I closed my fist around a pen, imagining stabbing him in the neck with it. Did I have the nerve? The speed? He was quick as an adder. And would avenge an attack without mercy.
Someone was playing the violin in another apartment. How crushing it was to know how little I mattered. Even if I died in this room, people would go on making dinner, taking children to the gardens, practicing the violin. How enviable they all seemed, unaware that in this room in their own building, a girl was being held prisoner.
No. Not unaware. They’d heard me. And decided to do nothing. Even on Grivtsova Alley someone would have come by now. Even the meekest of housewives would have knocked gently once the coast was clear. But here, as long as it wasn’t their own problem, a human being’s misery was something the neighbors could close their ears to, pretend it was a cat yowling.
I hated people. Who could go on living as if nothing was happening when something hideous unfolded just overhead, or in the next flat, working its way into their dreams? “I hate you!” I screamed. “I hate all of you!” I took the children’s silhouettes and pitched them across the room, one by one—their little curls, their overbites—where they broke with a satisfying crash.
Light bled from the sky, abandoning the bare branches of the trees. Would he return? Maybe I wasn’t that important. Maybe I was merely a hostage against Kolya’s unlikely reappearance, no more. I switched on the electrolier. At least the electric lights worked. I picked up a book—Chekhov—read a page or two of “The Lady with the Lapdog,” and then “The Black Monk,” but they held no interest, these men and women, fathers and daughters, orchards and oceans.
I found some paper in the desk, ink still in the inkwell. They had departed quite recently. Maybe Arkady had threatened them. I looked down into the black soul of the ink. Maybe I should drink it. If it were the previous century, that’s what I would do. A ruined girl. The idea sparked a sudden rage. Ruined for what? That murky melodrama. Better to throw it in his face, savor his pain. Before he caught me and killed me. Or handed me over to men rougher than he was. Anything could transpire in a room like this.
On a blank sheet, I wrote my name. Marina Makarova. My father’s name. I crossed it out and wrote Kuriakina. But I’d not been Kuriakina long enough to even recognize the sight of it. Under it, I wrote the character ya. I. That was the only name that belonged to me. Ya was the city under the lake, the thing I could claim for myself. I would keep it well hidden. I, Marina. Like a pebble in the mouth in a desert.
He came on the night of the third day, waking me out of a hungry sleep. Light from the streetlamps blued the window and splashed the ceiling with rain. His hair caught some of that glow. He didn’t look quite human in that unholy radiance. I eyed him sullenly from the daybed.
He passed his hand over the boarded window. “What did you think you were doing? Would you really have jumped?” He seemed fascinated. “We’re on the fourth floor.” His eyes shone for a second, transparent as a cat’s, then disappeared into his inky silhouette. “I thought you’d want a little company,” he said. “I’ve had an interesting night.”
“Rape anyone?” I spat it out like a bad taste. I would not collaborate. I would not be seduced.
“Makarova.” He placed his long hands over his heart, right where I would have stabbed him if I’d been able to find anything besides pens in the drawer. “We’re having an affair.”
“You’re joking.”
“Not at all.” Silhouetted against the windows, still in fedora and coat, he was like something left over from a dream. “You wanted to know this man, this Arkady von Princip. So different from all those little schoolboys. You were intrigued—admit it. By my power. By the danger. You came up here of your own accord, took off your clothes for me. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”
Lord, I remembered. My body still reminded me. “And then what happened? I remember that, too.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “You can’t play with me like you can with your little boyfriends. You’re mine now. A man can’t rape his own wife. It isn’t possible.”
I regarded his slow, languid movements as I would a snake’s. I inched—imperceptibly I hoped—toward my boots, in case he became overconfident, in case I got the chance to bolt. “If she doesn’t want him, what else would you call it? If he forces her.”
“She’s already his. She’s already accepted him.” He gazed out at the park, the tops of the trees. “She’s already taken her clothes off and spread herself out for him. Like this city. Petrograd is mine. I own her. I’ll do what I like with her. And I’ll do the same with you.” He turned back to me and I changed position on the bed, to conceal that I’d been reaching for my boots.
