There was a spring in his step as he turned the corner. Maybe, just maybe, it would work out in his favour after all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
You go on living, however much your heart aches. You go on getting out of bed, dressing in something or other, eating food that tastes of sand, and nodding when the people around you are talking, so they think you’re part of their conversation. You stand in line for bread and flour and sugar, go to the woods for mushrooms and berries, join in all the pickling and preserving and jam-making you can to stave off the hunger of the winter to come. You follow everyone else’s fretting about politics as the tide turns, and the Revolution, which had faded in the summer, comes back into fashion in the autumn, though its hapless current leader doesn’t. What, the Bolsheviks siding with Kerensky against the army! What, the military coup failed! What, Prime Minister Kerensky a drunken womanizer! A cocaine addict! A Jew in woman’s petticoats! You even laugh out loud, one day, when your husband comes in to tell you he’s just seen a slogan on a wall, praising an obviously Jewish revolutionary just out of jail who now kept getting his name in the papers; a slogan reading, ‘Down with the Jew Kerensky! Long live Trotsky!’ And, generally, you carry on with something that looks, from the outside, almost indistinguishable from your life before, only with the joy subtracted.
That, at least, was what Inna found as the summer drew to a close and the days got sharper and greyer, and her misery – which she’d explained to the Lemans and Horace as illness; a reason to stay alone on her side of the bed – shrivelled down to scepticism. It wasn’t as if Yasha had gone that far away to work. Smolny was just across town, wasn’t it? It wasn’t as if he couldn’t have come back and visited if he’d wanted to see her.
It was true that the last time they’d talked they’d had one of those excruciating discussions about whether she could leave Horace, and that she’d been reluctant even to let him persuade her out to see the room he’d half agreed to rent. They’d got as far as the embankment together. They’d hovered on a bridge, kissing and crying and arguing. But the place he wanted to go was much further off, and she found, when she looked at the grey currents rushing below, that she couldn’t cross the water to look at a possible future waiting on the other side. So you won’t go to the islands any more, Mrs Wallick? he’d said. It’s not that, she’d stammered, wondering if he really thought her so shallow as to be frightened of the poverty over the bridge. Surely he must know that she was more afraid of the not coming back than of the going there? Cut to the quick by his easy injustice, she hadn’t been altogether surprised when he’d flung off alone. She just hadn’t expected him to be gone for good.
He’d never even said goodbye, just got Marcus to pack up his stuff and take it over to him, along with the still-white copy of the Youssoupoff Strad that he’d made but not yet varnished, for something to work on in the evenings. She could see that a part of him might have been scared, after being beaten up. But she couldn’t altogether excuse him because of that. However many anti-Jewish mobs might have been prowling the courtyards of central Petrograd over the summer of reaction – and she didn’t see many, especially as the tide turned again, and revolutionaries again displaced the Jew-hunters on the streets – all he’d have had to do would be to turn his coat collar up. If he’d really wanted to persuade her, he’d have come. He’d have tried.
No, Yasha had made his choice. She wouldn’t go chasing after him: that was her choice. But that didn’t mean she didn’t go on agonizing about it. She couldn’t be sure, even now, that if Yasha were ever to turn up saying he’d chosen her over his politics, she wouldn’t choose him over the safety of life with Horace. It was just that this now seemed so unlikely. He was gone.
* * *
They finished the varnishing by the end of summer, Inna and Marcus. They hardly dared draw a bow across the violin’s strings to hear the magic of its voice; instead they locked it away, under two other violins, behind the wood stack in the storeroom. Felix Youssoupoff would send for it when he was ready. For now the Strad filled her with such sadness that she could hardly bear to look at it.
Once it was locked up, things got a little better.
Horace’s kindly presence – the way he’d say everyday things in a gentle voice, his knack of keeping life on an even keel – began to lift the fog of heartbreak that surrounded her.
One day, Inna saw Agrippina – really saw her, skulking in the shadows with a shawl clutched round her, as she always seemed to be these days. She looked dreadfully uncomfortable.
