“You are most welcome,” she said.
“So you’re from Danilov,” the old man cut in on our womanly exchange. A real old-time patriarch, chewing his toothless gums in his untidy beard. “Pack of thieves, if you ask me. I bought a horse there once—this was back in the seventies. Remember that horse, Faina? Had the wheezes. Didn’t last the winter.”
“In the seventies?” our hostess snorted. “How old do you think I am?” It must be the husband’s father—clearly no love lost there.
Kolya lit his pipe. “I remember that horse,” he said. “A noble beast. The noblest.”
Faina laughed out loud. I was sure she’d never seen such charm in her life. She lowered her eyes to her pots. She had the big fork out and was moving earthenware jars inside the oven, but whenever she looked up, there was hunger and pleasure in those eyes. She barely noticed I was there. The old granny next to me played with a little doll, dancing it on the table. She smelled sharp and, I hated to say, urinous. My envy for the good wife melted away. The village wives were all against her, she had nobody but these old people for company, three children to take care of, and a husband she kept nervously watching for out the windows. How could I begrudge her the fun we’d brought, the relief from boredom and labor?
The little boy at Kolya’s elbow wanted to know more about the bandits. “How many were there?”
“Hundreds,” Kolya said. “But nothing like the ones in the Caucasus. I was stationed there during the war.” And he began to tell a twisted tale about having been kidnapped by bandits in the mountains and the time he spent at their campfires. He described their women, who were all beautiful gypsy girls, and the wild tribesmen, their high hats and curved Circassian swords, the tale working up to a bet on a horse race. The adventures were strongly reminiscent of Lermontov and Pushkin, but luckily our hostess hadn’t read these venerable authors.
She brought me a pail of potatoes and set a short knife and a pan down in front of me. And so I began to peel, making myself useful just as I’d done at every stop on this journey, while my man sat in the place of honor under the icon and held forth, amusing everyone. I didn’t really mind working, it was warm and pleasant here. But there was no hiding from the fact that a woman was worth exactly nothing but labor. This beauty and I counted the same—a pair of hands, a womb to endlessly produce, breasts to suckle the young, feet to drag and carry and plant themselves in the dirt.
As I listened to Kolya—he was really outdoing himself tonight—the pan filled with my peelings, probably slated for the pigs. To think people in Petrograd clung to life on such peelings. The Third Ancient could make a passable cake from them. One thing you could say about a revolution, we all discovered hidden talents.
The shelf over Kolya’s head lovingly displayed the family treasures: a lacquered cup, a daguerreotype of two stiff people—maybe these two old people when they were young—two small paraffin lamps, and a black clock, stopped permanently at 2:50. And of course the icon in its silver frame, the red lamp dancing before it—the Virgin posed before a strip of water, and behind that, the shining towers of a white city. Peeling my potatoes, I wondered if this tidy izba, this warm kitchen, was a taste of faithful Kitezh, timeless and far from Marxist ideology and ration cards and modernity’s nightmares. I could feel the peasant woman studying me as well. I sat up straighter, tried to look less dejected. Was she envying me my clever man? Or perhaps curious about my relative youth and my freedom to travel the roads of Russia.
Meanwhile, the baby’s whimpering had become a wail. “Tishe, tishe, Lenochka,” she said from the stove. “Don’t I have enough to do? Pick her up for me, devushka.”
Inside the wooden tub hanging from ropes, the baby looked at me with sodden eyes, blond as the other children and flushed, her curls all sweated through. My first thought was for myself. Was she ill? I couldn’t afford to get sick now—I was already tired and achy all over—but how could I refuse? Keeping my head as far away from the infant as possible, I lifted the hot, heavy body from the boatlike contraption. The child immediately began to scream. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never picked up a baby before, and she knew it. Frankly I had about as much maternal instinct as a turtle that lays its eggs on the shore and leaves them there for the snakes and weasels. In that, Vera Borisovna and I had much in common.
The baby shrieked and arched her back and held out her arms to the woman at the stove as if I were about to eat her.
