Yes, Horace thought, I heard that there, in the yellow room, and then I went out today and saw it in the square, with my own eyes. Where else could that have happened?
* * *
Inna was asleep, curled over on the far side of the bed, when Horace crept back into the bedroom.
He switched off the lamp.
In the darkness, he told himself: It’s right to stay, for what would I be without all the life I’ve found here?
In the darkness, his own private fear came on him: the fear of abandoning everything he’d made for himself, and discovered for himself, here in this city, with all its manic energy; the fear of abandoning even the debonair, knowledgeable self he’d crafted here, who sauntered inquisitively around, transforming himself into first this kind of artist, then that, as fast as his environment shifted shape; the fear of leaving behind the place his soul had made its home.
No, it was simpler than that: Horace was experiencing the dread of Home.
It wasn’t that Yalta and the Whites would be so bad, in themselves. There’d be food, and respite from the snows. There’d be some of the exotic company he’d enjoyed here. But to think of going to Yalta would be to open his mind to the possibility that, further down the line, if things went wrong, there might also have to be a return to England.
England: that grey vision of half-hearted rain, bobbing bowler hats, dark umbrellas, stockbrokers on suburban trains, and bloodless, apologetic voices saying ‘can’t complain’ and ‘mustn’t grumble’. The dullness. The quiet.
Shrinking even further over to his side of the bed, Horace asked himself: What would I be, what would I do, in South Norwood?
* * *
For the next few days, Inna was quiet around Horace. She wasn’t angry, exactly, but maybe puzzled; keeping a tactful distance. He was pleased, at least, that if she wasn’t talking much to him, she wouldn’t be resuming that conversation. He didn’t want to be nagged.
But then she burst in on him in the yellow room with a letter in her hand, looking suddenly radiant and crying, excitedly, ‘Look, we can go – this is how!’
Horace, his heart heavy, glanced up from his newspaper. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed gaily, waving the letter. ‘God knows how it got through the censors, or even through the mail – maybe someone brought it; who knows? – but Youssoupoff has got a letter to us! It was in Aunt Cockatoo’s letterbox! I’ve just found it!’
Horace raised an eyebrow. ‘And…?’
‘He’s outside Yalta! He wants us to take his violin to him!’
Horace felt old suddenly; old and weary.
She must want Yalta a lot to have so completely forgotten her old animosity towards Youssoupoff, he thought. Well, Yalta was a legend that everyone knew and loved: the glitter of sun on sea, the dark-green mountains behind, the romantic aristocrats’ castles that you saw on postcards, the yachts and military ships, the men in uniform, the summer that lasted till November and began again in March, the softness of the balmy air, the tawny-skinned locals, the palm trees …
He stood up. ‘It’s out of the question,’ he said. He heard it come out like a whiplash.
Determinedly, Inna ignored him. ‘He’s offering very generous terms. Look, a payment in gold or valuables; because what good would roubles be? He’ll put us up for the rest of the war on his estate, and, if the war goes the wrong way for the Whites, and, God forbid, they all have to evacuate, he’ll help us leave too. He says we can travel with him!’
‘Forget it,’ Horace said harshly. ‘It’s insane. He’s insane. You of all people should know that.’
Looking as shocked as though he’d slapped her, she paused for breath, just long enough for Horace to regret his brutal tone, and to register the desperation in her excitement.
But then she stepped closer, and said challengingly, ‘He’s not that insane. And he’s offered to help us. Who else is willing to do that for us?’
He folded his arms across his chest. Closed his eyes. I’m not going back to England, he was telling himself, in the dancing red cloud of light-spots behind his eyeballs.
‘You’re not safe here,’ she persisted. ‘We’re not safe here. We have to leave.’
He opened his eyes. ‘We can’t – because of the journey.’
Doubt appeared on her face, because who would know more about this than him, after all his muttered conversations with about-to-be-émigrés whose papers he’d procured?
‘We’d have to go right through where the civil war is.’
