Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [360]
All the same, they managed to do quite well with Hamlet, and it was agreed that they would next attempt some scenes from Romeo and Juliet. ‘In which,’ Sergei added, ‘there is of course a bear.’
It was while Sergei and Ilya were busy with their translation that Olga decided one afternoon to go with young Karpenko and Pinegin on one of her favourite walks, along the low ridge behind the house.
The weather was perfect. The silver birches were gleaming in the sun and shedding a dappled shade. Karpenko, though he gazed at her with adoring eyes, was still too shy to say much. As usual, Pinegin was wearing his white tunic and puffing on his pipe. After two weeks of Sergei’s lively conversation, Olga found the soldier’s silence rather agreeable.
She had long ago decided that, if Karpenko was in love with her, he was certainly harmless. Indeed, he was so shy that she liked to bring him out of himself. She had learned, for instance, that he came from Poltava province, south-east of Kiev, from an old Cossack family. ‘My brothers are strapping fellows – it’s only me that’s so small,’ he apologized. After some coaxing, he had one day admitted that he, too, hoped to make a literary reputation in the future.
As usual, therefore, after they had walked awhile, they began to talk, and encouraged by Olga, the young Cossack started to speak of his beloved Ukraine. It was a delight to hear him, a pleasure to see his soft eyes glow as he described to them the whitewashed houses and their thatched roofs, the huge fields of wheat on the rich black earth, the vineyards and lemon groves down by the Black Sea, the huge melons that were grown in his own village. ‘It’s another world in the south,’ he confessed. ‘Life is easier. Why, even now, if we need more land, we just take our ploughs out into the empty steppe, which has no end.’
So wonderful was his description that Pinegin nodded his head thoughtfully and remarked: ‘It is so. I have been there, and it is just so.’
And it was this statement that suddenly prompted Olga to turn to the quiet soldier and try to draw him out for once.
How little, still, she knew of him. What sort of life had he had? Where had he come from? Where had he served? Was he always so much alone, or had there been others close to him in his past – lovers perhaps? And above all what did he really think about his life, this man who seemed to know so much, yet say so little?
‘It is your turn, Fyodor Petrovich,’ she said softly. ‘You say you have been in the south. What can you tell us about it?’
‘I passed through the Ukraine,’ he replied. ‘But I have served further south, in the Caucasus Mountains. Do you wish to know about that?’
‘Most certainly,’ she smiled. ‘I do.’
He took a little time to reply, but when at last he did, his thin, hard face took on a faraway look. His voice was very quiet. And the words he used were simple, soldier’s words, yet very carefully chosen. Olga was riveted.
He told her about the high Georgian passes that now belonged to Russia, and those beyond, where wild tribesmen still dwelt. He described the mountain goats; the huge ravines one could look down and see the shepherds in the gullies a thousand feet below; the swirling mists over which, as far as the eye could see, the snowy peaks hung pink and white in the crystal sky. He told her about the tribesmen in their bright tunics and shaggy sheepskins – Georgians, Circassians, and those distant descendants of the radiant Alans, the proud Ossetians – who might suddenly appear from nowhere: ‘Friendly one day, with a bullet for you the next.’ She could see it all, as though she had been there.
‘I was down in the eastern steppe once,’ he continued. ‘On the edge of the desert. That’s a strange region.’ And he told her about the little fortresses between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and about