Tsarina

by Ellen Alpsten

  ‘Any more questions?’ Nadia jangled the bunch of keys on her belt. She certainly looked in charge and was impatient to get on with things.

  ‘Yes,’ I dared to say.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘What?’

  ‘How will I not get lost here? The house is so vast,’ I said, yet I felt it might not be vast enough to hide me from Vassily. The sight of that narrow bedstead terrified me: would he come for me here tonight? Did the other women know why I was here?

  Olga smiled at me, but Nadia’s reply was curt. ‘Do your work well and you will not lose your way. Olga, the fire needs rekindling for the master’s samovar and chai. Don’t forget the vodka in his cup, to warm his bones.’ Olga slid out of the room. When Nadia made a decision, there was no contradicting her.

  Taking care to stay on the housekeeper’s good side, as well as sharing the bedchamber with Olga, might shield me from Vassily, I hoped, yet my stomach clenched with fear. How should I sleep a wink and still be strong enough to do my chores? I remembered his words from the riverbank all too well, and he did not seem like a man to make idle threats.

  5

  Nadia, Olga and I cured meat and fish, pickled mushrooms and root vegetables, marinated fruit, vegetables and herrings in alcohol and vinegar, and stuffed verst after verst of sheep’s intestines with spiced meat to make sausages. Chickens, geese and piglets ran around my legs, and the huge, glowing oven added to the summer heat, making it unbearable. As soon as Nadia turned her back on me, I would nibble at things and stick my fingers in all the saucepans, which made Olga warn me, only half-jokingly: ‘Stop eating, otherwise you’ll grow all fat and Nadia might slaughter you in autumn as well.’ But I’d never dreamt such delicacies existed. I had worked in the monastery kitchen on feast days, but what was the monks’ simple food compared to this heavenly fare?

  Vassily’s pantry had to be kept well stocked for his many guests, who often arrived and stayed several days. The shelves were stacked with jars of vinegar, oil and gherkins. Milk was left in barrels to sour into kefir, or hung in muslin cloths to make cheese, if I didn’t have to skim it and churn the cream into salted butter. Greaves, flour, red and white onions, nuts, lentils, peas and beans – thin green ones, as well as the fat white ones Tanya used to boil into a slimy stew – were all stored in sacks. Hanging from the ceiling, beside lightly salted sides of ham, were bundles of herbs and spices, all except the saffron, which Nadia kept locked away in a casket. When I’d asked why, she’d told me it came from a country in the East and was weighed and priced like gold. ‘Once we had a maid who pinched a bit and Vassily had me break her fingers. They didn’t quite grow back together again,’ she said, with the hint of a smile.

  The rest of the time I beat skins and carpets, turned or changed the straw on the floor or waxed the floorboards until they shone and smelled of honey, and dusted the gilded frames of the icons on the wood-panelled walls. I was uncomfortable about having to air the bed in Vassily’s room in the mornings. So far he almost seemed to have forgotten my presence, yet the cruellest hunter puts its prey at ease before striking suddenly. Nadia taught me how to sprinkle the washed and thoroughly dried linen with a brush of feathers dipped in water in which she had soaked peeled and sliced potatoes – afterwards I would touch the starched and herb-scented sheets in awe. Even the monks’ cells that I had cleaned in the monastery just offered bare planks or stone hollows for beds. At home I’d slept together with my family on top of the big, flat oven in our izba, burrowed deep in warm straw, like pigs in a sty. I tried not to think of them and of days past, as it made me too miserable. I longed so much for my family. Often I cried into my pillow and at first Olga would leave me be, folding her hands as in prayer on top of her thin blanket.

  Vassily traded in anything that made him money: linen from Russia, French velvet, and another cloth called silk. Once, Olga held one of the bales against her cheek, sighing at its shine and softness: ‘Did you know that its threads don’t come from fields like cotton, or animals like wool?’

  ‘No?’ I snorted. ‘So do they fall from the sky or what?’

  ‘Well, almost. Vassily told me it is spun by big, fat caterpillars that do nothing all day but hang around on certain trees, munching leaves.’

  I laughed. ‘How stupid do you think I am? Show me a caterpillar like that and I’d swap places any time!’

