For the men surrounding them had already burned down some Jewish houses in Pereiaslav the week before and now they were travelling round the local villages looking for more fun.
‘Time to get started,’ someone cried. There was laughter. The huge man with the brown beard, accompanied by the little old man, stepped towards Rosa’s father as she looked around desperately. She wanted to scream.
And it was just then that, twenty yards away, the stout cart bearing the massive form of Taras Karpenko and his son creaked into the street, and the two Cossacks caught sight of them.
‘Thank God,’ Rosa heard her mother whisper. ‘He can save us.’
The big Cossack did not hurry. He drove his cart calmly towards them, and the men parted to let it through. With his flowing moustaches and his powerful frame, he was a commanding figure. When he reached the edge of the circle round the little family, he pulled up and glanced down enquiringly at the fellow with the brown beard. ‘Good day,’ he remarked pleasantly. ‘What’s up?’
The peasant looked at the Cossack and shrugged. ‘Nothing much. Just teaching this Jew a lesson.’
Karpenko nodded thoughtfully. ‘He’s not a bad fellow,’ he remarked placidly.
Thank God. Thank God indeed for the big, powerful farmer. Rosa looked up at him gratefully. He would send these men about their business. She was so relieved that, for a moment, she did not fully take in the conversation that followed.
‘He’s still a Jew,’ the peasant objected.
‘True.’ The thickset Cossack glanced round at the men. ‘What do you plan to do?’
‘Burn his house and thrash him.’
Karpenko nodded again and glanced a little sadly at Rosa’s father. Then he spoke to him.
‘I’m afraid, my friend, you’re going to have rather a rough time.’
What was he saying? Rosa stared at him in disbelief. What could he mean? Her father’s friend, the man whose children she had played Cossacks and Robbers with – wasn’t he going to help them? In astonishment she saw him take up the reins. He was turning the horse’s head – leaving them.
A mist seemed to form in front of her eyes; she felt suddenly nauseous; and before her a great, cold gulf – something she had never imagined was there – seemed to be opening wide: wide as an ocean.
He was on the side of these men.
‘Father!’ It was young Ivan. Rosa blinked through the haze of her tears and stared up at him. The boy was white, trembling; he was standing up in the cart. How slim, almost frail, he looked, yet so tense, so passionate that he seemed to radiate an extraordinary strength. He was looking down at the heavyset Cossack. ‘Father! We can’t.’
And Taras stopped the cart.
Slowly, rather unwillingly, Karpenko turned to the big peasant with the brown beard. ‘They come with us,’ he said gruffly.
‘There are fifty of us, Cossack,’ cried the little old man. ‘You can do nothing.’
But Taras Karpenko, though he glanced round at the crowd, only shook his head. Then turning to the big peasant again he explained, a little sheepishly: ‘I owe this Jew a personal favour.’ He motioned Rosa and her parents to climb into the cart.
‘Call yourself a Cossack? Jew lover! We’ll come and burn your farm down too,’ shouted the old man. But nobody stopped the Abramovichs from getting into the cart.
‘I’m afraid your house will be burned down,’ Karpenko said in a matter-of-fact way to Rosa’s father. But I’ve saved you a thrashing.’ Then he flicked the reins and the cart started slowly down the street.
As they went out of the village, Rosa stared back. The men were busy smashing the windows of her house. She saw the old man going inside with a lighted torch. They are going to burn my piano, she thought: the piano her father had saved a whole year to buy for her. She looked at him. He was sitting in the cart, shaking. There were tears in his eyes, and her mother’s arms were round him. Rosa had never seen her father cry before and she supposed it was not possible to love anyone more than, at that moment, she loved him.
Then her thoughts turned back to the Karpenkos. Ivan had saved them. As long as she lived, she told herself, she would never forget that.
But she would also remember his father, their friend. He would have left them. And she thought of something else her father had once told her: ‘Remember, Rosa, if you are a Jew, you can never trust. Not completely.’ She would remember.
1891, December
Nicolai Bobrov told himself he should not worry too much.
The message from his father had been disquieting, of course – there was no denying it. He also felt a pang of guilt. But I dare say when I get there, it won’t be so bad, he reasoned. Then he sighed.
It was a long way to be travelling alone. As the covered sled whisked him through the broad streets of St Petersburg towards the station, Nicolai gazed out comfortably. He loved the mighty city. Even on a grey day like this, it seemed to have a dull, almost luminous glow. And, it had to be said, Nicolai was a comfortable fellow.
Like any other gentleman in the western world, he wore a frock coat, somewhat shorter than in earlier decades, with a single vent behind and two small cloth-covered buttons in the small of the back. His trousers were rather narrow, of a very thick cloth, and to a later generation might have seemed rather untidy, for the fashion of giving trousers a crease had scarcely come into use as yet. His shoes were polished and boned so that they twinkled and gleamed. Across his waistcoat hung a gold chain from his fob watch. His shirt was white with a stiff detachable collar; around this was a narrow silk cravat with polka dots, tied in a loose bow that gave him a faintly artistic appearance. The only parts of his clothing that were particularly Russian were the big greatcoat with a fur collar, which he had undone inside the enclosed sled, and the fur hat that lay on the seat beside him.
Nicolai Bobrov was thirty-seven. The hair on his head and the neat, pointed beard he favoured were prematurely greying. His nose seemed to have grown more hooked, giving his face something of the Turkish cast of his ancestors; but the face had few lines and still often wore the same, open look it had possessed in the days when he was a student trying to persuade his father’s peasants to usher in a new world.
How far away those days seemed. Nicolai was a family man now. He had a daughter; an elder son, named Mikhail after his grandfather; and this last year there had been a new baby, a boy they had called Alexander. In his pocket now he was proudly carrying a photograph, pasted on board, of the little boy. If asked his politics nowadays, he would certainly reply, in a general way: ‘I am a liberal.’
If the revolutionary fervour of his student days had not lasted, it was not surprising. Nicolai had never forgotten the humiliation of 1874. ‘The peasants weren’t even interested,’ he had soon confessed. He had felt cheated by Popov too. ‘He was just an opportunist who made a fool of me,’ he told his parents. And a few years later, when the terrorists killed the Tsar, he had only shaken his head sadly. ‘Even a Tsar is better than chaos,’ he nowadays declared. To which he would add: ‘Russia will be a free democracy one day; but the truth is, we aren’t ready yet. It’ll take a generation, maybe two.’ Until then, thank God, Russia was quiet.