Midnight in St. Petersburg (10 page)

It was the best she could do to make it feel, or at least sound, as if their realities converged, but it wasn't really an answer.

Yet his face lightened. ‘Anatoly Leman? Why, I know him!' he exclaimed. ‘I used to meet him at Repin's Sunday-night soirées. We're old friends. That settles it. We'll meet again, one way or another, either here, or there.'

Dumbly, Inna nodded and slipped away.

 

CHAPTER SIX

Inna walked the road home with dragging feet. I should carry on down Nevsky, she thought, and see it all while I still can. But she didn't have the heart.

She let herself into the building, but she didn't go into the Leman family flat. She thought they'd be having lunch, and she had no appetite. She didn't want Yasha staring at her bound-up hands, and she certainly didn't want any pitying or hostile looks. She went straight up the communal stairs to the attic, past the shoulder-high pyramids of crates on the landing, and shut herself in her box room.

To her surprise, she found her – or rather Yasha's – violin lying on her bed, with its bow placed neatly beside it.

Someone must have brought it up to her. Perhaps the Lemans hadn't understood that she'd deliberately left it downstairs, for Yasha.

She picked it carefully up. She'd have liked to play it. But she put it on the chest of drawers instead. It wasn't for her any more.

Then she lay down on the bed, still in her hat and coat, and pulled the quilt over herself.

It hadn't worked. She'd never be part of that warm, disorganized, laughing family downstairs.

At least there was no one up here to watch her facing defeat. At least here she could be alone.

But her solitude didn't seem a blessing for long. She listened to herself breathe, and watched the dust move. Then she stood up, and, trying not to panic or let herself feel the walls closing in, poured water out, washed and redressed her hands, so the two handkerchiefs looked as unobtrusive as possible.

At two o'clock, she went downstairs and slipped into the workshop through the back door. They'd asked her to clean up. She could keep a bargain.

The three men were sitting in three pools of lamplight, each busy with something. Marcus was whistling as he attached strings to a completed if still unvarnished white violin. Yasha had his back to Inna and she couldn't see his face or what his hands were at work on. Leman was holding up to the light a block of wood about the length of his forearm, scrutinizing it and marking it through some complicated template with a very sharp pencil. There was a tiny saw next to him, and two metal clamps waiting to be screwed to the workbench.

She'd never have been able to master all this anyway, she told herself. The walls were lined with tools whose purpose she'd never guess at.

They all looked happy and completely absorbed.

She stood, waiting to be noticed, letting the headlines from Leman's roughly refolded newspaper, stashed on the shelf next to where she waited, dance before her unfocused eyes: ‘SR Bomb Factory Discovered in Yekaterinburg', ‘Police Chief Killed by Terrorist Attack in Warsaw' and ‘Holy Man a Murderer? Rasputin “Knew in Advance” that Assassinated Prime Minister Stolypin's Post Would Soon Be Vacant'.

Eventually, she went and got a broom and, without saying a word, began sweeping up the wood shavings.

No one greeted her. None of them even looked up.

‘Personally I can never tell which of these holy fools that the Empress goes in for is which,' Leman was saying meditatively as he peered down and made another miniature graphite mark. ‘Charlatans one and all, of course, I expect, but I can't for the life of me remember which one's notorious for what.'

‘That's because you only ever read the arts pages, Pap,' Marcus said with a son's affectionate contempt. ‘You've got to read the news to keep up.'

Inna walked a first pan full of shavings over to the bins. One bin was marked, bafflingly, ‘For the chickens: shavings only, no prickly bits'. The others seemed to be half full of other things: wood offcuts, bits of wire, scrunched-up paper … Doubtfully she looked at the contents of her dustpan. Were some of those shavings too prickly for chickens?

Inna was beyond asking for guidance. She felt she was looking at this golden, contented world through glass.

‘But this Rasputin who's in the papers today, for instance,' Leman went on, unperturbed. ‘Is he the one who can make himself invisible by putting his hat on back to front?'

Inna heard laughter in Yasha's deep voice. ‘No, that was the Frenchman, Monsieur Philippe, who kept predicting our poor German Empress would have a son, when she kept having daughters. He's back in Lyon now. She only had a son after he'd left; how he must have cursed. This one's Russian.'

