The Longest Winter

by Daphne Wright

  By the end of 25 January, they had reached Bereznik, a village on the main road to Archangel, but it was not until 2 February that they marched wearily into the town itself. By then, Evelyn had more than once given up her place in the sleigh beside Bob to dangerously exhausted soldiers, checked every patient in her particular group for signs of frostbite, handed out rations, helped to brew hot drinks on pathetic fires lit by the roadside, and carried out myriad instructions from all the doctors in turn.

  On 29 January they had heard sounds of rifle fire, and Evelyn had stopped in the middle of renewing a dressing to listen, appalled to think that her cousins might even at this late stage be involved in a battle with the Bolsheviki. Dull, thunderous crashes succeeded the sharp rifle cracks, and the man on whose wincing body she was working said in his strong Detroit accent:

  ‘That’s the Canadians, lady. That’s why they were left there. They’ll see to it. Don’t you worry.’

  ‘No. Thank you, Sergeant,’ she said, looking at the stripes on the torn, bloodstained tunic. ‘There, I hope that’s a bit less uncomfortable.’

  ‘I’ll do fine. On your way now. There’s no need to stay.’

  She hid her relief in as bright a smile as she could summon up and plodded back through the icy hard snow to the sleigh. Adamson welcomed her back with a searching look and a curt instruction:

  ‘Get in and sleep. You’ll drop if you go on like this.’

  She was too tired to answer, but she obeyed, taking care to lean against the side of the sleigh so that she might not slip over in her sleep and find herself lying against him.

  Adamson understood what she was doing and wished that he could hug her – comfort her in the only way he could think of – but he could not find enough energy to try to batter down her resistance. He was so tired.

  Trying to think of something other than the pain in his legs, he looked sideways at Evelyn. Something about the way her dark head drooped against the back of the sleigh made him think of the last scene with his mother before he left New York for ever. He had never written to her and had thrown her letters away without reading them, telling himself that he wanted to cut every feeling for her and the rest of them right out of his mind. What they had done still shocked him, but his own self-righteousness now tasted a lot less satisfactory than it had done.

  He looked back at his younger self and if he had not been so weary would have laughed at the poor fool: so idealistic that he had exiled himself from home and family because all they seemed to care about was making themselves a second, quite unnecessary, fortune; and so ignorant that he had believed he could find people, somewhere in the world, who were governed not by the desire for wealth, but only by a love of humanity. An insidious idea suggested itself to him and he began to imagine the letter he might write to his mother.

  Then he took himself to task and chided himself for his ludicrous sentimentality. That part of his life was over. He would never go back if he could help it. What he ought to be doing was sorting out in his mind what he would write in his next major article about the reconstruction of this country.

  But that was no better; what was the point of pretending that Russia would soon be normal again and that the revolutionaries whom he had idealised would turn out to be the men he had always thought them? Stories of terrible cruelty perpetrated both by Whites and Reds came back to him and reports of unpleasant punishments invented by the Bolshevik leaders, which he could not ignore. The one that most horrified him had been imposed on Maria Spiridonova, a leader of the Left Social Revolutionary movement. She had paid terribly for her belief in the Revolution, suffering multiple rape by the Tsar’s Cossacks who arrested her in 1906 and then sentenced her to penal servitude for life. She had been released by the first revolution and used her freedom to argue passionately for the rights of the peasants, whom, she believed, Lenin hated. Her opposition to the Bolsheviki had led first to imprisonment in the Kremlin and now, Bob had heard just before his accident, to forcible incarceration in a home for neurasthenics. That the leaders of the Revolution could not accept criticism or verbal opposition from people who were essentially of the same mind as themselves, shocked him; that they could so severely and unnecessarily punish people for those criticisms reminded him sickeningly of the Tsar and Rasputin and all the most-hated figures of the past.

