The Revolution of Marina M.

70 Novinka

I AWOKE TO BLACK and the scent of evergreens. I couldn’t believe I’d slept but I must have. In the darkness, the shelter actually seemed warmer—like a bear’s den. I had lived through the night. Thank you, I prayed to the brush pile. Was it morning? There was no way to tell. I didn’t want to emerge too early, like a misguided crocus, to find it was still night, or be caught in the blizzard. But I didn’t hear anything, and after a few minutes I reached for a stick, and thrust it between the layers of boughs sealing off the mouth of the lean-to, working my arm through the brush until I felt snow. Carefully, I turned over onto my belly—and, yes, through a patch of snow I could see a faint glow—daylight.

I clawed my way out like a chicken from an egg and burst into the world so violently that parts of the shelter collapsed. It was a bitter morning, but the gray light was as good as rainbows in the falling snow. Oh praises, oh glory and hosanna, the wind had stopped blowing! Bless Pushkin, Seryozha, the Virgin, and anyone else who had joined me in that grave through that long night.

I took care of my needs and stood looking at my shelter with the fondness with which one gazes at one’s own mother. It had saved me. I would never ever doubt that I had survived for a reason. That there were forces that wanted me to live. I began to follow my clues back to the road—broken branches, the twin pines—and turned left at the road to Alekhovshchina. My boots, having been burned, were worse than before, but I was alive in them.

Alekhovshchina proved to be a large village half a day’s walk from where I’d buried myself. No way could I ever have reached it in time. Gratitude swelled within me. I had made the right decision. I wasn’t as foolish as I thought I was. A printer and his wife gave me a bite of supper, and their neighbor, a wizened crone, treated my frostbite with a stinking poultice. She wouldn’t tell me what was in it—chicken dung?—and kept laughing whenever she looked at me. I had a feeling she could see right through my Misha disguise. The old printer hinted that if I wanted to stay on, he could use a smart boy with good eyes, quick hands. But Novinka was only an hour or two farther, and Misha had places to go. Maryino had taken on a mythic significance for me by now. It was Kitezh, it was the kingdom beyond the seas seven times seven.

I found the road and soon began to recognize landmarks. A huge wide spruce. A fence with decorative piercings. Dusk fell, but already I could see the lit windows of the village, smell its dinners cooking in huts covered by the snowstorm.

As I entered its single lane, I was pleased to find it was no longer the vaguely threatening place I remembered. I eyed its small brood of izbas with the clear, slightly appraising eye of a salesman. I easily imagined its poverty, its worries, its petty rivalries, brutalities, and simple joys, which brought back thoughts of Kolya, and then his rural mistress, whose good jam I had just eaten. What was she doing now, that village seductress? No doubt still dreaming of the clever stranger she’d had in the bathhouse, the sweet words he’d poured into her ear. Probably she was feeling worse than before, when she hadn’t known how sweet a man’s love could be.

The hamlet was quiet, peaceful. I stopped an old peasant heading toward one of the poorer huts. “Excuse me, Grandpa, but does Lyuda, Olya’s daughter, still live here? She was going to marry the blacksmith, last time I heard.” The old man eyed me, alarmed. Did he recognize this boy covered with snow and wrapped in a sheepskin as the little barynya from up at the manor house?

“They’re having a meeting,” he spat. “Meetings. And nobody gets a speck of work done. Only talk talk talk.” His thin jowls flapped, his mouth sunken in. “You could lift the whole village on that hot air.”

“Where are they meeting, Granddad?”

“At the blacksmith’s, boy. At the blacksmith’s,” he drawled, disgusted with my ignorance. “Where else would they be?” He tramped into his windowless hut and slammed the door.

I poked around until I heard voices—a group arguing and a woman’s voice, high and assertive, cutting through the others. The smell of smoke led me to lit windows. Through the fogged and dirty glass, I could see ten or twelve peasants deep in discussion. I strained to see if there were any leather jackets in attendance and was happy to detect only kerchiefs and caps. Even so, I didn’t want to announce my presence, so I waited in the lee of a cabin—by the woodpile, stacked to the eaves for winter—and watched the doorway.

So the revolution had come to Novinka. I imagined what my grandfather would have said of such a meeting, of Soviet rule in general. My Golovin grandfather, who still spoke of “our peasants”—as did my mother, truth be told, in unguarded moments. People we had once owned. Human beings. Our village. Our land. Our country.

My nose burned with frostbite from the night before. I could smell the old baba’s poultice—resinous, sharp, suspiciously fishy, even in the cold. At last the peasants emerged from their meeting, talking as they went out, like people coming out of church. A few lingered in a cluster to talk in the doorway. Hurry up! I stamped my feet to keep them awake. Finally the peasants dribbled off into the night, leaving a single woman to lock up.

I wasn’t sure. The braid was gone, but the movements were still hers, quick and decisive. I came closer, crossing the dark lane. The woman stepped out from the cover of the porch.

“Lyuda,” I whispered.

She stopped, lifted her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sifting flakes. “Who’s that?”

I couldn’t exactly shout out my name. Who knew what the situation in the village was these days? But I imagined whatever attention I might draw here wouldn’t be all that welcoming. “So you married the blacksmith.” I called it out softly, continuing to approach—slowly, as one would approach a dog in the road. Darkness had fallen. Nobody seeing us could tell who it was. She stepped forward. “Who are you?”

“They say there was once a cow from Novinka…”

And now it came, the sharp intake of her breath. She rushed forward into the snow to grab me by the arm, pull me back into the cover of the blacksmith’s shop. She embraced me, glancing around, back over her shoulder. “Shh.” Unlocking the door, heavily padlocked with an American Yale lock. “Buistro!” Hurry! We slipped inside. She lit a kerosene lamp, pulled off her head scarf.

Lyuda had changed and yet not changed. Her hair was short now, though not as short as mine, and her wide-boned face had become quite arresting. She tucked her hair behind a well-formed small ear. “I didn’t recognize you in that getup. Who are you supposed to be, the phantom woodcutter?”

I looked down at my sheepskin, my trousers stuck in my boots. I took off the scarf and knocked the snow off my cap. “Safer for traveling.”

“What—did you walk all the way from Petrograd?” I recognized the warmth of her smile, the gap between her front two teeth. “Look at you—what a mess! Well, anyway, it’s good to see you. Been a long time.”

Tears sprang to my eyes at her words of kindness, surprising me. She couldn’t have imagined how long it had been since anybody who knew me had welcomed me anywhere. I shrugged my Misha shrug. “Going to Maryino. You know, just wanted to know the lay of the land. You’re looking good. How’re things here? Mind if I sit down?” I’d been standing too long, four days too long, and the black potbellied stove was still hot from the meeting. No shortage of firewood here. I sat down on a stump that they’d been using as a stool, took off my boot and rubbed my frostbitten toes. They hurt like the very devil. “So you didn’t go to Petrograd after all.”

“As you see.” She smiled, trying to conceal an obvious pride, an air of superiority even.

“And it’s been okay? The blacksmith?”

“I’m on the committee now. He doesn’t dare get out of line. I’d throw him out on his ear.”

This was what Faina had needed. Soviet Power. Lyuda was going to live a very different life from the peasant wives of the last generation. I looked around the shop. It was nice here, warm. Harnesses hung from the walls, chains and traces and all sorts of tools for refashioning them—tools! Better than any bank account. Huge hammers, an anvil—black and evil-looking—and the fire pit. Lyuda draped her scarf over the back of a chair by the stove, around which were arrayed a collection of mismatched stools and crates from the meeting. She’d grown into a solid, capable-looking young woman. I could only imagine what she thought of this scarecrow who stood before her.

I put my foot back in the boot and unsheathed the other one, held it out to the fire. I hoped it didn’t stink too badly. “What’s going on at Maryino?” I asked as casually as I could.

She put a kettle on the stove, using her skirt as a potholder. “Nobody goes out there,” she said. “All sorts of strange things going on. We don’t bother them and they don’t bother us.”

“Strange how?”

She gave me a look that was pure Lyuda, a bit impish, more than a bit stubborn. “You’ll have to see for yourself.”

“Is Mother there?”

“We don’t know a thing about it,” she said, running her hand along a piece of harness, stroking the worn leather. “And that’s the way it’s got to be. Understand?” She leveled her gaze at me.

I didn’t. But I felt that my mother was there, maybe even my father. Was that what she was telling me? The committee was protecting them. She was protecting them.

“Are you in the party now?”

She nodded, once, emphatically. “Since last September.” She set up two glasses for tea, glasses that had clearly been used earlier by members of the committee. “Everything’s changed. Novinka’s joined the modern world, if you can believe it. What we think matters. Even what the cow thinks. We sent a representative to Tikhvin this fall, after the harvest… you don’t have any tea on you, do you?” I should have brought a gift, but it hadn’t occurred to me. And even if it had, what could I have brought? Fir boughs? Lyuda sighed and put some sort of leaves in the brown teapot. “What good are the bourgeoisie if you’re poorer than us?” she said to the teapot. She poured the boiling water into the pot. “Only guess who the representative was.”

“The cow?”

“Idiot.” She tucked her hair behind her ear again, pleased with herself, and for good reason. She had done well, a barefoot village girl becoming the representative of the local committee, voting in regional meetings at Tikhvin. And all this had happened not in a generation, but in a mere two years. I was proud of her, proud of all of us. This was what the revolution had been for. Not the glacial changes my father had envisioned, so incremental that they never would have happened—the bourgeoisie would have made sure of that. “We haven’t bothered them out there,” she continued. “We’re not Alekhovshchina. They’re really going for the prize, lording it over everyone, those stick-up-the-ass bastards. We don’t need Alekhovshchina around here, telling us what to do. I guess we can wipe our asses all by ourselves. But they’re not all that safe there at Maryino. Tell them that. It’s only a matter of time.”

My refuge, which I hadn’t yet seen, was already in jeopardy—like a house that begins to crumble just as soon as you carry your bags in.

71 Maryino

IN THE MORNING, LYUDA brought me a bowl of hot kasha and sent me off before the blacksmith arose. But first, she agreed to sell me a chicken and some grain to feed it with. I kept it warm under my coat as I walked along. I could feel it fluttering there, its heartbeat, as I made my way through virgin snow that reached to the tops of my boots and above. It was slow going but I didn’t care. I was so close to Maryino I could smell it. Although I had to follow fences to stay on the road, I knew where I was. I couldn’t get lost, and my excitement urged me onward. Eventually dawn emerged weakly from under the night’s heavy cloak. It would not brighten to much more than twilight on a day like this.

I tried to steel myself for the worst. I’d seen ruined manor houses, their broad roofs caved in, their steps buckled, trees all cut down, doors and windows boarded up. But that wasn’t what Lyuda was intimating. It was something else. And if it was livable… I would find a way to live there. I was sure, now, after my night in the forest, that there was a reason for my life. I’d never doubt it again. The chicken curled quiet and warm under my sheepskin next to my heart. She was a good layer, Lyuda had said. I was just glad for the company.

The shape of the land became more familiar. That peculiar formation of trees, a fallen pine, that copse. That ridge like a bristly pig’s back, falling off toward the unseen river. I recognized it all. Only the heaviness of the snow kept me from running. Here, the very turn of the river where the house nestled beyond the line of trees. The squawk of crows in the birches and the occasional movement of the chicken accompanied my ragged breathing as I plunged through the accumulated inches like a short-legged dog.

A white plume of smoke rose from the trees through the quiet veil of falling snow—chimney smoke. The house was alive. Joyfully, I crept closer, tramping through the allée of bare lindens. At last the house came into view. Maryino! Its gingerbread woodwork still white against the black wood, the windows intact, the roof. But in the yard, there was too much light. I realized that the enormous larch had been cut down. A hatchet rested in the reddish stump amid shards of wood. Firewood lay stacked against the house all down its right side. So much fuel—enough for a whole winter if carefully shepherded. Dear house! It knew me, too. It was not fooled by my youth’s disguise. I hadn’t changed so very much after all. It was like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, who recognized his master after twenty years.

And yet who would have had the strength to cut such a tree, I wondered, and move all that wood? I shrank back against the cover of some little pines to watch and wait. Perhaps Mother and Avdokia had a man living with them, or someone from the village. But it might be someone else—squatters, deserters. The double windows had been hung, windows I’d never actually seen in place, only stored in the shed. The steps had been swept as well, and paths dug out from the house to the outbuildings and into the woods. The industry was clear, and recent. So tidy that I couldn’t imagine it was deserters. It had to be peasants, though this was tidy even for them. A Cheka outpost? No—Lyuda would have told me. She wouldn’t have let me walk into something like that.

Perhaps it was my father come back after Red Terror, waiting things out for another try at Petrograd. I thought of the conspirators assembled in the dacha at Pulkovo. But I couldn’t imagine them digging paths. They would have tried to be as inconspicuous as possible.

I crouched in the trees. The chicken’s warm fluttering under my coat felt like my heart held gently outside my body. I’d traveled so long, all this way, but had no plan, only the destination.

A woman in a patchwork quilted coat emerged from the kitchen door and walked away toward a shed, a basket over her arm. She moved gracefully, as if she were being watched. Like a dancer onstage. No, this wasn’t my father and his cronies. Then a man emerged from the same door, a handsome young one in a black beard and, like the girl, in thick padded coat that looked like it was quilted from rags, and a strange patchwork hat with a point on the top. He picked out some wood from the pile, carried it down the stairs to the stump, and proceeded to split it for kindling. He was precise and unhurried, like a woodcutter in a fairy tale. It all seemed so… enchanted. He stopped for a moment as if sensing something. I hunched down with my chicken. Could he smell me in the snow? Was it that frostbite medicine, which smelled like dead herring? He listened, then went back to his work. He didn’t work like a laborer. I couldn’t describe it, but it was as if he were playing a role onstage: the Woodcutter.

The woman came back from the shed like a maiden in a processional. What in the devil was going on here? Who were these people? Some sort of stranded theater troupe? Had I stumbled into the world of my childhood fantasies? I sidled along through the trees toward that shed. As I got close, I could hear squawking and crowing inside, and my chicken started to rustle and claw me. In the house, dogs barked. I opened the shed door a crack. A chicken coop, nicely appointed, lined with wood chips and shavings. Twenty fat hens flapped their wings and a tall black rooster ran at me, trying to fight me.

I latched the coop and backed away, looking for the best place to hide. Then suddenly two huge dogs appeared on the porch. They hurled themselves down the steps, racing toward me. I opened the chicken coop and closed myself inside moments before the dogs crashed into the door, their weight heaving the boards. They continued barking and growling while the rooster attacked me from within. I gave him a good kick while keeping my shoulder to the door, praying someone would rescue me. Had I been through all this only to be mauled by dogs?

“Bonya. Buyan,” a man’s voice clearly articulated. The growling and scratching stopped immediately. “Come out, thief.”

I cracked open the coop door. “I’m not a thief.”

“Don’t try my patience. Show yourself.”

I opened the door and slid out. The dogs sat on either side of a broad-chested, moustached man wearing a long sheepskin coat, Mongolian style, and an astrakhan hat. Behind him stood a motley array of young people, all in the strange colorful dress I’d seen before. The older man appeared to be unarmed, but I kept one hand up, the other pressing my chicken under my coat. “I’m not a thief. This is my chicken. I came with it. I bought it in Novinka. I have grain for it, too.”

He tilted his head at a dark-haired girl who’d come to his side. She had an eyebrow that grew together in the middle, like a gypsy’s, and she had a gypsy’s confident stare. She approached me and I pulled the white chicken from the warmth beneath my coat. It began to flap and struggle as soon as it was exposed to the light and the cold. She took it from me by its feet.

“And the sack,” said the man, and she took that as well.

She brought my belongings to him, and he began to go through them, keeping one eye on me. The others watched from the porch, as if there were to be a horse race or a public hanging. “Who are you people?”

The man’s eyes, black and slightly popped, like glass eyes in a case, ran over my face and form. He was dark, with a bull’s neck and a shaved head, a long moustache, and a ring in his ear. He continued examining the contents of my bag. He produced the jar of jam, which he opened and sniffed, tasted; then the small bundle of grain, which he rolled between his fingers. Then my women’s clothes, my peasant’s dress, which he fingered, then lifted to his nostrils. It was obscene. I knew then that he knew Misha was really a woman. He would call my bluff, as they said in poker. But he didn’t. He just stuffed it all back in the bag, threw it at my feet.

Now he walked a circle around me, hands behind his back, as if I was a bit of statuary someone had deposited in his yard. Pulled off my cap and dropped it at my feet in the snow. “Who are you?” he asked in perfect Russian.

“Misha,” I said. “What about you, Pops?”

He glowered at my insolence. “How did you find your way here? Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m from here. I knew the way.” I didn’t want to say how. For all he knew I was the son—or daughter—of a servant. “I was living in Petrograd, but it’s a bad time in the city. I decided to come back.”

His face betrayed nothing. He came closer, sniffed my hair. He looked like the strong man in a circus, and he smelled of something. Incense? Saddle leather? “You’ve been in the village. What do they say about us?”

“They didn’t say anything. Only that your business was your own.” I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed ahead, like a good soldier.

“Until it’s not,” he said. He kept walking, his gait that of a military man, commanding. Perhaps he was a deserter, a noncommissioned officer hiding out, hoping to avoid the new draft. But who were these others? I counted six of them, four young women, including the gypsy, plus the young man who’d been chopping kindling and an older one in wire spectacles, his hair a wild bush—an intelligent if ever I’d seen one. Behind them, I could see what they could not—myself as a child, peering out from the lilac bushes beside the kitchen door, sticking out my tongue, and the ghost of my Golovin grandmother standing on the porch, preparing to summon her coachman to escort these strange people off the land.

“Go back to the village,” he told me. “Tell them monsters are living here.” He made a terrible grimace, and the others laughed. “With three legs and four heads. We’ll come and eat their children if they’re not good. Go on. Pick up your things and go.” He turned back to the house.

I picked up my bag. “My chicken,” I called after him.

He gave the order like a king expecting to be obeyed. “Give it its chicken back.”

The dark-haired girl handed me the white chicken, which I put back under my coat. That was it? He was sending me away? Returning me like a flat of bad eggs? “I walked all the way from Tikhvin. I slept in the forest. And now you’re going to shoo me away like some stray dog?”

“Isn’t that what you are?” he asked.

“I belong here.”

His people waited like children, not sure what was going to happen. Obviously few people said no to this man, this sergeant or corporal or whatever he’d been at the front.

“Suit yourself.” He turned and mounted the porch steps as if rising to a dais, and his entourage followed him like little ducks. They all went inside, and left me standing in the yard.

Snow fell softly on my cheeks, like the lightest touch of hands.

Well, I wouldn’t leave. I would stand here until they gave in, until someone took pity. I had foisted myself on the most hard-hearted of peasants, I would not be turned away now. Because I had no other ideas. I had reached the end of my resources. I walked out to a place where they could all see me—the larch stump, which was as wide as a table. I sat on it and watched the house, glancing up at the windows, wondering who was watching me. Nothing mattered but to be here, to spend the night under this roof again. I was home and here I would stay. I would simply outlast them. For the first time, I understood that the secret of resistance wasn’t heroism but simple pigheaded balk. There was no question of a fight—I didn’t have the strength—but I would shame him, if nothing else.

I toyed with the hatchet, slicing off shards of wood into smaller and smaller bits. I breathed great clouds of steam, my legs crossed, like a homeowner relaxing in his yard, smoking a cigarette. Yes, I was home. I knew that ownership was a thing of the past, but nevertheless, in some gut-level way, this was mine. The frosted gingerbread of the old-fashioned house, built by my great-grandfather for his bride, the allée, the aspens and forest, the river. How funny that it took a revolution for me to care, to feel its deep roots entwined with my own. Yet the larch had been cut down, as our family had been cut down. So which was the metaphor?

So many evenings on that broad porch. White nights and fireflies, our songs and plays. The tables and chairs set out in the yard for lunches and dinners with visitors. Lying on the musty cushions of the wicker chaise reading Oliver Twist and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo on drizzly summer afternoons. Wordsworth and Keats… Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art… The requisite nap in the white-curtained nursery, the silence of those hot hours. Yes, the house knew me. If it were a puppy it would leap up and lick my face. It was these strange people who didn’t belong. Someone inside played the flute, a mournful, quarter-tone Eastern melody, bizarre yet pleasant on the frosty air.

I balled up some snow, packed it tight and threw it against the front door. It plashed with a satisfying splat, the dry new snow bursting against the glass and the wood. It was getting colder, but I would not leave. I wondered what time it was, but the sky was still a uniform yellow-gray.

In a little while, a lovely doe-eyed girl with a finely drawn face and motley coat came out, and, holding her head high, she marched up to me and put something on the stump. Steaming—a potato. She gave me a single strong look, as if to say, Don’t lose hope, then marched back to the house, slim and straight as a birch tree. I cradled the potato in my frozen hands, let it warm me, pressed it to my face. I had a friend here. And a potato. I was rich indeed.

I waited until the potato had cooled before I ate it. The snow built up on my sleeves. I didn’t brush it off, in hopes it would stir greater pity. I fed the chicken little bits of grain from my sack, its head peeping out the V of my coat. My ears were freezing under the poor cap, but I didn’t want to wrap my head in the scarf. I wanted them to see me, this poor boy they were leaving out in the snow. I wanted to pluck their hearts. I’d already won one of them over—how difficult could the rest be?

The front door banged back, and in the opening stood a tiny, bowlegged figure in a blue head scarf. “Merciful Virgin, you’re alive! Marinoushka!” She broke into a tottering half run, holding the railing, sidestepping down the porch stairs, running to me, clutching at me, kissing my hands in their dirty gloves, holding my face, crushing me to her. The chicken clawed at my stomach. I pulled it out, set it free. How I had missed her! And when I lifted her, how heavy she was for such a tiny woman—she weighed as much as a barrel of wheat. “Avdokia, you’re so fat!”

She laughed as she wept, touching my short hair. “You look just like blessed Seryozha,” she said, “may he rest in peace. Oh, my child. Look at you. Oh, sweet lovey. I can’t believe… we thought… we were sure…”

They must have thought I was dead. Murdered. How awful. I hadn’t thought about them, what they might have been going through. I had only thought of my own torment. I felt like Theseus, who, upon coming home from Crete, had forgotten to change his sails from black to white, causing his father’s suicide. The hell they must have lived, all these months. As I had when I heard of Seryozha’s fate. “Shh. I’m here now. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. And you’re here. You’re safe!” I twirled her around, her chubby hunched little body. “What’s going on around here? The boss told me to clear off, but I’m not going to.”

She petted me, kissed me again. “Yes, well, since when did you listen to anyone?”

“How is Mother?” I asked.

“Ai… don’t ask,” she said. “Let’s get you inside. Have something to eat.” She wiped her eyes on her apron. “And catch that chicken! We’re not above eating. Even on the astral plane, you should see them put it away.”

I lunged for the chicken, but it ran from me. Right up to Avdokia, who caught it. We walked to the chicken coop and she tossed my pullet in—the only white one—the others eyeing it with suspicion.

Warmth. That’s what I noticed when we entered through the kitchen. How warm it was! The fine young woman, my savior, ground flour in a mill clamped onto the table. Something boiled on the stove in an enormous cauldron. Cabbage. The girl smiled shyly with her eyes but said nothing. The cabinets still showed their painted birds. We left our wet boots by the door, donned felt slippers, and retreated into Lyuda’s and Olya’s old room behind the kitchen.

The bright painted bed that they’d shared, mother and daughter, was gone. The room held only a crude cot covered with a quilt made from the same rags the young people had been wearing. But the stove! Even this room was merry with heat. Avdokia’s shawl hung on a peg, and in the red corner hung a hand-colored print—a cheap reproduction of the Virgin of Tikhvin. Home. I was home.

I sat on the bed. The wildly varied quilt was made of velvet and charmeuse and wool. Dark colors, city colors, interlaced with squares of vivid cloth that would have done well at a village fair. Avdokia lowered herself down next to me, slow and heavy, stiff with age. The rigors of the previous year had left their mark on her ancient body, despite her well-fed look. “How’s Mother?” I asked.

A great shuddering sigh went through her.

A torn space opened inside me. “Alive?”

“Oh, yes, yes, she’s alive, God bless us,” Avdokia said, yet her hesitation was confusing. “Oh, how can I begin to tell you, Marinoushka, what our lives have come to?” She gazed down at our interlocked fingers, mine hard, weathered but strong and young, straight-fingered, hers twisted as the roots of an old olive tree. “It’s such a long story, my pet, my dove.” She tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “A strange story, stranger than I can say.”

“I want to see her,” I said.

“A moment, sweetness, and listen to me.” Patting me as she had when I was a child headstrong with some urgent idea, she wetted her thin lips, obviously trying to find the way to begin. But her aged brain could not find the end of the string. “Let me tell the story, so you understand. She’s alive, but not the same. Poor Verushka, strong and weak in all the wrong ways. This year, when you disappeared, when that devil, when he…” The tears started again. That cursed night when Arkady arrived. “Well, it was just too much for her. For her mind. After everything—your father, and poor Seryozha, the flat… you don’t know what we’ve been through.” She spoke to our hands, stroking mine rhythmically as she would pet a small dog. “We searched for you. Even went to the district soviet for all the good it did. Like telling a hedgehog to fly.”

Behind the kitchen door, soft voices, then a harsher one. A clatter of dishes. And from somewhere else, the unlikely Eastern sound of some stringed instrument. She leaned closer. “Well, after that, she took to her bed, not talking, or worse, talking to people who weren’t even there. Like you. And Seryozha. ‘They’re gone, sweetheart,’ I’d tell her. ‘Gone to heaven.’ But she said no, you were playing tricks on her, like you used to when you were young. Other times, she’d scream that the Cheka were coming, that they were going to burn the house down. She’d claw at the wallpaper until I had to wrap her fists, swaddle her in the blankets.” She took a shuddering breath. I put my arm around her. “The neighbors complained. The whole house was against us. You remember what it was like. It only got worse.” I could see their faces, the tired suspicious women and their hard husbands living in our flat. “I was half out of my mind. So I did the only thing I could think of—I called Vsevolod.” Master Vsevolod, with his stink of incense and his boneless white hands. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And he brought in that one.” She nodded at the door, her face pale as cake flour. “You know, the devil waits for an invitation. Forgive me, child. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Past her face, out the frosted window, snow built up along the limbs of the old apple tree, quite bare now. In the spring, I would see it full of sweet white flowers—if I were still here. “No, you did the right thing,” I said. Her pale, ancient face twisted with guilt, her small, tortured mouth. What did she have to be sorry for? It was I who needed forgiveness.

“Well, this one knows a good thing when he sees it. Vsevolod must have told him.” She was whispering hard now. “So gifted, he called her, a seer. Of course she could see her dead children. ‘No one ever dies… they just live happily in the land behind the sunrise’—anything he could think of.” Her face darkened with rage. “Yes, and suddenly rivers will swim upstream and the dead sit up in their graves and ask for tea with two lumps of sugar. Ai, the lies he told her! You’d have thought the very walls would cover their ears and run away. But I kept my mouth shut, God forgive me.” She crossed herself. “We needed him, milaya. We were being evicted. We would have been on the streets and not a soul would have lifted a finger to save us. This one had a circle living in a big dacha on Aptekarsky Island.”

What wasn’t happening up on the islands?

“That devil talks to her once—once!—and suddenly she’s out of bed, ordering me to pack, when before she wouldn’t get out of bed to save her own life. ‘Prophetess…’” She snorted, wiped the tears tracing the riverbeds of her wrinkles. “Of course he had eyes, he could see. The flat. The furniture. He asked her about the photograph of Maryino. I saw exactly what was on his mind. Maybe I’m a prophetess myself, eh?” She chuckled despite herself. “Oh, you’ll see, they’re a regular pack of idiots. My poor lamb could never resist a grand role. Anything you put in her head becomes real. So now she’s gifted. She’s reading the future in the ice, in a bowl of soup. Such imagination. Like mother, like children.”

I was stung that my nanny thought I was anything like Vera Borisovna.

She grinned a toothless grin and patted my knee. “All of you. Not a streak of sense in the whole family. So there we were on Aptekarsky. The Laboratory, they called it. The lunatic asylum, if you ask me. God preserve us.” She spat. “All Vsevolod’s people were there—the Gromitskys, the Kovelovs. Living cheek by jowl with people right off the street.” She lowered her voice again. “He loves that—you’ll see. Plagues them, stirs them up, sets them against each other. Your mother notices nothing.”

I tried to imagine a commune full of bourgeois spiritualists and beggars, orchestrated by the man who sicced his dogs on me. And my mother prophesying while Avdokia cursed every soul. I rested my head on her shoulder. I was at the end of my strength, bone-weary, not just in my body but in spirit as well. What I wanted was right here—the familiar smell of her dress, the birds painted on the kitchen cabinets. This was why I had come. “Don’t let him send me away,” I said.

“No, sweetness. I have a few tricks up my own sleeve.” She smiled and kissed me, petted me as if I were six. “But stay out of his way. Remember, we need these people more than they need us.”

“I’ll be as silent as a whore’s conscience.”

She rose and looked into my eyes, one of her pale brows arched in skepticism. “Chu chu chu. Just don’t stir them up. Stay here until I can talk to him, see what I can do. Whatever happens, don’t react. It’s lucky the earth is still solid under our feet and doesn’t go flying up into the sky.”

She left me there in the small bare room. I lay drowsing on the cot, listening through the stout walls of the old house to voices, muffled laughter, the sounds of a hammer, the clatter of pots. Out the window, I watched one of their ragged number go past with that same gliding walk. Further on, a boy and a girl I hadn’t seen before shoveled snow, making a soothing chop and hiss. Soft footsteps in felt boots shushed in and out of the kitchen. I smelled pungent sour cabbage, and bread baking. After a while, my nanny brought me back a bowl of soup and a piece of black bread. Gradually the noises settled, doors stopped opening and closing. I was happy to just fall asleep in Avdokia’s bed. I was home.

72 The Master

I SLEPT ON FOR two days, rising only to use the chamber pot, eat, and fall asleep again. I dreamed I was in my lean-to in the woods, but I discovered a set of stairs that led down to an entire underground house. How had I missed them? It was warm and a young man who seemed to know me lived there. We’d gone to school together. He fed me and we talked about Lermontov. In another dream, there was a bathhouse in a goat pen, and a fire-spotting tower on the rooftop of the house on Furshtatskaya. I was aware of Avdokia going to bed and getting up, but still I dreamed on.

