Midnight in St. Petersburg (38 page)

How quiet it was. Unnerved, he ventured on to the kitchen. They were still living here, he could see. There was a newspaper on the kitchen table by a cup of cold tea. But there was no heating, and the stove was out. No one was in the yellow room, or the bedrooms.

He hesitated. Slowly, he returned to the vestibule. For a moment it came into his head to go up to the attics, just to see …

Then, thinking better of that, he squashed his hat against the fiddle box under his arm and went down to the shop the inside way.

Perhaps it was better if no one was home.

They were all down in the workshop, right behind the boards they'd nailed the windows up with, and they'd made a nest: a tight little fug of family warmth around the stove, that, for a moment, made Yasha's heart yearn shamefully for the cosy, intimate ordinariness of it. There were six wooden chairs drawn up in a near-circular huddle, with cushions falling off them, a mess of books and writing things and chess and knitting and mending on the floor all around, two old oil lamps shedding a shaky golden light (the electricity must be off). The samovar was on the workbench, next to a violin and bow and some music.

Instead of sitting down, though, they were standing up, very quiet, staring straight at him as he came through the door in a frozen tableau. The men, to left and right of the women, were warily holding chisels, and Barbarian, the only one moving, was jigging from foot to foot in front, with his pocket knife out. In the middle of the women was Inna, thin and still, with dark-ringed eyes, but as painfully beautiful as ever.

Madame Leman broke the silence.

‘Why, it's only Yasha,' she said. By the time he'd registered that there was no great warmth in her voice, the rest of them had also unfrozen. Agrippina sat down, rather heavily, on her chair, then the others, one by one, fiddling with cushions and setting things straight, also settled themselves back down.

He moved further into the room, letting his eyes adjust to the false golden evening they were living in, created by shutters and lamplight, forgetting the harsh salt and fierce white-blue of the wind and light outside, forgetting the hot stink of rhetoric, the catch of brandy in the nose, the tinkle and ripple of glass breaking everywhere.

‘I didn't mean to frighten you,' he said awkwardly.

How old and worn and sick they all looked, he thought; even the young ones were pale about the jaw and sunken-eyed, and Barbarian had spots erupting between the unruly new fluff on his chin. He looked again at Inna, who was swaying just as she had when she'd first walked into the apartment; her skin was so pale it was almost ghostly, and her eyes huge in a diminished face.

He didn't expect his heart to contract the way it did when she moved closer to her husband, who put his arm around her shoulders.

Yasha turned away to put his violin down on the workbench.

He was hoping they'd find him a chair; ask him to sit down; offer him tea; get the samovar going. But no one said anything.

Well, he thought, trying not to be discouraged, perhaps there was just no tea. He opened the box.

‘I finished the fiddle I was making for you,' he said, addressing the box while he composed himself, because the dusty air was tickling his nose and making his eyes water. ‘Before all this…' He gestured to indicate the tumult of outside, the tide of events that had engulfed them all, and that, he now saw, might have separated them, perhaps forever. ‘It's yours, after all. I brought it back.'

He'd thought, until he got here, that they'd be pleased with the generosity of this gesture. They wouldn't need parts from this violin for the Youssoupoff commission any more, he knew, since they'd managed to repair the real Strad so successfully before he'd left. The prince must have been pleased with the job they'd done. But times were hard. They'd want this one back anyway. Yasha recognized that this was a time when ordinary people – the kind who wanted bread for their children now more than they wanted the bright tomorrow when personal possessions didn't matter – still wanted to hang on to everything they could. And the Lemans might, even now, find someone willing to buy it.

Without looking, he was aware of Inna's small shake of the head. She stayed where she was, but Yasha's words brought Marcus forward, at least. The younger Monsieur Leman – Comrade Leman now, Yasha supposed – limped towards him, perched one buttock on the workbench and picked the fiddle up. He turned it this way and that, nodding; finally, still cradling it, but looking shyly at Yasha – as shyly, Yasha thought, stricken, as if he'd forgotten all those years they'd sat together at this bench – said, ‘You've done a good job, all right. It looks just like the Strad in the store.'

