—bloody fool Tupolev—’
‘—reeking—’
‘—so we sent in our very own bourgeois. Ha, ha, ha! The winch is obviously a true Bolshevik—’
‘—the loading pin was too small—’
‘—almost had his head off—’
‘—came crashing down—’
‘—eight tons unloaded—’
‘—reeking, absolutely reeking—’
‘—bloody fool—’
‘—bam!’
Tonya felt the men swarm around her. Judging by the smell, her father hadn’t been the only one to take a drink that day. The Railway Repairs Yard was an all-male preserve and Tonya felt something charged and predatory in the atmosphere.
‘Who is he? Is he here now?’
‘No, no, the hospital took him ages ago. You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’ – Tonya’s uniform was visible under her coat – ‘Didn’t they tell you?’
‘Not my father. The man who pulled him out. He was hurt? Injured?’
‘Ha, ha! Thank the bourgeois, is it? He’s over there.
You won’t get much sense from him, though. Not with a crack on the head like he got.’
The men were unhelpful, pressing close. With their oily, leering faces and black beards and moustaches, the men didn’t just seem like another half of the same species, but like a different species altogether: dirtier, noisier, brutish, dangerous. Unconsciously, Tonya held her coat closed at the front and broke away from the men, heading for the welding bay. Behind her, the fool Tupolev began ordering his men back to work, so she was spared the delight of a fifteen-man escort.
Down in the welding bay, a single man worked with a blowtorch. Showers of flame and sparks were struck into being. The metal glowed red-hot, even white-hot. Nothing of the man himself was visible. He wore a protective suit and had a dark visor to protect his face. Except that he was tall, Tonya could guess almost nothing of his looks. He didn’t see her approach. He didn’t stop work. He was mending a thick metal tube which must have been heavy, but the man handled it with a rare combination of strength and deftness, turning it with his left hand as he welded with his right. Finally the job was done. He cut his torch and the flame died. He pulled his visor up and off. He stepped back and saw Tonya.
She was the first to react.
‘Comrade Malevich!’
‘Gracious! Good Lord! Lensky!’
Tonya saw a bright red weal across Misha’s forehead and the start of what looked like an almighty swelling. She was disconcerted by seeing Misha, of all people. She didn’t know what she felt.
‘It’s you… I had no idea… I came because of my father.’
‘Your father?’
‘My father, Kiryl, the drunken oaf whose life you saved this afternoon.’
‘That was your father, was it? Good Lord.’
As a nurse, Tonya was well accustomed to seeing head trauma, shock, and concussion. She could see at once that Misha had a well developed case of all three. He shouldn’t be working at all, still less handling dangerous equipment. He rubbed his head again, as though trying to clear his mind.
‘You hurt your head. None of the imbeciles over there could tell me what happened.’
Misha shrugged. ‘Your father got himself caught underneath a railway carriage. We had to winch it up and I slid in to get him out. The winch isn’t up to much though, and the whole thing came crashing down again. I only got out because Tupolev got hold of my leg and whipped me out. Somewhere along the way, I banged my head. It’s fine though. Sore, but fine.’
Tonya felt a surge of emotion, a mixture of tenderness, anger, impatience, compassion. She felt angry with her father for being a drunk. She felt suddenly, briefly, angry with all of Soviet Russia for being a place where winches broke, where drunk men tumbled from railway coaches, where injured men were sent back to work, unthanked.
‘You’re not fine,’ she snapped. ‘Come on. I’ll take you home.’
‘No, really, it’s—’
‘Don’t argue. I’m a nurse.’
Brusquely, almost rudely, she pushed Misha away from his work and out towards the exit. He let himself be pushed. When Tupolev called out to him to stop and explain his early departure, Misha just said, ‘Oh don’t be such a damned idiot!’ and carried on walking. Outside, under the violet night and the first scatter of stars, Tonya felt Misha stiffening and pulling away.
‘What’s the matter? You need to get home and rest. I’ll tell Tupolev, if you like. An official instruction from the hospital.’
‘Oh, I don’t care two kopecks for Tupolev … but I’ll go home by myself, thanks. I don’t need you to walk me.’
