The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

‘Please, please. If it’s so important, can’t I come?’

  Despite the fact that Dindin had been cooped up in the stifling, airless house and must be restless as she was herself, Evelyn could not bring herself to help the girl into disobedience. With regret mixed into her decisiveness, she said:

  ‘Dindin, I can’t. I’m sorry. You really must do as Ekaterina Nikolaievna tells you. I can’t wait. I’ll see you this afternoon.’

  ‘I hate you, Evelyn. You’re so selfish. Why should you be allowed to go out with the twins while I have to stay here? You’re only three years older than me. It’s not fair. I hate you.’

  ‘Try not to say things you will regret, Dina Andreievna. Go back to the schoolroom at once. I’ll tell you everything about it when I get back. Go on. Do as you’re told.’

  Dindin flounced out of the room, disappointed out of her hero-worship for the first time since Evelyn had come to the house. Evelyn looked after her, dismissing the charge of selfishness, but wishing that her cousin had not said such things. Rather disturbed, she went slowly downstairs to meet the twins, who were waiting impatiently in the hall.

  ‘Come on,’ said Georgii crossly. ‘We’re missing it all and Piotr wants to pick up Adamson at his flat.’

  As they linked arms and walked over the hard, rutted snow on the pavements, it occurred to Evelyn that she had hardly seen the American for weeks. For some reason she felt a kind of embarrassment at the thought of meeting him again and looked rather furtively at him when he came down from his flat in response to Piotr’s loud knocking. But he seemed just as he always had; tall, untidy, eager, feeling in his breast pocket for his spectacles.

  He balanced them as usual far down his bony nose and looked at her:

  ‘And what are you doing on this expedition, Miss Markham? Surely young English ladies don’t come to political meetings.’

  At the mockery in his voice, Evelyn flushed, but Piotr defended her.

  ‘Now, now, Bob. There’s no need for that. Today is a great day; it’s right that Evelyn should witness it.’

  At that moment they all heard the crack of a rifle, and the blood drained out of Evelyn’s face.

  ‘Piotr, you said the guns had stopped. What was that? Isn’t it safe?’

  ‘All the machine guns have been silenced. That was just a feu de joie. The people are so excited that they are firing into the air. Don’t you see? After so many years of cruel suppression, they have won their liberty at last. Everyone in this city is free today.’

  Evelyn smiled shakily and wished that she had not betrayed her fear. As they turned into the Nevski Prospekt she saw that the broad street with its serenely spaced neo-classical buildings was full of people. There were commandeered motor cars packed with soldiers, their bayonets fixed and sticking up out of the crammed vehicles like unwieldy bunches of flowerless winter roses. The red flags on the bonnets flew bravely against the hard, greyish-white snow, and despite their weapons the men waved cheerfully and yelled exultant greetings to the people they passed, calling them Tovarisch! Comrade! Parties of students hurried along the street and groups of workmen talked together, gesticulating, shouting and slapping one another on the back. Almost everyone seemed good humoured and although every soldier carried guns and many of the civilians had naked swords for walking sticks, Evelyn saw no killing.

  But, as they turned left into the Liteini Prospekt to walk the mile and a half down to the Taurida Palace, she became aware that among the thickening crowd there were some less comfortable sights. In between the happy students and excited soldiery there were grimmer parties, surrounding unarmed, white-faced men who were being herded down the street towards the palace.

  ‘Police,’ answered Bob Adamson to a question of Evelyn’s. ‘Mainly, I think, the men involved in the machine-gunning.’ If that were true, she thought, they deserved their fate, and she tried to suppress the memory of the fear she had seen in their faces. Looking round for something to help her forget them, she saw smoke in the distance and the reddish-orange glow of fire. As they walked towards its source, she saw that the whole of the Palace of Justice was on fire and that there were rows of smaller bonfires in the snow outside it, being fed with heaps of papers by people who from that distance seemed to be dressed entirely in black and to be dancing like devils around the flames. She could hear the roar of the fire that fed off the great building, and even from a hundred yards away could feel its fierce heat. As they walked nearer and nearer to the building, the roaring crackle seemed to force itself in on her, and as sparks fountained up into the white sky, she felt an impulse to clutch Mr Adamson’s arm for reassurance. She tore her glance away from the figures circling round and round the smaller fires in the road and watched the back of his head as he walked ahead beside Piotr.

