The Silent Land

by Sally Spencer

  “Yes, Mariamna.”

  She decreed that we all went to the lake and made Misha take his clothes off. “Look at him!” she ordered me. “Do you like what you see?”

  “I … I …”

  I didn’t know what to reply. How could explain to her that I did like Misha’s body, not for it’s own sake but simply because it was the body that belonged to Misha.

  “Get into the lake, Misha.”

  Misha waded into the water, up his knees, up to his thighs. He crossed his arms over his chest and gasped.

  “Further, Misha.”

  Up to his waist, up to his chest. He turned, as if expecting Mariamna to tell him that that was far enough.

  “Further, Misha.”

  Up to his neck.

  “You’re to bend your knees until your head is completely under the water,” Mariamna said. “When I want you to come up, I’ll throw a stone into the lake. If you surface before that, I’m going straight to Mama. Do you understand?”

  Misha’s disembodied head bobbed for a second on the surface of the lake, and then was gone. I lowered my own head and began to count silently to myself. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred … I had reached nine thousand before I dared look at Mariamna. She smiled, triumphantly, as if that was what she’d been waiting for.

  “Do you love him?” she asked me.

  “Yes.”

  She snorted and turned her back on me.

  Nine thousand one hundred, nine thousand two hundred, nine thousand three hundred …

  “No!” I screamed. “No! I don’t love him. I don’t love him at all.”

  Mariamna turned her head again, maddeningly slowly this time, until she was looking me in the eye once more. “Do you really mean it?” she asked. “Or are you just saying it?”

  I wondered how much longer Misha could stay under the water. Perhaps even now he was blacking out. “I really mean it,” I promised her. “I hate him. I swear on my mother’s life.”

  Mariamna hesitated, glancing first at the few bubbles which found their erratic way to the surface, and then at me. She bent down, picked up a pebble and threw it into the water. It landed very near where Misha had submerged himself. The water rippled, but he didn’t appear. And the bubbles had stopped.

  I ran into the water. My dress was slowing me down and I wished I had the time to take it off, but there was no time … no time.

  I reached the spot where Misha had been standing and dove. Weed floated in front of my eyes and I brushed it away with the slow-motioned impatience which is all that is possible under water. I could see Misha, lying on the bed of the lake. I managed to get my hands under his armpits, and by a combination of swimming and purely desperate kicking tugged him into the shallow water. I pulled him onto the shore, gasping for breath myself. Once he was lying on his side, his mouth opened, and a mixture of water and slime poured out.

  “I’ll … be … all … right … in a … minute,” he managed to gasp.

  I looked up at Mariamna. She was standing as still as if she’d been carved out of rock. But statues do not cry – and tears were flooding down Mariamna’s cheeks.

  Summer came, Misha’s last summer at home, but we drew no pleasure from it. Mariamna never again tried any trick as dangerous as the one she’d pulled by the lake, but she had a fertile mind, and it was easy for her to come up with a series of more minor torments. Worst of all was her strict order that Misha and I were never – never – to be alone together.

  And then, the berries were ripening, and it was time for Misha to go. I stood in the driveway, one early autumn morning before the frost had melted away, and watched as the drozhky set off for the nearest railway station. Misha turned once and waved sadly back at me, but I hadn’t the heart or the energy to return the wave. Even before the drozhky had disappeared, the Big House, despite Miss Eunice and all the servants, was already beginning to seem a cold and lonely place.

  Mariamna continued to persecute me every way she could, but her petty tasks and impositions were easier to bear now that Misha was in Petersburg, now I knew that he was not suffering too. I prayed that the Corps of Pages was not being too hard on his sensitive soul, and ached for his return the next holiday.

  He didn’t come home for Christmas.

  “The weather’s rather hazardous for travelling, so he’s staying with family in the capital,” the Count said airily, as if he weren’t actually announcing the most tragic news in the world.

