The Amber Rooms

Chapter Three

Walking the streets until morning would not do. She had to find somewhere for the night. With no sure friends in the city, and no papers, she would gamble on a safe house associated with her late employer, the revolutionary underground. St Petersburg held more than forty safe houses. They could not all be warned to expect her, not so soon, even if the man—or men—who had attacked her on the train had notified confederates upon arrival.

Saskia walked for three hours without incident and entered the city. She presented herself at a bookshop called Pushkin & Co. The superintendent was a short man. He pencilled the name she offered, “Ms Margaret Happenstance”, into his visitors’ book and, seeing interest where there was none, told her that he would erase the letters later and re-write them in peerless copperplate. He was that kind of man. Her back straightened with annoyance. The record of her name was, he sighed, an unfortunate bureaucratic consequence of the recent troubles. He installed Saskia in a small receiving room at the rear of the bookshop, where he continued to impress upon her the signal difficulties of his professional life. The second floor was occupied by a German baron and his wife, who were wonderful. But the higher the floor, the cheaper the rent, the worse the trouble, the greater the difficulty. The exception, he added, was the basement. It was the cheapest by some margin. Could she believe a tenant would pay for such lodgings? That is to say, basement lodgings in a city such as St Petersburg, where the Baltic rammed its cold storms down the throat of the Neva each winter with a regularity that smacked of malice? He, for his part, could not.

Saskia listened to the passers-by and the hoof falls while the superintendent spoke. When he left, she walked around the room. Its curtains were closed and buttoned. Locked concertina doors covered the books. A ginger cat slept on the cooling stove. It reminded her of another cat, Ego. Why were her memories of 2003 returning with such insistence? She might have been an old woman overwhelmed by thoughts of a childhood decades gone.

There was the familiar odour of soot. It was so familiar as to be requisite.

She walked to the icon and looked into its tilted, weeping eyes. She turned and faced the room. There, again in the beautiful corner, she waited.

‘They will stage A Life for the Tsar at the Mariinsky next week,’ said the young man, not twenty-five, straightening chairs and adjusting flowers as he crossed the room. A tallow candle burned in his lantern. He passed around the tables with the ease of a waiter. Saskia was surprised that he had not removed his ink-stained apron. The man was either audacious or forgetful. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘it is the first production of the season. Do you have a favourite ballerina?’

Saskia looked deliberately at his apron.

‘I have four,’ she said. ‘Karsavina, Pavlova, Siedova and Trefilova.’

The man smiled with relief. ‘You are Judjuna Mikhailovna?’

‘Yes,’ she said, though she had never heard the name. ‘I need to wash and pick up some new clothes. Then I must go to the Tsar’s Village. Can you arrange that?’

‘Everyone calls me Grisha. Costumes? We have costumes to spare. I can arrange everything. Please, come with me.’

He put his arm through Saskia’s and drew her across the room to a battered door, which opened onto a descending staircase.

The basement was a pit of three rooms: one for the printing press, a bedroom, and a living room-cum-kitchen. Their walls shone like a cold sweat. Grisha asked Saskia to remain in the living room while he attended the press. She was welcome to eat some beef and unleavened bread. Saskia thanked him and helped herself to the food. As she swallowed, ignoring the gristle, she walked the short perimeter. The bookcase was sloping and damp to the touch. The light bulbs were sooty yet harsh. The air smelled of cabbage, body odour and coffee. Wind piped in the hearth, where flames bowed and curtseyed. Saskia watched them until a lanky, red-haired man appeared at the foot of the stairs. This one was no older than twenty years. He was carrying a newspaper, and his first act was to give it to her.

‘Dry your hair. It must be wet, what with the rain,’ he said, flicking a glance at the ceiling. Then he bowed. ‘You may call me Robespierre.’

Saskia took the newspaper. ‘Thank you. Will you have some of this beef?’

‘No.’ Suddenly, he was embarrassed. ‘It’s for you.’

Saskia smiled. She had found the cell and been accepted. Arrangements would soon be in place for her journey to the Amber Room. She tipped her head to one side and drew a handful of her damp hair through the newspaper. She smiled at Robespierre in a manner that made him touch his fist to his lips and frown.

‘Robespierre?’ she asked. ‘That’s an interesting name.’

