One day at school Lika confided to Masha that Granny didn’t like her going out so often, or coming in at two a.m. The previous night she’d forbade her to leave, so Lika had claimed she was off to sit vigil at the convent. Granny made enquiries.
“Now she has me under lock and key. Mama wrote such an infuriating letter from Petersburg. ‘A young lady’s reputation is the only security she has, particularly one in your circumstances.’”
“What circumstances does she mean?” Masha asked.
Lika’s expression contracted momentarily. “That she even mentions my reputation is ridiculous considering how many lovers she’s had.” She hugged herself, shuddering over that crowd of remembered men.
Masha attached no importance to the gesture. Instead another came to mind: the first night Lika visited, how she’d instinctively sidled up to the coat stand as though it were her chaperone. Lika’s father had abandoned the family when she was three. She had no brother in her life, not even some sad whiskered uncle. She really was defenceless—unlike Masha, surrounded by brothers.
“And she accuses me of being unkind to Granny,” Lika went on. “Granny who, two days ago, took me by the hair and dragged me all around the parlour. Anyway, I won’t be at any more parties.” The end of her nose pinkened. “Please explain why to Antosha. I wouldn’t want him to think it was anything he did.”
“I’ll pass the message on.” Masha laid a comforting hand on her shoulder again.
She relayed the message, and the next day Antosha dropped in at the Arbat flat Lika shared with Granny. Later Lika told Masha all about it.
He’d brought along a signed copy of the Northern Herald. “It’s ‘A Dreary Story,’” he told Granny over tea. “Page three. Don’t bother reading it.”
“You’re a doctor as well as a writer, I understand,” Granny said, gazing at the journal in her lap.
Antosha shrugged off these accomplishments as he always did. Somehow the conversation came around to the behaviour of today’s young ladies, too free-spirited by half. “But should Lidia be allowed to visit us, I assure you my sister is always present, as is my mother, a righteous woman.”
This way Lika continued as a nightly fixture in their house—at least until Easter.
THE EGGS WERE DYED. THE CHEESE WEPT IN ITS MUSLIN sling, filling the basin with milky tears. The bread waited for the oven, carved deep with Christ’s initials.
Brother Ivan, the schoolteacher, came home, bringing Father with him. He seemed to have grown up since he’d ventured out in the world and stopped relying on Antosha. Grown his hair long too. He kept tossing it back, an affectation the other two brothers began imitating. When Ivan finally noticed, play-slaps and scalp-knucklings broke out, negating Masha’s impression of his newfound maturity.
“And who’s this girl everyone’s talking about?” he asked Antosha. “They say you’re going to Sakhalin Island to escape her.”
Antosha played dumb, so Misha answered with his fairy-tale nickname for her, Lika the Beautiful.
“She’s a friend of yours, Masha?” Ivan asked.
“Yes, but why would he want to escape her? She’s perfectly delightful.”
Ivan wanted Antosha’s opinion.
“Height: average. Skin and mucous membranes: normal. Chest: satisfactory. She respires normally, I mean.”
They roared with laughter. Then Father shuffled in wearing felt slippers. No reaction from Antosha. He didn’t flinch or alter his handsome face, the same way he concealed his opinion of their numerous boring or parasitical recent guests. Even in his own family, he was the perfect host.
As usual, their dread of Father’s return proved worse than the man himself, tyrant of their memories, fool at their table. Masha poured tea into a saucer for him so it would cool faster. As though she respected him. Was it better that he’d spent all those years at the warehouse, coming home only for holidays? It meant that no intervening good years might have erased the bad ones. Antosha, Aleksander and Kolia had lived through the worst of him in Taganrog. Once they moved to Moscow, Father had had to learn to control himself because one night while he was laying into Ivan with his fists, the landlady came running and threatened to evict them.
He held his long beard in one hand and bent to sip his tea. Masha remembered when the whiskers were black, not white. Remembered his satisfied grunts that accompanied each blow. Now it was his peasant slurps that made her gorge rise. He spent his retirement in prayer and harebrained theorizing, such as his latest. “I have figured out the reason more people get sick in winter than summer. There aren’t any flies to clean the air.”
