“I’ll write to your brother,” he said. “And to you, farewell!”
“It’s so strange,” Natalia kept saying on the train. “I was sure he was going to ask you.”
They parted at Sumy, which left Masha with her thoughts to keep her company. Away now from Smagin and his moustache, she fell into a fugue of irrational fondness for this man who could weep with such tea-spilling force. She shrunk him down to an acceptable size, dealt with the moustache as Natalia had suggested. Replaced the horsey smell with scent. Dressed him in a proper waistcoat instead of the homespun blouse. It was like playing with a doll. Could she then rouse some ardency for this doll? Did she want to?
She scraped her nails against the window and made a peephole. They were passing a cluster of huts, abandoned, she could tell by the dormant chimneys. Then a dead horse lying on a hill. No, a hill of dead horses half buried in snow, limbs tangled, lips drawn back, teeth enormous. No eyes—they’d been pecked out by the birds, who, without the left-behinds from the threshing, were starving too. The worst thing was that the horses had been flayed, their flesh peeled back, arches of bare ribs spanning snow-filled cavities. About this desolate place not a single human track showed in the snow.
The peasants were eating raw flour, Antosha had said. Or they made “famine loaves,” flour mixed with bark and moss. He predicted cholera in the spring. While she’d been struggling with her resentment of him, he’d been delivering aid.
ANTOSHA WAS STILL AWAY WHEN SHE GOT BACK. AS promised, two letters came addressed in Smagin’s crabbed, unmistakable hand, one for her, and one for her brother.
My desire to be your husband is so strong that neither your love for Georgi nor your negligible affection for me would stop me from fulfilling this desire, should you agree to it. I’ve written Anton, as you asked, and been clear about my feelings for you. I’ll send you his answer. I’m not afraid of his judgment—I want it!
She cringed at his reference to Georgi. Antosha’s letter she left on top of his growing pile, mostly famine donations. She could tell by the clink inside the envelopes. Every time she brought his post, she added it to the bottom. That way Smagin’s letter would remain on top. This way Antosha would read it first, and they could discuss what to do.
When he did return, though, he was unwell. Fever, chills, and—most alarmingly—a stabbing pain in his side. The anxiety she’d felt for him at Luka renewed, overwhelming her personal preoccupations again.
“Medically? It’s pleurisy,” he assured Masha and Mother as they fussed. “Morally, it’s shame.”
He’d expected corruption, but not to this extent. Relief funds embezzled, peasants without a crumb forced to beg, then steal, only to see their villages under Cossack guard, so they couldn’t leave. Nothing to eat and no plans to prepare for sowing. They had no seed, so how could they sow?
“We discussed the crisis over dinner. ‘What, oh, what shall we do for these unfortunates, and could you please pass the caviar? More wine? I say, this is damned fine caviar.’” He broke off coughing, a futile hack that lifted him off the bed.
“As soon as I’m well,” he said between bouts, “I’m taking Suvorin out there. Let him see for himself. Make him open his big fat wallet.”
Masha told him what she’d seen from the train. “Don’t tell me they all died.”
“They and five hundred thousand others. Do you remember being hungry?”
“Yes.” The memory twisted inside her. “Yes, I do.”
SEVERAL DAYS PASSED BEFORE HE ASKED ABOUT THE estates. “It wasn’t the best time of year to do this, sister. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m desperate. We can’t stay here. I can’t afford it.”
He turned on his side and, coughing again, closed his eyes.
“You have a lot of post piled up here,” Masha said, before he fell back to sleep. “Do you want me to read it out?”
“I’ll get to it, if I don’t die first.”
He was joking. She didn’t laugh.
The next day he was up and about, but in a shuffling way, wearing slippers and a dressing gown and giving strict instructions not to let anyone in, as he was too weak to put on clothes. He let Mariushka prepare his coffee, and she rejoiced. He was well enough to want it, thanks to the power of her icons and her prayers.
After school Masha found him sitting at his desk. He’d opened most of his correspondence and had begun his replies. An envelope waited on his scale, beside it a pile of slivered margins. Scraps from a taciturn man. All the things he left unsaid.
This was her fault. She should have refused Smagin herself.
“So you got something done.”
“Yes,” he told her. “With a lot of reposing in between.”
She lingered in the doorway. “Can I get you anything, brother?”
He dipped his pen. “No, thank you.”
Eventually she understood he wasn’t going to speak about Smagin’s letter, either because the matter was unpleasant, or because it was too trivial. Masha couldn’t argue with the latter. What were her small affairs compared to half a million starved to death? She didn’t even want to marry Smagin. Then why not speak?
That night she sat up in the dark. She wanted him to speak—out loud, to her—about her life and its value to his. Then it wouldn’t be just a grey thing overshadowed by him.
They met in the kitchen the next morning. He was grinding his own coffee now, moving his arm in that meticulous circle. The emboldening smell of it. She would force him.
“Did you receive a letter from Smagin?”
A glance and a cough. “I did.”
“Did you write back?”
“Not yet. I’ve still got a damnable pile to get through. Oh, I forgot to tell you something. You’ll never guess who I met.” He spooned the bitter grounds into the pot. “Lieutenant Egorov.”
Masha started at the mention of his name; her determination dissolved with her surprise. “Egorov? I can’t believe it. Where? Where did you meet him?”
He stooped to light the brazier, successfully avoiding her eye. “He’s been organizing relief in Nizhni, one of the few to do it honestly and intelligently. Not only has he started a soup kitchen on his estate, he’s set up an actual workable scheme to get the planting going.”
“Does he look the same?”
“Minimal hair. But he greeted me quite warmly and said he had no hard feelings. He left the army years ago.”
“No hard feelings?”