‘You’ve got a nasty case of concussion. You shouldn’t be alone.’,
Misha, tall, pale, suddenly angry, turned on her.
‘Alone? No, I expect not. But then again, I’m not sure if I want to be walked home by you. Our last expedition didn’t turn out so well, did it?’
‘Our last expedition? The logs? I think I was rude when you left. I’m sorry. I didn’t know… I didn’t mean…’
Misha brought his face close to Tonya’s. She felt his force, his anger.
‘Comrade Lensky, you can be as rude to me as you like. But I had thought we had gone to buy logs together. I didn’t know you were on a little mission from the secret police.’
‘The police? I don’t know… I didn’t… I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Tonya felt her voice vibrating with emotion. She didn’t really understand why. Only it was desperately important to her that this unusual man did not think badly of her.
‘The police. You don’t understand, eh?’
‘No, really not. Really!’
In a few brief and savage words, Misha explained. His arrival home. His instant arrest. His interrogator’s perfect knowledge of their little shopping trip.
Tonya’s face was wet with tears. ‘No. I know nothing of that. I told no one. I wouldn’t. It was you who bought me those logs. That figurine! I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I wanted it almost more than the firewood. They must have followed you. Maybe my cousin. Maybe Rodyon. Not me. I wouldn’t.’
‘Really? Really not?’ For several seconds, Misha searched Tonya’s face for the truth of what she said. Illuminated and simplified by the moonlight, Tonya’s face was a pale oval, surrounded by a halo of dark hair. Her lips and eyes were imploring. They had a softness about them which they seldom or never seemed to have by daylight. A strand of hair had fallen across her face and had stayed there, wet from her tears. At long last, Misha nodded. He put his hand to her face and moved the strand of hair away from it. ‘All right then. I believe you. I take back what I said. Sorry.’
‘Sorry.’
Tonya breathed the word as if it held no meaning. Misha’s apology didn’t seem to change things. Her face was still turned up to his. She was still crying, not even she knew why. Then quietly, gently, she raised herself on tiptoe and put her face to his. She kissed him, the first real kiss of either her life or his. The kiss was mouth to mouth, but still quite chaste. It was as though she wanted to break a barrier, but still allow herself room to retreat if she had got the situation wrong. But she hadn’t. When she pulled away, slightly frightened at what she had just done, he pulled her back and kissed her again. After a few minutes, they stopped kissing, but stayed arm in arm, suddenly and astonishingly close.
‘If this is concussion,’ said Misha, ‘then I like it.’
She butted his shoulder with her head in mock-rebuke.
‘Do you always thank people like this?’ he continued. ‘I should think it makes a good impression mostly, but some people must be a bit surprised.’
She shoved against him as if to scold him, but he had his arm so tightly wrapped around her body that the two of them moved together, one creature under the moonlight.
‘I wanted to kiss you when we sledged down that hill together and rammed the big snowdrift at the bottom. I wanted to kiss you and kiss you and
never stop,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
‘Well, why didn’t you?’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because I thought you didn’t want me to. You weren’t very friendly, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Well then… What about you? Why didn’t you let yourself kiss me?’
She tossed her head coquettishly, secure now that she was in his arms. ‘A girl doesn’t have to explain,’ she said.
‘But a good citizen always should, comrade Lensky.’
‘You make a good point, comrade Malevich. But I still won’t say.’
‘In that case, comrade Lensky, I might be obliged to tickle you.’
‘But first, comrade Malevich, you would be obliged to catch me.’
She broke away and ran from him, laughing. He chased her down the muddy street, and caught her. They were both laughing hard and panting hard. He pulled her close and they kissed again, longer and even more passionately than they had the first time.
Tonya did walk Misha home that night, but it took her more than four and a quarter hours to do so. Misha did go to bed that night with his cut head wrapped in bandages and bathed in vinegar, but it took him until dawn to get to sleep. Both Misha in his bed and Tonya in hers knew that their lives would never be the same again.
3
Four weeks passed the same way.
