“Can you offer no proof that you are really a friend?”
“None that I can think of.”
She stood up. “It’s a long road through the dark wood, Comrade.” She held out her hand. “We owe it to others to beware the beckoning of false lanterns.”
Chapter Eight
Yelenda Ovsenko had been at the plow all day. Or more accurately harnessed to the plow all day. With five other women she had “borrowed” an iron plow from the collective and in one long day from before dawn to just before dusk had turned over the earth in all six of their private allotments.
For most of the village women the achievement had been enough to call for a celebration. But Yelenda had other things on her mind. As yet she had said nothing of her troubles to her friends in the village, but word, she knew, would get round. It always did.
Yet before the gossiping began she wanted to talk to the Farm Chairman Pavel Rodontov. He was a good man and knew about these things.
Yelenda had lived all her life in the village of Morisa, 30 miles west of Moscow. In her youth, Moscow, though only an hour or two away by train, had been some unknown but glittering center of the world, and trains themselves on the few occasions she had seen one, had terrified her with their snorting smoke and great flashing central eye.
Now, of course, Moscow was a familiar city, the market she went to once a week to sell the produce of her private plot. But even so she remained in all ways a peasant. She retained a terror of lightning which she still somehow believed was a divine punishment, although she no longer believed in God. She considered it necessary to speak with caution to goatherds and tailors because they were invariably the source of malicious gossip. And she kept, sewn into the lining of her boot, a gold ruble from the Czar’s days, which was destined to pay for her funeral.
She had married late, after half a lifetime of looking after her aged mother. Her husband, finally retired from the army after twenty years’ service, had returned to his village in search of a wife. But in the Moscow oblast where all the young girls received internal passports at sixteen, there were no young women left. So he had married the forty-year-old Yelenda and had a son by her the next year. In the remaining twelve years of his life he had been a good father to Anton, teaching him about other peoples he had seen as a soldier, making him study and even securing a place for him in the school at Noginsk.
When he had died he left Yelenda a set of medals and a gold ruble. And a boy who was no longer a peasant’s son.
But Yelenda had loved her son. And he had loved her. Even when, as a University student, he would laugh at her superstitions he could still admire the crafty peasant intelligence of her market transactions.
She had dressed in her best winter coat to see the Farm Chairman and waiting now in the bare concrete room, she felt hot and anxious. Like all the other women workers on the Morisa Kolkhoz she was respectful of the Collective Chairman, Pavel Rodontov. Over many years she knew him to be just in his dealings with the peasants and for that reason perhaps there was less pilfering at Morisa than at any of the other collective farms in the region.
The door opened and Pavel Ivanovich invited her into his office. She admired the strong concrete walls and the metal window frames. It was all very fitting for a man of Pavel Ivanovich’s importance.
“Sit down, Yelenda,” Rodontov said.
She took a chair in front of his desk. It was the first time she had been into his office, but of course she had met him many times out in the fields.
“I am sorry to take up your valuable time, Comrade Chairman,” she muttered.
Rodontov seated himself behind the desk. “It’s about your son, Anton,” he said.
“You’ve heard about it already?” She was amazed that news could travel from Moscow that fast.
“The verdict of every trial is sent to the birthplace of the defendant,” Rodontov said. “Naturally, no one else will know about it, if that’s your wish. Was it that, that was troubling you?”
Hot in her winter coat, she hesitated. “Partly that, Comrade Chairman. But mostly I came to ask what can be done. Seven years in a camp, Comrade. He’ll be a grown man long before he is released.”
“Seven years is a severe sentence,” Rodontov agreed.
“And at the trial they told lies, Comrade.”
“Ah…”
“So can he not appeal to have the sentence removed?”
“Yelenda, he appealed within the seven days allowed under Soviet law. It was determined, also under Soviet law, that he had been justly convicted and sentenced.”
“Justly?”
“According to Soviet law, yes.”
“But in the court the prosecutor told lies.”
“You’re sure of that!”
“In his evidence, Anton said so. I was there.”
Rodontov rubbed the edge of his nose with a pencil. He knew this was going to be a difficult interview. “Yelenda,” he said patiently, “courts are not like normal life. Among friends, in the village, if an egg is bad you don’t try to sell it to your neighbor.”
“No, she’d beat me with a broom handle.”
“But Yelenda, in the market in Moscow, that would be different.”
“Perhaps,” she conceded.
“You see it’s not so much lies, Yelenda, as different sides of the truth.”
She frowned. “I have money, Comrade Chairman, I can tell you this in confidence. A gold ruble, from the old Czar’s days. Who do I give it to?”
“Give it to?”
“Someone at the court. A gold ruble’s always a gold ruble.”
“Yelenda,” Rodontov said carefully, “I’m sure this is difficult to understand. But not even Soviet lawmakers have always been as wise as Solomon.”
“Was Joseph Stalin not as wise as Solomon, Comrade Chairman?”
Rodontov paled. “I think,” he rose to conclude the interview, “we can safely say that he was not always as wise as Marx or Lenin.”
Yelenda left the office and walked back through the village. Electric lights shone brightly in the windows of the sturdy log houses. In every kitchen was a tap, turn it and water would flow into the bucket. These were things that Joseph Stalin had brought the village. And when the Germans came with the great tanks with the black crosses on them, it was Joseph Stalin who had driven them out.
Yelenda mounted the wooden steps of her izba and let herself in the door. She crossed to the three-legged table by the stove and, taking matches from her pocket, lit the brass ikon-lamp. The guttering flame rose beside the ikon, illuminating the fatherly smile on the face of Joseph Stalin, pasted over the figure of some long-forgotten saint.
“Seven years!” She was weeping. “It would never have happened in your day!”
Less than ten miles from Yelenda’s village high wooded bluffs looked down on a wide marshy expanse contained within a great bend of the river. Streams wound through the area, thin brown brackish trickles among the clumps of reed and marsh grass, or broad, shallow rivulets winding between clumps of alders.
The whole wide area had once been the preserve of reed cutters and here and there it was still possible to come across a wooden shack, collapsing now on its timber stilts, with a sunken mud-filled punt in the stream beside it.
But as men had abandoned the marsh, the snipe and waterfowl had taken it for their own. It was now one of the prime shooting areas within easy reach of Moscow.
Count Franz von Boden considered it a rare privilege to be asked to shoot over this land. On any autumn visit to Moscow he was sure of an invitation from Igor Bukansky, the editor of Novaya Literatura, and he eagerly took it up.
Not that today had been a good day for him. The snipe were plentiful. The peasant loaders were efficient enough. But somehow it was still not a good day.