After I’d been soaped and rinsed to impossible cleanliness, we moved into the steam, the fiery heart of the banya. Outside the window, the masses of snow in the dark branches of the firs blurred like memories dimly recalled. I ran my hand along the great logs that comprised the walls and could see the trees they had been, their heads in the sun, creaking in the wind. Logs that might have been masts of great ships. The girl threw a dipper of water on the stove, spawning a satisfying hiss and cloud. I stretched on the newly planed bench, imagining my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather here, felt caps protecting their tender ears, sipping tea with compote, listening to the gossip of provincial uncles and aunts. My mother and her brother, petted and praised, the most beautiful children in Petersburg.
“Are you allowed to speak to me?” I asked the girl.
She nodded but dropped her eyes, the lashes so long they grazed her cheeks.
“What’s your name?”
“Natalya,” she confessed softly.
“I keep thinking I’ve seen you before. Did you go to the Tagantsev Academy?”
She laughed, a bright tinkly laugh, and small dimples pierced her cheeks.
“Did you work at Smolny? In the canteen?” Now I just wanted to tease her, see those dimples. Little bells shimmered in the air. “At the Stray Dog then? Dancing on a mirror?”
“Perhaps at the Mariinsky?” she said shyly.
Of course. The tulle, the little tiara. The song in my head, “Dance of the Little Swans.” The thin strength of her high flat chest, the knobby arched feet. The way she had massaged me so expertly. “You left the Mariinsky for this?” I was astonished. No one had more privileges than the dancers at the Mariinsky, except maybe the Kronstadt sailors. “I heard you got category 1 rations.” Who would give up such a thing? Rations were dearer than gold.
Her expression grew stern, or as stern as she could manage with that sweet face. “There’s more to life than rations.”
“More than category 1 rations?” Maybe she really was a swan, and not a person at all.
“You’re still walking in your sleep. You won’t even know until you wake.” She took birch flails from a nail on the wall and put them in a bucket, released hot water onto them.
I lay back, feeling the sweat bead on my body, pooling between my breasts, dripping down my ribs and filling my navel. Maybe it was the tea, but now I could clearly see that my breasts were noticeably swollen, my nipples dark as saddle leather. How had I missed that? My aching hips had seemed like a product of hard travel, and that infernal nausea…the fact of my new condition should have been evident to me, but I’d been moving too much, too fast to notice. Blown about in the wind.
Such an odd thing, to live in a body. This portable shell, this suit of meat and bone. Just the same as the one I’d dismantled the day before. I looked at my skin, flushed in the heat, my sweat, my navel, my knees. It didn’t belong to me, not really. We were only using these bodies. They belonged to nature, lived their own lives, had purposes separate from our own. So who was the “I” within this body? A mere passenger? Hostage? Fellow traveler? Especially the female body, with its surprises and indignities. How much easier it was for a man to be a rationalist. As a woman, I might consider myself solely as my will, the sum of my talents and failures, my experiences and dreams, a poet, a rebel, the maker of my own destiny. But in fact I was a consciousness riding on the train of my body. An oblivious passenger, heading along rails I never put there. What was this female body? A prison? Or could it come to be a home with its own strange logic? I sensed that the Master and I could have an interesting conversation about this.
“Tell me about the Master,” I said. “Where’s he from? Was he in the war?”
I could see her wariness, but also her eagerness to talk about him. “His name in the world is Taras Ukashin,” she began. “But no one knows where he’s from. If you ask, he just teases you.” She stopped, uncertain if she’d said too much already. I waited, too, hoping her desire to confide would win out. “Sometimes he says Bukhara. Or Kars. Or Alma-Ata. He never gives the same answer twice.” She lifted the birch flails out of the hot water, tested their pliancy, plunged them back into the bucket. “Master says it doesn’t matter where you’re from—you should create yourself anew every dawn.”
I liked how she said it, in the world. As opposed to what? Was this not the world? “When I shot the deer, he put his hand on my shoulder, and I stopped feeling sick. A warmth came through his hands. He was the one who shot the deer, wasn’t he? I never could have done it myself.”
