David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul walked on a little further then crossed the road and passed under the trees between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty towards Nevsky Prospékt. He could recall only vague impressions of Petersburg’s main thoroughfare and those, like most of his memories, were coloured by the stories he had been read to as a child. What he remembered of the Russian countryside, for instance, had been influenced by fairy tales and, while in the country, he hadn’t actually expected to see gnarled trees and princesses and wood sprites, memories did not completely fade when faced with reality.

Nevsky Prospékt, though, was not how he recalled it from either imagination or memory. For some reason he remembered it mostly in winter with snow piled against the shops and the big houses dripping with crystal icicles like icing from cakes. There were always sleighs and the muffled sound of horses hooves in the snow and the tinkle of bells ringing on their harness. He could remember how the frosted air would cloud with the snorted breath from the animals’ nostrils, how the drivers were always wrapped like mummies in huge coats against the cold. But that was a winterland he couldn’t be entirely sure had ever existed, not outside his mother’s stories, anyway. The Nevsky Prospékt in front of him was a dingy prospect in summer, a dirty street peopled by shabby pedestrians. There were a few dust-covered cars and cabs and even, still, the occasional droshky , the open horse-drawn carriages that he really did remember. There were no other carriages and so, perhaps, it was like London and the war had taken all the horses. The Hun, after all, had got to a stone’s throw of the capital before the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty had been signed and Paul guessed by then there would have been panic in the streets with everyone who could trying to leave. In theory at least, the Germans were still only twenty-five miles away at the Finnish border and, if they chose to move on Petersburg, there was little that could stop them. But the faces of the people showed not so much a look of panic as one of resigned apathy. A man with a handcart filled with miscellaneous rubbish trudged past, his family scuffing along behind. Paul passed several dowdy women hanging around in doorways, selling clothes and perhaps more. The shops themselves were for the most part closed, or, if open, empty of goods. The buildings here were scarred by bullet holes and many of the windows either boarded over or had their glass cracked.

Further down the Prospékt he found the statue of Catherine the Great still standing in the small park, as if despite the political upheaval no one had yet summoned the temerity to remove her Imperial Majesty. A couple of blocks away stood the Kazan Cathedral. It looked rather the worse for wear and its columns and the statue of Prince Kutúzov-Smolénski showed signs of the street fighting.

Paul stood and lit another cigarette. He had seen no police but there were plenty of armed men hanging around in knots at street corners. Every now and then, he noticed, they stopped a passer-by and demanded to see identification. They seemed to choose the better-dressed pedestrians — burzhuis who they perhaps thought hadn’t yet received their full comeuppance. The few hapless passers-by Paul had seen stopped so far had merely been questioned and sent on their way, once or twice with a boot up the backside to speed their progress. Only on one occasion had he seen a man bundled into the back of a nearby truck and driven away. No one had tried to stop Paul so far, but in the rags he was wearing he supposed he didn’t look as if he had a history of class-exploitation.

The fact had given him confidence and, finishing his cigarette and grinding out the butt under what was left of Pinker’s right boot, he ambled past the next corner and it’s militia who looked right through him as though he wasn’t there.

Crossing the bridge over the Fontanka River, he turned north up Liteini Prospékt, towards the Neva again. Pushkin had lived somewhere close by, he recalled, remembering his mother had kept a map of St Petersburg in her rooms with circles on it around all the houses of old friends, and the homes of people she had admired. She had loved Pushkin above all writers, she was fond of saying, and had told Paul how she had once visited his apartment. He was long dead by then, of course, mortally wounded in a duel with a man he took to be his wife’s lover, but he had died in that particular apartment and Paul’s mother loved the romance of that sort of thing. The visit had been one of her favourite anecdotes and, to Paul’s permanent embarrassment, she usually contrived to work it into every conversation, regardless of whether her audience was interested or not. Now, on the very street, he couldn’t remember the address. Did anyone else in the new Russia? Would they care any longer about their literary heritage? Perhaps these new revolutionaries never read beyond the philosophies of Marx and Engels.

At Shpalernaya, before he reached the River Neva, he turned east towards the rear entrance of the Rostov palace. It had been a big house, even allowing for the magnification of childhood memory, but the title ‘palace’ had been an affectation of his grandfather. An attempt, no doubt, to convince Petersburg society that the family had arrived . Or perhaps convince himself. The first time Paul could remember hearing the house referred to as a palace he had assumed, naturally enough, that somewhere within its countless rooms must live a princess. He had been five or six years old at the time, he supposed, and the only thing that seemed remotely odd to him on hearing this was the curious fact that he had never actually run into her. A few days later he had resolved to seek her out, deliberately missing his lessons to conduct the search. Starting with the attic rooms, he had systematically looked behind every door he had come to and was in the basement kitchens before it slowly began to dawn upon him that he wasn’t going to find the princess. Instead he had been confronted by an immensely fat cook, a balloon of a woman with ham-sized arms floured to the elbows like dumplings. She had asked him what he was looking for.

‘The princess,’ he had said.

‘Princess? What princess?’

She was a servant and as such, he understood, not very intelligent.

‘This is a palace so there must be a princess,’ he had explained to her slowly.

He was startled then by a loud guffaw from a man he hadn’t noticed standing in the corner. He had looked to Paul like a giant, with long straggling hair and matted beard that almost — but not quite — hid his cavernous mouth. He approached Paul, towering over him and when, ever after, Paul heard the political metaphor ‘the Russian bear’, it was this man who immediately sprang to mind. The giant bent down and put his face in front of Paul, washing his foetid breath over him.

‘Do you know what we do with princesses down here, my little noble?’ he said. ‘We eat them!’ Then he had roared with laughter as the fat cook dug him in the ribs with one of her floured elbows.

Paul had fled in terror and a few minutes later his governess had appeared and dragged him back to the schoolroom, giving him a rap over the knuckles with a sharp-edged ruler for missing his lessons.

This, as far as Paul could remember, was the first instance of his ever being hit by this particular governess and it struck him as significant that soon after she had disappeared. He had put her departure down to the fact that she had punished him, and the knowledge had given him a sense of his own inviolateness. He was used to being hit by his nanny and other peasant-women in the house — that being the way of peasants — but never by anyone as socially exalted as a governess. The feeling of inviolateness had not lasted long, however. A few weeks later his cousin Mikhail had called him an ‘English bastard’. English , Paul knew; his mother was English. But bastard had been a new word and even Mikhail, when pressed, could not tell him what it meant. He told Paul it was something he had overheard his parents say and so thought worth repeating. Curious, Paul had asked the new governess what a bastard was and had promptly received another rap over the knuckles for his pains. Assuming that she, too, would disappear after this assault on his person, he had called her a bastard and had then got a beating from his father. Thoroughly confused, Paul had slunk away to lick his wounds, realising for the first time that his person was not inviolate. To his dismay the governess had not disappeared and thereafter took to pinching and poking him whenever he committed some minor transgression or was too slow with his lessons. In fact, rather than disappear, she survived longer than he did.