The Lieutenant’s Lover. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 willing 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.’

      Tonya heard his words as though he were talking about taking her to dinner on the moon, or asking her how she would like to furnish her palace. His words seemed ludicrous, but also somehow believable, coming from him. For the first time, Tonya began to believe that things might yet all turn out for the best.

      4

      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 СКАЧАТЬ