On the third day, I awoke to gray light, a snowy day, her empty bed. I waited to see if she would return, but when she didn’t, I got up and cracked the door. The kitchen was empty, scrubbed and clean as an English doctor’s office. Two loaves of bread cooled on the hearth. Wherever did they get the flour? Certainly a bunch of ragged intellectuals couldn’t have brought in a harvest—it was impossible. How long had they been here? Since May? June? I could hear the scrape of wooden dishes in the back parlor and a sonorous voice. Their leader must be holding forth. A younger man spoke, then, deferential. Their master again. I knew Avdokia had warned me to stay out of sight, but everyone was occupied, and I itched to see what was going on in the other rooms. I crept down the hall, the back parlor smelling of sawdust and linseed oil, turpentine. A workroom. I imagined this mad gang carving strange totemic symbols—Lord knew for what purpose.

Whatever they were doing in the back parlor, the front one lay virtually empty but for the unfamiliar Bukhara carpets that had replaced our cheerful Finnish ones. My grandfather’s wonderfully hideous Alexander III chair also remained. I remembered him sitting in it reading, an embroidered cap on his head, his legs stretched out on a stool. Strange paintings now hung along the walls in dark blues and purples featuring snowcapped mountains, veiled women, and deer. No evidence of the sofas and wicker armchairs in which we’d lounged and told stories and played games. No striped shades and cutwork curtains on the bare windows. The izbas of Novinka must be well decorated these days, rich with candlesticks and clocks and pictures of our Golovin ancestors.

Well, candlesticks could go to the devil. Let the peasants use them in good health. They’d left the house intact, that was the important thing. Oddly enough, they’d also spared the upright piano. It was amazing they hadn’t stripped it for the wire. And the carved wooden stairs had been left unmolested. I ran my hand along the heavy wooden banister. How I’d loved sliding down this as a child, imagining daring escapes. But another Marina couldn’t help but calculate how many weeks such a piece of wood could serve a Petrograd bourgeoika.

Upstairs, it was all the same as ever—the red-painted hall, the moldings carved from silvery birch. Capacious, with windows at each end and the strong scent of cedar wood. I crept to the door of Mother’s room. She’d never been an early riser, and she took over my grandmother’s room after her death, as it was the farthest from the kitchen, with its smells and morning bustle. I pressed my ear to the door. Had Avdokia told her that I’d come home?

I noticed a musky smell—leathery and resinous. The olive-eyed leader was standing right at my elbow. I jumped. How was it that I hadn’t heard him? He was too solid a man to have climbed the carpetless stairs without my hearing, yet here he was, his shining bald head, dressed in a sheepskin vest. He took my wrist, not hard but in a way that prevented resistance, and pulled me from the door. “I thought I told you to leave,” he said, his brow wrinkled in long folds, his voice controlled but commanding.

I stood as straight as I could, my arm clamped in his grip, fear lying thick in my throat. “I’m Marina Dmitrievna Makarova and this is my house.”

I had to hand it to him, he didn’t show a scrap of surprise. I would not want to have played cards against him. Stay out of his way. We need these people more than they need us.

“Ask her if you like,” I said. “If you don’t believe me.”

“Stay here.” As if I were one of his dogs. He knocked twice and, giving me one last searing glance, slipped inside, allowing me a quick glimpse into the room’s interior—dim, the air full of incense—and the very quickest impression of a woman in a long veil, like the pictures downstairs in the empty room.

I pressed my ear to the wood. I heard him, low, and Avdokia, too, in short humble replies, more pauses than speech. My mother remained completely silent. “I know but she can’t help it,” I heard Avdokia say. Were they arguing my case before my mother as before a judge? Why did he have any say at all? Whose house was this, anyway? I tried the door, but it was locked.

At last I heard the key turn and jumped back. It was Avdokia. She said nothing but her cheeks blazed in sharp little slashes. She jerked her head to the stairs and I followed her. She was furious, though I couldn’t tell whether it was at me or him, and we marched wordlessly downstairs and all the way back to the room behind the kitchen.

I did my best to stay “out of the way,” but I grew restless by the afternoon. I grabbed my coat and boots and slipped outside to prowl among the neatly shoveled paths and snowbound trees. A girl was laying new wood shavings in the henhouse. The tall bushy-haired intelligent was shoveling a path, and another girl threw a panful of water out the kitchen door. I approached the handsome boy with the black beard, who was chopping wood using the larch stump as a block. “Privet,” I said.

He wouldn’t even look at me. Had their master told them to avoid speaking to me?

I wandered off to try the girl at the henhouse. “How’s my chicken doing? The white one.” She, too, ignored me and a red rooster flew at me with his claws out. “Quit it!” I batted him away and she glared at me, closed the coop’s door.

When they had safely gathered in the back parlor for their communal dinner, I attempted a second unannounced visit to the inner sanctum, slipping silently up the bare wooden stairs—only to find one of the patchwork people stationed before the door. It was the bespectacled intelligent, cross-legged on a mat on the bare boards, reading a small, fat book. He must have sensed me standing there before him but refused to look up. I cleared my throat. He slightly resembled Blok, but with a sharper, more pinched face—none of the original’s grace and nobility. “I’d like to see her.”

“Ukashin said the Mother must not be disturbed.”

Ukashin. The first time anyone had said his name. “I’m her daughter.”

A parade of emotions rolled past his face as he eyed Misha, complex as clouds rushing over a field. Surprise, interest, hesitation, a note of fear? Judgment, then dismissal. “Ask Ukashin. It’s not up to me.”

“Why can’t I see her?” I demanded of Avdokia when she returned to her room with a bowl of soup for me.

“Please, Marinoushka.” She patted my head as though I were three years old, smoothing my ruffled feathers. “I’m doing my best, but—oh, you don’t know. Don’t make trouble with them.”

“This is ridiculous. She’s my mother. Am I to be a prisoner in my own house?” I dipped into the soup she’d brought, cabbage and potato. If there was one thing I had learned from Arkady about men, it was that you should never cower before a man with a whip. It just made him want to use it all the more. “I’m not going to be intimidated by some self-styled fakir, some roadside Houdini.”

She glanced up and her face grew tight again.

I followed her gaze to find the man standing right behind me in the doorway, in his shaggy long coat and astrakhan hat, ready for the outdoors.

“Walk with me,” Ukashin commanded.

I took one more spoonful and left Avdokia silently praying, to don my coat and boots and follow him outside. Snow was falling in light, crisp flakes. We walked silently together down a newly shoveled path—he clearly liked to keep his followers busy. I liked the feeling of the snow gently tumbling against my lips. I felt alive again. The dogs, hounds with gray fur that grew in no particular direction, bolted by us to roll in the snow and chase one another, barking. It occurred to me to wonder how he fed such big dogs. Did his acolytes disappear every so often?

The man walked his slightly military walk—hands behind his back. He was vigorous and broad-shouldered, with the eyes of a bull, a wide moustache. Attractive? I had to say yes. A certain magnetism… a definite presence. I estimated his age to be around forty—a good fifteen years older than anyone here except Avdokia, Vera Borisovna, and the intelligent who’d shooed me away from my mother’s door. Everyone else seemed not much older than me.

He spoke to me with a slight lilt, a slight purr. “Don’t worry about the Mother. We are taking very good care of her.”

Our steps crunched in the packed snow. I’d spent a night under this snow, had wrapped it about me like an eiderdown. I was not some cowering bourgeoise. “My mother, you mean.” I felt Avdokia’s reproof even as I said it, though she was safely back at the house. Don’t!

He nodded, not as one agreeing but rather as a man nods when he’s trying to gather his own thoughts and only hears your voice, not the sense of your words. My father did this, distracted, thinking of some essay he was writing. “I’m sure this is all quite strange to you,” he said. “But the woman you knew as your mother no longer exists.”

I picked up a gloveful of snow and packed it into a ball, heaved it at a tree. It smashed with a satisfying burst. “Who’s upstairs, then? The first Mrs. Rochester?”

The man didn’t appear to have read Brontë. “Let’s say she no longer exists on this plane.” As one might say, “She’s gone to Odessa.”

I was unable to stifle my impatience. “What plane does she exist on then?”

“You couldn’t begin to understand.”

We’d walked out of sight of the house with its fresh icing of snow and smoking chimneys, toward the aspen grove, white bark patterned with black in its wintery calligraphy. When I was young I imagined these marks were codes, secret messages from the fairy world. Perhaps I, too, was a prophetess.

“What do you know about aspen?” he asked.

I brushed snow from my cheeks, my eyelashes, blew icy vapor from my lungs. The insides of my nose, the corners of my eyes, told me it was fifteen degrees and dropping. “I’m no botanist, Comrade.”

He took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette, lit it. He smoked as if we had all the time in the world to stroll around on a cold day, taking the air like a couple of boulevardiers. My frostbitten nose burned. I was glad enough to be out of doors, however. The foul tobacco he smoked would have been unbearable in close quarters.

“The secret of the aspen,” he said, gesturing with the twisted butt of his makhorka, “is that it’s all one tree. All connected, under the earth. All one.” He cast his popped black eyes at me, the liquid eyes of an intelligent animal, a dog or a horse. I felt unnerved each time they met mine. Now he waited, snow accumulating on the curly lamb of his hat. I would not fall under his spell, though I felt his gaze urging me to do so. I knew a hypnotist when I saw one. “Sorry. I was never very good at riddles.”

His powerful form gave the impression of a man who would not suffer insolence, wouldn’t hesitate to deliver a blow. But instead he just smiled, superior, a swami pitying the crude materialist. “What you see here—us, my students, your mother, all of us—we’re one tree. You understand? All one body, all one breath.”

I tried to breathe though my mouth, shallowly, so I wouldn’t take in any more of his stinking tobacco than I had to.

The master ran his gaze over the white tree trunks, as if they were troops standing at attention. “Think of us as strings on a harp or a great piano, all in tune. Our fields harmonize. We amplify each other. We create a complex vibration.” In a surprisingly delicate gesture, he brought together the stout fingers of his hand, framed in the shaggy coat sleeve.

I puffed out a lungful of frost. “The peaceable kingdom.”

Two definite vertical lines formed between his dark brows. “We’re creating power.” Watching the woods, as if expecting someone to arrive. “Of a kind normally experienced only by adepts in the most remote corners of the earth. But to do it, we must be in absolute accord.”

“And I’m out of tune—is that what you’re trying to tell me?” I wished he’d just get on with it. Or put out that cigarette. I was feeling very unwell. Snow was building up on my coat and cap and scarf. I saw why we’d come out here to have this chat—so I wouldn’t pollute the purity of their vibrational field.

“If only you’d come to us back in Petrograd, you could have stayed on as long as you liked,” he said, watching his mongrel dogs as they wound through the trees, sniffing and marking. “We had all the room in the world. But we don’t have the luxury of hangers-on here.”

I flushed with outrage. “This is my house! I’m the one who belongs here. You’re the hangers-on, not me.” I was feeling so sick that I thought I might vomit right in front of him. A nice sign of strength. “I don’t care what you think.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. A heavy, broad hand, like a bear’s paw. All at once, I experienced a sensation of heat in my shoulder, then in my whole body. The nausea lifted. He released me and walked on. How did he do that? He stopped again and regarded me, and once more I felt the sensation of heat, of well-being, in my face, in my chest, my stomach. “I don’t think. I feel. I feel you, Marina Dmitrievna. Your energy. It’s very disruptive. The question is, what do you have to offer besides your ignorance and confusion? Tell me why we need you. Convince me.”

I was actually hot, here in the falling snow. I could see the steam rising off my coat. What was he doing to me? “I’m not planning to be a burden. I’m a good worker. I’ll do my share.”

“But the work’s all been done.” One dog trotted up, its tongue lolling, steam rising from its mouth, and he patted it, sliding its furry ear between his ungloved fingers. “We could have used you back in the spring, when we arrived. Building the smokehouse, fishing, putting in the garden. We could have used the extra hands. But now? A poor time to show up with your cup and spoon, calling us hangers-on.”

I could see that had been rude of me. I saw myself from their point of view, someone’s spoiled daughter, appearing and demanding to be fed. I couldn’t imagine they’d brought in much of a harvest, especially if they’d really grown their own rye, but certainly they’d gardened and built the smokehouse, which must be hanging with the fish they’d caught. And what did I have on my side? Inherited property, sullen, passive resistance, and the complete absence of other ideas.

He squinted against the smoke, foul as a burning carpet. “The father, can’t you go to him?”

“My father? He’s in the east, at Omsk with Kolchak. I’m not going there.”

The man sighed, gazing at me like a schoolmaster regarding the stupidest girl in the class. “No. The father… of your… inconvenience.” He dropped his eyes toward my midsection.

My what?

Again, that gaze, back at my face.

What was this man trying to insinuate?

The father.

No. That wasn’t possible. I hadn’t had a menstrual period in more than a year now. I could hang a coat on my hip bones.

Yet I’d certainly felt sick for some time.

Well, who hadn’t? The food we ate, or what substituted for food…

Though I’d been eating well enough recently… since Kolya and I had left Petrograd and turned to the largesse of the countryside.

No. It was ridiculous. Kolya was fanatically careful, nursing his supply of preservativy as if they were relics of the True Cross.

And yet—perhaps prophylactics had not been intended for such heavy use. There was no way to know how old they were.

I felt the weird sensation of a heavy liquid being poured onto my head from a great height.

“Yes, that man,” said the fakir. The dogs ran off, barking.

We watched them go. I was grateful for the distraction. “You’ve got it wrong, brother,” I said, in my most Misha voice. Hooligans didn’t get knocked up. I was a boy. A boy!

“Have I?” He breathed out a cloud of his smoke, and I had to back away. In my head, the hurricane roared. My stomach lurched and I vomited into the snow as he watched with amusement.

I’d never conceived with Genya, though I wouldn’t have minded. The last time we made love was right before he went out for the defense of Petrograd in March—I could have had his baby already. Thank God I hadn’t with Arkady, I would have known by now. No, other than the filigreed love letter he had cut on my back, it was only in my darkened spirit that he’d left his impression. But between Kolya and me, there had always been such a strong charge of nature. My body wanted Kolya, ached for him. Such a stupid beast—it didn’t know we were through. I imagined my reddest inner chamber, like a velvet-lined boudoir all prepared for this small guest.

Ukashin lifted his face, listening to the song of his dogs baying a higher, more excited note. I had to get away and think. He knew too much, noticed too much, and I had learned a few things, one of them being that men who knew things about you were people to be avoided. It was flattering to be understood but dangerous. A good man didn’t need to be intriguing. This one, drawing on his tobacco, squinting against the smoke, looked like a rug merchant waiting for a client to make up his mind. I could see him in a fez in a coffee house sucking a hookah, the patience of centuries behind him.

What if I really was pregnant? Only the single most disastrous thing that could befall me right now, being so far from Petrograd. The city at least had hospitals and a modern attitude toward women.

I counted the months since the October celebration—November, December, January… July. A summer baby, if this was true and not some game he was playing. I glanced again at the broad shoulders in the shaggy coat. But I knew he was right. I could feel it. Bozhe moi. I was frankly terrified. What did I know about children? Didn’t every woman want a child? Just as Russia was about to be torn apart like an old dress, what could I hope for here—to give birth in a bathhouse? Or roll in herbs in hopes of a miscarriage? In Petrograd I could have an abortion in a modern mothers’ hospital. Unless a certain thief found me first. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about my future.

An abortion… was that what I wanted?

Yet how could I have a baby? I couldn’t even diaper Faina’s brat. Any child with me as a mother would be in sorry shape indeed. And with Kolya Shurov, that womanizer, as a father? My own mother hadn’t had a shred of maternal instinct, but at least she had a responsible husband and the comforts of home, the protection of money, servants, food on the table. A child of mine would be tossed into this world with nothing, dragged behind me like a goat behind a cart.

Somewhere in the aspens, we heard the bay of the dogs. He threw the cigarette into the snow. “They’re onto a deer. Get your gun.”

I’d forgotten Kolya’s gun. How on earth did he know? No time to wonder. I pulled my glove off with my teeth, dropped it to the snow. The headman placed his warm hand on my shoulder as my bare fingers found the butt, the trigger. In a great crash, a young stag bounded out of the brush, leaping ten feet or more as the dogs bounded after it. “Shoot it.”

Smoothly, with shocking grace, I extended the weapon, closed one eye, sighted ahead of the leaping deer.

“Now,” he said.

The blast echoed. The stag dropped to its knees, then over onto its side in the snow, and was still. It was nothing short of a miracle. I’d killed it with a pistol I’d never fired, at forty feet. It was impossible, yet it had happened.

Amazed, I gazed at the pistol in my hand, but it was as plain and heavy and dumb as ever. The bull-necked man let go of my shoulder. Suddenly I was cold again.

The rest of the scene unfolded in slowed-down time. The dogs catching up with the beast. The master calling them off. Their wavering in the snow halfway between the stag and where we stood. On second call, they came racing toward us, tails all awag. “You see?” As if we had been having an argument and the deer was the proof of his point. “It’s better when you don’t think so much,” he said. “Let doubt fall away, let confusion fall away. This is the true path. Davai. Let’s see what you brought for our table.”

We walked out into the snow toward the fallen creature. It lay there, real as a rug, one leg doubled under itself, its dainty cloven hooves, its rack of antlers, three points on each, its soft brown eye turning glassy. A second eye just above the first one showed where the bullet entered.

“You can give life, you can take it.” He handed me the hilt of a deadly looking knife, its blade slightly curved.

I watched myself, under his instruction, slitting open the body of the stag I had killed, beginning at the genitals and slicing all the way to the throat. “Don’t nick the organs,” he said. “Steady…”

I placed my fingers inside. Hot. Wet. I guided the knife carefully, keeping the point away from the guts. The belly steamed in the frost, and with the steam rose a strong smell that should have been disgusting but wasn’t. This was us—the heat, the beast’s life, locked into this meat. My life and this life I might possibly be carrying. Fresh blood stained the snow bright red.

“Lung.” He pointed. “Heart. Liver. Kidney.” The white lung, the red heart, purplish liver, blue kidney, the heavy red coils of the intestine. The machinery of the body. It was clean and intricate, and the man kept his hand on my shoulder, pointing out what needed to be done. I cut the membranes, scooped out pounds of slick, warm animal guts, laid them out in the snow. I was careful to pinch off the bladder, to get the entire intestinal tract. The dogs crept closer, on their stomachs, whining, until they were within ten feet of the steaming mass, but he stopped them with a single gesture, one blunt finger pointing. Then he knelt and took the bloody knife himself, sliced off a strip of the liver and held it out on the blade. “For the hunter.”

Raw? He expected me to eat it raw? I had avoided squeamishness so far, but this piece of bloody meat?

“This is your kill. Life and death. Eat.”

He was waiting. I took it into my mouth. Hot flesh. I chewed. It was milder than I expected, even a little sweet, easy to eat. I was hungry. The protein sat better than I would have imagined, and I felt the vigor of the deer entering my own blood. He ate a piece himself, then cut two more and threw them to the dogs.

One of the followers ran up the shoveled path—a tall, silent boy I hadn’t seen yet, his eyes a light brown, wearing a quilted hat pointed like a medieval helmet. How had he known to come? Did the man have a silent dog whistle?

“Ilya, bring a basin, a pail, and some burlap squares,” the master ordered. “And a rope.” The boy nodded, his earnest face knobbly like the knuckles of a hand. Prior to this moment, none of them would look at me directly, but before the boy ran back, he eyed me admiringly, even enviously. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my bloody hand.

Ukashin picked out some of the inferior pieces of offal and threw them to the dogs, who attacked them in a great outpouring of growls. “While we’re waiting,” he said, “find yourself a tree with a long sturdy branch.”

In a kind of trance, I found a suitable tree, a tall fir whose lowest branches he deemed adequate.

The boy soon returned with squares of burlap, a basin, and a pail in which rested a coiled rope, a small saw, and a hatchet. The burly headman indicated the organs spread out on the ground. “Take these to Katrina in the kitchen.” The boy filled the basin with them and carried them back to the house with the pride of Salome bearing the head of John the Baptist.

I thought I understood then what Ukashin would have me do—hang the deer in the tree, cold and safe, out of reach of winter’s animals. Using the hatchet for a weight, I threw the rope up and over the outstretched limb. It proved a dangerous choice, as I barely avoided catching the ax head in my skull on the way down. He had a good laugh at that one.

Next, we braced the stag’s legs apart, my instructor showing me where to cut holes in the hind legs to lace the rope through.

“Now pull it up,” he told me.

I took hold of the rope and hauled. The deer was too heavy.

“Oh, come. This is your kill. Pull it up!”

I put all the strength of my arms and legs into pulling it up, but it was hopeless. Yet I kept trying. I had to show him I wasn’t the little barynya expecting to be fed and cared for, that I would throw myself into whatever work he gave me, uncomplaining, to the point of the absurd. He let me struggle a good long time, too, hooting as I failed again and again, before he finally bent down himself and lifted the deer straight up in his arms, neat as a prince lifting a swan in a pas de deux. I shortened the rope, and the deer’s head swung two feet off the ground.

“We’ll want the hide, too,” he said.

There would be no shortcuts, evidently. Perhaps I would have to chew the sinews into cord, like the red Indians of my brother’s Zane Grey novels. So be it. Despite the bloody liver, I was feeling strangely well. And I found I enjoyed the man’s company. I liked his blunt solidity, his cheerfulness. It surprised me. I had been so prepared to dislike him, with all his mystical nonsense, but I had to admit that it felt good to be with someone who knew what he was doing, possessed the sort of understanding that inspired trust. Though I realized I had to be on guard against it. Alas, Beloved…

He showed me where to cut, around the hind legs at the thighs, a seam to free the hide from the flesh. Then I pulled the skin down, scraping and cutting the whitish membranes wherever they held fast, until I had the creature’s coarse gray-dun coat down around its neck and upper legs like a sweater pulled over a child’s head but not yet freed from its arms.

Stripped of its skin, hanging there, head down, legs splayed, the carcass looked terribly, touchingly human. Vulnerable and so light compared to the presence and power of the live stag—the heartbreakingly narrow legs, the slender waist, the narrow rack of ribs. I felt a shiver of recognition. It was like working on my own flayed body.

“Yes,” he said. “This is you. And you will eat it and continue to live. And when you die, something will eat you. Look at it.” He spun the deer on its rope. “Small isn’t it, to contain so much life? A dead man’s very similar. Imagine a battlefield full of dead men. A village. Walking into a village and seeing every man, woman, and child like this.”

A deserter. I’d been right.

I cut the hide away from the neck and the forelegs and set it in the snow. It steamed on the ground as the perfect hexagons of snowflakes drifted down over us, dusting the blue trees, soon to cover the pink blood seeping down into the white. Blood dripped from the hanging carcass into the bucket. I was tired but happy with my work, looking forward to going back to Avdokia’s room to sleep, to ponder what to do about the inconvenience. I held the knife out to Ukashin, but he raised his hands, as if it were red hot. “What, you think you’re done?”

What more was there to do?

“You have to butcher it before it freezes. Start with those.” He indicated two strips of meat on the inside of the deer, to either side of its backbone. “Reach in and pull.”

How easily they came free, surprising me. A long strip of meat, nice as anything served at the Astoria Hotel. He laid out a burlap square and I set the fillets onto it. Now I understood. And as tired as I was, I saw he was right. If the unbutchered deer froze, we’d never be able to pull the meat free. We’d have to chop the flesh from the bone with an ax.

Now the work grew hard—severing the legs, the neck, the spine. I fought against the queasy sense of having murdered a person, and now tormenting its savaged body. It brought me back to the basement of Gorokhovaya 2. The dispassion with which one body could torture another. This strange thing, life, built upon such a fragile bit of flesh.

I worked like a medical student, separating the meat along its natural lines of musculature. One flesh-being dissecting another. I thought of the cat we once dissected in physiology class at the Tagantsev Academy—or rather that Mina dissected. I’d cringed and hung back. I didn’t want to see a cat all open like that. Back when there still were cats. But I wasn’t a girl in the academy anymore. I had nursed the dying, I had cleaned their shit. Perhaps I wasn’t the chaos I’d imagined.

As I worked I had the sense of myself as someone I hadn’t really met yet, someone silent and deep, patient and strong—not like Marusya, whose storms were as violent as the ones on the sun—but whole and quiet under the chaos of my apparent self. Perhaps it wasn’t I who was chaotic. It was life itself. Existence was the whirlwind. I had just been too light to keep from being blown around in it. Now I felt a density forming within myself as I quartered this beast, hacking off great pieces and wrapping them in burlap, cutting out the pielike brains and folding them into the deerskin. “We’ll tan the hide with them,” Ukashin explained. “Make you a new pair of shoes.” He threw the head to the dogs like a boy throwing a ball to his scrappy chums. One grabbed it by an antler and ran off through the trees, the other in pursuit.

Shoes would be nice, but I understood that he meant more than shoes. He was inviting me to stay on, to become part of his community. I felt the falling snow caress my cheeks and nose, and thought of the spark of life that might be embedded within me, growing, cells dividing, a child. Our child! I stood there, my hand throbbing from the hard work. There were worse places to face such a future. Here I had a roof, Mother and Avdokia, a place I could live, work, and time to figure out my next step.

73 The Fire Child

I DREAMED OF THE night forest. Cold, black, and starless, the snow coming down. I had to gather wood for a fire, but in the dark, I could only assemble the smallest pile. I squatted as I lit those poor shreds with matches, but the wind kept blowing them out. I was about to give up when I discovered a beautiful lighter in my pocket. I vaguely remembered it, someone had given it to me. It lit right away, and I let the flame lick the sticks of kindling.

A fire was born in the dark. Warm, though when I passed my hand through it, it didn’t burn me. I picked the flame out of its nest and held it in my cupped hand. And I realized—this was my child. I felt it warming my face, like a kiss. It knew me. I passed it gently from hand to hand, marveling. I had to be careful—it was just a small flame, tender and bright. I always thought I would have a human child, not a handful of fire, but I understood, as it pushed the inky darkness away, that of course I would have a fire child. When I held it too close, it began to scorch my coat. I needed something to put it in—a lantern, a tin box, something to keep it from the wind. I held it as close as I could and fed it tiny scraps of wood, and to my delight, it consumed them. But how to keep it safe? I couldn’t put it down, certainly not in a pocket. How would I sleep? I had to ready myself with one hand.

When I awoke, the sun was already up—a dull December day, as much of a day as we were going to get. I immediately looked at my hand. Empty. Sniffed it. Could I still smell smoke? Maybe… the flame was deep inside me now, and I was the lantern. Yes, this was true, wasn’t it? Oh, but my neck ached, my shoulder, and my hand, which had butchered an entire deer the day before. I massaged it, tried to flex it open. It was swollen, painful. The room smelled of Avdokia—yeast and a slight tinge of lavender. I’d wanted to tell her about the fire child.

There was a slight knock on the door, and a girl’s face poked in, framed by smooth hair of silky brown, a girl like flowing water. I recognized her, my savior, the one who had brought me the potato when I was staging my sit-down protest. “Are you awake?” she asked quietly. “I’ve come to take you for the bath.”

“Where’s Avdokia?”

“With the Mother.” She held out my Misha clothes, but I could barely move my right shoulder, and my hand was cramped like a crone’s. She helped me dress, don my boots, my coat.

In the kitchen, redolent of kasha, two girls in patchwork sarafany glanced up from their work—the fierce black-haired girl who’d taken my chicken and a spectacular blonde grinding grain. The dark one squinted with suspicion, and the blonde avoided my eyes as if the sight of me might turn her to stone. My Ariadne steered me out the back door into the yard. Outside, patchwork people shoveled paths as fast as the snow could fall. They too studiously ignored us as we passed them. Was I still persona non grata? I would have thought that last night’s venison stew would have convinced them I was worthy of adoption. We followed the cleared path past some new, solid-looking wooden outbuildings I hadn’t seen before, but she led me on until we reached Baba Yaga’s hut—Maryino’s ruined bathhouse.

Blue smoke rose from the chimney. I fought the urge to rub my eyes. What magic was this? Our spellbound playhouse, with its rotten porch and caved-in roof. Today it sparkled like fresh snow, the window frames newly painted, the panes washed, the roof and the porch rebuilt.

She swung open the door, silent on newly blacked and oiled hinges, and we entered, ducking under the heavy lintel. The smell of fresh-cut birch met me—walls, floor, all neatly scrubbed and clean. It was already warm—alive again, this banya built by my great-grandfather. This was no sooty bathhouse like the one in Faina’s village. Ours had separate rooms for changing, soaking, and steam, and a cast-iron double stove with bright nickel-plated ornaments of scallops and scrolls.

“A good bath to you,” I said loud enough for Bannik to hear as I hung up my coat and hat on a hook by the door. I felt like I’d arrived at a clearing in the forest where the animals spoke and sorcerers plotted and witches sat ready with their tests. You had to treat the local spirits with respect.

In the anteroom, with its little table and glass window, some bread and dried apple had been laid out for my breakfast. I ate quickly, then disposed of my boots, my hopeless socks. Such ugly feet I’d acquired since my first bathhouse visit, on Kazanskaya Street—calloused, red and bruised, still painful despite the old woman’s stinking frostbite poultice in Alekhovshchina. Off came my student’s trousers, my black Russian blouse, my homemade drawers—all Misha’s impedimenta. The girl gathered them up and left them by the door. After I’d eaten, she offered me a glass of tea—mushroomy-scented and dark. “What is it?” I sniffed the liquid suspiciously.

She shrugged her small, fine-boned shoulders. “Something we drink.”

So I drank it, sitting there naked and louse-infested, flea-bitten, and probably pregnant at the little table. The girl shed her own garments—the short jacket, the patchwork sarafan in blues and greens, the coarse linen blouse—and emerged lithe and smooth as a mermaid, her neat small head perched atop a long neck like a flower on its stem.

The tea, its earthy, musty taste and smell, lifted my tiredness without really waking me, gave me the strange sense that we had been thinned into two dimensions, as if we were painted on an urn. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. Eternal Keats. I imagined Genya, thinking of me. I held the fire baby in my palm. He was its father as much as Kolya. We were still married, still had that tie. As I gazed at the girl, I kept hearing Swan Lake’s “Dance of the Little Swans.” That magical tune wound through my head like a refrain in a music box.

I tossed down the rest of this murky tea and weightlessly followed the girl into the washroom, where she opened a spigot and a sweet rush of hot water surged into her crude wooden bucket. Steam coiled and plumed in the air. She poured water over my head, my shoulders, and I was in ecstasy. Thanks to the tea, I could turn my head freely again, and my hand and shoulder had stopped aching. She produced a comb and a thick bar of soap with which she soaped my dirty black locks. In Petrograd you could get a funt of potatoes for such a bar. Then she carefully combed through my sudsy hair, and I realized she was crushing lice between her fingernails without a word or a comment. What discretion, what tenderness. If I was drawn to women, this would be the kind of girl I would want. I imagined how envious Kolya would be if he could see me now, with her soaping my hair, massaging my scalp, pouring the water through.

Daylight peered through the steamy window of the mist-filled room, sweet with the resinous scent of the logs, the frostbitten sun pressing its face to the glass, envying our coziness. My toes tingled in the hot water. Such a cruel, primal difference between those who had fuel and water and those who didn’t. I remembered all those miserable buckets of water I had milked from the pump on Grivtsova Alley and lugged up a thousand steps to boil on our tiny stove.

Laughter roiled around inside me as the girl massaged my knotted shoulders, my right arm, my hand, like a page tending his knight after a battle. She expertly kneaded my horrible feet, unflinching. I turned so she could wash my back. The shame I normally felt was absent. My scars felt like a warrior’s scars to me now rather than a slave’s lashes, the mark of campaigns survived. And her tenderness was a revelation. This is what Arkady could never imagine. Simple human charity. Who had ever simply cared for Caliban, wanting nothing in return, a touch without fear? Who said I would never hear those bells again? Here, in the bosom of this strange community, I heard them chime.

After I’d been soaped and rinsed to impossible cleanliness, we moved into the steam, the fiery heart of the banya. Outside the window, the masses of snow in the dark branches of the firs blurred like memories dimly recalled. I ran my hand along the great logs that comprised the walls and could see the trees they had been, their heads in the sun, creaking in the wind. Logs that might have been masts of great ships. The girl threw a dipper of water on the stove, spawning a satisfying hiss and cloud. I stretched on the newly planed bench, imagining my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather here, felt caps protecting their tender ears, sipping tea with compote, listening to the gossip of provincial uncles and aunts. My mother and her brother, petted and praised, the most beautiful children in Petersburg.

“Are you allowed to speak to me?” I asked the girl.

She nodded but dropped her eyes, the lashes so long they grazed her cheeks.

“What’s your name?”

“Natalya,” she confessed softly.

“I keep thinking I’ve seen you before. Did you go to the Tagantsev Academy?”

She laughed, a bright tinkly laugh, and small dimples pierced her cheeks.

“Did you work at Smolny? In the canteen?” Now I just wanted to tease her, see those dimples. Little bells shimmered in the air. “At the Stray Dog then? Dancing on a mirror?”

“Perhaps at the Mariinsky?” she said shyly.

Of course. The tulle, the little tiara. The song in my head, “Dance of the Little Swans.” The thin strength of her high flat chest, the knobby arched feet. The way she had massaged me so expertly. “You left the Mariinsky for this?” I was astonished. No one had more privileges than the dancers at the Mariinsky, except maybe the Kronstadt sailors. “I heard you got category 1 rations.” Who would give up such a thing? Rations were dearer than gold.

Her expression grew stern, or as stern as she could manage with that sweet face. “There’s more to life than rations.”

“More than category 1 rations?” Maybe she really was a swan, and not a person at all.

“You’re still walking in your sleep. You won’t even know until you wake.” She took birch flails from a nail on the wall and put them in a bucket, released hot water onto them.

I lay back, feeling the sweat bead on my body, pooling between my breasts, dripping down my ribs and filling my navel. Maybe it was the tea, but now I could clearly see that my breasts were noticeably swollen, my nipples dark as saddle leather. How had I missed that? My aching hips had seemed like a product of hard travel, and that infernal nausea… the fact of my new condition should have been evident to me, but I’d been moving too much, too fast to notice. Blown about in the wind.

Such an odd thing, to live in a body. This portable shell, this suit of meat and bone. Just the same as the one I’d dismantled the day before. I looked at my skin, flushed in the heat, my sweat, my navel, my knees. It didn’t belong to me, not really. We were only using these bodies. They belonged to nature, lived their own lives, had purposes separate from our own. So who was the “I” within this body? A mere passenger? Hostage? Fellow traveler? Especially the female body, with its surprises and indignities. How much easier it was for a man to be a rationalist. As a woman, I might consider myself solely as my will, the sum of my talents and failures, my experiences and dreams, a poet, a rebel, the maker of my own destiny. But in fact I was a consciousness riding on the train of my body. An oblivious passenger, heading along rails I never put there. What was this female body? A prison? Or could it come to be a home with its own strange logic? I sensed that the Master and I could have an interesting conversation about this.

“Tell me about the Master,” I said. “Where’s he from? Was he in the war?”

I could see her wariness, but also her eagerness to talk about him. “His name in the world is Taras Ukashin,” she began. “But no one knows where he’s from. If you ask, he just teases you.” She stopped, uncertain if she’d said too much already. I waited, too, hoping her desire to confide would win out. “Sometimes he says Bukhara. Or Kars. Or Alma-Ata. He never gives the same answer twice.” She lifted the birch flails out of the hot water, tested their pliancy, plunged them back into the bucket. “Master says it doesn’t matter where you’re from—you should create yourself anew every dawn.”

I liked how she said it, in the world. As opposed to what? Was this not the world? “When I shot the deer, he put his hand on my shoulder, and I stopped feeling sick. A warmth came through his hands. He was the one who shot the deer, wasn’t he? I never could have done it myself.”

“It’s our energetics,” she said, swishing the flails. “You’ll learn. He’s studied with holy men all over the earth. Yogis and monks. He says we are the link between higher and lower. You’ll see. There’s nothing he can’t do.”

This little deer was in love with him—I saw it in her pleasure just speaking about him and I could understand his appeal, his combination of solidity and mystery, his competence. I also knew how flattering it was to think that someone could awaken things unknown to you. Flattering and dangerous.

“He’s too funny. He’s not off in a trance, like some holy man on a mountain.” Not that I would have mistaken him for one. “He’s the most down-to-earth person you’ll ever meet. He never says he has powers. He just says he’s a searcher, like all of us.”

She handed me one of the flails and took one herself, stroking it like a child’s hair. “But higher energies come through him. He’s trying to find the way to transform us so we can do the same. That’s what the Practice is. That’s why there were so many dancers at the Laboratory. The energetics come through the body. The body is the link, not the mind.”

Her lips, small and pale, parted as if for higher knowledge, or some other kind of kiss. The mushroom tea was making her glow. I felt my mockery oozing away with my sweat, along with my aches and my disbelief. “You were there at the Laboratory?”

Her gaze turned to the window, the steam transformed to trickles of water, as if the panes were weeping. She sighed. “Master says all things have to end. There’s nothing eternal but the present.”

The soaked, flexible bunch of birch twigs fanned in my hand, and I swore the little dried leaves were coming back to life. I felt fertile, like a goddess. We took turns whipping each other with the switches, making the room even hotter as we swatted the steam down from the ceiling to where we sat on the newly planed benches, so hot I could hardly breathe. “Tell me about the dacha. Avdokia said my mother was there.”

Her green eyes widened, they glittered with excitement. “So it’s true? She really is your mother?”

Why the breathlessness, the wonder? “Of course. Why do you ask?”

She came closer to me on the bench. “What was it like? Growing up with her?” Then she remembered her place, searched my face nervously. “You don’t mind my asking, do you? Master says women should be more curious about the mysteries of the universe, and less about what people ate for dinner.”

Master evidently said a lot of things. “She was a fashionable housewife,” I replied, rubbing dead skin off the tops of my feet. “An aesthete. Hairdresser in the Nevsky Passazh, hats from Madame Landis, gowns by Worth and Poiret…”

“Hats and gowns—that’s just the role,” she said. “That’s not who a person is.” She eyed me hungrily. “What about her, elementally?”

Elementally? That was a new one. “Mostly air, I’d say, maybe a little water. Foggy. Like Petersburg in the fog. Like the Moika at dusk. Like Vrubel. If she were a poem, she’d be Blok. She was part of a spiritualist circle. Séances and so on. She liked art.” The girl nodded as if I were revealing great secrets. “We went to the ballet. We probably saw you there. My brother wanted to design for the stage, like Benois.”

“You have a brother?” As if it were impossible that my mother managed to push out more than one of us.

“Actually, two,” I said. “One’s in the Don with Denikin. The other one, the artist, died.” More than a year I’d been living without Seryozha in the world. I felt guilty, even through the tea, like I’d left him behind, so much had I changed, so much had the world changed. I wondered how he would feel about my pregnancy. For someone so childlike, he didn’t care much for actual children. And he would have been disgusted to think of my body growing coarse and heavy, my belly like a watermelon. But he worshipped Kolya. I could imagine a life in which Kolya and I were still together and Seryozha lived nearby. I would have the baby, and we could see one another every day.

“I’m sorry,” Natalya said. “I shouldn’t have pried.” Then she straightened. “But Master says we shouldn’t apologize. ‘Act from the genuine impulse and stand by your actions.’”

“It’s fine. We spent a lot of time here when we were small.” I rested my head back against the logs. My lips, my hands, my toes tingled from the tea.

“It’s just so hard for me to imagine her with children. A regular family life.” How my mother must have changed so that this girl couldn’t envision her as a normal woman with children and a husband. She edged closer. “Did she have visions back then?”

What was my mother up to here? Though she’d always been somewhat clairvoyant. “She liked to guess who was on the telephone before she answered it,” I said. “Once, it rang and she said, ‘Pavel Popov is dead,’ before she picked up the receiver. It was one of my father’s friends, calling to say that a mutual friend had died.”

The girl’s lips parted, rapturous. “At the dacha, a woman, Veronika Konstantinova, accused Ilya of stealing a locket from her room. We went to Mother, and she said it had fallen behind the dresser. And when we pulled it away from the wall, it was right where she said it would be.”

Not exactly word from the Beyond. Something anybody might have thought of. How unpleasant, though, to hear a stranger describe her as “Mother.” She was my mother. My mother the seer. I laughed, remembering her complaining about having turkey when there was no meat in Petrograd.

Natalya’s eyes shone as she toyed with her birch flail. “She was the reason we came here.” She dropped her voice in case someone might be eavesdropping from the Beyond. “She saw a tide of blood lapping up through the drains of Petrograd, flooding the city. She wouldn’t let the Master rest until he promised we’d move out to her estate. ‘Before the snow melts.’ She was adamant about it. That’s why we left. It happened, didn’t it? The tide of blood.”

I didn’t want to reinforce this nonsense, but it was true. “There was cholera in the spring. All the bacteria from people shitting in the courtyards. It went into the water.”

“The drains,” she whispered. “You see?”

But it wasn’t the first time Petersburg had experienced the consequences of its shallow water table, and the lack of sanitation had been evident in every courtyard. Any doctor could have predicted cholera in the spring. Perhaps Mother had overheard it somewhere. But perhaps it was Red Terror she had seen. Those drains. “In the fall, someone tried to assassinate Lenin. The Cheka rounded up hundreds of bourgeois people, people from the intelligentsia—maybe thousands, who knows?—and shot them all. There were lists of the executed every day.” Maybe it was coincidence, an intensification of her normal anxiety about the revolution, but the timing was uncanny. I certainly hadn’t seen it coming, building over our heads like a great black storm. Then again, I was never one for predicting the obvious. Case in point: Kolya.

The girl’s countenance was grave, fully imagining the horror they had so narrowly escaped. “Master didn’t want to leave—we were doing such important work at the Laboratory. But she made us go. She’d start screaming in the night. You could hear it all over the dacha.”

“Will they ever let me see her?” I asked Natalya. “He was very upset when I tried.”

“You must prepare,” she said. “Even we don’t see her that often. She has other duties. She’s not of this world, Marina.”

I thought of her discussing hats with Madame Landis. She was very much of the world back then. “Is he like that, too? Visions and whatnot?” I still felt Ukashin’s knowing black eyes on me, the warmth of his touch.

A little dreamy smile replaced her earlier alarm. “Oh, no. He’s very human,” she said, swishing the birch twigs. The fragrance released into the steam, green and fresh and ropy. “Very elemental. It’s the Mother who has the visions. Her guides show her everything. She’s probably watching us right now.” I imagined my mother’s horror, forced to view this girl combing out my lice, or to see my pregnant body without benefit of cloth or modesty. Can you see me, Mother? I’m going to have your bastard grandchild. Her guides would be covering her eyes.

“The Master’s purpose is to connect the higher realms with this one. We have the most contact with him.” She shifted on the bench, tucking a long bony foot under her, straightening her spine. I wondered how much contact that was. I thought of the Master and my mother—like notes in a chord, higher and low. “The Mother deals with the higher realms exclusively.”

“Except when she’s finding lost lockets.”

Her high smooth brow developed a small wrinkle. “Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Making jokes.”

Here I was, disrupting the harp again. I would have to be more careful. I liked it here, and I didn’t want the headman to send me off. At least not until I could talk to my mother, find out what was really going on. “No,” I said. “I’m just a little nervous. I hadn’t expected any of this.”

“Master says that it will take time.” She switched at me with the birch flail, a sensation both painful and delicious. “To let you get used to us. Not to talk to you too much. But”—her dimples appeared again—“you don’t mind, do you?”

Sweet girl. Although I didn’t know if I could bear a whole winter of Master says. I could understand how Varvara felt, talking to me all those years ago—was it only three? Papa says, Papa says. Can’t you think for yourself? The girl threw more water on the stones, and I thought about that woman up in the house. Where was the Vera Borisovna who’d sat at our table in the Poverty Artel translating Apollinaire and playing American poker? I’d never felt closer to her than I did then. Though inexplicably it was Anton who drew her out. She liked men. Women envied her, but men vied to outshine one another in her presence—which was why her soirees were always so successful. And now she was trapped in that room all day long, doing God knew what. “When will he let me see her?”

“You’ll see her,” the girl reassured me. “Sometimes she comes out to watch the Practice or see our handwork. If she wants you, she’ll call for you. Don’t worry, she knows you’re here. If she sees something you need to hear, you’ll be brought to her. But she watches everything. It’s not so important that you see her, it’s that she sees you.”

But she hadn’t called for me.

When we couldn’t stand the heat anymore, we ran outside, steaming, into the frigid air and hurled ourselves naked into the snow. The contrast was delicious. It felt superhuman to roll in the snow without feeling cold. The winter sun peered like a red eyeball through the icy layer of sky while I stood steaming and immortal, watching the snow melt around me.

If I stayed, perhaps I would learn their secrets.

But for now, it didn’t take long for the true temperature to send us back into the embrace of the banya for another round of steam, though I declined more of that tea. I would have to keep my wits about me.

When we passed through for the last time, I noticed that fresh clothes had been hung on pegs in the anteroom—a blouse, a brightly patchworked sarafan, and a short quilted jacket. The ensemble would certainly provide more room for my possible inconvenience, if it went that far. But my Misha clothes were gone. “What happened to my things? My coat?”

“They’re being washed,” she said. “We’ll put the coat in the smokehouse for a few days to kill the vermin.”

A sensible move, but I felt disoriented as Natalya helped me into these odd archaic-feeling garments. The blouse was embroidered, everything clean and smelling of the iron. But now I had nothing. No coat, no normal clothes. And Ukashin had my weapon, which had been in the coat pocket. I felt vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt before, vulnerable and tended to at the same time. I would have to sniff my way across this terrain very carefully, like a little fox crossing a river, testing the ice.

74 The Ionians

IN THE LANTERN-LIT front parlor, cross-legged on the carpets facing my grandfather’s empty chair, the patchwork disciples sat deep in meditation. My benefactress leaned in next to me. “Breathe in the chaos of the world. Breathe out order.” The smoke from their billowing incense burned my lungs, seared my nostrils. Her command made no sense. Why would anybody want to breathe the chaos of the world into her own body? I already held far too much of that particular substance. What if this was real, and I was absorbing the gigantic trash heap of the world, its suffering, its waste, its hunger, its rage?

“Wouldn’t it be better to inhale order and exhale chaos?” I whispered.

She raised her lashes to regard me, as if from a long way off, her eyes dreamy water-green. A smile for my ignorance, my lack of spirituality, played about her petal-pink lips. “But it’s how we heal the world.”

I tried not to smirk, but somehow I doubted that this small group of Petrograd nincompoops could staunch human misery by sitting on a carpet in a candlelit room, breathing. I decided my lungs weren’t up to such heavy planetary responsibilities. Instead I breathed in their order and breathed out my own chaos, hoping no one would notice, the way people throw trash out their windows into the courtyards.

There was no clock in sight. Was it midnight? Two in the morning? My God, how long could a person breathe in and out, even if you thought you were saving the world! Bored, I amused myself by examining my new coreligionists in the cult of whatever this was, Ukashinism. Here they all were, the entire community, ten of them, not counting the absent Master, my mother, and the unregenerate Avdokia, no doubt cursing them all from behind the closed door of the servants’ room. Five men and five women, each more beautiful than the last, except for the gangly, bespectacled intellectual. Most appealing, I decided, was the long-lashed, dark-bearded, romantic-looking youth who chopped their wood. If I were looking for a conquest I would start there. His lashes flickered as he concentrated. Or the boy with firm broad shoulders and heroic dark eyebrows that met in the middle. The gypsy girl’s fierce beauty begged for gold around her neck and dangling from those ears. The blonde from the kitchen this morning could have lit up the room all by herself—Helen of Troy was their scullery maid. All wore multicolored homemade clothing, vaguely folkloric, and not a one was older than twenty-two except the storklike intelligent, a decade older and decidedly uncomfortable with the long sitting. He rocked from side to side, occasionally uncrossing his legs.

Light formed a dome around the candles, polishing these youthful faces into a Vermeer-like serenity, licking at their closed eyelids. The tallow smoked and sweated, and the chunk of incense in its blackened pot wove complex patterns in the air.

The gypsy struck a small gong.

“Think of exhaling long strands of light,” Natalya whispered from within her trance, gesturing with an impossibly graceful arm to evoke strands emerging from her lovely mouth.

I did my best, imagining producing long glowing threads from my lungs. I imagined wrapping the light around myself, then sending it snaking down the hall to tickle Avdokia’s ear. How sad she’d been to watch me move from her room to the sort of women’s dormitory or nunnery that had been set up in the old nursery. You’re with them now?

I’d sent her a quick wink as they removed me. Don’t worry, it’s still me.

I gathered my strands, wove a glowing sling, and laid my baby in it. I threw a brilliant fine Orenburg shawl of light around Maryino, in glowing protection against the predations of the outside world. I tried not to think of Lyuda’s warning in Novinka’s blacksmith shop. They’re not all that safe there. Watching the reflection of candles in the sparkling-clean windows, I wondered about the civil war unfolding somewhere in the night. How lucky I’d been to find my old nanny and my mother here. I would get through the winter with them, out of harm’s way. I had been truly, undeservedly fortunate so far. I hoped my luck would hold.

At last the pocket doors slid open with a bang, and the Master entered as if to a fanfare of trumpets. In unison, the students rose, folded their hands—fist below, flat palm above—and bowed to him. I imitated them as best I could, even to the degree of kowtow, and remained in the bow as he bowed in return and settled into my grandfather’s chair. I could feel Dyedushka’s fury. I was surprised his chair didn’t burst into flames. Finally we straightened and returned to our patch of carpet.

Wearing a Mongolian robe and Persian slippers that turned up slightly at the toes, he looked less like a mystic than a lost member of the Marco Polo expedition. The devil was tickling me ferociously. I fought it, strangling it in my throat. I had to get used to this. Ukashin lifted his hand and the others watched him hungrily, as if he were going to ascend bodily through the ceiling. “The devis have brought to us a traveler,” he said, gesturing toward me like a sultan in a ballet, “who has come to us after a long and hard journey.”

They turned to me at last, these lovely faces that had purposely avoided meeting my eyes even at the simple meals I’d begun to take with them. “Welcome!” “Welcome, traveler.” “Glad you’ve come.” Their unpracticed smiles and the warmth of their greetings shocked me.

I certainly didn’t want to become another string in their cosmic harp, yet it hadn’t occurred to me how it would feel to be welcomed anywhere at this point. Except for Natalya, no one had done more than move over on a bench for me. Now they all seemed quite human, eager to accept a new member to their circle. I reminded myself that this was a ritual greeting, not just for me but for anybody anointed by their leader. But it felt personal. Whoever I was—boy, girl, pregnant or not—I was welcome to share their meager rations of bread and all the incense I could inhale.

“The Mother herself called this traveler,” said Ukashin from his throne, where he sat with one leg tucked up underneath him, his skull gleaming in the candlelight. He looked into each face, making sure he had been understood. How reverently they returned his gaze, how solemnly, like little children being warned not to touch the stove. “Introduce yourselves.”

He nodded at Helen of Troy. In a throaty, resonant alto, she replied, “Katrina. Ionian.”

“And you?”

The lean, bony-faced boy who had brought the butchering materials. “Ilya. Ionian.” He had a shockingly deep voice that would be an asset to any men’s choir.

“We don’t use patronymics or family names,” Ukashin explained to me. “It’s of no importance ‘who’ you were. Only ‘what’ you are. We will be your family now.”

I tried to memorize the names. Katrina. Ilya. Bogdan—lithe, with the heroic eyebrows. Lilya, a nervous girl from the henhouse with a pointed nose. Natalya. Gleb, quiet, like a Swiss shepherd. Anna, a motherly brown-eyed blonde who ran the workroom. Andrei, the intelligent. Pasha, the adorable dark-bearded woodcutter. And Magda, the gypsy, who sat at the Master’s right hand.

“And you? Who are you, traveler?” He indicated me, both hands pressed together like a spear.

Something in me was loath to say it. I was prepared to go along with their nonsense, to work hard, keep quiet, and not ridicule their faith or his authority, but why must there be one more persona, one more disguise of self? One more set of rules? If I wanted to join something, I would have joined the Bolshevik Party. Couldn’t I just be Marina Marinovna Marinovskaya, daughter of myself? Or, like Odysseus, No Man?

The Master was waiting. I felt the force of his presence, the weight of his will, waiting, demanding that I submit, while I struggled with my own natural inclination ever to meet force with resistance. But I had to be realistic now. I was alone and pregnant and friendless. I’d burned every bridge, cut every tie. Of what importance could this be, another name to add to my list? Marusya, Misha, Kuriakina, Makarova were no more representative of my essential self than Ionian. I was not a mother’s or a father’s or a husband’s or a lover’s or the man in the moon’s. I belonged to the Future alone. However, if I was to live, it would be because I’d accepted a berth here. The dead are forever nameless, while the living have to declare themselves sooner or later. We have to be this and not that.

I cleared my voice and christened myself. “Marina. Ionian.”

What weird ritual could possibly have been missing that night? We intoned syllables—ho hee hu ha—vocalizing on the in-breath as well as the out-breath. We gathered the breath in our arms, then flung it up into the sky as if flinging confetti, lowering our hands back to the earth as the small glowing scraps rained back down upon us. My head buzzed. Ukashin drummed on a wide flat drum, and we moved to his varying tempos like so many life-size marionettes. The intelligent, winded from his exertions, finally removed himself to sit at the piano at the back of the room and accompany our exercises with long staccato themes cribbed from Stravinsky.

Our gestures gradually became larger poses, with much use of flexed hands and feet. We began using one another’s bodies as counterweights, like acrobats, leaning upon each other, balancing in strange postures. What joy! The boy with the heroic eyebrows, Bogdan, partnered me with a sureness that could only belong to a dancer. That’s why there were so many dancers at the Laboratory. I stepped on his thigh and stretched out into space. He held me aloft, and I wished I could have stood on his hands. I could feel strength returning to my body, the energy I’d once had, which my recent life had sapped from me. Then the tempo changed, became more fluid. They stopped their balancing, and ringed the carpet, grasping hands, creating a perfect circle.

“Marina Ionian, come sit by me,” Ukashin commanded.

Disappointed, I went and sat on the floor by his chair like a chastised child, as they reformed their circle. Suddenly they bowed their heads, chins on chests, arms at their sides, as if they had all gone to sleep or fallen under a spell. Then slowly they began to turn, their arms coming up along their bodies, crossing on their chests. They twirled faster, and their arms rose and spread, as if lighter than the surrounding air. Then one hand floated up, one hand sank down, and they spun, their heads tilted to the side, eyes closed, as if dreaming. How beautiful! Perfectly tuned. Yes, now I saw it.

After several minutes, the circle began to move, each person still spinning within the slow, stately procession. It reminded me of the motion of planets around an invisible sun. So synchronized was their spinning that they maintained their distances, their perfect circle, even while rotating around their own individual axes. I had no idea how they did it. Their eyes were closed!

“Don’t watch,” Ukashin said above me. “Feel.”

I felt their energy like a gas or a liquid filling the room. Whatever they were doing with their bodies, they were creating something absolutely real. Ukashin put his hand on my shoulder, its warmth suffusing me. “Can you see yourself there?”

I nodded, despite my pledge not to believe in anything, not to be sucked in by this dark-eyed mystic with his bald head and his bull’s neck.

“You have to stop throwing yourself into things,” he said. “You must wait and enter properly. All your life, you’ve been like a wild animal who finds itself inside a house—a panicked horse, slipping and knocking into everything, disrupting the bric-a-brac.” He smiled and squeezed my shoulder. “Likely to break a leg.”

He was right. Such a familiar sensation, crashing into things, causing my own chaos. But tonight I sat, my legs tucked under me, and felt. I took in their beauty, their peace, their dreamlike engagement as around and around they went, let it enter me. I wanted it. It was as if the room had lifted from its moorings, had risen out of this world to enter another state altogether. I was embarrassed even to be thinking in such terms. That was for my mother and her spiritualist crowd—another dimension. But the longer I watched, the more strongly I felt energy rising inside me, up my spine, and lighting my mind like a lamp.

“Now tell me, what do you feel, Marina Ionian?” said Ukashin in a low voice.

The energy in the room was so strong that I found it hard to speak. “Peaceful. Awake.”

“And what do you see?”

Such beauty. A glow filled the room, and it seemed so much brighter than it had been before they’d started spinning. To think something like this could happen in a place where we had once lain on couches reading Dickens. “Radiance.”

“Very good. I think you’ll be happy with us, Marina Ionian.”

I imagined they could do this for days and never have to stop to eat or drink or sleep.

“One hand receives blessings from spirit. Information, order, energy. The other hand gives it to the earth. We’re the link—that’s what we were made for. We hold together the light and the dark. Material and immaterial. Thus the human.”

But there was no darkness in this room, only light, and this feeling of rising.

“Religion makes the mistake of forswearing darkness, forswearing the body,” he continued. “But to forswear darkness is the worst thing. That’s inviting it to approach from the unguarded door and run rampant. We’re going to see worse in these times than we’ve seen so far. Each side trying to hold the light exclusively will create its own darkness. We’re lucky we came to this place.”

Trying to hold the light exclusively… yes. I had lived with Varvara, with Father. I knew what people who had no doubts about their rightness could do. We had been ruled by tsars who believed that God himself had put the scepter into their hands, and look where that had gotten us. “But they call you Master. Don’t you worry about that?”

A mischievous smile was only half disguised by his big moustache. “Oh, I can be as wrong as I can be right. I’m no saint. Darkness only becomes evil when it falls out of connection with the light.” He gestured to the spinning acolytes, his hand like that of a sorcerer who had created these creatures out of the air. “What you see is the Process, the power that turns the universe. Think how the earth turns from dark to light to dark to light. If it was stopped, even by the triumph of the light, the world would end. Everything flying off into space, and then—gone. Brahma awakens from his dream.”

Though I had sworn I would keep a certain distance, I could not help yearning to experience what I was seeing. To have found such pure beauty hidden in the midst of want and terror and material hopes, classes at war, the convulsions of a new nation—it was a miracle. It wouldn’t be hard to believe that the Ionians were holding the world together themselves, and that this room was an energetic anchor that went all the way to the center of the earth.

I could only imagine how Varvara would explode if she could hear me. How does this produce more food to feed the people? How does this provide justice? To her, these beautiful, glowing faces would be just a handful of delusional young throwbacks who should be working for the betterment of the nation—creating posters about public health, taking classes on Plekhanov and Marx. How is spinning around going to solve the problems of the socialist republic?

But I understood with startling binocular vision how it was both absolutely irrelevant, and yet in some strange way more relevant than the latest decision of Comrade Lenin and his Central Committee. I saw how, like poetry, the inner life was both more and less important than the clash of armies. Perhaps this was why I had come to Maryino, what had propelled me through the blizzard—the need to find a clearing in the greater blizzard. Just to feel myself alive, to be. And now that I had that little flame to consider, I didn’t want to go careening about the country like a ricocheting bullet. Maybe I needed to know where I was on the very largest scale of things. So that I could become the still point for this creature spinning inside me.

75 Dreams

IF THE FRONT PARLOR served as their sacred Practice space, the back parlor housed everything else: workshop, art studio, dining room and, no doubt, medical center. Half-finished chairs teetered, basted patchwork clothes lay atop mountains of rags. A painting lurked under a spotted cloth, while amateurish clay bowls dried on a plank. The big room smelled of clay and raw wood, turpentine. As we sat down for breakfast at the long, raw pine table, the chair at its head stood empty. Even vacant, it vibrated with the Master’s vitality, wafting his traces of clove and sandalwood. Natalya slid down on the bench for me, yawning, heavy-headed from sleep. I stepped over, steadying myself on her shoulder, slipping into the spot between her and Bogdan, my new friends. Outside the windows, the late winter dawn blued the sky. It was good to have friends again. I’d missed that.

“I brought something for you, Marina Ionian,” said Andrei the intelligent, seated at the foot of the table. He passed two books up the table to me. He’d not spoken to me since warding me off from Mother’s room, and now he brought gifts? They were the first books I’d seen here. One, small and fat, was bound in royal-blue cloth, the other, slender, was clad in worn burgundy calfskin. The disciples handed them to me with oddly guilty expressions. The first was called The Structure of Reality by A. A. Petrovin, the second was The Evolution of Man by N. D. Tomashevsky. I opened the first. Charts and diagrams, complex spirals and starlike radii punctuated thick unbroken paragraphs that went on for pages.

The intelligent’s blue eyes shone behind his spectacles. “It’s the mathematical basis of Ionia. It lays out the structure of multidimensional reality.”

The slightly humorous dismay on the faces of the other disciples reminded me of a classroom of children steeling themselves for a teacher’s lecture on comportment. “Are you familiar with the term déjà vu? That peculiar feeling of familiarity, that you have been here before, that we have had exactly this conversation sometime in the past?” He pointed quickly to one of the Ionians. “Gleb scratching his head just so and the snow on the trees just in those same clumps. All of it so familiar. But where does this feeling come from? Such a common phenomenon, throughout all cultures, all time. But what is it? Is it a message from the Beyond?”

