The colonel’s first mistake was to be born in a tavern, for reasons that remain unclear to this day. The publican – that is, the whoremaster – may have been the real father, and his mother probably tried too late to correct her mistake. One thing is beyond question: a tavern is no place to raise a child.
Although the records indicate that Pazhari was sent to an orphanage at five months old, he could swear he has a memory of his mother: a fleshy, vivacious woman of curly hair and low brow, who he remembers singing a lullaby in a French accent: “Mon chéri, my sweet, my jewel, mon petit.”
This lullaby, or, rather, the memory thereof, may provide all the information necessary for telling David Pazhari’s story. He never resented his mother and never dreamed of the day when he would take her to task for the wrongs he suffered. Not even when he was flogged by the orphanage headmaster, a pious priest, when he tried to escape at every opportunity. He accepted the floggings, knowing that they were a necessary deterrent for other children who might follow his example, and with every lash he calculated his next escape.
On his ninth attempt, on Christmas Eve, the holy matrimony between the birth of Christ and the resulting general inebriation permitted the boy to successfully flee the city and take refuge in the forest. The only drawbacks to his plan were the snow that slowed his escape and the cold, which took his breath away and forced him to find warmth in stables along the way. Huddled under old harnesses and sheltering in haystacks, he somehow managed to survive for three weeks, suffering only three chilblains: two on his legs and one between his mouth and nose, which left a scar that is still visible today, disrupting the otherwise irritating symmetry of his features.
As far as food went, he didn’t have much. He occasionally sneaked into empty houses and ransacked pantries. In the village of Tabulki, not far from Motal, he finally found work as a servant in the Komarov household, a peasant family who let him sleep in a small shed in their courtyard. As far as David was concerned, they had granted him a palace. It was bedecked with tools and nails, shelves and tins of paint, buckets of various sizes and even a barrel long enough to lay on its side and use as a bed, if he padded it with hay.
The Komarovs were a devout Christian family, and the boy learned to love Jesus as he never had done before. His favourite story was the family’s own version of the Holy Trinity – Jesus, his mother Mary, and Mary Magdalene – which the head of the family, Lev Komarov, who was evidently endowed with a fervent imagination, described to his children with grandiloquence. Nothing moved the young David more than the love of Jesus for Mary Magdalene. In his dreams she was fleshy, of curly hair and low brow, singing to Christ in a French accent: “Mon chéri, my sweet, my jewel, mon petit.” Lev Komarov noticed that the servant boy was listening in on his stories and allowed him to stop dusting the mantelpiece and learn about the crucifixion. The boy was charmed by this act of generosity.
One day, his idyllic new life was disrupted. A group of peasants from neighbouring farms arrived at the Komarovs’, demanding to know if they had noticed any suspicious activity on their land. They said that thieves had plundered Teplov’s cabin in what was Tabulki’s second break-in that week.
“No,” Komarov shrugged. “What were they looking for in the cabin? Children, did you see anything?”
Komarov’s children were silent, as was David.
“We haven’t seen anything,” said Komarov.
“The bastard threatened Teplov with an axe. Teplov swears it was a żyd, he saw him with his own eyes.”
“A żyd?” spat Komarov, as though the word was a curse. “Wait a minute, I’ll come with you. We’ll take a few horses from the stable. David, go and saddle them.”
What was it about that word, żyd, that had infuriated his master so much? David was curious and begged with Komarov to be allowed to join them. Komarov was in a good mood. He clapped the boy on the shoulder and let David sit behind him on his horse. The boy couldn’t have been happier as he set off into the birch forest with the search party, hunting for the fugitive, and on their way they set fire to a żyd's wheat field and burned down a log store belonging to another. Exciting stuff. “Death to the żyds!” Teplov’s brother shrieked and David followed suit, “Let them die!” The search party was jubilant. David was consumed with a desire to catch the thief, all his senses sharpened. The bastard! Breaks into a cabin, threatens people with axes, who does he think he is, the filthy żyd? Death to them all.
They returned home a few hours later without the culprit but quite pleased with themselves nonetheless, feeling they had restored their defences by brandishing their might and courage for all to see and hear. The pack sat down together at Komarov’s table. The men drank themselves into a stupor and the boy served them the leftovers from dinner: borscht, pork and potato cakes with soured cream. When David had finished cleaning the kitchen, Komarov sent him back to the shed, where a surprise awaited him.
Inside his barrel, in the darkness, there crouched a snarling figure. David didn’t think for one second of running away. That shed was his home, and he was prepared to die protecting it. He reached for the saw, but the beast jumped on him and hit him over the head with a bucket. David raised the saw, but then he heard the terrified whispers, “No! No!” This was the only word the beast knew in Polish, and David dropped the saw and stared at the boy before him. He had found the cause of the peasants’ riot.
All they could see of each other was their murky silhouettes, and they were unable to communicate. The fugitive spoke Yiddish and a bit of Hebrew, and David Pazhari spoke Polish and a little Russian. But they heard each other’s breathing, and suddenly David realised that even if it cost him everything he had, he would help this boy as best he could.
The fugitive was wet to the bone. David immediately produced his Sunday shirt, an old scarf, a lynx fur hat he had found near the river, which protected his ears from freezing at night – who would have believed that a boy like him would ever feel the softness of lynx fur? – and a pair of old boots with rather loose soles. He even considered handing over the trousers he was wearing, the only pair he had. He lifted a floor plank and showed the fugitive his secret food stash: fresh bread (just one week old), half a cabbage, cow’s milk cheese and blueberry jam. The terrified boy tore at the bread and stuffed his mouth with a chunk so big that it looked like a hand reaching out of his throat, stretching his teeth with its fingers.
