The Russians Collection

by Michael Phillips

  “I am honored that you speak so of my daughter,” said Yevno humbly.

  “The honor is all on my side,” rejoined Sergei. “I am honored, humbled, that a woman of Anna’s high character and purity and devotion would care for me. I have no intention of either toying with her or of finding some painless means to turn her eyes off me. I would die before hurting her.”

  “I am afraid I am too dull-witted, Your Excellency,” said Yevno. “I do not understand you.”

  “Yevno Pavlovich,” said Sergei earnestly, “it is my hope and intention, with your permission, to marry your Anna.”

  Yevno’s shock at the incredible words was registered by a falter in his step rather than with his voice. He turned and looked through the darkness, trying to see if he could find anything in the face of his young companion that would shed further light on the astonishing words he had just heard. But it was too dark, and no additional light came, either from the heavens or from Sergei’s eyes. The words hung echoing in the air just as the prince had spoken them.

  Their conversation had brought them to the cottage, and Yevno was able to avoid an immediate response to the shocking revelation by busying himself with more practical matters.

  “I hope the straw is dry and soft, Your Excellency,” he said, leading his guest around the back of the izba to the attached barn. “I know it is not what you are accustomed to, but it is all we have.”

  “I have rarely slept so well as the last two nights,” replied Sergei.

  “My son used to sleep out here when he grew older.”

  “The luxury is not in soft blankets but in warm company.”

  Sergei’s comment seemed to hint toward the previous conversation. Yevno turned toward him. “Perhaps we will talk more when we are both rested,” he said.

  Sergei nodded. “I meant what I said. There is no vodka in my brain causing words I will later repent of. I have wanted to say this to you, Anna’s father, for a long time.”

  Yevno turned and started for the cottage, then paused and looked back. “If I may keep you from your sleep a moment longer, Your Excellency, I have one question more.”

  “Of course . . . what is it?”

  “Your own father and mother—what do they think of what you have just told me?”

  Sergei looked away with chagrin. “They know nothing of my feelings for Anna.”

  Yevno nodded in understanding. “Then she may yet need the protection of those who care for her.”

  “I was in earnest when I said that I would not allow her to be hurt.”

  “Ah, if only we were powerful enough to keep away all hurt . . . ,” Yevno sighed. “We will talk again, Your Excellency. God be with you this night.”

  Yevno shuffled with heavy step back to the cottage, his shoulders slumped forward, his head bowed slightly. Sergei wondered if it had been wise to burden the man like this. But everything had come out without his planning it. He had thought to let a few more days pass, perhaps go back to Pskov and take an inn, hire a carriage and horse, and then return. Now suddenly here he was, sleeping in the man’s byre, after just announcing his intention to become his son-in-law!

  His thoughts strayed toward his own sister and best friend. Two more poorly suited than Katrina and Dmitri he could hardly imagine. Yet because they were of the same class, their marriage would receive the sanction and blessing of society. Yet he and Anna . . .

  He could not even complete the thought. Would they have to skulk about through life in dark corners, hidden from view, for no more reason than accident of birth?

  As he lay down on the bed of straw and pulled the worn wool blanket about his shoulders, the thought struck him of stealing into the cottage in the middle of the night and carrying Anna off with him.

  He smiled at the foolhardy notion. No, there had to be a better way. At least Anna was blessed with a wise and prudent father who didn’t seem to take offense with having a nobleman as suitor to his daughter. Yevno had spoken of protecting Anna from hurt, as he himself had. Yet what greater hurt could there be than to endure long years of separation?

  Hurting others was no solution; neither was running away. But what was he to do?

  At last the fatiguing hours and lack of sleep overtook him. Even as his heart cried out in despair, his eyelids drooped and finally closed in exhaustion.

  54

  Sergei’s days as a guest in the humble Katyk cottage of Yevno and Sophia Burenin slipped by as quickly as autumn passed into winter. He and Anna made the most of every fleeting moment, not knowing when such a time might come again.

  The cloak of secrecy that had hung over their brief stolen moments together in St. Petersburg was lifted in Katyk. It did not matter who might see them together. And the wide, vast countryside was scantly populated anyway. Now that the sheaves had been gathered into the barns, most of the men were inside threshing and winnowing the grain into bags and storage bins, where it would be used throughout the winter months.

  But the greatest joy of all for the young soldier and peasant girl was that here in the environs of Katyk they were no longer prince and servant, but simply man and woman, friends, companions. No shadows hung over them except their own uncertainty about their future together.

  The chores to be done did not stop because an honored guest was among them, and Sergei was up at daylight, thoroughly relishing being part of every aspect of country life. By the time Sophia reached the barn in the morning, her chickens had been fed, the few eggs gathered, and their roost cleaned out and supplied with fresh straw. Astonished, she saw the happy, whistling prince up to his ankles in manure, wearing an old pair of her husband’s boots, mucking out stalls.

  “Good morning, Madame!” he called to Anna’s mother, whose only response was a gaping jaw and disbelieving eyes.

  As he went on with his work, Sophia heard an amused chuckle behind her. She turned to see Yevno sitting on his crate watching the prince, but even more watching the reaction of his wife.

