Read Online Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett - Free Book Online

impulse. I would be fifty on my next birthday. How little we grow. And how marvellous we grow so little, in this aspect of our lives at least.
    I went to the window. Across the river smoke was already rising from the chimneys of the great grey factories of the Vyborg. A gentle snow was falling. I decided to drive to the office.
    My first appointment that morning was with none other than Gregory Vasilevich Petrov. As Petrov was champion of thecity’s poor (and hero to Catherine) so he was reviled as a demagogic opportunist by supporters of the autocracy like Zinnurov and the Baltic Barons. There were plenty of rabble-rousers in St Petersburg at that time, but what made Petrov especially loathed was his combination of oratory, impertinence and scathing quick wit – he was by far the most entertaining deputy in the Duma. His enemies’ constant disparagement only enhanced his reputation among the workers and students, in spite of his manifest – and, to some, troubling – contradictions: he professed himself the authentic voice of the destitute and oppressed, yet seemed addicted to expensive restaurants, the theatre and the opera. He dressed in nothing but the finest clothes, paid scrupulous attention to his toilette and revelled in the company of glamorous young women. He had verve and imagination. He was a law unto himself. He was mustachioed, vain, arrogant and clever. He was rarely punctual and often failed to turn up at all for his appointments. I was mildly surprised when Minna announced his arrival, but I was also pleased, for he was never less than interesting.
    Petrov collapsed on the couch like a man who has swum from the shipwreck to the shore. Although in public he demonstrated the energy of a man possessed, whenever I saw him he was exhausted. As far as I could tell he never rested. When not making speeches in the Duma, he was leading strikers against the police. When not locked in smoke-filled rooms arguing with comrades as they went line by line through their latest manifesto, he was in the arms of some young lover. He was perpetually in motion as if, like a bicyclist, motion alone kept him upright.
    â€˜You missed our last three sessions,’ I said.
    â€˜I was in Krakow,’ he said. ‘There was a meeting.’
    â€˜With whom?’
    â€˜A Party meeting. I can’t tell you any more than that, exceptthat it was important and I couldn’t miss it. You know there are areas of my life I can’t go into.’
    Petrov was a member of the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democrats. The Party was notorious, barely legal in Russia and subject to police surveillance and repression. In the absence of Lenin, its exiled leader, Petrov was its de facto chief. The strains involved in this alone would account for his mental and physical exhaustion, but in Petrov’s case there was something else. Something tormented his soul. He wanted to tell me, to tell someone, and yet he could not. As with Anna, as with all my resistant patients, I had fallen back on the principal ally of psychoanalysts everywhere – time; I was never in a hurry.
    â€˜On the last occasion we met,’ I reminded him, ‘you said you were at the end of your tether, that you couldn’t go on. How do you feel today?’
    â€˜The same.’
    There was a long silence, which he declined to disturb.
    I said, ‘Have you been eating properly? Sleeping?’
    â€˜It has nothing to do with eating or sleeping,’ he answered impatiently.
    â€˜What does it have to do with?’
    He jabbed a finger at me. ‘How would it be if I went to the people I represent and they told me all about their problems – how they couldn’t survive on their wages, how they lived twenty to a room and had no clean water, how rats swarmed over their children at night? How would it be if they told me all this and all I could say was: “What colour are the rats?” ’
    â€˜You have not told me