Midnight in St. Petersburg (14 page)

Still, she was obviously excited. ‘He was talking about taking me off to some artists' club, one night, to perform. He says it's very informal, people just get up and do a turn, but the whole of
la haute Bohème
goes.' She glanced up at him. ‘But I couldn't, of course.'

‘No papers,' Yasha agreed. He could see now that she knew the difference between dream and reality. Suddenly he felt relieved.

She bit her lip. ‘There's that, too, of course. But mostly just because I'm no good at performing in public.' She paused. ‘I know I played for all of you yesterday, but I don't, usually. I get too scared. I mess it up.'

‘Oh, come now, dear girl!' boomed Leman. ‘What nonsense!'

‘You played so wonderfully for us!' Marcus squeaked.

She shook her head. ‘I just don't like it,' she replied, very definitely.

Yasha's secret pleasure that she didn't, after all, seem to want to take up the Englishman's offer only increased at the thought of what neither of the others knew. She'd been happy enough playing with
him
, last night.

She put a hand on Leman's arm. ‘But I did appreciate the thought,' she added, with more warmth than Yasha liked. ‘It was so kind of Horace.' She turned to Yasha. ‘That wasn't the only thoughtful thing he did, either. He'd seen me earlier on, you see, when I went out on my visit; and even though he was at that peasant's flat too he must feel the same way you all do about
my
having been there, because he actually thought to bring me round a novel about wicked peasant holy men – to warn me off, I suppose.' She smiled tentatively at him.

But Yasha didn't want to hear any more praise of this interfering Englishman, and he wished he could think of something dismissive to say about the club they'd been talking about. But he didn't know it. There was so much he didn't know about St. Petersburg – not just about the white-gloved world of Nevsky high society, but even about the Lemans' circle of high-minded intellectuals.

‘Well, he can't take you out anywhere when you haven't got papers,' he repeated, obstinately. It was only when he saw Leman straighten out the beginning of a private smile that he realized he'd have done better just to shut up.

*   *   *

Before going up to lunch, Yasha put out some of his pamphlets on the bench, so she could see them as soon as they sat down again to work; not just the much-discussed Beilis one, but a few of each of the others too, the calls for Jews to relearn Yiddish and Hebrew, and take back the culture they'd lost. She picked them up, with what he feared might be no more than polite interest (for perhaps all she was interested in was white gloves and bohemian nightclubs?). But when his fears instantly came true – when she put the leaflets down again, saying, coolly, ‘I've never understood why anyone would want to learn Hebrew or Yiddish, even if their grandparents knew them; what would be the point?' – he didn't take offence, or start proselytizing. He just found himself taking the path of least resistance, and trying to explain the islands instead.

It wasn't just wronged Jews, or the students and radicals plotting over there, that Yasha cared about. There were more than a million people now in St. Petersburg, he explained, and half of them were illegals, hiding on the islands, trying to escape poverty or the police in the tenements around the factories. He even pitied the prostitutes in the taverns where he met his political friends. ‘Victims of the system,' he explained.

‘How disgusting,' Inna said, quickly, to Marcus.

Yasha hoped that she just didn't know yet how to react properly. It was all so new to her, after all. She was just trying out responses. She didn't see that, in his mind, at least, she was almost like one of those victims herself. So he shrugged, and said in his best pamphlet-speak, ‘But what are the poor souls to do? When all they have is the false freedom of destitution…' He leaned across the worktop. ‘I'll take you, some day,' he said encouragingly, trying not to see her elegant nose wrinkling again.

*   *   *

After they'd finished for the day, and were all trooping upstairs, Yasha noticed Inna, half a flight of stairs above him, murmuring with Monsieur Leman. When he saw Leman quickly glancing down at him, through the banisters, before turning back to Inna to reply, he felt despondent enough to wonder whether she'd been poking fun at him. Then, nodding affably at the girl, the master took her off into the flat.

Not even a ‘good evening', or a ‘thank you for the company', Yasha thought as he trudged on alone up the stairs.

He flung himself on his bed. He wasn't in the mood to play.