Faina swept down and picked up the pail of potatoes that I’d almost finished with, peeled the last ones with a few sure strokes, and chopped them into the pot, wiping hair from her face with the back of her hand. “The first ones were so easy, but this one, ai. You don’t have children?”
“Not yet,” Kolya said. “But we’re going to have tons of them. At least ten.”
Funny.
Holding the ailing infant on my lap, I bounced her, tried to amuse her with my fingers. I’d have her almost quiet, then she’d break out wailing again. Nervously, I thought of the boy who’d died of cholera. But children got sick all the time. It didn’t mean they were dying. “Check her diaper,” said the mother as the baby screamed. She took something away from the tiny girl holding her skirt and smacked her hand. “Not for you.” That one, too, started to cry.
“Can’t you keep them quiet?” said the patriarch in that high cracked voice of age. “Always someone crying. None of my children were allowed to cry like that.”
“Who asked you, old man?” snapped Faina. “At least these will grow up and be of some use someday, unlike you.”
I steeled myself and raised the baby’s shirt, loosened the cloth bound around its waist and peeked inside. A stench rose that made me gag. Oh, why couldn’t I be Kolya right now, happily sitting over on the bench doing magic tricks for the little boy? “It’s dirty.”
“There’s a pail for the dirty one right here, a clean one on the shelf over your head.”
I didn’t want to admit that I knew less about diapers than I knew about the birth of stars. I lay the child on the bench, but it immediately started to roll and the diaper came off and the shit flowed like lava, all over everything, the child screaming as if I were murdering it. I looked at Kolya, who was enjoying it all immensely.
“Oh the devil take it. You are useless, aren’t you? God help you when you have one of your own,” she said and moved quickly to take the infant from me. “Stir those pots.”
I held up my messy hands.
We heard the jingle of a harness, the gate scraping open. “Gospodi bozhe moi.” Panic had entered in her voice. “Here.” She had already removed the soiled diaper and held it out to me, folded in a neat packet. “Put it in that pail, wash it out, dump the water in the yard. I could use some more water, too, while you’re out there.” Of course—I had been waiting for that one.
We could hear the horse as it was led around to the stable. I could feel the temper of the house change, everyone’s urgency and unease.
Quickly I tipped some boiling water from the stove into the water in the enamel pail and dropped the dirty diaper in it. By the door, I washed the green muck off as best I could. I’d just opened the back door to throw the contents into the yard when the master of the house appeared at the bottom of the steps. He was a shrewd-looking peasant, taller than average, with matted hair cut straight across his ears and a squared-off beard. I bowed my head, a mere woman beneath the notice of the head of the household, perhaps of the whole village. He moved past me and into the house. “Whose horse is that? Who are these people?”
I was happy to take the pails and the yoke and leave Kolya to do the explaining. It was what he did best anyway.
When I returned, the husband was seated in the red corner, with Kolya next to him and another curly-headed blond child, a boy of around six, who had displaced his younger brother. Four children? Kolya and the peasant were talking easily, a bottle of vodka between them. But now the wife was suddenly dumb as a doorpost, tending to her pots like someone not wantin
g to be noticed, the infant propped on her hip. I couldn’t help but admire the clean, neatly folded diaper now wrapped expertly around the baby’s legs. “Can you put her back?” She held her out to me.
I was happy to put Lenochka back in her cradle and rock her gently by the ropes as the husband and Kolya talked about early oats and the rye harvest, how many acres under what crop, a lawsuit about a nearby forest of walnut and oak. I must have fallen asleep in the warmth and the pleasant scents because I was wakened by the sound of a big earthenware pot being dropped onto the table with a bang, a pot I probably couldn’t have picked up empty. Steam rose from a rich stew fragrant with mushrooms and potatoes. A second crock held shchi, a cabbage soup. Faina’s husband was served first, then my husband and the grandfather, followed by the children and finally, the women. The food was better than we’d seen in most of the villages. I ate in a dream, sitting at the table’s foot with the crazy grandmother and the toddler girl, who was fascinated by my red beads.
