'Yes.'

'Then tell me this,' she continued pleasantly. 'If the revolution actually comes soon, and I choose to resist it,' she smiled quizzically, 'would you kill me too?'

At which, instead of answering, he frowned and paused to think.

That, she decided, was what she liked. However devious he might be in his dealings, there was still a strange if cruel honesty about him. Something almost pure. He was undoubtedly dangerous: perhaps her fascination with him was, in part, the excitement of a forbidden love. And now, rather than lie, he was calmly considering whether he would kill her or not.

'Well?'

'I don't think it would be necessary. Actually,' he added, 'I think you could be saved.'

He did, too. She was like a bird in a cage, he often thought: trapped in this huge mansion and her bourgeois world, certainly; yet still a free spirit, capable of leaving all this behind if called to a higher purpose.

'I suppose that's a compliment,' she smiled.

'Yes. It is.'

For several more minutes they sat in silence, each conscious of the other, yet following their own thoughts.

And then the fire in the grate hissed, and spat.

The fire was low, just some brightly glowing embers amidst the ash, and the little piece of sparking cinder it threw out might easily have lain on the floor and slowly extinguished itself. But by chance it came to rest upon the edge of Mrs Suvorin's peignoir and immediately flared up with a sharp flame. She gave a little cry and, intending to whisk her peignoir away, stupidly flicked the lighted cinder on to her lap instead.

It was nothing really. An instant more and she could have risen and stamped out the tiny fire. But seeing the fear on her face, Popov suddenly thought that she was catching fire and, without thinking more, threw himself forward, plucking the burning cinder from her in his bare hands and tossing it back into the grate. Then, grabbing a cushion, he smothered the little fire.

And now, finding him almost in her arms, Mrs Suvorin looked into his face and saw, to her surprise, a look of tenderness.

'Don't move,' she said.

It was another two hours before, in the damp cold outside, young Alexander Bobrov gave up his lonely vigil. He could not understand it. The devil Popov was with her; there could be only one reason why.

And what on earth, he wondered, should be done?

1910.

At first sight, in the years 1909 and 1910, it might have seemed that the household of Professor Peter Suvorin was a place of perfect harmony.

Everyone was busy. Dimitri had two music professors now and was making rapid strides. Karpenko had entered the School of Art and was already gaining a reputation as a fellow of ideas. As was his custom, kindly Vladimir had given the young man a helping hand, inviting him frequently to his house when distinguished members of the art world were gathered there, and introducing him to several artists. And Peter Suvorin himself was particularly busy: for it was during these years that he wrote his classic textbook, Physics for Students Physics for Students, which was to make his name familiar to a whole generation of Russian schoolboys.

These were quiet times for Russia too. To Dimitri, as he walked into the shady courtyard of the apartment building, if often seemed that, if great events were stirring in the world, their sounds had been muffled by the time they reached the narrow, tree-lined streets of Moscow. Of the doings of the Tsar, his German wife and their children in their private palaces in St Petersburg, he heard hardly anything.

Dimitri knew, too, that Stolypin and the Duma continued on their road of slow reform; though when he read the newspapers it seemed to him that the great minister, though he brought peace and prosperity, had few friends. 'The liberals hate him for clamping down,' Vladimir explained, 'but the reactionaries hate him because his system of governing seems to weaken the absolute autocracy of the Tsar. He's winning through though,' he added.

To Dimitri, the evenings were the best of times, when the family sat together round the table and discussed the day's events. How delightful it was, especially in the spring and summer months when his mother would prepare tea, served with raspberries, and through the open window one could see the mellow turquoise sky and hear, faintly, the singing of vespers from the church next door.

