Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers Read online

  He saw Gasparov coming towards him. Gasparov was the last person he wanted to talk to just at the moment and he tried to move away. Gasparov, however, intercepted him.

  ‘Please!’ he said. ‘There is something we must discuss.’

  Dmitri, however, had gone off discussion.

  ‘Yes?’ he said unwillingly.

  ‘Please! It is important.’ He paused. ‘What exactly is the nature of your interest in Shumin?’

  ‘My interest in Shumin?’ said Dmitri, surprised.

  ‘Yes. The doctor spoke of her as your girlfriend. That I cannot believe.’

  ‘Well, no …’

  ‘Ah, no?’ said Gasparov, pleased. ‘But what, then, is the nature of your interest in her?’

  Dmitri hesitated. There was on the face of it no reason why he shouldn’t tell Gasparov, but something held him back.

  ‘You are cautious,’ said Gasparov approvingly. ‘Well, that is wise. People like us need to be cautious.’

  People like us? What was he talking about? Then he realized. Gasparov, having seen him in the cell with the politicals, thought he was a political too.

  ‘I, too, am interested in Shumin,’ Gasparov pronounced.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We must work together.’

  ‘Ye-es?’ said Dmitri more doubtfully.

  Gasparov smiled.

  ‘Still cautious? Well, we do not know each other. But it is surely not a coincidence that we are both … interested in Shumin. Perhaps your interest is the same as mine.’

  He seemed to be waiting.

  Dmitri couldn’t think what to say. How could their interest be the same? Was the fellow a police agent or something?

  ‘Perhaps,’ he temporized.

  Gasparov seemed disappointed. He shrugged.

  ‘Well, let us go our separate ways, then. Perhaps after … But, my friend, perhaps this I should say, in case you have to act alone. Have you known her long?’

  ‘Not very, no.’

  ‘Nor I. I have known her long enough, though, to have found out that she is unreliable.’

  ‘Unreliable?’

  ‘And that way, my friend, for people like us, danger lies. But perhaps you know that already. Perhaps others have found that out. And perhaps that is why you have come.’

  He smiled significantly and then moved away. Dmitri was totally mystified.

  The next night things proceeded as before. Shortly after midnight he descended into the yard, where he found the two men from the Artel waiting for him. There was no snow this time, however. The night was cloudy but every now and then the moon appeared through a break in the clouds and lit up everything alarmingly. They kept to the shadows where they could. Crossing the road, they waited for cloud. On the other side they hugged the infirmary wall.

  The gate was open as before. The men went straight to the right place this time. Dmitri bent and put his face to the chink.

  The ward was quite still. In the pale candlelight he could see the patients lying in their beds. Bandaged. One of them was holding an ikon clasped to his breast.

  Something stirred on the other side of the wall and then he found a face close to his and felt himself brushed by a wisp of hair.

  ‘You should not have come,’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘You need my help?’ said Anna Semeonova, astonished.

  ‘Yes. I want you to be a witness.’

  ‘Witness?’

  ‘They won’t believe me. Not if it’s me alone. And anyone else I could get, they won’t believe either, because they’d be a convicted prisoner.’

  ‘I am a convicted prisoner,’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘A prisoner, yes. But not convicted.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘What do you want me to witness to?’ said Anna Semeonova, a little shakily.

  ‘You were on the convoy. They asked you to help on the carts. You saw the people who were put on them. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘They had been shot, hadn’t they? They had been shot down?’

  Her ‘yes’ was so faint that he could hardly hear it.

  ‘They were taken to the infirmary and you have been nursing them. You know the nature of their wounds. You can testify to their having been shot.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Well?’ said Dmitri.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘What don’t you know? You saw the people, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl reluctantly. ‘I saw the people.’

  ‘Did you actually see them being lifted on to the carts?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Dmitri, ‘that’s all you have to say. That would do.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘You will do it?’ said Dmitri after a while. ‘You must do it!’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘You needn’t be frightened. You will be under my protection. The Court’s protection,’ amplified Dmitri, feeling that she might well judge the offer of his own services, unassisted, insufficient.

  ‘I cannot,’ she said.

  God, they were back to that, to her original mysterious refusal to return with him.

  ‘You must!’ he said determinedly. ‘You cannot allow a dreadful thing like this to go unpunished!’

  She said something that he couldn’t quite catch and he asked her to repeat it. She did, but again he couldn’t catch it. It sounded like ‘Someone else.’

  ‘It has to be you,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one who would do. They won’t believe anyone else, or they’ll say they can’t believe anybody else. They’d be able to hush it up.’

  He thought he heard a faint sob.

  ‘You don’t want that, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’ve got to help. It’s got to be you. No one else will do.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said again, shakily.

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘I just can’t!’

  ‘Why can’t you? You must tell me. You can’t let those people die and do nothing!’

  He had to wait for so long that he thought for a moment she’d gone away.

  ‘I was there,’ she said.

  ‘Well, then – ’

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand. I was there. I saw it happen.’

  ‘You saw it happen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Saw the actual shooting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Now the silence was Dmitri’s.

