Midnight in St. Petersburg (42 page)

‘I always thought I was brave,' Yasha said humbly. ‘But now I see I'm a coward, because I do it. I've met him a few times now. Sometimes I tell the other people I talk to that I've been asked to inform but refused, just as a way of warning them not to tell me their secrets, because who does refuse the Cheka? Who'd dare? So you see, I try not to make it bad. But it is.'

They sat quietly, Inna listening to Yasha's breath; to hers; to the slow drip of water into the bucket outside the door.

After a while she saw his lips twist into a mirthless grin. ‘It was all going to be so different when we were in charge,' he added wryly. ‘Wasn't it? When it was
our
police, and there was justice for everyone and the bright tomorrow. But what's actually changed, now we're there? Just the names of the crimes, that's all. They're still set over us. And we're all still just slaves.'

There was no more to say.

After a while, she stretched out a hand and touched his knee.

‘Poor Yasha,' she said softly. ‘What a terrible life that must be.'

Her heart was so full of pity for him, and a kind of astonishment too. He'd been so full of ideals. She'd never seen him without that unseen rival, the Revolution, in one guise or another. But here they were now, just the two of them, alone, without any of the pretensions that had divided them, just trust, just vulnerability, as if he were spiritually naked before her for the first time.

He shook his head. ‘Sometimes I think I should just run off, somewhere. My parents made it to America in the end, you know,' he said. ‘Like Beilis. But I can't. They'd find me. They find everyone.'

After another long silence, he put his hand on top of hers.

‘You're as lovely as ever. I think of you, often. I always have.'

She yielded when he pulled her closer, but drew her face back when he moved to kiss her.

‘Don't touch me; not if you don't want to,' he whispered. ‘Don't do anything you'll regret.'

She laughed, miserably. Whatever her mind was telling her, her hands were still roaming over his back. ‘I can't not,' she whispered back. ‘I never could.'

*   *   *

She was sleeping. There was a faint flush on her cheek. She looked so peaceful. Yasha raised himself on his elbow and softly brushed the hair back from her face.

She stirred, and reached for the hand touching her face; she stroked it and took a deep inward breath. For a moment, Yasha dreaded what would be in her face when she woke fully and turned to look at him. Would he see a slow-dawning horror at what had happened? Panic, even?

But when her eyes did open, it was only as part of a sinuous stretch that brought the entire warm length of her body against his, under the heavy pile of blankets that no longer felt damp or cold. She was smiling right at him,
knowing
, he saw, with unspeakable relief, as his arms twined across her smooth back, his legs around hers.

And when her lips parted, it was only to say one word, in a dreamy, happy murmur: ‘You…'

‘And you, what about you?' he whispered.

He could see the cloud passing over her face as she came to, properly, and remembered everything else. ‘Me … I don't like it here any more either. I want to leave. But Horace won't.' She sighed. ‘Let's not talk about it now.'

How beautiful her voice was. ‘No, tell me,' he said, not wanting the moment to end.

And so she did, in a hurried, worried whisper: how Horace had been keeping the family afloat by hiding valuables for his Fabergé colleagues; how that was over now that the Fabergé people had all gone, and it was up to her to start keeping him; how, even though Madame Leman was so good at sourcing parcels, there was never enough to go around; and, also, about the other fear she lived with, that her Horace's undisguisable foreignness would, sooner or later, bring the lynch mob to their door.

When she fell silent, eventually, Yasha kissed her parted lips, very gently. She pulled him down on top of her.

Through the red haze that came on him then, as their bodies started to move again, he heard her whisper, ‘If only things had been different. If only we hadn't let ourselves get so trapped by life, you and I…'

She drew in her breath, sharply, as his hands touched her breasts. ‘I love him, of course I do. But not like this. Not like I've always loved you.'

*   *   *

She woke again, at dusk. She looked sadder this time. She sat up, oblivious of the cold and her nakedness, and whispered, ‘I have to go.' Her breath was white.

