Midnight in St. Petersburg (43 page)

Within a few minutes the room was turned upside down.

The men were bulky, and had big slab faces, with broken noses and cauliflower ears, like criminals, Inna thought.

They paused for a minute over Horace's books, looking briefly hopeful at the gold-tooled set before sweeping them off the shelf to the floor to join the woollen stockings and bedclothes.

‘Foreign,' one grumbled. ‘What use are they?'

Bolsheviks they might be, but Inna supposed they still had this in common with the ordinary thieves they so resembled – that, even if they wanted to humiliate the person they were robbing, and rub their nose in their shameful class origin, they'd also want to confiscate stuff they could sell in the market later.

It didn't take them long to see there was nothing much worth taking in this bleak little pair of garret rooms. No typewriters, no smart lamps, no jewels. Even the violins were all locked up in the storeroom downstairs.

Inna's head was full of a not so distant memory: of Horace, holding her, swaying in the street, of the grey of the afternoon sky, and the misery in his voice when he'd said, ‘It's all gone. The box is empty…'

Even if they take the floorboards up, Inna told herself now, they won't find anything. But she couldn't be sure. Horace looked so pale.

Hardly daring to breathe, she watched the men give up.

‘There's nothing here,' said one. ‘They gave us a bad address, didn't they, the bastards.' He kicked the
burzhuika
and Horace's improvised pipe came away from the window with a metallic shriek.

Horace stifled his reproach, but a tiny sound came from his throat.

The one who'd kicked the stove turned towards him, looking at him properly for the first time. However shabbily you dressed Horace, Inna knew his bearing, the refinement of his features, gave him away. There was a brief silence as the man's mouth curled upwards and he started to nod. He could now see he was looking at a class enemy, all right; he just hadn't yet seen any way of profiting from having found him.

‘Waistcoat,' he said, triumphantly, and pulled open Horace's coat. ‘He's wearing a bleeding waistcoat, look, Van.'

The other man stepped eagerly forward, too, as they both saw the watch in Horace's waistcoat pocket.

Horace didn't give his watch up without a struggle. The dictionary he'd been clutching fell to the floor. But the scuffle lasted only a moment – not even long enough for Inna to shout, let alone start banging them about the head with the book in her hands, as she so wanted to. Then, pocketing their swag, they were strong-arming Horace down the stairs towards the street, and she was running down after them, with her heart pounding in her ears.

Outside, in the dance of firelight, the first man into the courtyard grabbed the doorman. The doorman in his raggedy cap cringed away from the stranger's touch as his own drunken friends abandoned him, shuffling back from the little fire they'd been sitting around, making themselves small against the dark courtyard walls. But they all edged forward again when the man said, ‘Shovel, mate, get us a snow shovel,' and the doorman rushed eagerly, cravenly, to fetch it.

Meanwhile, the man who'd punched Horace as he'd taken the watch put the shovel in his hands.

‘Clear the snow,' he jeered, ‘your bleeding excellency.'

For a moment, Inna's eyes met Horace's.

The doorman
,
with a bit of a crowd now muttering behind him in the archway, shouted, with savage pleasure: ‘Yeah, sweep up, go on, all of it. Don't forget the corners.'

Horace, his face drooping between bowed shoulders, scraped.

They might all just have gone on like that for five or ten minutes more, until the onlookers got bored and went back to their bonfire, if the doorman hadn't taken it into his head to point at Inna and call out, ‘And what about
her
, brothers? The wife, here, the Queen of bloody Sheba?'

At that first hint of a Jew sneer, Inna felt the crowd beginning to look at her. ‘Isn't
she
going to get a bit of what for, too?' the doorman mocked.

Then everything changed.

She was scared now, black and sick with it. She shut her eyes. But that didn't stop the cackles and catcalls and whistles from all around her. ‘Run,' she heard urgently, but whose voice it was she couldn't tell. ‘Run,' the voice whispered. ‘Innochka, run…'

And then she was back in the huge doorway, looking for Mama. She was in her white nightgown, twisting her blanket in one hand and her hair in the other, looking up into the smoke at the men towering above, with their backs to her, in a ring. She was wondering what they were all doing here, in the dark. Wondering why Mama had let them in, and where Papa was. Trying to make sense of the movements and the scuffling sounds and the flickering light and the smoke and the men laughing and saying things.

