Midnight in St. Petersburg (11 page)

She was beginning to see now. These cuts would simply organize the wood into a shape ready for finer carving later: there'd be a series of neat right-angled saw lines, each taking away a smaller segment of wood than the last. They'd got the whole thing clear in their heads beforehand. With the unnecessary bits of the block cut away, the scroll would be easier to handle.

‘Don't get too confident,' Leman warned, gently. ‘Don't forget, we like you to be a little bit scared. Now, after this cut, you get rid of the wood you don't want by cutting in again, at right angles, at the back of the scroll. But, don't forget, don't cut straight down. Your downward cuts must angle slightly away from the centre.'

She began, too boldly perhaps, for quickly he corrected the angle at which she was holding the little saw. Her heart seemed to stop. Had she destroyed everything? ‘No, it's fine,' he reassured her. ‘Keep going like this.'

When she'd recovered her breath and had made the two cuts successfully, she was left with more tools she didn't know – round and straight gouges, two little planes, and a scraper, Leman called them – first to shape the outside of the peg-box more finely (‘“Flat across the width and slightly convex in the length,”' Marcus called, twinkling). Then, with Leman's help, she marked the width of the walls of the tiny peg-box and cut down the inside with a knife, angling the cuts towards each other so that the walls widened at the bottom.

Leman drilled out the wood between the cuts for her, leaving a rough empty box shape. ‘Now,' he said, and her heart stopped again, though she was already beginning to understand that every new step was going to be the same sort of terrifying leap into the unknown, but that if she could only trust her teacher and wasn't too clumsy herself, it would come out right. ‘Now, clean up the inside with chisels and gouges … you'll find the right ones over there, in that drawer … but be careful to leave enough thickness at the bottom.'

Leman was nodding comfortingly at her as he heaved himself up from the stool at her side. She liked the slow amusement in his voice. ‘It's easy to go right through. So go easy, mind, especially under the top peg, where the bottom needs to curve up. Oh, and use a round gouge first at the throat.'

Ignoring the sting in her palms, ignoring the sting inside at the thought of Yasha, so quiet at his place, Inna went to fetch the chisels and gouges from their drawer.

Soon, in spite of herself, she forgot the black knot of unhappiness in her stomach, and let herself get lost in her work. Her hands ached. The tools were unfamiliar. And without Leman's hands on hers, the wood in her golden circle of lamplight often seemed hard and resistant.

‘Be braver,' he urged, from time to time. ‘Don't be too scared to dig in – though just a bit scared is fine. I can see you can do it.' But otherwise he let her be. She'd never been so absorbed.

She didn't join in the fitful conversation, when it resumed.

‘Well, according to the Stock Exchange News, he's as guilty as sin,' came Marcus's up-and-down voice. ‘Went to Nizhny Novgorod three weeks before the assassination and offered the governor there the job of prime minister.'

She barely heard. She was too busy worrying at a stubborn outcrop of splinters in a corner she couldn't work out how to get at. She shifted her grip on a handle in her sore palm, trying to work out how to make the tool obey her.

‘Ach…' came the rumble of Leman's voice. He sounded sceptical.

But Marcus persisted. ‘And when the governor, who couldn't work out what some peasant was doing offering gentlemen government jobs, started joking with him a bit, saying, “Ah, but the Prime Minister's post isn't even vacant,” do you know what Rasputin replied? “But it soon will be!” And then it was!'

Leman laughed it off. ‘So? The Emperor is always appointing new ministers; and he's daft enough to send all kinds of odd bods off round the country to sound people out about whatever changes he's thinking about, too. This peasant might have been doing a bit of politicking on his own account, if he's so close to power. It doesn't mean he had a hand in the murder, though, does it?'

It was only when Inna felt a large hand on her shoulder that she came out of her dream. Leman was rumbling in her ear, ‘We're about to see a birth.'

She looked up.

Marcus had the little unvarnished violin he'd been stringing up on his shoulder.

Tentatively he drew the bow across the strings. Then he played a line of a simple, sad folk song. He played just as he was, bending over the bench, with no vibrato and no dramatics.

