Midnight in St. Petersburg (6 page)

And now his parents had gone.

*   *   *

It was only once Yasha had emptied the room that he went into his own room and pulled out his parents' other letters. He was sweating. They'd never once said, he was muttering accusingly. Never … once … mentioned …

But they had.

He'd just never read any of them properly. He'd always flicked through their letters, chuckled over the first few careful phrases: still fretting over the doorman's thieving; still giving money to the school (whatever for?); still anxious about the quality of herring at the market; still at war with the officious nuns who nursed at the hospital. And once he'd got that far he'd put the letters back in their envelopes, to read properly later. He'd not noticed the anxious questions squeezed along a fold or as a PS or in a margin somewhere, in almost every one. When he might come home? Would it be prudent to get travel permission for the three of them, just in case? The careful mentions of so-and-so's visit to Haifa, and someone else's trip to Jerusalem itself. Each one, now, a knife in his side. Why hadn't he seen? Why hadn't he written back?

Yasha sat down heavily on his bed and tried to imagine what they were going through: Mama, tossing up and down on a boat deck, pale with travel sickness, with her fluffy mohair shawl damp and bedraggled round her shoulders and her hair all blown everywhere, surrounded by goaty old Orthodox pilgrims in rags and beards; and Papa letting bureaucrats fleece him blind, knowing something was wrong but not
how
they were cheating him – poor, flustered, helpless Papa, who'd never have the amused calm of Monsieur Leman or the granite strength of old Kremer.

It wasn't that Yasha didn't love them. But he'd been so angry, so resentful, so full of his new life that he hadn't made enough effort to respond when they'd tried to tell him about what they wanted to do.

Yasha groaned. He'd been the strong one all along, he saw now. He should have been better able to protect them. But he hadn't been there.

*   *   *

‘You're very quiet, Yasha,' Monsieur Leman said at lunch, lowering his newspaper and peering over the top at him.

He shrugged. Just as well if he was. No one else was being quiet.

Barbarian and Agrippina were giggling at the children's end of the table, with no one disciplining them. Marcus, who was supposed to be in charge, was too busy gawping furtively at the guest, or giggling too, more uproariously than anyone, in his up-and-down donkey-bray of a teenage voice.

Madame Leman had been giving Inna Feldman the story of the Lemans' lives since the food was dished up: her husband's career, from classics scholar (hence the children's names) to reluctant army cadet to billiards strategist to ingenious manufacturer of profitable false teeth; their brief, idealistic emigration to live among the People, in the countryside near Kiev; their disillusioned return to St. Petersburg on the eve of the revolution in 1905 (‘Country people – so
narrow-minded
!'); the liberal newspaper Monsieur Leman had set up that had nearly got him jailed in the police crackdown after the revolution failed; and his return, in the past decade, to his first love, violin-making.

Her face was pink. She was smiling. Hairpins tinkled unnoticed on to her plate. Well, at least talking about herself and her family was putting her back into her usual easy mood.

While Madame Leman talked, Monsieur Leman was reading, chuckling and every now and then saying, ‘Unbelievable!' as he pored over an allegedly eyewitness account from the assassination scene in Kiev. It was a gasp-and-stretch-your-eyes article that Yasha had already turned away from in disgust, claiming that the Empress's current favourite crackpot mystic, that goaty holy man, what's-his-name, had been in the crowd watching the Prime Minister pass on his way to the theatre, and started howling and wailing, ‘Doomed! He's being followed by death!' before collapsing to the ground.

Yasha, meanwhile, was watching Inna. Madame Leman was clearly determined not to let another Kremer situation develop, and had kept the new guest working in the kitchen, without let-up, till the meal was on the table. Inna was still grimy and travel-stained, but she was gamely trying to be polite. She nodded, from time to time. She used the pauses in Madame Leman's monologue to say yes or, occasionally, no! Mostly, though, she just ate, with the concentration of the very hungry. She had three helpings of the potato purée he knew she must have made herself before her face lost its sickly ashy colour and she finally put down her fork.

