Russka: The Novel of Russia

  At the corner she stopped and looked back. The bedroom she and Peter shared was the only room in the apartment that looked on to the street and for some reason – she herself did not know why – she had lit a candle and placed it in the window there. She could just see it now, a small, guttering flame set in the dark frame of the building, a strange, intimate little sentinel. A message perhaps, of love and of hope. Except for a note to say she had gone for a walk, she was leaving no other.

  She walked round the corner. Her footsteps, oddly, felt light.

  No one would know: that was the point. That was, in truth, her gift of love to them, that they should never know. Only Vladimir would know, and he was with his son in Paris now, not due back for a month. She had not written to him: there was no message; but he would know, and keep her secret.

  A party of Cossacks clattered by on their horses on their way back to barracks, capes pulled tightly round them against the autumn chill.

  When had it all begun? At the very start, perhaps: she had married Peter Suvorin when she was still depressed. That was her fault. Yet she had loved him passionately. No, she thought, she could pinpoint the real beginning. It was in 1900, when little Dimitri was five and the letter had come from America.

  Since her marriage, Rosa had had little contact with her family in Vilnius. Four years afterwards, her mother had unexpectedly died, and then her elder brother and his family had emigrated to America. Then, in 1899, her other brother had followed. Their departures had not surprised her. Tens, hundreds of thousands of Jews were leaving; indeed, by 1914 some two million Jews would leave Russia for the United States, and the tsarist government was glad to see them go. Rosa had been happy that her brothers had crossed the Atlantic to find happiness; but their lives, by now, seemed far removed from hers.

  And then came the letter. It was from her second brother, who normally disliked writing and from whom she had not heard since several months before he left. Yet now he wrote at length, giving a detailed account of the crossing and news of the family; and his letter also contained a long final section.

  We came to Ellis Island. It was frightening for a moment. When I saw that great slab of a building and saw the rows of other immigrants waiting for inspection in the huge hall I thought – My God, it’s going to be like Russia only worse. It’s a prison. But it was soon over and then we were out.

  And then … This is why I had to write to you, dear Rosa. Then we were free. Can you imagine the feel of it? It’s hard to describe. To know that you are free. There are no gendarmes watching you for the Ministry of the Interior, no police spies looking for enemies of the regime. You can go where you please. Everyone can vote. And a Jew has as many rights as anyone else.

  The Americans are like the Russians. They are simple and straightforward, and speak from the heart – the Russians at their best, that is! But also they are unlike Russians, because they are free, and they know it.

  And this is why I am writing to you now, dear Rosa. For being here, I can’t help thinking of you. Of course, you have converted and you live in Moscow. But are you sure, are you really sure that this truly makes you safe? And little Dimitri: apart from your conversion, which I know was done for expediency, in Jewish eyes the son of a Jewish mother is a Jew. It’s not that I’m personally religious: you know I’m not. But all I mean to say is, if things get bad in Russia, for God’s sake come to America. Legally or illegally, you can always arrange something. Come and join us, I beg you, here where all your family will be safe.

  The letter had made a lasting impression upon Rosa. If in recent years, with her new life and her child, she had seldom thought about the past, the letter brought it all back to her with a strange force. With poignancy she found herself thinking of her poor father and all he had tried to do for her. She thought of her own music, which she had never gone back to since marriage. She remembered rather sadly, now, the pain she had caused her mother. And picturing her brothers she thought: I wish I could see them again.

  The letter worried her too. Though her brother spoke of the Jews, she did not fail to notice his veiled reference to police spies and enemies of the regime. Peter, with his Socialist activities, could also find himself in danger. She had mulled over the letter for a month before showing it to Peter one morning and asking: ‘What do you think?’

  But even she had not been prepared for his response.

  ‘How terrible,’ he said, ‘to want to leave Russia.’ And when she suggested that perhaps it might be better for them to move to America, he just looked at her with blank incomprehension and suggested she might want to lie down. She knew better than to raise the subject again. She had discovered that, though gentle and kind, Peter also possessed a strange obstinacy that made him blind to anything that did not fit his idea of the universe. They would never go to America: there was nothing more to say.

