Midnight in St. Petersburg (39 page)

 

PART THREE

1918–19

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

On a crisp, frosty October afternoon in 1918, Mr and Mrs Wallick, with darns in their coats and moth-eaten bits of rabbit skin at their collars, joined thousands of other shabby comrades walking through Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had turned the city into a People's Art extravaganza to mark the first anniversary of the Revolution. Palace Square, now called Uritsky Square after a comrade, was festooned with giant posters, as were the Hermitage, the Admiralty and the Academy of Sciences. ‘Hero City!' and ‘Cradle of the Revolution!' the posters screamed. Arm in arm with Horace, Inna stared up at the soaring Alexander Column in Palace Square, which was enclosed by a giant red and orange Cubist-style rostrum, whose jagged planes looked like flames. It seemed to be blowing the column into the sky.

‘It's not so bad, you see!' Horace kept exclaiming, his stubbly face lit up. Inna knew that he loved all the strange, angular, athletic art of this new life. He'd sat up till all hours last night with Marcus and his poet girlfriend, Olympia, drinking in their fanciful talk about the explosive beyond-sense language the young were now experimenting with, the language of the birds, or of the gods, or of the stars; a language beyond time, the speech of the future; or was it the lost aboriginal language of the time before? Inna couldn't keep the doubt off her face.

It was 365 days since all this began. In that year, so many other people's resistance to the new order had been overcome. The bank workers who'd refused to open their safes for these grubby new masters had given in after the Bolsheviks held guns to their heads. The surly ministry doormen who, a year ago, had tried to turn away the first Bolshevik Commissars had, likewise, changed their minds. The actors in the imperial theatres, who'd come out on strike against the new regime, were back on stage. But Inna wasn't reconciled.

It wasn't all bad, true. Inna had been impressed by some of these new Soviet rulers' odder, more idealistic new laws. She oohed and aahed like everyone else when they abolished the two weeks that would ordinarily follow 31 January, making the next day 15 February instead of 1 February, and bringing Russian time, which had for centuries lagged two weeks behind the West's, bang up to date. She marvelled when they did away with all the old-fashioned glitches in Russian spelling and killed off a couple of useless letters, turning the written language into a logical modern construct.

It was true, too, that the war had ended (though it was best not to think about the terms).

Still, Inna was less willing than her husband to be charmed by the posters. Their defiant brightness reminded her of all the things that had gone wrong this year; of the darkness underneath.

Lenin had moved the Soviet government to Moscow in the spring after someone had taken a potshot at him. There'd never been anything to keep this boggy city going but the machinery of empire, and now the innumerable government offices and functionaries had gone. So Petrograd was dying all around them: and those people who hadn't already left were starving. The White resistance, down in the south, was crystallizing into civil war. The Bolsheviks had a secret police of their own called the Cheka, as terrifying as the Emperor's secret police had ever been; worse, maybe. Since someone else had taken another potshot at Lenin in August, in Moscow – a girl this time – the Cheka were stamping out opposition to the Revolution. But you didn't get details of the Red Terror from the papers, which were as empty as ever, just from whispers in queues: stories that the Romanovs had all been killed, from the former Emperor Nikolai Romanov, shot with his wife and children and servants somewhere in the Urals, to every insignificant cousin in every remote corner of the land. Shot, stabbed, dissolved in acid baths, dropped down mine shafts.

There was the everyday terror you saw whenever you went out, too: gloating servants turning on every grandee they'd ever felt slighted by, yelling, ‘Time to start looting from the looters!' as they emptied the houses of the rich. Everywhere eyes glinted with hate.

And then there was the hunger. Pavlov, a Nobel scientist, growing his own carrots and potatoes; poor old Professor Gezekhus, blown up with hunger like some African famine victim; or Nastya, the teenage daughter of the family upstairs, who'd taken to hanging around outside on the street, not with the icons and pearl brooches and leather-bound books and woollens and boots that took other gloomy ladies out to the market, but with cheeks boldly rouged and a pinched look on her face. How long before Agrippina went the same way? How long before she herself…?

