The Silent Land Page 5

  “T … the S … Soviet will g … go on,” he said. “It w … w … won’t give in. It kn … knows that Tsar h … hasn’t g … given m … much away.”

  Peter’s grin widened.

  “You’re such a fool, Sasha,” he said. “The Tsar hasn’t given away much, but it’ll be enough for the liberals. They’re like donkeys – just letting them see the carrot is enough. They’ll go over to the government, and the Soviet will be finished.”

  “N … no!” Sasha said.

  “Y … y … yes!” Peter countered.

  They may have said more, things that were beyond my comprehension. I simply don’t remember. But I’ll never forget their expressions as they looked at one another, Sasha squatting on the ground, Peter towering over him.

  On Peter’s broad, chiselled face was a look of complete complacency, a look which said, ‘I will always be right, you will always be wrong. I will always win, and you will always lose.’

  Sasha’s expression was more intense, but there was none of the gentle, suffering Christ in the icons about him now. His eyes blazed with hatred for everything Peter was – everything he stood for.

  Peter was right about the Soviet. The liberals withdrew their support, the strike collapsed and the government of the workers, by the workers, fell with it.

  As for the meetings by the well, they stopped as abruptly as they’d started. It wasn’t just that Peter had spoiled the place for us – though he had – Sasha seemed reluctant to meet anywhere. I think he felt he’d been humiliated, and that our relationship could never return to its former state until he had done something to redeem himself. Which is just the sort of foolishness that men do indulge in. I recognized it then as clearly as I recognize it now, and I have never, ever, been able to understand it.

  In our snug, smug little world, seven hundred miles from the centre of great events, there was scarcely a ripple of discontent – not then. The young men who had survived the Russo-Japanese War had no time to gripe; there was a harvest to be reaped and memories of battles were soon smothered by their struggle against time and nature.

  I, too, had obstacles to overcome, battles to fight. I learned how to ignore the hostility of Mariamna and Countess Olga, or at least to insulate myself so that their barbs did not prick quite so deeply. I learned how to behave at table, cutting up all my meat with a knife, then placing it on the knife rest and eating with a fork only. I learned history and geography and English, and basked in the warm glow of Miss Eunice’s approval.

  And so the autumn slid into winter – double windows sealed with moss, hot soups and stews, tobogganing. Then it was spring again, with crocuses pushing their heads out of the soil almost as soon as the snow had gone, to be quickly followed by blue asters and flowering lilac. It was not until the spring of 1906 drifted lazily into summer that the trouble started.

  It began as rumours. Muhziks in a village some hundred versts away had revolted, killing the landowner and his family and slaughtering all their beasts.

  “How did it happen?” I asked breathlessly from my bed in the maids’ room.

  “They slit their throats from ear to ear,” Natulia told me in a tone which lay somewhere between relish and fear.

  “No,” Tassaya countered, as she always seemed to do on principal. “They locked them in the house and set it on fire. They were roasted alive.”

  The troubles got closer. On still summer evenings, we could hear distant church bells ringing out the tocsin to warn of fire. The Count unlocked his armoury and issued every servant who had served in the forces with a rifle. Dressed in his Guard’s uniform he marched his reluctant troops into a fallow field and watched as slowly – clumsily – they regained their old skills. For three whole days all other tasks around the house were neglected, until finally he was satisfied that his private army was ready to deal with any disturbance. After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

  It was two o’clock on a summer’s morning when something finally happened. I remember it all vividly, even now – the dry taste in my mouth, the stickiness of my eyelids, the reluctance of my body to move despite Tassaya’s urgent shaking.

  “Get dressed,” she kept saying. “There’s a fire in the lower barn.”

