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Category:
Historical Fiction
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN-10: 1492931241
ISBN-13: 9781492931249
Price: $1.66 (eBook)
A British deserter from the Great War takes a fancy to Lenin's ex-mistress and goes off to Revolutionary Russia.
“I never gave a monkeys for Marxism or Monarchism or Liberalism or Conservatism or Socialism or any ism. I’ve always been leery of anyone brandishing an ism – an excuse to howl at the moon if you ask me. And they’re all moralists too, always got it in for someone else, usually someone like me.” - Archibald Brinsley Fox.
Brinsley Fox, adventurer, shirker, thief, cavalier poseur and all-round bad lot, was never the stuff of revolutionary heroes. But Lenin wasn’t to know that when he invited Fox along to the Russian Revolution...
It is April 1917 when Fox breezes into Petrograd, during the Spring of Hope. He personally hopes to seduce Lenin’s former mistress – the bewitching Inessa Armand – and purloin a Fabergé Egg.
Meanwhile the Russian economy has gone to hell in a handcart. The Great War is being lost hand over fist. The place is falling apart. Yet drink and be merry is the order of the optimistic day; ideal for a man who believes that fun and moral fibre are mutually exclusive.
Alas, the mood of Russia darkens over the months, and Fox’s leisurely life unravels in parallel. Fleeing a brute he cuckolded, Fox charges pillar to post around Russia. From the Eastern Front – the most disastrous front in the history of warfare – into the fateful July Uprising. From a cabal of counter-revolutionaries to a botched break-in at the Catherine Palace. From a lynch mob in a Dark Age village to a bizarre, fledgling republic. From helping ‘Comrade Lenin’ with his ludicrous, little coup to fleeing across country pursued by rabid Red Guards. And on into the final death throes of hope...
Along the way Fox has to face anarchic shoot-outs, violent Cossacks, dangerously desperate women, blithe fanatics, deadly disease, sinister river-gangs, hordes of rapists and even some sensible innocents, wondering where it will all end...
This is a diary of horrors and heroics, written with verve and style, and scant regard for “the luxurious morals of the materially cosseted.”
Praise for Hennessey’s first novel, Drowning in the Shallows, a contemporary satire and a cult hit in the author’s native Scotland:-
“… a terrific story… one of the funniest, sharpest debuts of the year – dry, witty and cynical as hell.”
- The Big Issue
"From the crackling start to the end of this debut novel the wit and pace are relentless and magnetic… the sexual swagger which underpins it all gives it style and presence."
-Scotland on Sunday
"Brilliant, intelligent and consuming writer… things ebb and flow through a series of exquisite interior monologues while his control of pace and tone are remarkably mature."
- The List
"An unflinching, brilliantly observed debut novel of love and sex."
- Publishing News
“… writes with tremendous energy and delivers excellent lines, supporting the manic comedy… Hennessey tells it with style.”
- Sunday Herald
Excerpt
After twelve hours traversing muddy undulations and barely discernible tracks, we pitched up in evening gloom. As we entered the village, Serzhya said; “Archie, these people, they’re different. They think angels live in the clouds, that the earth is flat and witches cause illness.”
I assumed he was exaggerating. Kalmyzh was a couple of rows of rickety huts, glum faces and the usual outsized church. They were no shops that I could see, no electricity or telegraph wires, no proper road or street-lighting, just these ramshackle homes and glowering, wild people in loose, filthy rags. The men had pudding bowl haircuts, the young women’s hair was pleated and the older ones wore headscarves. Some had no footwear, the rest only lapti [shoes of bark strips]. They all stared at us, not a smile among them.
There was a scream from between two huts. We went to investigate. A young chap was trussed up, his feet and hands bound together and suspended from the bow of a tree. Three fellows were working a crude pulley which lifted him. We saw him about ten feet up in mid-air. The pulley was released and his back cracked into the ground. He screamed. The men started working the pulley again. There were a few dumb brutes watching. One woman sobbed quietly. A few others cheered each time the fellow crashed to earth.
Serzhya asked what the chap had done. He had stolen a sack of grain. The sobbing woman said, “The village elders, they were bribed! With vodka! My brother is innocent!”
Serzhya said they would stop hoisting and dropping him when they were sure his vertebrae were all broken. He might die.
We called on Serzhya’s parents in their izba [wooden home of a peasant; ubiquitous and unvarying]. This was a posh home. It had a raised floor. Serzhya’s father, also called Sergei, proudly showed me round the one small room. There was a sleeping area to the left, full of straw currently being munched by a goat which, Sergei Senior explained, was great for warmth on cold nights. There was the holy part of the room, the ‘red corner,’ which had a few faded, cracked icons on a spindly table, and there was a ginormous stove which, again Sergei Senior explained, was good for sleeping, indicating bunks above the stove. He said the cockroaches which collected about the stove were, unlike the livestock, disgusting sleeping companions. Pudgy-faced Sergei Senior clearly thought a lot about sleeping.