Karpenko was a constant source of conversation. While Dimitri's studies at this time were of a gradual and private nature he would be immersed for weeks at a time in the Beethoven piano sonatas, or in a Tchaikovsky symphony, which profound joys could not easily be shared in words Karpenko was in a continual ferment of intellectual excitement, and hardly a week seemed to pass when he did not bring home some new discovery which changed the world. Sometimes it was a new school of painting, inaugurated in an exhibition with some name like The Blue Rose, or The Golden Fleece. One month he read the Confessions Confessions of the writer Gorky and some writings of a new group in St Petersburg who called themselves the God Builders, and each evening he would lecture the family: 'Don't you see, all through the centuries man has been like Prometheus, chained to a rock of superstition. But now, Dimitri, man is risen. The people is God. The people will be immortal. Think of it, Professor: first the people will create the revolution and be free; then, maybe one day we'll even take over other planets, the universe.' And afterwards he and Dimitri would continue these weighty discussions in the room they shared, late into the night. of the writer Gorky and some writings of a new group in St Petersburg who called themselves the God Builders, and each evening he would lecture the family: 'Don't you see, all through the centuries man has been like Prometheus, chained to a rock of superstition. But now, Dimitri, man is risen. The people is God. The people will be immortal. Think of it, Professor: first the people will create the revolution and be free; then, maybe one day we'll even take over other planets, the universe.' And afterwards he and Dimitri would continue these weighty discussions in the room they shared, late into the night.

But the discovery of Karpenko's that meant the most to Dimitri was something more modest. There were many poets in Moscow and St Petersburg just then; indeed, poetry was so popular that poets could even make a living at their craft. And one night Karpenko arrived with a collection of verses by some people Dimitri had not heard of before. 'They're a new school,' he explained. 'Instead of using symbols and abstract ideas they write more directly, about experience.' Two of these in particular Dimitri loved at once. 'I feel as if they're writing about this very street, this very apartment and family,' he said, delightedly. And so, at the start of their careers, he discovered two of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets: Osip Mandelstamm and Anna Akhmatova.

Yet despite Karpenko's brilliance, it was during these evenings that Dimitri gradually came, as never before, to appreciate one other member of his close-knit family: this was his father.

Peter Suvorin seldom spoke much, but he would sit, with his gold-rimmed spectacles propped below the bridge of his nose, quietly reading a paper or looking over the pages of his manuscript. His face was clean-shaven except for a small wedge of beard on his chin; and though his hair was grey and his face, somewhat drawn, had collected little lines upon it, he still looked less than his fifty-five years. With his look of kindly serenity, one might have taken him for a Swedish pastor.

And in his gentle way, he presided over everything. 'Do you know what your father reminds me of?' Karpenko once laughingly remarked to Dimitri. 'He's like one of those elders at a monastery. We all worship and make a noise and believe. But the elder in his hermitage, he's quiet and serene: because unlike the rest of us, he knows knows. That's how it is with your father and the revolution.'

Indeed, Peter Suvorin had reason to be content with his modest, steady course. The Bolsheviks in the last two years had little to show for their extremism. Police spies had infiltrated their ranks and made it hard for them to operate. Their lonely leader Lenin seemed to have been forced into permanent exile in Switzerland and their membership had plummeted. But the moderate, Menshevik Socialists had continued about their business, gradually building up support in the factories, organizing trade unions, educating and publishing mostly legal activities. Some were ready to work with the Duma. There was even talk of changing the party's name to the Workers' Party. And Peter Suvorin was happy because, as he would tell his family: 'It's progress.

'The new age is coming,' he liked to say, 'not because of your will, Karpenko, nor even the cunning of a fellow like Popov. You shouldn't worry about the now or the when: we do not know the hour or the manner of its coming. The point is that we know the process is inevitable.'

Once, with a smile, the professor had remarked: 'It occurred to me as I was working on my book the other day, that the Marxist Dialectic is like the laws of physics. Consider an electric current. It has a positive and negative charge: Thesis and Antithesis they create a tension, the potential difference. They flow together, making a Synthesis. When Trotsky speaks of a permanent revolution in the world a continuous process I suppose it's like an electric current: endless, dynamic, capable of powering anything.' Listening to his father Dimitri would get a wonderful sense that all things in the universe were scientifically related, and that his little family, with their different forms of expression, were all moving along the great highway to an ultimate and marvellous destiny.

Nothing ever seemed to change the professor. He taught; he wrote; his pupils came to the house. His life was as quiet and ordered as his mind. Whatever else was going on, Peter's activities gave the household a certain rhythm and purpose. It was comforting.

And, by the summer of 1910, Dimitri was certainly in need of comfort.

For by then it was clear that Rosa Suvorin was going mad.

