Red Moth

Having crossed

Having crossed the wide expanse of the Alexander Park‚ the three men stood at last before the entrance to the Catherine Palace.

Stefanov tried the doors but found them both locked.

‘Well, what did you expect?’ hissed Ragozin. ‘We should go back at once!’

But Barkat had already climbed in through a broken window. A moment later, there was a rattling as he slid back the bolt. ‘Your majesties,’ he said, swinging wide the double doors, and bowing extravagantly as the other two walked past him into the palace.

In front of them, the grand staircase rose up into the darkness of the floor above. At the base of the stairs, balanced on a short white marble pillar, stood a huge porcelain vase, strangely out of place in the otherwise empty hallway.

The three men went over to the vase, drawn to it like boys towards a pie left on a window sill to cool. Barkat wrapped his arms around the vase. ‘Maybe I can get this into the truck.’

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ muttered Stefanov, but even as he spoke, he wished he had thought of it first.

Barkat grunted. ‘I can’t even lift it!’

‘Let me try,’ said Ragozin, pushing Barkat aside. He had no luck either. ‘This thing is heavy!’ he whispered.

Now it was Stefanov’s turn. Folding his arms around the vase, he hugged the vase to his chest, braced his legs and lifted. The vase seemed to shift, as if it was a living thing determined to stay rooted to the spot. And then he understood why none of them could move it. The vase was filled with water.

‘Why would they do that?’ asked Ragozin.

‘Maybe it had flowers in it,’ suggested Barkat.

‘No,’ said Stefanov. ‘It’s so the vase won’t shatter from the concussion of an exploding shell. My family used to live right by the railroad tracks. Sometimes those trains would make the whole house shake. If the vibration reached a certain pitch, it could shatter a window, or a glass inside a cabinet, or a vase. At home, my father used to fill our only flower vase with water, so that it could absorb the shock. Whoever did this,’ Stefanov tapped a fingernail against the vase, ‘thinks there’s going to be a battle here. Come on. We have to hurry. It’s this way.’

Although Ragozin had brought an army-issue torch‚ there was enough moonlight coming in from outside that they could make their way around without it.

Instead of climbing the stairs, the three men went through a doorway to the right and entered a space which had once been the picture hall. No paintings hung there now and the gaping frames that once contained them lay scattered on the floor amongst handfuls of straw and a pile of empty, musty-smelling suitcases.

Of the furniture that once decorated the hall, only a single sideboard cabinet remained, its drawers pulled out and missing, as if the place had already been looted. On top of the sideboard, looking strangely out of place, sat a broken American-made Sylvania radio, the guts of its wires hanging out the back. Ragozin gently took the radio in both hands and lifted it so that the speaker pressed against his ear. ‘They listened to me on this,’ he whispered. ‘My voice came out through here. I can feel it.’

Thick velvet curtains still hung in front of the windows, moonlight winking through tears in the fabric where Stefanov’s gunfire had smashed through the window and strewn the floor with dagger-like shards of glass.

‘Where is everything?’ whispered Barkat. ‘Where did they put it all?’

Stefanov said nothing. He had heard stories, assembled piece by rumoured piece, about what had become of the treasures of Tsarskoye Selo. In the years after the Revolution, the office of Internal State Security, known to men like Stefanov simply as the ‘Organi’, had taken over one wing of the Alexander Palace, for use as a rest home for their senior officers. In reality, it was just a place for them to bring their mistresses. Things soon began to disappear, not just from the Alexander Palace but from the Catherine Palace as well. In the beginning, they were only small items, like letter openers and fountain pens. Later, whole paintings went missing, along with icons, lamps and even life-size statues, only to reappear for sale in the auction houses of London, Paris and Rome.

They arrived at a closed door.

Stefanov took hold of the brass handle, but remained frozen, as if suddenly afraid to go on.

‘What are you waiting for?’ demanded Barkat.

Stefanov knew that beyond this door lay the Amber Room, which his father had once described to him as the place where the walls were on fire.

At first, Stefanov had dismissed the old man’s description as another figment of his primitive and superstitious mind. But then, one summer evening, when many of the palace windows had been opened to let out the heat of the day, Stefanov had caught a glimpse of what at first he took to be flames, leaping from the walls inside.

