Читать книгу The Lieutenant’s Lover - Harry Bingham - Страница 18

Tonya was home early from the hospital. It was early July, the season of Petrograd’s famous white nights, when the nights were so brief that darkness never really set in, a late twilight fading into an early milky dawn.

Normally, she would have gone straight to the rail yard to wait for Misha to emerge. But not tonight. Misha wanted to use the long night to complete the secret compartment in one of his grain hoppers. He planned to stay up all night to do it. He wouldn’t see Tonya again until the following evening.

But, though Tonya missed him, she didn’t mind too much. She was behind with her housework and the apartment needed cleaning. She spent half an hour with her grandmother, Babba Varvara, then went back into the main room and began working. She hummed to herself as she worked, and sometimes found herself unconsciously repeating the dance steps that Misha had taught her. She was doing just that, twirling as she carried the cooking pot over to the stove, when she sensed the door open behind her. She stopped dancing and put the pot down. It was Rodyon.

He looked tired and thin, worn down. She saw him still from time to time, but not often. She was surprised to see him, and guarded.

‘Zdrasvoutye,’ she said.

Rodyon nodded, but said nothing. He sat down.

‘Tea?’

‘Yes, please, if you have it.’

‘You can have bread too, if you want.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not fine. You look tired and hungry.’

Tonya put the kettle on the stove, then jiggled the logs inside to stir up the heat. The apartment was hot even with the windows open wide, and the heat was an unwanted extra. There was also something unsettling about the length of these summer days. When she was with Misha, the long days made sense. But when he was absent, the endless days and shimmering nights seemed mildly insane, as though the world had lost its ability to rest. She cut a slice of bread and spread it with pork dripping and salt.

‘Here.’

‘Thank you.’

Rodyon ate it wolfishly, then sighed.

‘You know, Marx took a material view of humanity. It was his greatest insight, his greatest accomplishment. But you don’t realise how right he was until you’ve been hungry. All the time I’ve been sitting here, I’ve wondered whether you had sugar or jam to go with the tea. I desperately hope that you do, but have been too proud to ask. A spoonful of sugar against a man’s soul. Pitiful, isn’t it?’

‘I have sugar, yes. And lemon.’

‘Ah, the careful management of the official allocation or the miraculous bounty of the black market. I wonder which.’

‘You know very well which.’

‘Yes, and I’m going to enjoy it anyway. You were cooking as I came in. At least, you were dancing with a cooking pot, which I assume is the same thing. Don’t let me stop you.’

Tonya did as he said. To the pot, she added cabbage, beans, carrot, onion and a thick shin of beef. She put the whole thing on to boil. She worked carefully, guarding her expression. She wasn’t exactly nervous of Rodyon, but the two of them hadn’t seen each other for a while and Rodyon seldom did things without a purpose. She waited for him to reveal it.

The kettle boiled. She made tea, let it brew, then poured it, adding three spoonfuls of sugar. Rodyon took the cup with thanks. He had barely changed his posture since first sitting down, but she could see his tiredness slipping away, and he wore it now as a mask more than anything.

‘We’re seeing Pavel more and more at the Bureau of Housing,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

It was true. Because of Misha, Tonya had been at home very little. Pavel, never properly rooted since their mother had died, had taken to leaving home more and more. He often ended up at the Bureau of Housing, where his admiration for Rodyon had blossomed into something close to hero-worship.

‘He is useful. He runs a lot of errands for us.’

‘He’s a good boy.’

‘Yes… And when did he last wash, do you know?’

‘Wash? He washes every day.’

‘Face and hands, yes. I meant more than that. All over.’

Tonya shrugged. ‘He’s fourteen, nearly fifteen. You know what it’s like.’

‘This week? Last week?’

‘What do you care? He won’t wash in cold water and boiling enough water for a bath in this heat … well, he’s old enough to boil water for himself if he wants it.’

‘You didn’t always say that.’

‘He wasn’t always fifteen, or as good as.’

‘But the change came four months ago, didn’t it, Antonina Kirylovna?’

Tonya swallowed. Rodyon was creeping around to the real subject and she felt her mouth go strangely dry. Though she wanted to blame it on other things – the endless day outside, the light glittering from the city’s roofs and cupolas, the heat of the stove – she knew it was none of those things.

‘Maybe,’ she admitted.

‘Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich. Son of Ivan Ilyich Malevich. Ivan Ilyich was one of the country’s richest men. Not in the top fifty perhaps, but not so far outside either. Coal mines. Iron works. Land.’

‘They have none of that now.’

‘No.’

Rodyon stopped as though he’d finished. He finished his tea and pushed his cup away from him.

‘More?’ said Tonya.

‘Please.’

‘The sugar doesn’t come from father’s coal-stealing. It comes from Misha. The soup things too. He trades his family’s last few possessions. He is generous.’

