Midnight in St. Petersburg (4 page)

‘I'll ask someone then,' he said matter-of-factly, stepping away. ‘Moscow Prospekt, you say?'

He stopped one of the hard-faced traders, and Inna, still worried about crying again, saw the man answer him with a jerk of the thumb, to the left.

‘House Number Two,' she said, and they set off into the biting wind with a new sense of companionship.

The address she had written down turned out to be in a dark, fetid courtyard off one of the big ugly avenues nearby.

Even the peasant looked doubtful as they pushed open the door to a prison-like staircase, which seemed never to have been cleaned, and began to make their echoing way up the wide stone steps to the first-floor flat.

Inna stood tall, took a deep breath and rang.

Part of her felt journey's end just ahead, and safety, and wanted the peasant gone. But another part of her was full of gratitude for his help and panic that he'd just slip away before Yasha came to the door.

So she did nothing – didn't meet his eye, didn't speak – as they both strained to hear voices or footsteps from inside the leather-padded door.

It was only when footsteps did become audible that she looked at him. He looked back, thoughtfully nodding his head.

She feared he might make the sign of the cross, or say something pitying in farewell.

‘You forget about that gypsy woman, and her foolishness. What does she know? The future is a matter for God,' he said simply.

She was about to shake her head and say, No, it was a matter for her. But the door was opening and a stripe of warm yellow light came from within. The peasant, as if unwilling either to intrude or to leave before Inna had found her relative, stepped back into the shadows.

A tall, muscular, close-shaven man in his twenties was looking out. ‘Can I help you,
mademoiselle
?' he asked Inna politely.

She stared at him.

Could this man possibly be…?

There were none of the luxuriant dark curls she remembered from the photograph. This man's hair was cropped close to his skull. Following the bluish line of stubble from the long throat and lean jaw upwards, she saw how it receded at the temples and appreciated the small vanity that must have prompted the Spartan style he'd chosen. Still, he was handsome, in a sportsmanlike way: long-legged, with a torso whose muscles she could guess at under his white shirt, and that elegant throat, with his head set on top with almost military precision, chin down, crown high, in a way she'd never have guessed at from the picture.

But she recognized the straight nose with its flaring nostrils, and the wide, straight mouth, and the cheekbones, and the brown, almond-shaped eyes, with the possibility of softness suggested by their thick lashes. There was no softness in them now. Yet she'd never seen a face so arresting.

‘Yasha?' she asked.

It was only as he nodded, and confirmed, still in that neutral voice, though with just a hint of impatience or surprise, ‘Yes, I'm Kagan … how can I help you?' that Inna was aware of the peasant slipping away down the stairs. She was too preoccupied with the man in front of her to turn or call goodbye. It was only later that she realized she'd never even asked the peasant his name.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Yasha had been about to go out when he heard the doorbell. He'd have been long gone already if, earlier on, Madame Leman hadn't taken it into her head to bring out all the coats and hats and boots from storage, ready for winter. She'd dumped them in armfuls in the lobby, but then got distracted, as usual, and gone off leaving the job half done. So it was pandemonium in the windowless little room, and he'd been pushing through piles of furs, looking for his jacket in a cloud of mothball smell, and feeling exasperated for what felt like hours.

Before opening the door, though, he'd taken the precaution of shoving a couple of children's moulting rabbit hats on top of the box of leaflets he'd been planning to take round to Kremer's. You never knew. Better safe than sorry.

But when he looked out into the gloom of the landing – as stern as he could in case it was the police who'd come calling – what he saw, in the yellow stripe of light from inside the flat, wasn't a fat man in a uniform at all, but a girl.

An unnervingly attractive girl, too: very tall, slim, with lovely ankles visible below her threadbare coat and shining black hair escaping from under her hat. A girl half stepping forward to look at him (his face must be in shadow, he realized), with a face too pale for classical beauty and huge green eyes.

He stood up straighter. He'd never seen her before. He'd remember if he had. She wasn't the kind of girl you'd forget.

Yet, uncertain though her expression was, she seemed to know his name.

