David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘How long ago did Mikhail leave,’ Paul asked Sofya as she sat down.

‘Some weeks ago. I don’t remember.’

‘You said they came looking for him.’

‘Did I? Who?’

Paul sighed. ‘The Bolsheviks , Sofya. I know Mikhail was involved with Kornilov’s coup, so there’s no point in pretending.’

Sofya got up and went to the stove again. ‘I know nothing about it,’ she said. ‘He left, that’s all.’

‘And he didn’t say where he was going?’

She turned to face him, her hair was tangled and there was a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

‘South? I don’t know.’

‘Kornilov is dead. So was he going to join Deniken? Or do you think he went to the Urals?

‘Why would he go to the Urals?’

‘That’s where the Czechs are.’

‘What Czechs?’

She began stirring the pot once more.

‘He said nothing at all before he left?’

‘No.’

She had her back to Paul and he could see how thin she was through the skimpy dress. But he could also see there was a wiriness to her body despite her slender frame.

‘So what did the Bolsheviks want?’ he persisted.

‘How would I know? They came up here with Skala. Perhaps it was something to do with the house. They’ve confiscated a lot of the big ones. Those that belonged to any family who had money.’

‘What did they ask you?’

She suddenly stamped her foot. ‘Stop it, Pavel! You have no right to interrogate me. Why do you want to see Mikhail anyway? You disliked each other as children.’

The dislike, as he always recalled, was mostly on Mikhail’s side. But it was true, he hadn’t liked Mikhail. One of the things he had disliked most about his cousin was the way he had sucked up to Madame Korovina.

‘What about Korovina?’ he asked. ‘Would he have told her where he was going?’ He glanced at the cot. Her breathing had become ragged and shallow but he wouldn’t have put it past the old crone to be eavesdropping on their conversation. He went to the cot and bent over her.

‘Where is Mikhail?’ he said into her wrinkled ear. He saw her eyes flicker and he repeated the question. But she didn’t respond and her eyes closed again.

‘Leave her alone,’ Sofya said, pushing him aside. She leaned over the cot and laid a hand on Korovina’s brow.

‘She’s asleep,’ Paul said.

‘Maria doesn’t know where Mikhail is,’ Sofya said. ‘What do you want with him, anyway, if you say you’re not working for the Bolsheviks?’

‘Of course I’m not.’ He sat heavily in the chair wondering how much he ought to tell her. ‘I need to contact some people he knows.’

‘What people?’

‘People who oppose the Bolsheviks.’

She laughed, scornfully. ‘There are plenty of those,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to be quick — there are fewer every day.’

‘How would I find them?’

‘That easy,’ Sofya said. ‘They meet at number two Goróhovaya Street.’

‘What is it, a house?’

She laughed again. ‘It’s the headquarters of the Cheka, you idiot. It’s where the Bolsheviks take those who oppose them for interrogation. Not many come out again.’

‘Oh,’ he said, realising she was making a fool of him.

‘It used to be the Petersburg Prefecture of Police under the tsar. The Bolsheviks not only took over the building, they took over the whole apparatus. They even employ the old Okhrana agents. They’ve just changed the name, that’s all.’

‘The Allies have landed in Murmansk and Archangel,’ Paul said abruptly, deciding to jump in with both feet.

‘There was a rumour they had,’ Sofya said. ‘Although I thought the Bolsheviks might have made it up as an excuse for more arrests. Is that why you’re here?’

‘I’m supposed to liaise with any resistance there might be against them.’

‘Why you?’

‘Admiral Kolchak is expected to take charge of the White forces in the Urals when he arrives.’

‘What’s that got to do with you?’

‘The admiral served with my father during the war with Japan. Since I have connections with both Mikhail and the admiral it was thought I should come here to liaise between them and the Allies.’

Paul thought the plan sounded quite reasonable put like that. It was only when one started delving deeper that it was obvious the idea was as ephemeral as a soap bubble.

On the cot Korovina made a noise in her throat.

‘Just because Kolchak served with Uncle Sergei?’ Sofya asked, glancing towards the governess. ‘That’s not much of a connection.’

‘My mother met him in London when he passed through on his way to America.’

‘So Auntie socialises with admirals now, does she?’ Sofya said sarcastically.

Paul sighed. ‘She socialises with all the Russians in London,’ he said. ‘That’s her trouble, they’ve bled her dry.’

‘At least she has money to eat.’

‘Only what I give her. The allowance your father sent stopped when the Bolsheviks took over.’

‘Poor Auntie!’ Sofya cried. ‘Is she as radical as she used to be now the Revolution’s hit her in the purse?’

‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ Paul said, refusing to rise to Sofya’s bait. ‘The thing is, the people in London who sent me here think I can co-ordinate things between the Allies in Murmansk and Archangel, the Czechs in the Urals, and the Whites, once Kolchak arrives. I don’t know anyone in Petersburg or the south. That’s why I’m looking for Mikhail.’

‘I had no idea you were such an important man,’ Sofya said, raising her eyebrows. But she was only mocking him.

‘I’m not. To tell the truth they mistook me for someone else. But I’m here now so I have to make the best of it.’

‘What on earth makes you think Mikhail will co-operate with you? He hated you.’

Paul was taken aback. When had Mikhail’s dislike of him escalated into hate? He nurtured a malicious suspicion that Mikhail had perhaps inherited the Russian peasant’s well-known distrust of outsiders from his own great-grandfather. That would explain his cousin’s antipathy to Paul and his mother — the fact that Paul had a half-share in Mikhail’s descent apparently not enough to stop his being thought of as an outsider. But wouldn’t that mean that Paul, too, might have a half-share of Mikhail’s bigotry? That was something he wasn’t ready to consider.

‘And you, Sofya Ivanovna,’ he asked her formally, ‘do you hate me too?’

She began ladling the kasha into the bowls and avoided answering. They ate the gruel with rye bread, coarse and black and already stale. Paul crumbled it into pieces and soaked it in the gruel to soften it. Kasha was supposed to be thick like porridge but this was thin. Hungry as he was though, he ate it with relish. Sofya spooned the gruel into her mouth sparingly, watching him across the table. When he had finished, Paul drank tea while Sofya filled the third bowl for Madame Korovina, breaking in small pieces of bread for her.

‘The woman downstairs said they are going to throw you out when the old woman dies,’ Paul said to her. ‘Where will you go? Have you friends you can stay with? What about the rest of the family?’

There had been some other cousins, he recalled, further removed and barely remembered. They only lived in his memory because of his mother’s reminiscences. They had never quite acquired the social elevation that Sofya’s grandfather had, and only appeared on rare occasions dependent upon his uncle Ivan’s condescension.

‘No,’ Sofya said. ‘All our friends left, those who had any sense anyway. I wanted to go after Mama and Papa died but Mikhail insisted we stay. He said the rabble would soon be put back in their place. He said everything would return to normal. But it was easy for him to say, he was hardly here.’