Chapter One
IN WHICH A PROGRESSIVE WOMAN FINDS HERSELF IN A QUITE DESPERATE SITUATION
La Revue Parisienne
14 (2) July 1877
Our correspondent, now already in his second week with the Russian Army of the Danube, informs us that in his order of the day for yesterday, 1st July (13th July in the European style), the Emperor Alexander thanks his victorious troops, who have succeeded in forcing a crossing of the Danube and breaching the borders of the Ottoman state. His Imperial Majesty's order affirms that the enemy has been utterly crushed and in no more than two weeks' time at the very most the Orthodox cross will be raised over Saint Sophia in Constantinople. The advancing army is encountering almost no resistance, unless one takes into account the mosquito bites inflicted on the Russian lines of communication by flying detachments of the so-called Bashi-Bazouks ('mad-heads'), a species of half-bandit and half-partisan, famed for their savage disposition and bloodthirsty ferocity.
According to Saint Augustine, woman is a frail and fickle creature, and the great obscurantist and misogynist was right a thousand times over - at least with regard to a certain individual by the name of Varvara Suvorova.
It had all started out as such a jolly adventure, but now it had come to this. She only had her own stupid self to blame - Mama had told Varya time and time again that sooner or later she would land herself in a jam, and now she had. In the course of one of their many tempestuous altercations her father, a man of great wisdom endowed with the patience of a saint, had divided his daughter's life into three periods: the imp in a skirt; the perishing nuisance; the loony nihilist. To this very day Varya still prided herself on this characterisation, declaring that she had no intention of resting on her laurels as yet; but this time her self-confidence had played her a really mean trick.
Why, oh why had she agreed to make a halt at the tavern - this korchma, or whatever it was they called the abominable dive? Her driver, that dastardly thief Mitko, had started his whining with those funny Bulgarian endings: 'Let's water the hossesta, let's water the hossesta.' So they had stopped to water the horses. O God, what was she going to do now?
Varya was sitting in the corner of a dingy and utterly filthy shed at a table of rough-hewn planks, feeling frightened to death. Only once before had she ever experienced such grim, hopeless terror, when at the age of six she broke her grandmother's favourite teacup and hid under the divan to await the inevitable retribution.
If she could only pray - but progressive women didn't pray. And meanwhile the situation looked absolutely desperate.
Well then . . . The St Petersburg-Bucharest leg of her route had been traversed rapidly enough, even comfortably: the express train (two passenger coaches and ten flatcars with artillery pieces) had rushed Varya to the capital of the principality of Roumania in three days. The brown eyes of the lady with the bobbed hair, who smoked papyrosas and refused on principle to allow her hand to be kissed, had very nearly set the army officers and staff functionaries bound for the theatre of military operations at each others' throats. At every halt Varya was presented with bouquets of flowers and punnets of strawberries. She threw the bouquets out of the window, because they were vulgar, and soon she was obliged to forswear the strawberries as well, because they brought her out in a red rash. It had turned out to be a rather jolly and pleasant journey, although from an intellectual and ideological perspective, of course, all of her suitors were absolute maggots. There was, to be sure, one cornet who was reading Lamartine and had even heard of Schopenhauer, and he had been more subtle in paying court than the others; but Varya had explained to him - as one comrade to another - that she was travelling to join her fiance, after which the cornet's behaviour had been quite irreproachable. He had not been at all bad-looking, either, rather like Lermontov. Oh, bother the cornet, anyway.
The second stage of her journey had also gone off without as much as a single hitch. There was a stagecoach which ran from Bucharest to Turnu-Megurele. She had been obliged to swallow a little dust as she bounced and jolted along, but it had brought her within arm's reach of her goal; for rumour had it that the general headquarters of the Army of the Danube were located on the far side of the river, in Tsarevitsy.
This was the point at which she had to put into effect the final and most crucial part of The Plan which she had worked out back in St Petersburg (that was what
Varya called it to herself: The Plan, with capital letters). Yesterday evening, under cover of darkness, she had crossed the Danube in a boat a little above Zimnitsa, where two weeks previously the heroic Fourteenth Division under General Dragomirov had completed a forced crossing of that formidable watery barrier. This was the beginning of Turkish territory, the zone of military operations, and it would certainly be only too easy to slip up here. There were Cossack patrols roaming the roads, and if she once let her guard down she was as good as done for - she would be packed off back to Bucharest in the winking of an eye. But Varya was a resourceful girl, so she had anticipated this and taken appropriate measures.