Tin Sky (33 page)

The muffled clack behind the flight of cranes betrayed the unsteady setting of the plate down on the floor. “You’re not seeking affection here. You would have done back then, be certain of that. He was old enough then to have had a son your age.
Father and son, both of you would have ‘sought my affection’ then. It happened other times. Father and son.” The plump gloved hand emerged left of the screen, forefinger and thumb lifted, a sort of lay blessing. “Father
and
son. A rich merchant from Nizhny Novgorod and his first-born ruined themselves over me. The son set fire to the Odessa warehouses to spite his father; the father turned his son in to the Okhrana as a subversive.”

I must flatter her judiciously. She’s clever and suspicious, and rightly so given the circumstances. Father did fall head over heels for Nina, as if he’d never lived with his prima donna as man and wife. This could turn into a very long interlude, if I am to obtain information from her
. Knowing that she was prying, Bora nodded his head towards the piano. “Did you own it back then,
gospozha
?”

“When I lived in Moscow? Yes. What you want to know is whether your father played on it. It was his. He played on it. Do
you
play?”

“Actually, I do.”

“Who was your teacher?”

“Weiss, from Leipzig.”

“Ih! Weiss, the best. He is the best in Germany.”

Yes, and I traded him like a piece of furniture for a Petrov grand piano, which was the only way to get him to the Red Cross
. “My parents thought so,
gospozha
.”

“Your parents? They’re not ‘your parents’! The Little One, La Petite, she’s your mother. Your father is dead.” The screen trembled; she was perhaps getting to her feet, or maybe only crossing her legs or changing position behind it. “You’re itching to play; you wonder if it’s in tune. It’s in tune. Let me hear you. And don’t think I don’t have an excellent ear left.”

“What should I play?”

“Something he wrote.”

There was a brief composition, less than two minutes in all, called
The Bells of Novgorod
, dedicated by Friedrich von Bora to his disagreeable but genial colleague Balakirev. Difficult as it was minimal in duration, Bora knew it by heart, including the
finger-straining
ossias
that would make or break his chances of gaining her confidence.

He freed the piano of shawls and fringes, aware of his own eagerness. His motions felt even to him (and to her, no doubt) like a suitor’s haste to undress his beloved. In the dusty room, no dust flew about from the silk he parted, lifted and pulled back to expose the gleaming key lid.

Afterwards, no sign of life came from behind the screen for a time that exceeded the showpiece’s duration. Bora lowered the key lid slowly. He was already replacing the bright shawls over the instrument when she observed at last, “So, you do have talent after all, Martyn Friderikovich. You play better than your own father. He was a
god
before the orchestra, but played the piano no more than very well. You play more than very well: Weiss taught you right.
The Bells of Novgorod
, no less: difficult as
Islamey
, a worthy tribute to old Mily Balakirev. You are wasted in a uniform.”

“Hardly, Larisa Vasilievna. I like being a soldier.”

“Nonsense your mother’s second bed-mate has put into you. You are wasted in a uniform.”

“With all due respect, I have no intention whatever of making music my career.”

A swish of clothes and she emerged from behind the screen, a stocky, domineering grey-eyed woman with curls and a Queen Victoria jowl, in a lace-collared black gown reaching down to her feet. Her feet were small, swollen and bare. Bora was careful to exhibit no response other than a nod; he estimated her to be in her late sixties, and she was no longer beautiful. The butter she’d just finished eating rimmed her lips in greasy slickness, and the fatty folds of her cheeks were also shiny. The detail embarrassed him, but he remained unmoved.

“Killing for a career is better, I suppose.” Larisa waded among odds and ends, docking at last into a wicker armchair, whose overstuffed cushions she dropped on the floor before heavily
sitting down. “Come, what do you want? Other than wanting to meet me, yes, yes. Nimble-fingered as you are, you’re a Bora; you’re up to something else.”

He turned on his heel to face her where she sat. It was a challenge looking her in the eye and keeping his mind off the oily smears on her face. “Very well, Larisa Vasilievna, but I’m up to something very small. I read in articles about your relocation to Kharkov during the Great War, about your work with Lysenko and the Ukrainian People’s Opera. You led the music scene. So I was wondering whether you recall ever meeting a celebrated revolutionary officer who went by the name of Khan Tibyetsky. During the 1920s he frequented Kharkov’s brightest and most artistic. He might alternatively have used the name —”

Larisa interrupted him. “I met everybody who was anybody, back then.”