‘Did you not have any food on the train?' he asked, gently.

Eyes down, she shook her head.

Briefly, Yasha was aware of Monsieur Leman's eyes, peeping over the top of the newspaper at him again, looking amused. Shaking his head.

Hastily, Yasha got up, leaving his plate with the darling doves untouched to one side (he'd known Madame L. would have used minced pork as well as beef – she didn't approve of his new faddishness about pork – so he was secretly pleased that she'd made Inna peel enough potatoes to make purée for an army).

‘I'm off to the workshop,' he said, avoiding the master's eye, suddenly wanting to be alone again. ‘I got behind this morning.'

He didn't expect the tumult of reply that came as he scraped his chair back and prepared to slink quietly away downstairs.

First Inna, saying, in a stronger voice than he'd heard from her all through the meal: ‘Oh! Can I come too? I'd love to see your workshop.'

Then the rustle of a newspaper being put down, and Monsieur Leman's rumble and Marcus's eager multi-register cry, at the same time, ‘Of course!' and ‘I work there too, now! I'll show you round!'

And finally Madame Leman's forlorn squawk, as the men of the house all headed for the door: ‘But who's going to do the washing up?'

Yasha stopped. This might need careful management. It was just the kind of thing that had so annoyed her about young Kremer (‘Eating us out of house and home and never lifting a finger to help!'). But Inna had understood instantly. She'd already turned, and was saying in pleading tones, with an enchantingly furrowed brow, ‘Please, Madame Leman, just leave everything. I won't be long. I'll be happy to do it. And, by the way, it was a delicious lunch.'

That was enough, it seemed. Apparently at least half mollified, Madame Leman nodded and smiled faintly before turning energetically to Agrippina and Barbarian to say, ‘Well then, you two, isn't it time we sat down together to look at your homework?'

 

CHAPTER FOUR

You could get to the workshop by the building's back door, at the bottom of the communal staircase that connected the Leman's first-floor apartment with the other flats above, and also, several flights up, with the two box rooms of Yasha's domain, though the shop front opened onto the avenue outside.

Yasha sat straight down at his stool, put on his apron, turned on his lamp and picked up the violin he was making. He'd let the others fuss around her.

So he said nothing when Monsieur Leman started telling the girl, with his sly smile, ‘Best thing we ever did, hiring Yasha. His work is so quick and neat and elegant … and he's strong, too, does a week's work in a day without even noticing…' (though he did, for a moment, feel a quiver of secret pride).

It was frightening all the time, of course, this work, but a small, manageable fear – a fear born of love. You lived with it as you scraped away, a shaving at a time, never quite sure you'd mastered the tools, hoping you didn't cut your wooden infant's throat before it took its first breath. ‘I like my apprentices a bit scared,' Leman was saying to Inna, laughing with her over his gold-rimmed spectacles, until she relaxed and smiled her unexpected, enchanting smile back. ‘It makes me feel more like a master when I can set 'em right. Marcus, now: he's just beginning. Scared all the time. But Yasha's beyond that. Shaping up as a master.'

Yasha grinned, not looking up. He was carving a bass bar, whittling away at the delicate curves, making the arc of it higher in the middle, and broader and flatter towards the scooped ends. As always in this warm, comfortable, happy space, lit by pools of golden light, he felt cradled by the knowledge of the big, strong, broad-shouldered man for whom he worked, who could be relied on to have all the answers and who wanted to pass down his skills to a new generation. It had been the luckiest moment in his life when Leman had walked into his tough former master's workshop in Kiev and noticed him; when he'd invited him up here, to work for him; when he'd helped Yasha obtain the papers he'd need to get away from the brutal difficulties of the Jewlands to this new, gentler, life in the centre. Yasha was good at the job, and he knew himself to be useful; but if he was, it was because here, feeling a success, he worked with all his heart, because he loved the gentle promise of redemption that Leman had shown him in the work. Mistakes you can mend. Splinters can be glued back; cuts filled with glue and sawdust; unintended holes cut and lined and carved and sanded back into three-dimensional existence. Wood forgives.

