What a treasure she was, this baby Arina. She was fair-skinned with very light brown hair, and though one could not exactly call her pretty, there was a quietness and simplicity in her rather square, peasant’s face that was very attractive. She had a quietness about her, like a nun, that made her a pleasant, peaceful presence in any room she entered. She was very devout. Anna and she would often walk over to the monastery, shawls tied over their heads, so that from a distance one could not have said which was lady and which was peasant. Yet she had also learned from her grandmother a huge fund of folk tales, and when she recited these, her gentle face and blue eyes would seem to glow with pleasure and with quiet amusement. Besides her daily nursing, it was this knowledge in which old Misha rejoiced. ‘Tell me, little Arina, about the Fox and the Cat,’ Nicolai would hear his father’s voice weakly rasping as he passed the room. Or: ‘Pass me that book, little Arina – those Fairy Tales by Pushkin. He has a story like the one you tell.’
‘Your tales remind me of when I was a boy,’ he would tell the girl. ‘Isn’t it funny? We used to call your old grandmother young Arina then. And the tales you know come from another Arina – her aunt, I suppose – who was still alive when I was young.’ And to Nicolai he would say: ‘This young Arina, you know, she is the real Russia, the enduring heartland. Always remember that.’ And sometimes, looking at her affectionately, he would doze off and dream of those sunlit days when Pushkin was still alive, and his Uncle Sergei was putting on theatricals at Bobrovo.
‘If your father gets his health back, it’ll be thanks to that girl,’ Anna told her son. And indeed, Misha did seem to be gradually recovering his strength.
After three weeks Nicolai made a brief visit to St Petersburg to see his wife and children. Then he returned.
But there remained one huge problem: the promised grain supplies never arrived. ‘And I shan’t get well,’ old Misha declared, ‘until they do.’ Messengers were sent to the governor by the zemstvo and by Suvorin. Nicolai offered to return to St Petersburg to try to see certain high officials there. Every few days news came that the arrival of the grain was imminent, and everybody prepared. They still had a month’s supply in hand, then three weeks, then two.
It was in mid-February that the message came through to the local zemstvo. It was quite simple.
It was regretted that, owing to problems of transport and storage, the grain shipments previously notified would not be made.
And that was all.
‘Do they realize what this means?’ old Misha gasped from his bed. ‘It means the people here are going to die. No one’s even caught a fish in the river for two weeks. Two-thirds of the livestock has gone. Our people will be finished. I can’t believe that even those fools in the bureaucracy would do such a thing.’
The news was round the whole area in hours. And when Nicolai went into the village that day, he was hardly shocked when Boris Romanov shouted at him: ‘So, the people in St Petersburg have decided to kill us – is that it? Do they want our carcasses for meat?’ Nor was he surprised that this was greeted by nods of approval from the other villagers.
A week passed. The peasants were sullen. Another week. Many of the grain stores were now empty. A silence descended upon the village.
And then, one morning, grain began to arrive.
It was an extraordinary sight, lines of sleds, arriving from God knew where: a dozen; two dozen; three dozen. It was like a supply train for a small army. The sleds made their way ponderously into Russka where, it seemed, Suvorin’s managers were ready to receive them at one of the warehouses. But a dozen of the sleds peeled off and made their way through the woods towards the village of Bobrovo. When they reached it, they continued up the slope to the house of Misha Bobrov; and as they approached, and people came to the windows of the house to watch them in astonishment, it could be seen that, riding in the front sled, was a large and powerful figure – a figure who, wrapped in furs, his face glowing in the icy air, for once truly did resemble a mighty Russian bear. And it was the bear-like Vladimir Suvorin who now, with a happy grin, got down from the sled, strode over to where Misha – so excited that he had insisted on leaving his bed – was standing wrapped in a blanket, and gave him a mighty, bear hug. ‘There, Mikhail Alexeevich, I’ve brought you and your village some grain. We can’t have my old friend going hungry.’
‘I told you he’d do it!’ Misha cried to his son and his wife. ‘I told you only Suvorin could pull it off. But how the devil,’ he remarked to the industrialist, ‘did you manage to prize it out of the governor, after they told us they had nothing?’
‘My dear friend, you don’t understand. The authorities have nothing. No one is being supplied.’
Misha frowned. ‘Then this?’
The other grinned again. ‘I bought it myself. My agents found it and shipped it all the way from the south. It’s nothing to do with the authorities.’
For several seconds Misha was silent, unable to speak. Nicolai saw tears well up into the old man’s eyes. He held on to Suvorin’s sleeve, then muttered: ‘How can I thank you, Vladimir Ivanovich?’ And shaking his head: ‘What can I say?’
But it was after a moment’s thoughtful silence that Misha Bobrov suddenly made his extraordinary outburst. Throwing back his head, and gathering all his strength, he shouted out in a paroxysm of frustration, shame, and contempt: ‘Damn those people! Damn that governor! Damn the government in St Petersburg. I tell you, these people are useless to us. Let them give power to the local zemstvos since they are incompetent to govern themselves.’
He shouted it in front of the servants, the drivers, and several villagers. He did not seem to care. It came straight from his heart. Misha Bobrov, landowner, noble, liberal but loyal monarchist, was done with his government. So, Nicolai knew, were other landowners and zemstvo men all over the central provinces that winter of famine.
And so it was on this day, in after years, that Nicolai Bobrov would look back and murmur: ‘That was the start of the revolution.’
It was in early spring that the first outbreak began.
It started in the group of huts that straggled along the river bank below the little town of Russka. Why it should have started there no one knew. Perhaps because there was an old rubbish tip there – perhaps not.
At first, when several people suffered from diarrhoea, no one took much notice. But then, after two days, one man suddenly experienced a violent discharge from his bowels of whitish and yellowish matter, like whey. Shortly after, he vomited more of the same, then cried out that the pit of his stomach was on fire, and screamed for water. The next day he suffered acute cramps in the legs and his body started to turn blue. His eyes became so sunken he resembled a skeleton and when he spoke, his voice was only a hoarse whisper. When his wife tried his pulse, she could feel nothing. Just before the following dawn he died.
After his death, his body remained strangely warm for some time. His wife said it had grown hotter. She also noticed that, well after death, the corpse suffered muscular twitches and spasms, which frightened her.
And within a few more hours, all Russka knew that cholera had arrived.
‘If we can just keep it out of the village.’ This was Misha Bobrov’s litany each day. ‘Of course,’ he would say, ‘if Russia was properly run, the whole area would be sealed off. There’d be a cordon sanitaire.’ But neither local nor provincial administration could attempt such a thing: people came and went. Thanks, however, to the efforts of the two Bobrovs and of Suvorin, a sort of informal quarantine was in force that seemed to be limiting the terrible cholera’s spread.