Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [55]
But the loss of Boris was a wound that could heal.
Not so the loss of Ivanushka.
Where was he? A month after he had left for Constantinople, they had heard from Zhydovyn the Khazar that he had been seen at Russka. But where had he gone after that? Word came from the Russian merchants in Constantinople: he had never arrived there. A year of silence followed; then a rumour that he had been seen in Kiev; vague reports came also from Smolensk, Chernigov, even distant Novgorod. He had been seen gambling; he had been seen drinking; he had been seen begging. There were few reports, however, and none of them very reliable.
And from Ivanushka, for three years, came not a word to his parents to let them know if he was alive or dead.
‘He is searching for something,’ his mother said, after the sighting in Kiev had been reported.
‘He is ashamed,’ Igor concluded sadly.
‘Yet even so,’ Sviatopolk remarked, ‘he cannot love any of us, to behave like this.’
And as the third year passed, and no word came, even his mother began to believe Ivanushka did not love her.
The jetty was crowded. Above, a long path of dry earth made an untidy diagonal gash across the tall ramparts of Pereiaslav. In the faint sun, the ramparts, where they were not dirty brown, had a pale green covering of tired autumnal grass. The summer had passed. There was an air of lassitude about the place. The broad river, too, looked brown and dreary, stretching away like a monotonous echo under an iron sky. At the end of the jetty, a stout boat was about to cast off – an event which would have attracted no special attention but for a little incident concerning a young man.
He was a strange figure. His whole person appeared to be filthy. The brown cloak wrapped round him and the peasant’s bast shoes he wore had almost disintegrated.
He was sitting with an air of sullen helplessness on a small barrel by the end of the jetty, while the master of a stout boat was yelling at him.
‘Well, are you coming or not?’
It seemed he nodded.
‘Devil take it! Then get in, man!’
Again the young fellow assented. But he did not move.
‘I’m casting off, you fool,’ the master shouted in an access of fury. ‘Do you want to see Tzargrad or rot in Pereiaslav?’
When there was still no movement: ‘You promised me the fare. I could have had another passenger. Give me my money!’
For a second, it really seemed the passenger would rise; but he did not. With a curse the older man gave the order, and the stout boat with its single mast and bank of oarsmen pulled out into the broad, sluggish river and headed south.
And still Ivanushka did not move.
How long he had wandered. In the first year, several times, he had started to go south. At least, he had found merchants who were prepared to take him, and got as far as inspecting their boats. But each time, some invisible force had pulled him back. Just as surface tension holds a light object one pulls from the water, so a subterranean force seemed to make it impossible for Ivanushka to break free from his native soil and set out upon the great river that would carry him towards the religious life. It was almost, sometimes, like a physical force, a huge weight of inertia dragging at his back.
As his money had been eaten into, he had started to gamble.
If I win, he reasoned, it means that God wants me to go to the monastery. But if I lose all my journey money, then obviously He doesn’t. It seemed a good argument, and he did not have to gamble long before he lost.
It was not that Ivanushka consciously turned away from God, but rather that he hoped, by these devious means, to slide towards Him comfortably. As time went on, however, he had sunk into lethargy, punctuated by increasingly frequent bouts of drinking. He wandered from city to city, unable to go south or to return home. In the second