And we were both frightened of our fathers.
My father, Daniil Vladyavich, and Kolek’s father, Borys Alexandrovich, had known each other all their lives, probably spending as much of their boyhood in each other’s company as their sons would thirty years later. They were passionate men, both of them, filled with degrees of admiration and loathing, but their political opinions diverged considerably.
Daniil treasured the country of his birth. He was patriotic to the point of blindness, believing that man was given life for no other purpose than to obey the dictates of God’s messenger on earth, the Russian Tsar. However, his hatred and resentment of me, his only son, was as incomprehensible as it was upsetting. From the moment of my birth, he treated me with disdain. One day I was too short, the next I was too weak, on another I might be too timid or too stupid. Of course, it was the nature of farm labourers that they wanted to breed, so why my father saw me as such a disappointment after already siring two girls is a mystery. But nevertheless, it was how things were. Having never known anything different, I might have grown up believing that this was how all relationships between fathers and sons were cultivated, were it not for the other example that played out before me.
Borys Alexandrovich loved his son very much and considered him to be the prince of our village, which, I suppose, means that he thought himself to be its king. He praised Kolek constantly, brought him everywhere with him and never excluded him from adult conversation in the way that other fathers did. But unlike Daniil, he nurtured an obsession with criticizing Russia and its rulers, believing that his own poverty and perceived failure in life was entirely the result of the autocrats whose whims dictated our lives.
‘One day, things will change in this country,’ he told my father on any number of occasions. ‘Can’t you smell it in the air, Daniil Vladyavich? Russians will not stand to be ruled over by such a family for much longer. We must take control of our own destinies.’
‘Always the revolutionary, Borys Alexandrovich,’ my father replied, shaking his head and laughing, a rare treat, and one which was only ever inspired by his friend’s radical pronouncements. ‘All your life spent here in Kashin, tilling fields, eating kasha and drinking kvas, and still your head is full of these ideas. You will never change, will you?’
‘And all your life, you have been content to be a moujik,’ said Borys angrily. ‘Yes, we work the land, we make an honest living from the soil, but are we not men like the Tsar? Tell me, why should he have everything, be entitled to everything, own everything, when we live out our days in such poverty and squalor? You still say prayers for him every night, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ said my father, starting to grow irritated now, for he hated even engaging in any conversation which criticized the Tsar. He had been bred with an innate sense of servitude and it flowed through his veins as freely as his blood. ‘Russia’s destiny is inextricably linked to that of the Tsar. Think, only for a moment, of how far back this generation of rulers goes. To Tsar Michael! That’s more than three hundred years, Borys.’
‘Three hundred years of Romanovs is three hundred years too many,’ roared his friend, coughing up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it on the ground between his feet without shame. ‘And tell me, what have they given us during that time? Anything of value? I think not. Some day … some day, Daniil …’ He hesitated there. Borys Alexandrovich could be as radical and revolutionary as he wanted, but it would have been a heresy, and perhaps a death sentence, to have continued.
Still, there was not a man in our village who did not know the words that he intended to come next. And there were many who agreed with him.
Kolek Boryavich and I, of course, never spoke of politics. Such matters meant nothing to either of us as children. Instead, as we grew up, we played the games that boys played, found ourselves in the trouble that boys find themselves in, and laughed and fought, but were around each other so much that strangers passing through our village might have taken us for brothers, were it not for the difference in our physical appearance.
As a child, I was small in stature, and cursed with a mop of blond ringlets, a fact which might lie at the root of my father’s contempt for me. He had wanted a son to carry on his name and I did not look like the kind of boy who might accomplish such a task. At the age of six I was a foot shorter than all my friends, earning myself the nickname Pasha, which means ‘the small one’. Because of my golden curls, my older sisters called me the prettiest member of our family, garnishing me with whatever ribbons and fancies they could find, which caused our father to scream at them in fury and rip the garlands from my head, handfuls of hair often being extracted in the process. And despite the frugality of our diet, I had a tendency towards weight gain as a child too, which my father Daniil considered a mark of dishonour against him.
Kolek, on the other hand, was always tall for his age, lean, strong, and handsome in a very masculine way. By the age of ten, the girls in our village were looking at him with admiring eyes, wondering how he might develop in a few years’ time when he had grown to manhood. Their mothers vied with each other for the attention of his own mother, a timid creature named Anje Petrovna, for there was always a sense about him that he would be a great man one day, that he would bring glory to our village, and it was their fervent desire that one of their daughters would eventually be taken to his bed as his bride.
He enjoyed the attention, of course. He was more than aware of the glances that came his way and the admiration everyone had for him, but he too had fallen in love and with none other than my own sister Asya. She was the only person who could make him blush and lose confidence in his remarks. But to his dismay, she was also the only girl in the village who seemed utterly immune to his charms, a fact which I believe only fuelled his desire for her. He hovered around our izba daily, seeking opportunities to impress her, determined to break through her steely exterior and make her love him as everyone else did.
‘Young Kolek Boryavich is enamoured of you,’ our mother remarked one evening to her eldest daughter as she prepared another miserable pot of shchi, a sort of cabbage soup that was almost indigestible. ‘He cannot bear to look in your direction, have you noticed?’
‘He cannot look at me, so that means he likes me,’ remarked Asya casually, brushing his interest aside like something unpleasant which had found its way on to her clothing. ‘That’s a curious logic, don’t you agree?’
‘He is shy around you, that’s all,’ explained Yulia. ‘And such a handsome boy too. He will make some lucky girl a worthy husband one day.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But not me.’
When I quizzed her about this afterwards, she seemed almost insulted that anyone would think that Kolek was good enough for her. ‘He’s two years younger than me, for one thing,’ she explained in an exasperated tone. ‘I’m not interested in taking a boy for my husband. And I don’t like him anyway. He has a sense of entitlement about him that I cannot bear. As if the world exists only for his benefit. He’s had it all his life and everyone in this miserable village is responsible for giving it to him. And he’s a coward, too. His father is a monster – you can see that, Georgy, can’t you? A horrible man. And yet everything your little Kolek does is designed for no other purpose than to impress him. I’ve never seen a boy so in thrall to his father. It’s loathsome to watch.’