Angel on the Square Page 4

“It isn’t a trifle!” Suddenly Mama’s fragrance, which always seemed so delicious, made me angry. “How would you like to work all day in a place that stinks?”

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Katya! And never use the word ‘stink.’ This is all Misha’s doing. That boy does nothing but stir up trouble. It’s that school he goes to. It’s far too liberal. I’m going to speak to Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich at once. He must find a place for Misha in the military academy, where the boy will be too busy to get into such mischief. I should have done it long since. I’m sure it would be what his papa would have wished. It was very bad of Misha to involve you in his treasonous affairs. If he keeps on, he will bring trouble down on all of us.”

  I was miserable. Not only had I gotten Misha into trouble, but Mama had said the Tsar was too busy for such things. If the Tsar was our little father, why wouldn’t he want to know about the children? But Mama said he must not be bothered. It made no sense.

  As soon as I could get Misha alone, I confessed in a miserable voice what had happened. “I promise I didn’t tell that it was you who took me to see the rag factory. Mama guessed when she saw the letter to the Tsar.”

  “Your mother is smarter than you are, Katya. She knows the Tsar would not want to see a letter that tells the truth. The Tsar prefers to close his eyes to such matters.”

  In a shaky voice I warned him, “Misha, Mama wants you to go to the military academy and become an officer in the Tsar’s army.”

  “I’ll never do it,” Misha said. His face was red with anger. “They can’t make me.”

  “She’s going to ask Grand Duke Nikolai to find a place for you.”

  Misha’s face fell. Grand Duke Nikolai, a cousin of the Tsar, was known for his love of the army. He was six feet, six inches tall with piercing blue eyes, eagle eyes that looked right through you. The soldiers all worshiped him. “I’ll run away first,” Misha said, but there was less certainty in his voice. He knew he couldn’t oppose the Grand Duke.

  Misha stormed through the house the rest of the day, slamming doors and growling at me. After dinner, during which he hardly spoke a word, Mama took him into the parlor. They were there a long time. When he came out, he was grumbling, but there was no more talk of his running away.

  He flopped down on a chair and glared at me. “They can put me in the army, but they won’t silence me. Let them teach me to shoot guns. They will be sorry one day when I use them for the revolution!”

  “Misha! What a terrible thing to say. You’ll surely regret such words.” I rushed out of the room, no longer feeling guilty for my part in what was to happen to Misha. I thought the army would be a good thing for him. I hoped they would make him march all day until he was too tired to have such thoughts.

  Still, the next week, when Misha, his face stern and pale, went off to officers’ school, I threw my arms around him and began to cry.

  He tried to smile. “Katya, let go of me. You are like a limpet. How can I turn into a brave soldier if I am sent off with all this weeping?”

  After he left, I wailed to Mama, “He’ll be killed in a war like my papa and his papa were.”

  “Nonsense,” Mama said, trying to comfort me. “There are no wars for soldiers to fight these days. Countries are too sensible for such things.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE OAKS

  Summer 1913

  Mama and I always spent my August birthday at The Oaks. Misha usually went with us, but now he was at the military academy. The estate, a few hours by train and carriage from St. Petersburg, was inherited, like our mansion, from Mama’s papa. At The Oaks you left the busyness of the city for a world where there seemed to be no clocks. Mama had even forbidden electricity at the dacha, so we were in a different time as well as a different world.

  Vitya, the estate manager, and two coachmen met our train in a carriage pulled by four gray horses. There was a second, smaller carriage for Lidya and Anya. Vitya was a big man, packed into his suit as tightly as a sausage into its skin. He hastened to kiss Mama’s hands and to pat me on the head, saying, as he always did, “Our little flower is growing as fast as a weed.” With an air of great importance he ordered the coachmen to load our trunks on the carriage, and in a minute we were galloping over the country road, Lidya and Anya behind us, hanging on to their hats.

  Though Mama received a letter each month from Vitya giving an account of crops and earnings, there was still a year’s worth of gossip for Vitya to tell. While Mama and Vitya chatted, I looked for the landmarks that told me we were nearing The Oaks: a narrow plank bridge that rattled in a frightening way as the carriage rolled over it; an orchard whose trees were festooned with green apples; a peasant’s cottage where a flock of hissing geese attacked the carriage; and at last the double row of ancient oaks like sentinels, marching along our driveway.

