Midnight in St. Petersburg (37 page)

Horace, still sauntering around the city with his linen ironed and his chin shaved, still dropping in on the many acquaintances he'd made here and there, managed to find jobs for everyone, too, which brought in a few extra roubles. He teamed Madame Leman up with an English journalist called Ransome, who'd started employing her, a couple of days a week, to translate the Russian newspapers for him. He found Barbarian and Agrippina little evening jobs: one preparing paints for a group of wealthy amateur artists over on the English Embankment, where the foreigners lived; the other turning pages for pianists at the Philharmonia.

Horace's jobs were a cut above the employment Barbarian had briefly found for himself as an evening janitor at a peculiar medical museum round the corner. He guarded glass jars of bobbing body parts pickled in alcohol and came back with pockets jingling, and furtive glee in his eyes. They had Revolution sausage (don't ask what meat) for three or four meals. But it only lasted a fortnight, and he finally confessed what he'd really been up to: emptying the alcohol from the jars, pouring in water instead, and selling the murky pickling liquid in the market to sailors. ‘It's all gone now,' Barbarian said, rather wistfully. ‘There's no point going back.'

In his quiet way, Inna realized, her husband was taking charge of all their efforts to muddle through and survive. And, against all the odds, they – a widow, a cripple, two children, a Jewess and a foreigner – were still getting by without too much hunger or too many quarrels. It wasn't perfect – far from it. They were all outsiders now. But the cautious optimism in the household reinforced her hope that, maybe, everything would turn out all right.

‘Horace?' she said, one night, in the yellow room.

‘Mm?' he said vaguely. He was reading the paper.

‘Marcus says he's heard of a society paying musicians to give concerts at working men's clubs.'

‘Mm?' He looked up from his newspaper. His eyes were kind.

She took a deep breath, wondering whether she would get over her nerves and actually come to enjoy doing what she was about to suggest. ‘If I started practising again, do you think they would want me?'

*   *   *

By October people were saying that the Provisional Government was so scared it now held its sittings standing up. Out in the Hay Market, at dawn, they were saying the Bolsheviks would attack the Winter Palace tonight. Horace and his new friend Ransome had dropped in for a bite in the restaurant near Palace Square that had become the correspondents' stamping ground: ‘For the ringside seat,' Ransome had said, ‘all the reporters will be going.'

They had come in after an evening at the Mariinsky Theatre, in theory enjoying ballet, but really just watching the evening newspapers floating, like swans, along the rows from one buzzing member of the audience to another, as rumours, wilder by the hour, spread through the
parterre
and the
belle
étage
. Ransome needed light relief, he'd said, when he ran into Horace on Theatre Square. And his newspaper would pay for the whole evening. Who would say no?

Horace would have gone even without the promise of food. He enjoyed curiosities, and Ransome was certainly that: an unathletic man, soft-muscled, who suffered from stomach ulcers, but all buoyed up tonight with the strange high spirits of newspapermen in extreme times. (Madame Leman said Ransome was enjoying the unrest for an extra, private reason: because he was sleeping with the secretary of one of these now-fashionable Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, the squat, wiry-haired brute who, Horace now knew, had been running things since their real leader Lenin had fled.)

They were finishing their soup when the waiter came up and asked if Messieurs wouldn't mind moving into the other dining room, at the back of the hotel, for the second course. The management was expecting shooting, the waiter said uneasily. The mob attack on the Winter Palace was supposed to be imminent, and they wanted to put out the lights in this room, which was too close to Palace Square, and very exposed.

Ransome grinned cheerfully and got straight up. Horace too. As he followed the tweed-backed journalist into the other room, he wondered whether Ransome's Yevgenia was really the rouged-up hussy Madame Leman made her out to be, which sounded intriguingly un-revolutionary. He couldn't help but recall what Fabergé had said that morning: ‘No one in their right mind wants the Bolsheviks, but no one will bother to go out and fight for Prime Minister Kerensky either.'

