David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘What kind of teacher?’

‘Languages. French and English.’

Her nose wrinkled. ‘Our old allies, eh? Who now think they’re going to defeat the Revolution. Well, we don’t need foreign languages now, do we comrade? Especially not theirs. We all speak Russian now and you’ll do well not to forget it.’

‘Of course not,’ he said.

She eyed him suspiciously. ‘I took you for a simpleton before. Just where was it you worked? In the south where this brother of yours lived?’

‘Here, in Petersburg,’ he said. Adding, as if it might give him some credibility, ‘Until I was exiled.’

‘Exiled?’ Fedorova hooted. ‘And why would they trouble to exile you?’

‘Writing political pamphlets,’ he replied, praying he wasn’t digging a hole for himself.

‘And where did they send you?’

He tried to think of one of the eastern Siberian cities he had seen on his mother’s map. ‘Novosibirsk,’ he told her. ‘Before they put me in the army, that is.’

‘A conscript?’

‘What else?’

‘What unit?’

He wracked his brain to remember the name of any Russian units he might have heard of but couldn’t. She was waiting.

‘I don’t belong to the Little Father’s units anymore,’ he told her.

She laughed again. ‘Deserted?’

‘Medical discharge,’ he said, finding that an admission of desertion was too much to confess. He pulled his hair aside to show her one of his scars. ‘I get fits sometimes,’ he added, in the hope of scaring her.

She didn’t blink. ‘No more teaching for you then,’ she said. ‘They won’t want you scaring the little kiddies, will they?’ Then she pursed her lips and seemed to relent. ‘Maybe I can speak to Skala. For one of our brave pamphleteers. He might know of a factory that needs men. He’s a Party man, he has connections. Factory work isn’t beneath you, I suppose?’

‘Not at all, comrade,’ he said quickly. ‘And a bed for the night?’

‘A bed?’ she repeated. ‘You need to register with this building’s Committee of the Poor for a bed.’ Then her eyes fell on the body of the governess and a malicious glint appeared in them. ‘There’s a bed,’ she said. ‘It’s spare now, if you don’t mind sharing the room with a corpse and the ghost, that is.’ She turned to Sofya and asked sarcastically, ‘What do you say, my lady ? Do you object to sharing a room with an exiled teacher who has fits?’ She laughed at the prospect. ‘A fine pair you’ll make. But don’t forget,’ she said, pointing at Sofya. ‘You’re out in the morning just as soon as they fetch the body. And you, teacher, you’ll have to register with Skala.’

Paul slept on the floor. It was warm enough in the house that he needed no blanket. He had heated some water on the stove and washed as best he could at the sink by candlelight, conscious of Sofya’s presence. He discarded his old clothes and laid out the ones he had bought in the market for the morning. Sofya watched him while he went through this ritual, but if she was amused at the trouble he took over second-hand clothes she didn’t show it.

‘You had better pack whatever you want to take with you,’ he told her.

‘Take where?’

‘Fedorova said you’ll have to leave in the morning. Unless you have a friend you can stay with you’ll have to come with me.’

‘Go with you? Why should I leave? This is my brother’s house now. How will he know where I am when he returns?’

Paul was tempted to ask why she was so convinced Mikhail would come back for her when he hadn’t bothered himself about her when he had left. But Paul sensed she was in a sullen mood. She had been like it as a child, stubborn and, if unable to get her way, inclined to sulk.

‘Skala will make trouble for you if you stay,’ he said. ‘Can’t you leave a message with someone? A friend of Mikhail’s? Or someone he’d go to if you weren’t here? Fedorova, if there’s no one else.’

‘That cow,’ said Sofya.

‘Very probably,’ Paul said. ‘But things are different now. If you want to survive you’ll have to adapt. Things may never be what they once were.’

‘Easy for you,’ she retorted bitterly. ‘You haven’t had to watch while the svolotch of Petersburg have robbed us blind and no army to protect us!’

‘They may be scum,’ he said, ‘but they’re running the city now.’

She glared at him by the dim light of the candle.

‘Turn around,’ she said. ‘I want to get undressed.’

Paul turned his face to the wall.

‘And you needn’t think you’ll get any help from Skala,’ she went on behind him over the sound of rustling material. ‘He won’t swallow that story of yours about being a teacher for a minute. He may be a pig but he’s not stupid.’

‘I won’t give him the chance to swallow it,’ Paul said to the wall. ‘We’ll leave as soon as it’s light.’

Skala . He assumed the name was a pseudonym. They were fond of their pseudonyms, these Bolsheviks — Lenin, Kamenev and the rest… What did ‘Skala’ mean? It was a rock, as he remembered — a large rock. Hard as rock , the implication would be. Well, he wasn’t planning to stay around long enough to find out.

He heard Sofya moving and assumed she had finished. He turned around. She was naked, her back to him, and he saw her thin arms and taught buttocks, her slender legs…

‘Pasha!’ She quickly pulled her night-dress over her head.

‘I’m sorry, Sofya…’ he stammered. He turned to the wall again, his face flushing but still aware that she had used his diminutive. She had called him Pasha as she had used to as a girl.

He settled himself into a corner by the wall on a cushion. Sofya extinguished the candle and climbed onto her cot. The room was dark. He lit a cigarette and smoked, listening to Sofya’s breathing and the silence that had come over the house below.

After a while, sensing she was still awake, he asked:

‘Sofya? What was it like when the Revolution came?’

She didn’t answer immediately then said:

‘When do you mean? When the Bolsheviks took control?’

‘No, before. February last year, when it first began.’

‘What was it like?’ she repeated. ‘Like it always was. Nobody thought it would be any different from all the other demonstrations there’d been. They were calling it “International Women’s Day” or something. It was a Thursday and all the women came to Petersburg to complain about the shortages. Everybody was depressed because the war had been going so badly. There had been nothing in the shops for days, although all the restaurants were still open of course. If you had money you could get food, but the poor couldn’t buy anything.

‘Was there fighting?’

‘No, that was later. The next day there were more demonstrations only this time the men came too, marching out of the factories. Even then no one thought anything about it because it had happened so often before. The fighting began on the Saturday, I think it was. Some army officers were attacked and the police fired on demonstrators at the Nikolaevsky. Then the cavalry killed some men on Nevsky Prospékt. It didn’t seem to make any difference this time, though. Not like it usually did when that sort of thing happened. The workers weren’t intimidated this time. The next day the police tried blocking the bridges to stop them getting into the city but the crowd just crossed on the ice instead. There was some firing at the Moika Canal, I think. And a lot of people were killed in Znamenskaya Square. But even then no one thought anything would come of it. It all seemed so unreal. It had happened so many times before and nothing had changed… Princess Radziwell threw her party at her palace as usual, just as if nothing was happening at all. Everyone went.’