‘Siberian,' Marcus added.

Defiantly, she tipped the shavings into the bin. What did it matter? The chickens wouldn't notice any more than the men here.

‘So is this the one with the withered arm, then?'

Another snort came from Marcus. ‘No, that was Mitya Kozlovsky,' he said. ‘I don't know what's become of him.'

‘
This
is the one who's supposed to have seduced the royal nanny,' Yasha added. ‘Today's man. Last summer, when she went on a train trip to his Siberian village with him.'

‘I suppose we haven't been told why she did such an unsuitable thing as go to Siberia with him if she was really the pure vessel a royal nanny should be,' Leman replied, looking sceptically at Yasha over the top of his glasses.

She saw Yasha shrug; felt him grin back. ‘I doubt there's a word of truth in any of it. Just newspaper lies, then and now. At any rate, she was fired; and he's still around.'

‘Now I remember!' Leman cried, looking suddenly pleased, striking his head with his hand. ‘This is the one whose adoring followers keep his toenail parings as trophies, and sew them on their fronts!'

He looked round expectantly. They all burst out laughing.

As the laughter died away, Marcus said, in a quite different, slightly shocked tone of voice, ‘Why, Inna!'

At that, Leman's head swivelled towards her, as did Yasha's.

It was unnerving to have all those eyes on her, but it felt less lonely than before. She took a deep breath and said, trying not to gulp, ‘… thought I'd just start. You were talking…'

She could feel Yasha's eyes, even though she was avoiding his gaze. But she was also aware that he was trying, at least, not to look at her hands. She put them behind her back anyway.

‘Working hard,' Leman said with warmth. ‘Well done.'

‘So quiet!' Marcus added eagerly. ‘I didn't hear a thing. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw you.'

‘It's cleaner in here than it has been since
he'
s been working here, I must say,' Leman added, and Marcus fell silent, but his grin suggested he didn't mind the jocular rebuke.

Leman put his work down on the bench. He smiled at her over the top of his glasses. ‘I tell you what,' he went on. ‘Leave the sweeping up till the end of the day, why don't you – it's a boring sort of job – and come and look at this instead.'

Inna's heart was racing as she stepped forward. Now she was next to him, she could see Monsieur Leman had cut his block of wood into a rough approximation of the curve at the back of a violin's scroll – its head – and neck. It had none of the fluted elegance of a finished scroll yet, and the peg-box in the middle hadn't been hollowed out. It was just a question-mark shape on one side of a solid block of wood. When she took it and picked it up, it felt surprisingly heavy. It looked a primitive thing.

But a second glance showed her that he'd measured and drawn light markings on it – precise lines indicating the finer tapering that the back and top of the wood would be whittled down to, and dots, on each side, marking a snail-shell spiral which, she could see, would mark the parameters of the elaborately carved scroll shape itself.

‘Looks nothing now, you're thinking?' Leman said. He sounded amused. ‘Well, you'll soon see a difference. We're about to bring out its shape. Make it beautiful for the future.'

We? She kept still, trying not to let either hope or fear show on her face.

‘Get the clamp,' Leman was saying. Her fingers fumbled quickly for it. ‘That's right. Now, screw it to the table top, with the scroll in it. Yes, like that: upside-down baby, head at the bottom … yes. First things first. We've got to saw away the sides of the peg-box before we can start carving our curves.'

She was trying to control the thumping of her heart. She told herself, I'm going to have to do the same as yesterday when he wanted me to play: empty my mind and just do it.

She'd barely had time to reflect on her musical performance yesterday, what with everything else that had been happening, but she was still astonished that she'd managed to play the violin so composedly for the family. At school, whenever she'd been asked to play her pieces at concerts, she'd always been so nervous that the trembling of her arm had stopped her holding the bow to the string; and she'd play such idiotic wrong notes that she'd subside in a shaky heap, unable to go on. So she'd avoided playing for other people. She didn't care, she always told herself; the point of music was to satisfy herself. It made no difference if no one else could hear her, did it? And then Monsieur Leman had pushed her yesterday, and she'd felt she had no choice but to try. And somehow she'd lost herself in the piece she'd chosen, and when she'd stopped and seen the admiration on their faces, she'd also felt the elation of success.

