He was weeping. I was afraid to get near him. I thought he might hit me.
“I know who I am. I don’t need followers! I don’t need to be called Master. That’s his weakness. He needs them to love him, to fear him. He’s Moloch. It’s not about ideas. He needed my ideas to give him legitimacy. But once he had what he wanted, he didn’t care about them at all.”
A burst of wind blew snow in our faces. I could barely see the trees now. But soon we’d be safe. Or at least warm. So all the pretty girls, that was not a figment of my imagination. Yet I thought of that night in his kabinyet. He never touched me. “Why didn’t you leave? Why did you come here, then?”
He hung his head. “Why indeed…fool that I am, I had nothing left. I’d destroyed everything that meant anything to me,” he said bitterly.
“What about your wife? Couldn’t you go back to her?”
He gazed behind him, toward the river, that blurry sleeve of white. I hoped he wasn’t going to bolt. It had taken me forever to get him this far. “It turned out she was more attached to her roles than to me. She wanted to be the Publisher’s Wife.” He stabbed the snow as if lancing a bear. “She wanted me to renounce my research. Concentrate on publishing popular novels.” He grimaced. “Romances. Cookbooks. Said if I moved to the dacha, I would never see my children again. She wanted me to choose between my work and my roles. What could I do? What would you have done?” His haunted, desperate face, begging me for an answer. Me, of all people. I was just nineteen.
I tugged the fox hat further down onto my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been in that position.”
He leaned over the peeled birch ski poles and wept, great ragged sobs. It was terrible to hear. The months I’d watched him at dinner, accompanying us on the piano, shoveling snow, sitting like an Alsatian outside my mother’s door. Why had we never talked before this? Perhaps, like me, he hadn’t wanted to name his suffering, hadn’t wanted to see it so clearly.
He bent back so his face was bared to the sky, snow falling like freed secrets. “What was I to do? I had to pursue my ideas. A man is not an animal, to wander the world without a question in his head, a moment of wonder. I had to see, to learn, to discover! She brought the children in that night. ‘Kiss your father. He’s going on a trip.’ ‘Oh, where, Papa? To Moscow? With ’Kashin’? A grown man, a father, I walked in with my eyes wide open.” He struggled through the snow up to where I stood, slipped, fell against me, almost knocking me over. I pushed him back upright. “I’m such a fool,” he said, weeping, clinging to me. “I didn’t feel the noose around my neck until it was too late.” He backed away from me, sidestepping. “Maybe I still hoped I had a place. That I could protect my ideas somehow.” He took off his glasses. “I’ve been so blind!” And, disgusted, he pitched them out into snow.
That face, so full of pain. “Did I follow Ukashin, Marina? Have you noticed, only he gets a name? I have a name. Andrei Petrovin. Does that mean anything to you—Petrovin Press?”
He’d published poets I’d read. Ravich, Ivan Modal. And this is what had become of him.
“Andrei Petrovin!” He yelled into the falling snow, backing away from me. “Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovin!”
Without his glasses, he looked as unfocused and helpless as a worm writhing on a pavement.
I didn’t know how to help him. I didn’t want to embarrass him further, watching him sobbing so nakedly, so I moved in the direction he’d thrown his spectacles. I had little hope of finding them. Still, what else could I do? I couldn’t bring back his children, his good name, his publishing house, his marriage, his dignity. What would you have done? I scanned the snow, and there! Two small circles in the fading light. A perfect imprint of the specs. Like a fox, I dug them out with both hands, flinging snow left and right, then held them aloft. “Andrei, I found them!”
I was turning when I heard the blast. My God.
He sagged halfway to his knees, then fell over sideways in the snow, his feet still tied to the skis. I raced back to him, my right snowshoe coming undone. I plunged in up to my thigh, struggling to get back to him with one foot on top of the drift, the other falling through. “Andrei! Andrei Petrovin!”
He was lying on his side, my gun in his mouth, his eyes shocked and staring out, and the back of his head was gone.
