Lebed was covered in sweat; but she felt comfortable, working in that steady rhythm under the sun. Although they sometimes treated her scornfully, each of these women was in some way her kin – another wife, the other wife’s sister, her husband’s sisters and their daughters, these daughters’ aunts and cousins. For each there was a precise form of address which noted their complex relationship, the appropriate degree of respect, and to which was usually added the diminutive so beloved of all Slavs, and which turned every form of address into an expression of affection. ‘Little mother’; ‘little cousin’: how else would one speak to another speck of poor humanity here in the immensity of the endless plain?
These were her people. They might call her a Mordvinian, but she was part of them. This was the community: the rod as the folk in the south called it, or the mir further north. They held their land and village in common – only a man’s household possessions were his own; and the voice of the elder was law.
Now her mother-in-law was calling to the women, encouraging them with the soft, caressing names.
‘Come, my daughters, my swans,’ she called, ‘let us reap.’ Even to Lebed she cried softly: ‘Come, my Little Swan.’
In a way, Lebed loved even her. ‘Eat what is cooked, listen to what is said,’ the older woman would tell her sternly. Yet apart from her outbursts of rage, she could sometimes be kindly.
Lebed glanced across the field. Beyond, a few hundred yards away, her husband and the men were loading hay on to carts in the meadow. Her brother was there too. By the side of the field, three of the oldest women were quietly resting. She looked for Kiy. He had been sitting with the old women a little earlier, but perhaps he had gone to watch the men.
The women sang and swung their sickles, stooping once more, as though in prayer to the greatest goddess who fed them alclass="underline" Moist Mother Earth.
The great goddess of the Slavs took her finest form in that region. For the hamlet lay on the edge of the best of all the bands of soil on the great plain: the black earth.
There was nothing else like it on the Eurasian plain.
Up in the north, under the tundra, the soil was a peaty gley, poor for cultivation; next, under the forests, lay the sandy podzol soils – grey under the northern deciduous forests, brown as one came to the broad-leaved forests further south. In these soils, too, the yields were relatively poor. But as one came towards the steppe belt, a very different soil appeared. This was the black earth, the chernozem – glistening, soft, thick, rich as honey. And it stretched, for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, from the western coasts of the Black Sea, eastwards across the plain, past the great River Volga and far into Siberia. The Slavs who lived at the forest’s edge had only to clear a field and then crop it continually: on that rich black soil, they might raise crops for many years before the soil was exhausted, and then they would leave the field to grass over and clear another. It was a primitive and wasteful form of agriculture, but on the chernozem, a village could survive in this way for a long time without having to move to fresh soil. Besides, what need was there to worry – were not the forest and the plain both endless?
It was as the women paused between songs that she saw Mal strolling towards them. His face was red and covered with sweat.
‘Here comes Lazy-bones, looking for more work,’ one of the women cried mischievously. Even her mother-in-law laughed, and Lebed couldn’t help smiling. It was obvious from the slightly guilty look on his face that he had sneaked away on some pretext for a rest. She was only surprised that her son had not come with him.
‘Where’s Little Kiy?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know. Haven’t seen him all morning.’
She frowned. Where could the boy be? She turned and called to her mother-in-law.
‘May I go and find Little Kiy? He’s gone off somewhere.’
The large woman scarcely paused as she looked impassively at Lebed and her good-for-nothing brother. Then she shook her head. There was work to be done.
‘Go and ask the old women where he went,’ she said to Mal quietly.
‘All right.’ And he ambled amiably towards the edge of the field.
It always amused Mal to compare the lives of the people in the village. Those of the men were more vivid, perhaps, but shorter. A man grew strong, either fat or thin; and when at last his strength deserted him, like as not he would suddenly die. But the lot of women was quite different. First they would blossom – pale-skinned, slim, graceful as a deer; then, all and without exception, they would thicken – first at the hips as his sister had done, then about the midriff and the legs. And they would infallibly continue to get stouter and rounder, burnt by the sun, like a pear or an apple, year after year, until the taller of them might reach the stately massiveness of Lebed’s mother-in-law. Then slowly, still keeping their comfortable, rounded shape, they would begin to get smaller, shrinking gradually until at last in old age they shrivelled up, like the little brown kernel inside a nutshell. And thus the old woman – the babushka – with her wrinkled brown face and shining blue eyes, would live out her long last years until finally, as naturally as a nut that has fallen, she sank at last into the ground. It was the pattern for all women. His sister Lebed would go that way too in the end. When he looked at an old babushka, he always felt a wave of affection.
There were three babushki sitting together at the edge of the field. Smiling kindly, he spoke to each in turn.
Lebed watched him as he spoke to them and wondered why he was taking so long. Finally he returned, grinning.
‘They’re old,’ he explained, ‘and a bit confused. One says she thought he went back to the village with the other children; the second thought he went to the river; and the third thinks he went off into the forest.’
She sighed. She couldn’t think why Kiy should have gone into the forest, and she doubted that he had strayed to the river. The other children were back in the hut in the charge of one of the girls. Probably he was there.
‘Go and see if he’s in the village,’ she asked. And since it was better than working, Mal wandered off contentedly.
As the women worked, they continued to sing. She loved the song – for though it was a slow and mournful one, its tune was so beautiful it seemed to take her mind off her troubles:
The long line of women moved slowly forward, stooping as they cut the heavy-eared barley. The field was full of the soft swish and rustle of their sickles cutting through the browning stalks. The thin dust from the toppled barley hung low over the ground, smelling sweet. And Lebed, as she often did, experienced that half-pleasant, half-mournful sense – as though a part of her was lost, unable to escape from this slow, hard life in the great silence of the endless plain – half-mournful, because one was forever trapped; half-pleasant, because these were her people, and was not this life, after all, as things should be?
Some time had passed before Mal returned. His face still wore its usual vacant smile, but she thought she noticed a hint of uneasiness in it.