The sound was thin and hesitant, innocent as a newborn's voice. And it was beautiful. Inna looked from Leman to Yasha. Both had their heads craned forward, and a joyful stillness on their faces.

When Marcus had stopped playing, and, to Inna's surprise, started unstringing the white violin again (‘I'm going to start varnishing it tomorrow,' he explained, catching her questioning look), Leman came over to where she was sitting and picked up her scroll-in-the-making.

He held it up to the light. He turned it around, and the kindly smile on his face broadened.

‘This is good work,' he said appreciatively. ‘Neat. Elegant shapes. Why, look at the line she's made here, lads. Perfect.'

Yasha stayed where he was, doing whatever he was doing, but Marcus slipped round to her side of the workbench and took the future scroll, with the peg-box now hollowed out and shaped below it, and grinned at her. He said, agreeing with his father for once, ‘Yes, deft fingers! We need girls in the workshop after all!'

It almost hurt, the pleasure she felt at their praise. Bashfully, letting down her guard, she smiled hazily back.

So she was quite unprepared when Leman, still admiring her scroll, said, casually, ‘Pity we didn't get you started earlier. Where were you this morning?'

He meant no harm, she could see. But that question was enough to bring back Inna's memory of everything outside this warm workshop, where she now so wanted to belong. Once again, she experienced that black misery she'd felt in her stomach while she'd been walking back here earlier on, down the bleakness of Nevsky, through the biting salt wind.

She tried to be brave and disciplined, but she'd let down her guard too far. To her horror, she felt hot tears coursing down her cheeks even before she began to stammer out an answer. ‘I went to see someone … a peasant holy man of my own … someone I met on the train…' She put her face in her hands and closed her eyes.

‘Why?' she heard. Leman's voice was so soft.

‘Because he said he had a friend who knew how to get residence papers for Jews,' she muttered, trying very hard to steady her tone. ‘So I thought he might help me … because I so want…' She shut her eyes tight again, feeling humiliated. But tears squeezed out anyway. ‘… to work here,' she finished.

Into the silence came Marcus's question: ‘Couldn't she just stay, Pap?'

It was as if Yasha wasn't in the room at all. He'd withdrawn completely. Well, she thought bitterly,
he
won't want Leman to say yes; that much is clear.

That combative thought returned a measure of control to her and she opened her eyes. Leman was holding her scroll to the lamp again, looking at it, considering. There was a frown on his face.

‘The thing is, your mother's worried that if I put a foot wrong I'll have the police on my back again,' he said, uneasily. ‘You remember how things were after the revolution … back in 1906, when they shut down my paper…'

‘But you won the day in court. They never managed to put you behind bars. Anyway, it was years ago; what can they possibly do to you now?' wheedled Marcus's voice. ‘And she's good. You said so yourself. And you need someone else, you're always saying so…'

There was another long pause. Leman twirled the scroll absent-mindedly under the light. His eyebrows were going up and down, as if he were holding a long conversation with someone inside his head.

Inna watched through her fingers, barely breathing. Eventually, still uncertainly, he began to nod.

‘Well,' he said. ‘I expect I probably
can
square it with your mother for Inna to stay longer. But…'

Marcus whooped under his breath. Inna felt his hand grip her shoulder. Cautiously, not quite believing what she was hearing, she lowered her hands from her face.

‘You'll have Yasha to help you settle in,' Marcus murmured to Inna. Over-optimistically, she thought. Yasha, just out of her field of vision, only grunted. ‘Me? She doesn't need
my
help.' She ignored him. She was waiting for Leman's objection.

Leman was looking searchingly into her eyes. ‘If it's on your own head entirely, that is,' he added, sounding stern. ‘Let's agree this. You can do some work for me down here for your bed and board, but, since you're illegal, just don't say you're staying here, or that I know anything, or have helped you. Not to anyone official. Not to anyone. And if they catch you, you're on your own. All right?'

It was tentative. It was grudging. But it was something to work with.

Wordlessly, Inna nodded. She could already feel the dead weight inside her lifting and evaporating.

