Midnight in St. Petersburg (41 page)

Only Maxim himself looked chilly. He was wearing a thick grey sweater, and his sturdy but skinny body was racked by coughs. Inna could see the way his bony face, with its jutting cheekbones and big thin-lipped mouth, was constantly working to mask his tuberculosis.

Maxim's eyes lit up at the sight of Madame Leman. ‘Dear Lidiya,' he said warmly, advancing to embrace her, ‘come in, come in! Make yourself and your friend at home!' Turning to the plump woman dishing up gruel from a vat into whatever receptacles came to hand – a cut-glass bowl here, a tin mug there – he added, ‘Moura, dear heart! Two more, over here!'

Before Inna knew where she was, they were all perched on impromptu stools made from piles of encyclopedias which Maxim had scooped off the lower shelves; they had their coats off, and warm bowls in their hands, and were eating.

‘All your wonderful languages,' Maxim said enthusiastically to Madame Leman. ‘Why, I've had you in mind for some time for a project I'm discussing with the comrades now…' And he was off, describing, amid the gusts of steam and talk that seemed to come from another life, a miraculous-sounding plan to set up an enormous house of world literature and translate all (all!) foreign classics into Russian, for the benefit of the proletariat.

‘It sounds splendid, Maxim dear; I'd be delighted,' Madame Leman said quickly, and, winking at Inna, put an appealing hand on his arm
.
‘And it makes me wonder, right away, whether you might also be able to find something for Inna here?' She indicated Inna, with a beguiling smile. ‘She's a linguist, too – fluent English! And she's a good girl, too: a hard worker, conscientious, well read; in short, one of us.'

Inna held her breath. Why, Madame Leman knew she could only speak a few words of English. Perhaps Maxim did too, because he didn't really even look at her. But, after a brief pause, he patted Madame Leman on the shoulder, and nodded, and began smiling and talking again.

Breathing out, Inna ate, and let the happy phrases she was hearing, so forgiving of Madame Leman's wild exaggeration, swirl through her mind: ‘Plenty of clerking and copying, so I'm sure we'll be able find some jobs,' and, to Madame Leman, ‘
You
, dear lady. You are just what we need.'

It was only as she scraped the last of the food out of her bowl that she noticed, sitting at the very end of the long table, a fine-featured, thin-haired, wiry man, with intelligent eyes set in a face that had lost just enough of its youthful firmness to make you aware of the skull beneath the skin. He wasn't saying much, and was mostly just looking around, like Inna, as if enjoying the warmth in his belly, or memorizing the other guests. She'd never seen the man before; but she had seen the person hunched beside him, talking in a low, hurried voice. Even though this man had his back turned to them, and there was an unfamiliar furtiveness in his demeanour, she'd have recognized that silhouette anywhere. It was Yasha.

After a while, Inna touched Madame Leman's arm, and indicated Yasha with a nod. Maxim followed his old friend's glance across the room.

‘Ah, I'd forgotten. You all knew each other, didn't you?' Maxim murmured. ‘Before…' He gave a regretful shake of the head. ‘But he's swimming in dangerous waters, that young man. And, if I may be so bold as to offer an opinion: if he hasn't acknowledged either of you, I wouldn't go up to him right now.' He leaned closer, so that Inna could hear the rasping in his throat. He croaked, fishing for a hanky from his pocket, ‘He won't want that Cheka comrade he's talking with to notice you, I expect.'

Inna was startled. She'd never seen anyone from the Cheka.

Maxim began coughing terribly into his hanky. When eventually he stopped, he touched Inna's arm. ‘My apologies. Damn cough,' he said weakly, almost whispering. ‘He'll be avoiding you especially, because of your husband.' He looked straight at her, with watery eyes, and suddenly she was grateful for the cough, and the whisper.

Madame Leman hadn't actually mentioned Horace's name when introducing Inna, and Inna had thought Maxim didn't know who she was. But now, abruptly she realized he knew all about her, and was worried for Horace.

