The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

The servant fetched some, lifted me, and placed the cushions beneath my bottom. I took the opportunity to surreptitiously drop my wooden spoon on the floor.

  “You may serve now,” the Count said.

  In my long – too long – life, I have seen many terrible things. I remember a steppe village during the war in which the peasants, starving to death, had eaten the bark off the trees until there was none left, and then resorted to cannibalism. I remember a small town in Spain where the Nationalists, in revenge for a Republican atrocity, had slaughtered every man and mutilated every woman. Yet my most recurring nightmare is not of death and destruction, it is of that meal over eighty years ago.

  Knives, forks, spoons, glinting at me – accusing me in my ignorance.

  “Just do what I do,” Misha said. And under the table, I felt a small hand squeeze my knee.

  “Tell us,” the Countess said, “what is life like as a peasant?”

  I could think of nothing to say. Life was life. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer. Difficult when there was a poor harvest, better when nature was merciful. What could I explain? There was nothing to explain.

  “The child is stupid as well as barbaric,” the Countess announced.

  “All she needs is time, my dear,” her husband said soothingly.

  The Countess answered him in gibberish again, though she never took her eyes off me. This was to be her tactic from now on. Speaking in Russian when she wished to humiliate me directly. Switching to French or English when she merely wanted me to know that she was talking about me.

  The food arrived – borscht, our national soup. I was surprised that there were so many implements on the table, just to eat borscht. My wooden spoon would have done the job perfectly. I was surprised, too, to find the family eating the same food as the peasants – though I had no real idea of what else they would eat.

  I realized I was very hungry, and, using my spoon the same way as Misha did, began to ladle up my soup. It was delicious, the best, the most extravagant, borscht I’d ever tasted. Soon it was all gone, and my stomach was completely, satisfyingly full.

  The servant took our bowls away and returned with even more food – a variety of fish dishes served with salted cucumbers and marinated fruits. I gazed at it, unable to understand how anyone could eat any more.

  “Have some fish, Anna,” the Countess said. “It’s only proper manners, and if you’re going to live with us, proper manners you must learn.”

  I think it was her calling me by my name which put me off my guard. That and the fact that she talked about me living in the Big House as if she accepted it.

  I wanted to please her. I carefully forked up a piece of fish and put it into my mouth.

  “More,” the Countess urged. “You’re eating like a mouse.”

  I saw the Count smiling with relief. He, too, was taken in. I forced a little more down, though I didn’t really want it. I was relieved when the fish was taken away, but horrified when the servant brought more food. It was roasts this time – chicken, turkey and goose with apples.

  “A young lady always takes a little of everything,” the Countess said. “Don’t you want to be a young lady?”

  I nodded my head, and ate a little of the meat.

  It was the cakes and pastries which were my final undoing. “One slice, Anna. You don’t have to eat it all.”

  But one mouthful was enough. I had been brought up on a diet of black bread, cucumbers and cabbage, with a little tough meat on Sundays and at the end of fasts. All this richness was just too much.

  A heavy, uncomfortable feeling had been growing in my stomach, and the cake was a signal for it to erupt. I’d seen men vomit after two or three days of steadily drinking vodka, and I knew I mustn’t do it here. I fought back the bile and climbed off my chair.

  “Do you want to be excused, Anna?” the Countess asked, and even through my discomfort, I noticed a triumphant gleam in her eye.

  I didn’t stop to answer. I turned and ran for the door. I was half-way there when the pain hit me, and I fell to my knees. My stomach heaved again, and I gave up the battle. My mouth opened, my body shook, and I was violently sick.

  My body was out of control, but my mind was still working and I heard everything that was going on around me. Misha’s gasp, Mariamna’s laughter, Miss Eunice’s, “Oh dear!”

  And the Countess, talking to her husband. “Can you see now that all this is pointless?”

  “It’s bound to be difficult at first.”

  “Difficult? Impossible! Whatever you do for her, she’ll never be any more than a muzhik – a brutish beast.”

