The House of Special Purpose Read online

  Of course, I was not always this old and weak. My strength was what led me away from Kashin. It is what brought me to Zoya in the first place.

  The Prince of Kashin

  IT WAS MY ELDEST SISTER, Asya, who first told me of the world that existed outside of Kashin.

  I was only nine years old when she breached that naive insularity of mine. Asya was eleven and I was a little in love with her, I think, in the way that a younger brother may become entranced by the beauty and mystery of the female who is closest to him, before the urge for a sexual component appears and the attentions are diverted elsewhere.

  We had always been close, Asya and I. She fought constantly with Liska, who was born a year after her and a year before me, and barely tolerated our youngest sister, Talya, but I was her pet. She dressed me and groomed me and saw to it that I was kept away from the worst excesses of our father’s temper. To her good fortune, she inherited our mother Yulia’s pretty features, but not her disposition, and she made the most of her looks, braiding her hair one day, tying it behind her neck the next, loosening the kosnik and allowing it to hang loosely around her shoulders when she was so inclined. She rubbed the juice of ripe plums into her cheeks to improve her countenance and wore her dress pinned up above her ankles, which made my father stare at her in the late evenings, a mixture of desire and contempt deepening the darkness of his eyes. The other girls in our village despised her for her vanity, of course, but what they really envied was her confidence. As she grew older they said she was a whore, that she spread her legs for any man or boy who desired her, but she didn’t care about any of that. She just laughed at their taunts, allowing them to slip away like water off a rock.

  She should have lived in a different time and place, I think. She might have made a great success of her life.

  ‘But where is this other world?’ I asked her as we sat together by the stove in the corner of our small hut, an area which acted as bedroom, kitchen and living area for the six of us. At that time of the day, our mother and father would have been returning home from their labours, expecting us to have some food prepared for them, content to beat us if we did not, and Asya was busy stirring a pot of vegetables, potatoes and water into a thick broth which would act as our supper. Liska was outside somewhere, causing mischief, as was her particular talent. Talya, always the quietest of children, was lying in a nest of straw, playing with her fingers and toes, observing us patiently.

  ‘Far away from here, Georgy,’ she said, placing a finger carefully into the foam of the bubbling mixture and tasting it. ‘But people don’t live there like they live here.’

  ‘They don’t?’ I asked, unable even to imagine a different manner of existence. ‘Then how do they live?’

  ‘Well, some are poor, of course, like we are,’ she conceded in an almost apologetic tone, as if our circumstances were something of which we should all have been ashamed. ‘But many more live in great splendour. These are the people who make our country great, Georgy. Their houses are built from stone, not wood like this place. They eat whenever they want to eat, from plates encrusted with jewels. Food which is specially prepared by cooks who have spent all their lives mastering their art. And the ladies, they travel only by carriage.’

  ‘Carriage?’ I asked, crinkling my nose as I turned to look at her, unsure what the word could possibly mean. ‘What is this carriage?’

  ‘The horses carry them along,’ she explained with a sigh, as if my ignorance had been designed for no other reason than to frustrate her. ‘They are like … oh, how can I put this? Imagine a hut with wheels that people can sit inside and be transported in comfort. Can you picture that, Georgy?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly, for the idea seemed both preposterous and frightening. I looked away from her and felt my stomach start to ache with hunger, and wondered whether she would allow me a spoon or two of this broth before our parents returned.

  ‘One day I shall travel in such a carriage,’ she added quietly, staring into the fire beneath the pot and poking at it with a stick, hoping perhaps to find some small coal or twig that had not yet caught flame and which could be cajoled into providing us with just a few more minutes of heat. ‘I don’t intend to stay in Kashin for ever.’

