Dmitri and the Milk-Drinkers

He gave Peter Ivanovich a wink. The Presiding Judge responded with a thin little smile.

‘Finding out who was actually put on the convoy,’ said Dmitri. He turned to Stenka. ‘A real Russian beauty, you said?’

‘That’s right, Your Honour.’

‘Fair?’

‘As straw in summer.’

‘A Tatar?’

‘Tatar?’

‘Marfa Nikolaevna was Tatar.’

‘This girl was no Tatar,’ said Stenka uneasily.

‘What are you saying?’ said Peter Ivanovich sharply.

‘Not saying; wondering,’ said Dmitri. ‘Whether the right woman was put on the cart.’

Whereas the woman put on the cart had been fair, almost silvery blonde in the characteristically North Russian way, Marfa Nikolaevna, they eventually established, was dark. It took them some time because although she had been tried in the Court House, she had not been tried in a regular court. As a political prisoner, she had appeared before a Special Tribunal of the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry held its Tribunals in the same building as the ordinary Law Courts, but this was purely for convenience and the two administrations were quite separate. Peter Ivanovich could not, then, go directly to the Clerk of the Courts as he would otherwise have done, nor could he have an informal word with the lawyers involved since, despite the reforms of the eighties, out in the provinces political prisoners were not legally represented. Peter Ivanovich certainly knew the officer who had presided over the Tribunal that day – they met socially – but as a matter of protocol they never discussed each other’s affairs. Judges in Russia, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander, had learned discretion.

It was with a certain diffidence, therefore, that Peter Ivanovich inquired about Marfa Nikolaevna.

‘All I need to know about is her looks,’ he said to Porfiri Porfirovich, the officer who had chaired the Tribunal on the day that Marfa Nikolaevna had been sentenced.

‘Her looks?’ said Porfiri Porfirovich incredulously.

‘Yes. Whether, for instance, she is fair or dark?’

‘Dark,’ said Porfiri. ‘But – ’

‘A real Russian beauty?’

‘Hardly. A Tatar.’

‘I was afraid so,’ said Peter Ivanovich, sighing heavily.

‘What is this?’ said Porfiri.

‘A possible case of…’ Peter Ivanovich didn’t know what it was a possible case of. ‘Mistaken identity,’ he tried.

Porfiri Porfirovich’s eyebrows shot up.

‘On our part,’ said Peter Ivanovich hastily. ‘Or, at least, not on our part; possibly on the part of the Convoy Administration.’

But the Convoy Administration, too, came under the Ministry of the Interior and Porfiri Porfirovich’s eyebrows stayed raised.

‘Or, most likely of all,’ said Peter Ivanovich, adapting with the speed born of long years in the Russian judicial system, ‘it simply fell between stools.’

‘What fell between stools?’

‘This – this confusion.’

‘I can see that you are confused, Peter Ivanovich,’ said Porfiri sharply; ‘but over what?’

Peter Ivanovich was forced to tell him all.

‘The trouble is,’ he concluded, ‘the Marfa Nikolaevna who was sentenced was dark, while the Marfa Nikolaevna who got on to the cart was fair. And definitely not a Tatar.’

‘Simple,’ said Porfiri Porfirovich. ‘The sergeant gave him the wrong name.’

‘Yes,’ said Peter Ivanovich unhappily, ‘that’s what we thought. At first. But then we checked. There were only five women that day in the political cart and the soldier, Stenka, remembers them all. None of them were Tatar. Three of them were in their fifties, whereas this Shumin woman was – ’

‘In her thirties.’

‘Exactly. And of the other two, one was nursing a baby and the other was, well, blonde in the Russian style. So where is the real Marfa Nikolaevna?’

‘In the prison. She must have been put in the wrong cart.’

‘We have been to the prison. We have checked all the prisoners who were readmitted that day. None of them’, said Peter Ivanovich, ‘is Marfa Nikolaevna.’

Porfiri Porfirovich frowned.

‘Are you sure? Quite sure? Who did the checking? You can’t rely on the prison officers.’

‘Novikov,’ said Peter Ivanovich. ‘He went over there and checked them personally.’

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