Midnight in St. Petersburg (5 page)

There was nothing else for it. He squared his shoulders. ‘Come on,' he said, and picked up one of her bags.

Yasha stopped at the open door on the left and led her into the spacious living room, sunny yellow, with big divans and armchairs with books left open on them, and a pack of cards on the table, decorated with Tarot images, not the hearts and spades anyone who didn't know Madame Leman might have been expecting. Seeing her eyes open wider still, he remembered the effect this room had had on him, too, when he'd first got here. It was quite unlike the small, tidy, careful rooms of his parents' apartment, where you had to remember to do the right thing at all times. This was the warm kind of place where you could feel free to say anything you liked. There were pictures everywhere: big expansive things, peasants in sunlight, woodland scenes, portraits of sleeping children or men in suits; and one odd one that was just a red rectangle on black. But the most eye-catching image was the charcoal portrait of Monsieur Leman: a giant of a black-haired man with laughing, intelligent eyes, looking straight out into the room and a cloud of dark beard half-visible against the grey shadow of the loose top he was wearing; a flash of white cuff, a clean wrist.

Yasha was pleased when she took a step towards it. ‘Everyone stops at that one: it's a Repin,' he said, and he couldn't keep the pride out of his voice. He could see her catch her breath. He could imagine what she was thinking: What, the famous Repin! She'd have seen reproductions of his paintings: the wild Cossacks in fits of laughter at a letter from the Sultan; the Tsar's dejected prisoners pulling a barge under a happy blue sky. Yasha couldn't resist basking in the glory of it: ‘He's a friend of the family, so he drew the master.'

She nodded, entranced.

‘Wait here,' he said gruffly and put down her bag. ‘Take a good look while I go and tell Madame Leman you're here.'

*   *   *

Madame Leman was in the kitchen. Pink-faced, with fading blond hair escaping from a bun, she was supervising a child with plump cheeks folding mincemeat into little cabbage parcels. ‘Neatly now, Agrippina,' she was saying with a smile. There was steam rising from a boiling soup pot on the stove, next to a frying pan with the first batch of finished darling doves in it. The little girl looked excited. She was licking her lips. The smell made Yasha hungry too.

When Madame Leman heard Yasha wanted to have someone else to stay, her smile faded. ‘Oh, Yash,' she said. ‘Not again?' Her eyes went to the big book open on the table. It was full of tight little sums; notes, red-circled calculations, lists of expenditure. At the sight of it she sighed; then she caught herself. ‘Well,' she said, probably regretting that glance. ‘After all, we've just got the payment in from the orchestra; that'll tide us over for a bit. But one night only, mind.'

That suited Yasha fine. Honour satisfied. He nodded.

‘Who is it?' she added. Some of her usual warmth returned to her manner as soon as she saw he wasn't going to argue about how long. ‘One of your Jewish group friends?'

‘A girl,' Yasha said, then, realizing that this might be giving quite the wrong impression, added, hastily: ‘A cousin, I mean. She's been living with my parents. Up from Kiev.'

‘Why?' Madame Leman asked, looking wary again. ‘What is she here for?'

He shrugged. ‘She's brought a letter from my parents. Who've gone to Palestine. Apparently. They were scared there'd be a pogrom.'

At that, Madame Leman's eyes went soft. Stepping away from Agrippina, she embraced him, the smeary spoon waving behind him. ‘Oh, Yasha, I'm sorry,' she murmured. He hugged her mutely back, very hard, and this time felt obscurely comforted to hear her add, ‘You'll miss them, darling, won't you? But if they had to go, they had to go. They'll have been afraid.'

The little girl, who, living in this household, was used to flamboyant hugging, chided matter-of-factly: ‘Now, Mam, you're getting mincemeat in his hair with that spoon.' And the embrace broke up, with ‘tsssk' noises and laughs and fingers smoothing away any traces of onion.

When Yasha looked round, still smiling bashfully – she might be irritatingly all over the place at times, and she'd gone far too hard on him about Kremer, but Madame Leman was a good sort really – he realized Inna was standing in the doorway, watching.

She was quite still. She looked pinched and left out and tight about the shoulders, but even this couldn't hide the willowy sway of her movements. Yasha held his breath. He saw Madame Leman's eyebrows rise slightly.