“It’s our energetics,” she said, swishing the flails. “You’ll learn. He’s studied with holy men all over the earth. Yogis and monks. He says we are the link between higher and lower. You’ll see. There’s nothing he can’t do.”
This little deer was in love with him—I saw it in her pleasure just speaking about him and I could understand his appeal, his combination of solidity and mystery, his competence. I also knew how flattering it was to think that someone could awaken things unknown to you. Flattering and dangerous.
“He’s too funny. He’s not off in a trance, like some holy man on a mountain.” Not that I would have mistaken him for one. “He’s the most down-to-earth person you’ll ever meet. He never says he has powers. He just says he’s a searcher, like all of us.”
She handed me one of the flails and took one herself, stroking it like a child’s hair. “But higher energies come through him. He’s trying to find the way to transform us so we can do the same. That’s what the Practice is. That’s why there were so many dancers at the Laboratory. The energetics come through the body. The body is the link, not the mind.”
Her lips, small and pale, parted as if for higher knowledge, or some other kind of kiss. The mushroom tea was making her glow. I felt my mockery oozing away with my sweat, along with my aches and my disbelief. “You were there at the Laboratory?”
Her gaze turned to the window, the steam transformed to trickles of water, as if the panes were weeping. She sighed. “Master says all things have to end. There’s nothing eternal but the present.”
The soaked, flexible bunch of birch twigs fanned in my hand, and I swore the little dried leaves were coming back to life. I felt fertile, like a goddess. We took turns whipping each other with the switches, making the room even hotter as we swatted the steam down from the ceiling to where we sat on the newly planed benches, so hot I could hardly breathe. “Tell me about the dacha. Avdokia said my mother was there.”
Her green eyes widened, they glittered with excitement. “So it’s true? She really is your mother?”
Why the breathlessness, the wonder? “Of course. Why do you ask?”
She came closer to me on the bench. “What was it like? Growing up with her?” Then she remembered her place, searched my face nervously. “You don’t mind my asking, do you? Master says women should be more curious about the mysteries of the universe, and less about what people ate for dinner.”
Master evidently said a lot of things. “She was a fashionable housewife,” I replied, rubbing dead skin off the tops of my feet. “An aesthete. Hairdresser in the Nevsky Passazh, hats from Madame Landis, gowns by Worth and Poiret…”
“Hats and gowns—that’s just the role,” she said. “That’s not who a person is.” She eyed me hungrily. “What about her, elementally?”
Elementally? That was a new one. “Mostly air, I’d say, maybe a little water. Foggy. Like Petersburg in the fog. Like the Moika at dusk. Like Vrubel. If she were a poem, she’d be Blok. She was part of a spiritualist circle. Séances and so on. She liked art.” The girl nodded as if I were revealing great secrets. “We went to the ballet. We probably saw you there. My brother wanted to design for the stage, like Benois.”
“You have a brother?” As if it were impossible that my mother managed to push out more than one of us.
“Actually, two,” I said. “One’s in the Don with Denikin. The other one, the artist, died.” More than a year I’d bee
n living without Seryozha in the world. I felt guilty, even through the tea, like I’d left him behind, so much had I changed, so much had the world changed. I wondered how he would feel about my pregnancy. For someone so childlike, he didn’t care much for actual children. And he would have been disgusted to think of my body growing coarse and heavy, my belly like a watermelon. But he worshipped Kolya. I could imagine a life in which Kolya and I were still together and Seryozha lived nearby. I would have the baby, and we could see one another every day.
“I’m sorry,” Natalya said. “I shouldn’t have pried.” Then she straightened. “But Master says we shouldn’t apologize. ‘Act from the genuine impulse and stand by your actions.’”
“It’s fine. We spent a lot of time here when we were small.” I rested my head back against the logs. My lips, my hands, my toes tingled from the tea.
“It’s just so hard for me to imagine her with children. A regular family life.” How my mother must have changed so that this girl couldn’t envision her as a normal woman with children and a husband. She edged closer. “Did she have visions back then?”
What was my mother up to here? Though she’d always been somewhat clairvoyant. “She liked to guess who was on the telephone before she answered it,” I said. “Once, it rang and she said, ‘Pavel Popov is dead,’ before she picked up the receiver. It was one of my father’s friends, calling to say that a mutual friend had died.”
