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‘Of course.’
The young man smiled bitterly. And in that smile, for the first time, Tonya saw the revolution from the point of view of the former ruling class. This young man’s family had lost all its worldly goods, its enormous house, and now here he was being accused of stealing the things that had once been his. She was struck by his calmness, impressed.
‘Do you have any documents that relate to your father’s previous concerns?’
‘Yes.’
Without being asked the young man got them out and handed them over.
‘Why weren’t these submitted earlier to the proper authorities?’
‘I didn’t know they were meant to be.’
‘There were decrees issued and posted. It is the responsibility of every citizen to inform themselves and—’
‘I was in the army. I wasn’t in Petrograd.’
‘No matter. You were in the army. What about now?’
‘No, not any more. I was wounded…’
‘You have a demobilisation order from an officer in the Red Army?’
‘At the time it wasn’t the Red Army and—’
‘Movement orders?’
The interview lasted another couple of minutes: unrelenting, hard, hostile, tough. The business with the safe was brought up again. The young man insisted he knew nothing of it. Rodyon again reminded him of how seriously ‘theft from the Petrograd Soviet’ would be regarded. He meant either prison cells or the bullet, and the young man smiled grimly in acknowledgement.
And then it finished. Rodyon swept on out of the house, down onto the street, to the next house and the next and the next. But he left Tonya behind him, peering through the half-open door, listening to the silence.
5
Misha was about to bend down to check the stove, when he realised that the door out onto the corridor wasn’t closed and that the space outside wasn’t empty. He straightened. There was a girl there, dark-haired and serious. There was something very still in her manner, and something remarkable in her stillness. She was still in the way that a white owl is, or a deer grazing in snow. But there was also something watchful about her, untrusting. She didn’t come or go. She didn’t speak. She didn’t even glance away when she saw Misha looking at her.
‘Zdrasvoutye,’ he said. ‘Good day.’
‘Good day.’
She didn’t move.
‘If you want to come in, then come in. But close the door, it’s getting cold.’
She nodded, smiled briefly, and came in.
‘Well?’
‘I was wondering if you had things to trade?’
‘That depends. What do you have to sell?’
Her hand went into her pocket and came out with a lump of grey sugar and a pack of tobacco cut in half across the label. She held them out, but even as she did so, she must have seen that neither the tobacco nor the sugar were likely to go far in that house. Her mouth twitched. ‘Nothing. Just rubbish.’
Misha looked at the proffered goods and listened to the girl’s description of them with a grave face. Without changing his expression, he said, ‘Rubbish, hmm. We don’t have much call for that here. But perhaps we could find some garbage to exchange.’
He kept a straight face and looked directly at the girl. For just a second or so, she reflected his own expression: serious, unsmiling. Then his words got through some barrier, and she burst out laughing. She stuffed her goods away with a blush.
‘You want logs too,’ she said, gesturing at the feeble pile of birch wood next to the stove. ‘So do I.’
‘So does everyone, it seems. There are no wooden fences left any more.’
‘I know where to get logs though,’ said the girl. ‘Proper ones. Seasoned and everything. The peasants bring them in from the country, but they don’t dare come all the way into town because of the police. Only their prices are high. They don’t accept rubbish.’
Misha stared at the girl. The Housing Commissioner had only just left, seemingly leaving this strange girl washed up like driftwood on his doorstep. Could she possibly be a police spy? The girl read his thoughts.
‘Don’t worry about the commissioner. He’s gone. And anyway he’s my cousin. He brought me here, because he thought you might be able to… I mean he thought… I don’t really know what he thought.’
Misha hesitated, then decided to accept what she said. He plunged into the chest which contained those valuables too large to go under a floorboard. He came out with a china figurine, Meissen porcelain touched with gold leaf. It was very fine, very white, graceful.
‘Would this do, do you think?’
The girl gasped. Misha realised she had probably never seen anything so fine. He gave it to her to hold and look at. She turned it over reverentially, in silence. Her eyes were greenish, with a slightly eastern slant to her eyelids. Though entirely Russian in the way she looked, her eyes gave her a hint of something more exotic, a dash of the Tartar.
‘Well?’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘And would a peasant with a cart full of logs think so?’
She nodded. ‘Of course. They’re not short of food, logs or anything like that. Things like this … well! It would fetch a lot.’
‘Good. And if you had something other than rubbish to trade, you’d be happy to show me where to go?’
She nodded.
Misha grinned a huge and delighted grin. He had numerous problems, of course; all of them important. How to get his mother out of the country. What had happened to his father’s money. How to get inside the safe. But of all his concerns, his most pressing was firewood. Typhus was endemic in the city. Bad food and cold weather would turn it into a killer. His mother was certainly at risk. He dived into the chest again, and pulled out a second figurine. He tossed it into the air and caught it.
‘One for you, one for me. Is it too late to go there now?’
The girl looked at him and at the china doll in her hand. She was wide-eyed, disbelieving. ‘For me? Really?’
‘If you show me where to go.’
She nodded. ‘It’s too late now. We have to go first thing. It’ll be a long haul back anyway.’
‘Do you have a sledge?’
She shook her head.
‘Really,’ Misha tutted, ‘a pocketful of rubbish and no sledge. I can get one, though. Tomorrow morning then?’
She nodded.
She gazed down at the figurine in her hand and put it down gently on the table beside the stove. ‘You keep this,’ she said abruptly. ‘Until tomorrow. You shouldn’t…’
‘I shouldn’t what?’
‘You shouldn’t give people things like that. Not until you know that they’ll give you something in return. You don’t know me.’
