David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

She was still there, several years later, the day he had been dressed for an unexpected journey and had gone downstairs to find their luggage being loaded into a carriage. It was the day he and his mother left the Rostov palace for the last time.

The house didn’t really look anything like a palace. Smaller than he remembered and certainly dingier, Paul went around the back, through the gates to the rear courtyard. He found it crowded with people. Two men were unloading timber from a cart and carrying the lengths into the house by a back door. Across the yard, by the stables, a family had camped in one of the empty stalls, sitting around an open fire on the cobbles where women were cooking. The redolent tang of borsch hung in the air. By the pump in the middle of the yard, a stout woman was bent over a tin tub kneading clothes. She paused as she caught sight of him watching her and put a hand to the small of her back as she straightened, brushing away an errant strand of greying hair that had escaped the scarf tied around her head. Seeing she wasn’t going to look away, Paul walked over to her.

‘Yes comrade?’ she said. ‘Are you looking for something?’

‘This is the Rostov house, isn’t it?’ he asked her.

She gave a contemptuous snort.

‘Not any more it isn’t, comrade. Where have you been?’

‘In the army,’ Paul said.

‘Another returning hero?’

She had a broad peasant’s face and despite the greying hair was no more than forty.

‘Whose house is it now?’ he asked.

‘It belongs to the people. Didn’t you know?’

Paul gave her a hesitant smile.

‘Do any of the Rostov family still live here?’

‘What business is that of yours?’

He had thought this part of his story out while walking from the station. He smiled again, as an idiot might.

‘My brother worked on the family estate in the south. On the Don. Before the war this was. He wrote to me to say he was coming to Petersburg…’ he stopped. ‘Petrograd,’ he amended with a shrug. ‘I forget… I thought I might find him here.’

‘The world changes,’ the woman said unhelpfully.

‘I thought his excellency, Ivan Nikolayevich, might have had word of him. And could maybe give me some work? Just enough to keep body and soul together.’

‘You don’t want to talk about souls, comrade.’ She laughed. ‘We don’t have souls anymore.’

‘Do you think there might be some work for me here? Enough to eat, comrade?’

‘His excellency is dead,’ she said. ‘He was killed in the revolution.’

‘Oh. And his wife, Olga Alexandreyevna?’

‘That bitch? She died, too, a few months after Rostov.’

So his aunt was dead as well. Paul waited to feel some reaction, but nothing came. He hadn’t liked her alive and felt little for her dead.

‘You knew them?’ he asked. ‘Did you work here? When they were alive, I mean.’

‘Yes, I was one of their skivvies. All my life, God rot them.’ She began to cross herself, then seemed to remember what she was doing and dropped her hand. She scowled at him.

If she had been there all her life, Paul supposed she must have worked in the house when he was a child. One of the young girls working in the depths of the house, perhaps. It had been like a small town, a hive buzzing beneath the family keeping them in idle luxury.

‘What was your brother’s name?’ she asked.

‘Alenkov. Alexander Vladimirovich Alenkov.’

‘Never heard of him.’ Her nose wrinkled, either at Paul’s clothes or the man she saw inside them. ‘There’s no work for you here, comrade. And not much point in going back to the old estate either, if that’s what you were thinking of. The peasants have burned the house and taken back the land. Unless your family have a share you’ll be wasting your time.’

‘There was no land,’ he told her, ‘and no other family. Only my brother.’

The woman shrugged. She looked down at her washing, making it plain his problems were no concern of hers.

‘There were children,’ he persisted. ‘A boy and a girl.’

‘Your brother?’

‘The Rostovs.’

The woman spat at Paul’s feet. ‘He’s gone, Mikhail Ivanovich… Some months past. Perhaps the police picked him up. If they did it was no more than he deserved.’

‘And the girl?’

‘The ghost? She’s still here.’

‘Why do you say the ghost?’

‘The ghost in the attic.’ She jerked her chin towards the top of the house. ‘It’s what they call her… Rostova. She’s like a wraith haunting the house. They let her keep a room in the attic because of the old woman with her. I don’t know why, the bourgeois bitch. The girl clings to her like a baby. I’d have thrown them both out but she’s sick.’

‘Sofya Ivanovna?’

‘The old woman.’ Then she circled a finger by her head. ‘But the girl’s gone soft. They’ll throw her out when the old cow dies.’

‘Who’s in charge here now then?’ Paul asked.

‘Skala. He’s a Party man. There’s been some trouble and he was called away. If you take my advice you’ll be on your way before he gets back. There’s no room here for you.’

Paul thanked her and she bent to her tub again. He wandered across the courtyard to where the women were cooking and smiled encouragingly at them. They edged between him and their cooking pot, watching him warily out of the corner of their eyes. Seeing he would not be offered anything to eat he drifted towards the house and the cart where the men were unloading the lumber. Their horse, standing in the shafts, was occupied with a nosebag hung over his head. It stamped a hoof on the cobbles as Paul approached and he laid a hand on its neck to reassure it. Through the open door he could hear raised voices, a woman shouting something about a stove and the grunting response of a man.

The workers ferrying timber into the house returned and Paul stepped out of their way. They each picked up another length of wood and, as the woman inside distracted them by shrieking again, Paul took the opportunity to grab a length of wood himself and follow them into the house. Inside, he caught sight of a red-faced harridan and the man she was shouting at. Paul hurried by, following the two men along a corridor and up a narrow flight of stairs to the first floor.

The sound of hammering came from down the passage and he followed the noise through an open door, past another staircase, and into a cavernous room. At one end several carpenters were constructing a lattice of stud walls to partition up the huge space. Paul stood in the centre of the room. An ornate ceiling hung suspended above him, painted in the baroque style but peeling now from the cracking plaster. An extravagant cornice ran around the room, the walls beneath bearing the remains of wood panelling, stripped away to reveal split battening and bare brick. Despite how the room now looked, there seemed to Paul something familiar about it and his eyes automatically turned to the centre of the ceiling where he felt there ought to hang a chandelier. There was nothing there now, just a hole in the painted plaster to show where it had hung.

It had been the ballroom, he suddenly realised, a glittering wonderland of light and colour to the small child he had been, standing with his cousins on the occasions there was to be a grand ball. They had been allowed to watch the servants clean and prepare, dust and arrange the plush seating; erect the dais where the orchestra would sit and play.

‘You there,’ one of the carpenters called, jerking his chin at the timber Paul was carrying. ‘Put it there.’

‘What’s going on?’ Paul asked, walking over.

‘We’re dividing the room up, of course. Petersburg is full of homeless people. What good’s a room this big? You’d get ten families in here.’