She edged towards one ragged group and watched them with interest. Yes, this was where the tension lay. She could see it billowing off the men along with the smoke from the hand-rolled cigarettes they clutched between their fingers so ardently, like a badge of membership. She swallowed hard, then shifted the sack into a more comfortable position on her shoulder and headed for the huddle of three men. They were tucked in the mouth of an alleyway next to a laundry that spelled out its name in coloured glass, and she couldn’t help noticing that the shoes of all three men had holes in the toes. She moved closer, swinging her sack.
‘Go away, little girl.’
The words were muttered by the youngest of the three when he spotted Sofia standing near enough to overhear their conversation. He had very round brown eyes with eyelashes longer than a girl’s, and thin bony wrists.
‘Go away and play.’
It was the way he said play that annoyed her. ‘At least I’m busy working,’ she retorted, giving him a cool look that was meant to irritate.
It succeeded.
‘So are we, durochka.’
The second man bared small white teeth at Sofia and asked, ‘What’s in the sack, little girl?’
‘Something to interest you.’
‘What’s that? Kerensky’s head?’
The three men laughed and tugged at their caps. Sofia knew the name. Aleksandr Kerensky was head of the Provisional Government.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Vegetables. Good ones, not half rotten.’ Their mouths and their eyes opened wider at the mention of food. ‘I thought you looked hungry,’ Sofia added, keeping it polite this time.
‘Of course we’re hungry,’ the third man said in a mild voice. He was older than the other two, with deep creases scored in his cheeks and a sadness that sat around his mouth. ‘The whole of Petrograd is hungry, the bread rations are miserable…’ As he spoke a carriage swept past with four matched horses and a liveried coachman, the driver moving with easy arrogance through the slush and sending up a spray of ice on to the pavements. A slow ironic smile crept across the third man’s face and he shook his head. ‘Well, maybe not every bastard in this city has an empty belly.’
Something struck Sofia as odd then. These men were not quite what she had expected. Oh yes, their faces were sharp-edged and their clothes thin and patched, marking them clearly as part of Petrograd’s underclass, yet they didn’t stand around with a posture of defeat. Their heads were up like prize cockerels hungry for the fight. Their eyes burned with the expectation of… She struggled to work out what it was and then it came to her: the expectation of triumph.
Triumph over what?
She swung her sack again, trying to waft the smell of turnips under their noses to regain their attention. ‘Interested?’ she prodded.
The eyes of the men followed the sack.
‘We have no money.’
‘I didn’t think you did.’
‘So what do you want in exchange?’
‘Cigarettes.’
‘For yourself?’
‘That’s my business.’
‘How old are you, child?’
‘Eleven.’
‘OK, let’s have a look at what you’ve got in there.’ It was the one with the girl’s eyelashes. He reached forward to take the sack from her but she stepped back nimbly.
‘No, I’ll show it to you.’
Sofia started to open up the sack but again the bony wrist shot out and big-knuckled fingers began to close on it. Something inside her knew instinctively that if this man snatched the sack from her she would never see it again – nor any cigarettes in exchange.
‘No!’
She threw the word at him with all the strength she had and saw the man’s eyes widen with alarm. As he started to recoil, she followed it quickly with a thump of her fist right in the middle of his skinny chest. He stumbled backwards, limbs clutching at air.
‘Little devil,’ he cursed.
‘Serves you right,’ the older man chuckled.
‘Here, girl,’ said the one with the teeth. ‘If you’re so tough and want cigarettes, smoke this one.’ He thrust a smouldering butt at her. It looked disgusting. There were no more than a few puffs left in it and one end was damp with spittle.
She knew it was a test of some kind. With a casual shrug of her thin shoulders, she took the cigarette, put it to her lips and inhaled. The three men grinned as she swallowed smoke, choked back a cough and blinked furiously as her eyes filled with water. She pushed her mouth into a smile.
‘So, what’s your name?’ the older man asked.
Gently he removed the cigarette from her fingers, took a long drag on it himself and tossed the remains into the gutter where it hissed.
‘Sofia Morozova.’
The men immediately exchanged a glance.
‘Any relation to the priest, Morozov?’
The question caught her by surprise. Her throat tightened at the mention of her father. She nodded.
‘He was well-known here,’ the bony-wristed man said, and his whole manner had changed. It was as soft as his eyelashes.
‘My father.’ She managed to squeeze the words from her throat.
‘Well, Sofia,’ the older man bent towards her and lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘there’s going to be real action today, so a basinful of vegetable soup in the belly will give us all the stomach for it. My name is Igor.’ She could see his sad mouth curve into a smile. ‘I think we can do business.’
Sofia took up a position outside the Alexandrinsky Theatre, where there was a constant bustle of cars and carriages and patrons in their finery. She sneaked in close whenever she could, touting her cardboard tray of cigarettes, but more often than not she was shooed away by the uniformed attendant. It made her feel like a stray dog.
The cigarettes had been a good idea, easy to sell. Out of the forty-eight she had started with, she was down to seven. Not bad. She was looking around for her next customer when she spotted a man in a top hat and a dark cape with bright silk lining heading straight towards her on the icy pavement. He planted himself firmly in front of her and looked down at the tray through tiny half-moon spectacles. She inspected him back. He was glossy, like a fur coat is glossy. Even his hair shone like boot polish in the glow of the theatre entrance.
‘Hello, little cigarette girl.’
He picked up one of the greyish cigarettes and held it stiffly between finger and thumb as though it might bite. Then he shifted his gaze to Sofia’s face. Suddenly she felt she was the one about to get bitten.
‘It’s good tobacco,’ she lied.
‘Oh yes? So where did these come from? Stolen from your father’s pocket?’
She wasn’t going to admit they were soup cigarettes. Igor had jumped at her idea. He and his fellow strikers had stood around a big iron brazier on a patch of wasteland on the snowy banks of the Fontanka, a whole group of gaunt-cheeked faces, and heated her vegetables in a massive pan over the flames, turning them into a soup that drew men from the street corners across the city. Each paid one cigarette. Soup cigarettes.
‘Yes,’ Sofia said and looked the man straight in his soft-lidded eyes. ‘They’re from my father’s pocket.’ She paused and let her shoulders droop. ‘He’s dead.’
It made him blink. He pulled a five-rouble note from his wallet and dropped it on her tray.
‘You’re very pretty, my dear. Maybe you need someone to take care of you now.’ He slid a good imitation of a fatherly smile on to his face. ‘You don’t want to be standing out in the cold on a night like this, it could be dangerous.’
She twitched her plait, making it swing in an arc on to her shoulder. He watched it, fascinated.
‘You’ve bought my cigarettes,’ she said flatly, ‘not me.’
With a precision she was proud of, she spat on the ground next to his shoe, a habit she had acquired from her afternoon companions. If her father had been here, he’d have cuffed her, but he wasn’t here any more. She snatched up the money, thrust the tray and its contents into the man’s hands, then slipped away into the dark streets.