Midnight in St. Petersburg (40 page)

‘We should go too,' Inna said, stepping back. Struck, suddenly, by the obviousness of it. ‘Whatever old rat Madame Leman sews on your collar, you still look like a foreign gentleman. It's only a question of time before—'

But he shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘We're not going anywhere.'

*   *   *

There was food on the table when they got back: tea, steaming in glasses, and sugar in rough lumps in a bowl, a mound of rusks, and a big tin of sprats in tomato sauce. The four Lemans and Marcus's Olympia were at the table, waiting.

‘Hurry!' Agrippina said cheerfully. ‘Sit down before the tea gets cold. And tuck in – imagine, sprats! We're celebrating.'

‘We've got a new parcel!' Marcus chimed in.

Several months previously, Madame Leman had consulted her husband's old acquaintance, Yuri Pavlovich, an artist now more famous as the city's best ration-hunter, as to what her own family's plan of action should be to avoid starvation. Yuri Pavlovich got one parcel a month – scholar's rations – from the Academy of Art; another – a militiaman's rations – from the Cultural and Education Studio for Militiamen that he'd set up; and a third – the Baltic Fleet's special rations – for lecturing sailors on Italian painting. God helps those who help themselves, he told her. So you must thank God for the dissemination of culture to the proletariat, which the authorities are so keen on now, and start disseminating some yourselves.

Now Madame Leman talked once a week to militiamen on German literature. ‘Poor bored things, how they yawn and scratch,' she told Inna.

A week ago, Maxim had finally sent word, via Madame Leman, that if Inna was willing, and if her performance was at concert level, he'd found an opening for her to go and play Tchaikovsky at working men's clubs.

‘Will I be good enough?' she'd begun, but caught herself. Her old irrational dread was just a self-indulgent luxury when there was the possibility of a parcel.

‘Of course you are,' Barbarian had said scornfully, in his deep man's voice. She'd laughed in embarrassment as he'd gone on. ‘You could play any old marching song to them, with every note a wrong one, and what would it matter? They're not going to know the difference.'

‘Where is this parcel from?' Inna asked now, sitting down. Seated beside her, Horace was beaming round at the family as if nothing was wrong.

‘The Rosa Luxemburg Drops of Milk Maternity Centre!' they chorused.

‘Marcus has been lecturing midwives on the history of violin-making!' Madame Leman added, grinning.

‘He's going to get breast-feeding mothers' rations for it, too!' Agrippina said. Her eyes were round. ‘Next time there'll be cheese! Butter!'

When they went upstairs Inna said to Horace, reassured, ‘You see? They've found their feet. They don't need your stipend any more. They're going to be all right.'

After a moment, she added, ‘And we should go. Because we're not.'

But he averted his eyes. ‘No,' he said, too loudly, going out to wash and banging the door behind him.

*   *   *

Horace understood that Inna was afraid. She was always coming back from some queue with new stories from the crowd about the Cheka; about arrests, disappearances, torture. She repeated them, looking to him to share her fear. But he didn't, because he didn't really believe them. Of course people whispered. The new leaders only had themselves to blame for that, with their new censorship, which was even more stifling than the old. But things couldn't be as bad as people made out, surely? To Horace's mind, the stories about the new secret police had the nightmarish, exaggerated tone of fairy tales full of villains.

The Moscow clown who people were saying was now dead, for instance – Bim Bom – surely he hadn't really been killed just for poking fun at the politicians in his act? How could you actually believe that armed men had burst onstage and chased him around his props, shooting with pistols, making the circus crowd laugh and cheer while the grease-painted figure in checked trousers ran? Or that they'd all gone on thinking it was just another part of the show until he was shot dead, in front of a suddenly screaming audience? And what about the stories about the officer in Kharkov who was supposed to snort cocaine before interrogations, then dip his White, or maybe-White, suspects' hands in boiling water, so he could peel off their skin in perfect glove shape? (White gloves, of course?)

