Russka (58 page)

He remained silent for a few moments, but when he finally spoke, Andrei could only stare at him dumbfounded.

‘Well, Ostap,’ he remarked casually, ‘we’re taking over the farm.’

For several moments there was complete silence. They were all too astonished to speak.

‘What do you mean – taking over?’ Andrei suddenly burst out. ‘This farm is ours.’

Stanislaus looked at him with mild interest.

‘No, it isn’t. It never was. You are just tenants.’

Andrei was so astonished that he even forgot to wait for his father to speak.

‘We pay nothing to anyone for our land,’ he burst out.

‘Correct. It was granted you for thirty years free of obligations, and now the time is up.’

Andrei looked at his father. Old Ostap for a moment appeared confused.

‘That was thirty years ago,’ he mumbled.

‘Exactly. And now the Vyshnevetskys have sold the estate to me. You owe me service.’

It was not an unusual situation. In order to attract settlers to the frontier lands, the Polish magnates of the past had often granted lands with exemptions for ten, twenty, or even thirty years. Men like Ostap took such lands and then, as the years passed, came to
think of them as perpetually free: so much so that Ostap had entirely omitted to mention the original condition of his tenure to Andrei, even if he had remembered it himself.

‘I’ve been here thirty years,’ the old man now stated angrily, ‘and that means I own it.’ As far as he or many like him were concerned, this statement was correct.

‘Have you a charter that says so?’

‘No, damn you. My charter is this.’ And he held up his clenched fist as though wielding a sword.

Stanislaus watched him calmly.

‘You owe labour service for this land,’ he remarked.

‘Labour?’ Ostap now erupted.

‘Naturally,’ the Pole replied.

Andrei gasped. Labour! The Pole was suggesting that his father, a man of honour, should work for him in the fields like a common peasant, a serf.

‘I have worn the white coat, you Polish dog,’ the old Cossack fumed. ‘I am an officer. A registered Cossack. No man can make me work in the fields.’

Stanislaus shook his head.

‘You were on the register. But not now.’

Nothing was more vital to the Dniepr Cossacks than the register. Normally it contained about five thousand names of the Cossacks recognized as military servitors by the King of Poland. These were the free men treated, roughly speaking, as an officer class. Sometimes, after a Cossack rising, the register had been enlarged. But then it would be contracted again. Ostap had once, briefly, figured in the white coat of a registered officer, but had since lost his place.

And the problem was that, so far as the Polish King was concerned, any Cossack not on the register was a peasant – and therefore liable to labour like a serf.

This was just the life that Karp had gone south to escape. Not only was it degrading, it was outrageous.

‘Back in the reign of Stefan Batory, all Cossacks were made noblemen,’ Ostap had always told Andrei; and although that Polish King had in fact done no such thing, most Cossacks firmly believed that they were, if not quite noble, just as good as any noble.

So it was from the bottom of his heart that Ostap now cried out:
‘A Cossack is a gentleman, you Polish swine!’ He spat with disgust. ‘But what would a Pole know about nobility?’

Stanislaus looked at him with secret amusement. He understood the old man, but despised him.

What, he wondered, could old Ostap know of the life of a Polish noble, let alone the great magnates? What could this crude farmer know of the splendid palaces of Poland – those great European houses filled with French and Italian furniture, Renaissance paintings, Gobelin tapestries; a glittering world of ballrooms, libraries, huge salons, where Polish lords in rich brocades or hussar uniforms cultivated their minds as well as their manners and might converse in French or Latin as easily as Polish? Even the French remarked that the Polish lords seemed to live in paradise.

The Polish lords were proud. They were not the slaves of their ruler, as the Russians were of their Tsar. They chose their kings – and circumscribed their power in the great
Sejm
, the nobles’ parliament. Not for nothing was the great Polish state, of which the Ukraine was a part, called the Commonwealth.

But the Commonwealth was for the nobility. Like most Polish lords, Stanislaus looked down upon the Cossacks. Though they were brave, he saw them as little more than brigands and runaway peasants, who gave themselves airs.

Above all, he despised their Orthodox religion, and their illiterate mumbling to their icons.

‘It is,’ he would say definitively, ‘a religion fit only for serfs.’

How far indeed it was from the romantic Catholicism of this Polish gentleman who, for all his cruelty and contempt towards the peasants, saw himself as a crusading, courtly knight, albeit in a twilight world.