The man shrugged and put his hands into the pockets of his suit as he leaned against the mantel. Saskia heard the crinkle of more newspaper and she thought of the hidden doves of magicians. His collar was winged, student style. The bones of his cheeks were high but their flesh was dappled with smallpox scars. He stared at her sideways.

‘I chose it with some care,’ he said.

‘How many of you work here?’

Oddly, he switched from Russian to French, as though he wished to keep his name in focus. ‘Two, since they took Lera. Will you have some vodka?’

‘No, thank you.’

Robespierre pursed his lips as though this was an unexpected behaviour. Saskia thought he was right. She continued to watch him while she dried her hair using the newspaper.

‘What’s wrong with your left hand?’ he asked.

‘Why should there be anything wrong with it?’

‘You haven’t taken it out of your warmer. Did you hurt it?’ He stepped to the opposite side of the hearth. ‘Can I get you some medicine?’

Saskia had an idea that there was no medicine to be had.

‘No, thank you. To answer your question, I hurt it on the train.’

Loudly, Robespierre said, ‘Did you fight with her, the traitor?’

Saskia paused in her drying. Whom did he mean? Which traitor, of the endless parade, did he mean? Or was it a question designed to test her?

‘You are surprised that the traitor is a woman, Robespierre?’

‘That would offend my sense of equality, sister,’ he countered. Something in his expression changed. He added, ‘It is well known that the woman from the Caucasus has supernatural powers.’

Saskia laughed to cover her unease. It was possible, though unlikely, that news of her escape from the train had reached this cell. She hoped that Robespierre was cold-reading her. She dropped the newspaper near the bench and resumed her sandwich.

‘Like what?’ she asked, tearing at the beef.

‘Oh, it’s nothing like … My comrade on the Moika claims that this traitor knows when people lie. She can see in the dark.’ Robespierre looked at his shoes. He shrugged. ‘There is also the matter of her left hand. It is missing.’

Saskia stopped eating. She looked at him. ‘What do you study?’

‘I don’t understand.’

In Russian, Saskia said, ‘You’re a student, or dress like one. Let me guess—you study political economy.’

Robespierre pushed a hand through his thick hair. ‘Why do you look at me as if you were better? I studied agronomy until I discharged myself. The decision was mine.’ He looked at the hearth. ‘I am a comrade.’

‘Then you should choose your words with greater care,’ Saskia said. She looked at the door to the staircase. It was closed but not locked. ‘This is not the time for differences of opinion.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Robespierre. He scratched his eyebrow with a thumb. Pinched off a louse. ‘That is not what I meant.’

‘Robespierre,’ she said, swallowing. Why did she pity him, so suddenly and so fiercely? ‘Imagine your namesake here, right now. Think of an eighteenth century French revolutionary manifest in Russia, in troubled times, in the body of a man who stuffs his suit with newspaper to keep warm, named for half-baked notions of romance? And, my dear Robespierre, when the Party calls, you will go to the people. And the peasantry will laugh at you. A zemstvo might have you peeling potatoes for a week before they turn you in.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ he said. His shoulders were raised like hackles. ‘Didn’t Pisarev call for society and state to be turned over, like soil, for a new moral code to grow? We must assume the role of gardener, so to speak?’

‘And what costumes have you worn, Judjuna Mikhailovna?’ asked Grisha, entering from the press room. He removed his ink-stained gloves and touched Robespierre once, tenderly, on his pockmarked cheek. Saskia’s loneliness amplified her perception of the exchange. These pressurised environments encouraged the closest friendships. Even love. The embattled press crews lived minute to minute. A nosey superintendent or a chance street-meeting with an informer would end it. More likely, one of the crew would turn informer when the hunger and stupidity of the situation really bit. Loose teeth loosened the mouth.

‘Call me plain old Judjuna,’ said Saskia. ‘I don’t walk a stage.’

‘Oh, we all walk a stage,’ he said, smiling. ‘Do we not, Robespierre?’

‘You look at us as if you are better,’ Robespierre repeated. ‘And yet you boast about violence.’

‘Quiet,’ said Grisha. His smile had gone. ‘Our guest is eating.’

Saskia swallowed her mouthful and looked from one to the other. She wanted to leave. She appreciated once more that she was in the basement of a revolutionary safe house. The knowledge no longer brought a sense of relief. She was, by deed, an enemy of the revolution.

