The room in which I would board was in the house of a typical Russian lady of middle years. She was good-humoured, a little stupid, a voluble speaker on all topics of scandal, an ardent anti-radical (she did not even approve of the Tsar’s concessions to the formation of a democratic Duma and praised the recent curtailment of its powers): she could see no point whatsoever in the study of engineering. She hated the motor-car, the tram, the train, the telephone, and she was not altogether convinced that steam-boats were above suspicion. She thought, in common with many who lived close to the Neva, that their smoke injured the lungs, in spite of the fact that she only coughed during the winter, when it was impossible for the ships to sail. The nearby Finland Station, the steam-tram terminus, and various factories, also gave her cause for alarm. Within an hour or two of my arrival she had asked me what I was going to do about it. She was also able to blame me for the War. I had the impression that she would have objected to the wheel if it had just been invented and that she might also have had a great deal to say against the discovery of fire. For all this, she was a woman I grew to like immediately.
Her house was one of those featureless terraced Petersburg houses, set a little back from the street, with a narrow courtyard and all the rooms of regulation size. My room was on the third floor. It was much bigger than my room in Odessa. It was equipped with its own little stove and washing facilities, a large comfortable bed which could be set against the wall and disguised as a sofa during the day, a desk, a curtained-off ‘dressing’ alcove and so on. There was a lavatory one floor down. I shared the house with the lady, her two daughters, a maid and four other guests, all minor bureaucrats. We ate at a communal table downstairs. The food, I was to find, was heavy and indigestible by Ukrainian standards, but it was wholesome enough. The woman prided herself on providing good service to her customers. As the war went on and shortages became more evident we were given the choice of paying a little more in rent and her keeping up the standard of food, or paying the same rent but taking poorer food. Having experienced the horseflesh stews in the restaurants students used, I elected to eat whenever possible at Madame Zinovieff’s (she was no relation to the notorious Bolshevik).
Apart from the fact that she wore a wig and thick rouge to hide the scars of some disease, there was nothing very remarkable about the widow. Neither were her daughters anything out of the ordinary. Olga and Vera attended a nearby school and were interested in Russian literature, a subject which has never meant very much to me. They were full of romantic talk of Tolstoi, Dostoieffski, Bahshkatseva and various poets of whom Akhmatova (a woman) is the only one I recall. They read novel after novel, book of verse on book of verse, and they spoke of Lermontov’s and Pushkin’s characters as if they were real people. I found these girls often irritating and naive. They were also very plain. I was to learn later they thought me haughty and proud, like some character in a then popular novel, and they had been ‘a little in love’ with me. Russian girls are always a little in love with someone. But predominantly their abiding love is for themselves. I admit that when a Russian girl falls heavily, she falls all the way. This, however, is much rarer in real life than it is in fiction where passionate creatures are forever destroying themselves mentally and physically for the gratification of some inebriated cavalry officer or criminal-poet. I had never known a Russian girl to consider destroying herself, say, for a clerk in the Civil Service or a supervisor in an engineering works. One has to have no useful social function and preferably no money to win the hearts of such ladies. It is odd, therefore, that when they marry they tend to place much importance on the earning power of their dear one.
I was pleased when Olga elected the next morning, a Saturday, to show me something of the city. Thus far my impressions had been very vague. I had seen a few wide thoroughfares, a few alleys, the canals and quays, some municipal buildings, a girder bridge or two, some factory chimneys. I was more than pleased to take a tram with her over the Alexandrovski Bridge. There was no snow falling. The sky had cleared to a pale blue. This colour was reflected in the ice below.