Maxim's smile only got sadder. ‘You don't want Chekists even clapping eyes on you,' he mouthed, ‘if there's the least chance they might take it into their heads that you're … officer class. Anyone can be a counter-revolutionary or a saboteur. Anyone can be a White. Or so people might say.'

Inna nodded. The silence that followed was full of uncertainty.

Maxim looked from one woman to the other. ‘I don't think your Yasha does anything really bad,' he said at last. ‘He's a good boy, at heart. He isn't one of them, not really. He just … just
talks
to our Comrade Bokii there, sometimes, I've noticed. Who knows? Perhaps he has no choice. We all do what we have to, to survive.'

Inna looked towards the frail old grand duke, painfully putting his bowl on the floor for the little dog to lick, then back at Maxim. ‘Why do you have the Cheka man
here
, with
him
?' she wanted to ask, but Maxim was shrugging. I do what I can, he was indicating. But I can't guarantee anyone's safety. Then, smiling, clapping Madame Leman on the back, he shifted away from the difficult subject as if it had never been raised.

‘There's so much it's futile for us to worry about that all we can usefully do is hope,' he proclaimed.

Madame Leman cast one last wistful glance down the table, before, with what Inna saw as the determination of a true survivor, rising to Maxim's challenge. Visibly putting Yasha out of her mind, she turned, beaming, back to her friend. ‘But what we
can
do is plan for our shining future! We must make a comprehensive reading list for the proletariat!'

Inna sat very still, as if listening to the literary conversation that ensued: ‘Whom should we include? Zola? Dickens?' from Maxim; Madame Leman laughing back at him, ‘But don't the poor proletarians get enough miserable realism as it is? Shouldn't we give them love, mystery, enchantment – the things they're missing?' But all Inna was thinking was, Why is Yasha talking to that man?

She couldn't help noticing as the skull-faced man got up, shook Yasha's hand, and quietly left the room. Yasha then picked up both their bowls and took them into the kitchen. That last, highly unusual act – the submissive curve of Yasha's back – alarmed her more than ever.

But when he came out of the kitchen, his face was composed. He walked towards the way out without looking round or greeting anyone.

‘Why, it's a
wonderful,
elemental love story!' Madame Leman was exclaiming.

He hadn't seen her, then, Inna thought. He was going to leave without a word.

The disappointment she felt was crushing. She'd never know why he'd stooped so low as to be telling that man other people's secrets, as Maxim had seemed to be suggesting. (If that's what he
had
been doing. Informing … But, no, she couldn't believe that of Yasha.)

But then he stopped in the doorway, and turned his head just enough to give Inna a quick, impassive, unsurprised glance.

He did know I was here. He saw me after all, Inna thought, and was surprised by the surge of joy that came with the thought. Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded towards the door.

Outside, that nod said. Now.

Madame Leman, lost in another world, was continuing enthusiastically. ‘“I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it,”' Inna heard as she got up. The voice followed her as she started slipping behind chairs and benches towards the door. ‘“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am…”'

In the doorway, Inna paused. No, neither Madame Leman nor Maxim was looking her way. She slipped out.

Outside Yasha was striding down the wide street, wind flapping at his coat skirts. Shivering, with her coat still unbuttoned, Inna ran up behind him and caught his arm.

‘Why were you talking to the man from the Cheka?' she panted.

He shook his head. ‘Not here,' he mouthed. He turned to shield her from the roar of freezing wind and then nodded towards an archway into a derelict back courtyard. It was overflowing with stinking rubbish. Perhaps there were no dogs left to scavenge through the heaps.

‘I live just through there,' he said. ‘Come and talk.'

*   *   *

‘It's not what you think,' Yasha said – muttered – as soon as they'd got to the top of the stairs.

He opened the door. Everyone was thinner than they used to be, of course. But he looked … diminished, Inna thought: worried, slinking, stray. Now he'd got her here, even the masterful body language had gone. He couldn't quite meet her eyes.

The dark apartment wasn't small, and it was full of things: clothes lying in piles on the corridor floor, books heaped up, a scatter of leaflets, and unwashed plates in a bowl outside the kitchen up at the far end. But it felt very empty. Its high ceilings were fuzzed with cobwebs. There was a drip, and a bucket to catch it in.

