Ghost of the White Nights

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Beautiful,” murmured Terese as the other pianist finished. “I'm looking forward to hearing the entire concerto tomorrow.”

  The pianist—Robert Thies—stood, then bowed, as if he had an audience, and walked toward us.

  “How is the piano?” Terese asked as Thies approached.

  “It's still a little stiff on the bass.” Thies had a warm and somewhat shy smile. “It's not as cold in there today.” He looked at me. “You must be Minister Eschbach.”

  “I only heard the last of your playing, but it sounded magnificent.”

  “That it did,” Llysette added.

  “I'm glad you didn't hear the first part.”

  “We did the other day, and it was good,” Terese said.

  Thies smiled apologetically. “I've done it better, and I will tomorrow.”

  Llysette slipped out of her heavy coat and gloves and looked at me. I took both. Terese had laid her coat and gloves over a chair and was already headed out onto the stage, where the piano was still spotlighted. I added Llysette's coat to the pile and watched.

  “Your wife is quite something,” Thies murmured as he stood beside me.

  “She is.” More than he would ever know—or should.

  As Llysette neared the piano, the spots vanished, and the full stage lighting came up. The theatre was dark, except for the stage, and I couldn't see any way to get out front, at least not without tripping over something in the dark. So I just eased back slightly along the wings and stood beside one of the dark velvet curtains and listened.

  After a few minutes of warm-ups, Llysette and Terese began on the Rimsky-Korsakov piece, which was based, I understood, on a Pushkin poem—or maybe it was the Tchaikovsky “Nightingale” that was based on Pushkin. Either way, even though I didn't understand the Russian, I thought she was wonderful, but after she finished, she turned to Terese and murmured something. Then they did it again. What they'd fixed I didn't know, but it was somehow subtly different and better.

  Next came the first Tchaikovsky piece, the one set to the Goethe poem, except that Llysette was doing it in French. She'd learned it in both French and German, but French was far more appropriate than German in St. Petersburg. That went smoothly, and they went on to the next Tchaikovsky piece—“Last Night.”

  In the end, they spent their entire allotted hour on the stage, and the Black Mesa Chamber Quartet was waiting to step onstage when Llysette and Terese walked out.

  I gave my diva a warm smile as she approached. I held her coat but didn't offer it yet because she was hot from the exercise of rehearsing. Most non-singers don't realize how athletic singing really is.

  Llysette didn't speak to me, but that was normal. She was still in her own world, going over the rehearsal, and I didn't try to break in as we made our way down a set of stairs into a lower backstage area.

  There were several young women waiting down below, some younger than Llysette's students at Vanderbraak State, but they looked like singers, rather than having the almost emaciated look of dancers, although the Mariinsky was home to both the Ballet Russes and the Imperial Opera. The youngest-looking stepped forward, probably urged on by the older students. She didn't look at Llysette directly, but held forward what looked to be a glossy flyer with Llysette's picture—and a pen.

  “What is your name?” Llysette asked as she took flyer and pen.

  The girl looked blank.

  “Que vous appelez-vous?” Llysette asked.

  When the girl didn't respond, I almost repeated the question in German but decided against it. The Austrians and Germans weren't exactly beloved in Russia. “To a singer to be,” I suggested, “or something like that.”

  She wrote something like “Pour la chanteuse des années d'arriver.” The girl might not have understood spoken French, but she beamed as she read the words.

  A tall white-haired woman appeared, standing back as Llysette signed several more flyers. The older woman smiled as each of the girls stepped away, then said something in Russian. The young singers all turned and bowed to Llysette.

  “I am Irina . . . Arkhipova,” said the woman.

  “You sang at the Bastille Opera,” Llysette replied.

  “Many years ago.” The older woman laughed. “Many years ago. Before you were a student.”

  “Just after I was a student, alas.”

  Both singers laughed.

  “I am glad you are here. My students heard you sing, and now they will not think that only Makarina or Gorchakova can sing the Russian songs.”