This religious split between lord and peasant in the Ukraine had, if anything, been made worse half a century before when the subtle Catholic Church had come to a great historic compromise with the old Orthodox bishops centred at Kiev. By this arrangement, the Orthodox bishops had agreed to acknowledge the Pope as their spiritual head, so long as he would allow them to celebrate their services in, for all practical purposes, the Orthodox way.

This was the start of the so-called Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church.

The trouble was that many of the Orthodox had refused to
accept the compromise so that now in the Ukraine there were three Churches instead of two: Catholic, Uniate and Orthodox. The Cossacks, moreover, had decided to champion the old Orthodox faith. In every city, especially in the eastern Ukraine around Kiev, the citizens formed brotherhoods to defend their faith so that now there was a powerful religious movement sworn to oppose both the Catholic Poles and any kind of compromise with them.

It was, Stanislaus thought, just the kind of movement that would appeal to a Cossack like Ostap. He felt very little sympathy for him.

So now, with a casual wave of his hand, he indicated the thinner of the two Jews who had accompanied him.

‘This is Mordecai,’ he said casually. ‘I have given him the lease of this place, so you’ll be working for him. He’ll tell you what to do, won’t you, Mordecai?’ he remarked easily.

It was the final insult. As Ostap looked from the Pole to the Jew, he could not himself have said which one he hated the most. Religiously, he distrusted the Catholic more than the Jew. For although his grandfather had come from Muscovy, where the fear of Judaism was often deep, Ostap had lived all his life in the Ukraine where, ever since the time of the Khazars, the Orthodox and Jewish communities had usually tolerated each other well enough. The hatred he now felt for the Jew was not in fact based upon his religion but upon the particular roles in which the Polish overlords had used them – usually as tax collectors, liquor stall concessionaires, and rent agents. Consequently, men like Ostap found that, though in fact they were always in debt to the Poles, the face of the creditor they saw was nearly always Jewish. It was an arrangement that suited the Poles very well, for whenever their extortions went too far, they blamed their agents.

It is generally agreed that the root of the endemic anti-Semitism in South Russia lay in this cynical and unfortunate Polish system.

And no part of the system was worse than the practice of leasing, which Stanislaus was now planning to use. It was simple enough: Mordecai would hold the farm, probably on a short lease, of only two or three years. For this he would collect and pay Stanislaus a stiff rent; and in turn, Stanislaus would support him in whatever exactions he made to get extra profits out of the
peasants. Whereas Stanislaus might demand three or four days’ work from Ostap, therefore, this adding of an intermediary who was also looking for his profit might mean that Ostap finished up working five or even six days for someone else. And since justice lay in the Polish courts, there was probably nothing he could do about it.

The old man said nothing at all. Outwardly he seemed calm, though Andrei knew that this only masked a seething rage within.

‘Good,’ Stanislaus said cheerfully. ‘That’s all settled then.’ Now he glanced at the other Jew. ‘There’s just one other matter. It seems you owe Yankel here for your liquor. He says you haven’t paid him in two years. Give me the bill, Yankel. Ah, yes.’ He handed it down to Ostap, who took it glumly, glanced at it, and looked distressed.

‘The Jew is lying,’ he said firmly, but Andrei knew from the tone of his voice that his father was not certain of his ground.

Mordecai was a stranger, but Andrei knew Yankel well enough. He was a fat, rather cheerful fellow who operated the liquor store in Russka. Almost everyone in the area owed him money, but though he charged interest for it, he was not unduly harsh. He had two children – a girl and a little boy – and as Andrei considered his father’s formidable intake of vodka, he suspected that Yankel’s claim was perfectly justified.

‘Well, are you going to pay it?’ the Pole demanded.

‘I am not,’ Ostap replied.

‘As you please. Yankel,’ he went on, ‘go to the stable there and pick out the best horse you see. That should do it.’

Yankel hesitated a moment. He had been tempted to go to the Pole after twelve months of trying to get Ostap to pay what he owed, but now he was starting to regret it. He had no wish to make the Cossack his sworn enemy.

‘Get on with it,’ Stanislaus ordered peremptorily, and Yankel, with a look of embarrassment, went off. A few minutes later he returned with a horse that was by no means the Cossack’s best.

‘Is that it?’ Stanislaus asked.

‘It will do, your High Nobility.’

The Pole shrugged.