Ivan Ivanych, Faina’s husband, spoke with authority about the doings of the village. He was probably one of their headmen. He was older than his wife by at least ten years, and gray threads already ran in his hair and beard. I wondered if he had married her as a child or whether there had been a wife before her. But these children were certainly all hers—they were as alike as ducklings. Marx said that power lies with whoever controls the means of production. Clearly she was the means, and he was the owner. A certain stiffening of her posture when she spoke to him, the way she forced herself to look at him, told me she despised and feared him. And I noticed her effort now not to pay too close attention to the guest of honor.
Kolya was also careful to keep his regard evenly divided among his audience.
“So what’s going on in Danilov, boy?” Ivanych asked, helping himself to the stew pot with his decorated spoon.
Danilov was a district center about a four-day walk from here. Kolya always picked our “hometown” carefully, far enough from where we were staying to make it unlikely that people could question him too pointedly about acquaintances, but close enough to be plausible.
“The new draft, brother,” Kolya said, leaning toward our host, peasant man to peasant man, as if they were the only ones in the room. “Trotsky wants three million men under arms.”
The one thing I’d learned out here was that distance was time. The distance from a muddy village like this to anyplace with a newspaper and a telegraph could be a week, a month.
“We just got done with a war. Why the devil do they have to start a new one?” the old patriarch chimed in, eager to still be part of the masculine court.
“Do you support the Reds?” asked Ivanych, plucking at his beard as if searching for something. “You think they’re going to last?”
“That’s the question, brother, that’s the question,” said Kolya. He toyed with his empty glass. I could tell he would have liked to pour another, but it wasn’t done in a peasant home, to serve your own drinks. “Kolchak’s just declared himself dictator of Russia.” The White admiral with whom my father’s faction had recently joined. “All the other generals have sworn loyalty to him.”
“To the devil with them all.” At last Ivanych refilled the men’s glasses. “If they think we’re going to give up the land, they better think again.” They drank off the round in a single draught. “So what’s your trade, boy? Why aren’t you with your own people, getting ready for winter?”
Kolya began to tell our story. I had heard this act before in many an izba, but it was still magical, a tale as good as Afanasyev, in which he was the enterprising son of a poor widowed mother. With his new bride, he had left their town for the sake of his older brother, a worker in a factory in Petrograd—or Moscow—who had been crippled in an accident or in the war. He explained how badly he needed to buy enough food to see his brother’s family through the winter, as well as the old lady back in Danilov/Kostroma/Cherepovets/Rybinsk.
“There isn’t a morsel of food left in Petrograd,” Kolya concluded. So the brother was in Petrograd this time.
“The last shall be first,” said the peasant.
“They’re fighting over who’s last, then, brother.”
Our host snorted. “So tell me, why should I sell to you? Maybe someone comes along and offers me twice as much.” He fingered his beard as if he expected to find a small animal in it.
Kolya leaned on his elbow as if he were a student working out a difficult theorem. He pulled on his ear, bit his lip, looking like he was about to fail the exam. I tried not to smile, knowing that when Kolya put on the ermines of pure innocence, he would be picking your pocket clean. “Well, that’s true.” He opened his blue eyes wide. “Only, you know, it’s this million-man army they’re raising…”
“What about it?” Our host’s bushy eyebrows knitted together over his skeptical eyes.
“Well, you know, I was in the war, in a provisioning unit. The Southwestern Army. And I can tell you, when they say an army marches on its stomach, they’re not joking. They don’t bargain with you, and you won’t see any handfuls of gold.”
Now the headman was quiet. The little sons’ eyes shifted from their father to this handsome red-bearded man next to him, learning, absorbing. Faina, too, was watching.
Ivanych considered, rolling the empty glass in his hand. “We’ve already had the Yaroslavl workers. Twice.” It obviously had not been a pleasant encounter.
“And they’re the workers,” Kolya said. “Soldiers are another story.”
Now it was the peasant nodding. He poured vodka all around, even for Faina and me and the granny, so we could toast. “To Russia,” then to luck, then to the harvest. We drank, and I thought of this suffering land, bored full of mouse holes, the mice scurrying in before the storm.