  “So, wife,” he said in a humorous tone, “what do you think of our prince from St. Petersburg?”

  “Every day I believe less and less that he is a prince,” replied Sophia, only half in jest. “I think perhaps he is a homeless peasant that Anna felt sorry for.”

  Sergei laughed. “Sometimes I almost wish your words were true!” he said. Had he been capable of it in that moment, he would have traded his entire St. Petersburg heritage to be one of these country people.

  “Well, perhaps you are a prince,” added Sophia. “But one from a fairy tale, who will suddenly vanish before our eyes, never to be heard from again.”

  The joviality of their words had not kept Yevno from serious thought concerning their guest, although he and Sergei had not resumed their conversation from the night of the celebration. He had watched the young prince carefully, listened to his words, observed his treatment of his daughter, his eagerness for hard work, the humility that found no task distasteful, the deference he showed Yevno as Anna’s father and head of the home. He had taught Sergei to milk their cow. The young man had probably kept his wife and children from starving, or at least from extreme hunger during the winter to come. And as Yevno had sat watching him, he was unable to escape the conclusion that he could not hope for better for his daughter than this young man. Even if he was a prince and she a peasant, why shouldn’t such a fairy-tale marriage come to his home?

  How could he possibly withhold his paternal blessing from such a union, unlikely though it was? He could not . . . and he would not. And he would tell the young prince at the first opportunity. In the meantime, he would enjoy teaching him the ways of the Russian farmer and peasant, so that when Sergei did take his daughter as his wife, he would know as much about her life as she had learned of his.

  Once the morning chores were completed, as breaks in the inclement weather permitted, Anna took Sergei over hill, through wet fields, across meadows, and into the nearby forest, joyfully introducing him to all her favorite places on the land that had nurture
d her for fifteen years. For a day or two, Yevno lay in bed most of the afternoon, at his wife’s insistence, to regain some of the strength the harvest had cost him. Sergei milked the cow both evenings. And after the humble fare of Sophia’s supper table—which Sergei declared the best food he had ever eaten anywhere, including the Winter Palace itself—Anna resumed her tradition of reading to the family. It did not take long for Sergei to begin assisting her, the two sharing the book and reading different stories, or taking the parts of different characters. Everyone loved to hear the mixture of their voices, and Sergei took the dramatization to new heights by changing the inflection and emphasis with great result, adding many sound effects besides. Tanya and Vera and Ilya were so delighted after the first such night that they gave him no rest thereafter, begging him for stories, not merely every evening but all day long whenever he walked through the door. He took it all with smiles and laughter, scooping one or the other of them up into his arms, tossing them into the air, and repeating a phrase from one of the stories he had read with particularly comical voices. Never had such giggling and laughter been heard in the Burenin cottage!

  Still insisting this man could be no real prince, but was in fact only a prince in one of the fairy tales he himself was reading to them, even Sophia began to laugh at his playful antics. And when he kissed her cheek one night as the stories came to a close, the rising blush in her face gave evidence that he had at last won the heart of mother as well as daughter.

  Feeling gradually more rested physically, and increasingly relaxed in the presence of one society considered infinitely his superior, Yevno too entered into the festive spirit of the time. With the pressure of harvest over, he began to recover. His color and breathing improved, and much of his old vigor returned.

  After two days, he announced himself fit enough to begin separating the grain.

  “What is your hurry, Yevno Pavlovich?” objected Sophia. “You can take all winter if you like.”

  “I will go slow, wife,” he replied. “A small pile of grain each day is all. But I cannot stay in bed any longer or I will wither up and die!”

  The prince was at his side the moment Yevno headed for the byre, followed by all the children, and Anna last of all.

  After clearing a space on the floor of the barn, Yevno took one of the bundles from the top of the stack, untied it and tossed it down. He then took up a wooden pole with a flat board attached to its end with leather. “This is the flail,” he said to the prince. “Stand back, children!” he added.

  With that, he lifted the odd-looking instrument over his shoulders and brought it down with a great blow onto the heads of grain. After a few more such blows, he threw down a second bundle, continuing to beat the sheaves. The wheat flew, and the chaff fluttered into the air; the stalks of straw flattened and broke and spread out all around. At length, Yevno stood back, breathing deeply, beholding the small pile of threshed grain on the floor. He took a broom, lightly swept back the accumulated straw, then swept the greater portion of the wheat onto a wide, flat, woven mat. Without a word, Sophia stepped forward, taking one side of it with her two hands, while Yevno grabbed the other. They took it a step or two outside, then began tossing the grain into the air. The breeze gently carried off the lighter chaff. In two or three minutes, all that remained in the center of the mat was a pile of golden grain.

  He and Sophia brought it back inside and proudly deposited it into a large wooden bin built into one of the barn’s walls.

  “So, Your Excellency,” said Yevno, “that is what we must do now—first thresh with the flail, then winnow away the chaff to make what you cut in the fields fit to yield bread.”

  Already the flail was in Sergei’s hands. Anna grabbed a sheaf unbound it, tossed it to the floor, did the same with another, then stood back. Sergei raised the awkward thing high, but his first swing only managed to bring the flopping board at the end of the pole against his back.

