A sledge passed, loaded with hay. I trembled, leaning into a tree and fighting for consciousness, thinking of the girl I’d once been, waiting just here that evening after my long walk from Tikhvin. How strong I’d been then, how confident of my powers compared to this scarecrow, this ghost I’d become.
A burly man in a greasy coat and leather apron came out of the forge with another man. Together they stood smoking on the porch, shook hands and parted. Soon the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer filled the morning. So much activity! In my half-starved, unreal state, this tiny village was dizzying as Petrograd.
Finally a brisk young woman appeared on the porch of a prosperous izba with four windows past the blacksmith’s shop. She was eating an apple. I left the safety of the trees to approach her. It had been so long since I’d spoken to anyone not Ionian. She raised her head, squinting at me. I could only imagine what I looked like these days in my homemade fox hat and sheepskin and felt boots, my game bag, my patchwork sarafan with the trousers underneath, my face wrapped in a thick woolen scarf. I lowered the scarf.
I don’t know what I expected. A smile, an embrace? At least the welcome I’d received the last time I was here. But it wasn’t forthcoming. Her mouth gaped open in shock. Was I so changed? “What are you doing here? Are you crazy?” She lowered her head, her back half turned, checking up and down the lane. She tossed the apple, half-eaten, picked up a broom and swept the steps. “You’ve got to get out of here,” she hissed. “Don’t you know what’s going on? I can’t be seen with you. You’ve got to leave.”
But I was too weak to leave. I needed to eat, to rest, to collect myself and make plans. “I can’t go any farther. I’m pregnant. I need food. They’re starving out there at Maryino.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do about it?” She swept angrily. “They should have thought about that when they moved out there. We have our own problems now.” A cluster of peasant women were watching us from the porch of another house. “Damn those busybodies,” she said under her breath. “Now you’ve done it. Sveta!” she exclaimed, leaning her broom against the house. “Good to see you! Mama’s going to be so happy!” She pulled me in for an embrace. In my ear, she whispered, “Go to Olya’s. Two houses from the end. And don’t come back. I can’t do anything for you.”
“Thanks.” The smell of her apple followed me like a perfume as I headed down the lane. To think I’d taught Lyuda how to read. We’d swum in the river together, climbed trees, picked berries. But the revolution was still going on, and people had changed. I was the one who had to keep up. I walked down the lane, trying not to gape like a rube on Nevsky Prospect. But the colors were dazzling. I’d been locked away in another world. Here were children and horses and old people, but there were hidden worlds, too. I had to be the hunter, not blunder in, keep my wits about me. Lyuda’s fear had been palpable. Why? Had there been an expropriation? Had the Cheka arrived? Something had changed since I’d been out at Maryino if she was afraid to even talk to me now.
So I was to be Sveta, some cousin or other, visiting Auntie Olya.
Avdokia’s half sister’s house was small, sad, with an old coating of blue paint worn mostly to the boards. The path had barely been cut—it looked stamped, not shoveled. Some neighbor had broken her out, but that was all. What had been a front porch was only a tunnel, the roof heavily laden. I took off my snowshoes and propped them by the door. It was private here at least, down the end of the lane, away from the village center. I was about to knock on Olya’s door, then thought better of it. If I were truly some distant cousin, I wouldn’t be standing on the front porch like a census taker.
It was warm inside and shockingly crowded. Little tables, pieces of lace, rugs, even an ugly chandelier with a milk-glass bowl crammed the small cabin to the rafters, all bits and pieces of our bourgeois life at Maryino. On the tables stood portraits of my family in silver frames. It was a museum of a former life, a former world. I could not even be angry at her. They were only things, and things had no feelings. What would I do with them, anyway—sell them? If anyone deserved the booty, it was Olya, who had washed and dusted and polished them all these years. And yet I couldn’t deny a small sense of betrayal.
“Olya?”
The place was damp with steam, and a great pot boiled on the stove. “Olga Fomanovna?” I called from the doorway. I’d never used her patronymic. No one ever had, not in my hearing.
She looked up from a load of laundry she was ironing, a sheet on the board. She reminded me of a bigger, softer Avdokia, twenty years younger. Same father, different mother. Women wore out quickly in the villages. Her mouth made a perfect O.
“Sorry to barge in. Lyuda said you’d be here.”