Only when she was dressed, right to her coat and hat and boots, did she come back to the bed, and sit on the edge of it, and kiss his lips. There were no words. Nothing either of them could promise. Just sadness.

‘Will you come again?' Yasha asked.

She shook her head. And then she was gone.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

They'd abandoned the second attic room as it was too hard to heat, but she found Horace, in his overcoat and hat and gloves, in the bedroom, feeding pages from a book into the little stove he'd improvised for them when the building's central heating started getting unreliable. He'd made it from a square biscuit tin from England – you could still see the name Huntley & Palmers under the soot – as well as from various metal conserves jars, bound together and shaped into a long wonky tube that went out through a hole in the window pane. Everyone was making these stoves now. They were known, with the class sneer that had become habitual, as
burzhuiki
: bourgeoise women.

She stopped in the doorway. He turned, and said, with a relieved smile, ‘Ah,
there
you are. You've been gone for hours. I was worried.'

Horace had chopped up his bedside table for firewood, so there were small, kindling-sized bits of wood piled neatly by the bed. There was no need for one any more, he'd said. You couldn't read in bed any more, not with only a couple of hours' electricity a day. He'd moved his book and reading glasses to the window, next to the
burzhuika
– the light was strongest there, of course; and it was warm, too, if you kept a hand on the tin containing the little fire
.
His book, which he must have abandoned at dusk, was still there, face down on the floor. Something English, she saw; and felt obscurely comforted by the reminder that he was
from
somewhere, even if it wasn't a place he ever talked about with much affection, if at all.

‘I went for a walk after the lunch,' she said dully. (Lying was so easy, to those who wanted to trust you.) She walked in, coat, hat, wet boots and all, not wanting to take anything off; not wanting the smell of Yasha's body to give her away; not wanting to wash it away, either, which was when she'd really have to accept her reality. She sat down on the bed.

Horace said, ‘Are you hungry? Because Agrippina was lucky in the market.' He reached down for his offering, with an expectant, innocent look that felt like a knife in Inna's heart. On the little plate he was holding out were two slices of bread and a hard-boiled egg.

‘Horace, we have to leave,' she said, looking straight at him, suddenly knowing that, if they didn't go away, she wouldn't be able to resist going back to Yasha.

‘We really have to leave,' she repeated when he didn't respond. He was still holding out that plate, but he'd dropped his eyes.

‘I know you say I'd be in danger if we went south to Yalta. But I've been thinking, and really it isn't likely that the train would take us straight to a battle, or a lynch mob. The likeliest thing is that we'd just pass quietly through. It would take a few weeks, but after that we'd be safe. Just imagine: parasols, and sea breezes, and gypsy singers in cafés – not to mention food in the cafés – and all your old Fabergé clients – and safety.

‘And maybe, when it's all over, we'd come back here again…' she added, but by now her voice was faltering.

‘Marching in triumphantly behind the victorious White army, do you mean?' Horace answered, rather mockingly. ‘As some distant royal cousin renames the city St. Petersburg again, and proclaims himself the new Emperor?'

She sighed. No, she couldn't really imagine that happening either.

That old life seemed unimaginably remote now, as if decades, not just two years, had passed since anyone called himself Emperor. The brief euphoria of the revolutionary spring seemed no less a dream, though she knew Horace still found comfort in the enthusiasm of his young artists. Yasha's disillusioned voice echoed in her mind:
What's actually changed? They're still set over us. We're still just slaves.

‘And you realize, don't you, that we certainly wouldn't be marching back triumphantly behind the victorious Red army, if they came in and found us in Yalta with the Whites – and then won?' His voice was getting harder. ‘Because we'd almost certainly be dead. Going to Yalta doesn't just mean going for a holiday by the sea any more, till things somehow “calm down”. All those people waiting around down there, making fools of themselves with their seaside strolls and their parties, are only fooling themselves; you must see that. What going to Yalta almost certainly means, now, is accepting you'll soon have to leave Russia altogether – forever.'

