The Jewel of St Petersburg

Five

WHICH ONES SHALL WE CHOOSE?” “You can have the meringue, it’s your favorite.”

“What about the chocolate one?”

“No, you can’t have that,” Katya laughed. “I want it.”

With a delighted smile Katya circled her fork over the silver tiers of the cake stand in the middle of the table.

“I shall choose first,” she announced.

Valentina wanted to act as if nothing had happened. She wanted her sister to enjoy herself, that was why she’d brought her here-and it had been a long time since she’d seen Katya so bright and animated. But Valentina’s cake fork felt like lead in her fingers.

Arkin had been as good as his word. He’d barged the car along the sidewalks, indifferent to the shouts from the pedestrians who scattered at the approach of the big blue motor. He found a route out of there, just as he’d promised. They drove to another restaurant, La Gavotte, with no further comment on what had passed, and Valentina selected a table against the rear wall, near the door to the kitchens. As far from the front of the establishment as it was possible to be.

Around her everything went on as normal, the waitresses bobbing about in black frocks with frilly white aprons and frivolous twists of white lace in their hair. All so courteous. All so polite. No anger here. No shouts. The customers were smiling and smartly dressed, bathed in the healthy glow cast by the pink glass wall lamps, picking at patisseries, sipping hot chocolate. Laughing. Talking.

Valentina was stunned by her own fragility. No one else seemed frightened, and certainly no other customers appeared ready to bring up their lunch over the pristine white tablecloth. Everyone else was breathing normally. Was it she who was foolish, or was it them?

“Valentina.”

“Yes?”

“Are you all right?” Katya was peering at her closely.

“Yes.”

There was a space between them that felt fragile. Breakable. Valentina refused to touch it.

Katya deliberately changed the subject. “The new car is good, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“And Arkin was excellent.”

“He drives well.”

Valentina cast a wary glance at the wide arched windows that looked out onto the road through net curtains. Something in her chest gave a slippery shudder.

“Can you hear something?” she asked. “I thought I heard…”

Katya’s hand wrapped itself around Valentina’s and they lay on the cloth together, Katya’s fingers like fine strands of delicate porcelain, whereas Valentina’s were more robust, a strong pad of muscle on each finger. All those piano scales.

“It’s all right to be frightened sometimes,” Katya said, “after what you went through in the forest.”

Valentina looked back at the net curtains. “You weren’t frightened today.”

“That’s because my life is so dull, I am too stupid to know when I should be afraid and when I should not. You have more sense.”

“Katya,” Valentina asked softly, “do you think-”

That was the moment when the barrage of bricks hurtled through the windows, when tiny raindrops of glass sliced like diamonds through powdered cheeks. When one arrow-shaped shard lodged in a woman’s neck, that was the moment the screaming began.

VALENTINA WAS RUNNING. SLIPPING AND SLIDING ON THE snow but still running. Her legs didn’t know how to stop. The wheels of the chair screeched and skidded.

“Valentina, don’t!” An icy hand seized hers. “Please stop. Please.”

It was Katya. Begging her. With an effort her legs stumbled to a halt, but her fingers still gripped the handles of the wheelchair as though they had become a part of it, stiff and rigid, welded to the metal. The scream of the woman with the glass in her neck echoed in Valentina’s mind. She dragged air into her lungs and felt it peel away her flesh, it was so cold.

“Valentina, we’ll freeze to death.”

Katya had twisted around in her wheelchair, her ungloved hand pulling at Valentina’s sleeve. Her blue eyes were panicked.

Valentina looked around, momentarily baffled to find herself in a narrow dirty street where household slops had frozen into treacherous yellow mounds on the pavement. A drainpipe, covered in snow, was lying like a corpse in the gutter and windows were blanked out with cardboard. Paint peeled, walls cracked. A man was watching them, his beard and his dog as ragged as his clothes.

Oh God, what had she done?

The moment the bricks hit the window, she’d had only one thought. To get Katya out of there. Out. Away. Safe.

Her hands had seized the wheelchair with her sister in it and had propelled her straight through the door into the restaurant kitchen, then out the back of the building into an untidy courtyard. From there her feet had started running. Out. Away. Safe. The words hurtled around in her head. She’d darted down streets she’d never seen before, as if she knew instinctively she would be safer here among the destitute and the forgotten than among her own kind, where bombs and bricks had become the tools of speech.

