Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [530]
He worked on swiftly.
The coda depicted a remarkable scene. The firebird comes out of the forest – something it has never done before – and bursts into the circus. Swooping and wheeling around, the firebird terrifies everyone – the audience, the hunters, the bear-trainer. Sparks fill the air. The electric lights flash on and off wildly. And in this pandemonium, the bear, for so long cowed, breaks free, and begins his own, lumbering, tragi-comic dance.
Would it be played? Would he be allowed to finish it? Three miles away, deep in the Kremlin’s great stone heart, Stalin was working now. At just this time of night, it was said, the lists of those to be purged were placed before him. So many had gone already. Names, names without number, names without faces. Did they vanish from the universe, or only from the earth?
Slowly the coda formed, its syncopated rhythms coming together, then parting, as the crowds shouted and the firebird and the bear contrived their wild dance of ever mounting joy, and freedom, until they burst out of the circus into the night, and rushed towards the forest.
Midnight passed. One o’clock.
A knock on the door.
Still the firebird was flying high, brushing the top of the tent as the lights flashed madly. And the bear was hugging his trainer, not in rage but in love, while the foolish fellow howled with fright.
The knocks at the door grew louder.
His wife in the kitchen now, staring with frightened, uncomprehending eyes. ‘NKVD. What have we done?’ His little daughter, awakened and crying. His son, looking pale as a ghost, behind them.
The firebird was swooping now, calling to the bear. She had her stolen feather in her claws. The bear was lumbering towards the entrance. A minute more and they would be free.
The men were hammering on the door now. Their voices echoed angrily. Little Peter was turning into the hall. In a moment he would let them in.
And now the flaps of the circus tent flew apart and with a last, huge crash from the percussion, they rushed, the firebird and the bear, out into the huge embracing freedom of the forest where, for a second or two more, their timeless, joyous melodies were heard to echo.
Dimitri turned. There were three of them. They let him kiss his wife and little girl. The music rested on the table. They turned to go.
The little boy was there in the hall. Whatever they had told him at school had not been enough. Now, seeing his father being taken away, he had suddenly broken down.
Dimitri picked him up in his arms and held him. He hugged him close.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered. ‘You understand? I knew, but it’s all right. The music’s for you.’
Then he, too, went out into a colder, darker night.
1938, January
Ivanov was the local party chief at Russka that year. Not a bad sort of fellow. He had a deputy named Smirnov.
Between them they were looking at the list. Twenty-five names were required. They had got to twenty-three; at last found a twenty-fourth; but they were still a man short.
He had to be found, of course. Twenty-five names of enemies of the people. That was the funny thing about a purge. The top people, of course, were carefully chosen: but down here, you just got a quota you had to fill in. ‘There must be someone,’ he said.
And then he remembered Yevgeny Popov.
He was a strange figure, very quiet, who was living out his retirement in a small house at the edge of the town. He grew cabbages and radishes in his garden, and kept himself fit by walking each day to the nearby village and back. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen him recently.
‘Is Popov alive?’ he enquired. His deputy said he was. ‘He’ll do then,’ Ivanov suggested.
‘But he’s in his eighties,’ Smirnov protested. ‘He’s one of the real old Bolsheviks. A loyal man.’
The chief considered. ‘If he goes back so far,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘he must have known a lot of people.’
‘He knew Lenin.’
‘Maybe. Perhaps he also knew Trotsky.’
‘I hadn