Midnight in St. Petersburg

by Vanora Bennett

  ‘If my mother only knew where her pearls had been,’ Felix murmured, grinning impishly, ten minutes later, when he flung himself elegantly into the empty chair, dressed now in impeccable gentleman-about-town clothes. ‘Not to mention her dress! I hate to think what she’d say.’

  No, he didn’t want to finish this entertaining commission too fast.

  Felix took the edge off the sometimes stifling respectability of his job at Fabergé in which Horace painted very small pretty things for stout generals’ wives.

  Unusually for an Englishman, Horace had spent his entire youth in India; his father was a military surgeon; his grandfather had been a botanist who’d run the Calcutta botanical garden. His family hadn’t had the finance to treat India, as most of the English did, like a temporary posting, with the children sent Home to school and their ayahs dumped on London street corners when their usefulness ran out. Home hadn’t ever quite been home to the Wallicks; his grandfather, despite his accented elegance in English, had been a Danish Jew blown into English India as a young man by a change of political wind during the Napoleonic Wars. This meant there were no convenient aunts to die and leave them an inheritance to go Home on; no cousins with ramshackle houses crumbling under sprays of honeysuckle. So when Father had retired, there hadn’t really been anywhere to go in England, except rented apartments in London, where there’d been good works in the East End for his more spiritually minded, dutiful sister while he’d watched the moths eat away at his parents’ marriage after Father’s bankruptcy. Even more painful had been the sight of Father, embittered by the world’s ingratitude for his scientific researches, scraping around trying to re-establish himself professionally as a photographer.

  The childhood life before that grey, pinched, outsider scrappiness was all so long ago now that Calcutta had shrunk to no more than a saffron-coloured cloud of dust in Horace’s mind: hot, energetic, multi-lingual; with water glittering between the boats and exotic Himalayan plants swaying in the gardens and red-faced white men in military uniform and fabulous native grandees in bright silks. Horace felt oddly nostalgic for those dull, noisy colonels and peacock princes. He knew how to talk to them. True, he’d never be one of them, but he felt more at home with them than with the tepid rain of Home.

  So he hadn’t been able to believe his luck when he’d got to Russia ten years ago now, and found this other glittering, exotic empire, this brutal place of extreme contrasts and weathers, this splendid collection of oddities just waiting for him: where he could feel apart but also at home, again … at last.

  His latest client, this charming, wicked, flamboyant mass of impossible contrasts, Felix Youssoupoff, was the living, breathing shorthand symbol of the Russia Horace loved.

  Like the other delightful oddities Horace gathered elsewhere in his evening life, in the avant-garde circles he preferred to frequent (when his time was his own and he could sport the kind of dandyish coloured waistcoats and twirl the silver-topped canes that would have given the generals’ wives of his daytime employment a heart attack), an occasional dose of Felix reminded him he was, really, an artist with a wild side.

  Still, not tonight. He didn’t think tonight should be too alternative.

  He opened his case and got out the newspaper he’d been looking at over breakfast, to check the various concerts he’d ringed for this evening.

  There was the new young English violin sensation, Elsie Playfair. Señor José, the violin-maker who’d introduced him to Leman during a visit to Petersburg two years ago, had written last week, saying he should be sure not to miss her recital. That might be just the thing. Though, hm, Mendelssohn …

  He turned the page.

  He’d given tonight a good deal of thought. But he still wasn’t quite decided.

  He wanted to make it exactly right.

  * * *

  ‘Oh!’ Inna exclaimed, a few hours later. But then her voice faltered and her eyes clouded. She glanced sideways at Leman. ‘But I can’t. I’m sorry…’

  Still in his hat and coat, already feeling warm in the heat of the workshop, Horace breathed in sawdusty air with his disappointment. He could see she’d been expecting him, as she’d had the book ready to return. He’d imagined she’d be pleased. He glanced at Leman, hoping for clarification.

  But Leman just wiped his hands on his big apron. ‘Why don’t you stay to dinner instead, dear man?’ he said, with, as it seemed to Horace, indecision mixed into his customary heartiness. ‘The women have promised us cheeselets. Lidiya would be delighted to see you.’

