David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul would arrive at Finland Station on the Vyborg side of the city. He had been there as a child although could remember little about it. As it happened, Finland Station was not too distant from the Rostov palace, in the Litéinaya Quarter south of the river across the Alexander Bridge. It was the most likely place he’d find Mikhail and if his cousin was not there, no doubt someone at the house would know where he was — his sister, Sofya Ivanovna, or their mother, Paul’s aunt. It would be good to see Sofya again after all these years even if he did feel a slight sense of trepidation at the prospect. Sofya’s mother, he wasn’t so keen on seeing again; his aunt, like the rest of the family, could be haughty and disdainful, and about as welcoming as a Hun barrage at dawn. Still, even if worse came to worst and Mikhail wasn’t there and they threw him out, he always had the address Dorothy Henslowe had given him in Cumming’s office. That was somewhere to the south-east of the centre, near the Baltic Station, across the Obvodni Canal. Miss Henslowe had said he could stay there for a day or two, just to take stock of the situation.

The watery wastes beyond the wagon finally began to make way for a few ramshackle timber houses, then bleak brick and stone factories as the train reached the outer suburbs. It stopped now and then and those waiting who couldn’t find space in the carriages climbed up into the boxcars. By the time the train crawled into the Finland Station the wagon was crowded and filled with a buzz of conversation and the stench of bodies.

Paul jumped out as the train stopped and helped the baboushka with her boxes before walking along the platform to the gate. There were travellers of all kinds crowding the station — peasants hauling produce to sell, workers returning to their lodgings at the end of the day, hawkers selling a variety of wares… And soldiers. There were quite a few obviously middle-class bourgeoisie too, he noted, — burzhui , they were called — conspicuous by their finer dress, although no longer enjoying the luxury of having a porter at their beck and call. Most were having to haul their own luggage along the platforms.

A crowd had gathered at the exit where men blocked the way and were examining papers. Paul hesitated, then backtracked through the station looking for another way out. Passing a kiosk, he bought some cigarettes and, stopping to light one, found he was standing outside a door over which the double-headed eagle of the Russian Imperial coat of arms was displayed. It was the tsar’s waiting room. Paul couldn’t help thinking that the eagle, despite looking both ways, still hadn’t seen the Revolution coming.

The waiting room was where Lenin had made a speech after his arrival and, curious to see for himself, Paul tried the door. Expecting to find it locked, he was surprised when it opened. Inside was as crowded with the wash of Petrograd life as the rest of the station. The once-plush benches and chairs appeared to have been sullied with the arrival of a more democratic society, and here and there the odd hobbled chicken squawked beside its owner and men in boots sat with their feet up on the velvet seats. Posters declaring ‘All Power To The Soviets’ had been pinned up on the walls and, on the other side of the room, glass doors gave out onto a square. In front of them a militiaman with a rifle was arguing with a well-dressed man who was shaking a fistful of papers at him. Paul edged closer through the crowd then passed through the doors while the guard was distracted.

Walking quickly out of the square and remembering the map of Petrograd Berglund had shown him, Paul made his way to the river on the Arsenalnaya embankment. According to the map, on his left lay one of the old tsarist prisons and, to the right, the military hospital and medical academy. Two blocks behind that lay an asylum that Paul’s governess had used to threaten him with as a child. Despite that memory Paul turned right, conscious of making a decision for sickness and madness rather than imprisonment and idly wondering if Russia had done the same. Near the hospital, though, he avoided both by crossing the Alexander Bridge over the Neva to the Petersburg side and the Litéinaya Quarter.

The early evening streets were crowded and it suddenly came to him why the man in the cap in London — Yurkas — had looked familiar. Everywhere around him were men dressed in the same way, in cheap dark cloth and workingmen’s flat caps. Even their hair and moustaches looked similar. This was how the Russian working man dressed and Paul wondered if seeing the man had triggered some boyhood memory. He supposed he ought to buy some clothes like theirs as soon as he could — being dressed like a peasant from the northern swamps was all very well but what he really needed was to blend in with the urban working classes. The one thing he discovered he couldn’t do much about was his accent. Having kept his ears open in the crowded wagon, he became aware how much his way of speaking differed from those around him. Now he was away from the border, he had decided to alter his story and, if challenged, would say he was from the south, from Rostov-on Don. At least — in a genealogical sense — it was true. He couldn’t really remember much about the family estate himself, but his mother had talked about it so often over the years that he felt confident enough to speak of the country like a native.

The train had taken two hours to cover the few miles from the border but the evening was still light. In midsummer there were hardly more than a few hours of darkness in Petersburg. He had missed what was called ‘The White Nights’, that period between the middle of June to the middle of July when there was no true darkness at all, just a hazy twilight. It was well past midsummer now but it would still remain light for several hours yet.

On impulse, after crossing the Alexander Bridge, he turned west along Frantzuzsk embankment, towards Trinity Bridge and the Winter Palace. Although there were plenty of pedestrians there wasn’t too much traffic on the roads, some trams and a few cars and, now and then, an occasional armoured vehicle full of soldiers and sprouting red flags like a rash. Past the Summer Garden Paul found to his surprise that the Winter Palace remained much as he remembered it as a child. A great rib-fronted building in stone, with high windows and balconies and a terrace of stone steps leading up to a pillared entrance. What did differ from his memory were the red flags that bedecked the roof and balconies and were shivering in the cool breeze. At the entrance there were soldiers, too, although not dressed in the smart braided uniforms with epaulettes Paul supposed the tsar would have favoured. These were some kind of militia wearing ordinary dull jackets and baggy trousers and workers’ caps.

Looking up at the tsar’s palace from the embankment side of the road, away from the gaze of the guards, Paul had expected to see damage, the pock-marks of bullet holes or shattered doors and broken glass. It had been stormed during the October Revolution, but he saw no sign of fighting. It looked a little shabby without its tsar and Imperial family, a monument that had lost its raison d’être , perhaps, and he wondered if the Bolsheviks would pull it down. A demonstration of political power, just to show that they could. They hadn’t followed Kerensky’s example; Valentine had told him the former leader had established himself there for the last few weeks of his Provisional Government, little more than a pale shadow of the Social-Revolutionary firebrand he had been before the revolution. Caught in power between the remnants of the ruling class and the peoples’ Soviet, Kerensky had come to be detested by both, sustained only by his own hubris.