So walking about this festival of revolution in Petrograd this afternoon didn't delight Inna. It just made her feel dizzy, especially when she thought about the future. No wonder the sky was so cheerfully blue. Why would there be clouds, when the factories had all stopped working? Weeds sprouted from the Merchants' Yard walls, and the wooden pavements were rotting.

So there was bitterness in her voice as she replied, ‘Not so bad, no. And who cares if people heat their apartments by burning their books, and eat dogs and cats?'

‘Do you mind if I quickly drop something off?' Horace asked casually a little later when they got as far along Nevsky as Yeliseyevsky's. She could see the strip of open ground just beyond, marking the turning into Great Cavalry Street and the apartment where they'd once lived. Inna shivered. The great black skeletons of the trees there, beckoning bonily in the sharp wind, seemed to be calling her back.

She nodded agreement. She didn't want to be walking around on her own any more, and she definitely didn't want Horace doing so. Lucky his coat was so shabby, she thought, because it wasn't just thieves being killed on a mob whim any more. They were catching officers too – anyone in smart clothes – and administering revolutionary justice from the nearest lamp-post. That's why Madame Leman had sewn these mangy old rabbit skins on to everyone's collars. She'd started with Horace's, Inna guessed, because he was the one street boys were likeliest to stop and point at, squealing in their high, innocent, dangerous voices, ‘
BUR-ZHUI!
' Horace's upright carriage and kind, gentlemanly air meant he could easily be taken for some vestige of the old orders, or simply recognized as a foreigner who must therefore be a bourgeois, and punished accordingly.

‘Where are we going?' she said. But she'd half guessed already, even before they set off towards their old home. Franz Birbaum from Fabergé's still lived in the same building, with its view of the avenue of tall trees and the green-and-white classical temple where the Finnish Lutherans prayed. He was the last of Horace's colleagues left.

‘I won't be a moment,' he said, not answering her question. She glanced at him: at the lines – laughter lines – round his eyes, and those other lines, down his cheeks and across his forehead, which could only be worry. With sudden concern she thought, How careworn he looks.

He kissed her forehead when they'd pushed through the unlocked downstairs door (no doorman here any more). ‘You wait downstairs.' That excitement she'd seen in him outside seemed to have evaporated, as he plodded up the stairs.

She stood, pleased to be out of the wind, remembering the dusty smell of this place, and the wild wind soughing in the branches outside while she'd lain in her cosy bed with Horace beside her. Refusing to dwell on the anguish of those last few weeks here – the creeping about, the deceit – she remembered instead the warmth of the rooms, the electricity, clothes and food plentifully available at shops round every corner. She remembered laughing and eating with Horace on her wedding night, and the peace they'd shared. Yes, they'd been good times, here, she thought.

She'd liked Monsieur Birbaum, too: a precise, fussy, good-natured old gentleman, who'd learned passable Russian for a foreigner. And Horace admired his stubbornness in staying on, mending watches and gold chains, as he waited for the Whites to win the Civil War and the good old times to come back. Inna knew that Horace felt solidarity with him, when so many other foreigners were giving up and slinking away. They all came to say goodbye. These days, Horace seemed popular among foreigners whose names she'd never even heard until they came to shake his hand as they left; though, after they'd gone, he sometimes called them faint-hearts, and laughed a bit.

‘What are they running
to
? That's the question they should be asking,' he'd say, shaking his head. Carl Fabergé himself had gone, she knew, but Birbaum hung on. And, though she hadn't been back here for several months, Inna knew that Horace still dropped in on him every now and then.

Why didn't he ask me up too? she wondered, but without minding. They'd want to talk English or French, she supposed, and reminisce about old times.

Horace was as good as his word, and was down inside five minutes.

She didn't understand why, when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he embraced her as if they'd been parted for years, but she didn't mind that either.

‘How's Monsieur Birbaum?' she murmured into his shoulder.

‘Packing.' She heard tightness in his voice. ‘He's leaving the city tonight. The Housing Committee wants his flat.'

