The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ began Evelyn, but then the closed obstinacy of the thin grey face stopped her. ‘Well Dindin, will you at least make a start with the kitchen while I go for the bread?’ She knew that she could never ask Dindin to go out in the street after what had almost happened to her in the Vyborg during the July Days, but the girl said:

  ‘Of course I will, Evie, but couldn’t Georgii go for the bread? I know he is up in his room.’

  ‘Is he? Thank God. Well, will you go down and start to wash the cups and things from breakfast – they’re all in the sink – while I go and tell him?’

  ‘Can I help, Evie?’ The shrill voice stopped Evelyn as she was turning go, and she looked down at little Alexander. His face was eager and his eyes were shining.

  ‘Yes, Sasha, my little dove: of course you may. Go with Dindin, and I’ll come down in a moment.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Markham, I must protest. No, Natalie, stay where you are.’ Evelyn spun round as the little girl smothered her disappointment and obeyed. The clear fury in Evelyn’s eyes made the Russian woman shrink back in her chair.

  ‘If you won’t help, the least you can do is to stay out of the way, you frightful …’ She gasped and bit back the last three words she had been going to say. Without waiting for any response, she left the room and walked down the passage to Georgii’s private little study. She was in too much of a hurry to knock and so she marched straight in to find him kneeling at his fireplace in his shirtsleeves, feeding the fire with sheets from a pile of papers. She shut the door behind her and at the sound he looked round. The fear in his face shocked her.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Georgii?’

  ‘None of your business, Cousin. Please forget what you have seen, and go away.’

  ‘I can’t. I need your help.’ He had already turned back to his task and so she repeated the plea. ‘I need you, Georgii Andreivitch.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Evelyn, I can’t stop. Try someone else.’

  ‘There is no one else. All the servants have gone. The food has been taken again. Your mother is in such a state that I’ve sent her to put her feet up in the morning room. Your father is not here. Ekaterina Nikolaievna is worse than useless. Dindin mustn’t go out alone. I would, but if I do, they’ll never get the kitchen in a state in which we can prepare food.’ Without stopping his careful burning, Georgii said to her:

  ‘It can’t be me. I must get all these destroyed.’ Then, deciding that he must make her understand: ‘We have heard that the Bolsheviki are going to outlaw the Cadets, and my delightful brother will no doubt have told them about my place in the party. If they come here and find all these … Well, they must not, that’s all.’

  ‘What are they?’ she asked, coming closer.

  ‘Better that you don’t know.’ He looked up at her, and saw from the shock in her brown eyes that she understood.

  ‘As soon as I have finished, I’ll come down.’ She turned to go, understanding that she would get no help except from the children until either Georgii or his father could spare her some of the time they felt they had to spend on their far more important work. Resenting them, afraid that she would not be able to do what had to be done, she went heavily downstairs.

  She averted her eyes from the sight of Dindin standing on an upturned bucket at the sink, her sleeves already soaked with dishwater above the elbows, and searched for any food that might have escaped the raiders’keen eyes. All she could find was a little of the coarse black bread the servants had always eaten and a small bag of potatoes. Well, they would just have to do, she decided, and then undid the ten small buttons of each cuff and rolled the sleeves well up her arms, before tying an old sack around her waist as an apron and making a start on her self-imposed task.

  By the time she had swept the floor, scrubbed the table and refilled two buckets with clean water to start the floor-scrubbing, her back was aching, and so were her arms and the backs of her legs. She had broken two fingernails and she could feel herself sweating unpleasantly all over. She plumped down on to her knees on the floor, dipped the big scrubbing brash in water, rubbed it on a cake of hard yellow soap and bent forwards. As she put the brush down, the shadows in the corner nearest to it began to move. Faint with disgust, she put her hand to her forehead and then she saw that the shadows were in reality black beetles, cockroaches, that scuttled out of their hiding place and ran past her. Suppressing a childish desire to scream, she sat back on her heels for a moment to recover. Then she heard Sasha’s voice:

  ‘Dindin, Dindin, who’s that at the back door?’

