The Beginning of Spring

by Penelope Fitzgerald

Her accent was Georgian, and it was folly, he knew, to think of Georgia as a land of roses and sunshine only. But Georgians pride themselves on their rapid changes of mood.

These bribes, too, must be called gifts, and with that word you began your study of the Russian language.

‘Crane has now proclaimed himself a vegetarian, which I do not think is enjoined anywhere in the Bible, and he tells me he’s several times been in quite lengthy conversations with Count Tolstoy. Tolstoy is a very great man, Frank,’

Then, without listening very attentively to his answer, she said she had been teaching for four years and was due to take her qualifying exam for the certificate.

The preparations made Frank resolve never, until he came to be buried, to let himself become an object of attention at any kind of religious ceremony again.

He didn’t oppose his will to the powerful slow-moving muddle around him. What he did not like, or could not change, he guilelessly avoided. The current of history carried him gently with it.

‘How old is he?’ ‘I don’t know. We’ve got his particulars, I suppose. Some people are ageless, Frank.’

‘Your father may have told you that I don’t believe in direct resistance to evil. The only way is to put it to shame,

Once they were assembled the men complained that the boys, some of whom were only just fourteen, were incompetent to judge the question, and they were sent home. This cleared a good deal of space.

Linotype, he felt, was not worthy of a serious man’s carefully measured time. It was only fit for slipshod work at great speed.

Monotype, after some consideration, he tolerated. The machine was small and ingenious, and the letters danced out as they were cast from the hot metal, separate and alive.

‘You have to bring your skills to such places, of course, but that is all that is asked.’ He’d bring management accounting, Frank thought,

Selwyn had a fine tenor voice, a reasonable tenor voice anyway, which was what passed for a fine one in Russia,

where a performing bear was brought in as an entertainment. There was usually an argument with the door keeper and another with the cook when the animal was brought in through the kitchen.

For Kuriatin life, like business, was a game, but not a gambling game. On the contrary, it was one in which he had arranged to win, although the rules were peculiar to himself. Knowing that the children had been put at risk in his half-savage household, he had felt Frank’s visit as a reproach. But by insulting Frank—of whom he was genuinely fond—he had restored himself to a superior position. It almost compensated him for the loss of his tablecloth, glass and china, to which he had been insanely attached.

wearing a grey skirt of stout material, a grey blouse that did not quite match it, a grey spencer with pink bits about it somewhere and a felt hat, put on quite straight. The total effect was that of gallantry in the face of odds.

‘There shouldn’t be such a state of mind as expectation,’ interrupted Mrs Graham. ‘One gets too dependent on the future.’

This Pavel Borisovich had been intended for the College of Pages, but had been sent to school in Berlin, and thought it right to impose an absurdly strict regime on the children.

‘It’s good, but it’s hardly ever safe,’ said Mrs Graham. She was, or probably was, a kind-hearted woman, but she was too sharp, Frank thought. All sharp people, no matter whether they were men or women, were tiring.

Miss Kinsman was dowdy, another of the words that couldn’t be translated into Russian, because there was no way of suggesting a dismal unfashionableness which was not intentional, not slovenly, not disreputable, but simply Miss Kinsman’s way of looking like herself.

Inside, a woman of great size and strength, wrapped in a black knitted shawl, sat on a stool behind a wooden partition with a small window in it, wired in, like a ticket office. There was nowhere to sit down. Men and women waited with empty bottles or leaned uncertainly against the wooden walls. The exact money had to be counted out

This sounds West Philly to me

Remember that story, because there’s a great deal of benefit to be got from it.’ ‘There’s no benefit at all,’ Frank replied. ‘I object to it in principle and in detail.’ ‘You don’t understand it. You have no peasants in England, and therefore no stories.’

‘We have plenty of stories,’ said Frank, ‘but the woman always comes off best.’ ‘All the more reason to remember this one.’

It had been held up at the customs for goodness knows how long, because the removal people had wrapped it in English newspapers, and they’d had to wait until the Russian censors had read, or said they had read, every line and every word.

‘These are your premises, Frank Albertovich. You want to know what I’m doing here.’ ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me in time. I take it you’re a student?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A student of what?’ ‘Of political history.’ Frank wondered why he’d bothered to ask.

Perhaps I ought to say, though, that the question of whether the management deserve their profits has no relevance to their economic performance.’

God has given you patience, to take the place of your former happiness.’

‘Surely there couldn’t have been much harm in a pack of cards?’ Frank explained that playing cards were a state monopoly, and the proceeds went to support the Imperial Foundlings Home. ‘Well, that shows the Tsar’s heart is in the right place,’ said Charlie.

worried—as he had told Frank—by the recent behaviour of Englishwomen and English railwaymen and printers,

‘And he’s a vegetarian, too, like George Bernard Shaw. But Shaw isn’t a poet. It must be easier for him, writing prose, to sustain himself on vegetables.’ ‘Selwyn doesn’t eat much at any time,’ said Frank.

‘It isn’t the poet speaking,’ said Frank. ‘If I’m thinking of the right one. It’s a birch tree.’ ‘Well, I consider it a privilege to meet a poet on equal terms like that. You must feel it too, in the day-to-day running of the business.’

‘No tie is as strong as that between a brother and a sister, none. Only prison and hunger are stronger, that’s what’s said.

Ordinarily he would have done this by taking a taxi to the gipsy brothels in Petrovsky Park. Were there good gipsy brothels in Norbury? Frank reassured him on this point.

The fines didn’t amount to much, but Frank knew that Bernov would have enjoyed deciding whether the small amount of lost income was an overhead, a variable cost or an abnormal cost.

Annushka, born to take life in the way easiest to herself and to extract from any situation only the aspect which did her most credit, shouted, ‘I love my Uncle Charlie!’

He would rather have liked Dolly to give him a hug, but she had apparently decided against this.

All that Dolly gave him was a fearless, affectionate glance.

In any case, they wouldn’t do for presents, religious objects would look quite out of place at the vicarage.’

Only the strength of the vinegar and vodka, Russia’s potent protectors against universal death from poisoning, safeguarded the unseen fruit and fungus as it brewed through the winter months.

Twigs and boughs bent beneath the invasion, sighing, swaying back and forth with a circular motion, crossing and recrossing to settle back into their myriad delicate patterns.

By autumn, when their aromatic sharpness seemed to have vanished, or rather to have been assimilated into the burial scents of the decaying earth, the birches were hung with yellow leaves, but now the branches seemed too delicate to bear the twigs, the twigs too fragile for the stalks.