Inna closed her eyes and bowed her head. So this was it, she thought: how your lifeline petered out.
‘I thought so … you’re the little lady from the train who had your fortune told, aren’t you?’
It was the peasant from the train.
‘I saw you, and I thought, Well, you must be new to the city if you’re trying to leave through the station building. Police everywhere, snooping through your papers – waste half your day if you give them a chance. So why don’t I walk you out the way Petersburg people go, the ones who’ve got any sense. You don’t want to look like an outsider, do you?’
She nodded gratefully, noticing his extraordinarily calm pale-blue eyes again.
‘Come on, then.’ He set off briskly to the left into a narrow lane that went straight from the train platforms all the way round the side of the station hall to the street.
It only took a minute.
Inna looked round and realized that the great modern square they’d come out into, with its grey cliff-faces of hotels, and tramlines, and squealing motorcars and carriages and pedestrian crowds all rushing here and there under a lowering sky, was actually outside the station. There wasn’t a gendarme in sight.
‘So … that’s it? Are we out, in the city?’ she asked. ‘Really?’ She took a deep breath, dizzy with relief. She was in St. Petersburg. She was safe.
CHAPTER TWO
She began walking, one bag in each hand, impatient to be off and free of the peasant.
Yet the fact remained: she didn’t know where to go. She knew she had to walk into the centre, along Nevsky Prospekt, the great avenue which ran through the city in a dead straight line. But she had no idea which of the roads leading off this square would get her to Nevsky.
From behind her came a chuckle. ‘That’s the road out of town,’ she heard the peasant say, sounding amused. ‘I’m heading into town, along Nevsky. Shall I put you on your way?’
She turned, with dignity, to reject his offer, but when she met his eyes she could see there was no malice in them. He’d helped her till now. Of course he wasn’t about to start pestering her.
Chastened, she nodded. ‘I’m going to Hay Market,’ she said, realizing – to her surprise – that she’d be glad of the company.
‘I’ve known that lane since I had troubles of my own with the police,’ the peasant said, shouldering one of Inna’s bags (she kept the smaller bag, which contained her violin, in her own hand) and setting off beside her along a big straight ugly boulevard lined with tall grey buildings. What troubles? she wondered, but he went on: ‘That’s the thing about policemen: they get everywhere, like cockroaches. No way to actually stamp them out – but it never does any harm to keep out of their way.’
Inna couldn’t help but smile. It was a delicate gesture, she thought, to invite her to remember the terrifying gendarmes, who liked to call Jews cockroaches, as no more threatening than kitchen creepy-crawlies themselves.
‘Especially if you’re a Jew.’ The peasant gave her a sideways glance.
It was an invitation to frankness. She hesitated, and then took it. ‘Like me, you mean,’ she said.
Noncommittally, he nodded.
His casual mention, out loud, of Inna’s national identity, the fifth point on the passport, that inescapable evidence of her membership of a shameful race (if she hadn’t temporarily escaped it by borrowing Olya’s papers, at least), didn’t make her flinch in the way she usually did. She just felt distant from the proposition. Aunty Lyuba, who was Russian by blood, had raised Inna, with her Russian first name, to be just like any of the young Russian girls in their city apartment block. Inna’s last name, Feldman, could be Yiddish or just innocently Volga German; there were only ever difficulties if people raised their eyebrows on hearing Inna’s unchangeable middle name: the patronymic she was called by on formal occasions, ‘Inna Venyaminovna’, which was made from her father’s un-Russian-sounding, un-German-sounding name, Benjamin. Yet there’d never been religion in Aunty Lyuba’s life, or in Inna’s. They were progressive and scientific: no ancient Talmuds and Judaic chaos in Aunty Lyuba’s genteel apartment, thank you, just dead Uncle Borya’s books on medicine, Dahl’s dictionary, the Russian classics, freshly laundered white lace everywhere, and lessons, lessons, lessons all day long. Inna didn’t remember much about her own parents, but they’d been close to Aunty Lyuba, so she thought they must have been like her in this. Still, even if Inna, like Aunty Lyuba, had no Jewish ways, they were never unaware of what people might say, or think, or do. Inna remembered starting at the Academy, and pirouetting excitedly in her new white lace pinafore, ready to walk the three streets to the school by herself for the first time, and how her carefree happiness had curdled when Aunty Lyuba, shaking her head over Inna’s lustrous black hair tied in a big white bow, and the exotic curves of her cheekbone and nose, had murmured, ‘They’ll always know … but they’ll always expect a Jew to show fear. So walk tall … stare them down, like a princess.’