  His words had robbed Christmas of all its magic. I looked at the tree, gold-painted nuts tied to some branches, Crimean apples and tangerines weighing down others. I tried to admire the candles burning away and the bright paper crackers hanging so tantalizingly before me. It was no good. Without Misha, everything was pointless.

  Chapter Seven

  How my life had changed since I entered the Big House! The small girl who’d believed that the Tsar lived only a day’s walk away now travelled by first class train to spend the Season in France. Twice!

  On borrowed money, we stayed at the Hotel de Califone in Nice. While our motherland froze under feet of snow, we basked in the mild air of the Mediterranean. In the mornings, we walked in Chiplatz Park, high above the town, and looked down at the sea, the endless blue sea. In the afternoons, we took tea in the Palm Court. Yes, it was fine life we led, but even all that luxury – all that pampering – could never compensate me for the loneliness I felt, could never fill the gaping hole in a soul which yearned to be loved.

  Countess Olga’s hatred of me only grew as I went from triumph to triumph in the schoolroom, outstripping her daughter with effortless ease. Mariamna herself continued her campaign of making my life as unpleasant as possible

  And the Count? To his wife and daughter’s disgust he watched my progress with interest and discussed my lessons with me, often talking as if I were another adult. How desperately I wanted to love and respect him. But I couldn’t. He had sold his soul to Countess Olga in return for her dowry, he had mortgaged it again to Peter and sent Sasha to Siberia. Try as I might, I couldn’t make a god out of him.

  Even with Miss Eunice, it was sometimes hard to find real affection. She knew as well as I did that any kindness she showed me would immediately be matched by a show of cruelty by the Countess, and though I was willing to pay the price, she was reluctant to do anything that would bring me pain.

  Oh, Misha, I used to think as I sat at the dining table, surrounded by people but completely alone, why did you ever have to leave home?

  After my day with the family, I would descend the stairs to spend the night on the ground floor with the servants, who had once been my people, but were not any longer. “The Mediterranean’s so exciting,” I told Natulia one evening. “You look out to sea and you know that on the other side of it are people completely different from both the French and the Russians. Arabs and black men. Camel drivers and ivory hunters.”

  As I spoke, I saw her eyes glaze over, and realized I’d lost her. If I’d been older, more experienced, I would’ve tried harder to re-establish a point of contact between us. But at the time I didn’t understand what was going on. If Natulia couldn’t follow me, I argued, it was because she was too lazy to. I didn’t realize then that learning to read had done so much more than give me the ability to transform mysterious symbols into words. I didn’t realize then how different from Natulia’s view of the world mine had become.

  And if I had difficulties with the servants, who at least lived on the fringes of my new life, how much harder it was to understand, and be understood by, the muhziks in the mir. It was like being in a foreign country where the language was the same, but the meaning attached to the words was so different that I could only hazard a guess at what they were saying. I became more and more discouraged, and after the summer of 1910 – when I was robbed of the one real reason left for those visits – I stopped going at all.

  It was a peasant boy who brought the message which sent me on that last, frantic journey to the mir. I was sitt
ing on the veranda when he arrived, red-faced and gasping for air.

  “Your mother sent me,” he said. “She’s got the fever.”

  Alarm tingled through my body like an electric shock. “When did she catch it? Today?”

  The boy shook his head. “Two Sundays ago.”

  How long was it since I’d been to the mir? Three weeks? Four? More than that? And if she’d been ill for so long …

  “How sick is she?” I demanded.

  The boy looked down at his bare feet. “I think she’s dying.”

  I saw one the grooms crossing the cobbled yard in front of the stables. “Volodya,” I shouted, “saddle my horse. Quickly, man, I’m in a hurry!”

  He was a good groom, one of the best we had, and in no time at all my horse was saddled and I was galloping towards the village. “Please God, let me be in time,” I prayed guiltily.

  There were no anxious friends gathered around the door of my parents’ izbá. The sick can’t work, but everyone else can, and at harvest time they have to. I tethered my horse to the rail and pushed open the door. The izbá seemed small, dark and claustrophobic. I wondered how I could ever have lived there, how I could have stood the stench of animals and dung, of clothes which were washed, at best, once a week.

