The Lieutenant’s Lover (3 page)

And, Tonya noticed, he was fair. He never victimised the rich. He dealt with them the same way as he dealt with everyone. And he lived by the standards that he set others. Like everyone else, he was thin and hungry, and Tonya could tell from his clothes that he slept in them for warmth.

All morning, they strode around. Tonya didn’t find any opportunities for barter. She didn’t know why she was here. She felt cross with Rodyon for wasting her day.

‘I thought you were going to help me find logs,’ said Tonya, when they broke for lunch.

‘Yes. But first I wanted you to see this.’

‘See what?’

Rodyon turned to her, his handsome face with its broken nose.

‘People grumble because our revolution hasn’t delivered the promised land overnight. But how could it? For centuries, the bourgeois have exploited the workers. For centuries, the landowners have stolen from the peasants. It will take many years to put that right. And that’s why it’s important not to lose a day.’

‘Why me? Why did you want me to see it?’

‘Why you?’ Rodyon smiled and his smile turned his face back into an enigma. ‘Because it’s important for everyone to understand. Especially young people. Especially intelligent ones. Especially ones with sparkling eyes and—’

He moved his hand towards her face. Instinctively Tonya drew back and he managed to convert his gesture into a cousinly pat on the shoulder. He smiled as though to laugh away his last sentence, and she smiled as though she accepted his dismissal of it. She felt confused and her confusion made her uncomfortable. She liked Rodyon; liked and admired him. He was a man with power in a world where power mattered. But Tonya still never quite knew where she stood with him. She’d had men – boys really – in love with her before. But then she’d known that love was love. The boys had been goofy with it, soppy with it, angry with it, overcome with it. But it seemed as though nothing would ever overcome Rodyon. He seemed to be a man who could never be mastered.

Rodyon finished his bowl of gruel with a grimace.

‘Well then, comrade citizen, let’s find you logs.’ His voice sounded harsh.

The next house was a big mansion on Kuletsky Prospekt. And there it was the same thing. Arrangements were checked, papers filled, orders given, disputes settled. In one room, bone cold even in the middle of the day, a steel safe was cemented into the wall, the marks of sledgehammers and crowbars fresh in the surrounding plaster.

And on the top floor, Rodyon whispered to Tonya. ‘Your bourgeois await. How you deal with them is up to you.’

The family concerned – a mother, a small boy and a young man about Tonya’s age – were living in two rooms of a former servants’ attic. Rodyon flashed through his interrogation, purposeful and disciplined. Only this time, his usual fairness had been replaced by something harder. Rodyon’s questioning had a cruel edge to it, a hint of the police cells. The young man, the son, answered for the mother. Tonya could see that he was taken aback by Rodyon’s attitude, but he nevertheless kept his cool. After fifteen minutes, the questioning turned away from the matter of housing.

‘There is a safe downstairs.’

‘Yes.’

‘You are aware that the contents of that safe belong to the Petrograd Soviet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know what is inside?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know the codes?’

‘No.’

‘You’re telling me that your father didn’t tell you?’

‘I was away in the army. Before that – well, he thought I was too young, I suppose.’

‘You are aware that theft from the Petrograd Soviet is a serious offence?’

‘Of course.’

The young man smiled bitterly. And in that smile, for the first time, Tonya saw the revolution from the point of view of the former ruling class. This young man’s family had lost all its worldly goods, its enormous house, and now here he was being accused of stealing the things that had once been his. She was struck by his calmness, impressed.

‘Do you have any documents that relate to your father’s previous concerns?’

‘Yes.’

Without being asked the young man got them out and handed them over.

‘Why weren’t these submitted earlier to the proper authorities?’

‘I didn’t know they were meant to be.’

‘There were decrees issued and posted. It is the responsibility of every citizen to inform themselves and—’

‘I was in the army. I wasn’t in Petrograd.’

‘No matter. You
were
in the army. What about now?’

‘No, not any more. I was wounded…’

‘You have a demobilisation order from an officer in the Red Army?’

‘At the time it wasn’t the Red Army and—’

‘Movement orders?’

The interview lasted another couple of minutes: unrelenting, hard, hostile, tough. The business with the safe was brought up again. The young man insisted he knew nothing of it. Rodyon again reminded him of how seriously ‘theft from the Petrograd Soviet’ would be regarded. He meant either prison cells or the bullet, and the young man smiled grimly in acknowledgement.

And then it finished. Rodyon swept on out of the house, down onto the street, to the next house and the next and the next. But he left Tonya behind him, peering through the half-open door, listening to the silence.

Misha was about to bend down to check the stove, when he realised that the door out onto the corridor wasn’t closed and that the space outside wasn’t empty. He straightened. There was a girl there, dark-haired and serious. There was something very still in her manner, and something remarkable in her stillness. She was still in the way that a white owl is, or a deer grazing in snow. But there was also something watchful about her, untrusting. She didn’t come or go. She didn’t speak. She didn’t even glance away when she saw Misha looking at her.

‘
Zdrasvoutye
,’ he said. ‘Good day.’

‘Good day.’

She didn’t move.

‘If you want to come in, then come in. But close the door, it’s getting cold.’

She nodded, smiled briefly, and came in.

‘Well?’

‘I was wondering if you had things to trade?’

‘That depends. What do you have to sell?’

Her hand went into her pocket and came out with a lump of grey sugar and a pack of tobacco cut in half across the label. She held them out, but even as she did so, she must have seen that neither the tobacco nor the sugar were likely to go far in that house. Her mouth twitched. ‘Nothing. Just rubbish.’

