Turkish Gambit

CHAPTER ONE In which a progressive woman finds herself in a quite desperate situation la revue parisienne (Paris) 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 St. Augustine, woman is a frail and fickle creature, and the great obscurantist and misogynist was right a thousand times overat 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 blameMama had told Varya time and again that sooner or later she would land herself in a fix, and now she had. In the course of one of their many tempestuous altercations, her father, a man of great wisdom and endowed with the patience of a saint, had divided his daughter's life into three periods: the imp in a skirt; the perfect nuisance; the loony nihilist. To this day Varya prided herself on this characterization, declaring that she had no intention of resting on her laurels as yet, but this time her self-confidence had landed her in a world of trouble. Why on earth had she agreed to make a halt at the tavernthis korchma, or whatever it was they called the abominable dive? Her driver, that dastardly thief Mitko, had started whining, using those peculiar Bulgarian endings: "Let's water the hossesta, let's water the hossesta." So they had stopped to water the horses. Oh, 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, 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 favorite teacup and hid under the divan to await the inevitable retribution. If she could only praybut progressive women didn't pray. And, meanwhile, the situation looked absolutely desperate. So . . . the St. PetersburgBucharest leg of her route had been traversed rapidly enough, even comfortably: The express train (two passenger coaches and ten flatcars carrying artillery pieces) had rushed Varya to the capital of the principality of Romania in three days. The brown eyes of the lady with the cropped 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 theater of military operations at one another's throats. At every halt Varya was presented with bouquets of flowers and baskets of strawberries. She threw the bouquets out the window, because they were vulgar, and soon she was obliged to forswear the strawberries as well, because they brought her out in a rash. It had turned out to be a rather amusing and pleasant journey, although, from an intellectual and ideological perspective, of course, all her suitors were complete worms. There was, to be sure, one cornet who was reading Lamartine and had even heard of Schopenhauer, and he hAkunin, Boris is the author of 'Turkish Gambit', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400060504 and ISBN 1400060508.