Then they set to work.
And Yanka’s opinion of them changed.
She had never seen anything like it. Huge logs appeared, seemingly from nowhere. The sturdy little horses she had seen were dragging in tree trunks you could almost have hollowed into boats. Great timbers of oak were used for the foundation, then softer, easily worked pine.
The plan of the hut was much the same as in the south: a central entrance corridor with a large space for keeping one’s equipment and stores on one side of it, and a room on the other. A good part of the wall between corridor and room was taken up with the stove, which they built of clay.
They worked entirely with their axes – stout, broad-bladed implements with rather short, straight handles, the blade extended towards the butt – and whether Finn or Slav, they seemed equally skilled. Each log was neatly jointed and slotted into its neighbour so that, although the lines between the logs were filled with moss, they were so tight it was scarcely necessary.
And there was not a single nail in the whole house.
It was not only the neatness of their work that amazed Yanka, but the speed of it. She was used to the busy people of the south, but there was something in these northerners’ quiet, ferocious pace that was heroic. They worked into the dusk. The women brought torches and lit fires so they could see better. By the time they stopped that night, the whole house except for the stove and the roof was completed.
The steward and his wife gave them shelter that night. By noon the next day, their hut was complete.
‘There,’ the men said. ‘This is your place. It will keep you warm, and will last for thirty-three years.’
This was the northern hut – the Russian izba. Its huge stove and tightly sealed walls would keep its occupants baking hot through the coldest winter as its very name implied: for ‘izba’ meant ‘hot room’.
After they had thanked their new neighbours, the steward led them out to show them the plot of land he had chosen for them.
As they walked, they chatted, and Yanka told the steward how impressed she had been by the men’s work. ‘With men like this,’ she gazed about her, envisioning cities in the forest, ‘there is nothing we Russians cannot do.’
The steward was a small man with a shrewd face. He laughed. ‘This is the north,’ he told her. ‘Up here we can do anything – for a short space of time.’ And seeing her puzzled look, he smiled. Then he gestured to the forest all around.
‘You’re in the north now,’ he explained. ‘And up here it’s like this: we do our best, of course, but whatever we do, the forest reminds us that the land, the winter, and God Himself will always be stronger than we can be. Too much effort is in vain. So then we don’t work so hard, except when there’s something definite to do in a hurry.’ She laughed, thinking this a joke, but he only replied: ‘You’ll see.’
The estate, he explained to them, was of medium size – about four hundred desiatin, or a thousand acres. Only part of it was worked at present. It lay on both sides of the river.
Many landlords preferred to give these remote estates over entirely to peasants and collect a modest rent, usually paid in kind. It was not like the old days in the south, he told them, where landlords ran their own estates and shipped the surplus to markets. ‘You’ll find things simpler up here,’ he continued.
But the boyar Milei had the resources to buy slaves and hire labourers. ‘He’s planning to bring more people in and build this place up,’ the steward said, ‘and work some of the estate himself. So although it’s small as yet, you’ll see changes here soon.’
One thing troubled Yanka.
‘We are Christians,’ she told him. ‘Are all the people here pagan?’
She had noticed some strange, hump-backed graves outside the fence that did not look Christian to her.
‘The Slavs from the south are Christian,’ he replied. ‘The Mordvinians,’ he laughed, ‘they’re Mordvinians. As for the Viatichi, they’re Slav, but pagan too. Those were their grave mounds you saw by the fence.’
‘Will there ever be a church?’
‘The boyar plans to build one.’
‘Soon?’
‘Maybe.’
After this she returned to the hut, while her father and the steward went to see the land he was to be given.
The land that he was allotted was the standard peasant plot of thirty chets – about thirty-six acres. But it was poor woodland, west of the village, that would need to be cleared. For this, however, he would only have to pay a small rent, with none payable in the first year. The steward would advance him a small sum, in return for which he was to do some light work for the boyar. And so began his career in his new home.
For Yanka, this was a time of discovery. The summer drifted on far into autumn that year, into the time of Indian summer which the Russians call ‘Granny Summer’.
She walked all round the area, sometimes alone and sometimes with the steward’s wife. The steward’s wife was a small, rather cold woman, but she wanted to make sure this new girl was useful to the estate, and so she showed her round thoroughly.
The woods were richer than Yanka had imagined. The older woman showed her where to find herbs – St John’s wort, betony, ribwort – and where there were medicinal ferns. They walked through a little pine wood to the south, above the river, and there on the mossy ground grew bushes of bilberry and cranberry. Here and there, as they walked, the steward’s wife would point to a particular tree and say: ‘There’s a squirrel’s nest up there, look.’ And she would point to the little tracks made by the squirrel’s claws as it went up the trunk again and again, to fill the deep hollow with nuts for the winter.
‘We have special wooden spikes you can put on your feet,’ she explained. ‘You can climb up any tree in them and steal the squirrel’s nuts – or honey from the bees. Just like Misha the bear,’ she laughed drily.