‘I’m going. Thanks for the food.’

‘Where will you go?’ said Grisha, gesturing to the beef with inky fingers. His grin was wide. His breath smelled of vodka. ‘Eat.’

Saskia looked at Robespierre, whose eyes did not lift to hers.

‘If you want to help me,’ she said, ‘I need to send a telegram.’

‘Where will we find a post office open at this hour?’ said Grisha. He winked at Robespierre, but something had soured between them. Grisha covered the moment by putting more joviality into his voice. ‘Robespierre, where is your charm? This is a pretty lady, after all. Talk to her. Make her feel at home.’

Saskia stood up. Her legs were weak. Was it because of the fall? She moved towards Robespierre, then crouched at the fire. If only something burned there. She looked at the vegetable crate crammed with fresh, illegal literature. How such a cell would worship its printing press. Grisha would be lucky if one in ten of these gazettes was used for a purpose less pragmatic than the wiping of a worker’s arse. The futility of the enterprise was as characteristic of revolutionary fomentation as faith was to the religious: the greater, the grander. Saskia could only guess what stories of water leaks and animal infestations they had used to explain the noise to the superintendent. Perhaps they were bribing him. Yes; Saskia decided they were. Peerless copperplate indeed.

Robespierre put his hand on his hip. In so doing, he exposed the scuffed handle of a revolver. Saskia was not alarmed. Like his name, it was a gesture. Nonetheless, her heart rate was increasing. She drew attention to the bookcase.

‘I see you have some German novels.’

‘We’re supposed to be teachers,’ Robespierre replied. His eyes narrowed. ‘That’s what we do. As a cover, I mean.’

Saskia blinked. Sweat was itching over her scalp. Her mouth watered, as though she was about to be sick. She reached out at Robespierre. He stepped away, embarrassed by her again, and she fell unconscious onto her chest.

In a deeper realm than the basement, in a place where her thoughts began, the sparrows came. They poured from an overcast sky. Their keening chirrups were like a thousand windows shattering. When she saw them, she remembered that they had come to her before. Like fear, they were constant in their companionship. Unlike fear, their memory dissolved with the opening of her eyes. They flew in her dreams alone.

Odin had ravens: the first called Huginn, or thought, and the second, Muninn, or memory.

Again, she wondered what these sparrows wanted, and she knew that she had thought this before, back and back, dream after dream.

‘What are you?’

The sparrows reminded her of something. Years before, on the long walk west from Baikal, Saskia had been followed by a feral dog. It accompanied her for a week over the endless steppe. It neither approached nor stalked her. It tracked her day and night. It slept when she slept and moved on when she did. When she threw it bread, the dog ate.

She never knew what happened to the dog. One day, it was gone.

The sparrows wheeled now in the dream sky. A great thickening, visible as a contour, passed through the flock. Beyond them, the overcast sky brightened. She could see shapes in the clouds. Russian letters.

No, Greek symbols.

No: equations.

‘Can you take me home?’ she called.

Saskia awoke on a mesh bed in the smaller of the two anterooms. She was certain that only minutes had passed. Her eyes focused on broken ambrotype plates between a chamber pot and the wall. As the shapes became more distinct, a pain grew behind her eyes. She shut them.

The sparrows faded from her mind, forgotten.

I … I got rid of Kamo. I’m in St Petersburg. They poisoned me.

Saskia could not move from the bed. She twisted with another pain, which began in her lower back. She tugged her knees to her chest, put her teeth into a knee. She rode it. Her hand twisted into a claw. When the pain lessened, she tried to relax the hand. She could not.

The room became bright and she saw that Grisha was standing by the bed, tightening the overhead bulb.

‘The Georgians told us to be careful,’ he said. His tone was no longer playful. It was clear that he was speaking to another person. ‘They told us to be careful.’

Saskia lost her sense of where and when she was. She struggled to reorient.

Eighteenth century? Revolution. Beheading. Ah, Robespierre. He speaks to a man called Robespierre.

Saskia gritted her teeth as a cramp rolled through her bowels.

‘What did you give me?’ she whispered.

Grisha leaned close. ‘The real Judjuna Mikhailovna was found dead on the early afternoon train,’ he said. ‘They told us minutes before you arrived.’

Before Saskia could reply, her view exchanged Grisha for Robespierre. He was holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘look what you did. She’s soiled herself. What if she dies?’