‘Yasha, I'm Inna,' she was saying.

Her name meant nothing to him. And he could hear Kremer's uncle's voice in his head, saying, ‘A good revolutionary keeps his trap shut,' and, ‘Never trust a stranger.' So he looked watchfully back at her, waiting.

She hesitated before plunging on in her attractively low voice, ‘I've been living at your parents' flat.' He was shocked to hear her use the informal, family way of saying ‘you' and ‘your'. ‘Since my Aunt Lyuba died … I'm a kind of cousin of your father's…'

He noticed a beseeching look in her green eyes.

Of course. Mama had mentioned the cousin's turning up, in one of her very long and inconsequential letters, which were all full of gossip about people he'd left behind, and general aimless fretting about the bourgeois kinds of things his parents did fret about. It had been one of the few pieces of news he'd taken in, because he'd remembered hearing stories about the Feldmans as a boy. ‘So you're Inna Feldman?' he said.

She nodded, still looking expectant.

Yasha remembered old Kremer's warnings about women. ‘Always be on your guard,' he'd been fond of saying, in that wise, smoke-choked voice of his, ‘especially with women. You never know what they want – but you always know they'll want something. Anyway, there's only ever room in a man's heart for one love, lads. Let it be the revolution, and not some rouged-up hussy.'

‘You're their lodger in Kiev,' he said brutally, noticing the way she flinched as he said this. ‘But what are you doing
here
? In St. Petersburg?'

He'd made a point of replying using the formal ‘you' –
vy
– as if she were a stranger. Respected, but not his family, not his nearest and dearest. For the first time since he'd seen her and been thrown into this state of near-paralysis, he was taking control. He could think again.

He watched her register that, then decide not to take offence, just answer.

‘Well, because they've left,' she replied quickly, too eagerly, with the beginning of an anxious smile that both twisted his heart and angered him at the same time, ‘and I've brought…'

‘Left?'

If there was one thing Yasha knew about his parents it was that they never went anywhere. The concert hall, the shops, the theatre, neighbours' apartments, and a week at the coast in the summer, taking the Crimean air: those were the predictable parameters of their universe.

‘Are they here?' he asked, in what felt like a gasp. Turning; half expecting to see them coming up the grimy stairs any minute. ‘With you?'

‘No,' she said. ‘They went to Odessa. Where the boat goes from, to the Holy Land. For the Tuesday passage.'

‘But they can't have,' Yasha heard himself objecting. ‘They didn't tell me. They didn't write. They
always
write.'

He had piles of letters, most of them barely read, in a drawer in his room.

‘They did,' she said. How calm she sounded. ‘I've brought you the letter.'

He went on staring at her as his world turned upside down: as he stopped being the bold young man venturing far from his claustrophobic home to have adventures and change the world and sneer with his mates at his parents, who were pottering around safely back home, doing their best to forget they had a drop of Jewish blood in their veins; as he became … well, whatever you did become when your family suddenly just vanished into thin air.

After a long silence, he said, almost to himself, ‘But why?'

‘They were scared there would be a pogrom. We all were.'

Her voice was controlled, but he could hear the wobble in it.

‘But there's not going to be a pogrom,' Yasha said. He felt confident of this. All his comrades in the Bund had discussed this question, at length, and had decided that the appointment of Kokovtsev as the new Prime Minister – not a bloodthirsty man – meant the authorities had no interest, this time, in egging on the more uncouth elements of society to shed Jewish blood.

‘Nothing's happened so far, and nothing is going to happen in future, either,' Yasha added, aware that he was sounding too angry. ‘Everyone knows that. They should just have stayed put.'

Her eyes flashed with indignation. How green they were.

‘Well, it was completely natural to be frightened!' she burst out. ‘Anyone would have been, with the way things got … the streets full of those thugs, the things those leaflets were saying. You would have been scared, too, if you'd been there. And what does it matter if it hasn't happened yet? It still might. Any day. Why do you think so many people have been trying to leave?' He noticed that she'd gone on calling him the familiar ‘you',
ty
, as if insisting on their closeness.

