Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [436]
Hers was the only piano in the village. She would never forget the magical day when it arrived on a little barge coming upriver. Her father had saved for a year to buy it and brought it all the way from Kiev. All the neighbours had come out to watch as he and her two brothers proudly escorted this wonder to their house. She had been only seven when a visiting cousin, a musician, had told them she was a prodigy. The very next year she had gone to live with that family, during term time, down in the big city of Odessa on the Black Sea coast, where there were fine music teachers. Already she had given a public performance and people were saying she would be a professional musician.
‘As long as her health holds up,’ her mother would gloomily say. It was true: that nagging problem with her chest was often with her. Sometimes she would have to rest for days at a time, when she was longing to go back to school. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ her father promised her: and how she prayed that he was right. How she wanted to live her life for music.
For once Rosa stepped into that kingdom, everything else became unimportant. Sometimes it seemed to her that music was in everything: as absolute as mathematics, as infinite as the universe itself. Music was in the trees, in the flowers, in the endless steppe; music filled the whole sky. She wanted only to pray, and to learn.
And here was the strange conundrum which had puzzled her for several months, and which today made her thoughtful and melancholy.
For if God had made this beautiful world, and given it music, and if she, it seemed, might have been chosen to serve His musical purpose and to play for Him, then why were there evil men, planning to kill her?
Laid out on the east side of the little river, the village’s comfortable thatched houses with their whitewashed walls stretched on each side of the broad dirt road for nearly a mile. Several, like the house where her parents lived, had little orchards behind them. Near the river there was a market square; and just downstream stood a distillery. Indeed, in the poorer Russian north where settlements were smaller than in the Ukraine, such a place would have been called a town.
It was also quite prosperous. To the huge fields of wheat on the rich black earth of the steppe, two new and valuable crops had been added in recent times: sugarbeet and tobacco. Both were sold to merchants who exported them through the ports on the warm Black Sea, and thanks to this trade and the region’s natural abundance, the peasants lived well.
Rosa’s grandfather had first come to the region to farm. He had died five years ago and her father had taken over. An enterprising man, he also traded wheat and acted as local agent for a firm that manufactured agricultural equipment down in Odessa, so that they were now amongst the better-off families in the village.
She was not aware that once, in former times, this southern settlement had borne the name of Russka.
It was not surprising. The settlement had had two names since then; of its past few signs remained. The little fort on the western bank was only some marks upon the turf; of the church the Mongols had burned down, there was not a trace. Even the landscape had altered somewhat, for centuries of farming had led to the cutting down of many trees, and there were no woods on the eastern side of the river now. The pool and its haunting spirits had gone, dried up. Even the bee forest had disappeared. From the last house in the village, the open steppe of south Russia extended to the horizon, and the only way that the place might have been identified from ancient times was by the tiny mound of an ancient kurgan that appeared upon the steppe in the middle distance.
Rosa walked until she receded the end of the village, where she stopped to gaze over the steppe. There was a pale sun. High overhead, trailing white clouds coming from the west receded over the endless, browning grassland towards a violet horizon.
She had been