Russka (113 page)

Many landowners, however, were nervous. ‘I’ll tell you a useful trick,’ one fellow landlord told him. ‘Some of us reckon that if the emancipation comes, then we’ll have to give the serfs the land they till. So what you can do is to take your serfs off the land – make them into household domestics for the time being. Then if this awful thing happens you’ll be able to say: “But my serfs don’t till any land.” And you may not have to give them a thing!’

And, indeed, Misha actually discovered one landlord in the province whose lands were completely untilled, but who had suddenly acquired forty footmen! ‘A trick,’ he remarked to his wife, ‘which is as stupid as it is shabby.’ The Bobrov serfs stayed where they were.

Whatever changes were coming, Misha was looking forward to being at home. He had inherited not only Bobrovo, but also the Riazan estate from Ilya. ‘I shall devote myself to agriculture and to study,’ he declared. After Ilya’s death five years before, he had discovered the huge unfinished manuscript of his Uncle’s great work. ‘Perhaps I can complete it for him,’ he suggested.

No, there were plenty of things to think about. But still, the matter of Suvorin and the priest intrigued him.

‘For the one thing I regret about giving Suvorin his freedom,’ Alexis had always told him, ‘is that once he’s not under my thumb, he’ll start bringing his Old Believers here and converting people. And I always promised the priest I wouldn’t let that happen.’

In his years away on military service, Misha had rather forgotten about this; but now he had returned and had begun making some enquiries, it was soon clear to him that, indeed, this transformation had taken place.

The Suvorin enterprise was growing rapidly. The jenny imported from England for the cotton plant had been a huge success. Savva Suvorin now employed half the people living in the little town of Russka. His son Ivan ran the business in Moscow. And while it was not clear to Misha whether all those Suvorin employed were Old Believers, there was certainly a core of them at the factory; and the fact that recent legislation had broken up some of the Old Believer groups, including the radical Theodosians, had obviously not stopped some sort of observances continuing almost openly. Indeed, Timofei Romanov once obligingly showed Misha the house in the town where they met to pray.

Yet – here was the puzzle – there was no word of protest from the priest at Russka.

The first time Misha had asked him about this, the priest had denied it. ‘The congregation at Russka is loyal, Mikhail Alexeevich. I don’t think you need worry about that.’ His red beard was turning grey now. He was fatter than ever. Congregation or not, Misha thought, he certainly looks well fed.

Misha even once, out of curiosity, confronted Savva Suvorin himself. But that worthy, gazing down at him contemptuously from his great height, merely remarked with a shrug: ‘Old Believers? I know nothing of that.’

It was on a Sunday morning, one day in December, that Misha received his little moment of enlightenment. He was standing in the snow-filled market square in Russka, shortly after the church service, which had been rather poorly attended. He would have gone home; but it was at just this time, as it happened, that the sled bringing newspapers from Vladimir often arrived, and he had hung around for a little while in hopes of getting the latest news.

He was still waiting there when he noticed the red-headed priest emerge from the church and begin to walk ponderously towards his house. With him, Misha noticed, was a rather surly-looking fellow, also with reddish hair, whom Misha vaguely recognized as the priest’s son. Paul Popov – this was his name – was a clerk of some kind in Moscow, he had heard: one of that tribe of underpaid petty officials who, in those days, made ends meet by whatever small-time bribery and corruption they could come by. Misha gazed at the priest and his son with vague contempt.

And then he saw the strangest thing. Savva Suvorin entered the square and walked close by them. As he drew near, he gave the priest a curt nod, almost as he might to an employee. But instead of ignoring him, both the priest and Paul Popov suddenly turned and bowed low. Nor was there any mistaking the meaning of their gesture. It was not the polite bow that Misha made to the priest, and the priest to him. It was the bow of servant to master, of employee to paymaster. And they had both given it, father and son, to the former serf.

And then Misha understood.

It was at just this moment that the long awaited sled came in through the gates of Russka and jingled across the square.

Misha ignored it. He could not resist the sudden impulse that had suddenly taken hold of him. He had never cared for the redheaded priest, and this opportunity was too perfect. He strode across the market place and, just as the priest reached the centre, accosted him in a loud voice.

