1711
She had always come to this place to give of her devotion. But today only bitterness stirred in her aging breast.
In the gray dawn of a chilly morning, this humble peasant woman had stolen quietly from the dilapidated wood cottage where she had lived for thirty years with the husband who had given her two stalwart sons. In the tsar’s new city it would hardly have been considered fit abode for the sheltering of two mangy cows, much less a cottage for human dwelling.
But it was the only home she had. And like women everywhere, she possessed the capacity to make the best of it, and even to find hope in the midst of her impoverishment.
Until now. On this day, clutching a threadbare wrap around her shivering shoulders, hope was gone out of her life.
She approached the old country church—solemn, tall, still, and quiet in the growing light of day. Dark clouds hung overhead. There would be rain before the morning was past. The mere sight of the rounded dome above had at one time been enough to fill her heart with pious readiness for the colorful and symbolic mass the priest would administer. But today the sight stirred no such emotions.
She tried the door. It was locked. No doubt the priest still slept. It was just as well. She had not come today for mass. The icons would remain dark, the priests lips would remain silent, the eyes of the saints inside on the walls would remain blind to this old mother’s deepest hour of need. This morning vigil she would have to carry out in the anguished silence of her own soul, unseen by any human eye.
Around the side of the building she made her way. Though her remaining steps were few, this was the most difficult part of her journey.
She had always prayed for Tsar Peter. She had called him the Great One. Her husband had seen him once. She never forgot his description. He was a man, everyone said, who would make the Motherland the greatest power on earth.
She knew nothing of that. What was power in the world’s eyes? What mattered politics, ships, cities, armies! What mattered greatness . . . when it meant she had to live the rest of her life alone?
Curse his great city which would be the envy of the world!
Curse his army which would make the west tremble!
Curse his navy with its fast new ships!
Curse his new palaces!
Curse every inch of his huge being!
Pray for Tsar Peter! She would offer no more prayers on his behalf though she live to a hundred! Even in the shadow of the church itself, she would curse him, and pray that his should be tormented in hell!
Why had he needed an old man? What could her husband possibly have done that a younger man could not have done better? But like hundreds of other peasants in the surrounding countryside, he had been given orders to report to the site of the new city, under penalty of death if he did not. Within a week he was gone. Her two sons had been taken away only a year earlier, one to a state mine, the other to Peter’s shipyards. Suddenly she found herself desolate and alone.
Neither of her sons she ever saw again. One managed to get word to her that he had escaped and joined a band of renegade Cossacks in the south. The other returned home a year ago, in the crude box which lay in the earth under the stone marker she now approached.
She had not seen her husband for nearly five years. Then he had returned one day, looking fifteen years older, gaunt and worn. Most worrisome of all was the hacking tubercular cough which ground away at his throat and lungs night and day. Her heart sank with a woman’s worst fear the moment she beheld his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. It was small consolation that, he said, many of the workers had died in the first two years from swamp infections. He was one of the fortunate ones, he said with a pale smile.
Saint Petersburg, they called it. She could not even laugh at the irony of the name.
The three crumpled flowers she carried in her hand were hardly fit tribute to one who had given his life for such a worthless cause. But they were all she had.
Slowly she approached the fresh mound of dirt which lay alongside the grave of her eldest son. She stopped, crossed herself, first on her forehead, then along her chest. She tried to mumble a few silent words, but could scarcely recall the simplest prayer from the Domostroi.
Another moment she stood, lips trembling yet in mute heartbreak. Then all at once a renewed sense of emptiness overpowered and filled her breast.
Unconsciously the flowers fell from her hand. Her knees lost their strength, and she dropped to the freshly overturned ground.
With her tears moistening the very soil under which her husband of thirty-five years now lay cold and silent, she pressed her face to the earth and wept bitterly.