Russka: The Novel of Russia

  The tall, dark-bearded priest, in his late thirties, was showing the first streak of grey hair in his beard which if anything, in her eyes, added to his attractiveness. She admired him: indeed, he was to be admired, for he was a fine man. And they experienced the passion of those who have first come to terms with suffering, which is more measured and therefore potentially more powerful than the instantaneous passion of the young.

  He would read the service to her. She would pray. At other times they would talk, though never of personal matters.

  And this, had it been possible, would have been the courtship of two serious people, amidst the gathering storm of events which their own decency prevented them from fully anticipating.

  What extraordinary good fortune it was, Daniel thought, that God had given him the gift of observing two things at once.

  Had it not been so, he might have missed one or other of the highly significant though small events that took place in the market place on an early October afternoon that year.

  The first concerned the English merchant, Wilson, who had arrived the evening before with Boris. After spending time with Lev the merchant, the two men had ridden off to Dirty Place, and the monk had not seen either of them again until he had chanced, when he was taking the little ferry across the river to the monastery, to see the Englishman coming along the path deep in conversation with Stephen.

  He had waited, and then taken the ferry back again, so that he could follow them. What might they be up to?

  In fact, they had met by chance – Wilson returning ahead of Boris to Russka, and Stephen going for a walk. The priest, curious to meet an Englishman, had plied him with questions and Wilson, who was a good judge of character, soon decided that this literate fellow was safe to talk to and told him what he wanted to hear.

  It was not long before the subject turned to religion. Here Wilson was cautious, but the priest reassured him.

  ‘I know about you Protestants. There are people like the Trans Volga Elders who are a little like you in Russia. Our own Church needs reform too, though it’s unwise to say so at present.’

  And it was after quite a long talk on the subject that Wilson had finally shown the priest one of his printed pamphlets.

  Stephen was delighted.

  ‘Tell me what it says,’ he begged. And so, to the delight of the normally solemn priest, Wilson translated it as best he could.

  The little tract was vituperative. It called the Catholic monks vipers, leeches, robbers. It said their monasteries were rich and vain, their ceremonies idolatrous, and much else besides.

  ‘It’s against the Catholics, of course,’ Wilson assured him, but the priest only laughed.

  ‘It applies to us, too,’ he said, and he made Wilson go over the sheet with him once again, memorizing it.

  Before they reached the town, Wilson had wisely secreted it under his cloak again, but it was as they reached the far end of the market square, where the priest took his leave, that Wilson as a little gesture of friendship, put his hand into his cloak and slipped the piece of paper into Stephen’s hand.

  What does it matter? he thought. They couldn’t understand a word of it even if they could read.

  This was the gesture that Daniel saw.

  And it was at the same moment that he noticed, at the other side of the market place, another tiny movement.

  It was Karp, the son of that foolish fellow Mikhail the peasant who made it.

  He and his bear had just done a few tricks to amuse some merchants who had come down from Vladimir to buy icons. They had thrown a few small coins on the ground, and Karp had just scooped them up and handed them to his father who was standing nearby.

  That was all. Nothing more. The handing of the coins had taken place at the very same moment that the Englishman handed Stephen the piece of paper. Why should it have been significant?

  Because – and here, in all its glory, was the near genius of the observant monk – because he had noticed the expression on the faces of Mikhail and his son.

  He could not have put it into words. Was it a look of complicity? Perhaps, but more than that. It was something about the way Mikhail stood and looked about him: a sort of defiance. No, it was not just that. It was that the sturdy peasant had, just for an instant, taken on the character of his son. He had looked, thought Daniel, like a man who is free. Indefinable. Unmistakable.

  And in a flash he guessed. They were hoarding money.

  He stored both these pieces of information in his mind, and decided to learn more.

  In November 1567, just after he had set out northwards across the winter snows, Tsar Ivan abruptly cancelled his new campaign against the Baltic and hurried back to Moscow. Boris returned with the rest of the army.

  A new plot had been discovered. The conspirators were hoping to kill Ivan in the northern snows, with the connivance of the King of Poland. There was a list of names; and who knew how many more might be implicated in this business?

  In December the Oprichniki went to work. With axes under their cloaks and a list of names in their hands, they rode about the streets of Moscow making house calls. Some were exiled. Some impaled.

  At the end of the second week in December, a party of Oprichniki came to the house of the bald, stout nobleman Dimitri Ivanov. His son-in-law Boris was not one of them. They conducted him to a chamber in the armoury in the Kremlin. There they had prepared a huge iron pan, underneath which was a fire. In this they fried him.

  His death was recorded briefly in a secret list prepared for the Tsar. In common with over three thousand others who died in the coming months, the names upon this list, since known as the Synodical, were consigned to oblivion and it was forbidden to mention them.

  At the same time, all the monasteries in the land were instructed to send their chronicles to the Tsar for inspection. By this means, Ivan ensured that no records of events were kept for these terrible years.

  Daniel the monk was confident, even cheerful.

  Thank the Lord that a century and a half ago, the monks had made such a good job of writing the chronicle. There was little in it that could possibly embarrass the Tsar. Throughout, the references to the Tatars were offensive and the Moscow princes were treated as heroes in the struggle against them.