‘Tell me,’ he cried, ‘how much is it? How much do Suvorin and his Old Believers pay you for giving up your congregation to them?’

The priest went scarlet. He had hit!

But Misha never received his answer. For at that moment there was an excited shout from the far side of the square, where the newspapers were being unloaded. And as they all turned, a voice excitedly cried out: ‘It’s official. From the Tsar. The serfs are going to be freed.’

And Misha forgot even the priest, and hastened across the square.

With a slow hiss and clank the train approached the ancient city of Vladimir, and the two unexpected visitors gazed out with curiosity.

It was spring. The snow had mostly departed, but here and there they saw drifts, or long greyish slivers, across the terrain. All the world, from the peeling white walls of the churches to the brown fields by each hamlet had an untidy, blotchy look. There were huge puddles everywhere; rivers had overflowed their banks and the roads, turned into quagmires, were almost impassable.

Yet if, upon earth, all movement had temporarily ceased, the skies were full of traffic. Over the woods where light green buds had appeared, seemingly overnight, on the bare silver birches, the air was full of the raucous cries of birds who came flocking and wheeling over the forest. For this was the Russian spring, and the rooks and starlings were returning.

The journey had been long, but the two travellers were in good spirits. The train conductor – a tall, thin man with round shoulders, large ears, flat feet, and a strange habit of cracking his knuckles – had engaged their attention; and long before they reached Vladimir, young Nicolai Bobrov had refined his imitation of this man until it was a fine art.

Nicolai was twenty; a handsome, slim young man with the Bobrovs’ regular faintly Turkish features, a small, neatly trimmed moustache, a soft, pointed beard, and a mass of dark brown, wavy hair. His blue eyes and pleasant mouth looked manly.

His companion, though only twenty-one, looked a little older. He was a thin, rather sulky-looking fellow about two inches taller than Nicolai, with a shock of bright ginger hair. His face was cleanshaven. His mouth was thin, his teeth small, rather yellowish and uneven. His eyes were green. But the thing one noticed most, after the first glance, was the area around the eyes, which was slightly puffy, as if he had been punched at birth and never quite recovered.

When the train arrived at Vladimir, the two men got out and Nicolai went in search of transport. Horses were not enough, for they had a considerable quantity of heavy luggage, and he was gone over an hour before he eventually returned with a grumpy peasant driving a carriage so battered it was little more than a cart. ‘Sorry,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It was the best I could do.’ And a few minutes later he and his companion set off.

Mud. Everywhere he looked, it seemed to Nicolai Bobrov, there was mud. Brown mud that stretched to the ploughland’s horizon; mud that stretched down the road like an endless penance; mud that took hold of the carriage wheels and dragged them down like some evil spirit trying to drown a stranger in a pool. Mud splattered their clothes, mud caked the carriage, mud said to them, plainly and without fear of contradiction: ‘This is my season. None shall move, because I do not allow it. Neither horse nor man, rich nor poor, strong nor weak, neither armies nor the Tsar himself have any power over me. For in my season I am king.’ It was not the snow that first broke Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow, Nicolai remembered: it was the mud.

Yet despite their slow progress, young Nicolai felt elated. For it seemed to him that perhaps all his life – and certainly the last year or two – had been a preparation for this journey and this spring.

How he had prepared! Like all the other students in the house they shared, he had read, listened, debated week after week, month after month. He had even practised mortifications like a monk. One month, he had slept on a bare board, which he covered with studs. He generally wore a hair shirt. ‘For I am not yet as strong and as disciplined as I should be,’ he would confess to his friends. And now, at last, the hour was approaching at which, he hoped, both he and all the world would be born again.

And what luck, Nicolai considered as he glanced at his companion – what incredible luck that he should be undertaking his mission with this man above all others. He knows so much more than I do, he thought humbly. Nicolai had never met anyone like him.

As they made their way, at a snail’s pace, through the endless mud, only one thought secretly troubled Nicolai. His unsuspecting parents. What would become of them?

Of course, he realized, they would have to suffer: it was
inevitable. But at least I’ll be there, he thought. I dare say I can keep them from the worst.

Slowly the little carriage made its way towards Russka.

Timofei Romanov stood by the window of the
izba
on that damp spring morning and stared at his son Boris in disbelief.