It was ten minutes before he heard the click of the door, and a violin.

Miserably, he listened. Three low Es, then another, a long sob of a note, and then another piece with three beats in the bar, but as far as could be from the zany waltzing of last night: in a minor key, dreamily sad and reflective …

Wait. It was Jewish.

It took him a phrase or two more before he recognized the melody. Yes, it was the piece the Lemans had been so impressed with at that open-air concert last spring, wasn't it? Played by the thirteen-year-old wunderkind of the year, a new student at the Conservatoire, who'd drawn a crowd of twenty-five thousand and needed a police escort out afterwards to protect him from his screaming admirers; the Litvak boy who shared Yasha's first name? Heifetz, Yasha recalled; and the music, named ‘Hebrew Melody', was by another young Jew at the Conservatoire. Akhron.

Of course. Leman had bought the sheet music as soon as Josef Akhron had published it through whatever the name of the St. Petersburg society was that had been set up last year by Jews and anti-anti-Semites. It was just the kind of life-of-the-mind thing the Lemans did get involved in. It was called the Jewish Folk Music Society, he remembered, because the authorities had refused to register it simply as the Jewish Music Society.

He sat up, electrified by the realization that came to him next.

That's what she'd been whispering about with Leman.

She must have been borrowing the music, to play up here, for him.

It was the haunting music bringing this lump to his throat, he told himself now as he reached for his violin, and took it in his arms. But all he could do was cradle it, and shut his stinging eyes (dust, he told himself fiercely), and listen.

She must be sight-reading, he realized. But she finished the sorrowful first part of the melody not only without a false note but with such intensity of feeling, such depth of emotion, that it took his breath away.

It was only in the second, faster, more restless melody, full of rushed demisemiquavers, trills and sobs, high on the E-string, that her sureness of touch left her; only when she was at the peak of the cadenza, a wilder still improvisation on that second theme, that her tone roughened into hoarseness, and then, unexpectedly, went quiet.

In the sudden silence, he heard her open her door.

The sadness of that music might silence anyone, Yasha thought, blinking. And it must bring back so much pain for
her
, especially, with the memories she must have.

Wrenched with pity, he got up, still holding his violin, and went out to the landing, half hoping …

But she wasn't standing there in the dark, needing comfort. She was flying away from him, down the stairs, four at a time.

Yasha hesitated. Then he put his violin down on a leaflet box.

What must she remember? he wondered as he stood in the dark. His parents hadn't had to tell him anything, in the end, because he'd learned how to find out for himself. He'd read the newspaper stories published in the foreign press, and translated back into Russian. He'd also read the survivors' accounts, gathered by old Kremer for a pamphlet. So he knew everything that had happened at Zhitomir, where her family had lived, from the first rumours that Jews had poisoned their Christian servant, to the mysterious appearance in town of a St. Petersburg gendarmerie officer on the eve of Easter, to the printed handbills that started circulating, without interference from the police, telling people that an imperial ukaze had been published allowing the infliction of ‘bloody punishment', and all the rest of the awful, usual story.

Whatever Inna might remember of those days, whatever her part in it had been, her memories now would be unbearable, he thought. His own painful childhood memories suddenly seemed trivial by comparison.

He put his hands to his face, overwhelmed with pity.

All at once, breaking into the calm of his breathing, something warm and heavy cannoned into his chest. He staggered back a step; then he steadied himself and looked down. Slowly he made out Inna, grimacing and picking at his chest. He hadn't even heard her come back upstairs.

It took him a moment to realize she'd just caught her hair in his buttons.

‘Stay still,' he muttered. ‘You're only making it worse.'

Obediently, she stopped and stood before him with bowed head, very close.

She smelled so innocent; of lavender.

Trying not to think how close she was, or how warm, or how full of turbulent emotion she must be, he got out a match and lit it, holding it away from her head, working out which button – one on his shoulder, he could see – her hair was tangled in. Then he held out the box, and – as calmly as he could, given this unsettling physical proximity – told her to go on lighting matches until he'd set her loose.

