‘I am putting you in charge of the Committee,’ Popov said with a smile. ‘How’s that?’
There would be a Committee on paper, anyway. He wondered how long the boy would last.
It was late afternoon when Popov, satisfied with his day’s work, returned to Russka. On his way, he passed the monastery. It was empty now. The monks had been forced to abandon their home after the confiscations of January; but strangely enough, hoping that the government might relent or be overthrown, they had left everything in place. An old priest who still resided in the town kept an eye on things.
Since he was here, it occurred to Popov he might as well inspect the monastery too. ‘We’ll go in,’ he said.
It was entirely empty and very quiet. The kitchens and storehouse had been ransacked at some point, and a few of the windows had been broken, but otherwise the monastery had not been harmed. Popov walked all over it, carefully, by himself. When he had finished, he was glad he had taken the trouble; he made a brief note: ‘Monastery at Russka will make an excellent small prison or detention house. Inform Cheka.’
He had certainly done a good day’s work.
When he returned to the entrance, he found that the soldiers had built a small bonfire. The young commissar was busy carrying things out of the church to burn. Popov looked at him in mild surprise: the objects he was carrying were icons. ‘I didn’t know you were so strongly anti-religion,’ he remarked mildly.
‘Oh, yes. Aren’t we all?’
Popov shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’
He glanced at the icon the fellow was tossing on the fire. It looked vaguely familiar. ‘I think that one may be rather good,’ he remarked.
‘No such thing as a good icon,’ the other replied.
‘Perhaps.’ He watched the little object begin to burn. Its lines had a remarkable grace.
And so disappeared the greatest gift of the Bobrovs to the little religious house: the icon by the great Rublev.
As darkness fell that summer night, long after the little bonfire in the monastery had died down, a single figure emerged from the woods below the village to the river bank where Arina was waiting with a small boat.
Ivan had been hiding since the soldiers left. After the events of that afternoon, he had no choice. Would the sons of Boris Romanov forgive him for getting their father killed? Would the villagers forget he had given away their grain? As for this position the Bolshevik had just given him on this Committee – that in itself might have been his death warrant. ‘If I’m here in the morning, I’ll be dead,’ he had told his mother, and she knew it was true.
Now she helped him into the boat.
‘Which way are you going?’ she asked.
‘South. I daren’t go past the village. I’ll get down to the Oka, then follow it to Murom, I dare say.’
‘And what will you do?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Join the army maybe.’ He smiled despite himself. ‘Seems the safest place to be!’
‘Here’s money.’ Arina kissed him. ‘You’re my only son,’ she said simply. ‘If you die, I want to know. Otherwise I shall believe you are alive.’
‘I’ll live.’
Once again he embraced her, then got into the boat.
There was a quarter moon, away to the south. He pushed the boat out and began to row, slowly up the silvery stream towards it.
1920, October
It was getting cold but the work was nearly done: a simple mopping up operation. The truck and the artillery piece before them were little more than charred metal. Half a dozen bodies lay there, and one man apparently alive. An officer.
Ivan moved forward, cautiously. All around, the empty steppe of south Russia extended to the horizon.
The war was almost over. The Whites and their foreign allies had nearly been successful once or twice. For a brief period it had seemed Petrograd itself would fall. Denikin, Wrangel and others had fought well. But they had always lacked the coordination that the Reds enjoyed. And, perhaps, the determination. Now the final White front was being rolled back, and the capitalist allies – Britain, America, Japan, Italy – had all given up.
And now here was a Cossack officer still alive. A handsome devil certainly, but doomed.
Karpenko watched Ivan draw close. It was a pity, certainly, to be dying. Two years ago he could never have imagined himself fighting like this. But, to his great surprise, it had brought him a kind of satisfaction. The pain in his stomach was like a fire.
It seemed to him that the young Red looked vaguely familiar; but it scarcely mattered.
‘Well, comrade, you’d better put me out of my misery,’ he said cheerfully.