  Mama was lying on the stove, a small, pathetic bundle wrapped in a rough blanket. She was perfectly still and her eyes were closed.

  “Oh God,” I whispered to myself. “Oh God, I’m too late.”

  I bent over her and could feel her faint, wispy breath against my cheek. I stepped back and stood in silence – just watching her. Her beauty, in full bloom a only few years earlier, had withered. She looked like an old hag, but so did every woman in the mir beyond the age of thirty-five.

  While I had gone for horse rides or sat on the veranda reading a book, my mother had toiled, hour after back-breaking hour, in the fields. While I had eaten food so rich that it had once made me sick, my mother had survived on cucumbers and black bread.

  The Soviet saw to it that everyone got equal shares whether they were muhziks or aristocrats, Sasha had told me. But the Soviet, like Sasha himself, was only a memory, and for women like my mother mere survival was as great a struggle as it had always been.

  She stirred, and opened her eyes. “Anna?”

  It was little more than a croak.

  “I’m here, Mama.”

  “Come closer to me.”

  I reached over to her and took her work-roughened hand in my soft one. “How do you feel, Mama?”

  “I’m dying, Anna.”

  A loud snoring sound made me turn my head. My father was lying on the floor next to the bench. Drunk!

  “I can’t see you properly, Anna,” my mother wheezed. “It’s too dark in here. Go into the light.”

  I stepped past my unconscious father and walked to the open door. Mama began to move slowly and agonizingly, and I realized that she was trying to sit up. I made a move to help her.

  “Stay where you are!” Her voice was weak, yet so commanding that I froze. I watched as she struggled up onto one elbow, then stood self-consciously as she examined me like a fly under a microscope. “You look like one of the dvorianstvo,” she said finally. “You won’t grow old and ugly like me, Anna, there’s too much of him in you.”

  “Mama, I—”

  “How many women can say they’ve given birth to a lady?” my mother asked. “I can die happy. Enjoy your life, Anna. Live like the Empress herself. Enjoy it all – the clothes, the jewels – everything.”

  The clothes! The jewels! None of that mattered. It was in the schoolroom that the real treasure lay.

  My mother’s sacrifice had bought me knowledge. I wanted to explain that to her, to make her realize what a great gift she’d given me. And it broke my heart to know that however hard I tried, it would never make any sense to her.

  I started to walk back across the room to the stove. If I couldn’t make her understand, I could at least show her how much I loved her.

  “Don’t move,” my mother ordered.

  “I want to hold you, Mama.”

  “And I want to look at you. I sent your brothers to the fields, I let Papa get drunk. All of it so we could be alone. All of it so I’d be sure that the last thing I saw before I died would be you.”

  “Mama—”

  “You’re above me, Anna. I wasn’t meant to hold you, I was meant to admire you from a distance.”

  “Mama, it’s not true.”

  “Let a dying woman keep her dreams,” my mother said. “Let her believe what she wants to believe.”

  I felt helpless and ashamed, but I did as she asked me – she was entitled to that.

  For perhaps five minutes we were a frozen tableau; myself framed in the doorway, my mother weakly propped up on the stove, my father snoring drunkenly between us. Then my mother spoke once more. “Be a lady, Anna,” she said. “Always be a lady.”

  Her eyes closed and her elbow gave way beneath her. The rattle in her throat seemed as loud as a cannon bombardment. By the time I had reached her, she was already dead.

  I rode back to the Big House slowly. My horse sensed my mood and took heavy, mournful steps. My horse. The animal was mine, a gift from the Count.

  “How many peasant girls have a horse of their own?” I could almost hear my dead mother say.

  It had taken my mother’s death to make me realize how much I’d changed. When I heard she was sick, my first reaction hadn’t been to run to the mir, it’d been to order – order – one of the grooms to saddle my horse. How adaptable children are. And how quick to take things for granted.