One spot that Yanka particularly liked lay about half a mile south of the village. Here, the high bank was set about ten yards back from the river, providing a little glade of trees, reached by a path along the bank, at the water’s edge. And from the bank, about twenty feet up, burst a little spring of bright, clear water, wonderfully cold even in mid-summer. The spring water divided into three little falls, dancing down the mossy bank, over grey rocks, and running away in tiny pools amongst the ferns.
‘One waterfall is for love, one for health, one for riches,’ the steward’s wife told Yanka.
‘Which is which?’
‘No one knows,’ came the wonderfully Russian reply, and they turned back to the village.
As they parted, the older woman gave her one piece of advice, which reminded her of the house-building she had witnessed. ‘This year’s unusual, a very long summer. Don’t expect it again though. The summers are short here, so you work very hard while they last – harder than they do in the south.’
‘And after that?’
The other woman shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
The other change in Yanka’s life was that she was becoming a woman.
She had known it, physically, for some time; but the journey upriver had made her conscious of new stirrings and vague desires which on some days filled her with a new confidence, and on others made her blush unaccountably, uncertain about herself. She had a wonderful pale complexion with a delicate rose colour in her cheeks, and long, yellow-brown hair of which she was rather proud.
Yet some days her skin became oily and pimples appeared; or her cheeks felt blotchy; or her hair seemed sticky and hideous to her. Then her downward-turning mouth would contract into a tight line, she would frown and stay indoors as much as she could.
She was more pleased with her body. It had filled out that summer, and though she was slim, there was a warm, gentle curve around her hips that she supposed some man, some day, would find delicious.
For the time being, as winter approached, she took pride in making a home for her father.
While he was out working with the village men, or b
uilding a cart for them, she busily wove cloth, built up their food stocks, smoked fish, and put all her skills to good use so that he would come in in the evening and smile: ‘What a fine nest you are building, my little bird.’
He seemed in better spirits. The hard work and the new life had challenged him. There was a new hardness and strength about him that filled her with pleasure. And as he came in, his face glowing darkly in the dying sunlight before dusk, she would turn and think to herself: There is my father, the man I can be proud of.
Nor did she take an interest in any other man in the village.
There were reasons for this; they dated from the first day when the steward had shown them round.
For it had been only halfway through that afternoon when her father had burst in through the door, leant against the warm stove and cried: ‘Have you seen their fields?’ And before she could answer, ‘Slash and burn. It’s all slash and burn. Mordvinians! Pagans! They haven’t even got a decent plough!’
‘No plough?’
He gave a disgusted snort for reply. ‘You hardly need one for this land. Come, I’ll show you.’
The problem that her father had discovered was one of the major disadvantages that were to plague the state of Russia for the rest of its history.
For the land in the north is very poor.
There are, on the great plain of Russia, two kinds of soil: leached soils and unleached. In leached ground, the water in the soil does not evaporate fast enough and washes the rich salts down, leaving a poor, acidic topsoil of little agricultural value. These leached earths are called in Russian podzols – literally ‘ash-soil’.
Unleached soils occur where evaporation is good. The rich salts remain in the soil, which is usually neutral to alkaline. Here, agriculture is good. The richest of all the unleached soils is the deep black earth, the chernozem, of the south.
Between these two soil types, however, lies a third – a sort of compromise. This is the grey earth – technically a leached podzol-which is moderately good for agriculture.
Roughly speaking, the good black soil lies in the south, on the steppe; the grey in the centre of Russia, in the lands from Kiev up to the River Oka. But in the great loop of the Russian R, and thence northwards until one reaches the peaty, waterlogged soil of the tundra, the ground is poor podzol, and yields upon it are low. This soil, together with the cold weather, is the reason why the agriculture of northern Russia is very poor.
And upon this earth, one did not need the heavy iron ploughs that had already been used for centuries in the thick, rich black earth in the south. The peasants in the north used the soka – a light, wooden plough with a modest steel tip that only scratched the surface of the thin, infertile land.
It was this feeble little plough, and this half-barren soil, that had disgusted Yanka’s father. But even more to be despised was the method the peasants were using to organize their holdings.
For instead of having two, or sometimes three, big fields upon which crops would be rotated, the villagers were using the ancient slash-and-burn technique: cutting down a piece of woodland, burning the debris, and then working the resulting carbonized field for a few years before moving on to another and leaving their last to become wilderness again. It was a form of ancient subsistence agriculture.
‘Pagans,’ her father repeated in disgust. But there was little, as a single newcomer, that he could do about it.
And it was this primitive aspect of the place that confirmed Yanka’s opinion of the villagers, and her lack of interest in them.
The steward, servant of the boyar, was technically a slave. The Viatichi families, besides being uncouth, were the poorest kind of peasants – sharecroppers – who instead of a fixed rent paid the boyar a third of their crop. The Mordvinians were hired labourers, who worked a part of the estate some way from the village which the boyar had decided to retain in his own hands; and the other Slav families from the south had already adopted the primitive ways of the north-east, it seemed to her, and were contentedly using the slash-and-burn techniques on their modest holdings.