And Inna had done her best. She’d given every man on the way to school the fiercest look she could; yet even now she could never banish the fear.
The fear is all that’s really Jewish about me, Inna thought now. She couldn’t see anything else she had in common with the Jews they were always writing about in the papers (people she’d never actually seen for herself): those banned both from countryside and big cities, who filled the little towns of the south, the shtetls, with their wailing music and strange clothes, the ones behind the revolutionary movements, or the monstrous ones drawn, hunchbacked and grinning, who were said to bake matzos with the blood of murdered Russian children. (Not that this was likely. Everyone knew that; everyone with an education and some common sense, anyway. But still, there was the Kiev man they’d arrested a few months back – Mendel Beilis, his name was – on precisely that charge: the arrest that had started all the pogrom talk that was resurfacing now. So you couldn’t help but wonder, a bit.)
‘I don’t drink children’s blood or steal chalices from churches, if that’s what you mean,’ she said tartly.
‘No…’ the peasant replied. His voice was calm, absorbing her flash of defensive anger without seeming to notice. ‘Of course not. You’re just a person, getting on with your life.’
Inna bit her lip.
He went on, sidestepping the oncoming Number One tram without a second glance: ‘I know a man, Simanovich. He’s a jeweller in Kiev. They’re always on to him, the police: making out he’s a loan shark and a gambler. Evil-minded nonsense. He’s a dignified man. Loves his people. Tries to help them: he’s got several of his Jews papers to stay up here, for instance; and why not, if they like the city, why not? They’re people like anyone else. Simanovich should be rewarded, not tormented.’
She’d underestimated him, Inna thought, touched. He might be an unlettered peasant, but his goodness shone through. She liked his gentle garrulousness, too: that unhurried way of following a thought right through.
‘… But there’s so much hatred now. Maybe it’s just because of that man who’s been killed. Stolypin: the Prime Minister, the Chief Policeman.’ The peasant paused, then continued in a stronger voice. ‘Yes, the Chief Policeman … Because the police are people like everyone else. They take their style from the top. And him, Stolypin, they called him a reformer, but he was a cruel man too. No good for any of us. His days were numbered…’
He muttered something inaudible. Then, shaking his head, as if regretting his harshness, he made the sign of the cross, and said, rather reluctantly, ‘Well, God be with him.’
Inna nodded, keeping her face still. She didn’t want to tell him that she’d actually been in the theatre when Stolypin was shot, because in truth she didn’t have much to tell. She almost wished she had seen more than a stir in the crowd when the two shots rang out, and then the hysterics on all sides, women fainting in chairs and people pushing for the doors as word passed through the hall like fire of who it was who’d been attacked.
‘So
you know Kiev? Were you there for the Tsar’s visit?’ It surprised her, now she came to think of it. What would take a Siberian peasant so far from home? Come to that, what was he doing here, in the capital?
He turned his gaze on her, slowing down as he felt towards his answer. His eyes were vague. Then the deep lines around them crinkled, and he laughed.
‘Why, I’ve been to Kiev many a time,’ he said. ‘This time in a train, like a gentleman, but oh, in the pilgrim days of my past, many’s the time I’ve walked all the way from Siberia on my own two legs … rejoicing in God’s sunlight, or shivering under His snows. I’m not a young man, and sometimes I feel I’ve walked every inch of the empire on these two legs.’
He was shaking his head at the memory of his travels. Then he stopped walking, as if a more important thought had just struck him. He pointed at a side street – another gulch of cobbles between grey cliffs of apartment blocks. ‘That’s where I live now. Nikolayevskaya Street, House Seventy. I won’t ask you in now as we’ve got business in the centre. But mind you come and see me there when you’ve settled in. You’ll be welcome.’
