David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Boredom apart, what he found most unendurable was the lack of reliable information. There was little news of any sort and none, more particularly, of events on the western front. Sporadic news from Russia occasionally penetrated his seclusion and most of that was depressing. Things were bad, he was told. Crossing the border was becoming more difficult each day (another reason, he argued to get moving instead of kicking his heels). Conditions in Petrograd had deteriorated to the point where anyone who could was leaving, and those who couldn’t went hungry. The Bolsheviks, he was warned, were cracking down hard on dissenters and spies. How much of this was propaganda, the smug self-satisfaction of a people who had thrown off the Russian yoke, was something he could only guess.

By the end of the second week he began to consider taking his chances without identification. The four walls of his room had become a prison and even a firing squad seemed an option worthy of consideration. He might just make it, he would tell himself in optimistic moments; he was not short of money, still had Finnish marks and plenty of roubles, as well as the gold imperials he now wore in an irritating cotton belt next to his skin. He would have been happier had he had a weapon, but the Finns had taken his service Webley away as soon as they had seen it. Opasny — wrong manufacture, Berglund had insisted. Paul’s repeated requests for a replacement, something Russian perhaps as that was where he was going, were always patronisingly countered by the assurance that he would be safer if he wasn’t armed.

Safer for whom, Paul couldn’t help wondering.

After the modern flat and the room in Alexandersgata, he was moved to the Brunnsparken, a park to the south of the city, and ensconced in a comfortable villa with the non-Russian-speaking Jalonen for company. They rode there on the electric tram and — to Paul’s delight — walked through the park for an hour and even visited a picture gallery. Jalonen also thought to bring a Russian novel with him, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . That it was the second book of a two-volume edition rather spoiled the gift and he still lacked a dictionary but, as he kept telling himself, it would be good practice with a language he had not spoken for over ten years. The odd conversation with his mother, whenever she had got a bee in her bonnet about exercising her spoken Russian, he decided did not count. And the deeper he got into Karamazov , the more he was able to understand. Until he began foundering on Dostoyevsky’s penchant for metaphysics. In the end it came as a relief when Berglund turned up one morning and told him to pack his belongings. They had his new Russian papers and were taking the train east that night for the border.

The difficulty, Berglund said, had been in obtaining the correct identification. Paul would not wish to be picked up by the Germans with unsuitable papers, would he? Of course not. The photograph had been the problem. Having a photographer take a new a likeness for incorporation into existing papers was unfeasible, Berglund insisted. It had to do with Bolshevik stamps. The Finns had had no choice but search through the papers of Russian nationals who had come to support the Finnish Red Guards. They needed someone who resembled Paul. The original owner, of course, no longer had need of identification papers.

Because he was dead? Paul was left to infer as much. For him the identification papers had thrown up new questions, to most of which he didn’t care to know the answers. How was it, for instance, his minders had access to the papers of so many dead Russians?

Paul preferred not to ask. Instead he busied himself preparing for the journey. It didn’t take long. Having been made to abandon everything he had brought off the steamer, all he possessed now was a knapsack and a change of clothes. He stuffed the one into the other and signalled his readiness to leave. In his rush he even forgot his Dostoyevsky.

They rode the electric tram to railway square and the Bangärden on the north side of the city. The night express stood hissing as if eager to depart. Some German soldiers idled around the ticket office and Paul hung back as Berglund relieved him of Finnish marks for the train tickets.

‘We take a first-class sleeping car, I think,’ he said to Paul in Russian, whispering to keep his voice down and holding out his hand for the money. ‘We need tickets and supplements and you have to buy bed tickets also. I think you must agree it correct you pay.’

Paul, thinking for no particular reason that the Russian language wasn’t suited for whispering, offered the Finn a fistful of marks. Berglund took two hundred, returning a few minutes later with the tickets and a solitary coin that he placed in Paul’s palm.

‘It is very expensive now since the war,’ Berglund explained with a frown.

Paul followed Berglund and Jalonen along the platform, a porter wheeling their luggage beside them down the line of green and blue carriages of the night express. They stopped at one of the blue first-class carriages and Berglund handed their tickets to the guard who showed them to their compartment.

They were still stowing their bags when the whistle blew, reminding Paul fleetingly of the day he had left London. The train started with a lurch and steamed out of the station, north across the causeway over the Gulf of Tölö and through the Djurgården. Paul looked out the window at the park, silvery in the moonlight.

Once settled, Berglund reached inside his pocket and pulled out a map, spreading it on the small table beneath the window.

‘It is three hundred kilometres to Viipuri,’ he said, making a point of employing the Finnish, not the Russian, version of Vyborg’s name. He ran a finger along the railway line from their starting point in Helsingfors. We take seven, perhaps eight hours.’

Paul followed the finger as the line travelled north before turning east inland through Konvola and across the Kymmene River to Luumäki and Vyborg.

‘From Vyborg we go here, to Terijoki,’ said Berglund, indicating a town on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. ‘The border is no more than twenty kilometres further east, on the Rajajoki River. Here near the station of Byelo-Óstrov on the Russian side.’

Paul looked at where Byelo-Óstrov station was marked on the map, to the east and slightly inland. Seeing Terijoki, it came to him why the name had sounded familiar. There had been a small summer resort there a few miles outside the town that they had used to go to as children. It had been a watering-place favoured by the English residents of St Petersburg, his mother had told him. Paul could remember climbing aboard the train at the Finland Station as a boy, porters following with their bags. He had been excited at the prospect of a week’s holiday at the seaside.

‘ Tchórnaya Ryetchka ,’ he said as the name of the resort came back to him. He looked at the map to see if the small town was marked. It wasn’t. The two Finns turned to him expectantly. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t anything.’

The carriage provodnik knocked on the compartment door bringing their bedding and the tall Finn hurriedly folded the map away. They stood in the corridor while the attendant made up their beds then the Finns changed into their night clothes. Paul didn’t have any; he had been sleeping in his underwear since leaving the steamer and was now acutely conscious of the fact. Rather than undress he just loosened what he was wearing, took off Pinker’s boots and, ignoring the look on Berglund’s face, climbed into one of the upper bunks.

He was finally on his way, he thought as he closed his eyes. The weeks of inactivity had worn smooth the sharp edges of his apprehension and, almost despite himself, in a few minutes the rocking of the carriage sent him to sleep. He didn’t stir until a shaft of sunlight falling on his face through the crack in the blind woke him.