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She went on into the building. Down in the basement, there was a meeting of the Borough Housing Commission. At the front of the room, there was a kind of podium, planks stretched across wooden egg crates. The podium was dominated by a speaker, hatless and wearing an unbuttoned leather jerkin. The man caught sight of Tonya as she entered. She knew he’d seen her, because his eyes fixed on her, but there was no change in his voice or posture. His presence commanded the room. He was strikingly good-looking with dark curly hair, worn shorthand a lean, handsome, intelligent face. The only bad feature he possessed was a nose that had been badly broken. Though still narrow, it bent sharply where it had been struck.
The man, Rodyon Leonidovich Kornikov, was Tonya’s cousin and a rising star in the new Bolshevik administration. He fixed his eyes on her, then directed his glance deliberately across the room, before bringing it back to her. He never stopped speaking for a second. His sentences came out perfectly, without mistake or hesitation. Tonya looked over to where the man had indicated. Pavel was there, his eyes shining unhealthily, his coat unbuttoned like the man on the platform. Tonya pushed her way across to him.
‘Pavel! You’ll freeze.’
The boy, a fourteen-year-old, began buttoning up almost as soon as he saw his sister; and he let her adjust his hat and scarf. But he still kept his eyes on the platform where Rodyon was winding up.
Tonya turned her attention from Pavel to her cousin. Rodyon spoke of the necessity of establishing revolutionary principles ‘from the first winter on; from the worst slum outwards’. The broken nose in his perfect face served to draw attention to his handsomeness, adding something mesmerising to his features. He finished speaking, to a scattering of applause.
Pavel turned to his sister.
‘Wasn’t he good? When I’m older—’
‘When you’re older you can go out on your own. Right now, you need to stay warm.’
Pavel shrugged. His eyes still shone as though fevered. Rodyon barged through the crowd towards them, stopping in front of Tonya.
‘Comrade!’
‘Rodya! It’s all very well for you to march about like you don’t feel the cold. You should think about Pavel. He copies you.’
‘He will be a good citizen one day. Enthusiastic.’
‘If he doesn’t catch his death first.’
Rodyon smiled. He had perfect teeth, white and even.
‘Well, comrade,’ he said to Pavel. ‘Your sister’s right. You should stay warm too.’
The boy nodded.
‘Are you all right for things? Food and everything?’
‘We don’t have any wood. We’ll have nothing at all to burn by the end of the week.’
‘You have your allocation of course?’
‘If it comes. Last time there was nothing.’
‘That can’t be helped. You can’t rebuild a house without knocking down a wall or two.’
‘They’re not walls. They’re your precious comrade citizens.’
Rodyon smiled. He was an important man, the Housing Commissar of the Petrograd Soviet.
‘I can’t help you. Everyone’s in the same situation.’
Tonya shrugged. She hadn’t actually asked for help, but didn’t say so.
‘But if you want… Uncle Kiryl is still a thief, I suppose?’
Tonya nodded. Her father, Kiryl, worked on the railway and stole coal. An accomplice threw shovelfuls off the train as it entered the station. Kiryl collected the bits up in a sack and sold it on the black market. ‘He only gets vodka and tobacco. He wouldn’t even think of bringing the coal home.’
‘But still, you have things to trade.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then come with me on my tour of inspection tomorrow. You never know what you’ll find in these places once owned by the bourgeois.’
‘Thank you.’
He shook his head. ‘No thanks and no favours. When we have things running properly, you won’t be short of logs.’
He held Tonya’s eyes one last time. Rodyon was a long-time Bolshevik, with two spells in prison to his credit. His nose had been broken in a brawl with police and he was rising fast under the new regime. He had also, for the last two years, been paying careful court to Tonya. He had been constant and, in his way, generous, but Tonya never quite knew whether he was sincere. She wasn’t sure if she was his only girl, or if Rodyon would ever lose his heart to a woman. He seemed too self-possessed for that, too important.
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?’
