Chapter Text
The year Ivan left the farm—the year before he became the Champion of the Naked Hot Sauerkraut Wrestling League—was a hard one. A series of unusually warm weeks in early spring melted the snow and caused all the trees to bloom and green things to send out tender shoots of growth. Unfortunately, it was followed by a brutal series of ice storms that killed all the buds and blackened all the small green tips that had dared poke their heads above the earth. After the ice came torrential rains that washed away the soil and drowned any carefully-planted seeds.
And then the drought set in.
In May, what little rain fell was barely enough to wet the top inch of soil. June, July, August: each month was drier than the last. The ground shriveled and cracked. The creek shrank into a brownish trickle that threaded a slow, tentative course between the banks. Animals panted and went hungry. Songbirds dropped dead from the heat.
All the farms suffered, but Ivan’s little farm suffered most. Their plot was hard and rocky, right at the edge of the foothills for the tall, rugged mountains to the east. Every year, they broke their plow’s teeth no matter how carefully they worked the soil. Their meager grey earth grew meager grey vegetables and grains, even during the best of times—and this was decidedly not the best of times.
That year, they had nothing left but the cabbage field, a small vegetable patch, and probably potatoes, because very little killed the potatoes except the blight, and their potatoes were blight-free.
Probably.
Probably the potatoes didn’t have the blight.
So they tended to what they had, the three of them together: Ivan, his father, and his mother. They pumped water to irrigate the thirsty plots and prayed the well didn’t run dry. They sowed seed and prayed. They fed the mule, pig and chickens with what scant scraps and feed they had.
Despite their best efforts, however, the animals grew leaner and leaner, and consequently, craftier and craftier. The chickens began to break free of their run every day, wreaking minor havoc wherever they landed. It was negligible, really; a minor inconvenience rather than a serious nuisance.
And then they descended upon the vegetable patch and ate every tender pea shoot in it.
Mother cried for days. Eventually, father could bear it no more; he grabbed his axe from the woodshed and killed the biggest and greediest hen in revenge. Mother cried even harder after that, because she had been mother’s favorite hen.
Well, at least they had fresh meat for a few days.
And then came an even greater disaster.
It was the pig. They woke up one morning to a series of loud crashes, only to find she had broken into the shed where they kept their vodka mash barrels and smashed two of the three. They found her rolling around in the partially-fermented mess, drunk as a lord and twice as heavy.
Father did not cry, not quite, but his craggy face became craggier, and he looked longingly at the woodshed, where the axe was, then at the pig, then back at the woodshed again.
The cabbages grew, but they were small and tough and bitter. They were better than nothing, but just barely. The potatoes never came up. Perhaps they had the blight after all.
And then one day in mid-August, the Tsar’s men came.
A half dozen of them rode up to the door just as the sun peeped its sleepy head above the horizon. Ivan and his parents were already up: Ivan doing the backbreaking labor of pumping the water for their irrigation pipes while father chopped wood and mother made breakfast. The Hussars’ splendid red and blue uniforms and their muscular, immaculately-groomed horses did not belong in the monotonous gray and brown landscape—they looked like figures cut out of a painting and pasted into a charcoal sketch.
Lagging behind the Hussars was a cart heaped with lumpy green objects and pulled by two mules, a strange and homely counterpoint to the martial splendor.
Ivan stopped pumping and walked to where the soldiers were talking with father, though perhaps “talking” was a mischaracterization. The soldiers were talking. Father was yelling and beginning to brandish his axe.
Ivan broke from a walk into a jog. When father’s axe-swinging went from “beginning to brandish” to “rather aggressive brandishing, actually,” Ivan went into a full-on sprint. The Hussars were still mounted and not looking especially intimidated, but a few had their hands on their sabers.
The first thing Ivan heard, when he finally got close enough to make out his father’s bellowing, was “…take these cabbages over my dead body!” The Hussars, stony-faced, looked ready to oblige him. Ivan skidded to a stop and grabbed his father’s wrist.
“Sirs,” he panted, “I must beg your pardon for my father’s behavior. It is the heat, you see—it has quite disordered him. Pray, pay no attention, especially to any threats to you or the Tsar, and accept our most abject apologies.”
The Hussar in front spat into the dust in disdain. His uniform dripped with more gold braid than any of the others’, which probably meant he was the captain. “We would no more pay attention to your father’s threats than we would the tiresome buzzing of a fly. The Tsar has commanded us to take a cabbage tithe. All you have is on sufferance from His Radiance; these are not your cabbages that we are taking, they are rightfully his. Any that are in excess of the required tithe, you may keep. If your tithe today is insufficient, we will return in a month for the rest.”
