Midnight in St. Petersburg (2 page)

But Olya hadn't had time to think about her bag in the second interval, once the man in the shabby coat had walked in and they'd heard the shots and the entire audience had erupted in panic. She'd been too busy screaming.

Somewhere up ahead, in the echoing heights of the station building, a melancholy brass-band version of the overture of ‘A Life for the Tsar' could be heard. They'd been playing the same patriotic Glinka in the theatre, too, Inna remembered; the music brought it back.

The frightening crowds in Kiev after the assassination had also had the Tsar on their minds. The leaflets which had covered the town like a snowfall by dawn, with their ugly, hastily put-together type, full of grammar mistakes, telling the people the assassin was a Yid, as well as a Red: they all had the same message. It was time for patriotic citizens to show their loyalty to the Tsar by ridding the Motherland of this noxious nation of Christ-killers.

Inna had picked one up late the next day, once she'd used Olya's passport to buy her ticket for the night train. Her fear had lessened once she was on the move and taking control of her own destiny: it was still a series of stifling rises in the gorge, but at least not that numbing helplessness. After a glance, she'd trodden the leaflet into a puddle, outside the station. She'd ground it underfoot, and watched it disintegrate into the wet black of the water.

There'd been more crowds of patriots out all that day: snub-nosed, tow-headed, thickset men, in and out of the pubs, in and out of their Black Hundreds meetings, with their double-headed eagle pins gleaming on their lapels, carrying their pictures of the Tsar and his family, handing out the leaflets, chatting to the burly policemen in their midst as if they were brothers (which all too often they were). No blood had been shed; there had been no screams, or shop windows broken, or bonfires in the street, which Inna knew from hearsay was how things went when a real pogrom got going. But still, these people were dangerous as they milled around staring at those others – the shadows flitting by lugging parcels to the station, or to carts or carriages or motorcars. Tonight's escapees were all hoping not to be tomorrow's victims, and Inna was glad to be away.

Well, now she was away. But was she safe?

She turned and stared down her nose at the greasy jowl of a man in a dark uniform with silver and red facings. She felt something rising in her throat, but her voice sounded steady as she said, ‘Yes?'

He looked suddenly uncomfortable as he wriggled in his too-tight tunic. She could see him thinking that he'd mistaken the shiny thinness of the cloth at her elbows for the submissiveness of the poor, and got his tone wrong. Dropping his eyes, he said, ‘Begging your pardon,
mademoiselle
,' with an extra note of respect.

Not that there was any need for a man in uniform to apologize. If you were a subject of the Russian Emperor, and wished to go more than fifteen miles from your home, you needed permission from the police and the Ministry of the Interior that ran them. It was the ministry's task to stop terrorists throwing their bombs or sticking their knives into ministers' throats in the secret civil war everyone preferred to pretend wasn't convulsing the land. You could be watched, searched, fingerprinted, arrested, interrogated, exiled, fined or handed over to military justice on nothing more than a policeman's hunch that you might be doing something political or were a Jew – since Jews, it was believed, were especially prone to dangerous politics.

Yet even so a lowly individual policeman, like this one, could always fear that the next person he dealt with might just be privileged enough to harass him back, ensuring he lost the certificate of trustworthiness without which he would be banned from public employment.

‘Your documents, please,' he said, definitely less sure of himself now.

She put down her bag and got the wallet out, looking straight at him.

He unfolded the wallet, tsking at the thin sheets of paper in the little internal passport booklet that wouldn't separate, and making a big performance of blowing on them while giving Inna vaguely menacing looks. But there was nothing wrong with the red stamps and dates, Inna knew, or the permission from the Kiev Ministry of the Interior that the passport gave for Morozova, O. A. (occupation: student of Fundukleyevskaya Academy; age: 18; faith: Orthodox; residing at: Kreshchatik 86, Kiev; social class: hereditary noblewoman; facial features: dark hair and no distinguishing marks; daughter of: Morozov, A. P., hereditary nobleman, 6th-grade colonel of the Corps of Gendarmerie, Kiev department) to visit Morozova, A. A., hereditary noblewoman, her grandmother, residing at Italian Street, St. Petersburg, for family reasons, from last week, for the month of September.

