Midnight in St. Petersburg (7 page)

He turned off his lamp with a gentle hand and went slowly back upstairs.

He was wondering, as he went, what his parents could possibly have thought would happen to her once they'd gone? If they'd thought at all, because the likeliest thing was that they'd got so absorbed by their own fear that they'd just left her to fend for herself …

He opened the apartment door, imagining himself standing up to Madame L., insisting – no,
demanding –
in the face of every counter-argument, that Inna be allowed to stay for a few days, or even weeks. He'd make it up to the mistress.

He paused in the still chaotic lobby to compose himself. And, as he did, the conversation inside the yellow room died away, and the sound of a violin rose into the air.

A shiver went down Yasha's spine at the first wild, sweet, zany notes. He'd never heard anything like
that
here. Anywhere.

Everyone in this family played a bit, of course. He wasn't much of an artiste himself, but recently he'd taken to pouring his heart out, in the privacy of his room, into the mournful songs of the
shtetl
. Monsieur Leman, meanwhile, liked the mathematical purity of Bach; Madame Leman, who was literary, enjoyed the German romantics; Marcus preferred sentimental café music and soupy folk tunes; and the children sawed cheerfully away at whatever beginner's music they were made to practise.

But this?

It was frisky and catchy and modern. Playful, though it sounded fiendishly difficult, too: in thirds, and in a dancey three-beat rhythm, with odd accents on the third beat. Syncopated, like American negro jazz. It was composed of pointed little runs of six staccato notes, moving up and down the instrument, getting faster and louder and wilder, before dying away, from time to time, into a beautifully phrased, wistful, legato sigh.

Yasha stopped right where he was, among the coats and boots: entranced, lost. But his feet were tapping. He couldn't help himself.

The piece was being played with tremendous sophistication, too: with as much knowledge of emotional light and shade as technical confidence. Yasha found himself thinking, more poetically than usual: the flight of the soul …

And then it was over, moments after he'd recovered the power of movement, just as he reached the drawing-room door.

There could only have been one person playing, yet he was astonished, standing in the doorway, to see Inna there in the crook of the piano, with flushed cheeks and huge green eyes, looking around in apparent surprise at the tumultuous clapping, and only gradually, when she fixed her eyes on Barbarian and Agrippina, jumping up and down and cheering in their corner, letting her lovely face lift into a smile.

She had a violin cradled under one arm. After one shy glance around the room, she put it and the bow she'd been holding down on the lid of the piano.

Yasha couldn't see Madame Leman, who must still be sitting down in a chair out of his line of vision, but Monsieur Leman was standing up, beaming, and Marcus, too, spluttering joyfully beside him.

They hadn't even noticed him standing in the doorway. They were too enchanted by the girl. A feeling Yasha didn't understand clutched at his heart.

‘I'm wondering', Leman was saying appreciatively in his big booming voice, ‘who in Kiev can have taught you to play Scriabin?'

Yasha watched Inna shake her head. ‘Oh, I had lessons when I was younger,' she said awkwardly, not seeming at all the mature player of a moment ago. ‘From my Aunty Lyuba. I lived with her. But she's dead now. I just mess about on my own. And I heard that piece at a concert, and liked it…'

She looked over at Yasha, staring at her from the door.

‘And I do have a lovely violin to play on,' she added, and smiled tentatively at him, as if inviting him to share in her triumph. But he couldn't. Her playing had been better than anything he, or the rest of them, could draw from the instruments they spent their lives working on – so much better that it had made him feel a primitive by comparison. He could tell now that she must also know precisely how pretty she looked, and how vulnerable; she was knowingly
using
her charms.

‘Look,' she was saying. ‘It's the first violin Yasha made.'

The children whooped and squawked and surged closer: ‘Really…? Let's have a look!' They grabbed it. Smiling – smirking, as it now seemed to Yasha – Inna was holding it up, out of their reach. From the chair, inside, there was a pained female cry of ‘Children!'

At the same time, but much more quietly, Yasha said, ‘That's
my
old violin?' It was too much. He thought of her passport, his parents' letter. Was there no end to the things she'd taken?