  The Oaks was not one of the great estates, with thousands of acres of farmland and thousands of peasants to work it. There were only eight hundred acres and a few hundred peasants. We had no showy mansion with pillars, great stairways, marble halls, and a fine park. The dacha was much more cozy. It was a long wooden building, painted green so that it blended pleasantly into the grass and trees. A wide porch ran across the front of the house. The windows were all doors, so from any room you had only to open the window and step outside, which made the inside and the outside nearly one. In the garden were endless flower beds, tables and chairs for picnics, and a croquet court of velvet grass where Misha and I battled one another. Beyond the gardens was a small orchard of cherry and apple trees, and beyond the orchard, as far as you could see, fields of oats and wheat. It was those fields that brought in money to help pay for the upkeep of our St. Petersburg mansion.

  As we pulled through the carriageway and entered the courtyard, Grishka, Vitya’s wife, who always saved up some small thing to complain to Mama about, hurried to greet us. She curtsied to Mama and gave me a quick nod before she began: “Madame, you are just here, so I won’t trouble you at once, but there is such a problem with one of the housemaids. It is terrible how disrespectful the young have become.”

  She would have gone on, but Mama stopped her. “Da, da, Grishka. We will talk later of that. Now Katya and I are tired from our trip, and want nothing more than our tea.”

  At once Grishka was all business, shouting to the footmen to be careful with our luggage and summoning a maid to prepare the tea. While Lidya and Anya unpacked our trunks, Mama and I changed out of our traveling clothes into summer dresses. We settled on the porch while a young maid I had not seen before brought us a silver tray of tea and cakes with little pots of jam.

  “What is your name?” Mama asked the maid, who looked eighteen or nineteen. She was very pretty, with pink cheeks, green cat’s eyes, and blond braids pinned around her head like a crown.

  The maid was so overcome at having a question directed at her that she was speechless for a moment. Finally, with a deep curtsy, she whispered, “Nina Yankova, Madame,” and fled.

  As she was leaving, Grishka appeared. She frowned as she watched the girl hurry into the house.

  “I’m having trouble with that one,” she told Mama.

  “She seems such a sweet girl,” Mama said.

  “The young people are all the same these days.” Grishka frowned a terrible frown and lowered her voice. “That girl wants to marry one of the field hands. We cannot have it. We must keep up the standards of the household help. After all we have done to train her to be polite and respectable, we can’t have her living in a hut with a mud floor. I have forbidden the marriage.”

  Mama was always a little intimidated by Grishka. Besides, she hated to be in the middle of disputes between Grishka and the servants. “Well, well, Grishka, you must do as you think best. Let us talk of pleasanter things. Have you put up some of those delicious preserves for us?” My mouth watered as I thought of the barrels and boxes that arrived in St. Petersburg every fall from The Oaks.

  Grishka liked nothing better than to sho
w off her efficiency. “I had the kitchen prepare a hundred jars of wild strawberry jam, a hundred raspberry, a hundred cherry; and the blackberry and apple jellies are still to come. The pickles and sauerkraut will be ready in the fall.”

  I knew that soon Grishka would be telling Mama all the housekeeping problems in great detail. I stuffed another cake into my mouth and begged to be excused. A moment later I was running to the barns. I admired the cows’ long eyelashes, buried my hands in the sheep’s soft wool, and dirtied my dress by snatching up a piglet that had been rolling in mud. From a safe distance I looked at the workhorses with their muscled shoulders and sturdy legs. Next to the horses’ stable was the smithy. The blacksmith, a cheerful, redhaired man who kept his teeth on a shelf nearby, greeted me as he always had by making me an iron ring from a nail. “There you are, Katya Ivanova. It will have to do until your sweetheart gives you a ring with a diamond.”

