The Cleansing Flames

An act of singular daring

On the morning of Monday, 1 May, Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky entered his superior Porfiry Petrovich’s chambers at nine thirty. He closed the door behind him. There was nothing unusual in this. Afterwards the head clerk, Alexander Grigorevich Zamyotov, would say that he had noticed Virginsky’s expression to be unusually strained that morning, his complexion noticeably pale.

There were few people in main receiving room of the police bureau at the time, and so Zamyotov was able to steal a few moments to listen at the door. He had no great expectation of hearing anything of interest, and assumed the role of eavesdropper more out of habit than mischief. It was almost as if he believed it was expected of him.

Nothing prepared him for what he heard.

The explosive discharge of a gun threw him away from the door. A moment later, there was the clatter of something heavy and metallic falling to the floor and then Virginsky burst through, now flushed in the face. He stared into Zamyotov’s eyes, as though he were an acquaintance he had not seen for many years whose name he was struggling to remember. Gathering his wits, the junior magistrate bowed politely and began walking away from Porfiry Petrovich’s chambers. Looking back on the moment, it seemed strange to Zamyotov that Virginsky did not at any point break into a run, but merely walked calmly out of the bureau. But at the time, it was the junior magistrate’s calmness that went a long way to persuading Zamyotov that nothing untoward had happened at all, and that he must have been mistaken in thinking he had heard a gunshot.

But as soon as Virginsky was out of sight, it was as if Zamyotov was released from a spell. He rushed into Porfiry Petrovich’s chambers, where he found the magistrate clutching a hand to his chest, high up, to the left, just below the shoulder. The clerk was horrified to see blood seeping through the magistrate’s fingers. He noticed that there was blood on the magistrate’s cheek too. It seemed strange to him that the blood coming from the chest appeared darker than the blood on his face.

Porfiry Petrovich was breathing hard. ‘Get Dr Pervoyedov,’ he rasped into Zamyotov’s anxious face. ‘Only Dr Pervoyedov. No one else. Keep this. Quiet. No panic. Do you understand, Alexei? Go softly.’

‘What about Nikodim Fomich?’

‘Yes. Get him too. Quickly. But Pervoyedov is the only doctor I will allow to look at me.’ Porfiry Petrovich closed his eyes and slumped back in his seat. His face relaxed into something that for a moment resembled contentment, as if he welcomed the wound and held onto it jealously. But that impression was not long-lasting. The shift in his position seemed to take its toll on Porfiry, tightening his face into a wince of manifest pain.

‘Do not stir yourself, Porfiry Petrovich,’ said Zamyotov. ‘I shall return with a doctor forthwith.’

‘Pervoyedov,’ groaned Porfiry. ‘Only Pervoyedov.’

Zamyotov shook his head as he ran out of the chambers. Clearly, the old man was delirious. God only knew why he had got it into his head to insist on that eccentric. Zamyotov hated to go against him but this was a matter of life or death. To send to the Obukhovsky Hospital for Dr Pervoyedov would waste valuable time. The crucial thing was to get a doctor to Porfiry Petrovich as quickly as possible. Any delay might prove fatal. And if there were an inquest, how could he justify sending for Pervoyedov when there were other doctors just as capable closer at hand?

And yet Porfiry Petrovich had been strangely insistent. Perhaps, thought Zamyotov, I had better talk it over with Nikodim Fomich first.

But, of course, there would be no time for that.

It had been many years since Zamyotov had prayed in earnest, not since his boyhood, in fact. He and religion had gone their separate ways long ago. But now he closed his eyes tightly, fervently, and mustered all the sincerity of which his soul was capable. He opened himself up to an idea of God that, without his knowing, still resided within him. To that God he made all manner of rash promises, which perhaps he would not be able to keep. But at the time he made them, he was sincere and that is all that counts in these matters. Just save Porfiry Petrovich, was the burden of his prayers. Just save Porfiry Petrovich and I will live a different life.

It is a frightening thing, to open your eyes from prayer and see the answer to your prayers before you. It is not something you can ever be prepared for. And when you have made the answering of those prayers conditional upon nothing less than a wholesale upheaval of your being, you do not necessarily welcome such a sight. Indeed, it may inspire in you as much dread as joy.

Zamyotov opened his eyes to see the miracle of Dr Pervoyedov himself, walking towards Porfiry Petrovich’s chambers, as calmly as Virginsky had walked away from them.