  Horace wasn’t especially tempted. Greasy fried cream-cheese-and-raisin patties, topped with sour cream and sugar: highly indigestible. It wasn’t really an aristocratic cuisine, the Russian one. And those naughty children, making their racket … Amusing, of course, but not at all what he’d had in mind.

  But when he saw how Inna’s face lit up at this invitation, he smiled assent. Slipping her apron off, she stepped quickly forward to take the coat he’d started unbuttoning. She was pleased to see him, then. He’d find out easily enough, over dinner, what the problem was.

  * * *

  ‘It’s Inna’s papers, that’s the thing, you see,’ Leman said indistinctly as he pushed himself back from his still glistening plate.

  The question had hung in the air all through the meal.

  Horace hadn’t tried too hard to investigate. He’d just made maximum efforts to amuse and flatter. There wasn’t much he could do with the surly assistant, a tall good-looking dark youth who scowled silently into his plate all through dinner. But he’d tipped both the children a rouble, to their loud glee. He’d agreed with earnest young Marcus that both the Yugoslav princesses, that pair of troublemaking sisters married to grand dukes, should be banned from court or otherwise prevented from meddling in politics, or else the latest Balkans crisis would certainly end in war. He’d laughed not unsympathetically at Leman’s vaguely socialist musings about Russia being a powder keg, though his answering comment had been a wry one to the effect that, true though all that undoubtedly was, he still found evolution easier to contemplate than revolution.

  Horace poured Leman another glass of Crimean champagne.

  ‘Ah, yes, papers,’ he murmured, shaking his head understandingly. ‘A nightmare, dealing with chinovniki. Why, it took me months when I got here.’

  He paused, enquiringly, noticing the quick glance between Monsieur and Madame Leman. Inna’s face was turned down. The sour young man was sighing in an attention-seeking way. Horace ignored him.

  The young man, visibly provoked, put his glass down, with a thump. ‘She doesn’t have any papers,’ he said loudly. ‘You can’t take her out to any concerts.’

  Horace watched, astonished, as every head drew a little lower; every face bowed. Then, collectively, in scandalized tones, the family hissed, ‘Shh!’ And, ‘Yasha!’

  Only Inna raised her head. Her face was scarlet (and, Horace thought, even lovelier for it). Defiantly, she said, ‘He means I got here on someone else’s. I left mine behind.’

  Horace was privately pleased to see the flash of anger in her green eyes directed at Yasha.

  ‘So we thought it would be best she stays in for a while, out of trouble,’ Monsieur Leman explained hurriedly. ‘You know how the police are. I know you won’t say a word, of course, dear fellow, but still…’

  Horace smiled reassuringly. Personally, he always felt a bit impatient with this dreadful Russian fretting over documents. He’d worked it all out during his long years here: if a policeman started giving you a hard time about your papers, you just slipped him a rouble; there was never any more to it than that if you were a foreigner.

  But being Jewish, here, was different; of course she’d be at risk. He rather admired the bold act of pinching a passport. She knew what she wanted, clearly.

  ‘So,’ he said, to Inna, ‘you do have a document, even if it’s not your own, that you could take out, just in case – if you were to go out?’

  ‘Temporary
,’ Yasha supplied.

  ‘Valid till?’ Horace asked, addressing himself only to Inna.

  Addressing herself only to him, she whispered, ‘End of the month.’ He could see the hope in her eyes.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, triumphantly, turning to Leman. ‘In which case, we might as well put it to good use while it’s still useful, don’t you think? It’s too late for the concert, now, but I’d be delighted to take Inna to the Stray Dog before her purdah begins.’

  The children giggled at that. How brisk he was sounding.

  Leman again began to expostulate, but Horace over-rode him.

  ‘Let’s agree this, dear fellow: we’ll go by cab (no policemen hide in cabs that I’ve ever heard of); I’ll bring her back by one. You know, no one ever does ask many questions of a foreigner. She’ll be quite safe with me.’

  Leman might have gone on fretting, but, suddenly, Madame Leman reached over and patted her husband’s hand. ‘All right,’ she said decisively. ‘If Inna is willing to take the risk, she should go.’

