Midnight in St. Petersburg

by Vanora Bennett

  * * *

  Moscow, city of bells and onion domes and lopsided little yellow houses with their stucco falling off in great patches behind the red banners, came creeping up around them one overcast dawn.

  ‘Look,’ Horace said, waking Inna with a bristly kiss. She stared through the dull glass in dull surprise, and then began scrambling to do her hair, and assemble her coat and boots.

  When the train finally stopped in the north of the city, they picked up their bags and walked across town to the next train. They needed to save the money sewn into their coats, and, more importantly, were anxious to avoid attracting attention in an unfamiliar place where political sympathies were uncertain.

  ‘You’re still limping,’ Inna said. Marcus had tried to repair Horace’s boot, but the big string stitches through the uppers only just held the leather together. It would let damp in: maybe this was the problem?

  ‘Oh,’ said Horace, ‘it’s nothing.’ He smiled, and the care seemed to lift from his face. ‘You sound happier.’

  Moscow was just the first change of many on the itinerary Horace had tentatively drawn up to try and skirt anywhere the war further south was likely to be.

  The war, Inna imagined, was only ever a place; quite a small place, perhaps, with people leading something quite like their normal lives only a road or a field away. But the war was also like a storm that might move on at any moment. The important thing was to keep up to date with the war news, and listen to rumours on the trains, so you could have the most recent information about where the fighting might be, and how to avoid it.

  But even Moscow, still in the north, was alien territory to her and Horace. They walked, slowly, for an hour, towards the station for Kiev, through the black, icy snow of a city full of bonfires outside, and the exhaust pipes of burzhuiki, inside, sticking out of windows. The violin was slung across Inna’s back and she was carrying the two bags in her hands.

  ‘Let me,’ she’d said with sudden pity when she’d seen Horace grimace as he picked them up. ‘They’re not heavy.’

  She couldn’t cry here, as she had to ask strangers the way. They had decided it was unwise to let Horace, with his accent, open his mouth. On this journey, she felt in no particular danger – yet. But Horace, with his foreign voice, was a potential victim in this hungry crowd. She was going to protect him.

  * * *

  It turned out that Kiev, the most obvious next stop on their journey, was not a good place to head. She wasn’t sorry when Horace ruled it out – in a whisper.

  Kiev was almost certainly too dangerous now, he said. With the German wartime forces gone, their puppet government of Ukrainian nationalists had vanished too, leaving behind Whites, Reds and a mysterious Ukrainian peasant army slugging it out in the streets or in the fields. Wildly contradictory press reports spoke of first one lot and then the other trouncing the rest and forming governments with strange, wild-sounding names.

  Nor could they head straight for Sevastopol, the main port of the Crimean peninsula, south of Kiev. It was their logical destination, since from Sevastopol it was only a short drive along the coast to the Youssoupoff estate, and Yalta. But, like Kiev, Sevastopol was too important not to be dangerous. Ever since the sailors of the imperial fleet moored there had mutinied – hacking their officers to pieces, burning them alive in the ships’ furnaces, or throwing them into the Black Sea with iron bars tied to their legs – it had been off-limits.

  Horace and Inna picked a quieter route, one they thought would most likely allow them to avoid trouble, though you never knew. This quiet worry, this fretting and eavesdropping and anxious reading of newspapers as you crawled around the edge of the hostilities was as much part of what war was, she now saw, as the battles she and Horace were trying to avoid. And there was always the possibility everything would have changed once you got there.

  And so they zigzagged across country.

  From Moscow, they took a train to Kursk.

  ‘At least the bags are getting lighter,’ Horace murmured, subsiding with relief on to another top bunk. Inna nodded, though not so happily. The bags were lighter because the food was gone.

  Below them seethed another sea of the dispossessed: crying children; women with haunted eyes, trying to watch too many bags and babies at once; profiteers; soldiers.

  Horace, with his back to her, spent a long time easing his boots off.

  ‘Let me take a look at that,’ Inna said.

