Midnight in St. Petersburg (32 page)

Who needed drink? They were all drunk on happiness.

They all laughed over Yasha's tales from the Fortress: the lice, the idleness, the cold, the prisoners whispering in the cells. Yasha, now clean-shaven again, and shining-eyed, was dressed in one of Monsieur Leman's old country shirts, with the buttons up the side of the neck and a strip of country braid on the cuffs, and with a pair of very baggy, but too short trousers, held up against his long lean length with a belt.

‘How happy we are to have you back, dear boy,' Madame Leman kept saying, and Marcus kept clapping Yasha on the back. Inna just watched, keeping to herself her memories of the afternoon up in the attics, alone together, and what had happened between finding the clothes, and the combs; what they'd done together as the dust rose from the old mattress, making them both sneeze.

Inna even laughed in acknowledgement, though it was thinner laughter, when Horace turned up to take her home. Horace wasn't laughing. Her husband came in looking strained and breathless, and went straight to Inna. When she didn't get up, he swooped down and kissed the top of her head. He didn't even see Yasha.

‘I've just seen someone shot on Nevsky,' he said. ‘Right beside me. Some young woman with a red ribbon handing out leaflets dropped down dead on the pavement. Just like that.'

‘That will have been a sniper,' Marcus replied knowledgeably. ‘And I expect everyone ran away, which will be what they want, to spread fear and keep everyone inside. To regain control.'

‘Who?' asked Aunt Cockatoo, in her splendidly grating voice. Her yellow eyes blinked double-time above her little hooked nose.

‘The police, of course! The Tsar's police!' Barbarian said.

Madame Leman tut-tutted at him. But as Inna reflected on the possibility that a fat man with silver-gilt buttons might indeed still be sitting on a rooftop, watching her down the sights of a rifle as she went to sit in the bread queue, or find a paper, the hilarity went out of the evening. Everyone else was probably having the same quiet spasm of dread she was, she thought; they'd all be imagining the alleyways and courtyards and stone colonnades they might cut through to avoid main roads, if they were to live.

‘I was thinking that perhaps,' Horace began, ‘dear Lidiya' – he nodded at Madame Leman – ‘in the circumstances, we might stay the night here?'

Inna winced. She couldn't even begin to imagine staying in one garret room with Horace with Yasha just on the other side of the partition.

She glanced up at Yasha, on the other side of the table. She'd avoided looking at him all evening till now, especially since Horace arrived, but he just shrugged and grinned insouciantly – the picture of revolutionary dash. ‘Just make sure you don't stand around giving out leaflets on Nevsky, Wallick,' he drawled. ‘That's how to keep your hide intact.'

It was rude, but the children laughed.

Inna tried to stifle the queasy guilt she felt at their laughter. Well, he
is
only worried about keeping his hide intact, she told herself sternly. And he took that man's money.

Horace blinked. Then, rather uneasily, he laughed, too.

‘Kagan – Yasha, isn't it? Delighted to see you back, young man. Delighted,' he said. ‘And I can see you think I'm fretting needlessly. Well, you may be right.' He nodded self-deprecatingly and gave one of those meaningless little English half-smiles. ‘But I do want to be sure I've done all I can to protect my wife, whom I will, after all, be walking home tonight.'

*   *   *

Inna and Horace walked home by a cautious route, along cross streets, through courtyards and service doors, down deserted places where there were few footprints on the snow.

Looking at the occasional places where earlier sets of footprints blurred, trying not to remember that other nearby courtyard where she and Yasha had come to a halt, earlier on, or to shiver with pleasure as she recalled his urgent breathing, and the lift of fabric, and the hand that had held both hers above her head, in the attic, Inna kept very quiet.

‘Kagan looks well,' Horace said.

‘He's just out of prison,' she countered. ‘Madame Leman is letting him sleep in the attic for now. And Marcus is pleased. He'll be around to help in the workshop.'

‘Maybe you can stop working there, then.'

‘Stop? But I love it there! I don't want to stop!' she said, too loud and too fast.

But Horace didn't seem to notice her vehemence. He only nodded.

