Strange Are the Ways

by Strange Are the Ways (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  The station, even at this hour of the morning, was teeming with activity. Rich and poor, master and servant, townsman, soldier and peasant swarmed upon the freezing, slush-covered platforms and into the lofty halls. The Shalakov women and the two servants found themselves a draughty but relatively quiet corner and stood surrounded by their belongings waiting as Victor, with Dmitri in tow, made the arrangements that would take them to their final destination in a street called Venskaya not far from the new shop on the Nevsky. Seraphima and Nanny Irisha, scarved and shawled, huddled stoically together, eyes downcast, saying little. That St Petersburg was a den of thieves, rapists and hooligans every good Muscovite knew; they waited with the fatalistic resignation of their race and class for the worst to happen. Anna and Yelena, both a head and shoulders taller than their tiny mother, took station one each side of her to protect her from the jostling of the crowds, Anna keeping firm grip of her violin case.

  ‘Here comes Papa. See, he’s waving – he must have managed to hire a sledge –’

  In fact he had hired two, and it was in comfort that they drove to their new home, Victor, Varya and the two younger children in the leading sledge and Anna, Yelena and the two servants in the one that followed. Wrapped in rugs, collars turned up and fur hats firmly pulled down around their ears, Anna’s arms wrapped protectively about her precious violin case, they strained their eyes into the darkness of the morning to see the city that was to be their new home. With the clean smell of fresh snow in their nostrils they bowled along the wide streets and boulevards to the sound of the bells on the horses’ harnesses and the singing of the runners upon the packed snow. Braziers burned here and there on a corner, the ruddy glow of the charcoal warm and cheerful-looking in the morning darkness. The street lights gleamed upon large, well-proportioned, pastel-coloured mansions, upon slender spires, upon the graceful arch of a bridge across a frozen canal. Anna, tired as she was after an uncomfortable and broken night’s sleep, was, despite herself, enthralled. Yelena, wide-eyed beside her, was struck equally to silence. Tall trees, leafless and still, etched in white, stood guard upon streets and squares of spacious and graceful elegance. Even in the darkness the city’s special beauty was evident. A small troop of Cossack Cavalry rode past, harnesses jingling, the coats of their compact, muscular little horses gleaming, their officer, straight-backed and elegantly cloaked, looking like an equestrian statue come to life. Anna saw Margarita in the sledge in front turn in her seat and watch him with unabashed curiosity and interest. They skirted the huge square in front of the Winter Palace that even at this hour was ablaze with light. They followed the river a little way, past the Admiralty building with its slender golden spire, before crossing the Neva and moving into a quiet, respectable residential area of small houses and apartment blocks. Here there were more people to be seen; men and women, huddled against the cold, hurrying through the dark early morning to their places of work.

  As they swung around a corner the leading sledge-driver called, the horses’ pace slowed and stopped. An apartment house loomed above them. Victor stepped onto the pavement, and with some small ceremony handed his wife from the sledge. Anna tucked the violin case under her arm and she and her sister scrambled from the warm nest of their own sledge onto the icy road, Seraphima and Nanny Irisha grumbling down behind them. They found themselves before a large and gloomy doorway, dim-lit, beyond which a flight of wide, shallow steps led upwards into shadowed darkness. Bags and packages, the hand luggage they had carried with them on the train, were deposited upon the frozen road, the drivers swung back up onto their high seats and with musical, resonant calls urged the horses back into motion. Bells a-jingle, the two sledges swished away, leaving behind them a sudden quiet that held an edge of apprehension.

  Victor craned his neck, looking up. He cleared his throat portentously. ‘Well, this must be it. Andrei assured me in his last letter that the apartment that had fallen vacant above his was a roomy one, and could be made to –’ He stopped. A figure had appeared on the shadowed stairs: a slight, lightly-moving silhouette that hesitated only for a moment before leaping down the last few steps and flinging long arms about the surprised Victor, saluting him upon each cheek with a kiss. ‘Victor! Brother! You’ve come! Welcome!’ The man stepped back. Anna saw the flash of surprise on her father’s face and knew it must have been mirrored in her own and in the others’ who watched. Her uncle – for surely this must be Andrei Shalakov? – turned, smiling warmly from one to the other. In the light of the single lamp above the door his hair, which Anna remembered as being thick and black as his brother’s, shone, a shock of silver-white, bright as the snow. ‘Come now, all of you, out of the cold. The stove’s alight and the samovar’s waiting. Come.’ He scooped up the largest of the two bags and led the way up the stairs. A little wearily the small band followed, trudging up a long flight of stairs to the first floor, where a pair of battered double doors stood ajar.

