The Russian Album (11 page)

At each thatched, whitewashed cottage on the road to the estate, Paul lifted the young bride down from the carriage and presented her to the peasant couple standing in the doorway. From each they received the traditional round loaf of bread, with a salt cellar cut deep into the loaf, presented on an embroidered tablecloth, then they kissed the icons of the house laid out on a table by the doorway. As godfather to the village children, master of the village choir and largest employer in the district, Paul knew each man and woman by their names and father's names. At dusk while she sat with her new family on the veranda, the village choir serenaded them with Ukrainian songs. They went to bed with the cheers the choir had raised to their choirmaster's happiness ringing in their ears.

Next morning when she awoke in the small bright bedroom, she was alone. Paul was already downstairs on the porch receiving the first of the peasant delegations, listening to complaints, accepting petitions, meeting with the estate managers about the stock and the spring planting. He had been away for months. Everything had to be taken in hand again. When she came down to breakfast, she was seized with fear that she had lost him, that the week just passed in the Hôtel Cap d'Antibes had now slipped beyond reach.

Everything in the Ukraine was strange to her: the jabber of Ukrainian dialects from the peasants and servants; the heavily accented Russian of their Polish landowner neighbours; the talk of seed drills and tractors and stockbreeding around the table; even the strange wood carvings on the roof of the big house. On Sundays in the family church, the family would file past the priest, kissing the cross, General Ignatieff and his wife first, then their sons and daughters, then the peasants after them. And as they left church, the villagers would kiss the Ignatieffs' hands at the church door: in Doughino, the peasants did not kiss hands. She felt she had returned to the Middle Ages.

Perhaps the family thought her snobbish, standoffish, this princess from the great estate near Smolensk. Certainly Kroupodernitsa was smaller than Doughino: a solid, three-storey country house, comfortable but not luxurious or ancient. She admitted it was ‘cosy', but she could never feel at home there. At one end of the dinner table sat her mother-in-law, her grey hair always covered by a white shawl; at the other, slumped and brooding, sat her father-in-law, the old general. She felt pity for him. The whispering and the ridicule which followed each of his catastrophic financial adventures left Paul's father peevish and embittered. Yet there was still fire in him, and after dinner, with the family spread out around him on the veranda, he could still conjure up his great days in central Asia, in Peking and in the Turkish war. Even in his ruin Natasha felt he was the most forceful personality – with the exception of her own mother – she was ever to meet in her life.

Paul took his young bride driving along the dusty roads at dusk in the family brougham, past the oak woods at Bossibrod, to the little towns round about, Ouman, Lipovetz. On the warm afternoons of early summer, he rowed her along the marshy banks of the river and showed her where he used to hunt with Monsieur Castellot. He showed her the stables where he had once broken in his father's new Arab stallions and he tried in vain to interest her in riding. His boyhood was all around him. But her childhood was far away in the manicured lawns and greenhouses of Doughino. As much as she wanted to, she couldn't share his passion for the Ukraine. She missed Doughino, she pined for her mother. In those first months at Kroupodernitsa, her eyes were often red from crying. Once, sitting alone in the study dabbing her cheeks with a handkerchief, Natasha heard a knock at the door and before she could compose herself found herself face to face with Paul's mother. Countess Ignatieff gave her a cool, appraising stare. Natasha looked back at her in mute supplication.

The doors back to Natasha's past began crosing behind her just as the new life stretching before her seemed to become ever more strained. In September 1903 Natasha raced back to Doughino to be at her mother's bedside in her final hours. She was already expecting her first child and she thought of her child as a gift to lay in her mother's arms. But the gift arrived too late. Her mother was able to order her grandson's trousseau but cancer had taken possession of her and she died that month with Natasha and her sisters at her side. When Natasha drove out between the great white gates of Doughino the day after the funeral, she took away with her a photograph album of the park, the greenhouses and the luminous and vacant rooms shining with imperishable light. She never returned.

