The Silent Land Read online

  Yet who am I, of all people, to criticize them for that? What do I think of when I cast my mind back to the years between entering the Big House and my marriage? Do I remember my gradual mastery of the written word, my growing command of arithmetic and geography? Do I recall the slow filling out of my peasant frame and mind until I became, physically and mentally, one of the pampered? No! It’s the peaks at which I gaze. Easter, Epiphany, the grand ball, the wolf hunt.

  Perhaps that’s not so unreasonable after all. It is at these peaks that we have time to stop, to reflect on where we’ve been and look ahead to where we’re going. And perhaps, because we have this small respite, we can take the time to choose to make things happen, as I did in the barn with Misha, in the Easter of 1907.

  Oh, those Russian Easters. How can anyone brought up in this prepackaged, convenience food society ever begin to understand what is was like in a Russian household – even a humble one – at Easter? Seven weeks we fasted – and then we went wild. There was a feast to rival the end of a Pakistan Ramadan, Ali. There was a carnival which, despite the absence of steel drums, could match any of Winston’s sun-soaked memories.

  Excitement was already in the air when we walked to church on the Sunday before the Resurrection. In Palestine, they had waved palms that day eighteen hundred and seventy-four years earlier, but we carried catkins, a symbol that, after the death of winter, the land would be reborn and flourish once more.

  In the week which followed Pussy Willow Sunday the staff of the Big House threw themselves into the feverish, frantic preparations for Easter Day. In the kitchen, paskhas – special Easter cheeses – were being made. I watched, fascinated, as the servants filled a large tub with wheyless curds, added butter, whipped cream, sugar and vanilla, and then stirred – endlessly.

  “Is that enough, Zossim?” I heard a tired servant girl ask after she had agitated the mixture perhaps five hundred times.

  And pear-headed Zossim, a tyrant in his little empire, inspected the tub and found that it wasn’t.

  Hours passed, more stirring – and more – before the cheese was mixed to the cook’s satisfaction, and could be poured into the muslin-lined cones which were kept in the cool pantry.

  Nor was the bakery a safe haven from the madness of the kitchen. The Count’s confectioner baked and iced, baked and iced, turning out scores of kulich cakes decorating them with ‘KV’, the first two letters of the words Khristos Voskryese – Christ has risen. Cakes for the family, cakes for the guests, cakes for the servants – cakes for the whole world.

  What smells filled the air. Almonds, saffron, nutmeg, sunflower oil – blending together for a moment, then drifting apart. And how we worked with Miss Eunice in the schoolroom, painting the Easter eggs – green eggs, red eggs, yellow eggs, eggs of every colour and mixture of colours imaginable.

  The eggs went on the Easter table, but they did not sit there alone. There were hams, joints of glazed veal, baby sturgeon in aspic jelly, salmon, caviar, pickled mushrooms, salted herrings … each with its own special place, all part of the celebration of the Saviour’s triumph which would go on for several days.

  On Holy Thursday, the family and guests rode to evening service in the lineika. Night had already fallen, but the church, lit by the candles that all members of the congregation carried in their hands, was bright as day. We stood in silence while the priest read twelve passages from the Gospel on the Passion of Jesus Christ, and impious little Anna found her eyes, and her mind, wandering.

  I gazed at the stony faces of the muhziks. What did these people, who saw nothing beyond the mir, make of the story of the strange man who died in a hot land they couldn’t even picture? How much of what they were doing now was merely habit, something to be endured, uncomplainingly, just as war and famine had to be endured?

  My mother and father were there, along with all the rest. When Papa saw me looking at him, he turned his eyes to the ground – just as if I was one of the dvorianstvo. But Mama didn’t look away, and I could see that she was crying, though I was not sure whether they were tears of pride or sorrow.

  On Good Friday, we stood on the same spot and watched the life-sized icon of Christ being lifted from the Cross. The face was Sasha’s, and like Christ, he, too, had suffered for these peasants. It was nearly a year since he had been dragged off in chains to his Siberian exile. I wondered if he was all right and knew, of course, that he wasn’t.

