Another snort came from Marcus. ‘No, that was Mitya Kozlovsky,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s become of him.’
‘This is the one who’s supposed to have seduced the royal nanny,’ Yasha added. ‘Today’s man. Last summer, when she went on a train trip to his Siberian village with him.’
‘I suppose we haven’t been told why she did such an unsuitable thing as go to Siberia with him if she was really the pure vessel a royal nanny should be,’ Leman replied, looking sceptically at Yasha over the top of his glasses.
She saw Yasha shrug; felt him grin back. ‘I doubt there’s a word of truth in any of it. Just newspaper lies, then and now. At any rate, she was fired; and he’s still around.’
‘Now I remember!’ Leman cried, looking suddenly pleased, striking his head with his hand. ‘This is the one whose adoring followers keep his toenail parings as trophies, and sew them on their fronts!’
He looked round expectantly. They all burst out laughing.
As the laughter died away, Marcus said, in a quite different, slightly shocked tone of voice, ‘Why, Inna!’
At that, Leman’s head swivelled towards her, as did Yasha’s.
It was unnerving to have all those eyes on her, but it felt less lonely than before. She took a deep breath and said, trying not to gulp, ‘… thought I’d just start. You were talking…’
She could feel Yasha’s eyes, even though she was avoiding his gaze. But she was also aware that he was trying, at least, not to look at her hands. She put them behind her back anyway.
‘Working hard,’ Leman said with warmth. ‘Well done.’
‘So quiet!’ Marcus added eagerly. ‘I didn’t hear a thing. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw you.’
‘It’s cleaner in here than it has been since he’s been working here, I must say,’ Leman added, and Marcus fell silent, but his grin suggested he didn’t mind the jocular rebuke.
Leman put his work down on the bench. He smiled at her over the top of his glasses. ‘I tell you what,’ he went on. ‘Leave the sweeping up till the end of the day, why don’t you – it’s a boring sort of job – and come and look at this instead.’
Inna’s heart was racing as she stepped forward. Now she was next to him, she could see Monsieur Leman had cut his block of wood into a rough approximation of the curve at the back of a violin’s scroll – its head – and neck. It had none of the fluted elegance of a finished scroll yet, and the peg-box in the middle hadn’t been hollowed out. It was just a question-mark shape on one side of a solid block of wood. When she took it and picked it up, it felt surprisingly heavy. It looked a primitive thing.
But a second glance showed her that he’d measured and drawn light markings on it – precise lines indicating the finer tapering that the back and top of the wood would be whittled down to, and dots, on each side, marking a snail-shell spiral which, she could see, would mark the parameters of the elaborately carved scroll shape itself.
‘Looks nothing now, you’re thinking?’ Leman said. He sounded amused. ‘Well, you’ll soon see a difference. We’re about to bring out its shape. Make it beautiful for the future.’
We? She kept still, trying not to let either hope or fear show on her face.
‘Get the clamp,’ Leman was saying. Her fingers fumbled quickly for it. ‘That’s right. Now, screw it to the table top, with the scroll in it. Yes, like that: upside-down baby, head at the bottom … yes. First things first. We’ve got to saw away the sides of the peg-box before we can start carving our curves.’
She was trying to control the thumping of her heart. She told herself, I’m going to have to do the same as yesterday when he wanted me to play: empty my mind and just do it.
She’d barely had time to reflect on her musical performance yesterday, what with everything else that had been happening, but she was still astonished that she’d managed to play the violin so composedly for the family. At school, whenever she’d been asked to play her pieces at concerts, she’d always been so nervous that the trembling of her arm had stopped her holding the bow to the string; and she’d play such idiotic wrong notes that she’d subside in a shaky heap, unable to go on. So she’d avoided playing for other people. She didn’t care, she always told herself; the point of music was to satisfy herself. It made no difference if no one else could hear her, did it? And then Monsieur Leman had pushed her yesterday, and she’d felt she had no choice but to try. And somehow she’d lost herself in the piece she’d chosen, and when she’d stopped and seen the admiration on their faces, she’d also felt the elation of success.
