Of course Inna had wanted to come and see this. Throughout these last weeks of reproaching herself for having let Horace decide the course of their lives for so long, while she just sat inside that stifling apartment – ‘Like a slug in silk cushions!’ she’d been angrily telling herself – she’d been longing for the chance to do something brave and honest, to put things right with her conscience. The knowledge that Horace, locked away at his desk making trinkets for the rich, would certainly disapprove of this outing had put rebellious colour in her cheeks as she strode out. But she didn’t like crowds, and, from the moment they’d set out, she’d also been scared of exactly this: that she, Madame Leman and Agrippina would be separated.
Yet now she was out in the street, with the sun glittering on windows and golden snow, with the sky so blue, and the air so bright, and with everyone so good-tempered in the crowd, and excited, and full of songs and stories, the panic she’d thought she’d feel was less overwhelming than she’d expected. After a while, she gave up and let herself go with the crush. There was really nothing else to be done.
She was slowly tugged by the human tide right across the curved Imperial Army General Staff building at the back of Palace Square, past the arch leading back on to Nevsky, nearly as far as the embankment on the other side. She was close enough to see the iced-over Neva behind the Admiralty Gardens. Every bit of that vast space was full, full to cracking, of bodies, not just women any more but men too: striking factory workers and the refugees who were always going on protests. Both women and men were shouting and laughing and shouting again, whether it was whatever slogan they believed in, or stories they’d heard. Blood had poured from the revolving door of the Astoria this morning! The mob got in there last night and drank the cellars dry! Respect for waiters: call us vy, not ty! The Fortress is open: they’ve let the prisoners out! Soon Inna began to enjoy herself.
And then something changed. She didn’t know what, at first. You couldn’t actually see anything way back where she was: the speeches were all up at the front, outside the green front of the Winter Palace. Back here, the mood of the people around her suddenly began to turn fearful.
‘Cossacks,’ she heard, a whisper that seemed to come from everywhere at once. ‘The Cossacks are coming.’
It was worse than dismay, what she felt. It was a blackness. She couldn’t think, yet she could feel her limbs poised to run. The problem was that there was nowhere to shelter. Just thousands of people, packed tight, looking at each other with the same dread.
She scanned the sea of faces around her.
One particular pair of eyes fixed on hers, belonging, she could see, to a very tall, gaunt, wild-bearded man in a shabby worker’s wadded-cotton jacket, who’d made himself taller still by climbing on to the base of a street lamp.
It made her uncomfortable, that stare, which she went on feeling for a few long seconds more as she looked along the embankment and round towards the palace. It sent prickles down her spine. She turned back for a second look. But the man had gone; slipped down off his lamp base and been swallowed up by the crowd. She must have been imagining him staring at her.
The whisper started again. ‘Cossacks, Cossacks.’
And then someone touched her – someone with an emaciated shoulder and back and a long straggly black beard.
Above the beard, a pair of dark eyes stared straight at her.
‘Yasha,’ she whispered.
His jacket smelled of mould and sweat and tobacco, but he still smelled, wonderfully, just as she’d remembered. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here, I suppose,’ she said, breathlessly, feeling herself tremble as his arms enfolded hers. ‘I mean, you left me for the Revolution, and here it is.’
She didn’t dare meet his eyes any more; not now she’d named the terrible thing he’d done to her.
He turned her head with his hands, so he could see her face.
‘What are you talking about?’ he said, with none of the sugary tenderness that she’d added to her memories of him over the years. ‘I didn’t bloody well leave you for the Revolution.’
She opened her mouth to protest.
‘I was in prison,’ he went on roughly. ‘I’ve just got out. We all have. They opened the doors.’ He jerked his head over the river, towards the Fortress. ‘Look.’ There was a tattoo on his neck, with a number. ‘That idiot Kremer – remember him? I got him papers. The police found them on me the night I ran out.’
His voice softened. How deep it was; how soft. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she heard him say.
Suddenly, deafeningly, just behind her, a man began yelling, ‘Hoorah!’ and then they were all at it: a new sea of sound. The panic seemed to have disappeared as quickly as it had come.