  The icon was laid at the gate of the Holy of Holies. We stepped forward and placed flowers at its feet. Then it was the muhziks’ turn, and they shuffled forward and laid their offerings. They were paying homage now, I thought, because they knew that Christ had triumphed. But how many of them would have helped Him at the time, and how many would have deserted Him, just as they deserted Sasha?

  After the midnight mass on Saturday, the muhziks went home to collect the food which the priest would bless. When they returned, they were weighed down with cheeses, sausages and suckling pigs. They had gone forty-nine days without eggs, meat or dairy products and when they looked down at their hoards, their mouths salivated.

  The blackness beyond the church windows slowly changed to a soft blue and finally became a bright crimson as the morning sun began its climb.

  “Christ is risen!” the priest intoned.

  “Indeed He is risen!” the muhziks chanted, in much the same tone of voice as they would use eleven years later to proclaim, “The Tsar is dead! The Tsar is dead!”

  The harshest fast of the year was over. The longest orgy of drunkenness was just about to begin.

  We sat around the Easter table, the Count, the Countess, the house guests and we children, all eating as only Russians can. It was a warm day and the windows were open. Occasionally, when the wind blew in the right direction, we could hear the sounds of celebration wafting in from the mir.

  I could picture what was going on there. Having had their fill of food by now, the peasants would be attacking the vodka, not simply with the fierce epigraph of the men sitting around our table, but with a passion which verged on insanity.

  “Do you think your father will be paralytic yet, Anna?” the Countess asked me.

  How, I wondered, was she always able to read my mind so easily? “I … I don’t know,” I stuttered.

  “Don’t you? I do! He’ll be lying under the table at the tavern, covered in mud, with his face buried in his own vomit.”

  “He works very hard,” I protested. He needed to. The money the Count had given him for me had been long since frittered away.

  “Our horses work hard,” the Countess said viciously. “So do our oxen. But yet they behave less like animals than the muhziks.”

  I glanced nervously up the table. If the Count had heard, there’d be trouble. He wouldn’t publicly rebuke his wife, but later he would talk to her and she would find a way to make me suffer for it.

  “Don’t you agree, Anna?” the Countess persisted.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. The Count was in deep conversation with one of his guests.

  “It’s bad manners not to speak when you’re spoken to! I asked you whether you agreed that the behaviour of the muhziks would put most animals to shame?”

  The Countess was out for blood, and I would get a beating whatever I said. Well, I told myself, I’d survived them before, and I would survive the one I’d earn by my answer.

  “I’ve had enough to eat,” said Misha, my timid protector. “May I go for a walk, mother? And may I take Anna with me?”

  He spoke mildly, hesitantly, but it was enough to deflect the Countess’s wrath away from me and on to her son.

  “You’ve hardly eaten anything,” she said. “Can’t you do anything right, anything manly? Look at the body on your father, and then look at your own. Have you seen yourself in a mirror? You’re ten years old, but you have the frame of a child of seven.”

  It was cruel, and it wasn’t true. There was nothing Misha could do about his slight frame, sensitive features and long, artistic hands.
All the food in the world couldn’t have made him grow to be like his father. But fairness had never been the Countess’s forte, and over the time I’d lived in the Big House I’d seen her attitude to Misha change from tolerant affection to virtual loathing.

  It was because of me, of course, and I knew it, even then. The more he tried to shield me, the more her dislike of him increased. Ah, Misha, what sacrifices you made for me. What a hero you made out of yourself, for me. What would have happened if I’d never met you? Would you still be alive now, an old man surrounded by the beautiful things he had spent his life lovingly collecting?

  “I’m sorry, mother,” Misha said. “But I have had enough. May I take Anna out?”

  I watched the Countess’s face twist as vindictiveness fought out an ugly, losing battle with disgust. “Get out of my sight,” she said finally. “You make me sick, both of you.”

