Margarita rather doubted it, as her father had never been one to discuss his feelings. She felt that Sasha was just saying it to comfort her. His eau de cologne was overpowering and, combined with the cigar smoke, made her feel a little nauseous. She remembered her mother complaining that he was never without a cigar in his hand. Ella had disapproved of his habit of dying his hair as well – sometimes a light blonde, other times a dark henna, almost black. There was something very feminine about him, and the general verdict back in Petrograd was that he was rather odd, the type of man who laughs at a funeral and cries at a wedding.

  ‘Thank you for your letter of condolence,’ she said, searching for something to say.

  ‘Ah, you received it? I’m glad. My apologies for not coming to your mother’s funeral. But I had other things to attend to at the time. At least she is at peace now, removed from this miserable existence.’ He suddenly looked stricken. Sasha Belelyubskii was a bachelor, and thought the world of his own mother. He adored her in fact, would have gladly died for her, and talked about her constantly. Unfortunately, (the reason never became clear to Margarita) he had left her behind in Russia when he fled for Berlin in 1920. This was still an enormous source of anguish.

  Once he had calmed himself, they shook hands and made their farewells outside the café. Margarita watched him disappear from sight, striding down the street quickly and purposefully, like some fervent Christian eager to exit this world for the one beyond.

  6.

  Bruno and Larissa returned from their honeymoon brown as nuts and full of love. It took very little time for the sisters to fetch Margarita’s few belongings from her apartment and install them in her new bedroom on the top floor of the newlyweds’ handsome house on Ackerstrasse. It was very conveniently situated, and Bruno and Larissa could walk to the Charité hospital across the park. Larissa had kept her nursing job for now, though Bruno was pressing her to take on fewer shifts so that she would have plenty of time to look after their new home.

  After the cramped and dismal apartment, living in such a comfortable and spacious house was a delight. Margarita would have been perfectly happy to stay in every night, but she was aware that the newlyweds might value some time alone, so she made an effort to go out whenever she was asked. Which is why she found herself getting ready rather reluctantly for an evening of poetry readings at Café Leon on Nollendorfplatz. In the old days, Larissa would have been the first to put on her coat and go with her sister, but her husband didn’t think much of such evenings. Bruno had no time for poetry, although there wasn’t a sport he didn’t love watching or participating in – cycling, boxing, wrestling, sailing, fishing, and even women’s wrestling on occasion. But Margarita had observed that Bruno was generally reluctant to let his wife go out in the evening without him, even with her sister. He also didn’t like the fact that they spoke to each other in their mother-tongue.

  ‘Are you talking about me behind my back again?’ he would, ask, half teasing but half serious.

  ‘We’d never do such a thing, darling,’ Larissa would answer, kissing him fondly.

  ‘German is the language of this household.’

  ‘But we’ve always spoken Russian to each other, from the cradle,’ objected Margarita, ‘I don’t see a reason for changing.’

  ‘Not even out of respect for someone who doesn’t understand a word of the language?’

  ‘It would show a little respect to the two of us if you bothered to learn a little of our language. I’d be more than happy to teach you Russian.’

  ‘Thank you Margarita, but that seems rather pointless when you and your sister speak German so fluently.’

  The elder sister said no more, for the sake of the younger. Later, Larissa came to her room and said, ‘I know it’s a lot to ask, but would you mind not…? When Bruno is about? Could we try not to speak Russian together?’

  Margarita put the brush down and, sighing softly, turned to face her sister, ‘If that’s what you want…’

  ‘I just hate to make Bruno feel uncomfortable… especially under his own roof…’

  The poetry evening was held in the upstairs room at Café Leon. As Margarita reached the top of the stairs the first person to greet her was the old poet Podtyagin. He was a little confused and thought her mother was still alive until she gently corrected him. But a puzzled look entered his dull eyes, and he complained that there was always something new in the world, and it would be such a comfort if things could only stay as they were.

  These poetry evenings were nothing more than an attempt to recreate a little corner of Moscow before the revolution. In the room, the same old voices surrounded her, as the same old homesick, peevish crowd had come together to reminisce and squabble as always. For some reason, every émigré seemed to despise most of his fellow émigrés. Why did people in exile become so thin-skinned and petulant?

  In an interval, Gospodin Gregoryevich beckoned to her, indicating a spare place next to him on the banquette. Reluctantly, she went to join him.

  ‘How are the young couple?’ he inquired.

  ‘Very well, thank you for asking.’

  ‘And how are you, Margarita Kozmyevna?’ he scrutinised her, ‘Still looking for work?’

  She had no intention of telling Gospodin Gregoryevich about her life modelling.

  ‘Why don’t we arrange a little evening together?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t that be lovely? The four of us? Bruno, Larissa, you and me. How about it? We could play cards like we used to do when you girls were my neighbours. What do you think?’

  The next poet was about to begin, so Margarita was spared from giving an answer. In the next lull, Gospodin Gregoryevich started talking about her mother. ‘At Weinstock’s. That was when I first saw her.’ He sipped his beer. ‘I hadn’t been working there long. It was only a temporary post, though I was hoping it might lead to something more permanent. I was in my element working in a bookshop. Just the smell of all those volumes… there’s not a more delicious smell in all the world. Your mother would come in to browse and I’d make an occasional suggestion. Things I thought would interest her.’ He sipped his beer and pondered. ‘A very private woman. That’s the impression I had of her.’