Inna could just imagine the grim requisitioning party of men with old coats and hard eyes, working out how many people could be crammed into Birbaum's living space and where the partitions should be.

‘They've scared him off. He says I should be going too. It's all over here for the likes of us, he says.'

He looked down at her. His eyes were wet. She'd never seen this before.

‘Oh Horace,' she whispered, holding him close. ‘I'm sorry.'

He told her the rest out on the street as they walked under the heaving trees. Birbaum was planning on taking the route most people were leaving by, now the city was emptying out. He'd go south, through Kiev, down to the Black Sea at Yalta. Yalta, behind the White army lines, was where the White sympathizers were, the aristocrats, and plenty of less aristocratic people, too. Even if you hadn't liked the way things had been before, life for anyone remotely well to do had certainly felt safer under the Emperor. At Yalta, you were poised for onward flight, if need be, to Constantinople or Jerusalem or beyond, though no one wanted to leave Russia altogether unless the Reds broke through. Inna had heard that the White sympathizers were enjoying their long sojourn in the pretty seaside resort, under the bougainvillea. Felix Youssoupoff was among the many Fabergé clients down there, or nearby, at his family estate in the Crimean peninsula's hills, Horace continued, waiting for all this to be over, and for normality to return.

‘Perhaps we should go too,' Inna said cautiously, watching her toecaps kick up, one after the other, under her coat. Horace had never wanted to leave before, and he didn't answer now. Perhaps the wind had blown away her words? Inna thought, forgiving him.

‘What were you dropping off, anyway?' she asked, when they were nearly home.

He stopped, and Inna was aware of the sudden carefulness in his eyes. ‘Well, it's all over now – like Barbarian's adventure with the pickling alcohol, I suppose,' he said reluctantly.

Out of his pocket he took a roll of money she hadn't seen before, carefully cupped in his hand so that the ragged passers-by wouldn't be able to see it. Even in the debased currency of the day, with a bag of flour now costing five thousand roubles, she could see it was enough to help for a while. Once she'd seen it, he stuffed it away again.

‘It's for travel papers,' he said. ‘People pay me and I get them from Maxim.'

Inna blinked. Horace had gone out early this morning, true, and come back with a copy of
New Life
. But he hadn't said he was going to see Maxim. And what did Maxim have to do with getting travel documents, anyway? His newspaper was always in trouble with the authorities, for being so critical. But then again, the new rulers were still supposed to be fond of him, personally, for the support he'd given them in the past, and he knew all the socialists and was close to many Bolsheviks. He could have a word in anyone's ear. He was connected. So, yes, perhaps he would be a good man to go to, if you wanted documents for getting away.

She blinked again. Was
that
why all the foreigners came to see Horace?

‘I've been storing things for old Fabergé customers – things they used to keep at the shop, in Monsieur Fabergé's safe. Gold is better than money, with the inflation,' he went on, very low.

She let it sink in – how had she not known? Or had she half known all along? She nodded, slowly. ‘You kept them under the floorboards,' she breathed. ‘Of course. Under those bookshelves you keep moving round…'

‘I knew they'd rifle the safe in the end,' Horace confirmed jerkily. ‘I said, better to take precautions than just wait for the worst. I wanted to help people leave with their belongings. That's what my stipend was for. And Birbaum's been paying me that, too, over these last few months. But now there's no one else left.'

Inna nodded again, more bleakly this time. So the stipend would stop too. All they'd lived on, at least in the early months, before Madame Leman had got so good at sourcing government ration parcels, would come to an end.

Suddenly overwhelmed, she wrapped him in her arms again. ‘You did all that, for all of us, and you never breathed a word,' she said. ‘You're a good man, Horace Wallick. It's why I love you.'

His arms tightened about her. They stayed like that, swaying together for a long moment, turned away from the world, shutting out the filthy pavement of Garden Street and the stinking Hay Market ahead.

‘There was a whole crate of stuff when we moved in,' he said, his voice hollow. ‘And now it's all gone. The box is empty. Everyone's left.'