‘Boots to beard, I’m a Muscovite – where else in the world will I live?’
Mr Kobelev refused to be concerned by the increasingly menacing tone against the middle classes in the winter of 1917. ‘There is much that is good about the new regime, even if I disagree with it in many ways; it’s my duty to stay.’
Russia withdrew from the war and despite the catastrophe of the German invasion across a vast area in the south and west of Russia, he was still optimistic that the various Socialist parties would solve their differences and a democratic system would develop with time. He summoned the servants and told them that they were free to leave his employ, if they wished, and one by one they melted away, all except the yardman Yasha, the cook Darya, and one of the maids, Shura. We unpicked the fur collars from the children’s coats and took care not to look or behave in a ‘bourgeois’ manner on the street. My English classes were in demand; I took private clients as well as continuing to work at the school on Tverskaya. The children’s schooling, as well as Pasha’s university degree, limped on through endless strikes and political meetings. Sonya visited us often, exhausted and sad. Her husband, Petya, had been left severely disabled by injuries incurred on the Austrian front, and poor Sonya struggled to care for him. In this way we lived more or less uninterrupted at Gagarinsky Lane until the following spring.
One May evening in 1918 I couldn’t sleep. I leaned out of the open window, gazing into the dark spring night. A car, its headlights extinguished, cruised quietly down Gagarinsky Lane. Underneath my window it stopped and several men jumped out. They ran up to the gate and banged loudly. This was not the first time that the house had been searched, but the other occasions had been in daylight, and we’d had some warning to hide incriminating possessions. I darted along to Mr Kobelev’s study. His gun, a Mauser, was lying quite openly on the sideboard. People were shot for less. I thrust it into my bodice, then ran to Mrs Kobelev’s room.
‘Wake up, Sofia Pavlovna, dear, the militia are here,’ I said, shaking her. ‘Give me your jewels, quickly.’
‘What? Oh…’ She sat up and fumbled in the chest of drawers by her bed, pulling out several velvet bags. I could hear voices in the hall downstairs shouting for Comrade Kobelev.
‘He’s at work,’ Pasha told them.
‘Look at all this stuff, it belongs to the people. Thieves!’
I peeped over the banisters. There were perhaps four or five of them, swaggering and nervous. One of them casually swept the large china letter-dish off the hall table. It chimed like a bell as it smashed.
‘Who are you?’ said Pasha. ‘Show me your identification.’
‘Comrade Kobelev, I’m the Deputy Head of the Smolensk District Soviet.’ A man pushed forward to talk to Pasha; I saw it was Prigorian, who had been the Kobelevs’ chauffeur until the car was requisitioned. He had always been the image of deference. Now he stood with his legs apart and rested his hand on the gun holster at his belt. ‘The people are concerned that your father has been carrying off the treasures he expropriated from the nation.’
‘You mean his collection?’ I was impressed by Pasha’s calm tones. ‘You know perfectly well, Prig, nothing has been carried off. My father has preserved large numbers of works of art for the Russian people.’
‘Search the house,’ Prig told the others without looking around.
They moved towards the stairs and I ran to my bedroom and shoved the jewels and gun under my mattress. My heart was thrashing about in my chest. Voices were raised, there was the crash of a table being overturned.
‘Open up or we’ll arrest you all,’ I could hear them saying outside Mrs Kobelev’s room.
I waited in my room.
‘Open up, open up at once!’ They thumped on my door.
‘Certainly not,’ I said in my most haughty tones. ‘I am a British citizen. You have no right to search my room.’ I opened the door a sliver and showed them my passport.
In silence they examined it, one after the other. Prig was called.
‘It’s true, she’s an Anglichanka,’ he said, looking at me distastefully.
To my amazement, they moved on.
Half an hour later they were gone. When Mr Kobelev returned home, I went to see him in his study. For the first time since I had lived in the house, Mrs Kobelev was sitting with him. I gave them back their belongings.
‘Good Lord, Miss Gerty, how can we thank you?’ muttered Mr Kobelev.
‘No, no, don’t thank me – but, sir, is it safe for you all here in Moscow?’
‘I’ve always said the moral course is to remain—’ Kobelev began, then checked himself, looking at his wife. ‘I don’t know.’
Mrs Kobelev, very pale, but upright, suddenly spoke. ‘I think we should go south for the summer. Will you accompany us, Miss Gerty?’
‘No, Sofia Pavlovna, I must stay in Moscow,’ I told her gently. The Embassy had advised British citizens to remain in the capital in case of evacuation. ‘But perhaps you’d like me to protect the house, as far as possible?’
‘Oh Miss Gerty.’ Sofia Pavlovna turned away, unsteady on her feet. ‘What you do, of course, is your affair.’
I slept fitfully that night, and woke to hear someone crying. I went to check, but the children were quiet; in the early hours of the morning I heard it again. It was their mother.
We spent the next three days packing away Mr Kobelev’s ethnographic collection. We filled crates with straw for the peasant ceramics, then with the contents of the shelves in his study, fragments of embroidery and costumes wrapped in old cloths. All the woodcuts came down from the walls; all the Buryat weapons and animal skins. We labelled every box and Yasha nailed them shut. Then we hired a cart and transported them to the Alexander III Museum, which had agreed to store the collection. It took us four journeys, back and forth.
‘I always intended to donate it to the State when I died,’ Mr Kobelev remarked. ‘This way is better – sooner.’
Travel into German-held areas was not at all reliable, and although Mr Kobelev had procured tickets for them to Yalta, we had no real idea whether they would be allowed to cross into the Ukraine. Sonya’s husband Petya had returned to Petrograd; Sonya herself decided to accompany her parents south. Shura, the maid, would go with them to help with Dima and Liza. But the old ladies refused to move; Mr Kobelev was in despair.
‘We can’t leave you behind, my dears! Come with us, for our sake, if not for yours!’
‘No,’ said Anna Vladimirovna, definite as ever. ‘Much too hot! Not at all good for the health. Sonya, my girl, you will ruin your complexion.’
‘But my dears,’ said Sonya, kneeling beside her chair, ‘it might be dangerous for you here, and very hard – who will look after you?’
‘We’ll look after ourselves, won’t we, Mamzelle? We’ll manage very well.’
No argument would change their minds, and as I promised to care for them as best I could, Mr Kobelev finally agreed they should remain. In any case, as he admitted, it was quite possible that the journey itself would be just as dangerous for them. The trains were uncomfortable places these days, so it was said. Even more deadly than the borders and the militia were the typhus lice, hopping through the packed carriages. He insisted on leaving me the Mauser, which I took with some trepidation, having no idea how to load or fire it.