Midnight in St. Petersburg (34 page)

‘That savage,' he said, softly. ‘Did he
eat
it, or what?'

Inna watched as, very gently, Yasha lifted it out, and, with nurse's hands, turned it over, to inspect the gash in its back. She could only hope the sheer splintered beauty of it would make him want its loveliness more than his revolutionary principles, as she and Marcus both already did.

He was shaking his head, now. ‘A one-piece back,' he said thoughtfully, stroking the beauty of the tigerish stripes running diagonally across the wounded wood. ‘There's some maple in the store with a grain not unlike this, isn't there?' he added, looking up, and Marcus nodded.

Marcus, Inna could now see, was also, if for more practical reasons, longing for Yasha to bring his skill to this difficult work, to help the workshop make a success of it.

‘It'll be quite a job,' Yasha said at last. His eyes were still on the violin. ‘It'll take us a while.'

Inna's heart lurched again.

‘When do we begin?' he asked.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sometimes, Horace imagined himself saying to Inna, ‘You talk about Yasha a lot these days,' because of course he was alert to the negative possibilities of young Kagan's reappearance in their lives, especially at a moment when things had somehow gone so awry between them. He had been aware of the danger from the first. And now the pair of them were whispering away all day in the workshop over Youssoupoff's violin; and Horace couldn't help but be aware of Marcus's embarrassed grins when he saw Horace watching him, or of the furtive happiness Horace kept glimpsing in his wife's eyes.

It wasn't really Yasha she talked about, to be precise, any more than she ever mentioned Youssoupoff's name. It was the violin. But Horace heard Yasha hiding in all Inna's excited explanations. She said that they were approaching the repair from two different angles. She said she and Marcus were working together to make replica curved wooden shapes to patch into the existing violin. Yasha, meanwhile, was making a whole new violin of the same pattern – a very late Stradivarius design, from 1730 – as a control. If repairing the existing pieces of wood failed, their back-up plan was to cannibalize Yasha's copy, taking it apart and using the back or possibly the scroll from it to replace the broken part in the real violin. They were also intending to experiment with varnish on the new instrument Yasha was making, to be sure they had a recipe, and a method, for reproducing the colour and depth of the original varnish as precisely as possible.

‘Thank God we've got Yasha to work on it; he's the only one of us with anything like the experience you need. He's a wonderful luthier.' One way or another, she kept saying, they'd have the best possible version of the Strad mended, and playable, by the end of the summer.

Even if the Youssoupoff payment for the violin would tide them all over for several months to come, Horace knew that it had been a mistake encouraging Inna to take it. He wished, now, that he'd just let her say no.

As the cold months of winter turned into spring, then early summer, part of him wanted to succumb to raging, helpless, pointless, jealousy, but he'd never known how to rage. He was better at working out carefully how best to proceed.

*   *   *

To the relief of the staff of Fabergé, a new day of anti-war rioting that might have brought further, more extreme revolution fizzled out in the heavy rain of July.

Horace had been bringing in the papers every morning, and telling the Fabergé foreigners who worked in the back room, sheltering among the mahogany shelves as if behind circled wagons, what was in them. And this particular piece of July news suddenly seemed, as he read, like an opportunity.

What the failure of the latest action by the left seemed to have brought was a swing back to the right. In the aftermath, triumphant, preening, vain Alexander Kerensky took over government at the Tauride Palace and booted out the trouble-making workers' deputies of the Soviet, who until now had been meeting there too, to hold their interminable smoky, shouty sessions at a girls' boarding school on the edge of town. As Kerensky began planning to move the former Emperor and his family away from Tsarskoye Selo to somewhere less volatile, in the remote interior, the tiny extreme-left Social Democrat faction known, ironically, as the Majority, or
Bolsheviki –
vociferous in its demands for peace at any price – was also kicked out of its cosy city headquarters. It was reported that the foul-mouthed bald leader of these Bolsheviks had scuttled right out of town, for fear of arrest, and was now sleeping in haystacks somewhere, wearing a blond wig.