  Before Evelyn could stop the girl, she had run to the door to open it. Evelyn just leaned forward to her scrubbing brush, not wanting to see whatever was going to happen next, but then she heard Dindin say: ‘Mr Adamson, isn’t it terrible? We have nothing to eat for luncheon and all the servants have gone and we are having to do all their work.’

  ‘So, you have come to jeer, have you?’ said Evelyn in a biting voice.

  ‘No,’ he said, his voice almost gentle as he took in her tiredness and her dishevelled hair and dress. ‘To help. Georgii called to say you needed help.’

  ‘Not from a Bolshevik,’ she said and turned away to scrub hard at the floor.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said almost reverting to his old tone of voice. Before she could say anything else, Dindin intervened.

  ‘We do, we do, Mr Adamson. We need someone to collect the bread ration; and to find us some food. They took it all!’ There was outrage in her voice. Evelyn, scrubbing away, sitting back on her heels to rinse the brush and swinging forward to scrub again, wondered at the lack of fear in it. Dindin did not seem to understand how desperate their situation was becoming.

  ‘OK,’ came his voice. ‘I’ll see what I can do. So long then, Miss Markham.’

  Evelyn did not answer. She was determined to have finished scrubbing and to be tidy and in control when he came back. She hated the idea that he should have seen her so degraded.

  Dindin, who had finished the washing-up, came to give Evelyn a hand, and little Sasha brought cans of fresh water whenever they were needed, although Evelyn would not let him even try to lift one of the big galvanised iron buckets.

  ‘But I can, Evie, honestly. Look. They’re not heavy, really,’ he said, his small face already red with the effort. She smiled at him and ruffled his dark hair with her dirty hand and said:

  ‘No, no, little one. Put it down. I’ll carry them.’ She pushed herself up off her aching knees and straightened her back agonisingly before picking up the heavy buckets. When some of the evil dirty water slopped over the edge she felt ready to swear, but Sasha quickly mopped it up with a cloth he had found, and his sympathy turned her anger into an almost tearful laugh. She hauled the buckets up to the old stone sink one at a time and watched the filthy, scummy water slosh round and slowly seep down the drain, leaving a rim of greasy muck round the sink.

  They had just finished and were all three standing tired but triumphant surveying their achievement when Robert Adamson reappeared. He dumped a couple of packages on the table.

  ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t get much. There’s a mass of halva here that I found in a shop off the Liteini, and more potatoes. I wish I could have done better for you. Now I’ll peel these spuds for you.’

  ‘The what, Mr Adamson?’ asked Sasha, interested in the unfamiliar word.

  ‘Potatoes, Sasha. They need scrubbing and then peeling.’

  ‘Oh no, not more scrubbing,’ said Evelyn involuntarily. He looked down at her, and smiled in a way that she had never seen him smile before.

  ‘Don’t worry, Miss Markham, not that kind of scrubbing. Sasha and I’ll just hold them under the faucet and rub the mud off. I must say you have made a great job of this floor. You sit down. Now, Dina Andreievna, can you find something to cook them in? No, not a skillet – a pan. I think that one.’ He pointed to a large black pan beside the range, and Evelyn knew that she ought to insist that it was scoured. She
even opened her mouth to say something, but he took off the lid and rinsed it himself.

  ‘Oh, well, it’s clean enough, I suppose,’ he said before filling it with water. ‘Now, Dindin, put it on the range. Yes, that’s right.’

  Evelyn sat down at the table abruptly and pushed the heavy dark hair away from her forehead. She wondered vaguely how he knew what to do and assumed that in spite of his education he must come from a very poor family in America where he had had to learn that sort of thing. She was trying to think of an inoffensive way to ask whether she was right when he said:

  ‘Where’s Andrei Alexandrovitch?’

  ‘At the works, I suppose. He usually is.’

  ‘I don’t think so. They’ve been taken over by the State.’

  When Evelyn did not answer, he turned from his potato-peeling at the sink and, seeing that her face had closed in once more, said:

  ‘Now what’s up?’