Which Ivan did, as kindly as he could. As it happened, it was the last shot he had to fire.
The revolution had been won.
Coda
1937
Softly, softly, the music began, and although it was late at night, the eleventh hour, he felt fresh and confident.
If there were still just time.
Dimitri Suvorin’s pen moved quickly over the paper.
It was a short piece, the Suite. A little programmatic piece inspired by Russian folklore. Children and adults, he thought, could enjoy it. Everything was written now, except the coda.
In the room next door, his wife and children were sleeping. There was one boy, named after his grandfather, Peter, and a girl, Maryushka. The little boy, people said, was very like him. As he wrote, Dimitri smiled to himself. The Suite was for all his family, but especially for little Peter. He had dedicated it to him that very evening and he knew that it was important he should do so. For then, when the boy heard it, perhaps he would understand.
It was the answer to the terrible secret they shared.
The Suite was a charming idea. It was the story of some hunters who go into the forest and meet a bear. Naturally, they are afraid of the bear, but they capture it and bring the huge beast back with them in chains. On their way back through the forest, they catch a glimpse of the magical firebird. One of the hunters, knowing its wonderful properties, races after the bird, trying to get one of its feathers. But he fails. The gleaming bird, as it always does, flies away, taunting, elusive.
Dimitri was pleased with the musical characterizations: the bear had a slow, heavily accented tune, representing his simple nature and his heavy footfall; the firebird a haunting little melody which would suddenly break out into brilliant, staccato bursts of sound as its feathers glittered and burst into flame.
When the men get the bear back to the town, they train it for the circus, and the music represented the coaxing and the blows, the bear’s misery and his clumsy steps as he begins to rumble round the circus, obedient to their will. It was full of pathos and humour. The children would clap and laugh.
But would it be approved?
Dimitri paused in his work for a moment. Outside, he could see over the roofs of the nearby buildings. A moon, nearly full, rode high in the autumn sky. And three miles away, he knew, in his study deep in the Kremlin, another figure would certainly be working at this hour.
It was remarkable what Stalin had achieved: there was no question. In the early twenties, after the ruin of the Civil War, how uncertain the course of the revolution had seemed. The leadership had even had to tolerate, with the New Economic Policy, a measure of capitalism for a time. But then Stalin had imposed his will: what Lenin had begun, he would complete. And the transformation had been astounding: the entire countryside turned into state farms and collectives; the independent peasants of the Ukraine deported en masse. The first, stupendous Five Year Plan for industry completed in just over four. Russia was now, truly, a world industrial power. Yet at what cost? How many had perished? He did not like to think how many.
Russia had risen like a great bear: that was it. There was nothing, it seemed, the mighty bear could not accomplish with its huge strength, if properly directed.
Yet he missed those earlier days. Things had been livelier then. Writers like Bulgakov and
Pasternak had been free to say what they liked. Eisenstein had burst upon the world with his astonishing film work. Painting had still been the province of the avant-garde, before the present doctrine of Socialist realism had condemned all painting to a dreary depiction of idealized proletarian life.
Nowadays one had to be more careful. A friend of his who had foolishly recited a poem mocking Stalin back in ’32 – and done so only in the privacy of a friend’s apartment – had disappeared within the week. Eisenstein’s films were made under Stalin’s personal supervision now; all the history books were being rewritten.
‘I can only thank God,’ Dimitri would say to his wife, ‘that no one’s found a way to control music yet.’ His work, like that of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, was not much interfered with.
For several more minutes Dimitri wrote intensely: the coda was taking shape. The apartment was silent as his little family slept. Dimitri completed the first section of the final entrance of the bear.