And then, from somewhere in the middle of it, down on the ground in the dark, actually below hers – where nothing grown-up should be – she saw Mama's eyes. Fixed on her. Nodding. Jolting. And the whisper, over and over, ‘Run … run,' which she could hardly hear, because the big dark men were saying things now, so loudly, so rhythmically, so fast. Horrible things. ‘Run.'

But she didn't, because she knew she had to stop the men. They were alarming Mama, weren't they, hurting her, and they had bright policemen's piping on their shoulders, and it wasn't right. Mama needed help.

But then she looked around, and saw the other thing in the room, almost at her feet, on the floor where Papa's violin lay, or what was left of it, because someone seemed to have walked on it, and its neck was snapped. The thing was as big and unmoving as a felled tree trunk, but a tree trunk covered in the dark wool of Papa's suit, so that it looked like a still version of his chest.

There was something else, something red and smiling at the far end of the thing, in the dark – a giant clown-grin she couldn't understand, stretching right across the top of its vague shape.

It was a horrible shape, red and glistening as paint.

It was only after she'd finally made out the pale still lips of Papa's real mouth, further away still, that she finally understood that what she was looking at was his throat. The smile was in his throat. The red was his blood, a great long line of it. Running from ear to ear.

Shocked, sickened, she turned away.

‘Run,' she heard, the whisper in her ears again. And now she could imagine the men turning to her, on her; the feel of their arms on hers; the smell of their breath.

So, feeling as though she were floating, she began to tiptoe very slowly and quietly away, down the stairs, counting the banisters drifting past her eyes, humming to herself and twisting her hair in one hand and her blanket in the other. It wasn't that she was running away and leaving Mama, she told herself; not really. Aunty Lyuba downstairs would know what to do. Aunty Lyuba would stop them …

Somewhere very close, she heard a huge roar of rage, then the thud of something hard landing on bones, and a scream. And suddenly she wasn't in the fear of that other place any more, but here again, screaming.

Desperately she took a breath, opened her eyes, and saw Horace, his face contorted with fury, swinging the shovel. Horace's boot had been split open, and Inna realized that someone must have gone down savagely on it with that shovel a moment ago. But one of the men was on the ground, just near her, clutching his head and starting to groan, and several of the crowd were edging back out of harm's way, muttering to each other, ‘Call out the guard!' and ‘Man's gone crazy!'

The other man had already begun dancing backwards towards the safety of the archway that led back to the street.

Then he stopped altogether, because another man came in through the archway, took in the scene, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and strong-armed him back into the courtyard, to face the suddenly hushed little crowd.

Yasha, Inna saw. It was Yasha.

Inna watched as Horace grinned – a look of triumph – clanked down the shovel on the cobbles, so hard it nearly sparked, and shouted, ‘Don't ever think of laying a finger on my wife again, you filthy haemorrhoid!'

The fickle cluster of bystanders changed sides at once. With contemptuous nods towards the thugs, they began to leave, one of them kicking the man on the ground as he slipped away.

Horace limped the two steps to Inna, and pulled her close.

It was Yasha she watched, astonished at the extraordinary coincidence that had brought him through the archway at that moment. Not just she; all eyes were on Yasha.

But it was Horace she clung to, treasuring the feel of the rough dark wool of his coat.

‘What are you up to here then, comrades,' Yasha said sternly to the men now cringing abjectly in front of him. ‘
Scaring girls?
'

They backed away as the doorman shooed his family back inside, and the last of the spectators left the scene.

‘Do you know what I call that, comrade?' Yasha went on, his face a mask of disgusted anger.

Miserably, they shook their heads.

‘I call it betraying the Revolution.'

There was a low growl of agreement from the doorman.

‘So hop it,' Yasha added brutally, ‘before I turn the pair of you over for some People's Justice yourselves.'

