Midnight in St. Petersburg (3 page)

She'd underestimated him, Inna thought, touched. He might be an unlettered peasant, but his goodness shone through. She liked his gentle garrulousness, too: that unhurried way of following a thought right through.

‘… But there's so much hatred now. Maybe it's just because of that man who's been killed. Stolypin: the Prime Minister, the Chief Policeman.' The peasant paused, then continued in a stronger voice. ‘Yes, the Chief Policeman … Because the police are people like everyone else. They take their style from the top. And him, Stolypin, they called him a reformer, but he was a cruel man too. No good for any of us. His days were numbered…'

He muttered something inaudible. Then, shaking his head, as if regretting his harshness, he made the sign of the cross, and said, rather reluctantly, ‘Well, God be with him.'

Inna nodded, keeping her face still. She didn't want to tell him that she'd actually been in the theatre when Stolypin was shot, because in truth she didn't have much to tell. She almost wished she
had
seen more than a stir in the crowd when the two shots rang out, and then the hysterics on all sides, women fainting in chairs and people pushing for the doors as word passed through the hall like fire of who it was who'd been attacked.

‘So you know Kiev? Were you there for the Tsar's visit?' It surprised her, now she came to think of it. What would take a Siberian peasant so far from home? Come to that, what was he doing here, in the capital?

He turned his gaze on her, slowing down as he felt towards his answer. His eyes were vague. Then the deep lines around them crinkled, and he laughed.

‘Why, I've been to Kiev many a time,' he said. ‘This time in a train, like a gentleman, but oh, in the pilgrim days of my past, many's the time I've walked all the way from Siberia on my own two legs … rejoicing in God's sunlight, or shivering under His snows. I'm not a young man, and sometimes I feel I've walked every inch of the empire on these two legs.'

He was shaking his head at the memory of his travels. Then he stopped walking, as if a more important thought had just struck him. He pointed at a side street – another gulch of cobbles between grey cliffs of apartment blocks. ‘That's where I live now. Nikolayevskaya Street, House Seventy. I won't ask you in now as we've got business in the centre. But mind you come and see me there when you've settled in. You'll be welcome.'

Inna nodded, politely but guardedly. She knew she wouldn't be back.

So, she thought, still piecing together the puzzle, he'd be one of those peasant pilgrims she'd read about, the
stranniki
who found God in a thunderclap, and left their villages to wander the land for years, in religious ecstasy. That would explain his cross, and his godly air, though not why he'd left the land to come here to the city.

Not that it really mattered. What she wanted to know most, as they started walking again, was when would they get past this dull bourgeois avenue and reach Nevsky Prospekt, and the beginning of the gorgeous but frightening imperial Petersburg that every Russian novel described so vividly?

Inna had always imagined Nevsky as a place of wonders: classical columns, arches, caryatids, French bonnets, Guards officers, gleaming carriages, palaces pulsing with electric light and chandelier-lit shops full of lobsters, jewels and candied cherries.

Not like this street. The only salesman here was a scruffy man with a brazier on the pavement, selling pumpkin seeds roasted in salt in twists of newspaper, and giving her a lecherous wink as he called, ‘Seeds, seeds, I'll give you seeds, darling.' She swept past, nose up.

‘It's that house just there, do you see, on the corner with Nevsky,' the peasant was saying. ‘My house. Don't forget that.'

Nevsky?

‘Nevsky?'

This couldn't be it, surely? This – a street distinctly less glamorous than many in Kiev? This dull jumble of stolid ugliness – Nevsky Prospekt?

He roared with laughter again. ‘This is Nevsky. The most famous street in the land.'

‘But where are the palaces? The theatres, the concert halls, the shops?' she asked.

‘Ah,' he said, nodding. ‘Just up ahead. But don't be impatient. There's all the time in the world for palaces and shops and vanities.' He paused. ‘Yes, I know Kiev well, and I was sad to see it the way it was this week, with everyone so frightened, and disaster in the air, and all your people leaving…'

Inna shrugged, and said, as coolly as she could: ‘Yes, the people I've been living with this year – kind of relatives –
they
were scared. They're leaving for Palestine.'

