Russka (141 page)

And, by the summer of 1910, Dimitri was certainly in need of comfort.

For by then it was clear that Rosa Suvorin was going mad.

For some months after Dimitri’s accident, Rosa’s habitual anxiousness seemed to have lessened. It was as if, fearing something worse, she was actually relieved that tragedy had struck and that now it was over. But then, just around the time Peter began writing his book, something began to change.

Why did she insist upon typing his book herself? Several times he had begged her to let him give the work to someone else, but on each occasion she had gone white with determination, as though
he were somehow trying to violate her act of passionate devotion, and he had given up.

Each night, after supper was finished, she would set up her typewriter in the little dining room and start to work. She refused to do this during the day, saying she had no time then. Over and over again, she would type whatever Peter had written, until she was satisfied that it was perfect. Sometimes she would be done in an hour or so; but often she would continue, late into the night, lovingly placing her offering on the table in the hall in the early hours, and appear in the morning with eyes dark from lack of sleep. And how many nights, Dimitri wondered, had he fallen asleep to the faint sound of the typewriter going tap, tap, tap in the darkness?

Worse however than this obsessive behaviour, which wore Rosa down, was the reawakening of her old anxiousness, which now returned with a vengeance.

It took strange forms. If there were the faintest chill in the air, Peter must have an overcoat and a fur hat; if the sun was warm, she feared for sunstroke; whenever there was ice upon the ground, she knew he must have slipped and injured himself. This anxiety soon extended to cover Dimitri as well. Sometimes, to his great embarrassment, she would even insist that Karpenko go with him to school, in case anything should happen to him on the way. She could only relax, it seemed, in the evenings, when her husband and son were safely at home again.

Then she began to follow them. At first, they did not even realize that she was doing so: she would have some perfectly plausible excuse – a friend to visit, some shopping to do – for accompanying Peter to the university or Dimitri to school. But before long the excuses wore out and it became clear that she simply wanted to keep them in sight. Peter, who went in to the university only twice a week, decided to humour her; but Dimitri had to beg her to let him alone, and often thereafter he would turn irritably, to find her pale, wan face a hundred yards behind him.

More embarrassing were her suspicions.

They came, it seemed, from nowhere. Yet they tortured her. She would decide, quite suddenly, that a fellow professor was out to get Peter, or a neighbour with whom she was on friendly terms was a police spy, watching her whole family. She would earnestly
warn Dimitri that there was a hidden conspiracy, coming from the Black Hundreds, to destroy all Jews and Socialists. ‘Anyone may be in it,’ she would warn him, ‘you never know.’ And no one, it seemed, was above suspicion.

In the first months of 1910, Karpenko became agitated because the government, having allowed the Ukraine some cultural freedom, became nervous of the growing sense of nationalism emerging there. ‘The word is that they are about to close all the Ukrainian cultural societies,’ he told them dejectedly. ‘We Cossacks should rise up again as we did under Bogdan,’ he added wryly, ‘and take over the Ukraine again.’

It was an innocent statement, said jokingly. But suddenly Rosa’s face clouded. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she demanded. ‘What sort of uprising?’ And for some ten minutes she cross-questioned the youth suspiciously. And afterwards, when Dimitri asked her what the matter was, she turned to him with a troubled face and explained: ‘Don’t you realize, the Cossack rising was the greatest massacre of Jews that Russia has ever seen.’ ‘But you surely don’t think …?’ ‘You never know, Dimitri. You can never be sure of anybody.’ And he could only shake his head.

It was a week after this incident, when the two of them happened to be alone, that Rosa sat him down at the kitchen table and said to him earnestly: ‘I want you to make me one promise, Dimitri. Will you do it for me?’

‘If I can,’ he replied.

‘Promise me, then, that you will be a musician. That you will never become a revolutionary, like your father, but that you will stick to music.’

Dimitri shrugged. Since he had every hope of devoting his life to music this did not seem too hard a thing to promise. ‘All right,’ he said.

‘Your word?’

‘Yes.’ He smiled, half irritated, half with love and pity at Rosa. How haggard her face looked. ‘Why?’