*   *   *

The police – that last vestige of the Tsarist order, now exiled to the rooftops with their guns – were the last to give up their vain hope of retaining power. People carried on collapsing unexpectedly in city crowds for weeks, as February became March, causing a panicky scattering of those around them whenever the tell-tale trickle of red appeared on a coat on the ground. For weeks, too, people carried on dragging down from one rooftop or another some die-hard sniper who'd been taking pot-shots at innocent civilians.

But the Emperor went quickly and quietly enough. They said he'd abdicated internally long before he agreed to step down. Smoking (he was always smoking) with the smoke rising silently past his beard and empty eyes.

What people started saying was that the riots of February, and, to a lesser extent, the new provisional government that replaced the former Emperor, were bringing about the moral resurrection of the people. February became known as the festival of freedom, and the patriots who had torn down the double-headed eagles of the Tsars as the restorers of Russia's virtue.

Throughout March, having told Horace she was quite safe and, in this new, more elevated, moral atmosphere on the streets, didn't need to be walked home from the Lemans' after work, Inna quietly went upstairs to Yasha's every evening at six, a minute or two after he'd left the workshop.

He'd come to his door half-naked, and pull her to him. She'd stopped being shocked at his burning prison gauntness by now. She'd just sigh into him, and then one of them would breathe ‘shh' with a hint of a laugh, and click the door shut. After that there was nothing in their shabby secret world beyond the two of them: the kiss inside the wrist, the feel of skin, the tautness of stomach, the slow entwining of limbs. Sometimes they never even reached the bed.

She hadn't realized you could have love without the trappings she'd become so accustomed to, without candles and little kindnesses and breakfast chat. She'd never realized it could be this simple: this ache, this heat, this catch of breath at a touch.

At seven, she'd dress and somehow take herself out of the room, pulling away from the mouth exploring her neck again, from the longing and melting, from the teasing whisper, ‘Oh, not yet.' An hour was only a moment. But the memory of him stayed with her all through the night and day that followed, the smell and taste. She was languorous with love, drugged with it. It was everything else that was a dream.

At seven, Yasha also had to go striding out, taking whatever bit of bread and onion he'd saved from the midday meal, to the halls where he now spent his evenings discussing the future. At seven, too full of memory for guilt, she'd go home to her husband.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was a bright cold Sunday afternoon in March when Prince Felix Youssoupoff sauntered into the drawing room of the apartment in Great Cavalry Street, behind a hovering, anxious-looking Horace, and bowed to Inna.

There's no sugar to offer him for tea, was her first panicky thought. Even after the Red Revolution, you still needed to queue all night to buy basics at dawn: one night for bread, one night for meat, one night for oil, one night for sugar, and so on. The only difference in the queuing since February was that now you queued with hope. But it was still dog-cold sleeping on your stool on the street, even under wadded blankets, with your pillow. If she and Horace didn't have sugar, it wasn't because they didn't have the money to pay for it, or that the queuing was too onerous for her, because Horace did alternate nights, sitting up with the women. They'd simply agreed weeks ago to give up on buying sugar, since what was the point? They never had guests at the apartment, and they'd be better giving Madame Leman their sugar money instead, so she could use it for her family.

Inna thought next, There's only a tiny bit of tea, too. Then anger replaced her panic: Why has Horace even let him in? What's Felix Youssoupoff doing back here, anyway?

Youssoupoff didn't belong in this revolutionary Petrograd as Inna did. She loved the happiness of now: the self-congratulatory victory salutes in the street, among perfect strangers who suddenly felt themselves all together as part of the brotherhood of man, in this great new beginning. The provisional government had, among many other good things, abolished the Pale of Settlement down south and granted Jews full civil rights, at last. It was a triumphant end to the campaign that had started by getting Beilis freed. Inna would never need to feel less than equal to anyone again. (‘We're free,' Yasha said, whenever they were on their own, ‘as well as equal. Both of us.' She knew he meant, ‘Leave Horace.')

Yet, however exciting February had been – and however her private life had been secretly transformed – Inna was well aware that there was a lot that hadn't yet come right in the Revolution.

