The Beginning of Spring

by Penelope Fitzgerald

At three minutes to ten Tvyordov took a cup of tea, which necessitated going down to the canteen, and went to the washroom. This was one of the breaks made compulsory by the unions during the brief period after the government had been frightened by the disturbances, when they were allowed to negotiate.

Linotype, he felt, was not worthy of a serious man’s carefully measured time. It was only fit for slipshod work at great speed. To make corrections you had to reset the whole line, therefore you had orders not to do it. The metal used was a wretchedly soft alloy. 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. They weren’t as hard as real founder’s type, still they would take a good many impressions, and they could be used for corrections in the compositors’ room. When, or even whether, Tvyordov had been asked for his views was not known, but Reidka’s did monotype, and no linotype.

When he judged he had the feel of things at Reidka’s, Frank made a call on all the other shops and offices in Seraphim Street. There was a regulation imposing tax on new businesses according to the amount of nuisance they caused to the neighbours. To circumvent this, Frank suggested that he should contribute to the street’s welfare by paying the wages of a nightwatchman, to patrol the street up to the point where it joined the Vavarkaya. There was a room over Markel’s Bar where he could sleep during the day. ‘But Frank, there’s a hint of bribery here,’ said Selwyn. ‘Put the wages down to overheads,’ Frank told him.

We have now eight hundred miners on strike, and if you can tell me how Old England is to be kept running without coal, and how coal can be spirited out of the ground without miners, then I’m not the only one who would be obliged to you.

Yes, I am being asked to read with my second cup of tea, instead of my Daily Mail, this revolutionary sheet, for I consider it no less. When all this began, The Times said that ‘the public must be prepared for a conflict between Labour and Capital, or between employers and employed, upon a scale such as has never occurred before,’

There were Tolstoyan settlements, he believed, everywhere in Europe, there was one, for example, at Godalming.

Long before his death last year Tolstoy had fallen hopelessly out of fashion with thinking Russia, but not with his foreign disciples, and certainly not with Selwyn.

Tolstoy had forbidden any repairs to the fence, so that the patients could put their hands through gaps and pick the flowers if they felt like it.

Frank didn’t in any way contest the greatness of Lev Nicolaevich, but his hopes for the immediate future of Russia lay with the Premier, Piotr Stolypin. Something about Stolypin’s neatness, quietness and correctness, his ability to keep his head, his refusal, when Rasputin tried to hypnotize him, to be affected in the slightest degree, his decision to accept the premiership even though his enemies had tried to dissuade him from politics by blowing him up in his own house and crippling his young daughter, who had lost both her feet—something about all this suggested that Stolypin might, in Nellie’s phrase, not be got the better of. Stolypin asked for ten years in power. He gambled on ten years. By offering government loans to Russia’s one hundred and seventy-nine million peasants, so that they could buy their own land, he intended—if he was given ten years—to prevent revolution.

They took a taxi to a café on the edge of the Alexander Gardens. There was not a breath of wind, and under the glowing white sky tinged with pink from the horizon which seemed to fume with a warning of frost, the scant leaves were hanging motionless from the lime trees. The waiters who had to serve the tables outside the café were wearing their overcoats over their long aprons. It was the first sting of autumn. In two weeks the statues in the gardens would be wrapped in straw against the cold, all doors would be shut and all windows would be impenetrably sealed up until next spring.

Kuriatin had no telephone. Like most of the second-grade merchants he maintained an elaborate pretence, which, however, was a reassurance as well as a pretence, of keeping up the old ways. Sometimes he would indulge himself with the latest improvement. He had a motor-car, a 6-cylinder 50 horse-power Wolseley, of which he was proud, for there were only fifteen hundred cars or so in Moscow. But there was no electric light in his house, and you could not telephone him there.

When the cash was put into his hands he went through it minutely to make sure that there were no 1877 notes, or 100 rouble notes issued in 1866. Neither of these were legal tender. Probably he would have rather been paid in poultryfood, or benzine.

Frank knew the invitation wasn’t meant to be accepted. It was out of the question for him to come round like that, as a guest on the spur of the moment. Merchants of the second grade did not entertain in such a way. Preparations would have had to be made. Without them, he would have caused almost as much trouble as the bear.

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.

‘Not only does she look like a dismissed governess, but it’s clear that she was born looking like one,’ Mrs Graham had told him.

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

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.

Dolly’s word was not ‘just’ but ‘fair’. She would not think it fair of him to make any arrangement with Miss Kinsman. 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.