  Five years ago, to celebrate Ivan’s victories over the Moslem Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, the monastery had added crescent moons under the crosses above the church domes in the monastery itself and in Russka, as symbols of the triumph of Christian armies over Islam.

  Our loyalty cannot be questioned, he thought contentedly.

  The new purge in Moscow had had a satisfactory side-effect for him. The old abbot had been so distressed by the whole business that he had been scarcely capable of conducting ordinary business, and the question of the Russka administration seemed entirely to have slipped his mind.

  Besides, Daniel was more confident than before that he could defend his position there.

  Once again therefore, in early spring, his mind turned to the old question: how could he enlarge the monastery’s estates?

  Boris’s land, now that he was one of the Oprichniki, was of course out of the question. That left one other piece of land, a little to the north, that now belonged to the Tsar himself. Might Ivan be persuaded?

  It was not a foolish idea. Despite his restrictions on the Church acquiring new land, Ivan himself had remained a generous donor.

  ‘He strikes down his enemies; then he gives the Church some more land, to save his soul,’ one of the monks had cynically remarked.

  Might this latest purge in fact be a good time to approach him?

  It was with this in mind that Daniel the monk went to the brother who had been keeping the chronicle, and set to work.

  The document which they produced, and which, in the month of February, they persuaded the nervous abbot to sign, was a splendid concoction. It reminded the Tsar of the many privileges granted to the Church in the past, even under the Tatars. That some of these
were Church forgeries Daniel himself did not know. It pointed out the loyalty of the monastery and the purity of its chronicles. And it begged for much-needed land. Written in the high ecclesiastical style it was long, bombastic, and somewhat ungrammatical.

  If it succeeds, Daniel thought, my position in the monastery will be unassailable.

  Before sending it, the abbot rather doubtfully showed it to Stephen who read it, smiled, and said nothing.

  On the morning of March 22 1568, in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, a terrifying event took place.

  The Metropolitan Filip, while celebrating the Eucharist, suddenly turned and, in the presence of a large congregation of boyars and Oprichniki, publicly rebuked the Tsar for his murder of innocents in the latest purge.

  Ivan, in a fury, struck his iron-tipped staff upon the rostrum, but Metropolitan Filip stood his ground.

  ‘They are martyrs,’ he announced.

  It was an act of huge moral courage. The boyars trembled.

  ‘Soon,’ Ivan responded, ‘you will come to know me better.’

  Within days, the Metropolitan took refuge in a monastery and Ivan began to execute members of the brave churchman’s staff.

  And it was unfortunate for Daniel that it should have been on the very day following this event that a clerk brought to the Tsar the Russka monastery’s request for land.

  Tsar Ivan’s response was immediate, and frightening; and when Daniel saw it, neither he, nor the terrified abbot, were sure what they should do.

  St George’s Day had come.

  Mikhail the peasant, his wife, his son Karp, Misha the bear, and the peasant’s two other children were ready.

  The work of the year was done. The harvest was long in. Indeed, there had been little enough to do since, as if in punishment for the terrible deeds of its ruler, God had sent Russia that year a dismal crop.

  Over the brown and grey landscape a chill wind was bringing with it light flurries of snowdust that were speckling the wet, now hardening ground. The stout wooden huts of Dirty Place smelled dank; bare trees, bare fields having shed their last covering, waited gauntly for the snow to submerge them. St George’s Day, harbinger of the bleak winter to come.

  Mikhail and his family were ready to go. The exit money was all there in the peasant’s hand. Unlike many other peasants in the area, he had no debts, having discreetly cleared them the month before. He had a good horse and journey money besides. He was a free man. Today, he could leave.

  The peasants’ plan was ambitious, but quite simple. They would go across country, through the woods, to Murom. There they would stay until, probably in the spring, they could take a boat up the Oka to Nizhni Novgorod. From there they would find a boat that was travelling out to the east on the mighty Volga to the new lands where settlers lived free.

  It would be hard. He was not sure how they would find money to survive the whole journey; but they could find a way. Misha the bear would help them by earning a few kopeks here and there.

  Yet, though the family was all packed up and ready to leave, they had not departed. For a week now, they had sat in the little hut and waited. Each day, either Mikhail or Karp would go into Russka, and each day would glumly return.

  It was Karp’s turn that day. He came sadly along the path.

  ‘Well?’

  Karp shook his head.

  ‘Nothing. No sign.’ He suddenly kicked the door violently, but though it made him jump, Mikhail did not reprove him. ‘Cursed swindlers!’ the young man cried.

  ‘Perhaps another day,’ his mother said, without conviction.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mikhail said.

  But he knew it was hopeless. He had been cheated.

  The rules of departure from Boris’s estate were simple. The peasant must be free of debt and, a week on either side of St George’s Day, he might inform his lord that he wished to leave and pay his exit fees. That was all.

  But there was one small catch. The lord, or his steward, must be there to receive the request to depart, and the necessary moneys.

  A few days before the allotted time, Boris and his wife had abruptly departed for Moscow, and the house in Russka had been shut up. Mikhail had at once gone into Russka to seek out the steward, and had returned pale with shock.

