Yasha stopped. This might need careful management. It was just the kind of thing that had so annoyed her about young Kremer (‘Eating us out of house and home and never lifting a finger to help!’). But Inna had understood instantly. She’d already turned, and was saying in pleading tones, with an enchantingly furrowed brow, ‘Please, Madame Leman, just leave everything. I won’t be long. I’ll be happy to do it. And, by the way, it was a delicious lunch.’
That was enough, it seemed. Apparently at least half mollified, Madame Leman nodded and smiled faintly before turning energetically to Agrippina and Barbarian to say, ‘Well then, you two, isn’t it time we sat down together to look at your homework?’
CHAPTER FOUR
You could get to the workshop by the building’s back door, at the bottom of the communal staircase that connected the Leman’s first-floor apartment with the other flats above, and also, several flights up, with the two box rooms of Yasha’s domain, though the shop front opened onto the avenue outside.
Yasha sat straight down at his stool, put on his apron, turned on his lamp and picked up the violin he was making. He’d let the others fuss around her.
So he said nothing when Monsieur Leman started telling the girl, with his sly smile, ‘Best thing we ever did, hiring Yasha. His work is so quick and neat and elegant … and he’s strong, too, does a week’s work in a day without even noticing…’ (though he did, for a moment, feel a quiver of secret pride).
It was frightening all the time, of course, this work, but a small, manageable fear – a fear born of love. You lived with it as you scraped away, a shaving at a time, never quite sure you’d mastered the tools, hoping you didn’t cut your wooden infant’s throat before it took its first breath. ‘I like my apprentices a bit scared,’ Leman was saying to Inna, laughing with her over his gold-rimmed spectacles, until she relaxed and smiled her unexpected, enchanting smile back. ‘It makes me feel more like a master when I can set ’em right. Marcus, now: he’s just beginning. Scared all the time. But Yasha’s beyond that. Shaping up as a master.’
Yasha grinned, not looking up. He was carving a bass bar, whittling away at the delicate curves, making the arc of it higher in the middle, and broader and flatter towards the scooped ends. As always in this warm, comfortable, happy space, lit by pools of golden light, he felt cradled by the knowledge of the big, strong, broad-shouldered man for whom he worked, who could be relied on to have all the answers and who wanted to pass down his skills to a new generation. It had been the luckiest moment in his life when Leman had walked into his tough former master’s workshop in Kiev and noticed him; when he’d invited him up here, to work for him; when he’d helped Yasha obtain the papers he’d need to get away from the brutal difficulties of the Jewlands to this new, gentler, life in the centre. Yasha was good at the job, and he knew himself to be useful; but if he was, it was because here, feeling a success, he worked with all his heart, because he loved the gentle promise of redemption that Leman had shown him in the work. Mistakes you can mend. Splinters can be glued back; cuts filled with glue and sawdust; unintended holes cut and lined and carved and sanded back into three-dimensional existence. Wood forgives.
‘Bit of a mess,’ he heard Marcus apologize. ‘Shavings everywhere.’
‘Let me sweep up,’ Inna said eagerly from outside his field of vision. ‘No, really.’ He heard Leman rumble something appreciative in reply as he showed her where the apprentices’ brooms were. Leman liked a tidy space.
Yasha found he was whistling under his breath as his hands flew over the wood as, somewhere behind him, she started kicking up clouds of shavings. He didn’t even mind that he could feel her peeking over his shoulder at what he was doing.
Everyone was always whistling or humming under their breath as they worked down here. Sometimes they chatted: quiet, meditative talk, on the subjects closest to their hearts, easy streams of consciousness that flowed on and intermingled, quickly becoming familiar to their companions.
But not today.
Today, after twenty minutes of unusually loud talk by the two Lemans, and of poking about and rather boastfully demonstrating the work they were doing, between her energetic bursts of sweeping – he could see from the sweeping that Inna Feldman was as eager to please the Lemans as the male Lemans were to interest her – Leman and Marcus took her back upstairs again, at her request, so she could wash up.
