David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Feldmann looked pointedly at the bag.

‘Some of Madame Korovina’s clothes,’ Sofya said, surprising Paul by her glibness. ‘I am going to try to sell them. Would you be interested?’

Feldmann laughed. ‘Women’s clothes? Sorry, Sofya, they’re of no use to me.’ He hesitated, obviously wanting to say something else. ‘Do you think Fedorova will want to evict you now?’ he asked finally.

‘That’s what she’s threatened,’ Sofya said.

Feldmann glanced at Paul, then at the floor. ‘I thought… I mean, if you’ve nowhere to go, Sofya, I could find room in my apartment. Only,’ he added quickly, ‘if you’ve nowhere to go and the Poor People’s Committee approve, that is.’

‘Thank you, Igor Alekseev,’ Sofya said, and to Paul’s surprise even smiled at Feldmann. ‘I will give your offer my consideration.’

Feldmann returned her smile, glanced at Paul once more and gave him a curt nod.

They left the house through the stables.

‘Why do you encourage that man?’ Paul asked. ‘He used to work for you.’

‘Aren’t we all equal now?’

‘Why did you tell him you were selling Korovina’s clothes?’

Sofya shook her head as though she considered the question naive. ‘Fedorova will find out soon enough we’ve gone. There’s no point in telling other people.’

‘What is this Poor People’s Committee you’re obliged to register with?’

‘Them!’ Sofya said with disgust. ‘They’re the rabble who live in my house now. They give places on the Committee to the most shiftless, worthless svolotch they can find. It’s like the Poor Peasants Committees in the country villages. Drunkards, most of them. Every decision they make is based on vindictiveness and envy.’

She stood on the pavement, looking first one way and then the other. ‘Which way? Where are we going?’

‘The first thing I need is a pair of new boots,’ Paul said.

‘And where do you think you’re going to buy them? The Bolsheviks have requisitioned every pair in Petersburg for their new army.’

‘Can’t we go back to the market? Surely someone will be selling a second-hand pair? They sell everything else.’

‘Maybe,’ she said reluctantly. ‘If you can find a pair that fits. First I want to walk along the Neva once more. If we’re really going to leave Petersburg, I want to remember it in case I never see it again.’

Given what had happened, Paul thought the place would have been seared on her memory. But he didn’t try to dissuade her; if she ever came back he doubted it would be to the city she remembered.

Paul had expected to find the streets busy but they weren’t. Sofya noticed how quiet it was, too.

‘Where is everyone?’

There were a few pedestrians to be seen but little traffic. The trams seemed not to be running, either. They stood on the embankment and watched the Neva swirl sluggishly below, giving off a stench of effluent and garbage.

‘Where are the vendors?’ Sofya said. ‘Why aren’t the kiosks open?’

‘The Petropavlovka is busy,’ she said, pointing across the river at the Peter and Paul fortress. It was some distance but Paul could see lorries moving to and fro.

Sofya gazed at the Vasilevsky Ostrov and the embankment where Peter the Great’s Rostral Columns stood.

‘There are always people selling things there,’ she said. ‘They catch the people using the Birzmevo and Dvortzovi Bridges coming from the Petersburg side.’

A car turned onto the Troitsky Bridge towards them. Approaching the embankment, it slowed. A red flag flew from one of the windows.

‘Come, quickly,’ Sofya said, grabbing his hand and pulling him the other way. They hurried towards the Field of Mars and the Fontanka.

‘We’ll try the market on Ligovskaya if you want boots. That’s if anyone’s turned up this morning. They call the private traders “speculators” and round them up every so often. They haven’t raided the Nikolaevsky for a few days so it probably due for a visit from the Cheka.’

‘But they’re just ordinary people there,’ Paul said. ‘Why should ordinary people have anything to fear from the Bolsheviks?

‘There are no ordinary people anymore,’ Sofya snapped back at him. ‘There are the Bolsheviks and then there is everyone else.’

Clambering onto a half-empty tram, they rode a few streets south of the Horse Artillery Barracks, near the Protestant Hospital, then walked the rest of the way. Turning down Ligovskaya Prospékt Sofya pointed to a few traders who had set up stalls, taking their chances with the police. She found a burzhui offering a range of footwear, from cavalry boots and ladies ballroom slippers, to the felt valenkis and bark sandals the peasants wore. Paul liked the look of the shiny cavalry boots but they weren’t very practical and so tried on a pair of worn army boots. They looked as if they might already have seen service at Tannenburg and walked all the way back to Russia, but they were a fit and were comfortable enough. He left the vendor with Pinker’s old pair and was still stamping his feet into the new boots when Sofya started tugging on his arm again.

‘There’s someone I have to see before we go.’ She said.

‘Who?’

‘A friend.’

She led him along Govskaya Ligov. At the junction they turned down Zágorodni Prospékt. A school on the corner of Tchernvishov Pereulok was closed and beyond it, near the junction with Gorokhovaya and close to Tsarskoye Selo Station, Sofya pointed at a building.

‘My friend lives here,’ she said, banging her fist on the door when they reached it. The place looked derelict to Paul. A window beside the door had been roughly boarded over.

‘Her name is Irina,’ Sofya said. ‘Mikhail never liked her but if he comes back and finds I am gone he will come here. Her husband was an army officer. He was killed in the war. When the Bolsheviks took power they appropriated her house.’

‘And she lives here now?’

‘It used to be a milliner’s shop.’ She gestured at the boarded window. ‘The shop was looted and closed. The owner’s name is Madame Kausky. She has an apartment upstairs.’

Paul peered through a crack in the boards. He saw some broken furniture and a few trampled hats on the floor.

‘Irina was one of Madame Kausky’s customers. A good customer. When she lost her house Madame Kausky let Irina move in. It is safer for two than for a woman living on her own.’

Sofya pounded on the door again then turned into an alley that ran down the side of the shop. A wooden staircase at the end led up to the first floor.

‘Doesn’t this Madame Kausky sell hats anymore?’ Paul asked as Sofya started up the stairs.

Sofya sighed with exasperation. ‘There isn’t much call for fashionable hats these days, Pavel.’

‘How do they live then?’

‘They… they have friends. Friends who support them.’

‘That’s good of them,’ Paul said.

‘Don’t be obtuse, Pasha. I mean gentlemen friends.’

He coloured a little, embarrassed more by his own naiveté than the fact that a friend of Sofya’s was somebody’s mistress.

‘Is that why Mikhail doesn’t like her?’ he asked.

‘Misha thinks we should all conduct ourselves the way we used to.’ Her tone was full of irony.

They found the two women still in bed. Alone, Paul was thankful to discover, saving him further embarrassment. Irina opened the door. Madame Kausky, the former milliner, peered briefly from another room before promptly withdrawing. Irina invited them into the apartment, wrapping a robe, garishly decorated with Chinese dragons, around her ample body. She may have lost her house but Paul could see she had not gone without food. She kissed Sofya on both cheeks before looking appraisingly at Paul. She was much the same age as Sofya although her face, bloated from sleep and still smeared with last night’s makeup, made her look older. Her rouged cheeks and dishevelled robe lent her the appearance of an actress unprepared for her performance.