David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

Paul was shocked. Saintly Tolstoy, the peasants’ friend? If his estate wasn’t safe, whose was? He wondered how many others there were like the Rostovs who hadn’t fled when they had the chance. It was beginning to look as if it was too late now, at least if one wanted to get out with anything of value; perhaps even one’s life. It made him wonder why any had stayed. Was it arrogance? The hubris of a wealthy elite unable to comprehend that the life they enjoyed had gone, and their status with it?

He didn’t suppose the Rostovs were much different in that regard. Being only three generations from a peasant on the make, though, one might have supposed that the avarice that had lifted them out of serfdom might have given them some inkling as to just what those peasants they had left behind might do given the chance. But perhaps their memories weren’t that long. Money and power were corrosive agents and theirs had eaten away all those distasteful truths about their origin. That was probably why they had disliked him and his mother so much; being in the Rostovs’ eyes social inferiors, his mother may have excited what few memories of where the family had come from that remained.

‘It’s all fair game now,’ Valentine said, ‘if there’s land to appropriate. Lenin isn’t going to find the peasants as easy to manipulate as he did the workers, though.’

‘You sound as if you think he’ll live.’

‘How did she know which train we were on?’ Valentine suddenly asked.

‘What, Sofya? She followed us from the station.’

‘I never saw her.’

‘Perhaps you weren’t looking,’ said Paul, glad for once to be able to point up some deficiency in Valentine’s expertise.

‘Where is she now?’

‘A couple of carriages back, sitting with a peasant and a chicken. Do you want me to fetch her?’

‘Not if she’s got a seat,’ Valentine said, sounding uncharacteristically considerate. ‘It’s a long journey.’

The train turned east after Lyubertzi, passing through Gzhel and Kurovskaya. They made a lengthy stop at Tcherusti and, getting hungry, Paul got off only to find the restaurant was closed. He regretted not having eaten more in the traktir while he had the opportunity. It was another 150 versts to Murom and would take hours.

The morning crawled by in discomfort then slowed into an interminable afternoon. When they finally reached Murom they found the railway restaurant open but with little to offer. The soldiers on their way to the Kazan front spilled off the train and immediately filled the restaurant and Paul deliberately kept out of their way. He killed time by reading the faded posters on the waiting-room wall. They promoted the attractions of Murom’s old town, extolling the beauty of the River Oká and its harbour. A timetable advertised steamer trips up the Volga to Nizhni-Novgorod, for the tourists who once visited the area, he supposed. Not these days. There were no bourgeoisie left to take idle trips through the Russian countryside. When the soldiers came out of the restaurant and began milling around the platform like aimless sheep, he followed Valentine inside and made do with what they had left, bowls of kasha and bread.

Sofya did not get off and Paul put a piece of bread in his pocket to give to her later. He didn’t suppose she had eaten any more than he had since the previous day and certainly wouldn’t have gone into a traktir by herself.

‘Masaryk’s letter,’ Valentine said as he finished. ‘Once we get to Kazan we’ll find whoever’s in command of the Legion and show it to them. It’s safe?’

Paul patted his stomach where the money belt used to be, wishing Valentine wouldn’t keep on about the letter. He supposed he’d better get it back from Sofya in case Valentine took it into his head to look at the damned thing. Later, he decided, when it got dark and Valentine was asleep. He could slip back to where Sofya was and retrieve it. But it wouldn’t be dark for a long time yet even though they had been travelling for the best part of ten hours. The train barely made twenty miles an hour and there was still over four hundred to go before they reached Kazan. Not that he supposed they’d get as far as the city itself on the train. The front would be between them and the town and they would have to get off as close as they dared and make their own way across the lines.

He lit a cigarette after finishing what was left of his kasha , leaning towards Valentine so as not to be overheard.

‘Those steamer timetables gave me an idea,’ he said. ‘In Petersburg we took a barge to get to your house in the Nevskaya. Sofya said it was safer than using the streets. Perhaps we could get into Kazan the same way.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, if steamers used to ply up-river to Nizhni-Novgorod, I suppose they must have gone down-river as well, to Kazan?’

‘I was thinking much the same thing myself,’ Valentine said.

‘Oh. You were, were you?’

‘There’s a town called Sviyázhsk about thirty miles before Kazan. The line crosses the Volga just a few versts beyond it, over a new railway bridge they built just before the war.’ He paused and his lips twisted with an ironic smile. ‘They called it the Romanov Bridge although I daresay it’s probably been renamed the Trotsky bridge by now. Before the revolution steamers used to run up and down the river taking passengers who didn’t want to go by train. I was thinking we might be able to find one that will take us into Kazan.’

‘Unless the Bolsheviks have blockaded the river,’ Paul said, wondering just when Valentine had started thinking about a steamer.

‘I don’t see why they should,’ Valentine said, sucking noisily on his tea. ‘After all, they’re on the offensive and anyone coming down river will be behind the Bolshevik lines. It’s the Whites who are under attack.’

‘What about someone trying to reinforce Kazan?’

‘And cross miles of enemy territory to do it?’ Valentine asked.

‘People going over to the Whites, then,’ Paul suggested. ‘To get away from the Bolsheviks.’

‘It was your idea to find a steamer,’ Valentine said, but that is more likely. If we do find one I expect we’ll be fired on, but I suppose you’re used to that.’

Even if he was it was hardly something Paul had gone through by choice. Not that he could see there was much of one now. He’d only been putting forward objections because Valentine had claimed to have had the idea of a steamer first.

The train whistle blew and they climbed back aboard. Most of the passengers appeared to have got off at Murom and, although a few more had boarded, there were seats to spare as he passed back through the carriages to give Sofya the bread he had brought from the restaurant. He found her drinking tea made with water boiled in the samovar at the end of the carriage and sharing a meal with the peasant woman. Small parcels of wrapped cheese and cucumber, cooked potato and beets, lay spread across their laps. The chicken was still sitting on Sofya’s lap, clucking contentedly as it pecked at stray morsels of food.

Sofya looked inquiringly at his unappetising lump of rye bread. ‘Pasha,’ she said, taking it, ‘that was thoughtful.’

He went back to where Valentine was sitting, feeling even more hungry than he had been before.

They crossed the Oká and then the Tyosha River. The train rumbled on at its pedestrian pace, accompanied by a dirt road that paralleled the track. In the late afternoon they ran south-east through a wheat district. There wasn’t much traffic on the dirt road, just the occasional cart and a few peasants on foot walking between villages. The golden fields of wheat stretched away either side of the track, undulating in the breeze and bowed down under the heavy weight of their ears. Mesmerised, Paul stared at it for hours until dusk began to fall. It would be harvest in a week or two and the fields full of toiling peasants, scything down a crop that this year they would regard as their own, to sell as they pleased. What would Bolshevik ideology have to say about that?