Midnight in St. Petersburg

by Vanora Bennett

  It was 365 days since all this began. In that year, so many other people’s resistance to the new order had been overcome. The bank workers who’d refused to open their safes for these grubby new masters had given in after the Bolsheviks held guns to their heads. The surly ministry doormen who, a year ago, had tried to turn away the first Bolshevik Commissars had, likewise, changed their minds. The actors in the imperial theatres, who’d come out on strike against the new regime, were back on stage. But Inna wasn’t reconciled.

  It wasn’t all bad, true. Inna had been impressed by some of these new Soviet rulers’ odder, more idealistic new laws. She oohed and aahed like everyone else when they abolished the two weeks that would ordinarily follow 31 January, making the next day 15 February instead of 1 February, and bringing Russian time, which had for centuries lagged two weeks behind the West’s, bang up to date. She marvelled when they did away with all the old-fashioned glitches in Russian spelling and killed off a couple of useless letters, turning the written language into a logical modern construct.

  It was true, too, that the war had ended (though it was best not to think about the terms).

  Still, Inna was less willing than her husband to be charmed by the posters. Their defiant brightness reminded her of all the things that had gone wrong this year; of the darkness underneath.

  Lenin had moved the Soviet government to Moscow in the spring after someone had taken a potshot at him. There’d never been anything to keep this boggy city going but the machinery of empire, and now the innumerable government offices and functionaries had gone. So Petrograd was dying all around them: and those people who hadn’t already left were starving. The White resistance, down in the south, was crystallizing into civil war. The Bolsheviks had a secret police of their own called the Cheka, as terrifying as the Emperor’s secret police had ever been; worse, maybe. Since someone else had taken another potshot at Lenin in August, in Moscow – a girl this time – the Cheka were stamping out opposition to the Revolution. But you didn’t get details of the Red Terror from the papers, which were as empty as ever, just from whispers in queues: stories that the Romanovs had all been killed, from the former Emperor Nikolai Romanov, shot with his wife and children and servants somewhere in the Urals, to every insignificant cousin in every remote corner of the land. Shot, stabbed, dissolved in acid baths, dropped down mine shafts.

  There was the everyday terror you saw whenever you went out, too: gloating servants turning on every grandee they’d ever felt slighted by, yelling, ‘Time to start looting from the looters!’ as they emptied the houses of the rich. Everywhere eyes glinted with hate.

  And then there was the hunger. Pavlov, a Nobel scientist, growing his own carrots and potatoes; poor old Professor Gezekhus, blown up with hunger like some African famine victim; or Nastya, the teenage daughter of the family upstairs, who’d taken to hanging around outside on the street, not with the icons and pearl brooches and leather-bound books and woollens and boots that took other gloomy ladies out to the market, but with cheeks boldly rouged and a pinched look on her face. How long before Agrippina went the same way? How long before she herself…?

  So walking about this festival of revolution in Petrograd this afternoon didn’t delight Inna. It just made her feel dizzy, especially when she thought about the future. No wonder the sky was so cheerfully blue. Why would there be clouds, when the factories had all stopped working? Weeds sprouted from the Merchants’ Yard walls, and the wooden pavements were rotting.

  So there was bitterness in her voice as she replied, ‘Not so bad, no. And who cares if people heat their apartments by burning their books, and eat dogs and cats?’

  ‘Do you mind if I quickly drop something off?’ Horace asked casually a little later when they got as far along Nevsky as Yeliseyevsky’s. She could see the strip of open ground just beyond, marking the turning into Great Cavalry Street and the apartment where they’d once lived. Inna shivered. The great black skeletons of the trees there, beckoning bonily in the sharp wind, seemed to be calling her back.

