Russka (140 page)

Was she just bored? He did not think so. Unhappy, perhaps, but not bored.

He remembered a conversation he had had once with Lenin. ‘Don’t expect too much from women,’ his friend had told him. ‘I’ve never yet met any woman except my wife who could play chess or read a railway timetable.’ Popov grinned to himself. He knew that in recent years Lenin had been having a sporadic affair with a certain countess who lived in St Petersburg. He wondered if the countess could play chess. And now, as he looked at Mrs Suvorin, he idly asked: ‘Do you play chess?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but it bores me.’

As for Mrs Suvorin, whether she played chess or not, there was no doubt about her intelligence. Although recently he had heard that the authorities wanted to arrest him, Popov had managed to come discreetly to the house several times in the last two years. Each time, she had questioned him carefully about his beliefs; and though she had declined to read any Marx, it seemed to him that she was genuinely interested in what he told her.

It was also becoming clear that she was interested in him.

But why? From the first it had occurred to Popov that Suvorin might be unfaithful. If his wife wanted to revenge herself with an affair though, hadn’t she plenty of her own kind to choose from? Unless of course she wanted him because he represented the revolution that would destroy her husband’s world. That, of course, would be a special kind of insult. But whether that idea amused him, or whether it would make him feel he was being used, he was not sure.

The house was quiet. She had sent the servants to bed long ago. She was sitting on a low chair in front of the fire, which was burning low, and she wore a pale blue peignoir. She seemed to be
lost in thought as he sat, his legs apart, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees.

‘Tell me,’ she said slowly, ‘why you come here.’

Popov was silent for a while before answering. There were good reasons of course. The first had been that the Bolshevik Party was short of funds. Whether he could get money out of the industrialist’s wife he had no idea, but it was worth looking into. He remembered how, not long ago, when a rich sympathizer had left a legacy to the party and his two daughters had disputed the Will, a pair of enterprising Bolsheviks, concealing their affiliation, had somehow persuaded the two women to marry them and got the money for the party that way. Even Popov had been impressed by that piece of audacity. It showed what could be done.

Yet there was more to it than that. He was frankly flattered that this proud, clever woman should feel attracted to him. Indeed, he had to confess, he felt something for her, and if his first thought had been to humiliate her, now he found himself even wondering: Could she, perhaps, be saved?

‘I find you interesting,’ he said at last.

She smiled. ‘You’re just curious?’

‘Why not?’

Certainly he was curious. Suvorin impressed him. This was not a weakling, like a Bobrov, to be brushed aside. Suvorin was powerful and intelligent, one of the great capitalists whose final overthrow would begin the revolution. How could he not be curious about the man’s world? When he entered the Suvorin house, Popov also realized that it represented something else that had been missing in his life.

For though he had travelled, and studied history and economics, Popov had never taken much interest in the arts. When he was with Mrs Suvorin, he was sometimes reminded, with a wry smile, of a conversation he had had in Switzerland last year with his friend Lenin. They had been speaking of the countess in St Petersburg when Lenin burst out: ‘Do you know, she showed me a strange thing once. A postcard of a painting called the Mona Lisa.’ He had shaken his bald head. ‘Have you ever heard of it, Popov? I hadn’t. What on earth is it about? I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’ And though Popov was not quite so prosaic as the great revolutionary, he had often to confess a sense of ignorance in Mrs Suvorin’s presence; and he would let
her lead him to one of the rooms where her husband’s modern paintings hung and stare at them, fascinated, while she explained them.

But now she was looking at him thoughtfully. ‘Tell me,’ she suddenly said, ‘if you knew, for a certainty, that all this was going to continue, that there would be no revolution for at least a hundred years, what would you do?’

It was a fair question. ‘Actually,’ he confessed, ‘I think Stolypin may succeed. So does Lenin. The revolution may not even come in my lifetime.’ He shrugged, then smiled. ‘I suppose the truth is,’ he admitted frankly, ‘I’ve spent all my life being a revolutionary and I wouldn’t know how to be anything else. It’s a vocation, you know, like any other.’