Now he could see angry tears in her eyes. ‘But we’d just be passing through!’ she said, almost childishly.
‘But the time would come when someone, from one side or the other, would stop the train. Requisition it. We’d have to get out and walk. And what then?’ he replied gently. ‘We’d be right back there, down in the south, where it’s never been good to be a Jew, among the very people you wanted to get away from before. Peasants down there who’ve never even seen a foreigner might be at a loss as to what to make of me but they won’t be fooled for a moment by you. They’ll know exactly who they’re looking at. And everyone will be more feral than before with cold and hunger.’
He put his hands on her shoulders, and tried to draw her into an embrace. But she resisted.
‘You wouldn’t be safe, on the way down there,’ he said. ‘That’s why we’re not going. You’re better off here.’
Blinking hard, Inna nodded, shrugged off his hands and left.
I should follow her, Horace thought. But he didn’t. Instead he picked up his newspaper, and sat down in the sudden silence of an empty room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
‘Inna dear, I can tell you don’t really want to play to the working men, because you still aren’t practising, so you’d better come to see Maxim with me yourself,’ Madame Leman said briskly. ‘We need more parcels, and obviously Horace can’t go out and get one, the way things are. Besides, he’s done quite enough for us. And Maxim is full of ideas. He may be able to think of something else for you.’
It was after New Year, in February 1919. All kinds of people had started coming to Maxim with all kinds of petitions now, because he was still said to have the ear of the powerful. (Not that that made Maxim immune, as Inna knew. People had done just the same with Rasputin, once.) Still, for now at least he was a port of call for the desperate.
The scene that met their eyes in the great book-lined study-cum-dining-room at the apartment on Kronversky Avenue was like a hallucination. It was hot inside – hot! In fact, it was so hot that none of the two dozen or so people at the crowded trestle table was wearing a coat.
They were an ill-assorted bunch. There were rough Petrograd sailors, writers, and – Inna scanned the room curiously – all kinds of other oddities bumping elbows. Inna could swear that was Tatlin the young architect, Marcus’s and Olympia’s friend, over there, handsome and floppy-haired, and wasn’t that Chaliapin, less sleek than usual, asking for seconds in his famous bass voice? And over in the corner, looking haughty, not speaking, just intently eating, an old, old couple with a mangy dog at their feet, whom, she realized, she’d heard about: they were the grand duke and his wife, who lived upstairs surrounded by statues of the Buddha, whom Maxim was said to have rescued from the crowded jails of the Cheka soon after the Red Terror set in. Whoever they were, they were all doing the same thing she and Madame Leman were about to do: shovelling kasha (hot kasha!) into their mouths as fast as they were able.
Only Maxim himself looked chilly. He was wearing a thick grey sweater, and his sturdy but skinny body was racked by coughs. Inna could see the way his bony face, with its jutting cheekbones and big thin-lipped mouth, was constantly working to mask his tuberculosis.
Maxim’s eyes lit up at the sight of Madame Leman. ‘Dear Lidiya,’ he said warmly, advancing to embrace her, ‘come in, come in! Make yourself and your friend at home!’ Turning to the plump woman dishing up gruel from a vat into whatever receptacles cam
e to hand – a cut-glass bowl here, a tin mug there – he added, ‘Moura, dear heart! Two more, over here!’
Before Inna knew where she was, they were all perched on impromptu stools made from piles of encyclopedias which Maxim had scooped off the lower shelves; they had their coats off, and warm bowls in their hands, and were eating.
‘All your wonderful languages,’ Maxim said enthusiastically to Madame Leman. ‘Why, I’ve had you in mind for some time for a project I’m discussing with the comrades now…’ And he was off, describing, amid the gusts of steam and talk that seemed to come from another life, a miraculous-sounding plan to set up an enormous house of world literature and translate all (all!) foreign classics into Russian, for the benefit of the proletariat.
