In February, I turned nineteen. Only Avdokia knew—and conceivably Mother, though she’d made no effort to contact me. Avdokia, my angel, my savior, continued to take care of me, even more so once she learned about the baby. There was always more in my bowl at dinnertime than was strictly my share. The meat on my tongue, warm and necessary, was the product of my own dark handiwork. What a drive for life lay inside all this killing, feeding the life growing inside me. Though the whole program of Ionia was intended to quiet the body, my own was becoming more greedy, more desirous. There were times I thought I’d go mad with desire, for Bogdan, or Pasha. Even Ukashin started to look appealing. I almost succeeded in inveigling Bogdan down to the Practice hall in the middle of the night, full of energy from our evening’s exertions. But in the end he wouldn’t. He leaned against the wall, his fingers stroking a thick eyebrow. “Try to understand, Marina. It’s not the Laboratory anymore. Only us, you understand?” He left me there with my frustration like a pot of soup boiling over, the smell of scorch following me around in the air.
I missed Kolya, growling with a sweet roll in his teeth.
The suffocating closeness made me want to flee or start a fistfight. You could die from a thousand tiny cuts: hurt feelings, revenge, petty jealousy, jostling for favor. Who sat closer to Ukashin at dinner, whose dreams were chosen for a dance and whose overlooked. Whose question was considered seriously and whose mocked. You never knew. The safest thing was to lie low and not care too much. He liked keeping everyone guessing. Natalya was up, Katrina was down, Magda always on the lookout for a moment to attack. Bogdan the favorite, then it was Gleb.
I began taking refuge in the bathhouse after my trapping was done, to pass a private hour writing, dreaming, and just staying out of the house as much as I could. Natalya, mistress of the bathhouse, took to leaving small bundles of wood for me by the anteroom stove. These winter poems captured my sense of the life going on within the seemingly silent frozen landscape and the hidden life of the human heart. I wrote a poem about the animals in their dens, dreaming of their vague and shifting memories of spring. Only when the sun had lowered almost to setting did I venture home with a rabbit or two in my game bag and a new poem in my book.
It was when I was coming back in the sifting white of the afternoon after one such session that I again caught a glimpse of red through the trees. I hadn’t seen my ruddy friend for some time, and the sight cheered me more than a hundred rabbits. I marveled at how close he was letting me come, as if he was waiting for me. I left the path to edge even closer. Then I realized—he was too still. Bozhe moi, he had walked into one of my snares. One of my earliest traps, which I never checked anymore because it was so close to the house. Suspended in the little trap, all four legs on the ground, was one long frozen board of Reynard, his black nose lowered in shame. This clever fellow, caught in a snare just large enough for his head. I could see how he’d worn his neck hair bare trying to free himself from the wire, spinning around and around, trying to attack his enemy but unable to fight, unable to flee.
I knelt next to him, tears freezing to my face, stroking his pretty coat. “What were you doing here? This wasn’t for you.” The misery on that pointy face devastated me. Ukashin said that a fox could smell a mouse under three feet of snow, that he could run along the tops of logs and sniff out every danger, using his bushy tail to brush away his own scent. He wasn’t supposed to die! He was supposed to live and laugh at all of us as he stole our hens away.
The snow came down harder as I opened the noose, sliding my knife down the wire, freeing the fox. He was horribly light for his size, so thin, nothing but bone and fur. Nothing edible. His death was for nothing, taking that bit of light and joy from the world.
I returned to the house, threw my sad harvest of rabbit, hare, and fox onto the kitchen table, and though it was forbidden, went into Avdokia’s room, where I lay down on her bed, coat and all, and buried my nose in her quilt, inhaling her smell of yeast.
Magda eventually found me and shoved me out into the kitchen. Katrina Ionian stirred something on the stove, reluctant to witness our warden manhandling me. If I had not gotten my feet under me, surely she would have dragged me in by my hair. The furry pile of dead animals was right where I’d left it, the rabbits and the fox, waiting for me to skin them and cut them up. “You think you’re better than us? That you deserve special favors because you’re the Mother’s daughter? I see you.” She pointed at her eye and then at me in a strangely menacing gesture, as if she would cast a spell on me. “Now get to work.”
I picked up my knife and turned dully to my kill.
I skinned the hare and pulled it from its coat, still a moment that disgusted me. Opened its belly and pulled out the entrails, cut off its head, cut it into sections. The rabbit was smaller and, even worse, more infantlike as I drew it out of its skin. The fox lolled on the other side of the table, all the joy and mischief gone—from me as well. This wasn’t a prize, this Trud. I was the hangman, whom everyone respected but no one wanted to invite to the christening. I started to gut the rabbit only to discover a clutch of babies in its womb. I felt sick. I set down the knife, wiped my hands on a dishcloth, put on someone else’s quilted hat, and went back out into the snow.
I leaned against the house, taking great breaths of cold air in the twilight, shivering in jags, but I could not force myself to go back inside. That fox had been a messenger for me. I felt the noose around my own neck, the wire cutting into me. If I had been trying to ignore the message, the rabbit was the confirmation. What was I going to do?