  ‘Wait.’ Andrei set down the bags he was carrying and slipped through the doors. Beyond them the glow of a lamp beckoned and welcome warmth crept out onto the cold landing.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Margarita hissed in a whisper that could have been heard in Moscow. ‘Why are we waiting?’

  ‘Patience, child.’ It was Nanny Irisha, who had, Anna suddenly remembered, been Andrei’s nurse when he was a boy, as well as her father’s. ‘Patience.’

  ‘Come in, all of you – come in!’

  They filed through the door into a small hallway that led in turn to a large parlour, furnished simply; heavy armchairs and a sofa at one end, a round table upon which stood a simmering samovar at the other. By the table stood Andrei, his face, young-looking beneath its thatch of prematurely silvered hair, alight with warmth and welcome. He held a small icon of the Virgin and Child. On the table beside him was a tray upon which stood the traditional symbols of welcome: a loaf of black bread topped by a cellar of salt. Andrei raised the icon. With one movement the new arrivals went down on their knees as with it he made the sign of the cross above their bent heads. Then carefully he laid aside the icon and reached for the bread and salt, balancing it carefully as he again made the sign. It was as he turned to put them back upon the tray that the salt toppled. He made a swift grab for it and for the first time Anna saw clearly the maimed hand, which he was so skilled at hiding, looking claw-like in the half-darkness. She averted her eyes. The salt cellar flew through the air and clattered to the floor, spilling the salt as it rolled, stopping at the toe of Anna’s boot. There was a small silence. Few things to the superstitious races of the Russias could be more badly omened than to spill the salt of welcome. Swiftly, filled with a sudden rush of sympathy for her uncle, Anna bent to pick it up. Nanny Irisha it was who took it from her, scolding gently, breaking that strange tense silence. ‘Awkward is as awkward does! Always clumsy, the boy, always clumsy! Couldn’t walk upstairs without falling over his own feet. It’s a miracle he’s survived to his thirty-fourth year, that it is! But there, but there – strange are the ways of God, they say, strange indeed are his ways!’ She crossed herself once, twice, and then again; hobbled to the table to stand the salt cellar carefully back beside the bread.

  They all began to speak at once~;~ kisses were exchanged, coats, hats, boots and shawls discarded, exclamations made about the apartment – its size, its convenience, how very well the things that would be arriving from the station later would become it. Tea was passed around, and small sweet cakes. The stove in the corner of the room fairly glowed with warmth. The icon was set high in the corner where a small lamp burned beneath it. Tea glass in hand, Anna wandered to the window and drew the heavy curtain a little aside. It was growing light. She could see a spire in the distance glinting in the late-rising dawn. The street outside was busy; a tram clanked past the end of the road.

  ‘Annoushka. I hope you’ll be happy here.’

  She turned. Her uncle stood beside her, smiling. He was of middle height, his head only just topping he
rs and, as she had remembered, slight. His face was both like her father’s and yet, fascinatingly, unlike. The bones were lighter, the eyes a mild blue, yet something in the structure of the face, the slant of cheekbone and eye, that Dmitri too had inherited, stamped a family likeness that could not be denied. Andrei was fourteen years younger than his brother, these two the only survivors of eight children, six of whom had died at birth, and Anna had seen him only once since the day ten years before when he and his new young bride had left Moscow for St Petersburg. Anna had been eight years old then, and dazzled by the glitter and solemnity of the wedding service, the delicate beauty of the doll-like little bride. She had all but hero-worshipped her young uncle in those days; always he had had a kindly word, an ear to listen to childish woes. She had loved to watch him work, the deft, quick hands making wood and ivory and strong horse hair into a delicate, all but living thing that could draw music from the dullest of instruments. Andrei Shalakov’s bows had been famous even then. Disconcertingly, now, she found it hard to reconcile her memories of a tall, dark, quiet-voiced uncle with this man whose height barely outreached her own and whose changed appearance – the shock of silver-white hair, the deep-etched lines about a mouth that she remembered always smiling – took her aback each time she turned her eyes to him.

  He saw it. He flicked his head a little, genuine laughter in his eyes. ‘A bit of a shock?’

  She nodded.

  He shrugged. Smiled a very little. ‘Hard times, Anna. Hard times. But over now.’

  She nodded.

  His smile was warm. ‘I hear great things of you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  His eyes moved to where the battered violin case lay upon the table. ‘The scholarship.’

  There was a small, sharp silence. ‘Oh,’ Anna said again, the inflection entirely different.

