‘I know this work of yours is important,’ said Fyodor, ‘but surely even you can agree that the commune needs more than two rooms.’
‘The advance of Science must take precedence,’ Slavkin dismissed us.
A metalworker and his family moved into the dining room, seven of them. They told terrifying stories of life in the Volga region under the boots of one, then another army occupation, while they lay in a dugout with the trapdoor closed over their heads and ate beechnuts. At last the Whites were driven out and the local Bolshevik commander gave him a travel pass to Moscow as a worker with a skill useful to the Revolution. His children looked like five tiny old people, eyes shrunken in their yellow faces. Without consulting the others, Vera and I gave them dried apples and pickles from our stores.
Upstairs seven families of factory workers moved in. Servile and monosyllabic to our faces, they were aggressive filchers of any morsel of firewood, any utensil, any scrap of clothing behind our backs. The sign saying ‘Institute for Revolutionary Transformation’ was taken down by the cadres, and our decorations in the hall – ‘Come On, Live Communally!’, and the portraits of Marx and Engels in red paint – were covered over with decrees from the Soviet. We fixed locks and chains to our doors, but that didn’t stop someone from forcing open the window and stealing our cooking pots and soap. Volodya, Fyodor and I marched into the bedrooms and took back everything of ours that we could identify, although one woman – a dark, mustachioed termagant with arms like Christmas hams – had the gall to cling on to one of our mixing bowls, howling so loudly that she was being robbed, that we left her to it.
The main bedrooms at the front of the house were taken over by a group of ex-soldiers who made all our lives a misery with their constant drinking, fighting and ripping up pieces of the house to burn in their fireplace.
‘These people may look like the proletariat, but they were born in Russian villages; you know that really means they are of the Paleolithic era,’ said Fyodor. He looked surprised when Pasha and I laughed. ‘I’m making a serious point!’
Of course he was; I don’t think Fyodor ever knowingly joked in his life. He forgave us then, although not for much longer.
The ‘compression’, as it turned out, had its advantages. In November the first snows fell and the reality of War Communism under General Winter began to bite. During the winter of 1917–18, we had bartered for firewood and burnt old fences. In 1918–19 wooden bathhouses, sheds, duckboards and shop fronts were burnt as well as whole wooden houses – their inhabitants given twenty-four hours to clear out with their belongings. Moscow’s parks were decimated and the Boulevard Ring lost half its avenues. We congregated in the study for our evening meetings and soon to sleep as well, all the mattresses arranged in a star shape around a small metal stove, or burzhui (bourgeois person; for its fat stomach, I assume). The stovepipe shot vertically upright and out through the old chimney breast, smoke leaking out of every joint. The old ladies, against their will, came to sleep around the stove too.
‘What will my cousin say when he sees how you have treated us?’ complained Anna Vladimirovna bitterly to me. ‘It’s a disgrace! Don’t you know I am a Dolgoruky on my mother’s side?’
In vain I tried to explain to her that this was the best we could do. Poor things, they suffered from the cold more than any of us.
One evening Sonya produced a telegram from Constantinople.
‘All aboard the Eloise sailing Marseilles stop Mama’s health not good lack medicines and treatments here stop details on arrival stop 4 x Kobelevs.’
I closed my eyes partly against the fumes of the nyedyshalka, and partly against the tears that welled up against my lids. Since peace had been declared in Europe we had heard that hordes of refugees were leaving Russia for Turkey, France or New York. I hated to imagine their journey with an ill Mrs Kobelev. Dima would now be thirteen, Liza fifteen; old enough to help. Old enough to worry.
‘I would like to have the Commune’s agreement,’ broke out Sonya unexpectedly. ‘I want to leave my job. It’s such a waste of time! I didn’t leave my parents and my brother and sister on their own to fritter away my days in that office.’
I agreed with her. She was working in a government department – the Committee for Sovietisation of the Caucasian Nationalities. As the Caucasus was still overrun by civil war the business of Sovietisation was being carried out by the Red Army, who were fighting in the mountains, killing and being killed in great numbers. Meanwhile Sonya’s colleagues consisted of a few officials who saw it as a reasonable way to pass their days, thanks to the office’s ceramic stove which they kept alight with Tsarist reports on Caucasian questions. The promise of a ration, however erratic, and the protection of a government position, however sketchy, was enough to keep them at their desks at least for part of each day.
‘What would you do instead?’ asked Fyodor.
Slavkin spoke up. ‘I need a co-worker on the Capsule. I’m making progress, but it will go faster—’
‘But we need your ration, Sonya,’ objected Fyodor. ‘We can’t feed ourselves as it is.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I thought I could make a trip to Mikhailovka. Some of the peasants are still well disposed towards our family, you know. I think they would help us.’
‘Don’t be a fool!’ Pasha exclaimed. ‘It’s much too dangerous. Please, no, Sonya.’
‘From each according to his ability,’ Fyodor chipped in, raising his voice. ‘Each of us must contribute to the commune. We can’t carry any dead weights.’
‘I will do whatever the commune thinks best,’ Sonya spoke up again. ‘But as I say, I didn’t come back from the south to waste my time. I can hardly bear to see their greasy faces in the department – what clever fellows we are, they seem to say, keeping ourselves warm, our feet under the table, while those fools out there starve—’
‘If I succeed in the task I am now setting myself,’ said Slavkin calmly, ‘the Revolution will, I promise you, make a huge leap forward. This, after all, is our chief aim, is it not? We must keep our eyes on our goal.’
‘But – but is Sonya really the best person to help you?’ I put in. ‘She has little or no scientific education, and—’
‘She will do very well,’ Slavkin said definitively.
‘Wouldn’t I be more suitable?’ I persisted. ‘I could rearrange my English lessons. I at least have an elementary knowledge of physics.’
Slavkin turned his back on me, saying casually, ‘No, no, you must continue with your teaching. I will explain to Sonya what she needs to know.’
Sonya began work with Slavkin a day or so later, and with her, he spent longer hours than ever closeted in his workshop.
After making a careful inventory of our stores we decided that in order to survive the winter we would have to go bagging. The whole Russian nation would have starved without bagging under War Communism, despite the fact that it was illegal. It meant setting out into the countryside with a bag slung over your shoulder and bartering with any peasants you might come across – a few pounds of grain in return for the family silver. Talk in the food queues was full of terrible fates that had befallen ordinary folk, fathers of families, young boys, babushki, who had gone bagging and been caught by the flying brigades – Red Guards who searched the trains and not only confiscated any goods people might have collected, but quite often shot the bagmen too. But as the alternative was starvation, the tide of hopefuls with bags did not abate.
Pasha and Volodya volunteered to be the bagmen.
‘I’ll be able to deal with the brigades,’ Volodya said. ‘I know how to speak to the lads.’