*   *   *

The clock struck six.

Everyone got up and started tidying away their work.

‘Dinner at eight,' Marcus told Inna, unable to stop grinning. ‘Do what you like till then.' Without looking up from the cloud of wood shavings – her own wood shavings – that she was sweeping up, she nodded.

Yasha hung back, behind her, as they left the workshop.

Inna turned to him, but he wouldn't meet her eye. Instead he started walking from lamp to lamp, needlessly pulling out plugs.

She waited at the door. ‘Your violin's been put in my room,' she said eventually. ‘Not by me.'

‘Use it. That's fine. I've got a better one that I made here,' he said gruffly, still turned away. ‘You're going to need it, aren't you? You won't be going out much, if you don't want to get caught without papers.'

*   *   *

Yasha waited till he could hear Inna's footsteps far upstairs before he left the workshop. Even then, he spent a long time fiddling with keys, locking up.

He'd done his best. He'd tried to stop Leman testing her out while her hands were still painful. He'd thought those cuts would make her too clumsy for the work and would turn Leman against her, but he'd been wrong. She was single-minded: determined not to let anything stand in her way. And what he'd said had come out wrong, too. He'd seen that accusing glance she'd given him when he'd mentioned her hands, as if she hadn't understood he was trying to help her. She hadn't understood, either, that he'd put his old violin in her room that morning by way of apology for his words the previous day, and so she'd have an instrument to play. Well, so be it. She didn't need protecting. She already had both Monsieur Leman and Marcus eating out of her hand, knife cuts or not. She didn't need him.

Upstairs, safely alone, Yasha got out his violin. It was a beautiful instrument. He was proud to have made it.

He ran the bow gently over the strings, thrilling to its richness of tone.

It was old Kremer who'd encouraged him to play the melancholy songs of the
shtetl
. At first, at least until Yasha had dismantled the walls of Russian-only snobbery that his parents' aspirations had built in his mind, he had heard in the poor-man's music only the alien-sounding wailing of other people's misery: a noise to be ignored. But now he heard the hope in it, too, and the prayer, and the learning, and the thousands of years of suffering. He understood how it spoke of Abraham, heavy-hearted on the mountainside, offering his son to God; of the taste of locusts and honey in the desert; of the creak of carts overloaded with pots and pans and blankets and frightened children, heading over the muddy roads of Russia, bound for Odessa and the Holy Land in far-off Ottoman territory. As he fingered the violin strings, he recalled old Kremer's voice, intoning ‘Five million Jews in Russia, and a million of them gone in a single generation. Chased out by the Cossacks; scattered across the world.' The pity of it, the waste, the loss, infused his playing. He filled his versions of every melody he played with heartfelt, tear-jerking
dreydlekh
– ‘Spins,' old Kremer's voice murmured pedagogically in his head, ‘that is, musical ornaments,' – and
kneytshn
, and
glitshn
. (There were so many of these little musical renderings of feelings. ‘But what are
krekhtsn
?' he remembered asking in bewilderment at the beginning. A laugh softened his teacher's rough prisoner's voice: ‘Oh, a sort of weeping or hiccuping combination of backward slide and flick of the little finger high above the note itself, while the bow does, well, something … ach, words; useless;
nu
, just listen.' And he picked up the violin himself, and made it sob). Sobbing was what Yasha's violin had become best at, these days, however much he tried to keep in mind that these expressive melodies he was learning, so reminiscent of the human voice, were full of both tears and laughter, and that they were properly called Freilech music: happy music.

As he started to breathe life into a
nigun
, a mournful song without words, he heard the door of Inna's room click shut. She wouldn't know any of this, he thought, with sudden compassion. She was in the darkness, still, just as he'd been till he'd been taught.

Yasha hadn't been very good at the violin until old Kremer had put him straight about what kind of things he might enjoy playing. But now he'd got the feeling for it, he no longer felt guilty about skipping the hours of scales practice his parents had wanted him to do. That wasn't what mattered. It was putting your heart into it that counted, as he was doing now.