The Beginning of Spring. Penelope Fitzgerald

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      Up till a few years ago the first sound in the morning in Moscow had been the cows coming out of the side-streets, where they were kept in stalls and backyards, and making their own way among the horse-trams to their meeting-point at the edge of the Khamovniki, where they were taken by the municipal cowman to their pasture, or, in winter, through the darkness, to the suburban stores of hay. Since the tram-lines were electrified, the cows had disappeared. The trams themselves, from five o’clock in the morning onwards, were the first sound, except for the church bells. In February, both were inaudible behind the inner and outer windows, tightly sealed since last October, rendering the house warm and deaf.

      Frank got up ready to do what he might have done the evening before, but still hoped wouldn’t be necessary, to send off telegrams. Then, at some point, he had better go to the English chaplaincy, where he could see Cecil Graham, the chaplain, and count on his saying, out of embarrassment, very little. But it would also mean an explanation to Mrs Graham, who in fact, did both the seeing and the saying. Perhaps he might wait a day or so before going to the chaplaincy.

      At a quarter to seven the telephone rang, jangling the two copper bells fixed above a small writing desk. It was the stationmaster from the Alexandervokzal. Frank knew him pretty well.

      ‘Frank Albertovich, there has been an error. You must come to collect at once, or send a responsible and reliable person.’

      ‘Collect what?’

      The stationmaster explained that the three children were deposited at his station, having come back from Mozhaisk, where they had joined the midnight train from Berlin.

      ‘They have a clothes-basket with them.’

      ‘But are they alone?’

      ‘Yes, they’re alone. My wife, however, is looking after them in the refreshment room.’

      Frank had his coat on already. He walked some way down Lipka Street to find a sledge with a driver who was starting work, and not returning from the night’s work drunk, half-drunk, stale drunk, or podvipevchye – with just a dear little touch of drunkenness. He also wanted a patient-looking horse. On the corner he stopped a driver with a small piece of resigned, mottled face showing in the lamplight above his turned-up collar.

      ‘The Alexander station.’

      ‘The Brest station,’ said the driver, who evidently refused to give up the old name. On the whole, this was reassuring.

      ‘When we’re there, you’ll have to wait, but I’m not sure for how long.’

      ‘Will there be luggage?’

      ‘Three children and a clothes-basket. I don’t know how much more.’

      The horse moved gently through the snow and grit up the Novinskaya and then turned without any guidance down the Presnya. It was accustomed to this route because the hill was steep and so a higher fare could be charged both down and up, but it was not the quickest way to the station.

      ‘Turn round, brother,’ said Frank, ‘go the other way.’

      The driver showed no surprise, but made the turn in the middle of the street, scraping the frozen snow into grey ridges. The horse, disconcerted, braced itself, crossing its legs and moving with the awkwardness of a creature disturbed in its habits. Its guts rumbled and it coughed repeatedly, sounding not like a horse, but a piece of faulty machinery. As they settled into a trot down the Tverskaya, Frank asked the driver whether he had any children himself. His wife and family, the driver said, weren’t with him, but had been left behind in Rovyk, his village, while he did the earning. Yes, but how many children? Two, but that they had both died in Rovyk when the cholera came. His wife hadn’t had the money, or the wits, to buy a certificate to say that they’d died of something else, so they’d had to be buried in the pest cemetery, and no one knew where that was. At this point he laughed inappropriately.

      ‘Why don’t you send for your wife to keep you company?’

      The driver replied that women were only company for each other. They were created for each other, and talked to each other all day. At night they were too tired to be of any use.

      ‘But we weren’t meant to live alone,’ said Frank.

      ‘Life makes its own corrections.’

      They would have to pull up at the back of the station, in the goods yards. The driver wasn’t one of the smart ones, he hadn’t a permission to wait at the entrance.

      ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Frank said, giving him his tea money. The words meant nothing except general encouragement, and were taken in that spirit. Snow was lightly falling. The driver began to drag a large square of green oilcloth over the horse, whose head drooped towards the ground, dozing, dreaming, of summer.

      The yard was served from the Okruzhnaya Railway which made a circle round the entire city, shuttling the freight from one depot to another. The sleigh had arrived at the same time as a load of small metal holy crosses from one of the factories on the east side. Two men were painstakingly checking off the woven straw boxes of a hundred and a thousand.

      Frank walked past the coal tips and the lock-up depositories through the cavernous back entrance of the station. Inside the domes of glass a gray light filtered from a great height. Not many people here, and some of them quite clearly the lost souls who haunt stations and hospitals in the hope of acquiring some purpose of their own in the presence of so much urgent business, other people’s partings, reunions, sickness and death. A few of them were sitting in the corners of the station restaurant watching, without curiosity or resentment, those who could afford to order something at the gleaming rail or the buffet.

      The stationmaster was not there. ‘The nachalnik is in his office. This is the refreshment room,’ said the barman. ‘Quite so,’ said Frank ‘but didn’t his wife come in here earlier, with three children?’ – ‘His wife is never here, this is not her place, she is at his house.’ The waitress, tall and strong, elbowed him aside as she lifted the flap of the bar and came out. ‘Three little English, a girl with brown hair and blue eyes, a boy with brown hair and blue eyes, a little girl СКАЧАТЬ