Midnight in St. Petersburg (12 page)

He played on; but a part of him was listening, through the thin party wall, to Inna moving around her room; putting things down; the creak of bedsprings; a scrape.

He was playing for her, he realized. Trying to play away her fear. Showing her the place they both came from, and that he could help her rediscover.

He swooped from one string to the next, losing himself in the melody.

All at once, he heard the answering sound of a violin from behind the wall: a long, quiet, open A, played alone, then with a D, which he could hear being carefully tuned, then the G, and finally the E.

He paused. He didn't remember that old violin sounding so pure. He hadn't done a bad job on it, considering how green he'd been. Not a bad job at all.

He was already feeling the beginning of elation.

His playing had encouraged her, but it was only when he heard the next sounds to come through the wall that he realized it wasn't going to be as simple as he'd imagined.

Inna began with a quiet, disciplined G major scale, a fluid run of quavers from the bottom to the top of the violin and back. He paused. Next, she moved up to A-flat major, then A, then B-flat. Her playing got gradually louder over the next few scales, up through D to E-flat.

She's not joining in, he thought, with disappointment. She's just drowning me out. Using music as a weapon. Making war.

E, F, she played, pressing on the strings.

He picked up his instrument again. He answered, with his own louder, more extravagant howl of pained catgut. Well, if that's what she wants, he thought, pressing as hard as he could on the strings in his turn, I can give as good as I get, any day.

But he didn't have Inna's stamina, or her technique, or her sheer breadth of repertoire. As Tchaikovsky and Wieniawski succeeded Rimsky-Korsakov from behind the wall, he felt as though she was marshalling an unstoppable, unforgiving Slavic musical army behind her. He finally gave up. He shook his head, baffled and defeated, put his violin down and slunk out, retreating to the workshop with the box of leaflets he still hadn't taken round to young Kremer's.

As he hurried down the stairs, he tried to empty his mind of everything but the leaflet he'd written. He had reason to be proud of it, he thought. It was a good piece of work that demanded a fair trial for a Jew accused of ritually murdering a slum boy in Kiev. Mendel Beilis's face – beard, spectacles; looking through and through the stolid brick-factory manager he was – stared arrestingly out from the front page. As young Kremer always said, how could you look at that face and believe for a moment that a person of such transparent, respectable dullness could possibly have lured little Andrei Yushchinsky into a cave and stabbed him thirteen times to ‘milk' him of blood to bake into matzos?

Well, of course it was a ridiculous accusation. But that didn't mean Beilis wasn't facing execution. And the thought of that quiet, ordinary man, sitting in a damp cell in Kiev, staring at the walls, waiting for death, sent shivers that had something more personal than compassion in them down Yasha's spine.

But it wasn't just Yasha, or just Jews, who felt for Beilis. Oddly for a campaign of this nature – and hearteningly – they'd got support. Up here in the big city, Yasha now knew, there were more than enough liberals and radicals as disgruntled as he was with the creaking, brutal, hopelessly backward-looking autocracy and its crass police; people not unlike his own Monsieur Leman, who could really make a difference if they took a cause to their hearts.

Young Kremer had recently, on his uncle's advice, written about the case to a well-connected left-wing writer living abroad in Capri. This new friend, who signed his letters simply ‘Maxim', was, it turned out, more than ready to help, and was already talking about lining up all sorts of the great and good to fight for Beilis: Rabbi Mazev, of course, but also all the most able counsels of the Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev bars, not to mention the professors, even Glagolev, the Orthodox philosopher from the Kiev Theological Seminary. The important thing was getting other people united behind your cause, so they helped you achieve your aim. Inna, cutting away with her penknife as if damaging herself in solitude might somehow make her life better, had signally failed to understand that last night. (Though, Yasha thought, her embarrassment now, not to mention the charm she'd been showing Monsieur Leman earlier on today, might mean she'd now worked this out too.) If the Beilis case ever came to trial – if the prisoner didn't just die in his cell in mysterious circumstances, which still seemed the likeliest outcome – Yasha was beginning to think it possible that, whatever the police and the Black Hundreds alleged, he might, just might, get off.