It was the latest piece of foolish legislation which had really depressed him. To educate children for a Socialist world was one thing. Dimitri would sometimes smile at Stalin’s passion for Peter the Great. Peter, too, had seen all men as nothing more than creatures whose purpose was to serve the state. But even Peter the Great never dreamed of legislation like Stalin’s. To turn ordinary children into enemies of their own parents – everything in him revolted against that. The new Children’s Law was very clear, though. Any child who discovered counter-revolutionary tendencies in either of its parents should report them. He had grinned at the time. ‘Your mother’s a scientist and I’m a musician,’ he had said to young Peter, ‘so I don’t think you need to worry about that.’ And the little boy had laughed. He was only nine but already Dimitri recognized a studious, thoughtful look in his dark eyes. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a scholar, or an artist,’ Dimitri liked to say to him.
In the second section of the Suite, one of the hunters manages to catch the firebird just long enough to pull out one of its feathers, and he brings it to the circus. How the feather sparkles and crackles with light. It is as though the fellow has just discovered the power and wonder of electricity, and the music became charged with chromatic energy as the wondrous feather appeared.
It had been foolish of him, of course, to have made the remarks he had, even in private. Yet how could one not be irritated? The previous year the régime had actually declared that a number of scientific disciplines were to be abolished: paediatrics; genetics; sociology; psychoanalysis. The reason – Stalin’s great Constitution had just been published, which declared Russia to be a perfect democratic state. How then could there be sciences which spoke of poor children, inherited differences, social problems or troubled people?
And one evening, at home with some friends, Dimitri had turned to little Peter and said: ‘You realize, don’t you, that this Constitution is a flagrant lie?’ That was all he had said; but it was enough.
It was a week later that he had known. It was a look in the boy’s eyes that had told him. He had been working at the kitchen table one afternoon and suddenly seen little Peter gazing at him with a steady, accusing stare. Then, when he had instinctively drawn the boy to him, and put his arm round him, he had felt Peter suddenly draw back, then look at him guiltily and in evident confusion. He had known at once, and understood. And the boy guessed he knew. And neither had said a word.
It was a pity, though.
Would they let the Suite be performed? It seemed innocuous enough – just some circus scenes, based on fairy tales. He supposed they would, but perhaps he should hide the music somewhere, give it to someone. Just in case.
He worked on swiftly.
The coda depicted a remarkable scene. The firebird comes out of the forest – something it has never done before – and bursts into the circus. Swooping and wheeling around, the firebird terrifies everyone – the audience, the hunters, the bear-trainer. Sparks fill the air. The electric lights flash on and off wildly. And in this pandemonium, the bear, for so long cowed, breaks free, and begins his own, lumbering, tragi-comic dance.
Would it be played? Would he be allowed to finish it? Three miles away, deep in the Kremlin’s great stone heart, Stalin was working now. At just this time of night, it was said, the lists of those to be purged were placed before him. So many had gone already. Names, names without number, names without faces. Did they vanish from the universe, or only from the earth?
Slowly the coda formed, its syncopated rhythms coming together, then parting, as the crowds shouted and the firebird and the bear contrived their wild dance of ever mounting joy, and freedom, until they burst out of the circus into the night, and rushed towards the forest.
Midnight passed. One o’clock.
A knock on the door.
Still the firebird was flying high, brushing the top of the tent as the lights flashed madly. And the bear was hugging his trainer, not in rage but in love, while the foolish fellow howled with fright.
The knocks at the door grew louder.
His wife in the kitchen now, staring with frightened, uncomprehending eyes. ‘NKVD. What have we done?’ His little daughter, awakened and crying. His son, looking pale as a ghost, behind them.
The firebird was swooping now, calling to the bear. She had her stolen feather in her claws. The bear was lumbering towards the entrance. A minute more and they would be free.
The men were hammering on the door now. Their voices echoed angrily. Little Peter was turning into the hall. In a moment he would let them in.
And now the flaps of the circus tent flew apart and with a last, huge crash from the percussion, they rushed, the firebird and the bear, out into the huge embracing freedom of the forest where, for a second or two more, their timeless, joyous melodies were heard to echo.
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.
1938, January
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 surpri
sed to be sent to a gulag.
1945, August
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.
Epilogue
1990, June
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.
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