‘It sounds splendid, Maxim dear; I’d be delighted,’ Madame Leman said quickly, and, winking at Inna, put an appealing hand on his arm. ‘And it makes me wonder, right away, whether you might also be able to find something for Inna here?’ She indicated Inna, with a beguiling smile. ‘She’s a linguist, too – fluent English! And she’s a good girl, too: a hard worker, conscientious, well read; in short, one of us.’
Inna held her breath. Why, Madame Leman knew she could only speak a few words of English. Perhaps Maxim did too, because he didn’t really even look at her. But, after a brief pause, he patted Madame Leman on the shoulder, and nodded, and began smiling and talking again.
Breathing out, Inna ate, and let the happy phrases she was hearing, so forgiving of Madame Leman’s wild exaggeration, swirl through her mind: ‘Plenty of clerking and copying, so I’m sure we’ll be able find some jobs,’ and, to Madame Leman, ‘You, dear lady. You are just what we need.’
It was only as she scraped the last of the food out of her bowl that she noticed, sitting at the very end of the long table, a fine-featured, thin-haired, wiry man, with intelligent eyes set in a face that had lost just enough of its youthful firmness to make you aware of the skull beneath the skin. He wasn’t saying much, and was mostly just looking around, like Inna, as if enjoying the warmth in his belly, or memorizing the other guests. She’d never seen the man before; but she had seen the person hunched beside him, talking in a low, hurried voice. Even though this man had his back turned to them, and there was an unfamiliar furtiveness in his demeanour, she’d have recognized that silhouette anywhere. It was Yasha.
After a while, Inna touched Madame Leman’s arm, and indicated Yasha with a nod. Maxim followed his old friend’s glance across the room.
‘Ah, I’d forgotten. You all knew each other, didn’t you?’ Maxim murmured. ‘Before…’ He gave a regretful shake of the head. ‘But he’s swimming in dangerous waters, that young man. And, if I may be so bold as to offer an opinion: if he hasn’t acknowledged either of you, I wouldn’t go up to him right now.’ He leaned closer, so that Inna could hear the rasping in his throat. He croaked, fishing for a hanky from his pocket, ‘He won’t want that Cheka comrade he’s talking with to notice you, I expect.’
Inna was startled. She’d never seen anyone from the Cheka.
Maxim began coughing terribly into his hanky. When eventually he stopped, he touched Inna’s arm. ‘My apologies. Damn cough,’ he said weakly, almost whispering. ‘He’ll be avoiding you especially, because of your husband.’ He looked straight at her, with watery eyes, and suddenly she was grateful for the cough, and the whisper.
Madame Leman hadn’t actually mentioned Horace’s name when introducing Inna, and Inna had thought Maxim didn’t know who she was. But now, abruptly she realized he knew all about her, and was worried for Horace.
Maxim’s smile only got sadder. ‘You don’t want Chekists even clapping eyes on you,’ he mouthed, ‘if there’s the least chance they might take it into their heads that you’re … officer class. Anyone can be a counter-revolutionary or a saboteur. Anyone can be a White. Or so people might say.’
Inna nodded. The silence that followed was full of uncertainty.
Maxim looked from one woman to the other. ‘I don’t think your Yasha does anything really bad,’ he said at last. ‘He’s a good boy, at heart. He isn’t one of them, not really. He just … just talks to our Comrade Bokii there, sometimes, I’ve noticed. Who knows? Perhaps he has no choice. We all do what we have to, to survive.’
Inna looked towards the frail old grand duke, painfully putting his bowl on the floor for the little dog to lick, then back at Maxim. ‘Why do you have the Cheka man here, with him?’ she wanted to ask, but Maxim was shrugging. I do what I can, he was indicating. But I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. Then, smiling, clapping Madame Leman on the back, he shifted away from the difficult subject as if it had never been raised.
‘There’s so much it’s futile for us to worry about that all we can usefully do is hope,’ he proclaimed.
