David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

The one thing he was sure he did remember was his mother, standing in the snow beside him and wailing like one of those matronly characters from a Wagner opera. Although he had to allow that even this memory, though real was purely theatrical, designed to give her the kind of dramatic rôle she had always craved. This suspicion was based upon the fact of his mother’s fondness for opera, preferring the German but taking the Russian in a pinch — which was really just as well as there’d been precious little German opera on offer since 1914.

Discovering Mikhail Ivanovich had remained a tsarist had come as no real surprise. Given that Mikhail’s father, Paul’s uncle Ivan Nikolayevich, had been someone of note in the Ministry of the Interior — the most conservative of Nicholas II’s government ministries — it was only to be expected that one generation’s politics would rub off on another. Paul had been aware of it as a child, living in the family house following his father’s departure with the Baltic Fleet.

The big house on Tavricheskaya he recalled as a model of Russian orthodoxy, both in the religious and political sense. He had lived there with his mother and aunt and uncle both before and after his father had sailed with the Baltic Fleet on the outbreak of war with Japan. There had been an old grandmother — a wrinkled baboushka — as well, although his memory of her was more conditioned by the photographs his mother had brought to England than by any clear recollection. The house to him had seemed to be a maze of staircases and endless rooms; of corridors peopled by portraits of strangers and landscape paintings of alien countryside he had never seen outside of oil on canvas. His grandfather — according to his mother — had brought them all as a job-lot when he had purchased the house, not only to fill the empty walls but to give himself a ready-made ancestry. Beyond this forged past, though, there had been one room that had been genuinely Rostov: the Red Room, the room that held the holy artefacts, the ikons and candles, before which they had all trooped in twice a day to genuflect and kneel in prayer.

Once old enough to understand, he had come to wonder if this room had not truly been the essence of the Rostovs, a hangover from their peasant past, even if his mother had always insisted that all ‘good’ Russian homes possessed a variation on this theme. How ironic now, he couldn’t help thinking, that the word red — the same in the Russian language as the word for beautiful and derived from this domestic usage for the room in which the ikon was kept — had been usurped by the Bolsheviks to stand for a sensibility diametrically opposed to Russian religiosity.

According to his mother — again, his only source of information beyond a few scattered photo-like memories — the Rostovs had always been, by and large, a reactionary bunch. She maintained they were Johnny-come-latelys as far as the nobility went (a somewhat rich opinion to hold coming from his mother) being no more than descendants of a merchant, a man who himself had been the son of a peasant born a serf. The merchant had founded the family’s fortune on a killing made from procurement for the Russian army during the Crimean War, although Paul had never learned exactly what it was that this first Rostov had procured (food, weapons, women …?) Once the money had been pocketed, though, the usual fastidiousness of the nouveau riche for trade had surfaced and, along with it, the desire to distance themselves from their origins. Paul had sometimes suspected that this keenness to forget the past might also stem from the fact that, given the outcome of the Crimean war, whatever had been procured for the army had turned out to be substandard. The business had been lucrative enough, however, to fund a large country estate in the south as well as town houses in both Moscow and St Petersburg. The merchant had changed his name to Rostov — the city of his birth — and his son, dead husband of the baboushka Paul vaguely remembered, had been a social climber, successful enough to end his life as a minor member of the nobility.

By the time Paul had been old enough to be aware of the world around him, the Rostovs were part of that tiny percentage of the Russian population that had its collective boot firmly on the neck of the remainder. With such a background it was only to be expected that they knew which side of reaction their bread was buttered, that they were staunch tsarists, and prayed — Orthodoxly, naturally — that that was how matters would continue.

Paul’s father, it turned out, had been an exception. He had embraced the liberal politics of the day, much to the disgust of the rest of his family. Paul had learned this from his mother as soon as he was old enough to understand the ramifications, even if she had been a little more reticent about the fact that his father had compounded his folly by marrying a foreigner. There had been arguments and recriminations, no doubt, although he had never been directly exposed to this family rancour. As children, he and his cousins had rarely inhabited the adult world, being left mostly in the charge of governesses and servants; in Paul’s case, from little more than an infant, in the care of a nurse, an old peasant-woman whose smell he could sometimes even now recall if he ever happened to find himself in a farmyard.

Had his father lived, he supposed he and his mother would have continued to be tolerated — albeit with that acquired Rostov air of faint autocratic disdain. Once his father died, however, they had found themselves disposed of with almost unseemly haste. In retrospect it was perhaps not so surprising given the politics of the time; he could still recall seeing newspaper headlines proclaiming one or other of the numerous political assassinations of the day and could distinctly remember his mother blithely remarking over lunch one day that the nasty man had deserved it. He hadn’t understood at the time how any man, nasty or not, could deserve to be blown to pieces by an assassin’s bomb and had afterwards taken the trouble to ask his old nurse to explain it to him. She had merely clouted him across the head in the time-honoured peasant fashion and forced him onto his knees in the Red Room to pray for the dead man’s soul. What he had only understood later was that Russian politics had become so divisive that many of the liberal intelligentsia had managed to manoeuvre themselves into a cul-de-sac where they had come to accept assassination as the everyday give-and-take of political discourse. By that time, though, he had grown into adulthood and left Russia far behind. What was more, he had managed to acquire the information without the risk of brain damage under the tutelage of some heavy-handed peasant woman.

Given all that had followed since, he couldn’t help but wonder where the haughty arrogance of the Rostovs had got them. He knew well-enough where it had got his father — an early and watery grave in the sea of Japan, going down with his ship and the rest of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, that most humiliating of debacles. But he could hardly pin that on his father’s liberal politics. Sergei Nikolayevich had been a naval officer, after all, and had had to go where his incompetent senior officers had ordered him; might have been one of the incompetent officers himself, for all Paul knew. Had his father lived (or so Paul liked to think), he might have accommodated the changed political landscape of Russia. But as for the rest of the family, he doubted that they were capable of being so nimble-footed. It was always possible they had come to recognise which side of their bread the fresh butter was currently being applied and modify their politics accordingly, yet the news arriving from Russia since the previous November had disturbed even his mother. Since the Bolshevik coup it was beginning to look as if merely swapping sides wasn’t going to be enough. In fact it was all beginning to seem, like his dream, disturbingly reminiscent of the French Revolution.