  “And so they will try the French melodie, the English art songs?”

  “One hopes,” replied Arkhipova.

  Llysette smiled. “One never knows.”

  “No. That is true.” They both smiled, wistfully and ruefully. I knew why.

  Llysette stepped away, back toward Terese and me.

  “I thought the three of us could go out to dinner somewhere now,” I suggested. “It can't be too late, but if we go back to our rooms too early . . .”

  “I will worry.”

  “Food would be good,” Terese agreed.

  Robert Thies apparently was waiting for us, because he stepped forward. Farther back, halfway up a flight of stairs, on a landing, Irina Arkhipova had stopped to talk to one of the Russian singers.

  “We'd thought about going out to get something to eat,” I said to Thies.

  “I could use it.” He grinned quizzically. “Where?”

  I looked back. Arkhipova was still talking to the student. “Let me ask her. She might have some suggestions. Who knows, maybe I can get her to come with us.”

  “That would be good,” suggested Llysette.

  So I walked up the steps and edged toward the white-haired singer, waiting for her to finish her conversation.

  Abruptly, both stopped talking and looked at me.

  “Yes?”

  “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I was wondering if you could recommend somewhere to eat nearby.”

  The older singer tilted her head. “There are several . . .”

  “Would you like to join us?” I asked Arkhipova. “We'd like to have you, as our guest.”

  “I could not . . .”

  “Please do. I hope I'm not imposing, but we would feel better if you came.” I grinned. “We also wouldn't get lost.”

  The young student singer said something, in Russian, and Arkhipova laughed and said something in return, almost gently.

  “You are . . .” The student pointed to Llysette.

  “I'm her husband,” I said. “I'm the only one who isn't a musician.”

  Arkhipova nodded. “I will go.”

  I still wondered about the conversation between the two as we walked toward the others. “Miss Arkhipova has agreed to join us and guide us.”

  Llysette smiled broadly at Irina. “I am glad you will come.”

  “My student said that I would have more stories to tell if I come.”

  “Je crois que non . . .” Llysette murmured.

  “Where are we going?” asked Robert Thies.

  “If we . . . are welcome . . . the Winter Swan is good.”

  I liked the name, and so did the others, because they nodded.

  Arkhipova guided us back out through another convoluted set of steps, and we found ourselves out on the cold street. As she and Terese led the way toward the embassy car, Llysette bent her head toward me.

  “So charming you were, Johan.” Llysette gave me a wicked smile. “How could any woman refuse?”

  “As I recall, you did for quite some time.” “That, I did not.” She elbowed me gently. “Never did you ask.”

  “Yes, my dear diva.”

  “Johan . . .”

  I didn't say more as Arkhipova gave more directions to the embassy driver, most of which I couldn't catch or make sense of.

  “. . . across Voznesensky Prospekt . . . Ekaterina . . . left . . .”

  Whatever I thought, the driver understood, and, as
soon as we crowded into the Volga, we were off, through streets moderately crowded, under a dark purpled sky, with bright stars and a cold wind that seeped into the embassy vehicle. Less than ten minutes later, we were climbing out of the Volga beside yet another gray stone building, back into the chill and biting wind.

  From outside, the Winter Swan's windows were bright, welcoming against the cold and windy evening and the gray buildings looming seemingly in every direction.

  I wouldn't have called the Winter Swan either a restaurant or a café . . . more like the Russian version of a bistro . . . with tables almost too small for the number of people—but with linen tablecloths, and cutlery—especially with the five of us crowded around a table designed for four. The driver had decided not to join us but to come back in two hours. I had the feeling he didn't want to deal with another two hours of conversation about music.

  Llysette and I let Irina order for us. Robert Thies apologetically asked her questions about half of what was chalked on the menu board, and Terese asked Arkhipova to order her whatever was the best fish dish, and I vaguely remembered that she preferred vegetarian or fish dishes, something I should have asked before I fixed that first dinner for her.