‘Why's the Strad still in the store?' Yasha asked, surprised. ‘I thought
he
wanted it by September.'

‘Youssoupoff left,' Horace Wallick said in carefully neutral tones. ‘About the same time you did. He was scared there'd be another revolution.'

‘He didn't pay,' Marcus added, nervously; then, too fast: ‘I know I owe you a month's wages. But I can't pay you. We have no work.'

‘Fabergé's has closed down too, of course,' Wallick explained. ‘The Bolsheviks requisitioned everything in his safe.'

The silence deepened. Yasha could feel the blame in it now.

‘I didn't come to ask you for money,' he answered stiffly. ‘You don't need to worry about that. I have a job now. A Party job.'

This was true, though he hardly knew what it would entail. He'd been approached, only last night, at a Party meeting, by a tall, elegant, bearded comrade with a Polish lisp in his voice. He was a friend of old Kremer's, who, Yasha had been happy to hear, was still alive and now a Bolshevik, enlisting Jews to the broader cause in the confusion of the south. Young Kremer had vanished into the Siberian prison world at the time of Yasha's arrest, but perhaps he too would now soon be found and released. The conversation had felt as warm and friendly as if Yasha were rediscovering a long-lost family.

Being short of funds himself in the here and now, and with the landlady on his tail, he'd eagerly accepted the offer of a wage to join some committee to stop sabotage and keep the Revolution going. So he didn't need to grab the Lemans' last kopek. He might even, in due course, be in a position to help them out. He was just starting to imagine how Marcus or Barbarian might gratefully join him, their benefactor, in some future office, shuffling files, when he saw the look that Wallick and Madame Leman were exchanging.

‘Yashenka,' Madame Leman said, suddenly soft and anxious, reaching for his arm and looking tenderly at him. ‘Darling, don't you
worry
about where all this is taking you?'

They didn't understand, Yasha realized. Perhaps they never had. He was the outsider here, the one who didn't belong. Not Inna, who still wouldn't look at him, or her soft English husband, whom Inna had chosen over him. At last, he could admit that to himself.

It was too much. Yasha could feel himself losing control.

‘Me?' He could hear his voice trembling with the awful disappointment of this encounter, which was going so differently from how he'd imagined it. ‘Me?
He's
the one who should be worried about where everything's taking him, isn't it: Englishman Englishmanovich, a smart bourgeois gentleman with gold cufflinks?'

It was only when these words were out that he realized how wrong they were, here, however right they might sound among the comrades. All the eyes on him now were shocked, even Inna's.

He got up. Trying to sound casual, he mumbled, ‘Anyway, I just dropped by to see how you all were, really.' He was hoping, even now, that they'd stop him, but all they did was watch as he put his hat slowly on his head. ‘Mind if I take a look at how the varnish turned out on the Strad, since it's still here?' he asked, ‘So I can compare it with my one?' To the torn collar of his own coat, he addressed a final plea. ‘Inna, would you open up the store for me, and let me see it?'

But Inna just ducked her head towards Marcus. Marcus, equally quickly, nodded towards his mother. ‘Mam?' he said. ‘You've got the keys.'

So it was Madame Leman who led Yasha out to the back, into the lock-up cupboard that gave on to the courtyard, that familiar little room with shelves full of half-finished instruments, finished ones in a variety of cases, and neatly sawed cake-slices of wood, ready to be made up.

He put down his violin case on the floor, breathing in that familiar smell, knowing this would be his last visit.

‘Let's have a look at that Strad, then,' he said to Madame Leman's back. She turned round, but she was busy pinning up a falling strand of hair, and smiled without meeting his eyes.

‘Of course,' she replied, pointing to the pile of wood the case was stashed behind, then swaying to squeeze past him, in this confined space, without touching. ‘I'll leave you to it.'

Whistling bravely, Yasha got the Strad and his own fiddle out as soon as she'd gone. He laid the two bodies out, side by side.