The girl’s lips parted, rapturous. “At the dacha, a woman, Veronika Konstantinova, accused Ilya of stealing a locket from her room. We went to Mother, and she said it had fallen behind the dresser. And when we pulled it away from the wall, it was right where she said it would be.”
Not exactly word from the Beyond. Something anybody might have thought of. How unpleasant, though, to hear a stranger describe her as “Mother.” She was my mother. My mother the seer. I laughed, remembering her complaining about having turkey when there was no meat in Petrograd.
Natalya’s eyes shone as she toyed with her birch flail. “She was the reason we came here.” She dropped her voice in case someone might be eavesdropping from the Beyond. “She saw a tide of blood lapping up through the drains of Petrograd, flooding the city. She wouldn’t let the Master rest until he promised we’d move out to her estate. ‘Before the snow melts.’ She was adamant about it. That’s why we left. It happened, didn’t it? The tide of blood.”
I didn’t want to reinforce this nonsense, but it was true. “There was cholera in the spring. All the bacteria from people shitting in the courtyards. It went into the water.”
“The drains,” she whispered. “You see?”
But it wasn’t the first time Petersburg had experienced the consequences of its shallow water table, and the lack of sanitation had been evident in every courtyard. Any doctor could have predicted cholera in the spring. Perhaps Mother had overheard it somewhere. But perhaps it was Red Terror she had seen. Those drains. “In the fall, someone tried to assassinate Lenin. The Cheka rounded up hundreds of bourgeois people, people from the intelligentsia—maybe thousands, who knows?—and shot them all. There were lists of the executed every day.” Maybe it was coincidence, an intensification of her normal anxiety about the revolution, but the timing was uncanny. I certainly hadn’t seen it coming, building over our heads like a great black storm. Then again, I was never one for predicting the obvious. Case in point: Kolya.
The girl’s countenance was grave, fully imagining the horror they had so narrowly escaped. “Master didn’t want to leave—we were doing such important work at the Laboratory. But she made us go. She’d start screaming in the night. You could hear it all over the dacha.”
“Will they ever let me see her?” I asked Natalya. “He was very upset when I tried.”
“You must prepare,” she said. “Even we don’t see her that often. She has other duties. She’s not of this world, Marina.”
I thought of her discussing hats with Madame Landis. She was very much of the world back then. “Is he like that, too? Visions and whatnot?” I still felt Ukashin’s knowing black eyes on me, the warmth of his touch.
A little dreamy smile replaced her earlier alarm. “Oh, no. He’s very human,” she said, swishing the birch twigs. The fragrance released into the steam, green and fresh and ropy. “Very elemental. It’s the Mother who has the visions. Her guides show her everything. She’s probably watching us right now.” I imagined my mother’s horror, forced to view this girl combing out my lice, or to see my pregnant body without benefit of cloth or modesty. Can you see me, Mother? I’m going to have your bastard grandchild. Her guides would be covering her eyes.
“The Master’s purpose is to connect the higher realms with this one. We have the most contact with him.” She shifted on the bench, tucking a long bony foot under her, straightening her spine. I wondered how much contact that was. I thought of the Master and my mother—like notes in a chord, higher and low. “The Mother deals with the higher realms exclusively.”
“Except when she’s finding lost lockets.”
Her high smooth brow developed a small wrinkle. “Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Making jokes.”
Here I was, disrupting the harp again. I would have to be more careful. I liked it here, and I didn’t want the headman to send me off. At least not until I could talk to my mother, find out what was really going on. “No,” I said. “I’m just a little nervous. I hadn’t expected any of this.”
“Master says that it will take time.” She switched at me with the birch flail, a sensation both painful and delicious. “To let you get used to us. Not to talk to you too much. But”—her dimples appeared again—“you don’t mind, do you?”
Sweet girl. Although I didn’t know if I could bear a whole winter of Master says. I could understand how Varvara felt, talking to me all those years ago—was it only three? Papa says, Papa says. Can’t you think for yourself? The girl threw more water on the stones, and I thought about that woman up in the house. Where was the Vera Borisovna who’d sat at our table in the Poverty Artel translating Apollinaire and playing American poker? I’d never felt closer to her than I did then. Though inexplicably it was Anton who drew her out. She liked men. Women envied her, but men vied to outshine one another in her presence—which was why her soirees were always so successful. And now she was trapped in that room all day long, doing God knew what. “When will he let me see her?”
