And what of their leader, the daring Cossack, Stenka Razin? In the space of a few short years his name had already become a legend. ‘He’ll rule in Moscow,’ they said, ‘like a true Tsar.’
It was amidst all this excitement that the little children of Dirty Place found a new amusement. This was to taunt a quiet, serious, sixteen-year-old girl. She paid no great attention to them, although their persistent question, accompanied by giggles and peals of laughter, hurt her more than they knew. Her name was Arina, and the question they asked was always the same. ‘Arina, is Stenka Razin really your father? Is he coming to save us? Tell us, Arina, is it really your father coming?’
It hurt her because she did not know.
Who was her father? No one would tell her.
Until she was five, she supposed it was the steward: after all, they lived with him. He was a stern, sour-faced man, and although he sometimes took her on his knee, it made little Arina sad because she sensed he did not love her. No doubt it was her fault. But when she was five, he died, and she and old Elena moved into her uncle’s large izba. And it was a little after this that a little girl told her: ‘Your father was a Cossack.’
She did not understand, and when she asked her grandmother about it, old Elena just said: ‘What nonsense.’
But Arina soon realized, instinctively, that there was something strange about her. Something wrong. There were whispers and giggles. And finally, when she was seven, Elena abruptly told her: ‘The steward wasn’t your father. It was a Cossack. That’s all. Don’t talk about it.’
She didn’t. But from that day she understood, that in the minds of the village people, this strange, unseen figure of the Cossack in her past was like a mark upon her.
A Cossack. what did it mean? She had never seen one, but she knew that they were wild, terrifying fellows; that each had a single lock of hair sprouting out of his shaved head, and long moustaches; and that they rode the steppe like the Tatars. Could it really be that one of these devils was her father? Once, hesitantly, she had asked her grandmother what he was like. ‘Just a Cossack. Dark. Forget him,’ Elena had replied curtly. And an entire year had passed before Arina had dared even to ask: ‘What was my father’s name?’
‘I don’t know. It’s not important.’ Old Elena sounded irritable. ‘What difference does it make? He’s probably dead and even if he isn’t, you’ll never see him anyway.’ Then, seeing Arina’s disappointment, she had added more kindly: ‘Don’t worry, my little dove, you’ve got all the family you need here, thank God.’
It was true. Besides her uncle – who was her mother’s brother – about half the village seemed to be related to her in some way or other. Even the priest who came to the little wooden church in Dirty Place was a distant cousin; so were two of the merchants in Russka. No, Arina supposed, she had no excuse for feeling lonely.
Life in the village was often hard: the peasants expected to suffer. Their parents could remember the grim last days of Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles that followed. Twice in Arina’s short life, the harvest had failed and they had nearly starved. One year news came that a huge population of wolves – three or four thousand of them – had invaded the city of Smolensk in the west and roamed the streets in search of food.
But the greatest hardship was war. There seemed to be no end to the fighting. As feared, a new war with Poland had broken out the moment the Tsar took the Ukraine under his protection. For thirteen years, not a season went by without another batch of men leaving Russka for the Tsar’s army; and many did not return.
It was a piece of bad luck for the village that Nikita Bobrov had made a good marriage – it happened just after Arina’s birth – for what was good for the landlord was certainly not so for Dirty Place. ‘He’s got other estates now,’ Elena complained. ‘What’s it to him if half our men are killed? He just hands them over to Germans and heretics who drive them like cattle. He doesn’t care.’ Indeed, in his eagerness to please the Tsar, Nikita was generous in supplying serfs from this village – which he seldom visited – to fight under the foreign officers who so often commanded in the Tsar’s army. All through Arina’s childhood, the village seemed only half-alive, waiting for the return of those who never came.
Yet despite these troubles, her own family had emerged unscathed. For some reason, Arina’s uncle had not been sent away to fight. By good fortune his three boys, when they came of age, were not chosen either. The family prospered. Arina’s uncle was the only man in the village who was not in debt to the Bobrovs for paying his taxes and the family even had a hired labourer of their own to help in the fields.
It was only gradually that Arina realized her uncle bribed the steward. The old steward had been a peasant, but when he died, Nikita Bobrov had sent a slave in his place, and the reason why her uncle’s sons were never sent away to fight was that, somehow, he could afford to bribe this man. When she came to understand this, she was rather shocked. Wasn’t it wrong, she asked old Elena.
‘Perhaps,’ Elena said. ‘But be glad he does it.’
‘Where does Uncle find the money?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘It isn’t just, though,’ Arina said.
Elena only smiled ruefully. ‘You know the saying,’ she answered. ‘“The wolf is near, but on a cold, dark night, the Tsar is very far away indeed.” Don’t worry about right and wrong, just survive.’
The family were kind to Arina and she certainly made herself useful. She would prepare the big earthenware pot to cook on the flat-topped stove overnight and salt the food to preserve it through the long winters. When one of her cousins made a fine gingerbread board, it was she who helped him design the peacock that was to be carved on it. She embroidered well.
It was strange, given her parents, that she was so plain. From Andrei she had inherited dark hair, and from her mother a certain grace of movement. But that was all. Her face was pale; her nose, by general consent, was too long; she had a slight squint and there was a small wart on the left side of her chin. This lack of physical beauty, however, was modified by the fact that, when she allowed herself to show it, she had a smile of extraordinary sweetness.
To compensate for her shameful birth, Elena had brought her up very strictly. Grandmother and granddaughter would always be seen, at every possible church service in Dirty Place, Russka or in the monastery, hurrying quietly by, their kerchiefs over their bowed heads, scarcely even looking up to speak as they crossed themselves before the doorway of the church, and again inside; they would light candles before every icon, and say a prayer.
Above all, Arina loved to sing in the little wooden church in Dirty Place, with what became, by her fifteenth year, a beautiful contralto voice, so that the priest there would say: ‘She is our nightingale.’ And often he would remind the village people: ‘See how God, though He has not chosen to give this girl good looks, has instead given her a voice and a spirit of great beauty, by which He is praised.’
It was as well that Arina should have a religious nature, for as her grandmother told her bluntly: ‘You will never be married.’ She saw it only too clearly. Thanks to the war with Poland, there were five women to every man in the district around Russka. ‘And of all the girls, I’m afraid you’d be the last to be chosen anyway,’ Elena said, ‘so you may as well get used to the idea.’
If Arina ever felt bitter about any aspect of her fate, she never showed it. ‘I thank God,’ Elena would say to people in the girl’s presence, ‘I thank God, at least, that she isn’t headstrong like her mother.’ Submission, her grandmother taught her, submission and obedience were her only hope.