Paul Bobrov was thirty-three, the second of Alexander and Nadezhda’s ten grandchildren. He was of medium height and though he retained the slightly Turkish look of his ancestors, these features were softened. Sometimes, in the way of numerous past Bobrovs, he would unconsciously make a gentle, almost caressing movement with his arm.
How pleased old Alexander would have been, he thought, to know of his visit. His grandmother, still beautiful at ninety-two, though rather frail, had given him a vivid description of the place and assured him: ‘I certainly shan’t die until you get back and tell me all about it.’
The old estate: a vivid reminder of how things were. Not that anybody had ever forgotten.
The little Russian community to which Paul Bobrov belonged resided in a suburb to the north of New York City. It was one of several in the region: there were other, similar communities to be found in London, Paris and elsewhere. These were not, he could have told you, to be confused with the huge mass of Russian Jews who had come at the turn of the century; nor the later wave of those fleeing Russia at the time of the Second World War; nor, God forbid, the recent wave of Soviets who nowadays crowded into such areas as Brighton Beach below New York. No, Paul Bobrov’s community was that of the Russian emigrés, the noble classes to whom, strictly speaking, even Nadezhda only belonged by right of marriage.
They were a close-knit group. A few had money but many had not. They lived modest middle-class lives in shady tree-lined streets; and though to outward appearances they were ordinary Americans, they usually married amongst themselves, spoke Russian as well as English in the home and – rare amongst other emigré communities – preserved a genuine inner life from their home country.
The centre of this was the church. For old Alexander, always inclined towards, at least, the forms of religion, this was natural. For others, careless of religion back in Russia, the Orthodox Church was now the remaining bastion which preserved their identity and added moral integrity to that preservation. There were two branches of the Orthodox Church to which people like the Bobrovs belonged and neither recognized the legitimacy – for the time being – of the Patriarch in Moscow, who was felt to be under the thumb of the KGB.
Each Saturday, from far and wide, members of the community like Paul, already two generations removed from Russia, would bring their children to the church hall for a half-day of lessons in Russian language and history. On any Sunday one might see the bearer of some proud old Russian name handing out candles in the church or singing with a fine bass voice in the choir. The old woman with a scarf over her head, praying to an icon like any babushka, might be a Russian princess. Infants were thoroughly baptized – completely immersed in the font three times.
And once a year, Paul took his wife to either the Russian Nobility Ball – a sedate affair at which elderly gentlemen might be seen wearing tsarist decorations – or the more lively Petrushka Ball. Both were elegant, held in large New York ballrooms and well attended.
In such ways, with remarkable tenacity, the Russian community had held on and waited.
But for what? Paul was the first of the family to venture back. Did some of his uncles or cousins hope for a restitution of the Tsar? Though Nicolas and his family had been destroyed, the dynasty had survived through the Grand Dukes and such a restoration was technically possible. But Paul found it hard to imagine. Nor could he conceive of abandoning his home in New York. ‘But if things change, if things open up, then it would be good to get involved,’ he would say. It was a rather vague aspiration, but full of perhaps only half-acknowledged emotions.
What a stroke of luck it had been, meeting Sergei Romanov. They had found each other at a trade fair in New York the previous year. The Russian had been looking for opportunities to develop software programs in Moscow under licence to western companies. He had a good team of people but little idea of the business and Paul, who marketed desktop computers, had been glad to give him some help both in making contacts and with his faulty English. Only on the second day had Bobrov mentioned that one day he hoped to go to the Soviet Union and visit the family’s old estate. The only trouble, he explained, was how to get there as it wasn’t on any tourist route. ‘A little place called Russka,’ he had said.
‘But, Paul Mikhailovich,’ Romanov had exclaimed, ‘that’s the very place my own grandfather came from. I’ve never been there myself. Come to Moscow, my friend,’ he had said warmly, ‘and we’ll go there together.’