He'd done as well with his work as Inna and Marcus had with theirs, he told himself. He was pleased to see how closely the two pale gold backs matched. Only a master would be able to tell them apart. He could see subtle differences, of course: his F-holes and C-curve corners and purfling didn't have quite the sharp perfection of the master's, the delicate waist of the original had come out fractionally thicker on his copy, and his violin's tone, sweet and powerful though it was, wouldn't be imbued with all the uncanny golden magic of the Italian one. Still, if these two instruments weren't quite twins, they were, at least, close relatives: as similar in appearance as he and Inna, with their dark heads, and long, lean arms and legs, and strong, straight features …

All at once he was overwhelmed by a memory of her sitting on a stool at the workbench, leaning over this extraordinary work of art, with a strand or two of black hair escaping and wafting against the wood, concentrating as she worked; the beauty in the line of her cheek and neck mirroring the loveliness of the violin.

The pain he felt then came on like an ambush; a blow in the pit of the stomach. There was nothing he wanted more than to take both the violins back into the workshop, show the others, compare, get them talking the way they used to. No, not that: just go back, go to
her
, talk to
her
, and find a way to make things different between them. No, not that, either … Just to be alone with her again, in that little attic upstairs, murmuring love talk in her ear, dreaming of nothing more profound than how to get the next order in for the workshop, and pay the rent, and suck up to the next idiot in a top hat who wanted a present for his violin-playing daughter. It wasn't that Yasha hadn't always enjoyed making violins and known he was good at it, but he'd had no qualms, before today, about setting it aside for the higher goals in his life; it was just a job, after all. Yet it now seemed, as he writhed with the agony he hadn't known was coming, that that tradesman's life, petty and blinkered and closed in though he might have found it, a life in which he made no attempt to improve the world, might also have been his only chance of happiness. He closed his eyes as the pain rolled through him.

He wrapped his hands round his gut and rocked back and forward. With his eyes shut, he breathed slowly in, then out, trying to get control of himself again.

By the time he stopped rocking and opened his eyes, expelling a sharp whoosh of breath, he'd regained his grasp on reality. He could even smile, a bit shakily, at the way he'd just been carrying on. He could feel the pain lurking nearby, but he wasn't going to let it return. One burst of stupidity was enough. He couldn't turn the clock back. If the Lemans didn't want him around, then so be it. He had important work to do. He wouldn't even go back into the workshop to say goodbye. You're just tired, he told himself. Tired having been up half the night with the comrades.

He picked up the violins by their necks, one in each hand, ready to put them both back in their open boxes and hide them behind the wedges of violin-making wood, to confuse looters.

But then he paused. Hardly knowing what he was doing, or why, he put the Strad down again, and quickly put the copy he'd made back into the real Strad's box.

Fumbling at the catches, he closed both boxes, piled them up against the wall, the empty box under the full one, and arranged the wood blocks in front.

The Strad was lying on the shelf where he'd left it.

Taking off the big brown leather bag he always carried round his shoulder, Yasha eased open the thongs at the top and slipped the fiddle in.

It was only when he was shutting the storeroom door again, from the outside – very quietly – and standing in the fetid courtyard, with rubbish overflowing everywhere, cradling the bag in his arms, that he could begin to think what he was doing.

I'm liberating it to give to the Revolution, he promised himself, tiptoeing towards the archway on to the street. It's not doing any good just lying there, is it? Youssoupoff's forgotten all about it. That savage doesn't deserve it anyway. And just think how many hungry workers a priceless thing like this would feed, if you turned it into cash: why, hundreds. Thousands.

That was a good enough explanation, for now.

But he also knew that he might not do that yet. He might keep it a while in his room, just gazing at its beauty – because with beauty, at least, if not with the life of equality he and his political comrades were fighting to create, there were hierarchies, and this was at the very top. And it would remind him of Inna, too.

It was the only memento he could take. He wouldn't be going back.

Yasha didn't know why there were tears burning down his cheeks as he went out through the arch into the roaring street: into the drunken, shambling, brutal chaos of a today which, after this visit to his past, suddenly seemed so very far removed from the bright tomorrow he still wanted to believe was coming.