The Summer Day is Done

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘All of them, because there’ll be those who will have done it and the rest will be those who have let them. The Tsar is a good man, a kind man. They’re blaming him for everything, for the stupidity of politicians and the wickedness of others. I know nothing about how to govern Russia, but I know people and I know our Father Tsar. I know his family. If they are harmed, oh, I tell you, Ivan Ivanovich, I’ll do some harming myself. And I’ve something better to use than my tongue.’

  She pulled open the door of a tall corner cupboard in which was displayed china and ornaments. From it she took a polished, shining rifle. It was a British Lee–Enfield.

  She showed it to him and the burning in her eyes was reflected in his.

  ‘As soon as we can, Karita, we’ll go to Tobolsk,’ he said.

  Karita put the rifle away. ‘The soup won’t be long,’ she said, ‘but I wish I’d known you were coming, then I’d have had something much better than soup to give you. I wouldn’t have wasted so much time walking with Captain Kalinin.’

  ‘Walking? In this weather?’ His voice was drowsy. ‘And who is he?’

  Karita smiled a little slyly.

  ‘Oh, someone very nice,’ she said. ‘I’ve been working at the hospital. Captain Kalinin is one of the medical officers, he’s from Georgia. I’m to meet his people when I go there.’

  ‘Well, at last,’ murmured Kirby.

  ‘At last? What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Everything, I imagine, if his people approve. I can’t imagine them disapproving of a perfect treasure. When are you going?’ Had he not felt so tired, the wrench of disappointment at the obvious prospect of losing her would have been stronger.

  Karita slipped off her coat, she sank to the floor beside his chair. The fire tossed its flames, reached out its light and heat.

  ‘It hasn’t been very nice without you,’ she said, ‘it’s very nice now. I’m so glad you’re here again. I’m not going to Georgia. Goodness, do you think I’m to marry Captain Kalinin? You’ll be going back to England when the war is all over and what would Aunt Charlotte say if I let you go by yourself? She would ask where I was and make it uncomfortable for you.’

  ‘There are other things to do first, Karita.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She put her arm on his knee and rested her face there. ‘Captain Kalinin is just very nice and sometimes he gets food for me. Sometimes it isn’t very easy to come by, especially meat or flour. Oh, I forgot, do you know what I have?’

  ‘Something I like very much, Karita,’ he said. ‘You’re the loveliest kind of person to come home to.’

  ‘You’re saying that because I’m making hot soup for you. I have some beef.’

  ‘Beef?’ He stirred out of his drowsiness and sat up. ‘Beef?’

  ‘Yes.’ Karita sounded as if she were in happy possession of a fatted calf. ‘Boris – Captain Kalinin – gave it to me. He wouldn’t take any money. He never does. Was it proper to let him kiss me instead?’

  ‘It happens all the time, I suppose. It sounds a fair exchange. Yes, it’s proper enough. But beef?’

  ‘Yes.’ She jumped to her feet, flitted through shadows and found the paper bag. She extracted a square tin and showed it to him. By the light of the fire he recognized it as a tin of British army bully beef. ‘There, it’s in a tin to keep it fresh,’ she said, ‘and I think you make a hole in the tin, then put it in the stove and bake it.’

  ‘Ah, mmm, yes, but I shouldn’t do that,’ he said, ‘it’ll probably blow up. I’ll show you what to do with it later. Would you have potatoes and an onion?’

  ‘Potatoes, yes. But an onion. Oh, I’ll get one, you’ll see. Our neighbours are all very nice. I’ll go and look at the soup.’

  She went into the kitchen again. She was singing. He stretched in the chair, his body rapturous in its tiredness and its absorption of warmth. He thought of Olga. The memories came bright and clear. The pain was there, and the longing. But fear too now. Fear of what the Bolsheviks might do. If Karita had received none of the prisoner-of-war cards he’d sent, then Alexandra had probably not received the two he’d sent her. He closed heavy eyes. Despite the thoughts, the fear, he fell asleep in the chair.

  Karita came back, carrying a bowl of steaming soup. She looked down at him. His head was on one side, his hair thick and untidily long. It needed trimming. He was fast asleep. His drawn face was in quiet peace. She tiptoed away to keep the soup simmering. She returned with a blanket and put it over him.