  Once they got within shouting distance of the fires, the spindly, cavorting creatures were transformed into perfectly ordinary-looking men and women wrapped in the familiar poor overcoats and mufflers of the Petrograd people, and Evelyn saw that all they were doing was walking round their bonfires, stoking them.

  ‘What are they burning?’ she asked.

  ‘Secret police records,’ Piotr answered cheerfully. ‘Look at those piles of paper and files: all the spying and trickery of the past is being wiped out. They are ensuring that we can start again – free – as though the Okhrana had never been. All the exiles will be able to come back from Siberia and abroad. The political prisoners will be freed. There won’t be any more imprisonment without trial, nor censorship or spying.’

  Evelyn heard the ringing tone of hope in his voice, and with the free, cold air on her face, felt that she was breathing properly for the first time since she had come to Petrograd. Her stride loosened and her chin lifted. As the words ‘start again – free’echoed again and again in her mind, for a few blessed moments she believed it might be possible for her too to wipe out everything that had happened in the unhappy and shameful past. She smiled at Piotr so openly and warmly that he was astonished.

  But her exhilaration did not last. When they reached the magnificent, colonnaded Taurida Palace, the semi-circular courtyard in front was filled with lorries and motors, some with their engines running and pumping smelly exhaust into the freezing air, and streams of people were milling aimlessly around. Forcing their way through the crowds and up the steps into the packed building, the twins’only concern was to get a good enough place to hear what was going on. Evelyn, leaned on, her toes stepped on, buffeted in the back by burly workmen, began to wish strenuously that she had not come. The Suvarovs seemed quite unaware of what she was suffering, and pushed their way through beside Bob Adamson, using their elbows as aggressively as anyone. Together they forced a tiny space at the edge of the Ekaterina Hall and tried to listen to the impassioned speaker.

  Evelyn’s poor Russian meant that she could not understand what was being said, in spite of Georgii’s whispered comments. She gave up trying after a while and looked around to get some understanding of the events that way. Her eye was caught by an immense gold frame that hung, empty, above the speaker. As soon as he stepped down to cheers and yells and stamping from the crowd, she asked her cousin about it.

  ‘It used to hold a portrait of the Tsar; I don’t know what happened to it.’ He turned aside to speak in Russian to one of the men behind him, and then looked back to Evie. ‘Some soldiers ripped it down with their bayonets only this morning.’

  Evelyn looked thoughtfully at the blank framed space and said half to herself:

  ‘But what will they put in its place?’

  The man Georgii had consulted understood English, and it was he who explained in a heavy accent:

  ‘This is Liberty, Comrade. Nothing and no one will hang in his place. Tyranny is dead. Long live Liberty!’

  He was a large man, rather dirty, and he held a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and a rifle in the other, and Evelyn thought he looked dangerous. She gave him a small, cold smile of acknowledgment and turned away without speaking, but Adamso
n caught the expression of distaste that crossed her face. He shrugged: he too, found the empty frame an eloquent symbol, but to him it was one of hope.

  A few minutes later there was a disturbance by the door and, with many of the other latecomers, Evelyn craned around to see what was happening. She saw a frightened old man being hauled through the crowd by two young soldiers. He must have been some sort of priest because he was dressed in a long black robe with a large gold cross on his chest. As he staggered, his terrified eyes looking this way and that as though desperate for some help or at least sympathy, Evelyn whispered to Georgii:

  ‘Who is that poor man?’

  ‘Don’t waste your pity: that’s the Metropolitan Pitirim – a creature of Rasputin.’

  But Evelyn could not control her pity as the old man was dragged through the hall, obviously frightened for his life, taunted by the crowd.

  ‘What are they saying, Georgii?’ she asked and was surprised to see him blush.