  He had believed implicitly in the Revolution, convinced that its chief aim was the alleviation of human misery. Not until he had seen for himself what happens when idealists get their hands not so much in the till as on the executioner’s rifle, had he understood that human suffering did not concern any of them very much. He hated the way he had been forced to face the consequences of Marx’s tenet that ends justify means, and he despised himself for ignoring them until he had been so forced. The only glimmer of light in the darkness he had pulled over himself was the memory of what Nikolai Alexandrovitch had said just before he left the hospital:

  ‘My boy, if you truly want to make people happier, safer, even better fed, than they are, then you must set about it yourself – directly. Any mass movement, organised politically, will by its very nature create more misery than it can possibly cure.’

  Half lying in the sleigh on his way to a town on the edge of the Arctic Circle, fleeing from a civil war that was becoming more vicious month by month, surrounded by danger and death, Bob tried to force himself to concentrate on that article of Nikolai’s faith. But he could not, and in his depression and pain his mother’s face and words as she said goodbye to him came back to him in the extra vividness of dream. He had always persuaded himself that she at least was untouched by the desire for money and then more money, but she had not tried to make him stay. ‘My dearest boy’, she had said sadly, ‘I think I can understand why you want to get away from us, but please be careful – and come back to me.’ Her beautiful dark head had drooped and her voice had been very low, the pain in it unmistakable.

  A sound from the sleeping girl at his side interrupted his thoughts and he said, relieved:

  ‘Yes, Eve, what is it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s you. I was half asleep. Sorry.’

  ‘Yes, I’m here,’ he said, and then added under his breath: ‘I’ll always be here when you want me.’

  On arrival in Archangel they were separated. The military authorities categorically refused to treat a civilian, even an American one, in the military hospital and the senior doctor from Shenkursk was reprimanded for having included Adamson in the convoy of wounded soldiers. An ambulance was summoned and he was transferred to the Russian hospital in the town, while Evelyn had to stay with her other patients and see to their disposal around the tented army hospital. As he was taken away he looked at her anxious face for a few moments and then said:

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Eve. As soon as I can stand, I’ll be out of there, and I’ll come and find you.’

  ‘Take care, Robert. Don’t let them …’ She let the sentence hang unfinished, and stood and watched him taken away, worried for him, but still more concerned about her cousins, who with the rest of the Shenkursk refugees had still not arrived in the town.

  When she was allowed to go off duty she refused a billet with the other nurses and went at once to Andrei Suvarov’s manager, Michael Baines, who lived in a middle-sized house on the Troitski Prospekt, about a mile and a half from the hospital. To her relief she found that the trams were not only working, but were also quite modern and efficient. She boarded the first one that came.

  She was hit by an overpowering and unpleasant smell inside as the doors closed behind her, but she was too tired by then to care or even speculate on its origin. Leaning against the side of the vehicle, for there were no seats left, she peered out through the windows trying to catch a glimpse of the numbers on the houses in the gloomy dark of the Arctic afternoon. The conductor took her money and told her politely that he would tell her when to get off and she smiled in surprised gratitude at his courtesy.

  It was the last encouraging thing that happen
ed to her that day. When she found Barnes’s house and introduced herself to him he greeted her sourly. Taken aback and freezing into a caricature of her old self, she handed him the letter Andrei Alexandrovitch had given her.

  Baines read the thin sheets of crackling paper perfunctorily and handed them back to her, saying:

  ‘It’s all very well for old Suvarov to demand that I put you all up, but the house is full to bursting already. The only rooms I’ve got that aren’t already too full of people are up in the attic. Three rooms, there are, but one’s no more than a broom cupboard. You can have’em if you like, but you’ll have to get your own food. The kitchen can’t cope as it is. I expect I can get you a stove and some fuel, though that’s getting scarce too.’

  ‘Fuel,’ repeated Evelyn. ‘Scarce in a country full of forests?’

  ‘You’d be surprised at what this lot can turn into a scarcity,’ he said with his first glimpse of humour. ‘Come on up then.’

