The Book of Anna Read online

  After trying to comfort her husband, Claudia returns to the kitchen. The cook, who is distressed—but protective of her work—is still standing where Claudia left her, passing the tray of dough from one hand to the other. Claudia pokes the dough with her index fingers. It feels even worse than it looks: “It’s certainly off,” she says, but since she’s got Sergei raging in the room next door, she issues a command. “Give it a try, Lantur, make the bread just as you always do, let’s hope it bakes well,” and she retraces her steps, unaware that she says aloud, “Is the world coming to an end?”

  “It’s not the end of anything,” Sergei replies angrily. “It’s just starting. I don’t see how to avoid it…. Help me think, Claudine…. For God’s sake! Be still!”

  Claudia faces him. She looks at him—hands raised, palms outward, index fingers, still feeling the strange consistency of the dough, extended to keep from dirtying her clothes—and when she realizes the position her fingers are in, she extends her arms toward Sergei and says playfully, “Olé, torero! Olé! Watch my horns, here!”

  As a girl, she had been to a bullfight on one of the many trips she took with her father, the ambassador, a good-natured, lighthearted man who knew how to enjoy everything life had to offer and took great pride in his busy diplomatic engagements, sometimes saying, “My wife and I don’t remember clearly where our children were born, they were all born in different places.” It was true: her mother confused her pregnancies and their births, and for him it was all one big party. Eleven children born in eleven different cities—their parents confused their birth years, even their names.

  Claudia is their eighth child. She and her siblings were named after the countries in which they were born, “To aid my memory,” her mother used to say, “not that it helps much!” Ten boys and one girl, little Claudia, who was born in Spain.

  Sergei looks at his wife pretending to charge at him and takes her joke as an attack; he’s still wrapped up in his own world. “I’m sunk, there’s no way out of this mess. It’s the end. I’m a dead man. I can’t go on.”

  “Listen to me, Sergei. I know what you’re thinking. What a face! You look like you’re fighting in Japan and you’ve lost your men! Wipe that look off your face. You’re sinking in a glass of water. Not another word about the tsar’s letter until we’ve returned from the theater. Because I really, really, really want to go to the New Year’s concert. And I want to go for you, you’ve been looking forward to this for days. Enough! All right? When we get home we’ll decide what to say and what to do. But let it go for the time being, think about something else…. Stop tormenting yourself. Enough.”

  “There’s nothing to say, Claudine, I’m done for…. Calling the tsar a glass of water!”

  “Stop, stop!” sweet, patient Claudia says. “Take a deep breath!”

  Claudia was marked by the sun of Seville. Her mother gave birth to her there at midday. Between one step and the next, she felt an intense cramping, the little girl appeared before she even had time to squat down, the midwife had to catch the baby to save her from hitting the floor. The couple’s entourage fell over themselves looking after the ambassador’s wife, and despite the fact that she didn’t need to rest (she could have walked anywhere she needed to go), they wouldn’t let her take a step.

  “But I’m fine! Nothing’s wrong!”

  “Don’t lift a finger!” the ambassador replied, untroubled, unashamed, unembarrassed. That’s how easily his wife gave birth: she didn’t even know when her babies were about to be born. Her fertility filled him with pride. Overjoyed with his little girl (his first), when he held her he practically shouted, “Vivo Sevilla! Viva Sevillo! Vivo Sevillo!” muddling the feminine and the masculine; his knowledge of Spanish was shaky, and he was emotional to the point of tears.

  The mother was carried to the palace where they were staying—the Palace of the Dukes of Alba—where a doctor attended to her.

  The news of this birth to the fertile mother and the joyous ambassador was proclaimed throughout the city. Women from all the good families brought gifts for the ambassador’s wife and her daughter, and some even called on them at the palace, ignoring the postpartum quarantine. The first few days of Claudia’s life were one running celebration. All the city’s musicians serenaded them at the palace gates (especially Teresa, who had the voice of an angel). Men stopped by to join in this endless party with His Excellency the Russian Ambassador, who was celebrating the arrival of his “Sevillian daughter” with vodka. It was said that, twenty hours after she gave birth, the ambassadress tried to dance a Sevillana—“tried,” because she danced quite poorly, but she danced the whole thing from beginning to end. That’s how Claudia came into the world: the sunny orchard, the fountain, and the lemon tree, all bathed in the light of the Sevillian sky.