‘Bit of a mess,' he heard Marcus apologize. ‘Shavings everywhere.'

‘Let me sweep up,' Inna said eagerly from outside his field of vision. ‘No, really.' He heard Leman rumble something appreciative in reply as he showed her where the apprentices' brooms were. Leman liked a tidy space.

Yasha found he was whistling under his breath as his hands flew over the wood as, somewhere behind him, she started kicking up clouds of shavings. He didn't even mind that he could feel her peeking over his shoulder at what he was doing.

Everyone was always whistling or humming under their breath as they worked down here. Sometimes they chatted: quiet, meditative talk, on the subjects closest to their hearts, easy streams of consciousness that flowed on and intermingled, quickly becoming familiar to their companions.

But not today.

Today, after twenty minutes of unusually loud talk by the two Lemans, and of poking about and rather boastfully demonstrating the work they were doing, between her energetic bursts of sweeping – he could see from the sweeping that Inna Feldman was as eager to please the Lemans as the male Lemans were to interest her – Leman and Marcus took her back upstairs again, at her request, so she could wash up.

‘Back in a minute, Yasha,' Leman said cheerfully from the door.

He nodded without looking up.

‘I play the violin a bit myself,' he heard Inna tell Leman before the door shut. Alone, he breathed a long, long sigh. She wasn't going to get into Madame L.'s good books, not after the Kremer episode. But she just might with the others. And she was certainly doing her best. You had to give her marks for trying.

As Yasha worked, he went on trying to remember the Feldman story, calling to mind the details his parents had told him, long ago. Hinted at, anyway. It had been coming back in wisps. It went something like this, he thought: young couple, distant cousins, living in a flat in a smallish town an hour from Kiev with their little girl; both of them teachers. The apartment set alight, in one of those nights of anti-Jewish violence that the little towns down there were so prone to. Both killed. The little girl would probably have been killed, too, only she ran away, and was brought up by a neighbour.

‘So was it smoke from the fire that killed them?' he remembered asking, trying to imagine the smell of it in his nose, and wondering whether those people been scared or just asleep. What an innocent. Still, even an innocent couldn't help but notice the way Mama's eyes had shifted sideways, and the discomfort in Papa's as he muttered, ‘We don't know the details.'

He didn't know how old she'd been then – four, five? But of course she'd never forget something like that. So when she'd seen hateful crowds in Kiev last week, what could have been more natural than for her to draw the fearful conclusions she had?

Gently he blew the shavings off his workbench. She had guts, but he could see that she couldn't have been anything but afraid. He might, just might, have been too angry with her at the door this morning. It was possible he'd overreacted, he thought, holding up his fiddle front to the light, to caress the shape he'd been making with a loving eye and see whether the curve needed correcting.

It was good to be on his own again, down here in the calm, thinking. Seeing the whole shape taking form under his hands.

He was thinking, too, about that letter from his parents.

He'd crumpled it up so fast he hadn't really examined the envelope.

But now, looking back, in this more reflective state of mind, he remembered that it hadn't had the words ‘By hand' written on it, any more than the letter inside had mentioned that Inna was the courier.

In fact, now he came to think of it, there'd been a stamp in the top right-hand corner – as if they'd intended to post it.

He thought his parents' first letter mentioning her, nearly a year ago, had said she was in the final years of school. What
could
a schoolgirl be planning to do, up here, so far from home? With a pang, he realized that none of them, so far that day, had asked.

Then, suddenly, he knew.

He put the fiddle front gently down in its padded cradle, so he could think.

His parents
hadn't
asked Inna to bring him that letter at all, had they? She'd just picked it up in the flat – pinched it, the same way she'd pinched a passport. It had been her own initiative to bring it here herself, because … because … he scratched his head, feeling increasingly uneasy … well, obviously, because she didn't have anywhere else to go. She'd had no other plan in her mind beyond finding him, and digging in.

Remorse struck him like a blow. He should have been protecting her. Helping her find a way to stay a bit longer. Taking the fear out of her eyes.