Harry Bingham - The Lieutenant’s Lover

There was one subject, and only one, that had never been broached by them, but, aside from Tonya herself, it was the topic uppermost in Misha’s mind. The subject had to come up, and one day it did. It was the middle of May. They were walking through the streets in the deepening shade, listening to the dying burr of traffic and the clop-clop of horses’ hooves. Then Tonya squeezed Misha’s hand and said, ‘Your mother. You said she was ill.’

‘Yes.’

‘Headaches again?’

‘Headaches, yes, and back pain. And if it isn’t headaches or back pain, then it’s a cough or a fever or something else.’

‘She’s not strong.’

‘Oh, she’s strong enough, or would be if things were easier for her… You know they want her to start work as a factory hand?’

‘Your mother, a factory hand!’

‘At the saw mill down by the Finlyandsky goods depot. Can you imagine? Wearing blue overalls and shouting above the rotary saws all day.’ Misha laughed, but his face reverted almost instantly to its former serious expression. ‘I have to get her out of Russia. You know that, of course?’

‘To get her out? But…’

‘Her and Yevgeny. They’ll have to join Natasha and Raisa in Switzerland.’

Tonya heard his words and something inside her began to freeze. She walked along, silent and tense. Misha was preoccupied and took a moment or two to notice.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said in surprise.

‘Switzerland!’

‘Yes. Where else? Most of Europe is still at war, you know.’

‘But if she goes, won’t you need to … will you … who would go with her?’

‘Who would go with her?’

Misha stopped and looked full into Tonya’s face. He saw the worry gathered between her eyebrows, her green eyes flitting from one place to another on his face. He was still for a moment, then his mouth quivered and broke out in a merry, widening laugh.

‘Oh, comrade Lensky, comrade Lensky!’

He took her by the waist and her left hand, and, whistling out a tune to give them rhythm, he led her in a rapid waltz down the empty street. Infected by his mood, she started to laugh, but her anxiety hadn’t gone.

‘But really … wouldn’t you need to go?’

‘Comrade Lensky, you’re missing your steps!’

‘No, tell me!’

‘One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one. That’s better. Keep going.’

Tonya’s feet began to move as he instructed her. She was naturally a better dancer than he was, even though he’d been the one with the boyhood dancing tutor. He’d begun to teach her one evening and already she was technically more competent than him, though she still didn’t give herself to the dance the way he did.

‘Excellent, Lensky! Lensky of the Bolshoi!’

Misha turned from a simple waltz into a complex Viennese one, full of turns inside turns, spinning and circling down the street. Then he fumbled his steps. She pushed him in mock disgust. The dance ended with them leaning against a high stone wall, panting.

‘ Charmante, Madame ,’ said Misha bowing.

‘Tell me.’

‘My job is to get them out of the country with a little money. Natasha and Raisa are fifteen and sixteen. Mother will be safe enough with them.’

‘Really?’

‘No. I lied. Raisa must be seventeen now.’

‘Misha!’

He took her in his arms. He wasn’t broadly built, but there was something in his tallness and confidence that made him seem bigger. ‘I won’t leave Russia without you. And you have your family to think of – your brother, father, and grandmother.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘You wouldn’t leave them?’ It was half statement, half request.

‘No… No, I don’t think I could. Father – well, he needs me, but I don’t know if I owe him much. But Pavel’s young, you know. Younger than his age. And Babba, my grandmother, depends on me completely.’

Misha nodded.

‘That’s what I thought. You’re right.’

They walked on.

Tonya wanted to ask Misha if he meant what he had just said about not leaving without her, but she kept her mouth shut, knowing that if she asked him again, he would be certain to bound off again on some teasing diversion. All the same, the thought boomed in her head. Her lover, an aristocrat, a wealthy bourgeois of the old regime, was willing to stay in a country which had, for him, turned into something not unlike a prison camp. And for her! She felt light-headed at the thought.

‘You say you have to get them out … do you know how?’

‘Yes. The Rail Repairs Yard. I didn’t just end up there by chance, you know.’

‘The rail yard? You mean…?’

Misha told her. He told her about the single-track railway which crept out of Petrograd up to the Gulf of Finland. How it crossed the border between Vyborg and Lahti before turning and heading for Helsinki itself. How six wagons from the Vyborg line had come into the yard. How he had manipulated Tupolev into assigning the repair job to him.

‘They do need repair,’ said Misha. ‘They’re in a terrible state. A couple of them are probably beyond salvage. But that’s not all I’m doing.’

He told her the rest of it. How he was building a compartment flat against the rear of one of the wagons, built to look like the sloping wagon wall itself. How he would put in a bench, airholes, a sliding entrance panel. How another few weeks’ work would see his project completed. How he planned to conceal his mother and Yevgeny in the compartment one summer’s evening before the hoppers were loaded for export.

Tonya could well imagine the labour, ingenuity and sheer courage that had gone into Misha’s plan.

‘Your mother is very lucky,’ she said.

‘Well, we have yet to see if the idea works.’

‘And money. You said they needed money.’

‘Yes.’ Misha hesitated. He trusted Tonya, of course. He could hardly have told her about his escape plans otherwise, but telling her about the money seemed like a still more serious confidence. After all, senior Bolsheviks had been on the trail of the money when Misha had wafted it from in front of their noses. He had even at one stage suspected that Tonya had been involved in the whole affair.

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘No, no. It’s all right.’

Misha preferred to trust Tonya than to hold anything back. So he told her. About the safe. The codes. The items inside. ‘There was jewellery there. Not a huge amount, but – well, plenty.’ Misha felt embarrassed. It might not have been a huge amount to him, but to Tonya it would have represented vastly more money than her father had earned in his entire life. ‘And papers,’ he added. ‘Father had been buying stocks, bonds, anything he could. But buying it through agents abroad. He was clever about it. He didn’t know whether England and France or Germany and Austria would win the war. So he shared the funds about. Some in Berlin. Some in London. Some in Paris. Some in Geneva. Part of that money will be lost of course, but not all. If my mother gets to Switzerland, she will have plenty. She will be a rich woman. Rich enough. If, one day, we go to join them, then we’ll have enough to set up in business, to make a good life out there.’

Tonya heard his words as though he were talking about taking her to dinner on the moon, or asking her how she would like to furnish her palace. His words seemed ludicrous, but also somehow believable, coming from him. For the first time, Tonya began to believe that things might yet all turn out for the best.

Tonya was home early from the hospital. It was early July, the season of Petrograd’s famous white nights, when the nights were so brief that darkness never really set in, a late twilight fading into an early milky dawn.