  She stooped and kissed his forehead.

  Ivan Ivanovich, she thought, it’s about time you took a wife and went home. A fire is not enough to come back to, it’s ridiculous that you have no one but me. Why didn’t you marry the Princess Karinshka? That, I think, was something to do with Prolofski and Oravio. When I next see our Aunt Charlotte I’ll ask her if it’s not too improper for you to marry me. You must have someone.

  She sank down in front of the fire. She watched the flames. It was lovely not to feel lonely any more.

  It was cold, so cold in Tobolsk.

  The fuel allowance for the Imperial family permitted only one fire to burn, that in the drawing room.

  Sometimes the soldiers were friendly and sometimes, because of political happenings, not so friendly. The Bolsheviks had not swept Russia, after all, they were having to fight for their lives to keep what part of it they did have. Opposition was against all logic. It made them tremble with fear and frustration, it turned them vicious. One felt it. The soldiers felt it.

  On a morning when those guarding the Imperial family were not so friendly, one of them, a hard and cynical veteran of the campaigns in Galicia, placed himself in the path of Grand Duchess Olga as she crossed the hoar-frosted yard to retrieve a small spade belonging to Alexis. The girls had been using it to pile snow and shape it. The frost glittered on the man’s heavy eyebrows, on his fur cap. His gloved hands held his rifle across his body, blocking her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Olga gently, ‘is it because I’m not permitted to be out here today?’

  It was like that sometimes. Such meagre privileges as they had would be suddenly withdrawn and without apparent reason.

  ‘No,’ the man said gruffly. ‘Is there anyone behind me?’

  ‘Nobody,’ said Olga. She was heavily wrapped and muffed, her fur coat a welcome warmth about her cold body. She was thinner. Her skin had lost its kiss from the sun and she was pale, as they all were.

  ‘Then take what you see in my right hand and swear your ignorance of it coming from me,’ he said. He spoke growlingly. It was for the benefit of any suspicious comrades. His right hand covered his rifle butt. She saw a tiny triangle of white showing. She reached, pulled it free and slipped it into her muff. It was a crumpled envelope.

  She knew she must not thank him or smile at him. Everyone watched everybody else here. But she could not refrain from showing him eyes warm with gratitude. It was a letter she clutched inside her muff and how welcome it would be to Mama and Papa. The soldier brusquely turned his back, stamped to strike the cold from his booted feet and Olga went back into the house as if rebuffed. Her heart was beating, thumping. Letters sometimes came for them, but always they were censored first unless they were smuggled in. This one had come furtively. Was it for Papa?

  For some reason she did not go into the drawing room but hurried up the stairs as quietly as she could. She wanted to see to whom the letter was addressed before producing it in front of the others. The bedroom was icy. She pulled the envelope out. It was addressed to herself at Tobolsk, Western Siberia. She knew the writing. It was the same as that on the flyleaf of her Shakespeare, the same as that in letters sent to Alexis. She herself kept those letters for her brother. Her eyes swam. She heard Anastasia’s clear voice from below.

  ‘Where’s Olga? Someone is to tell her we’re all to go outside for exercise. Marie, don’t stand on my foot, you elephant.’

  But no one came up the stairs to look for her. Ol
ga sat down on the edge of her bed. She opened the letter. It was difficult to read at first because the ridiculous agitation of her heart seemed to affect her eyes.

  Dearest Olga. I don’t know if this letter will ever reach you but I’m told by a certain person that it will. And I pray that it will so you’ll know how much I and others are thinking of all of you. I wrote two cards to the Empress from a prisoner-of-war camp in Turkey, but fear she may not have received them. I’m back in Russia now and on my way with Karita and others to Tobolsk, and to do all we can when we get there.

  I know that as I write you are in Tobolsk. I know that Russia has gone mad. I can’t think of your present circumstances without anguish. What can I or any man say to comfort you? I could say that a family which deserved love and understanding received none at all, but what comfort is that? I pray that things are not too unbearable for you, although I know it isn’t necessary to tell you or any of your family to have courage.