‘Back in a minute, Yasha,’ Leman said cheerfully from the door.
He nodded without looking up.
‘I play the violin a bit myself,’ he heard Inna tell Leman before the door shut. Alone, he breathed a long, long sigh. She wasn’t going to get into Madame L.’s good books, not after the Kremer episode. But she just might with the others. And she was certainly doing her best. You had to give her marks for trying.
As Yasha worked, he went on trying to remember the Feldman story, calling to mind the details his parents had told him, long ago. Hinted at, anyway. It had been coming back in wisps. It went something like this, he thought: young couple, distant cousins, living in a flat in a smallish town an hour from Kiev with their little girl; both of them teachers. The apartment set alight, in one of those nights of anti-Jewish violence that the little towns down there were so prone to. Both killed. The little girl would probably have been killed, too, only she ran away, and was brought up by a neighbour.
‘So was it smoke from the fire that killed them?’ he remembered asking, trying to imagine the smell of it in his nose, and wondering whether those people been scared or just asleep. What an innocent. Still, even an innocent couldn’t help but notice the way Mama’s eyes had shifted sideways, and the discomfort in Papa’s as he muttered, ‘We don’t know the details.’
He didn’t know how old she’d been then – four, five? But of course she’d never forget something like that. So when she’d seen hateful crowds in Kiev last week, what could have been more natural than for her to draw the fearful conclusions she had?
Gently he blew the shavings off his workbench. She had guts, but he could see that she couldn’t have been anything but afraid. He might, just might, have been too angry with her at the door this morning. It was possible he’d overreacted, he thought, holding up his fiddle front to the light, to caress the shape he’d been making with a loving eye and see whether the curve needed correcting.
It was good to be on his own again, down here in the calm, thinking. Seeing the whole shape taking form under his hands.
He was thinking, too, about that letter from his parents.
He’d crumpled it up so fast he hadn’t really examined the envelope.
But now, looking back, in this more reflective state of mind, he remembered that it hadn’t had the words ‘By hand’ written on it, any more than the letter inside had mentioned that Inna was the courier.
In fact, now he came to think of it, there’d been a stamp in the top right-hand corner – as if they’d intended to post it.
He thought his parents’ first letter mentioning her, nearly a year ago, had said she was in the final years of school. What could a schoolgirl be planning to do, up here, so far from home? With a pang, he realized that none of them, so far that day, had asked.
Then, suddenly, he knew.
He put the fiddle front gently down in its padded cradle, so he could think.
His parents hadn’t asked Inna to bring him that letter at all, had they? She’d just picked it up in the flat – pinched it, the same way she’d pinched a passport. It had been her own initiative to bring it here herself, because … because … he scratched his head, feeling increasingly uneasy … well, obviously, because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She’d had no other plan in her mind beyond finding him, and digging in.
Remorse struck him like a blow. He should have been protecting her. Helping her find a way to stay a bit longer. Taking the fear out of her eyes.
He turned off his lamp with a gentle hand and went slowly back upstairs.
He was wondering, as he wen
t, what his parents could possibly have thought would happen to her once they’d gone? If they’d thought at all, because the likeliest thing was that they’d got so absorbed by their own fear that they’d just left her to fend for herself …
He opened the apartment door, imagining himself standing up to Madame L., insisting – no, demanding – in the face of every counter-argument, that Inna be allowed to stay for a few days, or even weeks. He’d make it up to the mistress.
He paused in the still chaotic lobby to compose himself. And, as he did, the conversation inside the yellow room died away, and the sound of a violin rose into the air.
A shiver went down Yasha’s spine at the first wild, sweet, zany notes. He’d never heard anything like that here. Anywhere.
Everyone in this family played a bit, of course. He wasn’t much of an artiste himself, but recently he’d taken to pouring his heart out, in the privacy of his room, into the mournful songs of the shtetl. Monsieur Leman, meanwhile, liked the mathematical purity of Bach; Madame Leman, who was literary, enjoyed the German romantics; Marcus preferred sentimental café music and soupy folk tunes; and the children sawed cheerfully away at whatever beginner’s music they were made to practise.
