Wild Sorrel

The cliff descending to the Volkhov is overgrown with a carpet of wild sorrel, but the willows near St. George’s Church have barely begun to turn green. The last April snow is greying in the lowlands, but rooks and river gulls already dart above the river, now free of ice. Twelve kilometers to the north, the expanse of Lake Ladoga, illuminated by the still-weak northern sun, opens up before the Volkhov.

“Inventory of the baptism of Anastasia, daughter of the Old Ladoga bourgeois Alexei Fyodorovich Mukhin and his wife, Tatyana Ivanovna, dated January 5, 1915.”

My great-grandfather, Alexei Fyodorovich, a river pilot, avoided conscription into the army and continued to steer ships from Ilmen, the great lake, to Ladoga and the Neva and to sea, from where, as the ancient chronicler said, the road to Rome and Constantinople unfolds.

The description of his wedding, two years before my grandmother was born, also comes from St. George’s Church — a perfect elongated cube, as if molded from sugar, crowned with a helmet-shaped dome.

Inside, on bright pre-Mongol frescoes, a princess in a snow-white robe leads a scaly dragon resigned to its fate on a leash, while the handsome George, on a lily-white stallion, tramples the creature under his horse’s hooves.

The dragon, however, gazes at the princess with affection, and a red cloak flutters behind George’s shoulders.

“A lock, golden gates, red walls, an azure field.”
— Coat of arms of the Ladoga Regiment in the flag armorial of General Minikh, 1730.

The locks made the Volkhov navigable from Ladoga to Novgorod, where in Varangian times only small boats could reach. Auger boats from across the Baltic Sea moored in Old Ladoga, having passed through the Neva and the lake, and descended south.

The rooks cry freely, joyfully, and a motorboat rattles on the Volkhov. The northern sky never presses down on a person descending the cliff to the white sand along the river. On the contrary, it opens its arms, lulls with grey clouds, and reveals a foggy horizon in the north. Beyond it lie Ladoga and the sea, the Varangians, Rome, and Constantinople.

The second cathedral of Staraya Ladoga, the Assumption Cathedral, also dates back to pre-Mongol times, though its frescoes have not survived the eight centuries separating us from the days when the Novgorodians, having expelled Prince Vsevolod, decided to live by their own wits. It was then that the mayor Pavel founded Ladoga as a stone city, replacing the wooden walls of the old fortress that had stood there since Rurik’s time.

The beautiful, eerie murmuring of the Chud, Ves, and Vod was replaced by the ringing of spears and shields—Aldegeya, Ingigerda, who received these lands, which later became Ingria, as a dowry when she married Yaroslav the Wise.

Fire pits blacken the sand on the riverbank, the clay on the slope has been washed away by rains, and the timid light breaking through the clouds silvers the dull metal. An earring from the time of Ingigerda? An Arab dirham? A coin from the reign of Ivan the Terrible, or the remains of a Swedish sabre?

Svensk ödeläggelse

År 1164 motstod fästningen en attack av svenskarna på 55 skepp (Novgorodrepubliken).År 1313 intog svenskarna fästningen och brände ner den (Novgorodrepubliken).År 1338 stormade svenskarna utan framgång fästningen (Novgorodrepubliken).År 1610 intog svenskarna fästningen.År 1701 belägrade svenskarna fästningen för sista gången.

1164: They came in 55 ships.

1313: They burned the fortress.

1338: They failed to take it.

1610: They succeeded.

1701: They came one last time.

Wild sorrel sours the lips; the Volkhov water chills them. The river is still icy, cramping the hands as it flows inexorably north.

How many times did the boats of the helmsman Mukha cross the Volkhov rapids? How many times did the river flood, even turning back under the pressure of the water in its tributaries?

“In the year 6684, the Volkhov again went to flood for five days.”

That was sixty years after the founding of stone Ladoga. And why was he called Mukha, The Fly? Was he short and light, like my grandmother Anastasia Alekseyevna, like her father, Alexei Fyodorovich — all fair-haired and light-eyed, slow and thorough northern people?

“In the Votskaya Pyatina is the city of Ladoga on the Volkhov River. The people in the settlement are the best. At the Bogorodsky end is the yard of Danilo Trufanov Mukha and his children Mikulka and Makoveyka.”
— Census book of the Vodskaya Pyatina, 1500.

Danilo Mukha lived very close to the riverbank, and his predecessor was buried in the Volkhov clay — with hewn logs, with rusty horseshoes, with birch bark and multi-colored glass beads — with the best people, with the salt of the earth.

“In the year 6613 [1105], the bishops were appointed. In that same year, we went to Ladoga to fight…”

ᚾᛟᛒᛟᛞᚤ ᚴᚾᛟᚹᛋ ᚹᚺᚨᛏ ᚹᚨᛋ ᛒᛖᚠᛟᚱᛖ.

ᛏᚺᛖ ᛖᚾᛞ1

Nelly Shulman’s prose was published in numerous literary magazines and
anthologies and she has authored three collections of short stories.
She is a member of The Society of Authors (UK).