For Yanka, this was a time of discovery. The summer drifted on far into autumn that year, into the time of Indian summer which the Russians call ‘Granny Summer’.
She walked all round the area, sometimes alone and sometimes with the steward’s wife. The steward’s wife was a small, rather cold woman, but she wanted to make sure this new girl was useful to the estate, and so she showed her round thoroughly.
The woods were richer than Yanka had imagined. The older woman showed her where to find herbs – St John’s wort, betony, ribwort – and where there were medicinal ferns. They walked through a little pine wood to the south, above the river, and there on the mossy ground grew bushes of bilberry and cranberry. Here and there, as they walked, the steward’s wife would point to a particular tree and say: ‘There’s a squirrel’s nest up there, look.’ And she would point to the little tracks made by the squirrel’s claws as it went up the trunk again and again, to fill the deep hollow with nuts for the winter.
‘We have special wooden spikes you can put on your feet,’ she explained. ‘You can climb up any tree in them and steal the squirrel’s nuts – or honey from the bees. Just like Misha the bear,’ she laughed drily.
One spot that Yanka particularly liked lay about half a mile south of the village. Here, the high bank was set about ten yards back from the river, providing a little glade of trees, reached by a path along the bank, at the water’s edge. And from the bank, about twenty feet up, burst a little spring of bright, clear water, wonderfully cold even in mid-summer. The spring water divided into three little falls, dancing down the mossy bank, over grey rocks, and running away in tiny pools amongst the ferns.
‘One waterfall is for love, one for health, one for riches,’ the steward’s wife told Yanka.
‘Which is which?’
‘No one knows,’ came the wonderfully Russian reply, and they turned back to the village.
As they parted, the older woman gave her one piece of advice, which reminded her of the house-building she had witnessed. ‘This year’s unusual, a very long summer. Don’t expect it again though. The summers are short here, so you work very hard while they last – harder than they do in the south.’
‘And after that?’
The other woman shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
The other change in Yanka’s life was that she was becoming a woman.
She had known it, physically, for some time; but the journey upriver had made her conscious of new stirrings and vague desires which on some days filled her with a new confidence, and on others made her blush unaccountably, uncertain about herself. She had a wonderful pale complexion with a delicate rose colour in her cheeks, and long, yellow-brown hair of which she was rather proud.
Yet some days her skin became oily and pimples appeared; or her cheeks felt blotchy; or her hair seemed sticky and hideous to her. Then her downward-turning mouth would contract into a tight line, she would frown and stay indoors as much as she could.
She was more pleased with her body. It had filled out that summer, and though she was slim, there was a warm, gentle curve around her hips that she supposed some man, some day, would find delicious.
For the time being, as winter approached, she took pride in making a home for her father.
While he was out working with the village men, or building a cart for them, she busily wove cloth, built up their food stocks, smoked fish, and put all her skills to good use so that he would come in in the evening and smile: ‘What a fine nest you are building, my little bird.’
He seemed in better spirits. The hard work and the new life had challenged him. There was a new hardness and strength about him that filled her with pleasure. And as he came in, his face glowing darkly in the dying sunlight before dusk, she would turn and think to herself: There is my father, the man I can be proud of.
Nor did she take an interest in any other man in the village.
There were reasons for this; they dated from the first day when the steward had shown them round.
For it had been only halfway through that afternoon when her father had burst in through the door, leant against the warm stove and cried: ‘Have you seen their fields?’ And before she could answer, ‘Slash and burn. It’s all slash and burn. Mordvinians! Pagans! They haven’t even got a decent plough!’
‘No plough?’
He gave a disgusted snort for reply. ‘You hardly need one for this land. Come, I’ll show you.’
The problem that her father had discovered was one of the major disadvantages that were to plague the state of Russia for the rest of its history.
For the land in the north is very poor.
There are, on the great plain of Russia, two kinds of soiclass="underline" leached soils and unleached. In leached ground, the water in the soil does not evaporate fast enough and washes the rich salts down, leaving a poor, acidic topsoil of little agricultural value. These leached earths are called in Russian podzols – literally ‘ash-soil’.
Unleached soils occur where evaporation is good. The rich salts remain in the soil, which is usually neutral to alkaline. Here, agriculture is good. The richest of all the unleached soils is the deep black earth, the chernozem, of the south.
Between these two soil types, however, lies a third – a sort of compromise. This is the grey earth – technically a leached podzol-which is moderately good for agriculture.
Roughly speaking, the good black soil lies in the south, on the steppe; the grey in the centre of Russia, in the lands from Kiev up to the River Oka. But in the great loop of the Russian R, and thence northwards until one reaches the peaty, waterlogged soil of the tundra, the ground is poor podzol, and yields upon it are low. This soil, together with the cold weather, is the reason why the agriculture of northern Russia is very poor.
And upon this earth, one did not need the heavy iron ploughs that had already been used for centuries in the thick, rich black earth in the south. The peasants in the north used the soka – a light, wooden plough with a modest steel tip that only scratched the surface of the thin, infertile land.
It was this feeble little plough, and this half-barren soil, that had disgusted Yanka’s father. But even more to be despised was the method the peasants were using to organize their holdings.
For instead of having two, or sometimes three, big fields upon which crops would be rotated, the villagers were using the ancient slash-and-burn technique: cutting down a piece of woodland, burning the debris, and then working the resulting carbonized field for a few years before moving on to another and leaving their last to become wilderness again. It was a form of ancient subsistence agriculture.
‘Pagans,’ her father repeated in disgust. But there was little, as a single newcomer, that he could do about it.
And it was this primitive aspect of the place that confirmed Yanka’s opinion of the villagers, and her lack of interest in them.
The steward, servant of the boyar, was technically a slave. The Viatichi families, besides being uncouth, were the poorest kind of peasants – sharecroppers – who instead of a fixed rent paid the boyar a third of their crop. The Mordvinians were hired labourers, who worked a part of the estate some way from the village which the boyar had decided to retain in his own hands; and the other Slav families from the south had already adopted the primitive ways of the north-east, it seemed to her, and were contentedly using the slash-and-burn techniques on their modest holdings.