  I struggled into my clothes and ran through the warm night air towards the amber glow. The barn was made of brick, or it would have burned down before anyone could reach it, but the thatched roof blazed away with tremendous force. The oxen, rescued from their stalls, had lost their normal placidity and shuddered nervously. The villagers, as was their duty, had all turned out with a bucket or a shovel to give their assistance. Firemen on their wooden truck were pumping furiously and a jet of water shot from the end of their hose onto the burning roof. I watched everyone I knew in the whole world fighting the fire – and wondered which one of them had started it.

  There were my mother, father and young brothers; here the thin, intense Sasha who I had not seen for nearly a year; over there the burly, powerful Peter, swinging the heavy fire buckets as if they weighed nothing. And suddenly, though I could not have explained how I knew, I realized that the fire was Peter’s work.

  It was an hour before the blaze was extinguished and we could return to the house. I climbed back into my narrow bed but though my small body cried out for rest, my mind buzzed with fear and excitement, and sleep would not come.

  I could smell the smoke in my night-dress. As I tossed from side to side, the straw in my pillow crackled like the flames which had greedily eaten up the thatch. I wondered if there would be more fires, or if we’d be murdered in our beds as the maids had darkly predicted.

  The morning, like so many mornings which follow nights of childhood fear, was an anticlimax. The servants, though looking sleepier than usual, were carrying out their normal duties. I sat at the breakfast table with the Count and his family, as I always did. In through the long windows shone an untroubled sun.

  “It’s a good day to start the harvesting,” the Count announced cheerfully, and as if to give ourselves fresh courage, everybody, including the bad-tempered Countess Olga, agreed that it was.

  We were excused school during harvest time, and when breakfast was finished we all went down to the pantry door where the bailiff had set up his table. We were waiting for the muhziks. Few of them grew enough to feed their families, and most were forced to work as labourers for the Count and the richer peasants like Peter. Soon, they would appear at the gates and shuffle uneasily around to the side of the house to make their marks in the bailiff’s ledger.

  An hour passed, and not a single peasant appeared. “The idle dogs,” the Count said. “Just because they were on fire duty last night is no excuse for sleeping in this morning.” His voice was gruff, as if he were annoyed. Yet I thought I could detect a underlying hint of unease.

  It was another hour before a solitary figure appeared at the gate. He was thin for a peasant and he didn’t walk down the drive with the hangdog attitude favoured by most of the mir, but instead moved with the purposeful, yet awkward gait of a reluctant hero. Even before we could see his face clearly, I knew it was Sasha.

  It seemed to take forever for him to arrive at the table. Once there, he stood squarely before the Count and his bailiff.

  “You’re late to sign on for work,” the Count said.

  “I haven’t come to s … sign on, otets.”

  Father! How ingrained are our habits, even in the souls of revolutionaries.

  “Then why are you here?” the Count demanded.

  “As a re … representative of the U … Union of Peasants.”

  “You mean, the mir,” the Count sneered.

  “No,” Sasha insisted, “the U … Union of Peasants.”

  “And what does the U … Union of Peasants have to say?” the Count asked mockingly.

  “That we’re t … tired of seeing our children go hungry, of w … watching our wives grow old before their time. That this year, we w … want to keep more of what we h … harvest for ourselves.
”

  The Count had been sitting, but now he sprang to his feet. “You dare to threaten me?”

  Sasha didn’t retreat – not an inch. Never in my life had I seen a peasant behave like this in the presence of the aristocracy. “I’m not here to thr … threaten,” he said. “I’m here to n … negotiate.”

  The Count picked up his riding crop from the table and slashed it through the air. Sasha reeled backwards under the blow, and fell to the ground. His face had turned deathly pale save for the angry red mark which ran from his cheekbone to his mouth.

  Slowly, Sasha climbed to his feet and dusted himself down. “You can h … hurt me,” he said, “but you can’t h … hurt us all. If you don’t n … negotiate, your crops will rot in the fields.”

  Only half a century earlier, the Count could have had Sasha knouted, until his back ran red with blood – until he was dead. But now the serfs were emancipated – now he could only stand there in helpless rage.

  “I’ll starve rather than give in,” he shouted. “I’ll see my family starve rather than give in.”

