Russka (53 page)

In this way he passed the month of June.

The weather had been changeable after late frosts in the spring. The harvest would be ruined.

On a hot and unusually sultry afternoon in late July, when even the breeze had stopped, as though realizing the futility of doing anything, Boris had ridden back from Dirty Place to Russka; and he had just come into the dusty little square when he saw, a hundred yards away, Stephen the priest slowly coming down the staircase from the upper floor of his house. He must have been seeing Elena.

His heart missed a beat.

The square was empty. The wooden houses around it and the stone church seemed to be held in a kind of empty stasis, as if they were awaiting a breath of wind that, with its gentle kiss, might bring them back to life.

As Boris approached his house, Stephen was walking away from him, his head sunk in meditation. He rounded a corner and disappeared.

Quietly Boris went up the stairs and opened the door.

She was there, by the open window. She was gazing out at the street, at the place where Stephen had been a few moments before. Her fingers, he noticed, were resting on the wooden frame of the window and a shaft of sunlight fell just across them as they lay there, very still. She was wearing a simple dress of light blue silk. He, having been in the fields, was for once not in black but in a white linen smock, tied with a heavy belt, like one of his peasants.

Although his heart was pounding, he breathed very quietly; he wondered how long she would stand there, gazing after the man. He tried, without moving, to see the expression on her face. A minute passed. Then another.

At last she turned. Her face was very calm; but she started when she saw him and, when he did not speak but only looked at her, she blushed a little.

‘I did not hear you come in.’

‘I know.’

Had she made love to him? He looked for some tell-tale sign: a faint glow about her, perhaps; some disarrangement in her dress or in the room. He could not see anything.

He stared at her.

‘You love him.’

He said it very quietly, not as a question but as a statement – as though it were something they were both quite agreed upon. Then he watched her.

She blushed deeply now, swallowed hard, looked miserably confused.

‘No. Not as a man. As a priest.’

‘Is he not a man?’

‘Of course. He is a fine man. A pious man,’ she protested.

‘Who makes love to you.’

‘No. Never.’

He stared at her. Did he believe her?

‘Liar.’

‘Never!’

She had said never. She could have used other words. She might have denied that she even wished it. But she had said: ‘Never.’ That meant she had desired it. As to whether she had or not … who knew? His reason told him she probably had not, but he was too proud to trust her, in case he was deceived.

Had he not wanted her to be unfaithful so that he could divorce her? Suddenly all that was forgotten as he looked at this modest, rather ordinary woman he had married, and who had committed these crimes against his pride.

She was pale now. She was trembling, afraid.

‘Never! You insult me.’

Very well. It might be so. But then he saw in her eyes, a little look that he had never seen before: a flash of contempt, of anger.

He would show her. He stepped forward suddenly, swung his hand and struck her with the open palm across the face. Her head jerked violently; she cried out, gasped. Turned back to him in rage and terror. He struck her with the other hand.

‘Bully!’ she screamed suddenly. ‘Murderer.’

It was enough.

He struck her. Again and again. Then he raped her.

He left for Moscow the next morning.

In September 1569 Tsar Ivan’s second wife died. The next month his cousin Prince Vladimir, still a possible successor to the throne, was accused of conspiracy and made to drink poison. The unlucky prince’s family were then killed, including his elderly mother, who lived in a convent.

But these events were followed by something far more terrible. For late in the year Ivan discovered another conspiracy: the cities of Novgorod and Pskov were planning to break away.

There may, in fact, have been some truth in it. To this day, the details are not quite clear. These once independent centres, near to the Baltic ports, may well have been tempted to escape the increasing taxation and tyranny of Muscovy by joining the newly united and formidable Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. They had always been closer to the busy Baltic shores than to the slow, deep heartland of Moscow.

Whatever the facts of the case, at the end of 1569, and accompanied by a large force of
Oprichniki
, Ivan the Terrible set out in great secrecy for Novgorod. He did not want the city to know he was coming. Even the commander of the advance guard did not know where they were going. Any passing traveller they met was immediately killed, so that no news of the advance would travel.