Father’s face turned a shade of purple that Ivan had not known existed in the world. He gripped his father’s axe hand even tighter and overrode his strangled protest.
“Yes, of course, take what you must. We are loyal subjects of the Tsar’s, long may he live and prosper.”
“Excellent. Now harvest a hundred heads for us, and throw them into the cart.”
“A hundred?” father exploded. The arm holding the axe, brawny with muscle, jerked and struggled in Ivan’s grip, but Ivan was bigger and stronger; father reluctantly, resentfully subsided.
And Ivan could hardly blame him. He doubted they had more than forty heads of cabbage in their fields. They would be lucky to have a hundred the entire year, with things going as badly as they had been.
Hungry was better than beheaded, however, and Ivan knew they had a few stored in the root cellar that these soldiers did not know about, so they had those to tide them through.
At least the cabbages tasted terrible. Ivan hoped the Tsar choked on them.
Ivan looked over at father, who was still quivering with rage. “I wish you joy with the harvest,” said father. “If you want those cabbages so badly, you can cut them yourself.” He spat at the ground, shook himself free of Ivan’s hold, and stalked off to the wood shed, axe slung over his shoulder.
Ivan looked at the Hussars, hoping his own seething resentment did not show. They had so little, and now the Tsar would take the last vestiges of what they had left. “I will harvest as many as required. Let me grab my sickle.”
The captain looked over at one of his men—a boy, really, not much older than Ivan himself, but with massive shoulders, easily twice as wide as his—and said “Boris, go help this peasant with his cabbages. It is only fitting, really, since you will be enjoying its benefits more than the rest of us.” The rest of the men sniggered; Boris’s face hardened, but he nodded and slid off his horse to follow Ivan as he made his way to the shed where they kept their farming equipment.
“I’ll need a sickle too, I suppose,” he said, his voice a bass rumble that resonated through Ivan and made the fine hairs on his neck stand at attention. Ivan glanced at him, then looked away as quickly as he could.
He had never seen anyone so beautiful. Ivan’s family owned exactly two books: a Bible, and an illustrated tome of folk stories and fairy tales. Boris looked like he could have stepped out of the pages of the latter—perhaps a princeling who had done something foolish to lose his beloved and now needed to go on a quest to retrieve her. His skin was satiny smooth and unblemished, a pale burnished gold from the sun; the hair that curled out from under his shako was a light blonde. In combination with his eyes, which were a glittering golden brown, and his expression, which was stern and haughty, he gave the overwhelming impression of being a golden statue come to life.
Ivan was quite sure his pounding heart and quickened breath were due to his run from the water pump. Very sure. There was no other conceivable reason.
He went into the shed and found a sickle. He thrust it at Boris, who took it and turned it over in his hands. “How do you use this thing?” he asked, an eyebrow raised in skeptical disdain.
“It’s dead easy. I’ll show you,” said Ivan, snagging two of their harvest baskets and giving one to Boris. “The cabbage patch is this way.”
They walked in silence for some minutes, Ivan darting the occasional secret look at Boris. He did not look like the same species as Ivan. Boris was sleek and smooth and well-muscled, like the Hussar’s horses. Ivan was very tall and very strong, and could generously be characterized as “lean,” but more accurate would probably be “rawboned,” or “gaunt.” He was perpetually covered in greyish brown soil dust, no matter how often he washed. His wavy black hair was wiry and unruly. He was about as sleek and smooth as a bristle brush.
“So,” said Ivan as they neared the cabbage patch, “What is the cabbage tithe? We have never been subject to one before. It seems awfully specific.”
Boris looked at him in astonishment, then sniffed in disdain. “Why, we need it for the wrestling, of course. The drought this year has resulted in a countrywide cabbage shortage, and the Tsar has deemed it necessary to exact a tithe to support our glorious national sport.”
Ivan blinked. Surely he had not heard correctly. “Wrestling,” he said, trying to sound thoughtful but coming out tentative instead. “With…cabbages?”
Good God in Heaven, what were they doing in the cities, wrestling vegetables? It did not seem like any sort of challenge whatsoever, and it was sure to make a terrible mess in the bargain. City people were deranged, clearly.
