Russka (90 page)

Perhaps at a future date, it may be vouchsafed
me to enjoy those blessings which alone, I
know, can come from our Holy Order’s
uncontaminated source, but I confess, highly
worthy Superior, that at present I find myself
unable to make those sacrifices which you
rightly demand of me, and therefore
respectfully withdraw until I can prove myself
worthy of our Brotherhood.

He had left the Rosicrucians. He smiled ironically. That would save more than his household expenses every year.

It was just as he sealed this letter that they brought him the news: Tatiana had gone into labour.

The day had passed, then the night. An anxious, interminable morning. And still Tatiana was in labour. The grey light outside gave the room a dull tone.

The afternoon before, a Polish midwife had been summoned; a German doctor in the evening. By midday they had both been shaking their heads. Since midday, there had also been one other figure in the room. The serfs from Russka who worked in the house had been urging Alexander to let her in all morning. They had no faith in the midwife from the city; as for the German doctor, they viewed him with silent contempt. But this was one of their own, a midwife from the country, a true Russian from the hamlet of Dirty Place. She was sitting in a corner now, doing what the foolish city folk should have been doing from the start: reciting the strange mixture of Christian prayer and pagan spell without which no child in the Russian countryside should be born. Alexander had glanced at the old woman and shrugged. God knew if she was doing any good, but he supposed she could do no harm.

And now the doctor was leading him out of the room. His face was grim.

‘It’s blocked,’ the doctor told him. ‘The baby can’t get out. There’s a chance, maybe, that I can save the child. But the mother …’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘She may bleed.’

‘To death, you mean?’

‘Perhaps. Some do, some don’t.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Nothing. Pray.’

The doctor went back in, leaving Alexander outside. He went to his little study, mechanically sorted through his papers, then tried to recite prayers, but received only a sense of his own emptiness. After a time he went back again and let himself into the bedroom.

How shocking it was. Tatiana’s round face was drawn and ghostly white; sweat had matted her fair hair and her eyes were large with fear. The contractions were making her shiver. ‘At any time,’ the doctor whispered, ‘the vessel of blood may break.’

Alexander gazed at Tatiana helplessly. It was terrible to be so useless. He went over to her and took her hand. She looked up at him and tried bravely to smile. He squeezed her hand. She winced as a contraction reached its peak, took a deep breath, and kept her large blue eyes fixed upon him; for at that moment, he realized guiltily, he was her only lifeline. He smiled, tried to
make her feel, at her hour of death, that he loved her. What else could he do?

‘I am having your child,’ she whispered.

He squeezed her hand but could not speak. She was about to die. He thought she knew it. And she was afraid, so much more afraid than she had ever been in her life, as she looked up at him with frightened eyes that said: ‘Even if you cannot help me, tell me, this once, that you love me.’

And it was then, a little after three o’clock on that March afternoon, that Alexander Bobrov, seeing little more to gamble for in the earthly or the heavenly kingdoms, made his final bargain with God.

Let her and the child live, merciful God, he silently vowed, and I will be faithful to my wife and give up Adelaide de Ronville.

It was, it seemed to him, the last card he had to play.

There is no stranger or more magical time in the city of St Petersburg than midsummer. It is the season known as the White Nights.

For around the summer solstice, in those northern climes, the endless days do not give way to darkness. Instead, the daylight lingers far into the evening and beyond until, at last, for the space of half an hour or so in the early hours, it is transformed into a pale, glimmering twilight. It is a magical time. The atmosphere is charged, the world unreal. Buildings seem like grey shadows, the water wears a milky sheen, and on the distant northern horizon the twilight greyness is punctuated by the flashes of the Aurora Borealis.

Season of White Nights: electric season. Surely it must have been some dangerous magnetism in the atmosphere that led Alexander Bobrov to commit such acts of complete insanity. No other explanation is possible.

For by that summer, the world had entirely changed. It was as if some huge electric storm was about to break. Who knew what monarchies might fall, what societies dissolve into chaos? Each day, St Petersburg waited for news from the west where, just three summers before, with the storming of the Bastille in Paris, the epoch-making cataclysm had begun.