‘They warned me what she can do,’ said Grisha. ‘This is better—you can trust me on that—and don’t forget that with the money we can pay off the punchcutter.’

‘You mean to kill her? Say it, if that’s what you mean.’

Saskia tried to roll out of her spastic posture, but fell onto the floor. The pain was a wave that crashed upon her every nerve.

‘Robespierre,’ she croaked.

‘No,’ said Grisha. ‘It’s too late. Our friends will arrive within an hour. Maybe you’ll be alive then, so they can work on you.’

Saskia closed bleeding eyes and said, ‘Robespierre, shoot him. He betrayed me for money. If your principles mean anything, let them lead you now.’ But the effort to speak was too much. She counted her breaths. A few minutes later, she heard the press start up. It would be business as usual while the traitor died.

Sleep released her from the tortures of her body. She dreamed that she had fallen upwards into the sky, only to land on its grey membrane and become affixed like an insect stuck to water. The sensation was not unpleasant. She could not see her body, or even be sure that she had a body, but she felt naked.

The sparrows descended.

Yes, she thought. How could I forget about them? This time, when I awake, I will remember them all.

She looked into the uncountable mass of wings, quick eyes, and sharp mouths. She screamed. The birds struck her body like a black waterfall. They pecked at her eyes and the soft flesh between her toes. Their feet scratched. Their wings were unbearable in their fluttering, touching, and though she tried to spit and shake her head, they found her mouth and wriggled inside.

There was no pain.

She remembered the dog that had followed her across the steppe. It had been neither friend nor foe, but a constant companion.

She opened her eyes. The birds poured in. She saw equations and beautiful schematics spelled in fire against her eyelids.

She shouted, ‘I don’t understand,’ and the words were clear, though she knew her mouth to be jammed with struggling sparrows.

The fire became a cloud. It was the distinctive shape of an atomic explosion.

‘You are trying to say something,’ she said. ‘What?’

Mushroom cloud? Is that it?

At once, she understood that the horse radish had contained a deadly fungus called the Destroying Angel.

The Angel of Death.

‘Who are you?’

The sparrows finally tore open the skin of her abdomen. She felt them cram inside. Some beaks snapped up tiny mouthfuls of her blood and spat it into the sky. Others spat new blood. They worked furiously.

She awoke in the bedroom. Once more, she felt that something important had been revealed in her dream, but its nature eluded her. The pain returned, along with a creaking sound. She saw that Grisha was tightening a rope around her forearms. The rope was sticky where it met her skin. Something in the poison had made her bleed and keep bleeding.

Saskia looked up and coughed out dried blood.

‘Robespierre,’ she whispered. Her voice was childlike. ‘I will never look at you again as though I am better.’

Grisha settled on his haunches and began to knot the rope. He smiled.

‘My dear, you’re confusing me with—’

Robespierre’s shot passed through Grisha’s chest below his collar bone. He fell against Saskia. He was still holding the rope, and looked from it to Saskia, as though they were pieces in a puzzle. Robespierre struck Grisha’s head with the butt of the gun, lashing left and right, until Grisha was lying alongside her, bloodied and snorting.

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Don’t kill him. You’ve done enough.’

‘Yes.’ Robespierre looked at the gun and his red hands. ‘You’re right.’

‘How long until the others arrive?’

‘Minutes. That assumes, of course, that Grisha told the truth. Maybe there is no time at all.’

‘Pick up the gun,’ she said. ‘Will the superintendent “hear” the shot?’

‘He is one of us. I don’t know.’ He looked at the weapon. He was weeping. ‘I guess this is the end of me.’

‘Listen, Robespierre. You’re a good man.’

He crouched by her head. ‘It’s almost dawn,’ he said. ‘They are coming for you. People from the south. Georgians.’

‘What about the Milkman?’

‘I don’t know anything about that. Don’t ask me.’ To himself, he said, ‘I stopped him because this is not right. This should not be about money. Perhaps I don’t have the strength for this.’

‘There is nobody else for me in St Petersburg, Robespierre. Do you understand? If you don’t save me now, nobody will.’

He pressed his hand against his temple. The hand still held the gun. Saskia tried to smile.

‘Robespierre, concentrate.’

‘I understand. There are people I know—they are unconnected to the Party.’

