It was a female hand, and before he could even look down, he heard a familiar voice speaking softly at his shoulder.
‘Take care, Cossack.’
Her hand was a little longer than he had realized; as she took it away, Maryushka gently squeezed his cheeks and then ran the tips of her fingers across his lips.
‘Don’t you realize, Mr Cossack,’ she whispered, ‘there are probably people in the crowd who are listening – they’ll tell the priests if they hear you swearing.’
‘What then?’
She shrugged.
‘Who knows? The knout perhaps.’
The Russian leather-thonged whip was a fearsome instrument.
‘Are these zealots so strict then that they burn musical instruments and give the knout for swearing?’
‘Oh, yes. The Patriarch is for it, and some of the zealots in the Church are even stricter. They are determined to cure us Russians of our whoring and drinking. All sorts of pleasures are forbidden.’ She laughed. ‘You know, the landlord’s even afraid to go home because the priest at Dirty Place preaches such sermons. And Bobrov has a lute from Germany hidden in his house, I know.’
Andrei frowned. Was this dour zealotry the Orthodoxy he was fighting for? Was everything in the Muscovite state so dark, so claustrophobic? The sense of unease he had felt on his journey northwards from the Ukraine seemed to come back to him now with more force.
But Maryushka had reached up and gently touched his lips again.
‘Is there anyone in your lodgings now?’ she asked.
He knew there was not.
He looked at her.
‘What if we’re caught? The knout?’
She smiled.
‘No one will catch us.’
A blue sky appeared the next day, and the spring sun. By noon the thaw had set in. And though, in the succeeding days, the sky was often overcast, it was clear that winter was ending at last.
The streets became sodden, grey and brown. A rich, damp smell began to emanate from the millions of logs of the wooden houses, like a sharp, resinous incense. The wet wooden walls were almost charcoal; icicles, thinning to mere needles, hung from the glistening eaves; and here and there the white walls of a church or the slender shape of a silver birch glimmered above the dull slush and endless puddles of the street. The smoke from the fire in every house rose to be carried, like the modest sound of the church bells, over the still sombre morass of the city whose high, golden domes alone gave promise of the light and warmth to come.
In this melting season, Andrei made love to the girl Maryushka.
She had a slim, strong body; the light freckles on her legs and breasts petered out to a surprisingly pale whiteness. Her breasts were rather small.
She would visit his lodgings in the afternoon, and they would lie on his bed in the shadowy room that was almost overheated by the big stove at one end. She liked to undress herself and stretch out, luxuriously, to await him. Sometimes, having arched her back with a catlike movement, she would raise one of her strong, slim legs and admire it before asking him, cheerfully: ‘Well, Mr Cossack, what are we going to do today?’
The first day they made love, he noticed that she winced when he first touched her, but when he looked surprised she gave a wry smile and held up her arms.
‘A little reminder from my husband,’ she remarked drily, and Andrei saw that along the side of one arm were ugly dark marks where the steward had obviously punched her. ‘He’s quite strong,’ she said mildly, and then, as though the bruises were not there, pulled him gently to her.
‘You are strong yourself,’ he remarked a little later, ‘like a cat,’ he added.
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘a cat with teeth.’
And so they passed the time each afternoon while the dull light outside slowly turned to dusk, then darkness, and apart from some occasional footfalls in the street and the faint hiss from the hot stove, the only sound was the slow dripping of melted ice from the overhanging eaves, or the little rustle and soft thud of snow slipping off the roof onto the ground below.
Sometimes, afterwards, she would sigh.
‘You will be gone soon, my Cossack.’
‘Don’t think of it, my little cat.’
‘Ah, easy for you to say. You’re not trapped.’
It was hard for him to reply to this.
‘Sometimes I wish that Ivan would die,’ she would muse. ‘But… what then? I’ve nowhere to go.’ And then she would manage a short, ironic laugh. ‘All dressed up on St George’s Day – but St George’s Day has been taken away. What do you think of that, Mr Cossack?’
This was a subject to which she often returned in their conversations, and it was one that made Andrei rather uneasy.
For his affair with Maryushka was turning out to be not only a sensual pleasure, but a very important piece of education: and it was an education that was by no means pleasurable.
Only since coming to know her, Andrei now realized, had he truly begun to understand the nature of this powerful Muscovite state. And the more he understood, the more uncomfortable he became. The feature of the state that he disliked above all was one that – though it had been developing for along time – had only recently passed into law. And this was what, nearly every time they talked, Maryushka complained about.
For she was no longer a free peasant. St George’s Day had been abolished.
It was the law code of the present Tsar, Alexis, which had so decreed just four years before. Until that time, though the right had been limited in practice, it was still possible in theory, once a year, for the Russian peasant – technically free since the days of ancient Kiev – to leave one master for another. The old institution of St George’s Day was still in force.
It was the service gentry, the small men with modest estates, who disliked the rule. Invariably short of money, they could never match the terms the Church and magnates could afford to offer for the labour which, thanks to Russia’s endemic famine and plague, was always in short supply.
Pitiful the service gentry might be, individually. But taken all together they were a large and formidable force. It was they who kept order in the country; they who could, when need arose, raise troops in every village in the vast, ungainly land. In short, as the rest of Europe entered the modern age, in the backward land of Muscovy there remained an essentially feudal state of petty landed retainers and a Holy Tsar.
It had been the riots of 1648, when the administration had briefly lost control of Moscow, which had reminded Alexis that he should ensure the loyalty of this service class. And he had done so brilliantly.
In 1649, the famous Russian law code known as the Ulozhenie was proclaimed. Amongst its provisions it stated that no peasant might leave his master’s land for another; and that there was no time limit for the recapture of runaway peasants by their owners. It also stated for good measure that the lower orders in the towns were likewise unfree to move.
To most of the peasants in Dirty Place, these provisions made no difference to their daily lives. They greeted the news, as it filtered down to them, with an apathetic shrug.
But Maryushka did not. Her sharper intelligence perceived the law for what it was. She saw that now there was nothing to prevent the landlord owning his peasants like chattels.
And she was right. As history was to show, with this great law code, the road to the final subjugation of the Russian peasant had been quietly opened. For over two centuries, longer than the actual subjugation to the Mongols, most Russians would be born to be serfs.