‘But I trust you. If you’d taken the figurine, you’d have come back tomorrow anyway, wouldn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘Well then.’
‘But that’s not the point.’
‘Isn’t it?’
She didn’t answer, just turned to go. She had her hand on the door and was about to leave, when Misha stopped her. ‘Wait! I don’t know your name.’
‘Lensky.’
‘I can’t call you Lensky.’
‘Antonina Kirylovna Lensky.’
‘Antonina Kirylovna,’ said Misha with a very pre-revolutionary bow, ‘I’m Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich.’
‘Mikhail Ivanovich, comrade.’
‘Till tomorrow then.’
‘Till tomorrow.’
6
Tonya arrived early the next morning, just as Misha was bringing the sledge around to the front of the house. It was dawn, or just a few minutes after.
They started off quickly. The empty sledge ran so easily on the icy upper layer of the snow that it seemed weightless. At turnings, it bucked and slid sideways like a boisterous colt. Going down hills, even shallow ones, it began to run so fast that on two occasions Misha and Tonya fell backwards into it, steering and braking with a boot heel. Misha laughed out loud for pleasure.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘This is. It’s fun, isn’t it?’
‘It won’t be so much fun on the way back, pulling this thing full of logs.’
‘All the more reason to enjoy it now.’
Tonya shrugged and for a few moments they tramped along in silence. Then Misha spotted a side street that dropped in a long curve to a secondary road below. His face twitched. With a quick glance sideways at Tonya, he put out his foot and toppled her backwards into the sledge. In the same swift movement, he pulled the sledge around and directed it to the right, down the hill. The sledge quickly leaped forwards, picking up speed. Misha jumped in next to Tonya, who, apart from a single shout of surprise, had said nothing.
Misha had his foot out, ready to guide the sledge, but where possible he let it find its own direction, banking steeply on the mounds of grey snow.
‘This isn’t the right way,’ she said.
‘We’ll go left at the bottom and pick up our road again.’
Tonya kept her face set forwards. ‘You’re going too fast.’
‘All right then, I’ll brake.’
Misha jabbed his foot out and deliberately kicked a spray of fine powdery snow high into the air. The sledge swept into the spray, spattering them. At first Tonya didn’t smile, but then she too thrust her leg out and kicked up a miniature snowstorm. And then they were both at it, wrestling each other like brother and sister, kicking snow everywhere, letting the sledge plunge recklessly downhill. When they got to the bottom, the sledge struck a big drift lying transversely across their path and the nose plunged in, stopping them abruptly and showering them with yet more snow.
They lay in the bottom of the sledge, laughing, getting their breath and looking up at the piled-up clouds above.
‘Antonina Kirylovna?’
‘Yes?’
‘May I call you Antonina?’
‘You may call me comrade Lensky.’
Misha looked at her. Her face flickered with a smile, though she was doing her best not to show it. ‘Very well. Comrade Lensky?’
‘Yes, comrade Malevich?’
‘May I reprimand you, comrade, for fooling around in the snow when your revolutionary duty is to escort the bourgeois to market.’
‘You are right, comrade. I believe my political education must be at fault. I will endeavour to correct my thinking.’
They got up and brushed themselves clear of snow. Misha had taken his hat off and tossed it behind him into the sledge. Somewhere during their tumultuous descent, his hands had got muck on them, and he briskly washed them in a drift of cleanish snow, as matter of factly as if the drift had been a basin of warm water. Tonya watched him, finding him strangely exotic: this former aristocrat now living in bitter poverty; this tall young man, an outcast from the new Soviet system, laughing and joshing with her, the daughter of a lowly railway worker. Young and fair-skinned as he was, Misha only barely needed to shave daily and Tonya felt herself older than him, much older even, though she guessed their ages must be almost the same.
‘Very good, comrade Lensky.’
‘If you please, comrade Malevich.’
They started off again, pulling the sledge, mostly in silence now, though the silence was very different from the way they’d started. After walking for an hour and a half, they got to the railway halt where the peasants brought their produce. There was everything there: food, logs, tobacco, vodka, sugar, meat. Tonya was right. The peasants faced none of the shortages of the city where food and fuel were concerned. Misha wished he’d brought more than just the figurine to trade.
Tonya insisted on handling the haggling process herself. She played her hand perfectly, showing little interest in the stacks of firewood, making little clucks of disappointment when she noted sticks that were too thin or poorly seasoned. At the same time, she allowed the peasant women to handle the two figurines, never for long, but always for long enough for them to admire the extraordinary workmanship that had gone into them. Tonya didn’t want Misha with her as she bargained, and she waved him away into another part of the slushy yard. He found a man, a former teacher, with nothing to sell except a stack of books on mathematics and engineering. Misha longed to buy them. The books seemed like a glimpse of a possible future, a future of quiet studies and a reputable profession. But Misha had nothing in his pockets and he had to disappoint the man. Meantime, Tonya had fixed on a particular peasant woman, and soon the bargaining began, swift and sharp. A deal was made, and Tonya came over to Misha, waving her hand at an enormous stack of logs.
‘Those,’ she said.
‘Those? All of them?’
Tonya nodded. ‘It’ll take two trips. You’ll have to take one load back by yourself while I wait here. I won’t let these logs out of my sight, or they’ll try to cheat us.’
Misha nodded. He thought of pointing out that Tonya must therefore trust him to return later with the sledge. But he said nothing. They stacked the logs on the sledge and tied them down. Tonya had somehow seen Misha’s desire for the books.
