Midnight in St. Petersburg

by Vanora Bennett

  Over his head, Inna could see Yasha and Madame Leman nodding at each other, as if they were beginning to understand. ‘The churchmen going after the favourite,’ Madame Leman mouthed at Yasha. ‘There’s no one left to keep them in order, now he’s been bumped off.’ She must mean the dead Prime Minister, Inna thought, after a moment. Yasha nodded. ‘Everyone jostling for a place at the trough.’

  Madame Leman turned back to Father Grigory, laying a soft hand on his forehead. ‘Do be careful, don’t dislodge the dressings, my dear.’ Her voice was tenderer by the moment. She believed him, Inna could see. ‘Are you sure you can’t manage a taste of bread and cheese, or some tea, maybe?’ Madame Leman patted his shoulder. ‘With plenty of sugar. Sugar helps against shock.’

  But Father Grigory didn’t raise his head.

  In the silence that followed, Inna stole a glance at Yasha and Madame Leman. She’d feared Yasha might look condemning. But, she thought, her heart swelling with gratitude, he just looked sympathetic. ‘Well, don’t you worry about it for now, brother,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s get you on the divan, lie you down for a bit. I’ll get you home later.’

  Father Grigory started pushing himself up. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, very low and hasty. ‘Though I’m grateful, I’m grateful. But I can’t be lying about all day. There are things I need to do, right away.’

  He’ll never get up, Inna thought, horrified at the pain in his face. But he did. And Yasha, looking appalled, helped him.

  ‘You don’t want to be going out just yet,’ he remonstrated. ‘You’re in no state…’

  But they could all see now that Father Grigory urgently wanted to get on.

  So Yasha pulled him up by one arm, and Inna went to his other side and gave him her arm. As the three of them shuffled forward, step by painful step, back down the corridor towards the front door, she was aware of Madame Leman clumping breathlessly around the kitchen behind her, scrabbling for things on the shelves, and of Yasha’s left arm, very close to her own right shoulder, and how warm and strong it was.

  No one spoke until they got to the vestibule, and Madame Leman proffered the coat she’d put over her arm. She had something else, too.

  ‘I thought…’ Madame Leman said, hesitantly, and there was something Inna didn’t understand in her voice, ‘… you might need some food. Please, take this.’

  It was a wicker basket. She’d bundled into a napkin the bread and cheese Inna had cut. There was more food below – a layer of big, sharp-scented apples.

  When Father Grigory bowed his head over the basket and lifted his free hand to make a clumsy sign of the cross she saw with astonishment that Madame Leman was acknowledging the devout old-fashioned gesture with a bob of her own. And that Yasha, too, had respectfully lowered his head.

  Madame Leman had put the peasant’s astrakhan hat down. Father Grigory reached a hand out to the table for it now.

  It was lying on a box. One of Yasha’s, Inna supposed.

  As Father Grigory picked up his hat, his good eye fixed on the leaflet beneath it.

  Peeping down sideways, following his eye, Inna could see just one sentence, in capitals: ‘CRITICAL REMARKS ON THE NATIONAL QUESTION’.

  But Father Grigory could clearly see more. Slowly, he mumbled, making out the words with difficulty, ‘“… is an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of the old and of the caste position of the Jews, an accomplice of the bourgeoisie…”’

  Yasha went crimson.

  ‘Ah,’ Father Grigory said, much more clearly, ‘revolutionary talk, I see.’ He shook his head. ‘The kind of dangerous nonsense that’s destroying the land. You don’t want filthy thoughts like that in your home.’

  Inna saw Yasha’s mouth open.

  ‘I tell you what, brother,’ Yasha started, heatedly. ‘It’s not the socialists destroying things in this country. It’s filthy anti-Semites like your so-called friend Iliodor: filling people’s minds with hate. Not to mention all those rich idiots at the court, doing bugger-all to look after the poor they say it’s their God-given duty to rule.’

  Yasha was red-faced and furious, but, to Inna’s astonishment, the peasant didn’t look angry, just slightly surprised. And he was nodding.

  It was all too much for Madame Leman. ‘A cab, Father, you’ll need a cab.’ She rushed him out on to the landing. Like Inna, earlier, she was still in her indoor clothes and slippers. Her passport was lying forgotten on the table.

