Midnight in St. Petersburg (31 page)

Like everyone they knew, they'd wanted to see what the 300,000 roubles had been spent on. And yet, on the night itself, like so much else for Inna (and perhaps Horace too, now), the performance seemed alternately trite and grotesque. Onstage, an imperial capital's élite made merry while rushing to their doom; in the gilt loggias all around, Inna saw, were the élite of another imperial capital, gawping through opera glasses, guzzling ice cream and champagne; with nobody listening to the ominous crowds outside, calling for bread and freedom.

As they and the rest of the jewelled audience swept out, Horace said something so quiet that he might have been talking to himself (though if he had been, Inna thought, why would he be talking Russian? No, it was for her): ‘So close to the starving … all this frenzied luxury. What is this: the Rome of the Caesars?' She didn't reply.

They couldn't find a cab to take them home. There were shots further up Nevsky. Machine guns were set up on rooftops. None of the coachmen wanted to go in the direction of the shots. One indignantly told Inna, ‘Young lady, I have a wife and two children.'

So they linked arms and walked, in the silence that was becoming habitual to them. Then, as now seemed usual, they slept facing away from each other.

*   *   *

They woke up like that, far, far apart, when the future began the next morning: when the cold snap ended, and the women in the bread queues and the men in the marches finally lost patience with the avoidable shortages and fear of famine that the bureaucracy's inefficiency forced them to live with, and took matters into their own hands.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

A band of grannies with linked hands pushed in front of Inna in the surging crowd. A low head whacked Inna in the mouth. She let go of the arms she was holding and clutched at her face. A little old woman looked up briefly and grinned at her. ‘Sorry, dearie, sorry,' she mumbled, before turning away to join her group's next excited mass yell of ‘bread! Bread! Bread!'

It was the first sunny day of the year, in February, and the tens of thousands of women who made up the bread queues were out on the streets of Petrograd. With the sun so unexpectedly on their faces again, they'd stopped to talk, for once, instead of just plodding miserably to their lines. And soon they'd started gathering in clumps, which coalesced, and grew, and were now moving together towards the centre of town. There were gales of defiant, raucous laughter. Women sang rude songs, and waved their empty baskets, and mounted the great hippo of a bronze horse on which the memorial statue to the last Emperor was seated, and cackled and cheered and egged each other on.

‘Don't get separated, that's all; just hold on tight,' Madame Leman had said when they'd set out together to try and buy bread – because obviously, however excited she was at the latest turn of events, Madame Leman couldn't go out alone in those crowds, and Agrippina was too young to protect her. Anyway, they'd all wanted to see what would happen today. ‘We'll be fine as long as we can feel each other's elbows.'

But now Madame Leman and Agrippina were being pushed one way, and Inna another. She could see their heads, bobbing up and down, further and further away; she could see Agrippina's anxiously energetic waving.

‘Excuse me,' Inna kept saying to the women bearing down on her as she struggled to get back to them, ‘excuse me.' But no one seemed to hear.

Of course Inna had wanted to come and see this. Throughout these last weeks of reproaching herself for having let Horace decide the course of their lives for so long, while she just sat inside that stifling apartment – ‘Like a slug in silk cushions!' she'd been angrily telling herself – she'd been longing for the chance to do something brave and honest, to put things right with her conscience. The knowledge that Horace, locked away at his desk making trinkets for the rich, would certainly disapprove of this outing had put rebellious colour in her cheeks as she strode out. But she didn't like crowds, and, from the moment they'd set out, she'd also been scared of exactly this: that she, Madame Leman and Agrippina would be separated.

Yet now she was out in the street, with the sun glittering on windows and golden snow, with the sky so blue, and the air so bright, and with everyone so good-tempered in the crowd, and excited, and full of songs and stories, the panic she'd thought she'd feel was less overwhelming than she'd expected. After a while, she gave up and let herself go with the crush. There was really nothing else to be done.

