Red Dusk and the Morrow

Here and there in the roadway lay a dead horse. The wretched brutes were whipped to get the last spark of life and labour out of them and then lay where they fell, for the ladies who were made to sweep the streets were not strong enough to remove dead horses. Every street, every building, shop, and porch spoke to me of bygone associations, which with a pang I now realized were dead. A few stores remained open, notably for music, books, and flowers, but Soviet licences were required to purchase anything except propagandist literature, which was sold freely at a cheap price, and flowers, which were fabulously dear. Hawkers with trucks disposed of secondhand books, obviously removed from the shelves of private libraries, while a tiny basement store, here and there peeping shamefacedly up from beneath the level of the street, secreted in semi-obscurity an unappetizing display of rotting vegetables or fruits and the remnants of biscuits and canned goods. But everything spoke bitterly of the progressive dearth of things and the increasing stagnation of normal life.

I stopped to read the multifarious public notices and announcements on the walls. Some bore reference to Red army mobilization, others to compulsory labour for the bourgeoisie, but most of them dealt with the distribution of food. I bought some seedy-looking apples, and biscuits that tasted several years old. I also bought all the newspapers and a number of pamphlets by Lenin, Zinoviev, and others. Finding a cab with its horse still on four legs, I hired it and drove to the Finland Station, where upon arrival in the morning I had noticed there was a buffet. The food exhibited on the counter, mostly bits of herring on microscopic pieces of black bread, were still less appetizing than my biscuits, so I just sat down to rest, drank a weak liquid made of tea-substitute, and read the Soviet papers.

There was not much of news, for the ruling Bolshevist1 class had already secured a monopoly of the Press by closing down all journals expressing opinions antagonistic to them, so that all that was printed was propaganda. While the Press of the Western world was full of talk of peace, the Soviet journals were insisting on the creation of a mighty Red army that should set Europe and the globe aflame with world-revolution.

At three o’clock I set out to look for Melnikoff’s café, a clandestine establishment in a private flat on the top floor of a house in one of the streets off the Nevsky Prospect. When I rang the bell the door was opened just a wee bit and I espied a keen and suspicious eye through the chink. Seeing it was immediately about to close again I slid one foot into the aperture and asked quickly for Melnikoff.

“Melnikoff?” said the voice accompanying the eagle eye. “What Melnikoff?”

“N⁠⸺,” I said, giving Melnikoff’s real name. At this point the door was opened a little wider and I was confronted by two ladies, the one (with the eagle eye) elderly and plump, the other young and good-looking.

“What is his first name and patronymic?” asked the younger lady. “Nicolas Nicolaevitch,” I replied. “It is all right,” said the younger lady to the elder. “He said someone might be coming to meet him this afternoon. Come in,” she went on, to me. “Nicolas Nicolaevitch was here for a moment on Saturday and said he would be here yesterday but did not come. I expect him any minute now.”

I passed into a sitting-room fitted with small tables, where the fair young lady, Vera Alexandrovna, served me to my surprise with delicious little cakes which would have graced any Western tea-table. The room was empty when I arrived, but later about a dozen people came in, all of distinctly bourgeois stamp, some prepossessing in appearance, others less so. A few of the young men looked like ex-officers of dubious type. They laughed loudly, talked in raucous voices, and seemed to have plenty of money to spend, for the delicacies were extremely expensive. This café, I learned later, was a meeting-place for conspirators, who were said to have received funds for counterrevolutionary purposes from representatives of the allies.

Vera Alexandrovna came over to the table in the corner where I sat alone. “I must apologize,” she said, placing a cup on the table, “for not giving you chocolate. I ran out of chocolate last week. This is the best I can do for you. It is a mixture of cocoa and coffee⁠—an invention of my own in these hard times.” I tasted it and found it very nice.

Vera Alexandrovna was a charming girl of about twenty summers, and with my uncouth getup and general aspect I felt I was a bad misfit in her company. I was painfully conscious of attracting attention and apologized for my appearance.

“Don’t excuse yourself,” replied Vera Alexandrovna, “we all look shabby nowadays.” (She herself, however, was very trim.) “Nicolas Nicolaevitch told me you were coming and that you were a friend of his⁠—but I shall ask no questions. You may feel yourself quite safe and at home here and nobody will notice you.” (But I saw four of the loud-voiced young officers at the next table looking at me very hard.)

“I scarcely expected to find these comforts in hungry Petrograd,” I said to Vera Alexandrovna. “May I ask how you manage to keep your café going?”

“Oh, it is becoming very difficult indeed,” complained Vera Alexandrovna. “We have two servants whom we send twice a week into the villages to bring back flour and milk, and we buy sugar from the Jews in the Jewish market. But it is getting so hard. We do not know if we shall be able to keep it going much longer. Then, too, we may be discovered. Twice the Reds have been to ask if suspicious people live in this house, but the porter put them off because we give him flour.”

Vera Alexandrovna rose to attend to other guests.