‘Palestine is for cowards,' he said flatly. ‘Better to fight than run away.' It was what his comrades told each other at their political meetings. Yet here, before this girl who actually knew his parents, it didn't sound so convincing. He tried not to think of his father's shortness of stature; of his bent back and timorous, scholarly ways; of his thin cracked voice; of his multiple minor medical problems and silver-topped cane. Because if he did, he'd know how absurd it was to imagine the old man going out and facing street gangs of hoodlums.

He didn't want to see mockery in her green eyes. He looked down.

‘Did you say you'd brought a letter?' he asked after another pause, still saying ‘
vy
'. He'd take it, she'd go away, and he'd have a chance to find out where Mama and Papa were heading, at least. Think it through on his own.

He could feel, hear, that she was nodding. ‘Well, where is it?' he said. He met her eye at last, but only to look expectant as he put out his hand. ‘Their letter?'

‘At the bottom of my bag,' she said shortly, looking away in her turn. He could see, now, that she was less mocking than he'd expected, and also angrier. Her lips were tight. There were white dents at her nostrils. ‘I'll find it once I've unpacked.'

And then, to his astonishment, she picked up her bags and pushed determinedly past him and through the door. ‘Because I'll need to stay.'

At a loss, Yasha followed her into the lamp glow of the vestibule in time to see her stop just inside the door and stare at the chaotic mounds of boots and coats and hats facing her as she put down her bags. With disquiet, he saw that one of the bags was now resting against his covered-up box of leaflets.

He watched her glance around, taking in the mortifying mess. Just for a moment, her nose – a straight, elegant nose, Yasha noticed – wrinkled. She must be smelling the mothballs. He saw her take in the full-length mirror, and the armchair for sitting on to pull on boots, and the little table beside it, with its lamp, the little dish for Madame Leman's hairpins and eau de Cologne and brush. Her eyes moved next to the shelves crammed with candles, lamps (some broken), Lucifer matches, and jars of jam, pickles and preserves, all hand-labelled in Madame Leman's flamboyant scrawl. He saw them widen at the fat magazines and periodicals, mostly very scuffed, piled up in front of the shelves lining the third, coat-free, wall.

For what seemed an eternity, Yasha couldn't think beyond his own agonizing awareness of the terrible impression all this clutter must be making. From behind the door onwards into the apartment, he could hear all the usual family din: banging and clattering from the kitchen, children squawking, and someone picking out a waltz on the piano.

And then he saw the look of painful longing on her face, and realized she wasn't despising it at all. He let out the breath he hadn't known he was holding.

Suddenly everything felt simpler. Now she was inside, he could also see how young she was: tall, but hardly more than a kid really, with shadows under her eyes.

Well, of course. Naturally she'd be tired. She must have been in trains, alone, for a good three or four days.

He wasn't going to let in any foolish thoughts about it possibly being right to have left Kiev in the past week for fear of a pogrom. But, thinking of the rowdy types who'd packed the communal compartments he and his friend Kremer had met in, travelling here together a year ago – those hard-drinking men and all the policemen who'd wanted to check the Jewish pair's papers – he could see how frightening the journey north must have been for a young girl on her own.

‘You must be tired,' he said, trying to restore a politer note to the conversation. ‘Were you all right on the train by yourself?'

‘Yes.' She looked at him challengingly – another flash of green. ‘Yes, I was all right, because I stole a passport,' she went on baldly. ‘A Russian one. And just as well I did. They weren't letting Jews out. And they had police at the station here too, looking for people coming in.'

His eyes widened a little at that. He wasn't going to admit to being impressed, though, or to there having perhaps been any real danger in Kiev. He just shrugged, uneasily, and let it pass.

He'd better ask Madame Leman if she could stay the night, at least, and just hope to God there wouldn't be a big to-do about it, like there had been when he'd sneaked Kremer in to sleep on his floor for those few days. She could have a bath. Get some rest. Get back on her feet. And then she could go off and do whatever it was she'd come here to do. Kremer and his leaflets would have to wait a day.