  Chapter Four

  Imagine this – knowing nothing beyond the world of the mir. Worse, imagine being completely incapable of seeing the point of knowing more. The Russian peasant had no interest in what the sun was made of, or why it appeared in the east and set in the west. For him, it was enough that it did appear, and he could build his life around that simple fact. Nor did the peasant speculate on what made an automobile move without a horse to pull it. The vehicle would amuse, even amaze him, much as would the antics of a dancing bear, but what had that to do with planting crops or fermenting bread to make kvass? Such was the state of my mind when, on my first morning in the Big House, I climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the schoolroom was located.

  It was a square room, middle-sized for the house. At one end was Miss Eunice’s desk and behind it a wall-mounted slate board. Facing the board were the pupils’ desks. A table rested against one wall with a hand-written notice above it. When I learned to read English, I would discover that it said ‘Nature Table’, but for the moment I was merely mystified by its collection of birds’ eggs, animal bones and dried flowers. Why would anyone wish to keep such rubbish inside the house?

  Mariamna, Misha and our governess arrived together, and we all sat down. “Until Anna has learned some English, we will sometimes have to speak in Russian,” Miss Eunice said.

  Her Russian was slow and careful, and though she made mistakes, it was not a lot worse than that spoken by the family, who only used the language when they were addressing servants.

  “Let us see what you know, Anna,” she continued. “What is that on the wall?”

  I looked at where she was pointing. It was a picture, obviously, but it was not a picture of anything I could recognize, just a series of different coloured shapes which seemed to slot together.

  “Is it an icon?” I asked.

  Mariamna burst into laughter. “It’s a map, stupid!”

  “How could she know that?” Misha asked quietly.

  Poor, little Misha. Always so willing to defend me, and yet always so meek in that defence. A knight in shining armour who carried a flower in his scabbard.

  “Mariamna,” Miss Eunice said severely, “you will not be rude to Anna. She has not had the advantages you’ve had.”

  To my surprise, Mariamna bent her head and said, “Sorry, Miss Eunice.”

  “It is not to me you should apologize. It is Anna you have insulted.”

  It seemed my powers of astonishment were to be stretched to the limit that day. Mariamna turned to me and, red-faced, and with eyes full of hatred, mumbled, “I’m sorry, Anna.”

  “I can’t hear you clearly, Mariamna,” the governess told her.

  “I’m sorry, Anna.” Louder this time, almost shouting.

  “And I’m sure Anna accepts your apology. Now, look at the map and watch my finger.” Miss Eunice traced around one of the shapes. “That is Russia.”

  It seemed particularly imbecilic to me to say that a shape on a picture could be Russia, but I was learning it was wiser to hold my tongue.

  “Mariamna,” Miss Eunice said, “show us where Great Britain is.”

  Mariamna stood up, walked to the map, and traced her finger round a smaller shape.

  “Mariamna can cut out all the countries of Europe and fit them back together again,” Miss Eunice told me. “Just like a jigsaw puzzle.”

  Sh
e was trying to be fair – Miss Eunice always tried to be fair – compensating for her earlier rebuke with well earned praise. It had little effect on me. I had no idea what a jigsaw puzzle was, but I couldn’t see why anyone should bother to cut something up just to put it back the way it had been in the first place.

  The map game continued for quite a while, and by the time it ended I was able to trace several countries successfully, though as far as I was concerned they might as well have been called Meat and Potatoes as Germany and Italy.

  At the end of the exercise, Miss Eunice set the others some reading to do, and came and stood over me. “Do you like doing this, Anna?” she asked.

  What could I say? What did she want me to say? “It’s … it’s very nice,” I stuttered.

  Miss Eunice smiled, but in that smile there was as much command as in Lenin’s hard stare or Stalin’s frown. “Don’t lie to me, Anna,” she said softly.

  “It’s … I don’t see why we’re doing it,” I confessed.