Inna knew she should feel more, much more, than she was feeling. She should be thanking Yasha for appearing. She should be thanking Horace for his heroic attempt to save her. But all she actually did was to turn around and stumble back inside the staircase door, heading not for the attics but for the unviolated rooms of the Lemans, just one floor up.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

‘But I didn't hear a thing!' Madame Leman kept saying once she'd got Inna and Horace safely in her kitchen. ‘It makes my blood run cold to think of it! You could both have been murdered, just like that!'

Yasha hadn't come in. He'd just nodded, curtly, as Inna stumbled towards the stairwell. ‘Get her in, and get that foot bandaged,' he'd told Horace before he turned on his heel.

‘Well, it was all very quick,' Horace kept replying now. He was keen to keep things calm. Marcus was out for the evening with Olympia and the poets. He was aware of Barbarian's and Agrippina's round eyes, fixed first on his beaten-up face and then on Inna's pallor. He didn't want to mention his throbbing foot. He didn't want them more scared than they need be.

Horace caught Madame Leman's doubtful glance at Agrippina in her green dress. She wouldn't say anything, because of course she didn't want to make him feel unwelcome, but she was clearly imagining what might happen next time thugs came hunting in this building for foreigners. He could see she was beginning to be afraid for her daughter.

‘You mustn't worry,' he said reassuringly. ‘It won't happen again.'

It was only as he said this that he realized, with dawning sadness, why.

‘Inna and I have been talking,' he went on. ‘Not because of tonight – we were discussing it anyway, before this happened – but this makes it easier. We've decided it's time for us to leave.'

In the pandemonium that followed, with the three Lemans each talking at the same time, shouting, ‘What do you mean, leave?' and ‘How could you possibly?' and ‘Where would you go?' and ‘Are you crazy?' (but not, Horace noticed, ‘Why?'), he saw Inna, very slowly, raise her head and smile at him.

‘You see, Youssoupoff wrote,' she told the Lemans with a strange calm. ‘From his estate at Koreiz, in the Crimea. He wants his violin.'

‘So we're going to go to Yalta first,' Horace said. ‘And then I think we're going to make for Paris.'

There was nothing else for it. He could see that. And he could so clearly envisage the first part of the journey on the train: the seat, the bunk, the pistons, the chuffing, the mournful hoots and the landscape streaming backwards. To this picture, he could easily add soldiers, massed in those cornfields through the murky glass of the windows, glimpsed through the round peep-holes they'd rub, some in Red uniforms, some in White (stick-men figures, shooting at each other with looks of surprise and muffled pops). Yet whatever he'd said to Inna about the dangers, crossing the war zone still seemed too unreal to prompt any emotion. It was the unknown lying beyond that was saddening him, he knew: what came once they'd crossed the unmarked line from Red to White Russia. Because there was no way back from the Crimea.

So he only nodded as they all started exclaiming again, ‘Paris!' and ‘Yalta!' The lump in his throat might have given him away if he'd tried to reply. He could see something of the same mixture of emotions on Madame Leman's face, as she took in the news that he and Inna would be unlikely ever again to sit in this kitchen with its gurgling pipes, eating whatever she'd managed to bring in from the market and joining in the usual arguments about art, or who should queue for what in the morning, or Barbarian's table manners.

But, even though she brushed an impatient hand across glistening eyes before she spoke again, what she said was, ‘Well, the last thing I want is to say goodbye to either of you, you know that, but I do see why you feel you must.'

Mixed up with the sadness of parting, he saw, was quiet relief. She wanted her children safe. Perhaps he'd been a fool to resist for so long, and put the people he cared for most in danger.

‘I'll go and see Maxim in the morning,' Horace said, getting carefully up on his uninjured foot and going to stand behind Inna. ‘We can be off as soon as he can get us travel papers.'

*   *   *

‘Be safe,' Maxim said, embracing Horace and kissing him on both cheeks before wiping water from his eyes.

The envelope had already disappeared inside Horace's greatcoat.

With a tenderly mocking salute, Horace stepped back. He would miss this. ‘You, too,' he said.