She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. The cuts on her palm were stinging, but she screwed the clamp round the bit of wood anyway. If she could do it yesterday, when she had to, then today, too—
‘She can’t,’ Yasha’s voice said roughly behind her. She flinched and stopped tightening the clamp.
‘Why not?’ she heard. Marcus.
‘She’s cut her hands. Look, they’re all bound up.’
She shut her eyes, hating him. She couldn’t understand why he would want to do this to her, again.
‘She’ll be clumsy,’ Yasha’s voice persisted. ‘She’ll mess it up, with her hands in that state.’
The silence yawned on endlessly, or so it seemed to her.
‘What did you do to them, Inna?’ she heard eventually. The question she was dreading, in Leman’s voice.
She opened her mouth to answer. But Yasha answered for her.
‘Rough edge on the handle of her bag … infected … nasty.’
His voice was hesitant. She let out her breath a little. He hated her, but not enough to tell them what he’d seen her do.
‘Does it hurt?’ Marcus asked her. She was warmed enough by the concern in his voice that she felt able to turn slightly and shake her head in his direction.
‘No,’ she muttered, defiantly biting off her words. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Well, then,’ Leman boomed, ‘what’s all the fuss about?’
She looked up. Leman and Marcus were gazing at her, eyes full of encouragement. She ignored Yasha, who, still somewhere behind, was saying, ‘I just thought…’
‘Come on,’ Leman said, breaking into a grin. ‘Yasha’s a perfectionist, that’s all. Very, very good at what he does, too. That’s why. But take no notice.’
Yasha muttered: ‘Better to let her heal for a few days…’
‘Ach.’ Leman turned back to the clamp. ‘She can tell us herself if there’s a problem, can’t she? Don’t be such an old woman, Yasha. Now, Inna, you’re going to need that saw.’
Smiling her own shaky answering smile, Inna picked it up.
* * *
Monsieur Leman stood behind her, guiding her hands, murmuring encouragement as he showed her how to make the first cut, on one side of the block of wood, and then said, ‘Now you do the other side on your own.’ Her heart seemed to stop every time she made the smallest inroad into the wood, but, she soon realized, needlessly. He’d marked it all so clearly. All she had to do was follow his instructions. Soon they had cut the two outside lines of the peg-box just below the scroll, where, one day, once the wood inside the box shape had been hollowed out, the violin’s strings would be attached to movable pegs for tuning. Then Monsieur Leman took a drill and, humming under his breath, made round peg-holes right through the still-solid future peg-box, while she watched.
‘And now,’ he said, as his kindly eyes sought her out again over the top of his spectacles, ‘you’re going to start shaping the scroll.’ He picked up a second saw from the bench, this one no bigger than a breadknife.
But a scroll was one long sinuous curve, Inna thought, panicking; and how could you possibly cut such a thing with a breadknife?
‘Saw-cut One,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘You cut it across by the throat…’
‘“… but don’t cut its throat,”’ Marcus quoted, smiling. Inna calmed down.
Leman must say the same words to all his apprentices.
&nb
sp; Apprentices?
She emptied her mind, not daring to think that word. But she couldn’t stop the flicker of hope.
Just do it. Just obey. She clamped the scroll back down to the workbench, on its side this time. Leman showed her the pencil line she was to saw along, and, terrified of going too far, she moved the little implement carefully through the wood, towards the earlier lengthways cut Leman and she had made. ‘Be braver,’ Leman said, twinkling at her.
The relief when she’d cut far enough to join the first cut, and a neatly shaped sliver of wood came away in her hand, was indescribable. She turned the scroll over and re-clamped it, other side up. She was grinning as broadly as Leman by the time a second piece of wood also detached itself from the scroll without disaster.
‘“Now, Saw-cut Two!”’ Marcus sang out.
Leman showed her how. This even smaller cut would run from top to bottom of the side of the scroll, at right angles to Saw-cut One, taking off much less wood.
