Midnight in St. Petersburg (20 page)

Inna looked down. She felt obscurely pleased at the idea Madame Leman had been worried for her. ‘Yes,' she said as Madame Leman got out the frying pan and put it on the stove. ‘I'm sorry.'

She still had the document in her hand, and started to say, ‘But now I do,' intending to thank Madame Leman, but she didn't get a chance, because the children swept noisily on, in chorus, ‘And is it true that you had the Empress's holy man to tea?' (Agrippina); ‘Putnik, Rasputnik?' (Barbarian); ‘Mama said he'd been hit on the head by a bishop?' (Agrippina).

Head bowed, feeling her cheeks redden, Inna nodded again: Sort of.

‘It's so unfair. Everything interesting always happens while we're out,' Agrippina said, exchanging envious glances with her brother.

There was a hiss as the first spoonful of batter went into the pan.

‘Horace thought it was funny that you didn't even realize, the other day,' Madame Leman said, ‘that it was Rasputin you were visiting.' Her voice was unemotional. She was concentrating on her
blin
, which went wrong, as they always do, first time. With pink cheeks, she scraped it out of the pan.

‘Mam's embarrassed to admit it, but she rather liked him,' Agrippina informed Inna. ‘Rasputny.'

Madame Leman smiled faintly at the pan. A pin tinkled out of her hair. ‘Horace thinks he's got something, too,' she admitted.

The arrival of Leman and a very silent Yasha, with the morning papers and some fresh bread, not only spared Madame Leman's blushes, but also gave Inna a chance to try and make the pretty thank-you speech she'd been failing to start on with Madame Leman.

Without looking at her, Yasha sat down at the kitchen table and opened the paper. Inna was laughing inside at their secret, as he must be. She couldn't look at him, either.

‘Oh, don't thank me,' Leman said breezily before she'd got more than a few words out.

She stopped, sensing Yasha's alertness behind the
Stock Exchange Gazette
.

‘Thank Horace,' Leman went on, twinkling at her. ‘It was all his idea.'

Yasha lowered his paper as Madame Leman turned to smile at her from the other side of the kitchen. The children were giggling.

Uncertainly she looked down at the residence permit, still in her hand. What could it possibly have to do with Horace? Surely she'd seen the Lemans' address written down?

But as soon as she looked further down the page she saw that, although she lived here, she worked, according to the document, as a decorative box-maker for Fabergé.

‘He said that was the way he got his own papers sorted. After months of trouble from the ministry, he just got a letter from Fabergé,' Leman was explaining, ‘which smoothed everything out at once. It's sometimes easier for foreign firms, he said: the ministry men are scared to stick their noses in. He said it was worth trying with you, too – as soon as he heard about your troubles. He sent me round the Fabergé standard letter the very next morning, and very impressive it was, too: “Give this honoured craftsman your best help on his/her visit to St. Petersburg,” with red stamps, the lot. And see? It worked like a charm.'

Inna's eyes were as wide as Barbarian's had been earlier.

‘Why,' she murmured, so overwhelmed with gratitude towards the Englishman that she thought she might cry. ‘How terribly kind of him…'

‘It's only temporary,' Leman said. ‘But it gives you a breather.'

‘He's a very good man,' Madame Leman agreed, lifting out half a dozen
blini
from the pan. ‘And now, shall we eat?'

A few minutes later, Yasha put down the paper he'd been hiding behind. ‘The newspapers don't think your Rasputin is a very good man,' he said, scowling at Inna.

Looking over his shoulder, she saw that article after article featured the attack on Rasputin – and not just in that paper but in the ones the Lemans were reading, too. There was no sympathy for him, or anger against the violent bishop, for the churchmen (or someone) had struck again with an anonymous pamphlet that offered ‘proof' Rasputin was the Empress's lover. Every article was dripping with poisonous malice, or so it seemed to Inna.

There were enough facts, just, to get the viciousness started. Rasputin was reported to have run straight from the bishop's palace to the Central Post Office (though no one knew he had dropped off at the Lemans' on the way) and telegraphed the Tsarina to denounce his attackers.