  “Ow . . . aah!” he cried in pain. Anna winced. Yevno could not help chuckling.

  “It is perhaps even more difficult than the scythe,” said Yevno. “Try it slowly, so that the free-swinging swiple on top does not hit you in the head but comes down on the heads of grain.”

  Again Sergei made the attempt, this time with more success. Within five minutes the flail was threshing with as much accuracy and impact as Yevno himself would have been able to muster.

  For the rest of the day, Sergei threw himself into the threshing with a zealous joy, heightened by Anna’s presence beside him. Yevno and Sophia continued to winnow the grain and chaff throughout the morning, until Yevno began to show signs of once again being taxed beyond what was good for him.

  During the afternoon, therefore, Anna and Sergei alternated between threshing and winnowing, and by day’s end a sizable pile of wheat had begun to rise at the base of the storage bin.

  55

  Too quickly the pleasurable days came to an end. It was time for the prince who had become part of a peasant family to return to his former and future life.

  The day before his departure, Anna wrapped a small loaf of bread, a hunk of goat’s cheese, and a few turnips in a cloth, and they walked to the stream that flowed by the great old willow to partake of one last simple meal together. The rains had passed and the day was bright and clear, although the crisp breeze that wafted over them carried with it the bite of the coming winter.

  Sergei lay back on the grass, closed his eyes, and drank in the exquisite sounds of the meadow—the splashing of water in the stream as it tumbled across the rocks, the sweet call of a lark, and the gentle rustle of the lacy fingers of the willow.

  “So, this is the place you love most of all, Anna?” he said dreamily, a smile of contentment spread over his face.

  “It always used to be,” she replied. “And now that I am here again, I think I would say so still.”

  “What makes it so special?”

  “No matter what the season or the time of day, I find myself enchanted here.”

  “Enchanted? How do you mean?”

  “Mostly I came here to read and think. I suppose you could say this was where I first left Katyk—in my mind. Under these spreading branches I have taken many a long journey to far and exotic lands. And this tough old bark has heard more than its share of a young girl’s secrets.”

  “And what kind of secrets do you tell an old willow, Anna?”

  “Oh, nothing that would amount to much in the larger scheme of the world, I suppose. But if my ramblings went up to heaven as the prayers I meant them for, then I am sure they meant something to God.”

  “If I spoke to the willow,” said Sergei lightly, yet with a definite earnestness in his tone, “do you think God would hear and answer me?”

  “Why not speak directly to God?”

  “And put some poor priest out of his job?”

  “You know better than that, Sergei.”

  “Because of you, Anna, I suppose I do know what you mean.” He paused and closed his eyes again as if he had resumed listening to the sounds of nature about them. “If I did pray right now, I would ask God to make this day go on for ever and ever.”

  Anna sighed. “And I would join you in it.”

  “But it would be a foolish prayer, would it not?” he added. “Good things don’t last forever; otherwise how would we know the difference between sadness and happiness?”

  When Anna did not reply, Sergei changed the subject. “I have never yet told you much about my year away.”

  “I hoped you would before you left.”

  “You want to hear about it, then?”

  “Oh yes . . . of course!”

  Sergei remained quiet for a few moments, collecting his thoughts. Hints of the mental turmoil that had sent him away in the first place seemed to settle over his countenance, even though when he spoke again, his voice remained cheery for Anna’s sake.

  “Yasnaya Polyana, the ‘bright glade,’ is a remarkable place,” he began. “It is a world all its own, and
I doubt it has changed one iota in the past hundred years. Tolstoy attributes his love for the Motherland to be a direct result of his life in the glade.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he wrote while there?”

  “Yes, both War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I suppose I harbored a secret hope it would inspire me as greatly.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute.” He lazily plucked a blade of grass and began to examine it as if it held the secrets of life he had been searching for in his travels.

  “Count Tolstoy is a tremendous man,” he went on after a moment. “But he can be rather intense. Nevertheless, he taught me a great deal and was extremely tolerant of my occasional ‘frivolous lapses,’ as he called them.”

  “He called you frivolous?” smiled Anna. “He must be unusual as well as talented.”

  “I’ll always be grateful to him. But after a while I knew it was time I moved on, for both our sakes. I did not want to wear out either my welcome or his patience.”

  “Where did you go then?”

  “I had hoped to find my own Yasnaya Polyana,” answered Sergei. “Some place where I could capture the same creative spirit that he found there. I traveled east as far as the Urals, then south to the Caucasus. I visited the provinces and the Russian peasantry, as I’ve always wanted to do. But I only saw. I was a spectator and always a stranger.”

  He paused again reflectively. Anna said nothing, but waited for him to continue.

  “Do you know where I finally ended up? On my family’s estate by the Black Sea. It was an ingenious place to hide, don’t you think? The last place anyone would think to look for me. There were only the caretaker and his wife, and I swore them to absolute secrecy. I stayed there through the winter and finally finished my book.”

  “Did you really? Oh, I’m happy for you, Sergei!” exclaimed Anna.

  “When I return to the capital I hope to deliver it to a publisher. Count Tolstoy says for me to expect the censors to tear it to ribbons—”