Marusya kept the cauldron of water boiling day and night. Carried pails of clean water back to their sad camp. Pomogayush brought salt and a clutch of desiccated sugar beets from last year’s crop to mash into the water and help fight dehydration. He’d imagined they might take the beets to the stars, not to a makeshift clinic in the trees.
When the patients could no longer make it to the latrine, and all the sheets were soiled, and the oilcloth over the cots just too hard to keep clean, she made pallets of long grass and sweet ferns and fennel on the ground, and hour after hour sat next to them and forced warm, slightly sweet, slightly salty water into their dry mouths. She was stubborn as a donkey when they waved her away. She held the buckets under their mouths for them to vomit into, then forced more water into them. Marina would have become discouraged, but Marusya would not be dissuaded by their pleas, their vomiting, their moaning, their shitting themselves, or their shivering and sweating as they lay on the ferns and pine needles, which she periodically gathered and piled up for burning. The boy told her about the dog they had to leave behind, about his friend who got sick first, about how he was going to go up in a rocket ship. He wept and asked for Mama. She moved them close together so the woman could hold his hand, though she could not lift her own head. The father came to their hideous camp several times during the day. She made him wash and wash. He had to think of his girl. He had to think of the Five. His boy and his wife were in the hands of Fate now.
They shat into the grasses, and Marusya raked them and put down new. They shook in the warm summer air and vomited into their buckets, which she rinsed with boiling water and chlorine, then threw the contents into the woods. When they were done they lay on the straw and moaned so pitifully she wished she were deaf as well as mute. Often she couldn’t decide which end to serve. Each time she gave them more salted water with mashed beet and tried not to think about the fate of the city. No medicines, no clean water, the sick dying by the thousands. And what would become of all those bodies? What of her mother, Avdokia, Anton, Mina and the Katzevs?
The nights were warm and brief. The crickets droned, mosquitoes bit. She dozed but did not sleep, watched over her patients like the moon. She didn’t drink except with her own glass straw. She ate bread and the cucumbers she and the Third had grown, all with a fork and knife. She slept with her hands in her pockets for fear she would touch her mouth in her sleep, and dreamed of the wards and sickrooms of the capital of Once-Had-Been.
Three days she worked at them, three days of terrible struggle. She had no thoughts, only images. Sunlight through the trees. The explosive birth of stars. Her own hands, cutting grass with a sickle she’d found, sharpening it on a whetstone produced by the Third. The stars of the wildflowers she sprinkled on the grass between the woman and the boy so they could look across the flowers as they gazed into each other’s faces.
On the fourth morning, the husband stood on the brink of the lawn, looking in at their stand of pines. The wife was sleeping, holding the dead boy’s hand. Marusya stood by her own cot and waited. She had nothing to say. He came closer. She mimed “sleep” and pointed to his pretty wife.
“And him?” he whispered.
He’d been convulsing, become too weak to drink. The water just seeped out from between his lips. Then it was over.
Have you heard a man sob for love of a child? Have you seen his tears? She stood aside and let him crouch between them. He’d studied the stars, but everything he loved was lying right here on this earth.
The summer passed. The visitors stayed on, waiting to return to the capital of Once-Had-Been. The wife sat on the steps of the observatory as Marusya worked in the garden. Sometimes she sang, sad songs. She had the loveliest voice. The little girl helped pull weeds and told Marusya her nursery rhymes. The wind turned fresh, the days shortened. The husband tried to persuade the Five to return with him and his diminished family. There were classes to teach, students who would share their rations with their professors. The epidemic had surely passed. Marusya walked amid the rows of fattening cabbages, the potatoes not yet dug, the onions and ferny carrots, the cucumbers too numerous to count, the melons done. It was time to start pickling and hunting for mushrooms. What would she do if the Ancients left? Where would she go? She would have to stay on, alone.