She was slowly tugged by the human tide right across the curved Imperial Army General Staff building at the back of Palace Square, past the arch leading back on to Nevsky, nearly as far as the embankment on the other side. She was close enough to see the iced-over Neva behind the Admiralty Gardens. Every bit of that vast space was full, full to cracking, of bodies, not just women any more but men too: striking factory workers and the refugees who were always going on protests. Both women and men were shouting and laughing and shouting again, whether it was whatever slogan they believed in, or stories they'd heard. Blood had poured from the revolving door of the Astoria this morning! The mob got in there last night and drank the cellars dry! Respect for waiters: call us
vy
, not
ty
! The Fortress is open: they've let the prisoners out! Soon Inna began to enjoy herself.

And then something changed. She didn't know what, at first. You couldn't actually see anything way back where she was: the speeches were all up at the front, outside the green front of the Winter Palace. Back here, the mood of the people around her suddenly began to turn fearful.

‘Cossacks,' she heard, a whisper that seemed to come from everywhere at once. ‘The Cossacks are coming.'

It was worse than dismay, what she felt. It was a blackness. She couldn't think, yet she could feel her limbs poised to run. The problem was that there was nowhere to shelter. Just thousands of people, packed tight, looking at each other with the same dread.

She scanned the sea of faces around her.

One particular pair of eyes fixed on hers, belonging, she could see, to a very tall, gaunt, wild-bearded man in a shabby worker's wadded-cotton jacket, who'd made himself taller still by climbing on to the base of a street lamp.

It made her uncomfortable, that stare, which she went on feeling for a few long seconds more as she looked along the embankment and round towards the palace. It sent prickles down her spine. She turned back for a second look. But the man had gone; slipped down off his lamp base and been swallowed up by the crowd. She must have been imagining him staring at her.

The whisper started again. ‘Cossacks, Cossacks.'

And then someone touched her – someone with an emaciated shoulder and back and a long straggly black beard.

Above the beard, a pair of dark eyes stared straight at her.

‘Yasha,' she whispered.

His jacket smelled of mould and sweat and tobacco, but
he
still smelled, wonderfully, just as she'd remembered. ‘I shouldn't be surprised to see you here, I suppose,' she said, breathlessly, feeling herself tremble as his arms enfolded hers. ‘I mean, you left me for the Revolution, and here it is.'

She didn't dare meet his eyes any more; not now she'd named the terrible thing he'd done to her.

He turned her head with his hands, so he could see her face.

‘What are you talking about?' he said, with none of the sugary tenderness that she'd added to her memories of him over the years. ‘I didn't bloody well leave you for the Revolution.'

She opened her mouth to protest.

‘I was in prison,' he went on roughly. ‘I've just got out. We all have. They opened the doors.' He jerked his head over the river, towards the Fortress. ‘Look.' There was a tattoo on his neck, with a number. ‘That idiot Kremer – remember him? I got him papers. The police found them on me the night I ran out.'

His voice softened. How deep it was; how soft. ‘Didn't you know?' she heard him say.

Suddenly, deafeningly, just behind her, a man began yelling, ‘Hoorah!' and then they were all at it: a new sea of sound. The panic seemed to have disappeared as quickly as it had come.

‘Come on,' Yasha said in her ear. ‘Let's get out of here.'

The crowd was fluid now. There were just as many people as before, but things had eased so you could walk again. Yasha was making for the Triumphal Arch that would take them back on to Nevsky, from where they could duck into the back streets on the other side and get to the Lemans' – or anywhere else – safely. They slipped out between families and friends, all hugging each other, half-hysterical with relief, and under the arch they saw the reason for the change of mood.

A detachment of Cossacks had dismounted and put down the rifles and sabres that might have killed half the crowd. They were being mobbed by a throng of new admirers, who were clapping them on the back and cheering. One snub-nosed youth was grinning bashfully and carrying a bunch of red roses as if he didn't know what to do with such a thing. His horse's reins were in his other hand, and there was a girl in his saddle, a street-trader girl in a wadded jacket like Yasha's and a ragged dog-fur hat. She was grinning round at the whistling crowd, waving and blowing kisses.

‘Just walked up to them, she did, with her basket of roses,' the man next to Inna said. ‘Sweating a bit, she was. Brave as anything. I mean to say, they had their rifles pointed. They was all ready to charge. But they didn't. He took her flowers, that bloke there. And then they all got down off their 'osses. And now look at them.'

