David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

It was just as well. They would have to leave early if they wanted to avoid Skala. Then it occurred to him that it might be easier to do what Mikhail appeared to have done and simply leave Sofya to her fate. After all, taking her with him wasn’t going to make his mission any easier to accomplish — whatever his mission now was. And he certainly didn’t owe the Rostovs anything. Mikhail in particular. They had disposed of him and his mother with unconscionable alacrity as soon as Paul’s father had died. They had sent a monthly allowance, it was true, but whether out of a sense of duty to his father or mere bad conscience, Paul couldn’t say.

So why should he be concerned about what might happen to Sofya?

He shouldn’t. And yet he was. He knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her. In the dark, he tried to rationalise it. In spite of everything, she was family. And, he supposed, Mikhail — if Paul ever managed to find him — would be grateful for his having saved his sister from the Bolshevik monster. Grateful enough to co-operate? The reasoning didn’t bear too close an investigation: Mikhail hadn’t worried too much about leaving Sofya in the first place, and in the second, Paul didn’t think his cousin was the kind to be grateful to people for doing him a service.

Paul turned it over in his head, yawned and closed his eyes. His argument slipped from his consciousness to be replaced by the memory of Sofya naked and the night-dress falling down over her back…

Heavy banging on the door woke him.

He sat up abruptly. He felt stiff from the floor and momentarily disorientated. By the time he gathered his thoughts and remembered where he was, he realised they had overslept. The banging started again. He got up quickly and dressed.

‘Just a moment,’ he called. It would be Skala and Fedorova, coming to throw Sofya out. And to interrogate him.

She was still curled up in her bed but stirred as the knocking continued.

He opened the door. Two men stood on the threshold.

‘Where is it?’ one of them asked. ‘The body,’ said the other.

They were holding their peaked caps respectfully in front of them as though just summoned from the graveyard. There was mud on their boots and on the knees of their trousers. Their hands and tunics were just as dirty.

Paul recognised the two as the men who had been carrying the timber up to the ballroom the day before.

He gestured towards the cot where the old governess lay under the blanket. Sofya was up and pulling on her dress. One of the men leered at her.

‘Where will you take her?’ Sofya demanded of him, trading his leer for a scowl. ‘She wouldn’t want to be buried in the Smolenéskoye Cemetery, neither the Orthodox nor the Lutheran section. She was Raskolnik .’

One of the men took hold of the governess’ shoulders.

‘Don’t worry, child,’ he said, ‘she won’t be buried in the Smolenéskoye. Or with the Romans on the Vyborg side. These days they all go to the Volkovskoye down beyond the Baltic Station.’

The man who had taken Korovina’s feet laughed. ‘She can keep her rituals if she wants. She’ll find the others all very easygoing in that regard.’

They hauled her unceremoniously towards the door.

‘A workers’ cemetery?’ Sofya objected. ‘Won’t there at least be a marker?’

‘If you want one.’ The man carrying Korovina’s feet dropped them. ‘They’ll put up a wooden marker with her name for two roubles.’

Sofya turned to Paul expectantly. He dug into his pocket and pulled out two roubles. Sofya wrote Maria Ilyainichina Korovina and her dates on a scrap of paper and handed it to the man along with the roubles. He pocketed both.

‘At least we’ll get her under before the rush starts,’ he said.

‘What rush?’

‘After what happened yesterday there’ll be a lot of people visiting the graveyards.’

‘What do you mean? What happened yesterday?’

‘Haven’t you heard? Comrade Uritsky was shot. He’s dead.’

He man picked up Korovina’s feet again. The two men edged the body through the door.

‘You know there won’t be any marker, don’t you?’ Paul said as soon as they had gone. ‘He’ll keep the money.’

‘I know no such thing,’ Sofya replied. ‘Do you always think the worst of people? Anyway, you’ve got more to worry about than someone pocketing your two roubles.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Didn’t you hear? Uritsky’s been assassinated.’

‘Who’s Uritsky? What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Uritsky was the head of the Petersburg Cheka. If he’s been murdered they’ll be out for revenge. They won’t just pick up opponents of the regime, they’ll arrest anyone they don’t like the look of. And if those papers you’ve got are old, they won’t be valid. They issue new ones every two months now and they don’t count for other cities, either. So I wouldn’t let Skala catch you here.’

‘Get your things together, then’ he told her. ‘Quickly.’ Reaching for his boots, he realised he would have to buy another pair. Pinker’s had come unstitched at their first acquaintance with water. He pulled on his new jacket. ‘Now Korovina’s gone,’ he said to Sofya, ‘Fedorova will evict you.’

She stood her ground looking at him as if she was about to argue. Then she glanced at Korovina’s empty cot and her shoulders seemed to slump.

‘But where will we go?’

‘We’ll find Mikhail.’

‘You have no idea where he is.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but wherever we go it can’t be worse than here.’

‘How do you know that?’

He didn’t but he had to believe it. Otherwise the future was too bleak to contemplate. He picked up the bag and told Sofya to put her things in it. He would have liked to stop long enough to finish the rest of the kasha but didn’t know how long they had overslept.

Sofya put the uncooked vegetables left over from the previous evening in the bag but had little else to take. Besides a change of clothes, she only possessed the ring belonging to her mother that she wore on a cord around her neck. There were a few other family items and some dog-eared photographs. She had no cosmetics, powders or rouges; only women of her class who had been reduced to the streets made themselves up any more, she said. Then had joked humourlessly that she looked more like a worker than the workers.

The bag was only half-full but even so Paul balked when she began to gather together her meagre collection of pots and pans.

‘We can’t take those,’ he said.

‘Of course we can,’ she insisted. ‘What will we cook with?’

‘We can’t take them,’ he repeated. ‘We have to move quickly. We can’t travel decked out like a couple of tinkers.’

‘You don’t know how it is now,’ she said. ‘How will we eat?’

‘We’ll buy meals. I told you, I have money.’

‘You need food cards to eat in the communal halls. What do you think, there are still fancy restaurants where you can dine whenever you like?’

‘We have money,’ Paul said patiently. ‘If you have money you will survive.’

‘My family had money,’ she said. ‘They didn’t survive.’

‘Where are we going?’

Sofya had been asking him since they left the house. They had gone down the back way to avoid Fedorova and Skala only to run into Feldmann again. He had eyed Paul resentfully then said to Sofya he’d heard Korovina had died and respectfully offered his condolences. Paul supposed that since Feldmann had worked in the house for the Rostovs, he would have remembered the woman when she had been the governess. Paul doubted that Korovina would have treated the staff any better than her employers had; yet, unlike Paul, Feldmann hadn’t had to suffer being educated by the woman so perhaps his memories of her weren’t as tainted as Paul’s.