  Sasha turned his back and began to walk away. He hobbled somewhat, as though the blow had injured his body as well as his face. No one tried to stop him.

  “Saddle my horse,” the Count said finally, when the muhzik was only a small shape in the distance.

  “Are you going riding?” Countess Olga demanded sulkily. “At a time like this?”

  “I’m not doing it for pleasure,” the Count snapped. “I’m going to the town to telegraph the dragoons. They’ll soon break this Union of Peasants.”

  Chapter Five

  There have been perhaps seven or eight occasions in my life when I’ve known, with absolute certainty, that there was something I had to do. They flit through my mind now, almost as if I were watching them on the flickering screen of the Bolshoi Cinema. Making a furtive assignation with a sex-crazed, fanatical holy man called Rasputin. Joining the Bolshevik Party. Forcing myself to pull the trigger of my pistol that night in the Crimea …

  Seven or eight occasions only. There may be one more. I will not let my great-granddaughters, my mock-solicitous, insufferable great-granddaughters, put me in a home. I, who have seen the vastness of the Russian Steppes, who have openly defied Joseph Stalin, will never allow myself to be confined to a narrow cell, granted freedom only at the whim of some uniformed matron.

  Sonia and Jennifer will not succeed in breaking my spirit now. Rather than submit to their tidy plans, to their desire to sweep an old woman under the institutional carpet, I’ll kill myself. I’ll wait until everyone else is out of the house, then put my head in the gas oven and turn on the tap. I’ll lie in the tepid water of the communal bath and slit my wrists. I’ll …

  Pull yourself together, you old fool! That isn’t what you meant to say. Not what you meant to think.

  Start again.

  There have been seven or eight occasions in my life when I’ve known, with absolute certainty, that there was something I had to do, and the first of these came that day when I saw the Count ride off to telegraph the dragoons.

  I told no one of my plans and it was only when I’d said good-night to the family that I made my move. By the time I reached the mir, a pale summer dusk had fallen and the muhziks, returned from the fields, sat outside the village inn, sipping tea. They would have preferred vodka, but drinking is a serious business in Russia requiring three days – one to get drunk, one to be drunk, one to sober up – and during the harvest there was no time for such luxury.

  The men looked at me as I walked past them, and I was almost on the point of speaking when they turned their heads away. I was not one of them any more. I’d been away for less than two years, and already I was a stranger.

  A dog howled, a baby cried. I marched steadfastly down the unmade street. The izbá I wanted was at the far end of the village. I knocked firmly on the door, and when it was swung open I saw Sasha standing there. The slash mark across his face had turned an ugly black. He looked down at me and smiled uncertainly.

  “Annushka! What are you d … doing here?” he asked.

  “The Count has sent for soldiers.”

  Sasha nodded his head gravely. “I th … thought he would.”

  “You must go!”

  “Go wh … where, little one?”

  “Anywhere! As long as it’s away from here.”

  “Whatever h … happens, I have to stay,” Sasha said. “There’s n … no choice.”

  “If you run away,” I blurted out, “I’ll go with you.”

  Sasha squatted down beside me, as he’d done so often in the past, so that our faces were almost touching. For a while, neither of us spoke. What was he thinking? It’s hard to be certain, I can only say that in his eyes I read a sorrow as deep as the village well.

  It was Sasha who finally broke the silence. “Your path has been chosen for you,” he said, and his voice had a mystical – almost priest-like – quality about it. “Perhaps it will cross mine again in the future, but for the moment it must travel a different way. Go back to the Big House, Annushka.”

  He said it softly, but it had the force of a command – and he hadn’t stuttered once.

  I kissed him quickly on the cheek, then turned and ran. The Big House was in darkness when I returned. I climbed in through the dormitory window and buried myself under the blanket on my narrow bed.

  The dragoons arrived the next evening. They didn’t come directly to the Big House, but instead rode up and down the village several times, glaring at the peasants who stood impassively in the street.