  Had she resented this? She did not believe so at the time. She loved Peter, he was so good and simple; and though he had been almost a father-figure at the start, as the years passed she realized increasingly how much he relied upon her. He did so with such touching faith. ‘I can’t imagine how I would have lived without you,’ he would sometimes say. ‘It was surely the angels who sent you.’ And once he had even confessed: ‘That day you spoke of America – that was the worst day in my life. For a moment, you know, it was as if you were suggesting you wanted to turn your back on everything I love. Thank God that madness passed.’

  He needed her. He plainly adored her. And how could she tell him, therefore, what was happening to her now?

  It was in 1905 that the terrible dreams had begun. They came quite suddenly and without warning. And the subject was always the same: the pogrom.

  Often it was her father’s face that she saw, surrounded by the mob. Then she would see the burly Cossack, sitting in his cart – sympathetic but ready to leave them to their fate – and it would seem to her that this time the men got her father, and dragged him away. After a while, however, the dream would get more complex. Time would be telescoped. She would be in the village in the Ukraine, but a grown woman instead of a child. Her father would suddenly become transformed into Peter. Worse yet, under an echoing grey sky, he would turn into little Dimitri.

  Night after night the dreams came, and she would awake in a cold sweat, terrified. They were so terrible that at times she dreaded even going to sleep. And in her waking hours, now, a terrible new premonition began to form in her mind – a gnawing conviction that, try as she might, nothing would shake: something was going to happen to Peter and Dimitri.

  Only some months after the onset of the dream had the other problem begun. Whether it was related or not, Rosa could not be sure. Was it some hidden resentment, or a fear about which she knew nothing? Whatever the reason, the new misery not only came to her, it refused to go away.

  She could not bear her husband to touch her any more.

  Even now, five years later, she could be proud of one thing: Peter never knew. She loved him. She knew that he could never understand. Sometimes of course she had slept with him, and, by a supreme act of will, had completely disguised her secret revulsion at the act. But week after week, month after month, she had devised excuses that allowed her to avoid lovemaking at night while she heaped her affection upon him by day; and whether it was guilt at this subterfuge and betrayal, or the recurring dreams, or whether they were all tangled up together, she found that she was becoming more and more filled with a terrible premonition that her husband and her son were in danger. This had been her frame of mind when Dimitri had been attacked and discovered he was Jewish.

  Only Vladimir had guessed her secret. Dear Vladimir. Somehow, he had guessed everything.

  She found she had reached the broad boulevard that circled the inner city. The wind was driving along it, picking leaves off the little trees at the edge of the street and carrying them eastward. A carriage rattled by.

  Had she briefly, when she was young, thought of Vladimir as a lover? She gave a li
ttle laugh. An impossible love: a love that could never be. Yet even a platonic love like theirs contained pleasures and pains. For what did it mean to a woman to know that it was not her husband but his brother who truly understood her? She loved his company; he made her happy. Yet she feared him. For he returned her to herself; he induced her to play again; he showed her too clearly what she tried to hide from herself – the agonizing gulf that separated her from her husband. And so she would flee from Vladimir back to her prison. ‘You must get away, just to sleep,’ he would urge, and she knew it was true. But she could not. ‘You’ll destroy yourself, my little bird.’ Then so be it.

  Vladimir had promised to get Dimitri to America. That was all that mattered to her now.

  She passed a store where they sold newspapers and glanced in. There was a little board by the door, proclaiming a headline. Poor Stolypin, the loyal minister, had been shot in Kiev earlier that month. Now it turned out that his assassin was a double-agent: a police spy who had only committed the atrocity because the revolutionary group he had infiltrated had begun to suspect him. She shook her head wearily. ‘Only in our poor Russia do we live with such insanity,’ she murmured. Was the whole Russian empire just a bad dream, she wondered. Perhaps.