But it was the other stuff they were printing that defied belief. Yesterday's Duma budget debate had been upstaged by the roughly copied anonymous pamphlet that started circulating in the streets before nightfall, containing what purported to be letters to Rasputin from female members of the imperial family. The lines the papers had quoted, with most evil-minded pleasure, were from the Empress. ‘I wish only one thing: to fall asleep forever on your shoulders, in your embrace … Will you soon be back by my side? Come back soon. I am in torment without you.'

Inna's heart sank. Surely the letter was a forgery? Then again, any of the acolytes she'd met might easily write to Father Grigory in that hysterical vein. They'd think it displayed their exemplary spirituality. And why would the Empress be any different? She was an acolyte, too. But Inna could also see why the papers would prefer to call it a ‘love letter', and link it to his enemies' accusations that he had physically seduced the Tsarina's untouchable imperial person.

The talk was that his holy-man rival, Iliodor, had written the pamphlet, and tried to blackmail the imperial family through the Empress's lady-in-waiting, Anya Vryubova; but she'd walked away. So he'd passed it out among the buzzing parliamentarians in revenge.

There was another rumour that the pamphlet had got out after being given for safe keeping to the fashionable Tibetan healer, Pyotr Badmayev, whose usual job was supplying drugs to the upper classes, but who hadn't been able to resist a little extra mischief on the side.

And there was more, much more. So much more that it made Inna almost weep with the sheer nastiness of it. A denunciation of Father Grigory, signed by a man called Novosyolov, asked the Synod how long they were going to tolerate ‘that sex maniac, Whipper and charlatan, and the criminal comedy that has victimized many whose letters were in his hands'. Articles headlined ‘Rasputin and Mystical Debauchery'. A malicious confection called ‘The Confession of N' featuring a lady seduced by a lecherous religious peasant. And everywhere vicious cartoons of Rasputin, gloating or drinking or, in one, playing the pipes while the cuckold Tsar squatted obediently and kicked out his legs, Cossack fashion, dancing to the peasant's tune.

‘I'm going to him,' Inna said. She couldn't get the picture of Father Grigory,
her
Father Grigory, bruised and defenceless at this table, out of her head. The Lemans had all been murmuring what a shame it was, but no one was actually suggesting action. And she was burning with indignation. ‘I want to show my support.'

‘But you can't,' Madame Leman said quickly.

‘Why?' Inna asked, all ready to wave her passport.

‘Didn't you see Horace's note?' Leman said, rather chidingly.

Slowly she reached for the envelope, still lying on the table among the newspapers.

‘He's coming by to take you out to lunch,' Madame Leman said, more gently. ‘To celebrate.'

Inna bowed her head over the spiky writing with all the hard and soft signs of the Russian alphabet charmingly muddled. Of course, she owed Horace. That should come first. She could go to Rasputin later: after work, maybe, or tomorrow.

*   *   *

A few hours later, Inna was sitting opposite Horace in the Astoria restaurant. Looking around, she thought she'd never seen so much starched, folded, draped and pleated white linen. It hung on tables and on the haughty waiters' arms and rustled solemnly in her lap. Or cut glass, come to that. On the table in front of her, wine glasses and champagne glasses and water glasses sparkled among the flash of jugs and the glitter of chandeliers above.

There was ruched muslin at the tall windows, and heavy gold silk, too. The great array of cutlery was polished bright silver. And there were diamonds at every female throat.

The champagne was French, like the murmur of conversation all around.

‘Ah, the widow; I love the widow,' Horace was saying, smiling to himself as the waiter poured. And now there were bubbles in her glass as well as stars etched on its edges.

She would watch carefully when the soup came, when the tiny birds in their pastry cases came, and when the flambéed pancakes came too, to see which eating iron Horace picked up.

She was glad Madame Leman had lent her that crisp pin-tucked blouse, because everyone at the tables around them was dressed in uniform, or in silks and chiffons. There was gold braid everywhere, and medals winked in the daytime candlelight. The ladies seemed indescribably beautiful, and most had tiny dogs on their laps.

Horace lifted his champagne glass. Looking very kindly at her, he said: ‘To your future success, my dear.'

With beating heart, she lifted hers too, and sipped.