80 Metel’
DID I SCREAM? Did I weep? My words returned tenfold as I knelt beside him in the falling snow. I’ve never been in that position. He’d reached out to me, and this was my answer to his soul-deep despair? That was all I could say? I took off my scarf and laid it over his head. I knew I should do something—go to the house, get help—but I didn’t want to leave him alone. It was not just the wolf. It was that he’d been alone so long already. I still had his glasses in my hand. I found your glasses, Andrei Alexandrovich. As if that was the important thing.
The crunch of snow. Pasha, flakes building up on his hat and his black beard, had heard the blast. He took one look at Andrei, at me. “Stay there. I’ll be right back.” The snow fell, trying to cover the deed, the blood, a soft mercy. Too late, too late. God forgive me, Andrei. I didn’t know there wouldn’t be another chance.
Soon Pasha returned with Bogdan and Gleb and the sledge he used to carry his wood. They loaded Andrei’s long, awkward body onto it. Bogdan didn’t know what to do with the gun. He tried to hand it to me, that deadly piece of steel. I couldn’t bear to look at it.
“I’ll take it to the Master,” he said, tucking it into his coat.
“No. Give it to me,” I said. I put it back in my pocket. It was already cold, and it weighed more than it used to, heavy with death. Andrei had fallen against me on purpose. His desperate hand reaching into my pocket. How could I have saved him? Why hadn’t I tried? Bogdan carried the skis while Pasha harnessed himself to the sled. Gleb held Andrei’s limp legs so they didn’t drag in the snow.
By the time we arrived at the house, the others had already gathered in the yard. They stared at the dead man, and at me, confused and wary. I had brought death to their camp.
Ukashin emerged from the house with his hairy dogs, buckling the belt of his greatcoat. The dogs ran to us, snuffled at the body. I kicked them away. This was a man, not a dead deer.
The Master approached. I didn’t want to look at him. Alive, so sturdy, so self-important. Usurper. He had stolen Andrei’s ideas, made him a laughingstock, driven him to suicide. He lifted my scarf to gaze at the man who’d once been his friend. His face betrayed nothing. I had the gun in my pocket. I could have shot him right there and then.
He straightened, whispered something into Magda’s ear, sending her into the house. Natalya hovered, scared, wanting to help, but her frightened eyes waited for Ukashin to signal his verdict. She would follow his lead. I glanced up to the second story, the windows overlooking the yard. Are you up there, Mother? What do you think of your companion now?
Magda returned with a sheet she laid out on the shoveled snow. The boys lifted the dead man onto it and wrapped him up. Natalya rested her arm around me. Ukashin avoided my gaze. My fellow sheep waited for their master to tell them what to think. He contemplated the broken figure of his compatriot. Did he realize that he’d taken it too far? Or was this what he wanted all along? For Andrei to eliminate himself, so he wouldn’t have to do it. The Ionians shifted, brushing snow from their sad, innocent faces.
Then he turned to regard the group. “Our brother, Andrei Ionian, did a desperate thing,” he said at last. He looked into the faces of his children, one by one, a hard extra moment for me. “Our life, what we’re accomplishing here, it’s a difficult path. He became trapped in his own darkness.”
The acolytes nodded, like wooden heads on springs. The wrapped figure in the sheet on the hard-packed snow testified to the truth of that.
“We must not become lost,” he said. “The path is twisting and hard to follow. It’s easy to head in the wrong direction.” His eyes met mine once again. “It’s easy to fall.”
Here came Avdokia, trotting across the snow. She pushed her way in at my elbow, crossing herself, murmuring a prayer for the dead.
“An idea without commitment to Practice is a dangerous thing,” he said. “Farewell, brother Andrei.” He nodded to the boys to lift him back onto the sledge.
“He had a name,” I said, my voice too loud. It startled the others in the fading light. “It was Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovin, and Ionia was his life’s work. It was all he had. And your Master took it from him. And now he’s dead.”
