Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - Anna

The evening drew towards dusk, the air cooled, and Sergei grew quiet. The firing from below was dying down. Soon Nikolai would come. Please God he would be in time.

Sergei woke, looked at her blankly. ‘Where am I?’

‘At my house,’ she answered.

‘Anna? Is that you?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, Seryosha, I’m here.’

‘I can’t see you. Don’t leave me! It’s dark. I’m so cold, so cold.’

It was still light in the room. She touched him with alarm, and felt the unnatural chill of his skin. She flicked a glance at Zina, who hurried off to fetch another blanket.

‘I won’t leave you,’ she said, stroking his head. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

He turned his head into her caress. His face was pure white, alabaster white, like a carving in marble of a dead hero. How long could he survive such loss of blood?

He drifted, and came back to himself.

‘Anna?’ he said, as if he had just recognised her. ‘Am I ill?’

‘You’re wounded,’ she said with difficulty.

‘Did I have a fall?’ he asked. ‘No – I remember. Borodino. We charged – charged the Germans.’

She saw he was rational now. His voice was hardly more than a whisper, but his eyes looked into hers with painful intelligence.

‘Seryosha, why did you do it?’ she asked suddenly. Akim Shan might talk of his longing for honour, but she didn’t believe that was Sergei’s reasoning. She had a deep inner fear that he had deliberately sought his death, and the end of his mental torment, which had begun that bloody day high in the mountains of the Caucasus. The tiger’s death he had sought, swift and merciful; but fickle chance had delivered him up to the jackal.

‘You were told not to try to take the town – only to cause a diversion,’ she said. ‘Akim Shan told me you – you went on, when everyone turned back. Why, Seryosha?’

She met his eyes, and his were sad and guilty and puzzled.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. She stroked his cold cheek again, not trusting herself to speak. He sighed. ‘Perhaps I wanted to escape.’ But you can’t escape. What you are comes with you, always, always.’ He closed his eyes.

Zina came back with the blanket and they tucked it round him. Anne slipped her hand down to his side, and felt the bandages only slightly damp. The bleeding was slowing – or was it that he had too little blood left?

She thought he had drifted away again; but after a moment, without opening his eyes, he said, ‘Anna? Did you ever love me?’

She couldn’t answer for a moment. She looked at his pale composed face with a love and pity that tore deeply at the fibres of her heart. He might almost have been her child – within her body a child now grew who was his brother. She ached to save him hurt, to preserve him, protect him, hold him close; and there was nothing she could do.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I loved you – I do love you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and she had to lean close to catch his words – his voice was only a murmur. ‘I’m sorry it’s like this.’

The light was fading outside, and one star was shining clear and steady in the pale green evening sky. Sergei began to yawn, as men bleeding to death often will. He had drifted away from her in his thoughts, back to the safety of his troop. After a long silence he muttered, ‘Don’t forget the horses. See to the horses first.’

It had been dark for a long time. The firing seemed to have died down, except for long rumblings, which sounded like distant thunder, from the direction of Utitsa. The main battlefield had fallen silent. It was silent inside the room, too. A lamp glowed softly in the corner, throwing its light over the bent head of Zina, who was dozing in an armchair. Anne sat beside the bed, watching Sergei. She had been still for so long, that perhaps she had dozed, too; at any rate, she had the feeling of coming suddenly to herself at the sound of voices and footsteps on the stairs.

She rose to her feet as though pulled by a string, and ran out into the hallway. Nikolai was coming up the stairs in a swirl of movement, with Stenka shuffling behind him as fast as he could, crying, ‘Barina! Barina! He’s here!’

‘Oh, thank God you’ve come!’ Anne was across the landing and in his arms in an instant. He pressed her to him, smelling of sweat and smoke; his cloak was damp from dew; he was trembling all over, and breathing fast, as though he had been running. Their embrace lasted only an instant; she was drawing him towards the room, asking as they went. ‘Is it over? Is the battle over? We could still hear cannon-fire in the distance.’

‘Just a flank movement on the old road. Action’s broken off everywhere else – the French have fallen back.’ Nikolai’s eyes went ahead of him, searching for their punishment. ‘When I got back to headquarters there was a message from your prince, about Sergei. I didn’t know you were still here.’

‘I couldn’t leave,’ she said. ‘Is the battle won?’