  ‘Shy, certainly,’ Margarita murmured.

  ‘Yes, a little, now that you’ve said.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A shame she passed away here in Berlin.’

  ‘To be buried so far from her own country was her greatest fear.’

  ‘A great shame.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  He was sitting far too close to her, and every time Margarita shifted away he simply sidled back up to her, filling her nostrils with that familiar smell of old cigarette cards that he always seemed to carry with him. Clearing his throat as he always did when he was nervous, Gospodin Gregoryevich leaned towards her, gazed into her eyes and said intensely, ‘Who among us can achieve the best life without suffering some pain?’

  There was a pleading look on his long face as he waited for her answer, but as the silence grew he became overcome with embarrassment. Blushing deeply, his whole body seemed to convey his awkwardness, and although he started to apologise for speaking out of turn, and for daring to… he trailed off, looking like a man who had fallen in his own estimation.

  For a while after his confidence, the two of them sat looking at the rest of the room in complete silence. Margarita turned to wondering idly why it was that death so often stalked her dreams, so that she would wake half suffocating, as though it had grabbed her by the throat. From when she was a little girl, she had lived with the fear that accompanied the first realisation that she would one day die, that everything that she was would come to an end. But what was she going to do until then? How was she going to fill the days and the weeks, the months and the years?

  Gospodin Gregoryevich eventually managed to start another conversation, telling her that occasions such as this brought to mind evenings in the Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo, on Stoleshnikov Street in Moscow, the café where all the journalists used to gather. How they’d drink and debate there all night long, in a thick miasma of tobacco smoke, until the place reeked like burnt wool. He proceeded to list all those who had frequented the place with him: Andrei Bely, Ivan Shmelev, Konstantin Balmont, and of course Ignaity Potapenko, the best short-story writer in the world. All of them now exiled the length and breadth of Europe.

  ‘We’d drink coffee from those great big enamel mugs. It didn’t matter how much sugar you spooned in, that coffee always tasted bitter. What was the name of the one who used to dye his beard?’

  By now Margarita was thoroughly bored.

  ‘He really was a sharp-tongued, malicious little man. Do you know the one I mean?’

  ‘I’m afraid I never lived in Moscow…’

  ‘He’d practically hiss as he spoke.’ Tapping his fist on his knee, with his eyes tightly shut, Gospodin Gregoryevich sighed. ‘I can’t for the life of me remember his name. My mind is like a sieve! But malice was his middle name, that’s for sure. What was he called? I wish I could remember… perhaps it will come back to me.’

  The greatest attraction at Café Leon that evening, and the last to perform, was Igor Serveryanin. As he began to recite his poems, a few threw the traditional red rose at his feet in tribute. At one time Igor had been achingly fashionable, in the vanguard of Russian modern poetry, and he had clung to the same stylistic tics ever since, which to Margarita’s ear were, by now, a little stale. The language existed as sound but without much sense. His philosophy was that so many secrets hid within each and every word – even the simplest –but familiarity made people cloth-eared, and only by reminting a word within an oddly new context was there a hope of rediscovering its true depths once again.

  It was a bravura performance, as Igor did his utmost to turn the familiar into the unfamiliar. There were powerful verses of trains rushing to the front, flashing through Russian stations where platform after platform of women wailed, and gangs of soldiers sang, the sound of mourning in every note of their accordions. The younger members of the audience seemed to love his verbal experiments, but for Margarita, there was more substance in the longing of his early, more traditional poems, those he had written to his sweetheart. To the communists of course, he was nothing but a dilettante poet, a self-obsessed bourgeois scribbler, out of tune with the new rhythm of the Soviet Republic, which demanded a very different type of poetry. But Igor was nothing if not stubborn, insisting that only the true visionary could distil life into art.

  When he finished there was thunderous applause, foot-stamping, and whistling, culminating in loud bravos. Margarita closed her eyes as empty talk surrounded her once more. Gospodin Gregoryevich was so dull. They were all so very dull. She listened to somebody calling the communists thieves and hooligans, recounting how they used to dress up like soldiers in order to encourage the real soldiers to desert, while their mother country was at war in the summer of 1917.

  ‘That’s where the heartbreak started, you’re quite right…’ someone moaned.

  ‘And those Petrograd thugs,’ a hoarse voice weighed in, ‘those pigs from Kronstadt lording it over us in the streets, interrogating us all, asking us who we were and what class we came from. The downright cheek of it. What right did those sailors ever have to demand that kind of information?’

  A reedy voice piped up. ‘I remember my dear brother coming home on leave one Christmas, and hanging his sword on the door hook as he always did. When it got dark, we could only light the one lamp in the kitchen, and the family would all sit around the table in the half-light to talk once we’d cleared the food away. But over in the corner, that golden hilt of my brother’s sword shone like the star above the stable in Bethlehem, a symbol of hope to me that Russia was not going to be overrun by Jews and communists.’