Yes, and
Redundant Lives
is the title of the memoir she wrote in 1915, so scandalous that only the French would publish it. After the Revolution she must have eaten humble pie to be forgiven for it, and all that remains is this parlour crawling with souvenirs. I don’t see my father’s portraits, but if I know her type, she has a shrine to him somewhere in this house.

“
Khan
, you said?” Seated like a barbarian queen among her trophies, she visibly searched her memory. “Khan Tibyetsky… Khan Tibyetsky. Khan! My red-headed sybarite!” Pulling another cushion from behind her back, she tossed it without looking, knocked a metal ewer from a fragile stand and sent both clattering on to the floor. In the time it took Bora to retrieve the ewer and return the stand to its feet, an alarmed Nyusha showed up from the garden, asking if
gospozha
Larisa needed anything.

“No, dear, thank you. I don’t need anything.” Larisa waved the girl away. To Bora, she added, “Nyusha lost her husband in the war. She is devoted to me, takes care of things. I will leave her all I have, even though she’s a peasant, a peasant through and through. Poor dove, droplet of my heart’s blood,
she won’t know what to do with what I leave her. But to
you
I’ll give nothing; not even things that belonged to your father, if that’s what you came for.”

“I’m not here for that reason, Larisa Vasilievna.”

“We’ll see. Well, you asked about Khan Tibyetsky. Why; what about him? He lived large. It felt delicious after the difficult years of the civil war and the months following Frunzik’s death to have champagne and butter. There were buckets of butter in the pantry, back then.”

In the sultriness of the cluttered parlour, Bora stood stock-still, conveying an image of comfort that did not remotely correspond to the way he felt. The concept he had of his father – formal, free of affection – was bruised by the sight of slovenliness mixed with remnants of vanity.
Where I stand, in the uniform in which I stand, I am empowered to do as I will. I could order this house to be torched with her inside it. I could. I live in a world where a son can with impunity destroy his father’s lover
. But when she charged him, “Why do you want to know? Why are you asking me these questions? You Boras always have an ulterior motive,” instead of anger he felt a near excess of pity.

“Esteemed Larisa Vasilievna,
gospozha
, I will bring you all the butter I can find if you talk to me about Khan Tibyetsky.”

“And sugar.”

“And sugar.”

Aware as she must be that he wouldn’t sit down until invited, Larisa let him stand. “It was in Makhno’s days, when his Black Army stole from rich estates, convents, barracks, farms. I know: I used to spend time in Kharkov even before the Revolution bought me a town house on Kusnetschnaya Street. Kulaks and other landowners entrusted valuables to their former servants, but Makhno hunted for and found the stuff in their huts. Makhno was like a sieve winnowing grain. The good things remained in the sieve. Only the chaff was scattered.”

“But that’s Makhno, not Tibyetsky.”

“Well, what do you know about Tibyetsky’s business? He took
over where Makhno left off. We made merry when he came. We had buckets of butter and buckets of champagne.”

“I don’t understand, Larisa Vasilievna: he
took over
how?”

“The valuables, funds for the Revolution. It all flowed through Kharkov, the year Frunzik died.”

1925. Yes. Tarasov had told him how throughout the 1920s Khan had often visited the Komintern tractor factory in Kharkov, but perhaps that was not his sole interest in the region.

“When you made merry,
gospozha
, was there a man called Platonov, too?”

The lacy hand indicated for him to sit, and Bora pulled out the piano stool to do so.

“Ih! Gleb Platonov: how long since I have heard that name. ‘Honest Platonov’, ‘Platonov the Righteous’. Gleb the Contrary, I called him. Scarcely smiled, scarcely drank: a tedious comrade if ever there was one. You see, I have an excellent ear and an excellent memory, Martyn Friderikovich. Now, Platonov acted soberly, but I saw through him. He was like you Boras: ambitious, single-minded. It wasn’t wealth with him, it was success. He knew exactly how to secure it. My good-natured Khan was afraid of him.”

Hard to imagine Tibyetsky in fear. “Physically afraid?”

“I don’t know that! He was afraid, that’s all. Platonov knew things. He kept secrets.”

And how
, Bora thought. “What sort of secrets,
gospozha
?”

“They wouldn’t be secrets if I knew. If I knew, it’d mean he didn’t know how to keep secrets. Secrets about Tibyetsky. Secrets about Frunze, even.”

