‘I’ll have to cut your holding,’ Ilych said brusquely.
‘How much?’
The elder considered. ‘By half.’ It was even worse than Timofei had feared. ‘I’m sorry,’ the elder went on, ‘but there are more young people in the village now. There isn’t enough land for them all as things are.’ Then he shrugged irritably, and left.
Yet whatever his troubles that morning, Timofei Romanov would have been dismayed had he known what was passing through his mother-in-law’s mind.
Arina was sixty-three. She was the senior woman in the family, and she let no one forget it. And above all, she loved her daughter Varya. ‘I didn’t nearly kill myself for her in thirty-nine,’ she would say, ‘to see harm come to her now.’ As the years went by, it became clear that the mark left by that terrible time was never going to leave her. And she herself would often remark: ‘I lived on one turnip for a month that year and my stomach’s never been the same. That’s why I’m older than I should be.’ And it was true that though she was still at first glance a comfortable, round little babushka like any other, there was an inner hardness concealed within a ruthless instinct for survival that made her formidable.
And now her daughter was going to have another child. She had watched quietly as the little family drama began to unfold. Several times, poor Varya had turned to her miserably and said: ‘God knows, it’d be a blessing if I lost the baby before it was born.’ And now, as she saw how events were shaping, Arina came to her own private conclusion.
If things don’t improve, she decided, the child will have to die. Such things were not uncommon. She had known a woman who had drowned her child; exposing them was easier and less obvious. If it has to be, then I shall do it, she thought. That’s what grandmothers are for.
But she kept this decision to herself. And when he returned gloomily from his talk with the village elder and told them the news, Timofei had no idea of the meaning of his mother-in-law’s grim look. Instead he remarked to his wife: ‘We may have to put Natalia in the factory. Send her to me.’
As Peter Suvorin followed in the wake of his grandfather Savva, a new idea took shape in his mind: Perhaps I should kill myself.
For some reason the thought had an extraordinary beauty. How would he do it though? That was something else to ponder. Whatever he did, one thing was certain: he must escape from this terrible trap.
If only his father had not died. Remembering his own harsh upbringing by Savva – and also because, when Peter was only ten, he had lost his wife – Ivan Suvorin had been a kindly father with the wisdom to let his two sons be themselves. Vladimir, five years the older, was a born businessman and Ivan had let him manage one of the Moscow plants when he was only seventeen. But Peter had intellectual leanings and – to old Savva’s disgust – had even been allowed to go to university.
Then, six months ago, Ivan had suffered a massive stroke, and Peter’s sunlit world had abruptly come to an end.
I’m completely in his power, he realized. For old Savva had asserted himself with extraordinary force. Within a week, he had taken personal control of everything. Peter’s studies were cancelled at once; and while young Vladimir was left to manage the factories in Moscow, Savva had curtly ordered Peter to accompany him back to Russka. ‘For it’s time,’ the old man told his wife, ‘that we took this one in hand.’
To Peter, it had been a revelation. As a child in the comfortable Moscow house, his grandparents had been distant figures whose occasional visits were treated with a kind of religious respect. His grandfather was the tallest man he had ever seen: with his thick shock of hair, his huge grey beard and piercing black eyes he was as terrifying as he was silent. Ever since he had gained his freedom, Savva had dressed in a long black coat and an immensely tall top hat: so that once, as a little boy, Peter had dreamed that the great tower in the Moscow Kremlin had turned into his grandfather and gone stalking across the city like an avenging fury. Many times, with a wry smile, Ivan had told his sons how Savva had broken a violin over his head. Peter avoided the old man as much as possible.
But now that he had been forced to live in his grandparents’ house, Peter’s feelings had changed. The childhood fear still remained, but it was accompanied now by something else: and this was awe.
Savva Suvorin was something more than a mere mortal. He was a law unto himself and unto God: fixed, immutable, and merciless. He was eighty-two and stood as straight as he had at thirty. He strode everywhere, on foot. The Theodosian community to which he had belonged had been broken up by the authorities in the 1850s and, like many other merchants, he had found it necessary to subscribe, nominally, to the Orthodox Church. But he remained an Old Believer in private and still ate alone out of a wooden bowl, with a little cedarwood spoon with a cross on it. The break-up of the Theodosians also removed any last chains that community might have had upon the Suvorin enterprises. Now they belonged entirely to Savva and his family. And they were huge.
Peter knew the holdings at Moscow: the dye factory by the river; the plant for printing calico; the glue factory; the starch factory; and the little printing press his brother Vladimir had set up. But never, until now, had he really understood what had taken place at Russka.
Russka had never been beautiful, but now it was hideous. On the steep slope down to the river, the huddled huts, lean-tos and straggling fences seemed to topple into the water as though they had been tipped out of the town like so much refuse. Inside the walls, the huge brick cotton mill with its rows of blank windows dwarfed the church, and its belching octagonal chimney out-matched even the ancient watchtower by the town gate. The cloth mill was nearly as big; there were long, barn-like buildings containing the linen factory. People were drawn there from miles around and old Savva Suvorin ruled it all.
The force of will that had built this place up was frightening to contemplate. And it’s all there, in his face, Peter thought. The great square head, the smouldering eyes, the heavy brows, and that mighty, shapeless promontory of a nose. Did they still make noses like that? His father’s had been large, his own inclined to heaviness; but history itself might have paused, he thought, before Savva’s features, like a sculptor before a stubborn granite rockface. My God, he realized, he’s like one of those elders of ancient times, from beyond the Volga – only turned into a merchant. Such was Savva Suvorin.
At first, life had not been too unpleasant. His grandparents lived in a simple stone house, not a tenth the size of the big Moscow house. It was furnished simply, with heavy, rather ugly furniture, which was impressive for being solid and highly polished. But what did the old people want with him? When he took Peter with him on his rounds, Savva gave no indication of what he expected; and after a few weeks Peter supposed the old man was bored with his company and would soon send him back to Moscow.
It was his grandmother, soon after Christmas, who had actually dealt the blow.
‘We’ve decided you should start work in the linen factory,’ she calmly announced. ‘You’ll get to know the village too, that way.’
Maria Suvorin’s face was still, in old age, perfectly round; her nose, if anything, even more pointed; her compressed mouth, despite her huge riches, never smiled. And behind narrow slit lids resided the same pair of hard grey eyes. Like most simple Russian women, her white hair was parted in the middle, drawn tightly round her head and fixed at the back. The only luxuries she allowed herself were the rich silk brocade dresses which ballooned out to the ground like a bell. Over her head she liked to wear a big shawl that spread over her shoulders and upper arms and was pinned under her chin so that she exactly resembled one of those brightly painted little Russian dolls – a comfortable image which was quite contradicted by her ruthless character.