  He only laughed. ‘Thank you, but no. Leave it. There’ll be water on this train for another day or two, don’t you think? So I’m going down, right now, to change the dressing – and have a shave, too. Or next time you see me someone will be asking me for a blessing, because they’ve mistaken me for an Orthodox priest.’

  He leaned over and touched her hand before he started easing himself down, with his wash-bag. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ he added.

  She nodded distractedly. She wasn’t going to cry any more. The time for tears had passed. She was worrying now about his foot, admiring the gallant way he made so little of his misfortunes, wishing she’d thought as much about him, before now, as he always had about her. She was thinking: I need to see why he’s limping.

  * * *

  Pine forests, villages, birch forests, dogs barking, little towns, the occasional man on a cart, whipping on his horse down a country lane: the mournful immensity of Russia. This time their journey took a week.

  She acted for both of them: bargaining for food and newspapers on station platforms; showing their documents to all the checkers while Horace shut his eyes, as if asleep. He was a biddable charge; falling obediently quiet whenever she shushed him, wedging himself awkwardly into the little space of their bunk, head on the fiddle box, reading and eavesdropping. But he didn’t sleep much. Even when his thoughts seemed far away, he was wakeful, sitting up late into the night, gazing out of the window. His eyes were almost always open before dawn, too, however early she woke. Was he in pain? she wondered sometimes. But he didn’t say, and she couldn’t tell.

  By now they were living on stale bread bought from station salesmen, or, sometimes, if they were lucky, on pies filled with unidentifiable meat. Rat patties! Horace laughed, rather uncertainly. Cat rissoles!

  Once, starting to smile, he whispered, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever spent so much time, so close together, have we?’

  And she smiled back, and squeezed his hand.

  It wasn’t Horace’s fault that she still felt that wrenching private pain in every joint and muscle. She wasn’t unhappy with Horace.

  One night – the night before they reached Kursk – she woke, to the jolt of the train, with her body agonized by the memory of Yasha. There was moonlight in the stuffy carriage. She opened her eyes to see her husband’s gaze on her.

  Startled, she pretended to yawn and rub her face, wondering guiltily whether he’d guessed her painful thoughts, and then, with a different kind of jolt, whether he was awake because he was suffering from that foot.

  But he just nodded at her, with that amused look of his, preventing her from asking. ‘It’s hard to sleep, sometimes, with all the shunting, isn’t it?’ He tightened his arm round her, settling her on his chest.

  ‘I often wonder what Kagan was doing in our courtyard that night, you know,’ he said reflectively. ‘Don’t you?’

  Inna took a cautious breath. This was new terrain.

  ‘Maxim said he thought he’d turned police informer.’ Horace’s tone was neutral. ‘He was concerned that all that political enthusiasm was taking him a step too far.’

  Inna shook her head. It didn’t seem to matter what the actual facts were. She just wanted to protect Yasha, since he couldn’t speak up for himself.

  ‘And he turned up just at the right moment, didn’t he, to weigh in for you with those thugs, the Bolshevik police or whoever they were.’

  Her surprise was genuine, this time. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did.’

  ‘Though not for me, ten minutes e
arlier.’

  ‘I was just lucky, I suppose,’ she parried, with a strange moonlit feeling inside, as if her innards were about to be cut open and rearranged.

  ‘It did occur to me that he might have sent them, for me, you know.’

  ‘Oh, no, Horace,’ Inna whispered, as the doubt began to sink in. That couldn’t be right: Yasha wasn’t like that. He wasn’t deceitful, or hadn’t been. But, well, it was always possible that he just might. You could never tell with Yasha. He always might go too far. And the mere possibility that he might have wanted to harm Horace, who harmed no one, felt unbearable. ‘Don’t even think that. It can’t be right. Please,’ she begged.

  ‘Well,’ he said philosophically, and rather too loud for a man who was only supposed to whisper. ‘I’m just glad we’re away.’

  * * *

  Kursk was quiet.

  So was Inna. But she couldn’t stop thinking: might Yasha really have done that?

