The Summer Day is Done (44 page)

Karita said that she was working in a hospital herself.

‘Well, I never,’ said Kirby.

‘I must do something while you’re in here,’ said Karita. ‘I work in the kitchens. The hospital food isn’t very good, but there’s the war, you see. It’s better than twiddling my thumbs, isn’t it?’

‘Much better,’ said Olga.

‘Much,’ said Kirby.

Karita, however, wished him to know that she hadn’t left the Crimea to work in hospital
kitchens for the rest of her life. She did not mind doing this for a while because of the war, she said, but he was to understand that she desired to resume her proper position with him as soon as he was better. Kirby assured her that she could not desire this more than he did himself.

This was not her first visit since he had been out of danger, but they would not let him receive visitors until he was out of his sweating pain. It was a great relief now to see that he was obviously going to be quite well again eventually. But not until her visit came to its end did she let him know she was not exactly pleased with him.

‘Ivan Ivanovich,’ she said, ‘I hope you aren’t going to make this sort of thing too much of a habit.’

‘It only happens when I get on a horse,’ said Kirby.

‘You should be more careful, you should think of others,’ said Karita, ‘it’s distressing for people.’

When she had gone the room, lacking her refreshing brightness, seemed obtrusively quiet. Olga was so silent as she busied herself with little activities.

‘Olga?’ he said, sensing she was quiet for a reason that had nothing to do with her work.

‘I am busy,’ she said in a suppressed voice, keeping her back to him.

‘Are you tired? I haven’t been easy for you and Nurse Bayovna, have I?’

She swung round at that.

‘I’m not tired and you’ve been no trouble at all, you aren’t even to think such a thing. Only—’ She
stopped. There were so many words but always she had to search so carefully for the right ones. ‘Only Karita was telling you the truth,’ she said, ‘you should not be so careless, you should think of how others will feel if anything happens to you.’

‘Sometimes it’s not carelessness, it’s circumstances,’ he said.

‘There, you see, that is it,’ said Olga, ‘because of the war and because of the circumstances, you should be very careful. Oh, it’s nothing to smile about—’

‘No, of course not,’ said Kirby, ‘I was only thinking how pleasant it was to be alive and to listen to Olga Nicolaievna being a Grand Duchess.’

‘Colonel Kirby, I shall get Nurse Bayovna to talk to you,’ she said.

‘Oh, Lord,’ he said. Nurse Bayovna did not suffer nonsense from any patient.

Olga smiled.

He would not be able to get up and go away and be careless again for a long time yet.

She felt happy about that.

Kirby had another visitor a week later. Andrei came to see him. He was in the uniform of a major. It was exquisitely tailored, it adorned him rather than clothed him. Kirby congratulated him. Andrei begged him not to mention it. The uniform made him shudder, he said, each time he put it on. But a man not in uniform these days had little appeal for ladies and none at all in the eyes of impressionable maidens. And one got
into exhausting arguments with patriots. Patriots were frightfully aggressive people. But he hadn’t come to bore Ivan with his own problems.

‘No, my dear man,’ he said, ‘I was distraught to hear you’d been cut to pieces in some barbaric skirmish and I had to see if the surgeons had cut you to more pieces or put you together. How delightful to see that your head is still where it should be.’

‘My remnants are knitting together nicely, thank you,’ said Kirby, while Nurse Nicola Bayovna eyed Andrei’s tailored languidity quite hungrily. ‘How is the princess?’

‘Aleka Petrovna,’ sighed Andrei, ‘is currently revelling in her natural role as the most beautiful bitch in St Petersburg. Or is it Petrograd now? I forget from time to time. You’re to blame, dear friend. She was only inclined to be enjoyably exhausting before. Now she’s like the kiss of death. The merest word out of place and she’ll destroy the most decent chap by ridicule. Fortunately, I’m able to turn a deaf ear. That is my only real talent, you know. It was extraordinarily obtuse of you not to have married her. I’m sure it gnaws at her. She’ll claim a pretty revenge one day.’

‘Aleka and I are the best of friends,’ said Kirby. He stretched, rested his head and shoulders comfortably on the heaped pillows and assumed, it seemed, an attitude of complacency. Andrei raised an unconvinced eyebrow.

‘Ah, my dear Ivan, that is your story,’ he said. ‘But has she been to see you? No. Have you asked her to come? No. What is to be inferred from that?’