“Khan was not Russian-born: could his past be one of the secrets?”

Where her armchair was, the corner of a frayed carpet drew a triangle on the wooden floor. She tapped her feet where rug and parquet met, a drumming of swollen toes. “Are you familiar with the Russian saying, ‘What’s good for a Russian kills the foreigner’? Do you know what
shirokaya natura
means? We have
superabundance of spirit
, Martyn Friderikovich. The way Khan lived in Kharkov tells me he was more Russian than I am, born in Moscow and raised by a father of the ninth administrative rank, an art collector who could honour a million roubles’ debt and outdrink a Cossack.”

“Please tell me more about Platonov.”

“Boring subject. Platonov made his career, surpassed Khan, stepped on Khan. And Khan had to keep on his good side. Khan’s legwork helped Platonov become a member of the Revolutionary Military Council. Of the two, saint and sinner, I’d take the sinner any day.”

It was what he’d heard from Tarasov, more or less in the same words. Bora smoothed a crease of the piano shawl near Frunze’s photograph. “But the ‘secrets’: could there have been goods involved? Property requisitioned during the Revolution, perhaps by Makhno, snatched from him and stashed away? Have you ever heard of a place called Krasny Yar?”

“No. I’ve never heard of the place. It must be a very small place if I’ve never heard of it. During those years Khan and Platonov argued like street dogs, but they never mentioned Krasny Yar.”

“You saw them arguing,
gospozha
? And why would a man with an ego like Khan Tibyetsky’s allow a seemingly less brilliant colleague to get ahead? Was it really, as you say, that Platonov knew secrets about him?”

“What else? Once when they had a fracas in my town house, he called Khan a ‘thief’s thief’, and only by throwing myself between them was I able to keep them from killing each other. They made up, as they always did. Khan was like embers under ash, though. After that time they never visited together any more.”

“And did one or the other, as far as you remember…”

Larisa sank in her armchair, nodding. “I remember everything, provided I want to. But not now. Now I’m tired. It tires me to look at you, you’re a Bora: five
pud
of manly arrogance.
I know your blood. Go. Come back when you have plenty of butter. Sugar, too.”

She might be pretending; or not. It was unlikely that he’d get anything else out of her in either case. Bora watched her sit looking elsewhere (or nowhere) in the room, disregarding him, an old person’s technique for dismissing the young. He left the parlour and the house, and the overgrown garden, not feeling wholly himself until he reached his army vehicle and sat behind the wheel. It relieved him to see the nick on the windshield frame: a testimony that it was still the same day, and the same life, in which he’d been shot at near the Diptany crossroads.

Tuesday 18 May, Merefa.

Good thing I remembered “The Bells of Novgorod”, “Tristan chord” and all. As a composer, my natural father had a predilection for the pentatonic scale and chromaticism. Weiss told me he had nothing more to teach me when I mastered that piece. I doubt it was true. But we were in 1934, and there was a new obligation for Leipzig residents to exhibit their racial papers. I’d just graduated with high honours from cavalry school at Hanover, and was about to enter the Dresden Army Infantry School. I was hardly home any more, whether or not I’d received enough piano lessons from a Jew.

As for
La Malinovskaya
, what did I expect? What was my impression? I believe it was Seneca who said,
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae
, pointing to a link between genius and madness. Although we didn’t mention her much at home for obvious reasons, I was always curious about her life and career. Her art connoisseur father might have honoured his huge debt, as she says; but, gambler that he was, he shot himself in a Marienbad casino a few years later. This detail she passed over in silence, while blaming “those two upstart merchants Ostruchov and Tetryakov” for his downfall (as if I should know them; I didn’t ask, to avoid going off on another wild goose chase). Larisa’s offstage rows with Odessite Maria Kuznetsova, also very beautiful, made the headlines. Not to
speak of her (reciprocated) jealousy of Salomea Kruszelnicka (if I am spelling her name right), at least until Salomea had to flee abroad for political reasons some 40 years ago. 1925 must have been a difficult time for Larisa, because, as well as Frunze, she also lost her young friend Jurjevskaya to a spectacular drowning suicide in a Swiss mountain stream. But much as she pined after faithless Friedrich von Bora and Mikhail Frunze, Larisa never even considered doing away with herself. Of course it would have been a loss to world music, as her remarkable coloratura was and is rare in large voices. In her generation, only Felia Litvinne comes to mind.