After a lengthy examination of the booklet, the policeman gave it back. Somewhere in his reading, perhaps at the mention of Morozova, O. A.'s father's exalted status in the services of state repression, his expression had become timid. He bowed, now, too low for comfort given his girth and the tightness of his tunic. ‘Checking for passengers from Kiev … have to, after…' he muttered. He didn't want to say the word assassination, Inna saw, and she felt a momentary pang of pity for him, with his cruel, stupid job.

‘Looking out for Yids on the run,' he added in a stronger voice, straightening up. Inna noticed that he had a double-headed eagle pin on his stand-up coat collar. ‘Murderous Red swine. Scared they'll get their come-uppance. Don't want to stay and take the punishment they've got coming. Running everywhere, thousands of them – like cockroaches. But we don't want that filth here, do we?' If he was expecting an answering leer from her, he was disappointed. ‘Well … well … I wish you a pleasant stay in our city, your excellency.' He handed back the booklet and, avoiding her eyes, turned to seek out a new victim among the hurrying third-class passengers.

Inna watched as he moved to intercept one of the other shadows she'd been aware of, a man in his early thirties, with the sadness in his soul clearly visible. He had a deathly white face behind his dark Jewish-looking beard and shadows under his eyes, and, every time Inna had glimpsed him, on both trains, he'd been holding tight to the hand of an unnaturally quiet little girl of about ten. No mother; Inna had tried not to wonder what had happened to her. Now, as he saw the approaching gendarme, the last flicker of hope left him. The little girl's face crumpled into panic.

Inna hurried on. So they had no passports. But since hers was stolen, and Olya Morozova's father might at any moment think to telegraph his colleagues to watch out for imposters, there was no time for pity.

But, when she looked more closely at the station building ahead, she realized it offered no safety. Instead there were more gendarmes guarding the doorway and pouncing on people in the crowd. Some were converging on youths in scruffy overcoats, filleting leaflets from their pockets; others were grabbing urchins, and flicking wallets from their hands. But most were looking for incomers.

Inna stopped dead. Someone bumped into her from behind. Scurrying feet shifted course. Then she felt a hand on her arm.

Inna closed her eyes and bowed her head. So this was it, she thought: how your lifeline petered out.

‘I thought so … you're the little lady from the train who had your fortune told, aren't you?'

It was the peasant from the train.

‘I saw you, and I thought, Well, you must be new to the city if you're trying to leave through the station building. Police everywhere, snooping through your papers – waste half your day if you give them a chance. So why don't I walk you out the way Petersburg people go, the ones who've got any sense. You don't want to look like an outsider, do you?'

She nodded gratefully, noticing his extraordinarily calm pale-blue eyes again.

‘Come on, then.' He set off briskly to the left into a narrow lane that went straight from the train platforms all the way round the side of the station hall to the street.

It only took a minute.

Inna looked round and realized that the great modern square they'd come out into, with its grey cliff-faces of hotels, and tramlines, and squealing motorcars and carriages and pedestrian crowds all rushing here and there under a lowering sky, was actually outside the station. There wasn't a gendarme in sight.

‘So … that's it? Are we out, in the city?' she asked. ‘Really?' She took a deep breath, dizzy with relief. She was in St. Petersburg. She was safe.

 

CHAPTER TWO

She began walking, one bag in each hand, impatient to be off and free of the peasant.

Yet the fact remained: she didn't know where to go. She knew she had to walk into the centre, along Nevsky Prospekt, the great avenue which ran through the city in a dead straight line. But she had no idea which of the roads leading off this square would get her to Nevsky.

From behind her came a chuckle. ‘That's the road out of town,' she heard the peasant say, sounding amused. ‘I'm heading into town, along Nevsky. Shall I put you on your way?'

She turned, with dignity, to reject his offer, but when she met his eyes she could see there was no malice in them. He'd helped her till now. Of course he wasn't about to start pestering her.

Chastened, she nodded. ‘I'm going to Hay Market,' she said, realizing – to her surprise – that she'd be glad of the company.

