Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [95]
The steward and his wife gave them shelter that night. By noon the next day, their hut was complete.
‘There,’ the men said. ‘This is your place. It will keep you warm, and will last for thirty-three years.’
This was the northern hut – the Russian izba. Its huge stove and tightly sealed walls would keep its occupants baking hot through the coldest winter as its very name implied: for ‘izba’ meant ‘hot room’.
After they had thanked their new neighbours, the steward led them out to show them the plot of land he had chosen for them.
As they walked, they chatted, and Yanka told the steward how impressed she had been by the men’s work. ‘With men like this,’ she gazed about her, envisioning cities in the forest, ‘there is nothing we Russians cannot do.’
The steward was a small man with a shrewd face. He laughed. ‘This is the north,’ he told her. ‘Up here we can do anything – for a short space of time.’ And seeing her puzzled look, he smiled. Then he gestured to the forest all around.
‘You’re in the north now,’ he explained. ‘And up here it’s like this: we do our best, of course, but whatever we do, the forest reminds us that the land, the winter, and God Himself will always be stronger than we can be. Too much effort is in vain. So then we don’t work so hard, except when there’s something definite to do in a hurry.’ She laughed, thinking this a joke, but he only replied: ‘You’ll see.’
The estate, he explained to them, was of medium size – about four hundred desiatin, or a thousand acres. Only part of it was worked at present. It lay on both sides of the river.
Many landlords preferred to give these remote estates over entirely to peasants and collect a modest rent, usually paid in kind. It was not like the old days in the south, he told them, where landlords ran their own estates and shipped the surplus to markets. ‘You’ll find things simpler up here,’ he continued.
But the boyar Milei had the resources to buy slaves and hire labourers. ‘He’s planning to bring more people in and build this place up,’ the steward said, ‘and work some of the estate himself. So although it’s small as yet, you’ll see changes here soon.’
One thing troubled Yanka.
‘We are Christians,’ she told him. ‘Are all the people here pagan?’
She had noticed some strange, hump-backed graves outside the fence that did not look Christian to her.
‘The Slavs from the south are Christian,’ he replied. ‘The Mordvinians,’ he laughed, ‘they’re Mordvinians. As for the Viatichi, they’re Slav, but pagan too. Those were their grave mounds you saw by the fence.’
‘Will there ever be a church?’
‘The boyar plans to build one.’
‘Soon?’
‘Maybe.’
After this she returned to the hut, while her father and the steward went to see the land he was to be given.
The land that he was allotted was the standard peasant plot of thirty chets – about thirty-six acres. But it was poor woodland, west of the village, that would need to be cleared. For this, however, he would only have to pay a small rent, with none payable in the first year. The steward would advance him a small sum, in return for which he was to do some light work for the boyar. And so began his career in his new home.
For Yanka, this was a time of discovery. The summer drifted on far into autumn that year, into the time of Indian summer which the Russians call ‘Granny Summer’.
She walked all round the area, sometimes alone and sometimes with the steward’s wife. The steward’s wife was a small, rather cold woman, but she wanted to make sure this new girl was useful to the estate, and so she showed her round thoroughly.
The woods were richer than Yanka had imagined. The older woman showed her where to find herbs – St John’s wort, betony, ribwort – and where there were medicinal ferns. They walked through a little pine wood to the south, above the river, and there on the mossy ground grew bushes of bilberry and cranberry. Here and there, as they walked, the steward’s wife would point to a particular tree and say: ‘There’s a squirrel’s nest up there,