“You’ll see her,” the girl reassured me. “Sometimes she comes out to watch the Practice or see our handwork. If she wants you, she’ll call for you. Don’t worry, she knows you’re here. If she sees something you need to hear, you’ll be brought to her. But she watches everything. It’s not so important that you see her, it’s that she sees you.”
But she hadn’t called for me.
When we couldn’t stand the heat anymore, we ran outside, steaming, into the frigid air and hurled ourselves naked into the snow. The contrast was delicious. It felt superhuman to roll in the snow without feeling cold. The winter sun peered like a red eyeball through the icy layer of sky while I stood steaming and immortal, watching the snow melt around me.
If I stayed, perhaps I would learn their secrets.
But for now, it didn’t take long for the true temperature to send us back into the embrace of the banya for another round of steam, though I declined more of that tea. I would have to keep my wits about me.
When we passed through for the last time, I noticed that fresh clothes had been hung on pegs in the anteroom—a blouse, a brightly patchworked sarafan, and a short quilted jacket. The ensemble would certainly provide more room for my possible inconvenience, if it went that far. But my Misha clothes were gone. “What happened to my things? My coat?”
“They’re being washed,” she said. “We’ll put the coat in the smokehouse for a few days to kill the vermin.”
A sensible move, but I felt disoriented as Natalya helped me into these odd archaic-feeling garments. The
blouse was embroidered, everything clean and smelling of the iron. But now I had nothing. No coat, no normal clothes. And Ukashin had my weapon, which had been in the coat pocket. I felt vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt before, vulnerable and tended to at the same time. I would have to sniff my way across this terrain very carefully, like a little fox crossing a river, testing the ice.
74 The Ionians
IN THE LANTERN-LIT front parlor, cross-legged on the carpets facing my grandfather’s empty chair, the patchwork disciples sat deep in meditation. My benefactress leaned in next to me. “Breathe in the chaos of the world. Breathe out order.” The smoke from their billowing incense burned my lungs, seared my nostrils. Her command made no sense. Why would anybody want to breathe the chaos of the world into her own body? I already held far too much of that particular substance. What if this was real, and I was absorbing the gigantic trash heap of the world, its suffering, its waste, its hunger, its rage?
“Wouldn’t it be better to inhale order and exhale chaos?” I whispered.
She raised her lashes to regard me, as if from a long way off, her eyes dreamy water-green. A smile for my ignorance, my lack of spirituality, played about her petal-pink lips. “But it’s how we heal the world.”
I tried not to smirk, but somehow I doubted that this small group of Petrograd nincompoops could staunch human misery by sitting on a carpet in a candlelit room, breathing. I decided my lungs weren’t up to such heavy planetary responsibilities. Instead I breathed in their order and breathed out my own chaos, hoping no one would notice, the way people throw trash out their windows into the courtyards.
There was no clock in sight. Was it midnight? Two in the morning? My God, how long could a person breathe in and out, even if you thought you were saving the world! Bored, I amused myself by examining my new coreligionists in the cult of whatever this was, Ukashinism. Here they all were, the entire community, ten of them, not counting the absent Master, my mother, and the unregenerate Avdokia, no doubt cursing them all from behind the closed door of the servants’ room. Five men and five women, each more beautiful than the last, except for the gangly, bespectacled intellectual. Most appealing, I decided, was the long-lashed, dark-bearded, romantic-looking youth who chopped their wood. If I were looking for a conquest I would start there. His lashes flickered as he concentrated. Or the boy with firm broad shoulders and heroic dark eyebrows that met in the middle. The gypsy girl’s fierce beauty begged for gold around her neck and dangling from those ears. The blonde from the kitchen this morning could have lit up the room all by herself—Helen of Troy was their scullery maid. All wore multicolored homemade clothing, vaguely folkloric, and not a one was older than twenty-two except the storklike intelligent, a decade older and decidedly uncomfortable with the long sitting. He rocked from side to side, occasionally uncrossing his legs.