  Yasha, meanwhile, grabbed the box, and fled back into the apartment.

  When she and the peasant reached the half-landing, and turned, Madame Leman looked back up. She made a sympathetic face. But, ‘He’s just a bit upset,’ she said to Inna. ‘He’s had a letter from his parents. He’ll be all right.’

  But Inna had seen Yasha’s expression.

  She stepped back inside, among the coats and hats and boots of the vestibule, wondering whether she dared go to him.

  She didn’t need to. As soon as the outside door banged shut down below, Yasha emerged again. His coat was buttoned up; hat on. The leaflet box was in his hand as he barged past her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she called.

  He didn’t reply. She heard footsteps rushing down the stairs.

  Moments later, Inna was also in her coat and boots and, by the time the outside door slammed again, she was slipping out of the flat after him, with Madame Leman’s passport in her pocket.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Yasha strode out of the city across first one bridge (over which, Inna saw, he hurled the box he’d been carrying), then another, and on into a shadowy unknown of deserted island streets running between looming factories, foul with the muddy leavings of the afternoon’s sleet. He was going so fast that Inna was frightened of losing him and being left alone in the thickening moon-shadows. Half-panicked, she was out of breath as she trotted, and sometimes ran, to keep him in sight.

  It was already almost night-time by the time he turned into an alleyway, where Inna saw a shadowy gaggle of poor folk hanging around the doorway of a hulking prison-like building.

  By the time she finally came close enough to cry breathlessly out to him, ‘Slow down, can’t you?’ she was red-faced and wishing she hadn’t come.

  But as soon as he turned and she saw his delight; when he put big, warm hands on her shoulders and muttered, ‘What the Hell are you doing here? No papers or anything. Alone. Insane…’ with a mixture of pride and solicitousness, she suddenly didn’t regret a thing.

  ‘I wanted to see you were all right,’ she whispered. ‘You looked…’

  ‘I needed a walk,’ he replied, suddenly cagey. But he kept his hands where they were. ‘I had things on my mind.’

  He didn’t mention Father Grigory. She thought, Well, I won’t ask about the letter, either; or his parents. Not yet.

  ‘I have a friend here,’ he added after a moment’s thought. She glanced doubtfully at the ragged shadows moving behind him. Was Yasha really … friends … with these people? She straightened her back. She didn’t want him to sense her fear. ‘They’re going into the poorhouse,’ he explained, which didn’t exactly answer her question, but she nodded anyway.

  ‘They’ll open the doors in a minute,’ he added. ‘For the night.’

  He’d barely finished speaking when a door cut into the big gates swung wide to let in the night’s newcomers. There was a creak like a cry of distress and a man stepped out: the man in charge, Inna could see. His fat was disintegrating in alcohol, falling off the bones in sagging pouches. His lantern cast shadows into the crevasses of his cheeks.

  Peeping out from under Yasha’s arm, Inna was transfixed by the crowd shuffling towards the light. The man in charge was taking the beggars’ kopeks silently, but he looked askance at Inna.

  ‘No women, mate, you know that,’ he said. ‘Round the back for her.’ But Yasha muttered in his ear. A coin changed hands. They were in.

  The consumptive at the door coughed blood on the flagstones as they passed. He wouldn’t last mu
ch longer, Inna knew, and she was filled with a desperate longing to do something for him. But Yasha was already pulling out another coin. ‘Here, brother. Get yourself some food,’ he said.

  They stopped in the echoing hall. Yasha was searching for someone in the slow-moving crowd.

  His friend wasn’t one of these victims, then.

  ‘Trust Kremer to find a cosy berth,’ Yasha muttered, pulling Inna forward again. He must have seen his man. It took Inna a moment more to identify him. A short, squat, gingery young man in a relatively respectable, if ragged, coat was standing in the doorman’s office, just down the hall. There was a stove and a lamp in there, and he was nursing a glass of steaming tea. His face lit up at the sight of Yasha. But he started looking suspicious as soon as he saw her.

  ‘We’ll only be a minute,’ Yasha said to Inna. ‘I’ve got a message for him, that’s all.’

