Beyond the Samovar

Janet Hancock

Description

'Beyond the Samovar' is a gripping, engaging story of escape, love and loss.In 1919, a young English couple, Livvy and Peter, leave Baku, which the previous year had become the capital of an independent Azerbaijan. While Livvy is reluctant to leave her home, Peter sees no future for Britons in the new country and treats their escape as an adventure. With their baby, they bluff and bribe their way across Bolshevik and White Russian territory to Archangel on the north coast of Russia, hoping to board a British ship. Only two of them ever manage to reach home.About the Author:Born in Worcestershire, Janet Hancock has lived in Dorset since 1991. For many years she taught English in the south of England to Arab and African officers. The germ of Beyond the Samovar was a newspaper reference to an unnamed Englishwoman caught up in the 1917 revolution in Baku, which at that time was in Russia. Janet enjoys choral singing and cultivating her courtyard garden.

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912924639
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEYOND THE 
 SAMOVAR
Janet Hancock


Beyond the Samovar
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2019
Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-912924-63-9
Copyright © Janet Hancock, 2019
The moral right of Janet Hancock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
Cover features images by Artem Svetlov of RZD steam locomotive Er 774-38 on Flickr and a painting of Distillation of oil Baku by unknown artist on wikimedia
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.
Edward Fitzgerald – Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859)


Remembering Ken, who made it all possible,
and
to the memory of my Birmingham grandparents:
William Walter Tonks 1862-1926
Gertrude Maud Tonks (née James) 1886-1978
whose story shall never be known


PART ONE
‘All the world has gone wrong. The millstones of God are
grinding; some sort of flour will come out of it.’
Peasant woman in N.E. Yaroslavl Province, Russia, September 1917
M.P. Price - My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution


ONE
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 1919
‘G o home to England?’ Livvy echoes as if trying the words for fit and finding them wrong. She is standing behind the kitchen table, something familiar, fingernails digging into the wood, perspiration tickling her wrists and the back of her neck. Peter is washing his hands at the stone sink, lathering carbolic past his wrists after a day at the oilfield. Wind is buffeting the shutters.
She can’t believe what her husband’s saying. ‘Travel?’ she repeats. ‘What do you mean? George isn’t even a month old. This is our home,’ she protests, ‘the first I’ve had I can call my own.’ She didn’t choose anything in this apartment in the Black Town, Baku’s industrial quarter: Yefim Aaronovich’s first father-in-law, one of Baku’s oil pioneers nearly fifty years ago, bought and furnished it as a wedding gift to his eldest daughter and Yefim Aaronovich, his heir apparent, in the last decade of the old century. But since July she has been mistress. She was sure another family would be allocated the second bedroom but the apartment has remained hers and Peter’s, their haven, their eyrie, their garden of Eden.
Peter looks at her over his shoulder. ‘Darling, we can’t stay here. The Russians are fighting each other in Russia and both sides want Baku’s oil.’
A tremor of dread, powerlessness, spirals through her at the memory of three days’ bloodletting in March last year, after which bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in Baku, the only faction who could impose law and order on ancient hatreds between Christian Armenians and Moslem Tartars.
Peter turns from the sink to dry his hands. His light brown hair is flopping over his forehead, where sweat is tracing a course to his shirt collar. She wants to push the hair back but stays where she is, his words distancing her. ‘The Azeris will fight anybody who tries to take their independence,’ he emphasises. He wiggles dripping fingers. She always has a clean towel for him. It lies on the table between them. Her eyes hold his, falter under their harshness. She lets go of the table, gives him the towel.
‘The British Army will protect us,’ she says. ‘That’s what they’re here for.’ It’s a comfort, an assurance of permanence, security, British soldiers on street corners these last six months and their cheerful: Morning, ma’am. And shops reopening, roads cleaned, although since George’s birth she’s hardly been out, flagging in the heat more than before.
‘They’re here to shore up Azeri independence but they won’t always be.’
‘Why not?’
‘Some British MPs are against more involvement now the war in Europe is over. Even if the troops aren’t sent back, they’re needed elsewhere: Egypt, India. We can either leave with them and go to Persia first, or make our own arrangements.’
‘Persia?’ she shrieks.
‘Livvy, the Russia we knew and loved has gone forever,’ Peter pursues, rubbing dry his hands and arms. ‘We must think of George, his future, where he is to grow up. Do you want it to be in an oriental Azerbaijan, anything Russian or European a relic of the past? He’ll have an Anatolian teacher, and be forced to study Azeri at school and the history of Turkic peoples. As an engineer and state employee, I’m expected to learn Azeri within two years.’
‘And from Persia how would we get to England?’
‘Overland west till we reached the Mediterranean.’
‘It would take weeks. And then as long again on a boat home. I’m not going anywhere by sea. I get too sick. You know I do. I’ve told you about those frightful five days from Tilbury to Petersburg, retching in the Baltic wind, stomach threatening to propel itself out of my mouth.’ She pleads, ‘I’ll teach George here.’ Tears are trickling down her cheeks, over her jaw to her neck. ‘I taught Yefim Aaronovich’s two small sons, didn’t I?’ She’s round the table, grasping Peter’s arm, burying her face in his jacket, inhaling him, the sweetness of crude oil and male odour of tobacco. He’s shushing her, kissing her. ‘We’ll be safe,’ she persists, ‘this apartment wasn’t touched when the Turks were in power.’
But his mouth is over hers and he’s pulling at her skirt. They’re on the table, their first lovemaking since George’s birth, in a wantonness and desperation of which she hasn’t thought herself capable and roughness she’s never known from Peter.
Afterwards, he carries her to their bed. ‘We’ll stay as long as we can, darling.’ He’s caressing her, smoothing stray hair from her face. ‘I can’t bear you to be upset.’


