Midnight in St. Petersburg Read Online Free PDF

gone already if, earlier on, Madame Leman hadn’t taken it into her head to bring out all the coats and hats and boots from storage, ready for winter. She’d dumped them in armfuls in the lobby, but then got distracted, as usual, and gone off leaving the job half done. So it was pandemonium in the windowless little room, and he’d been pushing through piles of furs, looking for his jacket in a cloud of mothball smell, and feeling exasperated for what felt like hours.
    Before opening the door, though, he’d taken the precaution of shoving a couple of children’s moulting rabbit hats on top of the box of leaflets he’d been planning to take round to Kremer’s. You never knew. Better safe than sorry.
    But when he looked out into the gloom of the landing – as stern as he could in case it was the police who’d come calling – what he saw, in the yellow stripe of light from inside the flat, wasn’t a fat man in a uniform at all, but a girl.
    An unnervingly attractive girl, too: very tall, slim, with lovely ankles visible below her threadbare coat and shining black hair escaping from under her hat. A girl half stepping forward to look at him (his face must be in shadow, he realized), with a face too pale for classical beauty and huge green eyes.
    He stood up straighter. He’d never seen her before. He’d remember if he had. She wasn’t the kind of girl you’d forget.
    Yet, uncertain though her expression was, she seemed to know his name.
    â€˜Yasha, I’m Inna,’ she was saying.
    Her name meant nothing to him. And he could hear Kremer’s uncle’s voice in his head, saying, ‘A good revolutionary keeps his trap shut,’ and, ‘Never trust a stranger.’ So he looked watchfully back at her, waiting.
    She hesitated before plunging on in her attractively low voice, ‘I’ve been living at your parents’ flat.’ He was shocked to hear her use the informal, family way of saying ‘you’ and ‘your’. ‘Since my Aunt Lyuba died … I’m a kind of cousin of your father’s…’
    He noticed a beseeching look in her green eyes.
    Of course. Mama had mentioned the cousin’s turning up, in one of her very long and inconsequential letters, which were all full of gossip about people he’d left behind, and general aimless fretting about the bourgeois kinds of things his parents did fret about. It had been one of the few pieces of news he’d taken in, because he’d remembered hearing stories about the Feldmans as a boy. ‘So you’re Inna Feldman?’ he said.
    She nodded, still looking expectant.
    Yasha remembered old Kremer’s warnings about women. ‘Always be on your guard,’ he’d been fond of saying, in that wise, smoke-choked voice of his, ‘especially with women. You never know what they want – but you always know they’ll want something. Anyway, there’s only ever room in a man’s heart for one love, lads. Let it be the revolution, and not some rouged-up hussy.’
    â€˜You’re their lodger in Kiev,’ he said brutally, noticing the way she flinched as he said this. ‘But what are you doing here ? In St. Petersburg?’
    He’d made a point of replying using the formal ‘you’ – vy – as if she were a stranger. Respected, but not his family, not his nearest and dearest. For the first time since he’d seen her and been thrown into this state of near-paralysis, he was taking control. He could think again.
    He watched her register that, then decide not to take offence, just answer.
    â€˜Well, because they’ve left,’ she replied quickly, too eagerly, with the beginning of an anxious smile that both twisted his heart and angered him at the same time, ‘and I’ve brought…’
    â€˜Left?’
    If there was one thing Yasha knew about his parents it was that they never went