Whatever they were doing in the back parlor, the front one lay virtually empty but for the unfamiliar Bukhara carpets that had replaced our cheerful Finnish ones. My grandfather’s wonderfully hideous Alexander III chair also remained. I remembered him sitting in it reading, an embroidered cap on his head, his legs stretched out on a stool. Strange paintings now hung along the walls in dark blues and purples featuring snowcapped mountains, veiled women, and deer. No evidence of the sofas and wicker armchairs in which we’d lounged and told stories and played games. No striped shades and cutwork curtains on the bare windows. The izbas of Novinka must be well decorated these days, rich with candlesticks and clocks and pictures of our Golovin ancestors.
Well, candlesticks could go to the devil. Let the peasants use them in good health. They’d left the house intact, that was the important thing. Oddly enough, they’d also spared the upright piano. It was amazing they hadn’t stripped it for the wire. And the carved wooden stairs had been left unmolested. I ran my hand along the heavy wooden banister. How I’d loved sliding down this as a child, imagining daring escapes. But another Marina couldn’t help but calculate how many weeks such a piece of wood could serve a Petrograd bourgeoika.
Upstairs, it was all the same as ever—the red-painted hall, the moldings carved from silvery birch. Capacious, with windows at each end and the strong scent of cedar wood. I crept to the door of Mother’s room. She’d never been an early riser, and she took over my grandmother’s room after her death, as it was the farthest from the kitchen, with its smells and morning bustle. I pressed my ear to the door. Had Avdokia told her that I’d come home?
I noticed a musky smell—leathery and resinous. The olive-eyed leader was standing right at my elbow. I jumped. How was it that I hadn’t heard him? He was too solid a man to have climbed the carpetless stairs without my hearing, yet here he was, his shining bald head, dressed in a sheepskin vest. He took my wrist, not hard but in a way that prevented resistance, and pulled me from the door. “I thought I told you to leave,” he said, his brow wrinkled in long folds, his voice controlled but commanding.
I stood as straight as I could, my arm clamped in his grip, fear lying thick in my throat. “I’m Marina Dmitrievna Makarova and this is my house.”
I had to hand it to him, he didn’t show a scrap of surprise. I would not want to have played cards against him. Stay out of his way. We need these people more than they need us.
“Ask her if you like,” I said. “If you don’t believe me.”
“Stay here.” As if I were one of his dogs. He knocked twice and, giving me one last searing glance, slipped inside, allowing me a quick glimpse into the room’s interior—dim, the air full of incense—and the very quickest impression of a woman in a long veil, like the pictures downstairs in the empty room.
I pressed my ear to the wood. I heard him, low, and Avdokia, too, in short humble replies, more pauses than speech. My mother remained completely silent. “I know but she can’t help it,” I heard Avdokia say. Were they arguing my case before my mother as before a judge? Why did he have any say at all? Whose house was this, anyway? I tried the door, but it was locked.
At last I heard the key turn and jumped back. It was Avdokia. She said nothing but her cheeks blazed in sharp little slashes. She jerked her head to the stairs and I followed her. She was furious, though I couldn’t tell whether it was at me or him, and we marched wordlessly downstairs and all the way back to the room behind the kitchen.
I did my best to stay “out of the way,” but I grew restless by the afternoon. I grabbed my coat and boots and slipped outside to prowl among the neatly shoveled paths and snowbound trees. A girl was laying new wood shavings in the henhouse. The tall bushy-haired intelligent was shoveling a path, and another girl threw a panful of water out the kitchen door. I approached the handsome boy with the black beard, who was chopping wood using the larch stump as a block. “Privet,” I said.
He wouldn’t even look at me. Had their master told them to avoid speaking to me?
I wandered off to try the girl at the henhouse. “How’s my chicken doing? The white one.” She, too, ignored me and a red rooster flew at me with his claws out. “Quit it!” I batted him away and she glared at me, closed the coop’s door.
When they had safely gathered in the back parlor for their communal dinner, I attempted a second unannounced visit to the inner sanctum, slipping silently up the bare wooden stairs—only to find one of the patchwork people stationed before the door. It was the bespectacled intelligent, cross-legged on a mat on the bare boards, reading a small, fat book. He must have sensed me standing there before him but refused to look up. I cleared my throat. He slightly resembled Blok, but with a sharper, more pinched face—none of the original’s grace and nobility. “I’d like to see her.”
“Ukashin said the Mother must not be disturbed.”
Ukashin. The first time anyone had said his name. “I’m her daughter.”
A parade of emotions rolled past his face as he eyed Misha, complex as clouds rushing over a field. Surprise, interest, hesitation, a note of fear? Judgment, then dismissal. “Ask Ukashin. It’s not up to me.”
“Why can’t I see her?” I demanded of Avdokia when she returned to her room with a bowl of soup for me.
“Please, Marinoushka.” She patted my head as though I were three years old, smoothing my ruffled feathers. “I’m doing my best, but—oh, you don’t know. Don’t make trouble with them.”
