There is nothing that Russia prides herself on more than her size, and there is nothing that Russia suffers from more than her size. The empire is a corpulent giantess who cannot see below her stomach or bend down to lace her own boots: she will never know what goes on between the creases of her flab. A Muscovite salt merchant might be called to visit Astrakhan on business and be eager to know that his pregnant wife is well back in Moscow, but any letter he receives will have been sent six months ago. If he replies, his wife will receive his letter six months later. Can he change the past or predict the future? Of course not. It is therefore best that his letters avoid advice on daily matters and instead contain words of affection, inquiries after his children’s well-being and health, and words of prayer. These things have always been free from the constraints of time and place.
It is little wonder therefore that the proposal by the Austrian engineer Franz Anton von Gerstner, to connect Russia by rail-way, was enthusiastically received by Czar Nikolai the First. His advisers did not doubt that this adventure might improve the state of the empire’s economy, but they were unconvinced whether the cumbersome Russian giantess could be transformed into a fleet-footed athlete almost overnight. They wondered if tens of thousands of versts of steel could really break through the desolate, intractable expanse, or if the railway would change the character of Russia.
Until then, Yakuts lived with Yakuts in Siberia, and Muscovites lived with Muscovites in Moscow. If the Yakut met the Muscovite, they would have been equally puzzled by the thought that they were subjects of the same empire. Their appearances could not have been more different: one was Turco-Mongol and the other an Eastern European Slav. Their religion was different – despite the Muscovites’ attempts at conversion, the Yakuts remained shamanic in faith. And what about their occupations? In one place they were cattlemen and in the other they were clerks and bureaucrats. What could the Yakut and the Muscovite talk about with one another? Well, they might have been able to make a stab at conversation if only they knew each other’s language. Would the railway do away with all these differences? It was hard to believe that it would.
In any event, many in government had wondered at the time: why should the Yakut and the Muscovite resemble each other? This aspiration seemed too far-fetched. Must all relationships be based on a common language, an identical faith and similar occupations? What is wrong with a relationship based purely on selling products, distributing goods or building factories? A wedding between a Yakut man and a Muscovite woman might still be long in coming, but in the meantime, commerce was a realistic prospect, and the railway tracks would multiply opp-ortunities in that regard. Incidentally, before a Yakut and a Muscovite could marry, it would be necessary to build the St Petersburg–Warsaw line first.
When Novak arrives at the busy Baranavichy railway station with his rosy-cheeked comrade-in-arms, the waiting room is packed and an announcement advises that there are delays due to urgent works on the Baranavichy–Slonim line. A muzhik was probably lying on the tracks in an alcohol-induced stupor. This is not a rare occurrence in itself, but instead of running him over, the train driver must have decided to spare his life and braked abruptly, derailing the train and buckling its axles. Now an entire region is paralysed, the passengers are kicking their heels, and no-one knows how long the repairs will take.
At the ticket counter, Novak learns that all trains heading east for Slonim have been cancelled until further notice. As to the question of when the service will resume, the sleepy cashier removes his glasses, rubs his eyes and shrugs. A conductor leaning against the wall next to Novak puffs on his pipe and says, “The way things are run in this country, it will take for ever.” Novak sees that the man is expecting to start a conversation. There is nothing better for striking up a conversation than an opening complaint about how the country is run, which soon leads to talk of avarice among the aristocracy, the corruption of bureaucrats, and ends with the defencelessness of the man in the street against the state. What a royal waste of time.
Back at Adamsky’s tavern, Novak decides to bypass the accident. They will travel to Slonim on horseback and then take the train to Grodno via Bialystok. The road to Slonim is not short, more than sixty versts of craggy hills, but Novak thinks they should not wait. At the end of their first day of riding, however, he is groaning with pain on account of his leg.
By now anaesthetics are useless. Damn Adamsky for waking up the monster of agony from its slumber. Novak could ask a doctor for morphine once they arrive in Slonim, but it will knock him out and the spectacle of Colonel Piotr Novak muttering nonsense under his blankets is out of the question. He has two choices: either learn to live with the pain or die.
“Need any help?” parrotfish-lips asks him.
The day I need help with my leg from this character, Novak thinks, I will stick a bullet in my head. But when they reach the inn, where they will break their journey, Novak is barely able to dismount from his horse. He is forced to let his butler-like interpreter carry his bag upstairs and sign the register. Novak lies down as soon as he can, but he stays awake for hours, his face buried in the pillow as shame mingles with pain and anger.
When they leave for Slonim on the second day and the interpreter falls asleep in his saddle, Novak can’t help but wonder why he keeps chasing after ghosts. His peers frequent sumptuous salons, hobnob with aristocrats and plutocrats, and free up time for their personal affairs by commissioning underlings to do their work for them. And what about him? Is he still trying to please his master, Governor Osip Gurko, or has this investigation turned into a personal vendetta against Adamsky for aggravating his leg? Is he driven by the desire to unearth the motive behind the killings, or by his attraction to their enigmatic perpetrator? Is it even possible to separate the two? What is certain, however, is that Novak would have ridden to Grodno in any event.
On the second day, they manage to cover only a third of the distance they travelled the previous day. Novak needs rest, and the original plan to reach Slonim in two days seems wildly unrealistic. They will have to ride for four, maybe five days. The decision to visit the cradle of the butcher’s life was critical: if it proves fruitless, Novak will have lost a vital week in the investigation, and it could be impossible to make up lost time.