  I shook my head in admiration for her. She was the most intelligent person I knew, for her awareness of these other worlds and lives was astonishing to me. I think that it was Asya’s thirst for knowledge which fuelled my own growing imagination and desire to learn more of the world. How she had come to know of such things I did not know, but it saddened me to think that Asya might be taken from me one day. I felt wounded that she should even want to seek a life outside of the one that we shared together. Kashin was a dark, miserable, fetid, unhealthy, squalid, depressing wreck of a village; of course it was. But until now I had never imagined that there might be anywhere better to live. I had never stepped more than a few miles from its boundaries, after all.

  ‘You can’t tell anyone about this, Georgy,’ she said after a moment, leaning forward in excitement as if she was about to reveal her most intimate secret. ‘But when I am older, I am going to St Petersburg. I’ve decided to make my life there.’ Her voice became more animated and breathless as she said this, her fantasies making their way from the solitude of her private thoughts towards the reality of the spoken word.

  ‘But you can’t,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You would be alone there. You know no one in St Petersburg.’

  ‘At first, perhaps,’ she admitted, laughing and putting a hand over her mouth to contain her mirth. ‘But I shall meet a wealthy man soon enough. A prince, perhaps. And he will fall in love with me and we will live together in a palace and I will have all the servants that I require and wardrobes filled with beautiful dresses. I’ll wear different jewellery every day – opals, sapphires, rubies, diamonds – and during the season we will dance together in the throne room of the Winter Palace, and everyone will look at me from morning till night and admire me and wish that they could stand in my place.’

  I stared at her, this unrecognizable girl with her fantastical plans. Was this the sister who lay on the moss-and-pine floor beside me every night and woke up with the imprint of the grainy branches upon her cheeks? I could scarcely comprehend a single word of which she spoke. Princes, servants, jewellery. Such concepts were entirely alien to my young mind. And as for love. What was that, after all? How did that concern any of us? She caught my look of incomprehension, of course, and burst out laughing as she tousled my hair.

  ‘Oh, Georgy,’ she said, kissing me now on either cheek and then once on the lips for luck. ‘You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I insisted quickly, for I hated her to think of me as ignorant. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘You’ve heard of the Winter Palace, haven’t you?’

  I hesitated. I wanted to say yes, but if I did, then she might not explain it in further detail and the words were already holding a certain allure. ‘I think I have,’ I said finally. ‘I can’t remember exactly. Remind me, Asya.’

  ‘The Winter Palace is where the Tsar lives,’ she explained. ‘With the Tsaritsa, of course, and the Imperial Family. You know who they are, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said quickly, for His Majesty’s name, and that of his family, was invoked before every meal as we offered a prayer for his continued health, generosity and wisdom. The prayers themselves often lasted longer than the eating. ‘I’m not stupid, you know.’

  ‘Well then you should know where the Tsar makes his home. Or one of his homes, anyway. He has many. Tsarskoe Selo. Livadia. The Standart.’

  I raised an eyebrow and now it was my turn to laugh. The notion of more than one home seemed ridiculous to me. Why would anyone need such a thing? Of course, I knew that Tsar Nicholas had been appointed to his glorious position by God himself, that his powers and autocracy were infinite and absolute, but was he possessed of magical qualities also? Could he be in more than one place simult
aneously? The idea was absurd and yet somehow possible. He was the Tsar, after all. He could be anything. He could do anything. He was as much a god as God himself.

  ‘Will you take me to St Petersburg with you?’ I asked a few moments later, my voice sinking almost to a whisper, as if I was afraid that she might deny me this ultimate honour. ‘When you go, Asya. You won’t leave me behind, will you?’

  ‘I could try,’ she said magnanimously, considering it. ‘Or perhaps you could come and visit the prince and me when we are established in our new home. You can have a wing of our palace entirely for yourself and a team of butlers to assist you. And we will have children, of course, too. Beautiful children, many of them, boys and girls. You will be an uncle to them, Georgy. Would you like that?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I agreed, although I found myself growing jealous at the idea of sharing my beautiful sister with anyone else, even a prince of the royal blood.