‘Come on,’ Yasha said in her ear. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
The crowd was fluid now. There were just as many people as before, but things had eased so you could walk again. Yasha was making for the Triumphal Arch that would take them back on to Nevsky, from where they could duck into the back streets on the other side and get to the Lemans’ – or anywhere else – safely. They slipped out between families and friends, all hugging each other, half-hysterical with relief, and under the arch they saw the reason for the change of mood.
A detachment of Cossacks had dismounted and put down the rifles and sabres that might have killed half the crowd. They were being mobbed by a throng of new admirers, who were clapping them on the back and cheering. One snub-nosed youth was grinning bashfully and carrying a bunch of red roses as if he didn’t know what to do with such a thing. His horse’s reins were in his other hand, and there was a girl in his saddle, a street-trader girl in a wadded jacket like Yasha’s and a ragged dog-fur hat. She was grinning round at the whistling crowd, waving and blowing kisses.
‘Just walked up to them, she did, with her basket of roses,’ the man next to Inna said. ‘Sweating a bit, she was. Brave as anything. I mean to say, they had their rifles pointed. They was all ready to charge. But they didn’t. He took her flowers, that bloke there. And then they all got down off their ’osses. And now look at them.’
There were women pinning red ribbons on the Cossacks’ uniforms. There were men calling out to each other, all around, a phrase something like the old Easter greeting, ‘Christ is arisen!’ only without the Christ: ‘Russia is arisen!’
‘Russia is arisen!’ the unknown man said to Inna, and kissed her.
She kissed the stranger back, ‘It is risen indeed!’ she answered, feeling Yasha’s arm around her, feeling the joy of this new world in which everything was possible. Red: the colour of revolution. Red roses: the colour of hope.
* * *
A courtyard, somewhere, with no one around, and his hand still in hers … There were too many things to say. Where to begin?
‘What do you mean, they opened the doors?’
Yasha grinned. He stopped walking. She did too. How close they were standing. How abruptly he spoke. Perhaps that was prison. She didn’t know him very well any more.
‘We were in the yard, maybe two hundred of us. Then we saw the door open. Just like that. The guards were all gone, and there was the street, and, just round the corner, the bridge … Well, I mean, we knew there was trouble in town. But still. I thought: Maybe it’s a trick? Get you through that gate then shoot you. A few of us started sidling up towards the gate, casually, like they’d just slip through on the quiet. But no one said a word. A few actually went through. Then the first one who’d got through, a bloke called Mitrofan, was walking over the cobbles out there. He got a good way off, then looked round. Slowly, like he couldn’t believe his luck. And then he turned back to us, and started yelling. “Come on, you idiots! There’s no one here at all! Get on out!”’
They were both laughing now; Yasha still disbelieving, his laughter with a hysterical edge.
‘And you did,’ Inna finished.
‘Ran like fuck; hundreds of us.’ It was so dark in the courtyard that she could only see his eyes, cr
inkled up. ‘And I ran straight into you; it’s a time of bloody miracles, I’m telling you.’ And then his eyes shut, too, and the kiss began.
It was only when his hands moved to her blouse, crushed her breasts, and started a clumsy quest for buttons and hooks that she came to, and pulled back a fraction.
‘Yash,’ she whispered, dizzily, right into his ear, because she couldn’t move away from his skin or smell, not altogether; it was magnetic, overpowering, this need to touch him; and surely she was demonstrating virtue enough by stopping the kiss? ‘Yash … I’m not your wife.’
He nuzzled at her neck, not wanting to know anything.
‘I thought you’d gone,’ she whispered. He ignored that too. ‘I married Horace.’
It overwhelmed her, the cosmic injustice of it, the stupidity: that she could feel all this for Yasha, but belong elsewhere.
But Yasha didn’t sound bothered. ‘Did you now? Well, we’ll soon see about that,’ he murmured, as if she’d told him a joke he wasn’t all that interested in laughing at, because he had something better to think about. He grinned down at her. ‘Time of bloody miracles. Didn’t I say?’
* * *
The Lemans were still all out, except Marcus, who was down in the workshop, when Inna and Yasha tiptoed into the apartment, quiet as thieves.