Avdokia held on to my arm. “Shh, shh,” she whispered. “For the love of God.”
I could hear the creak of the snow as the disciples shifted, backing away as if lightning bolts might come out of the Master’s eyes and strike me dead, and they didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire. But the face he showed me was one of mourning and concern. “Let us send a message of love to Marina Ionian, that she was the instrument of such a terrible loss. Her guilt and suffering are our own. But the universe supports all who need it.”
He lifted his palms to me, and they all followed suit, their eyes closing, their heads tilting to the right, sending me their impersonal love on command. And I could feel his energy among them, a force like a flavor of spice in the midst of their pallid porridge. I could smell it, strong and musky. He had me. I was as trapped as Andrei Ionian.
“Take him to the icehouse,” the Master told the boys. And they began to pull him back the way we’d come.
“Vechnaya pamyat’,” said Avdokia. Eternal memory.
Murmurs echoing her sentiment moved through the group as they followed him down the path to cold storage.
I returned with Avdokia to her room, where I sat on her bed, still in my sheepskin. “Don’t fight about this, Marinoushka, my angel,” she said, kneeling, pulling off my boots, putting my slippers on, taking my hat. “It’s not your business. This was between him and that one.”
I told her what Andrei had said, that he had thrown his glasses. I showed them to her, warm from my pocket. An hour earlier they’d been on his face. “You saw how it was. Ukashin cut him down every day, so no one would ever listen to him. He killed him.”
Her blue kerchief before me, she shook her head. “You have to think of yourself now. Your baby. This was not your quarrel.”
“You want me just to forget? Like it never happened?” I could still see him, his face to the sky, praying for help, praying for release from his suffering. How he fell on me. The blood in the snow.
Avdokia sighed as she hauled herself to her feet. “You have such a tender heart, milaya. I pray for you.” She sat on her bed next to me, her arm around my waist. I took a deep, shuddering breath. Her warm smell, so familiar. Oh couldn’t we go back to the way it was? “Don’t lose everything for that sad man. He’s gone, poor thing. But you’re still here. You have to live on. Ask yourself, who was he to you really?”
Who was he? Why would she ask such a question? In truth—an annoyance, a pedant. I knew nothing about him. But when a human being unburdens himself to you, you become part of his troubles. “Does it matter? He didn’t deserve to be so reduced. You didn’t hear him crying. Ukashin took everything from him.”
“Listen to me.” She pressed my face between the palms of her bent old hands, exactly as she used to do when I was a child and she needed to talk to me seriously. Her little eyes in their nest of wrinkles, her nose and her chin practically touching. “Things are going to happen to you in your life far worse than this, Marinoushka. It’s a terrible thing to say to a young person, I know. You’re still seeing him out there…God knows how he got your gun. But the thing is—where are you going to be when that one puts you out? What use will you be to anyone if you don’t make it? Let Andrei go. He’s in God’s hands now.” She crossed herself. “May God have mercy on the living and the dead.”
But my old nanny hadn’t been there. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen his face when he talked about kissing his children goodbye. What would you have done?
I slept in her bed with his glasses curled in my hand.
I heard them through the door, making dinner. No one said a word. I didn’t come out. I turned my face to the wall. Avdokia brought me soup with a good piece of meat in it. I ate it while she watched me, hoping I would talk to her, but I had nothing more to say. Not to her, not to anyone.
Later in the evening, Natalya’s pretty face poked through the door, her water-brown hair, my swan. “Are you all right?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you coming for Practice?”
“No.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” she said. “He fell into doubt.” As though he’d fallen from a tram. Belief was like that. When you fell, you cracked yourself open. And what would it take for this pretty butterfly to doubt her Master? Whose death would it take? Mine?
He sent for me, late. This time, Bogdan was the messenger. “He wants you.” Avdokia was the one who made me get up, put my slippers on me. “You have to go. You can’t hide in here forever.” And so I went.