  A dream from which it was time to escape.

  The street she now took contained tramlines. Since before the turn of the century, there had been trams in Moscow – stout vehicles with a lower and an open upper deck, and drawn by a pair of horses. They moved along at a pleasant, easy pace. In the last year or so, however, these had begun to be replaced by electrified trams – single deckers which moved along at a far greater speed. The new age was coming, there was no doubt. A little way up the street, Rosa noticed, there was an intersection of lines at a crossroad, and she made towards that.

  Dimitri would go to America, and he would be a musician. That was what her father had always said: ‘They often forgive Jews if they are musicians.’

  There was a little knot of people standing in a lighted doorway by the crossroads and they watched the woman idly as she walked up the street. One of them noticed that she looked rather cheerful. ‘Quite normal,’ as he later said. ‘Nothing unusual.’

  Peter Suvorin’s book, of course, had been her standby for the last eighteen months. How many nights had she devotedly typed for her husband until the early hours when he was safely asleep? The act of devotion that kept her from his bed and about which she had not had to explain. But the book had been finished last week. It was going to press. It would probably make him famous: and leave her with nothing to protect her.

  It was not difficult to accomplish. Like a friend who had only been waiting for her to arrive, the electric tram hastened towards her through the night, just as she reached the crossing. Rosa paused. She had taken off her gloves, as if to fumble for something in her pockets; now, casually, she put them on again, not even noticing that she had pulled her glove from her left hand on to her right. The tram, as it came closer, seemed to be whispering: ‘At last. Come with me.’ Two paces, three.

  They all saw. There was no doubt about what happened. The woman standing on the kerb and looking in her pockets had glanced up at the tram, turned, and slipped. She uttered a little cry as her foot, trying to find its balance on the damp stone, had shot up in an ungainly manner. She had seemed to grasp for support as, twisting, she fell into the street. The tram had been almost on top of her as she went down. It was all so absurd.

  Just as the tram passed over her, Rosa saw her father.

  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that, even if she was subject to moods, this wretched business had been an accident.

  It was two months afterwards that Dimitri Suvorin completed the three Etudes in her memory, rather in the manner of Scriabin, which have always been agreed to be his first serious and mature compositions.

  1913

  As the year 1913 drew towards its close, Alexander Bobrov looked forward with some confidence to a pleasant future. True, there were some obstacles to overcome, but he had prepared his personal campaign carefully and he was quietly confident. The girl was fifteen now and already a dazzling young woman. Soon it would be time to begin.

  Alexander was twenty-two. He was above average height, powerfully built, and had the saturnine, rather stern good looks of his great-grandfather Alexis though, unlike him, he was clean-shaven.

  He was acutely conscious of his good looks. This, however, was not exactly vanity. As the last representative of his noble family, and, despite his father’s liberal tendencies, a representative of the order which was dedicated to protecting and preserving the Tsar, he felt it was his duty to be handsome. He took care, besides dressing carefully, to hold himself with a military uprightness – with what, in those days, was referred to by the French term as a proper tenue – and to be seen, as far as he could afford it, in the best places. His position in life, his whole desire, prompted him to seek two things and two things only. One was a court appointment; the other his marriage to the heiress Nadezhda Suvorin. For both these objects he was steadfastly preparing himself.

  This preparation included sexual experience. ‘I shall be faithful to my wife,’ he told a friend, a young officer in the imperial guard. ‘But I shall get some experience first. My plan is to have ten mistresses. What do you think?’ ‘My dear fellow, why not twenty?’ ‘No,’ Alexander had replied seriously, ‘I think ten will do.’