Inna’s mind was clear as she worked out what to do, her body full of almost religious thankfulness for that first communion of their bodies in that blocked-off courtyard with what felt like the whole city singing and laughing out in the streets. She took the key for the attic room from the hook in the kitchen and gave it to Yasha. The Lemans would be glad enough to have him back, wouldn’t they?
‘Show me my room,’ Yasha whispered in her ear. ‘Mrs Wallick.’
And they both laughed.
* * *
She laughed later on, too, when she saw on what unlikely chests red ribbons had sprouted: on Madame Leman’s and Agrippina’s and Barbarian’s, of course, but also on the scrawny chest of Aunt Cockatoo, the genteel séance-holding neighbour, who’d spent a miserable winter last year standing on street corners selling her trinkets for food, and this winter, more profitably, selling the moonshine vodka she’d taken to brewing despite the ban. That evening, excitedly talking over the day’s events over whatever-you-can-find soup in the Leman kitchen, Aunt Cockatoo declared herself as sick of the imperial family and the corruption all around them as everyone else. ‘Who needs the life to come, or the Emperor, come to that, when our life on earth is turning into such a festival of freedom?’ she said. ‘There’ll be no more crime now we’ve got the Revolution: or chinovniki, or bribes, or drink…’
Who needed drink? They were all drunk on happiness.
They all laughed over Yasha’s tales from the Fortress: the lice, the idleness, the cold, the prisoners whispering in the cells. Yasha, now clean-shaven again, and shining-eyed, was dressed in one of Monsieur Leman’s old country shirts, with the buttons up the side of the neck and a strip of country braid on the cuffs, and with a pair of very baggy, but too short trousers, held up against his long lean length with a belt.
‘How happy we are to have you back, dear boy,’ Madame Leman kept saying, and Marcus kept clapping Yasha on the back. Inna just watched, keeping to herself her memories of the afternoon up in the attics, alone together, and what had happened between finding the clothes, and the combs; what they’d done together as the dust rose from the old mattress, making them both sneeze.
Inna even laughed in acknowledgement, though it was thinner laughter, when Horace turned up to take her home. Horace wasn’t laughing. Her husband came in looking strained and breathless, and went straight to Inna. When she didn’t get up, he swooped down and kissed the top of her head. He didn’t even see Yasha.
‘I’ve just seen someone shot on Nevsky,’ he said. ‘Right beside me. Some young woman with a red ribbon handing out leaflets dropped down dead on the pavement. Just like that.’
‘That will have been a sniper,’ Marcus replied knowledgeably. ‘And I expect everyone ran away, which will be what they want, to spread fear and keep everyone inside. To regain control.’
‘Who?’ asked Aunt Cockatoo, in her splendidly grating voice. Her yellow eyes blinked double-time above her little hooked nose.
‘The police, of course! The Tsar’s police!’ Barbarian said.
Madame Leman tut-tutted at him. But as Inna reflected on the possibility that a fat man with silver-gilt buttons might indeed still be sitting on a rooftop, watching her down the sights of a rifle as she went to sit in the bread queue, or find a paper, the hilarity went out of the evening. Everyone else was probably having the same quiet spasm of dread she was, she thought; they’d all be imagining the alleyways and courtyards and stone colonnades they might cut through to avoid main roads, if they were to live.
‘I was thinking that perhaps,’ Horace began, ‘dear Lidiya’ – he nodded at Madame Leman – ‘in the circumstances, we might stay the night here?’
Inna winced. She couldn’t even begin to imagine staying in one garret room with Horace with Yasha just on the other side of the partition.
She glanced up at Yasha, on the other side of the table. She’d avoided looking at him all evening till now, especially since Horace arrived, but he just shrugged and grinned insouciantly – the picture of revolutionary dash. ‘Just make sure you don’t stand around giving out leaflets on Nevsky, Wallick,’ he drawled. ‘That’s how to keep your hide intact.’
It was rude, but the children laughed.
Inna tried to stifle the queasy guilt she felt at their laughter. Well, he is only worried about keeping his hide intact, she told herself sternly. And he took that man’s money.
Horace blinked. Then, rather uneasily, he laughed, too.
‘Kagan – Yasha, isn’t it? Delighted to see you back, young man. Delighted,’ he said. ‘And I can see you think I’m fretting needlessly. Well, you may be right.’ He nodded self-deprecatingly and gave one of those meaningless little English half-smiles. ‘But I do want to be sure I’ve done all I can to protect my wife, whom I will, after all, be walking home tonight.’