  She was thinking it as she went down the platform in search of food. A boy in ragged britches was standing among the pie vendors, offering a fresh-cooked trout, with burn marks striped down its crispy side. Despite all that was on her mind, she registered that the trout smelled more delicious than any food she’d ever imagined: of wood-smoke and summer.

  The boy wrinkled his nose at the handful of coins she held out. ‘That’s no good here,’ he said. But his bright eyes lit up at the sight of her gold bracelet.

  Might Yasha have…?

  The bracelet was far too valuable an exchange for a fish. But she gave it to the boy, hardly aware of the joy with which he scampered off, calling to his mates.

  ‘Shall we try Kharkov next?’ Horace said, sitting on a bench on the platform, biting into his last chunk of fish. He was in good humour, and it wasn’t just from the food. He’d found a stream. He’d washed his foot and rinsed out the dirty bandages, which, disgracefully ragged, were flapping on the string he’d tied up behind them. His foot was stretched out on the bench. ‘It’s getting better,’ he said, but he still wouldn’t let Inna examine whatever was under the clean bandages.

  There were no papers on sale, and Inna hadn’t been able to find out much from the locals either about what they might find up ahead if, as seemed likely, Kharkov was no longer the capital of the Bolshevik Soviets of the imaginary republic of Ukraine, which had been conjured into existence a year earlier.

  The stationmaster had only shrugged when she’d asked. ‘Plenty of people still go to Kharkov, lady,’ was all he’d said.

  Kursk was certainly full of people asking about tonight’s train. And there was spring in today’s cold sunshine: a lift of hope. The snow on the banks beyond the tracks was glistening, turning transparent, ready to melt. Kharkov was further south, and it would be warmer still there.

  Inna was surprised at how much, suddenly, she longed for sunlight and journey’s end for them both.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to Kharkov.’

  Could Yasha have done that to Horace…?

  Could she have…? But, no, she couldn’t bear to think that.

  * * *

  The flat landscape outside, which hadn’t seemed to change for so long – snow, pines, birches, villages, snow, pines, birches, villages – did, at last, start to look different as they chugged towards Kharkov. The trees thinned out, and the snow did, too.

  Inna sat inside, swinging her legs, alternately watching Horace sleep – he had started sleeping more and more, these last two days, even in the daytime; he answered her uneasy queries by saying the warmer air was making him tired – and staring out at the great rolling fertility of the south outside. Last year’s corn stalks were still poking through the speckled snow on the black earth, and this year’s startling growth was already marshalling itself underground under vast golden-blue skies.

  She gazed, more curiously, at the flags that she had begun to notice whenever the train passed near a settlement. They were the first real evidence, apart from the usual crowds of refugees and food shortages, that there was a war being waged down here. Tattered and forgotten, the flags had been left to fly over abandoned village buildings. Often, in the distance, she saw the blue, white and red tricolour of old Russia, or the yellow imperial standard with its double-headed eagle; sometimes the red of the Bolsheviks, and, more and more often, the further south they went, the black, white and red tricolour of the recently departed German enemy. The war had been here, and not long ago.

  On the evening of the day she first noticed the flags, they passed near a village that wasn’t just empty, but had been burned. Recently burned. The roofs were still crackling and falling as the sun set, and some of the dark shadows on the ground, far away out there, didn’t look like the usual piles of manure or broken carts, but more like bodies lying on the roads.

  Her first sighting of the war didn’t frighten her unduly. Seen from the tight warm compartment of the train, it felt too unreal. Anyway, as she thought later, they were still moving forward.

  She just wanted to get beyond this landscape, with its slow melt and its uncertain loyalties. She was willing them forward. She could smell the spring.

  Even now Inna still looked up whenever a door opened, half hoping to see Yasha. But she couldn’t stop the restless new doubt, which had resolved itself, in her mind, into two questions. Was it because of Yasha that those heavies had come to make trouble for Horace? Or was it because of her?

  Yasha had told her himself that he talked to the man from the Cheka, hadn’t he? She could hear the despairing bitterness in his voice, even now. Who does refuse the Cheka? Who’d dare?