  We walked through the orchard, still muddy after the thaw. Misha stopped, suddenly, at the base of one of the cherry trees. “Look!”

  He was pointing at the first violets of spring, purple against the brown mud, new life rising from among the dead leaves. He bent down, plucked one, and gave it to me. “This will be our last Easter together,” he said as I held the delicate flower in the palm of my hand.

  “Our last Easter?” I asked, panic in my voice. “Are they sending me away?”

  “No,” Misha said. “It is I who am going away. In the summer I’ll join the Corps of Pages.”

  “The Corps of Pages? Like in a book?”

  Misha laughed. He had a light, infectious laugh on the few occasions he found anything in this cruel, hard world to amuse him. “It’s a military school. An exclusive one. I’m very lucky to be going there. And very happy.”

  He spoke almost as if he were delivering a speech he’d learned by heart in an effort to convince himself, and me, that it was a good idea. Poor Misha. If anyone was ever unsuited for army life, it was him.

  “You look upset,” he said, and though he sounded sorry that he’d distressed me, he was pleased, too, that I cared enough to be distressed.

  “I’m more than upset,” I told him. “I …”

  I felt a sickness, an emptiness, which started in my stomach and slowly spread, like a cancer, until it gripped my whole body. Life without Misha was unthinkable. It wasn’t that I’d miss his protection – his efforts to shield me from his mother often angered her so much that the final punishment was more severe than it would have been without his intervention. But I would miss him. Now that Sasha was gone, he was the only friend I had left in the world. He was a sweet, earnest boy who cared for me – so it seemed at the time – simply because I needed to be cared for.

  I felt a sudden, deep urge to give him something – a present. Yet what could I, a poor muhzik girl dependent on his father’s charity, offer him?

  It was instinct which made me take his hand and lead him across the orchard towards the barn. “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure I knew myself. “I want us to be alone for a while,” I said. “I just want us to spend some time together, so we can remember it when you’re a soldier and I’m here all alone.”

  Or maybe I didn’t say that at all. Perhaps it is just looking back at it with the eyes of an adult that I feel it is what I should have said.

  We reached the barn. Inside, it was warm from the heat of the animals’ bodies, and the oxen shifted slightly in their stalls as the door clicked closed. I led Misha down the aisle to the empty end stall. We climbed the bars and jumped down onto the prickly straw.

  Was I trying to seduce him? I don’t think so. I knew how baby animals were made, knew that girls like Natulia did the same thing for their own pleasure. But that had nothing to do with Misha and me. I didn’t want to make love, have sex, whatever you want to call it – I just wanted to be close to him.

  We sat in silence, side by side, holding hands. The scent of the beasts and the sickly-sweet smell of the sweating straw enveloped us like a familiar, comfortable cloak. The sounds around us – the gentle lowing of the oxen, the muted crackling as they pawed the straw, a cockerel crowing in the distance – were the ones we had grown up with. And yet I felt that something had changed, that somehow I had disturbed the balance of things as they used to be, only five minutes before.

  I looked at Misha, wearing his first frock coat. I imagined how I would look to him in my knee-length polka dot frock with a big red bow at the back and smaller ones on the shoulders. We were dressed like adults, but we were not really grown up, and we both felt lost in this strange new world I had forced upon us.

  “Would you mind if I kissed you?” Misha said finally.

  Poor Misha! As if he needed to ask!

  Children in this silent land of my exile know all about kissing – and so much more – almost from the time they learn to walk. Television, that magic box which dominates their living rooms – and their lives – provides them with all the answers. Their own first kisses may be hesitant, but at least they’ve seen such things enacted a thousand times before in dramas, soap operas – even commercials. Misha and I had no such guidance. That first kiss was a step into virgin territory, and it frightened us.

  Misha drew me awkwardly towards him. Then, placing a hand over each of my ears, tilted my head slightly to the side. Our lips touched. Our first kiss was softer than I’d imagined it would be, almost like the brushing of a feather. I could taste his breath, sweet from the Easter cakes. I could feel his heart, beating rapidly against me.