The next thing Inna noticed in the dim light of the oil lamp he lit was a patched woman's jacket lying on one heap – an ugly one, in some sort of dark stuff. All clothes were old and ugly now, of course, but this was one that had never been anything but brutally utilitarian. She was strangely pleased.

‘Your revolutionary friends are away, then,' she said, recognizing the jacket as one that only a political woman would wear and remembering, suddenly, that it had been brother-and-sister comrades he'd been talking about moving in with back then, though somewhere else. Feeling a stranger, she wondered if he and those people she didn't know had moved on here together.

‘They've gone.'

Holding the lamp, he moved her towards the nearest door. She kept her eyes on the jacket. There were several stockings, too, she saw: thick ones, darned many times, most worn through at the heel. Ugly though they also were, she was less pleased to see such intimate female articles so close to Yasha's room.

‘That's why I'm in this mess.'

Inside his room there was a small rough table, a chest and several more heaps of clothes. Drawn curtains kept out the grey daylight. There was no chair; she perched modestly at the foot of the rumpled bed. Yasha put the lamp on the floor and slumped down on the pillows at the other end, sinking his head despairingly into his hands.

Without being prompted, he began to tell Inna his story.

A year or so ago, back when the Cheka started, he'd been recruited to help fight counter-revolutionary sabotage by a tall Polish man with a pointy beard at a political meeting. He'd been excited, but the work had turned out to be nothing special, just writing the kind of leaflets he'd once written for the Bund. It was a harmless little job, involving nothing more than going into an office, from time to time, with the copy he wrote in this room. Back then he hadn't known anything more, except what they told him to put in the leaflets.

He'd been living with his friends, still, then: Fanny and her brother. They were trouble, because until Lenin came and they fell under his spell they hadn't been Bolsheviks, but Socialist Revolutionaries, and when all the opposition parties started being shut down, and their former members arrested, Fanny and her brother hadn't seen it was all for the good of the Revolution. They'd taken it badly. Yasha wrinkled his brow. ‘Bitching and kvetching, they were. But why should I have wept over that? The Bund was dissolved too.'

Then Fanny went off on a trip to Moscow, and never came back. Just disappeared, no word, nothing. And at the end of the summer, her brother vanished too.

Silence fell.

‘You see, they say,' he said, wild-eyed and twitchy, ‘that she was the one who shot at Lenin. That she was Russia's Charlotte Corday – the reason they started the Red Terror.'

Inna's eyes widened. She remembered the headlines and the police mug-shot. Fanny Kaplan: executed within the week.

‘Though she can't have done it, you know,' Yasha added, hastily. ‘Not really. Because when she was in prison before, she was beaten half to death. She was inside for eleven years, you know, and only got out when I did. She was arrested when she was sixteen for some bomb plot against the Emperor, stripped naked, and caned with birch rods – she was just a kid, for God's sake – and after she got out she could hardly move, half the time, for the headaches. She was more than half-blind. She might have wanted to, but she couldn't have seen to shoot.'

But of course when he next turned up with some copy for one of the Cheka leaflets, they took a new interest in him. Not the bearded man any more, a different one, but he had the same kindly, intelligent eyes. They look like good fathers, all of them, Yasha said miserably; they all talk so gently, as if they know the wickedness of the world and how to protect you from it.

The new man knew everything. Putting Yasha's copy down on his table with a polite nod of thanks, he started straight in. ‘Ah, yes, Kagan; I've been hearing about you. So you've been living with counter-revolutionaries, have you? And in the Bund, once, too. Well, well, you've got yourself into a pretty pickle, I see.' He stroked his beard, and Yasha trembled inside. ‘There will be arrests in the Bund soon,' the man said, affectionately, ‘a lot of arrests. But I can see you're a good man. We don't want
you
arrested, do we?'

And now Yasha was supposed to meet this Bokii, once a month, at Maxim's, just to talk over a meal; just to tell Bokii things about the people he'd talked to, and the people he met around town – especially, though this was never emphasized, if they were his former friends in the Bund.