Her interest in the community had to be secret. Only Silas, Daniel and his family knew, and they all agreed that there could be no other way. The villagers themselves did not know. Had Nikita himself ever guessed, needless to say, he would have clamped down at once. But if ever an icon, a prayer book, some candles were needed, mysteriously Silas or Daniel had always found the money and the needed articles had appeared.
‘We remember you in our prayers, good lady,’ Daniel had told her.
The monastery was lax but conformed. If once the Bobrovs had been suspected under the old regime, under Peter they were trusted. Russka was rather a backwater anyway. So for nearly two decades, while many Raskolniki left the centre of Russia for the frontier lands, and while there might be trouble at Nizhni Novgorod or on die Don, the authorities had just assumed that Russka was quiet. As for Dirty Place – who had even heard of it?
In the early spring of 1703, Silas had told Daniel he was dying.
‘I shall go this summer. You must take over.’
‘I too am old,’ Daniel protested.
‘You are the only one who can lead them,’ Silas replied.
‘Yet how shall I be ordained a priest?’ Daniel asked.
For this was now, and would always remain, the central problem of the Raskolniki.
They were the true Church yet outside the Church. No bishops had joined them and so there was, technically, no one to ordain priests. As the last of the original priests in the movement – men like Silas, who had been ordained before the Schism – died out, how were they to be replaced?
Some Raskolniki were prepared, if they could find one, to take on a disaffected priest from the new Church, as long as he underwent a ritual purification. Others used the old method, which the Church now frowned on, of electing their own parish priest. In the old days, such a man was submitted to the bishop for ordination. Now, without bishops, he remained an elder, recognized by his congregation alone.
Officially, therefore, when Silas died, it was decided that the congregation at Dirty Place should go to the church at Russka – though a priest from the monastery would go to the little church in the hamlet from time to time to hold a service in the proper manner.
Unoffically, however, having carefully washed and purified the little church whenever the priest from the monastery had come there, the Raskolniki of Dirty Place, led now by Daniel, continued their own services in secret.
At the end of the year there came another crisis. The steward died.
What if Bobrov should send a new man who was not of their persuasion?
Immediately Daniel wrote a letter and Nikita was rather puzzled, a few days later, when Eudokia said to him: ‘Let me choose a new steward for Dirty Place. I know the estate far better than you.’
Since he had many other things on his mind, Nikita had agreed and rather forgotten about the matter; while at Christmas Daniel had been delighted to welcome the new young steward in the little church at Dirty Place.
But the greatest threat to their safety still remained.
It is sometimes thought that Peter was liberal over matters of religion. And up to a point this is true. A year before, in 1702, he had not only authorized Protestants to worship freely but his laws had proclaimed the principle of religious toleration – certainly something no Tsar before would ever have dreamed of.
That same year, encountering a whole area full of Raskolniki up in the north, he had told them they might worship as they pleased so long as they produced a certain quantity of iron for his war effort. As time went on, though, Peter often fulminated against them and their old-fashioned ways; he also, rather contemptuously, issued laws which allowed Raskolniki to practise – but made them pay double taxes and wear a distinguishing yellow badge on their coats.
It was freedom – though of a rather poor kind; but some found they could live by it.
Yet for many Raskolniki, Peter had done nothing at all. For the one thing that he still absolutely demanded of all men, was the one thing they could not give: total loyalty and obedience to the Tsar and his new, secularized state. How could they obey him when they were coming to see him as the Antichrist himself?
Above all there was one unchanging requirement to which they could not yield.
‘We cannot, in conscience, pray for the health of the Tsar,’ Daniel declared. ‘That is impossible. If we do that, then we deny all that we believe in.’
Maryushka was with some other Russka children, fishing in the river on the monastery side, the morning that the abbot died.
They knew that something must have happened when they saw the monks hurrying about at the gate, calling the lay brothers in from the fields. A few moments later, the church bell started to ring.
That the abbot would die one day was to be expected. He was very old. But in fact he had dropped quite suddenly, in the monastery library, hence the confusion. Curious as always, the children had run to the monastery gates. At first the monks ignored them. But a lay brother soon told them; and immediately Maryushka ran off to tell her father.
And when she saw the look that Daniel gave Arina, she understood that this death meant something very serious indeed.
Yet at first, Maryushka thought she liked the new abbot. He was a pleasant-looking man in his fifties, with a round face and very pale blue eyes, who would stop to talk to children in Russka.
But he was an outsider. The death of the old abbot had caused a visitation from the authorities. They had not been impressed with what they saw; the election of a new abbot was stopped and the monks, to their great annoyance, had had this new man imposed upon them from Vladimir.
He had arrived in early May. Two weeks later, he had become suspicious of what was going on at Dirty Place. A week after that, two strangers arrived at the monastery, and were closeted with him for some time.
How warm the church always seemed to Maryushka.
It was a simple, wooden building with a little octagonal tower over its centre. One came up a flight of wooden steps to the covered porch by the west door; though beneath this was an undercroft with a stove where they often gathered in the depth of winter.
Inside the church, though the wooden ceiling hid the tower itself from view, the room was high and light streamed in through the open windows. There was a little iconostasis of four tiers, although the top row, the prophets, was so close to the ceiling that it had to be set at an angle. All the painting had been done by local artists, some of it very crude; overall, it looked reddish, rather squashed and friendly.
It was a warm, late afternoon in early summer. The sun was gently lighting up the icons of the local saints beside the Royal Doors. In the shadows in the corners, candles had been lit before other, darker icons.
The whole village was there, standing together in the stillness, while little particles of dust danced in the long shafts of sunlight above. Sometimes, when the village was at prayer like this – the men with their long beards, the women with scarves tied over their heads – it seemed to her as though they were timeless: as though the present itself, having been foreshadowed, was also a memory, dreamlike in its quality.
This was her family: the people with whom – such was the will of God – she was to live and die. And for that very reason, she belonged to them and they to her in the gentle, warm intimacy of the little church.
Her father was conducting the service. Still, though she was nine, she saw him as a Patriarch – as unshakable, as timeless as one of the prophets on the iconostasis. He, like Silas, will die, she knew. Yet he will never die. He will be with me here, always. She stood beside her mother. As she sang the responses, how lovely, yet how sad her voice sounded.