When Lika said Antosha’s name, Isaac spared him a glance. In place of his brotherly greeting, he said, “Nice tie.”
Antosha looked down at it. “Yes. I bought it in Italy. Neckties are marvellously cheap there. I almost took to eating them.”
“What was that boring man’s name?” Lika asked. “We called him B.-K. Bylim-Kylim? Isaac?”
The way she was gushing, she seemed fully Sophia’s type now. Or— Masha jolted with the thought. Was she acting? Maybe she really could.
Lika turned to Antosha again. “He adores your stories.”
Mother groaned. “Oh Lord. I hope you didn’t tell all these people where we’re staying.”
Lika turned in the direction of the mongoose’s plainting. “What’s that sound?”
“Svoloch,” Masha said. “He’s been naughty.”
Isaac laughed. “I thought it was a tree creaking in the wind. What a miserable spot. Will we get some plein air, Masha? The river’s close by, isn’t it?”
Antosha and Misha volunteered to take the painter for a walk. Isaac pouted when Lika wouldn’t come along.
“I want to pay my respects to my mongoose friend,” she told him.
Shortly after the three men left, the sun broke out. Mother clapped and Father crossed himself. It wasn’t just the sun that lifted their spirits, but Lika’s sunny laugh.
In Masha’s room, Lika played peek-a-boo with Svoloch, crouching on the floor eye to eye with him. She concealed herself behind the bed skirt. Svoloch tore it from her hand. Even he seemed glad to see her.
“But where’s Mrs. Svoloch?” Lika asked.
“Dead.”
“What?” She sat back on her heels.
Masha told her the story of the floor polisher. “And now this one’s twice as wild. I didn’t think they had anything to do with one another, but it seems her presence had been felt.”
Lika gave a little huff. “Is that our lot? To be felt?”
A rhetorical question. Even if Masha had had an answer, she would have been drowned out by the moans of the railway bridge. Lika turned alarmed eyes on Masha.
“It’s a train, not the end of the world. Are you running around with Isaac now?”
The train chattered past, shaking the walls. Lika resumed her game with Svoloch. “We’re just friends.”
“It doesn’t look that way,” Masha said.
Svoloch tore away the bedskirt again, and Lika smiled—at Masha, not Svoloch. “Doesn’t it?”
“Does Sophia know he’s here?”
Lika settled fully on the floor, clasping her hands around her knees. “I apologize for inviting him. I can see why you’re annoyed.” She waved at the smallness of the room, its chairlessness—just a bureau and a bed—without seeming sorry. She actually looked pleased with herself.
“I’m glad you like the floor,” Masha told her. “That’s where you’ll be sleeping.”
“Oh, Masha. Come and sit beside me. Or on the bed if you want. Sit above me.”
Above her. Lika saw right through Masha, who got down on the floor and was rewarded when Svoloch popped out from under the bed and curled up in her lap. He rarely snuggled anymore.
“It’s the Hermitage all over again?” Masha asked. “That’s what you’re playing at?”
“It’s obvious?” She seemed to expect an answer.
Instead Masha gave a warning. “You know about Isaac’s moods, don’t you?”
MASHA DID LET LIKA SLEEP WITH HER. PRESSED RIGHT up against Masha’s back in the narrow bed, she smelled like a love letter. Masha could almost feel her heart beating.
The men were still up, talking about Antosha’s trip to Europe and Isaac’s some years earlier, at ease now that Lika had retired. Their steps sounded in the hall, back and forth, as they got ready for bed. They made no effort to be quiet. They too wanted to be felt, particularly Isaac, who, like a devoted dog, made himself a bed on the floor in the hall, close to Masha’s door, heaving sighs and exaggerated yawns. Whenever a train passed, Lika tensed in the bed and Isaac cursed in the hall, waking Masha, who was by now deaf to the straining piles and girders.
In the morning she loaded the thrashing mongoose into his basket and coaxed Isaac and Lika into playing whist, with Misha as their fourth. Antosha, who hated whist, was writing in his room, or trying to. Because no one wanted to waste the sun, they dragged the table and chairs outside, despite the flies attracted by the spoils in the gully.