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, her voice plaintive, as she placed the bale of silk back on the shelf. Vassily kept a careful inventory of his goods: wax and honey, salt, sugar and flour, meerschaum, fats and oils, leather – and little pouches of a strange white powder that had a powerful effect. I could always tell when he had sampled it. He would then be in high spirits and go to town together with friends to a kabak – an inn that served only vodka – his whip dancing playfully against his shiny, freshly polished boots.

  There was a second storeroom that he kept tightly locked. ‘What’s in there?’ I asked Nadia on my first visit to the warehouse. ‘Why should I risk my neck by telling you?’ she asked, before telling me anyway, proud of her knowledge. This was where he hid forbidden treasures: sable, ermine, vodka and caviar in buckets of ice to keep it cool. Only the Tsar was allowed to trade in these goods and even here, outside the Russian Empire, Vassily could have his nose cut off for his misdeed, or be broken on the wheel. No Tsar was to be trifled with where his income was concerned – not even Peter, despite the strange things we heard about him.

  When Nadia wasn’t around to forbid it, Olga and I would lure the servants of Vassily’s customers into the kitchen, calling to them from the window, laughing and teasing them by blowing kisses. Then, over a mug of kvass, they would tell us everything that was going on in the world outside.

  ‘You won’t believe it, my girl. They say the Tsar isn’t even in Russia! He calls himself Peter Mikhailov, lives on cabbage like you and me, and is learning how to build boats in Holland.’

  What nonsense, I thought, but politely held my tongue. No one in their right mind would swap the richest of lives for our daily drudgery.

  Or: ‘If Peter carries on like this, Charles of Sweden is going to show us what for! He’s still a child, but he exercises with his troops from morning to night. They’re great towering fellows who adore him and obey his every order. Now that’s a real king.’ Their own Tsar bewildered them: he had just issued a decree ordering them to cut off their beards. Had Peter lost his mind? Being clean-shaven was sheer blasphemy: every icon showed Christ with a beard. Was he a changeling after all like the old stories said, one his mother had smuggled in from the German Quarter on the outskirts of Moscow, desperate for a son after the birth of a daughter? Or was the influence of his German whore, Anna Mons, to blame? He was with her in spite of his marriage to a good and god-fearing Russian noblewoman, who’d given him a healthy son as heir to the throne. Even I had heard rumours that Peter was a false Tsar.

  One evening at the end of May when I was lying awake – crying as usual while listening to the white night outside, full of birdsong and longing – I heard the floorboards of our room creak. I was so scared by the noise that I even stopped sobbing, my heart pounding. Was this Vassily coming for me? Olga stood by my bedside, the light pooling around her bare, thin feet, and her threadbare nightshirt hanging like a limp flag on the pole that was her body.

  ‘What?’ I asked, sitting up, wiping my nose and feeling almost defiant.

  Olga reached out and her long, slender fingers caressed my hair. ‘Stop crying, Marta. You exhaust yourself and you have to be strong,’ she whispered before withdrawing, her expression like a veil when she turned and climbed back into her bed. She could only offer words to comfort me, but after them I fell deeply asleep as I never had before in Vassily’s house, exhausted from all that had happened and all the new things I had to learn. Perhaps it was because of her unaccustomed tenderness and the brief solace she had offered me that I neither heard the steps coming up our narrow flight of stairs, nor the feet coming along the corridor, heavy with
drink and lust. I only woke when the door was thrown open, shrieking on its hinges as it never seemed to do in daytime. I sat up, startled. Vassily stood on the threshold, the milky light of night showing him a clear path to my bed.

  Though I was unable to move, my thoughts raced. The moment had come. What exactly would happen, what would he do? If he only lets me live, I thought. Vassily stood there, swaying a little in the doorway, steadying his heavy body against the frame with one hand. I did not stand a chance against him I knew, and pulled my knees up tight. Vassily was still catching his breath after the climb and I yanked the blanket over my head, shielding my eyes from the sight of him, and my head against any blows or else him taking me by the scruff of the neck. At least I would not see him come for me; it would be awful enough to feel him and to suffer his wrath. Had the long wait before it fell on me been part of my punishment for defying him?

  ‘Come here,’ he said hoarsely, his voice thick with drink. ‘Or shall I come and get you, girl?’