The old woman, the Fifth, walked with Marusya along the verge of the woods, told her they had no intention of going back to the university. They had their work to do here. Perhaps now others would return to the observatory. It was safer up here, though it would be a hard winter. They sent the young family on their way, watched them walking away down the hill—the man, the woman, and the child in the autumn light. Marusya felt as old as the Five. It was such a danger to love people. Nobody ever told you about that.
54 The Crows
NOW IT WAS HARVEST time, the ripest time of the year, when the wheat on the plain grew golden and the sky was the cornflower of heaven. It was then that their heaven grew dark with an invasion of dirty, glossy crows, wings studded with lice. They landed clumsily upon this island, crumpling the maps of stars, jabbing their beaks into the corners, chasing the Ancients like furies.
What were they looking for? Weapons? Hoarded food? The Grand Duke Michael?
Counterrevolution.
Blood.
They inspected the labor cards, interrogated the Five, collected their research in messy handfuls. They had no idea what they were doing. One of them struck Aristarkh Apollonovich—a man with a crater on the moon that bore his name—in the face when he tried to interfere. Of course they found the girl Marusya. No labor card. No papers. No name. It was not permitted to have no name. To those who occupied the leather jackets, having no name was not a personal matter. It indicated an attempt to circumvent the state. In this, the revolution was no better than what had come before.
“Who are you?” asked a hollow-cheeked thug.
“She doesn’t speak,” Ludmila Vasilievna said. “There’s something wrong with her.”
The astronomer knew much about the stars, but she knew little about men. It was a terrible thing to tell a tough with a pistol and Chekist arrogance that someone could not speak. That person would become a challenge, like a virgin who must be tested and tested again.
The local political police were looking to make an arrest. In the end they took three, calling them spies: Aristarkh Apollonovich, Nikolai Gerasimovich, and sad-eyed Boris Osipovich along with a couple of boxes of papers whose value they could not begin to imagine. And Marusya, who had no papers at all. They took them down the hill in a wagon, leaving fragile Valentin Vladimirovich behind, and Ludmila Vasilievna, who they thought was the housekeeper. “Water the garden,” Nikolai Gerasimovich called out over his shoulder. “Pick the cucumbers and get them into salt. And water the algae if you can.”
Aristarkh Apollonovich sat in the wagon with great dignity as Nikolai Gerasimovich rubbed his face, worrying about his plants, his work. Boris Osipovich winced at every jolting of the wagon down the hot, dusty road. Crows flew by overhead. The grain was ripening. Marusya sat very still next to Aristarkh Apollonovich. “They’ve searched before but they’ve never been so aggressive,” he said in a low voice. “I’m afraid something’s happened. We should have paid more attention. We forget about the outside world to our peril.” Such galaxies inside these three weathered heads jouncing down the road behind a mismatched pair of horses. What light would be lost if they were snuffed out.
Three of the crudest Chekists Marusya had ever seen brought them to a house in the village. They prodded the Ancients out. “Not you,” said one with a low brutish brow, and shoved Marusya back into the wagon. She watched as the astronomers disappeared through a door around which stock flowers grew, pink and white. Levkoi. Nikolai Gerasimovich turned and waved sadly, and Marusya waved back, holding her skirt down with the other hand where her guard was trying to lift it with the barrel of his pistol. He was probably the village hooligan before the Cheka recruited him.
They un
loaded Marusya at what looked like it had once been a small store. Inside, the brutish tough and another rural thug set to their business. “Who are you? Where are your papers? Where are you from?” They pulled her hair. They twisted her arm. “What’s your name? Say something!” One of them waved a revolver in her face. It wasn’t a Mauser, just some old and battered thing left over from the war before last. She could smell the cleaning oil. “Say something!” Beetle-Brow slapped her while the one with hollow cheeks smoked a cigarette. “We know you can talk, so stop pretending.” Her hair, bunched in his fist, as he screamed into her throbbing face and threatened her with his fist, huge as Jupiter rising. “What’s your name?!”
Her name.
Her name.
My name.
A curse.
A name.
Bitter was my name.