We heard a shout indicating that the ordeal for the fellow on the pulley was over. Through the doorway we saw children dragging his unconscious body through the mud to an izba. Serzhya had instructed me not to sit down and he had instructed Alexei to wait with the troika. It felt like an odd visit. Now Sergei Senior started on at his son for leaving the village. I realised he was drunk.
Serzhya said he had tired of being a beast and the villagers, especially his father, were nothing more than beasts. Sergei Senior clearly disagreed with this frankly charitable assessment. He drawled; “Ah, you take away snokhachestvo and now, you say we are beasts… You, with your dandy clothes, ah clothes!... What do you understand?”
“How to dress?” says Serzhya.
“Ah, you know nothing. Hit your wife with the butt of the axe, get down and see if she’s breathing. If she is, she’s shamming and wants some more!” And he laughed.
Serzhya introduced his mother, Tatyana Dmitrievna, who was bruised about her dark eyes, and his thirteen year old sister, Mila. I had barely shaken hands with Tatyana when Sergei Senior stumbled between us, saying, “A chicken is not a bird and a mouzhik wife is not a human being.” He laughed again and continued; “The more you beat your old lady, the tastier the borsch will be!”
“He stockpiles these pearls of wisdom to annoy me,” said Serzhya.
The brute was standing one foot in front of me, out-stinking the kerosene which was no mean feat. I inched away. “Ha, I suppose you don’t beat your wives in England?” says he.
I curled my lip and he actually swung for me. Serzhya had anticipated it and now caught his father’s arm, punched him in the stomach and decked him with an elbow to the back of the neck. Tatyana and Lyudmila raised their eyebrows. Serzhya’s voice was relaxed as kicked his father in the guts; “Let’s go for a walk, Archie.”
We left Sergei Senior doubled up on the floor and bawling after us, but not terribly bothered.
“What’s that thing your father said you’ve taken away?”
“Snokhachestvo; that’s when the male head of the household can sleep with the son’s wife when the son is away. It’s ancient, phased out mostly everywhere, I think, but old Sergei remembers it. His father was always forcing my mother. He thinks he should be allowed it. But the only time he raped Nadya, my sister-in-law, my little brother beat him senseless. He’s very old, my father, easy for a man to beat.”
“How old?”
“Fifty-eight. He was actually born a serf. He’s the only person older than fifty in the village. They don’t live long, but it’s too bloody long if you ask me.”
We were walking up the one street, a mud track lined with gaunt faces. Most of the villagers stood still. A few moved sluggishly. I nodded politely to some; still not a smile among them, though no shortage of warts, pockmarks, single brows and odd eyes – squinting, blackened and crossed. Atavism unbounded, I thought, this feels like the Dark Ages. Then I noticed a couple of men were fondling their dangling bits, in mid-conversation, and the toilets seemed to be small patches of open ground; we weren’t in the Dark Ages, we were in a zoo.
We called in at the hut of Serzhya’s older brother, Lavrik. He was reclining on the floor, but he stirred to hug his brother and pour us a home-made alcoholic beverage called kvas, which is drinkable stuff in Piter but here it was the colour – and, I suspect, the taste – of mud, with a faint malty tinge and dubious granules in the bottom.
Lavrik was saying that tonight he didn’t feel like going to the skhod [village meeting]. I’ve had enough fights. Ribs didn’t heal after the Revolutionary celebrations. Oh, but that was worth it! I tell you Serzhya, the whole village was in it, every woman too!”
He sat up and smiled at the memory, then addressed me with the funny part of his story. “On the third day, we all got up early and went over to Yuri Osipovich’s – they were all asleep in there – and we grabbed them, one by one! So easy! – when they got up for the toilet!”
Oh, this was so hilarious he was having trouble continuing. His splintered ribs were rattling with the sheer mirth of it all. Serzhya smiled affectionately. “They had no chance! Ha-ha!... I was so proud of Nadya, she got Lyuba, this fat bitch, and smashed her face in so good. She couldn’t eat for days, or talk properly for a month! Ha-ha!... Shame about Yuri; nice fellow, left shin and right femur shattered, a cripple now.”
The Nadya he was so proud of – his good, lady wife – was, as we spoke, sucking the penis of their five year old nephew by way of stopping his crying. I’d warrant little boys wail their heads off regularly round these parts.
“So what are you back for, brother?” asked Lavrik.
Serzhya smiled; “I’ve come for that.”
“Eh?” said Lavrik.
“Shh. Listen.”
A youth was walking nearby, singing; “…the rich don’t bother me/ But I will bother them/ The time has come to stop their fun/ So I will crush their skulls…”
“Ah, young Vanka, yes,” said Nadya, who had tired of sucking her nephew’s penis and was putting her titties away. They had been hanging out for no clear reason. “Siberia? Give him hard labour. He’s a pain in the arse. Do they still send people to Siberia?”
