David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

It was just as well that eight railway cars full of bullion weren’t the easiest things to run off with. If they were, given the competing claims on the stuff, they’d be chasing it all over Russia.

‘Well,’ Valentine said, having got no reply to his question as to whether Paul thought the Legion would hand over the gold on Paul’s say-so and Masaryk’s letter, he said, ‘it’s our job to see that they do.’

‘I suppose so,’ Paul muttered without enthusiasm.

‘That’s the spirit.’ Valentine clapped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Do or die. Isn’t that what they say?’

It was, and Paul was familiar with the adage, even if until this moment he had never actually heard anyone say it in earnest. But then he rather suspected that the kind of people likely to give voice to that sort of notion were rarely the ones who personally did the dying.

‘Mikhail won’t be in Moscow,’ Sofya pointed out.

She put half a cucumber on the table. She had made cabbage soup with the vegetables they had brought with them and a bunch of elderly and indeterminate greens she had found in the kitchen. It was already evening. They had been at the house all day and Valentine had not returned.

‘We won’t stay in Moscow long,’ Paul assured her.

‘Where will we go? South, now Deniken’s in charge?’

Paul didn’t answer, unwilling to admit they were not going south.

Sofya spooned the soup into bowls, cut the cucumber into slices and salted it. Peasant food, Paul thought, although Sofya ate it readily enough.

‘Kornilov was hopeless,’ she said, chewing the stale bread and the cucumber. The time to march on Petersburg was July when the Bolsheviks first tried to take power. Lenin and the rest of their leaders scuttled off into hiding. The Provisional Government arrested hundreds of those that were left. That’s when they were at their weakest. The newspapers were full of stories about how Lenin had taken German money to finance his party and how they had let him and his cronies through their lines.

‘He dithered,’ she said, spooning up the soup. ‘Kornilov. When he finally moved, Kerensky declared his coup illegal. None of the officers in Petersburg seemed to know what to do and by the time Krymov and the Third Cossack Corps got anywhere near the city the Bolsheviks that hadn’t been imprisoned got into the factories and armed the workers. They went out and tore up the railway tracks.’

Sofya’s face pursed with disgust. ‘Krymov’s men called themselves “The Savage Division”, Caucasian Cossacks. What did they do? They went cap in hand in front of the Petersburg Soviet and apologised. They said they had been misled and been told the Revolution was in peril. That the Bolsheviks were slaughtering people in the streets.’ She tore another piece of bread in two. ‘They’ll really find out who’s savage once the Bolsheviks find they can get away with it… then they’ll really start a slaughter.’

Paul ate silently. He’d already seen as much slaughter as he wanted to and didn’t care to see any more. It had been bad enough at the front but at least that had been war. One always knew that once back home some semblance of normality could be found. Not here. It astonished him how a civilised country could so quickly fall into chaos. It was as if beneath a thin veneer of modernism, the medieval savagery of Russia still lived and breathed, ready to reassert itself as soon as the mask of enlightenment slipped. But then perhaps it had always been plain enough to see for those who cared to look. All autocrats, from the modernising Peter to the bungling Nicholas had been quick enough to resort to the gnout when it suited them. Well, the boot was on the other foot now. Or rather, the gnout was in the other hand.

Sofya startled him out of his reverie.

‘What did you do in England, Pasha?’

‘I was a soldier,’ he said. ‘I am a soldier.’

‘Tell me about your life there.’

Paul broke a little more bread and took a slice of cucumber. He began to tell her but found, strangely, there wasn’t much to say. He told her about his life at school and his brief time at university before, like all the other young men, he had volunteered for the army. He tried to describe how it had been at the front only to find he didn’t have the words. Then he told her how, after he was co-opted by Cumming, his relief at not having had to go back to the trenches had been tinged with a sense of guilt for abandoning those who were still there.

Finally, unable to go on, he told her instead about his mother’s life in London. How she had kept her past alive by entertaining émigrés and keeping up with political events.

‘Until her monthly allowance stopped.’

‘The Bolsheviks took over the banks,’ Sofya said. ‘They stole everyone’s money. No one could get any.’

‘It must have been terrible,’ Paul said.

‘It’ll get worse,’ Sofya replied rising and clearing the table. ‘Now Lenin’s dead I suppose Trotsky will take over. He’s no better. He’s already head of the army.’

‘Valentine says they’re using the assassination as an excuse to arrest foreigners. They think the British had a hand in the plot.’

‘What plot?’

‘To kill Lenin. They’ve already arrested the head of the British political delegation in Moscow and killed the naval attaché who was looking after the Petersburg embassy. Now they think I’m involved.’

‘Well you are, aren’t you?’

‘I didn’t know anything about any plot.’

‘They’ll say that’s just a bourgeois distinction.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Whether you knew or not isn’t important. What’s important is your class.’

‘But that’s not fair! Just , I mean. That’s not just .’

Sofya began to laugh. ‘You haven’t changed, have you Pasha? Still the innocent who hasn’t the faintest idea what’s going on around him.’

He wanted to say that that wasn’t fair either, but the sound of a vehicle in the alley outside the house stopped him. He rushed down the hall and peered through the ragged curtains in the front room. The sun had gone down but it was still quite light.

A large car had stopped in the alley. A red flag hung from a baton fixed to the radiator grill. Paul’s stomach churned. He stepped away from the window as Sofya looked out.

‘It’s him,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Your friend Valentine.’

Paul peered at the car and saw Valentine step out. He said something through the car window to the man sitting behind the wheel then turn towards the house. The car’s engine remained running.

‘He’s betrayed us,’ Sofya said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Paul snapped. But could he be entirely sure? Valentine had done it before, hadn’t he, tricked Paul out of his savings? He had done it to corner Paul into accepting Cumming’s offer, but it was still an underhand thing to do. A pragmatic solution to a problem. A means to an end, like tossing Tamara Oblenskaya over the side of the ship. A Bolshevik sort of thing to do. Would he do something similar now, be pragmatic and betray them to save his own skin?

The front door opened and Valentine called: ‘Alenkov!’ before shutting the door again. Then he was in the doorway looking at them both, every inch the Russian worker, cheap suit, waistcoat, peaked cap and all.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’ he asked in English. ‘You both look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’ Then he turned to Sofya. ‘What is it about August in Petersburg? It’s raw out there.’ He rubbed his hands together vigorously.

‘Who’s car is that?’ Paul finally managed to ask, whispering despite himself.

‘It’s a Party car,’ Valentine said. ‘I thought it would be the safest way to get to the station.’