And now here he was, with Romanov coming to collect him.
They had agreed to meet in front of the hotel at six-fifteen. Too early to get breakfast in the cavernous dining room, but Paul had noticed the previous evening that on the fifth floor there was a little bar that opened at six, and he made his way there now.
It was a small place, typical of such refreshment rooms. Under the glass counter would be laid out plates of sliced cheese, sliced salami, pirozhki, hard boiled eggs and, of course, white and black bread. There were large jugs of apple juice and grape juice, a coffee machine and a samovar. By the window was a counter where one could stand to eat; down one wall there were four small tables. The big glass doors meant that one could see the people inside, and the opening times were pasted on the glass.
It was five minutes after six when he got there. Inside he could see the food being laid out by a pretty but bored-looking blonde girl of about twenty. Behind her, a large, grumpy woman in her fifties was grimly inspecting the bread. He tried to open the glass door. It was locked.
The girl glanced at him and said something to the older woman, who did not even deign to look at him. Paul glanced at his watch, tapped on the glass and pointed to the opening times. The girl just stared at him. Then the big woman turned and shouted at him: ‘Zakryt.’ The word most familiar to any tourist in Russia. ‘Zakryt.’ We’re shut.
And then the girl smiled.
‘Mnye skuchno.’ I’m bored.
‘Mnye skuchno, skuchno, skuchno.’
She used to mutter the words to herself by the hour, every day, almost as monks used to mutter the Jesus prayer. ‘Myne skuchno.’ It was a litany.
Ludmilla Suvorin was intelligent: her father Peter had been too, until he took to drink; and Peter’s father had been Suvorin the composer. Only, until a few years ago, one wasn’t supposed to mention him, because he’d been sent to the gulags. And though his work, including the final Suite, was reinstated nowadays, that fact did little good for her. Peter had died when Ludmilla was five; her mother had married a railwayman, and they lived in a drab, four-room apartment which they shared with another family, in a big, peeling concrete block in the wastelands of the city outskirts. There were four of these blocks on that street, standing in an isolated row, and across the top of them in large metal letters painted red were the words: COMMUNISM’S BUILDING A BETTER WORLD. Her building bore the letters: WORLD.
Ludmilla was also lazy. She should have been doing something better than this, but she couldn’t be bothered. She liked to dance. She had a good figure, slim and strong. Sometimes she had thought of selling her body like the leggy girls in the lobby. Several of those were students. One was married and saving to get a dacha in the country. Years ago, such girls often used to dream of snaring a westerner who’d fall in love with them, marry them, and get them out of Russia. But they were wiser now: it never happened. They took the money – hard currency – and were grateful.
She hadn’t done so, though. So here she was, with Varya.
And now Ludmilla watched the American with mild amusement on her sulky face. The American did not understand what he was up against as he gesticulated impatiently out there. But then, how would he?
For Varya had her own very clear ideas abut the running of the bar. On two things in particular she was inflexible, the first of which was opening hours.
If the bar was due to open at six, she understood, then that was when she arrived. ‘They don’t pay you for coming early, do they?’ she would say. ‘And after we open at six,’ she expl
ained, ‘then we have to get ready.’ During this time, while she put the food out on the trays and brewed the coffee, she naturally did not allow any customers in, since they would only be in the way. For some fifteen to twenty minutes therefore, every morning, there was an interval during which she explained, with no sense of contradiction: ‘The bar is open, but it is shut.’
And similarly, of course, in the evenings, when the bar closed at nine, customers ceased to be served some twenty minutes before that time. ‘Otherwise,’ she would say severely to Ludmilla, ‘we should be closing late.’
‘Zakryt!’ therefore, she shouted, as Paul waited irritably outside.
And only at thirteen minutes past six did Varya relent and tell Ludmilla to open the door.
The American spoke extraordinary Russian. Beautiful to hear. Even Varya looked awkward now and seemed anxious to make up for keeping him outside. They gave him a cup of coffee, salami, an egg. And bread, of course.