In January Novgorod was punished.

Exactly how many died in the torture, burning and executions that followed is not clear. They certainly numbered thousands. The city of Novgorod, so valuable to Russia over the previous centuries, was so utterly devastated that it never recovered. Having already killed most of its more important citizens on the road, Ivan only executed forty people at Pskov and burned a few priests at the stake. Then he returned to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda.

It was just after this that two small events of interest took place at Russka.

The first was the birth to Elena of a baby son. Boris had still not returned from the Novgorod campaign and so she and Stephen the priest had to choose a name. They chose Feodor, and so Stephen baptized him. That same day, the priest sent a letter to Boris to let him know what he had done.

The second event centred upon Daniel the monk. For in April 1570, still anxious to enrich the monastery, he hit upon a plan.

It concerned the oxhide that the Tsar had sent. It was so cunning, and so daring, that for centuries afterwards it would be known as ‘Daniel’s Ruse’.

When the abbot first heard of it, he went white with terror.

Boris scowled, as well he might. The snow in the market place at Russka had long since been trampled and packed down until it was hard as stone. The few stalls in the market place that had opened out of habit were now being shut. No chink of sunlight had appeared in the cloud cover and none had been expected; and now the short day, like the stalls, was closing down.

He scowled because he saw Mikhail and his family. They were standing beside the remains of the single fire that had been lit in the centre of the market place. Mikhail did not answer his look, but stared at him without hope. What was there to hope for, after all?

There was a week to go before the beginning of Lent; yet what could the Lenten fast mean that year, when the harvest had failed for the third time running the summer before? That morning, in Dirty Place, he had seen a family eating ground birch bark. Bark from the trees – the peasant’s last resort when the grain was all gone. Few had supplies to last them through two failed harvests. None could get past three.

The monastery had helped feed the worst cases, but even its reserves were running low. There had been plague in some of the northern areas. Two of the families in Dirty Place had run away last year. There had been greater desertions in other villages.

‘The people are leaving the land,’ a fellow landlord had remarked to him, ‘and there’s nothing we can do.’

Where did they go? East, he supposed. East to the new lands by the Volga. But how many of them, he wondered, ever got there in the mighty, icy winter?

Mikhail and his cursed family. How they must hate him.

Since Karp had gone off with their horse, the family had not recovered. They had replaced the horse, and got through the second bad harvest; but they had had to dig into their money reserve to keep going. There was no more talk of buying their freedom. As for running away, like the others, he guessed that Mikhail had concluded he was safer with his young children near a monastery than trying to survive out in the great eastern wilds.

Now the peasant spoke to him.

‘Spare a
kopek
, Boris Davidov. At least for the bear.’

He noticed the bitter irony in the request. Let my children starve but take pity on the animal – that was the message.

‘Damn your bear,’ he said, and walked on.

The bear was as gaunt as the peasants now. It had never performed its tricks for Mikhail the way it had for Karp; in its raging hunger it would probably turn nasty. It stood there, haggard in its chains. Why on earth didn’t they kill it?

Boris turned to look up at the watchtower that rose, tall and grey, over the gateway. He had been going up there every day of late. For on top of all their troubles, word had come that an attack was expected from the Crimean Tatars from the south. So far, nothing had come, but Boris scanned the horizon anxiously, each day.

He had just come down from there now. Up in the high, pointed tent roof, gazing out through the eastern window at the huge, flat spaces, he had been alone with his thoughts. Out there, far away, lay the Volga and distant Kazan. Out there lay the huge eastern empire of the Tsar. Why, after their holy crusade, had the heartland been turned to icy stone, famine and dejection? As he stared out at the endless greyness, it had seemed to Boris that Russka was swallowed up and lost in the long half-night of winter. Nothing moved upon the landscape. The sky, though always overcast, was empty. The snow, which he usually thought of as a protection for the earth, now seemed to him like a coating of misery that had been hardened by the biting winter wind.
Everything was grey. From his high place, he could make out the big field at Dirty Place which that day looked like a large, unmarked grave.