He pushed the plate towards her. ‘Do eat,' he said. ‘You must be hungry.'

But she didn't want to be coddled like a child any more. ‘All right,' she said. ‘Then let's leave Russia altogether. Look it straight in the eye, and do it. We have to. We're not safe here, either of us.' She hurried on, before she could be seduced by the memory of what was putting her in most danger in this city. ‘And if you're so worried about going south on a train, which as far as I can see is the soft option, then let's get out the other way, north, and walk over the lake ice, before the thaw, and get ourselves over the border to Finland. I don't mind how we go. Who cares if everyone says it's a long, hard walk over Lake Ladoga: cold and rough. If Anya Vryubova, that fat old thing, could get out over the ice, as they say she has, then surely we can too. Would you rather try that?' She could feel her eyes flashing.

Horace bit his lip. ‘You really want to go,' he said, slowly. ‘I can hear that.'

‘You have family in England, after all; we could go to them,' she went on. But as soon as the words were out, he looked away again, and his face grew stubborn.

‘No.'

‘Horace,' she said, more gently. ‘Is it England you don't want to go to? Is that the problem? Because we could go anywhere. You could find work wherever you wanted, after all. You're a wonderful craftsman, and you've been with Fabergé for years. You speak French and Russian as well as English. And I could work, too: I could learn to play in public, or teach the violin, or make violins; I could do something. It doesn't have to be England.'

He was gazing at her now, with something she could swear looked like relief in his eyes. ‘Of course it would be easiest to go where other people from here are going,' she added, ‘especially for me, because of the language – though I could learn a new language soon enough if I had to, couldn't I? And they're all likely to want to go somewhere French-speaking, since so many of them speak such good French. Paris, maybe – which would be easy for you, because you lived there once and you know your way around. But we don't have to decide yet where it might be. We could follow Fabergé, or Birbaum – didn't you say he's going to try to get home to Switzerland, eventually, from Yalta? And Monsieur Fabergé had shops in London and Paris and Tokyo – he might still have them. There might be a place for you in any of them. If we could only get ourselves to Yalta, we could just see where other people were thinking of heading, and follow. We could make our plans once we got there.'

She sat down on the bed, beginning, amidst all her other concerns, to be aware of her hunger, and the bread, and the egg.

But she kept her eyes fixed on him.

‘Paris,' he was saying, almost to himself, as she began to roll and crack the hard-boiled egg. ‘Montmartre.'

There was something she had to do before she touched the food. She put the plate down and went out to the landing to wash and change her linen. Horace was still standing there when she finally addressed herself to the meal, as if he hadn't even noticed she'd gone out.

*   *   *

‘Paris,' Inna was still telling herself the next evening, looking for a way to restart that conversation. Horace was thinking of it, too, she was sure, because although he hadn't mentioned it today she could see he'd kept back some torn-out pages from the old art periodicals he was slowly burning in the
burzhuika
. They were pages about the young Russian Jewish artist Chaim Soutine, and his French life supported by dealers called Guillaume and Zborowski, and his friend Modigliani, another sculptor, who'd once been in love with Anya Akhmatova and who'd escaped from the German bombing of Paris to the south of France last year, but now that the war was over was planning to move back to the French capital.

She was just framing something encouraging to say about the article when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

‘Get behind the door,' Horace said suddenly. Hastily she moved, though not behind the door; she picked up the only weapon she could see – Horace's book. Horace picked up another, a big Dahl's dictionary that he never consulted but always kept by the bed. They stood near the door, together, breath rising white from their mouths.

The knocking was hard and aggressive.

Two men stormed in. They wore ragged military coats, like deserters or thieves, but they carried cards with official stamps which they waved threateningly every time they barked ‘REQUISITION!' Inna and Horace could do nothing but stand helplessly while the men pulled out drawers and banged doors at will.