  Evelyn went with him and found the three rooms relatively clean: each had a window, which pleased her even though there was no light to come through them, and if Baines could be persuaded to produce some furniture and a stove or two, they would be adequate. She turned to him with decision and said:

  ‘Fine, we’ll take them. Now, we’ll need something for beds, five of them. Just mattresses will do if you really can’t provide bedsteads. And we’ll need some kind of chairs, at least one table, cutlery, crockery, saucepans and something to cook on.’

  He ignored the end of her list of requirements and said:

  ‘Five? Suvarov said you and three of his brats.’

  Too tired and disheartened to rebuke the fat, red-faced man for his vulgar rudeness, Evelyn just said:

  ‘Yes, but there’s an American at present in hospital; he’ll have to come here as soon as they discharge him.’

  ‘I won’t have any Americans ’ ere. Suvarovs and you, Miss Markham, if I can and if I’ave to. But no Americans.’

  ‘You have no choice, Mr Baines. He counts as part of the Suvarov family too and Andrei Alexandrovitch would never forgive either of us if he were not allowed to come here.’ She did not stop to think how odd it was that she was so determined to look after the man who, only a few short weeks earlier, she had thought she hated. She just knew that she had to do it.

  Baines gave up the argument. He had too much to do, and he was too worried about his own future and that of his Russian wife and half-Russian children to pursue any argument with this girl. He shrugged, told her he’d see what he could do about basic furniture and left her.

  When he had gone she sank down in a corner of the room and let her head droop down on to her knees. Tired out, worried, cold and hungry, she slept.

  She woke about one and a half hours later to the noise of wood bumping against wood. There was a digging ache in the small of her back and her mouth felt as though she had just chewed a large ball of cotton wool. Shaking her head to try to get rid of the effects of deep daytime sleep, she pushed herself up off the floor and went out on to the landing. There in the dim light of an oil lamp on the landing below she saw Baines and three Russian men, all with long unkempt beards, struggling to push and heave furniture up the narrow, twisting stairs.

  There was clearly nothing she could do to help until they got to the top of the stairs and so she waited, holding open the door of the largest room until the men stopped beside her, sweating and red-faced.

  ‘Where d’you want the beds, Miss Markham?’ asked Baines.

  Evelyn had been giving some thought to the problem as she waited and said with a decisiveness that slightly appeased him:

  ‘The American will have the broom cupboard to himself; the three Suvarovs can share the middle-sized room. We’ll use the large room for daytime and meals and things, and I’ll sleep in the little alcove off it.’

  It was not ideal that Sasha should sleep with his sisters, but it was the most practical arrangement she could think of and the one that observed the most proprieties.

  At last the man left and, feeling alone and bereft of everything that had made life even tolerable, Evelyn fumbled in her luggage for the box Nikolai had given her. There had been no time to look at it until now and in the inadequate light of the smelly oil lamp, she opened the small, shabby, brown-leather box. Lying inside on a faded red-velvet cushion was an old-fashioned oval gold locket, about an inch and a half at its widest point. There was an unreadable monogram on the front. Rather puzzled, a little disappointed, she tried to open it. Her thumbnail broke as she wrestled with the tiny catch, but at last it yielded and, removing a small scrap of stiff, folded paper, she saw two miniatures delicately painted on ivory. For a dizzy half-second she thought Nikolai must have commissioned someone to observe her in Shenkursk and paint her portrait beside one of him. Then she realised that the style of the lady’s hair and dress was as old-fashioned as the locket itself. She turned it over and traced the convoluted, embellished letters of the monogram and eventually worked it out: the lady in the portrait must have been her great-aunt, who had come out to Russia to marry Nikolai’s father. The man must be he, although he looked exactly like Nikolai, even down to the irresistible smile she missed so much.

  She unfolded the paper and read: ‘Evelyn, this was my mother’s. She always wore it until she was dying; then she gave it to me. Now I want you to have it. N.’

  With the gold locket clasped in her hand, Evelyn lay down on one of the beds, fully dressed. She pulled a threadbare, musty blanket over herself and with the tears oozing out of her eyes as she thought of what might happen to Nikolai, slept again in exhaustion and loneliness.

