David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘I come this way to avoid people,’ Sofya explained over her shoulder as they climbed a flight of steps and emerged in a dusty disused tack room. Old leather harness and saddles hung from the walls, cracked and dry through neglect. ‘There’s a man called Skala here who makes it his business to pry into everyone else’s and I try to stay out of his way.’

‘He’s not here,’ Paul said. ‘I spoke to a woman in the courtyard. She told me he’d been called away. Some sort of trouble.’

‘There’s always trouble,’ Sofya replied curtly, pushing through another door.

They were at the back of the stables. A row of disused stalls gave on to others. In a smaller yard surrounded by a high wall, a carriage with a broken axle lay slumped on one side like a crippled animal. Sofya led him to a small door set into a pair of tall wooden gates that opened onto the street. She opened the door cautiously and peered out.

‘This is the way they used to bring the carriages round to the front of the house when we went out,’ Sofya said. ‘The horses have gone, of course. Butchered for meat.’

They were standing in a narrow street. The house towered above them to their left. Sofya crossed the road and turned into an alley. After a few yards it gave onto the embankment and the river. The Neva flowed sluggishly below the embankment wall.

‘I used to come this way to school every morning,’ she said turning right.

‘You went to school?’

‘The Smolny Institute. For the daughters of the nobles and the rich. It’s where they taught us how to become young ladies. For all the good it did us. They closed it, of course.’ Her voice brimmed with contempt. ‘The rabble moved in with their executive committee after they left the Tauride Palace.’

‘What rabble?’

‘The Petersburg Soviet.’

‘Don’t you mean Petrograd Soviet?’

‘That shows you are a stranger,’ Sofya said. ‘No one who lives here calls it Petrograd. It is still Petersburg.’

She pointed down the road to a large building as they turned onto Shpalernaya. ‘There, that’s the Tauride. Don’t you remember it? It’s where the rabble first used to meet.’

Approaching the Tauride Palace with its familiar neo-classical façade he remembered how, as children, they had been taken there to admire its colonnaded halls and the gardens and lakes of the inner square. They sat in the summer sun while their governess — Korovina, he supposed, although he couldn’t remember — had told them its history. It had been built for Potemkin by Catherine the Great after he annexed the Crimea. Catherine had spent some months there each year after Potemkin’s death. The governess had stopped taking them there after the Duma, the parliament Nicholas II had been forced to accept following the 1905 revolution began using it. That had been the year he and his mother left although nothing in Russia had changed; the Duma’s influence had dwindled and Nicholas had reasserted his autocratic power. Paul supposed things might have turned out differently if the tsar had ever had the sense to take advice.

The evening light had begun to fade as Sofya skirted the Preobrazhensky Barracks and crossed onto Grecheski Prospékt.

‘It is safer on the streets now than it used to be. That, at least, is one thing the Bolsheviks have done. A few months ago some of the officers and soldiers took over several of the bigger houses. They called themselves anarchists but they were nothing but bandits. They used to be devils if they saw a woman on her own but Trotsky cleared them out last April and things are not so bad now. The Bolsheviks will not tolerate that sort of behaviour anymore.’

‘Where is the market?’ Paul asked.

‘There will be one by the Nikolaevsky Railway Station. You have money so we can take a tram.’

The stalls were set up on an area of rough grass lying between the cat’s cradle of rails. Around them derelict railway carriages stood rotting in forgotten sidings and rusted wagons lay amid discarded railway bogeys.

Many of the stalls had started to pack up for the day although there were still vegetables to be had, some clothes and a few household goods for sale. They were displayed on makeshift tables or on blankets spread on the uneven ground. Manned for the most part by peasants in from the countryside — ‘sackmen’, Sofya called them — who rode the train into the city everyday to sell their produce. There were squat, broad women swathed in shawls and head scarves, and grizzled men wearing smocks and felt boots who looked on with bored expressions while their goods were picked over. Some of the sellers, Paul saw, were clearly middle-class — the despised burzhui . One woman, obviously reduced in circumstances, mutely offered her clothes: a dress and some uselessly decorative hats; a fur stole and a pair of scuffed shoes.

Sofya sorted through a small pile of vegetables and dropped four beets into her bag.

‘It is illegal to sell food without permission of the city Soviet,’ Sofya told him as she selected some potatoes. ‘But if they arrested everyone who did we would all starve. There is no food in the shops.’

‘Why not?’ Paul held the bag open as she put in some carrots and an onion. ‘Where does it all go? The peasants still grow it, don’t they?’

She shrugged, her thin shoulders rising under the shapeless cotton dress. ‘ They say it has been requisitioned for the army. People here think the Bolsheviks keep it for themselves and the factory workers.’

‘So how do people live?’

‘You call this living?’

There was no meat to be had and by the time Sofya finished selecting everything she wanted most of the stallholders had packed their goods away and had started to leave.

Sofya’s face remained a mask as Paul handed the peasant the price she asked and he wondered if his cousin regarded shopping as beneath her. There had always been servants for that sort of thing. What had happened to them? Had the Bolsheviks passed some ideological decree against servants? Or perhaps under the new universal equality all former servants now thought housework and waiting upon others was beneath them. The woman in the yard who said she used to work for the family had still been skivvying as far as Paul could see, so where was the difference? Maybe like the serfs before them, they were discovering that freedom meant that they were free to starve like everyone else.

Seeing a man selling second-hand clothes, Paul stopped to see what he had to offer. It was time he got rid of his rags and here were trousers, a waistcoat and a jacket or two. Workingmen’s clothes all of them, badly worn and none too clean, but better than those he was wearing. He couldn’t help thinking that he too — like the burzhui woman — had been reduced in circumstances in a matter of a few weeks and was now having to buy someone else’s cast-offs. A month ago he’d never have believed it. Even amid the filth of the trenches, the grime had at least been his own, not some other man’s. And there, of course, the irony was he had still had a servant. Even so, he’d had enough of the rags and he picked out some garments he thought would fit him, topping the ensemble off with a peaked cap. It was the kind he had seen Lenin wearing in photographs and thought that in it, like the Bolshevik leader, he too might pass as a ‘man of the people’.

Sofya didn’t appear impressed as he paid for the clothes, and was even less pleased when a wild-eyed gaunt women who looked at the end of her tether offered to sell Sofya a winter coat.

‘You think I have money for clothes?’ she snapped at the woman, nevertheless stopping to examine the coat even though it was plain she had no intention of buying the article.