‘Doctor! Thank God you’re here! Something terrible has happened.’ Zamyotov’s startling cry, equally laden with panic and relief, changed the tenor of the day for good: ‘He has been shot! Porfiry Petrovich has been shot!’

*

Virginsky rapped urgently on the door. As soon as he had done so, he regretted not using the coded sequence of knocks that he had witnessed the last time he had visited the apartment.

Despite that oversight, the door was opened. The woman who had served tea to the guests, Varvara Alexeevna, appeared to be on her way out, with a shawl pulled up over her head and a large cloth bag in one hand. She clearly recognised Virginsky, but made no move to admit him. ‘Kirill Kirillovich is not here.’

‘I will wait for him.’

‘He will not return until this evening. And I must go out. I have been called away. I am a midwife, you know.’ Varvara Alexeevna volunteered this information with a self-important tilt of the head. ‘I was just about to leave when you knocked.’

‘You must let me in. I have nowhere else to go. And. .’

Varvara Alexeevna cocked an eyebrow questioningly.

Virginsky scanned the landing nervously. ‘I think I have just killed a man.’

‘You think?’

‘I did not stay to find out for certain.’

‘And you believe this will incline me to let you in?’

‘I did it for the cause. For them. I have put myself in a position of extreme. .’ Virginsky broke off, as if unable to define the position in which he had in fact put himself. ‘I have nowhere else to go,’ he said simply.

Varvara Alexeevna nodded and stepped to one side.

‘Do you know how to contact Alyosha Afanasevich?’ asked Virginsky. ‘Or Tatyana Ruslanovna?’

‘There will be time for that later. Stay in the apartment and do not answer the door to anyone. Kirill Kirillovich will know what to do.’

With that, she was gone. And if Virginsky had ever felt lonely in his life before, it was nothing compared to this.

*

When Kirill Kirillovich appeared at around four that afternoon, his face had already assumed the look of sour disappointment that seemed to come most naturally to it. ‘Why did you come here?’

‘Where else was I to go? The police will be watching my apartment.’

‘You acted without authorisation.’

‘It was what we talked about at the meeting. Alyosha Afanasevich called for action. You agreed. You all agreed.’

‘We were talking about general principles. No order was given. How could it have been? We do not generate our own orders. We must wait for them to come from the central committee. It had not even been definitely decided that you were to be accepted into the group.’

‘I trust there will be no doubt about that now?’

‘I would not be so certain. You have revealed yourself to be a highly unreliable and dangerous individual. A volatile character. You place us all at risk.’

‘As soon as you become involved in political activity, you place yourself at risk. You must have the courage of your convictions. You cannot call for the overthrow of the Tsar and then baulk at the assassination of a magistrate.’

‘You took matters into your own hands. That is ill disciplined.’

‘To me, it was clear what was called for at the meeting on Friday. I was called upon to use my position within a government department to carry out an act of singular daring. Those were the very words Tatyana Ruslanovna used.’

‘Yes, yes, that was what was discussed. But it goes without saying that we would have to wait for confirmation from the central committee before any action was taken. That is the way things are done.’

‘I believe there was one there who was authorised to speak for the central committee. And yet no voice was raised calling for delay.’

‘Nonsense. No one speaks for the central committee.’ Kirill Kirillovich’s expression became even sourer as he assessed and somehow dismissed Virginsky. ‘At any rate, you cannot stay here.’

Virginsky looked around. The apartment seemed large without the presence of the name-day guests. He also saw that it was more comfortably furnished than he remembered, even luxuriously so, as if some objects of value had been removed for that last occasion. This was either as a precaution against damage, or because Kirill Kirillovich and his wife had not wanted their guests to see that they possessed such items. One article in particular caught Virginsky’s eye. ‘I see that you have an icon in the corner.’

‘Why not? It is for form’s sake. Our neighbours expect us to be devout Russians. It does no harm.’

‘It was not in place last Friday.’

‘Naturally. There was no one present who needed to be deceived as to our true convictions.’

Virginsky frowned distractedly as he considered Kirill Kirillovich’s explanation. ‘You can’t kick me out. Not until the central committee have decided what to do with me.’

There was a knock at the door, the coded knock that signalled one of ‘our people.’ It was Alyosha Afanasevich Botkin, his face illuminated by a wild excitement. He held a newspaper in front of him. ‘You fiend! You are a veritable fiend! That’s what we will have to call you from now on!’

‘Just as they call you Hunger?’ remarked Virginsky, raising one sardonic eyebrow. ‘May I see that?’

It was a late edition of the Police Gazette. Virginsky read on the front page: