Russka (56 page)

What did he believe? He scarcely knew himself. She loved the priest; she shrank from her husband. She had, by this and other means, humiliated him, tried to destroy the pride which was – should it not be? – at the centre of his being. Suddenly all his resentment of her over the years came together in a single, overpowering wave. He would punish her.

Besides, if he gave way now, if he acknowledged the child which might not be his, then she had won. Yes: her final triumph over him. She would laugh to all eternity and he, the bearer of the ancient, noble
tamga
of the trident, would lay it down in the dust at her cursed feet. Not only he, but all his ancestors. At this thought, another wave of rage went through him.

And what had the Tsar told him? What had he said, with such meaning?

‘You can have other sons.’ Of course, that was it. Other sons, with another wife, to inherit. As for this boy … whoever his father was, let him suffer – for that way, infallibly, he would hurt her.

He would punish her, the child, even himself. That, he now saw, in this deep, dark night –
that
was what he wanted.

‘The child is not mine,’ he said.

Ivan said not a word. Taking his staff in his right hand, holding the infant, who now began to cry, in his other, pressed against his dark, flowing beard, he turned and began to walk, with the same tap, tap of his staff, towards the gate.

Boris, uncertain what to do, followed at a distance behind.

What was happening? Only gradually, in her confusion and fright, had Elena understood what was being said. Now, shivering in the snow, she stared after them in horror.

‘Feodor!’ Her cry ran round the icy market place. ‘Fedya!’

Slipping in her felt shoes, almost falling, she threw herself wildly after them.

‘What are you doing?’

Neither man looked round.

She came up with Boris, seized him, but he pushed her aside so that she fell.

And now Tsar Ivan reached the gateway where the frightened keeper, his hand on his heart, was bowing low in mortal fear.

Ivan pointed to the door to the tower.

‘Open it.’

Still bearing the child, he went inside. Slowly he began to mount the steps.

They were barring her way. Her husband and the foolish gatekeeper: they were barring her way at the foot of the tower.

She understood now: instinctively, she understood them, and the terrors that lay in the dark labyrinths of their minds.

Forgetting everything, she clawed at the two men, fought them like an animal and, with a sudden rush, burst past them, slamming the heavy door behind her and shooting the bolt.

She ran up the wooden stairs.

She could hear him now, somewhere in the darkness above her: the creak of his footfall on the stairs, the tap, tap of his iron staff on every second step. He was high above.

Desperately, her heart sinking, she ran up after him. She could hear her baby crying.

‘
Gospodi Pomily
: Lord have mercy.’ The words came involuntarily on her breath. Still he was high above her, so high.

It was halfway up, at the point where the tower steps came out on to the battlement that ran along the wall, that she realized she could hear nothing from above.

Ivan was already up there, in the high chamber in the tent roof where the look-out windows faced over the endless plain. She stared up at the tower that rose sheer, harsh and silent above her, and whose wooden roof made a dark, triangular shadow across the night sky. For an instant, she was uncertain what to do.

And then she heard it, her child’s cry, high in that great roof above; and looking up she suddenly saw a pair of hands hold out a small white form which then, as she herself cried out with a cry, she thought, that must have reached the stars, they tossed, like a piece of jetsam, out into the night.

‘Fedya!’

She threw herself against the battlements, reaching out, in a futile gesture, into the blackness, as the small white form, shocked into silence, fell past her into the deep shadows beneath where she heard its faint thud upon the ice.

At dawn the Tsar left. Before doing so he insisted that he receive the traditional blessing from the frightened abbot.

He added two sleds to his little cortège: one contained a substantial quantity of the monastery’s coin and plate; the other contained the bell which Boris’s family had given the monks in former times, and which he intended to melt down for the extra cannon he was making.

Soon afterwards, word came that the Crimean Tatars were indeed approaching the Russian lands. The Tsar, giving credence once more to the belief that he was a physical coward, absented himself in the north. The environs of Moscow were ravaged.

