Midnight in St. Petersburg (45 page)

Madame Leman hugged her back. ‘There, darling, there,' she said soothingly. ‘Don't you fret, it'll all be fine, and soon we'll—' But then her voice broke too.

‘Look after Horace,' Inna heard next, but only vaguely, for she was looking along the platform again. Could it be? But no, it was only Marcus, emerging from the crowded gloom, limping towards them with newspapers tucked under his arm.

‘They're fresh ones,' he said, trying to look cheerful. He gave the smudgy folded sheets to Horace. ‘Come back and see us,' he added. ‘And send your children to me, when they're old enough to be apprentices; I'll make luthiers of them all.'

Balancing on his crutch, he gave Horace a one-armed hug. Then he hugged Inna, too, looking hungrily into her eyes as if he were memorizing her for the future. ‘And
you,
dear heart. Look after yourself, look after your husband, look after your children when they come, be happy, wealthy and wise forever, and always as lovely as you are today.'

She clung to him. ‘Dearest Marcus,' she whispered, trying to laugh, remembering the puppy of a boy he'd once been, and his father rumpling his hair. How proud old Leman would have been to see him now, looking after the family. ‘Marry Olympia, have babies, write poetry, and open up the workshop again soon, do you hear?'

For a moment, behind Marcus, she thought she saw a tall silhouette in the distance: black hair cut short. Her heart stopped. But, as the man came closer and his outline resolved into detail, she saw he was just another nobody; one of the multitudes of strangers the world was filled with; not the shape she was looking for.

The whistle went piercingly in her ear. ‘Get on, quick,' Madame Leman was saying, wiping her eyes. Horace tugged at her arm.

Panic rose, catching Inna's throat. She couldn't go yet.

And then there were arms around her from behind.

She wheeled around, suddenly breathless with expectation—

But it was only Barbarian and Agrippina, both together, breathless themselves from climbing out of the carriage at high speed, both flinging themselves on her, nearly howling at the prospect of parting, ‘Innochka! Write! As soon as you can! Don't forget! We'll be waiting! We'll check the mailbox every day!'

Bitterly ashamed of the disappointment that must briefly have shown on her face, she kissed them both back just as frenziedly. ‘I will! I promise! And you be good for your mother, both of you, and for Marcus, and work hard, and…'

Behind them, the train hooted mournfully, then screeched into slow motion. She couldn't. She hadn't. She must. She looked desperately up the platform, through the thickening snow, one more time.

‘Get on, Innochka!' the children were screaming. ‘Hurry!'

Grabbing the handle on the carriage doorway, Inna leaped on to the latticework outer step behind her husband.

Even when the train speeded up, Barbarian and Agrippina went on running along the long platform beside them, faster and faster, waving and breathlessly shouting, with tears streaking their cheeks and snow pushing unheeded into their faces, until the adults behind them were just a grey huddle against the lit-up silhouette of the station; until, eventually, they fell back, laughing, crying and collapsing breathlessly against each other.

And they, too, dwindled away into points in the darkness, until they were swallowed up in it altogether, and there was just the rhythmic clank of the train, and the conductor closing the door, and the sudden stillness of the sweaty air inside, and the sway of the yellow lamp, and Horace beside her, tall but slightly bowed, blowing his nose and dabbing at his eyes. He was opening the last little package Madame Leman had pressed into his hands, which, Inna could see, even through the mist over her own eyes, contained a dozen hard-boiled eggs and Maxim's wife's piece of sausage. ‘Well, that's that. And now let's find our places,' he said shakily, taking her arm, and guiding her into the carriage.

*   *   *

Long ago, when Inna had come north, alone, by train, the journey had been frightening. But the empire had still existed, and everything about the actual travel arrangements had been as sleek as the gendarmes' shiny-buttoned uniforms. Her entire trip, with its one easy change of train in Moscow, had taken, what, three or four days?

Going south, now, in the People's Russia, was an altogether different matter, even up here in the north, where there was no war to worry about. The crowded, broken-down trains limped, agonizingly slowly, from one siding to the next, one tumbledown village or town or city to the next. People got on or off. And everyone argued.