  ‘One day …’ she said with a sigh, staring into the fire as if she could see depictions of her glorious future flickering and bursting into life within the flames. Of course, she was only a child herself at the time. I wonder whether it was Kashin that she hated or just a better life that she longed for.

  It saddens me to recall that conversation from such a distance of time. My heart aches to think that she never achieved her ambitions. For it was not Asya who found her way to St Petersburg and the Winter Palace. It was not she who ever knew how it felt to be surrounded by the seductive power of wealth and luxury.

  It was me. It was little Georgy.

  The closest friend of my youth was a boy named Kolek Boryavich Tanksy, whose family had lived in Kashin for as many generations as my own. We had many things in common, Kolek and I. We were born only a few weeks apart, during the late spring of 1899. We spent our childhood playing in the mud together, exploring every corner of our small village, blaming each other when our escapades went wrong. We both came from a family of sisters. I, of course, was blessed with only three, while Kolek was cursed with twice that number.

  And we were both frightened of our fathers.

  My father, Daniil Vladyavich, and Kolek’s father, Borys Alexandrovich, had known each other all their lives, probably spending as much of their boyhood in each other’s company as their sons would thirty years later. They were passionate men, both of them, filled with degrees of admiration and loathing, but their political opinions diverged considerably.

  Daniil treasured the country of his birth. He was patriotic to the point of blindness, believing that man was given life for no other purpose than to obey the dictates of God’s messenger on earth, the Russian Tsar. However, his hatred and resentment of me, his only son, was as incomprehensible as it was upsetting. From the moment of my birth, he treated me with disdain. One day I was too short, the next I was too weak, on another I might be too timid or too stupid. Of course, it was the nature of farm labourers that they wanted to breed, so why my father saw me as such a disappointment after already siring two girls is a mystery. But nevertheless, it was how things were. Having never known anything different, I might have grown up believing that this was how all relationships between fathers and sons were cultivated, were it not for the other example that played out before me.

  Borys Alexandrovich loved his son very much and considered him to be the prince of our village, which, I suppose, means that he thought himself to be its king. He praised Kolek constantly, brought him everywhere with him and never excluded him from adult conversation in the way that other fathers did. But unlike Daniil, he nurtured an obsession with criticizing Russia and its rulers, believing that his own poverty and perceived failure in life was entirely the result of the autocrats whose whims dictated our lives.

  ‘One day, things will change in this country,’ he told my father on any number of occasions. ‘Can’t you smell it in the air, Daniil Vladyavich? Russians will not stand to be ruled over by such a family for much longer. We must take control of our own destinies.’

  ‘Always the revolutionary, Borys Alexandrovich,’ my father replied, shaking his head and laughing, a rare treat, and one which was only ever inspired by his friend’s radical pronouncements. ‘All your life spent here in Kashin, tilling fields, eating kasha and drinking kvas, and still your head is full of these ideas. You will never change, will you?’

  ‘And all your life, you have been content to be a moujik,’ said Borys angrily. ‘Yes, we work the land, we make an honest living from the soil, but are we not men like the Tsar? Tell me, why should he have everything, be entitled to everything, own everything, when we live out our days in such poverty and squalor? You still say prayers for him every night, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said my father, starting to grow irritated now, for he hated even engaging in any conversation which criticized the Tsar. He had been bred with an innate sense of servitude and it flowed through his veins as freely as his blood. ‘Russia’s destiny is inextricably linked to that of the Tsar. Think, only for a moment, of how far back this generation of rulers goes. To Tsar Michael! That’s more than three hundred years, Borys.’

  ‘Three hundred years of Romanovs is three hundred years too many,’ roared his friend, coughing up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it on the ground between his feet without shame. ‘And tell me, what have they given us during that time? Anything of value? I think not. Some day … some day, Daniil …’ He hesitated there. Borys Alexandrovich could be as radical and revolutionary as he wanted, but it would have been a heresy, and perhaps a death sentence, to have continued.

