The others either ate in resigned silence or suppressed giggles, heads lowered to avoid catching his eye. Bogdan cast quick sympathetic glances toward me. Manipulating his long pianist’s fingers, the schoolmaster went on to explain how the universe was constructed—as a series of folds, like a Japanese paper flower. “What appears to be a linear phenomenon, when seen from the next level up, is actually folded space-time.” He certainly didn’t make himself popular by monopolizing the conversation, but perhaps on the next level up he was scintillating. “So a phenomenon which appears to move from A to B to C can actually be A and B and C simultaneously. See?”
I nodded politely. I figured I could catch up when I read the books. But now he’d moved from paper flowers to soap bubbles collecting around a soap bubble inside a soap bubble. Interlocking spheres. “Everything is happening inside the same moment, or what appears to be a moment linearly, in this dimension. But there is no linear time in the dimensions above. So in déjà vu, you’ve accidentally jumped to the next level and glimpsed one of the infinite parallel realities. The question is how to prolong that instant, how to investigate it.”
Suddenly the Ionians straightened from their slumped positions of polite boredom. The sleepiness in the air vanished. The Master had arrived.
They rose as one and waited until he had settled himself into his chair, a figure both formidable and whimsical in Russian blouse, shaggy vest, striped velvet trousers, and house slippers. All he lacked were bandoliers and a curved dagger at his belt. “Good morning, children. Has Dyadya Andrei donned his professor’s hat?”
Laughter, so far suppressed, rushed out like wind through chimes. Andrei’s lecture came to an abrupt end, his face gone pale.
“Such weighty matters, Andrei.” Ukashin frowned, though we could see he was teasing. There was a smile under his moustache. “Too much theory first thing in the morning. Less thinking, more dancing, eh?” He ran his hand over his gleaming head—he must have just shaved it—and gazed down the table directly at me. “Is life to be lived, do you think, Marina Ionian? Or contemplated, with the thumb in the mouth?” He reached out and shook the boy Ilya’s shoulder. “You don’t just read an opera score, do you? You sing!” The tall boy with his prominent Adam’s apple grinned. I could feel the pleasure he took in being singled out.
“You don’t admire a pattern for a coat, do you?” he asked brown-eyed Anna. “‘Oh, what a lovely pattern. Look at that clever design!’ No. You make the coat and go for a walk.” Bestowing his smile on her. She absorbed his charm with an indulgent smile of her own, like a fond mother.
“But surely you must agree, Taras, that understanding must come first,” interjected the gawky professor.
“Must I agree?” He watched the flaxen-haired goddess Katrina fill a bowl for him, set it before him. The glance that passed between them—so intimate…was there more here than I had suspected? I smelled sex in the air, though maybe I was just overly sensitive after Kolya’s night with the village temptress. Natalya had told me that separate relationships between the community’s men and women were strictly forbidden. But maybe the Master was the exception. “Katrina Ionian,” he asked the blond girl, “what do you think?”
She just laughed. “I’d rather eat.”
“Exactly,” concluded the master, tucking into his breakfast. “We would all rather eat.”
“But surely—” Andrei tried again.
“But surely—” Ukashin echoed him, his mouth full, imitating his disciple’s fish-gulping-air expression, detonating another round of giggles as the intelligent sat trying to collect himself. Where did this unprovoked cruelty come from? Was it for my benefit, or did he always do it?
“But surely, what do we have if we don’t have our reason, if we don’t examine these things—” the intelligent spluttered.
“What do we have, Professor?” Ukashin prodded him. “No doubt you will tell us.”
The poor man was on the verge of tears. “A travesty,” he replied. “A puppet show.”
Ukashin held out his arms, hands dangling at the wrists, and began to jerk like a puppet, his dark eyes wide and unfocused, as the other man sat, straight-backed and stone-faced. The success of the depiction seemed to encourage the Master. He rose and began to wheel about, unsteady on his feet, jumping and collapsing. He moved to my side to examine one of my new books with an expression both studious and ridiculous—quite a performance.