  ‘Oh, just insults. They are pretending that he was, well, intimate with the Tsarina and they’re promising to send her to him. It’s crude, but quite good humoured – and he deserves anything he gets, really he does.’

  ‘But what will they do to him?’

  ‘God knows. Shoot him probably. Evelyn, you must not look like that; he caused far more misery for years than he could possibly suffer now.’

  But for her, at that moment, what he had done was not the point. All she could see was one man at the mercy of many hundreds. The slogans and the bonfires that had exhilarated her paled before the realisation of what ‘starting again’ and ‘wiping out all the cruelty and tyranny’might actually mean to the people who had participated in the old regime.

  The proximity of the armed and unwashed men pressing so closely all around suddenly made her feel faint. She started to breathe erratically, in great gasps, and her forehead was soon covered in sweat. She wanted to attract the twins’attention, but could not bring herself to speak. At last her hoarse panting alerted Georgii to the urgency of doing something to help her. Piotr and Bob Adamson were too wrapped up in the proceedings to have noticed, and when Georgii said caustically to them, ‘Look here, Evelyn’s fainting. Someone’s got to take her home. I suppose it’ll have to be me,’ Piotr did not even reply; but Adamson looked around, and raised his eyes to heaven. How absolutely bloody typical of the silly girl, he thought. Insisting on forcing her way in on a day like today and then demanding to be taken home. Well, he was not going to miss this, the most important moment he had ever witnessed, just because a ridiculous British girl felt ill.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said. Quite apart from his own determination not to miss anything that happened on this day of days, his editor would have something to say if he did not telegraph, at the first possible moment, an eye-witness account of what was happening.

  Georgii shrugged resentfully as he realised that yet again he was going to have to do the tedious work while his brother selfishly enjoyed himself, and then turned to push a way through the massed spectators behind them. With an arm round Evelyn’s shoulders he helped her forward, murmuring encouraging words and apologies as they went.

  As soon as they got outside, Evelyn began to breathe more normally.

  ‘Thank you, Georgii. I shall be all right now. I am sorry. Do go back if you wish.’ But he still did not like the look of her and dreaded to think what his father would have said if he had left her alone in amongst the rabble. He pushed all the loose snow from the top step and told her to sit down and put her head between her knees. A clumsily-dressed man who was apparently standing guard with a cigarette in one hand and his rifle loosely held by the barrel in the other, slouched over to tell them to move on.

  ‘Can’t you see she’s ill?’ Georgii said angrily. The man shrugged, and jerked his unshaven chin at her.

  ‘Well, be quick.’

  Georgii waited until her face was pink again and her eyes looked much less wild; then he said:

  ‘Can you walk? I think we’d better go.’ Without looking again at the uncouth sentry, he shepherded Evelyn down the steps, across the littered, crowded courtyard and out into the Street.

  The long trudge home seemed endless, and the people they passed looked much grimmer than those they had walked among only an hour or so earlier. Evelyn knew that it was only her mood that had changed, but it did make everything look different. The fires at the Palace of Justice seemed to belch out far more smoke than before: it caught at their throats and made their eyes smart. Black smuts blew into their faces and dragged grey dirty lines across their skin.

  Evelyn wiped a gloved hand across her cheeks to brush away the grime, but succeeded only in smearing it all over. She wondered sickly whether she would be able to walk all the way back to the Suvarov house and lowered her head to stare down at her feet and count her steps. In that way, she thought, she might forget how far there was to go and how much her legs ached and her feet burned.

  She had lost count before she reached two thousand, but it was not long after that that they reached the house and found Natalia Petrovna waiting anxiously for them. As she saw them, she cried out:

  ‘Evelyn, whatever has happened? You look terrible.’

  Very tired after the long walk and the emotional tension of the morning, Evelyn found she could not answer.

  ‘Come into the morning room.’

  Evelyn followed her, expecting the reprimand she knew she deserved for staying out so long and missing the first hour of her afternoon lessons. When she had shut the door behind Natalia Petrovna, she tried to speak, but the elder woman forestalled her.