  For the old fellow and his wife had mysteriously disappeared too.

  They had never left the town before; no one knew they were going, nor where they might be. Their house was empty.

  Even then he had scarcely been able to believe it. He had heard stories of such trickery, to be sure, but here in Russka, beside a monastery, could such things be?

  They could. As the days passed, there was no sign of the steward.

  ‘But don’t think they’ve all left the area,’ Karp said furiously. ‘That steward’s about somewhere, he’s hiding nearby. And if we try to leave without paying our dues, he’ll appear out of nowhere with half a dozen men. You see if he doesn’t. He’s waiting to follow us and arrest us as runaways. Then he and our cursed landlord will take more from us than ever. I’ll bet you we’re being watched right now.’

  He was exactly correct. The only thing that neither Mikhail nor Karp guessed was that it was their cousin Daniel the monk who was behind it all.

  For Daniel, the whole thing had been a simple matter.

  After the Tsar’s terrifying message, it was clear that the monastery, and he in particular, would need friends wherever they could find them. The obvious first choice was the Tsar’s servitor Boris.

  It had not taken the cunning monk long to discover that Mikhail was quietly paying off his debts. Early that morning he had sought out Boris himself and discreetly warned him that his best peasant was planning to leave. He had also reminded him of how he could prevent him.

  Boris had been duly grateful.

  ‘I am always your lord’s friend,’ Daniel had said, and though Boris was not deceived by that, he nonetheless concluded that the heavily bearded monk might be useful to him.

  ‘Very well,’ he had remarked. ‘Keep me informed of anything else I should know.’

  So St George’s Day passed. And the next day. And the next.

  On the seventh day after, when he woke up a little after dawn, Mikhail was shocked, but not altogether surprised, to find that Karp and the horse had gone. On the table lay a little pile of money.

  Three days later a man from a village five miles down the river arrived at the door with a message.

  ‘Karp passed through our village the other morning. He has gone. He said he left money for the horse. He’s sorry it wasn’t more.’

  Mikhail nodded.

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Yes. Into the wild field.’

  Mikhail sighed. It was what he had suspected. Perhaps it was where, after all, his son belonged.

  The wild field: the open steppe: the land where, in recent decades, other wayward young fellows like Karp had gone to join those bands of half-brigands, half-warriors who had nowadays taken to calling themselves Cossacks.

  Yes, he belonged in the wild field. They would never see him again.

  ‘He said please to look after the bear,’ the fellow concluded.

  It was later that day that another, chilling piece of news reached Russka.

  Tsar Ivan’s men had carried off the Metropolitan.

  Elena kept her faith. She could still have a son.

  It was Stephen who encouraged her. Though she had never spoken a word to him about Boris, the priest thought he could guess what their life must be like. He felt sorrier than ever for her, the more he knew her; yet he always advised her correctly as a priest. ‘It is not by seeking for personal happiness that we are rewarded by God,’ he reminded her. ‘It is by denying ourselves. The meek shall inherit the earth, as Our Lord told us. Therefore we must forgive; we must suffer; and above all, we must have faith.’

  Elena had faith. She had faith that, after all, God would give her a son; she had faith that, one day, her husband would
turn from his path. For a time, after her father’s disappearance, she had had faith that he, too, might be saved. But Boris, who had investigated the matter, informed her that he had been executed. He did not say how. It seemed to Elena that this event had shocked her husband.

  Perhaps this, she hoped, would turn him back towards the paths of righteousness. So at least she prayed, though as yet in vain.

  How to have a son? There was a remedy the village women used, that the priest’s wife had once told her about. It consisted of rubbing the body, and especially her intimate parts, with oil and honey.

  ‘They say it never fails,’ her friend had assured her.

  And so now, while the man she truly loved gave her spiritual comfort, she prepared herself, as best she could, as a sacrifice for the husband whose darkening soul it was her duty to save.

  The spring of 1569 brought cold weather and the promise of another poor harvest. From the Baltic came news that the enemy had snatched a fortress town. Everyone seemed depressed.

  It was in early June that Daniel the monk had another talk with Boris.

  By now the monk was worried. Things at Russka were looking bad. Not that he was entirely to blame. The events of recent years – the ever higher taxes for the northern war, the disruption of the Oprichnina and the land confiscations – had hurt the Russian economy. That, with the failed harvest, was causing a grim recession. The revenues from Russka were sharply down, and the old abbot seemed to be at a loss, complaining to him one day about the shortfall, yet the next suggesting: ‘Perhaps we are too harsh with our people in these difficult times.’

  He had several times seen the old man looking appealingly at Stephen after these conversations. Something had to be done.

  And then there had been the business with the Tsar the previous spring. That had not helped Daniel’s reputation either.

  For instead of agreeing to or refusing their request for land, Ivan had sent a strange but insulting message. It was an oxhide: no more, no less. The messenger who brought it, a young black-shirt, obviously following the Tsar’s instructions to the letter, threw this object derisively at the old abbot’s feet, in front of all the monks, and cried out: ‘The Tsar says to you: “Lay this hide upon the ground and the land within it he will give you.”’