  Still, there was not a man in our village who did not know the words that he intended to come next. And there were many who agreed with him.

  Kolek Boryavich and I, of course, never spoke of politics. Such matters meant nothing to either of us as children. Instead, as we grew up, we played the games that boys played, found ourselves in the trouble that boys find themselves in, and laughed and fought, but were around each other so much that strangers passing through our village might have taken us for brothers, were it not for the difference in our physical appearance.

  As a child, I was small in stature, and cursed with a mop of blond ringlets, a fact which might lie at the root of my father’s contempt for me. He had wanted a son to carry on his name and I did not look like the kind of boy who might accomplish such a task. At the age of six I was a foot shorter than all my friends, earning myself the nickname Pasha, which means ‘the small one’. Because of my golden curls, my older sisters called me the prettiest member of our family, garnishing me with whatever ribbons and fancies they could find, which caused our father to scream at them in fury and rip the garlands from my head, handfuls of hair often being extracted in the process. And despite the frugality of our diet, I had a tendency towards weight gain as a child too, which my father Daniil considered a mark of dishonour against him.

  Kolek, on the other hand, was always tall for his age, lean, strong, and handsome in a very masculine way. By the age of ten, the girls in our village were looking at him with admiring eyes, wondering how he might develop in a few years’ time when he had grown to manhood. Their mothers vied with each other for the attention of his own mother, a timid creature named Anje Petrovna, for there was always a sense about him that he would be a great man one day, that he would bring glory to our village, and it was their fervent desire that one of their daughters would eventually be taken to his bed as his bride.

  He enjoyed the attention, of course. He was more than aware of the glances that came his way and the admiration everyone had for him, but he too had fallen in love and with none other than my own sister Asya. She was the only person who could make him blush and lose confidence in his remarks. But to his dismay, she was also the only girl in the village who seemed utterly immune to his charms, a fact which I believe only fuelled his desire for her. He hovered around our izba daily, seeking opportunities to impress her, determined to break through her steely exterior and make her love him as everyone else did.


  ‘Young Kolek Boryavich is enamoured of you,’ our mother remarked one evening to her eldest daughter as she prepared another miserable pot of shchi, a sort of cabbage soup that was almost indigestible. ‘He cannot bear to look in your direction, have you noticed?’

  ‘He cannot look at me, so that means he likes me,’ remarked Asya casually, brushing his interest aside like something unpleasant which had found its way on to her clothing. ‘That’s a curious logic, don’t you agree?’

  ‘He is shy around you, that’s all,’ explained Yulia. ‘And such a handsome boy too. He will make some lucky girl a worthy husband one day.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But not me.’

  When I quizzed her about this afterwards, she seemed almost insulted that anyone would think that Kolek was good enough for her. ‘He’s two years younger than me, for one thing,’ she explained in an exasperated tone. ‘I’m not interested in taking a boy for my husband. And I don’t like him anyway. He has a sense of entitlement about him that I cannot bear. As if the world exists only for his benefit. He’s had it all his life and everyone in this miserable village is responsible for giving it to him. And he’s a coward, too. His father is a monster – you can see that, Georgy, can’t you? A horrible man. And yet everything your little Kolek does is designed for no other purpose than to impress him. I’ve never seen a boy so in thrall to his father. It’s loathsome to watch.’

  I didn’t know how to respond to such a litany of disdain. Like everyone else, I considered Kolek Boryavich to be the finest boy in the village and it had always been my secret delight that he had chosen me to be his closest friend. Perhaps it was the difference in our appearance which allowed our relationship to thrive. The fact that I was the short, fat, golden-curled subordinate standing next to the tall, slim, dark-haired hero, my pathetic proximity making him appear even more glorious than he really was. And this, in turn, made his father even more proud of him. On that, I knew Asya was correct. There was nothing that Kolek would not have done to impress his father. And what was wrong with that, I wondered. At least Borys Alexandrovich took pride in his boy.