He took off his coat and hat and settled himself on the Louis chair. Only his face and hair stood out in the gloom. He crossed his long legs, fished his string from his pocket. The fingers moved quickly in the nets they were weaving. He seemed incredibly pleased with himself. “Ask me a question.”
“If that’s not rape, what is?”
He turned the figure in his hands. It was a woman, tangled in a web, her arms and legs outstretched. “Semantics. I own you now. I can starve you so that you’ll lick my boots. I can flog you so that, believe me, you’ll do anything I ask. If I get tired of you, I’ll kill you. Who would stop me? No one. Who cares? One girl more or less in this terrible world—it wouldn’t even make the papers.” I could smell him from here—cold and astringent, like cellar dirt. “Girls are there to be used. It’s how you’re built, and anyone who can be used will be.” His hair, a white nest. He threw his hat on the divan. “Are you looking for justice? Justice is a fiction. There’s only power.” He turned another figure—a crown. Then lowered his hands. “That’s what attracted you to me. The freedom of unapologetic power. A smart girl in your situation would think of how to make it work for her. How to cozy up to me. Flattery is good, for a start. Tell me what a wonderful lover I am, how brilliant I am.”
And he joined me on the couch.
Where were the proclamations about this?
Where were the decrees?
Where were the posters
handbills
commentaries from
Rykov and Bukharin?
I should have known
more would come out of a Revolution
than steady progress
toward a Workers’ State.
50 The Minotaur
I BECAME ACCUSTOMED TO things one should never become accustomed to. I struggled to remember precise details about the outside world. The clean, gummy smell of fir boughs at Christmastime. The loamy richness of the forest north of town, where we collected wild mushrooms in the fall—bright foxes, chanterelles. The felted valenki boots Avdokia stitched for us, with little animals embroidered across their toes, hedgehogs and leaping stags. The details helped keep me sane. I recited poems by the hour, speeches from Shakespeare, sang songs, danced. I was sure the men guarding the flat thought me stone-cold mad.
The baron came late at night, bearing food and drink, wanting to talk, wanting sex. He was never again as cruel as he’d been the first night, but I was at no risk of forgetting what he was capable of. Occasionally he was inward, gloomy and strange, which was even worse. Who could follow the Minotaur into the depths of his labyrinth? He drank the most on those moody nights. I hoped he might grow sloppy, giving me a chance at his keys, but he liked me to drink with him, and he held it better than I did. He never stayed the night. By dawn he was always gone. I imagined him having to return to his coffin.
As my despair deepened, my mind cleared. Voices flooded in, begging to speak through my pen—Persephone, captive queen in the halls of the Dark Lord. Ariadne in the labyrinth with her half brother the Minotaur. Vasilisa the Beautiful and her knowing doll. And the faithful women of Kitezh. Arkady, too, appeared on my pages despite my efforts, the source of dark mythologies.
And so we returned to robbers and thieves
Songs sung on the banks of rivers
&
nbsp; Under the bright eyes of beasts
The electric light found me sleeping. Arkady entered, carrying a basin, a pitcher, and a towel. He rested the washbasin on his hip and closed the door behind him. I felt for the elbow of glass beneath my pillow, a shard from a broken picture frame. The time had come to treat an animal like an animal. My fingers found its bladelike edge. When he bent over me, I would slash his throat from ear to ear.
He placed the basin on the desk and poured in the water, the steam rising.
I swore I would not react, that I would wait, but the lovely sound of water…I had not had anything to drink all day. “We’re going to have a little scrub down,” he said, pulling something from his pocket. I could hear the paper tearing, could smell it from the daybed. Levkoi soap. My grandmother used to buy this soap in the Nevsky Passazh, said it reminded her of stock flowers that grew in the dooryard at Maryino. Arkady was about to drop the soap into the water.