  Then the conversation got around to music, while Llysette and I sipped Russian tea, and the others more alcoholic beverages—Arkhipova a red wine, Thies and Terese white wines.

  “Lady Mac Beth of the Mtsensk District . . . you sang Katerina, non?”

  “Not often . . . the tzar's father . . . not fond of Shostakovich . . .”

  “. . . liked his Symphony for St. Petersburg . . . ”

  “. . . wrote that when he thought how close the Finns came to taking the city in the Winter War . . .”

  “. . . wasn't that his eighth?”

  “I would like to have heard Chaliapin as Holofernes,” Arkhipova said, her voice slightly louder. “Everyone . . . they all think of him as Boris Godunov. My great-aunt said he was magnificent as the Assyrian. That was how Golovin painted him.”

  I had to nod to that, because, although she had spoken in English, the only words that were really familiar to me were the name Boris Godunov, the upstart tzar, and the name of the opera by Mussorgsky. I'd never heard or seen the opera itself.

  I ended up eating what I thought might be the Russian equivalent of a meat pie, but for all I knew it could have been Ukrainian, Tatar, or something else. Whatever it was, it was good.

  “. . . claim operas do not represent the people . . .” “Music must lead people, don't you think?” asked Thies. “If it follows whatever the popular taste happens to be, then what's its value?”

  “That's the argument about elites,” I pointed out. “ Intellectual noblesse oblige.” I grinned. “The problem in any society is that, if the elites don't lead, who does? And what happens?”

  Arkhipova lifted her eyebrows. “But . . . who is elite? Does birth . . . tell . . . who is this elite? If the elite are . . .” she paused, as if trying to remember a word, “able, who says what is able?”

  And that had always been the problem, and probably was even more so in Russian, although some of the New Bruges old Dutch patroons weren't much better than the extended Romanov clan, I suspected.

  There was a momentary silence, into which I plunged. “Has anyone written an opera about the ghosts of the white nights?”

  “No,” replied Arkhipova bluntly. “

  I'm surprised that no one has written an opera about them.”

  “Operas are about heroes and leaders. The ghosts are not tzars. They are not living heroes. Some say that the ghosts saved Tzar Alexander II, but there is already one opera about a peasant hero who saves the tzar.”

  I looked blank.

  “It is A Life for the Tzar. Glinka. It is not performed often in these times.” Arkhipova smiled knowingly.

  “I just wondered,” I offered. “I was sightseeing the other day, and I saw the Bronze Horseman just after sunset, and there were ghosts there.”

  “St. Petersburg has many ghosts. It is a city built on ghosts. But few wish to dwell on them. Many would have them vanish, because they remind us of that which was less than good. Is that not so in your land?”

  For some reason, her words—“many would have them vanish”—struck a chord, but again, I just nodded and sipped the last of the tea, and tried to listen and follow the conversations that swirled around me.

  “ . . . Rimsky-Korsakov . . . he should not have tried to rewrite Boris Godunov . . . Mussorgsky understood Russia . . . oh, he understood Russia . . .”

  In one sense, as I listened, I was beginning to understand, not Russia, but Columbia, as far more Byzantine than Imperial Russia, even though Russia retained the Byzantine aspects fostered by the Eastern Orthodox Church, even though all in Columbia doubtless thought Russia the more cruel and Byzantine than Columbia.

  I knew better.

  29

  I DIDN'T EXPECT anything to happen on Wednesday morning, and it didn't. There were no messages, direct or indirect. No requests for meetings. No inquiries. Even the news summaries showed nothing new, just rehashes of the existing international questions and tensions.

  The embassy appeared happy to ignore me, and Llysette was busy in the salon room of our quarters, practicing with Terese.

  The wind had died away, but the sky remained a clear and cold blue, unusual, I understood, for December. So I went for a walk, accompanied by Christian. First, we walked up to the French Embankment, even though there was no longer a France to name it after.