‘That you’ve acquired another talent,’ said Kirby. ‘You’re making speeches. What has happened to you? Are you taking iron tonics?’

‘Please,’ said Andrei, ‘let us refrain from being gruesome. You forget, my brave brother-in-arms, you forget the hidden reserves any man must have to survive what I survive at the War Ministry. Paper, dear Ivan, mountains of it, positive avalanches day after day. And all of the most beautiful quality. I really don’t know where they get the money to pay for it when there’s none to be spared to buy rifles, or so I hear. General Sukhomlinov is a pretty villain, his wife a quite devouring hostess. There’s a woman with the real kiss of death for a fellow, if you like. Shall I give Aleka Petrovna your love? Be generous, dear friend.’

‘Tell her I hold her in eternal gratitude.’

‘Heavens,’ murmured Andrei. He looked around the room. It was bright, the windows open to the warm air. There were flowers. He smiled lazily at Nurse Bayovna standing by the windows. She blushed. ‘If you appreciate her as much as that,’ he said, ‘do marry her. She needs to have her mind taken off other things. She has now decided the war is a sham. She’ll find herself in Siberia yet.’

‘Andrei, old scout,’ said Kirby, ‘why don’t you marry her? You’re the only one able to turn a deaf ear to her kiss of death.’

‘Much as I adore her,’ said Andrei, ‘I’m already married. To peace and quiet. My angel,’ he said, raising his voice to reach the ear of Nurse Bayovna, shapely and full-bodied, ‘will you
dine with me tonight? I should be enchanted to discuss my appendix operation with you.’

‘How irresistible,’ said Nurse Bayovna, faint with rapture.

Karita was at a students’ meeting. In a large room on the top floor of a house in the workers’ district, the smoke from students’ pipes was as thick as the packed bodies. Karita thought it uncomfortable and unhealthy, but knowing a little about students now she suspected an unsalubrious environment lent authority to their politics. They did not like comfort when they were agitating on behalf of the poor. They were all very earnest and none more so than Paul Kateroff. She had come with him because she thought it as well to find out the extent of his interests in her desire to help him become an adult. He was a nice boy.

Everyone wished to address the meeting, it seemed. There was such a noise as they all argued about who should be first.

‘I can’t hear a word,’ said Karita, rather wishing she was back in England and feeding the ducks by the landing stage. The war was terrible and everyone in Russia was at odds with everyone else again. The majority of students in Petrograd had long got over the initial flush of patriotic excitement.

‘No one’s speaking yet,’ said Paul, ‘we’re debating order of precedence.’

‘I thought only aristocrats worried about that,’ said Karita sarcastically.

She was disgusted when the first speaker
was allowed to address the smoke and the peering faces. He made no sense at all except, she thought, to show how ignorant he was. And how deplorable. He was capable only of a ranting, hysterical hymn of hate, of asking for the destruction of so many Russians that she wondered if there would be any left. She was sure the students would shout him down. But they didn’t. The faces glimmering through the smoke shone with infected passion. There was a man standing against the wall to one side of the speaker. His arms were folded, his head bent. He was certainly not a student himself. He looked like a workman dressed for church, his dark suit ordinary but neat, his boots clean. His eyes glittered with approval as he listened.

The second speaker was an echo of the first, except that he was hoarse whereas the first student had been shrill. He said much the same as the first, as far as Karita could make out. Which was that Russia belonged to the people, that the aristocrats and bureaucrats should be exterminated, that the aristocrats were monstrous because of their inhuman cruelty and the people were despicable because of their abject cowardice. Monsters and cowards should all be exterminated, only in rivers of blood could Russia be cleansed. And the war must be stopped.

The applause was rapturous.

‘How silly they all are,’ Karita murmured to Paul, ‘wishing to stop this war so that they can start one of their own, and against their own people.’

‘Hush,’ said Paul sternly.

The man in the neat, dark suit was next. He was introduced anonymously as Comrade Worker. Comrade Worker began in level, unranting tones which Karita appreciated. The shrill and the hoarse voices had made the room hotter. Comrade Worker seemed intent on cooling it down. He was articulate, intelligent and persuasive as he outlined reforms that would eliminate injustices. He tabulated injustices one after the other, using his fingers. But when he had the rapt attention of every student he became passionate, sweeping them along on a tide of words full of the hatred that Karita despised. Waves of saliva-flecked invective washed the smoke. Karita was horrified as she found herself listening to a spitting denunciation of the Romanovs. The enmity Comrade Worker felt towards them was terrifying and it was reflected on faces shiny with heat.

