Midnight in St. Petersburg Read Online Free PDF Page B

anywhere. The concert hall, the shops, the theatre, neighbours’ apartments, and a week at the coast in the summer, taking the Crimean air: those were the predictable parameters of their universe.
    â€˜Are they here?’ he asked, in what felt like a gasp. Turning; half expecting to see them coming up the grimy stairs any minute. ‘With you?’
    â€˜No,’ she said. ‘They went to Odessa. Where the boat goes from, to the Holy Land. For the Tuesday passage.’
    â€˜But they can’t have,’ Yasha heard himself objecting. ‘They didn’t tell me. They didn’t write. They always write.’
    He had piles of letters, most of them barely read, in a drawer in his room.
    â€˜They did,’ she said. How calm she sounded. ‘I’ve brought you the letter.’
    He went on staring at her as his world turned upside down: as he stopped being the bold young man venturing far from his claustrophobic home to have adventures and change the world and sneer with his mates at his parents, who were pottering around safely back home, doing their best to forget they had a drop of Jewish blood in their veins; as he became … well, whatever you did become when your family suddenly just vanished into thin air.
    After a long silence, he said, almost to himself, ‘But why?’
    â€˜They were scared there would be a pogrom. We all were.’
    Her voice was controlled, but he could hear the wobble in it.
    â€˜But there’s not going to be a pogrom,’ Yasha said. He felt confident of this. All his comrades in the Bund had discussed this question, at length, and had decided that the appointment of Kokovtsev as the new Prime Minister – not a bloodthirsty man – meant the authorities had no interest, this time, in egging on the more uncouth elements of society to shed Jewish blood.
    â€˜Nothing’s happened so far, and nothing is going to happen in future, either,’ Yasha added, aware that he was sounding too angry. ‘Everyone knows that. They should just have stayed put.’
    Her eyes flashed with indignation. How green they were.
    â€˜Well, it was completely natural to be frightened!’ she burst out. ‘Anyone would have been, with the way things got … the streets full of those thugs, the things those leaflets were saying. You would have been scared, too, if you’d been there. And what does it matter if it hasn’t happened yet? It still might. Any day. Why do you think so many people have been trying to leave?’ He noticed that she’d gone on calling him the familiar ‘you’, ty , as if insisting on their closeness.
    â€˜Palestine is for cowards,’ he said flatly. ‘Better to fight than run away.’ It was what his comrades told each other at their political meetings. Yet here, before this girl who actually knew his parents, it didn’t sound so convincing. He tried not to think of his father’s shortness of stature; of his bent back and timorous, scholarly ways; of his thin cracked voice; of his multiple minor medical problems and silver-topped cane. Because if he did, he’d know how absurd it was to imagine the old man going out and facing street gangs of hoodlums.
    He didn’t want to see mockery in her green eyes. He looked down.
    â€˜Did you say you’d brought a letter?’ he asked after another pause, still saying ‘ vy ’. He’d take it, she’d go away, and he’d have a chance to find out where Mama and Papa were heading, at least. Think it through on his own.
    He could feel, hear, that she was nodding. ‘Well, where is it?’ he said. He met her eye at last, but only to look expectant as he put out his hand. ‘Their letter?’
    â€˜At the bottom of my bag,’ she said shortly, looking away in her turn. He could see, now, that she was less mocking than he’d expected, and also angrier. Her lips were tight. There were white