I called out, “Wait!” And despite my vow, I stumbled to the desk and lapped hot water from the basin into my hand, drinking deep from my palm like a peasant.
“Oh, you’re thirsty. How remiss of me,” he said, like a fop at a party who had forgotten a lady’s lemonade. “Such a hectic day.”
Suddenly he seized my other hand, my right, and squeezed it, hard. I screamed as the glass sliced through my palm, a pain so intense, so unexpected. He kept squeezing, his face a mere inch from my own, enjoying the pain, delighting in it. “You waited,” he whispered into my ear as he held my hand there. “That was stupid. You should have done it right away. Only amateurs wait.” Finally he let me go. My blood spilled out of my fist into the water, over the desktop, the chair. It was running down my arm. The shard of glass fell to the floor.
I keened over my damaged hand, holding my wrist. “Bastard. Whore’s son. Motherfucker.”
He grabbed my wrist and yanked me to the stove. I fought him with all my strength, shrieking and cursing, when I saw where he was dragging me but he was strong as a bear. Forcing me to kneel, he opened the stove door.
He pressed my palm to the hot metal.
I screamed so loudly that it should have been heard on every floor of the building, echoing onto the street and up into the pitiless sky. The black trees must have recoiled, the windows shattered for miles. He grabbed my hair and bent my head back. “Quiet.”
At last he let me go. I sat on the floor, trembling with the shock, holding my hand by the wrist.
He crouched next to me, ran his bony fingers through my hair. “You’ll thank me tomorrow.” All I could do was rock back and forth. “A nasty cut. Cauterization’s best. Stitches become infected.”
He picked me up under the arms and hauled me back to the daybed. I let him. I had not one ounce of fight left. He offered me some vodka from a flask he pulled from his pocket. I shook my head. I didn’t want anything from him except his disappearance from the face of the earth. All my being was locked in the nine square inches of my right palm.
“Come on, Makarova, don’t be stupid. There’s no one here to applaud your martyrdom.” He waved it under my nose.
I took the bottle and swallowed, once, twice. It burned my empty stomach, and it was a relief to feel pain somewhere besides my hand. I drank more.
He went to the door and spoke to someone. I held my wrist, my burned hand curled to my chest, as if it were a small wounded animal. Arkady returned and began unbuttoning my dress. This, too? Would I have to endure everything?
He pulled my boots off, removed my slip, my bloomers, even my hose without really touching me. As I stood naked in the hot room, he tenderly—like a nurse—began to wash me. Lathering the sweet soap on a cloth, wiping my shoulders, my arms, my breasts. The water was warm, the soap creamy. I closed my eyes, holding my wounded hand high above my head, and let him bathe me, concentrating on the sensations rising, an uncanny mixture of intense pain and pleasure.
He sang a lullaby under his breath as he washed me, something his nanny used to sing at bath time, no doubt. I didn’t recognize it. Every so often, I’d take another sip from the flask.
As he washed me, he talked. He wanted to talk about childhood. “What were you like as a child, Makarova? Did you play when you were a little girl? Who did you play with?”
Play? What was he talking about? Everything had acquired a slight halo. My hand throbbed overhead.
“Those games in a circle. I see them sometimes. They all seem to know how to play them. Does someone teach them, or do they just know, like ants?”
Despite myself, despite everything, I laughed, dribbling vodka down my chin. “Caraway, caraway, you can go any way…they didn’t play caraway in that castle of yours?”
“No, there was no playing,” he said. He had me lean over the basin and poured water onto my head. In the presence of mine enemies…worked the soap through my hair. “I was raised a gentleman—that is, beaten regularly, my head held under water, left outside without clothes. I learned about power. Useful, but not much of a childhood.”
I could smell him, antiseptic wormwood under the sweet soap. The vodka had gone to my head, my fear ebbing like the pain in my hand. It seemed like someone else’s now. How lovingly he touched me, as if he hadn’t just crushed my hand around a blade of glass. Rinsing my hair, my shoulders, my breasts and belly, the V of my cunt, as if my body were something beautiful and rare, not a sordid object he regularly used and forgot. How could one understand a man like this?
