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 pull
ed 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 d
ress, 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.