  “You will – if you give it a chance. I can open up a whole world for you, Anna. Will you let me?”

  Those were probably not her exact words, of course, but knowing Miss Eunice they must have been something like that. And though I didn’t understand, I could feel her intensity, sense that what she had to offer was wonderful.

  “You must not neglect my children for the sake of the peasant girl, Eunice.”

  The Countess, terrifying and magnificent, was standing so close that she could almost touch us. I felt a sudden chill overcome me, as if my very life were at stake.

  Miss Eunice rose to her feet. “I would never dream of neglecting any of my charges, Madam.” There was deference in her tone, but there was also anger. “Misha and Mariamna are making good use of their time.”

  If the Countess was offended, she did not show it – except perhaps for a slight narrowing of her eyes. “I am going to Kiev next week,” she said. “I think you could use a new dress. Velvet would be nice. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Miss Eunice gave a short curtsy. “Thank you, Madam.”

  The Countess was almost at the door when she stopped and turned round. “I don’t think this peasant girl will ever learn anything, Eunice,” she said. “It’s a waste of both her time and yours. I wish you would tell my husband so.”

  Miss Eunice gazed down at her sleeve, as if she had discovered a loose thread.

  “Don’t you think it is a waste of time?” the Countess persisted.

  “It’s too soon to know, Madam,” Miss Eunice replied.

  The Countess’s eyes narrowed even further, and her mouth tightened until her lips were almost puckered. “Are you happy working for us, Eunice?” she asked.

  “Yes, Madam.”

  “There are a great many British governesses in Russia. Most of them, I imagine, would be more than willing to change places with you.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, Madam,” Miss Eunice replied dully. “I am well looked after here.”

  “So you’ll speak to the Count?”

  Miss Eunice stood with her feet wide apart, her hands bunched into small, angry fists. “I will do my duty,” she said.

  “I see,” the Countess replied, and swirling round in her practised, haughty way, she left the room.

  Miss Eunice did not lose her position, but neither did she receive the velvet dress she had been promised.

  Oh, Miss Eunice, how much I owe you. What doors you opened for me. Did you ever think, when you left your comfortable bourgeois home in Glasgow and made the long journey from Tilbury, up the Kiev Canal to St Petersburg – did it cross your mind even for a moment – that you could have such an effect on a child as you had on me?

  I can picture her now, her small, wiry body, her hands waving wildly as she made a point. Sometimes, the Count came into the schoolroom and watched our lessons, nodding gravely when we got the answers right, frowning when we failed. Occasionally, the Countess would pay us a visit – mainly to laugh at my ignorance – but as both my confidence and knowledge grew, so the frequency of these visits declined.

  It didn’t matter to Miss Eunice who was there. The schoolroom was her little kingdom in which she bestowed her precious gifts on her small subjects – and she bowed her head to no one.

  It was a strange life I led, with the children in the daytime, the family at meals and the servants at night. Some of the maids were suspicious of me at first, thinking I’d repeat what they said to the Countess, but once they’d heard the way she spoke to me, they realized there was no danger of that.

  As their trust in my discretion grew, I began to learn almost as much from the servants as I did in the schoolroom upstairs. I discovered, for example, that the marriage between the Count and his wife had been far from a love match. The Mikloshevskys were a much older, more noble family than Countess Olga’s, but they were poorer, too.

  “He needed the money,” Tassaya, one of the kitchen maids, whispered to me in our room one night. “But even with the dowry, he’s finding it difficult to make ends meet.”

  I found that incredible. The Count was the richest man in the whole world. There was always meat at the table, fine horses to ride, the grandest clothes to wear.

  “They’ve been selling off their farming land,” Tassaya continued. “It’s nearly all gone. Soon it’ll be the timber forests, too – and then the Count will have nothing.”

  “Yes,” giggled Natulia, another of the maids. “Already Peter owns almost as much land as the master does.”