Avdokia staggered in bearing an enormous towel-wrapped crock, which she dropped onto the table with a bang. When she opened the lid, a grippingly nostalgic fragrance filled the room. Not quite déjà vu, but close. Oatmeal. While everyone else in Russia ate kasha, we Makarovs always ate oatmeal. It was the English tradition. If the English ate shaving cream with their bacon and eggs, we would have, too. My old nanny flashed me a semaphore of horror when she spotted me on the bench listening to the man’s earnest explanations, the books at my elbow, wearing my patchwork sarafan and white head scarf. I could hear her thinking, Holy Theotokos, protect us. Her big nose and chin came together across the thin line of her lips. Don’t trust them an inch. Flicked her eyes over to the gypsy. Especially that one.

But even Magda could not dampen my mood this morning, nor could this storky intelligent. The regularity of the group’s routines and the intensity of the evening Practice made me feel better than I’d felt in a long time. The morning sickness had gone. I tried to pay attention to Andrei’s lecture, to illustrate my dedication as a new Ionian, while bowls were passed and filled.

“Such things aren’t mysteries,” he said, his voice full of gravitas. “Or only insofar as we fail to understand their inherent structure.” He pointed his spoon at me. “We understand that fevers aren’t caused by demons. We know you don’t get rid of them by waving dead cats over your head.” He ate, and a bit of glutinous porridge appended itself to his bottom lip, where it wobbled precariously. It took everything I had not to stare at that lump of cereal rising and falling and instead gaze into his impassioned blue eyes behind his spectacles.

The others either ate in resigned silence or suppressed giggles, heads lowered to avoid catching his eye. Bogdan cast quick sympathetic glances toward me. Manipulating his long pianist’s fingers, the schoolmaster went on to explain how the universe was constructed—as a series of folds, like a Japanese paper flower. “What appears to be a linear phenomenon, when seen from the next level up, is actually folded space-time.” He certainly didn’t make himself popular by monopolizing the conversation, but perhaps on the next level up he was scintillating. “So a phenomenon which appears to move from A to B to C can actually be A and B and C simultaneously. See?”

I nodded politely. I figured I could catch up when I read the books. But now he’d moved from paper flowers to soap bubbles collecting around a soap bubble inside a soap bubble. Interlocking spheres. “Everything is happening inside the same moment, or what appears to be a moment linearly, in this dimension. But there is no linear time in the dimensions above. So in déjà vu, you’ve accidentally jumped to the next level and glimpsed one of the infinite parallel realities. The question is how to prolong that instant, how to investigate it.”

Suddenly the Ionians straightened from their slumped positions of polite boredom. The sleepiness in the air vanished. The Master had arrived.

They rose as one and waited until he had settled himself into his chair, a figure both formidable and whimsical in Russian blouse, shaggy vest, striped velvet trousers, and house slippers. All he lacked were bandoliers and a curved dagger at his belt. “Good morning, children. Has Dyadya Andrei donned his professor’s hat?”

Laughter, so far suppressed, rushed out like wind through chimes. Andrei’s lecture came to an abrupt end, his face gone pale.

“Such weighty matters, Andrei.” Ukashin frowned, though we could see he was teasing. There was a smile under his moustache. “Too much theory first thing in the morning. Less thinking, more dancing, eh?” He ran his hand over his gleaming head—he must have just shaved it—and gazed down the table directly at me. “Is life to be lived, do you think, Marina Ionian? Or contemplated, with the thumb in the mouth?” He reached out and shook the boy Ilya’s shoulder. “You don’t just read an opera score, do you? You sing!” The tall boy with his prominent Adam’s apple grinned. I could feel the pleasure he took in being singled out.

“You don’t admire a pattern for a coat, do you?” he asked brown-eyed Anna. “‘Oh, what a lovely pattern. Look at that clever design!’ No. You make the coat and go for a walk.” Bestowing his smile on her. She absorbed his charm with an indulgent smile of her own, like a fond mother.

“But surely you must agree, Taras, that understanding must come first,” interjected the gawky professor.

“Must I agree?” He watched the flaxen-haired goddess Katrina fill a bowl for him, set it before him. The glance that passed between them—so intimate… was there more here than I had suspected? I smelled sex in the air, though maybe I was just overly sensitive after Kolya’s night with the village temptress. Natalya had told me that separate relationships between the community’s men and women were strictly forbidden. But maybe the Master was the exception. “Katrina Ionian,” he asked the blond girl, “what do you think?”

She just laughed. “I’d rather eat.”

“Exactly,” concluded the master, tucking into his breakfast. “We would all rather eat.”

“But surely—” Andrei tried again.

“But surely—” Ukashin echoed him, his mouth full, imitating his disciple’s fish-gulping-air expression, detonating another round of giggles as the intelligent sat trying to collect himself. Where did this unprovoked cruelty come from? Was it for my benefit, or did he always do it?

“But surely, what do we have if we don’t have our reason, if we don’t examine these things—” the intelligent spluttered.

“What do we have, Professor?” Ukashin prodded him. “No doubt you will tell us.”

The poor man was on the verge of tears. “A travesty,” he replied. “A puppet show.”

Ukashin held out his arms, hands dangling at the wrists, and began to jerk like a puppet, his dark eyes wide and unfocused, as the other man sat, straight-backed and stone-faced. The success of the depiction seemed to encourage the Master. He rose and began to wheel about, unsteady on his feet, jumping and collapsing. He moved to my side to examine one of my new books with an expression both studious and ridiculous—quite a performance.

It shocked me, after the peace and beauty of our exercises, to see such heartlessness. The intelligent was a bore, true, but he didn’t deserve to be belittled. How Ukashin delighted in the man’s humiliation, how deftly he turned the others against him. His advocacy for darkness along with the light was certainly in evidence. No one said a word in Andrei’s defense. The intelligent rose, trembling, glancing from face to unsympathetic face. I put my hand on the books and smiled. I’ll read them. He nodded, but that stricken expression was terrible to behold. He turned and left us to his tormentor.

Ukashin was in a fine mood after that, like a man who has just vandalized a shop and walks away with expensive goods in his arms. As he ate, he asked for people’s dreams, as if nothing had happened. They were all eager to share. Bogdan dreamed of food—whitefish soup and caviar, asparagus with hollandaise. “Tonight don’t forget to take some sacks with you and bring some back,” Ukashin said. “We could use some caviar around here.”

Anna had dreamed of sewing a shroud, but no one would tell her whom it was for. She was afraid. She didn’t want to finish it. I tried not to interpret—it was awfully personal for Ukashin to ask everyone to share their dreams in a group. The woodcutter, Pasha, dreamed they were all back at the Laboratory and the Cheka was coming. Everyone stood against the walls and became the walls, so that when the Chekists broke in, the place was empty.

“Yes, we will learn to do this,” said the Master. “People are fools. They look, but they don’t see.”

Gleb, the furniture maker, with his bland face and colorless hair, shared a dream about a village girl he’d come across, washing clothes in the river. He watched her from the trees—her breasts, thinly clad in her slip, her skirts tucked up around her, her long hair covered with a kerchief. She saw him and called him to her, teasing him. It was excruciating to have to listen to him describe how this village girl had him make love to her there on the banks of the river. He blushed and stammered, but still he kept on talking. It was agonizing to watch.

“Is she here?” Ukashin asked.

Gleb nodded, swallowed.

“Who was it?”

“K-K-Katrina Ionian.”

Katrina listened, barely flinching, keeping her head cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening to a tram driver call out stops, and none of the stops was hers. But down the table, Pasha’s eyes flashed, and his lips turned down within the nest of his dark beard. Such intrigue! It seemed that the ban on sex could not quite eradicate the passions in young healthy people. Ukashin gazed at Gleb from under his emphatic eyebrows. “Yes.” He nodded as if this were important information. “I see.” As if he were unaware of the havoc he was stirring up. That devil. “We’ll do something with that.”

The night before, I’d dreamed I was a fox in autumn, the forest swirling with falling leaves. Ukashin’s dogs were hunting me—they’d picked up my scent. I’d doubled back along branches and crawled under logs, every trick I had, but I was getting tired. I wasn’t going to make it. He would get me one way or another. I certainly wasn’t going to turn a dream like that over to this fakir. But my face must have revealed my resistance, for he turned to me immediately. “And what did you dream, Marina Ionian?”

I shrugged, laughed apologetically—stupid, useless me—glancing around the table. “Sorry—I’m a heavy sleeper. I never remember them.”

He gave an exasperated sigh. His broad shoulders sagged with disappointment, but I suspected that, too, was an act.

“I wish I did remember. I envy all of you, having these nightly adventures.”

He leveled onto me the force of his gaze, that heavy bull’s face with the plum-dark eyes, but in turn I became a lump of clay. All he could do was harden me. He moved on to more pliable targets. Magda, the gypsy, leaped to share. In her dream, an enormous black horse flew into the window of the women’s dormitory while the rest of us slept. It took her on its back, and they flew out over deserted villages and empty fields. “The world had ended,” she said. “Everybody was gone, it was just me and the horse and all the land.”

You didn’t have to be an alienist to understand what that was about. Ukashin nodded as she spoke, but he was watching me, fingering his broad moustache.

Ukashin choreographed dances and exercises around our dreams. I actually felt a little left out, but I continued being unable to remember. The less he knew about what transpired in my psychic life, the better. Especially because he often figured in my dream life, and the way he did had to be kept absolutely to myself. The whole place was awash in repressed sexuality. But all romance had to be focused on Ionia as a whole—and especially on our admiration for and fascination with our charismatic Master. Andrei continued to improvise mystical compositions at the piano, while Ukashin took care to compliment him, at least for a while. During the Practice, they achieved some sort of rapprochement that nevertheless failed to prevent periodic jibes and mockery during the daytime hours.

One night we entered Magda’s dream of the flying horse, imagining riding the terrifying beast out the windows on a star-filled night, carried by the Master’s rumbling, rich voice, which became the horse, racing and plunging. What a feeling—the huge glossy horse beneath me, icy wind in my ears. What ecstasy to ride thus, over the sleeping world.

“No, not sleeping, my children,” the Master told us. “Deserted. The snowy fields have returned to rest. The roofs in the villages—fallen in. No lights, no hearth fires. We fly for how long? A year, a moment, eternity? From now on, this is how it will be, just you and the horse and the wind. You are the master, a god, but absolutely alone. The world has ended, but you were spared because you were airborne. You’re now past the end of the world. There are only the other dimensions now.” Achingly alone, all but for the diabolical horse.

It felt just as it had when Seryozha died. All gone. Mother, Father, Volodya, Kolya. There was no one. The terror of that, the searing grief. But one small thought glimmered, like one small star. The baby. I would not be the only one who survived the end of the world. The horse plunged on while the flame rocked in the lantern.

Afterward, when I was leaving with the others to ascend to the dormitory, Magda stopped me on the stairs. “He wants to see you. Wait in his kabinyet.” His office. Her nostrils flared with jealousy, her flashing eyes reduced to suspicious half-moons.

I imagined it was a privilege to be called by the Master to his kabinyet in the middle of the night, but I would have traded places with her in a second. His was the room at the head of the stairs that had once been Grandfather’s study. I knocked, but no one replied. He must still be with the others. I saw that Mother’s door lay unguarded—maybe I could slip across. But no—Magda lingered on the stairs, watching. Always someone watching. One couldn’t take a breath that wasn’t measured and reported. When would I see her? I wanted to tell her about her grandchild, about Kolya and Petrograd, and find out for myself if she was a captive or a voluntary recluse.

Now, under the scrutiny of glowering Magda, I had no choice but enter Ukashin’s study. Inside, his two smelly dogs lifted their heads, but they went back to sleep on the carpets that completely obscured the room’s wide floorboards, as if it were a Turkish seraglio. A portable campaign desk rested where Grandfather’s huge pigeonhole desk had always stood. It must have been something when the peasants claimed it. I hoped they all got hernias trying to carry it down the stairs. He used to let me open its myriad small drawers, each holding a different wonder: medals, postcards, pastilles for us children. Matchboxes, receipts, and letters. The desk had a secret drawer that looked just like all the others, but it was really only half as deep. Behind it lay a concealed second drawer that held just one lock of hair, a dusty dark brown tied in a thin, sea-green satin ribbon. It had been given to him by the great Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. He would hold it and sing quietly her famous “Casta diva” from Norma.

In its stead, the campaign desk seemed provisional, its edges studded with cigarette burns, its surface filled with mystic clutter—statuettes of Buddhas and fat goddesses, a curved letter opener with an Egyptian god on the handle.

Amazingly, in their cases above the windows, Grandfather’s books had survived the expropriation. I ran my hands along the beautiful gilded spines, pulled down his copy of War and Peace. I kissed its binding as if it were Dyedushka’s own soft, wrinkled face, still hearing Norma in my head. Dyedushka and Tolstoy, born the same year. I imagined them together in a garden somewhere, in the shade of green trees, talking and drinking tea. That whole generation, gone. Now my parents’ fading away, too, and soon, mine. All the children, going down before the scythe like waves of corn. Though Andrei would say it only appeared to be so from the limited viewpoint of life in the third dimension. As if that could make me feel any better. What did it matter what this life looked like from higher dimensions? We humans were stuck to this one like flies in sorghum.

Yet there was still this. I sat at the Master’s desk and turned the thin, handsome pages of the thick book. It was all here—memory, the Russian language, Tolstoy’s art—connecting us all, me and Grandfather and Mother and my child to come. The glory of this life, the earthy third level.

The dogs stirred, and then large warm hands enveloped my head on either side, so firmly that I could not jump. The carpets had silenced his footsteps, so I hadn’t heard him come in. I could see him in the window’s reflection, the bulk of him, his shiny shaved head, the wide moustache standing away from his face. “What’s in this head of yours, Marina Ionian, I wonder?” he murmured, low but clear. “If we peeled all this away, what would we find?”

“Mattress stuffing,” I replied. The suggestion of anyone peeling my flesh made me shudder.

“Haven’t I given you what you wanted, what you needed?” he said quietly into my ear. “Family, shelter, a place to rest?” I could feel his voice in my bones, though he touched me only with his hands. He could crush my skull like an egg. His hands smelled of clove and incense and a bit of dog.

I tried not to struggle or show any panic. I would remain as composed as my mother, my grandmother.

“You swore you wanted to join us. You declared yourself Ionian. But you insist on holding yourself apart.” I started to protest but he stopped me before the first denial escaped my lips. “Don’t. I’m stating a fact, not entering into a dialogue.”

Yes, it was a fact. He dropped his hands and I corkscrewed my neck, as if he’d had me in a headlock. This room was too small for the two of us. I felt as though I were inside a boxing ring.

“What am I to do with you?” He moved away. “If it wasn’t for the child, I would send you out to sleep with the chickens.” He leaned over to pet his dog.

I rose, carefully, on the pretext of putting the book away. “I’m tired—do you mind? I’d like to go to bed now. Was that what you wanted to tell me?”

“The thing is, what will you tell me?” He turned around, and the way he searched my face, I felt like a horse, a dog—my eyes unable to meet his. “Who are you, Marina? Why have you come to us? What do you want from us?”

I forced myself to return his gaze. His bulging eyes glistened like polished stone, so dark I couldn’t differentiate the pupil from the iris. “It’s no mystery. I came home and you were here. That’s all.” I tried not to swallow, but the tightness in my throat commanded it. “I don’t want anything. Just to get along.” If only he would let me talk to my mother.

He collapsed into his desk chair, rubbed the top of his bald head again as if to clear his thoughts. “I like you, Marina. You keep me awake, like a faceful of cold water. Maybe that’s why you came—to be the pebble in my shoe.” He kept staring at me. “But I forgot. You’re so tired. Lie down and rest.” He gestured, open-palmed, to the carpeted corner farthest from the windows, where a pallet lay covered with a sheepskin. “Go ahead. You’re exhausted. You can hardly keep your eyes open.”

And suddenly I was exhausted. And that pallet looked so welcoming, with fluffy curls of the sheepskin, after the long day, the late night, the emotional strain. Or was it a hypnotist’s trick? A lecher’s ruse? “Is this a proposition?”

He picked up one of his little statuettes. “Don’t make assumptions. Sleep, Marina.”

Waves of drowsiness crashed over me. “This isn’t really necessary,” I said, trying to stave off my exhaustion. “You don’t have to go through all this. I’m obviously not a virgin.” I slipped off my felted footgear and climbed in under the sheepskin, fully clothed. Ah, it was so soft, so warm…

“Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.” He turned on the desk lamp, pulled down a volume from Grandfather’s library, and began to read.

I tried to stay awake, concentrating on the hardness of the floor through the mat, the same floor where I’d played when Grandfather wrote his letters. Casta diva, che inargenti… Running my fingers through the long, shaggy tufts of the sheepskin, lamplight flickering. My boat soon drifted from the dock.

I dreamed I was back in Petrograd. I had my son with me. My son! We were on Grivtsova Alley. He was a beautiful child, a solemn little boy with eyes like black olives, about seven years old. And there was something I had to do—deliver a book, a very important book. The child had to come with me, I couldn’t leave him. So I tucked the book under my arm, got the boy into a jacket that was too big for him—Genya’s?—and wrapped my old scarf around my head.

How poor the city was now. Dark and broken in the moonlight, the pavement half submerged, water everywhere. I was sad that my son had to see it this way. He would never know what it had been like when it was the imperial capital. But the book was the thing, something momentous about it, utterly precious. And I was the only one who could deliver it. People had died for this book. It was up to me to preserve it.

I walked as fast as I could holding my son by the hand. His legs were so short, he stumbled as we dodged piles of soggy furniture, signs, clocks, trams lying on their sides. As we turned a corner, I sensed we were being pursued, and I caught just a glimpse of a face under a broad-brimmed hat before it melted into the shadows.

We took shelter on the portico of Kazan Cathedral with its forest of columns, the church in ruins now, and I saw that it was not a man at all who pursued us but a wolf. A white wolf with pale eyes. I ran across Nevsky, pulling the child, splashing into the first lit store, the old Granitsky flower shop. I bolted the door, doused the lights. My poor little boy was soaked to the bone. What if he caught a chill? There were no doctors anymore—it would be entirely my fault. I held him under my coat to warm him. All around us, the unearthly scent of the hothouse flowers. The quarrelsome shopgirl said there was a customer at the door. Don’t open the door! I screamed.

Strong hands shook me, pulling me from the dream like a child from the womb, still surrounded by the scent of cold flowers. “Marina. Wake up.”

I fought to sleep’s surface.

“Tell me. If you tell me, you’ll never have this dream again. I swear.”

So I told him. The boy, the church, the wolf.

76 Krasniy, Krasiviy, Krov’

A RASHY DAWN ALREADY filled the windows when I woke again to find Ukashin still in his folding chair, writing in a notebook at his portable desk. Had he been awake all night? His dogs lay curled up with me, their rough hair so much like the sheepskin’s long tufts that I’d been unable to tell the difference. They sighed and stretched as I propped myself on my elbow.

He turned, leaning back in his seat, regarding me with his pen in hand. “How do you feel, Marina Ionian?”

I nodded. I’d slept quite well, as he had said I would. Gone was the ruined city, the broken church, the wolf, the man in the hat. The water, the boy in Genya’s coat. “Fair. And you?”

How smug he looked. Delighted, as if we’d made the most wonderful love. But it wasn’t my body he’d wanted at all. It was the thing I’d withheld from him—my dreams. He had me sleep in his study so he could seize what he wanted like a little bird rising from the wheat. Well, now he had it. What would he give me in exchange? Safety? Could he repair the city? Could he bring the wolf to heel? He closed the book he’d been reading. “I’ve been meditating on you. Your situation. Your Trud.”

The word meant “work,” “labor,” but here the sense was deeper. Trud, I knew, accelerated your spiritual development in some way very personal to each individual. Each acolyte at Ionia had his or her own Trud—couturier, chef, carpenter, chemist, teacher. I was the sole exception. I’d been waiting for my assignment, but I hadn’t realized that it would depend upon my dreams. But of course. First you had to give him a window into your soul. Then the Trud would conform to the landscape of your psyche. I couldn’t help but be intrigued. What would he give me? What did he see my soul lacking? He lit one of his disgusting cigarettes, crossed his legs, and gazed out at the day, presumably at the disciples clearing paths, before regarding me with the full attention of those dark eyes. I waited for my morning nausea, but it didn’t come.

“You,” he announced, “shall be our hunter.”

Krasniy, red. Krasiviy, beautiful. Krov’, blood. Nothing exists without blood. Before the red of politics, before the red of art, blood was the first red, primeval. It was to be my trade.

My first assignment was to strip the parlor of its telephone wire. My father’s precious telephone. How upset he would be to see me pulling it out, his necessary connection to the modern world. It had taken him years to have that line put in. Whenever he was in residence, the telephone saw more of him than we did. Strangely appropriate that my first labor required me to remove it. We were oddly progressing into a timeless past, and that long-ago future world of telephones and automobiles could not have imagined this one, with hand-dipped candles and homemade furniture.

Outside, the day had dropped its garments of mist and cleared to a brilliance we rarely saw at Christmastime, the sky a Byzantine blue, crushed lapis. From the workroom, I could see Ukashin’s dogs race across the sparkling snow. I envied those who’d gone out to work clearing paths, cutting wood, even tending the henhouse. After I’d pulled the wire, Ukashin had me sit at the plank table in the workroom and laboriously strip the rubber casing from the copper. My hands bled. Alongside me, Gleb the woodworker planed a birch log, and Anna the couturier sang softly while she quilted rags onto a backing. In the corner, Bogdan heated something on the primus stove—glue?—and the stink of it threatened to reengage my morning sickness. Except for Anna’s lovely voice, we worked in silence.

But they all watched enviously when the Master sat next to me on the bench and cut off a length of wire with his pocketknife. “Observe, Marina Ionian.” He transformed his hand into a sniffing animal, its finger-snout testing the air. “Citizen Rabbit, on a brisk winter day.” The rabbit, sniffing, finally stuck its head into the wire loop he’d fashioned. “Okh! Too bad.” Ukashin pulled the loose end, and the noose closed around his wrist. “Unlucky rabbit. Unlucky for him, but for us—rabbit stew. Thank you, Good Citizen.”

He loosened the loop from his arm and placed it before me on the table. The others studied it with intense interest. Anything the Master did or said was a subject of utter fascination to them. “You have some string, some cord?” he asked Anna, who immediately produced a length of rough cord from a shelf nearby. She handed it to him on both palms, as she would have handed over her own dress or her firstborn child if he had wanted it. She had woven it herself out of some kind of plant fiber.

He tied the copper telephone-wire loop onto the cord, kinking the wire to keep it in the knot, then waved the trap in front of my face. “Come, let’s try it out on some real rabbits.” Rising, he put his warm hand on my shoulder. I felt the others’ longing for just such a touch.

The kitchen windows had steamed over, the air dense with the fragrance of cabbage soup. Katrina and Avdokia glanced up from their work—the one curious, the other alarmed to see me in the company of the Master. On the closed porch, Ukashin donned his greatcoat and astrakhan hat, and I put on my coat, which had been returned to me, smoked clean. With a flourish, he reached inside his own coat and produced my gun, handed it to me. And I understood that in sharing my dream, I had passed a test. Returning my revolver was a mark of his faith in me. I bundled myself into scarf and mittens, and Ukashin handed me a pair of ancient snowshoes. They must have been lurking in the attic for decades, for we never came to Maryino in wintertime. They’d been fitted out with new lacings—perhaps from the deer I had killed.

“Doubles?” I asked, showing my backhand.

He chuckled. I was glad he appreciated my sense of humor—nobody else around here had much of one. The dogs barked and jumped on us as we walked out into the sparkling white of the hard frost. He stopped on the steps and lashed my feet into the snowshoes, then applied a set of larger, newer ones constructed from bent willow, bast, and deer hide to his own felted boots. With these items secure, we stepped out onto the crusted snow, shadowed blue, pink, lilac, and green—and headed toward the glittering lindens at the estate’s entrance.

It was extremely cold and clear, windless, dazzling. What a day! Ukashin took off across the pristine meadow at the same speed with which he would have walked across a room, but I straggled behind him, gasping for breath. There were skis on the porch, and I wondered why I couldn’t have used them. But he hadn’t given me time to suggest it, and now he was too far ahead.

Finally, he stopped. “Today you are the rabbit.” He gestured all around us. “Where are you hiding, Citizen?”

I interrogated the sparkling meadow, the depth of the dark pines, the allée of big lindens with their smoky cloud of bare branches, the dense copse of aspens, the smudge of undergrowth at its verge, bilberry and blackberry and little firs. I pointed to where the undergrowth was thickest, among the red willow twigs and blackberry bushes. “There.”

His heavy face nodded once under his astrakhan hat. “Molodets.” Excellent. “Citizen Rabbit can’t afford to be caught in the open. He wants to be in the deep underbrush, where Chairman Wolf and Commissar Fox can’t follow him. Come.” We approached the aspens and began skirting the wood, the edges where trees had once been cut and berry bushes flourished. He pointed to a thin trail of trampled snow. I would have missed it, but Ukashin’s keen eyes missed nothing. I clearly had a long way to go if I was to be a hunter in anything but his imagination. He squatted on his haunches and parted the brush like opening a book. A tunnel, a tiny trail in the snow. He pointed to a long double footprint and a small one. A rabbit, bounding—I could see it. “Now find the narrowest part of this trail.” I hung back. It looked impassable to me. “Go on.”

I fought my way through the twigs and low branches that caught at my sheepskin, my scarf, my face. But sure enough, the tunnel narrowed further in a U of snow between two close trees. “Over here,” I called out.

Silently he followed me in. We squatted on our haunches, low, reading the trail, but my legs weren’t as strong as his. They wobbled, they burned.

“Citizen Rabbit, how tall are you?” He positioned the loop of wire a foot in the air. “Like this?” He had such a knack for creating fun, excitement out of the most ordinary thing. Without that talent, he never could have kept his little band of followers as enthralled as we were. Little wonder the others envied me, able to spend this kind of time with him all by myself.

I lowered his hand six inches.

“Now find a branch. Maybe a sapling, like this.” He formed a gap about an inch in diameter with his ungloved thumb and forefinger. “Take the saw.” He handed me the hacksaw from the workroom.

I found an aspen sapling that would serve us.

“Cut it at an angle.”

After I’d done it, almost cutting my hand in the process, he lashed it with some of the cord Anna had given us, then jammed the sharpened end into the snow. I watched him tie off the knot, trying to see how he did it, but my nose was running unstoppably, and my head ached. It was so cold I could barely focus. He took twigs and used them to steady the snare over the little trail. “That’s one. You find the next one.”

We circled around the back of those bushes, deeper into the wood, and where small firs had begun to grow among the thousand-headed aspen, I found another rabbit trail. I’d never noticed them before, much trampled among the twigs and trees, exactly the kind of terrain one avoided when walking in a forest. “Mouse,” he said, and pointed. Tiny splayed toes and the line of a tail in the snow. “Weasel”—five-toed prints, wider than they were long. “Deer are like hearts in the snow,” he said. “Get us another deer, Marina, and you’ll be queen of Ionia.”

He knew so many things. So unlike Father, who knew how to be witty and withering and give speeches after dinner. Ukashin was more interested in the how of things than the why. This world was not a mystery to him, not a disappointing thing to be transcended, as it was to my mother and Andrei. I could well believe that he’d spent years traveling in the remotest areas of the world, learning the skills of the simple people as well as studying with their holy men. He liked secrets of all kinds. As did I.

He showed me another kind of trap, which used a notched stick and a sapling’s natural spring. When an animal was snared, as he demonstrated, the stick fell away and the tree sprang upward, carrying the trapped animal with it, breaking its neck. “Now you do it.” He had me set the trap, and I laughed with the glee of a small child as it sprang free. “You’ll do well, Marina.”

It had been so long since I’d done anything right, I felt like the sun had come out. Perhaps this—Ionia, my Trud—would work out after all.

Without Ukashin, trapping day after day was not so much fun. But I stuck to it and I learned. My bare hands bungled the knots when I attempted to tie them gloveless in the cold, so I learned to tie my nooses ahead of time and carry the prepared traps with me in my game bag. I immediately added Misha’s trousers under my skirts and his shirt under my linen blouse for extra warmth, and borrowed a quilted hat to wear under my scarf. Warmer, I could stay out for hours learning my territory, discovering game trails, sketching unfamiliar tracks, and generally feeling my way into my new role. I sat with Ukashin at breakfast as he identified the animal tracks I’d seen. Snowshoe-shaped marks—squirrel. Pine marten with its delicate toes. Fox—doglike but smaller than his hairy hounds. “If you see Commissar Fox,” he said, “you have my permission to waste a bullet.”

My first successes brought me the respect of my fellow Ionians. Yet it took a while to get used to seeing the dead in traps, stiff and miserable-looking creatures resembling executed prisoners hanging from gallows—their blank eyes, their curled front legs. Tried and found guilty of counterrevolution and speculation. The sentence, death.

I skinned them quickly, trying not to notice just how much they looked like newborn infants as I pulled them from their pelts, the naked wet torsos delivered from bloody fur. I had to remember how sweet the meat would taste. The baby inside me cried out for it. Life and death, krasniy, krasiviy, krov’. I brought the pelts to Bogdan, whom the Master had taught to tan them. Soon squirrel and rabbit-fur collars, earmuffs, and mittens appeared in the Ionian wardrobe. These small deaths warmed us in countless ways.

The longer I worked outside, the better I liked it and the less the cold bothered me. I was becoming a harder woman than I’d been—a paradox, as motherhood to me had always implied a fleshy and vulnerable femininity. And I was becoming acquainted with Maryino in an entirely new way, these familiar woods and meadows in their winter disguise. The silence refreshed me after the hothouse currents of workroom and dormitory, the secret enmities and collusions, the spying and the dramas. Here, despite the cold and the physical demands, I could find the peace and privacy I craved.

One day as I returned to the house after making my rounds, I glimpsed a flash of red against the white. The fox! Traveling merrily across the crusty drifts, probably returning from sniffing around our henhouse. It stopped for a moment and regarded me conspiratorially before trotting away on its fine black legs. I felt such a rush of pleasure, watching it pad along the hard-packed snow. It was only after it was gone that I remembered Ukashin telling me to waste a bullet if I saw it.

Normally I didn’t let myself think about Kolya. I pushed him away from my consciousness like pushing an unwanted guest out the door. Yet why didn’t I shoot the fox? I thrilled at the sight of the clever red creature, so much like Kolya himself that it made me laugh. Cocking a snook at me in my prehistoric snowshoes, my patchwork and sheepskin and rabbit-fur mitts. I remembered Kolya breezing through the kitchen, grabbing one of Annoushka’s fresh sweet rolls on the run, and when she protested, holding it in his mouth and growling at her. Or dreaming away in a hammock, smoking one of Father’s pipes. The creature reminded me of Kolya, and I loved it as I loved that impossible man. I knew then that I would never be free of him. This fox would be my secret. Although I was happy enough with Ionia, to have a place among them—and a place to get away from them—still one needed one’s secrets or one could hardly be called human.

