“We never talk about personal things. We speak of the work, her experiences on the astral.” He paused, remembering her, then his face darkened. “But Taras doesn’t like us interfering with her. He wants to be her sole contact. As you’ve seen.”
“But you’re the one guarding her door.”
How sad he looked. “She can’t be disturbed. Changes are going on now. I’m no longer privy to the discussions.” The bitterness around his small mouth. “There’s a new darkness around us, haven’t you noticed? No one talks about it. Have they said anything to you?”
Me? I was the lowest on the ladder of initiation. “No one talks to me,” I said. “But I’ve felt it, yes. I thought it was the war…the violence. Red versus White. It’s probably reverberating all over the world, even onto the higher dimensions.”
“That’s not how it works,” he said. “The disturbance is above, and manifests on this level. Energy goes from higher to lower. The war is a disturbance in the higher dimensions, materializing in the third. That’s your mother’s work, to keep it from coming through.”
I didn’t like the idea of war in the higher dimensions. I liked my higher dimensions abstract and orderly and beneficent if possible. This was spooky, like devils in the bathhouse, witches curdling the milk. “I thought you were a scientist.”
“There are all sorts of beings on every dimension, Marina.”
We moved through the pines. Traveling on this side was easier, as some of the trees had been cut, though cover for small game wasn’t quite as good. I saw something in the snow that made my heart leap. Split-hoof tracks, pretty as name-day roses. I crouched down to study them. Here were the small tracks of a mouse, and oval prints with small forward toes—marten or sable. A crow strutting. And, queen of my dreams, those delicate hoofprints of deer. Recent, too. Nothing else had degraded their edges. They were imprinted on top, firmly as a rubber stamp.
I rubbed my nose with my mitten, trying to warm it, pulled my scarf up again. If I got a deer, Ukashin would be appeased, and I would be taken off the punishment list, brought back into the breast of Ionia, forgiven my trespasses. I could feel my day brightening.
Andrei hung over my shoulder like a man reading another’s newspaper. “What do you see?”
I pointed. “Deer tracks. Here, and here.”
I scanned the trees, and there, between trunks, something large and gray moved silently. I yanked my glove off with my teeth and took the pistol from my pocket, held my other hand out to silence Andrei. As quietly as I could, I began to approach in the creaking snow. I had to get closer. There was no way to kill anything from this distance. As I moved, I was already thinking how I would get a deer home, whether I would have to hoist it into a tree, and with what. As I neared, I heard a crash. The intelligent had caught his ski and fallen into a clump of evergreens. The big shape vanished.
Damn, Andrei! Could he be any clumsier? I could have had a clear shot in another few feet. In my mind I’d already killed that deer, was already tasting a bit of its raw liver. That stag had lasted us a month. I plunged ahead to try to find the animal, leaving Andrei to sort himself out. Or he could just sit there in the snow for all I cared.
I moved in the direction where I’d last seen it, watching for tracks. There and there. Bounding. But I was no match for a running deer. I followed the prints for a few minutes anyway, in hopes it might calm down and stop to browse. Finally, I had to admit I’d lost it. Damn him! Why did Ukashin think this was such a good idea, to cripple me in my hunting? He should be thinking of the rest of the Ionians, not my transgression. And now I was in an area of the forest where I’d never been before, and the clouds were descending. I thought of Andrei back there. My charge, my albatross. My anger said leave him there, but remorse ticked like a clock. Even if he’d managed to right himself, he would probably fall in a tree hole and break a leg. The snow would be coming soon, and he would be completely lost without me. I had to get him home.
I released the deer in my mind. How sad it was to watch it spring away. Frustrated and furious, I turned to follow my big ugly tracks back to where I’d left the intelligent. The Ionians constantly preached the necessity of misery to help you awaken, but as far as I could see, suffering never made anybody better. It just made us petty and irritable and selfish. We got better despite our suffering, not because of it.
I found Andrei exactly where I’d left him, sitting in the snow, his arms wrapped around his legs, resting his forehead against his knees.
“I lost the deer,” I said.
“I’m useless,” he said. “Just leave me here.”
“You can’t sit here. You’ll freeze. Get up.”
