David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘How far’s that?’

‘About two-hundred and fifty miles. Petrograd is only fifteen miles beyond the new border now.’

‘How do I get there?’

‘Train, sir. The railway line’s closed at the border so the plan is to get you as close as possible by train and then make other arrangements.’

‘What other arrangements?’

‘That’ll be up to the Finns, sir. There’s always been a lot of smuggling round there with the Ingrian population so they’ll know ways across.’

Paul wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. What with the Finns now being allied to the Germans he worried he might have some retail value himself. But Turner seemed unperturbed by the prospect.

‘There was always some sort of border post at Byelo-Óstrov, that’s the station on what’s now the Russian side of the Sestra, but the customs posts always depended on which way you were travelling. Coming north it used to be Terijoki. If the main line’s closed there’s always the branch line that runs along the coast from Sestroryetzk down into Petrograd. To pick that up, though, you’d have to cross the swamp around Sestror Lake. The river doesn’t actually flow into the Gulf of Finland anymore since they built a dam and a reservoir for water for the munitions factory at Sestroryetzk. There’s a canal that takes the overflow into the gulf. The main border, though, is the railway bridge that crosses the Sestra further up-river.’

Listening to Turner, Paul had become aware that the name Terijoki sounded familiar, but at that moment he was unable to place it.

‘I’ve been down there with Mr Hart,’ Turner went on, ‘and it’s a bleak old place, I don’t mind telling you. There’s always been a problem with smugglers in the area and now on top of it you’ve got the Finns worrying about the Bolsheviks, and the Bolsheviks worrying about Whites. And all of them on the lookout for spies. Everyone’s a bit jumpy. No need to worry though,’ Turner nodded confidently, no doubt noticing the expression on Paul’s face. ‘You’ll be all right. They’ll get you across.’ He gave him a wink.

Paul hoped Turner was right.

‘They’ll be fixing you up with some papers. Finnish ones to get you to the border and some Russian papers once you’re across. What with all the prisoners they took, some sort of Russian identity for you shouldn’t be a problem.’

‘You won’t be coming with me?’

‘No sir. I’ll have to get the stoker’s papers back to the ship, otherwise he’ll be waking up and raising Cain and we don’t want that, do we?’

Paul supposed they didn’t.

Turner dropped his cigarette butt on the floor and ground it out with the toe of his shoe.

‘I told the old woman to bring up a meal later to tide you over until the Finns come.’

‘Couldn’t ask her to bring up a bottle of something to drink, too, could you?’ Paul asked.

‘Sorry sir, this is a temperance hotel. You’ll have to forgo the hard stuff.’

‘ This is an hotel? It looks more like a doss-house.’

‘And they’re devils for principle here,’ Turner went on as if he hadn’t heard. ‘You can only get a drink if you’re eating and I’m afraid then it’ll be beer.’ He gave Paul a sympathetic look and stuck out his hand. ‘Good luck to you, sir.’

Paul took the man’s hand and a moment later was alone.

What was that saying he had once heard:

Be careful what you wish for?

How many times since leaving London had he wished to be alone with time to collect his thoughts. After Yarmouth and Hull and on the steamer, there had always been people around, and not just ordinary people either but people he was warned to be wary of.

Well, he had finally got his wish. For three weeks after the door closed on Turner he had found himself alone, kicking his heels in a variety of rooms around Helsingfors.

He had not had to stay in the boarding house long. He was woken early the next morning by two Finns dressed in city clothes that in London would have marked them down as clerks. They shook hands formally, the taller of the two, a blond of around thirty, introducing himself as Antero Berglund. With his watery blue eyes and long nose there was a bleakness about him that reminded Paul of Turner’s description of the borderland in the Karelian Isthmus.

When Paul muttered, ‘How d’you do’, to Berglund in English, the Finn had waved a stern finger at him and said ‘ nye Angleesky’ in Russian, twisting his face into a grimace as if the language left a bad taste in his mouth. The other Finn, dark, short and stockier and in every way Berglund’s antithesis, was named Jalonen. He spoke only Finnish but made up for the fact by smiling at Paul a lot, at least conveying the impression that he was pleased to make his acquaintance.

They brought him some Finnish papers and a change of clothes, indicating his new identity wouldn’t pass muster in the hands of someone dressed as a sailor. The smudged photograph might have been of anyone, and Paul only managed to memorise his new name, Kyösti Riihijärvi, through repeated locution following Jalonen’s example. Of the rest of the umlaut-peppered papers he could make neither head nor tail. Paul didn’t for a minute suppose a facility to repeat the name would impress any Hun who might demand to see his papers, since that was all he could say, and he began to wonder if he might get by pretending to be a deaf mute.

Before leaving the boarding house the Finns examined the few things he had brought off the steamer. Muttering in Finnish to each other they discarded most of them.

‘ Opasny ,’ Berglund said over his shoulder in Russian.

“Dangerous”, Paul supposed he meant; at least, items dangerous to be found carrying.

Opasny seemed to take in anything not obviously of Finnish origin. His English brogues were discarded — too bourgeois — but they allowed him to keep the boots he had taken from Pinker. The Northampton company, obviously deciding it commercially advisable not to rub the German noses in defeat, had neglected to stamp ‘made in England’ on the soles. The Finns did confiscated Paul’s razor, though, Berglund telling him to grow a beard.

After leaving the boarding house they crossed the bridge onto Skatudden, the island between Helsingfors’ two harbours. Paul was lodged in a modern apartment building that had large windows looking north-west towards the white roofs and gilded domes of the Cathedral of the Assumption. It was a fine view, but one that began to pall after a week. The flat was comfortable enough, with its own small kitchen which the Finns had thoughtfully stocked. Being ignorant of how to cook and only resorting to the attempt when it became obvious that no one was coming to do it for him, Paul effectively ruined most of the food they had left for him. He subsisted on fried bread and over-boiled vegetables. Bad enough, though the worst thing he found was the lack of anything to occupy his time. The flat had the air of never having actually been lived in, housing no personal belongings of any sort. He soon discovered that there was little for him to do but stare out of the window at the cathedral and munch his fried bread. For several days he saw little of Berglund and Jalonen and to his request for some sort of reading matter — Russian preferably, to improve his language skills — Berglund merely replied that they would soon be moving him on. Not to the border unfortunately, Berglund explained, as there had been a delay. Despite Turner’s optimism there was a hitch in procuring suitable Russian papers for him.

Instead Paul was moved across the city, past the Swedish Theatre to a house on Alexandersgata. Here he was housed in a room high in an old wooden house where through thin walls he could hear sounds of muted but unintelligible conversation. One improvement was that he had his meals brought up to him by a plumply pretty servant girl who giggled at his attempts to communicate. Here he finally came across a volume of Dumas in French. It demonstrated to him how lamentable was the gap between his knowledge of spoken French and that of the written. Unlike many aristocratic families, the Rostovs, (no doubt betraying their peasant origins) had spoken either Russian at home or English — in deference to the habits of the Imperial family. A series of tutors had attempted to teach him French — the language of most of Russia’s noble families — and while he had usually managed to stagger through orally, he had never got a handle on French grammar. His spoken French had served him well while in France, but with no dictionary to hand in his room at the top of the house, the Dumas took on the air of some interminably, but invisibly, censored letter; educated guesses took the place of knowledge and subtlety was lost along with most of the gist. Any hope that one of the clerks might read French was soon dashed and he finally gave up Dumas in favour of spending the better part of each day with a dog-eared pack of playing cards he found in a drawer, playing patience until he finally exhausted his own.