Then, with a determined smile, Madame Leman said very quickly, ‘Welcome!' and, ‘Yasha's family is like family to us!' Turning briskly to Yasha, she added, ‘Now, we'll put your cousin in the little room at the top tonight, Yasha, the one next to yours. I'll send Agrippina up with sheets in a minute. But I know you've got it full of your junk. So run along and clear it all out, will you? Put your boxes on the landing, all of them, so she can move, and don't grumble, please. After all, it's only for one night.'

There was something very final about those last words.

Yasha cleared his throat. ‘Can I have that letter now?' he asked Inna.

Inna nodded, seeming dazed. She'd probably never heard anyone talk as fast as Madame Leman, Yasha thought. He knew how bewildering it could be. He watched her go out and come back with the letter in her hand.

Inna gave Yasha the letter.

‘Now, dear, tell me your name, do,' Madame Leman went on, advancing on Inna with a chopping-board, a knife and some potatoes.

Yasha went out, grinning despite himself. There'd be no resisting the mistress of the house today, he could see. He could hear Madame Leman's determination, even from the corridor: ‘And while they're getting things ready upstairs, perhaps I can get
you
to give me a hand with the lunch?'

Yasha raced up the stairs, three at a time, past the doors of several other flats, all the way to the attic floor where he slept, before ripping open his parents' letter in the privacy of the top landing. There was no need to go into his room to read it. This was his space, all of it, the corridor and stairwell as much as his box room and the neighbouring room: one dusty, crowded, private domain.

But it took only a moment to see that the letter wasn't going to offer him any comfort. There was nothing much at all in the brief note beginning, in his father's tiny, neat hand, ‘Dearest boy, after much soul-searching, we have decided…' It contained only a poste-restante address in Haifa where letters might reach his parents through the society they'd entrusted with preparations for their emigration, and the pious hope that they would soon write again from Jerusalem. There was nothing about recent events in Kiev, nothing to suggest things had come to seem unbearable. There was nothing in it about Inna, either: no mention that she was on her way north, no recommendation that he take care of her … not a word. But then, their letters were always like that. Missing out all the important stuff. Hiding behind trivialities. Cowardly. Cowardly. Why hadn't they said anything before about planning to leave? Why hadn't he guessed?

He groaned out loud with the sheer frustration of it. Barely thinking, he screwed up the unsatisfactory letter in one of the fists he was cramming into his eyes, then threw the scrunched-up ball, hard, into a corner, and banged the flat of his hand, hard, against the nearest chest of drawers. That furious thump, that sting of wood on skin, was as close as he could get to relieving his feelings. But he was still raging against his parents as he started throwing boxes and bags out of the room where
she
was to stay.

It was his father he was angriest with. Yasha had been raging for years against his father's spinelessness. ‘When I was, oh, twelve or thirteen or so, still a skinny boy with a treble voice,' he remembered telling Kremer's uncle, the first time they'd talked, ‘I was on a train coming back from the dacha with my father. It was just after some terrorist bombing: I suppose the one when Grand Duke Sergei was blown to pieces in his carriage, entering the Kremlin gates. Do you remember? His wife ran across Red Square, weeping and picking up the pieces of his body? And their foster children ran after her? It was the only story in the papers that week, and so the train my dad and I were in was full of people all shouting about the Jews, you know, how something should be done about them.'

And Kremer's uncle had nodded in understanding. ‘Because everyone knew that it must have been the Jews, because Grand Duke Sergei had expelled all twenty thousand of them from Moscow. And by the time it turned out it
wasn't
the Jews who'd thrown that bomb, but just some Russian Social Revolutionary, they'd all stopped caring.'

Old Kremer was a good person to talk to, Yasha thought. With his great square close-shaven head propped on one reassuringly brawny hand, with his broad back and his knack of getting right to the heart of things, old Kremer really listened.

Yes that was how it was, Yasha remembered confirming. ‘So there we were in this packed train with these big men swearing and egging each other on – nail their whores of wives, burn their shops, you know the kind of thing. All round me, because I'd got kind of caught up in the middle of the crowd when they all poured in, drunk from their picnic. And there was my dad, sitting down in his corner, burying his nose in his newspaper, trying to pretend he wasn't there…'

Old Kremer, still nodding.