‘But in the long run, you think all this,’ she gestured round the beautifully furnished room, ‘has to go.’

‘Certainly. There isn’t room for such privilege. All men will be equal.’

‘And when the revolution comes, you will destroy the capitalists and their supporters ruthlessly.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then tell me this,’ she continued pleasantly. ‘If the revolution actually comes soon, and I choose to resist it,’ she smiled quizzically, ‘would you kill me too?’

At which, instead of answering, he frowned and paused to think.

That, she decided, was what she liked. However devious he might be in his dealings, there was still a strange if cruel honesty about him. Something almost pure. He was undoubtedly dangerous: perhaps her fascination with him was, in part, the excitement of a forbidden love. And now, rather than lie, he was calmly considering whether he would kill her or not.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t think it would be necessary. Actually,’ he added, ‘I think you could be saved.’

He did, too. She was like a bird in a cage, he often thought: trapped in this huge mansion and her bourgeois world, certainly; yet still a free spirit, capable of leaving all this behind if called to a higher purpose.

‘I suppose that’s a compliment,’ she smiled.

‘Yes. It is.’

For several more minutes they sat in silence, each conscious of the other, yet following their own thoughts.

And then the fire in the grate hissed, and spat.

The fire was low, just some brightly glowing embers amidst the ash, and the little piece of sparking cinder it threw out might easily have lain on the floor and slowly extinguished itself. But by chance it came to rest upon the edge of Mrs Suvorin’s peignoir and immediately flared up with a sharp flame. She gave a little cry and, intending to whisk her peignoir away, stupidly flicked the lighted cinder on to her lap instead.

It was nothing really. An instant more and she could have risen and stamped out the tiny fire. But seeing the fear on her face, Popov suddenly thought that she was catching fire and, without thinking more, threw himself forward, plucking the burning cinder from her in his bare hands and tossing it back into the grate. Then, grabbing a cushion, he smothered the little fire.

And now, finding him almost in her arms, Mrs Suvorin looked into his face and saw, to her surprise, a look of tenderness.

‘Don’t move,’ she said.

It was another two hours before, in the damp cold outside, young Alexander Bobrov gave up his lonely vigil. He could not understand it. The devil Popov was with her; there could be only one reason why.

And what on earth, he wondered, should be done?

At first sight, in the years 1909 and 1910, it might have seemed that the household of Professor Peter Suvorin was a place of perfect harmony.

Everyone was busy. Dimitri had two music professors now and was making rapid strides. Karpenko had entered the School of Art and was already gaining a reputation as a fellow of ideas. As was his custom, kindly Vladimir had given the young man a helping hand, inviting him frequently to his house when distinguished members of the art world were gathered there, and introducing him to several artists. And Peter Suvorin himself was particularly busy: for it was during these years that he wrote his classic
textbook,
Physics for Students
, which was to make his name familiar to a whole generation of Russian schoolboys.

These were quiet times for Russia too. To Dimitri, as he walked into the shady courtyard of the apartment building, if often seemed that, if great events were stirring in the world, their sounds had been muffled by the time they reached the narrow, tree-lined streets of Moscow. Of the doings of the Tsar, his German wife and their children in their private palaces in St Petersburg, he heard hardly anything.

Dimitri knew, too, that Stolypin and the Duma continued on their road of slow reform; though when he read the newspapers it seemed to him that the great minister, though he brought peace and prosperity, had few friends. ‘The liberals hate him for clamping down,’ Vladimir explained, ‘but the reactionaries hate him because his system of governing seems to weaken the absolute autocracy of the Tsar. He’s winning through though,’ he added.

To Dimitri, the evenings were the best of times, when the family sat together round the table and discussed the day’s events. How delightful it was, especially in the spring and summer months when his mother would prepare tea, served with raspberries, and through the open window one could see the mellow turquoise sky and hear, faintly, the singing of vespers from the church next door.

