The Beginning of Spring

by Penelope Fitzgerald

‘Nothing surprises me.’

  From downstairs a voice called out: ‘Sir, shots have been heard coming from your premises.’

  It was the night watchman. Nothing on earth would bring him upstairs if there was a chance of being fired at. Altogether he was a sensible fellow.

  ‘Everything’s all right, Gulianin.’

  ‘Good, sir. Very good.’

  Gulianin retreated. ‘Doubtless he’ll fetch the street police,’ said Volodya.

  ‘Doubtless he won’t. He’ll wait to see how much I give him in the morning.’

  Volodya, who seemed to have prepared what he had to say, repeated, ‘My name is Volodya Vasilych.’

  ‘So you told me.’

  ‘I only shot at you to demonstrate that I was serious. Let me explain. You are a printer, Frank Albertovich.’

  ‘I don’t deny that. Did you want something printed?’

  ‘I’m used to working a hand-press, but I no longer have access to one. I thought that if I could find a hand-press here I could get what I needed, only a couple of pages, done in a few hours. But you have no shutters here and I can’t work without light, which means I can’t conceal myself.’

  ‘I can see that’s awkward for you. But you could have come and given us an order, you know, in the usual way. However, I must warn you, that we don’t do anything political.’

  ‘What I have written is not political.’

  ‘What’s the subject?’

  ‘The subject is universal pity.’

  Volodya’s expression was strained, as though he had entered his remark for an important prize, and could hardly believe that he wouldn’t receive it.

  ‘Well, then, you could have asked us for a quotation,’ said Frank, ‘I mean, just for the two pages. It would have saved a good deal of time and damage, and I don’t think you’d have found our price unreasonable.’

  ‘Prices … I don’t know anything about that,’ Volodya murmured, and then, after a pause for reflexion, ‘it’s possible that what I wanted to print might be considered as political.’

  ‘I suppose that would depend on who’s being universally pitied,’ said Frank. ‘Have you got your copy with you?’

  Volodya hesitated. ‘No, I have committed it to memory.’ Then he made a wide gesture with both arms, as if he was scattering food for hens, and cried: ‘But after all, what can that matter to you? You’re a foreigner, the worst that you could suffer, if things didn’t go right, would be expulsion from Moscow back to your own country. A Russian can’t live away from Russia, but to you it’s nothing.’

  Frank had long ago got used to being asked, usually by complete strangers, for assistance. They were convinced that, as a business resident in good standing, he could help with their external passports or with permissions of some kind, or else they wanted him to delay their military conscription or to threaten their college superintendent into giving them better marks, or to sign a petition to the Imperial Chancery about a relative who had fallen into disgrace. Sometimes they wanted to borrow small sums of money to tide them over, or larger ones to help them train as a doctor or an engineeer. He had a reputation for doing what he could, otherwise these people wouldn’t have gone on coming to him, but all of them, at one point or another, reminded him that he was a foreigner who, even if things didn’t go right, had nothing to lose.

  ‘What makes you think it wouldn’t matter to me if I had to leave Russia?’ he said. ‘I was born here, I’ve lived here most of my life, I love Moscow at all seasons, even now at the beginning of the thaw, and I’m a married man with three children.’

  ‘Yes, but your wife has left you.’

  Volodya spoke confidently, but seemed to realize that he was not making exactly the impression he had intended.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Frank asked him.

  ‘A long way out. In the Rogozhskaia.’

  ‘Go back there.’

  ‘But my property …’

  ‘Not the gun. Here’s the candle, if you brought it with you. Don’t come here again.’

  As Frank took a last look round the room, he noticed the seventy-five copies of Birch Tree Thoughts, still neatly piled and undisturbed by Tvyordov’s frame.

  ‘Take this as a souvenir,’ he said to Volodya, handing him the top copy.

  Volodya put the book in his now empty pocket and loped away down the stairs. Frank switched off and locked up. Impossible to repair Tvyordov’s upper case, or the bullet-hole in his apron. Impossible, too, to estimate the effect on Tvyordov, when he reported for work next day, of the defilement and disturbance. That was a problem for the morning, and there were likely to be others. Open the doors, the Russians say, here comes trouble.