Everyone took short cuts in Moscow. The tram numbers, except for the line round the boulevards, were frequently changed, and unless you felt like paying for a sledge or a cab you were bound to spend a good deal of time on foot. But once you were off the main streets you had to know (since it could scarcely be explained) the way. Street names soon ran out. You were faced by towering heaps of bricks and drain-pipes, or a lean-to which encroached on the pavement, or a steaming cowshed whose rotten planks seemed to breathe in and out under their own volition.

Miss Kinsman was like his second cousin Amy in Nottingham, younger, but like cousin Amy, who crossed the road rather than go past a public house because she believed that if she did, the doors might open and men would stumble out to piss and inside she would glimpse women stabbing each other with hat-pins.

The river ran darkly, still choked with the winter’s majestic breaking ice and the debris carried along with it, an inconceivable amount of rubbish—baskets, crates, way-posts, wash-tubs, wheels, cradles, the last traces of the traffic the ice had carried while, for four months, it was a high-road.

The Gazeta-Kopeika said that a pair of dead lovers, clutched together, had floated by, frozen into the ice. The Gazeta repeated this story every spring.

‘Your difficulty in making up your mind what to do about Miss Kinsman is a reflection of your difficulty in deciding what to do about Nellie. Am I right in thinking that you don’t know all her motives? And will you let me say that you would reach a conclusion more quickly if you considered yourself less—if you thought, as each solution presented itself—who will be wounded by this? and whose heart will be made lighter?’

‘I’m trying to get the loan of some European type, Selwyn, you know that. Sytin’s have some, but they won’t lend it. We may have to try in Petersburg.

Paper from Finland was the cheapest by far, but the Tsar might decide to legislate against it. There was another offer, too, for the Mammoth, this time from Kuriatin, who thought he had discovered a purchaser in Tokyo, but as he had no licence to export, everything would have to be done through a third party.

‘I would say she is nineteen or twenty, and she is poor. There can be no higher claim on any of us, surely, than youth and poverty.’ ‘Where does she come from?’ ‘Vladimir.’ ‘Where they’re mostly carpenters.’ ‘Yes, Lisa Ivanova is a joiner’s daughter.’

‘No, I met her in Muir and Merrilees, at the handkerchief counter. Yes, she is in charge of the gentlemen’s handkerchiefs. I told you that she could manage a responsible position.’ ‘You picked her up at Muirka’s.’

It was her hair that surprised him. As a shop assistant, she must have worn it rolled up. Old Merrilees would never permit anything else behind the counters. But her hair now, her thick fair hair, which gleamed in the electric light, pale blonde on one side, palely shadowed on the other, was parted in the middle and fell in two flaxen pigtails like a peasant’s or rather like a peasant in a ballet. He didn’t think he’d be able to put up with this.

Selwyn subsided. Now that he saw everything was going well, his mind was turning to his next charitable enterprise. With the terrible aimlessness of the benevolent, he was casting round for a new misfortune.

He would have been heartbroken if they had shown the least symptom of unhappiness, but was disturbed because they didn’t. Annushka was, perhaps, wearing too many shawls and too many layers of clothing in the efficiently-heated house, and she had two holy medals round her neck now as well as her gold cross, but she looked pampered rather than neglected, and as if she were enjoying herself.

‘Have you ever noticed us?’ Ben asked. ‘We go there quite often.’ ‘No, I haven’t. I’m sorry if I’m disappointing you.’ ‘You’re not disappointing us,’ said Dolly. ‘We want to know whether you’re observant or not.’

Like all merchants, and all peasants, Kuriatin was obsessed with the chance to cut down trees.

In the end he said to the woman, ‘‘You have caused me to sell the horse, the pig is dead and you have borne no children. So now you can get between the shafts and live on oats and rye, and do a horse’s work.’’ In this way he showed he was master in his own house. Remember that story, because there’s a great deal of benefit to be got from it.’

There was only one problem, he told Tvyordov, and that was the European type for the hand-printing of Birch Tree Thoughts.

‘A man lives under the rule of nature. He can’t look after children, and he can’t live alone.’

The children were waiting round the supper table, which was already laid with several kinds of bread and a dish for cold boiled cabbage dressed, as it was Lent, with sunflower oil instead of butter.

Frank tried to avoid looking at Lisa. Cutting her hair had made a great difference to her appearance. Her great beauty was her eyes, which were not particularly large and quite close together, but a long oval in shape and dark grey in colour, with dark lashes, the lower lid raised a little, as though she was always expecting to look into a bright light.

Lisa’s face, so pale, so placid, so undisturbed even by speaking and smiling, was distorted now by the large piece of white bread she had crammed in, and her right cheek jutted out while her fine young jaws moved mechanically to and fro and her white throat dilated in the task of swallowing potato soup.