‘You’re Russian?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘American.’
‘So you’ve come back to see?’ She had met one or two of these emigrés in the hotel before. They all spoke this beautiful language: just listening to them could almost make you weep. ‘There’s not much of your Russia left, they tell me,’ she added. She couldn’t think of anything else to keep him there. He went over to the table and sat down. He drank some coffee; then ate a piece of bread. Then frowned.
Ludmilla smiled. ‘Something wrong?’
He made a small grimace. ‘Nothing much. It’s just that the bread’s a little stale.’ He glanced at her. ‘Haven’t you really anything better?’
And Ludmilla looked at Varya. For this was Varya’s second strange idea.
When had it first begun? Ludmilla had only been working there six months, so she did not know. But somehow the bar had finished one day with too much bread. Anyone else would have taken the bread, or thrown it away the next day. But for some reason known only to herself, Varya had insisted on serving the old bread the following day, until it was all used up – which, as it happened, was not until closing time. The fresh bread delivered that morning, therefore, had still remained untouched in the kitchen behind the bar. The following day she repeated the process. The previous day’s bread was served; the fresh, delivered sliced, was left in the kitchen. And within a short time this curious procedure had set into a pattern which had developed rules of its own.
No one was allowed to touch the bread. If you did, Varya would know. Nor could anyone tell the people downstairs not to deliver one day, to clear the backlog. ‘Then they’d start asking questions.’ Nor, even, could you use any of the fresh bread if you ran out of the stale bread during the day. ‘We use so much a day, no more, no less,’ she said firmly. So it was, in the fifth-floor bar, that the bread served was always exactly one day old.
Paul only stayed another two minutes. Then, with a nod to Ludmilla, he hurried off. It never occurred to either of them that they were related.
It was an easy journey down. The huge, broad street leading out of Moscow soon gave way to modest two-carriage highways; within an hour the two had merged into a single road, broad enough for two cars to drive abreast each side, but with no markings upon it of any kind. ‘We don’t have your freeways,’ Sergei remarked apologetically.
‘You don’t need them,’ Paul replied. And indeed, for a main road, the traffic was remarkably light.
Like most Russians, Sergei drove his little car at breakneck speed, feeling free to use almost any part of the road as the mood took him. Once or twice, rather unexpectedly, the road surface of even this highway would abruptly disintegrate, and one would be travelling, still at the same speed, over a surface of caked mud or chips for half a mile or so until the metalled surface resumed again.
The weather was excellent. The sky was a clear, pale blue, cloudless, and with only a faint, dusty haze along the eastern horizon. The birch trees lay to each side of the road, their silver trunks and brilliant emerald leaves producing a sparkling effect.
Sergei Romanov had a round face, balding head and fair hair. He had been twice to the west and hoped to go again. Like many Russians of his age – and Paul put him in his late thirties – Sergei was cautious about talking about himself, but extremely curious to know more about Bobrov. At first, however, as Paul had sometimes found with other Soviets of the intellectual kind, there was a slight shyness in this. When he referred to old Nicolai Bobrov, for instance, he said: ‘Your great-grandfather, the late esteemed member of the last Duma,’ which playful tone masked, Paul realized, a certain sense of respect towards his family’s past.
Bobrov chatted easily with him now, therefore, speaking of his family, his Russian upbringing, the nursery rhymes and folk tales he had learned as a child; and by the time they had been driving an hour, Sergei was entirely relaxed.
‘Of course, we can’t help being curious about you,’ he said frankly to Paul, ‘because when Russia lost all the people like you, we lost the better part of our old culture, and now we hardly know how to get it back.’
‘It depends what you want, I should think,’ Paul replied. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.
Sergei was thoughtful for some time. ‘You operated under capitalism before the revolution, didn’t you? Free markets?’
‘Yes. Pretty much.’
