Russka (152 page)

Dimitri turned. There were three of them. They let him kiss his wife and little girl. The music rested on the table. They turned to go.

The little boy was there in the hall. Whatever they had told him at school had not been enough. Now, seeing his father being taken away, he had suddenly broken down.

Dimitri picked him up in his arms and held him. He hugged him close.

‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘You understand? I knew, but it’s all right. The music’s for you.’

Then he, too, went out into a colder, darker night.

Ivanov was the local party chief at Russka that year. Not a bad sort of fellow. He had a deputy named Smirnov.

Between them they were looking at the list. Twenty-five names were required. They had got to twenty-three; at last found a twenty-fourth; but they were still a man short.

He had to be found, of course. Twenty-five names of enemies of the people. That was the funny thing about a purge. The top people, of course, were carefully chosen: but down here, you just got a quota you had to fill in. ‘There must be someone,’ he said.

And then he remembered Yevgeny Popov.

He was a strange figure, very quiet, who was living out his retirement in a small house at the edge of the town. He grew
cabbages and radishes in his garden, and kept himself fit by walking each day to the nearby village and back. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen him recently.

‘Is Popov alive?’ he enquired. His deputy said he was. ‘He’ll do then,’ Ivanov suggested.

‘But he’s in his eighties,’ Smirnov protested. ‘He’s one of the real old Bolsheviks. A loyal man.’

The chief considered. ‘If he goes back so far,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘he must have known a lot of people.’

‘He knew Lenin.’

‘Maybe. Perhaps he also knew Trotsky.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

It suddenly occurred to Ivanov that the little house where Popov lived would do very well for a cousin of his wife’s.

‘Number 25: Yevgeny Pavlovich Popov,’ he wrote. ‘Suspected collaborator with Trotsky.’

And so, at the age of eighty-four, Yevgeny Popov was surprised to be sent to a gulag.

It was a warm afternoon as Ivan walked past Russka and made his way towards the village. The sky was clear. A few clouds drifted up from the south. There was a pleasant smell in the fields and a dustiness everywhere, as there is at harvest time.

He was home from the war. In all but name, it was over – the Great Patriotic War.

He had fought well, nearly lost his life several times; but, along with every other soldier on the front, he had been sustained by two pieces of knowledge: he was fighting for the fatherland; and Comrade Stalin was commanding everything. It was well known, by now, that there was almost nothing the great leader could not do. The war, thank God, was almost done with. It was time to stay at home, and build a new, bright future.

And it was smiling at this thought that he came out of the wood and saw the big village field before him where the women were slowly stooping with their sickles as they had since time began.

And then his mother Arina looked up and saw him, and
forgetting her age, came running across the field, her arms outstretched, towards him.

So this was the day. Paul Bobrov was up early and before six o’clock he was ready to leave.

The Hotel Aurora wasn’t a bad place. Comparatively new and situated near Red Square, it was a nine-storey concrete structure whose rooms had been designed and furnished by a Finnish enterprise. The beds and chest of drawers were all of a piece, made of pale wood, and ran along one wall like a bench. The beds were not uncomfortable, but hard and narrow and it occurred to Paul that Russian hotels were certainly not places designed for sexual encounters, despite the opportunities which existed in the form of the score or so of pretty girls who infiltrated past his doorman into the lobby and the bars, looking for customers each evening.

A pale sunlight was coming through the windows as he made his way towards the elevator bank. Bobrov glanced at his watch. In fifteen minutes he would be on his way to the old Bobrov estate.

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 explained, ‘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?’