Karpenko was a constant source of conversation. While Dimitri’s studies at this time were of a gradual and private nature – he would be immersed for weeks at a time in the Beethoven piano sonatas, or in a Tchaikovsky symphony, which profound joys could not easily be shared in words – Karpenko was in a continual ferment of intellectual excitement, and hardly a week seemed to pass when he did not bring home some new discovery which changed the world. Sometimes it was a new school of painting, inaugurated in an exhibition with some name like The Blue Rose, or The Golden Fleece. One month he read the
Confessions
of the writer Gorky and some writings of a new group in St Petersburg who called themselves the God Builders, and each evening he would lecture the family: ‘Don’t you see, all through the centuries man has been like Prometheus, chained to a rock of superstition. But now, Dimitri, man is risen. The people is God. The people will be immortal. Think of it, Professor: first the people will create the revolution and be free; then, maybe one day we’ll even take
over other planets, the universe.’ And afterwards he and Dimitri would continue these weighty discussions in the room they shared, late into the night.

But the discovery of Karpenko’s that meant the most to Dimitri was something more modest. There were many poets in Moscow and St Petersburg just then; indeed, poetry was so popular that poets could even make a living at their craft. And one night Karpenko arrived with a collection of verses by some people Dimitri had not heard of before. ‘They’re a new school,’ he explained. ‘Instead of using symbols and abstract ideas they write more directly, about experience.’ Two of these in particular Dimitri loved at once. ‘I feel as if they’re writing about this very street, this very apartment and family,’ he said, delightedly. And so, at the start of their careers, he discovered two of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets: Osip Mandelstamm and Anna Akhmatova.

Yet despite Karpenko’s brilliance, it was during these evenings that Dimitri gradually came, as never before, to appreciate one other member of his close-knit family: this was his father.

Peter Suvorin seldom spoke much, but he would sit, with his gold-rimmed spectacles propped below the bridge of his nose, quietly reading a paper or looking over the pages of his manuscript. His face was clean-shaven except for a small wedge of beard on his chin; and though his hair was grey and his face, somewhat drawn, had collected little lines upon it, he still looked less than his fifty-five years. With his look of kindly serenity, one might have taken him for a Swedish pastor.

And in his gentle way, he presided over everything. ‘Do you know what your father reminds me of?’ Karpenko once laughingly remarked to Dimitri. ‘He’s like one of those elders at a monastery. We all worship and make a noise and believe. But the elder in his hermitage, he’s quiet and serene: because unlike the rest of us, he
knows
. That’s how it is with your father and the revolution.’

Indeed, Peter Suvorin had reason to be content with his modest, steady course. The Bolsheviks in the last two years had little to show for their extremism. Police spies had infiltrated their ranks and made it hard for them to operate. Their lonely leader Lenin seemed to have been forced into permanent exile in Switzerland and their membership had plummeted. But the moderate, Menshevik Socialists had continued about their business,
gradually building up support in the factories, organizing trade unions, educating and publishing – mostly legal activities. Some were ready to work with the Duma. There was even talk of changing the party’s name to the Workers’ Party. And Peter Suvorin was happy because, as he would tell his family: ‘It’s progress.

‘The new age is coming,’ he liked to say, ‘not because of your will, Karpenko, nor even the cunning of a fellow like Popov. You shouldn’t worry about the now or the when: we do not know the hour or the manner of its coming. The point is that we know the process is inevitable.’

Once, with a smile, the professor had remarked: ‘It occurred to me as I was working on my book the other day, that the Marxist Dialectic is like the laws of physics. Consider an electric current. It has a positive and negative charge: Thesis and Antithesis – they create a tension, the potential difference. They flow together, making a Synthesis. When Trotsky speaks of a permanent revolution in the world – a continuous process – I suppose it’s like an electric current: endless, dynamic, capable of powering anything.’ Listening to his father Dimitri would get a wonderful sense that all things in the universe were scientifically related, and that his little family, with their different forms of expression, were all moving along the great highway to an ultimate and marvellous destiny.

Nothing ever seemed to change the professor. He taught; he wrote; his pupils came to the house. His life was as quiet and ordered as his mind. Whatever else was going on, Peter’s activities gave the household a certain rhythm and purpose. It was comforting.