‘I forbid you,’ he cried at last.

‘I’m twenty and I’m married. You can’t stop me.’ Young Boris Romanov looked round his family. His parents’ faces were ashen; his grandmother Arina was stony faced; and his fifteen-year-old sister Natalia was looking rebellious, as usual.

‘Wolf!’ Timofei roared. And then, almost pleadingly: ‘At least think of your poor mother.’

But Boris said nothing and Timofei could only look outside at the clamorous birds wheeling over the trees and wonder why God had sent the family all these troubles at once.

The Romanov family was small. Over the years, Timofei and Varya had lost four children to disease and malnutrition; but such tragedies were only to be expected. Thank God at least Natalia and Boris were healthy. Arina too, though she had never quite recovered her health from the terrible famine of ’39, was a source of strength: small, somewhat shrivelled, sometimes bitter, but indomitable. Together with Boris’s new wife, they all lived together in a stout, two-storey
izba
in the centre of the village. And Timofei, now fifty-two, had been looking forward to taking things more easily.

Until a month ago when, to his astonishment, Varya had told him that she was pregnant again. ‘I couldn’t believe it at first,’ she said, ‘but now I’m sure.’ And in reply to her uncertain look he had smiled bravely and remarked: ‘It’s a gift from God.’

Or a curse, he thought now.

For Boris had just announced that he was going to ruin them.

The Emancipation of the Serfs had changed the lives of Timofei and his family, but not much for the better. There were several reasons for this.

While the peasants on land owned by the State had received a moderately good deal, the serfs of private landlords had not. For a start, only about a third of the land had actually been transferred to the private serfs, the rest remaining with the landlords. Secondly,
the serfs had had to pay for this land: a fifth in money or labour service, the other four-fifths by means of a loan from the State, in the form of a bond, repayable over forty-nine years: so that, in effect, the serfs of Russia were forced to take out a mortgage on their holdings. Worse even yet, the landlords managed to have the prices of land set artificially high. ‘And it’s not only those damned repayments,’ Timofei would complain. ‘It’s us peasants who still pay all the taxes too. We’re supporting the landowners as much as ever!’

It was perfectly true. The peasants paid the poll tax, from which the nobles were exempt. They also paid a host of indirect taxes on food and spirits, which were a greater burden on the poor. The net result of this was that, after becoming free, Timofei the peasant was actually paying ten times as much to the State for each
desiatin
of land he held as Bobrov the gentleman did for his. No wonder then if, like most peasants, Timofei often muttered: ‘One day we’ll kick those nobles out and get the rest of the land for ourselves.’

He did not hate the landowner – not personally. Hadn’t he and Misha Bobrov played together when they were children? But he knew that the nobleman was a parasite. ‘They say the Tsars gave the Bobrovs their land,’ he had explained to his children, ‘in return for their services. But the Tsar doesn’t need them any more. So he’ll take their land away soon, and give it to us.’ It was a simple belief which was shared by peasants all over Russia: ‘Be patient. The Tsar will give.’ And so he had waited for better times.

Young Boris Romanov was a pleasant-looking boy – square and stocky like his father, but with hair that was lighter brown and already rather thin at the front. His blue eyes, though defiant, were gentle.

He did not want to hurt his family; but in the last few months since his marriage, life had become impossible. The arrival of his wife – a lively, golden-haired young girl – in the household had produced a new pecking order. While Arina and Varya had previously expected obedience from his sister Natalia, they rather ignored her now and concentrated their attention on Boris’s wife. ‘They think they own me,’ she would furiously complain.

But it was his mother’s unexpected pregnancy which really brought about the crisis. ‘We shall be starting a family also,’ the girl protested to Boris. ‘And where will that leave us, when it’s her new child who’ll be the important one?’ His father Timofei, too,
always moody and feeling the strain of the new situation, had taken to shouting at him on the slightest pretext. ‘Call that a way to stack wood, you Mordvinian?’ he would bellow; and to Boris’s wife he had promised: ‘I may have failed with my son, but I’ll thrash some sense into my grandchild when you give me one – you can be sure of that!’ By the time the spring thaw came, Boris had decided it could go on no longer.