It shocked me, after the peace and beauty of our exercises, to see such heartlessness. The intelligent was a bore, true, but he didn’t deserve to be belittled. How Ukashin delighted in the man’s humiliation, how deftly he turned the others against him. His advocacy for darkness along with the light was certainly in evidence. No one said a word in Andrei’s defense. The intelligent rose, trembling, glancing from face to unsympathetic face. I put my hand on the books and smiled. I’ll read them. He nodded, but that stricken expression was terrible to behold. He turned and left us to his tormentor.
Ukashin was in a fine mood after that, like a man who has just vandalized a shop and walks away with expensive goods in his arms. As he ate, he asked for people’s dreams, as if nothing had happened. They were all eager to share. Bogdan dreamed of food—whitefish soup and caviar, asparagus with hollandaise. “Tonight don’t forget to take some sacks with you and bring some back,” Ukashin said. “We could use some caviar around here.”
Anna had dreamed of sewing a shroud, but no one would tell her whom it was for. She was afraid. She didn’t want to finish it. I tried not to interpret—it was awfully personal for Ukashin to ask everyone to share their dreams in a group. The woodcutter, Pasha, dreamed they were all back at the Laboratory and the Cheka was coming. Everyone stood against the walls and became the walls, so that when the Chekists broke in, the place was empty.
“Yes, we will learn to do this,” said the Master. “People are fools. They look, but they don’t see.”
Gleb, the furniture maker, with his bland face and colorless hair, shared a dream about a village girl he’d come across, washing clothes in the river. He watched her from the trees—her breasts, thinly clad in her slip, her skirts tucked up around her, her long hair covered with a kerchief. She saw him and called him to her, teasing him. It was excruciating to have to listen to him describe how this village girl had him make love to her there on the banks of the river. He blushed and stammered, but still he kept on talking. It was agonizing to watch.
“Is she here?” Ukashin asked.
Gleb nodded, swallowed.
“Who was it?”
“K-K-Katrina Ionian.”
Katrina listened, barely flinching, keeping her head cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening to a tram driver call out stops, and none of the stops was hers. But down the table, Pasha’s eyes flashed, and his lips turned down within the nest of his dark beard. Such intrigue! It seemed that the ban on sex could not quite eradicate the passions in young healthy people. Ukashin gazed at Gleb from under his emphatic eyebrows. “Yes.” He nodded as if this were important information. “I see.” As if he were unaware of the havoc he was stirring up. That devil. “We’ll do something with that.”
The night before, I’d dreamed I was a fox in autumn, the forest swirling with falling leaves. Ukashin’s dogs were hunting me—they’d picked up my scent. I’d doubled back along branches and crawled under logs, every trick I had, but I was getting tired. I wasn’t going to make it. He would get me one way or another. I certainly wasn’t going to turn a dream like that over to this fakir. But my face must have revealed my resistance, for he turned to me immediately. “And what did you dream, Marina Ionian?”
I shrugged, laughed apologetically—stupid, useless me—glancing around the table. “Sorry—I’m a heavy sleeper. I never remember them.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. His broad shoulders sagged with disappointment, but I suspected that, too, was an act.
“I wish I did remember. I envy all of you, having these nightly adventures.”
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He leveled onto me the force of his gaze, that heavy bull’s face with the plum-dark eyes, but in turn I became a lump of clay. All he could do was harden me. He moved on to more pliable targets. Magda, the gypsy, leaped to share. In her dream, an enormous black horse flew into the window of the women’s dormitory while the rest of us slept. It took her on its back, and they flew out over deserted villages and empty fields. “The world had ended,” she said. “Everybody was gone, it was just me and the horse and all the land.”
You didn’t have to be an alienist to understand what that was about. Ukashin nodded as she spoke, but he was watching me, fingering his broad moustache.