The next day, in school, it was his teacher, Madame Simonova, rumoured to be the fiancee of Inspector Pekkala, who had provided the explanation. The thousands of pieces of amber, each one worked into huge panels, reflected the light in such a way that they sometimes appeared to glow like embers.

Stefanov longed to see the Amber Room, but the palace was off limits to all but specially appointed staff, of which his father, the gardener, was not one. And if the chances of Stefanov’s father getting in were zero, his own seemed even less. In spite of this, he couldn’t let it rest. Thoughts of the amber consumed him and it was not long before he had devised a scheme to catch a glimpse inside the room.

The following week, he casually mentioned to his father that the ornamental hedges which lined the base of the Catherine Palace looked as if they needed trimming. Being well aware that this job required the use of ladders, and that his father did not like to climb on ladders, it came as no surprise to him when, a few days later, his father assigned him the task of trimming the hedges.

By ten o’clock the next morning, when Stefanov arrived for work, he had already planned it all out. He would have been there sooner, except it was not allowed to begin work anywhere on the estate before that time, in case the Tsarina was still asleep and might be woken by the noise.

The Amber Room lay nearly in the middle of the palace, on the ground floor, between the Hall of Pictures and the Portrait Gallery. For Stefanov‚ the simplest course of action would have been to begin working on the hedge directly beneath the windows of the Amber Room, but he reasoned that this would soon alert any bystanders to his real motive. Instead, beginning outside the choir anteroom on the left-hand side of the building, Stefanov worked his way across the front of the palace. It was difficult balancing on the rickety, paint-spattered ladder and the repetitive motion of cutting with the shears soon caused the muscles of his forearms to cramp. His only consolation was the fact that the hedge didn’t need trimming as badly as he had conveyed to his father, and the old man had taken his son’s word for it, rather than wait and risk having to do the job himself.

Finally, the young Stefanov arrived beneath the large double windows of the Amber Room, the bases of which stood about twice the height of a man above the level of the ground. Sweat pasted his shirt to his back. His head was reeling in the still, close heat of that July afternoon. He set up the ladder, careful to position it in such a way that he would, if he looked up from his cutting, be able to see directly into the room.

Slowly, Stefanov climbed the ladder and began his work, blinking sweat from his eyes as he snipped away at those individual branches of the hedge which had dared to grow beyond the level of the rest. The noise of the shears filled his brain, its sound like a clashing of daggers. At first he did not dare look up, petrified that someone might be watching.

Finally, Stefanov judged that the moment was right. At this point, he still had his back to the window. Glancing from beneath the brim of his cap, he scanned the grounds, in case anyone else might be watching. He had been planning this moment for so long that his mind had begun to play tricks on him. The act of simply peering into the room had, in Stefanov’s mind, taken on the magnitude of a great crime, the punishment for which lay beyond his comprehension.

The grounds were empty. Anyone with any sense was sleeping in the shade. Heat haze weaved and shimmered off the crushed stone of the riding path, as if ghostly horses were galloping by.

He began to turn, his movements practised and precise. The great glass panes slid into view. At first all he could see was his own reflection: a damp, dishevelled figure, unrecognisable even to himself. Slowly, however, like someone staring at the ripples on a pond, his eyes began to make out the interior of the room. He saw a desk, a chair, and a table on which he could make out the figures of a chess set. The walls looked dirty and mottled, as if they were covered with a layer of soot. He bared his teeth in concentration, leaning towards the glass until his breath condensed upon its surface. Now he began to see the colours. The walls took on a deep brownish-orange tint, and he could not escape from the notion that they were, in fact, on fire, and that his father had been right all along. Now the colour changed, both lightening and deepening at the same time. The whole room appeared to be losing its shape, expanding into that strange and parallel dimension, of which his father had always been aware. The amber seemed to shudder, as if the light of the sun which streamed into the room had brought the ancient sap to life.

In that moment, Stefanov finally grasped why the delicate amber was so valuable, and it did not surprise him that the Romanovs had learned to covet the substance whose origins were still a mystery to him. In fact, it seemed the perfect treasure for the Tsar and his family. Everything about the Romanovs had always seemed to Stefanov to exist in a separate dimension, whose glittering fragility could not endure the crude and rough-hewn world in which he lived.