  But that hadn’t stopped her telling him Horace’s secrets: how he’d kept things for the Fabergé people; how he’d worried that his being foreign would bring trouble to their door.

  And, a day later, trouble had come.

  I still can’t believe it, she told herself. But the worst thing was, she could.

  Watching Horace doze, curled up, with an arm resting on the violin case, and the tired lines of his face relaxed into trust, she was suddenly overwhelmed by repentant protectiveness. Whatever the truth about that night was, whatever Yasha had or hadn’t done, she’d certainly done more dreadful, damaging things to Horace than he would ever know. But at least she could make amends now, and look after him with the love he deserved, because they’d got away unharmed, and were together. She leaned over his sleeping shoulder, moulding her body to his, and lightly kissed his clammy cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  * * *

  Kharkov was quiet, too, what little they saw of it, a day later. But it was best not to linger too long, trying to find out; best just to slip the man by the gate that cigarette case with a bit of glitter about the serpent’s head and get yourself inside the train to Crimea and away.

  Now, on their last train – a local train, where there were no more bunks, just seats, packed with peasant women selling things in baskets, and chickens – Inna finally let hope take root that they’d slipped across the lines, and bypassed the war.

  Simferopol, still ahead, sounded reasonably safe. And beyond Simferopol, right down to the coast, as far as they could tell, everything was White. There were British and French ships docked in the Black Sea, keeping watch. Those Romanovs who remained alive after the killing of the Emperor and his family, all the royal cousins who’d been set free by the Germans last year, were down there too: fighting, or dancing in the restaurants at Yalta, along with what was left of the court.

  Halfway from Kharkov to Simferopol, they got down from the train and drank tea and ate – what? – something savoury in pastry at a place called Sinelnikovo. Inna sniffed the air and smelled catkins and willow-buds and said, ‘Spring.’

  And after that the landscape began to change into monotonous scrub-pasture with, every now and then, a surprising mound, a burial site like a child’s drawing of a steep hill, lightly dusted with icing-sugar snow.

  The next day, at the next station buffet – Ale
xandrovsk – even Horace noticed the spring. Lifting his head, he breathed in the unfamiliar southern smells with wonder. ‘Look,’ he said. Over in the distance, by the hollow where the river must be, she saw a green cloud – a great mass of luxuriant foliage.

  After that, it was swampy rivers, rushing with torrents of meltwater, and gentle-looking German Mennonite peasants in the fields, with their blond hair and beards. From Akimovka on, they saw sloe-eyed Tatars and strangely shaped rocks set in desert. Unfamiliar flags, too, were painted on buildings and half scrubbed off: Inna wondered whose fly-by-night governments they had celebrated.

  Ahead of them, beyond the water of the Putrid Sea, lay the flat, ugly northern part of the Crimean peninsula, and then, at last, as they chugged endlessly on, there it was: the hazy blue zigzags on the horizon that signified the northern approaches of the hills of Yaila. Beyond, Inna knew, lay the magical coast, full of palm trees, pale castles, steep hillsides, winding roads, and estates with exotic Turkic names.

  Inna put her hand over Horace’s. ‘You did it,’ she said, excitedly, gratefully. ‘We’re safe.’

  He startled awake. ‘What?’ he muttered. Then, smiling into her eyes, he said, ‘No, dearest: you did it.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was only the next morning, almost at the end of the journey, when they got out at yet another station, that Inna saw Horace wasn’t better, but limping worse than ever, and decided to intervene.

  ‘Can I rebandage your foot, please?’ she said, briskly. ‘Let’s get it washed.’

  He lifted a hand, like a stop signal. ‘It’s nothing.’

  And so she didn’t insist, not straight away. But once they were seated in the buffet, she slipped off to the stationmaster’s wife and asked for a bowl of warm water and some rags. And when the water was brought to the table, and when Horace was again insisting, in a whisper, ‘Truly, it’s nearly better, and anyway we can sort everything out once we arrive,’ she was grateful that the stationmaster’s wife was there too, in her bright red Little Russian sarafan, standing inescapably behind the carbolic-smelling basin.