“Not really. We’ll jail him or put him back into the army. He’s a dezelter, isn’t he? They’re always the worst for stirring up trouble in the villages.”
“Yes, and he’s with the SRs,” says Lavrik. “He was handing out their pamphlets, though he can’t read. They’re good for rolling cigarettes. He joined because some SR slut slept with him. The SRs are popular, mind. Mensheviki, Bolsheviki, Trudoviki, all the rest, nobody cares about them, round here anyway. They’re all hysterics, all these socialists, martyrs to nothing, SRs too, all lost God.”
“I hope you never take anything to do with them?” said Serzhya.
“I would if I thought they could organise the place but they’re not practical, just bossy, a lot of little tsars, think they know it all.”
“Hm. Do you think people will try and stop me taking Vanka?”
“Eh, not sure. Like I say, SRs are popular. Maybe you should have brought more people?”
“Don’t have the staff these days, not since the Revolution. It’s hard to organise anything.”
“Hm. Autumn’s coming. They might fight to keep him. Vanka’s father will need him in the fields. Got four children in that house and the mother, Vanka’s sister, remember Sonya? She’s stricken with typhus. But Nadya’s right. He’s a pain in the arse. Should grab him before he goes to the skhod. Or you might get grief from the mir [village community].”
We rushed out to grab Vanka but he was in the field, at the back of the skhod already. The skhod consisted of people standing about in a field. No order, no agenda, just drinking and bawling in the mud beside cattle plagued by clouds of huge flies. Constable, it wasn’t.
We didn’t have to wait long for the first punch, but that petered out. Lavrik and Nadya encouraged Serzhya to make the arrest. I wasn’t so sure. I hoped these wild animals knew their own kind.
“Right,” says Serzhya. “I’ll pick him up quietly. We’ll stroll up the street, get on the troika and be off before anyone is the wiser. You come with me, Archie.”
Oh spiffing, methinks. I was scared of everything in Kalmyzh. Even the children looked like they could go fifteen rounds with you, and wanted to. But I had no real choice.
Serzhya and I sidled up to Vanka, some thirty yards from the gate where we had been standing, just across a kitchen garden. Serzhya pulled out his pistol and held it low. Nobody saw but we were sort of in the skhod now. Serzhya hissed; “Come quietly or I’ll spill your guts right here.”
Vanka, a sallow youth with pockmarked skin and a greasy thicket of black hair, weighed Serzhya and groaned. We edged back from the crowd. Vanka kept glancing towards a nondescript hut to our right – a bathhouse or animal shed? We had almost reached the gate, back across the garden, when a fat, angry bint emerged from the hut, pointed at us and shouted; “They’re taking Ivan Valentinovich!”
We were near the street. It was another three hundred yards up to Alexei on the troika, assuming he was on it. The crowd was forty yards off and taking time to work up a head of steam.
“Let’s go!” said Serzhya, yanking Vanka by the hair, pushing him ahead and holding his tunic.
I started to run too. The mob formed and charged.
Serzhya bawled up the street to Alexei. He got the picture, started unleashing the horses’ reins from Serzhya’s father’s hut. The father was in the doorway. Lavrik and Nadya were running with us. The mob was still about fifty yards behind but there must have been four score of them, mostly male. Lavrik shouted; “I’ll give you time!”
He grabbed a pitchfork, by someone’s izba, and turned it on the mob. Nadya pelted into a couple of men, scratching and screaming. The mob seemed to diffuse. I looked behind to check. Serzhya shouted at me; “Never mind them! Get on the troika!”
Heads front and on we pelted. We reached the troika and again I looked back. Only some of our pursuers were engaged in the fracas. Most folks had circled round it and were back on our tails. Vanka was struggling not to be bundled onto the troika. We had barely twenty yards on the handful of fast guys leading the mob, just seconds away. Even sangfroid Alexei was shouting, “Move! Shift!”
Next he was, hesitantly, reaching for his gun. I helped bundle Vanka on, jumped on myself, the whip cracked and we were off. But too late.
One brute was on the platform with us and a few others were holding its sides, slowing it down so we were barely moving more than walking speed. The rest would soon be on us.
“Get them off!” shouted Serzhya, who had his hands full with Vanka’s renewed struggling.
I managed to shove the brute off the platform and punched one of those holding on. Only as I struck did I notice it was a young woman; she took the punch full on the face without a sound. The others were closing, looking to grip the troika, even a lardy guy was getting a hand to it. Alexei was whipping the horses furiously. “Your gun! Your gun!” shouted Serzhya.
I grappled for my gun but had to stop for another brute was jumping on to the platform. I shoved him off and into the couple coming up behind him. I could see we were for it and pulled my gun.
Suddenly the troika leapt forward, and there was only one chap holding the side. Serzhya’s father had come running up from his doorway and pulled off the others. I rapped the last chap’s knuckles with my pistol butt. He let go and flopped to the ground. Alexei cracked the whip and, with no drag, the horses bolted – a beautiful, soaring feeling.
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