Paul watched the execution.
It was the last thing he wanted to do, but he would not desert his friend now. He had not attended the trial, in faithfulness to Kazan’s wish, yet he could not help feeling guilty for staying away. Perhaps some of that same guilt now impelled him to come out of hiding on this blackest of all days in his young life. He only hoped that his presence in the crowd of spectators would somehow give Kazan added strength in this awful, dark moment.
Paul wondered if he could even be seen among the hundred onlookers. If not, surely Kazan would know he was there, that he’d always remain loyal. Always!
Next to him stood Kazan’s defeated lawyer, Basil Anickin. He seldom missed these public executions and, in large part, his presence aroused little suspicion, for many of the doomed radicals had been his clients. Beneath such professional interest, however, something greater drove him to these public displays, every one of which added more fuel to his silently seething hatred.
Glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, Paul noted the taut, hard lines etched indelibly on his face. His eyes focused ahead, smoldering with a deep fire that rarely burst into flame, yet burned all the hotter inside. With unrelenting malice he stared at the scaffold, not letting his gaze waver to the right or the left. Whatever thoughts simmered in the depths of the lawyer’s mind, Paul could not guess. But he knew they had to revolve around the imperative for justice, for recompense . . . for revenge. Only the spilling of blood could assuage the look he saw in those eyes.
As Paul stood there, had he been asked point blank, he could not have truthfully denied such thoughts himself. For the first time in his life, he found himself thinking—really thinking—about killing. He supposed he had wanted to kill the schoolmaster in Pskov, but he hadn’t really given his actions any predetermined thought. It had all just happened. Now, however, he found himself considering what it would be like to kill, and reflecting on the idea with practical realism.
Unexpectedly, the thought did not cause him to shudder in revulsion. In fact, a certain morbid sense of pleasure surged through him. The thought of wrapping his hands around the throat of that brutal thug who had so humiliated both him and his father, who had so cruelly treated the peasants of the country around his home and was now carrying out the savagery of his lofty new position in St. Petersburg . . . just the thought of sending Cyril Vlasenko to another world gave him a thrill of satisfaction.
Had Paul been able to witness the changes taking place at that moment on his own face as he considered the demise of the Third Section chief, he might have been surprised, even shocked. For his youthful face suddenly bore an uncanny resemblance to that of Anickin, who stood at his side.
As Kazan mounted the scaffold steps, all Paul’s hatred was swallowed, for the moment at least, by the anguished grief of what was taking place before his eyes.
He remembered the enthusiastic young idealist when he had first made an appearance in the towns and villages around Katyk. He had been full of hope then, and so convinced that Herzen’s dream of rousing the fervor and support of the peasants would be fulfilled. The discouraging failure of his mission in the region disheartened and defeated many, who then turned away completely from the cause. But it had only strengthened Kazan’s zeal. Some might argue that it drove Kazan toward cynicism and violence, but Paul believed he had held on to his hope of a better society right up to the end. His final words to Paul proved it: “This could be the turning point, the great moment when the people finally rally around our cause.”
But there had been no great popular uprising. In many ways Paul did not understand this man, his best friend. He hadn’t understood that Kazan’s final words were spoken in futility, hadn’t grasped the foolhardy inanity of his final desperate act, hadn’t seen that the death sentence was insured the moment the cell door had clanked shut behind him.
At least Pugachov in the time of Catherine the Great had gone to his scaffold with the comforting knowledge that he had made some lasting mark, that his name would endure as one of the forerunners of freedom. Thousands had followed the Cossack who claimed to be Peter III, sweeping like wildfire through the Ural region and Volga Valley, capturing forts, killing whatever military officers, priests, and landowners happened to be in his path. Everywhere peasants flocked to join his makeshift army. Only merciless, sadistic governmental reprisals against his recruits depleted his forces enough to defeat him and bring his short-lived rebellion to naught. Yet he had died with the memory of scorched earth and aristocratic slaughter to comfort him, and with the knowledge that for one brief and glorious moment, he had struck fear into the tsaritsa and the hated nobles of her regime.
Poor Kazan had no such comfort. He was an unknown rabble-rouser who had come to the capital city thinking to make a triumphant mark in the birth of a new societal order. Instead, he had never reached the lofty pinnacle of his noble goals, had lost his perspective, and in a madcap and ill-fated rush for glory, had succeeded only in blowing a modest-sized hole in one of St. Petersburg’s streets and getting himself arrested . . . for good. Even his trial had been an ignominious affair, attracting little publicity, sparsely attended, and providing no forum for the dissemination of radical ideals as Kazan might have hoped.
And now just barely a hundred people gathered to see Kazan breathe his last. Probably three quarters of them didn’t even know his name.
Before he realized it, tears began to spill down Paul’s face. The loss of his friend was a bitter sorrow, compounded by the fact that his death seemed such an utter waste. And the sentence was unjust. Radical leaders guilty of far greater crimes still walked the streets freely.
Paul wanted to be strong. He tried to stop the tears, squeezing his hands into hard, clenched fists at his sides. Yet nothing could help. He might have begun to blubber like a child had it not been for the sound of Basil Anickin’s cold, tight voice in his ear.
“What are you crying for, you fool?” said the lawyer. “We do not need little babushkas—and our enemies do not merit your tears!”
Paul tried with difficulty to suck in two or three calming breaths of the chilly morning air.
“Forget your weeping,” Anickin went on. “It will do neither your friend nor our cause any good. Give them your hate, do you hear?” He grasped Paul’s chin in his slim fingers and jerked Paul’s head up straight. “Look!” he commanded. “Do not stare down at the ground like a coward. Dry away those tears so you can see your friend die. Watch! And let it burn like a fire into your soul!”
Paul obeyed. Under the compelling force of Basil’s grip he could hardly do otherwise.
Yet later, he realized that more than the lawyer’s fearsome presence and imperious words had compelled him to breathe deeply and courageously, to make himself experience the full impact of the awful moment. Deep within him he realized that he wanted this moment to be marked forever on his brain and heart. He did not ever want to forget. It would have been impossible to forget, in any event. But he wanted to remember what he felt at this moment. He wanted to keep the present fires within him alive.
He wanted to hate! He wanted to carry on within him the passion Kazan had taught him to feel against the oppressors. And like Basil Anickin, he wanted to keep alive forever the fuel to continually ignite that hatred!
He watched as Kazan refused the priest’s offer of unction.
Had Paul’s heart not been so heavy, he might have smiled, for he thought he detected one last twinkle in Kazan’s eyes in that final act of defiance.
Then the executioner slipped the noose around the thin neck, cinching it tight against the protruding Adam’s apple.
With eyes transfixed upon the awful proceeding, Paul beheld the unfolding drama of death in silence. He fixed his eyes upon his friend’s. And although he knew that it was impossible for Kazan to see him, Paul felt that with the last remaining spark of life he possessed, Kazan was focusing down upon the youth he had affectionately called Pavushka.
Courageously Paul did not turn away. With great force of will, he managed to hold his gaze steady as the trap door sprung open. He winced with a shudder as the rope, with an awful jerk, snapped the bones in Kazan’s neck. As he dangled lifelessly at the rope’s end, the last gasp of air squeezed out of Kazan’s lungs, the hideous aspiration of death.
Paul watched . . . and he would never forget.