For some months after Dimitri's accident, Rosa's habitual anxiousness seemed to have lessened. It was as if, fearing something worse, she was actually relieved that tragedy had struck and that now it was over. But then, just around the time Peter began writing his book, something began to change.

Why did she insist upon typing his book herself? Several times he had begged her to let him give the work to someone else, but on each occasion she had gone white with determination, as though he were somehow trying to violate her act of passionate devotion, and he had given up.

Each night, after supper was finished, she would set up her typewriter in the little dining room and start to work. She refused to do this during the day, saying she had no time then. Over and over again, she would type whatever Peter had written, until she was satisfied that it was perfect. Sometimes she would be done in an hour or so; but often she would continue, late into the night, lovingly placing her offering on the table in the hall in the early hours, and appear in the morning with eyes dark from lack of sleep. And how many nights, Dimitri wondered, had he fallen asleep to the faint sound of the typewriter going tap, tap, tap in the darkness?

Worse however than this obsessive behaviour, which wore Rosa down, was the reawakening of her old anxiousness, which now returned with a vengeance.

It took strange forms. If there were the faintest chill in the air, Peter must have an overcoat and a fur hat; if the sun was warm, she feared for sunstroke; whenever there was ice upon the ground, she knew he must have slipped and injured himself. This anxiety soon extended to cover Dimitri as well. Sometimes, to his great embarrassment, she would even insist that Karpenko go with him to school, in case anything should happen to him on the way. She could only relax, it seemed, in the evenings, when her husband and son were safely at home again.

Then she began to follow them. At first, they did not even realize that she was doing so: she would have some perfectly plausible excuse a friend to visit, some shopping to do for accompanying Peter to the university or Dimitri to school. But before long the excuses wore out and it became clear that she simply wanted to keep them in sight. Peter, who went in to the university only twice a week, decided to humour her; but Dimitri had to beg her to let him alone, and often thereafter he would turn irritably, to find her pale, wan face a hundred yards behind him.

More embarrassing were her suspicions.

They came, it seemed, from nowhere. Yet they tortured her. She would decide, quite suddenly, that a fellow professor was out to get Peter, or a neighbour with whom she was on friendly terms was a police spy, watching her whole family. She would earnestly warn Dimitri that there was a hidden conspiracy, coming from the Black Hundreds, to destroy all Jews and Socialists. 'Anyone may be in it,' she would warn him, 'you never know.' And no one, it seemed, was above suspicion.

In the first months of 1910, Karpenko became agitated because the government, having allowed the Ukraine some cultural freedom, became nervous of the growing sense of nationalism emerging there. 'The word is that they are about to close all the Ukrainian cultural societies,' he told them dejectedly. 'We Cossacks should rise up again as we did under Bogdan,' he added wryly, 'and take over the Ukraine again.'

It was an innocent statement, said jokingly. But suddenly Rosa's face clouded. 'What do you mean by that?' she demanded. 'What sort of uprising?' And for some ten minutes she cross-questioned the youth suspiciously. And afterwards, when Dimitri asked her what the matter was, she turned to him with a troubled face and explained: 'Don't you realize, the Cossack rising was the greatest massacre of Jews that Russia has ever seen.' 'But you surely don't think ...?' 'You never know, Dimitri. You can never be sure of anybody.' And he could only shake his head.

It was a week after this incident, when the two of them happened to be alone, that Rosa sat him down at the kitchen table and said to him earnestly: 'I want you to make me one promise, Dimitri. Will you do it for me?'

'If I can,' he replied.

'Promise me, then, that you will be a musician. That you will never become a revolutionary, like your father, but that you will stick to music.'

Dimitri shrugged. Since he had every hope of devoting his life to music this did not seem too hard a thing to promise. 'All right,' he said.

'Your word?'

'Yes.' He smiled, half irritated, half with love and pity at Rosa. How haggard her face looked. 'Why?'

She gazed at him sadly. It occurred to Dimitri that the seers of ancient times, like Cassandra in Greek tragedy, might have looked a little like his mother, with huge, sorrowful eyes that seemed to see beyond the present, into a terrible future. 'You don't understand,' she told him. 'Only Jewish musicians will be safe. Only musicians.'

And there was nothing he could say at this obvious sign of madness.