But this?
It was frisky and catchy and modern. Playful, though it sounded fiendishly difficult, too: in thirds, and in a dancey three-beat rhythm, with odd accents on the third beat. Syncopated, like American negro jazz. It was composed of pointed little runs of six staccato notes, moving up and down the instrument, getting faster and louder and wilder, before dying away, from time to time, into a beautifully phrased, wistful, legato sigh.
Yasha stopped right where he was, among the coats and boots: entranced, lost. But his feet were tapping. He couldn’t help himself.
The piece was being played with tremendous sophistication, too: with as much knowledge of emotional light and shade as technical confidence. Yasha found himself thinking, more poetically than usual: the flight of the soul …
And then it was over, moments after he’d recovered the power of movement, just as he reached the drawing-room door.
There could only have been one person playing, yet he was astonished, standing in the doorway, to see Inna there in the crook of the piano, with flushed cheeks and huge green eyes, looking around in apparent surprise at the tumultuous clapping, and only gradually, when she fixed her eyes on Barbarian and Agrippina, jumping up and down and cheering in their corner, letting her lovely face lift into a smile.
She had a violin cradled under one arm. After one shy glance around the room, she put it and the bow she’d been holding down on the lid of the piano.
Yasha couldn’t see Madame Leman, who must still be sitting down in a chair out of his line of vision, but Monsieur Leman was standing up, beaming, and Marcus, too, spluttering joyfully beside him.
They hadn’t even noticed him standing in the doorway. They were too enchanted by the girl. A feeling Yasha didn’t understand clutched at his heart.
‘I’m wondering’, Leman was saying appreciatively in his big booming voice, ‘who in Kiev can have taught you to play Scriabin?’
Yasha watched Inna shake her head. ‘Oh, I had lessons when I was younger,’ she said awkwardly, not seeming at all the mature player of a moment ago. ‘From my Aunty Lyuba. I lived with her. But she’s dead now. I just mess about on my own. And I heard that piece at a concert, and liked it…’
She looked over at Yasha, staring at her from the door.
‘And I do have a lovely violin to play on,’ she added, and smiled tentatively at him, as if inviting him to share in her triumph. But he couldn’t. Her playing had been better than anything he, or the rest of them, could draw from the instruments they spent their lives working on – so much better that it had made him feel a primitive by comparison. He could tell now that she must also know precisely how pretty she looked, and how vulnerable; she was knowingly using her charms.
‘Look,’ she was saying. ‘It’s the first violin Yasha made.’
The children whooped and squawked and surged closer: ‘Really…? Let’s have a look!’ They grabbed it. Smiling – smirking, as it now seemed to Yasha – Inna was holding it up, out of their reach. From the chair, inside, there was a pained female cry of ‘Children!’
At the same time, but much more quietly, Yasha said, ‘That’s my old violin?’ It was too much. He thought of her passport, his parents’ letter. Was there no end to the things she’d taken?
But she didn’t appear to notice his ominous tone. With apparent artlessness, she said, as if he’d be pleased she was waltzing around Russia with her bag stuffed full of his things: ‘Your mother let me play it. I brought it … I thought—’
But Leman cut her off. Turning to Yasha, he boomed excitedly, ‘Ah, come in, come in, my boy! So you heard, too? Good heavens, why ever didn’t you tell us what a marvellous musician your little cousin is – the real thing! I was bowled over – especially since all I was expecting was more of that mournful Jewish caterwauling you go in for upstairs!’
He laughed so hard at his own joke that he didn’t notice Yasha’s scowl. Yasha looked at the children. At least they weren’t laughing at him; though it wasn’t much better that Agrippina was gazing so adoringly at Inna. Barbarian, meanwhile, was taking advantage of being unobserved. He was down on the ground, quietly tying Agrippina’s shoelace to a chair.