He was an almost comically unlikeable character, this Lenin, as Horace told his fellow workers at Fabergé. He'd lived abroad until April, and hated all the home-grown revolutionaries he'd found here on his return, and wanted to steal their triumph from them. His head was polished smooth like a billiard ball, who called everyone he met bastard-blockhead-bugger-cunt-shit, and who hated music because, he said, it made him want to say kind, stupid things, and pat people's heads, when what you had to do nowadays was beat them round the head, beat them without mercy.

Well, never mind the losers. It was who was winning that mattered. The diktats coming down now from on high, with their retreat from revolution towards a more usual kind of authoritarianism, felt very familiar.

Some Bolsheviks were hanged – their Lenin hadn't been wrong to be so scared – and the death penalty was brought back at the Front. Soldiers were banned from joining Soviets. In the city, the eight-hour factory day was abolished. And, by night, the Black Hundreds were out again, beating up Jews.

‘So
that's
the way things are going now,
hein
?' Carl Fabergé said with satisfaction after Horace read out that last snippet, once the other men had started moving off to their desks. Not that he especially wanted Jews beaten up, Horace knew. He just wanted normality back, as they all did. And, in Russia, the Black Hundreds, and their authoritarian masters, had always been normality. ‘
They
can always sniff out the lie of the land, those ones.'

Gently, Horace shook his head, because he didn't believe this state of affairs would last for long, or lead to normality. The revolutionary genie was out of the bottle for good. It had vanished for a moment, but it was waiting, and it would reappear, all too soon, in some new shape. He should talk to Monsieur Fabergé; and now, he hoped, was the right time. ‘I wonder, sir, if you and I could have a word in private?'

*   *   *

If Horace admired the carefree ways of his wild young artists, it was perhaps because he planned his own life with such caution. His thinking today ran along these lines. Fabergé, as a jeweller, had a safe, which in these uncertain times had been enough to turn him into an unofficial banker. Half Petrograd kept something in Fabergé's safe: their jewels, or their savings, because Fabergé's was believed to be safer than any of the real banks. The clients were all certain that, if there were another, worse revolution, one that obliged them to leave the country in a hurry, they'd be safe from runs on the banks if they'd left their movables with Fabergé. They'd just drop in, pick up their things, and be off. But what, Horace had asked, if this Kerensky who was in power now was toppled in his turn? Who else might be out there, hiding in haystacks, plotting a return? Could Fabergé be sure that his safe would really be safe?

*   *   *

‘It would be like a form of insurance, you might say,' Horace finished.

He was pleased to see Carl Fabergé thoughtfully stroking his beard.

‘You may be right,
mon vieux
,' the jeweller said.

Another man living with Fabergé's awful anxieties – his factories turned over to munitions, his order book collapsing, and so many mouths to feed – might have had bloodshot eyes and a blue-stubbled chin. A drink habit, or worse. But then that's what being Swiss did for you, Horace thought, admiringly. Fabergé just kept slowly nodding, and stroking his beard. You could only see his worry in the flicker of his eyes.

They wrote a contract, just the two of them, right there and then, and got a clerk to witness them signing it. ‘For form's sake,' Fabergé said apologetically. That piece of paper wouldn't help either of them, in law, if things went wrong, Horace thought. This was a question of trust. But he, too, welcomed the illusion that a contract still counted, and signed with respectful pleasure.

Then the two gentlemen went to the safe, together, and, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do, took out about a third of the little boxes and bags, loaded them into a crate with their own hands, then found a boy to wheel the closed crate out, and put it, and Horace, into a taxi.

‘Wait,' Carl Fabergé said, once Horace was in the carriage.

He came out a few minutes later, with a canvas bag. ‘You have thought of everything else. Allow me to have thought of this first. Inside: one large chisel, and one hammer.' He grinned, as merry as a boy to be sharing his burden.

