The Lieutenant’s Lover (2 page)

‘Comrade citizen Pavel, you mean,’ said her father.

Tonya ignored him and hurried out. A thin snow was falling, but nothing substantial, just tiny round specks flung around in a piercing wind. Her father’s last comment could have meant nothing at all, just another one of the old man’s jokes, but it had possibly been intended as a clue. She hurried through the streets, feeling her breath beginning to freeze on the brim of her cap.

After walking for twenty minutes, she came to the intersection of Sadoyava Triumfalnaya and Sadoyava Karetnaya. There was a large building with a broad fanlight over a lighted porch. Outside there was a pile of logs, guarded by a soldier with a rifle.

‘Is this where the meeting is?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Inside. It’s been going two hours already.’

‘Those logs…?’

‘… are red logs. For the Petrograd Soviet.’

The soldier might have meant his answer, or he might just be getting ready to haggle. Tonya thrust her hand in her pocket and brought out a lump of sugar as big as her fist. It was damp, grey and sticky, but good currency all the same.

‘I’ve got sugar.’

The soldier shook his head. ‘The logs belong to Comrade Lenin. You need to ask him.’

Tonya stuffed her sugar away, unbothered by the rejection. In this strange new world, money was no longer reliable. In a city where food and fuel were desperately short, Tonya now always carried something with her, in case she came across a good opportunity to trade. Most times she failed, sometimes she got lucky. It was just a question of being always ready to try.

She went on into the building. Down in the basement, there was a meeting of the Borough Housing Commission. At the front of the room, there was a kind of podium, planks stretched across wooden egg crates. The podium was dominated by a speaker, hatless and wearing an unbuttoned leather jerkin. The man caught sight of Tonya as she entered. She knew he’d seen her, because his eyes fixed on her, but there was no change in his voice or posture. His presence commanded the room. He was strikingly good-looking with dark curly hair, worn shorthand a lean, handsome, intelligent face. The only bad feature he possessed was a nose that had been badly broken. Though still narrow, it bent sharply where it had been struck.

The man, Rodyon Leonidovich Kornikov, was Tonya’s cousin and a rising star in the new Bolshevik administration. He fixed his eyes on her, then directed his glance deliberately across the room, before bringing it back to her. He never stopped speaking for a second. His sentences came out perfectly, without mistake or hesitation. Tonya looked over to where the man had indicated. Pavel was there, his eyes shining unhealthily, his coat unbuttoned like the man on the platform. Tonya pushed her way across to him.

‘Pavel! You’ll freeze.’

The boy, a fourteen-year-old, began buttoning up almost as soon as he saw his sister; and he let her adjust his hat and scarf. But he still kept his eyes on the platform where Rodyon was winding up.

Tonya turned her attention from Pavel to her cousin. Rodyon spoke of the necessity of establishing revolutionary principles ‘from the first winter on; from the worst slum outwards’. The broken nose in his perfect face served to draw attention to his handsomeness, adding something mesmerising to his features. He finished speaking, to a scattering of applause.

Pavel turned to his sister.

‘Wasn’t he good? When I’m older—’

‘When you’re older you can go out on your own. Right now, you need to stay warm.’

Pavel shrugged. His eyes still shone as though fevered. Rodyon barged through the crowd towards them, stopping in front of Tonya.

‘Comrade!’

‘Rodya! It’s all very well for you to march about like you don’t feel the cold. You should think about Pavel. He copies you.’

‘He will be a good citizen one day. Enthusiastic.’

‘If he doesn’t catch his death first.’

Rodyon smiled. He had perfect teeth, white and even.

‘Well, comrade,’ he said to Pavel. ‘Your sister’s right. You should stay warm too.’

The boy nodded.

‘Are you all right for things? Food and everything?’

‘We don’t have any wood. We’ll have nothing at all to burn by the end of the week.’

‘You have your allocation of course?’

‘If it comes. Last time there was nothing.’

‘That can’t be helped. You can’t rebuild a house without knocking down a wall or two.’