“Flies spread germs, Father,” the doctor told him.
Misha wiped his pince-nez on his sleeve, and after replacing them, peered across the table at Ivan. “No, Father’s right. I can hardly see my brother’s beautiful locks for all this dirty air between us.”
They left for church. Father, a familiar of so many, had chosen the Exultation of the Holy Cross, pale green and white, its cupola holding a single black onion to the sky. It stood on the edge of town. Antosha hired cabs to take them, one for the men, another for Mother and Masha—and Olga, who had nowhere else to go.
Despite Masha’s feeble faith, Easter service always moved her. The scent of juniper, the candles dabbing at the darkness. When the altar gates swung open, a cloud of incense rolled into the room, and she felt, as she often did, that her life was twice-lived. This exact moment she’d copied in one of Antosha’s stories. Easter on the page and the actual mass, the fictional bells and the real ones—all blurred together.
In Taganrog, where Father had been cantor, he’d conscripted Aleksander, Kolia and Antosha into the choir. Three little boys kneeling on the icy floor, convicts to early matins and interminable rehearsals. Brutal clouts for wrong notes sung. It had driven the love of God right out of them. She looked over at Antosha. Was he thinking about his harsh upbringing, or about his journey? He might still stay. Masha prayed for it. Please, God, keep him here. He is the only person I truly love. I’m terribly afraid for him.
If only she believed, but she too had been disillusioned in childhood, soon after they’d got to Moscow. They had no money for school fees, so Mother took her to the bishop and made her beg for a free place. Masha kissed the floor at his feet. Dirt and hairs stuck to her puckered lips while he glowered down like God Himself. His reason for refusing? “I’m not a millionaire.”
Midnight. The voices of her complicated family cried out in unison, “Christ is risen!” Father planned to stay until dawn. He rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate his zeal. Best of all, he loved to walk in the procession around the church, singing louder than anyone else.
The rest of them went home to break their fast. Afterward, bells still pealing, the young ones set out into the streets, arms linked. That multitude of jubilating churches—forty times forty—the sky streaked with green, the earth thawing and breaking into bud along the wooded Tverskoy Boulevard. They were giddy with sleeplessness, hatless, and being silly. Masha linked arms with Olga, who tolerated it. Big-eared Misha and long-haired Ivan splashed slush at each other, but not at Antosha, walking behind the rest of them. He took his trousers seriously.
“One of your galoshes is missing a buckle,” he told Olga.
“That’s just what you’re best at,” she snapped. “Pointing out to people what they don’t even know they lack.”
“Olechka, you’ve made me happy on this Easter morning.” He dashed forward and tried to kiss her.
“You’ve misunderstood me, then, as usual. Get off me.”
“But that’s all I want,” Antosha said. “To show people their own dull, impoverished lives.”
“Cruel man.”
“Not at all. Perhaps then they might choose a better life.”
“Or kill themselves.”
In the middle of this banter, Masha remembered a line from his Easter story: Why in this season of great rejoicing can’t a man forget his woe?
A heav
iness settled in her chest. She heard the birds competing with the bells, breathed in the green of spring. But what would any of it matter if Antosha left? She would bump around in her half-life, one sleeve empty.
THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENED, MORE ASTONISHING THAN the resurrection they had just celebrated.
The following afternoon Father heard Lika singing. It was a romantic song, yet still he climbed the stairs to the parlour and listened, hovering in the doorway; he didn’t dare step inside because Olga was there, and women smoking was sinful, as was drinking spirits. Christ didn’t drink vodka.
“Only because rye doesn’t grow in the Holy Land,” Masha told him. “He certainly drank wine.”
After Father left for prayers, Misha and Antosha teased Lika that Beauty had tamed the Beast.
Lika’s voice, not her eyelashes, had captured Father.
The last of Lika’s shyness seemed to moult under Father’s unexpected admiration. She asked Masha to draw her so that Antosha could take her likeness with him to Sakhalin Island.