And this leaflet might help.

Usually reflecting on this possibility energized Yasha. But tonight he was still sighing as he reached the workshop door and fumbled for the keys.

He remembered Inna's playing of that last Tchaikovsky waltz, upstairs.
She's
Jewish herself, he thought, yet she's probably also one of the people who looks at that picture of Beilis and thinks, No smoke without fire.

He squared his shoulders. He'd go to young Kremer's with his leaflets in a bit; after dinner, maybe … or perhaps he'd give dinner a miss? Suddenly he couldn't face the noise and bustle of Madame Leman's table.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was early evening, and Lidiya Leman was deep in an armchair in the drawing room, exhausted from heaving round all the coats and boots for winter, daydreaming over a periodical with a fashionable cover: a nearly pornographic line drawing of a curvy art-nouveau Mother Russia being ravaged by a Satanic monster.

None of these images and ideas shocked her any more, of course. They were all so
used
to the end-of-the-world-is-nigh posturing by now. She'd let the magazine fall.

Instead she was gazing at the troubled sky outside – that thick, roiling, grey mass, so weighted with soot and filth that it seemed unable to explode the snow that needed to fall – and remembering the golden light of the garden at Vinnitsa all those summers ago, and the sweet, alcoholic smell of decaying fruit, and the drunken buzz of the wasps, and Masha the housekeeper shouting up the stairs, in her cracked voice, ‘Madam! Madam! Christ has come for apples!'

How simple everything had seemed, back then; how alluring that golden fuzz of possibilities.

Masha's ‘Christ' had been nothing of the kind, really, just a peasant from a village near Vinnitsa, a dear man with pink cheeks and innocent eyes and a slow, gentle burr. But he was a Christ to Masha, because he was the leader of the circle of peasants Masha worshipped with. This group used to hold evening prayer meetings in the Leman family bath-house down by the river, out of sight of Father Yefim. Masha, usually so strict, was soft as butter with her Christ, and always encouraging him to come up to the house in the summer and pick up the windfalls from the family orchard.

Lidiya Leman had never liked the bloated spiritual bureaucrats of the Orthodox Church. She'd almost gone and prayed with the peasants herself, one summer evening. But by the time she reached the cabin door, there was already nothing to show that Masha, or Dunya, or a dozen other women and three or four village men were inside – nothing but an echo of voices, singing. The grass had sprung back, hiding their trails in scatters of wild flowers. There were butterflies in the innocent air. Well, God bless them, she'd said to herself, equally peacefully, I won't disturb them; and she'd gone home.

Lidiya Leman knew more now. She knew that peasant groups like her Masha's met in secret all over Russia, hounded, everywhere, by busybody officials and offended priests. They didn't need church. They believed that modest goodness – celibacy and abstinence and repentance for past sins – would be enough to save them.

It was beautiful, Madame Leman still thought, that these innocents called their groups ‘arks': secret ships of faith tossed on a sea of bureaucratic troubles; and that their gatherings were known, not as services, but as
radeniya,
or raptures.

Today, the newspapers said, there were hundreds of schismatic Christs in Russia. Every group had one, and a Lord of Hosts, too, just as every group had a woman known as a Mother of God. It was a peasant Trinity. But no one thought they were innocent any more, now that the peasant worshippers' recent brief moment as the darling of the city intellectuals had faded.

The novel she'd been so pleased to get out of the house, the other week, had made her see the whole thing in a nastier, dirtier light.

It told a story about peasant sectarians who, at first, reminded her of her gentle summers in Vinnitsa. But as she turned the pages, she'd read that the believers in the novel's fictional Brotherhood of the Doves had turned out to be evil. They had unearthly powers, all right, but they'd only used them to pervert the Russia she knew – to destroy the hope in it. The knowing, ugly, shaggy-bearded carpenter who led the sect had lured the book's gentleman hero away from his own life to sleep with the carpenter's pock-marked woman Matryona, in the clod-hopping belief that this unlikely pair's coupling would make a Christ baby … and when that didn't happen, and the carpenter got jealous of his handsome young rival, he'd ordered the sect to murder him.