Several times, in the spring of 1910, Peter tried to persuade Rosa to see a doctor, but she would not hear of it. He discussed the matter with his brother Vladimir, who twice came to the apartment and suggested she should go down to Russka for peace and quiet. This however she also rejected. 'I'm going to Germany in May,' he informed Peter. 'I believe there's a doctor there who could help her.' But though Peter was agreeable, Rosa utterly refused even to consider it. And no one knew quite what to do.

It was at the start of May that Dimitri overheard a strange conversation which, even in retrospect, continued to puzzle him.

He and Karpenko were spending the evening with Nadezhda. As usual the time had passed delightfully and after a long discussion about music he had suggested he play them the Tchaikovsky Seasons Seasons, only to find that the music was not in the house. He had returned to the apartment, therefore, with the aim of collecting the score and hurrying back to the big Suvorin house to play it.

He knew that his mother was alone that evening, since Peter was out at a meeting nearby. He was surprised therefore, upon opening the door, to hear voices coming from the little drawing room off the hall. They belonged to his mother and to Vladimir. His mother's for some reason was only a faint murmur, but Vladimir's rich voice he could hear clearly.

'I'm more concerned with you. This can't go on. For God's sake, my dear, come away with me to Germany.'

Then his mother's voice, too soft to make out.

'Nothing will happen to anyone.'

Another murmur.

'I tell you truthfully, the boy's better off here at present. There are no better music teachers in the world than in Russia.'

Now there was a longer pause. Dimly he heard his mother say something about a letter. Then his uncle's voice again.

'Yes, yes. I give you my word. Of course I can arrange it. If anything happens I'll get him out. Yes, Dimitri shall go to America if that is what you wish.'

After this there was a long silence, and then he thought he heard his mother sobbing. Instead of collecting his music, he quietly withdrew and returned to his friends saying that he had been unable to find it. But later that night, as he lay awake in his room and listened to the faint tap, tap, tap of his mother's typewriter he wondered: what on earth would he want with America?

There was no question about it. Mrs Suvorin had scored one of the greatest coups of her social career so far. A personal triumph.

For in mid-June 1910, the week after All Saints Day, she entertained the monk, Rasputin.

He had said he would come in the afternoon and take tea. It was therefore an intimate gathering that Mrs Suvorin had prepared, consisting of family members, some of her more important friends, and those few women who, over the years, had deliberately or inadvertently hurt her vanity, and who now could not fail to be impressed by this visitor who was known to be on intimate terms with the imperial family.

Vladimir was still abroad, but she kindly invited Peter Suvorin and Rosa, and naturally Dimitri and Karpenko accompanied them. And so it was that the two youths found themselves in a company of forty or so persons eagerly awaiting the arrival of the strange man.

It was five years since Rasputin had first appeared before the Tsar, but much about him was still a mystery. People called him a holy man though he was never a monk, as some supposed. Indeed, though he seldom bothered to see them, he had a wife and family in the distant Urals. And though voices had been raised in the capital about his lewd behaviour, many credited him with supernatural powers. 'He's a real hermit from the Russian forests,' Karpenko told Dimitri. 'They say he walked to the capital all the way from Siberia.' He gave a little laugh: 'He's supposed to have the power of second sight, you know. Just watch his eyes.' What everyone knew however, and what made him nowadays a figure to be courted by fashionable ladies, was the fact that he had a devoted admirer in the Empress.

What did she see in him? Few people knew. The imperial household was a little world apart, utterly cut off from the rest of society by a phalanx of noble courtiers from old service families who thought it their duty to separate the monarchy from the barbarous Russian people as far as possible. The Tsar, his German wife, his daughters and the heir to the throne, the little Tsarevich, were as hidden from even prominent subjects as the family of an oriental despot.

And that the heir to the throne had a terrible disease that made him bleed, and threatened his life, and that this extraordinary, hypnotic peasant from Siberia seemed able to cure it, not even rich Mrs Suvorin had the least idea.

If Mrs Suvorin had intended to stage a memorable little occasion, she was afraid for a short time that her efforts might collapse in ruins, since Rasputin was extremely late. But at last the doors opened, conversation dropped, and a black-clothed figure was ushered in. After which, all the company stared in surprise. For he was not what they had expected.