‘… and then they noticed me.'

Yasha could see from old Kremer's wise eyes that he didn't need to describe the things the men had started yelling at
him
in that train. The taunts.

‘Your father did nothing,' old Kremer prompted.

All Yasha needed to do was shrug. But he wouldn't forget the short, stout old peasant woman who
had
left her basket of apples on her seat and got up to defend him. The indignant, if absurd, way she'd started swatting at the jeering brute threatening to pull down Yasha's trousers to demonstrate to the carriage at large that he was a Jew. Her cracked country voice, screeching, ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you! Bullying a harmless little lad with no one to protect him!' Or the way the men's focus on him had transformed, in an instant, into mockery of their friend, being battered by a crone in a flowery headscarf. The proof: it only took a bit of courage, from someone.

And then the train stopped, and he'd jumped off, leaving behind the gales of laughter. A second later, Papa slipped furtively out, too, hunched under his hat.

‘We never mentioned it again,' Yasha told old Kremer. ‘He never said a word.'

‘That's the danger with fear,' old Kremer said. ‘It silences people.'

You should become a doctor like Papa, his mother always used to tell him. But after the incident in the train, Yasha had stopped paying attention at school. He'd failed his exams, and refused to retake them or think of university. To his parents' barely suppressed distress, he signed himself up instead as an apprentice at a violin-repair workshop, like a poor boy from the
shtetl
.

So here he was. And it was because of the Kremers that Yasha now had all these boxes of leaflets he was piling up on the landing – especially old Kremer, who wasn't afraid of anything. In fact Yasha had met the younger Kremer first, on the train north, but when
he'd
whispered eagerly about a Jewish political organization Yasha hadn't really taken much notice. It was only when he met Kremer's uncle, recently out of jail in Warsaw, that he started to listen, because old Kremer was impressive. He was looking for recruits, he said, replacements for all the thousands of young men arrested by Prime Minister Stolypin after the failed revolution a few years back. Mostly he was looking in the Jewlands, down south; but there were gaps even up in this relatively Jewless city, too, now that Kremer's uncle's tiny branch of the General Jewish Labour Federation – the Bund, they called it; a secular socialist party fighting for political rights for Jews in Russia – had fallen foul of the authorities.

Yasha remembered how old Kremer's eyebrows had risen at his fumbling, hesitant confession that he didn't even know Yiddish, let alone Hebrew, and that he wasn't religious, and what was the point. He remembered the indignation in the old man's voice when he'd snapped back, ‘Religion? Why, I'm not talking about
religion
. I'm talking about the rights of man; the right to be proud of what you come from, and to live where you choose, and work where you're qualified; to have the same rights as the Russians you live among, rather than skulking around in the shadows, waiting to be picked on.'

Yasha was ready to listen. When he came to think about it, he had no more idea than old Kremer why his parents would have been so shortsighted as to have thought they were protecting him by cutting him off from his past. He'd started Yiddish lessons the next day. He'd gone to every meeting since, even when old Kremer had gone off south again, proselytizing. When that had left the younger Kremer without a room, Yasha had taken young Kremer in. And even after Madame Leman had kicked him out, the spare room next door had been a Godsend for the leaflets.

He heaved another two boxes out and dumped them, in a cloud of dust, on the messy pyramid rising on the landing.

There were so many of them (the brothers were enthusiastic writers) but the leaflets were harder to distribute than they were to produce. There was nowhere safe for them; not over on the islands where he met the other Bundists, in pub rooms that stank of rotting plaster and cabbage. And now there was no room for them here, either – because this green-eyed girl from Kiev, Inna, had arrived.

Yasha couldn't bear to look inside the boxes. Not now.

They were so brave, the arguments in the wobbly type in there, about the need to fight back, right here, inside the Russian Empire, against official anti-Semitism. Not just take fright and emigrate, as so many thousands had in the past decade or two. Zionism is escapism, Yasha had half shouted, half whispered, aware of the possibility of police informers, to last weekend's nervous little gathering. Palestine is not the answer. Don't run from your troubles. Face them down.
Doykayt
– their made-up Yiddish word, ‘hereness' – is where it all begins.