Misha and Tonya were in love: each was the other’s ‘little paw’, as the Russian phrase had it. Each day after work, Tonya would meet Misha by the road leading down to the rail yard. Mostly, they spent their time together walking. The spring was a warm one and it was a pleasure to be outside after a long and dreary winter. They strolled through the city parks, or along the banks of the Neva. But they were outside for another reason too. There was nowhere else for them to go. Twice Tonya had come to Misha’s rooms on Kuletsky Prospekt. Both times his mother had treated her as she would have treated any member of the servant class. Tonya felt invisible, irrelevant and unwanted. Neither she nor Misha could behave normally in that atmosphere and they burst downstairs and outside as soon as they could.
Things were no better at Tonya’s home. Her father had been sent home from hospital, but his arm was healing slowly and it would be months before he was able to return to work. Deprived of his work, the nasty old man was also deprived of his access to tobacco and vodka. When Tonya and Misha were there together, he missed no opportunity to make a cackling joke, a dirty innuendo. He never thanked Misha for saving his life, nor did he ever once refer to the incident. When Tonya had to go next door to look after her grandmother, Misha had to sit and endure the old man’s silent, malicious scrutiny until Tonya was done and they could leave.
So, in the time that they weren’t at work, or taking care of their respective families, Misha and Tonya walked – outside, covering miles and miles, talking, laughing, kissing and walking. They made love too, not once but many times. There was a spot in the park they returned to again and again. It lay inside a thicket of birch trees, screened off by a dense curtain of juniper and broom. They were hardly alone in wanting privacy, of course, and there were times when they found their spot had already been taken (‘Give us a sodding minute, will you, mates?’ came from inside the thicket), and other times when they sensed a queue forming outside (‘Sorry, comrades, take your time’).
But, despite the limitations on their relationship, their love expanded. They lived in a daze. When they were with each other, nothing else seemed real. When they were apart, they dragged themselves around as though drugged.
There was one subject, and only one, that had never been broached by them, but, aside from Tonya herself, it was the topic uppermost in Misha’s mind. The subject had to come up, and one day it did. It was the middle of May. They were walking through the streets in the deepening shade, listening to the dying burr of traffic and the clop-clop of horses’ hooves. Then Tonya squeezed Misha’s hand and said, ‘Your mother. You said she was ill.’
‘Yes.’
‘Headaches again?’
‘Headaches, yes, and back pain. And if it isn’t headaches or back pain, then it’s a cough or a fever or something else.’
‘She’s not strong.’
‘Oh, she’s strong enough, or would be if things were easier for her… You know they want her to start work as a factory hand?’
‘Your mother, a factory hand!’
‘At the saw mill down by the Finlyandsky goods depot. Can you imagine? Wearing blue overalls and shouting above the rotary saws all day.’ Misha laughed, but his face reverted almost instantly to its former serious expression. ‘I have to get her out of Russia. You know that, of course?’
‘To get her out? But…’
‘Her and Yevgeny. They’ll have to join Natasha and Raisa in Switzerland.’
Tonya heard his words and something inside her began to freeze. She walked along, silent and tense. Misha was preoccupied and took a moment or two to notice.
‘What’s up with you?’ he said in surprise.
‘Switzerland!’
‘Yes. Where else? Most of Europe is still at war, you know.’
‘But if she goes, won’t you need to … will you … who would go with her?’
‘Who would go with her?’
Misha stopped and looked full into Tonya’s face. He saw the worry gathered between her eyebrows, her green eyes flitting from one place to another on his face. He was still for a moment, then his mouth quivered and broke out in a merry, widening laugh.
‘Oh, comrade Lensky, comrade Lensky!’
He took her by the waist and her left hand, and, whistling out a tune to give them rhythm, he led her in a rapid waltz down the empty street. Infected by his mood, she started to laugh, but her anxiety hadn’t gone.
‘But really … wouldn’t you need to go?’
‘Comrade Lensky, you’re missing your steps!’
‘No, tell me!’
‘One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one. That’s better. Keep going.’