  In the fields the peasants were at work with their sickles, harvesting the grain. In the sweltering heat the men had taken off their tunics and the women worked with rolled-up sleeves. There were children in the fields not much older than me. It was late afternoon. I knew the peasants started work early in the day, for in other years I had been awakened at dawn by their voices as they started for the fields. Their calls had meant no more to me than the early calls of the doves, and I had turned over in my soft bed and gone back to sleep.

  A few of the peasants stopped to look at me. In the past they would have given me friendly waves and calls of greeting, but today they only turned silently back to their work. I was hurt, but the afternoon was hot and they had been there many hours, so I thought little of it.

  I had grown warm. The underarms of my dress were wet, and I felt beads of perspiration on my forehead and the back of my neck. I made my way to a small stream almost hidden in cattails and tall grasses, pulled off my shoes and stockings, and, hiking up my skirts, stepped into the cold water. The mud from the bottom of the stream oozed up between my toes. A dappled green-and-brown frog gave a great leap and disappeared into the water. Ruby-and-emerald dragonflies wove a tapestry among the grasses.

  Farther upstream were deep holes where Misha and I used to fish for trout. Misha looked down on me because I used worms for bait, while he insisted on little “bugs” he made himself from bits of feather and fur. But much to his disgust, I was the one who caught the most fish. I never knew quite how to feel about Misha. Sometimes he was a brother, sometimes a friend, sometimes a tease and a vexation. Today I decided that the dacha was not as much fun without Misha.

  Lidya searched me out in the grasses. “Katya! We have looked everywhere for you. Your dress is all muddy, and your hem is wet. Come and change at once. Baron Nogin is coming to dinner.”

  Baron Ossip Maksimovich Nogin was a widower who lived nearby on an estate much larger and grander than ours. He was older than Mama. He had a shiny bald head and was so heavy, he would have filled two chairs had it not been impolite to offer them to him. Mama always winced when he settled down on one of her elegant settees, quickly saying, “Come, that is too uncomfortable; try this.” She would guide him to a sturdy overstuffed chair that I could see he hated, for he had a hard time pulling himself out of it.

  Our neighbor had once been a lawyer in St. Petersburg, taking the cases of people who were too poor to hire their own lawyers. On one state occasion he had shocked everyone by refusing to drink to the Tsar’s health. He wrote articles criticizing the Tsar’s government and calling for a constitution. For his defiance he had been sent to jail for two months. Now he lived in a kind of exile on his estate, still writing his articles. In past years Misha had spent long hours at the baron’s estate, talking with him about his ideas.

  I looked forward to Baron Nogin’s visits, because he always came with a present for me. That evening he handed me a cage. “There you are, Katya, a little friend.”

  Peeking inside the cage, I found a rabbit with such long hair, I could not tell its front from its back. At once I opened the cage and gathered its soft silkiness into my arms.

  “It’s an Angora rabbit,” he said. “Something different. I like to try new things on my estate.” He turned to Mama. “The trouble with you, Irina Petrovna, is that you leave everything to Vitya. He doesn’t rotate the fields properly, and he has the peasants beaten. You won’t get any work out of them that way. You should give up all that fancy living in St. Petersburg. It’s a bunch of nonsense. Move down here and marry me. That’s the thing to do. I’ll soon get this estate in shape.”

  It was what Baron Nogin said each time he came. Mama laughed. “I am only a woman, Ossip. I put all those things out of my head. Vitya sends me my money, and that is all I care about.”

  The Baron shook his finger playfully at her. “Saying that you are only a woman, Irina Petrovna, is an excuse. It won’t do. These are troubling times. In my father’s day our peasants were serfs, slaves, to be bought and sold. A cruel master could do away with a troublesome serf. Those days are past, but still the peasants are overworked, with no schools for their children and without enough land to make a living. There are men who are talking with the peasants and turning them against their masters. Estates have been pillaged and burned and their owners killed.”

  Mama turned away. “I don’t want to hear such horror stories, Ossip Maksimovich. You are only trying to frighten me.”

  In a more gentle voice Baron Nogin said, “You are right. It is just what I am trying to do. You ought to realize how much your peasants hate Vitya.”

  Mama shrugged her shoulders and said, “Very well, I’ll speak to him, but he doesn’t like me to interfere. Now come and have supper, and let’s talk of more pleasant things.”