  Sergei was born in the Karenin Palace, in St. Petersburg, in splendid isolation, as if there were something shameful about arriving in this world. We don’t know any of the details. It’s a fact that both Anna’s births were far from simple and painless. The second time, she developed a fever, she was on her deathbed (or so it’s written), and if there was a silver lining, it was that her impending funeral brought together people who had stopped speaking to each other.

  In her first birth—Sergei’s—she didn’t develop a fever, yet pain and anxiety dominated the whole experience. It’s possible the delivery took place at midnight, that it wasn’t snowing, raining, or windy. But the air was frigid. Neither grandmother was present; Anna’s only company, apart from the doctor, was Marya Efimovna, an older woman who had just started working for Anna, hired to look after her newborn son. His mother’s brother didn’t appear in the palace for more than forty days, and there wasn’t a single visitor from his father’s side of the family.

  3. Clementine Defends Herself

  Demoralized by the botched detonation of her bomb, hugging her (considerably lighter) faux babe, Clementine walks along, observing what’s happening in the streets. She notes the massive military preparations that have been undertaken without any fanfare whatsoever, with the utmost discretion.

  She decides to stick with the original plan and return to Nevsky Prospekt. She calms down. “It’s doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, there will be others…. Socialism and anarchy! The government is our enemy!” Clementine stops at the seamstresses’ entrance to the sweatshop behind the clothing store on Nevsky Prospekt. The door is two steps down from street level. She reaches for the doorframe, feeling along the top ledge with her fingers for the picklock. She unlocks the door and returns the pick to its hiding place.

  No sooner does she cross the threshold than she drops the bundle that was her pretend babe and kicks it, scattering the rags. Scraps of cloth fly. She picks up an oil lamp and lights it, then gathers the cloth scraps from the floor and rolls them up under one arm. She uncovers her head and neck, her thick mane is wild, and she shakes it out as she traverses the dark passageway to the back of the shop. Clementine puts the bundle of scraps on the table and wraps herself in her cloak once more as she says to herself, “It’s cold.”

  Inside the workshop, which is large, no one sits ruining their eyesight at the sewing machines. Clementine once worked here, her family’s breadwinner, supporting her grandmother and her siblings until first the old woman, then the little ones, died of the flu; her mother had died in another epidemic when she was five years old. She’s a seamstress by training (one of the best in St. Petersburg) with the heart of an activist—she was relieved of her responsibilities for participating in a strike and briefly imprisoned thereafter, but since she’s an attractive woman, they underestimated the role she had played in organizing her coworkers, ignoring their only informant, certain that he was laying the blame on her to protect the real culprit. That’s Clementine: she’s wary, and she’s angry. Back in those days, all she wanted was for the wealthy to have some pity, to show some charity to the poor and treat the workers with respect, but that experience showed her how foolish she had been, and
now she’s a true radical. She exchanged her needle for a sword, and not just in a manner of speaking: she traded in her scissors and thread for homemade bombs.

  The workshop is dark, except for her lamp and a timid candle burning in the far left corner. Clementine says aloud, “It’s very cold. How can you sew, your fingers stiff from this cold? It’s freezing!” She begins arranging her hair to cover it again. “Sitting here without natural light, in this damp air, how can you stand it?”

  In the darkness, the deep, well-enunciated voice of an educated man answers her. “Eleven and a half hours a day.”

  “What are you doing here, Vladimir?” Clementine is taken aback. “Didn’t you promise me not to use the pick again?”

  “I had to…. Eleven and a half hours a day.”