Horace still had money. Even if he didn't get paid very regularly, he still went to work, and Fabergé's was still rich, and he didn't complain of being short of cash. He had savings, she thought. And they never went hungry, even though it was hard to buy food in the shops to cook. But everything could be had, even in this new land of virtue, if you were willing to pay the price in the formerly fussy restaurants where you could still find uncertain meats in mysterious stews as well as enigmatic alcohols in grand bottles.

Yet Madame Leman only waved her arms indignantly whenever Horace suggested she and her family come with them to these restaurants. ‘What, take my children to sit with those vulgarians? Profiteers? Pimps? I'd sooner starve! We all would!' Inna wished she would be less indignant about their invitations, because it was obvious the Lemans were feeling the pinch. You had to eat, after all, and, if they weren't actually murderers, who cared who was sitting at the next table?

And Marcus was miserable, cooped up in the workshop, chafing to be out and away like Yasha, longing to be cutting a dash among the crowds of men in long overcoats arguing in smoky meeting houses every evening; but forced, by his crippled leg, and the snow, and the responsibility of being the master of the family, to stay at home.

Freedom was what Yasha talked about; but what Horace said, with one of his cultured English smirks, whenever the conversation turned to the Revolution was, ‘Fine words butter no parsnips.' And he was right. Inna couldn't help noticing that Madame Leman cooked soup for midday, on good days, if there were cabbages or potatoes on sale. Otherwise they made do with tea and bread. Inna had no idea how Madame Leman was managing to pay her rent, or the children's school fees.

Still, whenever Inna felt downhearted at the various shortcomings of life after the Revolution, she let herself be sustained by remembering – with a certain pleasure – that at least Youssoupoff and his murderous friends, who'd wanted their killing to stop a revolution before it started, had failed. She'd enjoyed imagining the prince cooped up at his father's estate, and his grand duke lover kicking his heels in a barracks on the Persian border, contemplating the rebellion they hadn't managed to prevent. Feeling their power ebb. They'd be off abroad soon, she thought. They'd never come back to Petrograd.

Yet here he was, in a fine brown suit, handsomer and more pleased with himself than ever, if that were possible. Twirling a stick.

Of course, she realized, after a moment's rage at the smugness of the man. The Emperor who'd exiled him was gone. So the prince had come skipping boldly back – freed, like everyone else, by the Revolution.

She stood up, but didn't extend a hand. She wasn't going to shake hands with a murderer.

‘Citizen Youssoupoff,' she said, coolly: today-speak. You weren't allowed to call the mighty ‘your excellency' any more, and she didn't choose, either, to call him ‘Felix Felixovich,' the well-bred way of addressing him as an equal.

She saw Horace wince, noticed the way his back bent a little more (he was a good head taller than Youssoupoff) as he started murmuring, with a fussy courtesy she found achingly hypocritical, ‘Felix Felixovich, do sit down, please.'

‘I'm afraid we've no tea,' Inna said.

Youssoupoff only smiled wider. She got the uneasy feeling that he understood her discomfiture, and was enjoying it.

‘Ah, yes, the new nomenclature,' he said lightly. ‘You're quite right
, Citoyenne
Wallick. We must all get used to it.' He made a point of tweaking at his trouser legs as he sat down, so as not to bag the perfect cut. ‘My apologies for dropping in unannounced. But – as I was just explaining to your husband outside – I may not be in town for long. I'm just here to arrange the restoration of some of my art collection.' He spoke as if nothing had changed; as if he hadn't even noticed the Revolution. ‘Including my grandfather's violins. Beautiful instruments, I'm told, though sadly neglected. Also…' he paused, delicately. ‘How to put this in a way that won't give offence to a master maker of your renown?'

Inna glanced in astonishment at Horace – she wasn't in the least renowned. Whatever had he said about her to inspire this piece of blatant flattery? Almost imperceptibly, from behind Youssoupoff's chair, Horace shook his head: nothing to do with
me
.

‘… the violins are a little, shall we say, battle-scarred?' Youssoupoff looked at his hands, adding, with composure, ‘Because I'm afraid my brother and I didn't treat them with much respect, as boys. In fact, we used to fight duels with them.' He laughed.