The next day, their companions were on their way. ‘God knows what they’ll do up by the Volga,’ her father growled. ‘We’re safer in the village.’ Then he turned away.
Russka.
This northern Russka was a very different place from the village in the south that she had left.
Its only similarity was that, like most Russian villages, it lay beside a river: that was all.
At the site chosen for the settlement, the river made a large, S-shaped curve. The western bank here was about fifty feet higher than the eastern, so that the curve formed a promontory on the west side, and left a large, sheltered space on the eastern bank just below it. This sheltered area had been made into a meadow.
There had once been a settlement in this meadow; but over time it had been moved for greater safety to the promontory where there now stood a dozen wooden huts with a strengthened fence around them. On the western side the land stretched away, almost flat. A few vegetable plots had been scraped bare near the fence, and two poor fields could be seen through a thin screen of trees.
There was no church.
The northern Russka.
The nearest village lay three miles away, to the south-east. This, too, was on the little River Rus. Just behind this village lay a low, wooded ridge. But below the ridge, down by the river, the land was marshy, and so when the Slav settlers had first come upon it they had called it Dirty Place – which remained its name thereafter. Past Dirty Place it was another seven miles to any village.
At first sight, it seemed to Yanka that the forest was all fir. But a walk around showed her that this was not the case. There were, in fact, a huge variety of trees: larch and birch, lime, oak, pine, and many others. Back along the Oka, around Riazan, she had even seen orchards of apple and even cherry trees. But she did not notice any here. The vegetable patches were not very impressive either. They grew peas and cucumbers mainly, as far as she could discover. And she observed something else: their horses were all tiny.
The houses were made of wood – huge, solid logs from base to roof: there were none of the clay walls and thatched roofs she had known in the south.
But, above all, the people were different. ‘They are so quiet,’ she whispered to her father, the first morning as they walked around the place. ‘You’d think they were frozen.’
There was a mix of people in the village. Before the boyar’s family acquired it, the inhabitants had been mostly Slavs of the Viatichi tribe. ‘Pagan animals’ she had always heard these Viatichi called, for they were amongst the most backward of the Slav tribes. There were six Viatichi families now. As well as these, there were three families who had moved up from the south a generation ago, and finally the three families of Mordvinians, with their high Finnish cheekbones and almond eyes, brought in by the boyar.
Different as these all were, to Yanka they seemed all the same in this one, crucial respect. For whereas the Slav villagers she knew in the south were expansive, argumentative, and full of droll humour, these people of the north were quiet, undemonstrative and seemed to be slow. In the south, one sat in the sun and talked. Here, people went quietly into the warmth of their huts.
They were not unfriendly though. On the steward’s orders, half a dozen of the men appeared with axes by midday. ‘We’ll build you a hut,’ they announced, and showed them a site at the southern end of the hamlet.
Then they set to work.
And Yanka’s opinion of them changed.
She had never seen anything like it. Huge logs appeared, seemingly from nowhere. The sturdy little horses she had seen were dragging in tree trunks you could almost have hollowed into boats. Great timbers of oak were used for the foundation, then softer, easily worked pine.
The plan of the hut was much the same as in the south: a central entrance corridor with a large space for keeping one’s equipment and stores on one side of it, and a room on the other. A good part of the wall between corridor and room was taken up with the stove, which they built of clay.
They worked entirely with their axes – stout, broad-bladed implements with rather short, straight handles, the blade extended towards the butt – and whether Finn or Slav, they seemed equally skilled. Each log was neatly jointed and slotted into its neighbour so that, although the lines between the logs were filled with moss, they were so tight it was scarcely necessary.
And there was not a single nail in the whole house.
It was not only the neatness of their work that amazed Yanka, but the speed of it. She was used to the busy people of the south, but there was something in these northerners’ quiet, ferocious pace that was heroic. They worked into the dusk. The women brought torches and lit fires so they could see better. By the time they stopped that night, the whole house except for the stove and the roof was completed.
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.