Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [492]
Worse however than this obsessive behaviour, which wore Rosa down, was the reawakening of her old anxiousness, which now returned with a vengeance.
It took strange forms. If there were the faintest chill in the air, Peter must have an overcoat and a fur hat; if the sun was warm, she feared for sunstroke; whenever there was ice upon the ground, she knew he must have slipped and injured himself. This anxiety soon extended to cover Dimitri as well. Sometimes, to his great embarrassment, she would even insist that Karpenko go with him to school, in case anything should happen to him on the way. She could only relax, it seemed, in the evenings, when her husband and son were safely at home again.
Then she began to follow them. At first, they did not even realize that she was doing so: she would have some perfectly plausible excuse – a friend to visit, some shopping to do – for accompanying Peter to the university or Dimitri to school. But before long the excuses wore out and it became clear that she simply wanted to keep them in sight. Peter, who went in to the university only twice a week, decided to humour her; but Dimitri had to beg her to let him alone, and often thereafter he would turn irritably, to find her pale, wan face a hundred yards behind him.
More embarrassing were her suspicions.
They came, it seemed, from nowhere. Yet they tortured her. She would decide, quite suddenly, that a fellow professor was out to get Peter, or a neighbour with whom she was on friendly terms was a police spy, watching her whole family. She would earnestly warn Dimitri that there was a hidden conspiracy, coming from the Black Hundreds, to destroy all Jews and Socialists. ‘Anyone may be in it,’ she would warn him, ‘you never know.’ And no one, it seemed, was above suspicion.
In the first months of 1910, Karpenko became agitated because the government, having allowed the Ukraine some cultural freedom, became nervous of the growing sense of nationalism emerging there. ‘The word is that they are about to close all the Ukrainian cultural societies,’ he told them dejectedly. ‘We Cossacks should rise up again as we did under Bogdan,’ he added wryly, ‘and take over the Ukraine again.’
It was an innocent statement, said jokingly. But suddenly Rosa’s face clouded. ‘What do you mean by that?’ she demanded. ‘What sort of uprising?’ And for some ten minutes she cross-questioned the youth suspiciously. And afterwards, when Dimitri asked her what the matter was, she turned to him with a troubled face and explained: ‘Don’t you realize, the Cossack rising was the greatest massacre of Jews that Russia has ever seen.’ ‘But you surely don’t think …?’ ‘You never know, Dimitri. You can never be sure of anybody.’ And he could only shake his head.
It was a week after this incident, when the two of them happened to be alone, that Rosa sat him down at the kitchen table and said to him earnestly: ‘I want you to make me one promise, Dimitri. Will you do it for me?’
‘If I can,’ he replied.
‘Promise me, then, that you will be a musician. That you will never become a revolutionary, like your father, but that you will stick to music.’
Dimitri shrugged. Since he had every hope of devoting his life to music this did not seem too hard a thing to promise. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘Your word?’
‘Yes.’ He smiled, half irritated, half with love and pity at Rosa. How haggard her face looked. ‘Why?’
She gazed at him sadly. It occurred to Dimitri that the seers of ancient times, like Cassandra in Greek tragedy, might have looked a little like his mother, with huge, sorrowful eyes that seemed to see beyond the present, into a terrible future. ‘You don’t understand,’ she told him. ‘Only Jewish musicians will be safe. Only musicians.’
And there was nothing he could say at this obvious sign of madness.
Several times, in the spring