Inna nodded, politely but guardedly. She knew she wouldn’t be back.
So, she thought, still piecing together the puzzle, he’d be one of those peasant pilgrims she’d read about, the stranniki who found God in a thunderclap, and left their villages to wander the land for years, in religious ecstasy. That would explain his cross, and his godly air, though not why he’d left the land to come here to the city.
Not that it really mattered. What she wanted to know most, as they started walking again, was when would they get past this dull bourgeois avenue and reach Nevsky Prospekt, and the beginning of the gorgeous but frightening imperial Petersburg that every Russian novel described so vividly?
Inna had always imagined Nevsky as a place of wonders: classical columns, arches, caryatids, French bonnets, Guards officers, gleaming carriages, palaces pulsing with electric light and chandelier-lit shops full of lobsters, jewels and candied cherries.
Not like this street. The only salesman here was a scruffy man with a brazier on the pavement, selling pumpkin seeds roasted in salt in twists of newspaper, and giving her a lecherous wink as he called, ‘Seeds, seeds, I’ll give you seeds, darling.’ She swept past, nose up.
‘It’s that house just there, do you see, on the corner with Nevsky,’ the peasant was saying. ‘My house. Don’t forget that.’
Nevsky?
‘Nevsky?’
This couldn’t be it, surely? This – a street distinctly less glamorous than many in Kiev? This dull jumble of stolid ugliness – Nevsky Prospekt?
He roared with laughter again. ‘This is Nevsky. The most famous street in the land.’
‘But where are the palaces? The theatres, the concert halls, the shops?’ she asked.
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Just up ahead. But don’t be impatient. There’s all the time in the world for palaces and shops and vanities.’ He paused. ‘Yes, I know Kiev well, and I was sad to see it the way it was this week, with everyone so frightened, and disaster in the air, and all your people leaving…’
Inna shrugged, and said, as coolly as she could: ‘Yes, the people I’ve been living with this year – kind of relatives – they were scared. They’re leaving for Palestine.’
She couldn’t suppress a sigh. The Kagans were the closest thing to family she’d had left. She’d been so grateful when they’d come out of nowhere and taken her in after Aunty Lyuba’s death. Not that they’d ever been close, once she was there; the Kagans were always too taken up with their fearful plans to be off. But now they’d gone, and it was so far away, Palestine. And she had no one else to keep her in Kiev.
‘I’ve been to Palestine,’ the peasant was saying. ‘Last spring, I went.’
Inna turned and stared at him. ‘Did you go there on your own two legs, too?’ she asked, letting scepticism into her voice.
‘No, no,’ he replied, almost absent-mindedly. ‘Kiev to Odessa, and from there over the Black Sea to Haifa on the Lazarus. You sleep on deck, and how beautiful the sea is, with the sun glittering on the waves. You only have to gaze on it for your soul to become one with the sea. And after that: Jerusalem.’ He sighed, but his breath was full of joy and love. ‘An earthly realm of tranquillity …
‘Not expensive, either,’ he added, perhaps understanding how trapped Inna was feeling. ‘Twelve roubles each way on the boat, third class. That’s how pilgrims go. No comforts, but why would you give up your share of suffering? It’s suffering and persecution that purify the soul. You could go, too, if you wanted. See your folks.’
‘Well, one day maybe I will,’ she said. She didn’t really think she would, but the idea it might be possible lightened her heart anyway.
Or perhaps it was the gleam of pale sun on water ahead …
Her eyes widened. She could see the road transforming itself into the Nevsky she’d hoped for.
On her left, looming up, was a great dark-red palace. And, beyond that, over the dark glitter of what she knew must be the Fontanka, was a bridge frilled with delicate iron tracery, and topped with four enormous statues of horses with rippling muscles …
She stopped, exhilaration chasing away her tiredness and worry. She was here, at the very centre of things. She’d made it.