  He had gone about the business methodically. His first had been the wife of an army doctor – a pleasant woman in her mid-twenties who had been amused, as much as anything, by the solemn eighteen year old’s evident determination to get into bed with her. That had lasted three months. There had been a charming dancer from the corps de ballet in St Petersburg: after all, every man of the world was supposed to have had an affair with a dancer. To make sure he had, so to speak, covered all the ground, he had a brief fling with a gypsy singer from a theatre – though whether she was really a gypsy he was not sure; and for a month he had gone regularly to a certain young lady in one of the capital’s most select brothels, patronized only by those from a certain milieu. Notwithstanding its select clientèle, he lived in constant fear of unhappy consequences and, besides, found it awfully expensive. After a month, he went there no more. He was currently on his sixth experiment, an amusing, blonde-haired widow in her twenties, half-German, half-Latvian, who, it seemed, saw no reason why a young fellow like him should sleep. And with this arrangement, for the time being, he was quite content.

  When he looked to the future of Russia itself, Alexander also had reason to be hopeful. The third Duma had lasted its full five-year term until the previous year and now a new, fourth Duma was sitting. The Tsar had succeeded in somewhat increasing the conservative element, though the radicals had also strengthened, leaving the centre weaker; but taken as a whole, the new body was no worse than the last. His father, indefatigably, had got himself elected again. And, it had to be said, the condition in the country as a whole was now excellent.

  ‘Stolypin’s gone, and his place has been taken by nonentities,’ Nicolai Bobrov had remarked to his conservative son, ‘but his work lives on. Look at the results.’ And he would tick them off on his fingers enthusiastically. ‘Trade: hugely up. Agricultural yields: up, and we exported thirteen and a half million tons of cereals in 1911. The state debt’s well down: we’ve run budget surpluses in three of the last four years. The countryside’s quiet.’ He would smile contentedly.

  ‘Do you know,’ he told Alexander once, ‘I met a Frenchman the other day who calculates that at our present rate of economic growth, we’ll overshadow the economy of the whole of Western Europe by 1950. Just think: you’ll probably live to see it.’ Of the revolution, little was heard in those years. ‘With a little luck,’ the elder Bobrov liked to say, ‘we may have headed it off.’

  Indeed, only if one looked abroad were there any clouds on the horizon; but neither of the Bobrov men, nor anyone they knew, was overly concerned.

  ?
??Diplomacy will sort any problems out,’ Nicolai would tell his son. ‘The great powers have to live together. That’s why we have all these alliances.’

  The huge system of alliances, indeed, seemed rather in Russia’s favour. The need for huge French finance, and a better understanding with the British Empire, had drawn these three countries into the pact known as the Triple Entente; Germany, Austria and Italy had formed the Triple Alliance. ‘But they balance each other,’ Nicolai often pointed out. ‘Each keeps the other in order.’

  Only down in the mountainous Balkan region above Greece was there any sign of real danger. Here, as the power of the almost defunct Ottoman Empire finally crumbled, Austria was advancing. In 1908 she had taken the two provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inhabited mostly by Slavic Serbs. Other Serbs felt threatened; Russia, sympathetic to her fellow-Slavs, and watchful of this region so close to Constantinople and the Black Sea, monitored each development carefully. ‘But all these things will get worked out,’ Nicolai predicted. ‘It’s not in anyone’s interest to start a war.’ There were few statesmen in Europe who would have disagreed with him.

  Indeed, in the last five years only one matter had marred the serenity of Alexander’s world and caused him mental discomfort.

  Yevgeny Popov: what should be done about him?

  In a sense, even Alexander realized, Mrs Suvorin’s affairs were none of his business. Yet so great was his loathing of Popov, so huge his respect for Vladimir, that the thought of Popov’s liaison preyed upon his mind. On that first misty night when he had seen the Bolshevik sneak into the Suvorin mansion, he had felt a kind of personal violation.

  Even then, after his chilly vigil in the street, he had not wanted to believe it. Trying to fathom the mystery, he had taken to wandering about the area late at night; and twice more that very month he had witnessed Popov arriving for a tryst. There could be no doubt: the household of his future wife, and the person of his future mother-in-law, were being contaminated by the redheaded Socialist.