In that miserable autumn of 1903, once more in the Ukraine, grieving for her mother, nauseous from morning sickness, she helped her sisters-in-law to run a day school for peasant children in harvesting time. She hated chasing after the little wretches in her stiff new clothes through the prickly stubble by the river's edge. She pined for someone to confide in but Paul was always riding off to Ouman or Lipovetz, to oversee the recruiting of peasants, to collect taxes and tithes or to adjudicate some boundary dispute involving the peasants. Countess Ignatieff, with experience of six children behind her, could have allayed Natasha's fears of a first pregnancy but she kept her own icy counsel.

Natasha turned to Mika, Paul's sister, for companionship, but she lived behind a screen of duty, bustling off every morning in her pony and trap with medicines and bandages to tend the children in the village and to inspect the hospitals and schools the family had built around the estate. Mika worshipped her brother Paul, and Natasha could sense that she had been judged and found wanting. Yet gradually as Natasha's pregnancy progressed, Mika began to thaw. She brought Natasha a plant from a barefoot pilgrim at the church door who said it had been picked in Jerusalem. It would flower, the pilgrim had told her, and its flowering would ensure Natasha a painless delivery. Through the autumn of 1903, she waited. The flower did not open.

Paul's older sister Katia was an even more commanding and austere figure than Mika. She was a trained nurse who had tended typhus victims among the foreign troops in Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion in 1898. In the photo albums of those early years at Kroupodernitsa, Katia – or Countess Kitty as the servants called her – stares out at the camera with a forceful look, the keys of the house dangling on a chain down the front of a severe black dress, her face tight with determination and her eyes ringed with sadness.

She looked very different in a picture taken about ten years earlier in the 1890s at a fancy-dress ball at the home of the Grand Duke Michael in Petersburg. She was nineteen then, a gentle oval-faced beauty, with thin wispy hair pulled back off her face and round wounded eyes. In the photograph, she is reclining at the Grand Duke's feet in a brocade ball gown, while he leans on a trestle table crowded with other guests, all in Renaissance costume. The Grand Duke had been in love with her then, and she with him, and in the photograph she seems to stare longingly at a future that she could not allow herself to believe in. It was not to be. The Grand Duke was a member of the royal family and the Tsar apparently forbade the match. Michael went to live abroad and Katia went round the world to try to forget. When she returned, she had renounced her gentle wounded self and became instead practical, level-headed Countess Kitty. Yet in the eyes that stare out of the later photographs, just a trace of the impossible wishes of a nineteen-year-old still remained. She threw herself into a round of duty at the estate and in January 1904, when the Japanese forces attacked the Russian naval base at Port Arthur and began the Russo-Japanese War, she rushed by train to Vladivostok to enlist as a nurse.

It was within a month of Port Arthur – as the country strained and snapped in the gale that was to end with the revolution of 1905 – that Natasha gave birth to her first son. She knew nothing about childbearing and wanted to know as little as possible. Like harbingers of doom, the forceps, bandages and scalpels arrived at Kroupodernitsa by coach from Kiev followed next day by a jewelled society midwife who announced that Natasha should be quick about it because she was loath to spend a second longer in the godforsaken Ukraine than necessary. Through one long night of labour, Paul read verses from the Bible to comfort Natasha, while an evil-smelling local doctor stood by and the decrepit society midwife held Natasha in her arms and shook with terror at her screams.

The baby boy, Nicholas, was safely delivered, but Natasha was left damaged by the birth and her beauty, as she put it, ‘quite packed up'. All spring and summer, she sat on the veranda convalescing, watching the peasant women coming up from their cottages to water the garden at nightfall. They bent low over the pool in the garden to scoop up buckets of water and carry them to the long rows of sweet peas, tuberoses and madonna lilies. She sat by the cot in her white crinolines in the veranda's shade and wondered if birth was the same for peasant women as it had been for her. These women bending over the pool in her garden seemed so strong. It came as a shock when a local doctor told her that most of them were broken at forty from childbearing and overwork.