‘I was glad to be away from the centre of vain and worldly things when I got on that boat,’ came the companionable voice at her side, sweeping her forward. ‘But sometimes, when you see the sun on the water, you can’t help but marvel at the beauty of Creation, even here.’
He squinted at her. ‘You like it, eh?’ He seemed amused. And as they walked on, he told her stories about the buildings they were passing, and about the grand duchesses or starving ballerinas or savvy Armenians or merchants behind each stucco façade. He knew so much. He breathed the gritty air with its smell of salt and industrial fog as naturally as if it were the country air of home.
Inna was impressed by his composure. On the corner of the Merchants’ Yard Market, two young dandies with gold frogging over their fronts forced her off the pavement, and she had to scramble back to safety out of the path of an oncoming carriage. Yet he glided through the crowds of tight-waisted gentlemen in braid – so many uniforms: army, navy, Guards, civil service; Inna couldn’t tell them apart – and of ladies in sweeping robes and feathers, as if he hardly felt their imperious jostling.
‘So this is why Dostoyevsky found Nevsky so tricky,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I feel like the Man from Underground now, too. Invisible, and black and blue from all these aristocratic elbows, and full of secret bile, you know?’
He put a hand out to steady her, but his only reply was a vague, uncomprehending, ‘What’s that you say?’
Then, without warning, he turned off the boulevard down another broad avenue.
‘Oh!’ Inna cried, forgetting Dostoyevsky because her head was still spinning with excitement. ‘But we haven’t seen half of it. Where is the Yeliseyevsky store, with the pineapples and fresh lobsters? And the Defence Ministry, and the Kazan Cathedral, and—’
‘Further on,’ he answered matter-of-factly. ‘But you wanted Hay Market, didn’t you? And that’s down here.’
Understanding that if he really did live way back on that street he’d shown her near the station, he must already have put himself out considerably to bring her so far, she said, quickly, ‘Of course, I understand,’ and hurried on behind him.
‘Where are you going, anyway?’ he asked, over his shoulder. ‘Who to?’
Inna paused, unease creeping back into her heart. ‘To a cousin. A kind of cousin.’
‘You have a lot of “kind of” relatives,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she replied, trying not to feel defensive, ‘he’s the son of the other “kind ofs”. I’m going to stay with him.’ She took a deep breath to steady herself. ‘He works for Leman, the violin-maker.’ She wanted to give the impression that she knew exactly what she was talking about. She didn
’t want her companion to realize that she’d never actually met Yasha Kagan.
But she felt tears painfully close as she strode on, round the corner into the new street.
She was remembering her flight back from the theatre through the restive crowds that suddenly seemed to have filled the Kiev streets, her feet hardly touching the ground, and finding the Kagans packing their trunk. They’d held off emigrating for the entire year, even though they had papers, because they’d kept thinking that their Yasha might come too, if things didn’t work out for him up in St. Petersburg. Yet there they were, not mentioning the frightening news of the night, just saying, with shame in their eyes, that they could get a passage from Odessa on Tuesday.
‘Of course,’ Inna had told them stoutly, wondering where she’d go, but not wanting to add to their burden by making them feel guiltier about her than they probably already did. ‘I’ll find somewhere new to stay tomorrow.’
She remembered retreating to her room – their son’s old room, where she’d been lodging for the year since Aunty Lyuba died.
It was full of memorabilia. There was the first violin he’d made, during his apprenticeship, which his mother had kept and which Inna had taken to playing since she moved in. There was a photo, too, from Yasha’s last year at school. The youth in it was tall and slightly out of focus, with his head held high, a long neck, and curls of black hair at nape and temples.
Inna had lain down on the bed, looking at that stranger’s photograph. It was late, but there was a lot of movement on the street outside: men’s feet running and urgent talk, and the uncertain light of lanterns.
It was only then that she’d realized exactly what she was going to do, instead of finding a room and clinging on here, alone, for another year of school.
‘I’m coming to you,’ she’d told Yasha’s portrait. ‘And I’ll bring your violin,’ she’d added as she heard a crash of wood splintering on something hard outside. ‘No point in leaving it to get smashed by them.’
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 2