Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

Yeliena sighed. The problem vexed her. She knew from experience that any attempt to discover exactly what her financial position would be in the event of the doctor’s passing was fruitless. However logical her argument Vasili would dismiss her fears as being groundless, even hysterical. Quite simply, it was a man’s duty to provide for his wife’s welfare: to question his competence to do so was to insult his essence. To date, the best she had managed to wring from him was a vague and ill-tempered promise that she would be ‘taken care of’. There was a small mortgage on the house; she knew that much. Besides that, and the normal accounts of day-to-day living, she knew of no outstanding debts. But regarding any speculative investments her husband might have made or the existence of any monies that might accrue from an insurance policy held in his name, or even the value of his pension (should he be awarded one), she was completely ignorant.

Pausing in her needlework, she straightened her back, her tired eyes blinking in the pale amber light cast by the lamp on the table beside her. She would ask him, when the time was right. A man did not want to be pestered about money the moment he had returned from a long and arduous journey.

Bowing her head once more, she resumed her sewing, plunging the needle through the worn fabric of the petticoat she was mending as she rehearsed the points of her argument. In one corner of the room, beside the bookshelves sagging under the weight of the bound volumes of medical journals and the doctor’s beloved Turgenev, a black tortoise stove radiated its life-giving heat and in the small iron hearth two logs, neatly sawn at the mill behind Kavelin’s yard, crackled and hissed on their bed of precious Ural coals. Above the hearth, in the centre of a narrow ledge of darkly varnished wood that served as a mantelpiece, the ticking of a black ormolu clock paused, gathering itself up before striking the hour of four o’ clock.

The sound of its chimes brought Yeliena’s head up again. Her frown of concern gave her face the appearance of what a stranger could be forgiven for mistaking as irritation. Just as the fourth hour struck, she heard the click of the latch on the back door and Katya’s heavy footsteps as she entered the kitchen. Before the next hour struck, night would reclaim its kingdom, held in brief abeyance for the eight hours and forty-seven minutes that, for the want of a better word, the inhabitants of Berezovo called day. A month, two months from now, the boredom of these brief days and long nights would be a dreary memory; their barrenness forgotten with the promise of the approaching thaw. But, until then, there was little for her or any other woman in Berezovo to do except tend her family, keep her home and entertain herself.

And some stoop to mischief, reflected Yeliena as her thoughts turned from her own situation to the behaviour of Irena Kuibysheva.

When she had first heard the rumours (where else but across the counter at Pavel Nadnikov’s general store?) she had dismissed them as gossip, but having watched the two women sitting side by side at Anastasia Christianovna’s the previous day she had become convinced that the shop girl had been telling the truth. While Illya Kuibyshev was away in Tobolsk ostensibly negotiating a new contract for furs with government officials – although no one in the town doubted that he also kept a woman there, if not two; he could afford it – his young wife had been seen drinking hot chocolate in the public dining room of the Hotel New Century with Leonid Kavelin, the husband of her closest friend Tatyana Kavelina. There was, as yet, no tangible evidence of conspiracy but Yeliena’s instincts told her that there was no smoke without fire. There had been something behind Irena Kuibysheva’s eyes, a sense of sly pleasure and legerdemain, that betrayed her manner for what it was: a performance designed to hoodwink her close audience. She wondered now whether Madame Wrenskaya had also sensed this aura of deception.

Tatyana Kavelina had little cause to complain of her situation, she reckoned. Leonid Kavelin was not a very interesting man and, as his wife, Tatyana already had everything the material world could offer: wealth, position, children… three children: a daughter she kept close to her at home and two boys, boarding at the seminary outside Tiumeni. Having mourned the death of her own son, she was at a loss to understand how any mother – however unnatural – could allow her children to be delivered into the hands of strangers for her own personal convenience.