In the front parlor, I could feel the just-completed Practice, like a violin that was too high to hear, an invisible cloak of scented silk. I didn’t want to feel its beauty, didn’t want it to dissipate my disgust. Bogdan left me with a guilty shrug.
“Sit down,” Ukashin said quietly. I was afraid of him. I tried to remember my courage, but where had it fled?
I sat on the carpet, and to my horror he came and sat right in front of me, our knees nearly touching. I was terrified to be so close to him. What was he going to do to me? He had already been threatening to put me out, and that was before my outburst.
“You’ve had a shock,” he said. “To have him do this when he was with you. And with your own gun. I don’t blame you for being upset. I’m upset, too.”
I saw again the bright bloom of Andrei’s blood, the way he’d crumpled to the ground, still strapped into his skis. A wave of comfort suffused me. I didn’t want it. I knew it was a lie, that he was doing it to me, but I needed comfort, too. I was not as strong as I pretended to be.
“I know you’re thinking you should have done something,” he said, his voice low, confiding. “If you’d only said the right words. That you should have steadied him, brought him back to the light. Supported his path instead of fanning his doubt.”
It was true. I didn’t try to make him feel better. I’ve never been in that position.
“He trusted you,” he went on in that kind voice. “He liked you. That’s why I sent him with you. To see if he would reach out. But you didn’t help him. You failed him.”
Oh God, that was true, too. But I had to remember, I wasn’t the reason for his suffering. I was only a tool.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “You didn’t know what you were doing. I worried about this from the beginning. You act without thinking.”
I gazed down at the carpet, the stylized pomegranates and deer. I didn’t want him to confuse me. It was he who had betrayed his friend. Andrei had no one, and that was Ukashin’s fault, not mine.
“Look at me, Marina Ionian.” I lifted my eyes, so very weary. “Am I angry?” In his face, no anger, only tenderness, a little tiredness, that of a man with many responsibilities. For all of Ionia. How human he looked right now. It surprised me after my accusations. “Each of us is seeking something here, Marina. Some want a more radiant path. Others, fellowship. We all have our own reasons. Even you.”
“I wasn’t seeking anything.” I wanted more than anything to push myself back from him, but then he would know how frightened I was.
“You wanted sanctuary,” he said. “A home. A place in the world. And I gave it to you, didn’t I?”
I had made this happen. Again, I had forced my way in. I was the one. He’d wanted to send me away that first day. Oh God, I wished he had.
“But you can’t both tear down your home and have it,” he said. “And your child can’t be born into a snowdrift. I want you to have it here.”
In that exact moment, I felt a fluttering, like an eyelid’s tic, in the depths of my body. The fetus had chosen this moment to awaken.
He was impossible to escape, those bull’s eyes, sad, piercing, his drooping moustache, the big nose, the planes of his face, the mole on his forehead, the lines on the dome of his head. “The dead hold no grudges, Marina. They know everything, understand everything.” Insistent, warm. “Andrei sought understanding,” he continued. “It was his life’s purpose. Now he’s released from the blindness of this world into the Great Knowledge. A violent release, but he didn’t know how else to accomplish it. He’s where he always wanted to be. He has transcended to the upper dimensions.”
How awful to say he was better off dead. But much of what this hard man was saying was true. The more he spoke, the less sure I was. I felt his words like a current, urging me onto the river of his story.
What would you have done?
He reached out and took my hand. His flesh like wood, denser than ordinary flesh. I felt a great rush of grief—for Andrei, and myself, and all the people caught in their traps, and those who don’t know how to save them. What a world of suffering we live in. I felt unmoored, drifting and spinning in the tide.
Andrei’s suicide lingered. It tapped the windows, clung to our faces and hands. The possibility of doom darkened the edges of the Ionian dream, and the weather did nothing to lessen it. Metel’, we say. Blizzard. The compressed savagery of the season came down as if trying to scrape us from the face of the earth. The nearness of death was a smell in my hair like gunpowder. How small and alone we were here, the country around us not Russia but Death.