She couldn't suppress a sigh. The Kagans were the closest thing to family she'd had left. She'd been so grateful when they'd come out of nowhere and taken her in after Aunty Lyuba's death. Not that they'd ever been close, once she was there; the Kagans were always too taken up with their fearful plans to be off. But now they'd gone, and it was so far away, Palestine. And she had no one else to keep her in Kiev.

‘I've been to Palestine,' the peasant was saying. ‘Last spring, I went.'

Inna turned and stared at him. ‘Did you go
there
on your own two legs, too?' she asked, letting scepticism into her voice.

‘No, no,' he replied, almost absent-mindedly. ‘Kiev to Odessa, and from there over the Black Sea to Haifa on the
Lazarus.
You sleep on deck, and how beautiful the sea is, with the sun glittering on the waves. You only have to gaze on it for your soul to become one with the sea. And after that: Jerusalem.' He sighed, but his breath was full of joy and love. ‘An earthly realm of tranquillity …

‘Not expensive, either,' he added, perhaps understanding how trapped Inna was feeling. ‘Twelve roubles each way on the boat, third class. That's how pilgrims go. No comforts, but why would you give up your share of suffering? It's suffering and persecution that purify the soul. You could go, too, if you wanted. See your folks.'

‘Well, one day maybe I will,' she said. She didn't really think she would, but the idea it might be possible lightened her heart anyway.

Or perhaps it was the gleam of pale sun on water ahead …

Her eyes widened. She could see the road transforming itself into the Nevsky she'd hoped for.

On her left, looming up, was a great dark-red palace. And, beyond that, over the dark glitter of what she knew must be the Fontanka, was a bridge frilled with delicate iron tracery, and topped with four enormous statues of horses with rippling muscles …

She stopped, exhilaration chasing away her tiredness and worry. She was here, at the very centre of things. She'd made it.

‘I was glad to be away from the centre of vain and worldly things when I got on that boat,' came the companionable voice at her side, sweeping her forward. ‘But sometimes, when you see the sun on the water, you can't help but marvel at the beauty of Creation, even here.'

He squinted at her. ‘You like it, eh?' He seemed amused. And as they walked on, he told her stories about the buildings they were passing, and about the grand duchesses or starving ballerinas or savvy Armenians or merchants behind each stucco façade. He knew so much. He breathed the gritty air with its smell of salt and industrial fog as naturally as if it were the country air of home.

Inna was impressed by his composure. On the corner of the Merchants' Yard Market, two young dandies with gold frogging over their fronts forced her off the pavement, and she had to scramble back to safety out of the path of an oncoming carriage. Yet he glided through the crowds of tight-waisted gentlemen in braid – so many uniforms: army, navy, Guards, civil service; Inna couldn't tell them apart – and of ladies in sweeping robes and feathers, as if he hardly felt their imperious jostling.

‘So this is why Dostoyevsky found Nevsky so tricky,' she said breathlessly. ‘I feel like the Man from Underground now, too. Invisible, and black and blue from all these aristocratic elbows, and full of secret bile, you know?'

He put a hand out to steady her, but his only reply was a vague, uncomprehending, ‘What's that you say?'

Then, without warning, he turned off the boulevard down another broad avenue.

‘Oh!' Inna cried, forgetting Dostoyevsky because her head was still spinning with excitement. ‘But we haven't seen half of it. Where is the Yeliseyevsky store, with the pineapples and fresh lobsters? And the Defence Ministry, and the Kazan Cathedral, and—'

‘Further on,' he answered matter-of-factly. ‘But you wanted Hay Market, didn't you? And that's down here.'

Understanding that if he really did live way back on that street he'd shown her near the station, he must already have put himself out considerably to bring her so far, she said, quickly, ‘Of course, I understand,' and hurried on behind him.

‘Where are you going, anyway?' he asked, over his shoulder. ‘Who to?'

Inna paused, unease creeping back into her heart. ‘To a cousin. A kind of cousin.'

‘You have a lot of “kind of” relatives,' he said.

