Beyond The Samovar by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical fiction;adventure;Russia;Baku;Russian revolution;Azerbaijan;Bolshevik;romance
Publisher: The Conrad Press
Published: 2019-02-27T11:04:08+00:00

An angry sun in the Baku November sky. Along the street, wind plays with fish skeletons, bones that cats and rats have discarded. Now three months’ pregnant, she’s walking the mile or so from the Black Town apartment to Yefim Aaronovich’s house to check that the Armenian servants are safe. An extended family trekked from a village in north east Anatolia more than twenty years ago, seeking refuge in Baku from Turkish repression of Armenians. Dedushka took several of them in, gave them work. Others settled in the city’s Armenian Quarter. After dedushka died and Yefim Aaronovich moved into the house with his young family, three of the Armenians stayed to work for him: Serge, who used to be dedushka’s coachman, wife Sonia, and sister-in-law Elena the cook. She can remember the three sitting in the courtyard in the late evenings, the throaty laughs and hard guttural consonants of their Armenian language rising into the warm air while Sonia sewed, and Elena smoked a small pipe.

Before the evacuation to Enzeli in September, she and Peter left bedding at the house; mirrors, photographs, clocks, ornaments, they locked with their clothes in an oak cupboard in the apartment which, on their return a few days ago, they found undamaged after the Turkish occupation. She can take back with her the pillow cases; Peter can call another time for the pillows and sheets.

Following a summer of booming Turkish guns, the quiet exhilarates her, a certainty of safety under British martial law since the armistice with the Turks at the end of October. She hopes Serge will be pleased to see her, for he was disgusted with the British evacuation plan: nothing will make me leave this house, barynya, he insisted when she and Peter tried to persuade him and the women to go with them; baryn left it in our care and we will fulfil the trust of a family who gave us sanctuary years ago. Argument, reason, proved useless: I cannot believe the British will abandon friends in need. Inscrutable eyes, like black cherries, fixed hers: the British are people of honour, were Serge’s final words on the matter. Sonia and Elena clasped and kissed her hands before she left; Elena’s once plump cheeks hung in folds. Each day in Enzeli, picking her way along duckboards where the sea had silted up through centuries of gales, she searched wharves and warehouses, shelter for camped refugees, in case Serge had relented.

‘Morning, ma’am,’ chorus two soldiers in British army khaki, stationed at an intersection. ‘Not too pretty down there,’ one indicates. She returns their greeting, crosses the road, slows her pace past unknown houses. Her insides feel as though some demon is twisting, wringing them out, and she fears for the child she is carrying; stares at windowless buildings like sightless eyes, doors hanging on one hinge, shreds of flapping velvet curtain, work not of shells but human hands. It seems obscene to look at the anatomy of someone’s home, rooms stripped bare, floors strewn with crumpled paper which the wind lifts only to drop again.

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