Harry Bingham - The Lieutenant’s Lover

Feeling strange, as though in a dream, he approached his own front door and stepped inside. The moment that his foot crossed the threshold, he knew that the world, his world, had changed for ever.

The old house, once grand and silent, was aswarm with people. There were families, families of workers , in every room. The house was occupied and carved up like any tenement block. In the drawing room, where countesses had once danced, crude wooden partitions chopped the room into three. A stove burned smokily in the fireplace. A washing line hung over the marble mantelpiece. There were beds, and not even beds, mere piles of straw covered over with dirty sheets heaped up around the walls. Misha noticed a woman, dressed in black, grinning at him as she stirred a cooking pot. Around her neck she wore what looked like a gigantic diamond, and he realised that the room’s chandelier had disappeared, its crystal pendants stripped and scattered. He stared at her in shock, until she began to cackle. He walked abruptly on.

In every room, it was the same. It wasn’t like a tenement block, it was worse. The great house had never been intended for more than a few occupants and its plumbing and drainage were overwhelmed. The stairway had become a urinal. Pails of faeces were slopped from windows or just left slowly freezing for the next person to deal with. The house rang with arguments, songs, whistles, babies howling, children yelling, neighbours bickering.

Misha entered every room in turn. Nobody stopped him or told him to leave. He recognised nobody. Nobody recognised him. No servant from the old days, no groom or footman, certainly not his father, mother or sisters. He felt gathering dread. On the ground floor, nothing. On the first floor, also nothing. The second and third floors were likewise empty of any trace of his family or staff. As he climbed to the fourth and final floor, a floor once reserved for servants, he was convinced of the worst.

At the top of the final flight of stairs, the corridor branched off in two directions. One corridor looked and smelled like everything else in the house: the same ill-dressed, chattering horde. The other corridor was different. Its mouth was blocked off by a makeshift barricade: a door torn from its hinges, behind it a wardrobe, an ebony chest, a silk damask chaise longue, a card table, a bookcase. There was a gap barely big enough for a human to pass through. Misha stared at the ridiculous fortification in astonishment, and sudden joy. He put his hand to the torn-off door, knocked loudly and began to squeeze through.

He was just sucking in his belly to get past an awkwardly placed chair leg, when there was a sudden movement in the half-dark beyond. A hand grabbed him and yanked. He tumbled forwards. There was the click of a pistol being cocked and a shouted warning.

‘Easy, easy,’ said Misha, speaking as calmly as he was able.

Further on down the passage, a door swung open releasing some daylight into the gloom. Turning slowly, Misha looked up. The family’s old coachman, Vitaly, recognised his master and pulled his pistol away in a flurry of apology. One of the ladies’ maids had been standing behind Vitaly with an antique carbine. She too dropped her weapon.

‘Mikhail Ivanovich! Mikhail Ivanovich!’

‘Vitaly! Thank God. Mother, is she—?’

But he didn’t have to finish. His mother, Emma Ernestovna, a woman of forty-two, but more stately, more queenly than her age, came rushing out. She was dressed as no one these days was dressed: a long gown in violet silk, fur-trimmed at the neckline.

‘Misha, my boy!’

She ran to him, her hands out for him to kiss. He kissed her as she wanted, then embraced her properly, kissing her on both cheeks. He didn’t let go, but asked the questions that drummed inside him.

‘Father? Natasha and Raisa? Yevgeny?’

Yevgeny, Misha’s six-year-old brother, answered the last question by emerging from somewhere like a bullet and hugging his legs.

‘Hello, Yevgeny. You’ve grown,’ Misha said, hoisting him up.

His mother watched distractedly. ‘Yevgeny, yes, he’s here. Natasha and Raisa, bless them, in Switzerland – we think – it all depends on the trains – I haven’t had a telegram – we should have had a telegram – what do you think? – Your sisters, really…’

‘I’m sure they’re fine. No telegrams would have come through anyway. And Father?’

‘Your father?’ She spoke the words as though struggling to remember someone she’d once known. ‘He’s very well. He’s in Zhavalya. On business. Urgent business. He must have been detained. He’s in Zhavalya. He must be. He wouldn’t leave us here like this.’

Misha listened to his mother, hearing her words and not hearing them at the same time. Zhavalya was the family’s country estate, about two thousand kilometres east of Moscow. But Misha knew his father wasn’t there. He couldn’t be. Not now, not in winter, now with revolution surging around the capital city and his family unprotected.

‘In Zhavalya?’ he said blankly.

But he didn’t mean anything by his question. He knew the answer. If his mother were telling herself this lie, then it could only mean that his father was dead. That the dominating industrialist, the man of business, his distant but not unkind father had been murdered. And in that same moment, literally from one moment to the next, Misha realised that his childhood was over. He had become a man, the head of the household.

Everyone now depended on him.

Pavel was gone.

Kiryl, Tonya’s father, either didn’t know where his son was, or more likely wouldn’t say. But the boy was just fourteen and delicately built. Two winters ago, he had caught typhus, at the same time as their mother had died of it. He had survived, but only just and Tonya knew she couldn’t let him wander the streets, out late and alone. She put on coat, hat, gloves and scarf.

‘I’m going to look for Pavel,’ she said. ‘We can eat when I get back.’

‘Comrade citizen Pavel, you mean,’ said her father.

Tonya ignored him and hurried out. A thin snow was falling, but nothing substantial, just tiny round specks flung around in a piercing wind. Her father’s last comment could have meant nothing at all, just another one of the old man’s jokes, but it had possibly been intended as a clue. She hurried through the streets, feeling her breath beginning to freeze on the brim of her cap.

After walking for twenty minutes, she came to the intersection of Sadoyava Triumfalnaya and Sadoyava Karetnaya. There was a large building with a broad fanlight over a lighted porch. Outside there was a pile of logs, guarded by a soldier with a rifle.

‘Is this where the meeting is?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Inside. It’s been going two hours already.’

‘Those logs…?’

‘… are red logs. For the Petrograd Soviet.’

The soldier might have meant his answer, or he might just be getting ready to haggle. Tonya thrust her hand in her pocket and brought out a lump of sugar as big as her fist. It was damp, grey and sticky, but good currency all the same.

‘I’ve got sugar.’

The soldier shook his head. ‘The logs belong to Comrade Lenin. You need to ask him.’

Tonya stuffed her sugar away, unbothered by the rejection. In this strange new world, money was no longer reliable. In a city where food and fuel were desperately short, Tonya now always carried something with her, in case she came across a good opportunity to trade. Most times she failed, sometimes she got lucky. It was just a question of being always ready to try.

She went on into the building. Down in the basement, there was a meeting of the Borough Housing Commission. At the front of the room, there was a kind of podium, planks stretched across wooden egg crates. The podium was dominated by a speaker, hatless and wearing an unbuttoned leather jerkin. The man caught sight of Tonya as she entered. She knew he’d seen her, because his eyes fixed on her, but there was no change in his voice or posture. His presence commanded the room. He was strikingly good-looking with dark curly hair, worn shorthand a lean, handsome, intelligent face. The only bad feature he possessed was a nose that had been badly broken. Though still narrow, it bent sharply where it had been struck.