  * * *

  An hour later, they were sitting in the dark, just the two of them, gazing around. Inna was wearing a rather loose black evening shift, borrowed from Madame Leman. Horace was topping up her glass, and making a point of not noticing her astonishment at the more outré habitués of the Stray Dog.

  Brilliant tropical flowers and birds decorated the cellar walls. There was a candle on their table, and icy dew on the Chablis glasses. Someone had been playing jazz earlier on, and there’d been a ballerina. Right now, over by the piano, a man with a bass voice was reciting a poem. You could hardly see him through the blue smoke.

  There was a ripple of applause. The poet bowed, and Inna clapped, wide-eyed.

  Horace had been waved into the club without paying. Bohemians didn’t have to pay, he’d explained casually. Only autograph-hunters, or the respectable – dentists in frock coats – or the vast rabble of nouveaux riches infesting Petersburg. He grinned, feeling a proper artist himself again, here. ‘We call them the Pharmacists.’

  Now he was watching her watch the tall stubble-headed man lying across a table, banging mockingly on the drum he was holding every time a monocled Pharmacist came in. Horace could imagine what she was thinking: Well, he must be Someone. You wouldn’t go out wearing a yellow and black striped smock unless you were. And people kept buying him drinks.

  ‘That’s Mayakovsky,’ Horace murmured. ‘The Futurist.’ He rather enjoyed Inna’s blank answering look. She was such an innocent. Why, she’d only just heard of Symbolism, which had been all the rage for as long as she’d been alive, though it was now out of favour with the avant-garde assembled here. Even if he were to introduce her to every last poet and painter here, she wouldn’t have the faintest clue who they were. Well, there was time for all that.

  ‘What’s next on the programme?’

  He dipped his head courteously closer to answer. ‘There’s no particular programme,’ he murmured, in her ear. ‘People just get up and show whatever they’ve been working on. This is somewhere to try things out.’ He twinkled down at her. ‘There’d be nothing to stop you getting up and playing, if you felt like it.’ But she only shook her head.

  Horace wasn’t quite sure how to bring about the idea that had hazily been forming in his head ever since he’d heard her play: Inna in a wonderful dress, arms flashing over her violin … him at one side, cheering her on … and the rapturous applause from all these people, not least for him, for finding her. He knew, deep down, that although his foreignness wasn’t really an impediment to fully belonging here, and nor was his day job (not really), the combination, along with his lack of an all-consuming furnace of a talent, would always keep him somehow on the fringes of everything: welcomed, always; enjoyed, certainly; but not embraced. But what if he had a lovely wife with an all-consuming furnace of a talent? What if he could play Osip Brik to Inna’s Lily, proudly twirling a monocle as she won the hearts of the world?

  For a moment he was too entranced, again, by that vision to realize she was saying something. She’d cut her hands. Look. She was showing him; making excuses. It would be impossible to play till they were healed.

  Hastily collecting himself, he took one outstretched hand in his – how soft her skin was; how slender the fingers – and shook his head over the cut palms.

  ‘In the workshop?’ he asked, tenderly. ‘You must be careful.’

  She glanced uncertainly up at him, and his heart twisted when he realized what she was stammering out next.

  ‘A new lifeline?’ he asked, and his fingers closed protectively over the slim fingers lying in his palm.

  Horace thought many things at once: that any Symbolist would love the desperation of that gesture; that she must have been scared stiff on that train up here; and that she must feel even more of an outsider than he often did.

  Then he saw the shame in her eyes; the awareness of what she’d done. She wasn’t that scared child any more, he realized. She was already learning how people did things in this new, busier, more sophisticated, more tolerant city environment, where being Jewish made so much less difference: watching with bright eyes, taking it all in. He’d been aware of her doing it all evening. It would be crass of him to dwell on the other thing any further. ‘Well,’ he answered lightly, ‘I can only wonder what future you’ve made for yourself. I must say I hope it will include performing. Because you play unusually beautifully; you’d be a sensation if you ever were to go on stage.’

