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In 1913 the journey from Moscow to Charing Cross, changing at Warsaw, cost fourteen pounds, six shillings and threepence and took two and a half days.
The neighbours’ oil lamps shone out here and there beyond the back fence. By arrangement with the Moscow Electrical company, Frank had installed his own twenty-five watt lighting.
The women began to cry. They must have helped Nellie to pack, and been the recipients of the winter clothes which wouldn’t go into the trunks, but these were real tears, true grief.
The messenger was still standing with his red cap in his hand. ‘Have you been paid?’ Frank asked him. The man said he had not. The guild were paid on a fixed scale, from twenty to forty kopeks, but the question was whether he had earned anything at all.
Reids, when Frank’s father had set up the firm in Moscow in the 1870s, had imported and assembled printing machinery. As a sideline he had acquired a smallish printing business. That business was pretty well all Frank had left. You couldn’t do anything with the assembly plant now, the German and direct import competition was too strong. But Reid’s Press did well enough and he had a reasonably satisfactory sort of man to do the management accounting.
He had no wife and appeared to have no grievances, was a follower of Tolstoy, still more so since Tolstoy died, and he wrote poetry in Russian. Frank expected Russian poetry to be about birch trees and snow, and in fact in the last verses Selwyn had read to him birch trees and snow were both mentioned pretty frequently.
‘What are we to do with the children’s rooms, sir?’ Toma asked in a low tone. ‘Shut the doors of their rooms and keep them as they are. Where’s Dunyasha?’
He said, ‘I shan’t take much longer. I’m checking the wage-bill against what the pay clerks are actually handing out. You said you wanted that done more often.’
The vast stove, glazed with white tiles from the Presnya, kept the whole ground floor warm. Outside, towards the bend in the Moscow river, a curious streak of bright lemon-yellow ran across the slate-coloured sky.
Selwyn Crane. Although Frank saw him almost every day at the Press, he often forgot, until he saw him in a different setting, how unusual, for an English business man, he looked. He was tall and thin—so, for that matter, was Frank, but Selwyn, ascetic, kindly smiling, earnestly questing, not quite sane-looking, seemed to have let himself waste away, from other-worldliness, almost to transparency. With a kind of black frock-coat he wore a pair of English tweed trousers, made up by a Moscow tailor who had cut them rather too short, and a high-necked Russian peasant’s blouse, a tribute to the
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‘No, Selwyn, it’s not,’ said Frank. ‘Lev Nikolaevich tried to give away all his possessions.’ ‘That was to make the peasants richer, not to make himself poorer.’ Tolstoy’s Moscow estate was only a mile or so away from Lipka Street. In his will it had been bequeathed to the peasants, who, ever since, had been cutting down the trees to make ready money. They worked even at night, felling the trees by the light of paraffin flares.
‘Not an unbeliever, sir, a free-thinker. Perhaps you’ve never thought about the difference. As a free-thinker I can believe what I like, when I like.
Up till a few years ago the first sound in the morning in Moscow had been the cows coming out of the side-streets, where they were kept in stalls and backyards, and making their own way among the horse-trams to their meeting-point at the edge of the Khamovniki, where they were taken by the municipal cowman to their pasture, or, in winter, through the darkness, to the suburban stores of hay. Since the tram-lines were electrified, the cows had disappeared. The trams themselves, from five o’clock in the morning onwards, were the first sound, except for the church bells. In February, both were
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It was the stationmaster from the Alexandervokzal.
He walked some way down Lipka Street to find a sledge with a driver who was starting work, and not returning from the night’s work drunk, half-drunk, stale drunk, or podvipevchye—with just a dear little touch of drunkenness.
‘The Alexander station.’ ‘The Brest station,’ said the driver, who evidently refused to give up the old name.
The horse, disconcerted, braced itself, crossing its legs and moving with the awkwardness of a creature disturbed in its habits. Its guts rumbled and it coughed repeatedly, sounding not like a horse, but a piece of faulty machinery.
Frank asked the driver whether he had any children himself. His wife and family, the driver said, weren’t with him, but had been left behind in Rovyk, his village, while he did the earning. Yes, but how many children? Two, but that they had both died in Rovyk when the cholera came. His wife hadn’t had the money, or the wits, to buy a certificate to say that they’d died of something else, so they’d had to be buried in the pest cemetery, and no one knew where that was. At this point he laughed inappropriately.
The driver replied that women were only company for each other. They were created for each other, and talked to each other all day. At night they were too tired to be of any use.
‘But we weren’t meant to live alone,’ said Frank. ‘Life makes its own corrections.’
They would have to pull up at the back of the station, in the goods yards. The driver wasn’t one of the smart ones, he hadn’t a...
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Snow was lightly falling. The driver began to drag a large square of green oilcloth over the horse, whose head drooped towards the ground, dozing, dreaming, of summer.
The yard was served from the Okruzhnaya Railway which made a circle round the entire city, shuttling the freight from one depot to another. The sleigh had arrived at the same time as a load of small metal holy crosses from one of the factories on the east side. Two men were painstakingly checking off the woven straw boxes of a hundred and a thousand.
But Georgians pride themselves on their rapid changes of mood.
Frank asked where the stationmaster lived. His house was in the Presnya, between the cemetery and the Vlasov tile works.
