Russka (28 page)

There were many such names that were carried like this from the south into the north.

It was not a bad place, and the winter that the boyar Milei spent there had convinced him that it had more possibilities than he had supposed. ‘Indeed,’ he told his wife, ‘from what I’ve discovered at Russka, we could make it highly profitable. All we need is more people.’ But then, finding enough peasants was the perennial problem of the Russian landlord.

The next spring, he returned to Murom to find his house outside the city walls burned down, but the large cache of coins he had hidden deep under the floor still quite safe. For the time being there had been plenty to do, for the Mongol invasion left much to repair. But the little village of Russka was often in his mind.

‘We must attend to it when we have time,’ he often remarked.

And so, late in the summer of 1246, he was surprised and delighted to find before him two peasants from his estate in the south.

Since the Mongol invasion, he had found it harder than ever to get enough peasants to work his land. So far he had only managed to add three families of Mordvinians to the settlement at Russka. ‘And two of those are drunk most of the time,’ his steward told him mournfully.

Now, as Yanka looked up at this tall, powerful man with his fair beard, only half grey, and his broad Turkish face, she saw nothing but friendliness. His hard blue eyes beamed. ‘I have the very place for you,’ he announced. ‘The Russka of the north.’

‘I’ve no money,’ her father lied.

The boyar gazed at him, not deceived for a second. ‘It’s more profit to me to give you land and have you work it than get no return at all,’ he replied. ‘You can build yourself a house – the villagers will help you. And my steward will take you there and set you up with everything else you need. You’ll repay me over time.’

He questioned them about their journey, and when he heard they had come with another family, with two strong sons, he at once made an offer to them too.

But they refused. ‘The offer’s good,’ their travelling companion told Yanka’s father, ‘but I don’t want a landlord. Come with us,’ he urged instead.

‘No,’ her father was shaking his head. ‘We prefer to remain. Good luck to you though.’

The next day, their companions were on their way. ‘God knows what they’ll do up by the Volga,’ her father growled. ‘We’re safer in the village.’ Then he turned away.

Russka.

This northern Russka was a very different place from the village in the south that she had left.

Its only similarity was that, like most Russian villages, it lay beside a river: that was all.

At the site chosen for the settlement, the river made a large, S-shaped curve. The western bank here was about fifty feet higher than the eastern, so that the curve formed a promontory on the west side, and left a large, sheltered space on the eastern bank just below it. This sheltered area had been made into a meadow.

There had once been a settlement in this meadow; but over time it had been moved for greater safety to the promontory where there now stood a dozen wooden huts with a strengthened fence around them. On the western side the land stretched away, almost flat. A few vegetable plots had been scraped bare near the fence, and two poor fields could be seen through a thin screen of trees.

There was no church.

The northern Russka.

The nearest village lay three miles away, to the south-east. This, too, was on the little River Rus. Just behind this village lay a low, wooded ridge. But below the ridge, down by the river, the land was marshy, and so when the Slav settlers had first come upon it they had called it Dirty Place – which remained its name thereafter. Past Dirty Place it was another seven miles to any village.

At first sight, it seemed to Yanka that the forest was all fir. But a walk around showed her that this was not the case. There were, in fact, a huge variety of trees: larch and birch, lime, oak, pine, and many others. Back along the Oka, around Riazan, she had even seen orchards of apple and even cherry trees. But she did not notice any here. The vegetable patches were not very impressive either. They grew peas and cucumbers mainly, as far as she could discover. And she observed something else: their horses were all tiny.

The houses were made of wood – huge, solid logs from base to roof: there were none of the clay walls and thatched roofs she had known in the south.

But, above all, the people were different. ‘They are so quiet,’ she whispered to her father, the first morning as they walked around the place. ‘You’d think they were frozen.’