  6

  Perhaps it would be better for me to give in. I looked towards Olga; all was quiet from her bed. How could she sleep through this – or was she stricken by sheer terror, as I was? I took a deep breath and prepared to peel back the blanket. The time had come and now the only thing to do was to survive it. If I could just stop shaking. I didn’t even know how I’d stand in this state.

  A loud creak from Olga's bed surprised me. ‘I’m coming,’ she said, in a voice brittle as dead leaves. I held my breath, stunned, and then hiccupped with surprise as I peered out from beneath the edge of my blanket and between my spread fingers. She rose from her bed as if dressed in a flaxen sheet, her light blonde hair flowing to beyond her hips as she stepped towards him. He grabbed it, wrapping it around his hand and pulling. She let out a short, pained scream. He led her out of the door, which he did not deign to shut, and into the corridor.

  I heard it all. When Olga stumbled back into our chamber, her thin legs trembling, clutching her torn nightshirt to her like a drowning person might a piece of driftwood, I was by her side before she fell down on her bed. I held her head, felt her tears on my throat and her slender body heaving, stroked her hair and dabbed her cut lip until the blood clotted.

  ‘Why is he doing this?’ I asked, hearing the helplessness in my voice.

  She tried to shrug but winced: I saw bruises blooming on her shoulder. ‘This is nothing. It gets him going. If I put up a fight, it’s even worse.’ Her blue eyes were huge in the moonlight. Was this what Nadia had meant by Olga being able to teach me ‘a thing or two’? Her hot cheek pressed into my palm, she whispered: ‘Don’t help me. You can’t. Help yourself.’

  The following day, I saw her dip her fingers in a tub of pork lard and sneak up to our room, where she greased the door’s hinges. I understood: the shrieking sound when Vassily came for her made her shame worse. A couple of weeks later, I did not wake from my restless slumber when he summoned her, but from the sound of her retching over the bucket in the corner of our chamber. In our chest, I spotted a new pair of soft green gloves on Olga’s pile of clothes, next to her other treasures.

  ‘Have you been in Vassily’s service long?’ I asked Nadia one afternoon in August in my still clumsy Russian, which caused endless laughter in the house.

  We were shredding cabbage for a pie of bacon and vegetables. The kitchen was sweltering in the summer heat. My hair stuck to my forehead and I had shortened the sleeves of my sarafan as much as possible, pulling on the strings there. I took care to do my chores swiftly and with a smile, so Nadia would not cuff me. That day she seemed in a good enough mood to chat.

  ‘My family belonged to his father so I grew up in his service.’ She gave me a short, sharp look. ‘Even though I wasn’t pretty or charming, I was allowed to work at their house. I could be trusted. When Vassily’s mother died giving birth to him, I raised him.’

  I almost dropped the cabbage stalk I was holding. ‘So you are like a mother to him?’

  Instead of answering, she cast me a glance and I busied myself with the cabbage, guarding my tongue. Nadia was at Vassily’s beck and call as any housekeeper worth her salt would be, bowing to his every demand while mercilessly keeping us in check. That she had raised him as her own child shocked me nevertheless, as I only knew love for my younger siblings. Exactly how close was Nadia to the master?

  ‘Doesn’t he have any family then?’ I asked, stirring the chopped cabbage that floated in a shallow bucket of water, cleaning it thoroughly, as both earth and small slugs loved to stick to its layered leaves.

  ‘He’s a widower and childless,’ she replied. ‘His wife died three years ago of consumption.’ She checked another cabbage stalk for blemishes and then halved it with a single chop.

  ‘What about Olga?’ I dared to ask. Olga, who tied her tunic more loosely these days and nibbled sour gherkins and pickled Baltic herring when she thought no one was looking.

  Nadia split the next cabbage stalk with a powerful blow that made me jump. ‘Olga was bought a year ago, a bit like yourself. Our lord has made her pregnant.’

  ‘Our lord?’ I said stupidly, lowering my own knife. ‘But that only happens in the Bible.’

  ‘Fool,’ scolded Nadia. ‘Vassily’s a man like any other. And Praskaya can’t keep an eye on him all the time.’ She chuckled, which made the hairs on her wart quiver in rhythm. ‘But she’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Who’s Praskaya?’ I gathered the discarded leaves to feed the chicken and pigs later.