Along a side-road patched with clinker, carriage springs, scrap iron punchings and strips of yellow glazed tin which once advertised Botkin’s Tea and Jeyes’ Fluid, wooden houses stood at intervals. They were raised by two wooden steps above the ground and Frank saw that the entrance, as in the villages, would be at the back.
At the same time the stationmaster, perhaps taking the opportunity to find out what was going on in his house, came in through the front. Probably he was the only person who ever did so. This meant that the whole lot of them—Frank, the children, the kitchen-mother, the stationmaster—had to sit down together for another half-hour.
His father had always held that the human mind is indefinitely elastic, and that by the very nature of things we were never called upon to undertake more than we could bear.
During the past winter one of the machine men from the Press had gone by night to a spot a little way out of the Windau station, and lain down on the tracks. This was because his wife had brought her lover to live in their house. But the height of the train’s wheelbase meant that it passed right over him, leaving him unhurt, like a drunken peasant. After four trains had passed he got up and took the tram back to his home, and had worked regularly ever since. This left the question of endurance open.
to see too clearly in Russia is a mistake, leading to loss of confidence.
He was aware that the time was coming when British investors, ironmasters, mill-owners, boiler-makers, engineers, race-horse trainers and governesses would no longer be welcome. Either the Russians would take everything into their own hands or the Germans would, but he thought that the good times would last a while yet. All that had really been needed, when he started out in the 1870s, was a certificate to say that the articles of association of your company were in accordance with British law and another form in St Petersburg to say that your enterprise was advantageous to the interests of
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foreign businesses were given ranks, according to their capital and the amount of fuel (soft coal, birch-bark, anthracite, oil) that their factory consumed. Reid’s (Printing Machinery) was of moderate rank.
When he was eighteen he went back for much longer, to train in mechanical engineering and printing, first at Loughborough Polytechnic, then for his apprenticeship with Croppers of Nottingham.
There was nothing legal at the moment against foreigners buying property, as long as it wasn’t in Turkestan or the Caucasus or anywhere where they were likely to strike oil,
There was a photograph enclosed of Seraphim Street, looking like most of Moscow’s side-streets, almost past repair, blank, narrow, patched and peeling, with children crowded around a horse and cart selling something unidentifiable. Above was a white sky with vast, even whiter clouds. The shop-signs made Frank feel homesick. Perlov’s tea-bricks, Kapral cigarettes 20 for 5 kopeks, and a kabak with a name that looked like Markel’s Bar.
His father usually gave the date Russian style, thirteen days earlier than the date in Nottingham,
in March that year that there was mention of Selwyn Crane, who’d been taken on, not at the works, but to ...
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It’s rather, he said, that wealth shouldn’t be used for the benefit of individuals.
His father, however, had no hesitation about the chief compositor he’d engaged, a capital fellow, a very steady worker, it would take a revolution to dislodge Yacob Tvyordov.
Frank was struck by her way of looking at things. There was a tartness about it, a sharp flavour, not of ill-nature, but of disapproval of life’s compromises, including her own.
It’s called Dutch treat, you know. What’s that in Russian?’ There was no Russian word for it. ‘Students, perhaps,’ said Frank, ‘I’ve seen them empty out their pockets at the beginning of the evening and put all the money they’ve got in the middle of the table.’ ‘That’s not Dutch treat,’ said Nellie.
It was a Russian triple knot, in three different colours of gold, made so that the three circlets were separate but could never be taken apart. They slid and shone together on Nellie’s capable finger. At the choral society it was thought pretty, but foreign-looking.
‘I’m not going to be got the better of. They may not know it, they won’t know it, but I’m not going to.’
One of the things that Frank’s father had told him at the Norbury wedding was that he’d better have a look at what they were doing in Germany, and so for three years he worked with Hirschfeld’s printing machinery in Frankfurt. Dolly was born there, and so was Ben. Then came the miscarriage.
In the winter of 1905 Bert Reid died in Moscow—not in the uprisings, although that was a year of strikes and violence, almost a revolution against the Russian war with Japan.
Frank’s affection for Moscow came over him at odd and inappropriate times and in undistinguished places. Dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore-houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarists straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers’ dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage-patches,
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They had had to move to Moscow in the dead of winter, and as they came out of the Alexander station the whole Tverskaya seemed to be drifting with smoke and steam, everyone, men and women alike, rolling and smoking their own cigarettes, their breath condensing heavily in the frost, like cattle in a pen.
From that morning Frank took on the job of overseer himself, or you might say there was no overseer at Reidka’s, only a manager who worked rather harder than most.
Work started at Reidka’s at seven, and at one minute to seven he was in the composing room. It took him a minute exactly to get his setting rule, bodkin, composing-stick and galley out of the locked cupboard where they were kept. These were his own, and he lent them to no one.
Tvyordov spent no time in distributing the type from the reserves of the thirty-five letters and fifteen punctuation marks, that had always been done the night before, but started straight away on his copy, memorized the first few phrases, filled his composing stick, adjusted the spaces and took a sounding from his watch to see how long this had taken and to set his standard for the day. This was not an absolute measure. It depended on the weather, the copy, the proportion of foreign words, but never on Tvyordov himself.
