How insignificant these places looked, seen from above: with modest wooden houses and the town, perched on its high river bank, facing the little white-walled monastery opposite. How still everything was. Did the sound of the monastery bells, tolling over the trees, reach up to the passing clouds? Surely not. The sky was silent but for the faint hiss of the breeze. For what were the lives, the loves and the fates of men to those clouds? They came from the vast eastern spaces where the natural order of things is, like the endless sky, unknowable, beyond mere human comprehension.
And could anything be less important than the subject the two peasants were discussing that afternoon? They were speaking of silk ribbons.
They were standing by the river bank. Behind them was the little village that belonged to Alexander Bobrov. The place had improved recently. There was a wooden footbridge over the river and walkways made of boards traversed the muddiest places. The huts, mostly raised off the ground, were in good repair. One or two, though retaining the arrangement of the traditional peasant izba, had an upper floor as well, and elaborately carved shutters as proof of the wealth of their occupants.
The two men were cousins, though separated by two generations. In common with fifteen other families in the village, they shared a descent from the girl Maryushka, the sole survivor of the terrible church fire in the reign of Peter, who had returned to the village long afterwards. As it happened, both men had been christened Ivan.
But there the resemblance between them ended. Ivan Suvorin was a giant. In him, it might be suggested, the genes of Maryushka’s father, once called Ox, had miraculously reproduced themselves without dilution. He was a head taller than any other man in the village. His arms were so powerful it was said he could lift a horse. He could chop down a tree in half the time it took anyone else. As for his face, even his massive black beard could not conceal its heavy features or the huge, shapeless promontory that was his nose.
His cousin, by contrast, was of only medium height and in shape almost perfectly square. He had a mass of wavy brown hair, soft blue eyes, and, when he chose, sang beautifully. He was a kindly man, though given to moods of depression that would lead him to sudden rages, or morbid tears. But these would pass as quickly as they had come, and he seldom hurt anyone.
His name was Ivan Romanov.
It pleased him that it was the same as that of the royal house: but in fact this was not an unusual distinction. The name which the imperial dynasty had chosen in the sixteenth century was amongst the fifty most common in Russia, meaning simply: ‘the son of Roman’, and pronounced, with the stress on the second syllable, Romahnoff. Nevertheless, Ivan Romanov was proud of it.
The two men were both serfs belonging to Alexander Bobrov. But there again, the similarity ended. For while Romanov worked the land and did wood carvings to help earn money to pay the landlord his obrok, Suvorin had been more enterprising. Starting with a single loom in the family izba, he had begun to weave cloth and sell it in the little market at Russka. Recently, however, he had discovered he could get a better price in the ancient city of Vladimir, a day’s journey away.
And now he wanted to make silk ribbons: and the question was, would his cousin Romanov like to come in with him?
The two men were accompanied by a ten-year-old boy, Suvorin’s son. He was called Savva and he was, as far as it was possible to be, a smaller replica of his father. As Romanov looked at the two Suvorins now, there was something about them that, he had to admit, made him feel nervous. What was it in those four piercing black eyes? He wanted to say it was cunning, yet there was no doubt that Suvorin was scrupulously honest. Perhaps they were just calculating. Yet it was more than that. There was something proud yet relentless about them, that was it, something unbending as if to say: ‘We are tall in stature and in spirit.’ Whenever he saw them, he remembered his mother’s favourite proverb: ‘It’s the tallest blade of grass that’s the first to be cut down.’
‘These silk ribbons are very profitable. We could all do well if you care to join us,’ Suvorin said.
Romanov still hesitated. He could use the money. He looked at them thoughtfully. And it was then that something struck him.
It was the boy: Savva. He was ten years old. And yet Ivan Romanov had never seen him smile.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll just stick to my wood carving.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Suvorin replied.
And they parted, not in any anger, but both parties understanding that, the offer having been refused, it would never be made again.
It did not seem significant to Romanov, at the time.
It was on that same day that, once again, Alexander Bobrov became a father. More or less.
As he held the child in his hands and inspected it, he felt conflicting emotions. There was, there must be, something wonderful, something holy, about a new-born child. As he looked down at Tatiana, who had gone through so much for him during many years, he gave her a kindly smile. ‘It’s a boy,’ he remarked.
Unfortunately, it was not his.
It had come as a shock to Alexander when, at the end of the previous year, 1801, Tatiana had been unfaithful to him. Strangely enough, it had come just as a new hope had entered his life.
The previous five years had been discouraging. Though Tsar Paul had released Alexander from prison, he had shown no desire for the former State Councillor’s services, and Alexander had remained, feeling rather useless, on the estate which his wife had run so competently without him. In a way, however, he was well out of St Petersburg, for the Tsar’s strange nature had soon turned to morbidness, then madness; and when a group of patriotic officers, in 1801, had murdered him and placed his son on the throne, all Russia had heaved a sigh of relief.
And Bobrov, too, had been filled with excitement. Young Tsar Alexander: the grandson whom Catherine herself had trained, autocrat of all the Russians, yet child of the Enlightenment. Youthful, beautiful to look upon, charming – the complete antithesis of his gloomy, narrow-minded father. The Angel, some called him. The Bobrov family had been planning to spend the winter in Moscow that year. In the month of November, suddenly fired with a new energy, Bobrov had left Tatiana and the children in Moscow and set out for St Petersburg alone. Perhaps, now, there would be some appointment for a man of his attainments. For two months he drifted about the capital, and received various promises which gave him hope, but nothing definite. In January he had returned.
It was a dashing young captain of Hussars who had found Tatiana alone, and who had quite captivated her before moving on with his regiment to the Ukraine. The officer was witty, amusing, and already had a score of such affairs to his credit. He was twenty-five; Tatiana thirty-one.
The young captain was discreet, one had to say that for him. Indeed, Alexander had not even been sure that the affair had actually taken place until the incontrovertible signs began to appear in Tatiana that spring. What should he do? He thought of a duel, but then learned that the fellow had been killed in a border skirmish; for a week he even dreamed of giving the bastard child away to one of his serfs’ families – that would teach Tatiana a lesson! But he knew he would not. After all, he told himself bitterly, any husband who leaves his wife alone in Moscow for two months is a fool. And, besides, he would tolerate no scandal. Nothing more was said about the affair; the baby would be treated as his.