Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [236]
‘Where did she go?’ the little girl would ask.
‘How should I know? To the steppe. Or across the Volga.’
‘And is she there now?’
‘Perhaps. If the wolves didn’t get her.’
‘Will she come back?’ Arina had sometimes asked hopefully.
In fact, Elena felt sure Maryushka was dead. What hope of survival had a lone woman walking off into the unknown? At best she had been captured and taken as a serf by a landlord somewhere. ‘No. She won’t come back,’ she would say bitterly. ‘What for?’
Yet although she never dared to say so, the little girl had always believed that one day her mother would come. Sometimes, at harvest, when the women were out with their sickles in the field, she would watch their long, bobbing line and suppose to herself that just once, even if only for a moment, one of them would detach herself from the line and come towards her, smiling and saying: ‘See, my little dove, I have returned to see you after all.’
And at harvest’s end, she liked to go over to the big meadow that seemed to stretch to the horizon and stare at the squat haystacks that dotted the empty spaces. For some reason, then, she would become convinced that her mother was out there, concealed behind one of the haystacks, and she would run from one to another, peeping round them, half-expecting to find a strange yet familiar form, who would take her into her arms. But each time she played this solitary, foolish game with herself, she would find nothing in the empty silence of the endless meadow except the freshly cut stubble and the high, sweet-smelling stacks so that, by the time the shadows lengthened, it seemed to the little girl in her sharp imagination as if God Himself had hidden His face behind a cloud, and left her all alone.
By the time she was ten, however, the village people seemed to have forgotten about her parents; at least, no one bothered to talk about them. And her life at Russka had been quiet.
But now Stenka Razin was coming. And who knew what that might mean?
There had been similar risings before, and there would be others in the future, but no Russian rising has ever attained the same romance in Russian legend as that of Stenka Razin in 1670. Perhaps this was because it was the last real cry from the old, free Russia of the borderlands.
It had begun, far away, amongst the freedom-loving Cossacks of the Don. For by 1670 even their democratic way of life had broken down, and a new class of rich Cossacks had appeared, who cared little for their poorer brothers. It was these poor Cossacks and peasants who, around 1665, had first rallied to a daring leader known as Stenka Razin, who was operating in the southern lands between the Volga and the Don.
It might have been only some local raiding, scarcely heard of across the endless steppe, but something about the character of Razin made it more. The raids soon turned into a rising, then a full-scale rebellion. Promising free assemblies of the people in the old-style Cossack way, he swept up the Volga taking town after town. By the summer of 1670, the rebel army was huge, had taken over half of south-east Russia, and seemed about to strike across at Moscow and the Russian heartland itself.
And now, suddenly, the village remembered Arina’s father.
‘Arina’s father’s coming,’ the little children cried. And the older ones, with more cunning: ‘How much loot has Razin got, Arina? Is he going to make you rich?’
For three weeks the taunts went on, and the girl inwardly cringed.
Then, suddenly, it was over. In early autumn, the Tsar sent an army that smashed the rebels. The democratic hero fled back to the Don, where the rich Cossacks captured him and handed him over to the Tsar. The following June, he was executed in Red Square. So ended, to all intents, the old free ways of the Cossacks.
‘The Tsar’s killed Arina’s father,’ the children now cried with glee.
She tried to take no notice. Yet, long after they had forgotten to taunt her,