Misha looked at the proffered goods and listened to the girl’s description of them with a grave face. Without changing his expression, he said, ‘Rubbish, hmm. We don’t have much call for that here. But perhaps we could find some garbage to exchange.’

He kept a straight face and looked directly at the girl. For just a second or so, she reflected his own expression: serious, unsmiling. Then his words got through some barrier, and she burst out laughing. She stuffed her goods away with a blush.

‘You want logs too,’ she said, gesturing at the feeble pile of birch wood next to the stove. ‘So do I.’

‘So does everyone, it seems. There are no wooden fences left any more.’

‘I know where to get logs though,’ said the girl. ‘Proper ones. Seasoned and everything. The peasants bring them in from the country, but they don’t dare come all the way into town because of the police. Only their prices are high. They don’t accept rubbish.’

Misha stared at the girl. The Housing Commissioner had only just left, seemingly leaving this strange girl washed up like driftwood on his doorstep. Could she possibly be a police spy? The girl read his thoughts.

‘Don’t worry about the commissioner. He’s gone. And anyway he’s my cousin. He brought me here, because he thought you might be able to… I mean he thought… I don’t really know what he thought.’

Misha hesitated, then decided to accept what she said. He plunged into the chest which contained those valuables too large to go under a floorboard. He came out with a china figurine, Meissen porcelain touched with gold leaf. It was very fine, very white, graceful.

‘Would this do, do you think?’

The girl gasped. Misha realised she had probably never seen anything so fine. He gave it to her to hold and look at. She turned it over reverentially, in silence. Her eyes were greenish, with a slightly eastern slant to her eyelids. Though entirely Russian in the way she looked, her eyes gave her a hint of something more exotic, a dash of the Tartar.

‘Well?’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘And would a peasant with a cart full of logs think so?’

She nodded. ‘Of course. They’re not short of food, logs or anything like that. Things like this … well! It would fetch a lot.’

‘Good. And if you had something other than rubbish to trade, you’d be happy to show me where to go?’

She nodded.

Misha grinned a huge and delighted grin. He had numerous problems, of course; all of them important. How to get his mother out of the country. What had happened to his father’s money. How to get inside the safe. But of all his concerns, his most pressing was firewood. Typhus was endemic in the city. Bad food and cold weather would turn it into a killer. His mother was certainly at risk. He dived into the chest again, and pulled out a second figurine. He tossed it into the air and caught it.

‘One for you, one for me. Is it too late to go there now?’

The girl looked at him and at the china doll in her hand. She was wide-eyed, disbelieving. ‘For me? Really?’

‘If you show me where to go.’

She nodded. ‘It’s too late now. We have to go first thing. It’ll be a long haul back anyway.’

‘Do you have a sledge?’

She shook her head.

‘Really,’ Misha tutted, ‘a pocketful of rubbish and no sledge. I can get one, though. Tomorrow morning then?’

She nodded.

She gazed down at the figurine in her hand and put it down gently on the table beside the stove. ‘You keep this,’ she said abruptly. ‘Until tomorrow. You shouldn’t…’

‘I shouldn’t what?’

‘You shouldn’t give people things like that. Not until you know that they’ll give you something in return. You don’t know me.’

‘But I trust you. If you’d taken the figurine, you’d have come back tomorrow anyway, wouldn’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Well then.’

‘But that’s not the point.’

‘Isn’t it?’

She didn’t answer, just turned to go. She had her hand on the door and was about to leave, when Misha stopped her. ‘Wait! I don’t know your name.’

‘Lensky.’

‘I can’t call you Lensky.’

‘Antonina Kirylovna Lensky.’

‘Antonina Kirylovna,’ said Misha with a very pre-revolutionary bow, ‘I’m Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich.’

‘Mikhail Ivanovich, comrade.’

‘Till tomorrow then.’

‘Till tomorrow.’

Tonya arrived early the next morning, just as Misha was bringing the sledge around to the front of the house. It was dawn, or just a few minutes after.

They started off quickly. The empty sledge ran so easily on the icy upper layer of the snow that it seemed weightless. At turnings, it bucked and slid sideways like a boisterous colt. Going down hills, even shallow ones, it began to run so fast that on two occasions Misha and Tonya fell backwards into it, steering and braking with a boot heel. Misha laughed out loud for pleasure.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘This is. It’s fun, isn’t it?’

‘It won’t be so much fun on the way back, pulling this thing full of logs.’

‘All the more reason to enjoy it now.’

Tonya shrugged and for a few moments they tramped along in silence. Then Misha spotted a side street that dropped in a long curve to a secondary road below. His face twitched. With a quick glance sideways at Tonya, he put out his foot and toppled her backwards into the sledge. In the same swift movement, he pulled the sledge around and directed it to the right, down the hill. The sledge quickly leaped forwards, picking up speed. Misha jumped in next to Tonya, who, apart from a single shout of surprise, had said nothing.

Misha had his foot out, ready to guide the sledge, but where possible he let it find its own direction, banking steeply on the mounds of grey snow.

‘This isn’t the right way,’ she said.

‘We’ll go left at the bottom and pick up our road again.’

Tonya kept her face set forwards. ‘You’re going too fast.’

‘All right then, I’ll brake.’

Misha jabbed his foot out and deliberately kicked a spray of fine powdery snow high into the air. The sledge swept into the spray, spattering them. At first Tonya didn’t smile, but then she too thrust her leg out and kicked up a miniature snowstorm. And then they were both at it, wrestling each other like brother and sister, kicking snow everywhere, letting the sledge plunge recklessly downhill. When they got to the bottom, the sledge struck a big drift lying transversely across their path and the nose plunged in, stopping them abruptly and showering them with yet more snow.