  ‘They pressed forward,’ she said, so quietly that Dmitri could hardly hear, ‘shouting. And the guards were shouting back. And then someone – the sergeant, I think – shouted, “Stand back, or I’ll fire!” And they still pressed forward. And then the guards began shooting, and they went on and on, until everyone was lying there, and there was smoke everywhere, and noise …’

  Her voice died away. Dmitri waited a moment, needed to wait for a moment, and then said gently:

  ‘Well, that is what you must say. You must say it, because something like this cannot be allowed to happen and nothing be done about it. I know it is distressing – ’

  ‘It is not that,’ she said quickly. ‘Not just that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You see … I caused it. I was to blame.’

  ‘Oh, come – ’

  ‘No, I was to blame. I am to blame. I caused it, and – ’ so faint that he could hardly hear – ‘I did it deliberately.’

  ‘Come,’ said Dmitri, ‘I am sure that whatever you did, you didn’t do it deliberately, intending innocent people to be shot down – ’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Not that! I didn’t think – I didn’t think for one moment – and then when it started happening I tried to run forward and explain, but something, or someone, hit me, and I fell, and when I looked up it was all happening, and I couldn’t believe it, and I just lay t
here stunned, no, not stunned, not unconscious, but – I was in a daze, I couldn’t – ’

  ‘Look,’ said Dmitri, ‘you really must not blame yourself.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘that is exactly what I must do. Because without me, it wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Perhaps’, said Dmitri, ‘you had better tell me. Tell me everything.’

  One of the men from the Artel plucked at his sleeve. Dmitri shook his head determinedly. The man’s hand fell away.

  Anna Semeonova didn’t say anything for a while. Then she caught her breath and began resolutely.

  ‘It goes back a long way. To Kursk.’

  ‘The Court House?’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Even before. I had got to know Marfa Shumin. I admired her. She seemed to be everything I was not. Brave, and good, and purposeful. She had a purpose in life and I had none. I wanted to help other people but I couldn’t see – and somehow she could. I admired her, I admired her very much. And then when she got taken away by the police, a person like that! I wrote to her; I said, was there anything I could do, and she wrote back and said, no, there wasn’t, that they would send her to Siberia and that was that. It seemed all wrong to me, it was all wrong. I went to the Court House that day wanting to help but not really knowing what I could do – ’

  ‘The day we met at the Court House?’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Yes. I wanted to see her. I had some vague notion about changing places with her, about sacrificing myself. Well, we went out into the yard, didn’t we, and then I sent you away. And then there was a chance and – well, I took it,’ said Anna Semeonova simply.

  ‘Had you arranged it beforehand?’

  ‘No, no. And when I spoke to Marfa, she couldn’t believe it, she just stood there, and I pushed her out of the way, and then I saw that boy looking at me, so I climbed up into the cart – ’

  ‘And went to Siberia in her place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was a stupid thing to do.’

  ‘Yes, I know that now.’

  ‘But then why,’ said Dmitri, ‘why did you refuse to come back to Kursk with me?’

  ‘Because of what happened. That dreadful … that dreadful thing in the forest.’

  ‘Why should that stop you?’

  ‘Because I was to blame.’

  ‘How could you be to blame?’

  Another long silence. Then she started again, shaky but determined.

  ‘There was a man in the convoy,’ she said. ‘He thought I was Shumin. And I played along, because I was Shumin. Or, at least, I wanted to be. But he began to talk to me about all kinds of terrible things, as if I was sure to be interested in such things and – and would want to do them. But I couldn’t believe that Marfa … I still don’t. But she was known to him as a – as a revolutionary, and he thought she would be interested and would want to – to help him.’

  ‘How could she help him? If he was going to Siberia?’

  ‘The Tsar’s regime was there, too, he said, and we could strike a blow there as well as we could anywhere else. And I listened, I just listened, I had no intention … But he went on talking and gradually it became clear he wanted my help. He said it was best if it was a woman. It would be easier to get people involved, men involved especially. He said that criminals were like that, he said it with a sort of sneer on his face, that they were stupid and would be more likely to get involved if it was a woman. It was important to get men involved because then there would be more chance of it getting out of hand. It had to be big, you see, big enough for people to notice, people back in Russia. It would show people what the Tsar’s regime was like, was really like. It would strike a great blow at it, and, and …’

  Anna Semeonova stopped.

  ‘And?’ prompted Dmitri.

  ‘I wanted to strike a blow,’ she whispered.

  ‘He had persuaded you?’

  ‘A bit. It was more, though, that I asked myself what Marfa Shumin would do, and I thought that perhaps, yes, she would want to strike a blow, and I thought that if she would have done it then surely I ought to …’

  ‘What exactly did he ask you to do?’

  ‘I had to talk to people on the march and pretend that the guards had attacked me.’

  ‘But surely – ’ began Dmitri.

  ‘Not in that way,’ she said. ‘They don’t attack you in that way. They hit you, but on the whole they don’t hit you very much, it’s more the men. It’s like the criminals,’ she said. ‘They don’t attack you either. It’s odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘So you did talk to people?’