“This is ridiculous. She’s my mother. Am I to be a prisoner in my own house?” I dipped into the soup she’d brought, cabbage and potato. If there was one thing I had learned from Arkady about men, it was that you should never cower before a man with a whip. It just made him want to use it all the more. “I’m not going to be intimidated by some self-styled fakir, some roadside Houdini.”
She glanced up and her face grew tight again.
I followed her gaze to find the man standing right behind me in the doorway, in his shaggy long coat and astrakhan hat, ready for the outdoors.
“Walk with me,” Ukashin commanded.
I took one more spoonful and left Avdokia silently praying, to don my coat and boots and follow him outside. Snow was falling in light, crisp flakes. We walked silently together down a newly shoveled path—he clearly liked to keep his followers busy. I liked the feeling of the snow gently tumbling against my lips. I felt alive again. The dogs, hounds with gray fur that grew in no particular direction, bolted by us to roll in the snow and chase one another, barking. It occurred to me to wonder how he fed such big dogs. Did his acolytes disappear every so often?
The man walked his slightly military walk—hands behind his back. He was vigorous and broad-shouldered, with the eyes of a bull, a wide moustache. Attractive? I had to say yes. A certain magnetism…a definite presence. I estimated his age to be around forty—a good fifteen years older than anyone here except Avdokia, Vera Borisovna, and the intelligent who’d shooed me away from my mother’s door. Everyone else seemed not much older than me.
He spoke to me with a slight lilt, a slight purr. “Don’t worry about the Mother. We are taking very good care of her.”
Our steps crunched in the packed snow. I’d spent a night under this snow, had wrapped it about me like an eiderdown. I was not some cowering bourgeoise. “My mother, you mean.” I felt Avdokia’s reproof even as I said it, though she was safely back at the house. Don’t!
He nodded, not as one agreeing but rather as a man nods when he’s trying to gather his own thoughts and only hears your voice, not the sense of your words. My father did this, distracted, thinking of some essay he was writing. “I’m sure this is all quite strange to you,” he said. “But the woman you knew as your mother no longer exists.”
I picked up a gloveful of snow and packed it into a ball, heaved it at a tree. It smashed with a satisfying burst. “Who’s upstairs, then? The first Mrs. Rochester?”
The man didn’t appear to have read Brontë. “Let’s say she no longer
exists on this plane.” As one might say, “She’s gone to Odessa.”
I was unable to stifle my impatience. “What plane does she exist on then?”
“You couldn’t begin to understand.”
We’d walked out of sight of the house with its fresh icing of snow and smoking chimneys, toward the aspen grove, white bark patterned with black in its wintery calligraphy. When I was young I imagined these marks were codes, secret messages from the fairy world. Perhaps I, too, was a prophetess.
“What do you know about aspen?” he asked.
I brushed snow from my cheeks, my eyelashes, blew icy vapor from my lungs. The insides of my nose, the corners of my eyes, told me it was fifteen degrees and dropping. “I’m no botanist, Comrade.”
He took out a pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette, lit it. He smoked as if we had all the time in the world to stroll around on a cold day, taking the air like a couple of boulevardiers. My frostbitten nose burned. I was glad enough to be out of doors, however. The foul tobacco he smoked would have been unbearable in close quarters.
“The secret of the aspen,” he said, gesturing with the twisted butt of his makhorka, “is that it’s all one tree. All connected, under the earth. All one.” He cast his popped black eyes at me, the liquid eyes of an intelligent animal, a dog or a horse. I felt unnerved each time they met mine. Now he waited, snow accumulating on the curly lamb of his hat. I would not fall under his spell, though I felt his gaze urging me to do so. I knew a hypnotist when I saw one. “Sorry. I was never very good at riddles.”
His powerful form gave the impression of a man who would not suffer insolence, wouldn’t hesitate to deliver a blow. But instead he just smiled, superior, a swami pitying the crude materialist. “What you see here—us, my students, your mother, all of us—we’re one tree. You understand? All one body, all one breath.”
I tried to breathe though my mouth, shallowly, so I wouldn’t take in any more of his stinking tobacco than I had to.
The master ran his gaze over the white tree trunks, as if they were troops standing at attention. “Think of us as strings on a harp or a great piano, all in tune. Our fields harmonize. We amplify each other. We create a complex vibration.” In a surprisingly delicate gesture, he brought together the stout fingers of his hand, framed in the shaggy coat sleeve.
I puffed out a lungful of frost. “The peaceable kingdom.”
Two definite vertical lines formed between his dark brows. “We’re creating power.” Watching the woods, as if expecting someone to arrive. “Of a kind normally experienced only by adepts in the most remote corners of the earth. But to do it, we must be in absolute accord.”
“And I’m out of tune—is that what you’re trying to tell me?” I wished he’d just get on with it. Or put out that cigarette. I was feeling very unwell. Snow was building up on my coat and cap and scarf. I saw why we’d come out here to have this chat—so I wouldn’t pollute the purity of their vibrational field.
“If only you’d come to us back in Petrograd, you could have stayed on as long as you liked,” he said, watching his mongrel dogs as they wound through the trees, sniffing and marking. “We had all the room in the world. But we don’t have the luxury of hangers-on here.”
