No,” she said. “Baba was right. We will not kill in anger. Or from rage: old anger. Or from revenge. Or as punishment. All are wrong. We cannot kill to change the past—it is fixed forever. We cannot kill in order to anticipate the future—such a future is not worth having.”

Short-statured, thin from old hunger, pale from old sickness, the tattoos on temples and chin showing black as night in the rising dawn, she leaned close and looked up into Ivanovich’s face. Though the smirk of the assured aristocrat had returned, it had not touched his eyes. He took a breath to answer, to rebut perhaps, and there was hauteur even in his stance and his erect riderly bearing. But it was a pose: the hauteur did not touch his eyes.

Dara spoke. She looked at Cecile, who—very slowly, and with seeming reluctance—finally nodded. Dara looked back at Ivanovich. Luzja said, “No, Dara. No, not now,” but Dara continued, as relentless as an executioner.

“But. There is another reason. Like the bodhisattva who killed the future pirate, we can assume the bad karma of the Now, and the inevitability of its echoes in the future, to prevent later and greater suffering.”

Never taking her eyes from Ivanovich’s, looking up into his face even as Ranbir and Emir held his arms, she slid the kukri home, to the hilt, in the V of the Russian’s sternum, under his ribs. Ivanovich’s expression did not change for a moment, but then he made a little gasp.

Still holding his gaze, Dara released the haft of the kukri, took one further step until they were only inches apart, and put her left hand to his chest. The two basmachi dropped his arms. As he began to sag, she pushed gently.

Ivanovich folded backward over the roof’s parapet, without a sound except for the scraping of his feet as they left the roof. There was a few seconds’ pause, and then the dull, wet sound of something heavy and soft hitting the cobblestones three stories below. A sudden shocked silence was gradually broken by a chorus of shouts, drowning out the birds.

In the flaming red light of the newly-risen sun behind them, Dara turned to look at Cecile.

“In the name of those who have suffered in the past, and would otherwise suffer in the future, I accept this karma.”

Cecile’s face was expressionless and still. But after a moment, she nodded.

“Yes. That is the nature of samsara.”