Through the door, his hold breaking away from her. ‘God knows. Our losses are heavy.’ His eyes found the shape in the bed. ‘How is he?’

She didn’t know how to tell him, but she didn’t need to. When she didn’t speak, he turned abruptly and read her face, and his mouth turned down bitterly. He went to the bedside and took the seat Anne had vacated, reached over for his son’s hand. ‘Sergei,’ he said. ‘It’s me, it’s Papa. Seryosha, look at me.’

Sergei muttered and turned his head. Please, Anne prayed inside her mind, please let him wake, let him know him…

‘Seryosha, it’s Papa. Can you hear me?’

Sergei opened his eyes, frowning. He licked his lips, and then yawned again. ‘Cold,’ he muttered.

Nikolai leaned closer. Tears left clean tracks down his smoke-grimed face. ‘I love you,’ he said; stroked the hair from the marble brow and kissed it. ‘Forgive me, Seryosha. Say you understand.’

But Sergei’s eyes were wandering. Anne could see he did not recognise his father.

‘Don’t forget the horses,’ he muttered. He turned his head away, staring towards the window, held apart in the loneliness of dying. An expression of great bitterness crossed his face, as if he had suddenly seen everything with great clarity, the whole futility and waste of it, the life he had been robbed of. Anne, watching him, did not see the moment when he went. Only she became aware that the look of bitterness had faded little by little, as the light fades gradually out of the sky after the sun has gone; and suddenly from being twilight it is night, without there being one particular moment when one could say the transition occurred.

Some time after midnight, Adonis arrived at the house, and was admitted by Stenka, who showed him silently into the drawing-room. Adonis took in the scene with one comprehensive glance; the body on the bed, covered with a burka; the old woman asleep in the chair beside it; and Anne and Nikolai on the day bed near the window, she seated, he lying down with his head in her lap.

Anne’s eyes, red-rimmed but sleepless, met his blankly over the Count’s head.

‘He’s sleeping,’ she said.

Adonis looked grim. ‘We’re pulling out. You’ll have to go too. It won’t be safe here. You’ll have to wake him.’

But he was stirring already. He woke from the dead sleep of utter exhaustion and looked up blankly at Anne for a moment, and she longed, helplessly, to give him a little longer in blessed oblivion.

‘Adonis is here,’ she said gently.

He blinked, and then groaned and pulled himself upright. That waking, he thought afterwards, was the worst of his life. He was more tired than he had thought it possible to be. Every bone in his body ached; his eyes were gritty in their sockets, his mouth was dry and foul-tasting, his head ached; but worse than all of that was the dead weight of grief that rolled on to his chest like a stone, as memory returned.

‘Adonis,’ he said thickly. ‘What’s happening?’

‘New instructions, Colonel,’ he said neutrally. ‘The Prince-General ordered us to regroup, to renew the battle at dawn, but when they counted up our losses, he changed his mind. We’re withdrawing past Mozhaisk. The artillery’s on the move already – infantry to move off at two o’clock. Cossacks to provide a rearguard and cover our retreat.’

The succinct report cleared the fog from Kirov’s head. ‘What were our losses?’

‘Forty thousand, by the first reckoning – dead and wounded.’ In the silence, Kirov heard Anne’s indrawn breath of disbelief. The number was past comprehension.

‘And the French?’ he asked.

Adonis shrugged. ‘As many, I’d say. They pulled back, out of sight of the battlefield, but by the numbers of the dead, it must be as many.’ Kirov nodded, and then put his head into his hands to rub his temples. Adonis eyed him with sympathy. ‘Orders, Colonel? You’re wanted pretty badly at headquarters.’ Kirov looked up sharply. ‘I must bury my son. Then I’ll leave. I must bury him first. The General will understand that. As soon as it gets light…’

Adonis was not a Russian, and looked as though he would like to argue; but he held his tongue. Even on the march, with the French on their tails, the soldiers had continually stopped to bury their dead, leaving a shallow mound and a hastily knocked-together wooden cross over each. He couldn’t expect his master to do less for his own son.

In the grey light of dawn, they set off down the track, turning on to the road that led past the ruins of Novoye Syelo to join the main road just beyond Gorky. Anne had left Stenka and Zina with warm thanks for their loyalty and help, and promised them a more tangible reward when the troubles were over. They accepted her thanks stolidly, and stood silently in the yard to see her off, looking as though they had grown up out of the cobbles: permanent, enduring.