Suddenly, a figure materialised inside the room. It advanced upon him, drifting across the floor, seemingly enveloped in white smoke. Another angel, his heat-dimmed mind announced, seeking vengeance for my crimes.

His legs began to shake. His left knee buckled. He did not fall exactly. It was more like a slow, clumsy, painfully controlled descent, bumping down the rungs on elbows, knees and chin until he came to rest upon the ground. High above him, the handles of the shears poked like the ears of a wooden rabbit from the top of the hedge.

There was a rattling noise and the double windows swung open. He saw two arms, swathed in the thin fabric of a white summer dress, and then a face. He gasped. It was the Princess Olga. Or was she a Grand Duchess? Suddenly, he could not remember. All of the Tsar’s daughters looked somewhat similar to him. They usually wore the same clothes and had more or less the same hairstyles. There was little to tell them apart, as far as Stefanov was concerned, but Olga’s face had always seemed to him the most distinctive. Her almond-shaped eyes and the steadiness of her gaze would have made her appearance too severe if it weren’t for the fullness of her lips. He had fallen in and out of love with her several times already.

She stared down at him, her expression a mixture of amusement and concern. ‘Are you hurt?’ she asked.

Stefanov knew that the correct response when in the presence of a Romanov was to take off his cap and hold it in his hand and to look at the ground before answering any question. But his cap had fallen off and it seemed foolish to be staring at the earth when he was already lying upon it. So he stared at Olga, eyes wide in awe and fear. ‘I’m not hurt,’ he finally managed to say.

‘What is your name?’ asked the Princess.

‘Stefanov. I am the son of the head gardener, Agripin Dobrushinovich Stefanov.’

‘Well, Stefanov, son of the head gardener, you should be more careful in future.’ She smiled at him, then closed the windows and from somewhere in the room came the sound of men and women laughing.

Too ashamed to feel his pain, Stefanov retrieved the shears, found his cap and, with sweat stinging in his eyes, carried the ladder back to the work shed, where the implements for gardening were stored.

Along the way, Stefanov pondered the repercussions he felt sure would follow soon. No doubt, he thought, the Princess would not hesitate to tell the story of him lying there in the dirt, and fumbling with his words as he identified himself. The Tsar himself would hear of it. Or worse. The Tsarina. Perhaps they already knew. Maybe it was their laughter he had heard after Olga closed the window. But now what? Would they punish him? Would they punish his father? And what would the punishment be? Would the Emerald Eye be summoned?

For days, Stefanov lived in terror of the moment when Pekkala himself would come knocking on the door to his family’s cottage.

But it never happened. Gradually Stefanov transformed from being certain of disaster to being only reasonably sure and from there he went to suspecting and finally, at the end of this strange journey, he arrived at a state of relieved confusion where he had been, more or less, ever since.

He would see the Princess Olga only once again, on a bitterly cold night in March of 1917.

Petrograd had fallen to the revolutionaries. Rumours reached Tsarskoye Selo that an 8‚000-strong mob of soldiers, deserters from the army, was heading towards the estate with the intention of destroying the palaces and murdering anyone inside them.

With the Tsar still en route by train from the military headquarters at Mogilev, the Tsarina Alexandra summoned all troops still loyal to the Romanovs, including the Garde Equipage, the military escort of the royal yacht, to take up defensive positions around the Alexander Palace, which was the residence of the Tsar and his family when they were staying at Tsarskoye Selo. In all, these soldiers numbered some 1,500 men, including Stefanov’s father, who had brought along his son to offer their assistance.

Confronted with the old gardener and his son, who was too awestruck by the ranks of uniforms and bayonet-fixed rifles even to speak, the soldiers turned them away. Hearing this, Stefanov’s father threw himself at the mercy of the troops, pointing out to them that he had nowhere else to go and stood little chance of survival if thousands of armed hooligans came swarming across the estate.

After a brief consultation among the officers, Stefanov and his son were allowed to remain, provided they kept out of the way.

All day, with fingers on the triggers of their guns, the loyal soldiers waited for the revolutionaries to arrive. But the mob never materialised and, by that evening, the nerves of the men were frayed almost to breaking point.