  Resisting the temptation to go on holding her wounded hand, he gently relinquished it and refilled their glasses.

  She took her glass and cradled it, thoughtfully. Sipped. ‘I mean, I can play all right at home, but on a stage I just can’t…’ She shook her head.

  ‘What, a person with your presence of mind?’ He paused, and then added, casually, ‘Your friend, who didn’t want you to come out tonight – why was he so angry?’

  She shrugged. ‘I think he was worried that I might get the Lemans into trouble,’ she said cagily. ‘But I won’t, will I?’

  Horace was reassuring her when new people came, laughing, to the next table: a young woman, and two young men fussing around her chair. The woman had dark hair in a severe bun, a fringe cut high on the forehead, and a tall, very slender shape wrapped in an embroidered Chinese dragon-shawl. She was a little older than Inna, in her twenties, but their bearing was not unalike. She had strong features, not exactly beautiful: jutting cheekbones, hooked nose.

  Horace leaned forward in the pleasure of the moment. Here, at least, was someone his young guest would almost certainly recognize. For surely all young girls loved Akhmatova.

  ‘Why,’ he heard Inna say to her, ‘you’re Anya Gorenko, aren’t you? From Kiev?’

  Everyone at the neighbouring table turned to look at them as Inna hurried on, ‘I remember you. You were at the Fundukleyevskaya Academy. You wouldn’t remember me. I was small then – just starting when you were taking exams. But it was you, wasn’t it?’

  At last, Akhmatova – Horace knew the exotically Tatar name to be made up – inclined her head: ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘My name’s Inna,’ Inna stuttered. ‘Inna Feldman.’

  Horace caught surprise in Akhmatova’s eyes.

  ‘My sister was called Inna, too.’ Akhmatova’s voice was soft and low, with a tragic catch in it. ‘She died,’ the poetess added. Then, equally simply, ‘Won’t you join us?’

  Now the minutes flew by. Horace, who’d delightedly recognized one of Akhmatova’s male companions as the new poet Leman had been reading the other day, found a tactful way to whisper to Inna how illustrious her schoolmate Gorenko had become in the past couple of years. Inna’s eyes widened in instant, open adoration.

  Akhmatova only replied, with grave modesty, ‘Oh, fame; it embarrasses me. It seems indecent, as if I’d left a bra or a stocking on the table.’

  Inna laughed in surprise.

  Bryusov, in the black garb of the decadent set, with a sc
arab bracelet, was the next performer to take the floor. His voice was loud, and felt louder when he started declaiming straight at Inna:

  ‘You’re Woman – you’re the witch’s brew!

  It sets on fire as soon as touching lips…’

  He bowed to her, very deeply, when he’d finished.

  Inna bowed back, looking only a bit flustered. She had savoir-faire, Horace thought. He’d wanted to thump the man. But it was only when the applause was over, and Bryusov had sat down again, that Inna, discreetly, wiped her cheeks.

  ‘What did you think of his poem?’ Akhmatova asked Inna.

  ‘I don’t know if I understood it,’ Inna replied, searching for words. Horace saw she knew she was being tested. ‘It was so high-flown. But then I’m learning violin-making, and violin-makers are practical. We make something useful – beautiful too, but basically useful – music from a piece of wood. That’s honest. But that poem felt different. Like being … drunk … with words, without knowing what all the emotion meant, or what it was for.’

  Horace breathed out. He hadn’t quite realized how nervous he’d been for her.

  ‘Bravo,’ said the quieter young man.

  ‘Yes, I’m tired of all this bloated mystifying, too,’ Akhmatova agreed. ‘Symbolists, decadents: it’s all too much.’

  ‘She plays the violin,’ Horace told them, proudly, after a companionable pause. ‘Very well, too.’

  And, soon after, Inna let herself be persuaded to join one of Akhmatova’s two companions, playing for the room.

  She might not have, if Horace hadn’t quietly explained that Sasha was going to sing a poem of Akhmatova’s that he’d set to music himself.

  ‘It would be a mark of respect,’ Horace prompted gently. ‘Everyone would like it.’

  ‘Really?’ Inna said, looking doubtfully from one to another.