Katya’s cheeks had turned white. She was freezing to death. The north wind had whipped up from the gulf, and neither of them was wearing a coat or gloves or even a scarf. Everything had been abandoned at La Gavotte. She could almost see blood congealing in Katya’s veins. She was killing Katya. All over again. She headed straight for the nearest door. It was split down the middle and patched with strips of rough planking, but she banged on it hard. After a long wait it was opened by a child, no higher than her hip.

“May we come in? Please. Pozhalusta. We’re cold.”

The boy didn’t react. His face was crusted with scabs, and one filthy finger picked at a ripe spot on his chin.

“Pozhalusta,” she said again. “Is your mother here?”

He stepped back and she thought he would swing open the door for the wheelchair to enter, but instead he pushed it shut. She banged the wood so hard that the crack widened.

“Open the door,” she shouted. “Otkroite dver.”

The door eased back just enough for one blue eye to peer up at her. “What do you want?” a girl’s voice asked.

“My sister is freezing to death out here. Please let us in.”

But she’d learned her lesson and didn’t stop there. This time she accompanied her request with a push against the door that took the child by surprise, so that she stumbled backward. Before she could recover, Valentina had the wheelchair and herself inside the dim hallway and the door firmly shut behind them. The musty reek of rat droppings loitered on the stairs.

“Thank you,” she said. “Spasibo.”

In front of her huddled three filthy urchins, two identical boys and a girl with dirty blond hair. The twin boys were nervous, their clothes torn and misshapen, trousers not meeting their ankles. The girl, younger than her brothers, was staring at the wheelchair with wide-eyed curiosity.

“Is your mother in?” Valentina asked.

The girl pointed to a door without shifting her gaze from the spokes of Katya’s chair. “Is it a bicycle?” she whispered.

One of the boys clipped her lightly around the ear. “Don’t be stupid, Liuba. It’s for cripples.”

Valentina opened the door the girl had indicated and pushed the chair into a small room that was only fractionally warmer than the air outside. A stained sheet was draped over a section of the window in an attempt to keep out the cold, turning the air gray and streaky. It smelled of damp plaster and unwashed bodies.

“I’m sorry to intrude.”

A woman was breast-feeding an infant on the end of a narrow bed. Her body was as scrawny as an old woman’s, but her eyes were still bright and young. She was wearing fingerless mittens, a brown scarf knotted around her head. She fastened the front of her dress.

“What do you want?” Her voice was tired.

“My sister and I need help. Please…” Valentina hated to ask for something from this woman who so clearly had nothing to give. “My sister is cold. She needs warmth. Some hot food.”

“My children need hot food,” the woman said sullenly, “but they don’t get any.”

Valentina took Katya’s cold hand in hers and massaged it vigorously. The woman immediately placed the infant on the bed and went over to the small black stove in the corner. She opened its metal door, a tiny wisp of flame within it, barely alive. No wonder it was so cold. Using tongs, the woman removed a heavy stone that lay inside the stove, wrapped it up in a blackened piece of toweling that lay ready for the purpose, and placed it on Katya’s lap. Katya’s hands burrowed under it.

“Can’t you put more wood on the fire?” Valentina suggested.

“No.”

“I have money.”

The three children edged closer. The girl held out a grubby palm. “We can buy firewood.”

Valentina had to trust them. She pulled two white ten-rouble notes from the purse in her pocket, even though she knew it was far too much for firewood. “Bring some food too. Hurry! Potoropites!”

All three children vanished.

“Here, take this.” The woman held out the blanket from the bed. Valentina looked at it. Probably riddled with lice.

“Spasibo.” She wrapped it around her sister’s shoulders and tucked it around her limp legs, aware of the woman’s watchful scrutiny as she did so, and for the first time in her life it occurred to her to wonder how much the wheelchair was worth. As much as this woman’s family earned in a month? In a year? She had no idea. This wretched, damp place was smaller than Valentina’s bedroom at home. Part of the ceiling was hanging down and black mold was crawling up one wall. “Thank you for helping us,” she said, genuinely grateful. “There was an attack by strikers on the restaurant we were in, and my sister and I escaped, but without our coats.”

The woman nodded her head at Katya. “Is she sick?”

