The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  “Her name, child,” the Count said. Impatiently, as if he was really interested in the answer.

  “Elisabeth Ivanova, otets.”

  The Count nodded. “Would you like to ride back to the mir on my horse?”

  How can I describe my emotions at that moment? Me – on the Count’s horse. I tried to speak, but the words would not come, and in the end I merely nodded.

  The Count patted the side of his beast. “Come over here, then.”

  My body had gone numb but I forced myself to move until I was standing where he had told me to. The Count reached down and hauled me into the air. I spread my tiny legs and he lowered me over the neck of the animal. I clamped on tight.

  So many new sensations assailed me – all at once. I was riding on a real horse. I was looking at the countryside from an entirely new perspective. I was breathing in the smell of the Count, not sheepskin and sweat but polished leather boots, starched serge uniform and eau de toilette. We were half-way back to the mir before I realized that I had somehow managed to lose the four coins which Zossim had paid me, but I could not really bring myself to care. I’d never been so happy in my life.

  As we trotted down the muddy street of the mir, it was almost like the arrival of a circus. Other children ran along beside us, screaming and shouting excitedly. Adults stopped what they were doing and looked on in astonishment. And I sat astride the horse, as proud as the Tsar himself.

  Word had reached home before we did, and my father was waiting in front of the cabin. “This is an honour, otets,” he muttered, keeping his eyes pointed at the ground.

  “I am prepared to honour you further,” the Count said. “I wish Anna to come and stay in the Big House.”

  Panic engulfed me. The Big House was a fine place to look at, but how could I possibly give up my cosy cabin and go and live there? I started to struggle, trying to get the right leg over the horse’s neck, so that I could drop to the ground. I felt the Count’s hand on my shoulder, restraining me.

  “Let me go!” I screamed.

  For the first time, my father raised his head. “Anna,” he said, “you mustn’t talk to the otets like …”

  “It’s all right,” the Count reassured him.

  Strong arms lifted me into the air and deposited me on the ground. I ran to my father and buried my head in his sturdy thighs. The old comforting feeling, the old reassuring smells.

  “You want Anna to live in the Big House?” Papa asked. “As a servant?”

  “No. As a companion to my children.”

  Companion? My father must have been as mystified as I was. In our harsh peasant world, there was no room for such a luxury. Everyone had to work, and the results of that work could be seen and touched, eaten or used. For us, the word ‘companion’ simply had no meaning.

  “She would take lessons with my children,” the Count explained. “She would eat with them and play with them. She would be better off than she is here.”

  I felt my father’s legs tense against me. A romantic would say it was at the thought of losing his daughter, but that would only show how little he understood muzhik men. Papa knew – or at least believed – that if the Count wanted me to live in the Big House it would come to pass whether he opposed it or not, and he accepted the fact with the fatalism which has led the Russian masses to their deaths in innumerable wars. But he knew, too, that the Count would not expect to get me for nothing. Cunning peasant that he was, he sniffed a deal.

  “The girl is useful to my wife,” he said. “And if she goes, the mir will take some of my land off me.”

  “You shall not lose out of it,” the Count replied. “You’ll no longer have the expense of feeding and clothing her, and I’ll pay you a hundred roubles.”

  “A hundred roubles!” my father said, trying to keep the greed out of his voice.

  I’d been frightened before, but now I was terrified. One hundred roubles! Was there that much money in the whole world?

  I could feel my father quivering in anticipation.

  “Are we agreed?” the Count asked.

  Say, no! I pleaded silently.

  “We are agreed,” my father replied.

  I let go of the legs which would no longer protect me, and rushed into the cabin. My eyes were full of tears. I wanted to find my mother, wanted to tell her that Papa had just sold me.

  Once, in the depths of winter, hunger drove a wolf into our mir. It cornered Mama and me on our way to sweep out the church. Its glassy eyes fixed on me and saliva dribbled from the corner of its mouth. As it tensed to spring, I knew that my last hour had come.

  Beside me, a voice – Mama’s voice – suddenly screamed, “No! No! I won’t let you take my child!”

  The wolf shifted its attention from me to Mama, and Mama ran at it, swinging her broom.

  A full grown wolf is of awesome size and weight. It could easily have held its ground – but it didn’t. It was faltering even before Mama cracked the broom over its muzzle, and then it turned and ran. Perhaps hunger had made it too weak to fight, but I think it more likely it was intimidated by the passion of a mother defending her cub.

  That was how I expected Mama to react now, when I sobbed out the story of my father and the Count. She was angry, as angry as she had been with the wolf, but her anger was directed at me. She knelt down, placed her hands on my shoulders, and shook me.

  “You little fool!” she hissed. “Can’t you see how lucky you are?”

  “I want to stay with you and Papa.”

  She swung me round so I was facing the stove, then turned me again until I was looking at the cupboard. “You want to stay with this?” she demanded. “When you have the chance to live in the Big House?”

  “Y … yes, Mama,” I gasped through my tears.

  She shook me again, even harder this time, until my teeth rattled. “I would have done anything – anything – if only he’d have let me …” she began. She let go of me. Her face was still red, but her blazing anger had left her and her eyes were as cold as ice.

