David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul saw no compassion for the woman in Sofya’s face. Nor, come to that, in any of the other faces he had seen, buyers or sellers. What he was reminded most of were scavengers, pecking over the remains of their own.

Apart from the few remarks she had made whilst walking to the market, Sofya barely spoke. She appeared to display no curiosity about his mother, or even why Paul had suddenly reappeared. With his rather confused grasp of psychology, Paul put her apathy down to malnourishment. He had seen a few cases among refugees caught in the fighting in France. Trapped in shattered towns close to the front, having to burrow into the ruins of their former homes to survive, they had often been forced to scratch in the dirt like fowls for sustenance. Lack of nourishment, a doctor had once told him, could induce in the sufferer an almost catatonic state, where finding morsels to put in one’s mouth became the whole of their existence.

Sofya wasn’t that bad, or anywhere near it. She might be hungry but she still had the strength to get around at a pace he had trouble matching. The washerwoman in the courtyard had implied that Sofya was mad although, from the little conversation Paul had managed to tease out of her, she had shown no signs of feeble-mindedness. He suspected she might put on the condition to encourage the other people in the house to avoid her, and it occurred to Paul that she might try the same ploy with him.

He looked at her out the corner of his eye as they crossed the railways lines, walking through the square and along Znamenskaya towards the river.

‘Aren’t you at all pleased to see me?’ he finally asked when she showed no inclination to speak. ‘Weren’t we friends as children?’

‘When we were children? What does when we were children matter? That was another life. All that is dead and gone.’

She quickened her pace. Carrying the bag, Paul had to skip a step to keep up with her.

‘What’s wrong with Madame Korovina?’ he asked. He didn’t particularly care but wanted to keep Sofya talking.

‘What is it to you?’ Sofya replied. ‘You used to hate her.’

‘The feeling was mutual if you remember.’

He had hated her. But he rarely had the opportunity to say as much. To confide in Mikhail or the adults only risked retribution. He had been able to tell Sofya and — oddly enough — had been able to make it plain to Maria Ilyainichina herself. The governess’ family name, Korovin , and the one used to address her — Madame Korovina — meant ‘cow’ and he found he was able to emphasise the word when addressing her and that there wasn’t much she could do about it. Except hit him later when they were alone, of course.

‘She caught influenza last spring,’ Sofya said, ‘and never got over it. She won’t eat, at least not until she is sure that I have eaten first.’

Dusk had fallen. There were few people left on the street, just the odd pedestrian hurrying by and some homeless people forced to bed down in doorways. Now and then a vehicle passed, some flying red flags, and once in a while a tram. They rode one back to the English embankment.

When they reached the house, Sofya led him to the rear door and through the back stables again. Climbing the stairs, Paul was startled by a man who stepped out in front of Sofya unexpectedly. He was thin and balding and his left arm hung loosely at his side.

‘Sofya Ivanovna,’ he said, smiling diffidently until he noticed Paul. ‘Who is this?’

‘Just a friend, Igor Alekseev,’ Sofya said, making to walk around him.

‘Are you visiting, comrade?’ the man asked Paul.

‘He is looking for my brother,’ Sofya said.

‘I knew him before the war,’ Paul explained.

The man’s expression hardened and he inclined his head slightly. ‘Things are different now, comrade’ he said. ‘The old ways are finished.’ He glanced at Sofya. ‘Begging your pardon, Sofya Ivanovna.’

He retreated into his room and Sofya continued up the stairs.

‘What was all that about?’ Paul asked.

‘His name is Feldmann,’ Sofya said. ‘He used to work in the kitchens here until he was conscripted. That’s where he lost the use of his arm.’

‘Was I mistaken or was he trying to make some point?’

‘He’s Jewish,’ Sofya said, as if that was explanation enough. ‘Igor tries to be nice to me, now we’re all working class. Mikhail didn’t like the idea.’

‘ Igor ?’ said Paul, repeating Sofya’s use of his given name. ‘I shouldn’t think he did.’

‘Mikhail threatened him with the Black Hundreds.’

‘Mikhail? He wasn’t one of them, was he?’

‘Fortunately,’ Sofya went on without answering, ‘Igor didn’t tell Skala or there might have been trouble.’

‘For Mikhail?’

‘For me. Mikhail had gone by then.’

They had reached the second floor. Paul asked if she had wood for the stove.

‘Not much,’ she admitted.

‘Water?’

‘Yes, there’s plenty of water. Water costs nothing.’

In the attic room, Paul emptied the contents of the bag onto the table and took it downstairs to the ballroom. The carpenters had gone and Paul filled the bag with wood shavings and some off-cuts of timber that had been left in a corner. He went back upstairs. Sofya was sitting at the table scrubbing potatoes in a muddy bowl of water.

‘Aren’t you going to peel them,’ he asked.

‘And waste the skins?’

He stacked the timber by the stove, took an old newspaper off the floor and built a fire. When the stove was hot enough he dropped into one of the chairs at the table and watched Sofya cook.

There wasn’t much in the attic except for the table and chairs, the cot the governess slept on and another in a far corner which he assumed was Sofya’s bed. She had a few pots and pans but the only other thing worth stealing he saw was the stove itself, and that probably only remained because of the difficulty of getting the thing down the narrow stairs.

Madame Korovina had not moved since their return. Her breath sounded laboured but she seemed to be sleeping comfortably enough. Sofya made kasha , the common buckwheat gruel the peasants ate. There was little scope for anything else, she told him. Leaving it to simmer on the stove, she laid out three chipped bowls and wooden spoons. Paul recalled the dinner services the family used to own, great multitudinous collections of hand-painted porcelain emblazoned with the family’s spurious coat of arms. All gone, he supposed, no doubt along with the rest of the family’s possessions. Sold, or more likely stolen. He wondered if the Rostov servants had been the first to plunder the assets of their former employers. The moral there, he supposed, was treat your servants well. And that was probably no guarantee either. To the best of Paul’s recollection, the Rostovs — like most wealthy Russians — had never treated their employees with much respect at all, viewing the working classes as an infinite resource. The man on the stairs for instance, Feldmann. He wouldn’t have received anything in the way of consideration from them. They would have treated him as earlier generations had treated their serfs, particularly if he was Jewish.

No doubt when Paul had said to Feldmann that he used to know Mikhail, the man had taken Paul for a Jew-baiter too, particularly if Mikhail had threatened Feldmann with the Black Hundreds. They had been an extreme right-wing organisation responsible for many of the pogroms against the Jews, as well as a terror campaign designed to intimidate the liberal intelligentsia. They had had the backing of the tsar and of the police. They’d mostly used ordinary Russians to do their dirty work, given that there had never been a shortage of anti-Semites among the Russian population. Paul assumed Mikhail had been a member. Not surprising but still an unpleasant thought. In Paul’s opinion, if the Revolution had only one positive outcome it was to destroy the Black Hundreds.