“She was in an accident.”

The baby on the bed started to whimper and the woman said, “Pick her up.”

Valentina looked at the squirming bundle.

“Pick her up.” The woman’s voice was sharper this time.

“What?”

“You want my help. In exchange I want yours. A moment’s peace from the child.” She smiled, and there was a flash of youth in it. “Don’t worry, I won’t steal your sister’s chair.”

A flush burned its way up Valentina’s cheeks as she picked up the baby. It had almost no hair and little twigs for legs.

“Valentina.” It was Katya’s faint voice. “Let me hold her.”

Valentina brought the child close to the wheelchair but didn’t hand it over. “It is dirty,” she muttered. “You don’t want…” But she saw the needy look in Katya’s eyes. She deposited the child on her sister’s lap and was appalled when she leaned down and kissed the bony little head. A smile spread across Katya’s face. Wherever she had been, she was coming back.

THE AROMA OF HOT PIROZHKI CHANGED EVERYTHING. THE three children seemed to swell out into their skin before they’d even been given one of the meat pies from the greaseproof paper package. They sat on the floor, in front of the blazing logs in the stove, and watched the fire with the kind of fascination that Valentina would give to a performance of the ballet.

“Shouldn’t they wash their hands?” Valentina suggested as she placed a pie on each palm. The dirt on their fingers was blacker than the floor.

“The water pump is frozen.” The woman shrugged and took a large bite out of a slice of bread spread with black currant conserve. As she chewed on it, Valentina watched the features of her face melt with pleasure and grow astonishingly younger.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Varenka Sidorova.”

“I’m Valentina. My sister’s name is Katya.”

Katya was sipping hot tea and honey from a tin mug, and there was color in her cheeks now. The infant lay like a kitten on her lap.

“Varenka, what does your husband do?”

The woman’s eyes grew cautious. “He works in a factory.”

“Is he a Bolshevik?”

She saw the tightening of the skin under the woman’s eyes. “What do you know of Bolsheviks?”

“Was he in the march today?”

Varenka started to laugh. The children looked around at her, astonished, as though unused to the sound, but the laughter didn’t stop. It went on and on, rolling from her open mouth. Veins in her neck stood out and tears slid down her cheeks, but still the laughter filled the air. She dropped to her knees, and then the laughter stopped as abruptly as it had begun. She yanked off the headscarf, releasing a crop of chestnut curls. Valentina stared. Katya gave a small smothered gasp. One side of the woman’s head was hairless, and a wide white scar, glistening as though wet, ran from her temple right across her skull to the back of her head. She regarded the sisters with a mixture of pity and hatred.

“Five years ago in front of the Winter Palace gates,” she said in a hard voice, “your soldiers came at me with their sabers when we marched to speak to the tsar. We intended no harm but they mowed us down. Yet I survived. And because of that, you survive today. Because of my help, you survive. But do you deserve to?”

Valentina lifted the baby from Katya’s lap and laid it on the bed. “I think it’s time we left.”

“You!” Still on her knees, the woman was pointing at Valentina. “I promise you that one day soon we will come for you and your kind, and this time you will not survive. You idle rich. You parasites.” She spat on the floor. “The workers will demand justice.”

Valentina took out her purse and upended it on the table. Roubles clattered everywhere, and the children scurried around like mice, gathering them up. “Take this because you helped me today. I am grateful.” She walked over to the kneeling woman and let her fingers touch the shiny scar on her head. Not wet, but smooth and slippery, as colorless as something that lived underground. “I’m sorry, Varenka.”

“I don’t want your pity.”

“Valentina.” It was Katya. “She wants us gone.”

“Yes, you’re right. Before my man gets back.” Varenka glared defiantly at Valentina. “My Bolshevik.”

A loud bang on the front door startled them. Before they could react it came twice more, like a hammer blow, and they heard the wood splinter. The woman scooped up the baby and clutched it to her breast so hard it started to whimper. Valentina’s heart pounded. “Wait here, Katya,” she said.

“No, Valentina, don’t…”

The hammering on the door came again. Without hesitation Valentina opened the door into the dismal hallway and unlocked the shattered front door onto the street. A massive figure blocked out the light.

“What the fuck are you doing in this shit hole, Valentina Ivanova?”

It was Liev Popkov.