The porch door opened. Footsteps on the stairs. A dirty dog jumping on me. I kneed the beast aside. “Marina,” the Master said. “You can’t stay out here forever.”
“I can’t do this anymore. Ilya wants to do the hunting. Give it to him.”
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
I was shivering, but I would not go back in.
A patient hunter himself, he lit one of his cigarettes and smoked it, threw a stick for his dogs. When he was done smoking, he took my elbow. I didn’t want to but it was too cold to resist. I let him lead me back into the house, into the warm kitchen. The hare was gone, the half-butchered rabbit. Either he or Katrina had finished my work for me. Only the fox remained. The girls had vanished, though the pot of borscht on the stove was fragrantly bubbling.
If I stayed here, I would end up as dead as that fox. That’s what it was telling me. As dead as the rabbits. If not in body, then in spirit. Gutted. The snare hadn’t been built for me, yet I was already caught in it. I saw.
The Master ran his fingers along the guard hair of the fox’s red tail—my secret rebel—its tragic pointed nose. He picked up the animal and draped it over my shoulder, the way a man gives a woman a fur scarf, placing it on her neck to see the color against her face.
“Please don’t,” I said, turning away.
“You are the hunter, Marina. This is your Trud. I didn’t make this up. It came to you in a dream. It’s for your good, not ours.”
I trembled, the way a horse shudders to rid itself of a fly. I wished he would take the fox off me. “Why? Ilya wants to do it. You took it away from him. Give it back to him.”
“But you are the one who is hunted. You must become the hunter,” he said, stroking the dead creature lying on my shoulder. “You must think like a hunter, Marina. Lie in wait, read the tracks. Notice where the trail narrows, when you’re being led to the noose.” He took the fox off my body, held it out to me. “You pity this fox? He was not supposed to die—is that what you think? But he was a greedy, foolish thing. He wasn’t paying attention. A ridiculous little person.”
Yes. Careless, ridiculous, greedy. And so easily—dead.
“He dropped his guard. But you must not follow suit.” Ukashin took my bloody hand in his. He studied my face, his dark eyes urgent. “You are the hunter, Marina Ionian. Say it.”
My mouth was so dry. “I am the hunter.” The fox thought it was clever, but it had bee
n foolish and had paid the price. I could not fall prey to my own vanity. I must not think myself too clever. That was a fox’s snare, its downfall. Maybe Ukashin’s, too. “Again.” His dark eyes very serious. “Say it.”
“I am the hunter.” I could feel my trembling ebb. He laid his arm across my shoulder, let his strength flood into me. I bent my head, leaning on my hands against the table. Either I was the hunter or I was the prey. There was no third option.
77 The Feast of the Golden Egg
IN LATE FEBRUARY, UKASHIN announced the Great Feast of the Golden Egg, to celebrate the birth of the fifth world. We’d had fasts before, but a feast? Now? We had months to go before we could plant anything, and months after that before reaping. Did we really have the larder for it? The idea reminded me of the story about a legendary city in the mountains of Georgia under siege by the Tatars. Desperate, almost out of food, the citizens decide to gorge themselves with their very last stores in clear view of the enemy. It broke the siege, the Tatars figuring that it was pointless to besiege a city with unlimited resources. Perhaps this was Ukashin’s way of reassuring us that there would always be bounty—if we only believed.
I asked Natalya if she really thought we had enough food for a feast. “Master says worry creates a field which itself pushes away that which you desire. If we all stay in harmony across the dimensions, there will always be enough. Someday he’s going to teach us how to absorb energy right through the skin, like the trees and the grass do. There are masters in Tibet who taught it to him.”
So they believed, and there was no quarreling with it.
And how could I help falling into the spirit of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg along with the others? First we threw ourselves into a frenzy of cleaning—washed all the clothes, scrubbed the house from the doorstep to the bathroom ceiling, mucked out the workroom, aired the bedding, swept the floors, beat the rugs, cleaned the windows. We were two weeks in preparing, and I think that was the point, to give us something to look forward to, something to focus on, something besides the length of the winter and the scantiness of our means, the frustration caused by Ukashin’s prohibition on “special friendships” within the blissful collective.
“Marina Ionian.” Ukashin stopped me on the porch as I was putting my gear on to check my traps. “I’d appreciate your composing some verses for the holiday. Everyone’s making an offering, and I would like this to be yours.”
I thought of those young Communists in the canteen at Smolny, creating slogans for public health propaganda posters. So now I was to do agitprop for the Golden Egg. A commission—well, I could see by the look in his popped black eyes that there would be no getting out of it. Yet perhaps I could turn this to my advantage. “All right. But I need a place to work without disturbance. Could I use your kabinyet? The energy is very creative there, and no one would bother me.”
The Master lifted one of his pointed eyebrows, mocking me, knowing it was low-level extortion. Maybe I could slip out and see if Mother’s room was unguarded. “For an hour. Before dinner.”