  “Without stopping,” Clementine replies as her expression fills with a different kind of light (her face is always full of light), one of joy. “An eleven-and-a-half-hour day.”

  “Compared to the fourteen they worked until a few years ago, it’s nothing.”

  “In the cold, no windows, no toilet, no break for a breath of fresh air … with so little light that your eyesight goes? That’s ‘nothing’? No. Resignation is shameful. Don’t give them ideas! There’s only one solution: revolution! One solution: revolution! One solution … !”

  “Eleven and a half hours is almost three hours less. Admit it.”

  “Revolution! They keep track of how many pieces they’re finishing and always make them work more. Not for God, not for any master!”

  “Their bodies may be freezing, but at least they have hot heads….”

  “Don’t provoke me. The day before yesterday when I stopped by the workshop they were saying, ‘Sunday we’ll go to the demonstration. With Father Gapon,’ ‘We’ll take pictures of the tsar and banners we’ll sew ourselves, he’s our father, he’ll hear us.’ Father Gapon this, Father Gapon that, their faith in him is blind, he’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin…. When they embraced me farewell, I could hardly refrain from scratching their faces, they’re so stupid. Over and over I told them, ‘The only church that shows the light is one that’s on fire!’”

  “You came out with that old slogan? I can see their faces now!”

  “And I told them, ‘Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’ And I told them …”

  Clementine falls silent and looks nervous, worried again; she wraps her scarf around her head.

  From the darkness behind the sole candle, the voice speaks again, now pleading, “No, Clementine! Don’t cover your hair!”

  He leaves the corner where he’s been hiding and comes to her. He’s very young, pale and thin, dressed impeccably. It’s hard to determine his profession from his voice and his clothes. Is he a domestic servant, an employee of the palace or some other branch of government, and if he is, what’s his rank? His coat is open; he trembles like an autumn leaf. His clothes are of good quality, but a careful eye would notice they’re not made to measure, and the fabric’s so fine they must be secondhand. His hands are delicate, not the hands of a man accustomed to chiseling stone. They tell the story of the work he’s done since he was a child: watchmaking. His luminosity gives him an air of both fragility and fortitude.

  Clementine uncovers her head and embraces him.

  “Clementine, I went to Tsarskoye Selo to deliver a letter to the tsar on behalf of Father Gapon.”

  Clementine steps back.

  “To Tsarskoye Selo? What on earth!”

  “He refused the letter. And my two companions were arrested. They let me go just so the reverend would hear directly from one of his own that the tsar doesn’t have the least interest in hearing what he has to say.”

  Silence. Clementine rubs her eyes and shakes her head impatiently.

  “You should never have gone to Tsarskoye Selo to see the tsar. What madness! Why would you knowingly put your head in the lion’s mouth? And they call the tyrant ‘father’! They’re done for! How on earth could you go? You’re crazy! What a relief to know you’re here, and safe.”

  “The tsar refused our letter.”

  “Yes, yes, I heard you, you don’t need to explain. Vladimir, what did you expect? A message enjoining him to come to St. Petersburg tomorrow to hear the prayers of his ‘children’? Another stupid Gaponist…. Never mind, you’re here now.”

  Vladimir is ashamed of his naivety; the color of his complexion gives him away. Red as a strawberry, he changes the subject. “But why is no one here today? What’s happened? Where are all the seamstresses? And the children who help make the lace? Are they going to shut down the workshop?”

  “Police orders, Vladimir. They don’t want laborers gathering in this part of town this weekend. They forced all the workshops near the Nevsky to shut down. So much the better for me: they might have taken me prisoner, identified me, come after my colleagues here in retaliation, and blamed them for something they had no involvement in…. And they would have found you here! I would never have forgiven myself…. I never thought you’d use that picklock again, we agreed….”

  “Forget the stupid picklock. Slow down, I’m not following you. Does this mean that … ?”

  “Yes, Vladimir. Today was my mission. Propaganda of the deed!”

  “Today?”

