When she was a little girl, Arina had often wondered about her mother. What sort of person had she been?
Fortunately, old Elena would often talk about Maryushka. She had loved her so much that she couldn’t help it. Indeed, the memory of the vanished girl still, after all these years, seemed to exercise a fascination over the stout old woman. ‘She was a beauty, there’s no denying it,’ she would say to Arina, with a shake of her head.
Her mother’s crime, Arina discovered, was not so much her affair with the Cossack. Such things were wrong, of course, but they happened. Her crime was being headstrong.
‘The steward, you see, he didn’t know he wasn’t your father. Not at first,’ Elena explained. He might never have known if he had not continually beat Maryushka.
‘Whenever something annoyed him, he’d take it out on her,’ Elena remembered sadly. ‘He used to hit her with his fist. She should have just taken it like most women do, but no, she had to lose her temper one day, just after you were weaned. She told him what she thought of him. Then she told him he wasn’t your father.’
She sighed. ‘Ah, Maryushka, my poor dove. “I’ve done it now,” she says to me. “You have,” I said. “He’ll bide his time,” she says, “then he’ll kill me. I know him.” “Yes,” I said, “I think you’re right.” “So will you take Arina?” she says. And then, next morning, without even saying goodbye to me, she’s gone.’
So had begun Elena’s life with the steward. He had told her bluntly that since her daughter had left him like this, she had better look after him. And since he had power over her family, she had agreed. ‘But don’t you try hitting me, though,’ she had warned. ‘I’m not your wife.’
Even then, the village assumed that wild Maryushka had run away because of the steward’s cruelty, and no one would have known about the Cossack if the steward himself, in his occasional drunken rages, had not blurted it out. ‘Curse him,’ Elena would remark. ‘He doesn’t mind dishonouring himself, so long as he can blacken her name. My poor Maryushka.’
‘Where did she go?’ the little girl would ask.
‘How should I know? To the steppe. Or across the Volga.’
‘And is she there now?’
‘Perhaps. If the wolves didn’t get her.’
‘Will she come back?’ Arina had sometimes asked hopefully.
In fact, Elena felt sure Maryushka was dead. What hope of survival had a lone woman walking off into the unknown? At best she had been captured and taken as a serf by a landlord somewhere. ‘No. She won’t come back,’ she would say bitterly. ‘What for?’
Yet although she never dared to say so, the little girl had always believed that one day her mother would come. Sometimes, at harvest, when the women were out with their sickles in the field, she would watch their long, bobbing line and suppose to herself that just once, even if only for a moment, one of them would detach herself from the line and come towards her, smiling and saying: ‘See, my little dove, I have returned to see you after all.’
And at harvest’s end, she liked to go over to the big meadow that seemed to stretch to the horizon and stare at the squat haystacks that dotted the empty spaces. For some reason, then, she would become convinced that her mother was out there, concealed behind one of the haystacks, and she would run from one to another, peeping round them, half-expecting to find a strange yet familiar form, who would take her into her arms. But each time she played this solitary, foolish game with herself, she would find nothing in the empty silence of the endless meadow except the freshly cut stubble and the high, sweet-smelling stacks so that, by the time the shadows lengthened, it seemed to the little girl in her sharp imagination as if God Himself had hidden His face behind a cloud, and left her all alone.
By the time she was ten, however, the village people seemed to have forgotten about her parents; at least, no one bothered to talk about them. And her life at Russka had been quiet.
But now Stenka Razin was coming. And who knew what that might mean?
There had been similar risings before, and there would be others in the future, but no Russian rising has ever attained the same romance in Russian legend as that of Stenka Razin in 1670. Perhaps this was because it was the last real cry from the old, free Russia of the borderlands.
It had begun, far away, amongst the freedom-loving Cossacks of the Don. For by 1670 even their democratic way of life had broken down, and a new class of rich Cossacks had appeared, who cared little for their poorer brothers. It was these poor Cossacks and peasants who, around 1665, had first rallied to a daring leader known as Stenka Razin, who was operating in the southern lands between the Volga and the Don.
It might have been only some local raiding, scarcely heard of across the endless steppe, but something about the character of Razin made it more. The raids soon turned into a rising, then a full-scale rebellion. Promising free assemblies of the people in the old-style Cossack way, he swept up the Volga taking town after town. By the summer of 1670, the rebel army was huge, had taken over half of south-east Russia, and seemed about to strike across at Moscow and the Russian heartland itself.
And now, suddenly, the village remembered Arina’s father.
‘Arina’s father’s coming,’ the little children cried. And the older ones, with more cunning: ‘How much loot has Razin got, Arina? Is he going to make you rich?’
For three weeks the taunts went on, and the girl inwardly cringed.
Then, suddenly, it was over. In early autumn, the Tsar sent an army that smashed the rebels. The democratic hero fled back to the Don, where the rich Cossacks captured him and handed him over to the Tsar. The following June, he was executed in Red Square. So ended, to all intents, the old free ways of the Cossacks.
‘The Tsar’s killed Arina’s father,’ the children now cried with glee.
She tried to take no notice. Yet, long after they had forgotten to taunt her, she remained sad. Somehow the death of the dashing Razin seemed like another loss, reminding her vividly how that other Cossack, her father, had vanished from her life so many years ago. And it prompted her to ask Elena, one day in early spring: ‘The Cossack, my father – did he know my mother was going to have me?’
‘Perhaps,’ Elena answered reluctantly.
‘Then,’ she pursued, ‘didn’t he ever come to see her again? Didn’t he even want to see me?’
At first, it seemed to Arina that her grandmother had not even heard the question, because for a time she did not even deign to reply. Then at last she answered.
‘No.’
Arina said nothing. She would not raise the subject again. Clearly, neither of her parents had loved her. She supposed that, for some reason, she did not deserve it.
It did not occur to her that the real reason why Elena had paused before she replied, was that she had told a lie.
1654
There were, by the year 1654, three Russias. The first, Great Russia, was the Muscovy of the Tsars. The second was the newly added Ukraine which the Muscovites chose to call Little Russia. The third was the broad band of territory, about two hundred miles across, that lay on the west side of the great R of Russian rivers – more precisely the lands west of the ancient city of Smolensk and which extended to the marshes of Poland. Once ruled by the ancient princes of Rus, they had long since fallen into Polish hands. This western, Russian-Polish territory the Muscovites called White Russia.
And it was from White Russia, in 1654, that Andrei was returning that late summer’s day.
It had been a strange year for the young Cossack. Bogdan and his council, after mistrustful negotiations, had finally joined the Ukraine to Muscovy with an agreement which gave them huge estates. The simple peasants of the Ukraine, needless to say, got nothing.