Masha worried about Isaac. Should she have been explicit with Lika about his suicidal tendencies? Antosha was still projecting his porcelain calm, but Isaac seemed agitated, so different from that night he and Lika had dropped in. Then, he and Antosha had teased Lika together. They’d all walked into the night, arm in arm. But that was months ago. Antosha had been out of the picture since then while Isaac had been painting it all along. Now he was as possessive about Lika as he was with his work, even with the little brother.
“Lika, Lika. My hand is full of hearts,” Misha said, causing Isaac to straighten on his chair and, with an attention-seeking flourish, throw down his hand prematurely. Pouting ensued.
They were into their second game when a pair of troikas stopped on the road in front. These were a rich man’s horses, groomed until they glowed.
“Is this where the writer is staying?” one of the drivers called out over the snorting and harness jangling.
“Who wants to know?” Misha called back.
“Master Bylim-Kolosovsky sends for you.”
Isaac recognized the name. “That’s B.-K. from the boat. He’ll bore us all to death.” He called out to the driver, “What does he want?”
“They’re saying in town that you’re unhappy with these quarters. The master’s got nicer ones to let.”
At these words, Antosha appeared in the doorway of the dacha. “What kind of quarters? Bigger than these?”
“I should say, sir. It’s his estate, Bogimovo.”
Masha didn’t want to leave Svoloch with the old ones who might let him out, accidentally or not. Or they’d be furious at Masha for subjecting them to his unrelenting din while she was gone. But if Antosha wanted her opinion, she couldn’t beg off.
“IT’S NORMALLY TWO HUNDRED ROUBLES,” SAID B.-K. “But I’m a great admirer of yours. I thought one-sixty for the whole summer. To thank you for your good work.”
His mistress, a redhead lacking a critical number of teeth, beamed at his side. “We followed your trip to Sakhalin in the papers. The suffering must end.”
“I hear this same sentiment daily at the tax office,” Misha quipped.
Blank looks from their earnest hosts. B.-K., like the Lintvariovs, was rich in land but empty of pocket, the pockets in his case in a long peasant coat worn in sympathy with a class of people who probably laughed behind his back. He and his gap-toothed mistress rented out the manor while living in intentional simplicity in one of the dachas beyond.
The house was enormous even with another family on the upper floor. In the drawing room, the still-surprising sun poured through the ceiling-high windows. Isaac beckoned Masha over to take in the view. Was that all she needed to begin painting again? To look? Instead she was worrying about what Svoloch was doing back in her room.
At the next window Antosha ran his hand along the capacious sill. “I could write here. I wouldn’t even need a desk.” He took a few steps. Stopped. Reapplied the toe of his shoe to the squeaking parquet. “A floor that talks to you.”
“So we’ll take it?” Masha asked.
A huge leather divan stood in the centre of the room. Other than that, there was more dust than furniture. Antosha liberated a whole cloud of it by sitting on one end and letting himself fall back. Lika came and looked down on him.
“Happiness at last,” he told her.
Isaac was still investigating pictorial possibilities. The linden avenue they’d driven up, the clotted sky. He missed what Masha saw. Perhaps Lika and Antosha had been doing this all along without Masha noticing either.
Passing something shivery and invisible back and forth with their eyes.
“It’s going to rain again,” Isaac announced, finally turning.
B.-K. was waiting in the doorway. “Please, come see the dairy. I think you’ll be impressed.”
They got out of meeting his cows because Antosha asked for a tour of the grounds.
“Brother,” Masha whispered. “I need to get back.”
“Are there mushrooms?” he asked B.-K.
The picking was capital, and Antosha wanted to see for himself. Off they traipsed, back down the avenue and into the woods, where B.-K. pointed out his secret troves. He’d inserted sticks in the ground to mark where they grew.
“There and there and there. Normally I don’t tell people this, but for a man of your stature, I’ll make an exception.”
“I’m actually taller,” Misha said.
Isaac had really let his guard down. If not for Masha shepherding him along, he would have fallen completely behind. No slower companion on a walk than a landscape painter. He stopped every few paces to look around. Just as they emerged back onto the avenue, the skies opened.