The French Revolution. Already the King of France, his Queen Marie Antoinette and their children were virtual prisoners. Who knew what these revolutionaries – these Jacobins – would do next? The monarchs of Europe were outraged. Even now, Austria and Prussia were at war with this disruptive new revolutionary power. Britain was ready to join. And no one was more shocked than the enlightened Empress Catherine of Russia. The principles of freedom and Enlightenment were one thing – splendid theory. Revolution and mob rule were quite another. Remember Pugachev! She had crushed that desperate Cossack and his peasants’ revolt years ago; she was not going to invite another peasant rising.

Small wonder therefore if enlightened thinkers, from the empress down, looked at these results of the Enlightenment with horror and concluded: ‘It went too far, too fast.’ Instead of reform, they saw only chaos. ‘These Jacobins have betrayed us all.’

And if, in France, the revolutionaries believed they were witnessing a new springtime of the world, at the distant court of St Petersburg, it seemed rather that a golden era was passing – as though Catherine’s long summer, having extended too far into autumn, had suddenly been exposed by this harsh, cruel wind blowing in the world; and’ that now her leaves were suddenly falling, revealing a bare forest before the unrelenting winter.

The empress was lonely. The faces about her were changing. Above all, she had lost her one true friend, her gallant old warhorse, the great Potemkin.

What a loyal friend he had been. He had given her the Crimea. Just two years before the Revolution, together with the awestruck ambassadors of the great European powers, he had taken Catherine on a magnificent tour of that huge southern province by the Black Sea. The path had been almost literally strewn with flowers. He had even erected delightful stage-set hamlets – the famous Potemkin villages – along the way to charm them. The villages might be artifice, but the new empire was not: it was rich indeed. And so it was that at last a Russian ruler had come to sit in the fabled palace of the Crimean Khans, at Bakhchisarai, and receive the final homage of the Tatars.

And that, both for Catherine and Potemkin, had been the end of their long, late summer. The winds had started to blow; the French Revolution had come; they had failed to take the last,
glittering prize of Constantinople; and sadly for both of them – just as Alexander Bobrov had foreseen – Catherine’s young lover had been unfaithful and this time Potemkin’s enemies had succeeded in putting their own protégé, a vain young man, into her bed. It was the end of the game for Potemkin and he probably knew it. He came to St Petersburg, gave the most gigantic party for the empress that the capital had ever seen, and then departed south once more, in deep depression. In a year he was dead.

She was lonely. What had she left? A vain young lover – at least she was not alone in bed. A son who had come to hate her, and who grew daily more like her late, impossible husband. Her two grandsons, educated by her own instructions, and adored. And the empire. She would preserve it and strengthen it for her grandsons. As with everything she did, she was thorough.

How changed was St Petersburg now. France was quite out of fashion: even French dress was frowned upon. The newspaper reports of the terrible French contagion were kept to a minimum. ‘Thank God,’ wise men declared, ‘that our peasants can’t read.’ Public discussion of the Revolution was forbidden, republican books burned, plays banned. It was the philosophers who had brought all this to pass: even enlightened men had to admit that now. If she was firm with others, Catherine was also firm with herself; sadly the empress ordered that the bust of her old friend Voltaire be removed from her rooms, as she mustered her strength to face this new, grey world.

And who could blame her if she turned with bitterness upon those she feared might weaken the state in these dangerous times? When Radishchev the radical was foolish enough to publish a book – at such a moment! – calling openly for the ending of serfdom, she was so angry that he was lucky only to be sent to Siberia. What, she demanded, were the Freemasons up to, with their secret activities? Were they conniving with her son? Were they Jacobins of some kind? It seemed not, but she had ordered that the professor be questioned carefully, just to find out. ‘Russia is looking,’ she made clear, ‘for loyalty.’

In all St Petersburg, in the autumn years of Catherine the Great, there was no more loyal man than Alexander Prokofievich Bobrov.