'I thought he'd be taller,' Karpenko whispered, in obvious disappointment.

The man who was the imperial family's confidant, and who knew the most terrible medical secret in the Russian empire, was hardly an impressive figure. He was only of medium height: the top of his head reached no higher than the base of Mrs Suvorin's coiffure. He was rather slightly built with a narrow chest and sloping shoulders. His long, dark hair was parted in the middle; his beard, which hardly reached the top of his chest, was rather wiry. His blunt nose veered noticeably away to the left. He wore a simple, long coat of black silk that reached below his knees. He might have been a small-time priest from one of a thousand villages. Though his clothes were clean and his beard combed, there was a faint, acrid smell from his body that suggested he washed himself less often than other men.

He bowed politely to everyone in the room and seemed grateful when Mrs Suvorin led him to a sofa, and offered him tea.

The little party, however, soon seemed to be going rather well. Mrs Suvorin, rather meeker than usual, sat and made polite conversation with her honoured guest. The imperial family was mentioned and pious sentiments about them expressed. Various people were brought over to speak to Rasputin and for each, it seemed, he had kind and modest words. When Nadezhda was introduced, he politely told her mother that the girl had a beautiful nature. To Peter Suvorin he respectfully said: 'You study the wonders of God's universe.'

'There doesn't seem anything so remarkable about him,' Dimitri remarked to Karpenko.

He was to revise this opinion somewhat, however, a few minutes later when Mrs Suvorin motioned him to approach. For it was only now, as he came face to face with Rasputin, that he encountered that strange man's most extraordinary feature.

While he observed him before, it had seemed to Dimitri that the fellow's eyes were rather foxy: curious, watchful, probably cunning as, from under his heavy peasant brow, their gaze darted here and there about the room. But now, finding them turned and fixed upon himself, Dimitri experienced their full effect.

They burned: there was no other word for it. They were like two searchlights, boring through the darkness, and everything else about the man was forgotten as one felt their astonishing, primal force. Only when he drew very close did the hypnotic gaze seem to soften and the eyes appear kindly, if a little bloodshot.

'A musician. Ah, yes.' That was all Rasputin said to him. It seemed he was not especially interested in Dimitri, though for some reason, after he had returned to his place, the boy felt a strange tingling sensation in his back.

Despite this little glimpse of Rasputin's power, the rest of the visit passed quietly enough; and it might have remained in Dimitri's mind as nothing more than a social event but for two small incidents that took place shortly before Rasputin left. The first concerned his mother.

Rosa had already been introduced, just after Peter, and apart from a polite bow, Rasputin had appeared to take no notice of her at all. Indeed, he was not even looking in her direction when suddenly, as if impelled, he rose from the sofa, turned, and walking swiftly over to where she was standing, took hold of her forearm with one hand and stood there, like a doctor feeling a pulse, quite silent for almost a minute. Then, without a word, he calmly let the arm drop and returned to his place, continuing his conversation with Mrs Suvorin as though nothing had happened. As for Rosa, though everyone else looked awkward, she did not blush, or even look startled, but stood very still, and neither then nor later did she ever refer to the incident.

The more frightening occurrence took place as Rasputin was leaving.

For some reason, after watching him for a while, Karpenko had suddenly decided he did not want to meet Rasputin. When it looked as if Mrs Suvorin was about to summon him, he had slipped away to a far corner of the room. And as the visitor finally rose to take his leave, Karpenko watched discreetly from behind the cover of two elderly ladies.

And Rasputin was halfway to the door when he abruptly stopped, wheeled, and came straight towards him.

The two ladies blushed and parted. Rasputin came nearer, then paused about ten feet in front of the young man. The hypnotic eyes stared at him, as Karpenko, stripped of his protection, seemed to quail before them. For a full quarter minute Rasputin looked at Karpenko. And then he smiled. 'Well, well,' he said softly. 'I have known others like you, in Siberia and St Petersburg.' And to Mrs Suvorin: 'What a clever young Cossack to have in your house.'

What on earth did he mean? Mrs Suvorin seemed to understand him, but she only looked a little awkward, and escorted Rasputin to the door.