Boris’s disdain transformed into incredulity. “My god, do you yokels know nothing?” he said. “Of course we don’t wrestle with the individual heads of cabbage. What a pointless endeavor! No, we turn the cabbage into hot sauerkraut, then we pour it into a large, shallow pool, get naked, and wrestle in it.”
Ivan was silent for some moments as he tried to wrap his mind around this. “Right. But that’s worse,” he said. “You do understand how that’s worse, right?”
Boris reared back as if struck and stopped in his paces. Ivan stopped with him, and was treated to a searing glare.
“How dare you malign our beloved national sport,” Boris growled, his voice so low that Ivan gave a small, involuntary shiver. “But then I cannot expect your provincial mind to grasp its magnificence. There, in the wrestling pool, naked as God made you, the fiery brine permeating your every surface and crevice, it is a matter of pure endurance. You must defeat your opponent—you must pin them to the ground, subjugate them to your will with skill and cunning and the undiluted strength of your muscles—but you must also outlast the burning that eats you from the outside in. To truly prevail in the Tsar’s favored sport, you must not only best your opponent, you must best yourself. A man who does not love naked hot sauerkraut wrestling truly cannot be said to love our country.”
Oh. Oh no. Lurid images flashed in Ivan’s brain with Boris’s recitation, including one of Boris, glorious and golden and naked, covered in fermented cabbage and pinning somebody down, his knee on the small of their back, a grimace of triumph on his face.
Ivan should not like this. He was very sure he should not like this. Except…it was apparently patriotic for him to like it?
He was so confused.
He took refuge in a show of servility, which he had learned from earliest childhood was a necessary, if not always effective, means of pacifying people with much more power than he had. He dropped his gaze, hunched his shoulders forward, and bowed his head.
“I am sorry,” he said, trying to inject as much humbleness into his voice as he could. “I did not understand. I do now. Thank you for instructing me.”
Ivan furtively peeped at Boris’s face from under his eyelashes. He did not look especially mollified, but he did turn around with a huff and march towards the cabbage field. “Pah. How can you understand anything, living in a place like this?” he said.
The contempt in his voice burned Ivan, not unlike how he imagined hot sauerkraut brine would feel on his skin. He flushed, but decided he had opened his big mouth enough times already. He showed Boris how to use the sickle to harvest their puny, bitter cabbages. Working silently, they made short work of their task.
After they loaded the cabbages into the cart, they walked back to the front of the house, where the rest of the Hussars sat on their horses, idly gossiping while their mounts swished their tails to keep the flies off their haunches. The captain’s eyes lit with a malicious glee when he saw Boris return, covered in the dust of the cabbage fields.
“Ah, there returns our champion,” he said. “How does it feel to know that soon you will be besting Saint Petersburg’s finest in a vat of cabbage you harvested with your own hands, eh?”
Boris colored, but did not deign to respond, instead mounting his horse and shooting a look of loathing at the captain. As Ivan looked at the captain, then back at Boris, understanding dawned on him. No wonder Boris had been so angry—he must have felt personally insulted, and Heaven knew how many barbs he had to suffer every day from the captain as it was; taking more from an unwashed peasant like Ivan must have felt like the last straw.
“Do we not have more tithes to collect for the Tsar, or must we continue to sit around and gossip like old women with nothing better to do?” said Boris.
The captain glared at Boris, but clearly being the national naked hot sauerkraut wrestling champion gave one a little leeway, for instead of punishing Boris for his insolence, he signaled the others to move on. In not too long, the Tsar’s men were no more than puffs of dust in the distance, headed to the next farm to pillage their cabbages.
Ivan looked over at the now-bare cabbage field, and worried about the Hussars returning in a month to demand more cabbages where none existed, a worry that followed him all day and into the night—that is, until he lay in bed and closed his eyes; then, the only thing he could see, the only thing he could think about, no matter how hard he tried, was Boris, nude and striving, conquering a faceless man while every muscle on his body glistened with moisture.
###
The unthinkable happened in September, one week before the Tsar’s men were due to return.
It was the cabbages. Of course it was the cabbages. The ones they had hidden in the root cellar had all turned black with mold. Ivan had insisted on throwing them away, fighting his mother all the way, who hated to waste food.
“Better to go hungry than to be poisoned,” Ivan said. “I will go into the woods and forage, mother, but you cannot eat this cabbage!”
He thought she had thrown them away. She must have kept them hidden and eaten them in secret, however, because during a hot, dry morning, yet another in an endless series of hot, dry mornings, mother fell over while cooking breakfast and vomited string after string of blackened cabbage.