Horace didn't believe there'd be more fighting in the street, even though the German army was so near to the city; even though he'd seen the barges full of ministry paperwork and treasures from the Hermitage floating down the Neva every blustery day, the first signs of the evacuation that must surely come soon; even though every street corner seemed to be manned by a ragged orator, yelling, ‘The rich have lots of everything; the poor have nothing; everything will belong to the poor,' and it now took a bagful of worthless new paper roubles to buy salt, or candles, or bread. People were too busy just surviving to rebel any more, weren't they?

Still, he wanted to know what Ransome thought.

Ransome had been at the Winter Palace in the afternoon, interviewing the ‘defenders of the palace' – as it turned out, just a few hundred Cossacks and schoolboy cadets, and two hundred bedraggled women known as the Women's Shock Battalion of Death, who'd been drafted in to save the Prime Minister from the hungry mob. He'd been laughing at how Kerensky's motley crew of defenders had got so depressed as the light faded that most of them had quietly gone off into town to lift their spirits by finding some supper.

‘Just like us,' Ransome said easily, waving at the other reporters eating at nearby tables; all, like him, lit up with electric excitement.

‘So,' Horace deduced, hopefully, ‘you don't think anything will actually happen after all?'

Ransome had picked up his spoon, ready to return to his soup. But he stopped at that, and looked brightly across the table. The un-English fervour of his gaze, Horace thought, sat very oddly on his tweedy academic shoulders.

‘Oh no,' he said. ‘I
do
think it will. You see, Lenin's on his way back.'

But not that night, it seemed.

It was eleven before Horace set off for home, merry on Château Latour, leaving his new friend with an American colleague, swapping stories. What did they know? There'd been no shooting. Nevsky was deserted. The night was quiet. The city seemed dead.

*   *   *

Yasha was polishing his fiddle left-handed, alone in his room near the school at Smolny, thinking of the way Inna had looked as she worked on the Strad. She'd had the same expression on her face whenever they were alone together, too – except for that sweet first moment, whenever he closed the door on the world and took her in his arms, when she'd sigh as if all her cares were lifted from her, and shut her eyes.

Yasha's thoughts ran naturally on from this to why he'd left the Lemans' house. He couldn't explain this satisfactorily to himself. He didn't like to think that he'd been successfully squeezed out by Horace, or had been rejected by Inna, who wouldn't come with him, or that he'd just cut his losses and given up on her. He'd found he preferred to tell himself that it was fear of the thugs who'd beaten him up that had forced him to clear out, however much he hated to believe that he was a person who could be governed by fear.

Well, it was true, he had been scared. Even now, out in the safety of Smolny, with his arm nearly healed, he still felt black sludge in his gut whenever he remembered those three brutes closing in on him – the empty look in their eyes, as their fists and feet crashed into him, as if he wasn't a person at all, just vermin to be exterminated. And he had nightmares he still woke up sweating from, however often his bony revolutionary flatmate Fanny slid into the bed and rocked him in her skinny arms. (She wasn't a bad sort, Fanny. Not maternal exactly, and not really a lover either, except for the occasional bleak fumble, but at least someone who, after all she'd gone through in all those prisons, really understood fear, and he clung to her like one terrified kid hanging on to another.) He was ashamed of having felt that fear. But he was more ashamed still of using it to avoid thinking about how defeated and outwitted he'd felt by Horace, even before the men had laid into him. Gradually, as his bruises and broken bone began to heal, and the layers of varnish went on, he began to tell himself that, soon, once the violin was done, perhaps he might take it back, and find Inna, and explain. As the weeks went by, he found himself believing she would listen, and forgive him his fear, and take him back.

Now, as he put the violin back down on the table, wrapped in the ragged scarf he'd been polishing it with, he caught a glimmer of movement on the street.

He glanced out. Two men were walking very quickly towards Smolny: short, unimpressive men. Coat collars up, noses stuck forward under workers' caps, eyes flickering furtively round; one very blond.

Nothing odd about that, except that it was nearly midnight – the time people left Smolny, usually.