  ‘I suppose I should have realised that you had come here just to spy.’

  At that he dropped potato and knife into the water, splashing Sasha and the newly bright floor, and came over to where she was sitting. She turned her face abruptly away. But he put one of his strong, wet hands under her chin, forcing her head round to face him again.

  ‘Miss Markham, will you stop it? I came because Georgii told me that you needed help, and I had time. The telegraph office is shut and so I can’t do any work. I am not a Bolshevik agent. I am not a Bolshevik. I am a foreign correspondent watching the affairs of this country for a paper in my own.’

  Evelyn looked him full in the eyes, and he was distracted for a moment by how magnificent she looked, her cheeks for once flushed with exercise and anger, her eyes wide open and her usually silkily perfect hair falling all about her face. But she said:

  ‘Then you are even worse than I had thought. You took my cousin’s hospitality while you tried to suborn one of his sons to a destructive, cruel political creed to which you do not even subscribe. What kind of person can you be? You have destroyed this family and now you say it was just for your newspaper.’ Suddenly everything that had happened to her and to the Suvarovs in the past terrible year seemed to be his fault and she wanted to hurt him, to make him angry.

  ‘You are despicable, a parasite and worse. You deliberately set out to damage something that may not have been perfect, but was a great deal better than what you put in its place. You are a destroyer, Mr Adamson.’

  His hand dropped away from her chin.

  ‘I guess there’s no point talking with you if you’re set on believing that,’ he said, but he found that he could not leave the subject alone. He wanted to make her understand.

  ‘You know nothing about this place, or the way that people without money have had to live … and die. Far too few people know and I’m trying in my telegrams to explain it.’

  ‘That may be true,’ said Evelyn coldly, ‘but even if it is, it does not excuse the way you … you made Piotr behave so that he had to leave this house.’

  As though he understood at last that her rage was fuelled by her regret for what had happened to Piotr, Adamson forced himself to smile at her. Then he took a deep, steady breath and tried to make her understand.

  ‘Miss Markham, it was not I who took Piotr to the Bolsheviki, but they who introduced me to him. He had to teach me what they want, and how they have suffered to get it. Jesus, I did not bring revolution to this family. Why, even his uncle was exiled for sedition after 1905.’

  ‘His uncle?’ she repeated, surprised out of her anger.

  ‘Yes, you knew surely? Andrei Alexandrovitch’s twin brother. He was sent to Siberia after the 1905 revolution and only got back last May. You must have heard about him. He’s living in Archangel now, at the Suvarov house in Shenkursk.’

  ‘Why not here?’

  ‘Piotr thinks it’s because after Siberia he can’t face the upheavals of political life. He has done his bit. No doubt he will be useful when it comes to organising the North. But first they must sort out the cities.’

  ‘Ow!’ A cry from the sink brought the antagonists back to the present. Dindin had cut her knuckle as she inexpertly sliced the skin off a large squashy potato.

  Evelyn held the bleeding finger under a spout of cold water, trying not to see how the mud from the potato skins mingled with Dindin’s blood, while Bob Adamson searched his pockets in vain for a clean handkerchief to use for a bandage. In the end Evelyn had to use her own, a pretty lace-edged square of delicate Irish linen that John had once given her. She watched Dindin’s blood soaking through it with regret, but she thought that John would prefer it to be used for so practical a purpose than to be left in a drawer smelling of stale lavender and sad memory. Then she wondered. He had changed so much on that last day; how could she be certain any longer of what he might think or say or do? She shivered. Bob Adamson touched her cold, wet hand for a moment.

  ‘Don’t fret. It’s not such a bad cut,’ he said. Evelyn smiled briefly and nodded, grateful for the warmth of his hand in her sudden moment of solitude.

  It was a small incident, but in some way it healed the hostility between Bob and Evelyn, and cemented the relationship between the four of them, as though they were a party of conspirators plotting against the rest of the world upstairs. When Georgii arrived, having succeeded in destroying all the incriminating documents in the house, each of them felt the contempt soldiers feel for those comfortable civilians they are dying to defend. But they allowed him to load a tray with plates and cutlery and to search for the salt, and even, once the potatoes were cooked, to carry the heavy tray upstairs to the dining room.