I flushed with outrage. “This is my house! I’m the one who belongs here. You’re the hangers-on, not me.” I was feeling so sick that I thought I might vomit right in front of him. A nice sign of strength. “I don’t care what you think.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. A heavy, broad hand, like a bear’s paw. All at once, I experienced a sensation of heat in my shoulder, then in my whole body. The nausea lifted. He released me and walked on. How did he do that? He stopped again and regarded me, and once more I felt the sensation of heat, of well-being, in my face, in my chest, my stomach. “I don’t think. I feel. I feel you, Marina Dmitrievna. Your energy. It’s very disruptive. The question is, what do you have to offer besides your ignorance and confusion? Tell me why we need you. Convince me.”
I was actually hot, here in the falling snow. I could see the steam rising off my coat. What was he doing to me? “I’m not planning to be a burden. I’m a good worker. I’ll do my share.”
“But the work’s all been done.” One dog trotted up, its tongue lolling, steam rising from its mouth, and he patted it, sliding its furry ear between his ungloved fingers. “We could have used you back in the spring, when we arrived. Building the smokehouse, fishing, putting in the garden. We could have used the extra hands. But now? A poor time to show up with your cup and spoon, calling us hangers-on.”
I could see that had been rude of me. I saw myself from their point of view, someone’s spoiled daughter, appearing and demanding to be fed. I couldn’t imagine they’d brought in much of a harvest, especially if they’d really grown their own rye, but certainly they’d gardened and built the smokehouse, which must be hanging with the fish they’d caught. And what did I have on my side? Inherited property, sullen, passive resistance, and the complete absence of other ideas.
He squinted against the smoke, foul as a burning carpet. “The father, can’t you go to him?”
“My father? He’s in the east, at Omsk with Kolchak. I’m not going there.”
The man sighed, gazing at me like a schoolmaster regarding the stupidest girl in the class. “No. The father…of your…inconvenience.” He dropped his eyes toward my midsection.
My what?
Again, that gaze, back at my face.
What was this man trying to insinuate?
The father.
No. That wasn’t possible. I hadn’t had a menstrual period in more than a year now. I could hang a coat on my hip bones.
Yet I’d certainly felt sick for some time.
Well, who hadn’t? The food we ate, or what substituted for food…
Though I’d been eating well enough recently…since Kolya and I had left Petrograd and turned to the largesse of the countryside.
No. It was ridiculous. Kolya was fanatically careful, nursing his supply of preservativy as if they were relics of the True Cross.
And yet—perhaps prophylactics had not been intended for such heavy use. There was no way to know how old they were.
I felt the weird sensation of a heavy liquid being poured onto my head from a great height.
“Yes, that man,” said the fakir. The dogs ran off, barking.
We watched them go. I was grateful for the distraction. “You’ve got it wrong, brother,” I said, in my most Misha voice. Hooligans didn’t get knocked up. I was a boy. A boy!
“Have I?” He breathed out a cloud of his smoke, and I had to back away. In my head, the hurricane roared. My stomach lurched and I vomited into the snow as he watched with amusement.
I’d never conceived with Genya, though I wouldn’t have minded. The last time we made love was right before he went out for the defense of Petrograd in March—I could have had his baby already. Thank God I hadn’t with Arkady, I would have known by now. No, other than the filigreed love letter he had cut on my back, it was only in my darkened spirit that he’d left his impression. But between Kolya and me, there had always been such a strong charge of nature. My body wanted Kolya, ached for him. Such a stupid beast—it didn’t know we were through. I imagined my reddest inner chamber, like a velvet-lined boudoir all prepared for this small guest.
Ukashin lifted his face, listening to the song of his dogs baying a higher, more excited note. I had to get away and think. He knew too much, noticed too much, and I had learned a few things, one of them being that men who knew things about you were people to be avoided. It was flattering to be understood but dangerous. A good man didn’t need to be intriguing. This one, drawing on his tobacco, squinting against the smoke, looked like a rug merchant waiting for a client to make up his mind. I could see him in a fez in a coffee house sucking a hookah, the patience of centuries behind him.
What if I really was pregnant? Only the single most disastrous thing that could befall me right now, being so
far from Petrograd. The city at least had hospitals and a modern attitude toward women.
I counted the months since the October celebration—November, December, January…July. A summer baby, if this was true and not some game he was playing. I glanced again at the broad shoulders in the shaggy coat. But I knew he was right. I could feel it. Bozhe moi. I was frankly terrified. What did I know about children? Didn’t every woman want a child? Just as Russia was about to be torn apart like an old dress, what could I hope for here—to give birth in a bathhouse? Or roll in herbs in hopes of a miscarriage? In Petrograd I could have an abortion in a modern mothers’ hospital. Unless a certain thief found me first. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about my future.
An abortion…was that what I wanted?
Yet how could I have a baby? I couldn’t even diaper Faina’s brat. Any child with me as a mother would be in sorry shape indeed. And with Kolya Shurov, that womanizer, as a father? My own mother hadn’t had a shred of maternal instinct, but at least she had a responsible husband and the comforts of home, the protection of money, servants, food on the table. A child of mine would be tossed into this world with nothing, dragged behind me like a goat behind a cart.