The Jewel of St Petersburg

Twenty-one

IT TOOK VALENTINA SOME TIME TO FIND THE RIGHT ROAD, but as soon as she turned into it she recognized the place. The wind had picked up, driving rain into their faces.

“This is the house.”

Jens showed no inclination to knock at the door where she had stopped. In fact he showed no inclination to be taking part in this expedition at all, but she had steered him into these backstreets, aware of his disapproval. His shoulders were set in a hard line.

“This is no place for you, Valentina. Your nurse’s uniform is not a disguise, you know. It doesn’t hide what you are. It’s not safe for you here.”

She laughed at him, provoking a frown. “Of course it’s safe. I’ve got you with me. Look, this is the door.”

Jens pushed at it, and it swung open with a grating sound. He led the way over the threshold and they were hit by the rank smell, so strong this time that Valentina lifted her handkerchief over her nose. The door to the left was closed, but this time there were no children to challenge her, so she walked over and knocked. There was no response from inside. Jostling his bundles, Jens tried the handle and it turned easily. The room was freezing cold and lay in semidarkness, just one stub of a candle spitting out a reluctant light. Valentina grew wary, knowing that the woman with the damaged skull had not welcomed her the first time.

“Varenka?” she called.

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she took in the silence. There was no bustle of children or squawk of a baby. No noise at all except a hot harsh breath like the sound of a wheezy horse. The smell in the room was worse than in the hallway.

“Varenka?” she said again.

There was a movement on the bed. A hand tugged at a blanket and a face grayer than ash stared at them through slits of eyes. It was Varenka. She wore no scarf on her head, the scars visible in the semi-darkness, but she roused herself to a sitting position.

“Get out,” she hissed. “Leave me in peace.”

Valentina dropped the bundle of kindling she was carrying and hurried over to the bed, shaking out the thick folds of the woolen blanket she had brought. But Jens seized her arm and jerked her away from the bed.

“Don’t,” he said sharply. “I’ll light the fire and then we’ll leave.”

Valentina yanked her hand away. “No. Now I’m here I want to cook her some eggs and-”

“Go away.” The woman sank back down. There was no pillow. Just a bare soiled mattress and a patched blanket that stank of vomit and worse.

“I’m a nurse now,” Valentina pointed out. “I can help.”

She’d never lit a fire before. Never cooked eggs before. But she was determined to do so now. She calmly set about looking for a pan while Jens organized the fire. He was efficient in his movements, spreading kindling in the stove, using the paper bags that he’d carried the food in to catch the flame from his match. Instantly the fire’s glow cast more light into the room, and Valentina shuddered. The place was filthy, worse than filthy, with a metal bucket overflowing with excrement in one corner and yellow trails of dried vomit across the floor. She felt bile rise in her throat.

“Jens,” she murmured. “I expected that we would present her with the food, thank her again for her help with Katya, and leave. Debt canceled.” She looked around her. “But now this.”

His face hardened as he looked at the woman on the bed. “She’s sick, Valentina. You can smell how sick she is. If you stay here, you’re taking a risk. We don’t know what she’s got and you could catch-”

She put a finger to his lips. “Just a few minutes, Jens. We’ll be quick.”

“I know,” he said. “You won’t leave this sick stranger any more than you will leave your Katya. That’s who you are.”

He wrapped his arms around her as though the woman weren’t watching with envious eyes. He kissed Valentina’s forehead. It silenced the chattering of her teeth. “We’ll be quick,” she promised.

“You’re a nurse.” His smile, when it came, did something extraordinary to her insides. It made them hum, taut as piano strings.

THEY WORKED TOGETHER, SIDE BY SIDE WITH SCARVES looped around their noses and mouths, their hands safe inside their gloves. They took shallow breaths, gulping in air only when they ducked outside into the street. The night air tasted sweet by comparison, though in reality it was acrid with factory waste and God only knew what else.

The worst came at the start. Valentina approached the bed.

“Where is the baby?” she asked.

The woman seemed to convulse, her limbs twisted in pain. “Dead,” the woman said flatly.

“I’m so sorry.”