‘Bourgeois sugar, eh?’

‘That’s one way to put it.’

‘Then I’ll have another spoonful.’

Tonya poured the tea and pushed it back at Rodyon. Her movement contained an ounce or two of anger and tea slopped over the rim of the cup. He ignored both the anger and the spillage.

‘His family’s last few possessions. What a piteous-sounding phrase!’

‘There’s no pity. It’s a simple fact.’

‘Is it? Really? That’s another insight of Marx’s. Facts aren’t necessarily simple, even the simplest ones. His father accumulated possessions by exploiting his workers. Each year, every year, men died underground in his coal mines. Others were cut to pieces in industrial accidents at his iron works. And he reaped the profit.’

‘He employed them. I don’t suppose conditions in his mines were worse than elsewhere.’

‘He gave them the lowest wage he could possibly pay them, you mean. Yes. And that wage wasn’t always enough to give his workers enough food, fuel, medicine or housing. Look at this rat-hole you live in. You have always counted yourself lucky to have it. How does it compare with Kuletsky Prospekt, eh? How does it compare with that? So: you say his family’s last few possessions, but if he stole the labour that allowed him to acquire them, then to whom, really, do those things belong?’

Tonya shrugged. ‘Who cares? In a few months, they’ll have nothing.’

Rodyon nodded, as though he agreed. He stood up. All at once, the lean tigerishness of his energy seemed to come rushing back. When before he had looked tired, now again, as usual, his face radiated an intense, challenging handsomeness, spoiled and completed by his broken nose. He paced the tiny apartment as though he felt cooped up in it. He leaned out of the open window, traced a line on a cupboard with the tip of his finger as though to check for dust, then came over to the stove and felt it for heat.

‘Good soup.’

‘Yes.’

‘The smell is almost the best part.’

‘Maybe.’

‘A meat bone?’

‘Beef.’

‘You’re lucky.’

‘If it’s luck that we’ve been talking about, then yes.’

‘Hmm.’

Rodyon paced again. Back to the window, behind Kiryl’s armchair, which he rocked to and fro on its back legs, then to the table and the carrot ends and onion skins left over from Tonya’s cooking. He took some carrot ends and began to munch.

‘Babba Varvara’s all right, is she?’

‘She’s fine. No different from ever.’

‘No. You do well with her. If she weren’t your responsibility she would be mine. Thank you.’

Tonya shrugged. Then he turned abruptly around, and faced Tonya. She found herself fixed in the sudden glare of his intensity.

‘Listen, Antonina, this boy of yours, Mikhail Ivanovich. He is a danger to you. You must stop seeing him.’

Tonya opened her mouth to protest. The anxiety that she’d felt since Rodyon’s entry had been pointing all along to this one inevitable moment. She felt fiercely, passionately protective of Misha. But Rodyon didn’t let her speak. He waved down anything she might have had to say.

‘You’ll protest of course. But hear me out. At the heart of the Communist Party lies the understanding that the interests of Malevich’s class are irreconcilable with the interests of the workers. It isn’t any longer a question of living space or property or anything like that. But Malevich knows that the Party is his enemy. The Party knows that Malevich is its enemy. If you align yourself with Malevich, you align yourself against the Party. That’s dangerous. It’s inconceivably foolish, if I may say so.’

Tonya moved her tongue inside her mouth. She found only glue and ash. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to, but Rodyon hadn’t finished.

‘The second thing is this. The All-Russian Central Executive Committee is about to issue a new set of decrees. Malevich and his kind will be sent into internal exile all over Russia. It’s no use having these people crawling over the seats of power in Petrograd and Moscow. They’ll be given work to do. They will work of their own accord, or they will be made to work in a labour camp. We find it helps to keep the alternatives fairly simple. The decrees will be published any day now. They will have immediate effect.’

Tonya felt the blood rushing in her head. She wanted to find some way to block the sound of Rodyon’s words, but couldn’t. The words had already smashed aside any possible barrier and were roaring forwards in their destructive progress. Only time could tell what wreckage would be left behind.

‘And one last thing. I think I’ve handled things badly. I should have acted sooner or perhaps later. I kept putting things off. But in the end I realise that the only important thing is that I should act. Antonina – Tonya – I am – I have always been your greatest friend and admirer. I know that this isn’t the time – there’s Malevich in your thoughts I know. But you will put him aside. You’ll have to. And when you do, please know that I’m here. I have loved you for a long time. For ever, so it seems. I would like to be – if you’ll let me – I know it’ll take time – more than just your friend and your cousin. Don’t give me an answer now. The timing is all wrong, I know. Forgive me. But some day. I shan’t go away.’

Rodyon took a step or two forwards as though intending to grasp Tonya’s hands or kiss her. Then, realising any such movement would be profoundly unwelcome, he simply nodded his head, briefly looked around the room, then strode briskly away.