  The Count was standing by the stable door, almost as if he had been waiting for me. “I’ve just heard about your mother,” he said. “Is it all over?”

  “Yes.”

  Volodya the groom took my horse from me and led it away to be rubbed down.

  “I’m very sorry,” the Count said, and he sounded as if he really was. “When she was younger she was very—”

  “I want to move,” I interrupted him. “I want a bedroom on the second floor, like Misha and Mariamna.”

  The look that could almost have been grief disappeared from the Count’s face, and was replaced by a troubled one. “Is one of the girls in the dormitory annoying you?” he asked. “Tell me who she is, and I’ll discipline her.”

  “It’s not a question of servants annoying me,” I told him. “I’m different from them. They feel uncomfortable in my presence. And I’ve earned a room of my own.”

  Concern had become panic. The Count took in a deep gulp of air to steady himself. “Walk with me,” he said shakily.

  We strolled through the orchard. The blossom had gone and the first fruit was ripening. Birds chirped in the trees and invisible insects buzzed in the lush, green grass. Everything was in perfect peace and harmony – except for the two of us.

  The Count’s hands wouldn’t keep still. First, they kept clenching and unclenching. Then, they rose to his head and his fingers raked through his hair. Finally, they fastened on to his jacket, where they tugged so hard that one of the buttons came away. “You know why you’re here, don’t you, Anna?” he asked.

  “Here? In the orchard?”

  “Not in the orchard,” he replied impatiently. “In the Big House.”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  The Count stopped walking. He placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me round until I was facing him. He looked deep into my eyes. “You really don’t know?” he asked, incredulously. “None of the servants has ever told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something else, then snapped it tightly closed again. Why didn’t I press him? Why didn’t I make him tell me? Because, I suppose, I didn’t want to know the answer. Because even the thought of an answer frightened me.

  “But you do know that my wife hates you?” he said. “And you’re too intelligent not to realize that every time I give you somethi
ng, like your horse, she … she …”

  “Finds a way to make you pay for it?” I suggested.

  He laughed, bitterly. “Yes, finds a way to make me pay for it. As long as you live with the servants, my wife can persuade herself that you’re one of them. If you move upstairs, she’ll be forced to recognize the fact that however much she dislikes it, you’re part of the family.”

  “I know.”

  “At the very best, she’ll make us both suffer for that. At the worst, she might be able to force me to send you away.” He waved his arms in exasperation. “For God’s sake, Anna, you already have all the other trappings of a privileged life. Does it really matter to you where you spend the few hours of the day when you’re asleep?”

  “It matters,” I said. “I’ve been a good pupil, I’ve worked hard to master my studies and learn the ways of the house. I’ve become what you wanted me to be, haven’t I?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Yes, you have.”

  “I’ve done so well that anyone who didn’t know us would take me for your daughter rather than a peasant girl you had brought into your house. I deserve a room on the second floor.”

  “And if my wife simply won’t allow it?”

  “If she won’t allow it, then she won’t have to throw me out – because I’ll leave.”

  “You’d do that?” the Count asked. “You’d leave the house? And where would you go? Back to the mir? Back to the life of a peasant?”

  “If no one else will have me, then, yes, I’ll go back to the mir,” I told him.

  It wasn’t too late to change my mind, I thought. It wasn’t too late to tell him, truthfully, that it didn’t matter to me where I slept. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “Our duty to the past is a terrible thing, Anna,” the Count said. “It’s a burden we carry throughout our lives. Look at all this.” He swung his arm round in an arc. “Do you think I’d have acted as I have done if hadn’t been for the estate, for the responsibilities which were passed on to me by my illustrious ancestors? Without all this, I’d have been free. Without all this, I could’ve done what I really wanted to.” He paused, and pulled another button free. “Was I betraying my family honour the day I took you in?” he asked in a rush. “Or was I at last proving that I could have some honour which was entirely my own?”