  He moved, laid a light hand on her arm. ‘Don’t, ’Noushka. Don’t ever despair. You never know —’ He stopped, a flicker of pain clear and sharp in his eyes.

  She had flinched. She could have chopped off her own arm for its small, involuntary recoil, but it was too late. He had seen it. Felt it. He snatched the maimed hand away, still smiling. ‘You never know what might come of such things. You did it. That’s what counts. You beat them all. You must be good, more than good, to have done that. Hold on to that. Who knows what may happen?’

  Cheeks bright with mortification, in the face of his composure she could behave no less well, for his sake. ‘Strange are the ways of God, as Nanny Irisha so often tells us.’ Her voice was very strained.

  He nodded, and the smile was gone. ‘Yes.’ He watched her for a long, quiet moment. ‘Strange indeed.’

  ‘Uncle!’ Margarita had appeared by their side. Her small, bright face, pretty and appealing as a kitten’s, turned to Andrei. ‘Mama says that you are to tell us about Petersburg – we are all quite lost. How far are we from the river? And the Nevsky? And have you seen Cousin Katya and her family?’ She towed him away, laughing, to the centre of the room. Anna turned back to the window, cheeks still burning.

  Outside full daylight was lifting, and it had started to snow again.

  Chapter Two

  In crisp and sunny weather that made the buildings of St Petersburg glitter like so many prettily iced cakes, Victor Valerievich Shalakov strode through the streets of the city, collar turned against the wind, and contemplated the coming meeting with his brother-in-law Bourlov. He disliked intensely the thought of borrowing money from the man that Varya’s sister had so shrewdly married, but the offer was there, and extra finance was essential if the new shop was to be brought to the standards demanded by the wealthy patrons he was determined to attract. He had worked his fingers to the bone over the years preparing for this day; the day when, his miser of a father dead at last, as senior partner he would have control of the business and make it his. Not that he felt any particular excitement or pleasure; Victor was a man to whom by nature disappointment came more easily than contentment. It was characteristic of him that surrounded by the beauty and brilliance of this lovely afternoon he should feel nothing but the bite of the wind. A successful businessman, always he saw only the greater successes of others. A respected family man, yet it could not be denied that privately he felt himself cheated by the Almighty in his brood of girls and his one weakly boy. Blessed with a shrewd brain and a pugnacious obstinacy that had stood him in good stead in his dogged fight to turn what had been a small and reputable family business into an expanding and profitable modern concern, yet always it had seemed to him that his brother’s more artistic skills and talents had been greater appreciated and better thought of by the family and by the world. Since childhood he had been aware, with a practical lack of self pity, that no-one really liked him – a fact that accorded him no particular suffering, since in Victor’s eyes to pursue the easy and worthless admiration of others was the surest sign of a weakness of character bordering on the insane. In consequence, however, any kindly interest, any unsolicited warmth had always been treated with the deepest of suspicion, and neither in childhood nor in adulthood could Victor Valerievich ever have been said to have had a true friend; the significance of this circumstance lying largely in the fact that he himself cared nothing for it, indeed might count it as reason for positive self-congratulation. Victor Valerievich could never be termed a self-indulgent man.

  In no area of his life were these facets of his character more apparent than in his relationships with his family; a fact, perhaps, not so very surprising and made even less so since his marriage to Varya Petrovna was rooted in his one rash break with calm and self-centred common sense. Aged thirty, the sober and straight-laced Victor had made the fatal and irrational mistake of falling in love.

  It had been Varya’s sister Zhenia, now married to Bourlov, who had first caught his eye. At seventeen, thirteen years younger than Victor, she had been attractive, clever, practical and, with the family fallen into straitened circumstances since the death of a much-loved but irresponsible father, looking for a husband with ambition that matched her own. Victor might well have been that man, had his eye not lighted upon her younger sister. Tiny, helpless, kittenishly beautiful, Varya was the kind of woman that Victor had always abhorred. Spoiled and petted, brought up in surroundings that had always been beyond the family means, she had neither the stamina nor the wit of her sister; yet from the moment he saw her mass of golden hair, her wide, forget-me-not eyes, fell victim to the flirtatiousness that was and always would be second nature to her, Victor had been obsessed by her. And against all odds and despite all effort, was still, twenty years later. The marriage had been, at least outwardly and by the world’s lights, a surprising success; she, child-like, dependent, still pampered, producing the healthy children that any good wife should, he the stern and reliable paterfamilias, a good provider, a strong protector. Only Victor knew the reality of his relationship with his wife; even Varya herself did not suspect the depths of his feelings, nor despite past troubles did she realize the agonies of possessive jealousy that still afflicted him when another man’s eyes lit, casually appreciative, upon his vain, often silly but still beautiful wife.