“Marina Dmitrievna! No, no, please, come in, come in!” She looked around the place, suddenly aware that I was seeing the extent of her plunder, and her hands flew to her mouth. The sheet started to burn. She put her iron upright just in time.
“It’s been a while,” I said.
“You’ve seen Lyuda, then?”
I nodded. “She didn’t want to be seen with me, though. Class enemy and all.” I took off my hat.
“Oh, don’t mind her.” Olya came away from the laundry, took my hat and bag, helped me off with my coat, hung it on the hook by the door. “Now that she’s on the village committee she thinks she’s Lenin’s right arm.” She nodded approvingly. “Married the blacksmith after all. That girl always had an eye to improving her lot. I told her the blacksmith would be good for her, didn’t I? She runs him like a horse around a ring.” The words poured out of her, probably in an attempt to distract me from the familial furniture and bric-a-brac. “Remember when she wanted to go to Petrograd and work in a factory? She certainly came to her senses. Sit down, sit down!” She pulled out a chair from the lace-covered table.
I recognized the chair, too. It was one that used to sit at the little desk in the front parlor where my mother opened the mail. Somehow the sight of that chair loosened the grief of having lost her. I settled down into it. Now I was glad to let Olya babble away.
“We don’t get many visitors, as you can imagine. Can I make you some tea? Let me heat the samovar. Did she tell you she had a letter in the paper, my Lyuda? Imagine! Look, there on the table.” She handed me a yellowed issue of Bednota, a badly printed newspaper intended for peasant consumption, folded back to a page of letters and reports from the villages. A complaint about a certain corrupt party official in Ryazan Oblast headed the page.
“Look—right there.” Flushing with pride, she pointed to a report below the Ryazan one. From “Correspondent L. G. Fedeyeva.” Lyuda, writing for Bednota. She described the cooperation of the Novinka Village Committee of Poor Peasants with a Red Army food detachment to expropriate the hoarded goods of the kulak Zuborin. How many poods of grain they had located under the floor of his barn and so on. It ended, “The Speculators and Kulaks might think they’ve put One over on Soviet Power but they will not Succeed because we Know Them.”
Because we Know Them. I shuddered at the thought of the savagery behind that simple statement. One might think there would be safety in these tiny hamlets, but it was the opposite. “What did they do with him?”
“Zuborin?” Olya sighed, fishing coals from the stove to put in the samovar. “He really was a terrible man. Everyone was afraid of him. Up there safe and sound at Maryino, your people never knew what our lives were like here. We had to pay Zuborin to graze our animals. His grandfather bought up all the common land with Emancipation. Those bastards have lorded it over us ever since. Think they own the village. Only last year, he beat an old man to death, didn’t he? An old man who owed him money.”
The outrage on her face told me it was true. But then something crossed it, something not so pure, a slightly sly look. “And we owe so much more grain to the provisioning this year…” She began straightening the room, swatting her rag at the lamps and tabletops, squaring chairs, not looking at me. “The workers used to leave us grain and seed an
d take the rest. That was bad enough. But now it’s different. The soldiers are hard, even the workers now, when they come through. They take their quota off the top, and if there’s not enough left for planting, it’s too bad for you. So what are you supposed to plant in the spring? When Zuborin’s got hundreds of poods hidden under his cow barn—everyone knew it. Why should we suffer for a man like that?” She shrugged. “The devil take him.”
So now it was to be peasant against peasant, all the wounds of the village since Emancipation resurfacing. The villagers had offered up Zuborin. “Did they kill him?”
She went back to the stove to recover her iron, spat on it, began to iron the sheet again. “It’s a hard world these days, Marina Dmitrievna, a hard life. At least they left the family. Except Motka. They took him for the army.”
When she was done catching me up on village gossip, she put the iron up and went to fuss with the samovar, pouring tea. “How strong?”
“Medium,” I said. I turned the fragile, soft pages of the newspaper back to the beginning. The issue was dated January 19. Epiphany. Two months ago. The broadsheet bawled about an English threat from the north. Blockade along the Baltic coast. Wrangel in the Caucasus—that was a new one. Joining forces with Denikin, threatening Moscow. Kolchak in the east. Soviet Russia, as far as I could tell, was surrounded, cut off not only from Europe but from the Ukraine, the Don, and Siberia. Only its red beating heart was left. Without Don coal, without Siberian grain, I couldn’t imagine how Petrograd was suffering by now. Of course Kolya would be right in the middle of it. He must have made a killing with our bags of grain. And may he never have a day’s peace with it.