There were, as it happened, no unmarried young men amongst these Slavs in any case. The nearest to her in age was an eleven-year-old boy. As for the three Mordvinian and two Viatichi youths, although they all seemed kindly, she did not care for them.
This place is primitive, she decided. Whoever I find to marry, he certainly won’t come from here.
It was three days later that her father had made a discovery that infuriated him even more.
‘There is good land here after all,’ he told her in frustration that evening. ‘Yes: chernozem. But they won’t let me work it.’
‘Where?’
‘Over towards the village they call Dirty Place. Can you believe it? I went over there today with those damned Mordvinians.’
For nature – the retreating glaciers from the last ice age, to be exact – had here and there deposited in the region of the sandy podzols, small stretches of good grey soil. There was a large area of this so-called chernozem above Vladimir, stretching towards Suzdal. And another, much smaller deposit had been made near Russka.
‘The boyar’s keeping back that land. He’s leaving us only the poor soil.’
As it happened, this stretch of chernozem was divided into three parts. One part, somewhat to the north, was a private estate that belonged to the Grand Duke himself. The village there had been destroyed by a plague some years ago, but in time, no doubt, the Grand Duke would use it again. The part to the east was Black Land – nominally the Prince of Murom’s – but let to the free peasants.
And the nearest, smaller part, belonged to Milei the boyar.
When the boyar had encountered Yanka and her father he had said nothing of this. A single man and a girl were hardly such desirable tenants for the best land. Let’s keep them in reserve and see what turns up, he reasonably judged.
Meanwhile, he had decided to work a part of the good land for himself with some slaves he had been able to find.
‘Perhaps we could work some chernozem,’ Yanka suggested.
‘No. I already asked the steward. He only wants hired labourers like the Mordvinians. I’ll not sink to that.’
She put her arms round her father and kissed him, aware of the faint smell of sweat from his shirt and the deep lines around his neck. She hated to see him frustrated like this. ‘We can leave,’ she suggested. ‘We have money.’
The money they had brought was safely hidden under the floor.
‘Maybe. Not this year though.’
‘No,’ she agreed, ‘not this year.’ Winter was too close.
Yet despite the unsatisfactory life of the village, she felt a certain sense of peace in these new surroundings. ‘At least,’ she remarked to her father one rainy day, as she stretched lazily, ‘it may be boring, but we are a long way from the Tatars.’
The warm weather, surprisingly, continued until mid-October. Yanka became used to the quiet rhythm of the village. She went out with the villagers to collect nuts in the forest; and when the men killed an elk one day she helped the women prepare a splendid feast.
He moved along the track, letting the water pouring down from the trees settle on his fur collar or run freely down the creased back of his neck. Below him, at the bottom of the little cliff, the lucky spring burst from the bank and seeped through the ferns into the river. He did not pause except to glance across the river below. Twice he cursed out loud.
Damn the girl!
Her fresh young body – what did it smell of? Roses? The wild carnations in the woods? Nuts. Roasted nuts. Could it really smell of roasted nuts?
Damn her, doesn’t she see me? he almost said aloud. Perhaps she doesn’t know, he considered, but at once dismissed the thought. Oh, yes. She knows. They know everything, women.
So what did it mean? What did she mean by it? What did she suppose he felt in that room, alone with her, with the rain pouring off the eaves all around like a waterfall? What did she mean, arching
those young breasts when she knew he was watching, and turning towards him – her whole, young body – and telling him in that soft voice that she was bored?
Is she teasing me? Does she despise me?
Pretending not to understand. That was her defence. And her weapon. She was good – oh, yes, she had been good to him. And she loved him. At least, she had once. It was as if she was his, yet not his; as if she understood everything, was ready to open herself to him, yet turned away whenever she sensed he might approach.
She was his daughter, of course.
Was that it? Of course that was reason enough, in theory. Forbidden. They both knew that.
But surely after all they had been through … They had a special bond, didn’t they? Was there not in her calm eyes that seemed to stare at the world with a kind of sad understanding – was there not a perfect understanding of how they were, he and she?
The way her mouth turned down, he thought – a little sad, a little cynical, and also, yes, sensuous: very sensuous when awakened. Those lips, those sad, obstinate lips with their hint of a pout – the pout that never developed because her strong mouth kept everything under control – were they going to refuse to part and open for him? Were they going to smile, and then open for another? The thought had become a torture to him.
He was her father. He stamped furiously down the path. He had heard of other fathers …
Besides, there was no one else for either of them. No one else in this God-forsaken place.
‘I’ll be a father to her. I’ll discipline her if she wants to play games with me,’ he muttered.
He had been so immersed in his thoughts that he had not noticed where he was going, nor realized how far from the village he had gone, until suddenly he looked up and saw a strange sight.
It was a bear. He stopped in his tracks. It was quite large. It was also very old. It was moving with great difficulty across the path ten yards in front of him. The bear saw him, but seemed uninterested. It was moving very stiffly.
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