“As I expected,” the cloud-master said.
At last an excuse to hurry. Lika and Masha ran back to the house, where they took breathless shelter under the eaves, waiting for the men to catch up. The men barely picked up their pace, just turned up their collars. Isaac was asking B.-K. something, moving his arms in a flagless semaphore, Antosha and Misha listening. Were they trying to prove who was most waterproof? Was everything a competition?
As they neared the house, Antosha was first to lift his gaze—to Lika with her wet curls sticking to her cheeks and her wet dress a second skin. That shivery thing Masha had seen in the drawing room, she saw again and recognized now. It was how they’d looked at each other every time Lika had stepped into their parlour when he was recovering from Sakhalin Island.
Do you think he’ll marry her? Mother had asked.
No, Masha had said. But whatever had been stopping him then—stopping his heart—it was gone.
Under her feet, the ground seemed to shift. One of her ankles wobbled and she nearly lost her balance. Antosha was right there, but still gazing at Lika. The wall of the house kept Masha upright.
THEY COULDN’T MOVE UNTIL BOGIMOVO HAD BEEN cleaned, which left them squeezed together for the next two days, the remainder of Lika and Isaac’s visit. Antosha gave up trying to write, saying he’d catch up later on the windowsill. Instead they dedicated themselves to amusements. Sketching and croquet. And long lingering meals when, over Mariushka’s thrice-daily nettle soup, Isaac lifted his soulful eyes to Lika and intoned, “In this tureen, in this very shade of green, I see our melancholia and spiritual loneliness.” And Misha, screwing up his face behind his pince-nez, told her, “In this tureen, I see what stung my backside this morning.”
Lika bestowed tolerant smiles. But when Antosha teased her for taking too much food, though she ate like a bird, her smile seemed part of nature. A flowering on her face.
What Masha saw in her bowl was bile. Antosha often wrote about love. Yet she’d never seen him in love with anyone, never seen him look at any of her friends as he’d looked at Lika under the eaves at Bogimovo. Not one! He’d looked through Lika, through her wet dress to her wet skin, and deeper still, peeling away her layers. It hadn’t mattered that Masha was standing right there, so private and exclusive was their mutual stare. And Masha was the one who’d introduced them!
This was not her intention. Not actual love. Someone to cheer him up, then to stop him from taking that terrible journey. Someone temporarily purposeful, like the wind. Let it flap dry the washing, then go away.
Masha excused herself from the table and returned to Svoloch. Soon Lika came to find her, flushed with a distressing happiness.
“We’re going for a walk. Come.”
Masha smiled, or at least stretched her mouth, and shook her head. She gestured to Svoloch, who was not actually misbehaving, but lunching on his tray of scraps in the corner of the room.
“I have to keep an eye on him.”
“I’ll stay with you, then,” Lika said.
“Don’t. I may nap.”
Lika hesitated before leaving. “Do you think you could take Isaac off painting tomorrow? This morning he was waiting for me at the top of the gully. I hadn’t even washed my hands.”
She was oblivious to Masha’s distress, or Masha hid it too well.
That night, Lika turned over in the bed, jostling Masha. She hummed herself to sleep while Masha lay stiff as a corpse. Would Antosha marry her? All that talk of being terrified of matrimony, of being married to his work, was that just to keep his sister happy?
Under the bed, the mongoose scraped at something with his teeth. Masha heard, too, the determined mechanical huffs of an approaching train.
If he married, what would happen to her, she who had not even wanted to sit on the floor with Lika? Ahhhh! screamed the trestles. Ahhhh! the piles and abutments. She would become an unmarried sister-in-law—Ahhhh!—which no sane person wanted to be.
Lika didn’t know what they’d been through. She thought Father was funny! No one but Masha had put on the same coat as Antosha or sat for hours in that dark storeroom, so still that not even the mice knew they were there. Lika would resent their closeness and drive herself between them. Then the babies would come, Lika growing fatter and more tyrannical with each one. Antosha didn’t earn enough. He could barely pay for the jewellery box. He would work himself to death. Lika would kill him.
Ahhhh!