  It was still dark when she woke the next morning, of course, and

  she had to grope blindly on the floor by her bed for her watch. Peering closely at it to see anything in the dimness, to her dismay she saw that it was already eight. She was going to be late on duty; and a quick look down at her uniform skirts showed her that they were filthy and irreparably crumpled.

  Vaguely wishing that she could curse in the way some of her Shenkursk patients had done when pain or frustration got the better of their discretion, she pulled off the dress and flung it on the rumpled bed. Then she stumbled over towards the place where she had dumped her canvas bag to find another one. But she tripped over a stool and fell, grazing her knee on the rough, splintered wooden floor.

  ‘I can’t blunder about in the dark like this,’ she muttered to herself and felt her way carefully to the table, where Mr Baines had left a lamp and some matches. After several false starts and burning her fingers on at least four of the matches she struck, she succeeded in lighting the lamp. She sucked the burned fingers and then put the glass chimney back over the burning wick and looked around for her bag.

  There was a neatly folded dress at the top and she put it on before turning to the dirty one to unpick the studs from the collar and cuffs. But in her clumsiness, she must have pulled one out as she ripped the dress off and it had rolled out of sight. Evelyn took deep breaths to try to regain her patience and then got down on her hands and knees to search for the stud.

  By the time she had found it, attached the tiresome, impractical stiff collar and cuffs and brushed the dust from her skirt, she had wasted nearly half an hour. There was no time to tidy up the squalid little room. ‘Never mind,’ she said to herself out loud, ‘if Dindin and the children get here before I get back, she’ll manage to do something about it.’ Making certain that she had a clean veil in her handbag, she blew out the lamp and went out, carefully shutting the door behind her.

  She saw no one on her way out of the house and felt more alone than she had done even in her first few days in Petrograd. Now there was no one to turn to if things became more than she could bear. She huddled the collar of her sable coat up round her face as the full force of the cold hit her when she stepped into the murky street and wondered desperately how long she would be forced to stay in this dark, icy, primitive town.

  Setting her teeth, she t
urned into the wind and started off towards the hospital. Taking the tram might be quicker, but there was none in sight and so she walked, breaking into a half-run whenever she could. As far as she could see in the lamplight that streamed out from one or two of the bigger houses, the raised pavement was a kind of duck-board and in some places where the snow had been dug away, she could just see that the inferior wood was broken and splintered in many places. Terrified of tripping and breaking an ankle, Evelyn kept her eyes firmly looking at the ground. If she fell and broke her leg there would be no one to pick her up, no one to look after her, no one to help Dindin with the Suvarov children.

  Chapter Fourteen

  So certain was Evelyn that she was going to be reprimanded, that she hardly heard the ward sister saying:

  ‘I think you deserve a little latitude on the first day after a retreat like that one, Nurse.’ What she did hear was the final command: ‘But don’t let it happen again.’

  ‘No, Sister. I’m sorry, Sister,’ she said and waited for her orders.

  At first she was sent to take temperatures and that was easy enough, but as the day wore on the tasks became more and more unpleasant and there was none of the informality of the little hospital in Shenkursk to help. In Archangel it seemed that none of the doctors spoke to the nurses except to give orders and there was an atmosphere of coldly official bustle. With no experience of any hospital except Shenkursk’s makeshift version, Evelyn thought it all daunting and even more horrible, and as the hours ground on so slowly she would touch Nikolai’s locket, which lay under her uniform dress, as though for protection.

  By the end of the shift her every bone and muscle seemed to ache and she longed for a hot bath. But she knew there was no such thing in Archangel. There was no mains water supply, Baines had told her, and every drop of water used in his house had to be brought from holes cut in the thick ice that covered the river. He had recommended the public steam baths in the middle of the town, but when he told her that there were no separate facilities for men and women, Evelyn resolved never to use them. As she was washing her hands in the sluice room beside another nurse who was going off duty, Evelyn asked if there were anywhere in the hospital where she could bath. The other girl shook her head.