“I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I’m done.”
“Come on.” I pulled him up, dusted him off, and we started home. I could tell that Andrei was tired. He dropped farther and farther behind. I wished I had another meal on me to perk him up.
As we moved back to the place where it was easiest to cross the river, I recognized a configuration of rocks where I’d set another trap. I tramped over to check it, watching for my ward. Yes! The trap had been sprung. But when I approached to collect my bounty, I found nothing hanging from the cord. Indeed the noose itself was gone, snapped clean, and the snow beneath lay trampled and bloody. Whatever I’d caught, it had barely been dead when the thief arrived, as the blood had flowed, not yet frozen. Although most of the tracks were trampled, one was clear as a signature. It sent a shiver through me. A doglike track, bigger than those of Ukashin’s hairy hounds. A new arrival. But how long ago? Days? Hours? The print was clean—no mouse tracks or twigs or snow around it.
“Did you find something?” Andrei asked, coming up behind me.
I stood, kicking the kinks from my legs. My nose was running, and my cheeks stung in the cold. “No,” I said. I didn’t want to frighten him. The talk of darkness brewing already had me on edge, and the sky was heavy with coming snow. I still pictured that deer drifting through the icy mist, but the rabbit and big hare would have to be enough for tonight. I could not afford to tarry.
As we set off again, I had to admit I was grateful for Andrei’s company and regretted that I’d contemplated abandoning him earlier. I would not want to be alone in the woods with the owner of that track. What was it the Kirghiz had said? If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. The two of us would present a more formidable prospect to a predator than myself alone.
“Sorry I ruined your hunting,” he said. “I can’t seem to do anything right these days.”
If he was looking for consolation, he wasn’t going to find it with me. I thought I saw movement about a hundred meters off. It might have been my overwound imagination, but I could have sworn I saw a ghostly form weaving its way through the pines. I took my pistol out. It must have scented us, maybe back when we’d eaten our lunch. Perhaps it had even followed me when I was tracking the deer. Oh God. Ukashin might have given me hunting as my Trud, but that thing out there in the trees, that was a hunter.
I blinked to clear my eyes, my skin prickling. An icy fog gathered in pockets along the ground. Andrei’s breath was short in my ear.
There—another flicker of motion. Or was it? If I hadn’t seen the print in the snow, I might have convinced myself I was imagining it all. I turned slowly, trying to see through the trees and the deepening mist. I could feel it stalking us, as it had through the moonlit arcade of my dream.
“The deer again?” he said.
I didn’t want to say the word. I might not believe in much, but I believed in the power of naming. “Maybe. But it’s getting late. I don’t think there’ll be anything else today.” What time was it? The light was unreadable, the mist blotting out shadows. Another hour at best. We had to get back across the river.
My heartbeat pounded in my ears as we moved through the bank of fog. I tried to hurry Andrei without alarming him, but he snagged his ski tip on a buried root and fell again. He was tiring. Something flew over our heads, silent until i
t was right on us. I ducked, held on to my hat. Owl. All the hunters were out today. It was as if this forest wanted us, had set its own snares.
We needed to make some noise, make ourselves seem loud, robust, confident. It knew we were here. We needed to impress it with our vigor. Well, that was something Andrei could do as easily as breathing—make noise. I asked him in a bright voice how he came to follow Ukashin.
I had not expected the reaction. He stopped. He even stopped panting. His bird face with its little spectacles, its red nose, its vulnerable mouth agape. “I don’t follow Ukashin. Is that what you think?”
Well, he’d spent every day since I’d arrived doing the worst of our tasks, taking out the ashes from the stoves, washing the chamber pots, sitting before Mother’s door, all while absorbing great shovelfuls of Ukashinian humiliation and spooling out reels of Ionian philosophy. “But you were at the Laboratory.”
“You think I trotted after him like a little dog? Begging for his attention? That I’m just another of his sheep?”
Obviously I had stepped on one of Andrei Ionian’s sore spots. “No, no,” I said. “I was just asking. Really.” Keep moving. I scanned the trees around us, the mist, trying not to picture the predator taking Andrei’s skinny intellectual neck in its teeth. But Andrei wasn’t with me. He was still where he’d stopped, as if he’d been hit by lightning. “I founded Ionia,” he said. “I invented it. It’s mine. Not his. Mine.”
