The Silver Swan by Brian Doswell (universal ebook reader .txt) 📕

and crawl in muddy fields. In December 1905 he was sent to Moscow with a contingent of soldiers detailed to suppress the Soviet riots in the city. There were five consecutive days of riots during which the ground moved constantly to and fro between the government and the Soviets. On the fifth day a skirmish broke out close to the Kremlin walls. A group of no more than a dozen Soviets were split apart from the main body of the protest and trapped, cut off on both sides by government troops. The men were desperate. They knew that this was their end and they determined to go down fighting for the revolution. Although they were out numbered, the Soviets fought bravely and Igor admired their spirit. He had sometimes wondered if he was fighting on the right side and if he should abscond and join the Soviets. He paused, engrossed with this thought when he should have cocked his rifle. The last thing he remembered was the brief pain in his chest as though he had been punched by a heavy fist. The bullet entered his left lung and a shattered rib bone pierced his heart.

Some thirty years later, in July 1935, Joseph Stalin ordered an urban regeneration programme aimed at turning all the little vegetable patches into great prairies of wheat fields. The might of the new communist machine would deliver a harvest fit for his new world order.

A crude oversized machine smashed the little shed and scooped up its contents with a large mechanical shovel. A small pile of sacking fell from the side of the bucket and rolled back onto the dark earth and, by the merest chance, the tracked wheels of the machine straddled the sacking bundle as it moved on to demolish the next shed.

Local villagers stood by watching the machines roll past turning their own personal histories into farms that would never actually produce anything of value. Vasili Repin was standing a short way away from the others. He watched the little ball of sackcloth roll onto the ground and, when the machine had gone by, he ventured to see what little thing might have escaped the wrath of Stalin. The sack was much heavier than he had expected. Vasili knew instinctively that he had found something important and that it would be wise to open the bundle in the privacy of his own home.

An hour later he and his wife sat at their kitchen table while he unwound the disintegrating threads to reveal a black tarnished bucket that someone had etched to look like some sort of bird. Old Polotov, the luckless Igor’s grandfather, had been dead for ten years or more but his reputation as a hoarder of rubbish was not forgotten. The old black bird-shaped bucket was taken to be one of Polotov’s bits of rubbish and shoved into a corner where it spent the next ten years as a potato pot.

In February of 1946 Vasili Repin returned from the war to his village home to find that his wife had died six months earlier of pneumonia. He had spent four horrifying years alternately freezing and then starving in empty fields facing the various assaults by Hitler’s troops and now he had no wish to stay in Russia. His first action was to pack everything that he could find of any value onto a handcart and head south. As luck would have it he crossed the border into Rumania just hours before the ‘Iron Curtain’ fell across the face of Europe. Three months, two weeks and three days later, Vasili wheeled his cart into Marseille where he got a job as a waiter in a Russian restaurant on the west side of the old port.

Six months after that a customer in the restaurant recognised Vasili’s accent and spoke to him in the dialect of his native village. Vasili was truly pleased to meet the man and, when the restaurant closed for the night, the two went on to a waterfront bar where they drank vodka and talked of the old times and the lost stories of life around Petrograd, the former St Petersburg. Life under the Tsar had been hard but predictable, nowadays, people disappeared during the night. The state police watched over everything. They were better off out of it all.

The following morning Vasili woke with a hangover and the broadest of smiles. It had been many months since he had spent an evening with a soul mate who actually knew his tiny home village. Vasili went to the restaurant where he worked, hoping to find hot coffee and something to ease the hammers in his head. He sat at on an upturned crate behind the kitchen doors and scratched at this ears, everything hurt but he still smiled. In his jacket pocket he found a folded copy of a Russian newspaper and he remembered that his friend of the previous evening had shown him an article in the paper which extolled the virtues of Russian art. The piece compared the photography of Shishkin Nestorov with the oil painting of Arkhip Kuindzhi. By chance there were two pictures in the Hermitage of a very similar scene, the banqueting hall of the royal palace in St Petersburg. It seemed that the two pictures were created at about the same time and the article compared the techniques of the two artists at great and exceedingly boring length.