‘Oh, Agrippinochka,’ she said, suddenly realizing that the girl’s developing figure was crammed into a tired child’s dress, with tears up the bodice seams hidden by the nasty old shawl. Of course – there was no money for new clothes. ‘You need a better dress. Let’s get you something of mine.’ She was surprised how pleased Agrippina’s grateful, if embarrassed smile made her.
One moment of domestic insight bred others in the following days. She was aware of Marcus grinning to himself when he saw her tutoring young Barbarian in varnishing, just as Horace smiled when, one evening, she and the young Lemans started teasing Marcus about a girl. He’d taken to going out on Thursday and Friday evenings to meetings of the Union of Youth avant-garde art group, which this girl attended. Inna even laughed when Agrippina, clearly feeling more confident in her pretty, cut-down, dark-green dress joked, ‘No secrets, brother: we can guess what she looks like already. We know your type: tall, thin, black-haired?’
That night, alone together upstairs with her husband, Inna rolled over in the bed towards him.
Horace was graceful enough not even to show surprise. He just enveloped her welcomingly in his arms, and smiled a great joyful smile as she wound her legs around his. She could feel his desire.
When they surfaced from that kiss of reunion, the first in so long, and he murmured, ‘How I’ve missed you,’ she saw from the tenderness in his eyes that it was all right, and everything could be as it was before. Only then he didn’t, as she’d imagined, shift her on top of him, with a great groan of want.
Instead, he blinked and, obviously remembering the bucket and rags on the landing, whispered, in that practical way of his, ‘But we should wait a week, shouldn’t we?’ That was their agreement: how not to have a baby.
She wriggled against him, suddenly desperate to move on from the impasse in their lives and create something, someone, new: another life to face the world with the pair of them. ‘We don’t have to wait, do we?’ she whispered back. ‘We could choose…’
‘It’s not the time for children,’ Horace said sadly, though his hands were still moving over her skin. ‘Not yet.’
* * *
If Inna was disappointed, she couldn’t help but see that Horace had reason on his side. She couldn’t help, either, being impressed at how adroitly her husband sidestepped the growing difficulties of getting money, as the autumn turned to brutal sleet, and the Germans got closer, and the queues and demonstrations swelled. At how he handled the gentlemen from Fabergé who, as he spent less and less time at the shop, took to dropping in at the apartment instead to chat quietly in English or French. Or at the small amounts of money on top of his stipend that Horace magicked up for the communal pot. And at his practicality, repeatedly moving around the furniture on the top landing and experimenting with the placing of the bookshelves he’d made to add to the comfort of what was now almost a second apartment.
Horace, still sauntering around the city with his linen ironed and his chin shaved, still dropping in on the many acquaintances he’d made here and there, managed to find jobs for everyone, too, which brought in a few extra roubles. He teamed Madame Leman up with an English journalist called Ransome, who’d started employing her, a couple of days a week, to translate the Russian newspapers for him. He found Barbarian and Agrippina little evening jobs: one preparing paints for a group of wealthy amateur artists over on the English Embankment, where the foreigners lived; the other turning pages for pianists
at the Philharmonia.
Horace’s jobs were a cut above the employment Barbarian had briefly found for himself as an evening janitor at a peculiar medical museum round the corner. He guarded glass jars of bobbing body parts pickled in alcohol and came back with pockets jingling, and furtive glee in his eyes. They had Revolution sausage (don’t ask what meat) for three or four meals. But it only lasted a fortnight, and he finally confessed what he’d really been up to: emptying the alcohol from the jars, pouring in water instead, and selling the murky pickling liquid in the market to sailors. ‘It’s all gone now,’ Barbarian said, rather wistfully. ‘There’s no point going back.’
In his quiet way, Inna realized, her husband was taking charge of all their efforts to muddle through and survive. And, against all the odds, they – a widow, a cripple, two children, a Jewess and a foreigner – were still getting by without too much hunger or too many quarrels. It wasn’t perfect – far from it. They were all outsiders now. But the cautious optimism in the household reinforced her hope that, maybe, everything would turn out all right.