I sat at his desk, taking the opportunity to look through his papers. He had an atlas of central Asia, an ethnography of Siberian shamans, and The Way of the Pilgrim, plus the Vedas and crumbling little books in alphabets I didn’t recognize. All his small amulets, a jewel-handled dagger that would bring a nice chunk of money even in the lowest village in Russia. Powders and herbs tied in little bags. A trunk, much traveled and securely locked. No bed, only the pallet and a pile of sheepskins on the carpet.
Across the hall, Andrei sat reading in front of Mother’s room, his back against her door. What was she doing in there, month after month? She must be mad by now.
Yet how pleasant it was to sit in a room by myself. I put my feet up on the rung of the campaign desk and felt like a king. I turned my attention to the Cosmic Egg. I knew what the Master wanted—some sort of faux-mystic rubaiyat full of “wherefores,” but even in contemplating it, my mind became a cart stuck up to its axles in mud. After trying to push myself out a few times, I gave up and leaned on a wheel, smoking. I would have to leave the cart mired there and walk away.
Yet the Egg, the Egg! Painted, shining, like a glorious Easter egg. Pagan, primordial. Not the relatively long succession of God-days of Genesis, but Creation as a hatching, pecking its way through the shell. All of existence. Imagine that bellyache. Hard enough to be pregnant with one little human. Imagine the fluttering, the pushing and shoving, the straining, having all creation inside you, waiting to be born.
And why would there be this expanding potential when before there was sweet, dark Nothing?
The Egg rolled onto the stage
Alone.
There, I had a start.
No one in the house.
No audience, ushers, snacks at intermission.
No intermission.
No Time.
In darkness, resplendent, gold.
Now the question.
“Why am I here, if I may be so bold?
Why need a One?”
The hall made no reply.
Then deep inside the Cosmic Egg
Its guts
began to seethe
with a nascent Universe.
Heartburn. How its back ached!
With Time, and Space, matter,
At the heart of Nothing.
“Cut it out,” said the Egg. “I’m trying to
sleep!”
But Eros stirred the pot.
Of course! How else did the world come into being? Desire. Something wanted something. How did anything happen here?
And Things started taking shape
In that close darkness
Like crystals growing in a cave.
Oh, the things of this world!
Spinning stars of the Milky Way,
Romanian bonds and Latvian blondes
The velvet antlers of springtime gods,
The ticking sheets of racetrack odds.
The Egg tossed, sleepless and terrified.
Things were waiting to be born!
Doorknobs, drains, and philosophes,
Pipes and prisons,
barbershops,
Samovars, love notes,
Dostoyevsky
Iambs and Macbeth,
The sword of Orion
The Rock of Gibraltar
The Caspian Sea and
Africa’s Horn
Catherine the Great and Terrible Ivan and
The Brazen Horse and Horseman.
How it ached and bulged and cried
Its mystic precincts wrapped so tight
About the awkward baby!
I was positive that this was not what my client had ordered, but I felt the rush, the joy, of saying something quite true and equally unexpected. I had not lost the most essential part of myself. More than any lover, any scheme, this moment, my own creation.
At last, a tiny
C
R
A
C
K
appeared
no bigger than a sigh
Come out! said Desire. Davai, davai!
And like a Siberian prison break,
Like a bomb in an underground vault
Creation
B L A S T E D
O U T
!!!
And out rushed oceans
Himalayas
Krakatoas,
warring nations,
Oedipus and Elementals,
Principles and heavy metals.
The wise
the slow
the cruel
the dreary,
All dimensions every city
Rushing, crashing, spinning away
Rocketing red and fiery across the dazzled brow
of Nothingness
Till Nothing itself became a memory.
But that couldn’t be all, not in a universe quickened by desire. Things just didn’t keep spinning out and out. They settled down, they found relationships
, they invented work and machines and childbirth.
And to this day
each form, each face
Bears a bit of eggy trace
And by the fire
late at night
Each,
(fingering
a shattered shard of the Primordial Egg)
falls silent,
dozy, dreaming of
that sweet embrace.
Bright jars of bilberry jelly appeared from the cellar, and giant squashes. Berries in syrup. Bogdan produced a large crock of wine. There was much disappearing behind closed doors in groups of three and four and six, the sounds of rehearsals. I composed my poem and spied on Mother’s room. Perhaps she would emerge for the feast.
The fatted calf was slaughtered—or, in our case, chickens, three of them, big and plump, and I was the executioner, untouchable. I am Kali, Bringer of Death. Lilya couldn’t bear to do it herself. I borrowed the ax from Pasha and chopped them on the larch stump, threw the heads to the ever-hopeful dog Bonya. We plucked, we roasted. Ilya brought sprats and salmon from the smokehouse. My own miniature Egg was not to be denied—I nicked a sprat and wolfed it down right there in the kitchen, head and all, the oily deliciousness bringing tears to my eyes. I licked my fingers and silently dared Katrina, who stared, horrified, to say something about it.
The celebration began at sundown. I spent the afternoon braiding the girls’ long tresses alongside Anna, who showed me intricate variations as the acolytes took turns sitting on a stool in front of us. My own hair had grown out a bit from Misha’s inky crop and Anna trimmed it every week to remove the black ends from my fox-red locks. For the feast, she plaited me a crown, threaded it through with green cord.