But she didn't appear to notice his ominous tone. With apparent artlessness, she said, as if he'd be pleased she was waltzing around Russia with her bag stuffed full of his things: ‘Your mother let me play it. I brought it … I thought—'

But Leman cut her off. Turning to Yasha, he boomed excitedly, ‘Ah, come in, come in, my boy! So you heard, too? Good heavens, why ever didn't you tell us what a marvellous musician your little cousin is – the real thing! I was bowled over – especially since all I was expecting was more of that mournful Jewish caterwauling you go in for upstairs!'

He laughed so hard at his own joke that he didn't notice Yasha's scowl. Yasha looked at the children. At least they weren't laughing at him; though it wasn't much better that Agrippina was gazing so adoringly at Inna. Barbarian, meanwhile, was taking advantage of being unobserved. He was down on the ground, quietly tying Agrippina's shoelace to a chair.

‘Inna reminds me of you, my dear,' Leman remarked to his wife, who was still sitting behind the door. ‘One of those women who, without any real teaching, can master the great arts.' He turned back to Inna and gestured proudly towards his life-companion. ‘You know Lidiya Alexeyevna here taught herself all the European languages? Before she'd travelled further than Moscow? Before she'd even turned twenty? Sheer dedication … I admire that. I really do.'

‘'S not just women. Men do it too. You taught yourself billiards in the army, Pap,' Barbarian called from the floor, grinning broadly.

Leman pulled a wry face. ‘I was locked up in a closed cadet school for years. Enough time for a boy like me to learn the oddest things,' he answered. ‘And, Barbarian, undo that shoelace right now or there'll be trouble,' he added, with no change of tone.

Grinning over the scuffle that ensued, he turned back to Inna.

‘So. You play beautifully, we're all agreed on that.' He paused. ‘Would you like to
make
a violin?' His voice sounded genuinely hopeful, as if the answer were up to her.

Inna's mouth opened. Her flush deepened.

Yasha's heart was pounding. To just let her in like this – so easily – when
he'd
had to learn his trade beforehand, and wait for months for papers, and struggle … When he'd been thinking she was an innocent who needed protecting, and had been rushing up here ready to fight her corner for her, only to find that with one dewy look, and one showing-off tune, she'd already got them wanting her here for good. If he didn't look out … well, the injustice of it took his breath away. Maybe old Kremer had been right about women, after all.

‘Women don't make violins,' Madame Leman's voice said, into the silence.

‘Not
ordinarily
,' Leman said sweepingly. ‘But that was no ordinary playing.'

‘But … are you actually looking for someone?' Inna asked.

‘Well, we're training Marcus. But we get a lot of work in these days. And I've been thinking of taking someone else on for some time. Though you know how it is. One's always too lazy to start the wearisome business of actually looking for someone, and wondering if they'll get on with everyone, because by the time they start it's already a bit late to say we don't like the cut of your jib, and we're all at very close quarters here, as you know, and who wants to see a quarrelsome face at breakfast? Now, if only it were you, well – you're already in the family, so to speak, and the question simply wouldn't arise.'

Inna's disbelieving smile widened, and so did her eyes.

There was a silence as Yasha waited, with diminishing hope, for Madame Leman, at least, to say no, quite impossible. But she didn't.

Eventually, Leman turned to him, nodding excitedly. ‘Good idea?'

Yasha only knew what he was going to do as he did it.

‘She can't,' he said, stepping forward into the room, composing his face into a half-smile. ‘She has no documents. She got here on a stolen passport.'

The smile hovered on Inna's face, diminishing over several agonizingly slow seconds as she struggled to understand what he'd done. And what did, finally, replace the hope that had been written on her was unmistakably the crumpled misery of a child with no home to go to.

Yasha watched, feeling terrible. Even then, she didn't turn the accusing eyes he deserved on him. Instead, she looked first at Madame Leman, who kept her own eyes carefully fixed on her feet, and then at Monsieur Leman, whose own excitement had been replaced by the cautious, hurt expression of a man realizing he's being taken advantage of.