‘And free expression? Literature? Philosophy?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Do you know, philosophy in Russian schools consists of Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx? Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Kant – these are scarcely mentioned.’ He shook his head. ‘We want our history above all,’ he continued. ‘Stalin rewrote so much we don’t have any idea what the truth is. Can you imagine what that feels like? To realize you have no idea what really happened, what made you the person you are? We feel like a lost generation. And we want it all back.’ Suddenly, and with an unexpected passion that sent the car careering to the centre of the road and back, he banged on the steering wheel. ‘All of it!’
‘How about the Church?’
‘I’m an atheist,’ Sergei said firmly. ‘I can’t believe. But if others wish to, they should be free to do so.’ Then he smiled. ‘My mother believed. She used to go to secret services in people’s houses. Did you know about that?’
Paul had heard of this secret religious activity. No one knew exactly how it was organized. It was known as the Catacomb Church, after the secret, underground worshipping of early Christian times; but he was aware that ever since the early days of the Soviet state, there had been a large network of priests, often moving from one region to another, who held secret services for the faithful in cabins, barns, or hideouts in the woods all over Russia.
‘Perhaps if Russian culture returns, you may become a religious believer too,’ he said with a smile.
‘I doubt it.’
They drove some way towards the city of Vladimir before turning south. Several times Sergei seemed to get lost, but managed eventually to find the narrow road that apparently led towards Russka.
Having relieved his feelings about his culture, Sergei seemed anxious to talk of other matters. He spoke of things he had seen in the West, and asked Bobrov about his business. ‘You market computers, don’t you? Tell me exactly how it works.’
This was not easy, but Paul did his best. He outlined the whole marketing plan for a new product from market research, all the way through to the advertising, and the sales-kits. ‘Then,’ he said with a grin, ‘I have to sell it to the salesmen.’ It was the same pattern, pretty much, he explained, for any product. And all the time, Sergei Romanov nodded and said: ‘Ah yes, this is what we should have.’
It was late morning when they reached the little town of Russka.
It was a terrible disappointment.
Thanks to his grandmother’s information, it was now Paul Bobrov who conducted Romanov around. The town was rather run down. The great watchtower, with its high tent roof, still stood. So did most of the houses in the town, though h
e noticed that the larger, merchant houses by the little park had been split into apartments and their gardens left to grow high with bushes and brambles. The stone church by the marketplace, however, was in a sorry state and had clearly not been used in decades.
He found that one of the factories there was making bicycles; but the textile business still existed, in that the other was making woollen blankets. Having made a tour of the sad little town, he led Sergei down to the river and walked him along the path to the springs. They, at least, had not altered, and the two men sat for some time on the green mossy bank and listened to the sounds of the water splashing down.
By now, however, Paul was impatient to see the old Bobrov house; and as soon as they had walked back from the springs, they got into the car and drove across the bridge and along the bumpy path through the wood.
The village was much as Nadezhda had described it. There were no Romanovs there now, and Sergei had no idea which house had been his family’s; but once again, remembering all Nadezhda had said, Paul was able to take him to the handsome two-storey house with the carved gables, and tell him: ‘This is where Boris Romanov used to live.’
There was only one thing that puzzled him: as they went round he kept looking up the slope towards where, he was sure, the old Bobrov house should be. But he could not see it. Finally he asked a villager: ‘Where’s the big house?’ And the fellow explained: ‘They say there was one up the hill there. But I never saw it.’
And so it proved to be. When they walked up the slope, they found nothing. Not a frame; not an outbuilding; nothing but a faint outline on the turf and, a little above it, an overgrown alley through the trees.
The ancestral house had gone. His link with the past was lost, buried in the ground. His journey had been in vain. Sadly, he turned to go back.
It was when they approached the monastery that they discovered something was going on.
From outside, it looked almost deserted. The walls were crumbling; the bell tower was down. The buildings within seemed to be windowless.