‘Goodbye,’ he said carelessly, and with that he was off, the two Jews following behind.

For some time no one spoke. Then Andrei turned to his father.

‘I ride south tomorrow,’ he said quietly.

Ostap nodded. Even Andrei’s mother did not complain. There was nothing to lose any more.

‘When I come back with our brothers,’ Andrei remarked with cold fury, ‘we shall kill every Pole and Jew in the Ukraine. Then the farm will be ours.’

‘Good idea,’ Ostap replied.

There was one thing left to do that night, but Andrei waited until he could hear his father’s snores in the yard before he slipped out of the house.

Cautiously he crossed the yard. Old Ostap liked to sleep outside in the summer; he would wrap himself in a blanket and lie in front of the porch, gazing up at the stars and humming quietly to himself until he fell asleep. It reminded him of the years past when he slept in the open on campaign.

‘I give each star a name, you know,’ he once told Andrei. ‘Each one’s an old comrade and I choose the star that seems to suit their character best. So I look up at the Plough and I say to myself: “Yes, there’s old Taras; and there’s my friend Shilo!” God knows how many Tatars his strong arm killed. They flayed him alive when they caught him, you know.’ He sighed. ‘I see their faces, up there in the night sky. And then I fall asleep.’ Each year, when summer was over, the old man would stay out a few nights longer than he should, wrapping himself in a sheepskin instead of a blanket, and downing God knows how many tots of vodka to keep out the cold. After a week or so of this he’d stagger in grumbling that his bones ached, and then give it up.

The night was still warm now, however. His snores were comfortable.

Softly Andrei made his way along the path. There was a half moon, low on the horizon, that gave the forest an agreeable sheen. He was so full of youth, his heart was dancing so lightly that, scarcely thinking about it, he began to run, gathering new energy and joy with every step he took. In the darkness, it almost seemed to Andrei that he was flying along the starlit path.

He passed the still pond where, the children said,
rusalki
dwelt. A few minutes later he was emerging on to the edge of the village’s big field. He was at Russka.

Nothing had changed. True, the little stone church from the
days of Monomakh had been burned down by the Mongols; and later, the village had lain deserted for two hundred years. And yet nothing had changed. For in this land, every wooden house, sooner or later, was lost to fire or age. Settlements, like the fields around them, had their seed time and harvest: it was as if Russka had been left fallow for a time and was now under cultivation once more. And how else should the place look, but a group of huts on one side of the stream, and a little fort with a palisade around it on the other? There was a wooden church, with a little tower, inside the fort. In the Ukrainian manner, it was arranged as a simple Greek cross with a cupola over the centre and smaller cupolas over its eastern and western ends and over the two transepts. In the tower was a single bell.

Andrei did not need to cross the river. Instead, he crept stealthily up to a large wooden hut at the edge of the hamlet.

A watchdog cocked its head at his approach, but scenting him came forward, wagging its tail and whimpering softly until Andrei quieted it.

The building had an upper storey; in the end wall, a single window looked out under the eaves, with carved shutters and a little balcony in front of it. The shutters were open, to let in the night air.

Carefully, but easily, Andrei climbed up and sat astride the balcony, before tapping gently on the window frame.

‘Anna.’

Silence.

‘Anna, I’m coming in.’

This time there was a faint sound from within. A pale form appeared in the shadows of the room. There was a soft laugh.

‘So what do you want, my young brave, calling on a girl at night?’ The low voice laughed again. ‘Be off or I’ll set the dogs on you.’

Andrei chuckled.

‘They won’t do anything.’

‘I could call my father.’

‘You could. But you won’t.’ He started to swing his leg over the window frame, but she moved forward quickly, caught his ankle, and pushed it out again.

‘No you don’t.’

Now he could see her, and it made him catch his breath. Anna was the daughter of a Cossack like his father but her mother was
from the faraway Caucasus – the villagers called her the Circassian – and the result of this union was a girl unlike any other in the region. She was almost as tall as he was, slim, with dark brown hair, a pale creamy skin, and a head held so high that she seemed to stare at the world as proudly as a young warrior. Indeed, her bold eyebrows, straight, strong nose and firm chin might almost have been those of a handsome youth; but a slight upturning at the end of the nose, and the wonderful, full lips, both proud yet always, it seemed, about to open into a warm kiss, undercut any masculinity in her other features and made her, for Andrei and many others, tantalizingly desirable.