Ukashin choreographed dances and exercises around our dreams. I actually felt a little left out, but I continued being unable to remember. The less he knew about what transpired in my psychic life, the better. Especially because he often figured in my dream life, and the way he did had to be kept absolutely to myself. The whole place was awash in repressed sexuality. But all romance had to be focused on Ionia as a whole—and especially on our admiration for and fascination with our charismatic Master. Andrei continued to improvise mystical compositions at the piano, while Ukashin took care to compliment him, at least for a while. During the Practice, they achieved some sort of rapprochement that nevertheless failed to prevent periodic jibes and mockery during the daytime hours.
One night we entered Magda’s dream of the flying horse, imagining riding the terrifying beast out the windows on a star-filled night, carried by the Master’s rumbling, rich voice, which became the horse, racing and plunging. What a feeling—the huge glossy horse beneath me, icy wind in my ears. What ecstasy to ride thus, over the sleeping world.
“No, not sleeping, my children,” the Master told us. “Deserted. The snowy fields have returned to rest. The roofs in the villages—fallen in. No lights, no hearth fires. We fly for how long? A year, a moment, eternity? From now on, this is how it will be, just you and the horse and the wind. You are the master, a god, but absolutely alone. The world has ended, but you were spared because you were airborne. You’re now past the end of the world. There are only the other dimensions now.” Achingly alone, all but for the diabolical horse.
It felt just as it had when Seryozha died. All gone. Mother, Father, Volodya, Kolya. There was no one. The terror of that, the searing grief. But one small thought glimmered, like one small star. The baby. I would not be the only one who survived the end of the world. The horse plunged on while the flame rocked in the lantern.
Afterward, when I was leaving with the others to ascend to the dormitory, Magda stopped me on the stairs. “He wants to see you. Wait in his kabinyet.” His office. Her nostrils flared with jealousy, her flashing eyes reduced to suspicious half-moons.
I imagined it was a privilege to be called by the Master to his kabinyet in the middle of the night, but I would have traded places with her in a second. His was the room at the head of the stairs that had once been Grandfather’s study. I knocked, but no one replied. He must still be with the others. I saw that Mother’s door lay unguarded—maybe I could slip across. But no—Magda lingered on the stairs, watching. Always someone watching. One couldn’t take a breath that wasn’t measured and reported. When would I see her? I wanted to tell her about her grandchild, about Kolya and Petrograd, and find out for myself if she was a captive or a voluntary recluse.
Now, under the scrutiny of glowering Magda, I had no choice but enter Ukashin’s study. Inside, his two smelly dogs lifted their heads, but they went back to sleep on the carpets that completely obscured the room’s wide floorboards, as if it were a Turkish seraglio. A portable campaign desk rested where Grandfather’s huge pigeonhole desk had always stood. It must have been something when the peasants claimed it. I hoped they all got hernias trying to carry it down the stairs. He used to let me open its myriad small drawers, each holding a different wonder: medals, postcards, pastilles for us children. Matchboxes, receipts, and letters. The desk had a secret drawer that looked just like all the others, but it was really only half as deep. Behind it lay a concealed second drawer that held just one lock of hair, a dusty dark brown tied in a thin, sea-green satin ribbon. It had been given to him by the great Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. He would hold it and sing quietly her famous “Casta diva” from Norma.
In its stead, the campaign desk seemed provisional, its edges studded with cigarette burns, its surface filled with mystic clutter—statuettes of Buddhas and fat goddesses, a curved letter opener with an Egyptian god on the handle.
Amazingly, in their cases above the windows, Grandfather’s books had survived the expropriation. I ran my hands along the beautiful gilded spines, pulled down his copy of War and Peace. I kissed its binding as if it were Dyedushka’s own soft, wrinkled face, still hearing Norma in my head. Dyedushka and Tolstoy, born the same year. I imagined them together in a garden somewhere, in the shade of green trees, talking and drinking tea. That whole generation, gone. Now my parents’ fading away, too, and soon, mine. All the children, going down before the scythe like waves of corn. Though Andrei would say it only appeared to be so from the limited viewpoint of life in the third dimension. As if that could make me feel any better. What did it matter what this life looked like from higher dimensions? We humans were stuck to this one like flies in sorghum.