‘Well,' she replied, trying not to feel defensive, ‘he's the son of the other “kind ofs”. I'm going to stay with him.' She took a deep breath to steady herself. ‘He works for Leman, the violin-maker.' She wanted to give the impression that she knew exactly what she was talking about. She didn't want her companion to realize that she'd never actually met Yasha Kagan.

But she felt tears painfully close as she strode on, round the corner into the new street.

She was remembering her flight back from the theatre through the restive crowds that suddenly seemed to have filled the Kiev streets, her feet hardly touching the ground, and finding the Kagans packing their trunk. They'd held off emigrating for the entire year, even though they had papers, because they'd kept thinking that their Yasha might come too, if things didn't work out for him up in St. Petersburg. Yet there they were, not mentioning the frightening news of the night, just saying, with shame in their eyes, that they could get a passage from Odessa on Tuesday.

‘Of course,' Inna had told them stoutly, wondering where she'd go, but not wanting to add to their burden by making them feel guiltier about her than they probably already did. ‘I'll find somewhere new to stay tomorrow.'

She remembered retreating to her room – their son's old room, where she'd been lodging for the year since Aunty Lyuba died.

It was full of memorabilia. There was the first violin he'd made, during his apprenticeship, which his mother had kept and which Inna had taken to playing since she moved in. There was a photo, too, from Yasha's last year at school. The youth in it was tall and slightly out of focus, with his head held high, a long neck, and curls of black hair at nape and temples.

Inna had lain down on the bed, looking at that stranger's photograph. It was late, but there was a lot of movement on the street outside: men's feet running and urgent talk, and the uncertain light of lanterns.

It was only then that she'd realized exactly what she was going to do, instead of finding a room and clinging on here, alone, for another year of school.

‘I'm coming to you,' she'd told Yasha's portrait. ‘And I'll bring your violin,' she'd added as she heard a crash of wood splintering on something hard outside. ‘No point in leaving it to get smashed by
them
.'

The next morning, she'd gone to the bank and withdrawn all that remained of Aunt Lyuba's small inheritance.

By now, Inna and her peasant were in Garden Street (though, as the peasant said scathingly, ‘Who knows when there was last an honest garden in it?') and going down the side of the glittering Merchants' Yard Market. The market arches sparkled with foreign goods, but once you'd got a bit further, past the Empire Bank, the traders under the next row of colonnades looked poorer, and the wind felt more brutal. By the time they reached the square at the end, the magical grandeur had gone out of the air altogether and they were surrounded by the grime of an ordinary city again: traders, trams, rubbish underfoot, and a brass band of old men hunched up against the wind by a small white church.

‘Hay Market,' the peasant said, stopping. ‘And now?'

‘Well … I mustn't keep you any longer,' Inna said, looking hesitantly around. The address she wanted was just off here somewhere. It shouldn't be hard to find. Yet the streets leading back from the square looked suddenly threatening. The men lurking all around were not wearing the bright military or civil service uniforms she'd admired on Nevsky, but threadbare working-men's padded coats or smelly sheepskins. Women stared assessingly out from under battered hats, and the eyes of the ragged street children were frankly frightening.

‘Nonsense,' the peasant replied. ‘Leave a young lady like you alone at the Hay Market? Why, you'd be stripped down to the bone within seconds. Look at all these scallywags. No, no, I won't think of it.'

All at once, it was too much, and Inna felt the tears hot and wet behind her eyes.

Looking down, she said, in as near to a level voice as she could: ‘I'm not exactly sure where he lives. It's Moscow Prospekt, just round the corner somewhere … but…' Here, to her horror, she heard herself gulp. ‘I don't exactly know him, you see.'

After a moment, she felt a heavy arm move slowly across her shoulders. ‘Does he know you're coming, this cousin?'

She didn't answer. She could feel her face, turned down behind her hand, scrunching up as she tried to stop the tears. But they coursed down her cheeks anyway, out from under her tight-pressed eyes. Her shoulders were shaking under his arm.

‘Don't you fret, now.' The peasant's voice was low and soothing. ‘We'll find him and everything will turn out all right. You'll see.'

Looking up, Inna said, still shakily, ‘I'm all right now.'