The Romanov Bride

Chapter 4 PAVEL

After we arrived in the capital my Shura found work within a few days, which was of course good, even though the pay was so low, some 16 rubles a month, though that depended on her output. She found a job at a textile factory, not the big Stieglitz Works but a smaller one, and the trouble started when on her first morning there the manager, this fancy Mister Foreman with his squeaky big leather boots-and I was sure he’d paid extra for that squeak just to impress us with their newness-insisted that she live at the factory. The normal working day for her was supposed to be eleven and a half hours, but the factory had received government permission to work fourteen, even fifteen, hours each weekday and ten on Saturday. There was to be only one day off-Sunday, of course. And that’s why Mister Foreman wanted Shura to spend the night at the factory-to be more efficient. He said she would make more money too because she was paid by the piece and the rate was very low, so he said that if she slept on a plank bed by her workbench she would be able to work more and make more, too. And at first Shura agreed to that. After all, she was a good girl from the countryside, devoted to Tsar and Motherland, submissive, and without a political thought in her dear, sweet head. Da, da, da, she wanted to obey her manager, but I said no.

“You are my wife!” I said to her. “I will not be separated from you! I will not agree to meet you just one day a week!”

And I won, and so we became “corner” dwellers. We found a place way out in the Narva District in the cellar of a building that cost us 4 rubles each a month, which seemed like a lot, particularly since all we got was a bed in one part of the cellar, a corner that was partitioned off by a dirty curtain. Three other families lived down there, all of whom, like us, had just arrived from the countryside. Children in makeshift cradles hung everywhere from beams, and it was all so uncomfortable and smelly, but that was all we could afford. Rents were very high… why, an apartment with its own bedroom in a sensible neighborhood cost 25 rubles a month, which of course was more than Shura would make in a month. So there we were in that dark cellar, packed like herring in a barrel. There were armies of cockroaches running this way and that, and the plaster was peeling from the ceiling in great scabs. And it was so cold, so incredibly cold. We shared the kitchen with seven other families, and the toilet, too, which was so dangerous that children weren’t allowed to go there by themselves. Frankly, the stench of the toilet was so thick you could cut it with an axe.

It took me several weeks to find a job.

Every morning I went to the gates of the great Putilov Works, which was one of the largest metalworking plants in the entire world, making locomotives, tractors, railcars, artilleries, and employing some 13,000 hands. It was located in the south-west part of the Narva District, not too far from that nasty place where we were living, and each day I stood at the big gates and called out for a job, and finally one of the foremen came over and examined my hands, tops and bottoms. When he saw that my fingers were thick and calloused from the farm, he knew I was a good worker and so he took me as a smith, placing me at the very lowest rung and giving me 21 rubles a month. Even though the conditions of the factory were a kind of living hell, I was thankful for the start. Our incomes were just enough for food and rent each month and we were together, my Shura and I. And even though each night we were nearly dead from exhaustion, even though we had no privacy in our little corner of that cellar, somehow it happened.

My Shurochka became with child, much to our joy.

Yes, before long she even began to show, perhaps, I suppose, because she was no longer a plump country girl but had become so thin from working so hard.