Yet there was still this. I sat at the Master’s desk and turned the thin, handsome pages of the thick book. It was all here—memory, the Russian language, Tolstoy’s art—connecting us all, me and Grandfather and Mother and my child to come. The glory of this life, the earthy third level.
The dogs stirred, and then large warm hands enveloped my head on either side, so firmly that I could not jump. The carpets had silenced his footsteps, so I hadn’t heard him come in. I could see him in the window’s reflection, the bulk of him, his shiny shaved head, the wide moustache standing away from his face. “What’s in this head of yours, Marina Ionian, I wonder?” he murmured, low but clear. “If we peeled all this away, what would we find?”
“Mattress stuffing,” I replied. The suggestion of anyone peeling my flesh made me shudder.
“Haven’t I given you what you wanted, what you needed?” he said quietly into my ear. “Family, shelter, a place to rest?” I could feel his voice in my bones, though he touched me only with his hands. He could crush my skull like an egg. His hands smelled of clove and incense and a bit of dog.
I tried not to struggle or show any panic. I would remain as composed as my mother, my grandmother.
“You swore you wanted to join us. You declared yourself Ionian. But you insist on holding yourself apart.” I started to protest but he stopped me before the first denial escaped my lips. “Don’t. I’m stating a fact, not entering into a dialogue.”
Yes, it was a fact. He dropped his hands and I corkscrewed my neck, as if he’d had me in a headlock. This room was too small for the two of us. I felt as though I were inside a boxing ring.
“What am I to do with you?” He moved away. “If it wasn’t for the child, I would send you out to sleep with the chickens.” He leaned over to pet his dog.
I rose, carefully, on the pretext of putting the book away. “I’m tired—do you mind? I’d like to go to bed now. Was that what you wanted to tell me?”
“The thing is, what will you tell me?” He turned around, and the way he searched my face, I felt like a horse, a dog—my eyes unable to meet his. “Who are you, Marina? Why have you come to us? What do you want from us?”
I forced myself to return his gaze. His bulging eyes glistened like polished stone, so dark I couldn’t differentiate the pupil from the iris. “It’s no mystery. I came home and you were here. That’s all.” I tried not to swallow, but the tightness in my throat commanded it. “I don’t want anything. Just to get along.” If only he would let me talk to my mother.
He collapsed into his desk chair, rubbed the top of his bald head again as if to clear his thoughts. “I like you, Marina. You keep me awake, like a faceful of co
ld water. Maybe that’s why you came—to be the pebble in my shoe.” He kept staring at me. “But I forgot. You’re so tired. Lie down and rest.” He gestured, open-palmed, to the carpeted corner farthest from the windows, where a pallet lay covered with a sheepskin. “Go ahead. You’re exhausted. You can hardly keep your eyes open.”
And suddenly I was exhausted. And that pallet looked so welcoming, with fluffy curls of the sheepskin, after the long day, the late night, the emotional strain. Or was it a hypnotist’s trick? A lecher’s ruse? “Is this a proposition?”
He picked up one of his little statuettes. “Don’t make assumptions. Sleep, Marina.”
Waves of drowsiness crashed over me. “This isn’t really necessary,” I said, trying to stave off my exhaustion. “You don’t have to go through all this. I’m obviously not a virgin.” I slipped off my felted footgear and climbed in under the sheepskin, fully clothed. Ah, it was so soft, so warm…
“Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.” He turned on the desk lamp, pulled down a volume from Grandfather’s library, and began to read.
I tried to stay awake, concentrating on the hardness of the floor through the mat, the same floor where I’d played when Grandfather wrote his letters. Casta diva, che inargenti…Running my fingers through the long, shaggy tufts of the sheepskin, lamplight flickering. My boat soon drifted from the dock.
I dreamed I was back in Petrograd. I had my son with me. My son! We were on Grivtsova Alley. He was a beautiful child, a solemn little boy with eyes like black olives, about seven years old. And there was something I had to do—deliver a book, a very important book. The child had to come with me, I couldn’t leave him. So I tucked the book under my arm, got the boy into a jacket that was too big for him—Genya’s?—and wrapped my old scarf around my head.