She gazed at him sadly. It occurred to Dimitri that the seers of ancient times, like Cassandra in Greek tragedy, might have looked a little like his mother, with huge, sorrowful eyes that seemed to see beyond the present, into a terrible future. ‘You don’t understand,’ she told him. ‘Only Jewish musicians will be safe. Only musicians.’

And there was nothing he could say at this obvious sign of madness.

Several times, in the spring of 1910, Peter tried to persuade Rosa to see a doctor, but she would not hear of it. He discussed the matter with his brother Vladimir, who twice came to the apartment and suggested she should go down to Russka for peace and quiet. This however she also rejected. ‘I’m going to Germany in May,’ he informed Peter. ‘I believe there’s a doctor there who could help her.’ But though Peter was agreeable, Rosa utterly refused even to consider it. And no one knew quite what to do.

It was at the start of May that Dimitri overheard a strange conversation which, even in retrospect, continued to puzzle him.

He and Karpenko were spending the evening with Nadezhda. As usual the time had passed delightfully and after a long discussion about music he had suggested he play them the Tchaikovsky
Seasons
, only to find that the music was not in the house. He had returned to the apartment, therefore, with the aim of collecting the score and hurrying back to the big Suvorin house to play it.

He knew that his mother was alone that evening, since Peter was out at a meeting nearby. He was surprised therefore, upon opening the door, to hear voices coming from the little drawing room off the hall. They belonged to his mother and to Vladimir. His mother’s for some reason was only a faint murmur, but Vladimir’s rich voice he could hear clearly.

‘I’m more concerned with you. This can’t go on. For God’s sake, my dear, come away with me to Germany.’

Then his mother’s voice, too soft to make out.

‘Nothing will happen to anyone.’

Another murmur.

‘I tell you truthfully, the boy’s better off here at present. There are no better music teachers in the world than in Russia.’

Now there was a longer pause. Dimly he heard his mother say something about a letter. Then his uncle’s voice again.

‘Yes, yes. I give you my word. Of course I can arrange it. If anything happens I’ll get him out. Yes, Dimitri shall go to America if that is what you wish.’

After this there was a long silence, and then he thought he heard his mother sobbing. Instead of collecting his music, he
quietly withdrew and returned to his friends saying that he had been unable to find it. But later that night, as he lay awake in his room and listened to the faint tap, tap, tap of his mother’s typewriter he wondered: what on earth would he want with America?

There was no question about it. Mrs Suvorin had scored one of the greatest coups of her social career so far. A personal triumph.

For in mid-June 1910, the week after All Saints Day, she entertained the monk, Rasputin.

He had said he would come in the afternoon and take tea. It was therefore an intimate gathering that Mrs Suvorin had prepared, consisting of family members, some of her more important friends, and those few women who, over the years, had deliberately or inadvertently hurt her vanity, and who now could not fail to be impressed by this visitor who was known to be on intimate terms with the imperial family.

Vladimir was still abroad, but she kindly invited Peter Suvorin and Rosa, and naturally Dimitri and Karpenko accompanied them. And so it was that the two youths found themselves in a company of forty or so persons eagerly awaiting the arrival of the strange man.

It was five years since Rasputin had first appeared before the Tsar, but much about him was still a mystery. People called him a holy man – though he was never a monk, as some supposed. Indeed, though he seldom bothered to see them, he had a wife and family in the distant Urals. And though voices had been raised in the capital about his lewd behaviour, many credited him with supernatural powers. ‘He’s a real hermit from the Russian forests,’ Karpenko told Dimitri. ‘They say he walked to the capital all the way from Siberia.’ He gave a little laugh: ‘He’s supposed to have the power of second sight, you know. Just watch his eyes.’ What everyone knew however, and what made him nowadays a figure to be courted by fashionable ladies, was the fact that he had a devoted admirer in the Empress.

What did she see in him? Few people knew. The imperial household was a little world apart, utterly cut off from the rest of society by a phalanx of noble courtiers from old service families who thought it their duty to separate the monarchy from the barbarous Russian people as far as possible. The Tsar, his
German wife, his daughters and the heir to the throne, the little Tsarevich, were as hidden from even prominent subjects as the family of an oriental despot.