‘Inna reminds me of you, my dear,’ Leman remarked to his wife, who was still sitting behind the door. ‘One of those women who, without any real teaching, can master the great arts.’ He turned back to Inna and gestured proudly towards his life-companion. ‘You know Lidiya Alexeyevna here taught herself all the European languages? Before she’d travelled further than Moscow? Before she’d even turned twenty? Sheer dedication … I admire that. I really do.’
‘’S not just women. Men do it too. You taught yourself billiards in the army, Pap,’ Barbarian called from the floor, grinning broadly.
Leman pulled a wry face. ‘I was locked up in a closed cadet school for years. Enough time for a boy like me to learn the oddest things,’ he answered. ‘And, Barbarian, undo that shoelace right now or there’ll be trouble,’ he added, with no change of tone.
Grinning over the scuffle that ensued, he turned back to Inna.
‘So. You play beautifully, we’re all agreed on that.’ He paused. ‘Would you like to make a violin?’ His voice sounded genuinely hopeful, as if the answer were up to her.
Inna’s mouth opened. Her flush deepened.
Yasha’s heart was pounding. To just let her in like this – so easily – when he’d had to learn his trade beforehand, and wait for months for papers, and struggle … When he’d been thinking she was an innocent who needed protecting, and had been rushing up here ready to fight her corner for her, only to find that with one dewy look, and one showing-off tune, she’d already got them wanting her here for good. If he didn’t look out … well, the injustice of it took his breath away. Maybe old Kremer had been right about women, after all.
‘Women don’t make violins,’ Madame Leman’s voice said, into the silence.
‘Not ordinarily,’ Leman said sweepingly. ‘But that was no ordinary playing.’
‘But … are you actually looking for someone?’ Inna asked.
‘Well, we’re training Marcus. But we get a lot of work in these days. And I’ve been thinking of taking someone else on for some time. Though you know how it is. One’s always too lazy to start the wearisome business of actually looking for someone, and wondering if they’ll get on with everyone, because by the time they start it’s already a bit late to say we don’t like the cut of your jib, and we’re all at very close quarters here, as you know, and who wants to see a quarrelsome face at breakfast? Now, if only it were you, well – you’re already in the family, so to speak, and the question simply wouldn’t arise.’
Inna’s disbelieving smile widened, and so did her eyes.
There was a silence as Yasha waited, with diminis
hing hope, for Madame Leman, at least, to say no, quite impossible. But she didn’t.
Eventually, Leman turned to him, nodding excitedly. ‘Good idea?’
Yasha only knew what he was going to do as he did it.
‘She can’t,’ he said, stepping forward into the room, composing his face into a half-smile. ‘She has no documents. She got here on a stolen passport.’
The smile hovered on Inna’s face, diminishing over several agonizingly slow seconds as she struggled to understand what he’d done. And what did, finally, replace the hope that had been written on her was unmistakably the crumpled misery of a child with no home to go to.
Yasha watched, feeling terrible. Even then, she didn’t turn the accusing eyes he deserved on him. Instead, she looked first at Madame Leman, who kept her own eyes carefully fixed on her feet, and then at Monsieur Leman, whose own excitement had been replaced by the cautious, hurt expression of a man realizing he’s being taken advantage of.
‘But…’ she said, pleadingly, a note of desperation in her voice, ‘even if it’s not mine … I showed it to a policeman, at the station, and he let me pass … wouldn’t it do?’
She reached into the violin bag, pulled out a passport and held it out to Leman.
Yasha stood in the middle of the room, as Leman flicked sadly through the passport. ‘Hereditary noblewoman,’ he murmured, shaking his head, ‘daughter of the deputy chief of the Kiev police…’
‘It’s my friend Olya’s,’ Inna said.
He handed it back. ‘They’d find you out, sooner or later,’ he told her, regretfully. ‘It would be naïve to think they wouldn’t. I’m sorry, my dear.’
She nodded, as if she was used to defeat, picked up the bag – leaving the violin out, Yasha noticed; she wasn’t going to claim it, then – and said, very quietly, ‘Do you mind if I go and rest now? I’m a little tired. But I’ll be fine to leave in the morning.’ From the doorway, she added, in a small voice, ‘It was a very kind offer.’
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 5