  Men who found fault in the Emperor but none in themselves have become his judges. I can only remember him as the kindest of men, I can only remember the Empress as the kindest of women. Who can judge them without setting aside their own imperfections? Dearest Olga, if there are such men there are also others, others who still love their Tsar and will have nothing to do with deposing him, or judging him. I’m with many such people now.

  If you’re surrounded by bitterness and hostility that you can’t understand, remember it can’t last, it must come to an end when they begin to know you all. I know you’ll be happy again, I know I’ll see you again. I have a promise to keep. The Emperor has not betrayed Russia, only trusted inadequate men too much and been too generous to his allies.

  Karita begs you to accept her love and loyalty. We think of you, of all of you. Remember me to Alexis, to the Grand Duchesses and to your well-loved parents. I cannot forget them, I cannot forget you. You are always in my thoughts, always in Karita’s prayers. You are very dear and very lovely, and I must say so.

  I love you. Sweetest and most beautiful Grand Duchess, I love you. God be with you. John Kirby.

  Olga sat there on the bed. The room was freezing. The world outside was brittle with hard, glittering frost, the voices of Anastasia and Marie high and clear with the resilience of the young.

  He had not forgotten them, after all. He had not forgotten her. Nor was he lying in an icy grave in bleak, wintry Armenia. He was on his way to her.

  Olga Nicolaievna smiled, her eyes huge pools of blue in her pale face. The letter in its preciousness she hugged to her body as she went down the stairs and out into the frosty yard. Tatiana looked up from the snow they were all helping to build into a huge pile to keep themselves warm.

  What did it matter if the guards were so moody and unfriendly today when her dearest sister looked so happy?

  They were in Western Siberia with the White Army, the formidable Czech Legion spearheading the counter-revolutionary war against the Reds.

  Karita was as hard as delicately tempered steel, Kirby as lean and bitter as a starved wolf. They had left Kars in late January and, with a motley collection of Bolshevik-hating ex-Imperial Army men, joined forces with the Czech Legion. They themselves were in an improvised cavalry unit of four hundred, and the horses they rode they had had to buy. Mostly the unit was comprised of Kuban Cossacks, who foresaw anonymity clothing their nation under Bolshevism, but Karita was not the only woman who rode with them. There were other Amazons only too willing to fight the Reds. And Karita not only had her rifle, she had a nose for Reds. She could smell them a mile away.

  She always had one question for strangers she did not like the smell of.

  ‘What would you do, my friend, if you had the Tsar in your hands?’

  They either replied stupidly or with hatred.

  She turned her back on the stupid ones. She blew off the heads of the others. She had Tartar blood in her veins and appointed herself the executioner of all those who dealt in violence and hatred. They were destroying the Russia she loved, repaying injustice with worse injustice. She knew the kind of Russia they wanted. Well, some of them would not live to enjoy it, she sent them to discuss it with their ancestors.

  She wore a Cossack uniform, including baggy trousers and boots, much to the roaring delight of her Kuban comrades. She had acquired a sabre to go with her British Lee–Enfield. She kept the sabre sharp, the rifle clean. She made good use of both weapons. If she and the other women were not allowed to attack Bolsheviks head-on, they were always there when the men had the Reds running. But sometimes it was harder to survive the admiration of the Cossacks than the dangers of anything else. Sometimes it was even necessary to shout for Colonel Kirby. They had a respect for Colonel Kirby, not because he was for their Tsar but because Karita had told them he was related to the King of England. That was something to Kuban Cossacks. They were admirers of Imperial power.

  Ivan Ivanovich worried her a little. He had become so hard and so obsessed by the need to reach the Imperial family before it was too late. He had lost his good humour, his tolerance, his smile. She was horrified at the risks he sometimes took when they were smashing Bolshevik infiltrators out of villages or towns. She harangued him passionately on occasions.

  ‘Will you let the scum of Russia take your life? Don’t you ever think of what’s to become of me?’

  ‘You’ll survive.’ His brusqueness was typical of his moods now.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ll survive and you’ll fight your way through a whole Red army, I suppose. And I’ll have to follow on to bury each little piece of you until only your stupid head is left.’