  She nodded agreement. She didn’t want to be walking around on her own any more, and she definitely didn’t want Horace doing so. Lucky his coat was so shabby, she thought, because it wasn’t just thieves being killed on a mob whim any more. They were catching officers too – anyone in smart clothes – and administering revolutionary justice from the nearest lamp-post. That’s why Madame Leman had sewn these mangy old rabbit skins on to everyone’s collars. She’d started with Horace’s, Inna guessed, because he was the one street boys were likeliest to stop and point at, squealing in their high, innocent, dangerous voices, ‘BUR-ZHUI!’ Horace’s upright carriage and kind, gentlemanly air meant he could easily be taken for some vestige of the old orders, or simply recognized as a foreigner who must therefore be a bourgeois, and punished accordingly.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said. But she’d half guessed already, even before they set off towards their old home. Franz Birbaum from Fabergé’s still lived in the same building, with its view of the avenue of tall trees and the green-and-white classical temple where the Finnish Lutherans prayed. He was the last of Horace’s colleagues left.

  ‘I won’t be a moment,’ he said, not answering her question. She glanced at him: at the lines – laughter lines – round his eyes, and those other lines, down his cheeks and across his forehead, which could only be worry. With sudden concern she thought, How careworn he looks.

  He kissed her forehead when they’d pushed through the unlocked downstairs door (no doorman here any more). ‘You wait downstairs.’ That excitement she’d seen in him outside seemed to have evaporated, as he plodded up the stairs.

  She stood, pleased to be out of the wind, remembering the dusty smell of this place, and the wild wind soughing in the branches outside while she’d lain in her cosy bed with Horace beside her. Refusing to dwell on the anguish of those last few weeks here – the creeping about, the deceit – she remembered instead the warmth of the rooms, the electricity, clothes and food plentifully available at shops round every corner. She remembered laughing and eating with Horace on her wedding night, and the peace they’d shared. Yes, they’d been good times, here, she thought.

  She’d liked Monsieur Birbaum, too: a precise, fussy, good-natured old gentleman, who’d learned passable Russian for a foreigner. And Horace admired his stubbornness in staying on, mending watches and gold chains, as he waited for the Whites to win the Civil War and the good old times to come back. Inna knew that Horace felt solidarity with him, when so many other foreigners were giving up and slinking away. They all came to say goodbye. These days, Horace seemed popular among foreigners whose names she’d never even heard until they came to shake his hand as they left; though, after they’d gone, he sometimes called them faint-hearts, and laughed a bit.

  ‘What are they running to? That’s the question they should be asking,’ he’d say, shaking his head. Carl Fabergé himself had gone, she knew, but Birbaum hung on. And, though she hadn’t been back here for several months, Inna knew that Horace still dropped in on him every now and then.

  Why didn’t he ask me up too? she wondered, but without minding. They’d want to talk English or French, she supposed, and reminisce about old times.

  Horace was as good as his word, and was down inside five minutes.

  She didn’t understand why, when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he embraced her as if they’d been parted for years, but she didn’t mind that either.

  ‘How’s Monsieur Birbaum?’ she murmured into his shoulder.

  ‘Packing.’ She heard tightness in his voice. ‘He’s leaving the city tonight. The Housing Committee wants his flat.’

  Inna could just imagine the grim requisitioning party of men with old coats and hard eyes, working out how many people could be crammed into Birbaum’s living space and where the partitions should be.

  ‘They’ve scared him off. He says I should be going too. It’s all over here for the likes of us, he says.’

 
He looked down at her. His eyes were wet. She’d never seen this before.

  ‘Oh Horace,’ she whispered, holding him close. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He told her the rest out on the street as they walked under the heaving trees. Birbaum was planning on taking the route most people were leaving by, now the city was emptying out. He’d go south, through Kiev, down to the Black Sea at Yalta. Yalta, behind the White army lines, was where the White sympathizers were, the aristocrats, and plenty of less aristocratic people, too. Even if you hadn’t liked the way things had been before, life for anyone remotely well to do had certainly felt safer under the Emperor. At Yalta, you were poised for onward flight, if need be, to Constantinople or Jerusalem or beyond, though no one wanted to leave Russia altogether unless the Reds broke through. Inna had heard that the White sympathizers were enjoying their long sojourn in the pretty seaside resort, under the bougainvillea. Felix Youssoupoff was among the many Fabergé clients down there, or nearby, at his family estate in the Crimean peninsula’s hills, Horace continued, waiting for all this to be over, and for normality to return.