  “A show of force,” the Count said triumphantly.

  But against what? No more buildings had been burnt and the muhziks were sullen rather than defiant.

  The dragoons were divided into units and each was quartered in a different barn or outlying farm on the Count’s estate. And there they sat for two more days, waiting for something to happen, while all the time the wheat in the Count’s fields was growing dangerously towards over-ripeness. Even someone of the Count’s influence could not have kept the soldiers there indefinitely, especially since there was real trouble in other parts of the country. Had events been left to themselves, the dragoons would probably have gone away and the Count would have been forced to give in to the peasants’ demands. But that would not have suited Peter – and Peter was never a man to leave events to themselves.

  He made his move at the end of the second day of our military occupation. I was lying on my bed when I spotted him coming down the drive. Sasha had been open in his approach, but the muscular Peter moved like a wolf, powerful but wary.

  I wondered who he’d come to see. Most of the servants had been dispatched to deliver rations to the soldiers, and the rest were away carrying other errands. Even the Countess and her children were absent. Under an escort of dragoons, they’d gone out for a ride in the drozhky.

  I don’t know whether it was curiosity or fear which made me move away from the window. Perhaps it was both. I heard Peter’s stealthy footfalls crushing the gravel, getting closer and closer, and then a voice saying, “Well, Peter Vassilyevich, this is a sorry state of affairs indeed!”

  The Count. Sitting on the veranda. Almost as if he had expected the peasant to call.

  “A sorry state of affairs, otets?” Peter asked, as though he didn’t know what the Count was talking about.

  “There are no muhziks to harvest my crop, and even if there were, much of my seed was destroyed in that unfortunate fire.”

  “It may yet turn out to have been fortunate fire,” Peter said.

  “Indeed? How could that be possible when it has almost ruined me?”

  There was none of the surprise in his voice I would have expected. They were both acting, I suddenly realized. They were just like the cockerel and the hen in the mating season, each one involved in an elaborate ritual – each one knowing all the time what the end would be.

  “I hope you’ll think of me as a friend,” Peter said.

&
nbsp; “A friend?” the Count replied with obvious distaste.

  “Or an ally, at least.”

  “An ally. Yes.”

  “Then as your ally, I’ll see to it that you have the money to replace your equipment.”

  “At an extortionate interest rate, of course.”

  “At the fairest interest you’ll get from any one,” Peter said. “Now about the other problem, the striking muhziks. I have a way to solve it that will benefit us both.”

  “Come and look at the barn,” the Count said, “then we can discuss exactly what I need.”

  I heard his chair scrape along the floor, then the sound of two sets of retreating footsteps. When Peter and the Count next spoke, they were too far away for me to distinguish the words. I wanted to follow them and listen to the rest of their conversation – to learn how a fire could possibly be fortunate for anyone – but they were out in the open and would soon spot me. I would just have to wait for my answer, I thought.

  He came in the middle of the night, tapping desperately on the window like a trapped, frightened bird. At first I thought the noise was only in my dreams, but slowly I forced my eyes open and looked around me. The maids were all asleep, little Tassaya no doubt dreaming of marrying Peter, the more practical Natulia snoring loudly.

  I climbed out of bed and made for the window. The hand continued to tap and beyond it was the pale face of Sasha. He saw me and stopped knocking. I pulled back the bolt and slid up the window as quietly as I could.

  “What do you want?” I whispered.

  “You’ve got to h … hide me,” he gasped. “The dragoons. Th … they’re out looking for me.”

  I raised the window higher so that he could climb in, then took his hand and led him through the maze of beds to the corridor. “Why are they looking for you? Is it because the muhziks won’t work?”

  “No. Th … they say I burnt down the C … Count’s barn.”

  “But you didn’t. I know you didn’t.”

  “Two of th … them came to arrest me. I knocked one out with my sh … shovel and beat the other one until he ran away. I’m st … stronger than I look.”