Russka (59 page)

She was sixteen and unmarried.

‘Nor will I be, until I see a man I like,’ she had announced to her parents and the village in half-mocking defiance.

In the manner of the Cossack girls, she lived a free and easy life with the young men of the village. Some of them might even steal a kiss – though if they tried to go too far they would find her more than a match for them and like as not be sent sprawling.

But since Andrei had returned from the seminary a few months before, there had been a subtle change in her manner towards him.

Little as the Poles might think of the Orthodox Church, in the last twenty years it had made great strides. Under an ambitious young churchman, a Moldavian noble by birth, called Peter Mogila, who had come first to the Monastery of the Caves and then become Metropolitan at Kiev, an academy and numerous schools had been set up. Though they imitated the Jesuit Schools of the Poles, they were strictly Orthodox – Ostap would never have sent Andrei otherwise. The new movement set up printing presses too, and already literacy was becoming widespread.

To Anna, therefore, young Andrei was the nearest thing she had come across to a gentleman. He could read and write. He spoke a little Latin and Polish. His father’s farm was a fair size. And he was undeniably handsome.

It was not long before people were whispering: ‘He’s the one’, or ‘A fine couple’, and she found that she had no objection.

For above all, she sensed that within Andrei’s charm and youthful exuberance lay the one quality she admired above all others – the one thing that truly attracted her.

‘He has ambition,’ she remarked to her father.

This had not meant much to the Cossack; but she had taken care to let young Andrei know where she stood before the harvest was begun.

‘Most Cossacks are fools, Andrei,’ she remarked bluntly. ‘They dream about fighting and they drink themselves stupid. But a few are wiser and they rise. Some of them even enter the gentry. Do you agree?’

He had nodded. He understood her.

And he would already have suggested that his father approach hers to arrange a marriage, but for one thing.

First let me go on campaign, he thought. I will see a little of the world before I marry.

But now he was to leave. He looked at her.

She was wearing only a linen shift, which had loosened as she hurriedly got up. Not only could he see her pale form; to his delight he suddenly realized that he could see her breast, almost all of it. It was not large but rather high and narrow; through the gauze-like linen he could see the dark tip of it. His heart pounded.

She realized what he was staring at, but did not even deign to rearrange her dress. Her pride was her protection. ‘Look if you dare,’ her body seemed to say.

In a few whispered words he told her that he was leaving. He told her they were going to fight the Poles. He almost told her about the loss of the farm, but suddenly felt embarrassed and ashamed, and did not mention it.

She’ll find out soon enough, he thought gloomily.

He could not tell what she thought of the news of his departure.

‘When I get back, I shall marry you,’ he said boldly.

‘Will you indeed!’

‘You like me, don’t you?’

She laughed lightly.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps there are other handsome men too.’

‘Such as? Who’s better than me?’

She cast about in her mind, wondering how to taunt him.

‘There’s Stanislaus the Pole,’ she said with a playful smile. ‘He’s a handsome man. And rich.’

For a second he gasped, but then remembered she did not know about today’s episode.

‘He’s a Pole,’ he said grimly.

She wondered why he suddenly looked so downcast.

‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t,’ she said. ‘Maybe you won’t come back. Then what would I do?’

‘I’ll come back. If I come back, you’ll marry me?’ he suddenly said, realizing belatedly she had just given him an opening.

‘Maybe.’

‘Let me in.’

‘Not until we’re married.’

‘Try me out. Make sure you like me.’

‘I’ll take it on trust.’

‘And if I die, I’ll never have made love to you. Let me at least – just once – take that with me to the grave.’

She burst out laughing.

‘You can die thinking about it!’

‘Perhaps I will,’ he said unhappily.

‘Perhaps.’

‘A kiss at least.’

‘A kiss then.’

Now they kissed; and it seemed to Andrei that while they kissed the moon must have moved across half the glittering stars in the night.

When he looked back, a little later, she had closed the shutters.

All around, that April day, the huge camp was bustling with activity. In the warmth of early spring, the ground itself seemed to be steaming.

New contingents had been arriving every day; the number in the camp had swollen to some eight thousand men.

