Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [538]
Varya was alone in the room. Eight forty-five had passed. She had nothing against the fellow from this morning who spoke so beautifully, but habit was not to be changed.
‘Zakryt!’ she called, and disappeared into the kitchen.
The sun was setting as Paul Bobrov sat at his window and gazed out over the rooftops of Moscow. To his left, he could see one of those tall thick-set towers with which Stalin had decorated the city in the last years of his rule. Symbols of a new age, like the Empire State Building; symbols of uncompromising power, like the bleak walls of the Kremlin.
Were they Russia, though?
He did not think so. Even now, he could not say, he did not know, what Russia was. That did not surprise him. She had always, down the centuries, defied definition. Was she part of Europe or part of Asia – what did those terms mean anyway? There wasn’t a commentator he had read who could tell him what this vast land was or what it might become. To be sure, no one in the Kremlin knew.
But whatever it was, he thought he had caught a glimpse of it that day, at Russka.
The city was quiet that night; Bobrov, at his window, continued to watch and ponder till long after dark.
High in the starlit summer sky, pale clouds passed from time to time, drifting in a leisurely procession, glowing in the reflection of the crescent moon that was now arising in the south.
And softly the wind moved over the land.