And then he had thought about his own little family, and the boy, Feodor. And that had made him scowl, too.

Was the boy his? It was a question that had been exercising his mind for nearly a year and a half. It was possible, of course. It might be that on that afternoon when he had struck her and forced himself upon her – it could be that then she had conceived. But what if it were not that day? What if the priest had already been with her, or if he had called the next day, or the next?

As the months passed, he had brooded upon this, frequently. When the child had arrived, he had received the message not from his wife, but from the priest, who had chosen the boy’s name. It was the name, moreover, of Elena’s brother whom he had hated. Was there irony in that? When he had finally returned, he had examined the child minutely. Who did it look like? It was hard to say. It did not seem to him to resemble anyone. But time would tell; features would appear which would tell him the truth: he was sure of it.

Meanwhile he had observed them both. The priest had congratulated him with a smile. Was there a trace of mockery in it? His wife had smiled faintly at the priest, who had stood beside her in a manner that, to Boris, appeared protective. Was there complicity between them?

The more he allowed, even encouraged, these thoughts to linger in his mind, the more luxuriantly did they grow, like some morbid but fantastic plant which, as it bloomed, took on in Boris’s imagination a kind of dark beauty, like one of those wondrous, magical plants that were said to flower only at night, in the depths of the forest. He watched the flower, he nurtured it; in a strange way he even came, in the dark recesses of his mind, to love it like a man who learns to feed upon poison and then, even, to crave it.

It was in December, when the baby was nine months old, that he had begun to feel sure it was not his. Whether this was the natural outcome of his speculation; whether the dark flowers of this plant he had nurtured required this belief in order that he might more completely admire their beauty; or whether something exterior had prompted him, he now became convinced. The child’s face, at certain angles, started to seem long, like the
priest’s. The eyes looked solemn. The ears, above all, were neither his nor his wife’s. They were not the same as Stephen’s either, but they were more like his than Boris’s. Or so it appeared to the landlord on one of his routine, secret inspections of the little boy.

He had stayed up the high watchtower that day, alone with these thoughts, gazing out at the endless wastes until he had definitely decided that it was so. The little fellow who crawled across the wooden floor and smiled up at him, was not his. He had not yet decided what he would do.

He had just come level with the church when he heard a shout from the gates, and turned to see what it was.

Daniel the monk saw them first: two large sleds, whisking down the frozen river from the north. They were each drawn by three magnificent black horses.

They sped over the bank and came straight towards the monastery gate.

Only as they drew close did he see that the men in the sleds were all dressed in black. And they were almost at the gate before he clearly saw the face of the tall, gaunt figure wrapped in furs who sat in the first sledge.

And then he crossed himself and, in stark terror, fell to his knees on the hard snow.

It was Ivan.

As usual, he had come from Alexandrovskaya Sloboda secretly, without warning, his swift horses eating up the miles as he sped, sometimes by day, sometimes by night, from monastery to monastery in the icy silence of the forest.

The party did not waste any time. They drove straight into the centre of the monastery courtyard, and the monks were still looking out in surprise when the tall figure rose from his sled and began to stalk slowly towards the refectory. He wore a high, conical fur hat. In his right hand he carried a long staff with a gold and silver top and a pointed iron tip that pierced deep holes in the snow as he advanced.

‘Call your abbot,’ his deep voice echoed around the icy yard. ‘Tell him his Tsar is here.’ And the monks trembled.

About five minutes passed before they were all assembled in the refectory. The old abbot stood at their head, some eighty monks
behind him, including Daniel. The dozen
Oprichniki
with the Tsar were stationed by the door. Ivan had seated himself in a heavy oak chair, and was facing them gloomily. He had not removed his fur hat. His chin was sunk upon his chest, so that his long nose partly obscured his mouth. His eyes, glinting under his heavy brows, looked up at the monks, darting suspiciously from one to the other. His long staff rested beside him, leaning at a sharp angle over the back of the chair.