Red Dusk and the Morrow · Chapter 2 (2/6)

“Come in, come in, please,” said the housekeeper, whom I shall call Stepanovna, still very nervously. “Excuse our showing you into the kitchen, but it is the only room we have warmed. It is so difficult to get firewood nowadays.”

I sat down in the kitchen, feeling very tired. “Ivan Sergeievitch is well and sends his greetings,” I said. “So are his wife and the children. They hope you are well and not suffering. They would like you to join them but it is impossible to get passports.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Stepanovna. “I am glad they are well. We have not heard from them for so long. May we offer you something to eat⁠—?”

“Ivan Pavlovitch is my name,” I interpolated, catching her hesitation.

“May we offer you something to eat, Ivan Pavlovitch?” said Stepanovna kindly, busying herself at the stove. Her hands still trembled. “Thank you,” I said, “but I am afraid you have not much yourself.”

“We are going to have some soup for supper,” she replied. “There will be enough for you, too.”

Stepanovna left the kitchen for a moment, and the nursing maid, whose name was Varia, leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “Stepanovna is frightened today. She nearly got arrested this morning at the market when the Reds came and took people buying and selling food.”

I saw from Varia’s manner that she was a self-possessed and intelligent girl and I resolved to speak to her first regarding my staying the night, lest I terrified Stepanovna by the suggestion.

“When I went to my home this afternoon,” I said, “I found it locked. I expect the housekeeper was out. It is very far, and I wonder if I may stay the night here. A sofa will do to lie on, or even the floor. I am dreadfully tired and my leg is aching from an old wound. Ivan Sergeievitch said I might use his flat whenever I liked.”

“I will ask Stepanovna,” said Varia. “I do not think she will mind.” Varia left the room and, returning, said Stepanovna agreed⁠—for one night.

The soup was soon ready. It was cabbage soup, and very good. I ate two big platefuls of it, though conscience pricked me in accepting a second. But I was very hungry. During supper a man in soldier’s uniform came in by the kitchen door and sat down on a box against the wall. He said nothing at all, but he had a good-natured, round, plump face, with rosy cheeks and twinkling eyes. With a jackknife he hewed square chunks off a loaf of black bread, one of which chunks was handed to me.

“This is my nephew Dmitri,” said Stepanovna. “He has just become a volunteer so as to get Red army rations, so we are better off now.”

Dmitri smiled at being mentioned, but said nothing. After two platefuls of soup I could scarcely keep my eyes open. So I asked where I might spend the night and was shown into the study, where I threw myself on the couch and fell fast asleep.

When I awoke I had such a strange sensation of unaccustomed surroundings that I was completely bewildered, and was only brought to my senses by Varia entering with a glass of tea⁠—real tea, from Dmitri’s Red rations.

Then I recalled the previous day, my adventurous passage across the frontier, the search for Marsh and Melnikoff, the secret café, and my meeting with my present humble friends. With disconcerting brusqueness I also recollected that I had as yet no prospects for the ensuing night. But I persuaded myself that much might happen before nightfall and tried to think no more about it.

Stepanovna had quite got over her fright, and when I came into the kitchen to wash and drink another glass of tea she greeted me kindly. Dmitri sat on his box in stolid silence, munching a crust of bread.

“Been in the Red army long?” I asked him, by way of conversation.

“Three weeks,” he replied.

“Well, and do you like it?”

Dmitri pouted and shrugged his shoulders disparagingly.

“Do you have to do much service?” I persisted.

“Done none yet.”

“No drill?”

“None.”

“No marching?”

“None.”

Sounds easy, I thought. “What do you do?”

“I draw rations.”

“So I see,” I observed.

Conversation flagged. Dmitri helped himself to more tea and Stepanovna questioned me further as to how Ivan Sergeievitch was doing.

“What were you in the old army?” I continued at the first opportunity to Dmitri.

“An orderly.”

“What are you now?”

“A driver.”

“Who are your officers?”

“We have a commissar.” A commissar in the army is a Bolshevist official attached to a regiment to supervise the actions of the officer staff.

“Who is he?”

“Who knows?” replied Dmitri. “He is one like the rest,” he added, as if all commissars were of an inferior race.

“What is the Red army?” I asked, finally.

“Who knows?” replied Dmitri, as if it were the last thing in the world to interest anyone.

Dmitri was typical of the mass of the unthinking proletariat at this time, regarding the Bolshevist Government as an accidental, inexplicable, and merely temporary phenomenon which was destined at an early date to decay and disappear. As for the thinking proletariat they were rapidly dividing into two camps, the minority siding with the Bolsheviks for privilege and power, the majority becoming increasingly discontented with the suppression of the liberties won by the revolution.