  On the way back he went down to the iron bridge, the Moskvoryetszkevya, where passers-by were still watching the ice, and threw the little gun into the river. Then he walked home with a reasonably clear conscience.

  In the living room Dolly and Ben were still, apparently, finishing their homework. A twenty-five watt bulb, the strongest that could be bought in Moscow, hung over their table, Dolly’s brown exercise book, Ben’s pink one. Dolly was tracing a map, a mildly hypnotic process. Her nickel-plated nib scratched industriously. Outside the circle of light, Lisa was sewing. Frank would have thought that the light wasn’t good enough there and that all this sewing might have been done by somebody else in the house. There was a little room fitted up with a Singer off the kitchen passage. Perhaps Lisa wanted to show that she wasn’t quite a governess and not quite a servant. Perhaps she didn’t want to show anything, and they were all passing a peaceable evening without him.

  ‘You’re late,’ Dolly said.

  ‘Didn’t Selwyn Osipych telephone you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dolly reluctantly, ‘but Lisa answered, and she didn’t tell us how long you’d be.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me either, Dolly.’

  ‘Well, we were waiting,’ Dolly said. ‘Ben got rather restless.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why I’m late, it’s nothing to worry about. There was someone at the Press, someone hanging about who shouldn’t have been there. I went to see what was going on. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a thief.’

  Dolly seemed mildly disappointed.

  ‘If it wasn’t a thief, who was it?’

  ‘He was a student, I think.’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Dolly asked. ‘You never used to be like this.’

  ‘He said he was a student.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘What was he called?’

  ‘Volodya something-or-other.’

  ‘Where has he gone?’

  ‘Back home, as far as I know.’

  ‘Will he come back?’ Lisa asked. Frank met her clear, blank gaze. He felt pleased to have aroused even this much interest.

  ‘I think it’s very unlikely. I’m afraid the whole outing must have been a great disappointment to him, and I don’t think he’ll have any further business at the Press.’

  ‘I can’t see why he had to come so late anyway,’ said Ben. ‘Were you angry with him?’

  ‘Not at all, I gave him a present.’

  ‘Do you think he’s got a gun?’

  ‘Not now.’

  15

  When Frank had been a small boy and they had lived on the site, the first sign of spring that couldn’t be mistaken had been a protesting voice, the voice of the water, when the ice melted under the covered wooden footpath between the house and the factory. The ice there wasn’t affected by the stoves in the house or the assembly-shop furnace, the water freed itself by its own effort, and once it had begun to run in a chattering stream, the whole balance of the year tilted over. At the sound of it his heart used to leap. His bicycle came out of the shed and he oiled it out of a can which was no longer frozen almost solid. In a few weeks the almond trees would be in flower and the city would be on wheels again.

  The day after the break-in, he allowed himself, as he had done then, to ex
pect the spring. He knew he had an awkward day ahead, although he’d always thought, until the last week or so, that he enjoyed difficulties. Perhaps he still did. What kind of day it would be for the new cost accountant seemed uncertain. Before that began he had to think of Tvyordov, for whose sake he was coming in early through the snow-patched streets.

  Outside the Press he found two fourteen-year-old apprentices who had, until work began, nowhere else to go. They were arguing over a boat-shaped piece of wood in the gutter and as to which direction it would be swept in when the current unfroze.

  ‘Listen,’ said Frank. ‘I’m sending both of you with a message to the chief compositor.’

  He had decided what to do while he was having a shave at one of the many barbers who opened at five o’clock in the morning. ‘Look at this letter. Read me the address on the envelope.’

  The smaller boy read out, ‘Chief Compositor I. N. Tvyordov, Kaluga Pereulok 54.’

  ‘Do you know where that is?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Go together, keep an eye on each other, knock at the door, take a message if there is one from the chief compositor, and come back here within the half-hour.’