  “That used to be the French Embassy.” Christian pointed to the building across from the one on the corner that bore the Austrian flag. “I suppose it still is. It's empty now.”

  We waited for a break in the traffic and then crossed the embankment road. Maybe the enbankment and the road were both the French Embankment, but, in any case, we turned westward along the Neva. As the poets and the novelists had written, the waters of the river were a steely gray.

  “If this weather continues, it will freeze before Christmas. Christmas is later here. Eleven days, I think,” Christian said.

  “The Eastern Orthodox Church never changed the holy calendar?” I asked.

  Christian shrugged.

  We continued walking toward the Troitsky Bridge, named for an obscure reformer, and I kept surveying the traffic and the few others walking. So far as I could tell, no one was tailing us, at least not closely.

  The large and ancient structure on the north side of the Neva became clearer and clearer, especially after we passed the bridge. The tower of the cathedral stood out against the blue sky.

  “Is there anyone in the Peter and Paul prison?” I asked.

  “People talk about it. It's where they dump the student dissidents.”

  “The ones that caused the uprising at the university last month?”

  “If they imprisoned any, that's where they'd be.”

  “They must have imprisoned some of them,” I pointed out. “They claim that they didn't kill more than a handful. There aren't hundreds of ghosts around the university. In fact, we didn't see or sense any, and there aren't any students.”

  “They closed the university until January.”

  “I wasn't aware they allowed disagreements, but I suppose that's one way.”

  “It's getting harder to control them. Difference engines are getting smaller and cheaper, even here. The Ohkrana raided a stationery supply warehouse last month. They claimed the business was a front for an Austrian plot to distribute difference engines and printers to the Septembrists.”

  “Was it?”

  “How would we know?”

  That was a very good question. I could certainly see the Austrians supporting any group that had a good chance of creating a civil war in Russia, but I could also see the Ohkrana and the tzar creating a plot where none existed to focus discontent away from St. Petersburg, and the Romanov autocracy.

  We were walking into the embassy past the guards and through the private courty
ard, and I was thinking about catching Llysette so that we could have something to eat together, when Commander Madley caught us just inside the doors.

  “Sir, this came for you just after you left.” He extended an envelope, a heavy parchment envelope with the PetroRus seal embossed in gold and my name written in elaborate script.

  I turned it over, then opened it. There was a single sheet of PetroRus stationery with a short message.

  If you are available at two this afternoon, perhaps we could meet again at my office.

  The note was signed, and underneath the Russian signature was the script-printed name: Kyril Kulikovsky.

  “PetroRus wants to talk some more. I have another meeting with them at two.” I looked to Christian. “The embassy has some duplicators, I assume.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We need to duplicate a chapter or two from a technical manual. I'll meet you both in the office section in ten minutes.”

  The two of them were still looking at each other when I walked away and toward the elevator. No one else was on it, nor in the corridor to our rooms. I did hear Terese playing something through her door as I passed, but I couldn't say what the piece was.

  Llysette was stretched out on the chaise longue in the bedchamber. She had a sheaf of sheet music in her hand, but her eyes were closed. She bolted upright as I walked in. “Johan . . . you surprise me.”

  “I didn't mean to.”

  “The Russian . . . I know it, but I do not.”

  “You don't feel as comfortable with it as with French or English?”

  “Or even German.”

  There wasn't much I could do about that, since my knowledge of Russian was nonexistent. “Could I interest you in something to eat in about a half an hour?”

  “Half an hour?” She looked down at the music. “That would be good. We rehearse at three.”

  “No dress rehearsal tonight?” I'd just assumed there would be a dress rehearsal for something like the cultural exchange concert, and dress rehearsal were usually the night before at the expected performance time.

  “The Ballet Russes, it is performing tonight.” She shrugged. “That, they will not cancel for us to rehearse. We rehearse at three.”