Читать книгу The Lieutenant’s Lover - Harry Bingham - Страница 11

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.’