The horror stories had their own grotesque Gothic logic, to be sure, but Horace was persuaded they were the usual Russian exaggeration. And Inna was just reliving her understandable fear of the old police, he thought, splashing water from the jug on his face. And he wasn't going to be frightened away by ghosts from the past, when he was so interested by the present.

There was so much happening here and now, in the realm of ideas this stiff old city had suddenly become. After the dull grind of his Fabergé years, he felt jolted into electric life by Marcus's young friends from the Union of Youth, with their thrilling, shockingly modern statements.

‘The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.'

And Alyosha Kruchenykh, bard of Beyond-Sense poetry, the most avant-garde of all the avant-garde, had asked him only last night, with that puckish grin of his, if he'd help their friend Kasimir paint the sets for a new staging of the Futurists' opera. Of course Horace had no intention of giving up his chance to bring to life all those extravagantly radical stage characters, Nero and Caligula in the Same Person, Traveller through All the Ages, Telephone Talker and the rest. Even if nothing came of that, he had no intention, either, of leaving behind those late-night conversations, which were headier than any champagne and full of truth for today. What was it the other poet had said last night? ‘The poetry of Futurism is the poetry of the city, of the contemporary city. Feverishness is what characterizes the tempo of the contemporary world. In the city there are no flowing, measured lines of curvature: angles, fractures and zigzags are what make up the profile of the city.'

Yes, Horace thought, I heard that there, in the yellow room, and then I went out today and saw it in the square, with my own eyes. Where else could that have happened?

*   *   *

Inna was asleep, curled over on the far side of the bed, when Horace crept back into the bedroom.

He switched off the lamp.

In the darkness, he told himself: It's right to stay, for what would I be without all the life I've found here?

In the darkness, his own private fear came on him: the fear of abandoning everything he'd made for himself, and discovered for himself, here in this city, with all its manic energy; the fear of abandoning even the debonair, knowledgeable self he'd crafted here, who sauntered inquisitively around, transforming himself into first this kind of artist, then that, as fast as his environment shifted shape; the fear of leaving behind the place his soul had made its home.

No, it was simpler than that: Horace was experiencing the dread of Home.

It wasn't that Yalta and the Whites would be so bad, in themselves. There'd be food, and respite from the snows. There'd be some of the exotic company he'd enjoyed here. But to think of going to Yalta would be to open his mind to the possibility that, further down the line, if things went wrong, there might also have to be a return to England.

England: that grey vision of half-hearted rain, bobbing bowler hats, dark umbrellas, stockbrokers on suburban trains, and bloodless, apologetic voices saying ‘can't complain' and ‘mustn't grumble'. The dullness. The quiet.

Shrinking even further over to his side of the bed, Horace asked himself: What would I be, what would I do, in South Norwood?

*   *   *

For the next few days, Inna was quiet around Horace. She wasn't angry, exactly, but maybe puzzled; keeping a tactful distance. He was pleased, at least, that if she wasn't talking much to him, she wouldn't be resuming
that
conversation. He didn't want to be nagged.

But then she burst in on him in the yellow room with a letter in her hand, looking suddenly radiant and crying, excitedly, ‘Look, we
can
go – this is how!'

Horace, his heart heavy, glanced up from his newspaper. ‘What is it?' he asked.

‘Look!' she exclaimed gaily, waving the letter. ‘God knows how it got through the censors, or even through the mail – maybe someone brought it; who knows? – but Youssoupoff has got a letter to us! It was in Aunt Cockatoo's letterbox! I've just found it!'

Horace raised an eyebrow. ‘And…?'

‘He's outside Yalta! He wants us to take his violin to him!'

Horace felt old suddenly; old and weary.

She must want Yalta a lot to have so completely forgotten her old animosity towards Youssoupoff, he thought. Well, Yalta was a legend that everyone knew and loved: the glitter of sun on sea, the dark-green mountains behind, the romantic aristocrats' castles that you saw on postcards, the yachts and military ships, the men in uniform, the summer that lasted till November and began again in March, the softness of the balmy air, the tawny-skinned locals, the palm trees …

He stood up. ‘It's out of the question,' he said. He heard it come out like a whiplash.