  Nadia clicked her tongue. ‘Praskaya’s a snake. She’s Vassily’s mistress. Can hold her own in any drinking game, and her jokes would make even a soldier’s ears burn. She allows him to stray, but only as long as no other woman is a threat to her . . .’ She fell silent, because at that moment Grigori, the young stable boy, came into the kitchen, followed by Olga herself, who had been washing and darning the horse blankets. Grigori was about fourteen or fifteen years old, with arms and legs that seemed too long for his skinny body, and angry pustules blooming across his cheeks and neck. To me he resembled a cross between a puppy and a colt, like my brother Fyodor had.

  ‘I’m starving, girls. Can I have some of the vegetable soup?’ He eyed the cauldron where the pea soup – lunch for everyone – was bubbling on the open fire. Its scent was laced with bacon rind, heavenly, thick and moreish.

  ‘Cats and maids eat in spades, servants and dogs wait by the bogs,’ Nadia said with a scowl, but then filled a wooden bowl for him anyway. Grigori sat with us, slurping his soup contentedly. I was tempted to point two fingers like a pair of horns to ward off the evil eye when Olga crossed herself with three fingers behind Grigori’s back. I noticed scratches and deeper marks like cuts on her arms. As little as she spoke about herself, she knew things about others and had told me all about Grigori: ‘Keep well away from him – he’s got the evil eye.’

  In the milky evening light of our chamber her words had crawled across my skin like spiders’ legs. ‘Really?’ I’d sat up, pulling the threadbare blanket high as my chin.

  ‘It comes over him all of a sudden, when he’s exhausted. He screams and twitches and thrashes about before throwing himself on the ground. Then he foams at the mouth, as if the Devil himself were in him.’

  ‘Has he always been like that?’ I’d shivered, in spite of the blanket.

  ‘Yes, he used to have these fits as a child. But he’s been much worse since Vassily punished him.’

  ‘Punished him? What for?’ My throat had suddenly gone dry, thinking of the maid who had pinched saffron. Severe measures were taken for even small mistakes.

  ‘Grigori wasn’t paying attention. Vassily’s stallion scraped its flank on a rusty hook in the stable and died of blood poisoning. Vassily whipped Grigori senseless. Since then we’ve often had to tie the boy up when he goes into convulsions, to stop him from hurting himself.’

  Did I really think that Vassily would forget and forgive any offence, least of all from a girl who had threatened him in front of
his men?

  ‘Some soup, Olga?’ Nadia offered her, but she shook her head, turning her face away in disgust. ‘You have to eat,’ Nadia scolded, while Grigori sat hunched on his stool, eating his soup and smiling shyly at me whenever I caught his eye. Nadia glared at us, sieved the rest of the flour, chucked away tiny pieces of gravel and husks, and weighed out the precious salt before giving me my orders. ‘Go to the chicken shed and collect the eggs,’ she said, and I sighed: Vassily’s chickens were foul beasts that put up a fight for each and every egg they were obliged to yield. Nadia added: ‘Then chop the white onions.’ White onions! They always made me cry my eyes out.

  When Praskaya returned from her travels, she hated me on sight. I had to tie my hair back tightly, hide it under a scarf and keep my eyes lowered at all times. She gave me the hardest tasks. ‘Carry the coal bucket!’ ‘Sweep out the fireplaces – look at the state of them!’ ‘The pigs have to go out in the field – don’t dawdle, go on, go, go, go.’ If I showed the slightest clumsiness, she would box my ears, dig her nails into my arm or pinch me hard, twisting my skin, leaving blue and blackish bruises. Once she pushed me as I was carrying boiling water for her bath; I stumbled and almost scalded my hands and feet. In the evening, she would lock our bedroom door. Olga and I were prisoners every night, which also meant Vassily wouldn’t come to us. ‘Thank you, Praskaya,’ we laughed, before, despite our fear, we sank into deep, dreamless sleep.

  It was the hottest, driest summer in living memory. Under the burning sun, corn caught fire in the fields and the harvest failed. I worried desperately: from all over the country we heard dreadful stories. Souls died during their work in the fields, and their masters – against every law of man and country – first closed their ears to their serfs’ pleas and then their cellars and pantries to the starving. Corpses lay bloated in their mir or floated downstream, to be eaten by fishes and bears. Still, I also heard that those who could left the stricken villages. At night I did not draw the curtains and looked up to the sky, hoping for my family to find a new home elsewhere, in peace and safety.