‘Horace?’ she said, one night, in the yellow room.
‘Mm?’ he said vaguely. He was reading the paper.
‘Marcus says he’s heard of a society paying musicians to give concerts at working men’s clubs.’
‘Mm?’ He looked up from his newspaper. His eyes were kind.
She took a deep breath, wondering whether she would get over her nerves and actually come to enjoy doing what she was about to suggest. ‘If I started practising again, do you think they would want me?’
* * *
By October people were saying that the Provisional Government was so scared it now held its sittings standing up. Out in the Hay Market, at dawn, they were saying the Bolsheviks would attack the Winter Palace tonight. Horace and his new friend Ransome had dropped in for a bite in the restaurant near Palace Square that had become the correspondents’ stamping ground: ‘For the ringside seat,’ Ransome had said, ‘all the reporters will be going.’
They had come in after an evening at the Mariinsky Theatre, in theory enjoying ballet, but really just watching the evening newspapers floating, like swans, along the rows from one buzzing member of the audience to another, as rumours, wilder by the hour, spread through the parterre and the belle étage. Ransome needed light relief, he’d said, when he ran into Horace on Theatre Square. And his newspaper would pay for the whole evening. Who would say no?
Horace would have gone even without the promise of food. He enjoyed curiosities, and Ransome was certainly that: an unathletic man, soft-muscled, who suffered from stomach ulcers, but all buoyed up tonight with the strange high spirits of newspapermen in extreme times. (Madame Leman said Ransome was enjoying the unrest for an extra, private reason: because he was sleeping with the secretary of one of these now-fashionable Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, the squat, wiry-haired brute who, Horace now knew, had been running things since their real leader Lenin had fled.)
They were finishing their soup when the waiter came up and asked if Messieurs wouldn’t mind moving into the other dining room, at the back of the hotel, for the second course. The management was expecting shooting, the waiter said uneasily. The mob attack on the Winter Palace was supposed to be imminent, and they wanted to put out the lights in this room, which was too close to Palace Square, and very exposed.
Ransome grinned cheerfully and got straight up. Horace too. As he followed the tweed-backed journalist into the other room, he wondered whether Ransome’s Yevgenia was really the rouged-up hussy Madame Leman made her out to be, which sounded intriguingly un-revolutionary. He couldn’t help but recall what Fabergé had said that morning: ‘No one in their right mind wants the Bolsheviks, but no one will bother to go out and fight for Prime Minister Kerensky either.’
Horace didn’t believe there’d be more fighting in the street, even though the German army was so near to the city; even though he’d seen the barges full of ministry paperwork and treasures from the Hermitage floating down the Neva every blustery day, the first signs of the evacuation that must surely come soon; even though every street corner seemed to be manned by a ragged orator, yelling, ‘The rich have lots of everything; the poor have nothing; everything will belong to the poor,’ and it now took a bagful of worthless new paper roubles to buy salt, or candles, or bread. People were too busy just surviving to rebel any more, weren’t they?
Still, he wanted to know what Ransome thought.
Ransome had been at the Winter Palace in the afternoon, interviewing the ‘defenders of the palace’ – as it turned out, just a few hundred Cossacks and schoolboy cadets, and two hundred bedraggled women known as the Women’s Shock Battalion of Death, who’d been drafted in to save the Prime Minister from the hungry mob. He’d been laughing at how Kerensky’s motley crew of defenders had got so depressed as the light faded that most of them had quietly gone off into town to lift their spirits by finding some supper.
‘Just like us,’ Ransome said easily, waving at the other reporters eating at nearby tables; all, like him, lit up with electric excitement.
‘So,’ Horace deduced, hopefully, ‘you don’t think anything will actually happen after all?’
Ransome had picked up his spoon, ready to return to his soup. But he stopped at that, and looked brightly across the table. The un-English fervour of his gaze, Horace thought, sat very oddly on his tweedy academic shoulders.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I do think it will. You see, Lenin’s on his way back.’
But not that night, it seemed.