‘But…' she said, pleadingly, a note of desperation in her voice, ‘even if it's not mine … I showed it to a policeman, at the station, and he let me pass … wouldn't it do?'

She reached into the violin bag, pulled out a passport and held it out to Leman.

Yasha stood in the middle of the room, as Leman flicked sadly through the passport. ‘Hereditary noblewoman,' he murmured, shaking his head, ‘daughter of the deputy chief of the Kiev police…'

‘It's my friend Olya's,' Inna said.

He handed it back. ‘They'd find you out, sooner or later,' he told her, regretfully. ‘It would be naïve to think they wouldn't. I'm sorry, my dear.'

She nodded, as if she was used to defeat, picked up the bag – leaving the violin out, Yasha noticed; she wasn't going to claim it, then – and said, very quietly, ‘Do you mind if I go and rest now? I'm a little tired. But I'll be fine to leave in the morning.' From the doorway, she added, in a small voice, ‘It was a very kind offer.'

‘Look,' Yasha said, defensively, as soon as she was out of the door. ‘It's not
my
fault. You know the way things are.'

But he couldn't help also remembering that Leman had found a way to register him as a resident in St. Petersburg. A Jew was allowed to live here only if he was serving in the army, or was rich, or a qualified craftsman. The craft couldn't be too glamorous, either. So when the ministry had rejected Yasha as a violin master, he'd been in despair. But Leman hadn't been discouraged. ‘There's always a way,' he'd said, and Yasha now had a residence permit as a carpenter. There were twenty-five thousand Jews in Petersburg, so there were probably twenty-five thousand ways to get in.

But there weren't any if you didn't have a passport in your own name, or a sponsor.

‘I wish the law was made by liberals, too. But it's not. The ministry would never let her in. There's no use raising her hopes,' Yasha said now, trying to ignore the accusing looks from Marcus and the younger children.

Nothing went right after that.

Yasha went angrily back to work, so angrily that he stupidly splintered an edge of his violin, and had to put it aside. Until he calmed down, he knew, he wouldn't be able to figure out how to make the wood forgive his mistake. No one else came down to join him. They were avoiding him, clearly. He retidied the workshop. He hounded wood shavings, and dealt death to spiders' webs.

Eventually he flung back upstairs, hoping for supper. But when he got to the kitchen door he could hear a tense conversation inside the room between Monsieur and Madame Leman, which he didn't like to interrupt.

He skulked uncertainly in the corridor, wondering what to do. The blood rushed hot to his face when he heard Madame Leman's alternately weary and exasperated voice, saying, ‘But we had that other idiot friend of Yasha's to stay, don't you remember, while he was supposed to be looking for a proper room? And all he did was sit in the attic writing leaflets, and eat our food with never so much as a thank you, and never lifted a finger – for
two months
, Tolya!'

Surely it hadn't been two months? Yasha thought. But it had; he knew it had, really.

‘Well, maybe she could help you in the house, just for a while?' he heard Leman reply cautiously from behind the door. ‘Because we could all see today that
she's
willing enough to help, and that travel passport she's got is valid till the end of the month, even if it's not hers, and really, dear heart, look at the state of her; we can't just send her straight back tomorrow, can we?'

Yasha couldn't bear the idea of her going off to the station in the morning, either, holding herself tall and trying not to look scared.

But Madame Leman wasn't having any of it. ‘I don't need help,' sang out like a slap in the face.

Yasha had never been able to be cautious for long. Now he opened the door and walked in.

‘Or perhaps she could help out in the workshop for a few days – just till the end of the week, say,' he suggested boldly, catching Leman's eye. ‘Sweeping up. Running errands. There's plenty she can do to make herself useful.'

Leman looked back at him in relief, and raised his eyebrows hopefully at his wife.

But Madame Leman was looking hard at Yasha. ‘You've changed your tune,' she said.

Yasha blushed. He had, and for reasons he couldn't quite understand. But Inna was family, and, as he was telling himself now, families must stand together.

*   *   *

It was Madame Leman who gave Yasha a bowl of soup and some bread to take up to Inna in her room.