She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. The cuts on her palm were stinging, but she screwed the clamp round the bit of wood anyway. If she could do it yesterday, when she had to, then today, too—

‘She can't,' Yasha's voice said roughly behind her. She flinched and stopped tightening the clamp.

‘Why not?' she heard. Marcus.

‘She's cut her hands. Look, they're all bound up.'

She shut her eyes, hating him. She couldn't understand why he would want to do this to her, again.

‘She'll be clumsy,' Yasha's voice persisted. ‘She'll mess it up, with her hands in that state.'

The silence yawned on endlessly, or so it seemed to her.

‘What did you do to them, Inna?' she heard eventually. The question she was dreading, in Leman's voice.

She opened her mouth to answer. But Yasha answered for her.

‘Rough edge on the handle of her bag … infected … nasty.'

His voice was hesitant. She let out her breath a little. He hated her, but not enough to tell them what he'd seen her do.

‘Does it hurt?' Marcus asked her. She was warmed enough by the concern in his voice that she felt able to turn slightly and shake her head in his direction.

‘No,' she muttered, defiantly biting off her words. ‘I'm fine.'

‘Well, then,' Leman boomed, ‘what's all the fuss about?'

She looked up. Leman and Marcus were gazing at her, eyes full of encouragement. She ignored Yasha, who, still somewhere behind, was saying, ‘I just thought…'

‘Come on,' Leman said, breaking into a grin. ‘Yasha's a perfectionist, that's all. Very, very good at what he does, too. That's why. But take no notice.'

Yasha muttered: ‘Better to let her heal for a few days…'

‘Ach.' Leman turned back to the clamp. ‘She can tell us herself if there's a problem, can't she? Don't be such an old woman, Yasha. Now, Inna, you're going to need that saw.'

Smiling her own shaky answering smile, Inna picked it up.

*   *   *

Monsieur Leman stood behind her, guiding her hands, murmuring encouragement as he showed her how to make the first cut, on one side of the block of wood, and then said, ‘Now you do the other side on your own.' Her heart seemed to stop every time she made the smallest inroad into the wood, but, she soon realized, needlessly. He'd marked it all so clearly. All she had to do was follow his instructions. Soon they had cut the two outside lines of the peg-box just below the scroll, where, one day, once the wood inside the box shape had been hollowed out, the violin's strings would be attached to movable pegs for tuning. Then Monsieur Leman took a drill and, humming under his breath, made round peg-holes right through the still-solid future peg-box, while she watched.

‘And
now
,' he said, as his kindly eyes sought her out again over the top of his spectacles, ‘you're going to start shaping the scroll.' He picked up a second saw from the bench, this one no bigger than a breadknife.

But a scroll was one long sinuous curve, Inna thought, panicking; and how could you possibly cut such a thing with a breadknife?

‘Saw-cut One,' he said, cheerfully. ‘You cut it across by the throat…'

‘“… but don't cut its throat,”' Marcus quoted, smiling. Inna calmed down.

Leman must say the same words to all his apprentices.

Apprentices?

She emptied her mind, not daring to think that word. But she couldn't stop the flicker of hope.

Just do it. Just obey. She clamped the scroll back down to the workbench, on its side this time. Leman showed her the pencil line she was to saw along, and, terrified of going too far, she moved the little implement carefully through the wood, towards the earlier lengthways cut Leman and she had made. ‘Be braver,' Leman said, twinkling at her.

The relief when she'd cut far enough to join the first cut, and a neatly shaped sliver of wood came away in her hand, was indescribable. She turned the scroll over and re-clamped it, other side up. She was grinning as broadly as Leman by the time a second piece of wood also detached itself from the scroll without disaster.

‘“Now, Saw-cut Two!”' Marcus sang out.

Leman showed her how. This even smaller cut would run from top to bottom of the side of the scroll, at right angles to Saw-cut One, taking off much less wood.