The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  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.

  3

  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.

  4

  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.

  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.

  5

  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 g
ave 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.’