Svoloch came out from under the bed. There was just enough moonlight for her to see the object he was tossing around. A white bone gnawed clean.
AS THEY WALKED, LIKA ASKED IF ANYTHING WAS THE matter.
“I didn’t exactly drown in sleep,” Masha told her, adding, “Not with those trains.”
In a few hours Lika and Isaac would be gone on one, thank God. Isaac and Antosha had set off early to fish. Masha and Lika were searching for wild strawberries where the meadow met the woods. Father walked ahead, sweeping his stick through the undergrowth. The heat was such that they’d put on their white summer dresses for the first time.
Wild strawberries are secretive. They had to push aside the leaves to get to the fruited jewels. Their sugary fragrance exacerbated Masha’s vertigo, as did the stale smell of her dress just out of the trunk, and the sun’s hot fingers on her nape. Her nerve endings outside her skin.
Father looked over to where Masha and Lika crouched. “During serfdom the girls had to sing while berry-picking. Otherwise the master would accuse them of eating his berries and beat them.”
Masha translated for Lika. “He’s asking for a song.”
Lika indulged him with one that Masha had never heard, a conversation in alternating verses between a mother and her child. The child hears voices, a fancy her mother refutes.
Thou’rt dreaming, darling daughter. It’s just the night wind sighing.
Angels, the fevered child insists.
I follow on, she says, dying.
When Lika finished, Masha saw that Father had been moved to tears, as Masha herself nearly was. How could Antosha not love her?
Father asked the name of the song.
“‘Angel Serenade.’”
“I just heard one,” he said.
Masha braced herself for an attack of religiosity, but Antosha came into view then, crossing the meadow dressed in his sailcloth fishing jacket and broad-brimmed hat. Lika turned, then waved, prompting Antosha to clutch his chest and stagger; she threw back her head and laughed to shame the birds.
As he approached, Lika held out her bowl. There was nothing coy in the gesture. She did it out of natural generosity. Antosha popped a berry in his mouth. The first wild strawberry of summer. On his face, the same look that had shoved Masha aside.
“I thought you were fishing,” Masha said.
“They weren’t biting. Mother told me where you were.” He
picked a handful of strawberry leaves and put them in his pocket.
“What good are the leaves?” Father asked.
“They’re medicinal.” To Lika he said, “They steady the heart.”
“Where’s Isaac?” she asked.
“Ah,” he said to Masha. “She thinks of him every minute. Only him.” He put a leaf in his mouth and began to chew it. “He’s gone after Trofimov.”
“What?” Lika smiled now. “Is Trofimov here?”
“He just showed up. And you won’t believe how he got here.”
“How?”
“He swam!” Antosha held out his arm for her to take. “Did I hear right? Were you singing?”
“Yes, she was.” Father sighed.
They set off together, deeper into the woods, where fewer, if any, strawberries grew. Lika began to sing again. Father and Masha resumed picking, not speaking, instead listening to Lika’s serenade grow fainter. On second hearing, a cloying song.
Lika had succeeded in getting him alone without Masha’s help.
The singing stopped, and Father said, “They must be eating the berries.”
The last thing Masha wanted was to be standing there when they emerged hand in hand. She straightened from her crouch, shook her bowl to level the berries.
“I’m done,” she told Father. “I’m going back.” Her skirt, she noticed with irritation, was speckled with bright red droplets, like she’d been stabbed all over with a pin.
Before she’d taken a step, she heard a halloo. Isaac waving his hat, half striding, half running toward them. He reached them, breathless and looking panicked.
“Where’s your brother?”
Masha was guilty only of a reflex. Of their own accord, her eyes veered in the direction the two had gone. Isaac charged past her and Father, bellowing again.
Moments later—Masha had only just begun to walk away herself—Lika came up from behind. Hands shielding her face, she hurried past, along the green twice-trampled path. Masha glanced back to see Father watching Lika too, his white brows united in consternation.
Next came the strained, comradely banter of Russia’s greatest writer and painter—the landscape, the landscape—then the great men themselves. Seeing Masha and Father still there, Antosha put on a surprised face. Lika’s empty bowl was in his hand, but he acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened to its tearful owner.
A Russian Sister Page 13