David was pleased. He was overcome by satisfaction as he watched the żyd voraciously eating the bread he had saved for himself. Loyalty is a strange thing. One man can betray his most generous benefactor while another can blindly follow his adversary. David did not stop to weigh up the pros and cons of the matter, but turned to stack the pails, seal the holes in the shed walls, move his barrel-bed and create a hiding place for the boy. Had he found him in the woods an hour earlier, he would have beheaded him. Yet now, even though he knew that turning the fugitive in would make him a hero, David was prepared to give up his life to save his guest.
The rooster started scolding the sun as dawn sneaked in through the cracks that David had tried to seal. Judging by his deep and even breathing, the fugitive was still asleep. David sat in a corner like a sentry, unable to sleep a wink. For how many nights did the runaway stay? David could not remember. How many words did they exchange? If one said none, this would be correct, and yet if another said an infinite number, this would be equally true.
David still remembers his guest’s last night. After midnight, the boy dared to leave his hiding place and sit next to David. He stank of urine but David didn’t care. He had never imagined that a human body could emit heat like a hearth. The two ended up embracing one another tightly, and the guest raised his glistening eyes to the heavens, reassuring David that he had done the right thing.
David woke up the next morning to find that his friend had gone. Without the fugitive, the shed had become a strange, empty place that no longer felt like home. David packed the clothes he had lent to his guest, who had left them in a neatly folded pile, and started planning his escape from the Komarovs. His destination was St Petersburg. Why the capital? Because St Petersburg was the place that had been most maligned in David’s ears. In the Komarov household, it was said that the metropolis was one big tavern, a sewer teeming with pompous cliques who aimlessly roam around Nevsky Prospect. They wear the latest fashions and talk favourably about social reform in the Stroganov Palace grounds. Who will benefit from this reform? Not them, of course. Not the rabble: villagers, muzhiks, serfs and all other slaves making a living by doing actual work and by growing things that can be actually tasted or smelled, all of whom have nothing to do with the aristocracy. In between their debates about reform, Petersburgians frequent the theatre, mainly in order to gossip, and even as the opera they have come to see reaches its climax, they simply gawk at so-and-so’s latest beau. Officials and officials’ sons, none of whom know anything about real work, that’s who inhabits the capital, that’s who devises the reforms. David gathered little from these critiques, but his heart was drawn to the place that the Komarovs despised.
How did Pazhari turn from a vagabond to a scion of Petersburgian nobility? Well, he didn’t. As he disembarked at Moscow railway station at half past eight in the morning, the boy stood at the terminal, dazzled by the onrush of grim faces. What was he thinking? They were dressed differently, smelled different, spoke a Russian dialect he had never heard before. He wanted to ask how to get to . . . but did not even know where he was going. Worse still, he felt embarrassed when he finally did speak. He walked to Vosstaniya Square and kept on going until he reached the Nevsky Monastery and the banks of the Neva, sensing policemen eyeing him suspiciously as if he were about to snatch a purse. Seeing some soldiers who had gathered in a side street, he approached them and for some reason felt more at ease.
The next day the boy presented himself at the city head-quarters and enlisted in an imperial military school in the east, beyond the Ural Mountains. When asked for his name and from whence he came he replied, “David Pazhari, St Petersburg,” and noticed that his interviewers’ faces had grown suddenly intent. “Are you related to Count Pazhari of St Petersburg?”
“Of course, I am related to Pazhari,” David replied, as if this were obvious.
“You are one of His Highness’s sons?” they inquired, intrigued.
At this point, David realised that there had been some misunderstanding, but decided to stick with his story. “I’m his nephew,” he muttered. “His sons’ cousin.”
Count Alexander Pazhari of St Petersburg was one of the best- known and most venerated men in the empire. He was among the Czar’s closest and most influential advisers, and an almost certain bet for the job of chancellor, the highest position in political office. He lived on Nevsky Prospect – where else? – and he was an intimate friend of the Stroganov family. David Pazhari, the boy now considered the relative of this senior statesman, was received in the army camp with a respect reserved for kings. His comrades treated him with great politeness, officers demanded weekly reports about his well-being, and every commander who took Pazhari on a mission of any sort deemed it necessary to state for the record that he had been scarred between his lip and nose prior to his stationing with their unit.
It soon emerged, however, that the pampered boy was quite a military talent. He did well in his studies, took on the strongest opponents, proved an excellent shot and quickly adapted to the climate. In winter, he walked around without any furs and at mealtimes he was satisfied with only a scrap of bread with some cheese and jam.
Pazhari’s rapid rise up the ranks was absolutely justified. If his last name gave him any advantage, it was only that every commander wished to have him stationed in his unit. Over time, rumours began to spread in the capital about Count Pazhari’s nephew warrior, who was by then a junior officer, and, surprisingly, the count did not deny the connection. None of Count Pazhari’s sons – a bunch of indolent brats to a man – had chosen to serve their country in the army. The only requests they made were “Papa, make me an adviser here”, “Papa, let me open a law firm there”. Papa, Papa, Papa. They didn’t have a shred of decency between them. It would do the family no harm if it became known that one of its descendants was a true-blue military officer.
If anyone discussed David Pazhari with him, the count would evade the matter of his descent. “Your Excellency, we hear that David Pazhari is doing well,” they would tell him. “Not even thirty years old, and he’s already been promoted to captain.”
“A jolly good fellow,” the count would reply, enthusiastically. “I always knew that he was destined for great things.”
When David Pazhari was promoted to colonel at the age of thirty-five, he started receiving offers to join the civil service. Pazhari turned them all down, determined to remain with his soldiers.
“Your Excellency,” Alexander Pazhari was asked in St Petersburg, “what is wrong with your nephew? Does he mean to grow old at the barracks?”
“David Pazhari is no ordinary man,” the count said. “The blood of princes runs through his veins.”