It was two weeks after the death of her child that Elena discovered, to her astonishment, that she was pregnant. The father of the child in her womb, as it had been before, was Boris.

There is, in the service books of the Orthodox Church, a very beautiful reading.

It is an address of the great St John Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, and it is read only once a year, in the late-night vigil that welcomes in Easter Day.

It was with some surprise during the Easter Vigil at the Monastery of Peter and Paul in the year 1571 – at which most of the diminished population of Russka and Dirty Place were present – that the congregation noticed a single figure enter, very quietly, at the back of the church a little after the vigil had begun.

Since the beginning of Lent, Boris had not been seen out of doors. No one was sure what was going on.

It was said that he was fasting alone. Some also said that his wife would not see him; others that they had heard him addressing her.

Again, some declared that he had tried to stop the Tsar killing his son; others that he had stood by.

So it was hardly surprising that people glanced back at him now, every few minutes, to see what he was doing.

Boris stood with his head bowed. He did not move from the back of the church, the place reserved for penitents, nor did he look up or even cross himself at the many points in the service where this is called for.

The Easter Vigil, celebrating as it does the Resurrection of Christ from the tomb, is one of mounting joy and excitement. After the long fast, almost total in the final days of Passion Week that follow Palm Sunday, the congregation is in that state of weakened, cleansed emptiness which is conducive to receiving a feast of spiritual rather than material food.

The Vigil begins with Nocturne. At midnight, the royal doors of the iconostasis are opened to signify the empty tomb and, with tapers in their hands, the congregation makes the Easter procession round the church. Then begins the service of Matins, and the Easter Hours, which rises towards that climactic point where the priest, standing before all the people, proclaims:

‘
Kristos voskresye
: Christ is risen.’

And the people cry back:

‘
Voistino voskresye
: He is risen indeed.’

Since Stephen had gone, a young priest had taken his place. This was the first time that he had stood, cross in hand, before the Holy Doors.

His own knees felt weak from fasting, but now, as he faced the
congregation with their lighted tapers and smelt the thick incense that filled every corner of the church, he had a sense of exaltation.

‘
Kristos voskresye
!’

‘
Voistino voskresye
!’

Despite their hunger, despite everything, it seemed to the priest that a wonderful joy was filling the church. He trembled a little. This, truly, was the miracle of Easter.

‘
Kristos voskresye
!’ he cried again.

‘
Voistino voskresye
!’

He saw that the solitary figure at the back of the church, too, was mouthing the joyous response, but was unaware that no sound proceeded from Boris’s throat.

And then came the Easter kiss when, one by one, the people come forward to kiss the cross, the Gospels and the icons, and then, greeting the priest himself, they kiss him, saying: ‘
Kristos voskresye
’; and he to each of them replies, with a kiss: ‘
Voistino voskresye
!’ Then the people kiss one another, for this is Easter, and this is the simple, affectionate way of the Orthodox Church.

But Boris, of all the people, did not come forward.

And it is then, after the Easter kiss, that the priest begins that most lovely sermon of Chrysostom.

It is a sermon of forgiveness. It reminds the congregation that God has prepared for them a feast, a reward: it speaks of the Lenten fast, by which is also meant repentance.

‘If any have laboured long in fasting, let him now receive his reward,’ the priest read out, in his gentle voice. How kindly the sermon was. If any have delayed, it said, let them not despair. For the feast of the Lord is not denied to sinners so long as they come to Him. For He shows mercy to the last, just as the first.

‘If any have wrought from the first hour,’ he read out, ‘they should be rewarded. If any have come at the third hour, they too. If any have arrived at the sixth hour, they should not now fear. If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let them approach. If any have tarried …’ Ah, that was it, even until the very last … ‘If any have tarried,’ the priest glanced towards the back, ‘even until the eleventh hour, let him come …’

Whatever had been passing in his mind – whether it was that he now understood that his wife was innocent; whether it was from guilt for the deaths of Stephen and Feodor; or whether it was that, being unable any longer to sustain the burden of evil that his pride,
and fear of the loss thereof, had placed upon him – it was certain that, as he stood in the place reserved for penitents, Boris, when he heard these lovely words, at the eleventh hour sank to his knees and, at last, entirely broke down.