Only Cossacks came here. No one interfered with the well-defended island below the Dniepr rapids. Once, a dozen years before, the Poles had built a stout fortress a little way upriver, in the hope of intimidating the unruly Zaporozhians. They had called the fortress Kodak. The Cossacks had sacked it within months.

The island was full. The usual brushwood and log cabins, some covered with horsehide, others with turf, had been supplemented by every kind of temporary shelter. The latest arrivals had been putting up felt tents on the opposite bank. There were corrals of horses and baggage wagons everywhere.

This was the Cossack host. It contained all manner of men. There were fellows of Tatar blood, Turkish tribesmen from the east, Mordvinians from beyond the Oka River, renegade Poles and runaway peasants from Muscovy; there were farmers, small landowners, even noblemen from the Ukraine. Rich and poor, this colourful collection made up the huge fraternity of the host. There was not a woman in the place.

The Ukrainians, who now counted themselves as part of the Zaporozhian host, mostly wore the loose, baggy trousers and broad cummerbunds that the Zaporozhians had originally copied from the Tatars of the steppe. Then there were their brothers, the Don Cossacks, who had come in large parties to join them and brought with them other Cossacks from even further away, across the Don by the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. They looked more like Georgians and Circassians, with open coats, slanting pockets and heavy braiding. They wore black sheepskins and, when they rode, enveloped themselves in their huge capes, called
burkas
, which they used for sleeping blankets as well. There were even Cossacks from Siberia and the Urals, who favoured red shirts and high, Muscovite hats trimmed with fur.

There was tension in the air. At any moment, everybody knew, they would be off; but since this was the Cossack camp, where things must be done democratically, no one could assume anything until the meeting had been held and the vote taken.

Meanwhile, on every side, the Cossacks were passing the time and relieving the tension in the usual ways. Many were drinking. Once they set off, however, drinking would be forbidden, on pain of death. Here and there a Cossack was playing an eight-stringed lute and humming to himself some endless ballad about the great exploits of the past. In one place a group of energetic young fellows had got one of the older men to give them a tune on a balalaika while another joined in on an instrument rather like a small set of bagpipes: they were dancing wildly, squatting down, kicking their legs out, then leaping up high into the air.

And in the midst of all this commotion, a splendid young Zaporozhian Cossack and his companion were striding through the middle of the camp.

If old Ostap could have seen Andrei at this moment, how proud he would have been.

Over his wide, baggy trousers he wore a fine satin kaftan. His
cummerbund was made of silk, his boots of red morocco. Usually he wore a tall sheepskin hat, but at present he was uncovered, revealing a head that had been carefully shaved except for a patch in the middle which had been gathered into a top-knot. At his side was a splendid, curved sword.

As soon as he had arrived the previous autumn, Andrei had undertaken the first initiation of a Zaporozhian, and taken a boat through the treacherous Dniepr rapids. He was itching to go on campaign so that he could be accepted as a full Cossack. But already, not just in his appearance but in his whole manner, there was a new toughness that, joined to his youthful elegance, made him stand out from the rest.

His companion was a strange fellow. He was huge, also wore a top-knot, like a Zaporozhian, but his coat and black sheepskin suggested he had come from somewhere near the Caucasus region. He also wore a huge, brown beard, like a Muscovite.

‘My father ran away to the Don and he kept his beard, so why shouldn’t I keep mine?’ he had explained to Andrei who had admired its length. ‘It’s a sign of respect,’ he added, quite seriously.

Stepan was thirty. He was immensely strong and there was no one in the whole camp who could out-wrestle him, but like many large men, he was gentle. Only in battle did he work himself up into a kind of transcendental rage that made even brave men scatter before him. For all this strength, however, he had the mind of a child. He was also immensely superstitious. The other Cossacks called him, affectionately, the Ox.

It was strange that the graceful young man from the Dniepr and this naïve giant from the Don should have become close friends, but each admired qualities in the other and they shared their secrets unreservedly.

Though the ethos of the camp was strictly military – women were only a useless distraction when the Cossacks went on their raids – Stepan had long ago confided in Andrei that when this business was over, he intended to give up his wandering life and get married.