He'd had that look in his eye, earlier, when Horace had first said: ‘After all, who would ever think of looking for your treasures in a run-down attic in Dostoyevskyland? It's the safest place you could possibly keep them!'

‘They're for getting up the floorboards,' Fabergé added, now.

*   *   *

Naturally Horace did not tell Madame Leman that he would be jimmying up her attic floorboards and stuffing them with Fabergé jewels and keepsakes, to keep them safe from any socialists who might come trying to requisition the jeweller's safe.

Instead he told her, as soon as the July trouble on the streets had died away, that it was getting too expensive to keep on his flat on Great Cavalry Street, and that he would like it if Inna and he could move into one of the attic rooms at the top of the Lemans' house. If Yasha were to leave the other room, he added, he'd take that too. There were many advantages to living together. Horace would pay rent – less rent than before – to Madame Leman, not to an outsider. She, meanwhile, could feed them all. And Inna wouldn't have to walk across town twice a day to get to work. She could spend all the time she needed in the workshop, Horace said robustly (ignoring the twist in his heart).

And even though he had till now worked purely on commission as a miniaturist, he told Madame Leman that Monsieur Fabergé would in the future also be paying him a separate, small, regular stipend, in return for which Horace would help any colleague who might wish to leave Russia to arrange papers to do so.

‘Which, I might add, is just making a virtue of necessity,' Horace added, with a rueful laugh. ‘Because there's precious little of my kind of painting work about any more. Fabergé's really only being kind, paying me a regular bit extra to be ready to help people get stamps on their passports, in case there is any more revolution. Though of course I'm grateful. Every little helps.'

Madame Leman was nodding enthusiastically. The words ‘regular stipend' had gone down particularly well, Horace noticed.

‘We'll introduce you to Maxim,' she said quickly. Maxim, Horace remembered, was one of her husband's old socialist friends, sometimes talked about in the Leman apartment as a benefactor who'd helped the family with one problem or another. This Maxim, who'd come back from exile in Capri shortly before the war, was no doubt just waiting now for the next wave of revolution. ‘He'll help, for sure, if you do need to start getting people papers; he's a socialist and knows all these new people…'

‘And I'll go in to the shop, every day, of course, for form's sake,' Horace added, diverting her from the undesirable fantasy of a socialist future back to the point. ‘But basically I'm here. I'll help with anything.'

Madame Leman looked relieved. She felt her responsibilities, Horace knew, and her age. She wanted an older man about the house; someone to rely on.

*   *   *

On a tray, Madame Leman brought up two jugs of water for the washstands, and a spray of lilac in a vase. She put the flowers on the little table between the two armchairs at the end of the room. ‘You can sit and read here together,' she said, fondly. She sat down in one of them herself.

They were just getting back their breath, looking admiringly round at the transformation – ‘So
sensible
,' Madame Leman was saying. ‘Why didn't we think of this before?' – when they heard footsteps on the stairs.

‘That'll be Yasha,' Madame Leman said comfortably, leaning back in the armchair in the corner. ‘It must easily be six. They'll have finished.'

But Horace could hear there were two pairs of feet.

He could also hear the silence as the people outside saw all the changes on the landing.

The betrayal was in that moment's caution, he thought, not in Inna's brightness when, a moment later, she looked around their door.

‘So we've moved, it seems!' she said. Still standing in the doorway, not coming in, she glanced around the room, taking in her cushions, and quilts, and brushes, and the lilac. ‘Well, you
are
good to have done all this by yourself, so fast,' she said, not looking him in the eye. ‘It's just like home.'

Yasha must be standing right behind her, Horace thought.

They must have exchanged startled glances, out there. And how long had they been coming up here alone together after work in the evenings?

‘You knew what I was up to, then?' he couldn't resist asking.

Inna smiled. ‘Oh, Madame Leman said, so I came straight up,' she replied breezily.

Horace was aware of Madame Leman stirring awkwardly in the armchair behind the door, out of Inna's line of sight; of how she wanted to cover up the unpleasant nakedness of that moment's untruth as much as he did.