Valentina squinted into the gloom of the far side of the bed. Only then did she make out the three small bundles under the edge of the blanket, so thin and flat they looked no more than rumples in the material. She leaned closer. So there were the other children.

“Stay away,” the woman snapped.

Valentina took a quick look at the small bluish-gray faces and turned away. “I’ll find some water,” she said. “There must be a pump somewhere in the street.”

She snatched an earthenware bowl from a shelf and hurried outside. She only just made it. In the darkest corner she vomited up her day’s food, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and stood in the rain, her face turned up to the clean cold blast of it. The children in the bed were the ones who had accepted her coins with such eagerness. Now they lay there beside their mother, still and stiff. All dead. By the time she had found a water pump and was making her way back to the house, a stray dog was gobbling up her vomit.

THE DOOR SLAMMED OPEN, STARTLING VALENTINA AS SHE was boiling up another can of water on the stove. Even after boiling, the liquid still looked gray and brackish.

“Who the hell are you?” A man in an army greatcoat with the insignia cut off, dark at the shoulders from the rain, had kicked his way into the room.

Even without the swaying of his stocky figure, it was obvious he was drunk. He threw his cloth cap onto the floor, revealing a shaven head and skin that was mottled with brown speckles like birds’ eggs.

“What the hell are you doing in my house? Get away from my wife.”

Jens moved immediately. He took the skillet out of Valentina’s hand and swung her cape over her shoulders. “We’re just going.” He threw a hefty handful of rouble notes on the table. “Get your wife a doctor and your children a decent burial.”

“You.” The man was trying to focus on Valentina but had to blink hard. “Who are you? What’s a pretty thing like you doing in-”

“She’s leaving,” Jens said. His voice was as cold as the dog in the street.

“We came to help your wife,” Valentina said. “You should be here helping her yourself.”

“Shut up!” The man lunged for her.

She sidestepped him with ease. But before he could unscramble his feet, he was slammed against the wall with a crash that cracked the plaster and Jens’s forearm was jammed across his throat.

“Don’t push your luck,” Jens growled.

“Ivan,” the woman on the bed wailed. “Please, don’t hurt my husband.”

Jens released the man. “You are of no interest to me,” he said sourly. “Your wife once helped my friend here, and she wished to return the favor. That’s all.”

“You bloodsucking parasites.”

Jens shrugged and moved away, keeping himself between Valentina and Ivan. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, tossing another to the man, who caught it and pushed it between his lips.

“Do you work?” Jens asked.

“Yes. Da. I work fucking hard every bloody day.”

“Where?”

“In the Raspov foundry.”

“Foundry work is tough,” Jens commented.

“So am I.”

“Ivan,” the woman called. “They’ve helped. Look at the fire.”

For the first time the man’s bloodshot eyes shifted around the room, and his gaze took in the food package on the table and the new candle on the shelf. Finally it settled on the flames in the stove, and the sight of them seemed to sober him. He shuffled over to the candle flame and stuck his cigarette in it, drew on it with satisfaction, and held his callused palms out to the warmth of the fire.

“You’ve come from one of the meetings, haven’t you?” Jens gestured at the pamphlet sticking out of the man’s coat pocket.

“Da, I have. What’s it to you?”

“What are they saying now?”

“They’re saying we’ll soon be rid of the lot of you. Justice for the proletariat is so fucking close we can taste it. We stand shoulder to shoulder, comrades in arms. We are organized.”

“More strikes?”

“Da.”

“I hear the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks are at each other’s throats.”

“You hear wrong.”

Valentina sensed Jens being drawn in. He’d said, You are of no interest to me, but it wasn’t true; she could see it in his eyes.

“Jens?”

He nodded but didn’t shift his gaze from this Ivan, this man of committees and strikes whose wife lay sick. This man whose house she had just scrubbed, whose excrement bucket she had helped empty, whose children lay dead and unheeded on his bed while he drank himself stupid.

“Time to leave,” she said.

Still Jens didn’t move.

“It needn’t be like this, Ivan,” he said. “There are people working for change within the government, men like Garyatan and Kornov. The Committee of Industrial Development is meeting with factory owners, forcing changes that improve the conditions for the workers.”

