Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [456]
‘This,’ he whispered to himself, ‘is for Natalia.’
What a business that had been, Misha considered a short time later as he walked hurriedly back to the house. How horribly hot the room was. Thank God he had taken care not to touch anything. You couldn’t be too careful.
But he was proud of himself. He had done the right thing, and the old peasant was happy: he could see that.
He must have been sweating himself in there, more than he had realized. As he strode back up the slope even his coat felt damp. He wiped his brow and his moustache with his coat sleeve. Yes, it had certainly been an unpleasant business and he was glad it was over.
A week later the news reached Nicolai in St Petersburg: his father had cholera.
1892, Summer
There was a subdued buzz of conversation in the room. Soon the distinguished speaker would arrive and Rosa Abramovich felt a tingle of anticipation. She had never been to a meeting like this before. There were about thirty people there, almost all in their early twenties.
Outside the evening sun was bathing the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius and its old castle hill in a soft orange light.
Rosa Abramovich was twenty now and she had lived in Vilnius for a decade. She might, she knew, have been in America. Many Jews had started to go there after the pogroms in 1881; but at the family conference her father had called in the autumn of that terrible year, they had decided instead to cross the Jewish Pale, some five hundred miles to the north-west, into Lithuania. ‘There’s not much trouble in Vilnius,’ her father had remarked. ‘If pogroms come there, then we’ll leave Russia.’ He still had faith.
Rosa loved her new home. From the Lithuanian capital it was only a day’s train journey to the Baltic Sea, or south-west to the ancient Polish capital of Warsaw. To the north lay the Baltic provinces where the Latvians and Estonians lived and where once, centuries ago, the Crusading Teutonic Knights had raided Russia. ‘It’s very much a border province, a crossroads,’ her father had remarked.
And indeed, though all these lands nowadays formed part of the Tsar’s sprawling empire, it could not be said that their character was in the least Russian. In the rolling, prosperous farmlands and woodlands of Lithuania, the people had not forgotten that once they and the Poles, in their joint kingdom, had been masters of all these western lands, and more besides. The Lithuanian farmers, with their large, handsome wooden houses, reminded Rosa of the independent Cossack farmers she had known in the Ukraine. As for the capital of Vilnius, it was a pleasant old European city, containing buildings in many styles – Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical. It contained a fine Catholic cathedral and numerous churches. Of Russian architecture there were hardly any examples at all. And this cosmopolitan city had also a thriving Jewish community.
In fact, Rosa’s father had found only one thing wrong with the place: there were far too many of those secular-minded young Jews who were turning their back on their religion. Try as he might, it had been almost impossible to stop his two sons consorting with them; but little Rosa he had kept a strict watch over, until his sudden and unexpected death the previous year. And now, it was into precisely such dangerous company that she had fallen that evening. It was all rather exciting.
Friends of her brothers had brought her there. Half the people in the room were young men and women from the assimilated Jewish middle class – students, a young doctor, a lawyer. The rest were Jewish workers, including three girls who were seamstresses. It was a pleasant, lively group, but to Rosa they were all strangers. And why had she come? She hardly knew: but mainly, she supposed, because she had nothing better to do.
For though she was only twenty, life had already dealt Rosa some bitter blows. At first, after arriving in Vilnius, it had seemed that everything