Natasha felt no wave of maternal feeling at first, just a kind of pity at how pathetic her little son seemed, lying helplessly in his cot, sniffling and breathing like a puppy. She had not wanted a child so soon. She wanted to hold on to her life alone with Paul a little longer, to prolong the spell of their courtship. But it was not to be. In the first thirteen years of marriage, she was pregnant at least nine times. She hated and dreaded ‘the whole business', and at the same time tormented herself with the thought that she was failing him. Their sexual life together was cursed by quack doctors, by the unhappy fate of easy fertility and by an unbreachable gulf between Paul's passionate and demanding sexuality and her retiring and aversive physical nature.

She was glad in the autumn of 1904 when Paul's new post as chairman of the
zemstvo
– the local government board – for the province required them to leave the Ignatieffs at Kroupodernitsa and live alone together in Kiev. At last she could be under her own roof, away from the rule of her mother-in-law. The two years in the sunny little flat on Levashkovskaya street in the Lipki, the leafy residential quarter of the city built on the bluffs overlooking the Dnieper, were a happy dream for her. For once she felt she was a partner in his work: visiting the hospitals and institutions administered by the
zemstvo,
and entertaining the
zemstvo
workers at the end of the day with
piroshki
and beer.

Paul threw himself into the work. He dashed out early in the morning with his sandwiches and newspaper, walking the short distance to the
zemstvo
offices in the City Hall Square, returning at night to work on papers in his study. There were hospitals to build; only one general hospital existed to serve the four and a half million people of Kiev province; the country roads had to be surveyed and resurfaced; sugar-beet cooperatives were opened; rural fire insurance was reorganized to give the peasants protection for their thatched cottages; the forced-labour system used to maintain the roads, provide horses for the post chaise, even to transport criminals, was replaced by a rural tax system. It was work of detail, the practical business of bringing his country into the twentieth century, and Paul loved every minute of it. He prided himself on being a practical farmer, a man from the provinces, who knew how to run combine harvesters, when to plant beets, how to talk to peasants in the field, how to get the best out of a man. He discovered his own capacities for leadership, assembling round him a core of vets, agronomists, surveyors, teachers and doctors who were devoted to ‘the liberalism of small deeds'. These were the
zemstvo
professionals – resented by the Petersburg bureaucracy, scorned by the revolutionaries in Zürich and Bern – who were trying to lead their old country along the path of quiet, unspectacular rural modernization. They prayed for time: every new cooperative, factory, hospital needed a decade for its harvest.

All of this steady work occurred against the increasingly sombre backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War. The
zemstvos
had been asked to take care of all the dependents of the soldiers sent from the province to the battlefields of Manchuria, but without any resources to help them complete the task. Paul travelled to Petersburg with other
zemstvo
leaders to demand assistance from the central government. When an official from the Department of Finance protested that the
zemstvos
were failing in their patriotic duty, and added, ‘This is not the spirit that prevails in Japan!' Paul shot back across the table, ‘We know of only one measure taken to strengthen the finance of the country to enable it to carry on the war, the tax on matches!'

From Katia's letters written from Vladivostok, Paul could sense how badly the war was going. There was a shortage of everything: weapons, bandages, field glasses, cannon, boots. Most of the commanders had not seen service since the Russo-Turkish War and were stunned by the new kind of war the Japanese were waging. Yet the staff officers' talk in the mess was full of blithe assumptions of Slavic racial superiority over the yellow enemy and the patriotic press was full of perverse confidence in the virtues of Russian backwardness, in the peasant bayonet charge against the machine gun. At home in Kiev, Paul heard the peasant recruits being loaded on to the trains wondering why they were having to die in the east. It was rumoured that the country had been lured into conflict by the Tsar's desire to protect a consortium of concession hunters who were seeking control of forest rights in Korea, which traditionally had been under the Japanese sphere of influence. This consortium included Paul's own uncle, the rotund and reactionary General Alexis Ignatieff, former governor general of Western Siberia, now a member of the State Council.