David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

The train was packed and there were no seats. The crowd that had been waiting on the platform at the Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod Station while the train got up steam had made a sudden surge towards the carriages, fighting to get aboard as if someone had dropped a starting flag. Lines of troops heading for the Kazan front had commandeered several carriages for themselves, and the rest of the passengers had been left to elbow each other aside as best they could. Luggage and parcels had bounced off bodies as everyone scrambled for the open doors. Small livestock, chickens and geese mostly but also the odd piglet which a moment before been tucked contentedly under their owners’ arms, began squawking as if the life was being crushed out of them.

Valentine had tried pushing his way through the scrum with the liberal use of his elbows and holding aloft the proletarian icon of his Party card as if its manifestation might part the crowd like a human Red Sea. And, in fact, had just managed to reach a carriage door when the peasant with his face presently stuck into Paul’s had pushed in front of him.

Valentine complained and pushed his card into the man’s face, but this particular peasant seemed signally unimpressed, by both Valentine’s Party card and by his threats.

‘Fuck off,’ he said and climbed in front of them into the carriage, giving Valentine a lesson in village etiquette as well as language. Not to mention a face full of spittle as he did so.

Paul, jammed up against Valentine as he was, felt him stiffen, halting so abruptly that Paul stepped on the toes of some innocent baboushka behind him. She squealed and Valentine shouted something at the peasant who was now on the step above him. It was a colloquial mixture of dialect and muzhik execration, as far as Paul could make out, and Valentine rounded it off by threatening to have the man arrested. The peasant merely repeated the direction in which he thought Valentine should go and how he should get there.

Where Valentine had learned his Russian, Paul didn’t know; the factories he’d worked in judging by his vocabulary. Paul’s Russian had been learned in the schoolroom of a noble’s house under the vigilant eyes and ears of private tutors. In those surroundings coarse words earned a clout around the head — peasant violence for peasant manners, as one tutor was fond of saying.

Now, squashed against the carriage door, the brute was blocking Paul’s way again, fumes from his patched smock competing with his foetid breath in the nauseation stakes, fouling the whole atmosphere between them.

Paul squeezed around so that he had his back to the man and pulled down the window to let a little fresh air into the carriage.

They had arrived at Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod Station. It was the terminus for most of the Petersburg trains, although some coming from the former capital also stopped at the Nikolaevsky. Stepping onto the platform, Paul thought how much more convenient that would have been. The Nikolaevsky was no more than a couple of hundred yards from the Kazan Station from where they would be catching the train for Kazan. The Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod Station, to the south and on the eastern side of the city, may not have been much more than a mile from the Kazan Station but it still meant having to find their way through the Moscow streets.

He had felt a hand squeeze his arm as he stepped off the train behind Valentine and had turned in time to see Sofya disappear into the crowd. Watching her go, wishing he was going with her, he had bumped up against Valentine.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘She’s gone,’ Paul said.

‘Gone?’

‘I told her to make her own way.’

‘Make her own way where?

‘South,’ Paul said, ‘anywhere.’ Anywhere away from you , was what he meant. ‘To look for her brother.’

A detachment of soldiers with slung rifles moved along the platform. Roughly dressed in an assortment of ill-matching uniforms, Paul assumed they were bound south themselves to face Deniken.

Valentine pushed something into Paul’s hand. ‘Here. Show it at the gate. It’s all they need to see.’

Paul looked down and saw he was holding Slepynin’s Party card. At the barrier two expressionless men were watching the crowd. One caught Paul’s eye as they approached. Paul forced himself to make straight for the man, barely breaking his stride and raising the Party card as he reached the barrier. The man’s icy gaze swept over it and then up at Paul. He nodded and Paul walked past though the barrier.

‘We can take a tram to Kazan Station,’ Valentine said, gesturing across the road to where a line of them were parked. He dropped his hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘We should have kept her with us, you know. Your cousin. She knows too much. About us , I mean.’

Paul paused at the kerb. ‘She said you killed Slepynin.’

For a second he thought Valentine was going to deny it and he held out Slepynin’s Party card like a trump he was prepared to play. Valentine’s face assumed his habitual open expression.

‘No choice I’m afraid, old man. He started asking too many awkward questions.’ He gave a shrug as if it wasn’t really of much consequence. ‘He was Cheka,’ he said. ‘Hardly a loss.’

Paul looked at the Communist Party of Bolsheviks card in his hand and thought about Slepynin and the man he had left in the alley; about Pinker on the boat, Tamara Oblenskaya and Olga Volokoskaya. He wondered if any of them had been a loss to somebody.

Valentine started across the road and Paul hurried to keep up.

‘Suppose they’d found his body before we got off the train? Did you think about that?’

Valentine boarded the tram through the rear door and bought the tickets. Paul slumped into a seat and leaned against the window. Red flags decorated the exterior of the station. Slogans had been strung across on banners exhorting the people to support the workers and peasants, to defend the Revolution, to stand in solidarity behind the Party… The tram started, rattling along Zemlyanói.

‘They wouldn’t find him before we reached Moscow,’ Valentine said quietly. ‘I put him out the lavatory window. And a devil of a job I had getting him through, too. He hadn’t gone hungry in Petersburg, that’s certain.’

Paul stared at the passing street.

‘Well, if she’s gone she’s gone,’ Valentine said philosophically. ‘With luck we’ll be out of the city before they pick her up.’ Then, no doubt remembering it was Paul’s cousin he was talking about, he added in palliation, ‘I know she was family of sorts, but after all old man, you hadn’t seen her for a long time and they’d hardly treated you like the prodigal son, had they?’

Paul was thinking Valentine had confused his biblical analogies but said nothing.

‘So I’d put her out of your mind if I were you,’ Valentine went on. ‘One thing, she doesn’t know where we’re heading so if they do happen to pick her up at least she won’t be able to tell them much. Anyway, all to the good if they assume we’re headed south as well. As it is I think we can now dispense with Mikhail Rostov. Komuch has raised their own army. We’ve got Masaryk’s letter of introduction to the Legion and that’s all we’ll need.’

Paul said nothing at all.

He watched the Moscow street pass on the other side of the window. He had been to the city often as a boy with the family, usually on the way to or from the family estate near Rostov. The trains south left from the Kursk and Nizhni-Novgorod, and they would invariably arrive there and generally break their journey in the city. They had a family house in Moscow in the Byeli Gorod , the most elegant quarter of the city near the palaces and shops on the wide streets north of the Kremlin. His mother had been fond of the opera and the ballet. She often attended performances at the Great Imperial Theatre in Theatre Square, or plays at the smaller Imperial opposite. As children they had never been allowed to accompany the adults and would have to stay home under the supervision of Korovina or someone like her. Unless it happened to be summer when the theatres were closed, in which case they would be taken to the circus, the Truzzi or the Nikitin in the Triumfálnaya Sadóvaya.