  In the letter he had told Tvyordov that there had been a break-in at the Press during the night, so that the work would be interrupted, and there would be no need for him to check in until the next day, when everything would continue as usual. Pay for the missed day would be maintained. On the whole, Frank considered his message as untruthful – there had been no break-in, it was quite clear that Selwyn had forgotten to lock up – and cowardly, since it was only deferring an awkward moment. On the other hand, to confront Tvyordov, without any warning, with the ruin of his apron and his upper case would be inhuman, and at the same time Frank had to bear in mind that it was the feast of St Modestus, the patron saint of printing, and it was his duty to see that the blessing of Reidka’s ikons went through, if possible, without disturbance. He had also to consider the night watchman, Gulianin, who had heard shots, but must be persuaded that he hadn’t. With this in mind Frank had brought a reasonable sum of money in notes.

  The night watchman, however, couldn’t immediately be found. He lived over Markel’s Bar, a few doors down from the Press, slept there all day, and was said to be asleep now. Back at Reidka’s, the delivery boys had arrived, and, by the time Frank had unlocked, so had the two apprentices.

  ‘We gave your letter to the chief compositor. His wife came to the door, but she fetched him and we put it into his hands.’

  Frank knew Tvyordov had a wife, because she came to the dinner he gave to the whole staff and their families on his name-day. He couldn’t have said exactly what she looked like, and very probably she couldn’t have recognized him. There had been no answer for the apprentices to bring back from Tvyordov.

  Selwyn and the number 2 and 3 compositors came in together, and, while they were still hanging up their coats downstairs, the police were announced. For this Frank blamed himself. If he’d insisted on seeing the night watchman earlier and had given him a hundred roubles – somewhere between tea-money and a bribe – Gulianin wouldn’t, as he evidently had done, felt the need to take his information to the police. From them he would have got considerably less, but very likely he needed ready money immediately. Probably he was caught in the tight network of small loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures which linked the city, quarter by quarter, in its grip, as securely as the tram-lines themselves.

  Frank said that he would see the police in his office. Only a captain and an orderly and to Frank’s relief, in uniform. That meant the night watchman couldn’t have seen Volodya leave the building, or he would have recognized from his cap that he was a student, and trouble with a student would have meant the plain clothes section, the Security. Tea was brought, the captain, though not the orderly, unbuttoned his jacket. Just a few questions, a little interrogation, a dear little interrogation. Why had Mr Reid come back here so late on the previous evening? A light in the window, who had reported that?

  ‘My accountant, Selwyn Osipych Crane.’

  The inspector smiled. ‘Well, we know Selwyn Osipych.’ From one end of Moscow to the other, Frank thought, when they hear Selwyn’s name they either laugh or weep. In its way it was a considerable achievement. Now Selwyn himself came into the office through the connecting door, stricken and haggard. ‘Frank, strange things have been happening. Ah, good-morning, officer.’

  The captain looked at him indulgently. ‘If you saw a light here last night, sir, that should have been reported to us at once.’ He turned to Frank. ‘And you, too, sir, should have reported it.’

  ‘I left that to the night watchman,’ said Frank.

  ‘Gulianin very correctly came to us. He also heard shots.’

  ‘Is he sure he heard them?’

  The police captain stirred some jam into his tea. ‘Not altogether sure. This is a very noisy street. You have a blacksmith here, and a motor-car mechanic, and up to midnight you’ve got the noise of the trams. Let’s say he thought he heard something.’

  This was a fairly strong hint that the inspector was prepared not to take things any further. He accepted a glass of vodka flavoured with caraway seeds, which was kept in the office exclusively for the police. How he could drink it so early in the morning, or indeed at all, Frank couldn’t fathom. But it preserved a distinction of rank, since the orderly, knowing his place, refused it.

  ‘Now, sir, did you find any property missing?’

  ‘No, nothing at all.’

  ‘Pardon me,’ Selwyn broke in eagerly, ‘when I came in just now I counted the first run of Birch Tree Thoughts. There are only seventy-four copies there. Yes, seventy-four. One has been purloined.’

