After “The Gypsies,” huge parts of Eugene Onegin came pouring from my lips, lips that had been born to speak them. There with me in that cold retreat came maddening Onegin, with his Byronic pose, and naive, book-mesmerized Tatiana and her dangerous love for him. I recited her famous letter, the dearest verse in the Russian language, as she admitted her passion, baring her heart to his cynical eye: Ya k vam pishu—chevo zhe bole? I write to you—what more to say? Oh, to someday create lines a hundredth, a thousandth as immortal as these! I vowed to the close darkness and to the storm and the branches and the heavens above that if I lived through this night I would dedicate myself to poetry alone and leave passion to those better able to withstand its fury.
Part VII
The Ionians
(November 1918–Spring 1919)
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 t
oo 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 s
o…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.”