Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [531]
It suddenly occurred to Ivanov that the little house where Popov lived would do very well for a cousin of his wife’s.
‘Number 25: Yevgeny Pavlovich Popov,’ he wrote. ‘Suspected collaborator with Trotsky.’
And so, at the age of eighty-four, Yevgeny Popov was surprised to be sent to a gulag.
1945, August
It was a warm afternoon as Ivan walked past Russka and made his way towards the village. The sky was clear. A few clouds drifted up from the south. There was a pleasant smell in the fields and a dustiness everywhere, as there is at harvest time.
He was home from the war. In all but name, it was over – the Great Patriotic War.
He had fought well, nearly lost his life several times; but, along with every other soldier on the front, he had been sustained by two pieces of knowledge: he was fighting for the fatherland; and Comrade Stalin was commanding everything. It was well known, by now, that there was almost nothing the great leader could not do. The war, thank God, was almost done with. It was time to stay at home, and build a new, bright future.
And it was smiling at this thought that he came out of the wood and saw the big village field before him where the women were slowly stooping with their sickles as they had since time began.
And then his mother Arina looked up and saw him, and forgetting her age, came running across the field, her arms outstretched, towards him.
Epilogue
1990, June
So this was the day. Paul Bobrov was up early and before six o’clock he was ready to leave.
The Hotel Aurora wasn’t a bad place. Comparatively new and situated near Red Square, it was a nine-storey concrete structure whose rooms had been designed and furnished by a Finnish enterprise. The beds and chest of drawers were all of a piece, made of pale wood, and ran along one wall like a bench. The beds were not uncomfortable, but hard and narrow and it occurred to Paul that Russian hotels were certainly not places designed for sexual encounters, despite the opportunities which existed in the form of the score or so of pretty girls who infiltrated past his doorman into the lobby and the bars, looking for customers each evening.
A pale sunlight was coming through the windows as he made his way towards the elevator bank. Bobrov glanced at his watch. In fifteen minutes he would be on his way to the old Bobrov estate.
Paul Bobrov was thirty-three, the second of Alexander and Nadezhda’s ten grandchildren. He was of medium height and though he retained the slightly Turkish look of his ancestors, these features were softened. Sometimes, in the way of numerous past Bobrovs, he would unconsciously make a gentle, almost caressing movement with his arm.
How pleased old Alexander would have been, he thought, to know of his visit. His grandmother, still beautiful at ninety-two, though rather frail, had given him a vivid description of the place and assured him: ‘I certainly shan’t die until you get back and tell me all about it.’
The old estate: a vivid reminder of how things were. Not that anybody had ever forgotten.
The little Russian community to which Paul Bobrov belonged resided in a suburb to the north of New York City. It was one of several in the region: there were other, similar communities to be found in London, Paris and elsewhere. These were not, he could have told you, to be confused with the huge mass of Russian Jews who had come at the turn of the century; nor the later wave of those fleeing Russia at the time of the Second World War; nor, God forbid, the recent wave of Soviets who nowadays crowded into such areas as Brighton Beach below New York. No, Paul Bobrov’s community was that of the Russian emigrés, the noble classes to whom, strictly speaking, even Nadezhda only belonged by right of marriage.
They were a close-knit group. A few had money but many had not. They lived modest middle-class lives in shady tree-lined streets; and though to outward appearances they were ordinary Americans, they usually married amongst themselves, spoke Russian as well as English in the home and – rare amongst other