  “Mama—”

  “If you won’t go,” she said, “then you’re no daughter of mine. You can wander the countryside until you die!”

  At that moment, I think she really hated me. Hated me for not seeing the opportunity when it was offered. Hated me for being lucky enough to have it offered at all.

  We set off for the Big House the next morning, Mama and I. The sun was shining and the birds were singing. Insects, hidden in the grass, made strange rasping noises. I watched other children swinging their strawberrying baskets, and I thought my heart would break.

  I was wearing my best Sunday dress and head-square. In my hands, I carried a cloth parcel containing all my worldly possessions – my wooden spoon and bowl, my sheepskin shooba and felt valenki.

  We reached the cast-iron gates, and Mama stopped. I had hardly spoken to her since her ultimatum, and it was only fear which made me speak now.

  “Shall we go on, Mama?”

  “No, my child.”

  Joy of joys! She had changed her mind.

  “You must go the rest of the way alone,” Mama said. She knelt down beside me as she had done the day before, but this time there was no anger in her eyes, only a deep sorrow. “This is for the best,” she said. “A few more harvests and I will be an old woman. And after that, there is only death.”

  “No, Mama!”

  She put her fingers to my lips. “Shush, child. A muzhik’s time on earth is hard, yet it is mercifully short. But for you, there will be a better life.” She paused. “Remember the wolf? How he ran when I hit him!”

  She laughed, and I laughed too, although we were both crying.

  “He had his tail between his legs,” I said, “like a beaten dog.”

  “I would have given my life for you that day. It would have been easier than what I am doing now.”

  “Can you … walk with me to the door?” I asked, trying to grasp a few extra minutes with her.

  Mama shook her head. �
��There was a time when I might have done, but not now. Look after yourself, my Annushka.”

  As I watched her disappear into the distance, the bundle in my arms took on the weight of lead. I wanted to put it down, but I knew that if I did, I’d never have the strength to pick it up again.

  I waited until my mother was completely out of sight, then turned my back on the mir and headed slowly, reluctantly, towards the Big House.

  Chapter Three

  The staircase was incredibly wide, and the red carpet which covered it tickled the soles of my bare feet. When we reached the top, the man in the frock coat, who had been escorting said, “Wait here.”

  He knocked gently on the nearest door and then opened it. “The girl is here, master.”

  “Bring her in.”

  I walked timidly to the opening, clutching my bundle tightly in my trembling hands.

  The room took my breath away. Everything was strange and wonderful. The shining parquet floor. The windows, seeming even bigger looking out than they they did looking in – and with curtains hanging beside them. The furniture, delicate polished wood, so different from the rough benches of my izbá.

  “This is Anna.”

  The Count’s words snapped me back to reality. He was sitting at a round table in one corner of the room. He was not dressed in his riding uniform, but instead was wearing a suit, shirt and bow tie. He did not seem so commanding as he had done the day before. His glance flickered back and forth between me and one of the women on his right, his voice had lost the assurance it had when he was talking to my father.

  To his left sat two children, a boy and a girl. The girl was perhaps a little younger than me, the boy a little older. He was dressed in what I later discovered was a sailor suit, she in a pretty blue and red check dress that I would have given my soul for.

  Of the two women it was plain, even to my untutored eye, that one was important and the other wasn’t. The unimportant one was young and wore a dark skirt with a pale v-necked blouse. The older woman was taller and more imposing. She had on a long white dress with a high collar. Around her neck was a string of pearls.

  “This is my son Misha,” the Count said.

  The boy rose to his feet and bowed in my direction.

  “My daughter Mariamna …”

  The girl frowned at me, sulkily.

  “… and Miss Eunice who is their governess and will be giving you lessons too.”

  Miss Eunice smiled, and though she was not pretty, the smile made her face look warm and welcoming.

  “And this is my wife, the Countess Olga.”

  The tall woman stood up, walked across the room until she was only a few feet from me, then slowly and calculatingly looked me up and down. Unlike the governess, Countess Olga was pretty, almost beautiful, yet her features seemed unnaturally pinched.

  I had no idea how to react to a lady. Muzhik men bowed to each other, but I knew of no polite method of greeting women, so I made the only formal sign I knew – I crossed myself.

  The Countess laughed, and the sound was harsh and grating. Then she spoke to me, very quickly, in what sounded like gibberish.

  I looked down at the floor and mumbled some sort of reply. “I … I don’t … I’m sorry …”

  “Good heavens, child,” the Countess said, “don’t you speak French?” Without waiting for a reply, she turned to her husband and, still in my native tongue, told him of my deficiency.

  “Be reasonable, my dear,” the Count pleaded. “Of course she doesn’t speak French. She’s a peasant girl.”

  “Exactly,” the Countess replied triumphantly, still in Russian to make sure that I understood. “This mad idea of yours can never work. Look at her! Smell her! She stinks!”

  “All peasants stink,” the Count replied, “but it’s only because they’re dirty. Give her a bath and she’ll be just like Misha and Mariamna.”

  “She will never be like Misha and Mariamna,” the Countess said, and with a swish of her immaculate white dress, she left the room.

