David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘Have you heard any further news of Comrade Lenin?’ Valentine asked.

‘Only that his condition is thought to be stable,’ Slepynin replied. His face assumed a funereal aspect. ‘An outrage. A tragedy for the country. And comrade Uritsky, too. Such counter-revolutionary action must be liquidated. The Social-Revolutionaries are to be held to account. You agree, comrade, of course?’

‘Of course,’ said Valentine. They exchanged views on the measures needed to counter opposition to Bolshevik power, Slepynin expressing the need for terror. Paul stopped listening.

The train left Nikolaevsky through a desert of hatched tracks and marshalling yards. They passed the Alexander Nevski Quarter, a warren of narrow streets and squalid housing where the workers from the harbour and the factories near the Baltic and Warsaw Stations in the eastern Narva Quarter lived. The Putilov metalworks where Valentine had worked lay in that direction, beyond the Narva Triumphal Arch.

Paul glanced across to where he was sitting, deep in conversation with Slepynin, and wondered how Valentine did it; how he was able to assume a character that must be completely alien to him. To look at him, one would have taken Valentine for a born in the bone Russian, the sort of man Paul himself ought to be, having been born there. And yet he was the alien, as out of step and out of sympathy with those around him as it seemed possible to be. Even Sofya didn’t appear out of place in her cheap dress and scuffed shoes. She had retrieved Valentine’s attaché case from the luggage rack and was presently pretending to study a sheaf of papers she had found inside. She held a pen which she periodically touched to the sheets although, as far as Paul could see, it was dry of ink.

Through the window he caught a glimpse of the Volkovskoye Cemetery in the twilight, where their governess had been buried that morning; interred at dawn only to be resurrected at midnight as Sofya assumed her identity. She had given it to avoid Slepynin’s curiosity, Paul supposed, and was impressed at how quick-witted she had been. No doubt he would have blithered and blathered, forgetting his own alias the moment he needed to remember it. What on earth had possessed Cumming to thinking he was fitted for this kind of work?

On the opposite side of the tracks were working-class districts, hovels mostly, and Paul wondered if it was chance or design that had engineered the passage of Petersburg’s masses through a cemetery each day as they passed to and from work. Was it a deliberate lesson on the temporary nature of life, and the need for the poor to keep their eyes focussed upon salvation? If so it was a lesson being ignored. The Bolsheviks had made their intent plain in weaning the people off their religious opiate — as Marx had had it — and to that end had begun sacking the churches. Like Henry VIII, he couldn’t help thinking, unable to keep avaricious hands off all those valuables. Paul didn’t doubt they’d strip the lead off the roofs, too, so that in a hundred years or so Petersburg and other Russian cities would be dotted with crumbling cathedrals like the English monasteries.

A vendor appeared at the door with glasses and a jug of kavass . From a tray he offered blinis , pirogis and purées. Valentine and Slepynin dug into their pockets and pancakes and pastries were handed round for a few kopecs. Lenin’s recovery was toasted with glasses of kavass , the fermented fruit juice.

‘Did you by chance work at the Ministry of the Interior, Miss Korovina?’ Slepynin persisted as Paul watched him spoon the last of an unappetising-looking kisél gorókhovi — a pea purée — into his mouth. ‘I was a mere factotum there before the Revolution, you understand. At everyone’s beck and call. But learning valuable lessons nonetheless on the workings of the bureaucratic autocracy. On occasions, I even found myself in the august presence of his excellency , Minister Kurlov himself, rot his soul.’ Slepynin’s face twisted unpleasantly as if his pea purée was giving him indigestion. He turned to Valentine. ‘Was Kurlov tried for his crimes, do you recall?’

‘Pavel Grigoriyevitch Kurlov?’ Sofya said, as if unable to help herself. ‘No, he escaped abroad. Others died, though,’ she added flatly.

‘So I believe,’ Slepynin said, his head suddenly cocking to one side like an attentive spaniel’s. ‘Indeed, was not the under-minister, Rostov, one of those killed in the disturbances?’

Sofya’s eyes dropped to the papers again. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said.

Slepynin looked as if about to say something else but the provodnik knocked on the door at that moment, carrying their bedding. It was dark beyond the window now and Paul pulled the curtains together before they shuffled into the corridor while the provodnik made up their bunks. The men stayed outside the compartment for a minute or two to allow Sofya time to undress and get into bed then, when she called, followed her in. She had taken an upper bunk and Valentine took the other, leaving Slepynin opposite Paul on the lower. The light was extinguished and after a muttered exchange of ‘sleep well,’ Paul lay back fully clothed. He closed his eyes, rocking in the bunk to the steady movement and listening to the rattle of the train.

In the dark he thought of Petersburg receding behind them and tried not to think of Moscow ahead at the end of the arrow-straight railway line.

‘ Out of the frying pan ,’ Sofya had said. Well, he’d been in worse spots, he supposed. Or would have thought so at the time. In the trenches, though, you knew where you stood — or cowered, more like — with the Hun flinging a barrage at your head. There at least you knew why he wanted to kill you, even if it was for no better reason than you were English. Here it seemed as if everyone was after your blood simply because you might support some vague variant of the ideological soup of the day. Here it wasn’t the whining shell one had to listen out for but the knock on your door in the middle of the night. But hadn’t that sort of thing always been prevalent in Russia? The tsarist police had, by and large, been fairly incompetent in their pursuit of revolutionaries and were just as likely, if they happened to catch one, merely to give him a slap on the wrist and pack him off to Siberia for a spell. They sometimes hanged a few now and then for form’s sake — Lenin’s elder brother among them. A decision Paul supposed some had since come to regret — or, more likely, regret they hadn’t strung up the whole family while they were about it. But they wouldn’t have done that, of course. Lenin — Ulyanov — had come from good stock, minor nobility, rather like the Rostovs themselves. But then that had been the case for many of the revolutionaries, the theorists, at least; Kropotkin had been a prince , top of the tree so to speak, and Paul didn’t suppose anyone had ever thought of hanging him . No, political fever had always been abroad in Russia, a fever to which most of the populace were oddly susceptible. Although whether that was due to the authorities lack of dispensing the final cure he couldn’t say. It was obvious to him now that both his mother and father had suffered a mild form of the fever all their adult lives, even if they had apparently avoided infecting him, their son, with the disease. Not that that was going to make any difference now, whether he had caught it or not. So much for immunity; now it looked as though the damn fever was going to kill him just the same.

A grey light was seeping through the curtains of the compartment but it wasn’t this that had woken Paul. It was Sofya shaking his shoulder the way terriers shake rats.