Throughout that night, the soldiers kept their watch.

Although several of the Tsar’s daughters had come down with measles, the Tsarina emerged several times from the Palace, drifting through the courtyard in her black fur cloak and pleading with the soldiers to remain vigilant. No fires were lit, in order to deny the enemy the advantage of illumination.

It was on one of these visits that the Tsarina, accompanied by her daughter Olga, chanced upon Stefanov and his father, who were sitting on the steps with only a piece of cardboard to insulate them from the stone. They were, by then, so frozen, that it was only with difficulty that the old man and his son were able to get to their feet.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Olga, having recognised the gardener’s son. In spite of the cold, her face was glistening with sweat brought on by sickness.

‘Who is this?’ demanded the Tsarina‚ before either of them could reply. Her face, framed by the fur of her hooded cloak, looked pale and haggard.

It was Olga who answered for them. ‘It’s the gardener, Agripin, and his boy.’ In spite of her illness, Olga smiled at Stefanov.

‘And what are you doing here?’ the Tsarina asked. Her voice sounded harsh and impatient.

‘Majesty,’ explained Agripin, ‘we came to help.’

The Tsarina’s tone changed suddenly. ‘But the soldiers are here. Your duties do not lie with them. There is nothing you can do.’

Agripin drew himself up to his full height, which was not considerable. ‘There would be if I had a gun,’ he said.

Overhearing this comment, some of the soldiers began to laugh.

‘Perhaps you would do better with a shovel,’ said one.

‘Or a rake!’ added another.

Seeing his father mocked by the soldiers, the young Stefanov felt ashamed. Helplessly, he looked down at his feet.

Agripin glared at the soldiers. Then he faced the Tsarina again. ‘Majesty,’ he said solemnly, ‘I would rather help you now than spend the rest of my life knowing that I could have and didn’t.’

For a moment, the Tsarina said nothing. Then she turned to the soldiers. ‘Get this man a rifle,’ she commanded.

Two weeks later, on the orders of the Tsar himself, Stefanov and his father loaded their belongings on to a cart and left the grounds of the estate‚ bound for the home of a relative. But they did not stay long. In the years that followed, Agripin and his son made their way from town to town, working in fields, repairing walls, doing any job that would guarantee a meal and a roof over their heads. Fearing reprisals from the revolutionary committees that maintained a choke-hold on every village in Russia, Agripin never mentioned his years of service to the Tsar and, likewise, his son remained silent.

Now, deep within the deserted hallways of the Catherine Palace, Ragozin shoved Stefanov out of the way, opened the door, and the three men piled into the room.

Ragozin turned on his torch. The weak light played across a high ceiling and smooth, bare walls which were the same pale blue green as a duck’s egg.

‘But this is the Amber Room!’ gasped Stefanov.

‘You must have it wrong,’ whispered Barkat. His footsteps echoed in the empty space

‘This is the Amber Room‚’ insisted Stefanov. ‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Maybe it was‚’ quipped Ragozin. ‘But it isn’t any more.’

Then, from the main entrance, they heard a voice call out, ‘Who’s there?’

‘That’s Commissar Sirko!’ Barkat hissed. ‘If he catches us in here. .’

The three men panicked. They ran to the window, opened it and jumped down into the garden. It was a hefty drop, but their falls were broken by the same ornamental hedge which Stefanov had trimmed that summer day, already lifetimes ago.

‘Is anyone there?’ Sirko called out.

Stefanov, Ragozin and Barkat sprinted across the Alexander Park, their long shadows, lapis blue in moonlight, pursuing them across the grounds. By the time they reached their gun emplacement, all three were out of breath. Looking back, they saw the blade of a torch splashing across the empty walls of the Portrait Hall, as Commissar Sirko continued his hunt for intruders.

Their moment of relief was cut short by a grinding, squeaking, metallic sound, like that of a huge machine whose moving parts required oil, which reached them on the night breeze from somewhere to the west.

‘Tanks,’ said Barkat.

‘Can you tell if it’s ours or theirs?’ asked Stefanov.

It was Ragozin who replied. ‘Whoever they belong to, they’re headed straight towards us.’