‘I’m not like you though,’ he said, gazing at Andrei’s fine clothes. ‘I’ve got nothing except the clothes I stand up in.’ Indeed, his heavy blue coat was badly frayed at the edges and in several places the gold braid was coming off.

‘If the Poles take our farm, I shan’t have anything either,’ Andrei had confessed. ‘But don’t worry, old Ox. I’ll get the farm back and you can go home with a wagon-load of plunder. Tell me, though,’ he asked curiously, ‘who’s the girl you’re going to marry?’

Stepan smiled.

‘The one.’

‘What one?’

‘The only one, of course. The one fate has reserved for me.’

‘You haven’t met her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Do you know anything about her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So she might be a Tatar, or a Georgian, a Mordvinian, or,’ he laughed, ‘a Polish lady?’

Stepan nodded and smiled.

‘Any of those.’

‘You don’t mind which?’

‘How can I mind? It’s not for me to choose. I keep my mind blank. I form no picture. I just wait.’

Andrei smiled.

‘You sound just like one of the priests at the seminary. He told me that’s how he tries to pray.’

‘Ah, that’s right,’ Stepan said earnestly, ‘that’s just it. That’s how we should lead all of our lives.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ Andrei replied. ‘But tell me – this magical girl – how will you recognize her when you see her?’

‘I shall know.’

‘God will tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dear old Ox, how I love you,’ Andrei had said, suddenly embracing him.

Today, however, as they walked through the camp, there was a very different subject on their minds. At any moment they would be off, striking into the heart of the Ukraine. Moreover, as Andrei had discovered during the winter months in camp, the rebellion this time was no minor revolt. Since the Poles had put down the last Cossack uprising, some fifteen years before, the apparent peace of the Ukraine concealed a seething resentment. Only when he got to the camp and met scores of others like himself did Andrei realize that the kind of treatment his father had received
was commonplace. In the western parts, nearer Poland, conditions were even worse and most of the population had already been reduced to utter serfdom. About half the small estates in the Ukraine were now in the hands of Jewish leaseholders.

And the current preparations for an uprising were due to a man rather like his own father, though richer and better educated, whose estate had not only been illegally seized by a Polish subprefect, but whose ten-year-old son had been beaten to death for protesting. His name, ever since revered in the history of the Ukraine, was Bogdan Khmelnitsky; and though writers since often refer to him, for simplicity, as Bogdan, the Cossacks at the time called him Khmel.

It was Khmel who had come down to the Zaporozhians to ask for help. It was he who, for months, had been sending secret agents to villages all over the Ukraine. And it was Khmel – understanding very well the strength and disposition of the Polish forces, and seeing the weaknesses of the fearless but rather disorganized Cossack cavalry – who had undertaken the most brilliant stroke of all. That February he had crossed the steppe to Bakhchisarai, the headquarters of the Tatar Khan of the Crimea, and by a ruse had convinced him that the Poles were planning to attack him. That was why, this very day, news had come that no less than four thousand of the devastating Tatar cavalry would reach the Zaporozhian camp the next day.

The combined force would strike into the heart of the Ukraine and, as it did so, the entire country was going to rise.

‘We’ll teach those Poles a lesson,’ Andrei predicted. ‘And then the farm will be ours.’

Even with such a force, it was a daring plan. The armies the Poles could muster were still much larger, and well trained. But even if the Cossacks succeeded, the question remained – what next? What would they demand? What were they fighting for?

Hardly anyone seemed to know. The Polish oppression would have to end, of course. Then men like his father would be restored to wealth and honour. There would be a lot of booty for everyone, naturally: there always was after a big Cossack expedition. But beyond that, Andrei confessed to himself, he had no clear idea.

Strangely, it was simple-minded Stepan who not only had considered the matter but had a detailed answer.

‘You must have a free Cossack state,’ he told Andrei, ‘with
equality for all and to every man an equal vote. Just like the Don Cossacks. No rich men, no poor men; no landlords and serfs; no best men and lesser men. We’re all equal brothers on the Don.’