It took four days just to get to Moscow. And Inna wept all the way.

‘So many tears,' Horace said, gently, with his arm about her. ‘A lifetime's supply.' And it was true that the endless flow of salt liquid down her face surprised even her.

They were sharing a top bunk. They lay down on it by night, with the violin under the two bags at their feet, and the dwindling parcels of food on top of everything, and the eggshells slowly filling up the tube Horace had made of one of Marcus's newspapers. By day they sat on the bunk, side by side, arm in arm, with their legs swinging down in the faces of the people below; or, if the compartment was crowded, as it usually was, they went on uncomfortably lounging on the rumpled bedding and – in Inna's case – quietly sobbing.

She was aware, even as she cried, that they shouldn't be drawing attention to themselves. So she tried to stop. There's so much you don't need to think of, she kept telling herself. You just have to hold on to what you need: that we're going to get through the war, that we're going to find Youssoupoff, that we're going to be all right. But, however surprised she felt at her collapse, however angry with herself, the tears would well up again, regardless, dripping on to the newspaper, swelling over the eggshells, soaking her front.

Yet, as it turned out, it didn't much matter what she did, in this rhythmic, trance-like movement from past to future. Many of the passengers didn't even seem to be aware she was there. Mostly, they were too busy with their business: particularly the fattish, smooth-jowled men, with their mysterious bundles and their suspiciously good clothes and their supplies of chicken drumsticks and brandy and cards and cigarettes.

They liked to sit up half the night chomping, and gaming, and smoking, and warbling sentimental folk songs out of tune in their rough voices, and even when the singing of one merry band (‘Spreading o'er the rii-veer, Golden willow tree-eee; Tell me true: my lover, Whe-e-ere is she?') reduced Inna to audible sobs in the middle of the first night, long after Horace, with his head by her feet, had fallen into a heavy, exhausted sleep, the men just laughed, not unkindly. One got up, and, in a fiery burst of brandy breath, grinned at her. Frightened, she pulled away from him, but all he did was hold out a square of chocolate, unwrapped and half melted in the heat of the compartment. He said, ‘Here, girl, don't take on so, it's all going to be all right,' and watched, as if she were a child with medicine, while she swallowed his little black-market luxury down. She kept her breathing quiet after that, although even then the water squeezed out under her eyelids, as she lay willing herself to sleep.

Sometimes, kindly matrons, of whom there were fewer, also looked sympathetically up to their high bunk. One reached up before she got out, patted Inna's knee, and said, ‘Heading south, are you? No need to be so scared; you're in God's hands,' before making the sign of the cross over her. Another passed Inna a hanky, saying hoarsely, ‘Keep it, dearie; I know a broken heart when I hear one.'

Inna told Horace the first evening that it was the shock of having remembered her parents that was making her cry, that she felt as though she was only now beginning to mourn them. Horace nodded as she spoke, as if everything about her were coming together in his head and making sense at last.

‘That's why you've always been so frightened, isn't it?' he kept saying, unbearably kindly. Once, kissing her hair, he even added wistfully, ‘And maybe now you'll lose that fear. Who knows, perhaps you'll even become a violinist at last, and take Europe and America by storm?'

‘You don't think, do you, that
she,
my mother, felt … abandoned … when I went away?' Inna whispered.

‘Oh dear heart, no. It was exactly what she wanted – for you to get away and be safe. It was what she was telling you to do. You don't ever need to feel guilty for having obeyed her. You were absolutely right,' he replied, holding her close.

He also said that it was a blessing to have remembered her family, even with all the pain that the memory had brought. Because she'd felt alone in life, hadn't she, until now? But now she knew that, however badly things might have ended for her parents, at least they'd known the greatest joy in life: having her. And she could take real comfort, at last, in having brought her parents that happiness; having been at the centre of their world; and in knowing that she hadn't been alone at the start. ‘You had their love,' Horace whispered. ‘And you have me now. You'll never be alone again.'

But I am alone, Inna thought then, in spite of all his kindness, and, out of despair at her own ungrateful contrariness, cried again.

