‘They say, Lord Powerscourt,’ Mikhail Shaporov looked very much at home here, ordering their cabbage soup and black bread with great anticipation, ‘that when the next European war comes the army will be so short of weapons that they will impound all that old stuff above the door and cart it off to the battlefields.’
Powerscourt smiled. ‘Is there a military academy round here? Does that account for all the portraits and things?’
‘Oddly enough,’ said Mikhail as two enormous bowls of cabbage soup were put in front of them, ‘it’s the university students who frequent this place. The prices are low, the food is plentiful – if it’s enough for a peasant’s main meal of the day it’s enough for a philosophy student’s lunch. I should leave that soup to cool down for a moment, if I were you. They send it out hot enough to burn your tongue off.’
‘You were not tempted, Mikhail, to be a student here, in your own native city?’ said Powerscourt blowing desultorily at his bowl.
‘My father was very keen that I should go to Oxford, I don’t know why,’ the young man replied, ‘but my elder brother was here. I can’t tell you how different it is being a student in England and Oxford, Lord Powerscourt.’
‘Really?’ said Powerscourt, trying the first exploratory mouthful of his soup.
‘It’s much more serious here,’ Mikhail Shaporov replied, stirring his soup slowly with his spoon. ‘It’s nearly an occupation in itself. In Oxford the height of fame and fashion is probably to climb to the top of Magdalen Tower or the Sheldonian or drink your college cellars dry. Here the height of fame and fashion would be to blow up a government minister or start a revolution. I don’t think undergraduates in England ever take philosophy seriously. Here you find people whose student lives are consumed by it. Some of them become so wrapped up in it that they turn into perpetual students, staying on at the university in their quest for the answer to everything until they are in their thirties.’
Powerscourt was now seriously engrossed in his soup. It was thick, far thicker than any vegetable soup he had ever eaten in London. He thought he detected carrot and potato and garlic and maybe tomato and maybe lemon juice and possibly sour cream, as well as the eponymous cabbage. It was remarkably filling, giving the impression that the consumer was not in a barrack-style restaurant near the university but out in the great expanse of the Russian countryside, flat fields reaching to the distant horizon, an occasional tree providing a modicum of shade, a lone peasant pulling a handcart along a dusty road, a sense of space stretching out till eternity, cabbage soup that tasted of the earth of Mother Russia herself.
‘People always think,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, ‘that they must have a battalion of grannies in the kitchen here, imported from the nearby countryside perhaps, who have inherited this recipe from their grannies and so on, a direct line of grannyhood going back to the foundation of the city itself, hunched over their ancient saucepans, chopping and tasting and stirring and checking their soup all day long.’
‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt.
‘There’s only two of them who make it, Lord Powerscourt. They’re in their early twenties and learnt the recipe from their mother. They’re the proprietor’s daughters.’
‘A man could do worse than marry a woman for her soup, perhaps. What do you say, Mikhail?’
‘Indeed. And there are rumours that these two have been working on a surprise for Easter time. People say they’ve developed an entirely new borscht.’
‘Cabbage soup on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, borscht on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. You would live like a king.’
‘What I am about to ask you has nothing to do with soup or marriage, Lord Powerscourt, but with our plans today after the interview in the Interior Ministry this afternoon. Do you think you will need my services after that, after I have taken you back to the Embassy, of course? It’s just that I have made a provisional arrangement to meet somebody for an hour or so at six o’clock. Don’t get me wrong, please. If you need me I’ll translate for you all day and all night.’
Powerscourt wondered at the mental process by which his young friend had gone from soup and marriage to discussion of his plans for an evening rendezvous.
‘Forgive me for asking you, Mikhail, but would I be right in thinking you are going to meet a young lady?’
‘You are quite right, Lord Powerscourt.’ Mikhail went slightly pink as he replied. ‘It is a young lady and could I make a further suggestion? This has only just come to me, and you may think it absurd.’
‘I’m sure I won’t think it is absurd, once I know what it is,’ said Powerscourt.
‘My friend is called Natasha. She comes from a very grand family here in Petersburg. Just now she is working as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress and her daughters at the Tsar’s country palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Do you think it might help if I told her about your mission and our work in pursuit of the vanished Martin? I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I went to London. Her letters to me were very stilted and stiff as if she felt somebody was reading them, I think. But it has always been said that the best-informed people in St Petersburg are the servants who wait at the Tsar’s table and his coachmen and suchlike people. She might hear something to our advantage.’
Powerscourt scraped the bottom of his bowl to extract the very last drop of cabbage soup. ‘Let me put it like this, Mikhail. Do you think it would be dangerous for her if she were known to be close to the British Embassy?’
‘Dangerous, possibly. I don’t think she’d end up dead on the Nevskii Prospekt but I think she’d be out of a job pretty quickly.’
‘I think you must decide, Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, looking serious all of a sudden. ‘I think it would be unwise to involve Natasha in the decision, however level-headed she is. There’s nothing more attractive to some women than a whiff of danger. I think I would insist that she only listens. She never asks any questions. She doesn’t poke her nose into areas that don’t concern her. Some women, mind you, would find even that limited prospectus hard to stick to.’
‘I will think about it before our meeting,’ said Mikhail Shaporov, trotting off to pay the bill. ‘I insist on paying for lunch, Lord Powerscourt. When we Russians introduce distinguished visitors to our national cuisine, it is only fitting that we should pay. I insist, I really do.’
As they made their way across the river to their next meeting Shaporov told Powerscourt some of what he knew of the Interior Ministry. Most of his information, he said generously, came once again from his father, some of it from his friends who had had dealings with it, some of it simply absorbed from the air and the streets of his city. Mikhail gave his English visitor the Russian bureaucracy in numbers. Eight hundred and sixty-nine, the number of paragraphs in Volume One of the Code of Laws that defined the rules and conduct of the Imperial Civil Service. Fourteen, the number of different Civil Service ranks, each with its own uniform and title. The top two ranks of civil servants were to be addressed as Your High Excellency. Those in ranks three and four to be addressed as Your Excellency. The less fortunate in ranks nine to fourteen had to make do with Your Honour. White trousers changing to black, red ribbons changing to blue, even adding a stripe here and there could mark momentous turning points in the orderly progression of the bureaucrat’s life. He could be promoted by one rank every three years from ranks fourteen to eight and one every four years in ranks eight to five. Promotion – and Mikhail emphasized how typical it was, this interface between the autocracy and the bureaucracy that would only make it less likely that either could function effectively – promotion to the last four ranks was at the discretion of the Tsar and carried a hereditary title. With great care not to displease, taking as few decisions as possible in case they gave offence, a man might reach the top of the tree by the age of sixty. This carefully modulated bureaucracy, Mikhail said, was strangling Russia, strangling it in a slow bureaucratic bear hug.