Father cleaned mother up and bundled her into bed while Ivan harnessed their mule and somehow coaxed the bundle of skin and bones to jog all the way to the doctor in the village five miles away. Using a mixture of cajolery and bullying, Ivan convinced him to come back to the farm despite having nothing to pay him with, not even eggs, since most of the hens had stopped laying a week ago.
Mother had deteriorated rapidly in the hours Ivan had been gone. She was feverish and raving in bed, periodically pausing to retch into the bucket father had set by her, but there was nothing left, not even bile. The doctor felt her forehead, looked at her eyes, took her pulse, and asked to look at the cabbage mother had thrown up. His face became very grave as he poked at the slimy remains with a stick.
“There is no cure for this,” he said. “That mold is very bad news; it kills cows and horses faster than you can blink when they eat infected hay. See if you can get her to keep down water; the lack of it is what kills the fastest. We shall hope that the fever goes away quickly.” It was clear from the look on the doctor’s face that he did not think it especially likely.
Ivan wanted to scream, but instead, he thanked the doctor politely, promised he would have the fee for him next week while the doctor pretended to believe him, and saw him out the door.
He went back to the bedroom where mother reclined on a small mound consisting of every pillow in the house, panting lightly while father held a cup to her lips.
“Drink,” he said, voice harsh but eyes wet with worry and grief. “The doctor says you must.”
Mother took a few sips, then shook her head and pushed the cup away. “No,” she whispered. “Stomach hurts.”
Ivan sat down next to her. “Mama,” he whispered. “Why, mama? I told you the cabbage was poison. Did you not believe me?”
She looked over at him, her eyes already alarmingly sunken in her face. They had all grown thinner as food had become scarcer, but how had Ivan not noticed how much harder it had been on his mother? She held out a trembling hand, and he brought it to his lips.
“I did it for you, Vanya,” she said. “If I ate the cabbage, I would be more full, so you had more to eat.” She gave a small smile. “Ah, well, my plan might have worked better than I could have dreamed; you may not have this mouth to feed much longer.”
“Do not say such things!” barked father.
Mother turned to father. “It does not matter what I say, or don’t. It is now in God’s hands.”
And then she vomited the three sips of water she had just drunk.
###
It did not take long. The doctor was right: lack of water killed a person rapidly, and they could not get mother to keep a sip down for more than a few minutes. By the next day, she had sunk into a torpor they could not rouse her from. Ivan and father took turns sitting by her bedside, squeezing drops of water from a wet cloth into her mouth, both of them struggling not to cry.
The morning after, Ivan woke to a crash. His first thought was that the pig had gotten into the vodka mash again, but then he remembered she was gone now, slaughtered for meat a few weeks ago. He pulled on his trousers and his shirt as fast as he could, and was running out of his room while trying to button his trouser flaps when he heard more crashing, and realized the sounds were coming from inside the house.
A bellow ripped through the air, the sound like an aggrieved bull. As he rounded the corner into the living area, he ducked barely in time as the axe whistled past where his face had been mere moments ago and embedded itself into the wall. Father, his eyes wide open and wild, chest heaving like a bellows, stared at Ivan, huddled against the wall with his arms over his head. Father’s hands, beset by tremors, still held the handle of the axe. Behind him, the room was a wreck: the furniture chopped to splinters, chunks gouged out of the wall.
“She’s dead,” he croaked at Ivan. “Your mother is dead. My beautiful Masha. Dead. Dead!” As he wailed that last word, he heaved the axe out of the wall. “And all because of the accursed Tsar and the accursed cabbage tithe. If your mother had fresh cabbage to eat she would never have poisoned herself. May God rot every last one of those men in hell! I hope Satan himself rips the Tsar’s bowels out of his body with his teeth. I hope they—I hope th-they—”
Sobs began to shake father. The axe wobbled in his grasp. Ivan stood up and walked over to his father and pulled the axe out of his unresisting fingers, throwing it across the room in a clatter. Ivan held his father close as they both wept, bitter tears spilling out of them in a painful flood.
As they calmed down and drew apart, wiping their eyes with the hems of their shirts, Ivan was struck with the certainty of what he needed to do next.
“We will bury mother out amongst the cabbages,” he said. “Or at least, where the cabbages used to be before the Tsar’s men came and wrenched them from us. Papa, I promise you this: I will go to Saint Petersburg, and I will exact my revenge on the Tsar’s men and on the Tsar himself. With God as my witness, I will put a stop to this unholy sport that has taken my mother’s life, or die trying."