David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘It used to be a ballroom,’ Paul said.

The man laughed. ‘The nobles don’t have balls these days, comrade!’ and he winked, chuckling at his own joke.

Paul put the timber on the floor.

‘You know the house?’ the carpenter asked.

Paul gave a shrug. ‘I used to work here before the war.’

The man gestured with his hammer towards the remnants of the wood panelling. ‘Must have been a fine sight in those days,’ he said. ‘A shame to ruin good carpentry.’

‘Why was it ripped out?’

‘Firewood. Why do you think? Wasn’t a stick to be had in the city last January. People were burning whatever they could get their hands on. Where have you been?’

‘The army.’

The man grunted, dropped to his knees and began nailing a length of timber to the polished wood floor. Paul watched him for a second then stepped through the skeleton of stud walling and made his way out of the ballroom through the great double doors.

He stopped by the grand staircase, looking up to where it wound its way to the second floor. Climbing on the once-thick carpet, now matted with dirt, he dragged memories from his past. Much of the finely carved balustrade that he vaguely remembered had been cut away leaving a precipitous drop to the floor below. In the rooms off the central corridor where the family had had their private apartments, he found a bustle of families crowded in together. The fine furniture that had once filled the rooms had been put to a more prosaic use; remnants lay in pieces in corners like matchwood.

Taking the staircase to the third floor, he began knocking on doors asking for Sofya Ivanovna, to be met either with shaking heads or the door slammed in his face. Climbing to the very top of the house he found a warren of attic rooms. Grimy windows looked out across the river to the Peter Paul fortress, or south over the roof to the rear courtyard. He wondered if all the grand houses of Petersburg had been reduced to a similar architectural penury; if the mob had actually occupied the Winter Palace itself.

A fug of stale air had percolated up from the lower floors and seemed to hang trapped under the sloping ceilings. Heavy with the aroma of stale cooking and unwashed bodies, wood and tobacco smoke, it stained the greasy walls and condensed on the cracked windowpanes. These had been servants’ quarters, he supposed; accommodation for those visible attendants who kept the big house running — the butler and the footmen and the maids. The invisible, the cooks and porters, scullery maids and stable boys would have been squirreled away below stairs in basement rooms, in cellars or outhouses.

Paul could only ever remember having been up there once, as a child on his quest for the princess. Before that he had never been curious enough to want to know where all the servants lived, all those people who kept his and his family’s life comfortable. Like others of his class, he now realised, servants had been non-people to him, familiar faces some of them, but not the kind of people who had a life independent of the family’s. They were not people like his mother, or his aunt and his uncle; not people in the same way as the finely dressed friends of the family who came to call. It was something he had never given a thought to at the time. Or later, come to that, after he and his mother had left for England. The servants were no longer there. Forgotten.

In a corner of the rambling attic, when there was finally nowhere else to go, he came to the last door. From below he could still hear the muted bustle of the rest of the house, punctuated by the carpenters’ hammering. From beyond the door, he could hear nothing.

He knocked.

Seconds dragged slowly by and he knocked again. He tried the handle and slowly opened the door.

The room was a narrow triangle, cramped under the slope of the roof. Dust motes hung suspended in the heavy air, held in a shaft of light that filtered through a cracked skylight. It left the corners of the room in shadow. He made out a stove and two wooden chairs standing by a rough pine table in the centre of the room and, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, a cot against the far wall. Someone was lying on it, half-buried under a huddle of bedding, with only a thin arm protruding. Kneeling beside the cot and clutching at the arm, was a girl. She turned a pale and drawn face towards him as the door opened, staring at Paul with a pair of dull eyes.

‘What do you want ?’ she demanded in exasperation. ‘We’ve nothing left to steal.’

Paul stepped into the room.

‘I told you.’ She got to her feet and stood between him and the cot. ‘Everything of value has been taken.’

Paul stared at her, looking for the eight year-old child who had watched him and his mother climb into the carriage before it left for the railway station.

Mikhail had been standing next to her, stony-faced despite Paul’s mother’s tears. Even their parents had relented enough to stand by the carriage to see them off. It was Sofya he remembered most clearly, though, because she, like his mother, had been crying.

‘I haven’t come to steal anything,’ Paul said. ‘It’s me, your cousin, Pavel Sergeyevich. Don’t you remember me?’

Her dull eyes widened a little but there was no sign of recognition in them, just wariness.

But how was she to see past his beard and the filthy clothes they had made him wear? He stepped closer, trying to think of something to say that might prove who he was. Nothing came.

‘I’m Pavel,’ he repeated. ‘Your uncle Sergei’s son.’

But she wouldn’t remember his father any more clearly than he did. She was even younger than he when his father died. And now she’d grown up. She had changed but he recognised her for all that. She was wearing a plain sleeveless dress — a sarafan — belted at the waist. Her hair was darker than he always pictured it. Uncombed, it hung to her shoulders. Adulthood had deprived her of the soft chubbiness she’d had as a child. She was thin now, with hollow cheeks and dark rings beneath her eyes. He had seen the same indications of malnutrition on refugees behind the western front. Her bare arms were reduced to muscle and tendon and yet, through it all, he could still see the girl with whom he had spent his childhood. It was almost as if the emaciation had regressed Sofya from a woman to a child again.

‘You don’t remember me,’ he said, the realisation bringing a prick of sadness. He knew her , but he had expected to find her there. She must have thought him a thousand miles away. Or dead, if she ever thought of him at all. He smiled at her diffidently. ‘I’ve come back.’

Sofya’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who do you say you are?’

‘Your cousin, Pavel Rostov. Pavel Sergeyevich…’ He took another step towards her so he was standing beneath the skylight and she might be able to see him better. ‘I don’t know what I must look like dressed like this…’

‘My cousin went away years ago,’ she said flatly. ‘I don’t know who you are. Go away. I told you, we have nothing.’

This wasn’t how Paul had imagined their reunion would be. For some reason, despite all he had read and heard about the Revolution in Russia, he had supposed he would find her much as he had left her. Grown up of course, and now a young lady, but still the wilful girl he remembered, daughter of an affluent family — a sort of romantic figure in his imagination; something like Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace , only more familiar.

‘I had to grow a beard,’ he explained nonsensically. ‘And they made me wear these rags. It’s not surprising you don’t recognise me.’

‘You say you are Pavel Sergeyevich?’ she said, shrugging. ‘Very well. Why should I not believe you if you say you are my cousin? My brother Mikhail will be sorry to have missed you. You remember what great friends you were…’