TWO
September 1919
P eter is already through the door into the outside corridor. She must move, follow him, not dawdle. They didn’t tell Masha, their maid, exactly when they were leaving until he emerged from their bedroom with two bedrolls - something you see people with these days for a journey of any distance – and he called Masha from the kitchen.
The Russian girl has come into the hall; her lips part slightly.
You’ve been waiting for this moment, Livvy thinks. George sleeps in her arms.
Masha holds the door. ‘Go well, Livvy.’ Blue eyes linger on George before looking down.
Peter’s feet, left, right, sound on the stone steps down to the road. ‘Thank you,’ she manages and is out of the apartment. Go. Just go.
Outside, Peter is several paces ahead. She sets off into hot north wind, the dust fine, penetrating. She settles the muslin shawl, same blue as her skirt, over her head and the lower part of her face: a combination of protection from the elements, and eastern modesty, for since Azeri independence last year people do stare at a bare face. Peter’s in working things: black jacket, cap askew. He’s worn the jacket nearly every day of the twenty months she’s known him, except for their wedding day and Sundays when they used to go to church. It makes him look shabby, ordinary, what everybody strives for since the revolutions a couple of years ago. The only way to stay safe on the streets, he’d say.
Look ahead, not back. Think of survival. Yes, but is it wrong to take with you memories, things you won’t, can’t, forget? She will always remember the wind in Baku. For three quarters of the year it howls round the city like a genie out of a bottle, bringing a little relief from the heat. But this late afternoon there is no respite. She passes curlicued, wrought-iron balconies and shuttered windows of sandstone apartment blocks like the one she’s left. Not even cinnamon water sprinkled on her shawl can mask smells which for her will always be part of Baku: oil, spiced cooking, the perfume of acacia; and fear.
She holds George to her chest to guard eyes tight in sleep and calm her shaking hands. A dog is barking, a baby crying, the city waking from its second slumber of the day.
Peter strides towards the tram stop. Against his legs bounce the bedrolls. Into them she has wrapped muslin squares for George - how soon, where, will she be able to change him, wash them? – one set of clothes each, drawings by Peter’s brother and his diary, photographs of her own brothers with her mother in Norwich, both Princess Royal hatbands, some valuables for barter, with the few Kerensky and tsarist roubles they managed to hoard. And the white silk stockings she wore the day she married Peter. On a string round her neck, beneath the top button of her blouse, hangs the ring, a Russian triple knot in three shades of gold which he placed on her finger a few minutes after six o’clock on a July evening last year in the English church a mile down the coast. The ring had belonged to the baboushka where he’d been lodging, and fitted as if made for her. Without it, the finger feels empty, increasing her sense of vulnerability. She is a few days into her twenty-fifth year.
Under a sky burned white by the sun’s glare, she catches up with Peter. He’s two and a half years older than she is. She’s loved him since the second time she met him – no, the third, really – captivated by the warmth of his gaze and smile in Baku’s Tartar Quarter where she’d gone shopping for Yefim Aaronovich’s cook. Now, he doesn’t look at her as if to meet her eyes might encourage her to voice again misgivings about a two thousand-mile journey across Russia, or even turn back; worse still, make a scene as she did in May. Since his decision to leave the day before yesterday, he hasn’t shaved, moustache no longer neat, adding to his unkempt appearance.
The tram to the railway station tru