He thrust his face up toward the white sky, exposing that bony throat, as if begging God to witness his suffering. “You don’t know anything. You think I’m just some clown. Andrei the fool. Useless, ridiculous Andrei, with his stupid books, his boring lectures. Can’t even ski without falling down.”
“You ski fine. Come on—it’s snowing.” The tall pines creaked. It was spooky, and I could see the first big feathery flakes, felt the kiss of one on my cheek.
“Just the village fool. Dance, Andrei, dance!” Strapped into his skis, he imitated the paws-up clumsiness of a dancing bear.
My hands were freezing, but I couldn’t shoot with mittens on. “Please—let’s go. Why don’t you tell me about inventing Ionia as we go?”
“Don’t patronize me.” But at least that got him going. “You don’t care about what he did. You’re as besotted as the others. You’re up to your neck in it. You don’t care if it’s a system or a moment’s whim as long as it’s Taras dishing it out.”
No one had ever mentioned Andrei as the founder of Ionia. Avdokia said Vsevolod brought Ukashin to Furshtatskaya, not the two of them. “So tell me,” I said, hoping I could console him. He was having some kind of breakdown. “Nobody talks about how it started.”
I smiled to encourage him, all the while thinking: You must be the hunter. Think like a hunter. If I was truly a hunter I would double back and try to kill that beast. Even if I only succeeded in wounding it or scaring it, it would avoid us. But I had Andrei to think about. I couldn’t leave him now, and I couldn’t take him with me.
“I wrote the book. I gave it to you when you first got here.” The Structure of Reality by A. A. Petrovin. Why had I not guessed? “You see? I had the idea years before I ever laid eyes on Taras Ukashin. Vera Borisovna could tell you. Vsevolod—” But then he remembered, the Ionians had abandoned Vsevolod and the others at the Petrograd dacha, left them in the lurch. Everyone who could have vouched for him had already been betrayed. “Taras could tell you—”
“Maybe I should ask him.”
That got me a laugh, a single bitter Ha! “Yes, you do that.”
Here was the river. Thank God. The snow coming down in thick, fat flakes now. It had already started to obliterate our footprints. I scanned for that thing, tracking us. It could be circling; it could be ten feet behind. “Hurry, please.” I unstrapped my snowshoes and climbed down the short face of the riverbank, strapped myself back in. “Hand me your skis, Andrei,” I said. But rushing him only made him clumsier, and he was more interested in his tale than in our pressing need to get away from this place.
“Maybe I am the fool. I was dazzled by him myself.” He’d bent over to loosen his ski, in the process dropping his glove, his pole. “He came to my office, wanted to talk about my book. We talked until six in the morning.” Finally he got a ski off and handed it down to me, but the cold was getting to him, and his hands trembled. “He wanted to know all about my work. And in return he told me about his travels. Egypt, China! Where hadn’t the man been? He studied with Sufis and Tantric Buddhists. Secret practices no one had ever recorded.”
I eyed the far shore longingly. Would we ever get there? His breath came short as he bent over the straps of his remaining ski. “He wanted to get his knowledge out into the world. I told him about my dream to create a society of brothers conducting research into the very shape of reality.”
Would I have to climb up there and get that other ski? “Really, we need to go.”
He ignored my urging. “You don’t know what it is to be alone your whole life, Marina, and then meet someone like that. We became the dearest of friends. The happiest time of my life—I’m not embarrassed to say it.”
I could imagine. All Ukashin’s formidable personality and charm descending upon the poor undefended intellectual. It must have been overwhelming. It must have felt like love.
Finally he got the other ski off and handed it to me, but he slipped on the rocks coming down, scraping his cheek and tearing his pants. Down on the snowy river, I put his skis back on him, strapping him in. For a brief moment I imagined doing the same for my child, buckling his skis, tying his little skates. I would be a good mother. If I survived.
He picked up his ski poles and pushed off across the white expanse. “I introduced him to everyone he knows. They embraced him as one of their own. I opened every door for him. He never would have had access to those circles if wasn’t for me.”
