Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [453]
‘I told you he’d do it!’ Misha cried to his son and his wife. ‘I told you only Suvorin could pull it off. But how the devil,’ he remarked to the industrialist, ‘did you manage to prize it out of the governor, after they told us they had nothing?’
‘My dear friend, you don’t understand. The authorities have nothing. No one is being supplied.’
Misha frowned. ‘Then this?’
The other grinned again. ‘I bought it myself. My agents found it and shipped it all the way from the south. It’s nothing to do with the authorities.’
For several seconds Misha was silent, unable to speak. Nicolai saw tears well up into the old man’s eyes. He held on to Suvorin’s sleeve, then muttered: ‘How can I thank you, Vladimir Ivanovich?’ And shaking his head: ‘What can I say?’
But it was after a moment’s thoughtful silence that Misha Bobrov suddenly made his extraordinary outburst. Throwing back his head, and gathering all his strength, he shouted out in a paroxysm of frustration, shame, and contempt: ‘Damn those people! Damn that governor! Damn the government in St Petersburg. I tell you, these people are useless to us. Let them give power to the local zemstvos since they are incompetent to govern themselves.’
He shouted it in front of the servants, the drivers, and several villagers. He did not seem to care. It came straight from his heart. Misha Bobrov, landowner, noble, liberal but loyal monarchist, was done with his government. So, Nicolai knew, were other landowners and zemstvo men all over the central provinces that winter of famine.
And so it was on this day, in after years, that Nicolai Bobrov would look back and murmur: ‘That was the start of the revolution.’
It was in early spring that the first outbreak began.
It started in the group of huts that straggled along the river bank below the little town of Russka. Why it should have started there no one knew. Perhaps because there was an old rubbish tip there – perhaps not.
At first, when several people suffered from diarrhoea, no one took much notice. But then, after two days, one man suddenly experienced a violent discharge from his bowels of whitish and yellowish matter, like whey. Shortly after, he vomited more of the same, then cried out that the pit of his stomach was on fire, and screamed for water. The next day he suffered acute cramps in the legs and his body started to turn blue. His eyes became so sunken he resembled a skeleton and when he spoke, his voice was only a hoarse whisper. When his wife tried his pulse, she could feel nothing. Just before the following dawn he died.
After his death, his body remained strangely warm for some time. His wife said it had grown hotter. She also noticed that, well after death, the corpse suffered muscular twitches and spasms, which frightened her.
And within a few more hours, all Russka knew that cholera had arrived.
‘If we can just keep it out of the village.’ This was Misha Bobrov’s litany each day. ‘Of course,’ he would say, ‘if Russia was properly run, the whole area would be sealed off. There’d be a cordon sanitaire.’ But neither local nor provincial administration could attempt such a thing: people came and went. Thanks, however, to the efforts of the two Bobrovs and of Suvorin, a sort of informal quarantine was in force that seemed to be limiting the terrible cholera’s spread.
Indeed, their modest success was soon confirmed by a young doctor that the zemstvo managed to employ to help deal with the outbreak.