She was beginning to see now. These cuts would simply organize the wood into a shape ready for finer carving later: there’d be a series of neat right-angled saw lines, each taking away a smaller segment of wood than the last. They’d got the whole thing clear in their heads beforehand. With the unnecessary bits of the block cut away, the scroll would be easier to handle.
‘Don’t get too confident,’ Leman warned, gently. ‘Don’t forget, we like you to be a little bit scared. Now, after this cut, you get rid of the wood you don’t want by cutting in again, at right angles, at the back of the scroll. But, don’t forget, don’t cut straight down. Your downward cuts must angle slightly away from the centre.’
She began, too boldly perhaps, for quickly he corrected the angle at which she was holding the little saw. Her heart seemed to stop. Had she destroyed everything? ‘No, it’s fine,’ he reassured her. ‘Keep going like this.’
When she’d recovered her breath and had made the two cuts successfully, she was left with more tools she didn’t know – round and straight gouges, two little planes, and a scraper, Leman called them – first to shape the outside of the peg-box more finely (‘“Flat across the width and slightly convex in the length,”’ Marcus called, twinkling). Then, with Leman’s help, she marked the width of the walls of the tiny peg-box and cut down the inside with a knife, angling the cuts towards each other so that the walls widened at the bottom.
Leman drilled out the wood between the cuts for her, leaving a rough empty box shape. ‘Now,’ he said, and her heart stopped again, though she was already beginning to understand that every new step was going to be the same sort of terrifying leap into the unknown, but that if she could only trust her teacher and wasn’t too clumsy herself, it would come out right. ‘Now, clean up the inside with chisels and gouges … you’ll find the right ones over there, in that drawer … but be careful to leave enough thickness at the bottom.’
Leman was nodding comfortingly at her as he heaved himself up from the stool at her side. She liked the slow amusement in his voice. ‘It’s easy to go right through. So go easy, mind, especially under the top peg, where the bottom needs to curve up. Oh, and use a round gouge first at the throat.’
Ignoring the sting in her palms, ignoring the sting inside at the thought of Yasha, so quiet at his place, Inna went to fetch the chisels and gouges from their drawer.
Soon, in spite of herself, she forgot the black knot of unhappiness in her stomach, and let herself get lost in her work. Her hands ached. The tools were unfamiliar. And without Leman’s hands on hers, the wood in her golden circle of lamplight often seemed hard and resistant.
‘Be braver,’ he urged, from time to time. ‘Don’t be too scared to dig in – though just a bit scared is fine. I can see you can do it.’ But otherwise he let her be. She’d never been so absorbed.
She didn’t join in the fitful conversation, when it resumed.
‘Well, according to the Stock Exchange News, he’s as guilty as sin,’ came Marcus’s up-and-down voice. ‘Went to Nizhny Novgorod three weeks before the assassination and offered the governor there the job of prime minister.’
She barely heard. She was too busy worrying at a stubborn outcrop of splinters in a corner she couldn’t work out how to get at. She shifted her grip on a handle in her sore palm, trying to work out how to make the tool obey her.
‘Ach…’ came the rumble of Leman’s voice. He sounded sceptical.
But Marcus persisted. ‘And when the governor, who couldn’t work out what some peasant was doing offering gentlemen government jobs, started joking with him a bit, saying, “Ah, but the Prime Minister’s post isn’t even vacant,” do you know what Rasputin replied? “But it soon will be!” And then it was!’
Leman laughed it off. ‘So? The Emperor is always appointing new ministers; and he’s daft enough to send all kinds of odd bods off round the country to sound people out about whatever changes he’s thinking about, too. This peasant might have been doing a bit of politicking on his own account, if he’s so close to power. It doesn’t mean he had a hand in the murder, though, does it?’
It was only when Inna felt a large hand on her shoulder that she came out of her dream. Leman was rumbling in her ear, ‘We’re about to see a birth.’
She looked up.
Marcus had the little unvarnished violin he’d been stringing up on his shoulder.
Tentatively he drew the bow across the strings. Then he played a line of a simple, sad folk song. He played just as he was, bending over the bench, with no vibrato and no dramatics.