  I remember, I remember…

  The same old story.

  The same old song going round and round.

  Margarita couldn’t stomach any more remembering, and thought if she stayed she really might scream. Murmuring her apologies, she hurried down the stairs, walked quickly through the café, grabbed her coat, and stepped out into the night.

  In bed that night, the realisation came to her that she had changed. She had left the people at Café Leon behind her, and she didn’t have the slightest wish to ever spend another moment in their company. She no longer felt herself to be a part of their world. Her horizons were wider now. She was determined to create a new life for herself.

  7.

  The bar had enormous mirrors along the walls which made her feel that she could step through to an eternity of other bars. There were various potted plants about the place and one palm tree. It was already quite full, and the tobacco smoke tickled her throat, as practically everybody was smoking.

  ‘Norbert Schmidt is here already,’ Larissa told her, pulling her sister after her into the room. ‘Look…’

  She looked over to where Larissa was pointing and saw Norbert sitting next to Bruno, dressed in a smart, light-blue suit, white tie and grey leather shoes, his fair hair neatly brushed.

  ‘What have you said to him?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing. I just noticed how well the two of you seemed to get on at our wedding, so I thought it would be nice if you met again.’

  ‘We had one dance together. That’s all.’

  ‘You can have another dance with him tonight then. I’m sure he’ll be delighted.’

  ‘Oh, Lala! No. Seriously, what have you said to him about me?’

  ‘Hush, behave…’

  As they joined the group, Bruno was in the middle of a spirited account of a new surgical procedure – an abdominoperineal resection – and was explaining rather graphically how the first surgeon attacked the tumour from the abdomen while the second surgeon cut from below, through the perineum. Margarita grew paler and paler and when Larissa squeezed her fingers, they were like icicles.

  ‘Are you alright?’ she asked. ‘Gretushka?’

  Margarita swallowed the bile that had risen to her throat and slowly the urge to vomit receded. Bruno laughingly apologised when his wife gently berated him, but he found it difficult not to talk shop. He looked handsome in his well-cut suit, though he always dressed a little older than his age and there was something rather stately and ceremonious about the way he conducted himself publicly, as though he was very aware of his own standing and worth. But he had a small mouth, a boyish one with soft lips, which gave Margarita the impression that he was a weak man.

  Within no time, the doctors were discussing a gastroenterostomy and the best ways to avoid bruising of the stomach. Their voices swelled as the evening progressed, and Norbert proclaimed that everything he’d learnt in his lectures was pretty much useless when it came to surgery, with all the complications and variables that could arise. That was when a doctor showed his mettle, and it wasn’t always easy to keep a clear head in such stressful situations.

  They were there that evening to celebrate Norbert’s birthday, and all the doctors were determined to enjoy themselves. Larissa introduced her sister to some of the nurses she worked with – a lively group of young women, happy to have an opportunity to socialise with the doctors.

  ‘Bruno thinks I should give up working completely now I’m married,’ Larissa told her when they had a moment alone.

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘He’s mentioned it a few times. None of the other wives work. I think he’d much prefer it if I didn’t either.’

  Margarita sucked on her cigarette. ‘Well, it’s up to you. What do you want to do?’

  ‘There’s a lot to be said for it, of course. There’s always so much to do. I never thought running a house would be so time-consuming, even with a maid.’

  ‘Lala, that doesn’t really answer my question.’

  ‘I know… I suppose whatever makes Bruno happy, that’s what makes me happy too.’

  ‘But you enjoy nursing. You don’t have to pretend with me. I’m your sister.’

  ‘I adore nursing…’

  ‘Well, there you are then. You’ve just answered my question.’

  Larissa threw a little glance over to where her husband sat with the other doctors.

  ‘But Mama never worked, did she?’

  ‘No. But she was brought up in a different age. She never would have wanted to go out to work. Things have changed since her day. It would be a shame to give up your work when it gives you so much pleasure.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘And the company as well. You’d miss that more than anything, I’m sure. Why don’t you keep working until you have children?’

  ‘Yes… perhaps you’re right… I’m not sure, we’ll have to see… I’ll have to discuss it again with Bruno.’

  ‘Well, at least let him know how much it means to you.’

  Later in the evening, some medical students arrived and Larissa motioned with her eyes for her sister to look over to a round table where a rowdy group of them were drinking, smoking and laughing.

  ‘See the one with the scarf?’

  Margarita looked at the thin young man, with dark skin and darker eyes and said, ‘What about him?’

  ‘He was on our ward this week. He’s called Simon. Don’t you think he’s the prettiest thing you ever saw? Look at those curls. And his eyes. Did you ever see anything so delicious in your life?’

  ‘Larissa,’ chided Margarita quietly.

  ‘I know, I know. But you know, we all have our little fantasies, even we married women. She lowered her voice, ‘But honestly, if I wasn’t… I really would be tempted…’

  The students soon left for some other bar, and at around ten o’clock a small band started to play and the first few couples took to the floor.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Norbert comes over in a minute,’ said Larissa, sucking her cocktail through a straw.