Midnight in St. Petersburg Read Free Page A

heard the peasant say, sounding amused. ‘I’m heading into town, along Nevsky. Shall I put you on your way?’
    She turned, with dignity, to reject his offer, but when she met his eyes she could see there was no malice in them. He’d helped her till now. Of course he wasn’t about to start pestering her.
    Chastened, she nodded. ‘I’m going to Hay Market,’ she said, realizing – to her surprise – that she’d be glad of the company.
    â€˜I’ve known that lane since I had troubles of my own with the police,’ the peasant said, shouldering one of Inna’s bags (she kept the smaller bag, which contained her violin, in her own hand) and setting off beside her along a big straight ugly boulevard lined with tall grey buildings. What troubles? she wondered, but he went on: ‘That’s the thing about policemen: they get everywhere, like cockroaches. No way to actually stamp them out – but it never does any harm to keep out of their way.’
    Inna couldn’t help but smile. It was a delicate gesture, she thought, to invite her to remember the terrifying gendarmes, who liked to call Jews cockroaches, as no more threatening than kitchen creepy-crawlies themselves.
    â€˜Especially if you’re a Jew.’ The peasant gave her a sideways glance.
    It was an invitation to frankness. She hesitated, and then took it. ‘Like me, you mean,’ she said.
    Noncommittally, he nodded.
    His casual mention, out loud, of Inna’s national identity, the fifth point on the passport, that inescapable evidence of her membership of a shameful race (if she hadn’t temporarily escaped it by borrowing Olya’s papers, at least), didn’t make her flinch in the way she usually did. She just felt distant from the proposition. Aunty Lyuba, who was Russian by blood, had raised Inna, with her Russian first name, to be just like any of the young Russian girls in their city apartment block. Inna’s last name, Feldman, could be Yiddish or just innocently Volga German; there were only ever difficulties if people raised their eyebrows on hearing Inna’s unchangeable middle name: the patronymic she was called by on formal occasions, ‘Inna Venyaminovna’, which was made from her father’s un-Russian-sounding, un-German-sounding name, Benjamin. Yet there’d never been religion in Aunty Lyuba’s life, or in Inna’s. They were progressive and scientific: no ancient Talmuds and Judaic chaos in Aunty Lyuba’s genteel apartment, thank you, just dead Uncle Borya’s books on medicine, Dahl’s dictionary, the Russian classics, freshly laundered white lace everywhere, and lessons, lessons, lessons all day long. Inna didn’t remember much about her own parents, but they’d been close to Aunty Lyuba, so she thought they must have been like her in this. Still, even if Inna, like Aunty Lyuba, had no Jewish ways, they were never unaware of what people might say, or think, or do. Inna remembered starting at the Academy, and pirouetting excitedly in her new white lace pinafore, ready to walk the three streets to the school by herself for the first time, and how her carefree happiness had curdled when Aunty Lyuba, shaking her head over Inna’s lustrous black hair tied in a big white bow, and the exotic curves of her cheekbone and nose, had murmured, ‘They’ll always know … but they’ll always expect a Jew to show fear. So walk tall … stare them down, like a princess.’
    And Inna had done her best. She’d given every man on the way to school the fiercest look she could; yet even now she could never banish the fear.
    The fear is all that’s really Jewish about me, Inna thought now. She couldn’t see anything else she had in common with the Jews they were always writing about in the papers (people she’d never actually seen for herself): those banned both from countryside and big cities, who