  ‘Perhaps we should go too,’ Inna said cautiously, watching her toecaps kick up, one after the other, under her coat. Horace had never wanted to leave before, and he didn’t answer now. Perhaps the wind had blown away her words? Inna thought, forgiving him.

  ‘What were you dropping off, anyway?’ she asked, when they were nearly home.

  He stopped, and Inna was aware of the sudden carefulness in his eyes. ‘Well, it’s all over now – like Barbarian’s adventure with the pickling alcohol, I suppose,’ he said reluctantly.

  Out of his pocket he took a roll of money she hadn’t seen before, carefully cupped in his hand so that the ragged passers-by wouldn’t be able to see it. Even in the debased currency of the day, with a bag of flour now costing five thousand roubles, she could see it was enough to help for a while. Once she’d seen it, he stuffed it away again.

  ‘It’s for travel papers,’ he said. ‘People pay me and I get them from Maxim.’

  Inna blinked. Horace had gone out early this morning, true, and come back with a copy of New Life. But he hadn’t said he was going to see Maxim. And what did Maxim have to do with getting travel documents, anyway? His newspaper was always in trouble with the authorities, for being so critical. But then again, the new rulers were still supposed to be fond of him, personally, for the support he’d given them in the past, and he knew all the socialists and was close to many Bolsheviks. He could have a word in anyone’s ear. He was connected. So, yes, perhaps he would be a good man to go to, if you wanted documents for getting away.

  She blinked again. Was that why all the foreigners came to see Horace?

  ‘I’ve been storing things for old Fabergé customers – things they used to keep at the shop, in Monsieur Fabergé’s safe. Gold is better than money, with the inflation,’ he went on, very low.

  She let it sink in – how had she not known? Or had she half known all along? She nodded, slowly. ‘You kept them under the floorboards,’ she breathed. ‘Of course. Under those bookshelves you keep moving round…’

  ‘I knew they’d rifle the safe in the end,’ Horace confirmed jerkily. ‘I said, better to take precautions than just wait for the worst. I wanted to help people leave with their belongings. That’s what my stipend was for. And Birbaum’s been paying me that, too, over these last few months. But now there’s no one else left.’

  Inna nodded again, more bleakly this time. So the stipend would stop too. All they’d lived on, at least in the early months, before Madame Leman had got so good at sourcing government ration parcels, would come to an end.

  Suddenly overwhelmed, she wrapped him in her arms again. ‘You did all that, for all of us, and you never breathed a word,’ she said. ‘You’re a good man, Horace Wallick. It’s why I love you.’

  His arms tightened about her. They stayed like that, swaying together for a long moment, turned away from the world, shutting out the filthy pavement of Garden Street and the stinking Hay Market ahead.

  ‘There was a whole crate of stuff when we moved in,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘And now it’s all gone. The box is empty. Everyone’s left.’

  ‘We should go too,’ Inna said, stepping back. Struck, suddenly, by the obviousness of it. ‘Whatever old rat Madame Leman sews on your collar, you still look like a foreign gentleman. It’s only a question of time before—’

  But he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’

  * * *

  There was food on the table when they got back: tea, steaming in glasses, and sugar in rough lumps in a bowl, a mound of rusks, and a big tin of sprats in tomato sauce. The four Lemans and Marcus’s Olympia were at the table, waiting.

  ‘Hurry!’ Agrippina said cheerfully. ‘Sit down before the tea gets cold. And tuck in – imagine, sprats! We’re celebrating.’

  ‘We’ve got a new parcel!’ Marcus chimed in.

  Several months previously, Madame Leman had consulted her husband’s old acquaintance, Yuri Pavlovich, an artist now more famous as the city’s best ration-hunter, as to what her own family’s plan of action should be to avoid starvation. Yuri Pavlovich got one parcel a month – scholar’s rations – from the Academy of Art; another – a militiaman’s rations – from the Cultural and Education Studio for Militiamen that he’d set up; and a third – the Baltic Fleet’s special rations – for lecturing sailors on Italian painting. God helps those who help themselves, he told her. So you must thank God for the dissemination of culture to the proletariat, which the authorities are so keen on now, and start disseminating some yourselves.