‘The Jacobins are traitors,’ he often said. On the Enlightenment, he was in total agreement with the empress. ‘Freedom of
speech, like reform, is only possible when things are stable,’ he would declare firmly. ‘We must be very careful.’

For in all St Petersburg, there was no more careful man than he. He lived in a modest house, no longer in the First Admiralty quarter but in the less fashionable Second. He kept only thirty servants and seldom gave dinner to more than a dozen guests. His carriage and equipage were modest; even his debts were modest. Indeed, he almost lived within his income.

He was still a State Councillor. For some reason his career had come to a halt. And with his old patron Potemkin gone, it seemed unlikely that he would rise higher. ‘He’s a very nice man,’ people now said: and a wise fellow knows he is going no further when they say that. Yet he appeared to be content. He still had hopes of minor appointments in the future which might supplement his income; and if he had such hopes, it was because people these days said something else about him too. ‘Bobrov,’ they would agree, ‘is sound.’

He had worked hard at that. From the very moment of the Revolution, he had severed his ties with all radicals. When Radishchev had been arrested, he had even submitted a brief article to a journal exposing the monstrous errors of his former acquaintance. By good luck, also, he had never had any contact with the Rosicrucians since the day he had sent his resignation to the professor. Indeed, he had even avoided the ordinary Masonic lodges. If his life was duller, it was also very safe. And how else should it be, for a cautious family man?

For if Alexander had struck a bargain with God, that terrible day in 1789 when Tatiana lay near death, the Almighty had kept His side of it. Tatiana had lived. Not only that, she had produced a fine baby boy and then, two years later, another. For his part, Alexander still saw Adelaide de Ronville as a friend, but no longer as a lover. He was a model husband: a little paunchy now, but dependable, so that his old friends said with a smile: ‘Ah, Bobrov – a very married man.’

There had been one unexpected set-back: Tatiana’s father had died and, to everyone’s surprise, left only a pittance. It seemed that, unknown even to Tatiana, the Baltic nobleman had been speculating in the grain from his southern estates and had lost heavily. Alexander and the family were not ruined: the estates were only about half-mortgaged now. ‘But thank God for the
countess,’ he remarked to Tatiana. ‘Without her, there’d be almost nothing to leave the children.’ They both visited the old woman regularly, and she had long ago promised them that their legacy was secure. ‘God knows,’ Alexander would say, ‘she can’t last much longer now.’

This then, in the autumn years of Catherine the Great, was the modest family life of Alexander Bobrov, whose gambling days were over.

Season of White Nights: it was on one of the first of these magical evenings that Alexander made his way over the Neva for one of his routine visits to the countess.

She had been growing rather frail of late, but she still insisted on entertaining. Her evenings were quieter now. Only a few old faithfuls came; but the eccentric old lady carried on exactly as before. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to Alexander that she must be confused about the date, for she always ignored the French Revolution. Perhaps she had even forgotten it! But then nothing, he mused, should disturb the tranquil certainty of the old lady’s temple.

When he entered the vast salon, the huge, white silk window blinds had been three-quarters lowered, but the windows were open so that the faint breeze gently ruffled the bottom folds of the blinds. Outside, the evening was light; within, the room seemed filled with paleness and half-shadow.

As he expected, there were only a few people there, mostly old men, though one or two of the younger generation had appeared. He saw Adelaide de Ronville, talking quietly with one of the old gentlemen, and they exchanged a smile. She looked a little thinner, more brittle nowadays. It was a pity that she had no lover at present. And there was the countess, in the middle of the room, sitting on her gilt chair. What a curious old creature she was, with her long dress and ribbons, still just like something out of the old French court as she sat in state to receive her guests. He bent down to kiss her, noticing that she seemed rather listless that evening. Did she like him? Even now, after all these years, it was impossible to say. One moment she would seem to smile at him; but then, a few minutes later, he would see her watching him with a look of such cynicism, even malice, in her sharp old eyes that it almost made him cringe. Who knew what she was thinking? She
seemed pleased to see him now, however, spoke a few words, and then let him go.