Madame Leman cast one last wistful glance down the table, before, with what Inna saw as the determination of a true survivor, rising to Maxim’s challenge. Visibly putting Yasha out of her mind, she turned, beaming, back to her friend. ‘But what we can do is plan for our shining future! We must make a comprehensive reading list for the proletariat!’
Inna sat very still, as if listening to the literary conversation that ensued: ‘Whom should we include? Zola? Dickens?’ from Maxim; Madame Leman laughing back at him, ‘But don’t the poor proletarians get enough miserable realism as it is? Shouldn’t we give them love, mystery, enchantment – the things they’re missing?’ But all Inna was thinking was, Why is Yasha talking to that man?
She couldn’t help noticing as the skull-faced man got up, shook Yasha’s hand, and quietly left the room. Yasha then picked up both their bowls and took them into the kitchen. That last, highly unusual act – the submissive curve of Yasha’s back – alarmed her more than ever.
But when he came out of the kitchen, his face was composed. He walked towards the way out without looking round or greeting anyone.
‘Why, it’s a wonderful, elemental love story!’ Madame Leman was exclaiming.
He hadn’t seen her, then, Inna thought. He was going to leave without a word.
The disappointment she felt was crushing. She’d never know why he’d stooped so low as to be telling that man other people’s secrets, as Maxim had seemed to be suggesting. (If that’s what he had been doing. Informing … But, no, she couldn’t believe that of Yasha.)
But then he stopped in the doorway, and turned his head just enough to give Inna a quick, impassive, unsurprised glance.
He did know I was here. He saw me after all, Inna thought, and was surprised by the surge of joy that came with the thought. Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded towards the door.
Outside, that nod said. Now.
Madame Leman, lost in another world, was continuing enthusiastically. ‘“I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn’t have thought of it,”’ Inna heard as she got up. The voice followed her as she started slipping behind chairs and benches towards the door. ‘“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am…”’
In the doorway, Inna paused. No, neither Madame Leman nor Maxim was looking her way. She slipped out.
Outside Yasha was striding down the wide street, wind flapping at his coat skirts. Shivering, with her coat still unbuttoned, Inna ran up behind him and caught his arm.
‘Why were you talking to the man from the Cheka?’ she panted.
He shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he mouthed. He turned to shield her from the roar of freezing wind and then nodded towards an archway into a derelict back courtyard. It was overflowing with stinking rubbish. Perhaps there were no dogs left to scavenge through the heaps.
‘I live just through there,’ he said. ‘Come and talk.’
* * *
‘It’s not what you think,’ Yasha said – muttered – as soon as they’d got to t
he top of the stairs.
He opened the door. Everyone was thinner than they used to be, of course. But he looked … diminished, Inna thought: worried, slinking, stray. Now he’d got her here, even the masterful body language had gone. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
The dark apartment wasn’t small, and it was full of things: clothes lying in piles on the corridor floor, books heaped up, a scatter of leaflets, and unwashed plates in a bowl outside the kitchen up at the far end. But it felt very empty. Its high ceilings were fuzzed with cobwebs. There was a drip, and a bucket to catch it in.
The next thing Inna noticed in the dim light of the oil lamp he lit was a patched woman’s jacket lying on one heap – an ugly one, in some sort of dark stuff. All clothes were old and ugly now, of course, but this was one that had never been anything but brutally utilitarian. She was strangely pleased.
‘Your revolutionary friends are away, then,’ she said, recognizing the jacket as one that only a political woman would wear and remembering, suddenly, that it had been brother-and-sister comrades he’d been talking about moving in with back then, though somewhere else. Feeling a stranger, she wondered if he and those people she didn’t know had moved on here together.
‘They’ve gone.’
Holding the lamp, he moved her towards the nearest door. She kept her eyes on the jacket. There were several stockings, too, she saw: thick ones, darned many times, most worn through at the heel. Ugly though they also were, she was less pleased to see such intimate female articles so close to Yasha’s room.
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 31