“Lies.”

“No, it’s true.”

“They tell you lies. The factory owners pay off the bastards on your committees with fat bribes. Nothing is changing.” The man’s face sank into folds of despair. “Nothing. You are fools, people like you, if you believe this can be settled with talk.”

“The alternative, comrade, is rivers of blood on Nevsky.”

“So be it.”

Valentina strode over to the door and yanked it open.

“Who are you?” Ivan asked her. “A dainty little rich girl. I bet your father is someone important. Corrupt and worthless, but important.”

“How dare you?” She wanted to slap the loose smile from his face. “My father is Minister Ivanov, and he is an honest and upright man.”

Suddenly Jens took a grip on her shoulder and hurried her into the street. The freezing rain sank like ice picks into her cheek.

“Valentina,” he muttered as he marched her away from the house, “you should not have said that.”

“But it’s true. My father is an upright man.”

“You should not have said your name.”

ARKIN WATCHED THEM DISAPPEAR UP THE RAIN-SODDEN street, the engineer’s arm clasped around the girl’s waist, her head on his shoulder. As if they owned each other. He watched them until they were out of sight, and then he strolled across the road to the front door they had just left.

It didn’t take much. A quick nudge of his shoulder and it sprang open. No lights. A filter of night sky through the cracks of the door. So he stood for a moment, listening, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Why this hovel? What made her come here? What the hell was she doing? He wondered what her mother would say when her daughter came home laden with lice and fleas.

From the doorway of the house opposite he had watched the pair of them go in and out with buckets of stinking shit and of water; he had seen the girl lean over and vomit against the wall in the pouring rain. She had marched right back into the hall and turned to the door on her left. It opened at the touch of his knuckles, and he stepped inside.

“Get out!”

A big man with a shaven head was slumped at a table, glaring at him with bloodshot eyes. A woman lay on the bed, and her lifeless gaze sent a shudder through him.

“I’m here to talk to you, comrade,” he said to the man, “nothing more.”

It was the use of the word comrade that did it.

“Talk about what?” the man asked suspiciously.

“Your visitors.”

“Them!” Dirty fingers tore a chunk off the loaf of black bread and pushed it into his mouth. “What about them?”

“Why were they here?”

“Bringing bread and blankets to my wife. When what we really need is a decent wage so that we can buy our own bloody bread.” He sank his head on his arms on the table.

Arkin took a few paces nearer the bed. It smelled bad. “Did they say anything?” he asked the sick woman.

“Nyet.”

“They just brought you gifts?”

“Da.”

“Why?”

“She is my friend,” she whispered.

He almost laughed out loud. This woman and Valentina. But he recalled again how she’d stood in the rain. And then, still, she’d returned to this place. As if she cared.

“Who are you?” the woman croaked.

“I work for her father.”

“The minister?”

So she’d told them that much.

“She came once before,” the woman mumbled. “With her sister.”

Now he understood. This must be where Popkov tracked them to the day of the march on Morskaya, and Valentina had not forgotten the kindness.

“Where does your husband work?” he enquired.

“Raspov.”

The foundry on the edge of the city. Immediately he went back to the table, lit a cigarette for himself and one for the husband, then prodded him awake.

“Here.” He offered the smoke.

The man took it with ill grace and sat up bleary-eyed. “You still here?”

“You work at the Raspov foundry.”

“So what?”

“You have many apprentices there.”

“What of it?”

Abruptly the woman started to retch, and Arkin rose quickly to put a zinc bowl in front of her. He reached over to pull up the blanket but jumped back in shock. Three faces, tiny and gray as stone.

“Leave them.” Her voice was a faint whisper.

Sorrow for her lay like lead in his chest. “I know a priest,” he said softly. “May I bring him here?”

Her wretched eyes clung to his as she nodded. He headed quickly for the door, stopping only to shake the man by the shoulder. “Sleep it off, comrade. I will be back and I shall want to talk to you about your Raspov apprentices.”

The man looked bemused. “Why?”

“Because I have a job for them.”