It was eleven before Horace set off for home, merry on Château Latour, leaving his new friend with an American colleague, swapping stories. What did they know? There’d been no shooting. Nevsky was deserted. The night was quiet. The city seemed dead.
* * *
Yasha was polishing his fiddle left-handed, alone in his room near the school at Smolny, thinking of the way Inna had looked as she worked on the Strad. She’d had the same expression on her face whenever they were alone together, too – except for that sweet first moment, whenever he closed the door on the world and took her in his arms, when she’d sigh as if all her cares were lifted from her, and shut her eyes.
Yasha’s thoughts ran naturally on from this to why he’d left the Lemans’ house. He couldn’t explain this satisfactorily to himself. He didn’t like to think that he’d been successfully squeezed out by Horace, or had been rejected by Inna, who wouldn’t come with him, or that he’d just cut his losses and given up on her. He’d found he preferred to tell himself that it was fear of the thugs who’d beaten him up that had forced him to clear out, however much he hated to believe that he was a person who could be governed by fear.
Well, it was true, he had been scared. Even now, out in the safety of Smolny, with his arm nearly healed, he still felt black sludge in his gut whenever he remembered those three brutes closing in on him – the empty look in their eyes, as their fists and feet crashed into him, as if he wasn’t a person at all, just vermin to be exterminated. And he had nightmares he still woke up sweating from, however often his bony revolutionary flatmate Fanny slid into the bed and rocked him in her skinny arms. (She wasn’t a bad sort, Fanny. Not maternal exactly, and not really a lover either, except for the occasional bleak fumble, but at least someone who, after all she’d gone through in all those prisons, really understood fear, and he clung to her like one terrified kid hanging on to another.) He was ashamed of having felt that fear. But he was more ashamed still of using it to avoid thinking about how defeated and outwitted he’d felt by Horace, even before the men had laid into him. Gradually, as his bruises and broken bone began to heal, and the layers of varnish went on, he began to tell himself that, soon, once the violin was done, perhaps he might take it back, and find Inna, and explain. As the weeks went by, he found himself believing she would listen, and forgive him his fear, and take him back.
Now, as he put the violin back down on the table, wrapped in the ragged scarf he’d bee
n polishing it with, he caught a glimmer of movement on the street.
He glanced out. Two men were walking very quickly towards Smolny: short, unimpressive men. Coat collars up, noses stuck forward under workers’ caps, eyes flickering furtively round; one very blond.
Nothing odd about that, except that it was nearly midnight – the time people left Smolny, usually.
He was just about to get up and take off his clothes, ready for the rumpled bed in the corner, when he saw a gust of wind outside lift the blond man’s cap off his head. It lifted his blond hair, too, revealing the bald pate gleaming underneath. The man grabbed at it, and steadied it back on his head. But Yasha couldn’t miss the black beard, which popped out from inside his coat collar.
With a prickle of excitement, he recognized the missing Bolshevik leader: the man who’d been on the run since July.
Immediately his fatigue vanished. Lenin had come out of hiding! Something really was up. He grabbed at his coat, flung himself down the stairs, and began to race back towards the crowds at the doors of Smolny.
* * *
It was only that night that Yasha finally knew for sure that, of all revolutionary groups and beliefs represented here at Smolny, it was the Bolsheviks who would win, and it was their leader alone whom he could support with all his heart. What swayed him was the fearless, doubt-free way that Lenin walked into Room 36 and announced, ‘Comrades! We need to start the seizure of power now!’
Yasha’s heart swelled. He’d found his truth. Most people were ground down by prison, exile and violence. Even he had been, a little. But now it felt as though all those distortions and impurities were being burned away, for here, at last, was a man stripped of the personal and immune to the stupidity of emotion. Impervious to fear.
* * *
When Inna and Horace and Madame Leman went out at dawn the next morning to join the bread and groceries queues, shivering and yawning, it was to discover that the palace had, to Horace’s astonishment, already been overrun. Young men with pails of glue were slapping up posters telling them Kerensky was gone and there was a new revolutionary government: the Soviet of People’s Commissars.
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 28