Tonya puts the book aside and stands from her chair with a yawn of her own.
She has been waking up every day at five, to see him speak.
She has her hand on the door handle when she hears the rustling of blankets behind her. She dares to take another look at the divan, at the heaping of pillows and deerskins, the withered figure of Anastasia lost amongst them. The flames in the background, flickering low.
‘I mean to ask you, child. I know about your displeasing dreams. Your disturbed sleep.’ Anastasia’s voice is not unkind. ‘Is something troubling you?’
‘My dreams began in childhood.’ Here, at least, there is no need to lie. ‘I have suffered them as long as I can remember.’
‘Very well.’ The good eye is open again, pale, penetrating. ‘But if I can help, just tell me how.’
The good weather ends early here. A winter chill slinks through Petrograd like a serpent, without any warning. Tonya awakens one morning blue-lipped and hardly breathing. Unable to fall back asleep, she climbs out of bed. She draws the velvet-tasselled curtains, opens the doors to the balcony. Her bedroom overlooks the Fontanka, and the river is as lifeless as she feels. She inhales. The air bristles in her lungs.
She could ring for her breakfast and take it in bed. Olenka would tend a flawless fire. There is nowhere to go, nowhere she has to be.
Is this freedom? Or a spacious cage?
For a moment, she hesitates, but only a moment. She has become practised at this routine: dressing on her own, not bothering with her hair; tiptoeing out her own boudoir and past Dmitry’s rooms and down the central stairs; ignoring the noise of the servants, dim and chattery and echoed in the walls, like mice. All the way through, along every corridor, Tonya keeps her shawled head bent. She goes out the grand foyer, shutting the bronzed doors gently behind her.
Outside, a hostile wind blows, bites at her face. Snow blankets the parquet along Nevsky, and is still falling, soft and sugary. Although the streets are mostly empty, Tonya can hear the quivery jingle of sleigh bells, the whinny of horses. Petrograd is waking up. Her hands buried in her sable, she hurries now to cross Nevsky at the Anichkov Bridge and continue up Liteyny. It is close to a forty-minute walk to the Neva, but by the time she reaches it, she has warmed.
There is an overturned sleigh dug into the muddy slush of the embankment, surrounded by people. He stands somehow balanced upon it, on the runners. He gestures to the bridge, to the river, as if he can see across that growing expanse of ice the very future he is taking pains to describe.
She will be no more, this frail Russia! She will be born anew!
He is a Bolshevik.
Tonya has stood in enough of his crowds by now to know that his name is Valentin Mikhailovich Andreyev. That he is twenty years old, a disciple of Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary. She has learnt far more about their small but vociferous political party than she probably should; only yesterday she found a published pamphlet by Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, in one of Dmitry’s libraries, and read it aloud to Anastasia, hoping Dmitry’s mother might understand everything Tonya could not. Revolutionary theory. Class consciousness. Social democracy. A world of strange, new, meaningless words.
She prefers the ones that Valentin Andreyev uses in his speeches.
Tonya wanders now to the rail of the bridge. She will remain until Andreyev has finished. They will exchange a wordless glance. He will smile as he does, and then she’ll walk on, and it will all happen again tomorrow and the next day. He is only a silent, secret fantasy, one that she guards. She has nothing of her own in Petrograd. Not her furs, her lace. Not her hair, her skin, her breath. Nothing except this.
She has started to recognise his closing lines, the things he wants people to remember. She removes her muff and wipes a layer of snowflakes off her shawl. The cold seeps into her gloves. Bells begin to ring in the distance, high and haughty, while the wind swoops by, even higher. She leans against the cast-iron cladding of the rail, glancing in the direction of the Kresty Prison, on the opposite bank of the Neva. Infamous home of the Tsar’s political prisoners, it is made of faded red brick. Yet today it looks shiny, scratchy-white, like a Christmas ornament.
That is where people like Valentin Andreyev end up.
‘You are devoted to the cause, comrade,’ says a voice from behind her.
Tonya turns, but fails to reply. There’s a slight rush in her ears. He is standing there. The other onlookers have dispersed, and the crowd has scattered. She observes him mutely, almost at a gape. His wool jacket is strewn with holes, and the wind from the river must sail right through. The flurries dust his dark hair, his shoulders, even his smile. Yet she is the one trembling.
‘I was certain you’d stop coming, now the weather’s turned,’ he says.
He must know she is Dmitry’s wife. He’s being disingenuous, but then she has been, too, acting like she is free to be here, standing with him, staring at him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
‘Antonina Nikolayevna,’ she says without thinking. It’s too many syllables. Too formal. He is already too close for that.
‘I’ll be on the other side of the bridge on Saturday,’ he says. ‘Will you come?’
‘I don’t—I don’t know.’
‘We’ll see, then. Antonina.’
He says it like a challenge, like he doesn’t expect to see her again, now that they have spoken. Now that he has come down to her level. She doesn’t know whether she wants to prove him wrong or not. She watches as he saunters off, hands in his pockets. Modestly, like he was never atop that sleigh, never addressing the people, never promising a thing. Quietly, like maybe there is more to him than that: Valentin Andreyev, the Bolshevik.
At teatime there is a caller: the Countess Natalya Fyodorovna Burzinova, heiress and socialite, mother and widow, friend and foe. Dmitry and Natalya met as children, and the intimacy between them is old and obvious. He calls her Natasha, a familiar name; Tonya doesn’t dare. She used to imagine that the Countess would be something of a mentor, an older sister, a replacement for Nelly and Kirill, her dearest friends back home.
By now she knows better.
Dmitry isn’t home for tea, which has often been the case of late. More trouble at the factory, if the servants are to be believed. Once the Countess has swept herself into the Blue Salon, Tonya rings for a tray. The two women regard one another until Tonya backs down, looks instead at the wallpaper, at the places where it curls, where the ends do not quite meet.
The Countess is a regular visitor, yet somehow she always catches Tonya by surprise.
Natalya is older, self-assured, sly. She has the habit of rubbing the silver Orthodox cross that hangs around her neck. Rub, rub, rub. Today it matches her snake-like silver earrings. Natalya often accessorises with silver, perhaps to offset – or to accentuate – the flaming redness of her hair. People say that the Countess must paint her hair, for everything else about the woman appears deliberate, even the contours of her face. But anyone acquainted with Natalya’s two children would know the beetroot colour is indeed a family trait.
Rub, rub, rub.
‘I was hoping to speak to you alone,’ says the Countess. ‘Is it true that you set off every morning and walk the city?’
‘I enjoy the quiet.’
‘It’s not quiet any more.’ Natalya taps her falcon-claw fingernails on the arm of her chair. ‘It’s anarchy. And perhaps you’re unaware, being a country mouse, but when a young woman regularly ventures out on her own at odd hours, rumours tend to follow.’
Tonya has heard her own share of rumours by now. She’s heard, for example, that the young Natalya was desperately in love with Dmitry; that Natalya’s scheming, social-climbing parents intervened, marrying their daughter off to the decrepit Count Burzinov. Oh, if only the Count had died earlier than he did! For by that time Dmitry had already departed on a fateful sojourn to the lower provinces, and was soon to return with, amongst other trinkets, his new bride.