“And how is Avdokia? Still putting on airs?”
This was how her sister saw her—as the one who had escaped. My dear Avdokia, whom I’d left to Mother, to live or die. All depended upon what I could do with Olya right now.
I began to wonder, why hadn’t anybody told the Red Army about us? The villagers owed us nothing. Why would Correspondent L. G. Fedeyeva, a rising revolutionary star, protect the Ionians in general and a former landowner in particular? No wonder she wanted to be rid of me. Maybe she was holding us in reserve, a card up her sleeve in case of emergency. More likely she was afraid of turning us in at this late date, afraid she would be accused of sheltering the aristocracy. A born politician, you had to give her that.
Olya finished the sheet she’d been ironing, folded it gently. No, not a sheet. It was a priestly gown. I couldn’t help but smile. She was doing the priest’s laundry. Didn’t she see the contradiction—Lyuda on the committee, a party candidate, maybe even a member by now, with a mother who still did the priest’s linens? Then I noted the icon in the red corner, the little flame. The family had one leg in the past, one in the future. Hedging their bets.
I sipped my tea—roasted barley—and she opened a tin with a flowered top. Oh that smell! Inside were the sweet fennel cookies she used to make at Maryino. I took one, dipped it in my tea. The taste threw me into a parallel reality, one where I was a child of seven and bees hummed in the lilac bush out the kitchen window. Flowers on the cabinets, my doll Natasha having a tea party with me. “You still make these…” I could hardly speak or choke it down for the nostalgia of it.
“I don’t have so many visitors anymore. Have another.”
That licorice smell, the slight sweetness. How far I’d come to end up a half-starved pregnant woman of nineteen with my possessions in a stained game bag. It made me cry, my mouth full of longing. I wanted more. I wanted to eat the whole tin.
“So they’re having a hard time out there, are they?” Olya asked, sitting down at the table, folding her strong, reddened hands before her.
I was relieved she’d brought it up herself. “How did you know?”
She raised her palm. Isn’t it obvious? My gauntness was evidently clear, even in all these layers of clothes.
And here I’d been trying to think of a tactful way to work up to the desperate situation at Maryino. “They’re not practical people, Olya.”
She smoothed out the tablecloth. “I heard they have a wonderworker.”
What on earth had Ukashin done when they came through in the spring? Thrown some energy into an old lady and convinced her to cast away her crutches? “I wouldn’t exactly call him a wonderworker.”
“Not him. Her.” She lowered her voice, as if the stove imp might hear us. “Vera Borisovna.”
I almost dropped my tea glass.
“They say she has powers.” There was awe in her voice, and her eyes were bright—so like her sister’s, but with an innocence untainted by contact with the outside world. “The priest says she’s a sorceress, that all them out there is devils.”
My mother the wonderworker. Now, there was a pretty idea. The priest had a better sense of it. But what mattered was that Olya thought so. I pretended my heart wasn’t pounding in my chest as I responded casually, “Well, she always did have the second sight. You remember when she wouldn’t get in the trap with Slava? And the axle broke the same day?”
“We thought it was because she didn’t like young Slava. He lost his leg. Kept him out of the army, though, so there’s a blessing. But she knew it was going to happen.”
“Last spring she saw of a tide of blood,” I said, lowering my voice so she would come closer. “They moved out here a few weeks short of a cholera epidemic. Then Red Terror. They would have all been shot.”
Olya’s eyes were aglitter. “They say she makes cures.”
She makes cures. The priest said she’s a sorceress. Suddenly I saw, as if right through this opaque form seated before me, what the trouble was. Olya was ill, suffering from some hidden misery, and frightened. Her chances of obtaining medical help out here were just about nil—not in the best of times, and certainly not during a civil war. If there were any doctors, they would have been swept up when the army came through, leaving the old women to their diseases. Now Olya was holding out hope for a miracle worker.
I thought of those beautiful Ionians trying to live on promises and air. “I bet Avdokia could get you in to see her. You should go out there.”