  “You’ll never imagine what happened: I planted a dud … a faulty bomb! It didn’t explode! It hardly even made a noise, as if it didn’t have any explosives in it. What a failure.”

  Clementine embraces him again, shaking.

  “Calm down, Clementine. Look on the bright side: no one died. Calm down.”

  “I’m holding you because I want to….”

  Clementine recovers her composure.

  “It’s over now.”

  “Not completely. I failed, though it wasn’t my fault. I left the bomb before we had planned to because they suspended the tram service. Boring details…. The fact is, the bomb was good for nothing. If only you had made it!”

  “I don’t make bombs, Clementine. I used to repair watches, which is quite different.”

  “But you know how to make explosives. If you had made it …”

  She steps away from Vladimir again. She changes her attitude. She’s completely revitalized. Handsome Clementine, a one-of-a-kind woman.

  “Clementine … I don’t make bombs. Understand?”

  “Giorgi is coming to get me out of here at eight. Do you want to come with me? We’ll take you to the Haven? Will you give Gapon the news?”

  “I can’t, Clementine. Father Gapon already knows everything, and he doesn’t want the news to spread. That’s why they ordered me to go into hiding until the demonstration is over tomorrow. I can’t go to Narva and I can’t go anywhere near other members of the assembly…. I may not have been afraid of delivering the message to the tsar, but I’m afraid of everyone else, Father Gapon’s people most of all. I can’t disobey them, it wouldn’t make any difference. Besides … I don’t want to go to tomorrow’s ‘prayer.’ … See how they’ve given it a religious name? I’ll spend the night at my sister Aleksandra’s, Mademoiselle Anya never notices…. That will put my sister at ease, I sent her a message that I was going to deliver Father Gapon’s letter and that I was a little worried…. I’m sure she’s worried too.”

  Clementine covers her head once more.

  “Everything’s turning out badly, very badly. Today they posted some notices … announcing that demonstrations are forbidden. Things are going very badly, very badly.”

  “The demonstration should be cancelled.”

  “I agree. No … although … if something happens, something horrible, a massacre … the people will rise up in rebellion, they’ll forget about their prayers and call for the blood of the guilty. And that would be no good at all.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Clementine.”

  “Some hero will offer to carry the red flag. It will serve as an excuse to kill who knows how many innocent people. They’ll be the ones who ruin the prayer. Point
less prayers, but perhaps they’ll suffice…. And if there’s no red flag, what do I know, perhaps bullets won’t fly….”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can’t fool ourselves. They’ve made it clear a thousand different ways. If my bomb had only exploded … they wouldn’t have been able to continue with their plan, they would have called off the demonstration.”

  Clementine leaves without saying goodbye. Behind her, unraveling,

  the small bundle that was, for a few hours, her fake child

  a tangled mess of strips of cloth

  another element of the darkness

  becomes complete a few minutes later

  Vladimir blows out the candle

  and leaves.

  4. To the Concert

  At 7:35 on the dot, Claudia and Sergei get into their carriage. Just as the horses begin to move, Claudia speaks: “We’re picking up Anya.” Her words land like a grenade.

  With his hands on his chin he asks, his voice strangled, “Anya? Why are you persecuting me?” Sergei can’t bear seeing his little sister, least of all at the theater, where everyone in society gathers. He practically shouts at the driver, “Giorgi! Stop the horses!”

  “Sergei, for God’s sake, calm down!”

  “You go! I’m not going. You’ve ruined the only good thing about this horrible day.”

  Giorgi slows their pace, listening to the argument—he’s accustomed to them—but he doesn’t bring the horses to a halt.

  “We have plenty of time, don’t worry,” Claudia argues, trying to pacify him, because, to justify his reaction to going to the theater with his sister, Sergei has complained that he can’t stand how long they always have to wait for her when they go to pick her up, an undeniable fact. “I took matters into my own hands, she’ll be ready on time.”

  “There’s never enough time for Anya, you know that. She’ll take years to come down, she always forgets something … and …” Sergei wants to describe his revulsion to Claudia, but his tongue fails him.