  ‘The mail from England has arrived at last.’

  Evelyn’s drawn face lit up and she stretched out a hand towards Natalia Petrovna, who gave her two letters. She had a curious expression on her face that Evelyn had never seen before. In a trembling voice Natalia Petrovna said:

  ‘Sit down here on the sofa while you read your letters.’

  In that instant, Evelyn seemed to understand.

  ‘Tony?’ she whispered. Natalia Petrovna nodded. Evelyn wailed, ‘No,’ on a single high note, and to her cousin’s consternation sank on to the sofa, bent almost double in pain.

  ‘No,’ the agonised protest came again and, really worried, Natalia Petrovna watched the girl put her head on her knees and, pulling off the shawl she had worn around her head, throw it on to the floor. Tortoiseshell pins were dragged out of her collapsing hair with the shawl, and her shoulders shook as she wept for her dead brother, for John, and for everything the war was taking from her.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Your father could not explain much in his letter to us. He only said that it happened when Captain Markham was leading his men across No Man’s Land to the wire.’

  Evelyn flinched and then said in a voice so composed that it sounded hard:

  ‘I think if you will forgive me I shall go up to my room.’

  That was the last any of the Suvarovs saw of Evelyn for four days. Natalia Petrovna sent up trays of the most delectable food she could think of that was still available; she sent oral messages by Anna, the maid; she sent Ekaterina Nikolaievna; she sent kindly phrased written notes; but Evelyn answered none of them. When she eventually emerged, she was pale and she looked thinner and more tired than ever, but her dark eyes were calm, her wide mouth looked resolute, and she was as perfectly dressed and tidy as she had ever been.

  None of her cousins dared to speak to her of her brother and it was only Robert Adamson who thought that behind the hard coolness of her face lay a need to talk about Anthony. But Adamson’s attempt to break through to her was clumsy, and she turned away from him, the pain in her face so severe that he was silenced. But for once he felt really sorry for her, and so he tried to touch her, in a gesture of comfort. She was as taut as a violin string and only looked at him angrily until he took his hand away from her arm.

  He could not know that through her sorrow was beating the memory
she had tried so hard to keep out of her mind. Now that Tony was dead, it was becoming almost impossible for her to believe that John could have survived. Ever since the news of his disappearance had reached her, she had told herself that while she hung on to her hope, she would be doing something to keep him alive. If she ever once allowed herself to doubt, to break the link that she still felt between them, she believed that the telegram confirming his death would come.

  Now with the link begining to crack, Evelyn was unable to keep away the memory of John’s handsome face as it had hung above her in the dimmed sunlight, distorted by the tears that shocked her so much, and of his hoarse, unfamiliar voice telling her about the horrors to which he must return. She had been unable to give him any comfort as she lay there on the floor of the old summer house in his parents’garden, looking up at him, aching and ashamed.

  If she had not loved him so much she would never have been able to yield to his desperate pleas, she would never have gone with him to the summer house, and she would not have become indissolubly linked to him. For persuading her into that frightening surrender and then breaking up in front of her eyes when he had always been so strong and confident and right, she had almost hated him. Then had come the telegram, and her hate had seemed so cruel that she had tried to wipe the memory of it out of her mind and concentrate on the man he had always seemed to be.

  Now she was beginning to find it difficult to forgive herself for concentrating so hard on John. There had been times when she had almost forgotten that Tony, too, was out there, fighting, being wounded and afraid, perhaps even as frightened as John had so astoundingly shown himself to be. Now Tony was dead.

  All the happy nursery years she had spent with him were smirched in her mind, and she would never be able to think of them without pain. All his hopes and ambitions could never be achieved now. He was destroyed, dead, nothing.

  Desperately trying to think of something – anything – else, she remembered Sergei Voroshilov. Why had she allowed herself even to like him? Was it not enough that she should torture herself with fear and misery about her brother and her lover? Must she also be afraid for Sergei? She did not think that she could bear to hear any more bad news of anyone for whom she cared at all.