By then Masha understood he really was going. The floor of his study had disappeared under books and supplies. A massive trunk. A leather coat to shed the weather. The whole room stank of it. He slashed the air with a savage-looking knife.
“For cutting up sausages and tigers.”
Her meticulously dressed, weak-lunged brother was heading off to an unimaginable place, a place that existed solely to inflict suffering. To get there would entail months of gruelling travel. Would he ever come back?
Lika posed on the edge of Masha’s bed, hands folded in her lap. Masha took her in. Despite Lika’s ebullience, her trilling voice, her five-kopek eyes, her slender figure, despite even her alluring deformity, Antosha was leaving. What was the point of her, then? As Masha put pencil to paper, the silly girl made everything worse by flinging herself down and moaning the sort of stage moan that Antosha parodied when he was reviling the theatre.
“Masha, I’m dying. Dying of love.”
How stiff Masha’s fingers felt. She hadn’t picked up a drawing pencil in so long.
“Have you ever been in love?” Lika asked.
Masha traced a long line. “Never.”
“But I see you playing hostess. Everyone admires you. You must have had suitors.” She propped herself on one elbow, suddenly curious. “Who? You’re smiling.”
“Lie still,” Masha commanded, and Lika fell back.
She found herself wanting to tell Lika, especially about Isaac. Why? She hardly needed to impress her. What did proposals even prove? Masha winced over that last thought. She sounded like Olga, who was admirably brilliant but also pathetic in her shabby dresses and mismatched gloves. Masha did not want to be pathetic.
“The first was a nonentity. One summer he hung around the dacha we were renting. Lieutenant Egorov. Bald, with an annoying sense of humour. The same joke over and over. Antosha sent him packing.”
She added shading to the drawing, aware that she had removed it from Lieutenant Egorov. Not that she had thought much of him over the years—just that when she did, it was not harshly like this.
“Who else?”
“Isaac Levitan.”
Lika lifted her head again to gape. “Isaac Levitan proposed to you?”
“Don’t move. And don’t sound so surprised. I told you he was my painting teacher.”
“Tell me more.”
“It was a few years after Egorov. Isaac came to the dacha we were renting and gave me lessons. I didn’t see the proposal coming at all.”
She remembered how he’d bent close to her easel, a hesitant look on his face. She’d assumed he was trying to think of a kind way to criticize her, that he was about to circle his finger, his usual prelude to “Where are you, Masha?”
“What happened?” Lika asked.
“He suddenly dropped to his knees and began babbling, ‘Masha, my little queen! I paint only for you. The trees, the fields, the mist, the sunset. Marry me and we’ll paint it together.’ Something like that. You know how he talks.”
“I only met him once. What did you answer?”
“Nothing.” She was drawing Lika’s arm now as it dangled over the side of the bed. “I ran away as fast as I could. Cried the rest of the day. When I didn’t turn up for dinner, Antosha came and asked what I was blubbering about. I told him. He said I could marry Isaac if I wanted but that he, Isaac, greatly preferred women of a certain age.”
“Does he?” Lika asked.
“Sophia must be forty. Isaac’s mother died when he was young. That’s what attracts him. Antosha’s theory.”
“So you refused him?”
“I didn’t have to, thankfully. When I went down to dinner, Isaac acted like nothing had happened. He’s never mentioned it since.”
“I think he’s handsome,” Lika said. “I could swim in those dark Jew eyes.”
“You and everyone else. What a little ninny I was to cry like that— Stop wriggling.”
It wasn’t just that she’d been taken by surprise. Masha remembered now. Isaac had come to them that summer because he’d been depressed. Suicidal. Antosha had invited him to bring him back to the world. She’d been afraid he’d relapse if she had to reject him.
“Don’t you want to get married?” Lika asked.
“No. I’d rather be sister to a great man than wife of a nobody. I’m honoured to be Antosha’s sister.”