She quickly forgot her nerves, and soon they were talking animatedly about the Stray Dog evening, and Bryusov's demonic philandering, and what Anya Akhmatova had been like when she was Gorenko the schoolgirl; about Monsieur Fabergé's caustic tongue; and about Horace's childhood in India.

When the cheese came, she even felt confident enough to broach the Rasputin scandal in the newspapers. ‘The Lemans said he'd been to you, right after the fight?' Horace replied, sounding intrigued. He laughed at the idea that Madame Leman, and possibly Yasha too, had fallen at least partly under Rasputin's spell. ‘It's a dreadful mess, all of it. I feel for him, poor fellow.'

She wanted him to come with her and visit Father Grigory after they'd eaten. But he said, ‘I think we won't; I hear the Tsar's personally ordered police put at his door, for his own protection; and he'll have the fools all mooning about, anyway. He doesn't need your support. And your papers are too temporary to bear much examination. You have too much at stake, and too much to do, I think.' It made her feel so considered that she acquiesced.

‘What do you mean, I have too much to do?' she asked, leaning forward.

‘Well,' Horace went on, and he was twinkling now, just as Leman had been earlier, ‘I have a suggestion, you see, and if you like the idea I imagine you'll be pretty busy in the next few days…'

Horace's plan, explained over tiny cups of sweet Turkish coffee, was this: that Inna should use the three months' space the temporary passport had won her to start violin lessons with Leopold Auer, the greatest master of the instrument that the city could offer.

‘You know of him, of course?' Horace asked. ‘Oh, my dear girl … He's the first violinist to the orchestra of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres: the Ballet and the Opera, Peterhof, the Hermitage. He's the man all the composers write the violin solos especially for: Pugni, Minkus, Drigo, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov.'

Nodding, and pleased that her ignorance hadn't condemned her in Horace's eyes, and that he was explaining everything so kindly, she eventually broke through his stream of praise and asked, ‘But surely such a great man would have no time for teaching? Let alone teaching
me
?'

Horace's voice was full of excitement. ‘Ah, but he's one of the great teachers, too. That's why Anton Rubinstein wanted him here, originally – to teach at the Conservatoire, back when Rubinstein was still setting the Conservatoire up.'

The great thing about Auer, Horace said, was that he took students from everywhere: there was Mischa Elman, a poor klezmer's son from somewhere down south, now off touring America and world famous; Efrem Zimbalist, the child of a minor conductor from Rostov-on-Don, who'd started with Auer at twelve and was now acclaimed in Berlin and London and Boston; and his current star, Jascha Heifetz, the twelve-year-old who'd done that outdoor concert here last summer that had made the whole city go crazy for the violin.

Horace grinned. The maestro could be severe, he said. A rib-prodder, he was liable to snarl in the middle of the lesson, ‘Give it a bit more blood, can't you? More blood!' and he'd been known to eject pupils physically, throwing their music out into the corridor after them if he thought their playing too anaemic.

But Auer loved his better pupils like his children. He helped them get scholarships, patrons and better instruments. Horace looked intently at Inna.

‘And, of course, he uses his influence to get residence for his Jewish pupils…'

Her mouth opened.

‘Permanent residence permits,' he stressed.

‘Is Auer a German name?' Inna asked. But even as she said it, it seemed a foolish question. Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist. ‘Or a Jewish one?'

‘Well, it's one of those names you can never quite tell with,' Horace replied, looking amused. ‘Like yours.' He smiled. ‘And mine.'

Her eyes opened wider. But he only shrugged, as if having Jewish blood was of no importance to an Englishman; which, she reflected, perhaps it wasn't.

Still, there was a new softness inside her as he went on.

‘Auer took over at the Conservatoire from Wieniawski, at a time when ladies like the dear creatures here' – Horace waved his hand at the neighbouring tables – ‘were all still startled at the very idea that you could use the uncultured Russian language, not civilized German or French, for teaching music. “Teach music in Russian – why, what an
original
idea!”' he mimicked.

‘It was the notion of Russians thinking about music that shocked the élite here; not Jews. It's really only secret policemen and peasants down south who are so frantic about the Jews, don't you think? No one in St. Petersburg cared where the musicians came from. I suppose they thought, what did it matter, if you could play the piano as wonderfully as Rubinstein did?'