Novak finds Akaky Akakyevich intolerable. Heeding authority and honour, detainees tend to curry favour with their jailers so they might have their ear when the need arises, but not Akaky. Sometimes he treats Novak as though he were his patient. “Need any help? Are you hungry? Thirsty?”
“Enough with those questions,” Novak says. “I don’t need anything from you.”
Unperturbed, Akaky starts asking the colonel personal questions, assuming the role of a prying, intrusive interrogator.
Akaky: “So where is your family?”
Novak: “St Petersburg.”
Akaky: “And when did you see them last?”
Novak: “A year ago.”
Akaky: “Do you miss them?”
Novak: “That is a strange question. I suppose so. But I would let it go if I were you.”
Akaky: “Why don’t you visit them more often?”
Novak: “Work.”
Akaky: “How many children do you have?”
Novak: “Two boys, Ivan and Alexey.”
Novak is forced to assert his authority by launching a counter-interrogation.
Novak: “So, where does your family come from?”
Akaky: “Vitebsk, Minsk, Kovne.”
Novak: “I don’t understand.”
Akaky: “Nor do I.”
Novak: “And how did you find your way to Marx?”
Akaky: “He found his way to me.”
Novak: “What?”
Akaky: “Precisely.”
Akaky’s laconic answers are too diffuse for Novak to be able to connect the dots. Nonetheless, Akaky is at his disposal, and even if the detainee tries to feign control over the situation, his trembling body gives away his fear.
Yet, regarding this latter point, Novak has made a crude and uncharacteristic mistake. A man who truly fears authority does not poke fun at the secret police by presenting himself as Akaky Akakyevich. There’s no guarantee that Novak will indeed force him into submission.
In fact, he does not know that Akaky suffers from chronic arthritis, which torments him with cold shivers and constant tremors. For this reason, he left his home to study medicine in Minsk. His real name is certainly not Avremaleh, and he’s never known any Pinchasaleh; his name is Haim-Lazer, and he was not born in Vitebsk, Minsk or Kovne (he’s never even set foot in the latter). He is actually a native of the town of Mir. How did he end up circulating Marxist pamphlets? Many years ago, in his anatomy class, he met Minka Abramovich, a Jewish girl who set his head spinning. She seemed so progressive and enlightened, spoke fluent Russian and wore St Petersburg fashions. If she had asked him to join an underground group that hailed the works of some pharaoh, he would have handed out pamphlets lauding the Egyptian monarch. What does he care? And although it was clear from the start that he never stood a chance with her, this did not curb his enthusiasm in the least. He was too old-fashioned for her taste; in other words, he could not completely renounce his Judaism. Indeed, he had quit yeshiva and gone to study medicine, but he had not shed the old world altogether, and had been known occasionally to sneak into a synagogue.
Unlike him, Minka was wild. She kept talking about world revolution, the proletariat and an international uprising. The veins in her high forehead bulged ominously when she gave public speeches. Whenever volunteers were needed to circulate leaflets, she was the first to raise her hand, and he was the second.
After two years, Haim-Lazer left medical school and joined the underground cell under Minka’s command. Like other young revolutionaries who tend to forget the personal motivations that originally attracted them to the cause of the rebellion, the ideas and principles became the heart of the matter, even after Minka married a goy and all the more so after she was arrested and sent to Siberia. Years later, Haim-Lazer became the leader of an underground cell and became adept at internal politics, which had always seemed to him to be as corrupt as the government he wanted to overthrow. When he was caught by the secret police in Baranavichy, he did not want to be released that same day. He intended to return to his comrades after a week’s incarceration, no, no, after a month’s detention, to impress them. That was why he called himself Akaky Akakyevich, and he was surprised when none of the agents recognised the provenance of his alias. When he met Novak he realised that at least this one read something other than police reports, and after listening to the interrogator’s speech, he realised that he had become embroiled with a senior Okhranist. A high-ranking secret police officer will not mete out a month’s detention, but what the underground calls “an evaporation”. And yet, upon hearing about the four suspects that Novak is hunting down, Haim-Lazer decided he has to do whatever is in his powers to disrupt the investigation. The four suspects are not partners in his crime, but they are outlaws, which is enough to make him want to help them.
One thing surprises Haim-Lazer: try as he might, he cannot hate Novak. This is his first substantial encounter with such a senior policeman, a man who stands for everything that is evil in the Czar’s decadent reign. After all, the colonel is authorised to comb through the personal letters of any living soul; he can invade any house in the name of national security, drag people from their beds, turn their homes upside down and tear them away from their loved ones. Under the aegis of justice, law and order, he sows chaos in citizen’s lives, who, fearful that they might prey on one another in the absence of a central government, allow the imperial chimera to prey on them instead. Unlike others of his rank, however, it seems that Novak believes that he is indeed the protector of public order. His battered body is covered with scars, his cheekbones protrude from his worn-out face, and he shambles about like a broken man. To tell the truth, Novak is as lonely as Haim-Lazer; they are both men who have left home far behind. If Haim-Lazer had to guess whether the person riding next to him was an Okhrana district commander or a troubled Jew like himself, he would have said the latter. Therefore, even though Haim-Lazer wants to see Novak lose, he does not want his defeat to be humiliating.