  ‘Stop wagging your tongue,’ he said, ‘use your bottom instead. Put it on your horse. We’re moving.’

  ‘There’s no need to be improper,’ said Karita icily.

  He stared at her. She had survived vicious Reds and amorous Cossacks, she lived each day within earshot of blaspheming men and she had seen sights he did not care to think about. Yet here she was acting the prim puss of the drawing room.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said impatiently. He was consumed night and day by urgency and fear. Any advance was always too slow, and every Bolshevik who stood in his way he wished to hell. He had neither time nor inclination for the kind of conversation he and Karita had had in the past.

  ‘Aunt Charlotte would blush to hear you speak like this,’ she said.

  ‘She’d blush for you. You look like a thieving Cossack.’

  ‘Oh, yes, a nice clean skirt would be better, wouldn’t it?’ She was furious with him. ‘Aunt Charlotte would like that, of course, with every man leering at my legs and petticoats.’

  He smiled then. Karita, tanned by sun and wind and ice, her golden hair plaited and bound, smiled too.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  If she sometimes worried about him, he sometimes wondered about her. Whenever prisoners were taken Karita, unforgiving in her contempt for those who were turning Russians against Russians, sons against fathers, disclosed a streak of cruelty. She could watch without pity as the Cossacks put many captives to slow death. It was an anguished dance the Bolsheviks performed in the middle of a village before the Kubans finally dismembered them or broke their limbs and knotted them around their necks. Karita could smile at such things, her eyes burning.

  Kirby, hating the cold, fanatical face of Bolshevism, the creed of men dedicated to the political liquidation of millions, did not care much whether men like these were executed or not. But he did not like torture for its own sake. He did several captives a good turn by shooting them as soon as they began their tormented writhing. This displeased his Cossack friends, but he was an Englishman with an Englishman’s eccentricities which they humoured, though sometimes with a scowl.

  Advancing towards Western Siberia, the White Russian units were incorporated into the Czech command, and from then on had the umbrella of organized Czech efficiency to protect them from their own waywardness. But although the combined Czech and White Russian force began to hammer oppo
sition into the ground with increasing speed, nothing satisfied the hurry Kirby was in. He had been blown up by the Germans in Poland and had been fortunate to survive the campaign in Armenia and his year as a prisoner of the Turks. Now he had more luck than a cat with nine lives. Stiffened by the Czechs, the White Russians were more formidable, the Cossacks more savage, and Kirby rode with them as they hurled themselves at Reds like the intoxicated Assassins of Hasan-i-Sabah. His disregard of risks and his apparent indifference to them appealed to men to whom life was not something to cling on to at the expense of so much else.

  The Czech Legion, made up of fifty thousand men who had deserted from the Austro-Hungarian forces, had been promised safe conduct across Russia by the Bolsheviks. They had intended to join the Allies in the continuing war against the Germans. But at station after station the Czechs received anything but help from local Soviets. The Soviets had already taken on the trappings of riddling intolerance and bureaucracy that they had disliked so much under Tsarism.

  Finally, the Czechs, sensing treachery, took matters into their own hands. They struck first. Disciplined, well organized and well led, they were the real power behind the campaign to shove Bolshevism back into the obscene obscurity from which it had sprung. By the spring of 1918 they had helped to turn over the eastern half of Russia to White control.

  They drove on into Western Siberia, towards Tobolsk, Kirby feverish now. He almost loved the Czechs for their inspired tactics, for their masterly and imaginative flanking movements which enabled them to isolate objectives and then easily reduce them. Russians would have gone for a massed frontal attack every time. The Czechs would take Tobolsk their own way, minimizing the Reds’ chances of removing the Imperial family in time.

  They had fought through ice and snow, then through rain and howling wind. They had seen Russia at its most fearsome, but there was a day at last that was warm and sunny. It was a day when Karita and Kirby came close to quarrelling. It was late April. The Russians were saddling horses, men spitting and coughing, clearing their throats. Kirby was bristly and dark; the bitterness of civil war, of fighting that had no end, combined with anxieties that never left him, had hardened him body and soul. He was tightening the saddle girth when Karita, the skirt of her coat frayed and worn, her Cossack-style hat swinging in her hand, came up to speak to him.