An hour later, he had skinned it.
Yanka found the muddy season depressing. It was made worse by her decision, on a day when the rains had stopped, to go down to the nearby village of Dirty Place.
What a dreary spot it was. Half a dozen huts clustered by the river bank. The land there was Black Land, like the northern territory, so that the peasants there were, in practice, free. Better than that, the village’s land lay directly on the chernozem.
Yet still it was dismal. The river bank was very low. The ground immediately to the south was waterlogged and smelt of marsh. And when Yanka spoke to some of the village women, she found that four out of the six she met suffered from some strange affliction that made the skin on their head spongy to the touch and their hair perpetually oily and matted.
Instinctively, she drew away from them.
She was glad to get back, to put wood in the stove and feel her own hair, soft and light, as she ran her hand through it for reassurance.
It was that very evening that her father came in with a wonderful coat, made by one of the Mordvinian women from a bear he had killed for her himself. He had kept the incident a secret from her. Now he handed it to her with a smile.
‘You killed a bear? For me?’ She was half delighted, yet half terrified. ‘You might have been killed.’
He laughed. ‘It will keep you warm up here in the north.’
She kissed him. He smiled, but said nothing more.
Three days later the snows came. It was very cold; though one was perfectly warm inside. Yet once winter had sealed the little village she could not escape the sad fact: it was boring.
She had no friends. The village, it seemed to her, was quiet as a tomb. They did not mix much with their neighbours and, though they were only yards apart, days might pass without her speaking to another soul. There was not even a church to draw them together.
To pass the time, she began to make a large embroidered cloth. It had a white background, and on to this she sewed, in bright red, the striking, geometric birds that the village woman had taught her when she was a child.
So, in this remote northern hamlet, appeared a design drawn directly from ancient, oriental patterns familiar to the Iranian horsemen from the steppe a thousand years ago.
November passed. The cloth progressed, and the girl and her father lived alone.
The change in her life came in the first half of December. It took place rather suddenly.
Her father had been very kind to her of late. He knew that she was sometimes afraid of him if he drank too much, and so he had hardly touched any mead since autumn. In the last two days he had been especially warm with her, often giving her friendly hugs and a gentle kiss.
One evening, however, he did drink mead. She saw the faint flush around his neck; she looked at him a little nervously, but decided that he had not drunk enough to make him depressed. Indeed, she felt a little surge of happiness to see the smile of well-being on his face. She noticed his hands, resting on the table. For some reason she noticed the thick fair hairs on the back of them and this, too, filled her with a feeling of affection.
And then she did something very foolish.
She had been heating some red dye for the thread: it was almost boiling, and she decided to carry it across the room.
Her father had been sitting very quietly at the table now, for several minutes, without speaking. She did not particularly look at him, though she was aware of his strong back, and the bald top of his head as she brushed past him with the pot of dye.
Perhaps it was glancing at the top of his head that made her lose concentration. But suddenly her foot caught against the leg of the little bench he was sitting on. She started to fall, desperately righted herself and, by a miracle, only slopped a quarter of the boiling contents of the pot on to the table.
‘The devil take me!’
He had leaped back, upsetting the bench on the floor.
She stared at him, horrified, then at the dye on the table.
‘Your hands?’
‘You want to scald me alive?’ He clasped one hand in the other with a grimace of pain.
She dropped the pot on to the stove.
‘Let me see. Let me bandage it.’
‘You careless idiot,’ he roared. But he did not let her come near.
She was terrified, yet also anguished.
‘Let me help you. I’m sorry.’
He took a deep breath, gritted his teeth. And then it happened.
‘You will be,’ he suddenly said, very quietly.
She felt the inside of her stomach go cold.
She knew that tone. It came from her childhood, and it meant: ‘Wait until this evening.’
She trembled. In an instant, it seemed to her, the relationship of the last few months had vanished. She was a little girl again. And as a little girl, she knew what was to follow. Her knees began to shake. ‘You should look where you are going with scalding water,’ he said coldly. She was so upset she had hurt him that, in a way, she would almost prefer it if he would punish her. It was two years since he had last done so, before Kiy had been taken away. Yet it was strangely humiliating to be addressed like a child again.
‘Go to the bench.’
She lay face down on the bench. She heard him undoing his belt. Then she felt him pull up her linen shift. She braced herself.
But nothing happened.
She closed her eyes, waiting. And then, to her surprise, she felt his hands upon her. Then she felt his breath upon her ear.
‘I won’t punish you this time, my little wife,’ he said softly. ‘But there is something else you can do for me.’ Now she felt his hands moving over the back of her legs. She frowned. What was he doing? ‘Hush now,’ he breathed. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
She began to blush, furiously. She did not know what to do. Even now, she could not quite understand what was happening.
She felt his hands advance. Suddenly she felt naked as she had never done before. She wanted to cry out, to run; yet a hot sense of shame held her strangely helpless. Where was she to run to? What could she say to their neighbours?
At this terrible moment, this man, her father, in this stifling hot room, was trying to do something strange to her. And now she realized exactly what it was.
His touch terrified her. Her body suddenly arched, rigid, and she heard him gasp.
‘Ah, that’s it, my little wife.’
Moments later, after a sudden spasm of pain, she heard him moan: ‘Ah, my little bird, you knew. You always knew.’
Did she know? Did a little voice within her tell her that she had known this was to be, that she shared some complicity with him?
She wanted to cry, yet oddly, at this instant, she could not.
She could not even hate him. She had to love him.
He was all she had.
The next morning she went out early in the snow.
It was going to be a bright day. The sky was pale blue. Pulling snow shoes on over her thick felt boots she trudged towards the high river bank.
The sun was gleaming on the edge of the bank. Below, the forest was bathed in golden light as the sun rose.
A ragged figure was coming towards her. It was one of the Viatichi men. He was leaning far forward, dragging a pile of logs on a little sled behind him. His dark eyes stared at her, piercing, from under his heavy grey eyebrows. He knows, she thought. It seemed impossible to her that everyone in the hamlet did not know what she had done the night before.
The bearded figure went silently past her, without a word, like a sullen, elderly monk.
There was the lightest breath of wind, but it was very cold. Her heavy coat kept her warm; yet she was unusually conscious of her own body inside it, a body which felt naked and bruised.
She turned.