There was a mix of people in the village. Before the boyar’s family acquired it, the inhabitants had been mostly Slavs of the Viatichi tribe. ‘Pagan animals’ she had always heard these Viatichi called, for they were amongst the most backward of the Slav tribes. There were six Viatichi families now. As well as these, there were three families who had moved up from the south a generation ago, and finally the three families of Mordvinians, with their high Finnish cheekbones and almond eyes, brought in by the boyar.

Different as these all were, to Yanka they seemed all the same in this one, crucial respect. For whereas the Slav villagers she knew in the south were expansive, argumentative, and full of droll humour, these people of the north were quiet, undemonstrative and seemed to be slow. In the south, one sat in the sun and talked. Here, people went quietly into the warmth of their huts.

They were not unfriendly though. On the steward’s orders, half a dozen of the men appeared with axes by midday. ‘We’ll build you a hut,’ they announced, and showed them a site at the southern end of the hamlet.

Then they set to work.

And Yanka’s opinion of them changed.

She had never seen anything like it. Huge logs appeared, seemingly from nowhere. The sturdy little horses she had seen were dragging in tree trunks you could almost have hollowed into boats. Great timbers of oak were used for the foundation, then softer, easily worked pine.

The plan of the hut was much the same as in the south: a central entrance corridor with a large space for keeping one’s equipment and stores on one side of it, and a room on the other. A good part of the wall between corridor and room was taken up with the stove, which they built of clay.

They worked entirely with their axes – stout, broad-bladed implements with rather short, straight handles, the blade extended towards the butt – and whether Finn or Slav, they seemed equally skilled. Each log was neatly jointed and slotted into its neighbour so that, although the lines between the logs were filled with moss, they were so tight it was scarcely necessary.

And there was not a single nail in the whole house.

It was not only the neatness of their work that amazed Yanka, but the speed of it. She was used to the busy people of the south, but there was something in these northerners’ quiet, ferocious pace that was heroic. They worked into the dusk. The women brought torches and lit fires so they could see better. By the time they stopped that night, the whole house except for the stove and the roof was completed.

The steward and his wife gave them shelter that night. By noon the next day, their hut was complete.

‘There,’ the men said. ‘This is your place. It will keep you warm, and will last for thirty-three years.’

This was the northern hut – the Russian
izba
. Its huge stove and tightly sealed walls would keep its occupants baking hot through the coldest winter as its very name implied: for ‘
izba
’ meant ‘hot room’.

After they had thanked their new neighbours, the steward led them out to show them the plot of land he had chosen for them.

As they walked, they chatted, and Yanka told the steward how impressed she had been by the men’s work. ‘With men like this,’ she gazed about her, envisioning cities in the forest, ‘there is nothing we Russians cannot do.’

The steward was a small man with a shrewd face. He laughed. ‘This is the north,’ he told her. ‘Up here we can do anything – for a short space of time.’ And seeing her puzzled look, he smiled. Then he gestured to the forest all around.

‘You’re in the north now,’ he explained. ‘And up here it’s like this: we do our best, of course, but whatever we do, the forest reminds us that the land, the winter, and God Himself will always be stronger than we can be. Too much effort is in vain. So then we don’t work so hard, except when there’s something definite to do in a hurry.’ She laughed, thinking this a joke, but he only replied: ‘You’ll see.’

The estate, he explained to them, was of medium size – about four hundred
desiatin
, or a thousand acres. Only part of it was worked at present. It lay on both sides of the river.

Many landlords preferred to give these remote estates over entirely to peasants and collect a modest rent, usually paid in kind. It was not like the old days in the south, he told them, where landlords ran their own estates and shipped the surplus to markets. ‘You’ll find things simpler up here,’ he continued.

But the boyar Milei had the resources to buy slaves and hire labourers. ‘He’s planning to bring more people in and build this place up,’ the steward said, ‘and work some of the estate himself. So although it’s small as yet, you’ll see changes here soon.’

One thing troubled Yanka.

‘We are Christians,’ she told him. ‘Are all the people here pagan?’

She had noticed some strange, hump-backed graves outside the fence that did not look Christian to her.

