Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [198]
‘What do you mean – taking over?’ Andrei suddenly burst out. ‘This farm is ours.’
Stanislaus looked at him with mild interest.
‘No, it isn’t. It never was. You are just tenants.’
Andrei was so astonished that he even forgot to wait for his father to speak.
‘We pay nothing to anyone for our land,’ he burst out.
‘Correct. It was granted you for thirty years free of obligations, and now the time is up.’
Andrei looked at his father. Old Ostap for a moment appeared confused.
‘That was thirty years ago,’ he mumbled.
‘Exactly. And now the Vyshnevetskys have sold the estate to me. You owe me service.’
It was not an unusual situation. In order to attract settlers to the frontier lands, the Polish magnates of the past had often granted lands with exemptions for ten, twenty, or even thirty years. Men like Ostap took such lands and then, as the years passed, came to think of them as perpetually free: so much so that Ostap had entirely omitted to mention the original condition of his tenure to Andrei, even if he had remembered it himself.
‘I’ve been here thirty years,’ the old man now stated angrily, ‘and that means I own it.’ As far as he or many like him were concerned, this statement was correct.
‘Have you a charter that says so?’
‘No, damn you. My charter is this.’ And he held up his clenched fist as though wielding a sword.
Stanislaus watched him calmly.
‘You owe labour service for this land,’ he remarked.
‘Labour?’ Ostap now erupted.
‘Naturally,’ the Pole replied.
Andrei gasped. Labour! The Pole was suggesting that his father, a man of honour, should work for him in the fields like a common peasant, a serf.
‘I have worn the white coat, you Polish dog,’ the old Cossack fumed. ‘I am an officer. A registered Cossack. No man can make me work in the fields.’
Stanislaus shook his head.
‘You were on the register. But not now.’
Nothing was more vital to the Dniepr Cossacks than the register. Normally it contained about five thousand names of the Cossacks recognized as military servitors by the King of Poland. These were the free men treated, roughly speaking, as an officer class. Sometimes, after a Cossack rising, the register had been enlarged. But then it would be contracted again. Ostap had once, briefly, figured in the white coat of a registered officer, but had since lost his place.
And the problem was that, so far as the Polish King was concerned, any Cossack not on the register was a peasant – and therefore liable to labour like a serf.
This was just the life that Karp had gone south to escape. Not only was it degrading, it was outrageous.
‘Back in the reign of Stefan Batory, all Cossacks were made noblemen,’ Ostap had always told Andrei; and although that Polish King had in fact done no such thing, most Cossacks firmly believed that they were, if not quite noble, just as good as any noble.
So it was from the bottom of his heart that Ostap now cried out: ‘A Cossack is a gentleman, you Polish swine!’ He spat with disgust. ‘But what would a Pole know about nobility?’
Stanislaus looked at him with secret amusement. He understood the old man, but despised him.
What, he wondered, could old Ostap know of the life of a Polish noble, let alone the great magnates? What could this crude farmer know of the splendid palaces of Poland – those great European houses filled with French and Italian furniture, Renaissance paintings, Gobelin tapestries; a glittering world of ballrooms, libraries, huge salons, where Polish lords in rich brocades or hussar uniforms cultivated their minds as well as their manners and might converse in French or Latin as easily as Polish? Even the French remarked that the Polish lords seemed to live in paradise.
The Polish lords were proud. They were not the slaves of their ruler, as the Russians were of their Tsar. They chose their kings – and circumscribed their power in the great Sejm, the nobles’ parliament. Not for nothing was the great Polish state, of which the Ukraine was a part, called the Commonwealth.
But the Commonwealth was for the nobility. Like