  Now Madame Leman talked once a week to militiamen on German literature. ‘Poor bored things, how they yawn and scratch,’ she told Inna.

  A week ago, Maxim had finally sent word, via Madame Leman, that if Inna was willing, and if her performance was at concert level, he’d found an opening for her to go and play Tchaikovsky at working men’s clubs.

  ‘Will I be good enough?’ she’d begun, but caught herself. Her old irrational dread was just a self-indulgent luxury when there was the possibility of a parcel.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Barbarian had said scornfully, in his deep man’s voice. She’d laughed in embarrassment as he’d gone on. ‘You could play any old marching song to them, with every note a wrong one, and what would it matter? They’re not going to know the difference.’

  ‘Where is this parcel from?’ Inna asked now, sitting down. Seated beside her, Horace was beaming round at the family as if nothing was wrong.

  ‘The Rosa Luxemburg Drops of Milk Maternity Centre!’ they chorused.

  ‘Marcus has been lecturing midwives on the history of violin-making!’ Madame Leman added, grinning.

  ‘He’s going to get breast-feeding mothers’ rations for it, too!’ Agrippina said. Her eyes were round. ‘Next time there’ll be cheese! Butter!’

  When they went upstairs Inna said to Horace, reassured, ‘You see? They’ve found their feet. They don’t need your stipend any more. They’re going to be all right.’

  After a moment, she added, ‘And we should go. Because we’re not.’

  But he averted his eyes. ‘No,’ he said, too loudly, going out to wash and banging the door behind him.

  * * *

  Horace understood that Inna was afraid. She was always coming back from some queue with new stories from the crowd about the Cheka; about arrests, disappearances, torture. She repeated them, looking to him to share her fear. But he didn’t, because he didn’t really believe them. Of course people whispered. The new leaders only had themselves to blame for that, with their new censorship, which was even more stifling than the old. But things couldn’t be as bad as people made out, surely? To Horace’s mind, the stories about the new secret police had the nightmarish, exaggerated tone of fairy tales full of villains.

  The Moscow clown who people were saying was now dead, for instance – Bim Bom – surely he hadn’t really been kille
d just for poking fun at the politicians in his act? How could you actually believe that armed men had burst onstage and chased him around his props, shooting with pistols, making the circus crowd laugh and cheer while the grease-painted figure in checked trousers ran? Or that they’d all gone on thinking it was just another part of the show until he was shot dead, in front of a suddenly screaming audience? And what about the stories about the officer in Kharkov who was supposed to snort cocaine before interrogations, then dip his White, or maybe-White, suspects’ hands in boiling water, so he could peel off their skin in perfect glove shape? (White gloves, of course?)

  The horror stories had their own grotesque Gothic logic, to be sure, but Horace was persuaded they were the usual Russian exaggeration. And Inna was just reliving her understandable fear of the old police, he thought, splashing water from the jug on his face. And he wasn’t going to be frightened away by ghosts from the past, when he was so interested by the present.

  There was so much happening here and now, in the realm of ideas this stiff old city had suddenly become. After the dull grind of his Fabergé years, he felt jolted into electric life by Marcus’s young friends from the Union of Youth, with their thrilling, shockingly modern statements.

  ‘The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.’

  And Alyosha Kruchenykh, bard of Beyond-Sense poetry, the most avant-garde of all the avant-garde, had asked him only last night, with that puckish grin of his, if he’d help their friend Kasimir paint the sets for a new staging of the Futurists’ opera. Of course Horace had no intention of giving up his chance to bring to life all those extravagantly radical stage characters, Nero and Caligula in the Same Person, Traveller through All the Ages, Telephone Talker and the rest. Even if nothing came of that, he had no intention, either, of leaving behind those late-night conversations, which were headier than any champagne and full of truth for today. What was it the other poet had said last night? ‘The poetry of Futurism is the poetry of the city, of the contemporary city. Feverishness is what characterizes the tempo of the contemporary world. In the city there are no flowing, measured lines of curvature: angles, fractures and zigzags are what make up the profile of the city.’