In the year 1572, the dreaded
Oprichnina
was officially ended. All reference to its existence was forbidden.

In the year 1581 came the first of the so-called ‘Forbidden Years’ during which peasants were forbidden to leave their landlords even on St George’s Day.

In that same year, Tsar Ivan, in a fit of anger, killed his own son.

Freedom: freedom was everything.

The steppe lay all around him. How quiet it was – golden, brown, violet at the horizon, stretching forever eastwards. A single hawk hovered in the sky; a tiny marmot scurried into the cover of the long, dry stalks. There was no breeze. Here and there, unexpectedly, an ear of wheat whose seed, no doubt, had been dropped in that place by the wind in bygone years, grew amongst the myriad wild grasses of the endless plain.

Andrei Karpenko rode his horse slowly, making a large, lazy curve out from the big wheat field, past the little
kurgan
that marked its end, and away some two miles out into the wild plain before returning slowly in the direction of the little River Rus that flowed down towards the mighty Dniepr in these ancient Kievan lands.

The young man took a deep breath, so full of contentment that it was almost a sigh. How sweet was the scent of the grasses – the cornflower and broom, the wild hemp and milkwort, and, always, the unending, now withered feather grass that covered all. It was as though all these, and thousands of varieties more, had been thrown by the hand of God into a huge, flat basin, burnished by the sun all summer long, moistened with dew each day and then heated in the glowing pan once more until they gave off in their last extremity a final quintessence that arose from the land like a shimmering haze on this slow, late-summer afternoon.

His father’s farm lay just inside the line of trees, about a mile from the little settlement still known, after all these centuries, as Russka.

Andrei smiled. His father, Ostap, had been amused by the name of the place when he first came to it. ‘Russka – that’s where my father Karp ran away from, in the north,’ he had often told his son. It was from this runaway that they had been given the typically Ukrainian family name of Karpenko. But the fact that he had
returned to the home of far earlier ancestors was something old Karp never knew.

Freedom: the birthright of every Cossack. Freedom and adventure.

And now Andrei’s turn had come. It was a thrilling prospect. Only the day before, the two men had appeared at the farm. They were disguised as wandering monks, and so Andrei had taken them to be; but the instant old Ostap set eyes on them he had given a broad grin and conducted them inside.

‘Vodka!’ he shouted to his wife. ‘Vodka for our guests! Andrei, listen and attend. And now, gentlemen,’ he continued in a businesslike way, the moment they were seated, ‘what news from the south – from the camp?’

They were Cossacks, and when they had announced their exciting news, old Ostap slapped his thigh and cried out: ‘It’s time you were off, Andrei. What an adventure! The devil – I’ve a good mind to go too!’

To ride the steppe with the Cossacks – it was what young Andrei had been dreaming of since he was a boy. His horse, his equipment, everything was ready.

There was just one problem.

He was a handsome young fellow of nineteen, recently returned from the Academy at Kiev where the Orthodox priests had taught him to read and write, some simple arithmetic, and even a smattering of Latin.

His hair was jet black, his skin dark, but smooth rather than swarthy; his beard was thin, like that of a Mongolian, and mostly sprouted on his chin, but he was growing a long, fine, drooping moustache. His face was round, with high cheekbones, and he had handsome, brown, almond-shaped eyes. Though some of these features came from the beautiful Tatar wife that his grandfather Karp, the runaway, had taken, Andrei’s tall frame and graceful bearing were Karp’s exactly. Slavic charm and ruthless Tatar eyes – it made him magnetic to many women.

Since he was still young enough to believe that human nature was consistent, it sometimes puzzled Andrei that he seemed to have two souls at war within himself: one devoted to his family and their farm; the other a wild, free spirit with neither home nor conscience, which yearned to roam the steppe to the horizon and beyond. He was a perfect young Cossack.