The weather grew foggy, and gloom set in—monotonous, melancholy weather. Christmas came and went without mention. The Master, like all true revolutionaries, had a calendar of his own, complete with events we could look forward to. We celebrated a Day of the Earth Devi and a Fast of Jericho. There were new dances to learn and long mystical hours when Ukashin led us to higher levels of existence, full of transparent fiery beings.

But the child was a clock in my body whose face I could not see. I needed to know the date. I kept my own calendar in my notebook, playing with the dates in brief poems. The word at the end of the second line gave me the month, and the one at the end of the last line was the day. Dekabr’, December: deliver, decide, derail, detail; Yanvar’, January—yearn, yeast, year. For the numerals—odin, dva, tree, chetiri, piat’: ordinary, drainpipe, tyranny, chinstrap, poultry. For the teens and twenties, two words. Fourteen, chetirnadsat’: constant nullity, clever notion. Twenty-two, dvadsat’-dva: devil’s deal. Dying day. I wrote a poem in honor of each passing day. Poets are the spies of the world, and every poem is a code.

The year 1919 arrived without fanfare. No wax to be cast, no wishes made, no tangos. I looked back at the snow-wrapped house like gingerbread covered in white icing, nestled in its yard among the new outbuildings, and thought of that St. Basil’s Eve so long ago, the smell of pine and goose and winter lilacs, Après l’Ondée and kisses among the snow-perfumed furs. Only three years ago—had a person ever changed as much as I had? Or a country?

I had no idea whether Admiral Kolchak had broken through the Urals or what had become of the Ukraine or what was happening with the Volunteers under Denikin. Was Red Russia completely surrounded? Had we surrendered? Were the English in Petrograd? Out here, who would have told us? If what the Ionians believed was true, Mother would know. But if she hadn’t wanted to know these things when she lived in Petrograd, why would she pay attention now? How I itched to broach that door with its five inset panels. I tried to manage it periodically, even now, but one couldn’t be more closely observed if one were an invalid’s goldfish. And I was lucky to be here, lucky for the respite from the world’s convulsions. If I could make it to July, I’d have a baby to bring home to Kolya, or I could travel elsewhere, I could make up my mind, or perhaps the world would make up my mind for me.

In February, I turned nineteen. Only Avdokia knew—and conceivably Mother, though she’d made no effort to contact me. Avdokia, my angel, my savior, continued to take care of me, even more so once she learned about the baby. There was always more in my bowl at dinnertime than was strictly my share. The meat on my tongue, warm and necessary, was the product of my own dark handiwork. What a drive for life lay inside all this killing, feeding the life growing inside me. Though the whole program of Ionia was intended to quiet the body, my own was becoming more greedy, more desirous. There were times I thought I’d go mad with desire, for Bogdan, or Pasha. Even Ukashin started to look appealing. I almost succeeded in inveigling Bogdan down to the Practice hall in the middle of the night, full of energy from our evening’s exertions. But in the end he wouldn’t. He leaned against the wall, his fingers stroking a thick eyebrow. “Try to understand, Marina. It’s not the Laboratory anymore. Only us, you understand?” He left me there with my frustration like a pot of soup boiling over, the smell of scorch following me around in the air.

I missed Kolya, growling with a sweet roll in his teeth.

The suffocating closeness made me want to flee or start a fistfight. You could die from a thousand tiny cuts: hurt feelings, revenge, petty jealousy, jostling for favor. Who sat closer to Ukashin at dinner, whose dreams were chosen for a dance and whose overlooked. Whose question was considered seriously and whose mocked. You never knew. The safest thing was to lie low and not care too much. He liked keeping everyone guessing. Natalya was up, Katrina was down, Magda always on the lookout for a moment to attack. Bogdan the favorite, then it was Gleb.

I began taking refuge in the bathhouse after my trapping was done, to pass a private hour writing, dreaming, and just staying out of the house as much as I could. Natalya, mistress of the bathhouse, took to leaving small bundles of wood for me by the anteroom stove. These winter poems captured my sense of the life going on within the seemingly silent frozen landscape and the hidden life of the human heart. I wrote a poem about the animals in their dens, dreaming of their vague and shifting memories of spring. Only when the sun had lowered almost to setting did I venture home with a rabbit or two in my game bag and a new poem in my book.

It was when I was coming back in the sifting white of the afternoon after one such session that I again caught a glimpse of red through the trees. I hadn’t seen my ruddy friend for some time, and the sight cheered me more than a hundred rabbits. I marveled at how close he was letting me come, as if he was waiting for me. I left the path to edge even closer. Then I realized—he was too still. Bozhe moi, he had walked into one of my snares. One of my earliest traps, which I never checked anymore because it was so close to the house. Suspended in the little trap, all four legs on the ground, was one long frozen board of Reynard, his black nose lowered in shame. This clever fellow, caught in a snare just large enough for his head. I could see how he’d worn his neck hair bare trying to free himself from the wire, spinning around and around, trying to attack his enemy but unable to fight, unable to flee.

I knelt next to him, tears freezing to my face, stroking his pretty coat. “What were you doing here? This wasn’t for you.” The misery on that pointy face devastated me. Ukashin said that a fox could smell a mouse under three feet of snow, that he could run along the tops of logs and sniff out every danger, using his bushy tail to brush away his own scent. He wasn’t supposed to die! He was supposed to live and laugh at all of us as he stole our hens away.

The snow came down harder as I opened the noose, sliding my knife down the wire, freeing the fox. He was horribly light for his size, so thin, nothing but bone and fur. Nothing edible. His death was for nothing, taking that bit of light and joy from the world.

I returned to the house, threw my sad harvest of rabbit, hare, and fox onto the kitchen table, and though it was forbidden, went into Avdokia’s room, where I lay down on her bed, coat and all, and buried my nose in her quilt, inhaling her smell of yeast.

Magda eventually found me and shoved me out into the kitchen. Katrina Ionian stirred something on the stove, reluctant to witness our warden manhandling me. If I had not gotten my feet under me, surely she would have dragged me in by my hair. The furry pile of dead animals was right where I’d left it, the rabbits and the fox, waiting for me to skin them and cut them up. “You think you’re better than us? That you deserve special favors because you’re the Mother’s daughter? I see you.” She pointed at her eye and then at me in a strangely menacing gesture, as if she would cast a spell on me. “Now get to work.”

I picked up my knife and turned dully to my kill.

I skinned the hare and pulled it from its coat, still a moment that disgusted me. Opened its belly and pulled out the entrails, cut off its head, cut it into sections. The rabbit was smaller and, even worse, more infantlike as I drew it out of its skin. The fox lolled on the other side of the table, all the joy and mischief gone—from me as well. This wasn’t a prize, this Trud. I was the hangman, whom everyone respected but no one wanted to invite to the christening. I started to gut the rabbit only to discover a clutch of babies in its womb. I felt sick. I set down the knife, wiped my hands on a dishcloth, put on someone else’s quilted hat, and went back out into the snow.

I leaned against the house, taking great breaths of cold air in the twilight, shivering in jags, but I could not force myself to go back inside. That fox had been a messenger for me. I felt the noose around my own neck, the wire cutting into me. If I had been trying to ignore the message, the rabbit was the confirmation. What was I going to do?

The porch door opened. Footsteps on the stairs. A dirty dog jumping on me. I kneed the beast aside. “Marina,” the Master said. “You can’t stay out here forever.”

“I can’t do this anymore. Ilya wants to do the hunting. Give it to him.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

I was shivering, but I would not go back in.

A patient hunter himself, he lit one of his cigarettes and smoked it, threw a stick for his dogs. When he was done smoking, he took my elbow. I didn’t want to but it was too cold to resist. I let him lead me back into the house, into the warm kitchen. The hare was gone, the half-butchered rabbit. Either he or Katrina had finished my work for me. Only the fox remained. The girls had vanished, though the pot of borscht on the stove was fragrantly bubbling.

If I stayed here, I would end up as dead as that fox. That’s what it was telling me. As dead as the rabbits. If not in body, then in spirit. Gutted. The snare hadn’t been built for me, yet I was already caught in it. I saw.

The Master ran his fingers along the guard hair of the fox’s red tail—my secret rebel—its tragic pointed nose. He picked up the animal and draped it over my shoulder, the way a man gives a woman a fur scarf, placing it on her neck to see the color against her face.

“Please don’t,” I said, turning away.

“You are the hunter, Marina. This is your Trud. I didn’t make this up. It came to you in a dream. It’s for your good, not ours.”

I trembled, the way a horse shudders to rid itself of a fly. I wished he would take the fox off me. “Why? Ilya wants to do it. You took it away from him. Give it back to him.”

“But you are the one who is hunted. You must become the hunter,” he said, stroking the dead creature lying on my shoulder. “You must think like a hunter, Marina. Lie in wait, read the tracks. Notice where the trail narrows, when you’re being led to the noose.” He took the fox off my body, held it out to me. “You pity this fox? He was not supposed to die—is that what you think? But he was a greedy, foolish thing. He wasn’t paying attention. A ridiculous little person.”

Yes. Careless, ridiculous, greedy. And so easily—dead.

“He dropped his guard. But you must not follow suit.” Ukashin took my bloody hand in his. He studied my face, his dark eyes urgent. “You are the hunter, Marina Ionian. Say it.”

My mouth was so dry. “I am the hunter.” The fox thought it was clever, but it had been foolish and had paid the price. I could not fall prey to my own vanity. I must not think myself too clever. That was a fox’s snare, its downfall. Maybe Ukashin’s, too. “Again.” His dark eyes very serious. “Say it.”

“I am the hunter.” I could feel my trembling ebb. He laid his arm across my shoulder, let his strength flood into me. I bent my head, leaning on my hands against the table. Either I was the hunter or I was the prey. There was no third option.

77 The Feast of the Golden Egg

IN LATE FEBRUARY, UKASHIN announced the Great Feast of the Golden Egg, to celebrate the birth of the fifth world. We’d had fasts before, but a feast? Now? We had months to go before we could plant anything, and months after that before reaping. Did we really have the larder for it? The idea reminded me of the story about a legendary city in the mountains of Georgia under siege by the Tatars. Desperate, almost out of food, the citizens decide to gorge themselves with their very last stores in clear view of the enemy. It broke the siege, the Tatars figuring that it was pointless to besiege a city with unlimited resources. Perhaps this was Ukashin’s way of reassuring us that there would always be bounty—if we only believed.

I asked Natalya if she really thought we had enough food for a feast. “Master says worry creates a field which itself pushes away that which you desire. If we all stay in harmony across the dimensions, there will always be enough. Someday he’s going to teach us how to absorb energy right through the skin, like the trees and the grass do. There are masters in Tibet who taught it to him.”

So they believed, and there was no quarreling with it.

And how could I help falling into the spirit of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg along with the others? First we threw ourselves into a frenzy of cleaning—washed all the clothes, scrubbed the house from the doorstep to the bathroom ceiling, mucked out the workroom, aired the bedding, swept the floors, beat the rugs, cleaned the windows. We were two weeks in preparing, and I think that was the point, to give us something to look forward to, something to focus on, something besides the length of the winter and the scantiness of our means, the frustration caused by Ukashin’s prohibition on “special friendships” within the blissful collective.

“Marina Ionian.” Ukashin stopped me on the porch as I was putting my gear on to check my traps. “I’d appreciate your composing some verses for the holiday. Everyone’s making an offering, and I would like this to be yours.”

I thought of those young Communists in the canteen at Smolny, creating slogans for public health propaganda posters. So now I was to do agitprop for the Golden Egg. A commission—well, I could see by the look in his popped black eyes that there would be no getting out of it. Yet perhaps I could turn this to my advantage. “All right. But I need a place to work without disturbance. Could I use your kabinyet? The energy is very creative there, and no one would bother me.”

The Master lifted one of his pointed eyebrows, mocking me, knowing it was low-level extortion. Maybe I could slip out and see if Mother’s room was unguarded. “For an hour. Before dinner.”

I sat at his desk, taking the opportunity to look through his papers. He had an atlas of central Asia, an ethnography of Siberian shamans, and The Way of the Pilgrim, plus the Vedas and crumbling little books in alphabets I didn’t recognize. All his small amulets, a jewel-handled dagger that would bring a nice chunk of money even in the lowest village in Russia. Powders and herbs tied in little bags. A trunk, much traveled and securely locked. No bed, only the pallet and a pile of sheepskins on the carpet.

Across the hall, Andrei sat reading in front of Mother’s room, his back against her door. What was she doing in there, month after month? She must be mad by now.

Yet how pleasant it was to sit in a room by myself. I put my feet up on the rung of the campaign desk and felt like a king. I turned my attention to the Cosmic Egg. I knew what the Master wanted—some sort of faux-mystic rubaiyat full of “wherefores,” but even in contemplating it, my mind became a cart stuck up to its axles in mud. After trying to push myself out a few times, I gave up and leaned on a wheel, smoking. I would have to leave the cart mired there and walk away.

Yet the Egg, the Egg! Painted, shining, like a glorious Easter egg. Pagan, primordial. Not the relatively long succession of God-days of Genesis, but Creation as a hatching, pecking its way through the shell. All of existence. Imagine that bellyache. Hard enough to be pregnant with one little human. Imagine the fluttering, the pushing and shoving, the straining, having all creation inside you, waiting to be born.

And why would there be this expanding potential when before there was sweet, dark Nothing?

There, I had a start.

Now the question.

Heartburn. How its back ached!

Of course! How else did the world come into being? Desire. Something wanted something. How did anything happen here?

Oh, the things of this world!

I was positive that this was not what my client had ordered, but I felt the rush, the joy, of saying something quite true and equally unexpected. I had not lost the most essential part of myself. More than any lover, any scheme, this moment, my own creation.

But that couldn’t be all, not in a universe quickened by desire. Things just didn’t keep spinning out and out. They settled down, they found relationships, they invented work and machines and childbirth.

Bright jars of bilberry jelly appeared from the cellar, and giant squashes. Berries in syrup. Bogdan produced a large crock of wine. There was much disappearing behind closed doors in groups of three and four and six, the sounds of rehearsals. I composed my poem and spied on Mother’s room. Perhaps she would emerge for the feast.

The fatted calf was slaughtered—or, in our case, chickens, three of them, big and plump, and I was the executioner, untouchable. I am Kali, Bringer of Death. Lilya couldn’t bear to do it herself. I borrowed the ax from Pasha and chopped them on the larch stump, threw the heads to the ever-hopeful dog Bonya. We plucked, we roasted. Ilya brought sprats and salmon from the smokehouse. My own miniature Egg was not to be denied—I nicked a sprat and wolfed it down right there in the kitchen, head and all, the oily deliciousness bringing tears to my eyes. I licked my fingers and silently dared Katrina, who stared, horrified, to say something about it.

The celebration began at sundown. I spent the afternoon braiding the girls’ long tresses alongside Anna, who showed me intricate variations as the acolytes took turns sitting on a stool in front of us. My own hair had grown out a bit from Misha’s inky crop and Anna trimmed it every week to remove the black ends from my fox-red locks. For the feast, she plaited me a crown, threaded it through with green cord.

Amid the bustle and laughter, I saw how much we needed this, saw the wisdom of this extravagance. We’d missed Christmas and New Year’s and Epiphany. No birthday or name day had been acknowledged. This would be all of them rolled into one. I touched my crown and wondered how I looked. There were no mirrors at Ionia. Ukashin felt they were especially harmful to women, that they pulled our souls out of our bodies and left them floating between dimensions, and I wondered if that wasn’t true enough, though I would have liked to have seen my own face that day. I felt the neat crown, my bones, the arch of my brow, my lips, soft. Did I have circles under my eyes? Was I still attractive? Would Kolya want me if we met again? Me with his child in my arms.

We watched the last low, red rays of the winter sun descend, turning the snow to blood. Anna, once the principal alto of the Mikhailovsky Theater, began to sing “Along the Quiet River.” From the hall, Ilya joined her, and then Katrina’s soprano—my God, the Mikhailovsky Theater really lost some talent when these three left Petrograd. The other girls took up the song, and the men.

There is no sound on earth as beautiful as the harmony that can arise from a group of people who sing together day in and day out. Floating on a current of song, we descended in a procession in that lilting, gliding step I’d finally mastered—male, female, male—down to the front parlor, where the rugs had been rolled up and the long plank table had miraculously appeared. We never ate in this room, preferring not to sully it with such third-dimension activities. But here it was, the table, covered with patterned quilts and decorated with colored eggs and pine boughs. Already enthroned at the table’s head, looking like something out of One Thousand and One Nights, was our master, while at the table’s foot, his regular chair from the back parlor was draped in a blue cloth. Could it be that Mother was coming down at last?

We circled the table seven times—once for each of the seven dimensions—to finally stop at our places, marked by elegant place cards painted by Lilya. Ukashin filled a goblet from a big crock of wine and we passed it from hand to hand around the table. Bogdan beamed with pride as he handed it to me—herbal, sharp, and green. Under normal circumstances I would have drunk deep, but the smell was abhorrent in my current condition, and I was happy to pass it on. The baby was more enthralled by the marvelous smells emerging from the kitchen. Hurry up! it shrieked as the elaborate toasts unfurled, to the heavens and the earths and the devis and guardians, the Mother. Hurry up and bring out that rabbit stew! I want bread! Roasted chicken!

The open seat awaited.

Avdokia stood in the doorway, and with each toast, a new unspoken comment radiated out from her eyebrows and her big nose, her mouth growing smaller with disapproval. Idiots. Swindler. I knew she was afraid. What will we all eat come spring? Yes, it was foolhardy to have a feast, my sweet old dear. Yes, it was insane. But we were not driving this train, she and I. We had not laid the rails.

At last she and Katrina began bringing in food. Oh glorious! Ruby borscht and big round loaves of bread. Pickles and smoked sprats followed by russet chickens in nests of potatoes, eggs dyed golden with onion skins and red with beets. Who could begrudge such bounty? We gorged, we drank. Calories pumped through my body, as intoxicating as wine, the baby floating in that heavenly sap of my blood. We sang old children’s songs. Ukashin told a funny story about the Laboratory, and suddenly they all began to open up, trying to top one another with stories about the strange characters they had left behind, encounters between socialites and beggars, a man who kept a lizard in his mouth. Ukashin laughed and told jokes and drank right along with his disciples. Even Andrei drank, though it seemed to make him all the more melancholy. But for the rest, how they needed a night like this, of revelry, of bounty. Healthy young people couldn’t live on oatmeal and the fourth dimension forever. All that vitality and beauty and smoky desire needed to have its day.

After the meal, the offerings began. Natalya and Bogdan presented an original pas de deux to the accompaniment of Andrei’s piano. It was about the love affair between the moon and the sun. I recognized bits of Ukashin’s energy-accumulating choreography grafted onto modernist stylings from the Diaghilev ballet—The Firebird particularly. Oh, such grace in our midst! Natalya’s lithe legs dabbed and fluttered like the legs of an egret through a marsh, and her turns and arabesques were kissed with moonlit delicacy. Bogdan’s robust sun courted her with flashy leaps and turns. That such artistry, such ability, should dwell among us seemed unthinkable, like watching Karsavina dancing on the tiny stage at the Stray Dog. He lifted her on his shoulder and carried her away, careful to avoid the beams.

Then brown-eyed Anna rose and began to sing—of all things—the mezzo’s great “Habanera” from Carmen. Miraculous—the gentle girl who sewed our rags and patches strutted around the table, transformed into the sultry Spanish seductress, while Ilya, Katrina, and Lilya played the other parts. Flush with food and wine, framed by those bright faces, Ukashin looked like a crow among songbirds, his plummy eyes slightly glazed. Was he drunk? Who could tell? The man had the energy and strength of four. There wasn’t that much wine—it had just gone to everyone’s heads.

When the “Habanera” finished and its performers rejoined the group, water and wine were passed around again. Ukashin rapped the table. “Marina Ionian, you think we have forgotten you?” He swept an expansive gesture in my direction, almost knocking over his big goblet.

All these lovely faces. My friends. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake after all, this feast, this place, my having landed here, even with my doubtful heart. At that moment, I felt such love for these exceptional people, their sweetness, their dedication. Taking pleasure in one another’s unlikely company. I rose and recited my poem.

Moving my gaze from face to face, as each imagined the Egg’s emergence. Was it a prison break? Or an expulsion from paradise? Ukashin remained unreadable, like a match behind a hand on a battlefield. He was wondering, I could tell, if I was sincere or mocking him. But there was no mockery in my poem. I had found the place where I could write without lying. I’d left that cart behind where it belonged.

The company was silent as the poem, which, like a thick, fatty yolk, dripped from their faces. Still dreaming around the fire, fingering their own bit of the cosmic shell, perhaps remembering their own mothers, their own homes, which they’d abandoned to follow the Master. They turned to Ukashin, waiting to see if it was all right to approve of me.

Slowly, a smile appeared on his complex face. I could see him congratulating himself on his own wisdom, having gradually led me into harness like a skittish horse. And now that the others saw it was good, they felt free to applaud and embrace me.

It was an evening full of wine, more singing, skits and monologues—it reminded me of long summer nights here when I was a child. Four of the girls sang in close harmony. Boys did Cossack dances with knives in each hand. Magda danced a real gypsy dance, with much flashing of teeth and shaking of shoulders, claiming her rights as the authentic Carmen. Even Ukashin made an offering, an athletic Circassian dance. He was at least forty but as energetic as a twenty-year-old, doing the spins and leaps and even walking on his hands! Urah! The windows dripped with steam. I spun and clapped and whistled with the others. But the chair at the foot of the table remained empty. I wondered if Mother could hear this up in her lair, if the sound of our gaiety reached the fifth dimension, or if she’d had to place a wet cloth across her brow and cotton wool in her ears.

Between dances, the Master fell into the seat next to mine, clapped me on the shoulder. “We’ve had a theorist and a prophet, and now we have our bard!” He kissed me on both cheeks. “We must talk. We need more of this. Maybe you’ll write us some songs… and an invocation.”

At one point I caught a glimpse of Pasha and Katrina disappearing together into the hall. Did the Master notice? But he was drunk, busy dancing with Natalya. Yes, a real carnival was taking place, and Ukashin was allowing it. This must have been what the Laboratory was like before the spartan life of Ionia. Andrei had fallen asleep at the table. Gleb and Ilya were arm wrestling. This was the time I could have had Bogdan if I wanted to, but it came to me—there was no one guarding Mother’s door. I would never again have a chance like this. I practiced invisibility, blending with the woodwork as I slid out of the room and glided up the stairs.

78 The Mother

FIVE INSET PANELS MARKED her door like the spine of a forbidden book, and the scent of an oily incense emanated from the other side. I knocked softly, Fais dodo. The wooden knob turned freely, warm as flesh in my hand. A cloud of incense spilled out like smoke from a badly ventilated stove. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

In the otherwise lightless room a small comma of flame burned in blue glass at eye level, farther away than was possible given the dimensions of a space I knew as well as I knew my own body. Maybe it was the effect of a darkness like the inside of a jewelry box upholstered in smoke and black velvet, but I was afraid to take a step, as if I might fall down into limitless space.

“Mother?”

Behind the flame, I could just make out two icons with overlarge Byzantine eyes, weirdly animated, as if they weren’t painted but lived within their frames in two dimensions. The darkness was impenetrable but for that small blue flame and those saints.

Then came a clicking sound like the turning of a handful of pebbles from near the flame. It made me aware of the uncanny quiet of the room. I couldn’t hear the party directly below us, perhaps because of the heavy carpet under my feet. It made me dizzy, standing still.

A shadow slipped between me and the flame. A ghost, a spirit. I remained perfectly still, like a rabbit eluding a hawk, which sees only movement. Colored patches appeared in the air, and my scalp tingled, the tips of my fingers went cold. Click, click.

“Mama?”

The elongated form discouraged my approach. My mother was not a tall woman. What if it was not her at all? Perhaps that was why they’d kept me away from her all this time. But it had to be Vera Borisovna. Avdokia wouldn’t have lied about that.

The very air shimmered and swirled, alive as a Viennese ballroom. Was there a drug in the oily incense? I wouldn’t have put that past Ukashin. And here I’d imagined my mother up here with a blanket over her knees, reading Madame Blavatsky.

“Mama?” I whispered.

She didn’t turn but stepped aside so the two accusatory icon faces could observe me. I had the strangest feeling that she was watching me through their eyes, as one might spy on other restaurant patrons through a well-placed mirror. Click, click went the stones. “It’s Marina, Mama.”

“Approach.” The clear high voice came from very far away, the words formed as if she’d had to push them through thick cloth.

With one foot, I felt my way ahead. “I’ve been here for months. They won’t let me see you.”

Her hands appeared, white in the darkness, pushing something around atop an inlaid table that I remembered being in the upstairs hall. Her forearms rested on the dark wood. I saw she was arranging tumbled stones—clear, pointed, smooth—some glowed amber, others red, blue, pale cloudy jade. Yes it was my mother, luminous but indefinite, like the underpainting of a portrait. “Did you know I was here?” She hadn’t seen me since the night Arkady came to claim me. “Why don’t you say something?” I reached out and pulled back the hood draped over her head. Her hair tumbled down, loose, white, wild like a stormy sea.

She continued to swirl the stones on the tabletop.

“Will you stop doing that?” With a sweep of my hand I sent the stones flying. They bounced and scattered, some hitting the wall. “Look at me! You haven’t seen me for almost a year! Don’t you care that I’m here?”

She lifted her blue eyes to me then, wide and transparent as tumbled quartz. “I see you. I’ve seen you all along.”

What was she talking about?

“In the snow. In the tower. In the forest and the storm. Come. Marina. Come home.” She lifted her hand to the room’s corner. I followed her gesture. “Stop there,” she whispered. “It’s too far. Marina!” Her voice rose in urgency. “Heed me!”

And I knew. She was seeing me in my desperate walk through the forest. Right now. In a parallel time. It was her voice I’d heard telling me to stop and take shelter.

“Why did you call me here if you didn’t want to see me?”

She shook her head, and from her throat emerged bubbling laughter—like the water in a springhouse, cool and clear. Was she mad? Or was this a private joke? “Mother—”

Those clear, translucent eyes were on me again. “Don’t mistake me for the one who was. What you remember is a bit of golden shell. The egg has vanished.”

How had she heard that? The hair stood up all over my body. Where was my mother? I wanted to shriek. What have you done with her? The woman who loved hats and parties, who’d translated Apollinaire head-to-head with Anton, who loved white lilacs and risqué Pierre Louÿs novels. This Vera Borisovna wasn’t even looking at me. Rather, she scanned me, as if I were a landscape painting too large to take in at a glance.

Then the thought came to me with the force of a blow—this was who she’d always been. Yes. Now I saw her, the mystic who’d always been waiting. I saw her the way you finally see the stones at the bottom of a pool when you stop wading and the water stills and clarifies around your feet. She’d only been playing the role of mother. It was that other person, the spoiled housewife, the glamorous society fixture, who’d been the impostor. She had stepped out of that suit and now stood revealed.

She settled her hood back over her hair. She had what she’d always wanted. No children, no husband, no earthly cares. It wasn’t luxury she’d sought—it had never been about that, not beauty, not art. It was transcendence she was after. Ukashin gave her that psychic space, protection, freedom. And what did he get in return? Money, this estate, a mystical figurehead to awe the faithful?

“What about Father?”

She gestured circles with her hands, as if clearing a window or washing a horse. “So much motion. So much red. Your father has that as well.”

Yes, I had that red. It bubbled up now, clouding my aura. She had been posing all those years as my mother, as a devoted wife. I found myself suddenly furious with her. “So you do remember him,” I said. “Your husband? All those years, was that nothing?” Why was I defending him? As if he were still Papa, and not the politician who betrayed me though it meant my death.

“Some realities are tangential.” She shrugged. “It’s no one’s fault.”

Her detachment made me want to slap her. “I saw him, you know. Back in April. He’s in league with the counterrevolution, plotting away. He exposed me as Red. Thought I was a spy. I was almost killed.”

“White becomes red, red becomes white.” Her voice, far away again. “Seryozha’s here.” She glanced up, the way you notice someone entering a room—in that same corner, where there was no one. “Can’t you see?” She held her hand out to my right, where I saw nothing. “He watches you. He misses you. He’s been trying to communicate with you.” She nodded into the nothingness. “Yes, I know.”

I gazed into the dark spot where her focus was trained. I smelled gunpowder. My hair felt electrified. Was it possible she could see my brother between the worlds? What if all this Ionian nonsense was true—energetics and folds in space-time? Ukashin said there was no death, only transition.

“Don’t look. Feel him.”

I closed my eyes and tried, but couldn’t sense anything more. I passed my hands through the space but it was neither cold nor warm, gave no whisper or rustle. I would have given anything to believe he was here, reaching out to me. Seryozha! But I didn’t need a visitation to know that my brother was near me. He would always be near me. But oh, to see his face again—his slightly pointed ears, the way he read while biting his nails abstractedly, the way he mimicked Papa scolding him.

“How old is he?” I asked, my eyes still closed.

“A small boy. Though sometimes he comes as an old man. It depends.”

This was crazy. I opened my eyes. “He’ll never be an old man. He’ll always be sixteen.”

“In some of the streams he dies young, in others he lives to be an old man, or a soldier, even a priest.”

That made me smile. I could only imagine how my sharp, attentive brother would imitate her now, mocking her mystic face. “And what about me? What do you see for me, Mama?”

That glowing spiritual expression dropped away. She lowered her gaze.

I stepped on one of the oracular stones, slipped, caught myself, picked it up. Smooth and hard. I wanted to throw it at her. Not even a word about the baby?

“Go now.” She looked away from me, chin against her shoulder—that profile, still as beautiful as when Vrubel painted it.

What did she see that made her lower her eyes? I felt as if the ceiling were coming down on me. “Tell me.” I grabbed her by the arm, pulled her so she had to face me.

Her eyes looked wild, as if she were in a snare, cornered and fighting for a way out. “The strong must suffer everything, everything! Don’t you understand?” She struggled to break free of my grip, but though she may have been a prophetess she wasn’t much of a wrestler. “I can’t be upset. Let me go! Ukashin!” she called out. Her voice was shrill enough to carry downstairs. “Taras! Andrei!”

“Don’t scream, please.” I let her go, holding both hands up in surrender. “For God’s sake, Mother.”

She only became more agitated. “Ukashin!”