  The difference between the two factions was even more marked when the others saw what constituted their luncheon. To Evelyn and her helpers, the boiled potatoes and sickly halva constituted a triumph; to the rest, a privation hardly to be endured.

  Andrei Alexandrovitch arrived just in time to stop Ekaterina Nikolaievna from taking the last potato, and both she and his wife burst into explanations and excuses while Sasha and Evelyn exchanged happily amused glances. Sasha’s father was more surprised to see Evelyn’s uncharacteristically impish expression than the unconventional luncheon table, and so it was she whom he asked for the story. She gave him a colourless account, but Sasha and Dindin filled in the parts she had glossed over.

  As he listened and watched their faces, Andrei Suvarov began to believe that the Russia into which he had been born had gone for ever. It had been becoming clear to him that the theft – or ‘nationalisation’ – of his giant timber works was no temporary aberration, and that even if the Bolsheviki were crushed as he fervently hoped, it could be many months before Petrograd returned even to the spurious peace of the last weeks of the Provisional Government. He thought once more of the letters he had received from his brother, begging him to bring his family up to live in Shenkursk until the troubles were over.

  According to Nikolai Alexandrovitch, the Archangel Soviets were peaceful and conciliatory; there had been no burning of land or looting of the big houses; and life continued much as he remembered it from the years before his exile. Were it not for the knowledge that he would irrevocably lose the Petrograd house and much else if he left the city, Andrei would have accepted his brother’s suggestion at once. As it was, he allowed himself to say:

  ‘If this gets any worse we shall go and live in Archangel.’

  ‘In winter? Andrei Alexandrovitch, you must be mad. No one lives there who can help it, even in summer. You know quite well that winter temperatures are as bad as minus fifty degrees. We should all die.’

  ‘Nikki seems happy enough, and he has survived so far, Natasha.’

  ‘But, Papa, he has had all those years’practice in Siberia,’ offered Georgii, equally perturbed at the prospect of being dragged away from Petrograd, where he might actually be able to help the Cadets’ cause, to Archangel, which was too far away to have any importance. Andrei Alexandrovitch left the subject then, but he was certain that it could not
be long before they had to leave.

  In fact, it was Christmas Eve when it became clear even to Natalia

  Petrovna that Arctic temperatures would be preferable to what was happening in Petrograd. At about three in the afternoon, when it was already beginning to get dark, a party of secret policemen smashed their way into the house and ransacked it in search of the papers Georgii had so prudently destroyed. The men, all of whom had once been employed by the Tsar’s Okhrana, rampaged through the house, kicking down any door or cupboard that was locked without even asking for a key, removed a whole cartful of books and left the entire house looking as though it had been sacked by some barbarian army.

  The men had hardly been gone for more than fifteen minutes when Piotr arrived at the house for the first time since his party had seized power in the city. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s salon, looking sadly at his distraught family surrounded by the wreckage of their home. His mother’s treasured Boulle cabinets had been kicked open and some of the doors wrenched off; pictures had been slashed and delicate china ornaments swept disastrously to the floor. His mother and Dindin were in tears, his twin brother was arguing violently with their father, while Evelyn was clearly trying to wrest some kind of order from the books and papers that were strewn about the great room. None of them noticed him standing there, regret written all over his face, until Sasha looked up.

  ‘Look Evie, there’s Piotr.’

  At the sound of that shrill voice, Georgii stopped shouting at his father and jerked his head round to stare at his twin in contemptuous accusation. Piotr’s face hardened as he saw the message in his brother’s eyes. He might have said something then, if his mother had not stopped weeping and run clumsily across the room, crying:

  ‘Peterkin, my darling. Peterkin. Thank God you are all right.’

  Georgii snorted and then said:

  ‘Mama, for God’s sake! It’s my dear brother’s friends who have just been here to smash up your house and you’re concerned for him. When will you learn? You’re besotted.’