‘I've known that lane since I had troubles of my own with the police,' the peasant said, shouldering one of Inna's bags (she kept the smaller bag, which contained her violin, in her own hand) and setting off beside her along a big straight ugly boulevard lined with tall grey buildings. What troubles? she wondered, but he went on: ‘That's the thing about policemen: they get everywhere, like cockroaches. No way to actually stamp them out – but it never does any harm to keep out of their way.'

Inna couldn't help but smile. It was a delicate gesture, she thought, to invite her to remember the terrifying gendarmes, who liked to call Jews cockroaches, as no more threatening than kitchen creepy-crawlies themselves.

‘Especially if you're a Jew.' The peasant gave her a sideways glance.

It was an invitation to frankness. She hesitated, and then took it. ‘Like me, you mean,' she said.

Noncommittally, he nodded.

His casual mention, out loud, of Inna's national identity, the fifth point on the passport, that inescapable evidence of her membership of a shameful race (if she hadn't temporarily escaped it by borrowing Olya's papers, at least), didn't make her flinch in the way she usually did. She just felt distant from the proposition. Aunty Lyuba, who was Russian by blood, had raised Inna, with
her
Russian first name, to be just like any of the young Russian girls in their city apartment block. Inna's last name, Feldman, could be Yiddish or just innocently Volga German; there were only ever difficulties if people raised their eyebrows on hearing Inna's unchangeable middle name: the patronymic she was called by on formal occasions, ‘Inna Venyaminovna', which was made from her father's un-Russian-sounding, un-German-sounding name, Benjamin. Yet there'd never been religion in Aunty Lyuba's life, or in Inna's. They were progressive and scientific: no ancient Talmuds and Judaic chaos in Aunty Lyuba's genteel apartment, thank you, just dead Uncle Borya's books on medicine, Dahl's dictionary, the Russian classics, freshly laundered white lace everywhere, and lessons, lessons, lessons all day long. Inna didn't remember much about her own parents, but they'd been close to Aunty Lyuba, so she thought they must have been like her in this. Still, even if Inna, like Aunty Lyuba, had no Jewish ways, they were never unaware of what people might say, or think, or do. Inna remembered starting at the Academy, and pirouetting excitedly in her new white lace pinafore, ready to walk the three streets to the school by herself for the first time, and how her carefree happiness had curdled when Aunty Lyuba, shaking her head over Inna's lustrous black hair tied in a big white bow, and the exotic curves of her cheekbone and nose, had murmured, ‘They'll always
know …
but they'll always expect a Jew to show fear. So walk tall … stare them down, like a princess.'

And Inna had done her best. She'd given every man on the way to school the fiercest look she could; yet even now she could never banish the fear.

The fear is all that's really Jewish about me, Inna thought now. She couldn't see anything else she had in common with the Jews they were always writing about in the papers (people she'd never actually seen for herself): those banned both from countryside and big cities, who filled the little towns of the south, the
shtetl
s, with their wailing music and strange clothes, the ones behind the revolutionary movements, or the monstrous ones drawn, hunchbacked and grinning, who were said to bake matzos with the blood of murdered Russian children. (Not that this was likely. Everyone knew that; everyone with an education and some common sense, anyway. But still, there was the Kiev man they'd arrested a few months back – Mendel Beilis, his name was – on precisely that charge: the arrest that had started all the pogrom talk that was resurfacing now. So you couldn't help but wonder, a bit.)

‘
I
don't drink children's blood or steal chalices from churches, if that's what you mean,' she said tartly.

‘No…' the peasant replied. His voice was calm, absorbing her flash of defensive anger without seeming to notice. ‘Of course not. You're just a person, getting on with your life.'

Inna bit her lip.

He went on, sidestepping the oncoming Number One tram without a second glance: ‘I know a man, Simanovich. He's a jeweller in Kiev. They're always on to him, the police: making out he's a loan shark and a gambler. Evil-minded nonsense. He's a dignified man. Loves his people. Tries to help them: he's got several of his Jews papers to stay up here, for instance; and why not, if they like the city, why not? They're people like anyone else. Simanovich should be rewarded, not tormented.'