*   *   *

Moscow, city of bells and onion domes and lopsided little yellow houses with their stucco falling off in great patches behind the red banners, came creeping up around them one overcast dawn.

‘Look,' Horace said, waking Inna with a bristly kiss. She stared through the dull glass in dull surprise, and then began scrambling to do her hair, and assemble her coat and boots.

When the train finally stopped in the north of the city, they picked up their bags and walked across town to the next train. They needed to save the money sewn into their coats, and, more importantly, were anxious to avoid attracting attention in an unfamiliar place where political sympathies were uncertain.

‘You're still limping,' Inna said. Marcus had tried to repair Horace's boot, but the big string stitches through the uppers only just held the leather together. It would let damp in: maybe this was the problem?

‘Oh,' said Horace, ‘it's nothing.' He smiled, and the care seemed to lift from his face. ‘You sound happier.'

Moscow was just the first change of many on the itinerary Horace had tentatively drawn up to try and skirt anywhere the war further south was likely to be.

The war, Inna imagined, was only ever a place; quite a small place, perhaps, with people leading something quite like their normal lives only a road or a field away. But the war was also like a storm that might move on at any moment. The important thing was to keep up to date with the war news, and listen to rumours on the trains, so you could have the most recent information about where the fighting might be, and how to avoid it.

But even Moscow, still in the north, was alien territory to her and Horace. They walked, slowly, for an hour, towards the station for Kiev, through the black, icy snow of a city full of bonfires outside, and the exhaust pipes of
burzhuiki
, inside, sticking out of windows. The violin was slung across Inna's back and she was carrying the two bags in her hands.

‘Let me,' she'd said with sudden pity when she'd seen Horace grimace as he picked them up. ‘They're not heavy.'

She couldn't cry here, as she had to ask strangers the way. They had decided it was unwise to let Horace, with his accent, open his mouth. On this journey, she felt in no particular danger – yet. But Horace, with his foreign voice, was a potential victim in this hungry crowd. She was going to protect him.

*   *   *

It turned out that Kiev, the most obvious next stop on their journey, was not a good place to head. She wasn't sorry when Horace ruled it out – in a whisper.

Kiev was almost certainly too dangerous now, he said. With the German wartime forces gone, their puppet government of Ukrainian nationalists had vanished too, leaving behind Whites, Reds and a mysterious Ukrainian peasant army slugging it out in the streets or in the fields. Wildly contradictory press reports spoke of first one lot and then the other trouncing the rest and forming governments with strange, wild-sounding names.

Nor could they head straight for Sevastopol, the main port of the Crimean peninsula, south of Kiev. It was their logical destination, since from Sevastopol it was only a short drive along the coast to the Youssoupoff estate, and Yalta. But, like Kiev, Sevastopol was too important not to be dangerous. Ever since the sailors of the imperial fleet moored there had mutinied – hacking their officers to pieces, burning them alive in the ships' furnaces, or throwing them into the Black Sea with iron bars tied to their legs – it had been off-limits.

Horace and Inna picked a quieter route, one they thought would most likely allow them to avoid trouble, though you never knew. This quiet worry, this fretting and eavesdropping and anxious reading of newspapers as you crawled around the edge of the hostilities was as much part of what war was, she now saw, as the battles she and Horace were trying to avoid. And there was always the possibility everything would have changed once you got there.

And so they zigzagged across country.

From Moscow, they took a train to Kursk.

‘At least the bags are getting lighter,' Horace murmured, subsiding with relief on to another top bunk. Inna nodded, though not so happily. The bags were lighter because the food was gone.

Below them seethed another sea of the dispossessed: crying children; women with haunted eyes, trying to watch too many bags and babies at once; profiteers; soldiers.

Horace, with his back to her, spent a long time easing his boots off.

‘Let me take a look at that,' Inna said.

He only laughed. ‘Thank you, but no. Leave it. There'll be water on this train for another day or two, don't you think? So I'm going down, right now, to change the dressing – and have a shave, too. Or next time you see me someone will be asking me for a blessing, because they've mistaken me for an Orthodox priest.'