Determinedly, Inna ignored him. ‘He's offering very generous terms. Look, a payment in gold or valuables; because what good would roubles be? He'll put us up for the rest of the war on his estate, and, if the war goes the wrong way for the Whites, and, God forbid, they all have to evacuate, he'll help us leave too. He says we can travel with him!'

‘Forget it,' Horace said harshly. ‘It's insane. He's insane. You of all people should know that.'

Looking as shocked as though he'd slapped her, she paused for breath, just long enough for Horace to regret his brutal tone, and to register the desperation in her excitement.

But then she stepped closer, and said challengingly, ‘He's not that insane. And he's offered to help us. Who else is willing to do that for us?'

He folded his arms across his chest. Closed his eyes. I'm not going back to England, he was telling himself, in the dancing red cloud of light-spots behind his eyeballs.

‘You're not safe here,' she persisted. ‘We're not safe here. We have to leave.'

He opened his eyes. ‘We can't – because of the journey.'

Doubt appeared on her face, because who would know more about this than him, after all his muttered conversations with about-to-be-émigrés whose papers he'd procured?

‘We'd have to go right through where the civil war is.'

Now he could see angry tears in her eyes. ‘But we'd just be
passing through
!' she said, almost childishly.

‘But the time would come when someone, from one side or the other, would stop the train. Requisition it. We'd have to get out and walk. And what then?' he replied gently. ‘We'd be right back there, down in the south, where it's never been good to be a Jew, among the very people you wanted to get away from before. Peasants down there who've never even seen a foreigner might be at a loss as to what to make of
me
but they won't be fooled for a moment by
you
. They'll know exactly who they're looking at. And everyone will be more feral than before with cold and hunger.'

He put his hands on her shoulders, and tried to draw her into an embrace. But she resisted.

‘
You
wouldn't be safe, on the way down there,' he said. ‘
That's
why we're not going.
You're
better off here.'

Blinking hard, Inna nodded, shrugged off his hands and left.

I should follow her, Horace thought. But he didn't. Instead he picked up his newspaper, and sat down in the sudden silence of an empty room.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

‘Inna dear, I can tell you don't really want to play to the working men, because you still aren't practising, so you'd better come to see Maxim with me yourself,' Madame Leman said briskly. ‘We need more parcels, and obviously Horace can't go out and get one, the way things are. Besides, he's done quite enough for us. And Maxim is full of ideas. He may be able to think of something else for you.'

It was after New Year, in February 1919. All kinds of people had started coming to Maxim with all kinds of petitions now, because he was still said to have the ear of the powerful. (Not that that made Maxim immune, as Inna knew. People had done just the same with Rasputin, once.) Still, for now at least he was a port of call for the desperate.

The scene that met their eyes in the great book-lined study-cum-dining-room at the apartment on Kronversky Avenue was like a hallucination. It was hot inside – hot! In fact, it was so hot that none of the two dozen or so people at the crowded trestle table was wearing a coat.

They were an ill-assorted bunch. There were rough Petrograd sailors, writers, and – Inna scanned the room curiously – all kinds of other oddities bumping elbows. Inna could swear that was Tatlin the young architect, Marcus's and Olympia's friend, over there, handsome and floppy-haired, and wasn't that Chaliapin, less sleek than usual, asking for seconds in his famous bass voice? And over in the corner, looking haughty, not speaking, just intently eating, an old, old couple with a mangy dog at their feet, whom, she realized, she'd heard about: they were the grand duke and his wife, who lived upstairs surrounded by statues of the Buddha, whom Maxim was said to have rescued from the crowded jails of the Cheka soon after the Red Terror set in. Whoever they were, they were all doing the same thing she and Madame Leman were about to do: shovelling kasha (hot kasha!) into their mouths as fast as they were able.