He punched me in the stomach. Bastard! I doubled over, gasping for breath. His knee to my back, he forced me to the floor and lifted my head by the hair. “You’re going to tell me, aren’t you? Who’re you working for? The British?” Knocked my forehead against the wooden planks. My brains swirled. He kicked me as I curled around myself, got me in the ribs. He had just lifted my skirt over my head and ripped down my bloomers when someone came in with heavier boots—had he heard me scream? Or maybe it was just luck. “Vovka, you pig fucker. Put it away. The commissar’s here.” Beetle-Brow rose, kicked me again—in the ass, angry to be denied his final payoff, and left me with my unintentional savior.
I rolled over on my back, trying to breathe through my bleeding nose, my aching ribs. Had he broken one? Vovka, I will remember you. Someday I will return the favor. The one with the hollow cheeks returned, yanked me to my feet by one arm, my bloomers falling around my knees, opened a trapdoor in the floor revealing a steep wooden stairway, and pushed me down it. I would have fallen all the way but I caught the rail in time. The door dropped shut above me.
The place must have been the cellar of a grocery store or maybe a vodka shop—low ceiling, dirt floor. Light came through a dirty window up at street level framing the proletarian footwear and bast shoes of passersby. Three other women already sat on the benches. I recognized two of them, a plump woman who worked in the bakery where Marusya collected the Ancients’ bread and an old baba I’d seen in the village. A third, a younger woman in a summer dress, sat hunched in the corner quietly weeping, holding herself around the waist. I was grateful that Ludmila Vasilievna had been spared this.
“Got you, too, did they? Poor unlucky girl,” clucked the bakery woman, helping me over to the bench, supporting me as I sat. I wondered why she was here. Speculating? Shorting the customers, as people complained to one another in the queue? I lowered myself to the bench. Every movement was excruciating. I sat half curled, wrapping myself in what was left of my silence. I kicked off my torn bloomers, there was nothing to be done with them. The woman used the corners of her apron to wipe my face, the blood from my nose. “Those Makushkins. Pig thieves. If your pig is missing you can count on it that a Makushkin’s behind it. And now they’ve got a license.”
“Someone shot the big boss,” said the old baba from the other bench, working her toothless gums. “We’re in for it now.”
Which big boss? Some rural commissar? Lenin? Could someone have shot Lenin? I was dying to ask but I couldn’t suddenly reveal myself as capable of speech or they’d think me a spy indeed. I kept my head tilted back, trying to stop the blood from flowing. I could taste the salty thickness down my throat.
“To think, I voted for them,” said the baker, spitting on the dirt floor. Her eyes were very blue. “Lord have mercy on us.” Both women crossed themselves.
The third woman moaned and whimpered. Young and pretty, her hair coming out of its braid, she sat with her arms across her belly, rocking herself, and I suspected worse had happened to her than the kicks and blows I’d suffered. Probably the fate I had been about to receive before the commissar showed up. I’d been lucky, despite my throbbing eye and aching ribs—I’d only lost my underwear. And what of the Ancients? Would they beat Aristarkh Apollonovich, the man who’d discovered the composition of Saturn’s rings? Torture Nikolai Gerasimovich?
In the afternoon, the trapdoor opened and the other pig thief, Hollow Cheeks, called down for me. “You. Red.” I climbed the steep steps as I would the stairs to a gallows. Across the dusty road, in the village tavern, a moustached man in tinted spectacles sat at a plank table that smelled of old beer. The commissar. He wasn’t from around here. He was neat and looked intelligent and efficient. Papers lay piled before him. The pig thief shoved me forward. There was nowhere to sit.
The commissar regarded me wearily. Would he notice the city cut of my clothes, worn as they were? “How did you come to stay at the observatory, devushka? Who brought you there?”
I just stared at his lips, that moustache. I, Marina, had no trouble cringing at the sight of the Chekist and at the hollow-cheeked pig thief behind me, but Marusya had no idea what they wanted. I clung to the last shreds of her, a poor girl bewildered by such an important man, not understanding any of this.
“We can make things very unpleasant,” said the commissar. “Why do you have no papers? Where are you from?”