I had to stop her screaming. I couldn’t believe my own mother was afraid of me. It was a nightmare. “Please, I’m not hurting you!” I reached out, but she shrieked again before I could touch her, shrinking from me as though I held a hot torch, a live viper. “Ukashin!”

“I’ll stay away,” I said, backing up until I hit something that clattered—her vanity table. “I’m way over here.” Please, Seryozha, help me. You were always her favorite. Come and deal with this. I was never good with her.

The door opened and light from the hall fell across the carpet. The Master staggered in, stinking of sweat and wine. How huge he looked outlined against the light from the hall, like a genie released from a bottle, filling the doorway. “What’s going on in here?”

My mother cringed before her icons. “She’s been tormenting me.”

He lowered his great bull’s head as if he would charge me. “I see.”

“I just wanted to talk to her.” I still clutched that clear piece of tumbled quartz.

“Forgive us, Mother.” He crossed the room and yanked me out by the arm, shoved me into the hall, and closed off the Mother’s world behind us.

I stood in the hallway holding my wrenched shoulder, hot tears shamelessly streaming, gulping air that hadn’t been stained with that acrid smoke. I wished to God I had never opened that door. I’d been operating under the illusion that I was special, that I could walk a tightrope between worlds, a privileged character, the Daughter. But I was not special in any way. No father, no mother… now I was truly here, fully in the hands of this cosmic bully and his mad priestess. There would be no other future.

79 Andrei Ionian

MY PUNISHMENT WAS TAILOR-MADE to fit the crime. The night after my transgression, the Master stopped me in the hall. “Andrei needs to learn about hunting. Take him with you in the morning.” And turned away. There would be no argument. How appropriate to consign me to Andrei Ionian, depriving me of the one thing I needed after that encounter with my mother: solitude. I needed time to think, to make some plans. Now I would have the professor dogging my days with his steady stream of philosophy and gangly obliviousness.

The following morning, I got him onto a pair of homemade skis, and soon we left the house behind, smoke trickling from its chimneys, the dark wood of the outbuildings slowly diminishing to train-set size, like toys dusted in soap flakes. I needed to sort out my thoughts about my place at Ionia, my responsibility to the baby, and the way Mother had looked at me like someone examining a stamp through a magnifying glass. The way she’d shrieked for Ukashin. But Andrei could not be still. The very air around him crackled with anxiety. For someone who extolled the virtues of the present moment, could Andrei be any less present?

He launched into a lecture about his favorite subject, simultaneous incarnation, the proposition that we live many lives at once in parallel streams of space-time. This was what my mother had been talking about—seeing Seryozha at four, Seryozha as an old man, a soldier, a dog, a dancing master. I only wished it were true. Then I might be back before the revolution, living with my child and my clever husband, hosting Wednesday at-homes in turban and pantaloons, smoking a little cigar and writing my decadent poetry, instead of stranded in this mystical commune, trapping small animals in the bitter cold. But Andrei wasn’t content with imagining it: he wanted it to literally be so. Mathematically provable.

Well, who was I to criticize? My job was to show him hunting, and that’s what I would do. I pulled my scarf over my nose and mouth and kept moving.

“You see, it’s all our perspective.” It was the Ionian catechism—things that appeared separated on the third dimension were simultaneous when seen from the fourth, more so from the fifth, and so on. He panted to keep up with me, his breath a plume of vapor, but the flow of information never stopped. “You have to look at the position which encompasses the highest point of view.”

He was so desperate that I understand. I saw that for an intellectual like him, the need to be understood was a trap. Once caught, he just kept tightening the noose around himself. He would be better off just admiring the beauty of his system for his own sake. I couldn’t help wondering, what was my own trap? Reflexive hope? The yearning for peace? No, those held no allure. Passion. And the need to see what happened. One’s strength, overdone, was one’s weakness.

As I waited for him to catch his breath—a painful sight, hands on his knees, gasping—it occurred to me that this reassignment must be Andrei’s punishment as well as mine. But what had been his crime? Not keeping me from Mother’s room? On the icy, misted air, I could hear the rooster bragging how he’d made the sun rise. I hiked on, trying to get away from the tide of nervous chatter, which resumed as soon as he could speak.

I stopped on top of a rise, alone for a short moment. Overhead in an ancient apple tree, ravens cawed and clicked their strange squirrel sounds and dropped twigs on my head. I no longer saw them as harbingers of doom, but welcomed them as clever companions whose language I could almost decipher. I stroked the apple tree’s trunk, its spiraled bark like a shirt wrung out by a beefy washerwoman. Its deformation probably had saved it from many a woodsman’s ax. It looked like a claw, an old man’s hand. What do you have to tell me, Tree?

Endure, it said.

I used to ride here with Volodya, the two of us on his bad-tempered pony. He’d put me in front and let me hold the reins, tall grass brushing our bare feet. We’d stop to let Carlyle eat the fallen apples, the fruit small and hard. In those days when you looked back at the house, you would always hear music, Mother playing her piano, Olya singing while she hung the wash in the summer sun.

Now all that was gone. Just me and the tiny passenger. What kind of a life was I facing? What did Mother mean, the strong must suffer everything?

Andrei finally managed the hill, his skis splayed in a gawky V. His scarf, tied across his nose and mouth, had grown thick with frost. But still he talked on, about the folds of space-time: “So you’re you now, but also you at eight walking with your mother, going to fetch some sweets. And eighty, leaning on your daughter’s arm.”

“But we still have to live here and now,” I said. “I don’t see why this is so important to you.”

“It’s essential. Vital! If we could figure out the mathematics of the parallel streams, we would be seen as magicians. Time travel, jumping between alternate lives would become a reality. Seeing the intention of the entire structure. That’s what we should be studying, not whirling around with our eyes closed.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose vigorously. The crows cawed in response.

But I liked the whirling. Opening the vortex, we called it. It was my favorite thing at Ionia. It made you less hungry, more peaceful, and the room held that beautiful energy. We got along better afterward. “What about the sacred spiral? I would have thought you’d approve.”

“We should be examining the layers of existence. It’s a different order of magnitude.”

“But it’s right out of that book you gave me, The Structure of Reality.” The spiral was the gateway to higher dimensions. What could he object to in its embodiment?

“You’re dancing it. It’s not the same as engaging here.” He knocked on his forehead. “You can draw a motor, too, but it won’t take you to Moscow.” He sighed, whacked a tree trunk with a crude ski pole. “But nobody cares. It’s too much mental work. I’ve failed here if you can’t see how it matters.” I could see I’d offended him.

We started down the hill toward the aspen copse, the trees all talking to each other, their roots entwined. “I wrote a poem about parallel time streams,” I said. He seemed so bitter that no one cared about his cosmic theories, I thought it might cheer him. “Want to hear it?”

“Go on.”

He said nothing at first, the crunch of snow under his skis. “Yes, but don’t you want to know why? It’s the manifestation of a universal truth, not just inspiration for a poet’s reveries. Such a bright girl, too. I’d had such high hopes for you.”

How tedious he was. He fell in love with patterns, ignoring the very things worth living for—the body in motion, the beauty of these frosty woods, a line of verse. Every bit the spaceman that Varvara was. Who was he to have hopes for me anyway? “I’m a disappointment to many. You’ll have to queue, I’m afraid.”

We reached the logged stretch, overgrown with blackberries and willows, their bare red twigs sticking up from the snow like the fingers of a frozen traveler. Andrei panted and coughed. I was tempted to send him off into the bush ahead of me, like a beater, to flush the game. I wanted to sneak up behind him and scream, “Wolf!” I knew exactly why Ukashin used him as a scapegoat and court jester. He was so wretchedly earnest. Too much air, Ukashin would say, too little earth. Though didn’t we all suffer from the same complaint? Truly, which of us Ionians wasn’t too much air, too little earth? It was lucky any of us had a roof over our heads. Without Ukashin, Ionia would have starved long ago.

“Hold up!” Andrei was caught. He tried to free himself and toppled over like a rootless aspen.

I tried not to laugh. I was tempted to suggest maybe he could leap over into a parallel time-space stream where he was graceful and useful and quiet. But it wasn’t his fault, he really was helpless, and one didn’t add to the suffering of others, even if they were annoying. I went back to help him, got him out of the snow, set his ski out for him to step into, and strapped him back onto the raw birch plank. I even set his hat back on his head and handed him my bottle of tea wrapped in birch bark.

After that he fell silent for a while. Perhaps he was finally noticing the beauty of the woods, the finely etched branches of maple and birch, the little berries the animals would come again and again to eat. The first trap of the day lay empty, also the second. I had to keep setting new traps in wider circles, I even crossed the river now. It took longer, but we needed the meat. I still could hear Natalya reassuring me that groceries would manifest themselves if we didn’t repress them with our fears.

Andrei was wearying, forcing himself forward into the heavy snow. I stopped at a favorite spot with a view of the river and the low round ball of the sun, always near the horizon in these winter months. He stood next to me, gulping the frigid air, taking in the mesmerizing display of black marks on the white birches, vivid against the white sky, like the masterful strokes of a Chinese brush.

“You know, we’ve met before, Marina.”

“We have?” I squinted at him. Tall, storky, in his quilted coat, squirrel-skin gloves, and felted hat. Emaciated, his lips blue. “When was that?”

“At a party. You wore a rust-colored dress and danced a tango with a young officer. You were laughing. I never see you laugh like that here.”

He’d been there, that New Year’s Eve, the night we cast the wax. He had seen me with Kolya… how was that possible?

Master Vsevolod. Andrei must have been one of Mother’s table-rappers. Of course. “I’ve been here three months and you’re just telling me this now?”

“We don’t speak of the personal,” he said, slightly mocking. “The past is irrelevant.” He sighed. “But your mother and I were once great friends.”

I wanted to hear more about my mother, but we needed to get going if I had any hope of crossing to my other traps and getting back before the weather turned ugly. Already the belly of the sky hung low and fat and was turning the yellow-green of impending snow. We were going to be in for it.

We made our way down to the frozen-over river and took off across the crisp whiteness of the open snow, stopping in the middle to listen to the muffled gurgle. There is no greater pleasure, any Russian will tell you, than standing on a frozen lake or river and contemplating hidden currents under the snow. I thought perhaps I should try ice fishing. Overhead, an osprey circled. The eagles didn’t leave in the winter. I couldn’t imagine the fortitude to last out these brutal winters in a nest of twigs. Even Andrei stopped talking to hear the river’s quiet music.

On the other side, where once little boys had watched me swim naked, not understanding their own excitement, we stopped for our lunch. A good spot, though cold as the heavy clouds descended. We sat on a fallen fir. The white birches were scarred where deer had chewed on them. I shared our luncheon of dried perch and black bread, a red egg left over from the feast—a love offering from Avdokia. I peeled it and ate half—yolk, too—and gave the other half to Andrei. He gnawed the bread with his eyeteeth. It was not quite as tough as rock, but getting there. The fish was full of bones, but nice and salty. I forced myself to eat it flake by flake, careful not to drop any with my freezing hands.

“So you were one of Vsevolod’s… circle,” I finished, not wanting to insult him. “My brother used to do a great imitation of him.” I attempted it, the hunchy obsequiousness, the flabby lips, rubbing his hands.

“He was a kind man, though,” Andrei said. “He didn’t deserve the treatment he got from Taras, and me.” He balled up the paper from the fish and threw it into the woods.

“Was this at the Laboratory?”

He looked impossibly sad. “We should get going,” he said.

We finished the tea, and I led him off into the pines that grew tall on this side of the river, giving off a jammy smell. My first trap bore fruit.

“Oh look, you got one!”

Citizen Rabbit, condemned for crimes unknown. I slid the tip of my knife to find the precious wire buried in its neck, worked the noose open. In better times I would have cut it, but in better times I wouldn’t be doing this at all. I dropped the dead weight of my catch into my game bag, then showed Andrei how to reset the little snare, steadying it with twigs over the game trail. He watched me with the same bemused curiosity I’d had in the days when I watched Mina dissecting things in the biology lab at the Tagantsev Academy—interest without any intention of trying it myself. I would make Andrei set the next one. I stood, straightening my legs, rubbing the circulation back into them.

The next trap also paid off—a large hare had been caught around its neck and foreleg. I could feel its struggle before it finally froze to death. In the spring, I planned to catch rabbits alive and breed them. That way we would have fresh meat next winter without expending all this energy on hunting—though it had been designed for my psychospiritual advancement and not just as a way to feed the tribe. Then I caught myself. Next winter. As if I would still be here. Not a chance. Certainly the civil war would be over by then. Things would start to improve and there would be food in the city. My child would grow up there. I would not be fooling with rabbits by then.

I made Andrei reset the trap, bend the sapling down to the ground, lacing it into the notched twig. Set them well, Ukashin had said. Even a rabbit will avoid a snare if he’s been caught once and fought his way free. Only a person is stupid enough to be caught twice.

The intelligent bashed himself in the face a couple of times, but eventually reset the trap. He beamed with his accomplishment.

“When I think of the man I was,” he said, “I want to shake him. So confident, so naive. It took the revolution to awaken us from our dream of life. Perhaps that was its true purpose.”

“The revolution’s purpose was to free the worker, to feed the poor, not to awaken the bourgeoisie. If we could have fed the people, given them hope, we wouldn’t have needed the Bolsheviks to be our alarm clock.”

He blew into his thin long hands, rubbed them and put his gloves back on. “Nevertheless, it was a liberation,” he said, picking up his ski poles. “You were never yourself back then. You were the Good Husband, the Publisher, the Dutiful Wife. Even you. Rebellious Daughter? Daddy’s Girl? Girl of the Season? The revolution made short work of all of that. It exploded all the roles.”

“You think we’re free now? Or are the new roles just less obvious?” I had been the Rebellious Daughter, also the Good Girl, and yes, Daddy’s Favorite. And now I was the Mystical Orphan, the Haphazard Acolyte, the Husbandless Mother-to-Be. Kali, Bringer of Death. It hardly seemed an improvement.

“I’ve refused to take on any new roles,” he said. I could see his energy had returned with his meal. “For the first time in my life, I am just a man. Only a man feels, only a man lives. A Publisher can’t feel hungry, but I feel my hunger. What does a Good Husband feel? Nothing. He’s a construct. I feel. Everything drops away but what’s meaningful. Noumenon. Ding an sich. A rebirth.”

I looked at us both, in our rags and patches. Ding an sich. The thing in itself. Kant in the woods. Platonists in sheepskins and quilted jackets. It made me laugh.

He couldn’t really think this was freedom. Under one role there was always another. But I didn’t have time for this house of mirrors. I had traps to check before the snow. “Tell me about my mother. Does she ever come out of that room?”

“She used to come out for Practice.” He skied along in my wake, bumping the backs of my snowshoes with his tips. “She’d visit the workroom… we often played the piano together. She has such beautiful technique. So sensitive. She sometimes plays my own compositions. Occasionally she invites me to her room for tea.”

I liked the idea that they were friends, that she had someone to talk to besides Ukashin. “Do you ever talk about Petrograd, the old days?”

“We never talk about personal things. We speak of the work, her experiences on the astral.” He paused, remembering her, then his face darkened. “But Taras doesn’t like us interfering with her. He wants to be her sole contact. As you’ve seen.”

“But you’re the one guarding her door.”

How sad he looked. “She can’t be disturbed. Changes are going on now. I’m no longer privy to the discussions.” The bitterness around his small mouth. “There’s a new darkness around us, haven’t you noticed? No one talks about it. Have they said anything to you?”

Me? I was the lowest on the ladder of initiation. “No one talks to me,” I said. “But I’ve felt it, yes. I thought it was the war… the violence. Red versus White. It’s probably reverberating all over the world, even onto the higher dimensions.”

“That’s not how it works,” he said. “The disturbance is above, and manifests on this level. Energy goes from higher to lower. The war is a disturbance in the higher dimensions, materializing in the third. That’s your mother’s work, to keep it from coming through.”

I didn’t like the idea of war in the higher dimensions. I liked my higher dimensions abstract and orderly and beneficent if possible. This was spooky, like devils in the bathhouse, witches curdling the milk. “I thought you were a scientist.”

“There are all sorts of beings on every dimension, Marina.”

We moved through the pines. Traveling on this side was easier, as some of the trees had been cut, though cover for small game wasn’t quite as good. I saw something in the snow that made my heart leap. Split-hoof tracks, pretty as name-day roses. I crouched down to study them. Here were the small tracks of a mouse, and oval prints with small forward toes—marten or sable. A crow strutting. And, queen of my dreams, those delicate hoofprints of deer. Recent, too. Nothing else had degraded their edges. They were imprinted on top, firmly as a rubber stamp.

I rubbed my nose with my mitten, trying to warm it, pulled my scarf up again. If I got a deer, Ukashin would be appeased, and I would be taken off the punishment list, brought back into the breast of Ionia, forgiven my trespasses. I could feel my day brightening.

Andrei hung over my shoulder like a man reading another’s newspaper. “What do you see?”

I pointed. “Deer tracks. Here, and here.”

I scanned the trees, and there, between trunks, something large and gray moved silently. I yanked my glove off with my teeth and took the pistol from my pocket, held my other hand out to silence Andrei. As quietly as I could, I began to approach in the creaking snow. I had to get closer. There was no way to kill anything from this distance. As I moved, I was already thinking how I would get a deer home, whether I would have to hoist it into a tree, and with what. As I neared, I heard a crash. The intelligent had caught his ski and fallen into a clump of evergreens. The big shape vanished.

Damn, Andrei! Could he be any clumsier? I could have had a clear shot in another few feet. In my mind I’d already killed that deer, was already tasting a bit of its raw liver. That stag had lasted us a month. I plunged ahead to try to find the animal, leaving Andrei to sort himself out. Or he could just sit there in the snow for all I cared.

I moved in the direction where I’d last seen it, watching for tracks. There and there. Bounding. But I was no match for a running deer. I followed the prints for a few minutes anyway, in hopes it might calm down and stop to browse. Finally, I had to admit I’d lost it. Damn him! Why did Ukashin think this was such a good idea, to cripple me in my hunting? He should be thinking of the rest of the Ionians, not my transgression. And now I was in an area of the forest where I’d never been before, and the clouds were descending. I thought of Andrei back there. My charge, my albatross. My anger said leave him there, but remorse ticked like a clock. Even if he’d managed to right himself, he would probably fall in a tree hole and break a leg. The snow would be coming soon, and he would be completely lost without me. I had to get him home.

I released the deer in my mind. How sad it was to watch it spring away. Frustrated and furious, I turned to follow my big ugly tracks back to where I’d left the intelligent. The Ionians constantly preached the necessity of misery to help you awaken, but as far as I could see, suffering never made anybody better. It just made us petty and irritable and selfish. We got better despite our suffering, not because of it.

I found Andrei exactly where I’d left him, sitting in the snow, his arms wrapped around his legs, resting his forehead against his knees.

“I lost the deer,” I said.

“I’m useless,” he said. “Just leave me here.”

“You can’t sit here. You’ll freeze. Get up.”

“I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I’m done.”

“Come on.” I pulled him up, dusted him off, and we started home. I could tell that Andrei was tired. He dropped farther and farther behind. I wished I had another meal on me to perk him up.

As we moved back to the place where it was easiest to cross the river, I recognized a configuration of rocks where I’d set another trap. I tramped over to check it, watching for my ward. Yes! The trap had been sprung. But when I approached to collect my bounty, I found nothing hanging from the cord. Indeed the noose itself was gone, snapped clean, and the snow beneath lay trampled and bloody. Whatever I’d caught, it had barely been dead when the thief arrived, as the blood had flowed, not yet frozen. Although most of the tracks were trampled, one was clear as a signature. It sent a shiver through me. A doglike track, bigger than those of Ukashin’s hairy hounds. A new arrival. But how long ago? Days? Hours? The print was clean—no mouse tracks or twigs or snow around it.

“Did you find something?” Andrei asked, coming up behind me.

I stood, kicking the kinks from my legs. My nose was running, and my cheeks stung in the cold. “No,” I said. I didn’t want to frighten him. The talk of darkness brewing already had me on edge, and the sky was heavy with coming snow. I still pictured that deer drifting through the icy mist, but the rabbit and big hare would have to be enough for tonight. I could not afford to tarry.

As we set off again, I had to admit I was grateful for Andrei’s company and regretted that I’d contemplated abandoning him earlier. I would not want to be alone in the woods with the owner of that track. What was it the Kirghiz had said? If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. The two of us would present a more formidable prospect to a predator than myself alone.

“Sorry I ruined your hunting,” he said. “I can’t seem to do anything right these days.”

If he was looking for consolation, he wasn’t going to find it with me. I thought I saw movement about a hundred meters off. It might have been my overwound imagination, but I could have sworn I saw a ghostly form weaving its way through the pines. I took my pistol out. It must have scented us, maybe back when we’d eaten our lunch. Perhaps it had even followed me when I was tracking the deer. Oh God. Ukashin might have given me hunting as my Trud, but that thing out there in the trees, that was a hunter.

I blinked to clear my eyes, my skin prickling. An icy fog gathered in pockets along the ground. Andrei’s breath was short in my ear.

There—another flicker of motion. Or was it? If I hadn’t seen the print in the snow, I might have convinced myself I was imagining it all. I turned slowly, trying to see through the trees and the deepening mist. I could feel it stalking us, as it had through the moonlit arcade of my dream.

“The deer again?” he said.

I didn’t want to say the word. I might not believe in much, but I believed in the power of naming. “Maybe. But it’s getting late. I don’t think there’ll be anything else today.” What time was it? The light was unreadable, the mist blotting out shadows. Another hour at best. We had to get back across the river.

My heartbeat pounded in my ears as we moved through the bank of fog. I tried to hurry Andrei without alarming him, but he snagged his ski tip on a buried root and fell again. He was tiring. Something flew over our heads, silent until it was right on us. I ducked, held on to my hat. Owl. All the hunters were out today. It was as if this forest wanted us, had set its own snares.

We needed to make some noise, make ourselves seem loud, robust, confident. It knew we were here. We needed to impress it with our vigor. Well, that was something Andrei could do as easily as breathing—make noise. I asked him in a bright voice how he came to follow Ukashin.

I had not expected the reaction. He stopped. He even stopped panting. His bird face with its little spectacles, its red nose, its vulnerable mouth agape. “I don’t follow Ukashin. Is that what you think?”

Well, he’d spent every day since I’d arrived doing the worst of our tasks, taking out the ashes from the stoves, washing the chamber pots, sitting before Mother’s door, all while absorbing great shovelfuls of Ukashinian humiliation and spooling out reels of Ionian philosophy. “But you were at the Laboratory.”

“You think I trotted after him like a little dog? Begging for his attention? That I’m just another of his sheep?”

Obviously I had stepped on one of Andrei Ionian’s sore spots. “No, no,” I said. “I was just asking. Really.” Keep moving. I scanned the trees around us, the mist, trying not to picture the predator taking Andrei’s skinny intellectual neck in its teeth. But Andrei wasn’t with me. He was still where he’d stopped, as if he’d been hit by lightning. “I founded Ionia,” he said. “I invented it. It’s mine. Not his. Mine.”

He thrust his face up toward the white sky, exposing that bony throat, as if begging God to witness his suffering. “You don’t know anything. You think I’m just some clown. Andrei the fool. Useless, ridiculous Andrei, with his stupid books, his boring lectures. Can’t even ski without falling down.”

“You ski fine. Come on—it’s snowing.” The tall pines creaked. It was spooky, and I could see the first big feathery flakes, felt the kiss of one on my cheek.

“Just the village fool. Dance, Andrei, dance!” Strapped into his skis, he imitated the paws-up clumsiness of a dancing bear.

My hands were freezing, but I couldn’t shoot with mittens on. “Please—let’s go. Why don’t you tell me about inventing Ionia as we go?”

“Don’t patronize me.” But at least that got him going. “You don’t care about what he did. You’re as besotted as the others. You’re up to your neck in it. You don’t care if it’s a system or a moment’s whim as long as it’s Taras dishing it out.”

No one had ever mentioned Andrei as the founder of Ionia. Avdokia said Vsevolod brought Ukashin to Furshtatskaya, not the two of them. “So tell me,” I said, hoping I could console him. He was having some kind of breakdown. “Nobody talks about how it started.”

I smiled to encourage him, all the while thinking: You must be the hunter. Think like a hunter. If I was truly a hunter I would double back and try to kill that beast. Even if I only succeeded in wounding it or scaring it, it would avoid us. But I had Andrei to think about. I couldn’t leave him now, and I couldn’t take him with me.

“I wrote the book. I gave it to you when you first got here.” The Structure of Reality by A. A. Petrovin. Why had I not guessed? “You see? I had the idea years before I ever laid eyes on Taras Ukashin. Vera Borisovna could tell you. Vsevolod—” But then he remembered, the Ionians had abandoned Vsevolod and the others at the Petrograd dacha, left them in the lurch. Everyone who could have vouched for him had already been betrayed. “Taras could tell you—”

“Maybe I should ask him.”

That got me a laugh, a single bitter Ha! “Yes, you do that.”

Here was the river. Thank God. The snow coming down in thick, fat flakes now. It had already started to obliterate our footprints. I scanned for that thing, tracking us. It could be circling; it could be ten feet behind. “Hurry, please.” I unstrapped my snowshoes and climbed down the short face of the riverbank, strapped myself back in. “Hand me your skis, Andrei,” I said. But rushing him only made him clumsier, and he was more interested in his tale than in our pressing need to get away from this place.

“Maybe I am the fool. I was dazzled by him myself.” He’d bent over to loosen his ski, in the process dropping his glove, his pole. “He came to my office, wanted to talk about my book. We talked until six in the morning.” Finally he got a ski off and handed it down to me, but the cold was getting to him, and his hands trembled. “He wanted to know all about my work. And in return he told me about his travels. Egypt, China! Where hadn’t the man been? He studied with Sufis and Tantric Buddhists. Secret practices no one had ever recorded.”

I eyed the far shore longingly. Would we ever get there? His breath came short as he bent over the straps of his remaining ski. “He wanted to get his knowledge out into the world. I told him about my dream to create a society of brothers conducting research into the very shape of reality.”

Would I have to climb up there and get that other ski? “Really, we need to go.”

He ignored my urging. “You don’t know what it is to be alone your whole life, Marina, and then meet someone like that. We became the dearest of friends. The happiest time of my life—I’m not embarrassed to say it.”

I could imagine. All Ukashin’s formidable personality and charm descending upon the poor undefended intellectual. It must have been overwhelming. It must have felt like love.

Finally he got the other ski off and handed it to me, but he slipped on the rocks coming down, scraping his cheek and tearing his pants. Down on the snowy river, I put his skis back on him, strapping him in. For a brief moment I imagined doing the same for my child, buckling his skis, tying his little skates. I would be a good mother. If I survived.

He picked up his ski poles and pushed off across the white expanse. “I introduced him to everyone he knows. They embraced him as one of their own. I opened every door for him. He never would have had access to those circles if wasn’t for me.”

It was with relief that I saw the red twigs of riverbank willows poking up through the snow. We were across. I could exhale.

Now it was as if he’d forgotten he was crossing a frozen river. He was back in that office in Petrograd, his own parallel stream. “My wife hated him, of course. She knew he was up to something. Well, I couldn’t see it. I was mesmerized. He understands people, you see. He reads them like you read those tracks. He knows what you want. He makes you feel special, like you can do great things.”

I knew the truth of that. It worked until he turned on you, as he had Andrei, and perhaps me as well.

“I don’t know what people want. I don’t understand people. I’ll admit it. To have a friend in him… I felt like I’d been asleep my whole life, just imitating a human being, and now I was awake. I felt like anything was possible.” Understand why I trusted him, he was saying. Why I loved him. And he still did. I eased my pace, and he stopped, inhaling a chugging breath, trying to calm himself. It wasn’t exertion. But it was now only another half a mile to the house. I felt safer. I didn’t think the wolf would follow us so far. So I let him talk. Why not?

Replacing the pistol in my pocket, I put on my mittens. “Tell me about the Laboratory.”

He started moving again, climbing the little rise. They had discussed renting a dacha to conduct their research, in a resort town on the Gulf of Finland. Without the skeptical wife, no doubt. “Just a dream, I see that now. A toy. Before October, you couldn’t find five people in Petrograd willing to give up their roles for such an experiment. But after, that was another thing. Taras came to my home. My boys were already asleep. He always came late—it drove my wife mad. ‘He’s a free man,’ I told her. ‘You don’t know what to do with a free man.’ ‘I know what to do with him,’ she said. ‘Just give me half a chance.’ Honestly, I wish I had.”

But then they wouldn’t have been here. The place would have been abandoned, in a shambles. I scanned the trees ahead through the falling snow, and I imagined I could smell dinner cooking. I had the rabbit and the hare in my bag; it was good enough.

Ukashin had been the one to find the dacha. “He told me he’d found the perfect place for our Laboratory. The Gromov dacha, you know where that is?”

A huge place with massive gardens on Aptekarsky Island.

“I thought it was far too large for our needs. There were only eight of us, after all. But he predicted there would be many more. Well, he was right about that. But I had pictured philosophers, scientists, authors. Cultured people. Not dancers and lunatics.” Snow gathered on his hat and shoulders, his brow and moustache. His glasses steamed over.

“And where was Mother in all this?”

“Vsevolod brought us to your old flat. She was down to one room by then. It was a shame to see how low she’d fallen. We took her to the dacha that very night. Almost like old times.” But by then, the Laboratory was already out of control. “Shopgirls, spiritual thrill seekers. Morphine addicts. His so-called followers. And I was helpless to stop it.”

“I’m sure you did what you could,” I said, sounding like Sofia Yakovlevna. We were almost within sight of the house now. I took a couple of steps up the hill but failed to entice him onward.

“I couldn’t stem the tide,” he said, growing more upset as he told the story, as if pleading his case before a judge. “Who would follow Andrei Petrovin? By then it was all Taras the Magus. He stole it from me! Imagine how it feels to hold your dream in your hands only to watch it fed to the dogs. Thrown into the fire, your life’s work!” A sob caught his voice.

Yes, I could imagine. I’d felt something similar when I’d seen the lists of the executed in Krasnaya Gazeta. Here’s your revolution. See what we’ve done with it.

“We were supposed to be a circle of equals. All of a sudden we had people who’d never heard of Steiner or Blavatsky. They just wanted to open their mouths like baby birds and have us feed them. They kissed the hem of his coat. It was disgusting. By that point he was styling himself as a holy man. He spent hours creating rituals for our little acolytes to enact. ‘Go find five things the color green.’ And they would do it! And the women—I shudder to tell you what went on there. ‘How can you do this, Taras?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t what we talked about at all.’ He said, ‘People are animals, my friend. They want to know where they stand. Are they up? Are they down? They don’t come to us to have us ask them, ‘Well, what do you think?’ They’re waiting to be told. Would you withhold that from them?”