67 The Bathhouse Devil
AFTER THE RICH SUPPER, the family treated us to a bath in the village banya. My stomach purring with the good meal, vodka pulsing in my veins, my clever lover at hand, my aching carcass free for the time being from that infernal wagon. And now a bath! What more could a mortal ask for?
We crossed ourselves as we descended into the log-and-earthen hut by a pond not quite iced over, glazed by sharp moonlight. Kolya, comically humble and visibly drunk now, gestured and wished us a good bath, loud enough that Bannik would be satisfied, as if he were actually afraid of the little bathhouse devil. Oh, I remembered Avdokia’s stories about Bannik, what he had done to this or that relative of hers in the village when his rules were disobeyed or when some naughty young girls tried out some magic spell that went terribly awry. We never used the Maryino bathhouse. Father didn’t believe in it. We have indoor plumbing, damn it all. We’re not savages. I thought of him as we ducked under the low entrance to the log shed—first the headman, then Kolya, then the patriarch, followed by Faina and myself. Where was Father now? In what godforsaken hut in Perm or boardinghouse in Omsk did he sit with his reason and his outrage, now hopelessly aligned with reactionary forces in Siberia?
In the anteroom, under the log beams, we stripped off our patchy clothes and modestly entered into the steam, redolent of fragrant pine. Faina teased me about my short hair, that I made a very pretty boy. I made excuses, saying that I’d had scarlet fever earlier this year. Ivanych threw water on the hot stones and disappeared in a fine mist. It was lovely here, the pine perfume satisfying something in me so primal I hadn’t known it existed. It had taken a revolution to bring me here. Compared to this close, dark, scented lodge, the banya on Kazanskaya Street was a sewer illustrated by Daumier.
I eyed Faina with her big belly painted red-gold in the stove light. I wondered if she would give birth here—I had heard that village women did, the reason why proper relations with Bannik were essential. I caught Kolya glancing at her ripe figure, her round haunches and luxurious poitrine, her blond braids. Did he want her? I was thin and ragged now, and my inky cropped hair could not have been terribly picturesque. My toenails looked like rawhide. I rubbed balls of dead ski
n off my feet, wondering if Kolya had tired of his boyish lover. Did he miss the women in Paris, perfumed and tantalizing? Was a woman like this more enticing?
Ivanych, drunk, held forth about the goings-on of the village, who had it in for whom, and assuring us that no one in the village council put up with the Kombedy and its finger-pointing. Then he moved on to the former landlord, Kachanovsky, who’d cut a stand of timber that belonged to him, Ivanych, and he’d taken that devil to court and won. It was the great triumph of his life. I couldn’t help but notice his body, which was very white and surprisingly well built. He was younger than he’d appeared in his clothes. I tried not to look at the grandfather, sunken chest and little potbelly, his sparse nest of pubic hair. Instead I sank into the clouds of fine steam as one would sink into a lover’s arms. Ivanych threw more water on the stones, and Faina beat him with the birch twigs she’d been soaking in a wooden pail.
The peasant was evaluating me as well. He seemed to approve of me, nodding. I actually thought he was going to say something kind. Instead he turned to Kolya and said, “You flog her good and proper, I see.”
Kolya had to tear his eyes off Faina’s breasts in order to respond. “Every Sunday,” he replied. “That way she knows what day of the week it is.”
Ivanych nodded again, wiping sweat down his wiry arms. His eyes were very pale under the dark brows. “Only one way to remind them who the man is, eh, boy?”
With a shock, I realized that this ignorant sot had seen my scars and assumed Kolya had been their source. Probably couldn’t write his own name, yet he had no trouble reading the signs of violence on a woman’s body. I waited for Kolya to stand up to him, to admit he was joking, that he’d never do such a thing, but my lover just grinned, drunk and too interested in the grain we were buying off this peasant to disagree. “She’s a tough one.” He swished the flail in the bucket, then switched his own back. “She looks sweet but she’s the very devil. Her parents didn’t tell me about that. They were just happy to get her off their hands.”