Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [498]
A dream from which it was time to escape.
The street she now took contained tramlines. Since before the turn of the century, there had been trams in Moscow – stout vehicles with a lower and an open upper deck, and drawn by a pair of horses. They moved along at a pleasant, easy pace. In the last year or so, however, these had begun to be replaced by electrified trams – single deckers which moved along at a far greater speed. The new age was coming, there was no doubt. A little way up the street, Rosa noticed, there was an intersection of lines at a crossroad, and she made towards that.
Dimitri would go to America, and he would be a musician. That was what her father had always said: ‘They often forgive Jews if they are musicians.’
There was a little knot of people standing in a lighted doorway by the crossroads and they watched the woman idly as she walked up the street. One of them noticed that she looked rather cheerful. ‘Quite normal,’ as he later said. ‘Nothing unusual.’
Peter Suvorin’s book, of course, had been her standby for the last eighteen months. How many nights had she devotedly typed for her husband until the early hours when he was safely asleep? The act of devotion that kept her from his bed and about which she had not had to explain. But the book had been finished last week. It was going to press. It would probably make him famous: and leave her with nothing to protect her.
It was not difficult to accomplish. Like a friend who had only been waiting for her to arrive, the electric tram hastened towards her through the night, just as she reached the crossing. Rosa paused. She had taken off her gloves, as if to fumble for something in her pockets; now, casually, she put them on again, not even noticing that she had pulled her glove from her left hand on to her right. The tram, as it came closer, seemed to be whispering: ‘At last. Come with me.’ Two paces, three.
They all saw. There was no doubt about what happened. The woman standing on the kerb and looking in her pockets had glanced up at the tram, turned, and slipped. She uttered a little cry as her foot, trying to find its balance on the damp stone, had shot up in an ungainly manner. She had seemed to grasp for support as, twisting, she fell into the street. The tram had been almost on top of her as she went down. It was all so absurd.
Just as the tram passed over her, Rosa saw her father.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that, even if she was subject to moods, this wretched business had been an accident.
It was two months afterwards that Dimitri Suvorin completed the three Etudes in her memory, rather in the manner of Scriabin, which have always been agreed to be his first serious and mature compositions.
1913
As the year 1913 drew towards its close, Alexander Bobrov looked forward with some confidence to a pleasant future. True, there were some obstacles to overcome, but he had prepared his personal campaign carefully and he was quietly confident. The girl was fifteen now and already a dazzling young woman. Soon it would be time to begin.
Alexander was twenty-two. He was above average height, powerfully built, and had the saturnine, rather stern good looks of his great-grandfather Alexis though, unlike him, he was clean-shaven.
He was acutely conscious of his good looks. This, however, was not exactly vanity. As the last representative of his noble family, and, despite his father’s liberal tendencies, a representative of the order which was dedicated to protecting and preserving the Tsar, he felt it was his duty to be handsome. He took care, besides dressing carefully, to hold himself with a military uprightness – with what, in those days, was referred to by the French term as a proper tenue – and to be seen, as far as he could afford it, in the best places. His position in life, his whole desire, prompted him to seek two things and two things only. One was a court appointment; the other his marriage to the heiress Nadezhda Suvorin. For both these objects he was steadfastly