Vasili took out the paper and gazed, through bloodshot eyes, at the two pictures, both poorly reproduced one above the other on the grainy newsprint page. Two things came to mind.

The first thing was that both pictures showed the banqueting table. Behind the Tsar was the stone lintel that capped the enormous fireplace. In the oil painting the broad chimney breast was flanked by two ornate serving tables on each of which stood two polished silver swans. In the photograph, taken just a few months later, there were only three swans.

The second thing, and the thing that he could hardly believe, was that he suddenly knew where the missing swan was.

Vasili carefully folded the paper and slipped it back into his jacket pocket. He made his excuses to his employer and walked back to his tiny apartment, desperate to get there but suddenly scared to run least he should somehow attract attention. He made one stop along the way, to buy a large can of silver polish.

Inside, he locked the door and set to work with the polish. It took just a few minutes for the chemical reaction of the polish to start to lift the layers of black tarnish that engulfed the family potato pot. Another hour of elbow grease proved that this old pot was not iron as he had thought, and was probably worth considerably more than the few kilos of potatoes it contained. Perhaps the village stories about old Polotov were all wrong. Perhaps there had been more to old Polotov than met the eye.

On impulse, Vasili wrapped the pot in a blanket, hid it under his bed, and went back to work.

For the next few days he worked in the restaurant and polished the pot when he got home. He talked in vague and general terms with his colleagues and several of his regular customers about the value of silver being careful to not suggest that there was any reason for his new-found curiosity. The pot was heavy, he had not actually weighed it but he knew that at the market rate quoted in the Marseille papers there was a lot of silver and a lot of money hiding under his bed. At last he heard of a jewellery shop in Toulon where the owner was not too particular about the provenance of the things that he bought. The shop was on the corner of a run down street close to the naval dockyard. All sorts of things arrived in Toulon by ships that arrived from ports around the world, and no one asked too many questions as to their port of origin.

Vasili wrapped the pot in a sack and struggled with it onto the train from Marseille to Toulon. He walked from the station down towards the port and eventually located the shop that he had been told about. When he arrived, the place was closed so he had little option but to sit by the door and wait for it to open again. The owner, who was taking coffee in a café across the road, watched Vasili for a good half hour before deciding that he was just another naive punter who wanted to pawn something. Oddly, the longer the owner watched, the more he became intrigued to know what was in the bulky sack. Eventually he stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer of his coffee cup and walked over to his shop door. Vasili stood respectfully to one side and the owner led him into the cool interior taking care to slip the bolt on the door behind them.

Vasili unwrapped the swan and buffed an errant finger mark with the cuff of his jacket. Then he drew out the folded copy of the newspaper and spread it out on the glass topped counter. Vasili showed the shopkeeper the two pictures.

The shopkeeper made a show of checking the pictures under one light and then another. He took the newspaper to the door way and looked again. This was all for Vasili’s benefit. The shopkeeper already knew that sitting on his counter was a rare and exquisite Faberge swan. Even in these austere, post war times, the art world would pay millions of francs for this piece and he needed to know just how much Vasili understood this. The man grunted and made out that Vasili might just be right about the swan, but if it were stolen then the police would get between him and a worthwhile sale. It was indeed a nice and valuable piece but he could only give Vasili ten thousand francs for it. Vasili gripped the glass toped counter until his knuckles turned white. Ten thousand francs was more than a year’s wages. Vasili accepted.

The shopkeeper had gambled that a substantial offer would either seal the deal or Vasili would be frightened off. He gambled correctly. The Faberge swan was going to be his. Vasili waited, with his swan, inside the locked shop, for an hour while the shopkeeper found the money. When the shopkeeper returned, Vasili took the carefully folded newspaper and placed it inside the swan and, within minutes, he was on his way back to Marseille.

Behind locked doors, the shopkeeper polished his Faberge swan for two days. He had never taken in such a valuable piece. With this he could retire and never work again. This was such an important piece that he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams. He would go to America. He would buy a house in Hollywood. He just needed to find the right buyer.

A week later he sat in his shop long after the town had closed its doors. He polished the Faberge swan again and again and held the precious silver close to his chest. On closer examination the detailed engraving was so precise that he found he had spent