Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [497]
He needed her. He plainly adored her. And how could she tell him, therefore, what was happening to her now?
It was in 1905 that the terrible dreams had begun. They came quite suddenly and without warning. And the subject was always the same: the pogrom.
Often it was her father’s face that she saw, surrounded by the mob. Then she would see the burly Cossack, sitting in his cart – sympathetic but ready to leave them to their fate – and it would seem to her that this time the men got her father, and dragged him away. After a while, however, the dream would get more complex. Time would be telescoped. She would be in the village in the Ukraine, but a grown woman instead of a child. Her father would suddenly become transformed into Peter. Worse yet, under an echoing grey sky, he would turn into little Dimitri.
Night after night the dreams came, and she would awake in a cold sweat, terrified. They were so terrible that at times she dreaded even going to sleep. And in her waking hours, now, a terrible new premonition began to form in her mind – a gnawing conviction that, try as she might, nothing would shake: something was going to happen to Peter and Dimitri.
Only some months after the onset of the dream had the other problem begun. Whether it was related or not, Rosa could not be sure. Was it some hidden resentment, or a fear about which she knew nothing? Whatever the reason, the new misery not only came to her, it refused to go away.
She could not bear her husband to touch her any more.
Even now, five years later, she could be proud of one thing: Peter never knew. She loved him. She knew that he could never understand. Sometimes of course she had slept with him, and, by a supreme act of will, had completely disguised her secret revulsion at the act. But week after week, month after month, she had devised excuses that allowed her to avoid lovemaking at night while she heaped her affection upon him by day; and whether it was guilt at this subterfuge and betrayal, or the recurring dreams, or whether they were all tangled up together, she found that she was becoming more and more filled with a terrible premonition that her husband and her son were in danger. This had been her frame of mind when Dimitri had been attacked and discovered he was Jewish.
Only Vladimir had guessed her secret. Dear Vladimir. Somehow, he had guessed everything.
She found she had reached the broad boulevard that circled the inner city. The wind was driving along it, picking leaves off the little trees at the edge of the street and carrying them eastward. A carriage rattled by.
Had she briefly, when she was young, thought of Vladimir as a lover? She gave a little laugh. An impossible love: a love that could never be. Yet even a platonic love like theirs contained pleasures and pains. For what did it mean to a woman to know that it was not her husband but his brother who truly understood her? She loved his company; he made her happy. Yet she feared him. For he returned her to herself; he induced her to play again; he showed her too clearly what she tried to hide from herself – the agonizing gulf that separated her from her husband. And so she would flee from Vladimir back to her prison. ‘You must get away, just to sleep,’ he would urge, and she knew it was true. But she could not. ‘You’ll destroy yourself, my little bird.’ Then so be it.
Vladimir had promised to get Dimitri to America. That was all that mattered to her now.
She passed a store where they sold newspapers and glanced in. There was a little board by the door, proclaiming a headline. Poor Stolypin, the loyal minister, had been shot in Kiev earlier that month. Now it turned out that his assassin was a double-agent: a police spy who had only committed the atrocity because the revolutionary group he had infiltrated had begun to suspect him. She shook her head wearily. ‘Only in our poor Russia do we live with such insanity,’ she murmured.