* * *
Inna and Horace walked home by a cautious route, along cross streets, through courtyards and service doors, down deserted places where there were few footprints on the snow.
Looking at the occasional places where earlier sets of footprints blurred, trying not to remember that other nearby courtyard where she and Yasha had come to a halt, earlier on, or to shiver with pleasure as she recalled his urgent breathing, and the lift of fabric, and the hand that had held both hers above her head, in the attic, Inna kept very quiet.
‘Kagan looks well,’ Horace said.
‘He’s just out of prison,’ she countered. ‘Madame Leman is letting him sleep in the attic for now. And Marcus is pleased. He’ll be around to help in the workshop.’
‘Maybe you can stop working there, then.’
‘Stop? But I love it there! I don’t want to stop!’ she said, too loud and too fast.
But Horace didn’t seem to notice her vehemence. He only nodded.
* * *
The police – that last vestige of the Tsarist order, now exiled to the rooftops with their guns – were the last to give up their vain hope of retaining power. People carried on collapsing unexpectedly in city crowds for weeks, as February became March, causing a panicky scattering of those around them whenever the tell-tale trickle of red appeared on a coat on the ground. For weeks, too, people carried on dragging down from one rooftop or another some die-hard sniper who’d been taking pot-shots at innocent civilians.
But the Emperor went quickly and quietly enough. They said he’d abdicated internally long before he agreed to step down. Smoking (he was always smoking) with the smoke rising silently past his beard and empty eyes.
What people started saying was that the riots of February, and, to a lesser extent, the new provisional government that replaced the former Emperor, were bringing about t
he moral resurrection of the people. February became known as the festival of freedom, and the patriots who had torn down the double-headed eagles of the Tsars as the restorers of Russia’s virtue.
Throughout March, having told Horace she was quite safe and, in this new, more elevated, moral atmosphere on the streets, didn’t need to be walked home from the Lemans’ after work, Inna quietly went upstairs to Yasha’s every evening at six, a minute or two after he’d left the workshop.
He’d come to his door half-naked, and pull her to him. She’d stopped being shocked at his burning prison gauntness by now. She’d just sigh into him, and then one of them would breathe ‘shh’ with a hint of a laugh, and click the door shut. After that there was nothing in their shabby secret world beyond the two of them: the kiss inside the wrist, the feel of skin, the tautness of stomach, the slow entwining of limbs. Sometimes they never even reached the bed.
She hadn’t realized you could have love without the trappings she’d become so accustomed to, without candles and little kindnesses and breakfast chat. She’d never realized it could be this simple: this ache, this heat, this catch of breath at a touch.
At seven, she’d dress and somehow take herself out of the room, pulling away from the mouth exploring her neck again, from the longing and melting, from the teasing whisper, ‘Oh, not yet.’ An hour was only a moment. But the memory of him stayed with her all through the night and day that followed, the smell and taste. She was languorous with love, drugged with it. It was everything else that was a dream.
At seven, Yasha also had to go striding out, taking whatever bit of bread and onion he’d saved from the midday meal, to the halls where he now spent his evenings discussing the future. At seven, too full of memory for guilt, she’d go home to her husband.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was a bright cold Sunday afternoon in March when Prince Felix Youssoupoff sauntered into the drawing room of the apartment in Great Cavalry Street, behind a hovering, anxious-looking Horace, and bowed to Inna.
There’s no sugar to offer him for tea, was her first panicky thought. Even after the Red Revolution, you still needed to queue all night to buy basics at dawn: one night for bread, one night for meat, one night for oil, one night for sugar, and so on. The only difference in the queuing since February was that now you queued with hope. But it was still dog-cold sleeping on your stool on the street, even under wadded blankets, with your pillow. If she and Horace didn’t have sugar, it wasn’t because they didn’t have the money to pay for it, or that the queuing was too onerous for her, because Horace did alternate nights, sitting up with the women. They’d simply agreed weeks ago to give up on buying sugar, since what was the point? They never had guests at the apartment, and they’d be better giving Madame Leman their sugar money instead, so she could use it for her family.
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