Marusya’s silence soured on my tongue. Her raiment was already in shreds. She was half naked. It would be every bit as easy to kill a silent girl as a verbal one. Merde. I had to end this charade. But how? People so disliked being mocked. I gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward, opened my mouth as if trying to give birth to speech. Or vomit. The commissar instinctively sat back. “I…I…”
He leaned forward to catch my revelation, as if expecting miracles. Suddenly I wanted to laugh at the way he was watching me. But he would not have taken it well.
“Pe…Pe…Pe…”
“What’s she trying to say?” he asked Hollow Cheeks.
“She’s an idiot,” Hollow Cheeks said.
“Pe…te…te…”
“Petrushka? Petrovka?” The commissar tried to help me along.
I shook my head. “Pe…” I stuttered more forcefully. “Pe Pe PePe…” My eyes were full of realistic tears. And I pointed, jabbing my finger. North.
“Petrograd! You’re from Petrograd!” The commissar slapped the poor gouged plank of a table like a man who guesses the clue in charades. “She’s from Petrograd!” he told the pig thieves. “Do you write? Can. You. Write?” he repeated, enunciating each word, miming a hand, writing.
I just let the tears stream, thinking of the Second and his slate, and my throbbing eye, and my painful ribs, and what could possibly save me. The precious Five—whatever I did, I must not be forced to implicate them. These people had to leave the stars alone. They must not be allowed to wipe their Cheka asses on the sky.
I nodded.
The commissar took a piece of paper and a pencil that looked like it had been sharpened with an ax and set it before me. I knelt to write. How wrong I was to think I could hide myself away out here in my silence, in my absolute service. I’d confused the observatory with the city in the lake. Alas…it was true, after all—I would not hear those bells again, not on this earth. Tucking my tongue into the corner of my mouth, I wrote my SOS, my message in a bottle. Hoping the handwriting would suggest that of a simply educated rural housekeeper, I wrote the words—Varvara Razrushenskaya.
“Is this your name?” he asked.
I shook my head violently, tapped on the name several times, and after it added the fatal acronym, the black crow wings.
Cheka.
He looked at the paper for the longest time, lost in thought. He’d been so happy to have solved the first puzzle…would he understand? Or would I be delivered into the hands of the pig thieves again? Maybe pressured into saying something about the Five? He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his handkerchief. His eyes were without any light or emotion. Outside the high window, a maple tree was losing its leaves, bright scraps floating through the afternoon air. A single leaf hovere
d impossibly in midair, twirling and twirling, glowing, lit from behind. A small flame of hope that my message was understood. He put the paper in his pocket and nodded at Hollow Cheeks to take me away.
55 Red Terror
I WAS SUMMONED FROM that dirt-floored cellar at dawn. A shabby Chekist I recognized from the observatory search marched me to a police van waiting in the unpaved road. A dull rain was falling and the air smelled of ozone as it hit the dusty earth. Guards opened the back doors. The van was packed tight with prisoners. I couldn’t imagine there being room for any more bodies. “The tram’s not made of rubber,” a man in the back shouted out, and a few laughed. It’s what we said when the trams were full in Petrograd. I tried to keep my skirt down as the guards shoved me in, my drawers having been turned to rags by the pig thief. Before the doors clanged shut, I could see that all the prisoners had been beaten in one way or another. A fleeting impression of black eyes, bloody noses, cuts, and contusions. But no Ancients. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.
“Where are you from?” I asked the bulk next to me, a man who smelled of coarse wool and tobacco. It felt so strange to speak after my long summer of silence. It felt dangerous, like a vow I was breaking.
“Tsarskoe Selo,” he said.
“Detskoe Selo,” someone nearby corrected him in the close, thick, fear-tinged darkness. Ah yes, the renaming of the world. The tsar’s village had become “children’s village,” in preparation no doubt for its repurposing as a site for orphanages and schools.
The prisoners smoked and talked as we rattled along. There were no guards back here and I was dying to know if the rumor was true. “They say someone shot the big boss—which one?” I asked.