To manage his household. To interpret his needs and moods. “What is the matter with Antosha?” Mother would ask because Masha alone could figure it out. His cough. His “downstairs complaint.” His finances. That he was not able to write, or not writing well. An uncured patient, a bitter memory, a bad review. Other people’s stupidity, or their suffering. The general state of the world. Masha alone could diagnose the doctor.
Lika’s brow crimped while the rest of her lay still. After a moment she said, “That doesn’t make sense, Masha. Isaac Levitan is a great painter. And you’d still be Antosha’s sister no matter who you married.”
How had they got onto proposals? Then Masha guessed. Lika expected Antosha to propose before he left. Who was the ninny now?
The next thing Lika said really was too much. “When your brother kisses me, Masha? He puts his tongue in.”
Masha thought of a gudgeon swimming in her mouth. Dunia had been too free with the private details as well. Masha had severed their friendship.
“I simply melt,” Lika said.
“Extraordinary. A transmutation of matter.” She pressed so hard with the pencil that the lead snapped.
“Don’t,” Lika told her when Masha crumpled the page.
She rose and stuffed the picture in the wastebasket.
THE MORNING ANTOSHA LEFT, HE SHOWED MASHA THE letter he’d written Alexei Suvorin, who had given him an advance to fund his voyage.
If anything untoward does happen, please bear in mind that everything I possess and may possess in the future belongs to my sister. She’ll pay off my debts, including this one.
Masha sank down on the divan and sobbed into her hands. He, who hated all damp scenes, said, “I need you to take over while I’m gone. You will, won’t you?”
“I can’t,” she cried.
“Nonsense,” he told her. “You already hold the place together. The old ones are useless, as you know. Well, Mother’s a wonderful cook. Keep her happy. Make the little brother study hard for his exams so all that I’ve invested in him isn’t wasted. Try not to mind the crackpot patriarch. Sister?”
“Antosha, I’m afraid for your health.”
“I’ll take good care. It will make the trip more difficult if I know you’re worrying. But if I know you’re happy and enjoying life, I’ll feel lonely and come home.”
She dried her face with her sleeve. What choice did she have? She stood and kissed his cheek, which made him smile.
Shortly afterward Lika came bursting into the house, stamping her little boots, flinging off her hat. She wasn’t the tidiest person. With her tear-
stained face and melodramatic gestures, she forced her way in. How dare she. She barely knew him! Even as Masha bristled, she recognized what was behind her irritation. Easier to take offence at a silly lovesick girl than be angry at her risk-taking, too-kind brother.
Their landlord lived next door. An amateur photographer, he gathered them together for a farewell picture. Masha, Misha, Ivan, Mother and Father arranged around Antosha, their sun, dressed in a bright yellow jacket. Then Antosha called out, “Jamais!” and beckoned to her. As soon as Lika squeezed in beside Antosha, the landlord waved in his own children too.
“The famous adventurer and all his admirers! Say ‘raisins’!”
Just as he ducked under the black cloth, a hen strutted past like a wooden toy pulled along on a string. Misha, cross-legged on the ground, nabbed it. What next? Masha thought. The kitchen basin? She only just managed to erase her scowl before the disappointing moment was fixed on glass.
According to custom, the whole family gathered in the parlour and seated themselves for a moment of silence so that Antosha would journey safely. Then Mother started off the crying and kept it up as they made their way out the door to the waiting cab.
A larger farewell party was expected at the station. A group of them planned to travel along for a time with Antosha to see him off properly drunk. Ivan and Misha had gone ahead with the trunk. Antosha went with Mother, Masha and Lika—Lika sniffling too now as she gazed besottedly at Antosha.
Masha stared sullenly out the window. It was her own fault. She’d invited Lika— not to the station, Antosha had done that—but to fall in love with him. As usual, Masha the instigator suffered more than he did.
When they arrived, the advance guard was there waving and hallooing. Antosha called out to Ivan to get everyone on the train. Then he turned to Mother. It was really happening. He bowed to accept her blessing. She gave it through sobs.
Next he faced Masha, lifting her chin and forcing her to meet his steady gaze. Their secrets lived in that look, their treasured closeness too.
A Russian Sister Page 5