“Have you a Committee of the Poor in this house?” I asked Stepanovna. “Yes,” she said, and turning to Dmitri added, “Mind, Mitka, you say nothing to them of Ivan Pavlovitch.”

Stepanovna told me the committee was formed of three servant girls, the yard-keeper, and the house-porter. The entire house with forty flats was under their administration. “From time to time,” said Stepanovna, “they come and take some furniture to decorate the apartments they have occupied on the ground floor. That is all they seem to think of. The house-porter is never in his place in the hall” (for this I was profoundly thankful), “and when we need him we can never find him.”

Varia accompanied me to the door as I departed. “If you want to come back,” she said, “I don’t think Stepanovna will mind.” I insisted on paying for the food I had eaten and set out to look again for Melnikoff.

The morning was raw and snow began to fall. People hurried along the streets clasping bundles and small parcels. Queues, mostly of working women, were waiting outside small stores with notices printed on canvas over the lintel “First Communal Booth,” “Second Communal Booth,” and so on, where bread was being distributed in small quantities against food cards. There was rarely enough to go round, so people came and stood early, shivering in the biting wind. Similar queues formed later in the day outside larger establishments marked “Communal Eating House, Number so-and-so.” One caught snatches of conversation from these queues. “Why don’t the ‘comrades’ have to stand in queues?” a woman would exclaim indignantly. “Where are all the Jews? Does Trotsky stand in a queue?” and so on. Then, receiving their modicum of bread, they would carry it hastily away, either in their bare hands, or wrapped up in paper brought for the purpose, or shielded under the shawls which they muffled round their ears and neck.

Again I trudged across the river and up the long Kamenostrovsky Prospect to Melnikoff’s hospital, but again he had not returned and they knew nothing of him. Wandering irresolutely about the city I drifted into the district where I had formerly lived, and here in a side-street I came unexpectedly upon a window on which a slip of paper was pasted with the word “Dinners,” written in pencil. This, I could see, was no “communal eating-house.” Without a ticket I could not go to a communal eating-house, so I peered cautiously into the door of the little establishment and found that a single room on the ground floor, probably once a store, had been cleared out and fitted with three tiny tables, large enough to accommodate half-a-dozen people in all. Everything was very simple, clearly a temporary arrangement, but very clean. The room being empty, I entered.

“Dinner?” queried a young lady, appearing from behind a curtain. “Yes, please.” “Will you sit down a moment?” she said. “It is rather early, but it will be ready soon.”

Presently she brought a plate of gruel, small in quantity but good. “Bread, I am afraid, is extra,” she observed when I asked for it. “Can I get dinner here every day?” I inquired. “As long as they do not close us down,” she replied with a shrug. I drew her into conversation. “We have been here a week,” she explained. “People come in who have no food cards or who want something better than the communal eating-houses. My father used to keep a big restaurant in Sadovaya Street and when the Bolsheviks shut it he went into a smaller one in the backyard. When that was closed, too, we moved in here, where one of father’s cooks used to live. We cannot put up a sign, that would attract attention, but you can come as long as the paper is in the window. If it is not there, do not enter; it will mean the Reds are in possession.”

For second course she brought carrots. Three other people came in during the meal and I saw at once that they were persons of education and good station, though they all looked haggard and worn. All ate their small portions with avidity, counting out their payment with pitiful reluctance. One of them looked a typical professor, and of the others, both ladies, I guessed one might be a teacher. Though we sat close to each other there was no conversation.

Purchasing three small white loaves to take with me, I returned in the afternoon to Stepanovna’s. My humble friends were delighted at this simple contribution to the family fare, for they did not know white bread was still procurable. I telephoned to Vera Alexandrovna, using a number she had given me, but Melnikoff was not there and nothing was known of him.

So with Stepanovna’s consent to stay another night I sat in the kitchen sipping Dmitri’s tea and listening to their talk. Stepanovna and Varia unburdened their hearts without restraint, and somehow it was strange to hear them abusing their house committee, or committee of the poor, as it was also called, composed of people of their own station. “Commissars” and “Communists” they frankly classed as svolotch, which is a Russian term of extreme abuse.