There were women pinning red ribbons on the Cossacks' uniforms. There were men calling out to each other, all around, a phrase something like the old Easter greeting, ‘Christ is arisen!' only without the Christ: ‘Russia is arisen!'

‘Russia is arisen!' the unknown man said to Inna, and kissed her.

She kissed the stranger back, ‘It is risen indeed!' she answered, feeling Yasha's arm around her, feeling the joy of this new world in which everything was possible. Red: the colour of revolution. Red roses: the colour of hope.

*   *   *

A courtyard, somewhere, with no one around, and his hand still in hers … There were too many things to say. Where to begin?

‘What do you mean, they opened the doors?'

Yasha grinned. He stopped walking. She did too. How close they were standing. How abruptly he spoke. Perhaps that was prison. She didn't know him very well any more.

‘We were in the yard, maybe two hundred of us. Then we saw the door open. Just like that. The guards were all gone, and there was the street, and, just round the corner, the bridge … Well, I mean, we knew there was trouble in town. But still. I thought: Maybe it's a trick? Get you through that gate then shoot you. A few of us started sidling up towards the gate, casually, like they'd just slip through on the quiet. But no one said a word. A few actually went through. Then the first one who'd got through, a bloke called Mitrofan, was walking over the cobbles out there. He got a good way off, then looked round. Slowly, like he couldn't believe his luck. And then he turned back to us, and started yelling. “Come on, you idiots! There's no one here at all! Get on out!”'

They were both laughing now; Yasha still disbelieving, his laughter with a hysterical edge.

‘And you did,' Inna finished.

‘Ran like fuck; hundreds of us.' It was so dark in the courtyard that she could only see his eyes, crinkled up. ‘And I ran straight into you; it's a time of bloody miracles, I'm telling you.' And then his eyes shut, too, and the kiss began.

It was only when his hands moved to her blouse, crushed her breasts, and started a clumsy quest for buttons and hooks that she came to, and pulled back a fraction.

‘Yash,' she whispered, dizzily, right into his ear, because she couldn't move away from his skin or smell, not altogether; it was magnetic, overpowering, this need to touch him; and surely she was demonstrating virtue enough by stopping the kiss? ‘Yash … I'm not your wife.'

He nuzzled at her neck, not wanting to know anything.

‘I thought you'd gone,' she whispered. He ignored that too. ‘I married Horace.'

It overwhelmed her, the cosmic injustice of it, the stupidity: that she could feel all this for Yasha, but belong elsewhere.

But Yasha didn't sound bothered. ‘Did you now? Well, we'll soon see about that,' he murmured, as if she'd told him a joke he wasn't all that interested in laughing at, because he had something better to think about. He grinned down at her. ‘Time of bloody miracles. Didn't I say?'

*   *   *

The Lemans were still all out, except Marcus, who was down in the workshop, when Inna and Yasha tiptoed into the apartment, quiet as thieves.

Inna's mind was clear as she worked out what to do, her body full of almost religious thankfulness for that first communion of their bodies in that blocked-off courtyard with what felt like the whole city singing and laughing out in the streets. She took the key for the attic room from the hook in the kitchen and gave it to Yasha. The Lemans would be glad enough to have him back, wouldn't they?

‘Show me my room,' Yasha whispered in her ear. ‘Mrs Wallick.'

And they both laughed.

*   *   *

She laughed later on, too, when she saw on what unlikely chests red ribbons had sprouted: on Madame Leman's and Agrippina's and Barbarian's, of course, but also on the scrawny chest of Aunt Cockatoo, the genteel séance-holding neighbour, who'd spent a miserable winter last year standing on street corners selling her trinkets for food, and this winter, more profitably, selling the moonshine vodka she'd taken to brewing despite the ban. That evening, excitedly talking over the day's events over whatever-you-can-find soup in the Leman kitchen, Aunt Cockatoo declared herself as sick of the imperial family and the corruption all around them as everyone else. ‘Who needs the life to come, or the Emperor, come to that, when our life on earth is turning into such a festival of freedom?' she said. ‘There'll be no more crime now we've got the Revolution: or
chinovniki
, or bribes, or drink…'