But the effect upon Karpenko was devastating. By the time Rasputin had gone and Dimitri had gone over to him, he was white as a ghost, and shaking. When Dimitri put his arm around him and asked him what was the matter he could only whisper: 'He saw through me. He saw everything. He is the devil himself.' And when Dimitri gave him a look of blank incomprehension, he just grimaced, shot an awkward glance at Mrs Suvorin, and muttered: 'You don't understand. You know nothing.'

And for several weeks afterwards, the young Cossack was moody and withdrawn, and Dimitri could not discover why.

1911, September For some reason, Rosa noticed, her breasts felt cold. Why should that be? The chill damp air smelt faintly of smoke as she walked down the street. Darkness had fallen an hour ago. Here and there, lamps glowed.

At the corner she stopped and looked back. The bedroom she and Peter shared was the only room in the apartment that looked on to the street and for some reason she herself did not know why she had lit a candle and placed it in the window there. She could just see it now, a small, guttering flame set in the dark frame of the building, a strange, intimate little sentinel. A message perhaps, of love and of hope. Except for a note to say she had gone for a walk, she was leaving no other.

She walked round the corner. Her footsteps, oddly, felt light.

No one would know: that was the point. That was, in truth, her gift of love to them, that they should never know. Only Vladimir would know, and he was with his son in Paris now, not due back for a month. She had not written to him: there was no message; but he would know, and keep her secret.

A party of Cossacks clattered by on their horses on their way back to barracks, capes pulled tightly round them against the autumn chill.

When had it all begun? At the very start, perhaps: she had married Peter Suvorin when she was still depressed. That was her fault. Yet she had loved him passionately. No, she thought, she could pinpoint the real beginning. It was in 1900, when little Dimitri was five and the letter had come from America.

Since her marriage, Rosa had had little contact with her family in Vilnius. Four years afterwards, her mother had unexpectedly died, and then her elder brother and his family had emigrated to America. Then, in 1899, her other brother had followed. Their departures had not surprised her. Tens, hundreds of thousands of Jews were leaving; indeed, by 1914 some two million Jews would leave Russia for the United States, and the tsarist government was glad to see them go. Rosa had been happy that her brothers had crossed the Atlantic to find happiness; but their lives, by now, seemed far removed from hers.

And then came the letter. It was from her second brother, who normally disliked writing and from whom she had not heard since several months before he left. Yet now he wrote at length, giving a detailed account of the crossing and news of the family; and his letter also contained a long final section.

We came to Ellis Island. It was frightening for a moment. When I saw that great slab of a building and saw the rows of other immigrants waiting for inspection in the huge hall I thought My God, it's going to be like Russia only worse. It's a prison. But it was soon over and then we were out.And then ... This is why I had to write to you, dear Rosa. Then we were free. Can you imagine the feel of it? It's hard to describe. To know know that you are free. There are no gendarmes watching you for the Ministry of the Interior, no police spies looking for enemies of the regime. You can go where you please. Everyone can vote. And a Jew has as many rights as anyone else. that you are free. There are no gendarmes watching you for the Ministry of the Interior, no police spies looking for enemies of the regime. You can go where you please. Everyone can vote. And a Jew has as many rights as anyone else.The Americans are like the Russians. They are simple and straightforward, and speak from the heart the Russians at their best, that is! But also they are unlike Russians, because they are free, and they know it.And this is why I am writing to you now, dear Rosa. For being here, I can't help thinking of you. Of course, you have converted and you live in Moscow. But are you sure, are you really sure that this truly makes you safe? And little Dimitri: apart from your conversion, which I know was done for expediency, in Jewish eyes the son of a Jewish mother is a Jew. It's not that I'm personally religious: you know I'm not. But all I mean to say is, if things get bad in Russia, for God's sake come to America. Legally or illegally, you can always arrange something. Come and join us, I beg you, here where all your family will be safe.

The letter had made a lasting impression upon Rosa. If in recent years, with her new life and her child, she had seldom thought about the past, the letter brought it all back to her with a strange force. With poignancy she found herself thinking of her poor father and all he had tried to do for her. She thought of her own music, which she had never gone back to since marriage. She remembered rather sadly, now, the pain she had caused her mother. And picturing her brothers she thought: I wish I could see them again.