  Still holding on to Inna, Yasha put his free right arm around Kremer, pulling them all into an unlikely, unwelcome near-embrace. Hastily, both Inna and Kremer shuffled away from each other. Yasha looked from one to the other, then shrugged – with a slight, surprising twitch of the lips – and let go of Kremer.

  Kremer immediately put an expectant hand out to his friend, and Yasha put a banknote into it. Ten roubles, Inna saw: a good whack for a journeyman luthier.

  Kremer pocketed it and looked expectantly at his friend. Yasha muttered into his ear.

  ‘It won’t be ready till Monday,’ Inna made out. When Kremer’s face fell, Yasha just looked impatient. ‘Look, I’ll bring it, don’t worry. But you’ll just have to hang on till I do.’

  Inna turned her head away and went back to gazing at the dispirited shadow-mob still streaming in. Her heart swelled at the misery of it as she remembered how she’d sneered at some story Yasha had told, in the workshop, about the beggar-women from the starving villages. If only she’d seen this first.

  And then, unexpectedly, a new sight met her eyes: one so strange that it drove every other thought from her mind. Near the back of the crowd trudging through the door were three tall, young, handsome beggars. They were dressed in ragged britches, true, but their limbs were as slender and well muscled as if they’d been raised on a refined diet of meat and greenhouse fruit and fine wine. Their heads were not bowed like the others, either; instead their eyes darted about, half fearfully, half pleasurably, as they took in the other poor souls’ appearance. They were rich boys, surely? They didn’t even look drunk.

  She touched Yasha’s arm, but he was still whispering furtively with Kremer. ‘… not my fault you’re in this mess…’ she heard. By the time he turned, and said briskly to her, ‘Right, let’s go,’ the three young men had vanished into the murk of the sleeping hall.

  There were so many questions Inna wanted to ask Yasha. But what she was most aware of as they came out of the alley and began walking back through the black and silent streets leading to the Samson Bridge was the way she’d started leaning into his side. How self-assured he’d been with everyone. How good he was with the needy, and how well he’d handled everyone today, Father Grigory – Rasputin – included.

  ‘Kremer’s not a pauper, but the police are after him. He’s got to get out of town. I’m getting him travel papers, but they’re not ready yet. I told him to doss down at the poorhouse while he waited. They like me there. I usually give them a bit of my pay, so they ask no questions,’ he explained, and she heard confidence in his voice. ‘It’s a good place to lie low. No one asks for passports and there are no name checks. It only costs a few kopeks a night, too.’ He laughed. ‘It’s not luxury accommodation, true. He’s not happy about it, but it’s his own silly fault he’s there.’

  I had no idea he knew all this, she thought in a daze.

  ‘Why are the police after Kremer?’ she asked, respectfully.

  He didn’t answer for a minute. ‘He got himself mixed up with some Socialist Revolutionaries, the bloody idiot. You know – the bombers,’ he replied eventually.

  Perhaps he heard her intake of breath. ‘I don’t have any truck with them. No one in their right mind does,’ he went on angrily. ‘No bloody judgement, that’s his problem. He was just letting them keep their buckets in his cellar, but he didn’t count on the janitor getting nosy and blowing himself up. There’s nothing against him, but he was the only Jew in the building. Of course they came after him.’

  Inna had no idea what to say to this. So I was right not to like Kremer, she thought. He’d killed some innocent old man with a tub of explosive? Well, he should be arrested, shouldn’t he? Kremer’s crime only confirmed all the worst things she’d ever thought about politics, not just about the terrorists on its fringes: it was all violence, really, all threat, wasn’t it?

  Yasha was continuing, possibly aware of her unease. ‘I owe Kremer a debt, you see. He has an uncle…’ and a whole torrent of stories about the Kremers poured out: about old Kremer’s strength, and the years he’d suffered in Siberia for what he believed. How different he was from Yasha’s father, who couldn’t even protect his ten-year-old from a gang of thugs. How important it had become to Yasha to stand up firmly for what he believed – to be brave, like old Kremer, who’d had the defiant word ‘TOMORROW’ tattooed on his arm on his first day behind bars.

  Yes, Inna thought, remembering Yasha’s parents’ fear while she’d been living with them, and the hasty way they’d left. Realizing, only now, that it had been a betrayal to leave a schoolgirl alone in a town so full of danger. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can imagine that; they didn’t look out for me much, either.’