I knew what I was doing was wrong, duping the vulnerable, but if she went, she would bring offerings—a sack of grain, a funt of potatoes, maybe an old sheep—and with any luck the word would spread. The peasant women of Novinka and even the surrounding hamlets were capable of feeding the Ionians into spring. Avdokia would make sure the gifts kept coming, of that I had no doubt. And these women would raise no alarm. They knew better than anyone how to protect their old ways.
Grandfather Golovin glared out from his silver frame, beleaguered and outraged, bushy white eyebrows like snowy eaves over his beautiful old eyes. Sorry, Dyedushka, but it’s 1919, not 1875. You’re going to be a great-grandfather. We’ve got to be practical, you and I. At least he was here, in his village, where they knew him, with his family all around, if only in photographs. All I pray is that I’m buried in Russia, Avdokia liked to say. For myself, I had no idea how much longer I would sojourn, how many miles I would walk, how many years. To live was the thing.
I stayed at Olya’s until she found a ride for me into Tikhvin, a neighbor with a load of wood to sell. I left Novinka on top of a sledge heading for town, pulled by a little swaybacked mare. For the food she fed me I paid cash but managed to cajole her into parting with one of my grandmother’s silver salt cellars in exchange for the ride. “It’s only pewter,” I told her. Though I noticed she had no trouble convincing the old man it was sterling. How appropriate that my ride had been purchased with salt.
I sat atop the load and looked back—oh, yes I did—my hungry eyes drinking in every detail. The dogs sniffing the new drifts. A boy running out of a gate, red-cheeked, his young mother shouting, “Don’t forget your brother!” Nostalgia gored me like a bull. The smaller child, so thickly clad he looked like a ball, arms sticking out on either side, toddled after him. When Seryozha was that age I had to take him with me everywhere. The load, re
dolent with the sticky smell of new-cut pine, shifted beneath me as the sledge slid and jolted in a lane freshly scored with runner marks.
Maryino—already lost. The house with its dark logs, the lilac bush, the painted cabinets, my mother wrapped in mists and visions. A fox running in the snow. Seryozha lying on his stomach in the front parlor, cutting figures from an old Paris fashion catalog. A fallen tree over the river. Floating along in the lazy green—then crossing it again with Andrei Ionian. The larch proud in the yard, the larch cut down. Ionians spinning in perfect synchrony, an egg stained red with beet juice. I folded all these images in half, in quarters, over and over again, and pressed them, hard nuggets of memory, into the center of my forehead.
The horse labored hock deep through the new snow, its harness creaking. Olya’s old neighbor lit his pipe. A woman came out onto her porch and threw a basin of water into the yard, and I saw Mother in white coming off the veranda at Maryino in a hat like a wheel. My governess in a straw boater, calling me as I drifted deeper into the trees. Marina…Volodya, standing on the back of a fat pony. And that young girl in green, walking barefoot along a rope tied between two trees.
Marina…
I would remember this: the brush of the runners over the new snow, the squeak of the sledge as the hamlet shrank into the past. First the pines disappeared, then the aspen-shingled church, the sooty barn of the blacksmith’s shop, and Lyuda’s pretty house. Now the dogs, the gates, the children. At last Novinka itself blurred and vanished into the fog, like a sketch in pencil rubbed out by a thumb.
End of Book I
Acknowledgments
The people to whom I owe gratitude in the writing of this book would populate a small but extremely beautiful city. First, I would like to offer thanks to the heroes of my writing life, my writers’ group, David Francis, Rita Williams, and Julianne Ortale, whose unfailing support saw this book through its long gestation. Also to my daughter, Allison Strauss, whose sharp eye proved instrumental in shaping the version of the novel you hold in your hands today. To my tireless editor, Asya Muchnick, at Little, Brown, who took on Marina’s epic journey without a backward look. Thanks to the rest of the team at Little, Brown, and especially Karen Landry, who moved mountains for this book. To my agent and champion, Warren Frazier at John Hawkins and Associates, ever in my corner as the book and I went eighty rounds, and to Bill Reiss, for changing my life. Thank you to Boris Dralyuk, gentle friend and sounding board, for your insights and for creating original translations for much of the Russian poetry that appears in this book. To the irreplaceable Dr. Judson Rosengrant, close reader and literary Virgil into the manners and mores of the Russian intelligentsia. And thank you to my earliest reader, Jane Chafin, for your curiosity and long friendship.