Madame Leman now felt contaminated by the book, and so she'd lent it to the charming English jeweller, her Tolya's friend. She wasn't the only one troubled by it. Everyone in St. Petersburg was reading it, and talking. And, of course, it had become deeply unfashionable to believe that Russia could be saved by godly peasants.

So perhaps it was no wonder that the papers were now full of these savage stories about the real-life peasant mystic, the Empress's favourite, who was supposed to have known about Stolypin's death, or perhaps even been behind it. These days, it seemed, all you had to do to earn the frightened suspicion of the drawing-room classes was to be a peasant with a cross round your neck.

It was what Marcus and even her usually level-headed Tolya had been going on about when they'd come upstairs, making her feel a monster for not making that wretched girl from Kiev feel more welcome yesterday. ‘She's so desperate she went to a peasant holy man for help!' they'd both kept saying. ‘Some charlatan, of course … But she believed him when he told her on the train that he could get her papers! She's such an innocent! We can't, in all conscience, just let her wander off to dubious strangers begging for help. Who knows what might come of it? Really it wouldn't be any trouble just to let her stay…'

None of it made any sense, any more than Marcus going on about the girl having chafed her hands on a rough edge of her bag on the journey as if this was any reason to have her move in. Why, her hands would get better in no time. But however many times Madame Leman had said so, however high she'd lifted her eyebrows, however much she'd regretfully shaken her head, they'd just kept on begging. Until, in the end, half buried in coats and running out of reasons to refuse, she'd said yes.

She could see, as well as any of them, that Inna needed help. But even here, in the peace of her armchair, with the smells of dinner wafting comfortingly in from the kitchen, she still wasn't in the least sure it had been the right thing to do. Not that she really thought for a moment that Inna would get Tolya into trouble with the police, or that she'd turn into another nuisance guest like Yasha's Jewish revolutionary friend with the disgusting personal habits and body odour. And it was obvious she wanted to please. She'd looked so heartrendingly grateful, just now, when Madame Leman had gone up to her room to tell her, formally, that she could stay. But still, she could easily turn this whole family upside down.

Uneasily Madame Leman reviewed Inna's long, slender arms, floating back and forth over the violin; the flash of her green eyes under all that black hair; the slenderness of her waist, and the animated loveliness of her face whenever she forgot whatever misery it was that was eating away at her. Yasha, the most talented violin-maker they'd ever had in the workshop, was already looking so hungrily at her; her little Marcus, not so little now, was half in love; and even Tolya …

Madame Leman was shaking her head, and picking up her magazine again, hoping to dispel her worries with a bit more fashionably apocalyptic doom-mongering before dinner, when the doorbell rang.

A moment later, Agrippina stuck her tousled head round the door.

‘It's the foreigner, Mama,' she lisped importantly. ‘Mister Wallick … Papa's friend. I told him we were about to have dinner. But he says he's just dropping by for a moment. He doesn't want to disturb you. Won't even come in. But he wanted to tell me he's brought back your book.'

Madame Leman seldom minded if someone extra turned up for a meal (you could always stretch the food a bit further, couldn't you?), and even if she didn't really want that vicious novel she'd lent him back, she liked the Englishman very much. He was an artist just like her husband, someone who thought about the higher things, even though, with that job he was always laughing at himself for doing, painting hackneyed scenes from English life or miniature portraits on cigarette-box lids at Fabergé's, the court jeweller, he was also unlike Tolya in that he'd earned an entrée into fashionable society. That, she thought, must help him bring in lucrative commissions. So, thanking Agrippina and patting her bun back into place, she got up and went to the door herself to try and persuade Horace Wallick to stay for dinner.

He was standing in the doorway with the book under his arm, tapping his feet. He was looking up the communal stairwell with a wistful, delighted smile.

His awkwardness was his charm, Madame Leman thought, fondly: his legs were far too long for most rooms, his frame slightly stooped from politeness, but he had a lustrousness about the eyes that lit up what might have been stern features on a man of different personality. His eyes went down at the corners, and he had a big nose, lines down thin cheeks, and a strong cleft chin. He looked trustworthy, but also always ready to be amused. This was his attraction.