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.