It was with relief that I saw the red twigs of riverbank willows poking up through the snow. We were across. I could exhale.
Now it was as if he’d forgotten he was crossing a frozen river. He was back in that office in Petrograd, his own parallel stream. “My wife hated him, of course. She knew he was up to something. Well, I couldn’t see it. I was mesmerized. He understands people, you see. He reads them like you read those tracks. He knows what you want. He makes you feel special, like you can do great things.”
I knew the truth of that. It worked until he turned on you, as he had Andrei, and perhaps me as well.
“I don’t know what people want. I don’t understand people. I’ll admit it. To have a friend in him…I felt like I’d been asleep my whole life, just imitating a human being, and now I was awake. I felt like anything was possible.” Understand why I trusted him, he was saying. Why I loved him. And he still did. I eased my pace, and he stopped, inhaling a chugging breath, trying to calm himself. It wasn’t exertion. But it was now only another half a mile to the house. I felt safer. I didn’t think the wolf would follow us so far. So I let him talk. Why not?
Replacing the pistol in my pocket, I put on my mittens. “Tell me about the Laboratory.”
He started moving again, climbing the little rise. They had discussed renting a dacha to conduct their research, in a resort town on the Gulf of Finland. Without the skeptical wife, no doubt. “Just a dream, I see that now. A toy. Before October, you couldn’t find five people in Petrograd willing to give up their roles for such an experiment. But after, that was another thing. Taras came to my home. My boys were already asleep. He always came late—it drove my wife mad. ‘He’s a free man,’ I told her. ‘You don’t know what to do with a free man.’ ‘I know what to do with him,’ she said. ‘Just give me half a chance.’ Honestly, I wish I had.”
But then they wouldn’t have been here. The place would have been abandoned, in a shambles. I scanned the trees ahead through the falling snow, and I imagined I could smell dinner cooking. I had the rabbit and the hare in my bag; it was good enough.
Ukashin had been the one t
o find the dacha. “He told me he’d found the perfect place for our Laboratory. The Gromov dacha, you know where that is?”
A huge place with massive gardens on Aptekarsky Island.
“I thought it was far too large for our needs. There were only eight of us, after all. But he predicted there would be many more. Well, he was right about that. But I had pictured philosophers, scientists, authors. Cultured people. Not dancers and lunatics.” Snow gathered on his hat and shoulders, his brow and moustache. His glasses steamed over.
“And where was Mother in all this?”
“Vsevolod brought us to your old flat. She was down to one room by then. It was a shame to see how low she’d fallen. We took her to the dacha that very night. Almost like old times.” But by then, the Laboratory was already out of control. “Shopgirls, spiritual thrill seekers. Morphine addicts. His so-called followers. And I was helpless to stop it.”
“I’m sure you did what you could,” I said, sounding like Sofia Yakovlevna. We were almost within sight of the house now. I took a couple of steps up the hill but failed to entice him onward.
“I couldn’t stem the tide,” he said, growing more upset as he told the story, as if pleading his case before a judge. “Who would follow Andrei Petrovin? By then it was all Taras the Magus. He stole it from me! Imagine how it feels to hold your dream in your hands only to watch it fed to the dogs. Thrown into the fire, your life’s work!” A sob caught his voice.
Yes, I could imagine. I’d felt something similar when I’d seen the lists of the executed in Krasnaya Gazeta. Here’s your revolution. See what we’ve done with it.
“We were supposed to be a circle of equals. All of a sudden we had people who’d never heard of Steiner or Blavatsky. They just wanted to open their mouths like baby birds and have us feed them. They kissed the hem of his coat. It was disgusting. By that point he was styling himself as a holy man. He spent hours creating rituals for our little acolytes to enact. ‘Go find five things the color green.’ And they would do it! And the women—I shudder to tell you what went on there. ‘How can you do this, Taras?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t what we talked about at all.’ He said, ‘People are animals, my friend. They want to know where they stand. Are they up? Are they down? They don’t come to us to have us ask them, ‘Well, what do you think?’ They’re waiting to be told. Would you withhold that from them?”