  ‘Yes. I said it had happened at the last stop. I told some of the women and they spread it, and there were men there and they became angry. I don’t know quite how it came to flare up, but then suddenly …’

  ‘And what about this man, then? What happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wasn’t in the infirmary. Perhaps – perhaps he was one of the dead.’

  ‘If anyone is to blame,’ said Dmitri, ‘it is him and not you.’

  ‘He is certainly to blame,’ said Anna Semeonova. ‘But so am I.’

  ‘I don’t think – ’

  ‘I should have foreseen it. I thought it would just end in shouts and blows. I didn’t think for one moment … But, of course, I should have thought. I was too innocent,’ said Anna Semeonova. ‘What I now know is that innocence is no excuse.’

  ‘And so,’ said Dmitri, ‘you have set out to punish yourself? By condemning yourself to Siberia?’

  ‘It’s appropriate, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Dmitri. ‘It’s not appropriate.’

  But Anna Semeonova would not be moved.

  ‘Listen, mate,’ said one of the men from the Artel, ‘we can’t stay here all night.’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Dmitri. ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘He’s thinking,’ said one Artel man to the other.

  ‘Well, I’m thinking, too,’ said the other Artel man. ‘I’m thinking we should bloody well get out of this.’

  ‘Get out of it if you want!’ said Dmitri.

  ‘Are you coming, then?’

  ‘No.’

  The men looked at each other.

  ‘Here,’ said one, ‘you’ve got to come. Otherwise the Artel will have our balls.’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ said Dmitri.

  ‘You must go,’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ said Dmitri. ‘Why have you changed places with Marya Serafimovna?’

  ‘Not changed,’ said Anna Semeonova. ‘I’ve just taken her place, that’s all.’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘She died,’ said Anna Semeonova. ‘She was very weak, poor thing. I talked about it with the Milk-Drinkers. They suggested it, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘People die here all the time,’ said Anna Semeonova. ‘They don’t inquire too closely about the bodies. A body passed out. Marya Serafimovna stays. That’s all.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Dmitri.

  ‘I don’t want to be Shumin. Not any more. And, besides …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I want to be Marya Serafimovna.’

  ‘I must ask you again: Why?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘Mr Kameron – ’ Dmitri was oddly pleased at this use of his name – ‘do you know anything about the Milk-Drinkers?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘They’re good people. They’re about the only good people I’ve met. I didn’t meet many good people at Kursk. Vera Samsonova, perhaps, but she’s not exactly good, not in the way the Milk-Drinkers are. There’s something special about them. Have you noticed, Mr Kameron? They’re against shooting. They’re against all violence, whether it’s the stupid, mindless violence of the criminals or the kind of violence that the Government uses all the time. Well, I’m not a good person, Mr Kameron, but that will do for me. I’ve decided to become a Milk-Drinker.’

  ‘Look, mate
,’ said the man from the Artel.

  ‘Shut up!’ said Dmitri.

  ‘He’s thinking,’ said the other man.

  ‘He’s not thinking enough,’ said the first man. ‘It’s time we got out of here.’

  ‘You’ve got to come back with me,’ said Dmitri. ‘If you don’t come back with me I can’t do anything!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘I need you as a witness. You saw it all. You can’t just step aside. You must stand up and testify.’

  ‘Testify?’ said Anna Semeonova.

  ‘Look, mate,’ pleaded the man from the Artel ‘if we don’t go now – ’

  ‘Yes, go!’ said Anna Semeonova. ‘I must think.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said the man from the Artel. ‘Not another one!’

  Dmitri felt he had to tell Timofei about Marya Serafimovna.

  Timofei nodded his head in acceptance.

  ‘The Lord gives,’ he said softly, ‘and the Lord takes away.’

  For Dmitri, there was too much quiescence in it. Why should the Lord take away? He, Dmitri, would have protested.

  ‘Marya Serafimovna I can understand,’ he said. ‘Just. She was sick and ill. You can argue it would have happened anyway. But the others, the ones in the forest – no, I don’t think that’s to be accepted.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Timofei. ‘Not without doing anything.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Dmitri. ‘I’m afraid, though, that no one’s going to listen much to a junior Examining Magistrate.’

  ‘Not even a Magistrate?’ said Timofei, opening his eyes in surprise.

  ‘I would have to produce evidence that they couldn’t brush away. More to the point, I want to produce someone they can’t brush away.’

  ‘It’s a pity she’s not your sweetheart,’ said Timofei regretfully. ‘Then she would do what you asked.’

  Dmitri, surprisingly, found himself thinking not of Anna Semeonova but of Vera Samsonova.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s quite like that.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Timofei, ‘she will come back with you.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Dmitri despondently.

  ‘She will. She has to, you see. If she’s a Milk-Drinker. You said she had become a Milk-Drinker?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘A Milk-Drinker’, said Timofei, ‘has to bear witness.’

  It wasn’t quite the same thing, though, thought Dmitri. He would have liked to have had another talk with Anna Semeonova, another go at persuading her. Instead, he saw Gasparov coming towards him.