Tonya’s feet began to move as he instructed her. She was naturally a better dancer than he was, even though he’d been the one with the boyhood dancing tutor. He’d begun to teach her one evening and already she was technically more competent than him, though she still didn’t give herself to the dance the way he did.
‘Excellent, Lensky! Lensky of the Bolshoi!’
Misha turned from a simple waltz into a complex Viennese one, full of turns inside turns, spinning and circling down the street. Then he fumbled his steps. She pushed him in mock disgust. The dance ended with them leaning against a high stone wall, panting.
‘Charmante, Madame,’ said Misha bowing.
‘Tell me.’
‘My job is to get them out of the country with a little money. Natasha and Raisa are fifteen and sixteen. Mother will be safe enough with them.’
‘Really?’
‘No. I lied. Raisa must be seventeen now.’
‘Misha!’
He took her in his arms. He wasn’t broadly built, but there was something in his tallness and confidence that made him seem bigger. ‘I won’t leave Russia without you. And you have your family to think of – your brother, father, and grandmother.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘You wouldn’t leave them?’ It was half statement, half request.
‘No… No, I don’t think I could. Father – well, he needs me, but I don’t know if I owe him much. But Pavel’s young, you know. Younger than his age. And Babba, my grandmother, depends on me completely.’
Misha nodded.
‘That’s what I thought. You’re right.’
They walked on.
Tonya wanted to ask Misha if he meant what he had just said about not leaving without her, but she kept her mouth shut, knowing that if she asked him again, he would be certain to bound off again on some teasing diversion. All the same, the thought boomed in her head. Her lover, an aristocrat, a wealthy bourgeois of the old regime, was w
illing to stay in a country which had, for him, turned into something not unlike a prison camp. And for her! She felt light-headed at the thought.
‘You say you have to get them out … do you know how?’
‘Yes. The Rail Repairs Yard. I didn’t just end up there by chance, you know.’
‘The rail yard? You mean…?’
Misha told her. He told her about the single-track railway which crept out of Petrograd up to the Gulf of Finland. How it crossed the border between Vyborg and Lahti before turning and heading for Helsinki itself. How six wagons from the Vyborg line had come into the yard. How he had manipulated Tupolev into assigning the repair job to him.
‘They do need repair,’ said Misha. ‘They’re in a terrible state. A couple of them are probably beyond salvage. But that’s not all I’m doing.’
He told her the rest of it. How he was building a compartment flat against the rear of one of the wagons, built to look like the sloping wagon wall itself. How he would put in a bench, airholes, a sliding entrance panel. How another few weeks’ work would see his project completed. How he planned to conceal his mother and Yevgeny in the compartment one summer’s evening before the hoppers were loaded for export.
Tonya could well imagine the labour, ingenuity and sheer courage that had gone into Misha’s plan.
‘Your mother is very lucky,’ she said.
‘Well, we have yet to see if the idea works.’
‘And money. You said they needed money.’
‘Yes.’ Misha hesitated. He trusted Tonya, of course. He could hardly have told her about his escape plans otherwise, but telling her about the money seemed like a still more serious confidence. After all, senior Bolsheviks had been on the trail of the money when Misha had wafted it from in front of their noses. He had even at one stage suspected that Tonya had been involved in the whole affair.
‘You don’t have to tell me.’
‘No, no. It’s all right.’
Misha preferred to trust Tonya than to hold anything back. So he told her. About the safe. The codes. The items inside. ‘There was jewellery there. Not a huge amount, but – well, plenty.’ Misha felt embarrassed. It might not have been a huge amount to him, but to Tonya it would have represented vastly more money than her father had earned in his entire life. ‘And papers,’ he added. ‘Father had been buying stocks, bonds, anything he could. But buying it through agents abroad. He was clever about it. He didn’t know whether England and France or Germany and Austria would win the war. So he shared the funds about. Some in Berlin. Some in London. Some in Paris. Some in Geneva. Part of that money will be lost of course, but not all. If my mother gets to Switzerland, she will have plenty. She will be a rich woman. Rich enough. If, one day, we go to join them, then we’ll have enough to set up in business, to make a good life out there.’
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