It was a prevalent belief of the populace at this time that the allies, and particularly the British, were planning to invade Russia and relieve the stricken country. Hearing them discussing the probability of such an event, and the part their master Ivan Sergeievitch might take in it, I told them straight out that I was an Englishman, a disclosure the effect of which was electric. For a time they would not credit it, for in appearance I might be any nationality but English. Stepanovna was a little frightened, but Dmitri sat still and a broad smile gradually spread over his good-natured features. When we sat down about nine I found quite a good supper with meat and potatoes, prepared evidently chiefly for me, for their own dinner was at midday.

“However did you get the meat?” I exclaimed as Stepanovna bustled about to serve me.

“That is Dmitri’s army ration,” she said, simply. Dmitri sat still on his box against the kitchen wall, but the smile never departed from his face.

That night I found Varia had made up for me the best bed in the flat, and lying in this unexpected luxury I tried to sum up my impressions of the first two days of adventure. For two days I had wandered round the city, living from minute to minute and hour to hour, unnoticed. I no longer saw eyes in every wall. I felt that I really passed with the crowd. Only now and again someone would glance curiously and perhaps enviously at my black leather breeches. But the breeches themselves aroused no suspicions, for the commissars all wore good leather clothes. None the less, I resolved I would smear my breeches with dirt before sallying forth on the morrow, so that they would not look so new. How shabbily everyone was dressed, I mused drowsily. But the peasants looked the same as ever in their sheepskin coats and bast shoes. One of the pamphlets I had bought was an address to the peasantry, entitled Join the Communes, urging the peasants to labour not for pecuniary gain but for the common weal, supplying bread to the town workers who would in turn produce for the peasantry. The idea was a beautiful one, but the idealistic conception was completely submerged in the welter of rancour and incitement of class-hatred. I recalled my talk with the cabman who told me it cost him two hundred roubles a day to feed his horse because the peasantry refused to bring provender to the cities. Two hundred roubles, I reflected dreamily as I dozed off, was half my monthly wages of the previous year and twice as much as I earned before the war teaching English. I reheard snatches of conversation at the railway station, at the little dining-room, and with Stepanovna. Was everyone really so bitter as Stepanovna said they were? Stepanovna and Varia were devoted to their master and thought in their simplicity Ivan Sergeievitch would return with the English. Anyway, it was nice of them to give me this bed. There were no sheets, but the blankets were warm and they had even found me an old pair of pyjamas. I nestled cosily into the blankets; the streets, Stepanovna, and the room faded away in a common blur, and I passed into the silent land of no dreams.

I was awakened rudely by a loud ring at the bell, and sprang up, all alert. It was a quarter to eight. Who, I asked myself, could the callers be? A search? Had the house committee heard of the unregistered lodger? What should I say? I would say Stepanovna was a relative, I would complain rudely of being disturbed, I would bluster, I would flaunt my passport of the Extraordinary Commission. Or perhaps Stepanovna and Varia would somehow explain away my presence, for they knew the members of the committee. I began dressing hastily. I could hear Stepanovna and Varia conferring in the kitchen. Then they both shuffled along the passage to the door. I heard the door opened, first on the chain, and then a moment’s silence. At last the chain was removed. Someone was admitted and the door closed. I heard men’s voices and boots tramping along the passage. Convinced now that a search was to be made I fished feverishly in my pockets to get out my passport for demonstration, when⁠—into the room burst Melnikoff! Never was I so dumbfounded in my life! Melnikoff was dressed in other clothes than I had seen him in when we last parted and he wore spectacles which altered his appearance considerably. Behind him entered a huge fellow, a sort of Ilya Muromets, whose stubble-covered face brimmed over with smiles beaming good-nature and jollity. This giant was dressed in a rough and ragged brown suit and in his hand he squeezed a dirty hat.

“Marsh,” observed Melnikoff, curtly, by way of introduction, smiling at my incredulity. We shook hands heartily all round while I still fumbled my passport. “I was about to defy you with that!” I laughed, showing them the paper. “Tell me, how the⁠—I thought you were in prison!”

“Not quite!” Marsh exclaimed, dropping into English at once. “I had a lucky escape! Slithered down a drainpipe outside the kitchen window into the next yard as the Reds came in at the front door. Shaved my beard at once.” He rubbed his chin. “About time, by the way, I saw the barber again. The blighters are looking for me everywhere. I was held up one evening by one of their damned spies under a lamppost. I screwed my face into a grimace and asked him for a light. Then I knocked him down. And yesterday evening I was going into a yard on Sadovaya Street when under the arch I heard someone behind me say, ‘Marsh!’ I sprang round, just about to administer the same medicine, when I saw it was Melnikoff!”

“But how did you find me here?” I said.

“Ask Melnikoff.” I asked Melnikoff in Russian. He was nervous and impatient.