He was weeping. I was afraid to get near him. I thought he might hit me.

“I know who I am. I don’t need followers! I don’t need to be called Master. That’s his weakness. He needs them to love him, to fear him. He’s Moloch. It’s not about ideas. He needed my ideas to give him legitimacy. But once he had what he wanted, he didn’t care about them at all.”

A burst of wind blew snow in our faces. I could barely see the trees now. But soon we’d be safe. Or at least warm. So all the pretty girls, that was not a figment of my imagination. Yet I thought of that night in his kabinyet. He never touched me. “Why didn’t you leave? Why did you come here, then?”

He hung his head. “Why indeed… fool that I am, I had nothing left. I’d destroyed everything that meant anything to me,” he said bitterly.

“What about your wife? Couldn’t you go back to her?”

He gazed behind him, toward the river, that blurry sleeve of white. I hoped he wasn’t going to bolt. It had taken me forever to get him this far. “It turned out she was more attached to her roles than to me. She wanted to be the Publisher’s Wife.” He stabbed the snow as if lancing a bear. “She wanted me to renounce my research. Concentrate on publishing popular novels.” He grimaced. “Romances. Cookbooks. Said if I moved to the dacha, I would never see my children again. She wanted me to choose between my work and my roles. What could I do? What would you have done?” His haunted, desperate face, begging me for an answer. Me, of all people. I was just nineteen.

I tugged the fox hat further down onto my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been in that position.”

He leaned over the peeled birch ski poles and wept, great ragged sobs. It was terrible to hear. The months I’d watched him at dinner, accompanying us on the piano, shoveling snow, sitting like an Alsatian outside my mother’s door. Why had we never talked before this? Perhaps, like me, he hadn’t wanted to name his suffering, hadn’t wanted to see it so clearly.

He bent back so his face was bared to the sky, snow falling like freed secrets. “What was I to do? I had to pursue my ideas. A man is not an animal, to wander the world without a question in his head, a moment of wonder. I had to see, to learn, to discover! She brought the children in that night. ‘Kiss your father. He’s going on a trip.’ ‘Oh, where, Papa? To Moscow? With ’Kashin’? A grown man, a father, I walked in with my eyes wide open.” He struggled through the snow up to where I stood, slipped, fell against me, almost knocking me over. I pushed him back upright. “I’m such a fool,” he said, weeping, clinging to me. “I didn’t feel the noose around my neck until it was too late.” He backed away from me, sidestepping. “Maybe I still hoped I had a place. That I could protect my ideas somehow.” He took off his glasses. “I’ve been so blind!” And, disgusted, he pitched them out into snow.

That face, so full of pain. “Did I follow Ukashin, Marina? Have you noticed, only he gets a name? I have a name. Andrei Petrovin. Does that mean anything to you—Petrovin Press?”

He’d published poets I’d read. Ravich, Ivan Modal. And this is what had become of him.

“Andrei Petrovin!” He yelled into the falling snow, backing away from me. “Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovin!”

Without his glasses, he looked as unfocused and helpless as a worm writhing on a pavement.

I didn’t know how to help him. I didn’t want to embarrass him further, watching him sobbing so nakedly, so I moved in the direction he’d thrown his spectacles. I had little hope of finding them. Still, what else could I do? I couldn’t bring back his children, his good name, his publishing house, his marriage, his dignity. What would you have done? I scanned the snow, and there! Two small circles in the fading light. A perfect imprint of the specs. Like a fox, I dug them out with both hands, flinging snow left and right, then held them aloft. “Andrei, I found them!”

I was turning when I heard the blast. My God.

He sagged halfway to his knees, then fell over sideways in the snow, his feet still tied to the skis. I raced back to him, my right snowshoe coming undone. I plunged in up to my thigh, struggling to get back to him with one foot on top of the drift, the other falling through. “Andrei! Andrei Petrovin!”

He was lying on his side, my gun in his mouth, his eyes shocked and staring out, and the back of his head was gone.

80 Metel’

DID I SCREAM? Did I weep? My words returned tenfold as I knelt beside him in the falling snow. I’ve never been in that position. He’d reached out to me, and this was my answer to his soul-deep despair? That was all I could say? I took off my scarf and laid it over his head. I knew I should do something—go to the house, get help—but I didn’t want to leave him alone. It was not just the wolf. It was that he’d been alone so long already. I still had his glasses in my hand. I found your glasses, Andrei Alexandrovich. As if that was the important thing.

The crunch of snow. Pasha, flakes building up on his hat and his black beard, had heard the blast. He took one look at Andrei, at me. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.” The snow fell, trying to cover the deed, the blood, a soft mercy. Too late, too late. God forgive me, Andrei. I didn’t know there wouldn’t be another chance.

Soon Pasha returned with Bogdan and Gleb and the sledge he used to carry his wood. They loaded Andrei’s long, awkward body onto it. Bogdan didn’t know what to do with the gun. He tried to hand it to me, that deadly piece of steel. I couldn’t bear to look at it.

“I’ll take it to the Master,” he said, tucking it into his coat.

“No. Give it to me,” I said. I put it back in my pocket. It was already cold, and it weighed more than it used to, heavy with death. Andrei had fallen against me on purpose. His desperate hand reaching into my pocket. How could I have saved him? Why hadn’t I tried? Bogdan carried the skis while Pasha harnessed himself to the sled. Gleb held Andrei’s limp legs so they didn’t drag in the snow.

By the time we arrived at the house, the others had already gathered in the yard. They stared at the dead man, and at me, confused and wary. I had brought death to their camp.

Ukashin emerged from the house with his hairy dogs, buckling the belt of his greatcoat. The dogs ran to us, snuffled at the body. I kicked them away. This was a man, not a dead deer.

The Master approached. I didn’t want to look at him. Alive, so sturdy, so self-important. Usurper. He had stolen Andrei’s ideas, made him a laughingstock, driven him to suicide. He lifted my scarf to gaze at the man who’d once been his friend. His face betrayed nothing. I had the gun in my pocket. I could have shot him right there and then.

He straightened, whispered something into Magda’s ear, sending her into the house. Natalya hovered, scared, wanting to help, but her frightened eyes waited for Ukashin to signal his verdict. She would follow his lead. I glanced up to the second story, the windows overlooking the yard. Are you up there, Mother? What do you think of your companion now?

Magda returned with a sheet she laid out on the shoveled snow. The boys lifted the dead man onto it and wrapped him up. Natalya rested her arm around me. Ukashin avoided my gaze. My fellow sheep waited for their master to tell them what to think. He contemplated the broken figure of his compatriot. Did he realize that he’d taken it too far? Or was this what he wanted all along? For Andrei to eliminate himself, so he wouldn’t have to do it. The Ionians shifted, brushing snow from their sad, innocent faces.

Then he turned to regard the group. “Our brother, Andrei Ionian, did a desperate thing,” he said at last. He looked into the faces of his children, one by one, a hard extra moment for me. “Our life, what we’re accomplishing here, it’s a difficult path. He became trapped in his own darkness.”

The acolytes nodded, like wooden heads on springs. The wrapped figure in the sheet on the hard-packed snow testified to the truth of that.

“We must not become lost,” he said. “The path is twisting and hard to follow. It’s easy to head in the wrong direction.” His eyes met mine once again. “It’s easy to fall.”

Here came Avdokia, trotting across the snow. She pushed her way in at my elbow, crossing herself, murmuring a prayer for the dead.

“An idea without commitment to Practice is a dangerous thing,” he said. “Farewell, brother Andrei.” He nodded to the boys to lift him back onto the sledge.

“He had a name,” I said, my voice too loud. It startled the others in the fading light. “It was Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovin, and Ionia was his life’s work. It was all he had. And your Master took it from him. And now he’s dead.”

Avdokia held on to my arm. “Shh, shh,” she whispered. “For the love of God.”

I could hear the creak of the snow as the disciples shifted, backing away as if lightning bolts might come out of the Master’s eyes and strike me dead, and they didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. But the face he showed me was one of mourning and concern. “Let us send a message of love to Marina Ionian, that she was the instrument of such a terrible loss. Her guilt and suffering are our own. But the universe supports all who need it.”

He lifted his palms to me, and they all followed suit, their eyes closing, their heads tilting to the right, sending me their impersonal love on command. And I could feel his energy among them, a force like a flavor of spice in the midst of their pallid porridge. I could smell it, strong and musky. He had me. I was as trapped as Andrei Ionian.

“Take him to the icehouse,” the Master told the boys. And they began to pull him back the way we’d come.

“Vechnaya pamyat’,” said Avdokia. Eternal memory.

Murmurs echoing her sentiment moved through the group as they followed him down the path to cold storage.

I returned with Avdokia to her room, where I sat on her bed, still in my sheepskin. “Don’t fight about this, Marinoushka, my angel,” she said, kneeling, pulling off my boots, putting my slippers on, taking my hat. “It’s not your business. This was between him and that one.”

I told her what Andrei had said, that he had thrown his glasses. I showed them to her, warm from my pocket. An hour earlier they’d been on his face. “You saw how it was. Ukashin cut him down every day, so no one would ever listen to him. He killed him.”

Her blue kerchief before me, she shook her head. “You have to think of yourself now. Your baby. This was not your quarrel.”

“You want me just to forget? Like it never happened?” I could still see him, his face to the sky, praying for help, praying for release from his suffering. How he fell on me. The blood in the snow.

Avdokia sighed as she hauled herself to her feet. “You have such a tender heart, milaya. I pray for you.” She sat on her bed next to me, her arm around my waist. I took a deep, shuddering breath. Her warm smell, so familiar. Oh couldn’t we go back to the way it was? “Don’t lose everything for that sad man. He’s gone, poor thing. But you’re still here. You have to live on. Ask yourself, who was he to you really?”

Who was he? Why would she ask such a question? In truth—an annoyance, a pedant. I knew nothing about him. But when a human being unburdens himself to you, you become part of his troubles. “Does it matter? He didn’t deserve to be so reduced. You didn’t hear him crying. Ukashin took everything from him.”

“Listen to me.” She pressed my face between the palms of her bent old hands, exactly as she used to do when I was a child and she needed to talk to me seriously. Her little eyes in their nest of wrinkles, her nose and her chin practically touching. “Things are going to happen to you in your life far worse than this, Marinoushka. It’s a terrible thing to say to a young person, I know. You’re still seeing him out there… God knows how he got your gun. But the thing is—where are you going to be when that one puts you out? What use will you be to anyone if you don’t make it? Let Andrei go. He’s in God’s hands now.” She crossed herself. “May God have mercy on the living and the dead.”

But my old nanny hadn’t been there. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen his face when he talked about kissing his children goodbye. What would you have done?

I slept in her bed with his glasses curled in my hand.

I heard them through the door, making dinner. No one said a word. I didn’t come out. I turned my face to the wall. Avdokia brought me soup with a good piece of meat in it. I ate it while she watched me, hoping I would talk to her, but I had nothing more to say. Not to her, not to anyone.

Later in the evening, Natalya’s pretty face poked through the door, her water-brown hair, my swan. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you coming for Practice?”

“No.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” she said. “He fell into doubt.” As though he’d fallen from a tram. Belief was like that. When you fell, you cracked yourself open. And what would it take for this pretty butterfly to doubt her Master? Whose death would it take? Mine?

He sent for me, late. This time, Bogdan was the messenger. “He wants you.” Avdokia was the one who made me get up, put my slippers on me. “You have to go. You can’t hide in here forever.” And so I went.

In the front parlor, I could feel the just-completed Practice, like a violin that was too high to hear, an invisible cloak of scented silk. I didn’t want to feel its beauty, didn’t want it to dissipate my disgust. Bogdan left me with a guilty shrug.

“Sit down,” Ukashin said quietly. I was afraid of him. I tried to remember my courage, but where had it fled?

I sat on the carpet, and to my horror he came and sat right in front of me, our knees nearly touching. I was terrified to be so close to him. What was he going to do to me? He had already been threatening to put me out, and that was before my outburst.

“You’ve had a shock,” he said. “To have him do this when he was with you. And with your own gun. I don’t blame you for being upset. I’m upset, too.”

I saw again the bright bloom of Andrei’s blood, the way he’d crumpled to the ground, still strapped into his skis. A wave of comfort suffused me. I didn’t want it. I knew it was a lie, that he was doing it to me, but I needed comfort, too. I was not as strong as I pretended to be.

“I know you’re thinking you should have done something,” he said, his voice low, confiding. “If you’d only said the right words. That you should have steadied him, brought him back to the light. Supported his path instead of fanning his doubt.”

It was true. I didn’t try to make him feel better. I’ve never been in that position.

“He trusted you,” he went on in that kind voice. “He liked you. That’s why I sent him with you. To see if he would reach out. But you didn’t help him. You failed him.”

Oh God, that was true, too. But I had to remember, I wasn’t the reason for his suffering. I was only a tool.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “You didn’t know what you were doing. I worried about this from the beginning. You act without thinking.”

I gazed down at the carpet, the stylized pomegranates and deer. I didn’t want him to confuse me. It was he who had betrayed his friend. Andrei had no one, and that was Ukashin’s fault, not mine.

“Look at me, Marina Ionian.” I lifted my eyes, so very weary. “Am I angry?” In his face, no anger, only tenderness, a little tiredness, that of a man with many responsibilities. For all of Ionia. How human he looked right now. It surprised me after my accusations. “Each of us is seeking something here, Marina. Some want a more radiant path. Others, fellowship. We all have our own reasons. Even you.”

“I wasn’t seeking anything.” I wanted more than anything to push myself back from him, but then he would know how frightened I was.

“You wanted sanctuary,” he said. “A home. A place in the world. And I gave it to you, didn’t I?”

I had made this happen. Again, I had forced my way in. I was the one. He’d wanted to send me away that first day. Oh God, I wished he had.

“But you can’t both tear down your home and have it,” he said. “And your child can’t be born into a snowdrift. I want you to have it here.”

In that exact moment, I felt a fluttering, like an eyelid’s tic, in the depths of my body. The fetus had chosen this moment to awaken.

He was impossible to escape, those bull’s eyes, sad, piercing, his drooping moustache, the big nose, the planes of his face, the mole on his forehead, the lines on the dome of his head. “The dead hold no grudges, Marina. They know everything, understand everything.” Insistent, warm. “Andrei sought understanding,” he continued. “It was his life’s purpose. Now he’s released from the blindness of this world into the Great Knowledge. A violent release, but he didn’t know how else to accomplish it. He’s where he always wanted to be. He has transcended to the upper dimensions.”

How awful to say he was better off dead. But much of what this hard man was saying was true. The more he spoke, the less sure I was. I felt his words like a current, urging me onto the river of his story.

What would you have done?

He reached out and took my hand. His flesh like wood, denser than ordinary flesh. I felt a great rush of grief—for Andrei, and myself, and all the people caught in their traps, and those who don’t know how to save them. What a world of suffering we live in. I felt unmoored, drifting and spinning in the tide.

Andrei’s suicide lingered. It tapped the windows, clung to our faces and hands. The possibility of doom darkened the edges of the Ionian dream, and the weather did nothing to lessen it. Metel’, we say. Blizzard. The compressed savagery of the season came down as if trying to scrape us from the face of the earth. The nearness of death was a smell in my hair like gunpowder. How small and alone we were here, the country around us not Russia but Death.

The blizzard raged. Wind shrieked at the corners of the house; the trees streamed, tugging at their roots. Branches rattled against the walls. Bad luck had arrived. Ukashin’s dogs mysteriously disappeared. Nightmares swept the dormitories. We no longer shared our dreams in public, teasing out their meaning. Ukashin met with each of us privately in his kabinyet to unburden us, to explain away the darkness.

I dreamed I was feasting with Taras Ukashin, gorging on dates and almonds, colored eggs and mulled wine. We made love on the sheepskins while Andrei Ionian stood outside in the cold, miserable, with only that sheet around him, his blue face pressed to the window.

The temperature continued to drop. Outside the kitchen, the glass tube with its mercury spine showed forty below. There’s a hardness to the air when the thermometer falls this low. The cold is a knife gouging any bit of exposed skin. It slashes your cheeks. You have to close your eyes or your eyeballs freeze in your head.

The Master ordered everything to be brought into the house—meat from the smokehouse, chickens from the coop, everything edible carried down to the larder under the kitchen. I could not stop thinking about Andrei in the icehouse. I was not so sure that the dead forgive us everything.

Bad-tempered Lilya and I brought in the chickens from the henhouse, collecting them one by one and conveying them under our coats. She left the rooster to me. I tackled him, wrapped him in my sheepskin as he madly clawed me. I was afraid I’d break his neck or one of his feet. We stashed them under baskets weighted with wood in Avdokia’s room and stood by the hot stove, waited for the shivering to die down before going out again. The boys brought firewood into the hall, and the girls melted snow in barrels in the kitchen. It was as if we were preparing for a siege.

No more could I escape to tramp the woods. I would experience Ionia undiluted, the full force of the communal mind.

We assembled in the Practice room. The Master had an announcement to make. “It is time to accelerate your advancement, the adept along with the novice. All together as one.” He would introduce a new Practice—vlivaniye. Inflowing. It was a technique known only to a few dozen human beings on earth. The excitement in the faces of the acolytes was as if he’d announced to a bunch of children that the Sugar Plum Fairy was coming to visit. “A secret teaching,” he said, “kept for thousands of years among the Brotherhood of the Sun.” A sect of monks in the Tien Shan, the eastern Himalayas, where he had spent time learning their mysteries. They took in energy directly from the earth and sun right through their skins. Hale and hearty, they lived to a great age, and some had not eaten in fifty years.

“Imagine the freedom,” he said. “To no longer have to feed on matter that feeds on other matter. To concentrate energy directly from the cosmos. If people knew, all wars would cease, all craving would vanish. People would know there was always enough to sustain them. That they were truly sons and daughters of the universe.”

Vlivaniye became our lives. Sealed together by the storm, we were one body, one consciousness. And I went under like a diver, I plunged. In the end I could not bear the loneliness of being outside the circle. I had to trust that there was a boat rocking above me, my own rationality, and that when I returned to the surface it would still be there, and I would not be lost in a featureless sea.

Ukashin taught us that the material body wasn’t solid but rather permeated with radiant matter capable of absorbing energy, as a sponge can be filled with water. We held on to his voice as if it were a rope across a vast chasm of space.

First we inflowed with the earth. I was surprised how much I enjoyed descending into the ground, passing the tunnels of moles and lairs of badgers, the nut-filled hideouts of squirrels and rabbits—how surprised they were to see me! I visited foxes with their tails around their noses, and sleeping bears, and proceeded down through the roots of trees, breathing through the earth, reaching the glowing gems and veins of metals. You were safe down there. Nothing could hurt you with the earth tucked in over you. Cross-legged on the carpet, we breathed in the planetary emanations, and they felt like kindness, forgiveness. All things began and ended in earth. Crops, trees, animals. How alive it was, how generous. At least I could say, This was my home. Safe from guilt, safe from the past, safe from Andrei, safe from the Master himself.

The sun’s energy was brighter, clear and intelligent. “Your light body is activated,” he lectured. “Open your eyes, look around. You’ll know this to be true.” And when I looked, the Ionians had become floating bodies of light, suffused with bright handfuls of energy like glittering fistfuls of confetti.

I gazed at my own arms, astonished. I could have sworn I saw light like fine hairs rising from them. Movement in the hair and in the beards of my friends, light concentrating in their organs. Yet still I heard Andrei saying, You don’t care, as long as he keeps you fascinated. Well, I was not Andrei, willing to sit in a corner while the others did their Practice, feeding on self-righteousness, alone, hungry, and miserable.

Those nights I lay on my pallet, trying to see if I could still detect that glow, testing to see if it was only hypnosis. But it was becoming harder to tell what was suggestion and what was real. We were eating very little, and the near fasting exaggerated the effects. I turned over, trying to sleep, but the energy was far too high. I thought of Andrei in the icehouse, his blue face, his bloody head. Don’t listen to him, he begged me. Don’t fall under his spell.

But I couldn’t be both here and there. Andrei, you shot yourself with my gun, but I didn’t shoot you. You made your choices long before. You should have left when people started kissing his hem, but you could not open your hand.

I know I was a failure, he replied. But don’t succumb as I did.

His feud was with Ukashin, but it wasn’t my fight. The Earth Devi was supporting me now. It wasn’t about the Master. The teaching wasn’t the man. The former could be good while the other was corrupt, couldn’t it? Andrei could not do the inflowing, dissolving himself, because he loved only ideas. And without a body, there was nowhere for the light to come in. It entered the skin, it filled you like a wineskin.

Though the days were dark and the wind shook the house, the sun grew inside us, rushing through the glowing sea anemones of our nerves, our blood vessels like rivers. Sometimes I jerked crazily. Ukashin said it was because I was leaping so far ahead of where I’d been in my Practice, bringing in far larger quantities of energy than my body was accustomed to. The energetic channels had to expand to accommodate the new current, and sometimes there were kinks. I sweated, I shook. Natalya created a dance—coiling in, then uncurling. When others joined her, it became a flower. But no more would Andrei accompany our dances on my mother’s old piano.

We would not be ready for total inflowing for months, he said. But I could attest that the Practice was already making changes in us. For one thing, food seemed sickening now. We had to be urged to eat. When did that happen, in the Russia of 1919? Avdokia dropped the big pot onto the table with a clang, as if she wanted to startle us from our high vibrational hum. As we passed our bowls I could hear her grumble. “Living on light… we’ll see how well that works.”

Ukashin lowered his spoon. “The ignorant suffer most, because they brace for the worst. Fear closes you off. You have to be porous, like a sponge.”

After she left, we could hear her clattering in the kitchen. I wanted to laugh, imagining her curses, her comments about sponges and the Master. She couldn’t see what we saw—that we were feeding on radiance, living in radiance.

After the dishes were cleared, we brought out our projects, shoes and hats. Ukashin played his flute. The disciples sang. Though our voices were not as strong as before, they were purer. Small motions captured my eye. I was transfixed by the movement of the hanging spindle—long and slender, of carved wood like a top—that Anna used to spin flax. The spinning reminded me of the earth and the stars. Like a wedding ring hung over a pregnant belly—will it be a boy or a girl? I never did that. No wedding ring.

My head shimmered with strings of sound—the storm’s vowels, oooo ooo oooo. The consonants: Ts, the sizzle of the peppering snow. K—Crack! Crash! The wind clawed the windows, battered the house as if shot from a fire hose. Eeee.

“Why shouldn’t it storm?’ said Ukashin, brandishing his flute like Aaron with his staff. “Why should nature cut itself down to fit our capacity for experience? Don’t be afraid. Embrace it. Look at Marina. Tell us the storm, Marina Ionian. Be our bard.” He leaned back in his chair.

I rose, the storm in my mouth. I am the storm. The size of it rose within me, the power. I felt its rage and envy, its hunger. I gloried in my own strength.

Their faces startled, mesmerized.

With Andrei, the house of death awaiting them all.

The thrill and the heart of the chaos, its inhuman force and destructive joy surged within me. The throne, empty. Yes. He could not invite the devil in and stop it halfway. The storm served no one but itself.

Suddenly heads swiveled to the door.

My mother stood in the doorway, hovering, in an aura of powder, like a moth. Her long white hair unbraided, her pale cloak awry. Ilya, at her side, her indecisive shadow, looked terrified. “Taras?” came the high, tremulous voice I knew so well.

Already Ukashin was moving toward her, taking her white hands.

It was as if some fantastic figure who lived across seas seven times seven had appeared in our humble izba, summoned by my words. “The wolf,” she hissed. “Don’t you hear it?” My mother’s terror ratcheted up their anxiety, even higher than my poem had. “Scratching, scratching. Don’t let it in!” She pointed toward the north, and the storm’s volume rose at that moment, as if in reply. Let me in.

The Master held her thin hands between his own. “We won’t let it, Mother. What shall we do? Tell us what you see.”

“Rub the sills! Have them fetch fir and juniper. Lay them across the doorways. Don’t let it in!”

Ukashin looked around. His eyes settled upon Pasha. “You. Cut some boughs, bring them in.”

He was going to send Pasha out into that storm? Yes, he was the woodsman, but he was also guilty of a secret personal love, something that excluded the Master. This would be a two for one. It was not a joke to send someone out for the storm to eat. But Pasha rose without hesitation.

Katrina paled, her face a mask, but the woodcutter bowed to the will of his Master and the prophetess.

Mother’s urgency breathed life into my metaphor, creating a shape—yes, a wolf, tearing at the windows, trying to get in. “I’ll go, too,” Bogdan volunteered. “Davai,” said Gleb, rising. Perhaps not wanting Pasha to get all the credit for bravery in Katrina’s eyes. The three piled into the kitchen, grabbed their skis and snowshoes, coats and hats, and returned through the hall to the front door to prepare for the bitter cold, wrapping their scarves around their faces, leaving mere slits for their eyes.

I snatched at Bogdan’s sleeve. “Please—don’t risk your life for a handful of pine needles. If you die, he’ll say it’s because you didn’t believe enough.”

He stroked my face, gently. “It will be fine. You have to trust.”

“Don’t say die,” Katrina snapped, trying to pull me back toward the workroom. “Can’t you see you’re just making it worse?” Her worried blue eyes followed Pasha out the door.

I yanked myself away from her grasp and stood in the cold vestibule after she returned to the others. They didn’t know how quickly death could come. Just in a minute. Tree limbs flew faster than horses out there. Your skin froze in moments.

Avdokia appeared at my elbow. “You can’t talk a fool out of a fire,” she said and slipped something into my pocket—a packet wrapped in paper. Meat. She must have stolen it from the pot right under Katrina’s nose. I choked it down, threw the paper into a corner so they wouldn’t find it on me. “Can you smell me?” I held out my hands to her.

“Don’t get too close,” she said.

In the workroom, my lunatic mother now sat in Ukashin’s chair, white as Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, Winter’s daughter. Maybe she really had seen a wolf, or a spirit, or a Dark Body from a far dimension only visible to her squid eyes, but you didn’t send precious humans out when these creatures were stalking.

Katrina and I wiped off a window and peered out at the tiny flicker of lantern light swinging off in the lee of the house. Then it was swallowed by the storm. All because of a woman who hadn’t been out of her room for months and talked to imaginary creatures in the dark. Ukashin sat by her side, knitting his brow like a priest at confession as she spoke into his ear. It was the first time I’d seen them together in the open, in the light. How reverently he was listening, his head bowed, nodding.

And then it struck me like a tree branch in the head. Taras Ukashin believed in my mother. This was no confidence game, not a clever use of her to appropriate her holdings or to lay further claim to the mystical Beyond. It was worse. He truly believed she was receiving insights from other worlds. I’d always assumed that he was controlling her—but what if it was the opposite? What if it was Vera Borisovna setting our course, not Taras Ukashin? Bozhe moi.

Mother continued speaking urgently to her—what? Lover? Communicant?—while her devotees ranged around the table, nervously resuming their tasks. I noticed that Magda could not take her eyes off Ukashin, the way he practically knelt at Mother’s feet, holding her hand. Jealousy burned in her like an empty pan on a hot stove. Ilya swallowed, his big Adam’s apple rising and falling. I saw that he was ashamed to be inside and safe when the other boys risked their lives on this fool’s errand.

Five minutes passed. Forty below, with a wind like frozen nails. My mother’s glance slid briefly over the rest of us without interest, as if we were dolls in a shop window. Something struck the house, and we jumped. She jumped as well. Good, she was not so insensible as all that.

“There are no wolves, you know,” I said. “It’s too cold. They’re asleep in their dens under the snow.” The minnows of her attention hovered over my face, their tickling mouths in my eyes, in my ears.

“So much red,” she pronounced. Evidently even inflowing had done nothing for my aura.

“Recent events have disturbed her energy, Mother,” Ukashin defended me. “But she is one with us.”

“She’s one with no one,” my mother said. “She’ll never be one with anyone. It is her fate.”

As if balling me into a lump like a greasy piece of paper and throwing me into a corner. So much for me. My lungs froze in my chest. I tried to think of people I had been one with—Genya, Kolya. The Poverty Artel. But a deeper truth uncoiled, like a fiddlehead fern. Around me, glances of pity. A ripple of unease traveled around the room—except for Magda. A pleased smile flickered around her lips.

“There’s no such thing as Fate,” I said. But what the high priestess said was oracle, and I had the horrible suspicion that she could be right. What if it was true? Damn her—why did she have to come downstairs when she’d been so happy in that creepy room with her weird icons and little polished stones?

Ukashin leaned toward her. “She’s with us for now, Mother,” he said. “In this time stream. And who can say more about anyone?”

I should have felt gratitude. Yet I still felt the teeth of the storm in my mouth, my horrible red aura, and wanted to hurt her for handing me such a fate like a slap. I wanted to wipe that otherworldly vagueness from her face. “Did your spirit guides tell you Andrei Petrovin shot himself?” I called down the table. “Your friend Andrei?” The attention swam back to me, regarding my outline as if it wavered in water. “That’s right—Andrei Petrovin. Notice you haven’t seen him around much? He’s lying in the icehouse, rolled up like a carpet.”

She turned away from me as she used to when I’d said something awkward to one of her guests, simply erased me from her attention. That was her answer. Her friend’s death meant nothing. Ukashin had been more perturbed.

“What else didn’t they tell you?” I shouted down the table. “Did you know I was pregnant? I’m going to have a child, Mama. This summer. Your grandchild.”

The devotees shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed that their priestess was being dragged into a matter so unseemly and personal when they’d given up every family connection, even their names. I could see that Magda wanted to get her hands around my throat. Ukashin stared at me. I could almost hear him—I can’t save you forever.

“Your grandchild, Mama. It’s Kolya Shurov’s.”

Now her vision cleared, and she saw me. Oh, yes. She remembered me now. Your daughter. She regarded me with something resembling fear.

“Yes, Kolya. We’ve been lovers since I was sixteen. Did you see that in your multidimensional universe?”

But then her vision clouded over, and she was scanning me, as she had in the room upstairs, as if she were reading a wall poster, a playbill for a drama at the People’s House. What was I, a little Ibsen? Or maybe Wilde?

“It won’t live,” she said.

The sound echoed like a gunshot in a long hall. When it faded, the only sound in the room was the roaring of the wind.

Doors slammed, and in a gust of frigid air, the trio of boys thundered into the hall. In walked Pasha, frosted white, hat, scarf, coat, boots, gloves, his arms piled high with fragrant fir, followed by Gleb and Bogdan equally laden. The relief was palpable. All uncertainty vanished, and the disciples beamed with the proof: their prophetess was wise, Ukashin was still in control, I was an alarmist and disrupter. You see? said the Master’s sideways glance. We know what we’re doing here. The others grabbed up the boughs and began rubbing the sills and doorways.

