Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [101]
Moments later, after a sudden spasm of pain, she heard him moan: ‘Ah, my little bird, you knew. You always knew.’
Did she know? Did a little voice within her tell her that she had known this was to be, that she shared some complicity with him?
She wanted to cry, yet oddly, at this instant, she could not.
She could not even hate him. She had to love him.
He was all she had.
The next morning she went out early in the snow.
It was going to be a bright day. The sky was pale blue. Pulling snow shoes on over her thick felt boots she trudged towards the high river bank.
The sun was gleaming on the edge of the bank. Below, the forest was bathed in golden light as the sun rose.
A ragged figure was coming towards her. It was one of the Viatichi men. He was leaning far forward, dragging a pile of logs on a little sled behind him. His dark eyes stared at her, piercing, from under his heavy grey eyebrows. He knows, she thought. It seemed impossible to her that everyone in the hamlet did not know what she had done the night before.
The bearded figure went silently past her, without a word, like a sullen, elderly monk.
There was the lightest breath of wind, but it was very cold. Her heavy coat kept her warm; yet she was unusually conscious of her own body inside it, a body which felt naked and bruised.
She turned.
A few yards in front of her there was a silver birch tree. Its branches were bare, wintry; but the eastern morning sun was making its silvery bark shine. The black ribs on its bark reminded her of the rich black earth in the south. You look as if you were made of snow and ice, she thought, yet inside you are still warm.
The birch was a hardy tree. It would grow anywhere, in any conditions, supplanting trees that had been burned or cut down. I will be like that, too, she vowed. I shall survive.
Slowly she trudged back to the izba. An old woman peered at her from a doorway.
‘Perhaps she knows; perhaps not.’ Though she did not realize it, Yanka had said these words out loud.
She decided that, if her secret was guessed, she did not care.
She went inside.
Her father was there. He was sitting on a bench eating kasha. He glanced up at her, but neither of them spoke.
It happened again, a few days later; then again, the next day.
She was puzzled herself by her own attitude.
On the first of these two occasions she had tried to resist him. It was the first time in her life that she had realized, actually physically felt, how much stronger he was than she. He had not hurt her; there had been no need. He had simply taken her arms and she had found that she was completely unable to move them. Unless she chose to kick, or try to bite him, she was easily in his power. And even if she had: what then? A physical fight she would lose? The break up of the only home she had?
In silence she had braced herself against him, trying to ward him off, then given up the futile struggle.
And as he had possessed her she had thought, grimly, of the birch tree in the winter snow, surviving, always surviving.
Her confusion, in the weeks that followed, was natural. For he was never brutal. Despite herself, she could not help the fact that her body responded to his lovemaking.
He no longer called her ‘little wife’. That would have seemed, now, a too blatant reference to their secret. Nor did he put his arm round her in public, as he had used to do.
Yet she came to see him, now, as a woman sees her husband.
Still she loved him. She became aware in a different way of the rhythm of his body. When he sat at the table and the back of his neck seemed taut, or his hands slightly clenched, she felt sorry for him, as she had done when she was a child; but now, instead of thinking he needed comfort, she knew that these were simply physical symptoms to which there were equally simple remedies.
Sometimes – even if with a secret inner sigh, because she knew what must follow – she would walk over to him when he sat like this and, instead of throwing her arms round him as she would once have done, she would knead the back of his neck and his