  Children, they say, have great resilience to suffering. Perhaps that’s why we Russians have allowed ourselves to take so much punishment – never having really grown up, we accept pain and discomfort as a way of life. And though I endured a great deal that first day at the Big House, I was both a child and a Russian, and it never occurred to me to run home to Mama.

  My first ordeal was a tub of hot water. I’d never had anything but a steam bath before, and the idea of immersing myself in water seemed as dangerous as it was novel. “I’ll drown,” I complained to Elena, the fat old peasant women who served as the children’s nanny.

  Elena laughed. “You won’t. Lots of people get clean this way.”

  Lots of people drank vodka until they fell over, I thought, but it still wasn’t a very sensible way to behave. Still, I climbed into the tub and let the nanny scrub away my dirt.

  Once my skin was pink again, I was given an old dress of Mariamna’s to put on. The cloth was so smooth that it felt uncomfortable, and I began to itch.

  “Time to get rid of the bugs in your hair,” Elena said cheerfully.

  What for? Everyone had bugs. Didn’t they?

  I sat there patiently while Elena dragged a brush through the knots in my hair and rubbed a burning lotion onto the scalp to kill the lice. “There’s a positive army of them in there,” she told me, “but this stuff’ll soon shift ’em.”

  I endured it all with a peasant’s resignation. Only over the shoes did I revolt. “They don’t fit,” I protested.

  “Yes, they do,” the nanny assured me, running her finger along the gap between my foot and the side of the shoe. “There’s more than enough room.”

  It all seemed crazy to me. In the winter, when the ground was frozen, I wore my boots. That was only sensible. But in the warmer weather, why should I make my feet prisoners? Because the Countess and Mariamna did? That wasn’t a good enough reason for me and I told Elena so.

  Though we were alone in the room, the nanny looked around her before lowering her head until her lips were almost touching my ear. “Listen, little one,” she whispered, “you have an enemy in the mistress, and she’ll do everything in her power to get rid of you. Don’t even give her the tiniest excuse.”

  “But why do they want me to act like them?” I demanded. “Why am I here at all?”

  “Hush, child,” Elena urged. “There are some things it’s better not to talk about.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” I persisted.

  “Yes, Anna. Everybody does. That’s the problem.”

  When I was finally presentable, the nanny took me back down to the ground floor, into a room just off the main hallway. “You’ll be sleeping here with the servants, instead of upstairs with the family,” Elena explained. She sniffed. “That’s one battle, at least, that Madam has won.”

  I looked around for the stove, and could find none. Instead, the whole room seemed to be filled with long, thin, iron tables, all covered with blankets. “Where am I to sleep?” I asked.

  Elena stripped the blankets off one of the tables. “Here,” she said. “In this bed.”

  “Bed? I don’t understand.”

  The nanny sighed with exasperation. She had forgotten what it was like to be a muzhik and to see the world through simpler eyes. “This is the bed frame,” she said, tracing it with her finger, “and this is your mattress. This is where you’ll sleep.”

  It seemed very strange that anyone should wish to sleep on mattress suspended above the ground when they could just as easily, and more cosily, lie down on the stove. But I was coming to accept that people in the Big House always did things in a much more complicated way than normal folk.

  “Wait here until they call for you,” Elena said briskly. “I’ve other duties to attend to.”

  And she was gone, leaving me sitting on the edge of my new bed, and wondering how things could possibly get much worse.

  It must have been an hour before fat Elena came to see me again. �
��They want you upstairs,” she said. “Or at least, he does. You’ve to have dinner with them. Come on. Don’t keep them waiting.”

  I quickly rummaged through my bundle, pulled out my wooden spoon and ran after Elena, who was already waddling her way upstairs.

  Having once visited the room in which the family lived – though I had seen neither stove nor beds there – I expected to be returned to it now. So I was mystified when Elena led me to another one, even larger than the first.

  The family and Miss Eunice were sitting at a long table, as long as the one which the muhziks used for a meeting of the mir. I would have thought it strange that they needed a table of such a size, had it not been for the quantity of things piled up on it. There were glasses, plates and dishes, any number of knives, forks, spoons …

  I became aware of the wooden spoon in my hand at the same moment Mariamna did.

  “See, Mama,” the girl said gleefully. “See what she’s holding.”

  I put my hands quickly behind my back.

  “You look very nice, Anna,” the Count said.

  The Countess twisted her lip into a sneer. “She looks like a peasant who has been scrubbed and dressed in Mariamna’s old clothes.”

  The Count pretended not to understand. “Tomorrow we will take her into town and buy her some clothes of her own from the Jewish shop.” He smiled at me. “Come and sit down, Anna.”

  I walked timidly towards the table. A servant – there were three of them in the room – stepped forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to block my way. But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled out a chair between Mariamna and Misha. I was not used to sitting on chairs, and anyway, this one was rather high. As I struggled to climb on it, I was aware of all the family’s eyes on me, and of Mariamna’s sniggering.

  “Help her,” the Count ordered.

  The servant put his hands under my armpits and swung me up. Even then my troubles were not over – I could hardly see over the top of the table.

  “Cushions,” the Count said crossly. “Like you bring for the other children.”