  His hand tightened on her shoulder, and then slipped down around her waist.

  ‘I got word from them today. They’re in Haifa. They got cleaned out on the boat, and were too broke to go on to Jerusalem. Mama’s found work scrubbing floors, and they have a room. Papa’s not well. I wired them some money. But it makes you wonder where all their Russian conformity got them in the end: a bedsit and a cleaning job in an Ottoman port.’

  ‘I see why you’d want to stand up and be counted, too,’ she said softly, and she could understand, now she’d looked at some of those faces, how much there was to fight for. ‘But all those poor men,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘Why does no one help them more? And how did they get like that?’

  ‘They’re victims of the factories, most of them,’ Yasha said with bitter compassion. ‘They lose a limb, and they’re no good for a sixteen-hour shift any more. So that’s the whole family, out on the street. Goners.’

  Inna glanced up at him. His profile was stern.

  ‘And no one gives a damn. Nevsky is so close, stuffed with plutocrats’ wives buying lobster, but they might as well be on the moon. There’s no one much helping. Just the factory committees, and a few socialists with hearts but no money. We give all we can, but it’s nothing compared with the need.

  ‘It impressed the Hell out of me, suddenly seeing you out there,’ Yasha added gruffly. His voice vibrated through her ribcage. ‘Leman’s always talking about the islands, but he’s not actually brave enough to come.’

  She took her hand out of her pocket and touched his hand, which was resting just above her hipbone. His skin was freezing, so she drew it into the warmth of her pocket, closing her fingers around it.

  She could feel the length and strength of his arm, a stripe of heat across her back, and was fully aware of her gesture as an invitation.

  ‘The morning,’ she heard him say. ‘In your room. I never should have – I mean, we were only seconds away from Madame L. coming in.’

  He was looking at her, not quite meeting her eye. Joyously, she saw in that snatched look that he was memorizing her face, the line of brow and cheekbone, the cast of eye and lip, just as she so often did, stealing her glimpses of him.

  ‘I didn’t mind you being there,’ she whispered, smiling shyly, and when they walked on again through the factory yards, she noticed with relief that Yasha’s urgent pace was slowing to a relaxed saunter.

  U
ntil, suddenly, he stopped. A moment later, Inna felt it too: a prickle of the skin. Her heart started thumping as he turned his head, keeping his body still, scenting danger.

  He’d heard something. Behind.

  ‘Footsteps,’ he breathed.

  He pushed her into a black alley between two factory yards. They crouched behind crates and watched as the men approached.

  Knives? Sticks? Inna felt sick with helplessness. Yasha was nearer the street, to shield her.

  The moon came out as they appeared. As they walked by – not even looking into the alley – she could see them clearly. No weapons, no bottles. Three ragged youths sauntering by, laughing. It was the boys from the poorhouse, Inna saw, with a rush of relief.

  She could hear their loud, confident voices, swearing prettily in the playful half-French of the aristocracy. ‘God … absolutely freezing…’ one said, hugging himself with limber arms, rubbing his hands fast against his skin. ‘Merde…’ Another boy, a dark one, looking disgusted, was shaking his head and frenziedly scratching. ‘I don’t care,’ he answered, petulantly. ‘I’d rather be cold now than itching all night.’

  His face was turned towards them in the moonlight. He was unusually dark for a Russian, Inna saw. Above his torn britches and wadded workman’s jacket, he had the delicate southern cheekbones of a Tatar, with his olive skin and almond-shaped eyes. His face was lovely enough for a girl.

  I know that face, she thought.

  It was the prince. Horace’s friend. Felix.

  Shakily, Yasha pulled her out. ‘Who the Hell…?’ he was muttering. ‘Who were they?’ He looked at her, baffled. ‘Didn’t they sound…?’

  She nodded, but kept her eyes on her hands. Best not to reveal she’d seen the dark one before, she thought. Best not to say where, either. It would only confirm, in his mind, that she’d been an idiot to go visiting Father Grigory: that mixing with him, and even with Horace (who of course would have no idea that his friend went out on dubious mock-the-poor missions like this, late at night), had been the worst kind of naïveté.