She reached for it. But she couldn't take it. She already had something in her hand.

‘What's that?' he asked as she let it fall to take the matches.

He was looking at her face in the sudden circle of flickering light. There were no tears on it, he realized; no sign of upset; just frustration at being trapped.

‘A mute,' she answered, sounding far more self-possessed than he expected, or felt himself. ‘I wanted a mute for the next bit. I remembered there was one on the piano.'

‘Oh,' Yasha heard himself say, not at all the decisive male rescuer he wanted to be.

She went on quite conversationally. ‘Because the music was marked
con sordino
, in the next section, and I wanted to do it right. It's such a beautiful tune.'

‘I thought that the music must have upset you…' Yasha muttered, trying to make his hands gentler, ‘reminded you of your parents…'

She turned up her trapped face, cautiously, so she could look at him. ‘My
parents
?' she said, sounding astonished. ‘Why would it?'

‘Because it's Jewish music, and you sounded so sad.'

She laughed, awkwardly he thought. ‘Oh, I'm afraid I don't really even remember my parents. Just Aunt Lyuba, who brought me up. And she wasn't Jewish at all. The flu took
her
off too,' she added, after a moment. ‘I do miss
her
. But not when I hear Jewish music.'

It was Yasha's turn to stare. What did she mean, the flu had taken her aunt off
too
? Surely she didn't think this was what had happened to her parents, when everyone knew—

Suddenly the trapped hair came loose.

‘There,' he said, his blood still pounding through him, and stepped quickly away from her flower scent, and the questions he couldn't ask. It was a relief.

She was free. She stepped back too, pushed open her door for the welcome lamplight, and stopped in the doorway, silhouetted in that square of light, so he could only see her outline.

‘Why
did
you think I'd be upset by that Jewish tune?' he heard her ask curiously. ‘They were never at all observant, you know, my parents. Aunty Lyuba said.'

He shook his head. ‘I don't want to say.'

‘Say
what
?'

She stepped forward, right up to him, so close that his senses were filled with flowers again.

He was so overwhelmed by the desire to take her in his arms that it made him angry. ‘You must know what! They died in the Zhitomir pogrom! I thought that the music might have made you think of it and caused you pain!'

She went still. ‘What do you mean?' she asked, her voice a shocked whisper.

‘You were nearly killed too,' he said softly. ‘I heard about that pogrom all through my childhood. We all did. All the cousins, everyone – it terrified us! And my parents used to say … well, that's not the point…'

She stepped back. His body yearned to step after her, to keep her close. But he stayed where he was.

The light caught her stern profile as she came to rest against her doorframe. She stood there for a while, looking down at her hands, with the white bands across the palms.

‘It sounds like a story from one of your Jewish freedom fighters' leaflets,' she said eventually. Her voice was quiet. ‘If it were true,' she added, sounding more openly sceptical, ‘wouldn't at least one of all those grieving relatives you're talking about have thought to get in touch – even if not to train me for your heroic fight for Jewish rights, maybe just to offer to bring me up? Because, you know, no one ever did. Aunty Lyuba was only a neighbour. She didn't have to have me. It was just that there wasn't anyone else offering.'

Her lonely logic defeated Yasha. No, he realized, miserably, of course they hadn't offered: they'd all have been too scared. For a moment, he almost spoke up for his parents, to remind her that after Aunty Lyuba had died, they
had
taken her in. But in the end he said nothing. Because even he could see that they'd only done it because they'd had a room free and needed a reliable paying guest. They'd taken her rent money, and left her behind when they ran off. How grateful would anyone be for that?

He blinked.

‘No,' Inna was saying, insistently. ‘The truth is that my parents died in the epidemic. It took off a lot of people in Zhitomir that winter. Aunt Lyuba's husband, too. So she took me in, and we went to live in Kiev. Kiev's the only place I remember. Aunt Lyuba was my only real family. What you were suggesting is' – and, for a moment, her calm broke and her face twisted in pain – ‘politics.' She put her hand on the door-handle and stepped inside.