“You played as a girl, I know you did,” he said. “Tell me what you did.”
Poor monster. His fate, like the Minotaur’s, had been cast before birth. “Was there nothing you loved as a boy? Nothing that you enjoyed?”
“I rode well. Shot, of course. I was good with horses and dogs. I raised wolfhounds.” He ran his hand along my ribs. “My hounds—that was my great pleasure. You should have seen them, Makarova. There’s nothing quite as beautiful as wolfhounds chasing a wolfpack across the moonlit snow.”
I actually felt pity for the man. In another week, I would be as insane as he was. “My mother kept Italian greyhounds. The last one was named Tulku. But Red Guards shot him. He tried to bite one when they came to take her furniture.”
“Bastards. Dogs are far superior to people. They’re incapable of betrayal, for one thing.”
The cloth moved around my neck. I bent forward to let him wash my back, losing myself in the warmth and the rough cloth on my skin. He washed between my legs, down my thighs. “Tell me,” he said. “I want to know you as a child. I want to know everything. What did you play?”
I shook my head. I would sink beneath the lake, out of reach of the invader’s hand. The bells sang under water. He could never reach me there. If you are pure at heart…
“You’ll tell me eventually,” he said. “I’m all there is now.”
Something about that struck me hard as I stood there, dumb as a horse, with my fiery hand and my heavy tongue, being washed by this evil thing that had come out of the earth.
“I had a brother,” I said. “We were like twins. We had our own world, our own language. We invented our own games. Fairy tales, secret signs. He was a terrific mimic. We wrote our own plays—”
“And where is he now, this prodigy?” Arkady asked.
“He was in Moscow. With the cadets.” And now he was nowhere. I began to cry. I pressed my good hand to my eyes. All the fight had gone out of me. I needed someone to hold me, to pity me. Even him. Even him.
“Too bad,” he sighed, patting my shoulder awkwardly. “Dying like that, for a lost cause—Holy Russia or whatever. I want to die with my eyes wide open, believing in nothing.”
“I’m sure you’ll get your wish,” I said.
He took it in good spirits. Obviously my pain had put him in a cheerful mood. “Other brothers? Sisters?”
“My older brother fought with Brusilov. He’s in the Don with the Volunteers.” As if it were a matter of pride. Even now. I pictured Volodya on his beautiful Orlov trotter, Swallow. My bro
ther’s shining hair and dark eyes, his cap just so, the horse polished like brown satin. Though I knew after years of war they were both roughened, it was how I liked to imagine him. Safe from all this squalor. What would he think of me now, my heroic brother—his sister a corrupt, corrupted, stinking piece of whoredom?
Suddenly my captor’s hand fell away from me. “That’s the connection, isn’t it? The older brother, the school chum.” He collapsed onto the empire chair. “Of course. So simple. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Drinking bouts, shared whores. Typical Petersburg boyhood. Signed up together, I imagine. Oh, I should have guessed.” Amazed at his own genius. His mind was like an elastic band that always snapped back to the same shape.
Angry as I was at Kolya, I trembled for him, to be the object of such a relentless obsession. And I knew, at that moment, that my lover would never return to Russia. He wouldn’t dare. Once you’d escaped Arkady von Princip, you were best off staying very, very far away.
Arkady stood, came close, sniffed my neck. “Have you always been in love with him? Tell me. Were you the little girl admiring your brother’s pal from behind the curtains? Letting him fondle you in the cloakroom?”
I was his prisoner, to do with what he liked, and still he was jealous as a schoolboy. “That was a long time ago.” But Tuesday was a long time ago, too.
“How old were you? Eighteen? Fourteen? Twelve?”
I felt a rush of perversity. It was like poking a snake, I couldn’t resist. I was sick to death of him. “You want to know? You want to know about me and Kolya? Yes, I was twelve and fourteen and eighteen. Everything you’re thinking and more. I was mad for him. I loved him more than any man alive.”