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.