‘Stop him,’ she gasped to Paul.

‘Hush,’ he said again. He had spoken to her many times about injustices, about the necessity of revolution, but Karita had heard the same things from others. She could listen when anyone spoke of injustices, but she could not listen to lies and she could not tolerate it when lies became calumny. Her brown eyes began to burn.

Suddenly Comrade Worker became quiet again, suddenly his voice was hissing sibilantly through his sweat.

‘My young comrades,’ he said, ‘you are the intelligent youth of Russia, the future strength of Russia. But are you to have a future? Who
has control of your destinies, your minds, your bodies, your hands, your tongues? Why, Nicholas the Bloody, Nicholas the Butcher. Who has the power to deny you bread? Nicholas the Autocrat. And who sows the rotten seeds of corruption in his Imperial guts, bloated with the blood of students and workers? Alexandra the German whore. Who’ll succeed the butcher and the whore? Why, the pox-poisoned Tsarevich and the fat, bow-legged daughters as they eat off gold plates and learn to become bigger whores than their—’

‘Liar! Filth!’ Karita burst through wedged bodies, her eyes burning, her face white. ‘You,’ she shouted at Comrade Worker, ‘you are an obscenity! You speak of people you’ve never met, whose love for Russia would shame you if you could be shamed, which you can’t. You know nothing of our Father Tsar, of his family, and your lies are as disgusting as you are! Am I to follow obscenity? What would you do for people but poison their minds and fill them with hatred? Give me truth and I’ll listen to you, give me disgusting lies and I spit on you!’ And in the white heat of her anger Karita did spit.

‘Get her, stuff her mouth!’ shrieked the student who had spoken first.

Karita was roughly jostled. She was appalled at the violence of the hatred she could sense and see. Paul shouldered his way through to her, his thin body bristling. He thrust off a girl student attempting to grab Karita by the hair.

‘Don’t touch her, any of you,’ said Paul, putting his arm around Karita’s shoulders. His
expression was fierce, he flung back his lank hair. ‘She has her own opinions and has a right to express them. Otherwise, what is this freedom we all talk about? Is it the freedom only to listen to ourselves?’

‘It’s the freedom to do away with her kind!’ shouted someone. ‘Are we to listen to her telling us we must love the Romanovs?’

‘The right of free speech must not be denied to anyone,’ said Paul, having to shout himself in order to be heard. ‘If it is denied then we’ll be no better off than we are now. Everyone must have that right, everyone.’

‘My young comrades.’ It was Comrade Worker trying to regain command of the meeting. ‘Listen to me, let me deal with her—’

‘Yes, let them listen to more lies,’ said Karita loudly and clearly. ‘I would prefer to go.’

She was too contemptuous to feel afraid. She turned her back on the speaker. Paul began to escort her to the door. They let her go. They were angry but they stood aside for her.

‘We’ll remember you, lover of Romanovs!’ called the first speaker, his voice shriller.

When she was in the street with Paul she said, ‘Thank you, Paul, you were at least more grownup than the rest of them. It’s simply no good hating people.’

‘There are some individuals I can’t help despising,’ said Paul, ‘but hatred, yes, that’s the least commendable of all human emotions.’

This part of Petrograd was grey and ugly. It had become so because of encroaching industry. Karita disliked it intensely. It made the Crimea
seem like God’s garden. She longed for Colonel Kirby to be out of hospital, for the war to be over so that she could return to the Crimea with him or go back to England with him. Her rightful place was in service with him, she did not feel ambitious beyond that. One day he would marry, have a wife and children, and then her role would be more satisfying than ever. She would have a whole family to look after.

‘Paul,’ she said, ‘do you despise the Imperial family? Are they among those you resent?’

‘I despise all autocrats, Karita,’ said Paul, ‘I reject all forms of autocracy, everything which denies fundamental human rights.’

‘We’re all the children of our Tsar,’ said Karita. ‘I love the Tsar, I think nothing of your Comrade Worker. Shall I tell you about the Tsar and his family whom you despise so much?’