And with her beautiful hair gone, she ought to look less interesting. He wished that this was so.

It seemed, however, that this teacher had spent some time the year before in exile, as a suspected person, in a village somewhere on the river Yemtsa. ‘The government allowed her thirteen roubles a month, and a grant for extra winter clothes, but she didn’t buy any.’ ‘She’s dowdy,’ said Ben. ‘You only get eight roubles as an exile if you’re of peasant origin,’ Dolly went on. ‘But then, of course, you can earn money working in the potato fields.’

‘Lisa Ivanovna’s of peasant origin,’ said Ben. ‘That’s her status. It’s on her papers.’

What you are, Lisa Ivanovna, is solid flesh inside your clothes, within arm’s length, or nearly, in all the glory of solid flesh, lessened a bit by your idiotically cutting off your hair—you

Frank knew that Selwyn ought to have been present when he interviewed the alert, ambitious, bright-eyed Bernov, and he felt a pang of shame when Selwyn put only one more question: ‘Would you say that this young man has been touched to any extent by the teachings of Tolstoy?’ He had to say that he didn’t know, but thought it unlikely. ‘But you wouldn’t call him a quarrelsome fellow?’ ‘He didn’t quarrel with me when I saw him.’

Since it was supposed to be devoted to tea-drinking, the walls were frescoed from smoky ceiling to floor in red-gold and silver-gold and painted with dancing, embracing and tea-swilling figures overlapping with horses, horse-collars with golden bells, warriors, huts prancing along on chickens’ legs, simpering children, crowned frogs, dying swans, exultant storks and naked women laughing in apparent satisfaction and veiled, to a slight extent, by the clouds of a glowing sunset. Service at Rusalochka’s was in principle a simple matter, since nothing was served but tea, cakes, vodka and listofka, slievanka, vieshnyovka and beryozovitsa, the liqueurs of the currant-leaf, plum, cherry and birch-sap. But the great silver tea-pots, each like a kettle-drum on its wheeled stand, crossed and recrossed the aisles between the tables, which became smaller and smaller as the room filled up, only avoiding collision with each other and the trollies of strong alcohol through the manipulation of the waiters, who seemed to be chosen for strength rather than skill, and as a result of the threats and warnings of the customers bellowing either for further orders or, as it seemed, to encourage the racing tea-pots, as in a sporting event.

The customers registered only as the opening and closing of mouths, all sound and sense being drowned by Rusalochka’s mighty Garmoniphon, the great golden organ which with its soaring array of Garmonica pipes occupied the whole of one wall of the demonic tearooms. A German in a frock-coat played it, or perhaps a series of Germans in frock-coats, closely resembling each other. At home, the merchants preferred the old Russian songs, but not here, not at Rusalochka’s, a very expensive place, by the way, where one saw and was seen, and where first Grieg and then Offenbach’s Belle Hélène were now being played at the pitch of a dockyard in full production.

Frank had long ago got used to being asked, usually by complete strangers, for assistance. They were convinced that, as a business resident in good standing, he could help with their external passports or with permissions of some kind, or else they wanted him to delay their military conscription or to threaten their college superintendent into giving them better marks, or to sign a petition to the Imperial Chancery about a relative who had fallen into disgrace.

As Frank had told Selwyn, Aleksandr Alexsandrovich Bernov had been with Sytin’s, the giant print works beyond the Sadovaya Ring. Clean-shaven, sharp-glancing, quick on the uptake, he had been impatient with his place there as head clerk, but his ideas—if they were his—were geared, perhaps irretrievably, to a large firm. He saw the business, any business, as an undeclared war against every employee below the rank of cost accountant.

Hand-printing is associated now with Tolstoyans and student revolutionaries and activists in garrets and cellars. The future belongs to hot metal, of course.’ ‘It’s still useful for small jobs and essential for fine work,’ said Frank.

Bernov, however, urged that Reidka’s should give up the small jobs altogether. Rent more warehouses, install linotype and print newspapers. ‘There’s a new paper or a new journal starting up every day. And with a newspaper you’re printing so many identical units that you can go straight into large-scale unit costing.’ ‘I don’t want to print newspapers,’ said Frank. ‘This firm has to be kept on a very delicate balance, so that it can be sold without loss and at short notice if the international situation gets worse.’

More pay for more efficiency. English and German firms have a system of merit rating for their workers. I don’t know if we shall ever accept that here. But you can start by increasing the fines for drunkenness, lowering the agreed payments for waiting time when the paper runs out and so forth, and, above all, no special cases, no humanitarian allowances. That’s what prosperity means. You’re giving everyone the money they deserve.’