  “Peter Vassilyevich?” I asked. Peter from the village who made my stomach turn in a way I didn’t quite understand? “But he’s only a muzhik like my father.”

  “It’ll be a lucky girl who marries him,” Tassaya said, ignoring me. “And in more ways than one.”

  “Well, it won’t be you,” Natulia replied, rather nastily. “Vodka once drunk is nothing but piss.”

  “Better piss than horse shit,” Tassaya retorted.

  The two girls folded their arms, turned their backs on one another and lapsed into a sulky silence, leaving me, sitting in the middle, completely mystified. There was much about big people I still didn’t understand.

  The events which were to change Russia – and the world – really began in the Autumn of 1905. There had been grumbling earlier in the year – when the Tsar’s soldiers fired on an unarmed demonstration – but it was the printers’ strike in Petersburg which first threw the country into a chaos it would not emerge from for another twenty years.

  “And it’s not just the printers who are on strike,” the Count complained over breakfast, as he read a report from a newspaper published in strike-free Kiev. “The Petersburg lawyers are refusing to work, and so are the bank employees. Even the corps de ballet have come out in sympathy.”

  “And what is the government doing about it?” Countess Olga asked.

  “Nothing!” the Count replied in disgust. “The whole city’s in the hands of the workers’ soviet.”

  “The workers’ soviet,” the Countess repeated, her disgust matching her husband’s. “They’re nothing but anarchists and should be hung from the nearest lamppost.”

  Soviet! There are some words which seem to have a magical ring about them, which roll around the mouth like a ripe strawberry. Soviet was such a word for me and though I had no idea what it meant – and knew I would get no satisfactory answer at the Count’s table – I wanted to find out more. And so I went to see the one person in the mir – apart from my mother – who still seemed to have time for me. I went to see Sasha.

  I ambushed him by the well at the edge of the village, and fired my question at him. He put his bucket on the ground and squatted down, so that our eyes were at the same level.

  “The S … Soviet is rule by the workers, f … for the workers. Can you understand that?”

  “I think so,” I said dubiously.

  “Each f … factory elects a man to it. The Soviet controls the st … strikes and demonstrations. But it also d
istributes f … food.”

  “What does ‘distributes’ mean?”

  “It sees to it that p … people get food, and that each person gets a fair share.”

  “You mean that if we were living in Petersburg, my mother and the Count would get the same?”

  “Ex … exactly.”

  What a wonderful thing the Soviet seemed to be.

  The meetings at the well became a regular part of our lives. Sometimes Sasha would talk about politics, and though much of what he said was above my head, I was content just to listen to the sound his voice. On other occasions, I was the one who did the talking. I would tell him about life at the Big House, and he’d nod his head in disgust at the luxury and extravagance of it all. I would repeat my lessons, and he’d greedily absorb the information at second hand.

  They were peaceful, happy times. We were careful to go to the well only when we were sure there would be no one else there, for though we had never discussed it, we both knew we had a pact to keep our friendship secret. And so our meetings remained a secret – until that fateful day in late autumn.

  It was Sasha who was doing the talking that day. He was sitting on the ground, legs stretched out and back leaning against the well. He had a radical newspaper in his hand, and he was telling me about an article he’d just read. And I, sitting cross-legged and so close to him that my knees almost touched his feet, was eager to listen, eager to learn if I could.

  “The Tsar’s s … set up a Duma,” Sasha said. “An elected parliament.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “N … no. Because he’s not given it any real power. He st … still controls the army and f … foreign policy and the police. And when the Duma’s not meeting, the government – and that means Nicholas – rules by decree.”

  “So what will happen to the Soviet?” I asked.

  “The Soviet,” a new voice said, “will collapse.”

  We looked up, startled, to find Peter grinning down at us. What was he doing there? He didn’t fetch his own water, he paid other people to do it.

  A few moments earlier, Sasha had been relaxed, despite the earnestness of the conversation. Now he tensed up, and when he spoke again, his stutter had got worse.