  There had indeed been a time, after Anna was born, when his suspicions of Varya might well have driven him to murder.

  A young captain of hussars, handsome and highly-strung, son of a family friend and newly back from service in the south, had taken to haunting the apartment where they lived with Victor’s father, ostensibly visiting his good friend Victor and his family, in fact all too obviously enslaved by Victor’s lovely young wife. Varya, bored with life and perilously flattered, had done nothing to discourage him. On the contrary it had soothed and cheered her after the fearful and depressing shock of childbirth that this young man should press his attentions so sweetly and assiduously. Varya had married Victor, as she had done so many other things, because that had been what the world had apparently expected her to do; she had needed someone to look after her, Victor had been there ready and willing
to do so. Both her mother and her sister – who by that time had been in determined pursuit of much bigger game – had each for her own reasons seen the match as desirable. Varya, as always, had taken the line of least resistance. At seventeen, for, in her own eyes, the very good reason that she had needed a relief from the uncertainties of sudden and appalling near-poverty, a home of her own, and something more than the company of women, she had married a man of thirty who scolded and bullied her as he might a pretty, half-witted child. Her feelings for Victor, or the lack of them, had not really entered into the matter at all. A year or so later, the mould of her life cast, the attentions of her handsome captain had been something else again; he had been a dream, a fantasy, a fairy-tale prince, a shimmering curtain of love, attention and above all uncritical admiration that hung between her and the true realities of her life. The joys of the marriage bed had passed Varya by completely. Quite simply and predictably, she had hated it; and married to someone who accepted that as normal and even becoming behaviour for a modest young female, the fumbling couplings with which she had paid for her home and her security had never become anything more than that: a furtive, incomprehensible and humiliating exercise to be endured in darkness and banished from the mind at all other times. The thought of indulging in such disgusting behaviour with her young admirer would no more have occurred to her than she might have thought of sprouting wings and flying. Had Victor been a more sensitive soul he might have seen and understood that, but he was not. He had become obsessed with the thought that his wife was betraying him; which indeed she was but in a manner too subtle for either of them to grasp.

  The ensuing fracas he preferred not to remember, though it did occasionally surface in the most disturbing of his dreams.

  By a chance that had proved unfortunate for them all the young captain had turned up at the apartment when Varya was alone; an almost unique circumstance in itself. Victor had discovered them, together in the lace-draped boudoir of which Varya was so enormously proud, reading poetry. The strong and stocky Victor, righteous rage upon his side, had hauled his shocked rival by the collar and the seat of his fashionably-cut trousers out of the door and hurled him down a steep flight of stone stairs that might well have broken a back or a neck. Fortunately the young man’s bones remained whole; a fact that did not at the time please Victor, but for which later, prudently, he thanked whichever gods had been presiding over his unnatural loss of control. Death or crippling would have brought scandal, and what might that have done for the respectable name of Shalakov? He had then taken primitive revenge upon his wife – the only time in a lifetime of marriage they were ever to couple in daylight – and the result, unfortunately for the child, had been their second daughter Yelena. That Yelena, of all of them, was in character the most like her father, that physically she resembled no-one, least of all the dashing young captain of the strikingly handsome looks, counted for nothing with Victor. His clever eldest daughter Anna was his pride, though he would have denied that indignantly if taxed. Dmitri was his boy, weakly perhaps and a disappointment in many ways, but nevertheless the one who would carry the Shalakov name into the next generation. Margarita, the pretty, frivolous image of her mother, held a special if sometimes grudging place in his heart. The very sight of Yelena enraged him. From the moment she was born, mute and helpless reminder of an act of anger and violence of which, had he been able to bring himself to honesty he would have admitted he was deeply ashamed, he had detested her. In his worst moments, despite all evidence to the contrary, he could convince himself that she was indeed the fruit of adultery, a cuckoo in his orderly nest, a stranger to his blood. That Yelena had grown up sullen and awkward was not surprising. Bewildered, resentful, a nature already darkened by melancholy and self-doubt had become very difficult indeed. Even her physical appearance angered her father; like her sister Anna she had grown almost as tall as her father but, unlike Anna who to her own private mortification was still skinny as a boy, Yelena’s body had ripened to a sensual womanhood completely at odds with her pale, childish face and lank brown hair. Poor Lenka – even in this she was wrong; her breasts were full and heavy, her waist slender, her hips wide and seductively curved. Victor saw the look in men’s eyes as this awkward daughter of his passed and, against justice, detested her the more for it.