Ian Hocking - The Amber Rooms

‘Of course.’

Saskia remembered her bloodstained handkerchief. It was crumpled. She took it. Inside there was a cigarette paper with the pencilled message: Find me outside the Ministry of Justice.

‘I can get rid of that for you,’ said Draganov.

‘No. I will, thank you.’

Within the hour, Saskia had returned to Kamo. He had not moved from his position in centre of the room. Her dress still draped him. Saskia settled alongside and closed her eyes on his greasy hair and dreamed that she was once more in the Alexander Park, carrying Pasha from danger.

She awoke on the balcony overlooking the department store Gostiny Dvor. It was silvered with streetlight. She was breathing heavily. Had she sleepwalked? She still wore her shift, but nothing else. The wind hurt. She looked down at her hand. It was gripping the iron rail.

She noticed a pain near her collarbone. She probed it with her finger and found a mosquito. It flickered into the night before she could kill it. The bite itched.

Another gust of wind struck her.

Someone lit a cigarette across the street.

“The flames of victory light our country.”

Dawn commenced.

She watched the dust shift in wavelets. Two winds met in St Petersburg. One came from the Gulf of Finland, across which Lenin, so Saskia imagined, looked from the stoop of a villa. The second came from the south, direction Novgorod, and was too local to have stirred the reddish hair of Soso in Baku, or Tiflis, or whichever Caucasian town he was ghosting through.

There was a language where sky was “the sea above”.

She felt Kamo behind her.

‘The future is a mountain, is it not?’

Kamo was in a philosophical mood. Perhaps it was a facet of the character he had adopted as part of his disguise. She wondered how he would answer that question, since he had crossed the calendar line many times himself, sailing under the trade winds of anarchy.

‘Kamo,’ she said, feeling the hair moving at her temple, ‘I want you to obtain tickets for a masked ball tonight at the Summer Palace. I’ve tried and failed. I want you to pay back my effort in rescuing you.’

Saskia thought about the mosquito, which carried her blood.

‘How did you feel,’ Kamo asked, his voice quiet, ‘when you crossed the border from our calendar to the Gregorian?’

‘One travels in time thirteen days. Thirteen days into the West. It is nothing more than moving from one salon to another. A door opens. One walks through. There is a new sky.’ She realised that she was cold. ‘Mountains.’

‘A new sky,’ said Kamo. Saskia did not flinch when she felt his rage radiate. One hand gripped the hair at the back of her head and pulled. The other clamped her mouth. She gritted her teeth and breathed through her nose, which felt too narrow for the job. ‘You want me to pay back your efforts? You talk of mountains, whore. The debt your owe me is the mountain. Do not dare to suggest I am obligated to you. Is that clear?’

Saskia nodded.

Kamo held for a moment longer, then relaxed. His hands slipped to her hips and he rested his chin on her shoulder.

‘My sweet Lynx,’ he said, ‘you bring out the worst of me. Who will pull out your claws, I wonder?’

Saskia and Kamo used the main staircase to leave the building. Saskia held Kamo’s arm. Their steps were slow. Kamo wore smoked spectacles and a homburg that was low on his brow. Saskia had acquired a grey wig. As they crossed the foyer, Saskia looked at the frosted door of the superintendent’s office. It was closed.

Outside, on the Nevsky Avenue, Saskia made eye contact with Robespierre, who was across the street. He glanced at something to her left. Saskia did not turn, but watched the passenger window of a cab as it passed. She saw the reflection of a man leaning against the telephone pole on the corner.

In Armenian, she said, ‘ Okhranniki , twenty yards on our left.’

Kamo grunted.

Saskia made eye contact with Robespierre again. With his eyebrows, he indicated a taxi near the Gostiny Dvor rank. Before she could smile, he looked away, stepped on his cigarette, and stepped onto a horse bus. Saskia longed to tell him, for the last time, that he was a good man.

‘The taxi with the white sash.’

‘I was beginning to get worried.’

Saskia felt her scalp sweat beneath the wig.

The coach’s interior was luxurious, which satisfied Saskia because the coach and its driver had cost the remainder of her money. Kamo sat on the rear-facing seat. He did not help her lower the blinds or, in shadow, pull the cases from the small rack. He watched her.

‘When we’ve merged into traffic,’ she said, ‘open the rear window and pull the sash inside.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Are you going to change?’

‘Directly,’ he said, tasting the arm of his glasses. ‘Directly.’

With her legs braced on the rocking floor, Saskia opened her case and examined the costume. It might have been a huge, red parachute. The metaphor suited her vertigo. She stripped to her corset while Kamo rubbed his left eye, the one that had been damaged by the bomb.

‘Does something worry you?’

‘Silence, woman.’

‘Very well.’

The new costume had a fitted corset. Saskia removed her own. At this, Kamo said, ‘You’re not like the others.’

‘Who?’

‘If you were lost, a hundred ships would be launched to your rescue.’

She smiled crookedly. ‘Don’t you mean a thousand?’

Kamo stood. He could not reach his full height, and he bent over her. His humour had gone. ‘I have never forced myself upon you.’

‘Should I thank you?’

He pursed his lips. ‘Some men have laughed at me because I would not.’

‘If laughter is so important to you, perhaps you should.’

Kamo put his hand to his wounded eye once more. As he kneaded the lid, Saskia felt an absurd pity. Once, he had been a spoiled boy in a seminary, bewitched by the older student assigned to help him pass some exams. And now this: brigandage, escapology, and casual talk of hurt.

Softly, he said, ‘How are we meant to get the money out of there?’

‘You’re standing in it. Now get dressed. I don’t want these blinds to be down for much longer. It will draw attention.’

As Saskia completed her transformation and sat down, she discovered a note in her hand warmer. She could read it in the gloom, but she lifted the window blind and turned the paper against the light. Its words had been written in a trivial substitution cipher.

The boy passed his viva voce, and will become a student at the Lyceum. His examiners were particularly impressed by his discussion of the St Petersburg Paradox. His father thanks his tutor. I remain,

Your good man.

Saskia did not weep. It would have revealed too much to Kamo.

‘Give me that,’ he said, taking it. But his eyes moved haphazardly over the text. ‘What language is this?’

She looked through the window at the people. In one hundred years they would be dead, but she would be alive, if being alive meant anything.

As a woman who had overheard a thousand conversations about St Petersburg throughout the Russias, she knew that no commentator passed through St Petersburg without remarking, with the pomp of private insight, that the city was an attempt to impersonate the face—and, by association, the bone structure—of its European cousins: the polyglot, intellectual Vienna; the lynchpin Berlin; Peter’s favourite, Amsterdam; and Paris, which could never be bettered for taste. Last of all, Saskia thought, there is Venice, as she passed her invitation to a footman who was dressed in white, clownish pyjamas, a stove-pipe hat, and black mask. Her invitation read, Carnevale Veneziano a San Pietroburgo, 1908 . Tonight the cliché would be celebrated.