  ‘What are Birch Tree Thoughts?’ the inspector asked.

  Frank explained. In the ordinary way, poetry was suspect and, once again, might have been a matter for the Security. But this was something written by the harmless Selwyn Osipych, and the captain only said, ‘Well, sir, what do birch trees think?’

  Selwyn, who believed all questions should be answered, replied that they thought in the same way as women. ‘Just as a woman’s body, inspector, moves at her heart’s promptings, so the birch tree moves in the winds of spring.’

  Frank could see that the captain and the orderly were not listening, being in the genial grip of inertia and greed. He took an envelope out of his drawer, and, conscious of taking only a mild risk, since the whole unwieldly administration of All the Russias, which kept working, even if only just, depended on the passing of countless numbers of such envelopes, he slid it across the top of the desk. The inspector opened it without embarrassment, counted out the three hundred roubles it contained and transferred them to a leather container, half way between a wallet and a purse, which he kept for ‘innocent income’.

  ‘Selwyn, take the police officers downstairs and out through the back way,’ said Frank. ‘They’ll want, I’m sure, to have a look at the rest of the premises.’

  After giving them five minutes he went to confront his No 2 and No 3 compositors, who were surrounding, like dazed mourners, Tvyordov’s broken frame and scattered type and the white apron which, with its single bullet-hole hung, a victim, from its hook. The inspector could only have missed the disorder, or overlooked it, because it suited him to.

  ‘Put the covers on,’ he said.

  The covers were put on the frames only on Saturday nights and on the eve of feast days. Each compositor did this for himself. The frames were sacrosanct, and the two men moved like trespassers.

  Frank told them there had been an incident, a little incident, a little break-in during the night, and that he had asked Tvyordov personally not to come in today. There must have been an intruder, but he must have managed to get away. It wasn’t a thief, nothing had been stolen, or nothing – Frank corrected himself – that couldn’t be replaced. They were to get on with the current orders, in the first place with Muir and Merrilees’ Easter catalogue, all of whi
ch had to be hand-set. This was popular with the compositors because they were paid by the page, and most of the pages were taken up with illustrations. But what had become of the open discussions, Frank asked himself, the joint decisions between management and workers which he had set his heart on when he took over Reidka’s?

  ‘The police are satisfied,’ he said. ‘As you’ve seen for yourselves, they came and they went. All we have to do is a day’s work.’

  But they could not adjust themselves to Tvyordov’s absence. Hand-printing, whose rhythm was still that of the human body, went adrift with the disappearance of the pacesetter, assumed always to be on duty as the given condition of the whole process.

  16

  At nine o’clock, as had been arranged for his first day, the new costing accountant came to take up his duties. As Frank had told Selwyn, Aleksandr Alexsandrovich Bernov had been with Sytin’s, the giant print works beyond the Sadovaya Ring. Clean-shaven, sharp-glancing, quick on the uptake, he had been impatient with his place there as head clerk, but his ideas – if they were his – were geared, perhaps irretrievably, to a large firm. He saw the business, any business, as an undeclared war against every employee below the rank of cost accountant.

  Frank wanted to discuss the possibility of paying something for distributing the type, a payment compositors had been asking for, but had never been given, since the days of Gutenberg. Bernov admitted that at Sytin’s, until they went over to machinery, the men used to take away the type and throw it into the river on the way home rather than distribute it in unpaid time.

  ‘But, Frank Albertovich, I want to make this clear from the start – one mustn’t encourage the survivals of the past. Hand-printing is associated now with Tolstoyans and student revolutionaries and activists in garrets and cellars. The future belongs to hot metal, of course.’

  ‘It’s still useful for small jobs and essential for fine work,’ said Frank. The image persisted of Tyvordov’s ruined possessions, only a few yards away, and his murdered apron. Bernov, however, urged that Reidka’s should give up the small jobs altogether. Rent more warehouses, install linotype and print newspapers.