David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

He had always thought of Moscow since as being the heart of Russia. Or perhaps more accurately, he supposed, his memory of Moscow filtered through his mother’s recollections. But he did have memories of Mátyuska Moskvá — ‘Little Mother Moscow’ — of his own. Mostly they were sights and scenes glimpsed from carriage windows as the family moved between railway stations and the house. Or while out shopping, or on the way to the circus. As he recalled now, Moscow had always appeared more colourful to him than home — Petersburg — and while he recalled that many people in Moscow dressed in the bourgeois style — what had then been termed German dress — as they had in Petersburg, it was here in Moscow that one was able to see the full diversity of the Russian Empire. There were the Tartars and the Circassians to be seen; Greeks in their red fezes and Persians wearing their tall conical sheepskin caps; there would be Cossacks from the Don and Bokhariots… and everywhere the bearded muzhíks , the peasants in their bast slippers and caftans and their armyáks . Looking out the tram window now, the colours were drab, like home — his real home — England. Army tunics and greatcoats could still be seen, despite the war with Germany being over. But they had a new war now, one with each other. And, like Europe, that required soldiers, dull men in grey unenlivened by any colour to denote rank or staff. Any colour other than red, that was. There was plenty of that: Bolshevik red.

When the tram reached Kazan Station he followed Valentine out of the front door. Threading their way through the crowd outside the station he became aware of the sense of menace in the air. He could almost taste it, as if he inhaled it with the oxygen. It had an electrical, almost metallic , taste, a taste redolent of blood in the back of the throat. Was it premonition? Or was the sense of menace simply a memory of blood mixed with fear, the anti-coagulant that kept it flowing? Imagination again. But it was exactly how he had felt in London, at Liverpool Street Station, when he had had the assassin’s blood over his clothes and was expecting to be challenged any minute.

What had his name been… Yashin? Yankov? No, they were Russian names and Valentine had said the man had been Lithuanian. Yurkas , that was it. For some reason the Bolsheviks preferred Lithuanians and Letts to staff their political police. Why was that? Did they believe Russians had an inborn disinclination against using force against their fellow nationals? He had never noticed the fact. Certainly not when the tsar had needed a demonstration broken up, a few heads cracked or a few men shot or sabred down. But then the tsar had favoured Cossacks for that sort of job and the Cossack was a breed apart…

‘Hungry?’ Valentine asked unexpectedly.

Paul realised he was. He had eaten nothing since the bread and cucumber he had shared with Sofya apart from a blini on the train.

‘There’s a traktir by the station,’ Valentine said. ‘We can eat there. We can’t count on getting much on the train and it’s nine hundred versts to Kazan.’

‘Six hundred miles? How long will that take?’

‘Thirty hours at least. The express is quicker but I don’t know if we can get on that. Best take the first offered.’

‘No chance of a sleeper, then?’

Valentine chuckled. ‘You’re a worker now, old man, and don’t you forget it.’

‘Sofya said you needed food cards to eat in traktirs.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Valentine assured him. ‘As Communist Party members we’re top of the heap now.’

Traktirs were cellars usually, the long dark rooms that served cheap black bread and salted cucumber, tea and vodka. Only there hadn’t been much vodka since the outbreak of the war when the tsar put an embargo on its manufacture — another thing the working classes had had against him, Paul supposed. Traktirs were where the poor and the peasants ate; where the workers who had no more than a few kopeks in their pockets could rely on vodka to make them forget the fact. They had traktirs in Petersburg, of course, but Paul had never been inside one. Valentine, though, pushing through the door and down the steps looked quite at home in the gloom of the long room.

It was no more than half full but the stench of the place hit Paul’s nostrils as if it had been packed to the gunnels. The air was thick with an odour of sweat and stewed tea, heavy with coarse Russian tobacco and rank clothes and unwashed bodies. He had grown used to the close proximity of men in the trenches, of living cheek by jowl with filthy bodies in uniforms that hadn’t been taken off for days at a time, used even to the constant aroma of putrefaction. But this was different. The trenches were at least in the open air. Here the ceilings and walls somehow compressed the smell so that walking into the room felt like immersing oneself in redolent fluid.

‘Over there,’ Valentine said, gesturing at one end of a long table by the door. ‘They might ask for a ration card but just show them your Party card. No one will argue.’ Then he wandered off across the room and left Paul to it.

Paul sat down, showed them Slepynin’s card and began chewing unenthusiastically at the bread served him. He asked if there was vodka and was brought a cloudy spirit that tasted as if it had been distilled from army boots. He knocked it back anyway and lit a cigarette. Russian tobacco had a taste all its own, at once sugary yet somehow oriental; heavy with a musty odour. He breathed it in deeply to rid himself of the stench around him.

Valentine came back, broke some bread and began sucking tea through a sugar lump.

‘There’s a train in an hour. There’ll be troops on it moving to join Trotsky at the Kazan front.’

‘Trotsky’s there?’

‘Lenin told him to retake the city whatever the cost. They’re saying Trotsky’s already shot every tenth man in the units that ran when the last attack failed.’

‘Lenin’s still alive then.’

‘Yes. If I can get to a telephone I’ll try ringing Ransome, see if I can find out what the situation is. Eat up and we’ll go and get our tickets.’

Paul pushed the bread away. ‘I’ve had enough.’

At the station, while Valentine bought their tickets and went to find a telephone, Paul looked for a lavatory. He found a malodorous one by the waiting room, a cubicle so filthy it suggested that whoever’s job it was to clean it had decided the chore beneath him now the Revolution had arrived.

Paul needed a wash. The spirit he had drunk, whatever it was, had been a bad idea. Already dehydrated from the overnight journey, it had only made him feel worse. He wasn’t quite desperate enough to drink the rust-coloured trickle emanating from the faucet, nor would have been even if there wasn’t a cholera scare in Moscow. Instead he took off his cap and dampened his hands then ran them over his face and around his collar. Needless to say there was nothing on which to dry himself, so he wiped his hands on his jacket. Putting the cap back on he went outside and waited by the gate until Valentine showed up.

‘Ransome’s in Stockholm with his mistress, Evgenia Shelepina,’ he said when he returned. ‘She’s purportedly there to assist the Bolshevik Ambassador to Sweden, Vovovsky. I didn’t know who I was speaking to so I kept it short rather than tell them anything.’

Paul thought that was probably just as well. He hadn’t forgotten that someone had tipped off the Bolsheviks that Cumming was sending him to Russia. It could only have been one of the myriad agents or diplomats already in the country. Logic would have dictated that whoever it was also knew of Valentine’s presence, but somehow he seemed able to come and go with impunity. Paul supposed the chances of ever finding out who the traitor was were slim and, as long as long as he wasn’t arrested, he didn’t much care. Finding traitors was Cumming’s job — or Kell’s. All Paul wanted was to get to some place where he might have a decent stab at trying to do the job he was there to do. Kazan seemed to offer the best opportunity for that and the fewer people who knew they were going there the better. Of course he still needed to contact the Legion, and to do that it would have helped if he had Masaryk’s letter. But that was in the money belt with Sofya.