  The Baron willingly followed Mama into the dining room, a smile on his face, for he was never more happy than when he sat down to a meal.

  After Baron Nogin left, I took my rabbit outside so it could nibble on the grass. Though it was after nine o’clock, it was still light, that light that is not daytime but some extra thing saved just for summer evenings. Flowers, the night beauties and teardrops, glowed in the twilight. A nightingale trilled from a linden tree. The August air was heavy, and the windows of the sitting room were open to tempt whatever breezes there were. I heard Mama summon Vitya. As he entered the room, I could picture him bowing and scraping, as he always did in front of Mama.

  “Vitya,” Mama said, trying to sound masterful, “what is this I hear about you beating our peasants? I won’t have that, you know.”

  “Oh, Madame, forgive me for saying so, but you have been listening to Baron Nogin. He makes trouble for all of us. His estate is like a kindergarten. All his peasants run about doing as they like. If I managed The Oaks like that, Madame, we should soon be in the poorhouse.”

  I knew that was a threat Mama hated to hear, for her expenses in St. Petersburg were large. Each month she sat at her little desk, frowning over the accounts. There were wages to be paid for my governess, my drawing master, Madame LaMott, our steward and butler, the footmen and maids, the silver polisher and cooks and laundresses, the gardeners and stable boys and coachmen. “Very well, Vitya, I leave it to you, but you must be fair with the peasants.” In a weak voice she added, “I insist on that.”

  As I lay in bed that night, I could not get Baron Nogin’s words out of my head. If what the Baron said was true, then surely Mama should help the peasants. She was so gentle and kind; how could she put up with Vitya’s cruelty? Perhaps she thought the Baron was exaggerating. I remembered the stony looks I had received from the peasants. I decided the next day I would talk with one of the peasants and find out for myself if Vitya beat them. At last, as the candle at my bedside guttered out, I fell asleep to the fiddling of crickets and the rustling of the aspen leaves outside my window.

  The next morning Mama was busy going over the linen supply with Grishka, who had come to her at breakfast to complain that the sheets needed mending and the tablecloths were stained.

  I wandered outs
ide to see how my rabbit was. I cuddled it for a bit, let it run about, and tore up grass to feed it. After a while I thought of my decision to talk with one of the peasants and, after putting the rabbit back in its cage, headed for the threshing barn. The barn was heaped with grain. Men stripped to the waist and women wearing kerchiefs to keep the dust from their hair were working away with flails, separating the grain from the chaff. They paid no attention to me, and after a bit I left, unsure of how to approach them.

  I went into the kitchen garden to split open pea pods and eat the fresh green peas. They crunched as I bit into them, and tasted of summer. The kitchen door opened, and I saw a sobbing Nina collapse on the porch steps, her knees drawn up, her head buried in her arms. I was sure she hadn’t seen me, and at first I thought I would tiptoe away. But she appeared so miserable, I asked softly, so as not to frighten her, “Nina, what’s the matter?”

  She began to cry harder than ever. “Vitya is sending Stepan away to the army to keep him from marrying me. They won’t even let me say good-bye to him.”

  “But you are both of age,” I said. I was filled with romantic thoughts. “Can’t you run off together?”

  “Oh, Miss. How should we live? We don’t have a ruble in the world. If we go to another estate to ask for work, they will demand references, and where would we get them? Worse than that, they have already given Stepan’s name to the army recruiter. Every village has to give so many men to the army. Now Stepan will be one of them. He will have to go into the army for years and years. If he doesn’t, he will be shot as a deserter.”

  “Can’t he get out of it?”

  “Only by bribing the recruiting officer.”

  “How much would that take?” I asked. “I have a little money.” I thought of the five rubles I had saved from my Easter gifts.

  “Fifty rubles,” Nina said.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, Miss.” Nina took my hand. “I can tell you have a kind heart. There is something you can do. Could you give Stepan this message? Tell him I will never stop loving him, however long he is gone.” Hurriedly she gave me directions to Stepan’s cottage. “You must go after supper. He will be in the fields now.”