Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [398]
The force of will that had built this place up was frightening to contemplate. And it’s all there, in his face, Peter thought. The great square head, the smouldering eyes, the heavy brows, and that mighty, shapeless promontory of a nose. Did they still make noses like that? His father’s had been large, his own inclined to heaviness; but history itself might have paused, he thought, before Savva’s features, like a sculptor before a stubborn granite rockface. My God, he realized, he’s like one of those elders of ancient times, from beyond the Volga – only turned into a merchant. Such was Savva Suvorin.
At first, life had not been too unpleasant. His grandparents lived in a simple stone house, not a tenth the size of the big Moscow house. It was furnished simply, with heavy, rather ugly furniture, which was impressive for being solid and highly polished. But what did the old people want with him? When he took Peter with him on his rounds, Savva gave no indication of what he expected; and after a few weeks Peter supposed the old man was bored with his company and would soon send him back to Moscow.
It was his grandmother, soon after Christmas, who had actually dealt the blow.
‘We’ve decided you should start work in the linen factory,’ she calmly announced. ‘You’ll get to know the village too, that way.’
Maria Suvorin’s face was still, in old age, perfectly round; her nose, if anything, even more pointed; her compressed mouth, despite her huge riches, never smiled. And behind narrow slit lids resided the same pair of hard grey eyes. Like most simple Russian women, her white hair was parted in the middle, drawn tightly round her head and fixed at the back. The only luxuries she allowed herself were the rich silk brocade dresses which ballooned out to the ground like a bell. Over her head she liked to wear a big shawl that spread over her shoulders and upper arms and was pinned under her chin so that she exactly resembled one of those brightly painted little Russian dolls – a comfortable image which was quite contradicted by her ruthless character.
‘But I’m quite unsuited to this kind of work,’ he protested.
‘We think it’s best,’ she calmly replied.
‘But what about my studies?’
‘That’s all over now,’ she said placidly. And then, not unkindly: ‘You surely can’t expect your eighty-year-old grandfather to do all your work for you, can you?’
And now, on this cold, damp spring morning, as the starlings wheeled over the rooftops, it seemed to Peter that he could bear it no more.
He had tried to take an interest and find something to excite his imagination. When Savva told him, ‘The American Civil War hit our cotton supplies for a while’ or: ‘We can get cotton from Asia now’, Peter conjured up images of distant ships from the New World, or caravans across the desert, and told himself that the Suvorin enterprises were part of some larger, exciting adventure. But each day as he was faced with the same grim chimneys, the endless lines of spinning machines, and the monotonous, grinding work of the factories, he knew in his heart: Russka was a prison.
That morning they were doing what he hated most of all: they were inspecting the workers’ living quarters.
Life was not so bad out in the villages, where the flax for the linen was grown and every peasant izba produced its own handicrafts. But the living quarters in Russka were completely different. There were three long rows of wooden houses for worker families, which might not have been so bad except that three to five families were crammed into each house. ‘We are all one family,’ Savva would remind these people as he moved amongst them like a grim Old Testament patriarch. ‘We live together.’
And then there were the dormitories. Why was it that, as the two men entered one of these, Peter’s heart sank?
It was not that the place was squalid. It was spotlessly clean, light, airy and well heated. The long room was painted white, with a line of wooden pillars running down its centre and