The sound was thin and hesitant, innocent as a newborn’s voice. And it was beautiful. Inna looked from Leman to Yasha. Both had their heads craned forward, and a joyful stillness on their faces.
When Marcus had stopped playing, and, to Inna’s surprise, started unstringing the white violin again (‘I’m going to start varnishing it tomorrow,’ he explained, catching her questioning look), Leman came over to where she was sitting and picked up her scroll-in-the-making.
He held it up to the light. He turned it around, and the kindly smile on his face broadened.
‘This is good work,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Neat. Elegant shapes. Why, look at the line she’s made here, lads. Perfect.’
Yasha stayed where he was, doing whatever he was doing, but Marcus slipped round to her side of the workbench and took the future scroll, with the peg-box now hollowed out and shaped below it, and grinned at her. He said, agreeing with his father for once, ‘Yes, deft fingers! We need girls in the workshop after all!’
It almost hurt, the pleasure she felt at their praise. Bashfully, letting down her guard, she smiled hazily back.
So she was quite unprepared when Leman, still admiring her scroll, said, casually, ‘Pity we didn’t get you started earlier. Where were you this morning?’
He meant no harm, she could see. But that question was enough to bring back Inna’s memory of everything outside this warm workshop, where she now so wanted to belong. Once again, she experienced that black misery she’d felt in her stomach while she’d been walking back here earlier on, down the bleakness of Nevsky, through the biting salt wind.
She tried to be brave and disciplined, but she’d let down her guard too far. To her horror, she felt hot tears coursing down her cheeks even before she began to stammer out an answer. ‘I went to see someone … a peasant holy man of my own … someone I met on the train…’ She put her face in her hands and closed her eyes.
‘Why?’ she heard. Leman’s voice was so soft.
‘Because he said he had a friend who knew how to get residence papers for Jews,’ she muttered, trying very hard to steady her tone. ‘So I thought he might help me … because I so want…’ She shut her eyes tight again, feeling humiliated. But tears squeezed out anyway. ‘… to work here,’ she finished.
Into the silence came Marcus’s question: ‘Couldn’t she just stay, Pap?’
It was as if Yasha wasn’t in the room at all. He’d withdrawn completely. Well, she thought
bitterly, he won’t want Leman to say yes; that much is clear.
That combative thought returned a measure of control to her and she opened her eyes. Leman was holding her scroll to the lamp again, looking at it, considering. There was a frown on his face.
‘The thing is, your mother’s worried that if I put a foot wrong I’ll have the police on my back again,’ he said, uneasily. ‘You remember how things were after the revolution … back in 1906, when they shut down my paper…’
‘But you won the day in court. They never managed to put you behind bars. Anyway, it was years ago; what can they possibly do to you now?’ wheedled Marcus’s voice. ‘And she’s good. You said so yourself. And you need someone else, you’re always saying so…’
There was another long pause. Leman twirled the scroll absent-mindedly under the light. His eyebrows were going up and down, as if he were holding a long conversation with someone inside his head.
Inna watched through her fingers, barely breathing. Eventually, still uncertainly, he began to nod.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I expect I probably can square it with your mother for Inna to stay longer. But…’
Marcus whooped under his breath. Inna felt his hand grip her shoulder. Cautiously, not quite believing what she was hearing, she lowered her hands from her face.
‘You’ll have Yasha to help you settle in,’ Marcus murmured to Inna. Over-optimistically, she thought. Yasha, just out of her field of vision, only grunted. ‘Me? She doesn’t need my help.’ She ignored him. She was waiting for Leman’s objection.
Leman was looking searchingly into her eyes. ‘If it’s on your own head entirely, that is,’ he added, sounding stern. ‘Let’s agree this. You can do some work for me down here for your bed and board, but, since you’re illegal, just don’t say you’re staying here, or that I know anything, or have helped you. Not to anyone official. Not to anyone. And if they catch you, you’re on your own. All right?’
It was tentative. It was grudging. But it was something to work with.
Wordlessly, Inna nodded. She could already feel the dead weight inside her lifting and evaporating.
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 8