‘I need to leave the city before the Georgians come. If Grisha knows, they all know.’

‘Grisha told me you had a rendezvous with someone in the Tsar’s Village.’

‘Concentrate. Untie me. Bring me water and salt. But first look to Grisha. Turn his head so that his airway is open.’

‘Why would you be kind to him?’

‘If you do it, I’m not the one being kind.’

Sleep-sleep-sleep, she thought, recalling a nursery rhyme she had heard in Tiflis. Don’t lie on the edge of the bed or a grey wolf will come and bite you.

When Saskia saw daylight through the seams of her moving coach, she was detached from the news that she had survived the night. Her bleeding had reduced but her kidneys felt burned. She knew that her death would now be a slow poisoning of the blood, daylight or no daylight, and it would take more than this continuous, secret tour of the city by closed carriage to save her from the Georgians. Robespierre planned to keep her moving while he searched for what he called a “safe landing”. He had found her bandages, towels to line her underwear, and an infusion of blessed milk thistle, which she sipped as the carriage rocked through street after brightening street. Robespierre would not say how he had acquired these medicaments, beyond a mutter that his father would not miss the money. Saskia called him a gentleman and touched his cheek. He frowned and told her to drink more of the tea.

The hours passed. In the early afternoon, the carriage stopped outside an apartment block near the Griboyedov Canal and Saskia was carried, in blankets, to a wheelchair. Robespierre took her to an apartment occupied by polite, indifferent strangers who appeared to owe Robespierre their help and their silence. The strangers offered Saskia food; she declined. She drank only the infusion. On the hour, she changed her bloodstained clothes for nondescript servant apparel. She was careful not to disturb the black band that she wore above her elbow.

Touching the band, she agitated a memory two years old, perhaps three. She had been standing in a book-lined study near Tiflis, in the Caucasus, when she thought she heard a flock of birds settling in a poplar tree outside the window. It was late in the year for such birds, so she pulled the blind. The tree had been empty.

Robespierre, a stranger himself, abandoned her to the care of these strangers. Saskia could do nothing but sit alone and look into the cup of blessed milk thistle, waiting for the Georgians to break through the door and end everything. During these silences, the strangers read books and played cards.

It was late in the evening when Robespierre returned. He claimed to know a reliable smuggler. Saskia allowed him to make the arrangements. He left to do so. At midnight, a boy interrupted Saskia’s sleep with a note. She frowned at the words. Had something broken inside her? She could not understand them.

She closed her eyes, took a breath, held it, and opened them again. There was a sense of something blurred coming into focus.

Saskia stared at the note. Then she bade the boy goodnight and thought about Robespierre and a room in the Great Summer Palace of the Tsars, and home. She slept, and dreamed not of sparrows, but of the Baltic shore and the cinders of amber cast there by the surf.

The rendezvous was at Znamenskaya Square, a busy crossing of the Nevsky and Ligovsky Avenues. Here she met her smuggler. He was an Orthodox Jew in his mid-fifties wearing a padded lapserdak jacket. He would not, at first, meet her eye, but he took Saskia’s money, folded it into a small square, and tucked it into his boot. He looked at her chest. She turned away. She did not trust him.

He said, ‘You stink, my dear,’ but Saskia did not reply. If he learned that she had Yiddish, but was a gentile, this would make her an especially memorable character, which she had no wish to be.

The man took her cases. They were not heavy, since they contained only the minimum expected of a woman travelling to see relatives: lacquer boxes, dolls, some books and clothes.

He walked on and Saskia followed, carefully, as though she had gained fifty years in the night. It would be better to hail a carriage but her money would not stretch so far. She scratched her scalp beneath her kerchief and focused on the smuggler’s lapserdak as he walked ahead of her through the gentleman strollers, street stalls, and scuttling children.

The wind came from the true north. Flakes of snow were falling. They settled on her cheap boots. St Petersburg’s green winter was turning white and Saskia might have cried but for the blood in her tears. It would not do to be memorable.

She turned towards the unseen Tsar’s Village. The Amber Room was there. If she had decoded the vibrations of her time band correctly, it was a portal to the future. Her mind stopped once more on the greater question: Who was making the band vibrate? But the countdown had reached zero during the day. The doors of the Amber Room had closed. She did not know when they would open again.

Sleep-sleep-sleep, she thought.