‘They’re not walls. They’re your precious comrade citizens.’

Rodyon smiled. He was an important man, the Housing Commissar of the Petrograd Soviet.

‘I can’t help you. Everyone’s in the same situation.’

Tonya shrugged. She hadn’t actually asked for help, but didn’t say so.

‘But if you want… Uncle Kiryl is still a thief, I suppose?’

Tonya nodded. Her father, Kiryl, worked on the railway and stole coal. An accomplice threw shovelfuls off the train as it entered the station. Kiryl collected the bits up in a sack and sold it on the black market. ‘He only gets vodka and tobacco. He wouldn’t even think of bringing the coal home.’

‘But still, you have things to trade.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then come with me on my tour of inspection tomorrow. You never know what you’ll find in these places once owned by the bourgeois.’

‘Thank you.’

He shook his head. ‘No thanks and no favours. When we have things running properly, you won’t be short of logs.’

He held Tonya’s eyes one last time. Rodyon was a long-time Bolshevik, with two spells in prison to his credit. His nose had been broken in a brawl with police and he was rising fast under the new regime. He had also, for the last two years, been paying careful court to Tonya. He had been constant and, in his way, generous, but Tonya never quite knew whether he was sincere. She wasn’t sure if she was his only girl, or if Rodyon would ever lose his heart to a woman. He seemed too self-possessed for that, too important.

She felt suddenly uncomfortable with him and looked away. But logs were logs, and if Rodyon could help her get some, then she would certainly do as he suggested.

‘Till tomorrow then,’ she said.

Misha made changes.

He made them fast, over the tears and protests of his mother and the servants. He began with the barricade at the mouth of the corridor.

‘It has to come down. Now. You think the red militias will be stopped by a chaise longue and a couple of armchairs? Nonsense. It has to come down. Vitaly, come here. I want you to dismantle this thing. That horrible old wardrobe is no good for anything. We can use it for firewood. Those other pieces you can share out among the others.

‘Next the windows. They’re hopeless. They need fixing properly. We don’t have any putty, of course. But how do you make putty? It’s chalk and oil, isn’t it? Linseed oil. I saw chalk in Yevgeny’s room. We’ll use that. Seraphima, do you know where we can get linseed oil? If we can’t get the oil, ordinary flax seeds will do. We can press them for oil. And in the meantime, curtains.

Do we have any fabric? No? Then use the hanging in mother’s room—’

‘The tapestry, Misha! No! It’s French, you know. Your grandmother—’

‘It’s thick and it’s heavy. It’ll do. Use the carpet too if you have to.’

And on it went.

The fireplaces were useless, so Misha stole some empty oil cans and turned them into stoves. He dismissed the servants. He exchanged the ebony chest for a sackful of millet flour, which would see them through winter. He made an inventory of their remaining valuables and concealed them beneath the floorboards.

But problems remained.

Firewood was the worst. They had terribly little, and decent firewood seemed almost impossible to obtain. And the next thing was his mother. She couldn’t adjust to the new conditions. She was always sick with one thing or another. It wasn’t just physical illness, it was a sickness that penetrated her soul. Misha was certain that if he couldn’t find a way to get her into a place of safety, then she wouldn’t survive. Yevgeny too was having his childhood stolen. It seemed clear that the best thing for all of them was to escape Russia, to make their way to Switzerland to join Natasha and Raisa there. But how to do that, with no money, no friends, no help …?

It was as he was thinking about that precise problem one evening that inspiration came to him.

He had gone, as he had done often enough already, over to the glass cabinet and taken out a bundle of papers: his father’s papers that his mother had managed to salvage. He turned the papers in his hand. Although only a few months old, they seemed as ancient as Egyptian papyrus. Stock certificates. Title deeds. Bank statements. Holdings of land. Everything represented by those papers had been swept away, almost literally overnight. On the top of the pile, there was a coloured picture postcard of General Kutuzov, the victor of the Battle of Borodino a hundred years earlier and a particular hero of Misha’s father. It was odd seeing the card. It was almost as though these stock certificates and the struggle against Napoleon both existed in the same far distant past.