I lay on my pallet that night among the others, no longer marveling at our initiation into the mysteries of inflowing. Even hiding within the earth did me no good. I only heard my mother’s voice. I thought of her face, her calm. I wanted to slap her even now. Was she punishing me for insisting that there was no wolf and that she was no seer, only a madwoman? Or was she so crazy that she didn’t understand how terrible was her curse?

But what if it was true?

No. That I would not believe. I might never be one with anyone—fine—but I would not let her kill my baby. I rejected her spell, I spat on it, I walked on it, I pissed on it. I would not believe. To think of how I’d cared for her. She was the reason I’d broken with Genya, the reason I’d gone to Kamenny Island to sell that pin. She had not defended me against my father that October night. I turned over and over, settling the sheepskin back on top of the quilt. As long as I could have my baby, I would endure the rest.

I had not realized how passionately I wanted this child until my mother tried to take it away from me.

81 The Hunter

THE STORM DID NOT abate. If anything, it worsened. Ukashin moved us into the heart of the house, the back parlor, closing off all the other rooms to conserve heat and firewood. We squashed into the workroom like kittens in a sack. After what my mother had said to me, it was agony to have to see her every day. I thought I would go mad. Everyone breathing each other’s breath and that sticky incense, the stove pushing smoke into the room as it would in a black izba. If it wasn’t for inflowing, I would have had to stop breathing altogether. Only under the earth was it still possible to inhale. Meditation was the only escape from the oppressive togetherness. I supposed my mother’s curse of eternal loneliness had not yet taken effect.

I sometimes ventured up the frost-coated stairs to the water closet just to be free of them all. The chamber pots we’d put there had frozen fast—we couldn’t have them in the room with us. They didn’t stink, though you had to wear your coat and hat and boots to visit the convenience. You might as well be outside. White rime built up on the bare risers of the stairs, showing our footprints. Outside, snow buried the first-floor windows, cutting us off from the world, mirroring what was going on inside our minds. Only in the window on the stairway landing could you see what was going on in the yard. Sometimes I stood there for hours, it seemed, in a trance, watching the trees lashing about like souls in some white hell.

Now that Mother had joined us, Ukashin more and more often turned his back on the others to focus entirely on his prophetess. He stopped leading the inflowing meditation, leaving it in the hands of Magda and Natalya. Instead he spent hours in communication with his priestess, meditating with her, or else painting or lying in his hammock, which he’d slung in the corner by the fire next to Mother’s chair. Through the buildup of snow, the storm’s roaring sounded more and more like the blood in my ears. The acolytes worked hard to regain their Master’s favor, as if the blizzard were somehow their fault, as if they could make things better by being perfect little disciples. Mother sat communing with the paintings they’d fetched from her lair and rearranging her little stones with the clicking sounds like waves turning pebbles on a beach. Her spirit guides watched us night and day.

Pasha was the first to collapse. He crumpled during a meditation session. Katrina, surfacing from her trance, jumped to her feet. “Pasha?” she called out, leaning over him but afraid to touch him. “Master? Pasha’s fainted!”

But the Master said nothing.

“He’s all right,” Magda said. “Let him be.”

It was frightening to see Pasha lying on the carpet. It reminded me of Andrei in the snow. Bogdan, our erstwhile doctor, knelt to tend to his fallen brother. Katrina hovered. She brought a cloth as white as her face and a jug of cold water. Wiping his face revived him, and he was terribly embarrassed. I myself was teetering on the tightrope between the need to inflow to keep hunger and terror at bay and my growing anger and anxiety about Ukashin’s detachment from the world he’d built, the one he’d stolen from Andrei Ionian.

Inflowing went on. The meals lightened to suit our more rarefied systems—thin oatmeal, cabbage, kasha, soup with floating bits of meat. The more resentful I became about the figure in the hooded cloak, the less the meat sickened me and the hungrier I became.

It struck me one day—the meat.

Fresh meat.

Not salted. Not smoked. Where did it come from?

Surely those two rabbits I’d caught the night Andrei died hadn’t lasted thirteen people this long, no matter how frugal we were. The vlivaniye was supposed to supply us with new ideas, but in fact I could see that the opposite was true. It kept us from thinking at all. As I fell out of step with the others and my dense body returned, I started to consider things more clearly. For one thing, I recalled the quiet departure of Bonya and Buyan. Ukashin never mentioned them, and no one asked, just as we’d never asked about Andrei’s sorrows. Those dogs hadn’t run off. We were consuming them, bit by bit.

There will always be enough if we believe. If we don’t repress the bounty with our doubts.

I wondered what else I’d missed amid so much inflowing. Harmony was lovely but I was the hunter—the fox, not the lamb. And the fox in me wondered—what really lay in the larder beneath the kitchen floor? I thought of the profligacy of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg. That green-painted door beckoned. What secrets might be hidden in the cold room where we used to keep Annoushka’s jams and the canned produce from our garden, barrels of apples and turnips in sand? That door made my palms itch. Nobody was allowed down there now but Katrina Ionian. Even entering the kitchen was a rationed act.

I woke in the night, squirmed into my coat, my hat, and quietly left the workroom. But instead of walking upstairs to the icy water closet, I felt my way along the hall lined with Ukashin’s spiritualist paintings toward the forbidden door. One painting, two, three. As children, we often played the game of Blind Man. You pretended to be blind and found your way about the house by touch alone. I found the kitchen door, and opened it. Inside, the oven was still warm from dinner, the air soup-perfumed. I felt along the soft wood of the chest, the table. I knew the door to the larder would be to the right. The iron knob was cool, and turned. Unlocked. Cold musty air rose from under the house as I slipped inside, closed the door behind me and inched down the steep stairs, holding the wooden railing.

Such a familiar smell enveloped me—mushrooms, cold dirt, apples, potatoes. I knew the shape of the room as I knew the shape of my lover’s hand. Shelves along three sides for preserves, starting just underneath the low ceiling and stopping around hip height. Bags and barrels tucked underneath. Boxes of sand for the root vegetables. I began examining the shelves with my fingertips, moving from left to right, top to bottom. Empty. Empty. All empty. A crock. The faint tang of pickles. Two more cold crocks—maybe more of that green wine Bogdan had made. Something brushed my face and I jumped. Strings of dried mushrooms. The dry crunchy whisper of braided onions. More empty shelves. My felt boot found a sack. I dipped my hand. Grain, cool through my fingers. Another—grain, but only half full. String after string of wizened ears—dried apples. I tore off a few, ate them as I went. Pairs of dried fish hung together, and the urge to eat one was overwhelming, but I resisted. It would be stealing—they belonged to the group. Hypocrite. I let Avdokia steal for me almost every day. But I wouldn’t do it myself.

My worst fears had proved correct. The cellar held nothing but empty shelves, empty sacks. In the sandboxes, a few cabbages lay buried like severed heads, along with some turnips, maybe, or beets. A barrel of apples. And that was all. Thirteen people could not live off this for the rest of the winter. Maybe there was more hidden away somewhere. Perhaps they’d only brought in what was needed to last through the storm.

But my Petrograd mind was already flying, calculating: half a pound of grain a day per person. How long could these sacks last? Two, maybe three weeks at most. Eight chickens at one chicken a day… fourteen fish, in soup…

We weren’t going to make it.

No wonder he’d introduced inflowing. No wonder.

I was halfway up the stairs when I saw the flicker of a candle under the door. I flew back down and wedged myself behind the sandboxes and barrels, lay down on the cold earthen floor at full length, my head under the lowest stair. The smell of earth and apples. Childhood. The creak of the stairs under a soft-shod foot. “Marina, I know you’re down there.”

Magda Ionian. Did she know or was she just guessing? Had she seen me get up? Had she counted the sleeping bodies? I could hear her breathing. I inflowed through the earth, my breath just a wisp. She was examining the stores, rattling the crocks, counting the fish. I could hear their dried skins rasping together. I wasn’t here, I told myself. I was within the earth, with just a siphon to the surface. I wasn’t breathing; the earth was breathing me. She held the candle aloft, as if I might be clinging to the rafters. “If you’re stealing, he’ll put you out, Mother or no. She can only protect you for so long.”

Then her shuffle on the earthen floor grew near. The candle threw its light over the sandboxes. Theotokos, protect me. Would she see where I’d left my handprints in the sand? She looked, but she didn’t see. I could hear her sighs of frustration. Yes, doubt, Magda. You’re cross, you’re tired, you’re hearing things. It’s so cold down here. Your pallet by the stove misses you.

What was she waiting for? Did she think I would pop up like a rabbit in an amusement-park arcade?

She sneezed. Her candle’s light was weak and unsteady, the dust and cobwebs thick under the stairs. At last the light moved off, and the old steps creaked. She closed the door behind her.

In the morning, she never took her eyes off me. I did nothing that would give myself away. I stretched, practiced inflowing, ate breakfast as innocently as a lamb. I am the hunter. She would not catch me asleep. “You’ve got cobwebs in your hair,” she whispered, passing behind me.

“But not in my eyes,” I said.

Avdokia caught our exchange. Her eyes shot a warning: Don’t bite the tiger’s tail! But my teeth craved it. My dense matter. My fury building as I watched Ukashin meditating with Mother, their backs to us. It won’t live, she’d said. Not if I trusted that larder. We must have eaten half our stores the one night of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg. Without such an elaborate gesture, we might have made it. What were you thinking, Taras Ukashin? No matter what his failings, I’d always considered him a practical man, but Andrei was right. The well-being of Ionia had never been foremost in his mind. It was fascination he sought, adulation, keeping us under his sway. I didn’t know what he was planning or if indeed he had a plan at all. Maybe my mother told him the sky would open up and rain down pirozhky with meat or, better yet, roast beef. Maybe he really did believe in inflowing. Or had finally realized the enormity of what he’d done and was too guilty to face us. But I was past wanting his answers. Whatever he’d planned or hadn’t planned, his future wouldn’t include me or my child. Because this baby needed to live. It had to.

On each trip to the chamber pot now, I hid something on top of the wardrobe in the cold women’s dormitory. All the things I’d brought with me—my Vikzhel papers, my clothes, my gun. The letter opener from Ukashin’s campaign desk for good measure. I watched for the end of the storm. The wind still gusted, and snow flew, but I could feel the blizzard tiring, like a man continuing an argument long after his initial passion has faded. Now it was only habit. The gypsy caught me up there once. “What were you doing in here?”

I forced myself to peer through the windows and not look in the direction of the wardrobe. “Seeing if the storm’s over yet. I’m sick of breathing everyone’s farts. I need to get back to my traps. Soup’s getting thin, don’t you think?”

“The devis will provide,” she told me.

“Believe what you want,” I replied, pushing past her. “I prefer rabbit to dog meat.”

“Doubt’s a contagion,” she called after me. “He should put you out now.”

It was hard. I could no longer lose myself for hours inflowing. I felt every bit of my hunger, the need to leave while I could still walk. Now I saw them as they were. Natalya, becoming ghostly, paper thin. Ilya’s hands shaking. They couldn’t see they were fading away. Inflowing worked, but only because the trance lifted you out of your body. We were starving, though our spirits felt bright. It was a lie. They should kill off those chickens now and conserve the grain. But still the chickens clucked on in their overturned baskets. Pasha passed out again during dinner, Lilya during inflowing. Ukashin didn’t even deign to turn around and see what had happened.

One morning I pleaded illness, refusing to get up off my pallet for the Practice. Natalya came to me, gazing down with great green eyes filled with anxiety. “You have to inflow, Marina. We’re almost there.” Her poor worried face, that I’d cut myself off from the invisible manna. Should the emperor wear a vest or a waistcoat?

“I will,” I said. “I’m just going to sleep a little now.”

She went back with the others. I could see their light, their bliss. I wanted to shriek, “You’re dying!” but not one of them would hear me. Don’t say “die.”

Avdokia, who’d seen Natalya come for me, padded over, asked, “Marinoushka, are you all right?”

I pulled her down to me. She lowered herself, stiff as a person born without joints, and stroked my hair, my cheeks, felt my temperature with the back of her soft hand. I winked. She stopped when she realized my illness was purely theatrical, then resumed her ministrations, glancing quickly around us. “How do you feel? You have a little fever,” she said in a stage whisper.

“My snowshoes,” I murmured in her ear. “Put them on top of the wardrobe in the dormitory.” Magda watching my every twitch and cough. I didn’t dare get anywhere near the kitchen. I could end up tied, wrist and ankle, in a cold room.

Avdokia nodded her old head. She was a master of conspiracy. “I’m going to get you some tea now,” she announced. “Your lips are all dry. See if you can sleep a little.”

After a while, she brought the tea back. I could feel the cold on her, the smell of unheated rooms. She propped me up, held the glass, just as she had when I was small. If only I could stay here forever, just like this, in her arms. But I had to get out. I had a baby to think about. She kissed me as I drank. “I made it just the way you wanted,” she said.

My tears would betray me, so I closed my eyes, nestled at her breast. How could I leave her behind? How could I have this baby without her? “Come with me,” I whispered between sips. “It’s not that far. You could do it.”

Her expression could have melted a heart of stone. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “My strong, brave girl.”

She would still sacrifice her life for my mother, her first love. I could take care of myself, yes, but who would take care of Avdokia? Maybe I should put this off another day or two. But no. I would never forget Arkady’s lesson, taught to me with a shard of glass—I still bore the scar. You waited. That was stupid. Only amateurs wait.

My nanny snugged my scarf around my neck. “I only wish I could hold that baby,” she said. “Yours and Kolya’s—heaven help us.” I rested against her, her arms around me as she tipped the last of the barley tea into my mouth.

“How can I leave you?” I said.

She smoothed my hair. “Go, while I can still stand it,” she breathed in my ear.

My old love, my nanny, with her ancient gnarled hands. She helped me on with my sheepskin and felt boots for the trip to the icy loo. If I only could carry her—my Vasilisa doll—with me in my pocket, I would feed her crumbs, and she would teach me how to throw a comb that would become a forest, a towel that would become a river, and I would outwit all the sorcerers and stepmothers and Baba Yagas from here to Tikhvin. But I would have to do my best on my own.

From the windows in the dormitory, I could not see as far as the henhouse for the fog. The wild horse of the storm had finally run itself out, and the softness of the powdered air hid the damage. Below me, snowdrifts covered the roof of the kitchen porch. I opened the window and sat on the sill, strapped hard into my snowshoes, my game bag snug across my chest, my scarf wrapped around my face. In my pocket, I touched Andrei’s glasses for memory, if not for luck. Without him, I might still be down there inflowing with the rest. I said a prayer and dropped into the unbroken white.

82 Wonderworker

I SMELLED THE village before I saw it. After the long fast, I was weak as any invalid. I struggled the last half mile, stopping every other minute to corral my last reserves of strength. The snow had hardened a bit with the wind, but was still incredibly deep, and often I’d had to strike out cross-country across fields where fallen trees barred the road. Finally I smelled chimney smoke—welcome as a brass band. People cooking, bread baking. Salvation. A dog barked. Peasants called to one another in the fog, exchanging thoughts about the storm as they dug out narrow walkways between snowbound izbas and the lane.

A sledge passed, loaded with hay. I trembled, leaning into a tree and fighting for consciousness, thinking of the girl I’d once been, waiting just here that evening after my long walk from Tikhvin. How strong I’d been then, how confident of my powers compared to this scarecrow, this ghost I’d become.

A burly man in a greasy coat and leather apron came out of the forge with another man. Together they stood smoking on the porch, shook hands and parted. Soon the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer filled the morning. So much activity! In my half-starved, unreal state, this tiny village was dizzying as Petrograd.

Finally a brisk young woman appeared on the porch of a prosperous izba with four windows past the blacksmith’s shop. She was eating an apple. I left the safety of the trees to approach her. It had been so long since I’d spoken to anyone not Ionian. She raised her head, squinting at me. I could only imagine what I looked like these days in my homemade fox hat and sheepskin and felt boots, my game bag, my patchwork sarafan with the trousers underneath, my face wrapped in a thick woolen scarf. I lowered the scarf.

I don’t know what I expected. A smile, an embrace? At least the welcome I’d received the last time I was here. But it wasn’t forthcoming. Her mouth gaped open in shock. Was I so changed? “What are you doing here? Are you crazy?” She lowered her head, her back half turned, checking up and down the lane. She tossed the apple, half-eaten, picked up a broom and swept the steps. “You’ve got to get out of here,” she hissed. “Don’t you know what’s going on? I can’t be seen with you. You’ve got to leave.”

But I was too weak to leave. I needed to eat, to rest, to collect myself and make plans. “I can’t go any farther. I’m pregnant. I need food. They’re starving out there at Maryino.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about it?” She swept angrily. “They should have thought about that when they moved out there. We have our own problems now.” A cluster of peasant women were watching us from the porch of another house. “Damn those busybodies,” she said under her breath. “Now you’ve done it. Sveta!” she exclaimed, leaning her broom against the house. “Good to see you! Mama’s going to be so happy!” She pulled me in for an embrace. In my ear, she whispered, “Go to Olya’s. Two houses from the end. And don’t come back. I can’t do anything for you.”

“Thanks.” The smell of her apple followed me like a perfume as I headed down the lane. To think I’d taught Lyuda how to read. We’d swum in the river together, climbed trees, picked berries. But the revolution was still going on, and people had changed. I was the one who had to keep up. I walked down the lane, trying not to gape like a rube on Nevsky Prospect. But the colors were dazzling. I’d been locked away in another world. Here were children and horses and old people, but there were hidden worlds, too. I had to be the hunter, not blunder in, keep my wits about me. Lyuda’s fear had been palpable. Why? Had there been an expropriation? Had the Cheka arrived? Something had changed since I’d been out at Maryino if she was afraid to even talk to me now.

So I was to be Sveta, some cousin or other, visiting Auntie Olya.

Avdokia’s half sister’s house was small, sad, with an old coating of blue paint worn mostly to the boards. The path had barely been cut—it looked stamped, not shoveled. Some neighbor had broken her out, but that was all. What had been a front porch was only a tunnel, the roof heavily laden. I took off my snowshoes and propped them by the door. It was private here at least, down the end of the lane, away from the village center. I was about to knock on Olya’s door, then thought better of it. If I were truly some distant cousin, I wouldn’t be standing on the front porch like a census taker.

It was warm inside and shockingly crowded. Little tables, pieces of lace, rugs, even an ugly chandelier with a milk-glass bowl crammed the small cabin to the rafters, all bits and pieces of our bourgeois life at Maryino. On the tables stood portraits of my family in silver frames. It was a museum of a former life, a former world. I could not even be angry at her. They were only things, and things had no feelings. What would I do with them, anyway—sell them? If anyone deserved the booty, it was Olya, who had washed and dusted and polished them all these years. And yet I couldn’t deny a small sense of betrayal.

“Olya?”

The place was damp with steam, and a great pot boiled on the stove. “Olga Fomanovna?” I called from the doorway. I’d never used her patronymic. No one ever had, not in my hearing.

She looked up from a load of laundry she was ironing, a sheet on the board. She reminded me of a bigger, softer Avdokia, twenty years younger. Same father, different mother. Women wore out quickly in the villages. Her mouth made a perfect O.

“Sorry to barge in. Lyuda said you’d be here.”

“Marina Dmitrievna! No, no, please, come in, come in!” She looked around the place, suddenly aware that I was seeing the extent of her plunder, and her hands flew to her mouth. The sheet started to burn. She put her iron upright just in time.

“It’s been a while,” I said.

“You’ve seen Lyuda, then?”

I nodded. “She didn’t want to be seen with me, though. Class enemy and all.” I took off my hat.

“Oh, don’t mind her.” Olya came away from the laundry, took my hat and bag, helped me off with my coat, hung it on the hook by the door. “Now that she’s on the village committee she thinks she’s Lenin’s right arm.” She nodded approvingly. “Married the blacksmith after all. That girl always had an eye to improving her lot. I told her the blacksmith would be good for her, didn’t I? She runs him like a horse around a ring.” The words poured out of her, probably in an attempt to distract me from the familial furniture and bric-a-brac. “Remember when she wanted to go to Petrograd and work in a factory? She certainly came to her senses. Sit down, sit down!” She pulled out a chair from the lace-covered table.

I recognized the chair, too. It was one that used to sit at the little desk in the front parlor where my mother opened the mail. Somehow the sight of that chair loosened the grief of having lost her. I settled down into it. Now I was glad to let Olya babble away.

“We don’t get many visitors, as you can imagine. Can I make you some tea? Let me heat the samovar. Did she tell you she had a letter in the paper, my Lyuda? Imagine! Look, there on the table.” She handed me a yellowed issue of Bednota, a badly printed newspaper intended for peasant consumption, folded back to a page of letters and reports from the villages. A complaint about a certain corrupt party official in Ryazan Oblast headed the page.

“Look—right there.” Flushing with pride, she pointed to a report below the Ryazan one. From “Correspondent L. G. Fedeyeva.” Lyuda, writing for Bednota. She described the cooperation of the Novinka Village Committee of Poor Peasants with a Red Army food detachment to expropriate the hoarded goods of the kulak Zuborin. How many poods of grain they had located under the floor of his barn and so on. It ended, “The Speculators and Kulaks might think they’ve put One over on Soviet Power but they will not Succeed because we Know Them.”

Because we Know Them. I shuddered at the thought of the savagery behind that simple statement. One might think there would be safety in these tiny hamlets, but it was the opposite. “What did they do with him?”

“Zuborin?” Olya sighed, fishing coals from the stove to put in the samovar. “He really was a terrible man. Everyone was afraid of him. Up there safe and sound at Maryino, your people never knew what our lives were like here. We had to pay Zuborin to graze our animals. His grandfather bought up all the common land with Emancipation. Those bastards have lorded it over us ever since. Think they own the village. Only last year, he beat an old man to death, didn’t he? An old man who owed him money.”

The outrage on her face told me it was true. But then something crossed it, something not so pure, a slightly sly look. “And we owe so much more grain to the provisioning this year…” She began straightening the room, swatting her rag at the lamps and tabletops, squaring chairs, not looking at me. “The workers used to leave us grain and seed and take the rest. That was bad enough. But now it’s different. The soldiers are hard, even the workers now, when they come through. They take their quota off the top, and if there’s not enough left for planting, it’s too bad for you. So what are you supposed to plant in the spring? When Zuborin’s got hundreds of poods hidden under his cow barn—everyone knew it. Why should we suffer for a man like that?” She shrugged. “The devil take him.”

So now it was to be peasant against peasant, all the wounds of the village since Emancipation resurfacing. The villagers had offered up Zuborin. “Did they kill him?”

She went back to the stove to recover her iron, spat on it, began to iron the sheet again. “It’s a hard world these days, Marina Dmitrievna, a hard life. At least they left the family. Except Motka. They took him for the army.”

When she was done catching me up on village gossip, she put the iron up and went to fuss with the samovar, pouring tea. “How strong?”

“Medium,” I said. I turned the fragile, soft pages of the newspaper back to the beginning. The issue was dated January 19. Epiphany. Two months ago. The broadsheet bawled about an English threat from the north. Blockade along the Baltic coast. Wrangel in the Caucasus—that was a new one. Joining forces with Denikin, threatening Moscow. Kolchak in the east. Soviet Russia, as far as I could tell, was surrounded, cut off not only from Europe but from the Ukraine, the Don, and Siberia. Only its red beating heart was left. Without Don coal, without Siberian grain, I couldn’t imagine how Petrograd was suffering by now. Of course Kolya would be right in the middle of it. He must have made a killing with our bags of grain. And may he never have a day’s peace with it.

“And how is Avdokia? Still putting on airs?”

This was how her sister saw her—as the one who had escaped. My dear Avdokia, whom I’d left to Mother, to live or die. All depended upon what I could do with Olya right now.

I began to wonder, why hadn’t anybody told the Red Army about us? The villagers owed us nothing. Why would Correspondent L. G. Fedeyeva, a rising revolutionary star, protect the Ionians in general and a former landowner in particular? No wonder she wanted to be rid of me. Maybe she was holding us in reserve, a card up her sleeve in case of emergency. More likely she was afraid of turning us in at this late date, afraid she would be accused of sheltering the aristocracy. A born politician, you had to give her that.

Olya finished the sheet she’d been ironing, folded it gently. No, not a sheet. It was a priestly gown. I couldn’t help but smile. She was doing the priest’s laundry. Didn’t she see the contradiction—Lyuda on the committee, a party candidate, maybe even a member by now, with a mother who still did the priest’s linens? Then I noted the icon in the red corner, the little flame. The family had one leg in the past, one in the future. Hedging their bets.

I sipped my tea—roasted barley—and she opened a tin with a flowered top. Oh that smell! Inside were the sweet fennel cookies she used to make at Maryino. I took one, dipped it in my tea. The taste threw me into a parallel reality, one where I was a child of seven and bees hummed in the lilac bush out the kitchen window. Flowers on the cabinets, my doll Natasha having a tea party with me. “You still make these…” I could hardly speak or choke it down for the nostalgia of it.

“I don’t have so many visitors anymore. Have another.”

That licorice smell, the slight sweetness. How far I’d come to end up a half-starved pregnant woman of nineteen with my possessions in a stained game bag. It made me cry, my mouth full of longing. I wanted more. I wanted to eat the whole tin.

“So they’re having a hard time out there, are they?” Olya asked, sitting down at the table, folding her strong, reddened hands before her.

I was relieved she’d brought it up herself. “How did you know?”

She raised her palm. Isn’t it obvious? My gauntness was evidently clear, even in all these layers of clothes.

And here I’d been trying to think of a tactful way to work up to the desperate situation at Maryino. “They’re not practical people, Olya.”

She smoothed out the tablecloth. “I heard they have a wonderworker.”

What on earth had Ukashin done when they came through in the spring? Thrown some energy into an old lady and convinced her to cast away her crutches? “I wouldn’t exactly call him a wonderworker.”

“Not him. Her.” She lowered her voice, as if the stove imp might hear us. “Vera Borisovna.”

I almost dropped my tea glass.

“They say she has powers.” There was awe in her voice, and her eyes were bright—so like her sister’s, but with an innocence untainted by contact with the outside world. “The priest says she’s a sorceress, that all them out there is devils.”

My mother the wonderworker. Now, there was a pretty idea. The priest had a better sense of it. But what mattered was that Olya thought so. I pretended my heart wasn’t pounding in my chest as I responded casually, “Well, she always did have the second sight. You remember when she wouldn’t get in the trap with Slava? And the axle broke the same day?”

“We thought it was because she didn’t like young Slava. He lost his leg. Kept him out of the army, though, so there’s a blessing. But she knew it was going to happen.”

“Last spring she saw of a tide of blood,” I said, lowering my voice so she would come closer. “They moved out here a few weeks short of a cholera epidemic. Then Red Terror. They would have all been shot.”

Olya’s eyes were aglitter. “They say she makes cures.”

She makes cures. The priest said she’s a sorceress. Suddenly I saw, as if right through this opaque form seated before me, what the trouble was. Olya was ill, suffering from some hidden misery, and frightened. Her chances of obtaining medical help out here were just about nil—not in the best of times, and certainly not during a civil war. If there were any doctors, they would have been swept up when the army came through, leaving the old women to their diseases. Now Olya was holding out hope for a miracle worker.

I thought of those beautiful Ionians trying to live on promises and air. “I bet Avdokia could get you in to see her. You should go out there.”

I knew what I was doing was wrong, duping the vulnerable, but if she went, she would bring offerings—a sack of grain, a funt of potatoes, maybe an old sheep—and with any luck the word would spread. The peasant women of Novinka and even the surrounding hamlets were capable of feeding the Ionians into spring. Avdokia would make sure the gifts kept coming, of that I had no doubt. And these women would raise no alarm. They knew better than anyone how to protect their old ways.

Grandfather Golovin glared out from his silver frame, beleaguered and outraged, bushy white eyebrows like snowy eaves over his beautiful old eyes. Sorry, Dyedushka, but it’s 1919, not 1875. You’re going to be a great-grandfather. We’ve got to be practical, you and I. At least he was here, in his village, where they knew him, with his family all around, if only in photographs. All I pray is that I’m buried in Russia, Avdokia liked to say. For myself, I had no idea how much longer I would sojourn, how many miles I would walk, how many years. To live was the thing.

I stayed at Olya’s until she found a ride for me into Tikhvin, a neighbor with a load of wood to sell. I left Novinka on top of a sledge heading for town, pulled by a little swaybacked mare. For the food she fed me I paid cash but managed to cajole her into parting with one of my grandmother’s silver salt cellars in exchange for the ride. “It’s only pewter,” I told her. Though I noticed she had no trouble convincing the old man it was sterling. How appropriate that my ride had been purchased with salt.

I sat atop the load and looked back—oh, yes I did—my hungry eyes drinking in every detail. The dogs sniffing the new drifts. A boy running out of a gate, red-cheeked, his young mother shouting, “Don’t forget your brother!” Nostalgia gored me like a bull. The smaller child, so thickly clad he looked like a ball, arms sticking out on either side, toddled after him. When Seryozha was that age I had to take him with me everywhere. The load, redolent with the sticky smell of new-cut pine, shifted beneath me as the sledge slid and jolted in a lane freshly scored with runner marks.

Maryino—already lost. The house with its dark logs, the lilac bush, the painted cabinets, my mother wrapped in mists and visions. A fox running in the snow. Seryozha lying on his stomach in the front parlor, cutting figures from an old Paris fashion catalog. A fallen tree over the river. Floating along in the lazy green—then crossing it again with Andrei Ionian. The larch proud in the yard, the larch cut down. Ionians spinning in perfect synchrony, an egg stained red with beet juice. I folded all these images in half, in quarters, over and over again, and pressed them, hard nuggets of memory, into the center of my forehead.

The horse labored hock deep through the new snow, its harness creaking. Olya’s old neighbor lit his pipe. A woman came out onto her porch and threw a basin of water into the yard, and I saw Mother in white coming off the veranda at Maryino in a hat like a wheel. My governess in a straw boater, calling me as I drifted deeper into the trees. Marina… Volodya, standing on the back of a fat pony. And that young girl in green, walking barefoot along a rope tied between two trees.

Marina…

I would remember this: the brush of the runners over the new snow, the squeak of the sledge as the hamlet shrank into the past. First the pines disappeared, then the aspen-shingled church, the sooty barn of the blacksmith’s shop, and Lyuda’s pretty house. Now the dogs, the gates, the children. At last Novinka itself blurred and vanished into the fog, like a sketch in pencil rubbed out by a thumb.