And that the heir to the throne had a terrible disease that made him bleed, and threatened his life, and that this extraordinary, hypnotic peasant from Siberia seemed able to cure it, not even rich Mrs Suvorin had the least idea.

If Mrs Suvorin had intended to stage a memorable little occasion, she was afraid for a short time that her efforts might collapse in ruins, since Rasputin was extremely late. But at last the doors opened, conversation dropped, and a black-clothed figure was ushered in. After which, all the company stared in surprise. For he was not what they had expected.

‘I thought he’d be taller,’ Karpenko whispered, in obvious disappointment.

The man who was the imperial family’s confidant, and who knew the most terrible medical secret in the Russian empire, was hardly an impressive figure. He was only of medium height: the top of his head reached no higher than the base of Mrs Suvorin’s coiffure. He was rather slightly built with a narrow chest and sloping shoulders. His long, dark hair was parted in the middle; his beard, which hardly reached the top of his chest, was rather wiry. His blunt nose veered noticeably away to the left. He wore a simple, long coat of black silk that reached below his knees. He might have been a small-time priest from one of a thousand villages. Though his clothes were clean and his beard combed, there was a faint, acrid smell from his body that suggested he washed himself less often than other men.

He bowed politely to everyone in the room and seemed grateful when Mrs Suvorin led him to a sofa, and offered him tea.

The little party, however, soon seemed to be going rather well. Mrs Suvorin, rather meeker than usual, sat and made polite conversation with her honoured guest. The imperial family was mentioned and pious sentiments about them expressed. Various people were brought over to speak to Rasputin and for each, it seemed, he had kind and modest words. When Nadezhda was introduced, he politely told her mother that the girl had a beautiful nature. To Peter Suvorin he respectfully said: ‘You study the wonders of God’s universe.’

‘There doesn’t seem anything so remarkable about him,’ Dimitri remarked to Karpenko.

He was to revise this opinion somewhat, however, a few minutes later when Mrs Suvorin motioned him to approach. For it was only now, as he came face to face with Rasputin, that he encountered that strange man’s most extraordinary feature.

While he observed him before, it had seemed to Dimitri that the fellow’s eyes were rather foxy: curious, watchful, probably cunning as, from under his heavy peasant brow, their gaze darted here and there about the room. But now, finding them turned and fixed upon himself, Dimitri experienced their full effect.

They burned: there was no other word for it. They were like two searchlights, boring through the darkness, and everything else about the man was forgotten as one felt their astonishing, primal force. Only when he drew very close did the hypnotic gaze seem to soften and the eyes appear kindly, if a little bloodshot.

‘A musician. Ah, yes.’ That was all Rasputin said to him. It seemed he was not especially interested in Dimitri, though for some reason, after he had returned to his place, the boy felt a strange tingling sensation in his back.

Despite this little glimpse of Rasputin’s power, the rest of the visit passed quietly enough; and it might have remained in Dimitri’s mind as nothing more than a social event but for two small incidents that took place shortly before Rasputin left. The first concerned his mother.

Rosa had already been introduced, just after Peter, and apart from a polite bow, Rasputin had appeared to take no notice of her at all. Indeed, he was not even looking in her direction when suddenly, as if impelled, he rose from the sofa, turned, and walking swiftly over to where she was standing, took hold of her forearm with one hand and stood there, like a doctor feeling a pulse, quite silent for almost a minute. Then, without a word, he calmly let the arm drop and returned to his place, continuing his conversation with Mrs Suvorin as though nothing had happened. As for Rosa, though everyone else looked awkward, she did not blush, or even look startled, but stood very still, and neither then nor later did she ever refer to the incident.

The more frightening occurrence took place as Rasputin was leaving.

For some reason, after watching him for a while, Karpenko had
suddenly decided he did not want to meet Rasputin. When it looked as if Mrs Suvorin was about to summon him, he had slipped away to a far corner of the room. And as the visitor finally rose to take his leave, Karpenko watched discreetly from behind the cover of two elderly ladies.