‘The Slavs from the south are Christian,’ he replied. ‘The Mordvinians,’ he laughed, ‘they’re Mordvinians. As for the Viatichi, they’re Slav, but pagan too. Those were their grave mounds you saw by the fence.’

‘Will there ever be a church?’

‘The boyar plans to build one.’

‘Soon?’

‘Maybe.’

After this she returned to the hut, while her father and the steward went to see the land he was to be given.

The land that he was allotted was the standard peasant plot of thirty
chets –
about thirty-six acres. But it was poor woodland, west of the village, that would need to be cleared. For this, however, he would only have to pay a small rent, with none payable in the first year. The steward would advance him a small sum, in return for which he was to do some light work for the boyar. And so began his career in his new home.

For Yanka, this was a time of discovery. The summer drifted on far into autumn that year, into the time of Indian summer which the Russians call ‘Granny Summer’.

She walked all round the area, sometimes alone and sometimes with the steward’s wife. The steward’s wife was a small, rather cold woman, but she wanted to make sure this new girl was useful to the estate, and so she showed her round thoroughly.

The woods were richer than Yanka had imagined. The older woman showed her where to find herbs – St John’s wort, betony, ribwort – and where there were medicinal ferns. They walked through a little pine wood to the south, above the river, and there on the mossy ground grew bushes of bilberry and cranberry. Here and there, as they walked, the steward’s wife would point to a
particular tree and say: ‘There’s a squirrel’s nest up there, look.’ And she would point to the little tracks made by the squirrel’s claws as it went up the trunk again and again, to fill the deep hollow with nuts for the winter.

‘We have special wooden spikes you can put on your feet,’ she explained. ‘You can climb up any tree in them and steal the squirrel’s nuts – or honey from the bees. Just like Misha the bear,’ she laughed drily.

One spot that Yanka particularly liked lay about half a mile south of the village. Here, the high bank was set about ten yards back from the river, providing a little glade of trees, reached by a path along the bank, at the water’s edge. And from the bank, about twenty feet up, burst a little spring of bright, clear water, wonderfully cold even in mid-summer. The spring water divided into three little falls, dancing down the mossy bank, over grey rocks, and running away in tiny pools amongst the ferns.

‘One waterfall is for love, one for health, one for riches,’ the steward’s wife told Yanka.

‘Which is which?’

‘No one knows,’ came the wonderfully Russian reply, and they turned back to the village.

As they parted, the older woman gave her one piece of advice, which reminded her of the house-building she had witnessed. ‘This year’s unusual, a very long summer. Don’t expect it again though. The summers are short here, so you work very hard while they last – harder than they do in the south.’

‘And after that?’

The other woman shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

The other change in Yanka’s life was that she was becoming a woman.

She had known it, physically, for some time; but the journey upriver had made her conscious of new stirrings and vague desires which on some days filled her with a new confidence, and on others made her blush unaccountably, uncertain about herself. She had a wonderful pale complexion with a delicate rose colour in her cheeks, and long, yellow-brown hair of which she was rather proud.

Yet some days her skin became oily and pimples appeared; or her cheeks felt blotchy; or her hair seemed sticky and hideous to
her. Then her downward-turning mouth would contract into a tight line, she would frown and stay indoors as much as she could.

She was more pleased with her body. It had filled out that summer, and though she was slim, there was a warm, gentle curve around her hips that she supposed some man, some day, would find delicious.

For the time being, as winter approached, she took pride in making a home for her father.

While he was out working with the village men, or building a cart for them, she busily wove cloth, built up their food stocks, smoked fish, and put all her skills to good use so that he would come in in the evening and smile: ‘What a fine nest you are building, my little bird.’

He seemed in better spirits. The hard work and the new life had challenged him. There was a new hardness and strength about him that filled her with pleasure. And as he came in, his face glowing darkly in the dying sunlight before dusk, she would turn and think to herself: There is my father, the man I can be proud of.