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.
The Cossack
1647
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?’