He was just about to get up and take off his clothes, ready for the rumpled bed in the corner, when he saw a gust of wind outside lift the blond man's cap off his head. It lifted his blond hair, too, revealing the bald pate gleaming underneath. The man grabbed at it, and steadied it back on his head. But Yasha couldn't miss the black beard, which popped out from inside his coat collar.

With a prickle of excitement, he recognized the missing Bolshevik leader: the man who'd been on the run since July.

Immediately his fatigue vanished. Lenin had come out of hiding! Something really was up. He grabbed at his coat, flung himself down the stairs, and began to race back towards the crowds at the doors of Smolny.

*   *   *

It was only that night that Yasha finally knew for sure that, of all revolutionary groups and beliefs represented here at Smolny, it was the Bolsheviks who would win, and it was their leader alone whom he could support with all his heart. What swayed him was the fearless, doubt-free way that Lenin walked into Room 36 and announced, ‘Comrades! We need to start the seizure of power now!'

Yasha's heart swelled. He'd found his truth. Most people were ground down by prison, exile and violence. Even he had been, a little. But now it felt as though all those distortions and impurities were being burned away, for here, at last, was a man stripped of the personal and immune to the stupidity of emotion. Impervious to fear.

*   *   *

When Inna and Horace and Madame Leman went out at dawn the next morning to join the bread and groceries queues, shivering and yawning, it was to discover that the palace had, to Horace's astonishment, already been overrun. Young men with pails of glue were slapping up posters telling them Kerensky was gone and there was a new revolutionary government: the Soviet of People's Commissars.

Inna and Horace and the Lemans didn't really understand how it was that the tiny Bolshevik group, in the days that followed, so quickly took control of everything, although Horace's friend Ransome described how the rest of the revolutionaries from the Soviet, the Mensheviks and Left SRs, who were outraged by the lawlessness of the night seizure of the Winter Palace, went to the packed Soviet Congress to denounce it as a criminal venture which would cause civil war, and then walked out, leaving only the Bolsheviks on the podium. It had been political suicide, Ransome said, recalling how Trotsky had howled after them, ‘You're finished: go where you belong – into the dustbin of history!'

It soon became clear to Inna, though, that they were in ruthless hands, and just how ruthless became apparent right from that first grey morning in October. There was shouting, somewhere in the crowds on Hay Market. Horace drew Inna and Madame Leman into a doorway as a pack of men in some unrecognizable sort of hand-me-down soldiers' uniforms came noisily by. They were dragging a skinny youth towards the canal. He was covered with blood; his face was smashed and one eye was out. There were children running along shouting beside them: high-pitched cries of glee.

When the group had passed, the three of them stepped out of their doorway and began, quickly, to retrace their footsteps home. ‘Best away from this,' Madame Leman muttered, white-faced, pulling the others between the frozen bystanders. Still, they weren't quick enough to miss hearing the return of the crowd to the square, and the elated soldiers chanting, ‘The People's Judgement!' and the children's bright cries behind, ‘Sunk him, drowned him!'

What could you do, Inna thought, if you were ruled by men who seemed to encourage lynch mobs and hatred? Just shut yourself in at home. What other choice was there?

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

They'd boarded up the Leman shop front, Yasha saw a few weeks later as he stood outside in the bitter cold of December. With the violin box under his right arm, he banged and banged at the door, wondering which of them had gone out to hammer those nails so roughly into the window frames.

No one answered.

Well, they were wise to take precautions, he thought. The mob had got into the Emperor's cellars, and the crowds everywhere were still drunk and would be for weeks more. Ruffians were waving bottles of Château d'Yquem as they shuffled along Nevsky; ragamuffins were sitting on walls draining bottles of vintage cognac; courageous drunks were breaking shop windows to get at the merchandise behind. You stepped over puddles of half-frozen Armagnac and vomit through a fumy, swaying world.

After a while Yasha gave up and went round into the courtyard. He still had his key, so he let himself into the stairwell, then the apartment. In the vestibule, he stopped, took off his hat and smoothed down his hair in front of the glass. He fiddled with the collar he'd gone to the bother of ironing this morning. He'd shaved, too. The reflection staring back at him looked sickly pale.