  Suddenly, it was no longer a gentle brush of lips. Misha’s mouth was half open and he was pressing hard. My tongue, as if it had a will of its own, left my mouth and began to explore his.

  Misha’s hands stroked my back and then he gently pushed me away from him. I looked into his sensitive eyes and saw that he was crying. “I love you,” he said.

  “And I love you.”

  With tentative fingers, he reached forward and began to unfasten the front of my frock. When it was open to the waist he put his hands inside, fought his way through my undergarments and began to caress my young breasts.

  “You’re beautiful. Do you know that?”

  I’d never even thought about it before. We peasant girls are valued for our ability to work hard and our strong, child-bearing hips. Beauty, as my comrades of later years would say endlessly, was a bourgeois concept.

  “I want to take all your clothes off,” Misha said uncertainly. “I want to see you totally naked. Will you let me?”

  “Yes.”

  He stripped off my dress and my underwear, my white stockings and my shoes. Russians are not self-conscious about their bodies. Though groups of men and women bathe separately in the river, it’s always within eyesight of each other. So why did I become so shy then, aware that my breasts had only just begun to bud, that my new pubic hair was a very inadequate thatch for what it was intended to cover? Perhaps it was the way he looked at me which made me feel so unsure. His gaze said that I was the most marvellous, wonderful, delicate thing he had ever seen. No body, no matter how perfect, could have lived up to the look in Misha’s eyes that day.

  “I … I want to get undressed too,” he said, and I did not object.

  He was clumsier with his own clothes than he’d been with mine, and I had to help him with his buttons. It wasn’t until he was completely naked that I really looked at him – his slim chest, each and every rib clearly visible; his slender, young hips; his pubic hair, even fluffier and less substantial than mine. And there, between his legs, a boy’s penis which had hardened as if it belonged to a man.

  “Could we …?” he asked.

  Could we make love? He seemed physically able, and I was willing – there’s no doubt about that. I didn’t know what it would be like, or why I wanted to do it with him, but now I realised that this had been what I’d been waiting for since I took his hand and led him towards the barn.

  “You’ve picked the right place, Misha,” a harsh voice said from
out of nowhere. “If you’re going to rut with that little sow, you might as well do it in a barn.”

  I looked up, my eyes wide with fear, my heart thumping furiously. Mariamna was leaning on the bars of the stall. The skin was tight across her cheeks, her mouth was twisted in a sneer of contempt. Her eyes blazed with disgust, but there was more in them than that. There was a sort of satisfaction – almost a perverted kind of happiness. She was nothing more nor less than a smaller version of her mother.

  What we had been doing had seemed so natural, so right, I hadn’t really thought about it. Mariamna’s expression changed all that. I realized the way she saw it was the way other people, people who knew nothing about Misha and me, would see it too. I felt unclean and ashamed.

  “Mariamna …” Misha mumbled.

  “Just like animals,” the girl spat. “What a pity you’ve only got two tits, Anna. However will you manage when you drop Misha’s litter?”

  She turned and was gone.

  “She’ll tell Mama,” Misha said. “She’ll tell her right away. What can we do? Where can we go? They’ll send you back to the mir. They’ll make me … make me … I don’t know what they’ll make me do.”

  As Misha’s panic rose, my own started to ebb. “She won’t tell your mother,” I assured Misha.

  “She will. She will. She hates you.”

  “I know, but she doesn’t want me thrown out of the house. She wants me where she can keep on punishing me. So don’t worry that she’ll tell – worry about her price for keeping quiet.”

  We started paying the next day.

  “If we have borscht for lunch, you’re to leave half of it,” Mariamna told me. “If it’s anything else, you’re to eat all you’re given, and then ask for second helpings.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Because I say so!”

  She made demands on Misha, too. “You’re to tell father that you don’t feel well enough to ride today.”

  “What if he—”

  “Just tell him you’re sick. Do you understand?”