‘I just mean, sir, you and I know who did it,’ Boris said boldly.
‘Do I? And who might that be?’ It was said with a faint smile, but to his annoyance Misha could feel his heart pounding. Could the fellow really know?
‘That red-haired devil Popov,’ Boris replied with confidence.
Thank God! He knew nothing. The insolent young peasant was bluffing.
‘Then you know more than I do,’ Misha replied blandly. ‘And now, since you are being impertinent, you’d better get out.’ He glowered at Boris. ‘If I hear another word of this, I’ll lodge a complaint with the police,’ he added, then turned his back while, crimson and furious, Boris departed.
This interview marked the beginning of an unspoken but permanent coolness between the Bobrovs and the Romanovs. No further help came from Misha Bobrov even to Timofei: the landlord preferred to ignore them. Timofei regretted this, but as he said to his son: ‘After what you did, I can hardly look him in the eye.’
As for Boris, though he had been humiliated, the interview had done nothing to shake his suspicions. Indeed, as time went on and he brooded about the subject further, he found more and more reasons to confirm his belief. I saw him blush, he remembered. He knew something, all right. And it seemed ever clearer to him that – even if he could not fathom the business – there had been a conspiracy. That red-head, those damned Bobrovs, maybe even the Suvorins too for all I know – they’re all in it somehow, he concluded. They killed Natalia.
And in his rage he came to two decisions which he would never alter as long as he lived. The first, which he shared with his father, was very simple: One day, I’ll meet that accursed red-head Popov again: and when I do, I’ll kill him.
The second decision he kept to himself, though he was no less determined to carry it out. I’ll ruin that landowner who sits on the land that should be ours, he promised himself. Before I die I’ll see those damned Bobrovs thrown out. I’ll do it for Natalia. And so, in the village below their house, the Bobrov family acquired a mortal enemy.
But these undercurrents caused no ripple on the placid surface of the village’s life. By the following year, it seemed that the events of 1874 had receded into obscurity. The red-headed student Popov was apparently forgotten; and in the town of Russka, only occasionally did anyone trouble to ask: whatever became of young Peter Suvorin?
Revolution
1881, September
The Tsar was dead: assassinated. Even now, months later, the ten-year-old girl found it hard to believe.
Why were there such wicked people in the world? For the last three years there had been killings – policemen, officials, even a governor. And now, with a terrible bomb, they had killed the good man, the reforming Tsar Alexander II himself. Rosa could not understand it.
Who would do such a thing? A terrible group, it seemed: the People’s Will, they called themselves. No one had known who they were or how many: perhaps twenty, perhaps ten thousand. What did they want? Revolution: the destruction of the whole apparatus of the Russian state that ruled its people from on high. Month after month, the People’s Will had hunted the Tsar; now they had destroyed him, as if to say: ‘See, your mighty state is only a sham. Against us, even the Tsar himself is impotent, to be destroyed when we wish.’ And now, with the poor Tsar dead, they had supposed the people would rise up.
‘Which shows how little these revolutionaries know,’ her father had said.
For nothing had happened. Not a village had risen, nor a single factory. The shocking event had been greeted only by a huge Russian silence. The Tsar’s son – the third Alexander – had succeeded to the throne and at once imposed order. There had been a huge crackdown; many of the revolutionaries had been arrested and most of the Russian Empire was at present under martial law. The People’s Will had failed, God be praised. Russia was calm and at peace.
Or so it had seemed. Until this new and horrible business – so inexplicable to her, so terrifying – had begun. And once again, as she had done so many times in recent months, Rosa wondered why there were such wicked people in the world.
‘They will not come here,’ her father had promised. But what if he were wrong?
It was early afternoon – a quiet time in this peaceful southern village at the border of forest and steppe. Few people were moving about; Rosa’s parents were resting on the upper floor of the solid, thatched house. Although it was autumn, down here in the Ukraine the weather was still warm. Through the open window, Rosa could see the apple tree in the courtyard and smell the sweet scent of a honeysuckle bush nearby.
Rosa was a beautiful girl. Her pale, oval face, long neck, and a certain slow grace in her movements had made some of the villagers call her ‘the swan maiden’. Her raven hair was worn in a thick braid down her back. She had a long nose and full lips. But her most striking features were her eyes. Dark-lidded, framed under the strong, black arch of her eyebrows, they were huge, blue-grey and luminous, gazing solemnly out at the world like a figure in an ancient mosaic.
She sat by a piano. She was not playing, now, but the music she had been practising that morning – a piece by Tchaikovsky – was echoing in her mind. As she stared out at the blue sky, she went over each phrase, each haunting melody, trying them this way and that until she was satisfied.
Hers was the only piano in the village. She would never forget the magical day when it arrived on a little barge coming upriver. Her father had saved for a year to buy it and brought it all the way from Kiev. All the neighbours had come out to watch as he and her two brothers proudly escorted this wonder to their house. She had been only seven when a visiting cousin, a musician, had told them she was a prodigy. The very next year she had gone to live with that family, during term time, down in the big city of Odessa on the Black Sea coast, where there were fine music teachers. Already she had given a public performance and people were saying she would be a professional musician.
‘As long as her health holds up,’ her mother would gloomily say. It was true: that nagging problem with her chest was often with her. Sometimes she would have to rest for days at a time, when she was longing to go back to school. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ her father promised her: and how she prayed that he was right. How she wanted to live her life for music.
For once Rosa stepped into that kingdom, everything else became unimportant. Sometimes it seemed to her that music was in everything: as absolute as mathematics, as infinite as the universe itself. Music was in the trees, in the flowers, in the endless steppe; music filled the whole sky. She wanted only to pray, and to learn.
And here was the strange conundrum which had puzzled her for several months, and which today made her thoughtful and melancholy.
For if God had made this beautiful world, and given it music, and if she, it seemed, might have been chosen to serve His musical purpose and to play for Him, then why were there evil men, planning to kill her?
Laid out on the east side of the little river, the village’s comfortable thatched houses with their whitewashed walls stretched on each side of the broad dirt road for nearly a mile. Several, like the house where her parents lived, had little orchards behind them. Near the river there was a market square; and just downstream stood a distillery. Indeed, in the poorer Russian north where settlements were smaller than in the Ukraine, such a place would have been called a town.
It was also quite prosperous. To the huge fields of wheat on the rich black earth of the steppe, two new and valuable crops had been added in recent times: sugarbeet and tobacco. Both were sold to merchants who exported them through the ports on the warm Black Sea, and thanks to this trade and the region’s natural abundance, the peasants lived well.