But as well as certificates of ownership, the bundle contained letters from lawyers, accountants, brokers. And a persistent theme ran through them. From about February 1917, his father seemed to have started selling assets. Stocks, bonds, land, anything. There were no huge sales. The country was at war with Germany and Austria, after all. It would have been impossible to sell up completely, even if he had wanted to. But there was a steady stream of sales and yet no evidence from the bank statements that his savings accounts had increased by even a rouble. And yet there were hundreds of thousands of roubles involved. Though Misha had reviewed the papers a dozen times already, he was struck by a sudden thought.

‘Mother? These papers. Where did you get them?’

‘Oh, your father’s study of course. Where else?’

‘
Where
in his study? His desk? His cabinet?’

‘Oh yes. His desk, the cabinet. Luckily we had the keys. But we had to work fast. One day, we had everything, the next it was a knock at the door and this horrible young man with a leather coat telling us about the new decrees.’

‘You had the key. Who else?’

‘Oh, your father, silly! How else could he have opened them?’ Emma Ernestovna laughed out loud.

‘His secretary, I suppose?’

‘Leon? I suppose.’

‘And how did you happen to have one? Did he give it to you?’

‘Oh no, not me. Why should I have a key to his cabinet? Maria Fedorovna, the housekeeper, had a set of keys. That cabinet! Japanese lacquer. So nice, but the polishing!’

‘Maria Fedorovna had a key, did she?’

Misha’s mother said something in reply, but he was no longer listening. He felt a sudden shock of excitement. Because it was inconceivable that his father would have left his most important documents in a place where a servant could have access to them. It was almost as if the bundle that his mother rescued had been a decoy to draw attention away from the real ones. Misha jumped up.

‘Excuse me.’

He ran out, down the corridor and downstairs. His father’s study had been on the ground floor, behind the drawing room, a place of high bookshelves, cigar smoke, polished wood and leather. Of course, it wasn’t like that now. Two families had been allocated the room, and seemed to fight bitterly over the use of every square inch. A china pisspot tucked behind a curtain constituted the hygiene arrangements. A trail of slops led from there to the nearest window. But that wasn’t what caught Misha’s notice.

What caught his eye was a grey steel safe, bolted and cemented into the wall behind the panelling. The safe had only been exposed when the room’s inhabitants had begun ripping up the panelling for firewood. The plaster around the safe had been smashed off. Misha could see the pale marks where sledgehammers had struck. But the safe had withstood the assault. Steel bars protruding from the side of the safe were deeply set into the masonry. Misha had never known of the safe’s existence. Its sudden exposure reminded him of what his family must have been through in those first weeks of revolution, before his arrival home. No wonder his mother was in a state of collapse. Anyone would be.

He looked up, snapping himself out of this unhelpful change of thought. Both families, fourteen or fifteen people in all, were staring at Misha, grinning. They knew who he was, as did all the occupants of the house. An old man, a grandfather spat in the fireplace and cackled, ‘Come to say goodbye, eh?’

‘I’m looking for logs. You don’t have any, do you?’

The old man wasn’t deterred. He nodded back at the safe. ‘They’re coming to take it away next week. They’re going to put a tractor in the yard out there, run chains in through the window, then bang! Out it comes. It’s full of gold, they say.’

‘When are they coming?’

‘Tuesday. Wednesday. Who knows?’

That gave Misha three days, maybe four. Except he didn’t know the codes and he wasn’t a safe-breaker.

Tonya went with Rodyon the next day.

The Petrograd Soviet had issued a stream of housing decrees, making bold statements about minimum space requirements, light requirements, heat requirements, water and sewerage requirements. It was Rodyon’s job to see those decrees were implemented, or at least not wildly breached. All morning, Tonya watched him stride around his domain, backed by a flurry of lesser officials. And he did stride. He seemed to fly through his duties. Those with surplus space were reprimanded, spare rooms reallocated, disputes settled.