“No. It’s too bad, though. He turned to be a fine fellow after all.”
He looked right at her as he said this, and it seemed that his eyes were apologizing, even if he wasn’t.
Masha dropped her gaze too, shaken. Was he married? Did he have children? Had he mentioned her? If she’d asked these things, wouldn’t his answers be too painful to bear?
Of course, of course. No.
What was she doing in the kitchen? She’d come to ask him something. It took a moment to remember.
“And Smagin? What do you plan to say?”
His back was turned now, and he kept it that way. “I’ll say he has the most hideous, heathenish, desperately tragic handwriting. He’d have more success with women if he’d learn to write.”
Masha made herself taller. “And if I feel differently?”
He glanced back, the surprise his now. “Do you?”
“No,” Masha said, and walked out.
ANTOSHA’S STORIES WERE FILLED WITH UNHAPPY MARRIAGES. With promising marriages that drifted into boredom and indifference. Into misery. He didn’t want that for himself, or for her either. And she didn’t want Smagin. Yet for several weeks she felt quite low.
After church on Sunday, she took the tram to the Zoological Gardens. In exchange for donating Svoloch, they’d given Antosha a free ticket. She drew it out of her muff and handed it to the gatekeeper.
She knew where the bear was housed. Now she began her search from reeking pavilion to reeking pavilion. Across the grounds, a wolf howled, and a band of h
alf-drunk students howled back. A creature’s plea met with human mockery.
Eventually she found him imprisoned with none of his species. Weasels, marmots, lemmings overcrowded each other, but Svoloch was alone in his cage. He kept up his air of busy curiosity, circling the mesh walls, rushing over to peer at every visitor, turning in ever-smaller circles. After a few minutes this behaviour seemed more insane than antic.
When the room cleared, and they were alone, she spoke his name at last. He reared right up. Two leaps and he thrust his narrow snout between the wires.
She offered her finger, which he nibbled. She pressed herself right against the cage until the wires scored her forehead. How she loved him. His small hands touching her wet face, exploring her hair while she wept.
Tenderly, one at a time, he removed her combs.
Act Three
1892
Masha: All this is just nonsense. Love without hope—it only happens in novels. It’s really nothing. You’ve only got to keep a firm hold on yourself, to stop yourself hoping for . . .hoping for the tide to turn. . . . If love sneaks into your heart, the best thing to do is to chuck it out.
1
IN THE GAZETTE, MISHA NOTICED AN ADVERTISEMENT for a country estate seventy-five miles from Moscow, six from the nearest railway station in Lopasnia. Antosha, away again on famine relief work, sent Masha with him to look at it. All they saw of Melikhovo was a collection of brightly painted buildings perched like iced cakes in the snow. Winter kept the pond and fields a secret. The house, though a single storey, was organized in a spacious L.
Buy it, Antosha wrote by return post.
The side door, the one they mainly used, led to a vestibule cheered by a stained-glass window. Two other doors opened off it, one to Antosha’s study, the biggest and brightest room in the house, the other to the Pushkin Room, named for the portrait they hung there. Antosha liked to confuse first-time visitors by leading them in a circle: vestibule, Pushkin Room, main parlour, his study, back through the vestibule, then into the Pushkin Room again. Not realizing they’d seen Pushkin twice, they invariably exclaimed that the house was much bigger than it looked from the outside.
Masha’s bedroom was off the main parlour, with space for an easel, a settee and chairs. Over her bed she hung Kolia’s portrait of Antosha, the one with the unfinished ear, which Antosha refused to have in the parlour because portraits of himself were as embarrassing as waiters reciting his stories by heart.
Those were the rooms in the small leg of the L. The ones leading off the longer leg were Antosha’s bedroom, Father’s (crammed with icons), the dining room, Mother’s room with her sewing machine, and Misha’s while he was on leave from the tax department. Mariushka cooked and slept in the cramped kitchen next to Misha’s room, until they built the new kitchen out back. No conveniences yet, just an outhouse. The men used Antosha’s washstand, the women Masha’s.
They still needed Masha’s income, irregular as it was. She would not have wanted to give up teaching anyway. She found an inexpensive room for the week and took the train to Melikhovo every weekend to help out. Scrubbing, papering, waging war with the cockroaches. For this alone she would have loved the place, for giving her a purpose again.
WHEN THE WINTER TERM AT SCHOOL STARTED, MASHA glanced across the assembly hall. Over all the plaited heads she caught sight of a blond one. A double take and she recognized the dazzling smile. Lika. Masha waved back, startled by the happiness she felt.
After school Lika came to Masha’s classroom. She looked thinner, face drawn, but her girlish gestures and ready laugh cancelled out these signs of worry. She’d had enough of the council clerks, she told Masha from the doorway, miming a smack she’d no doubt had to give numerous hands. Faces too, perhaps.
“I earn half as much here, but I love it twice as much.”
Her main news was that her long-lost father had unexpectedly reappeared and was paying for singing lessons.
“How did he find you?” Masha asked.
“Through Mama. She gave him our address. She didn’t ask me if I cared to meet him, just sent him along and left me to deal with him. As usual.”
“What’s he like?” Masha half expected a Swan Princess to have a cob for a father.
Lika shrugged. “Handsome, I suppose. Anyway, he has a guilty conscience, and offered an allowance for clothes, which I refused. But it was hard not to accept the lessons when I so want to improve.”
Then Lika said that she had run into Misha by chance. “He’s met someone. Klara. Do you know her?”
Masha didn’t. “I guess he’s keeping her a secret.” From Antosha, no doubt.
Lika’s expression softened. “He told me about poor Svoloch. I felt so bad for you, Masha. He was like your child.”
Two months had passed since Svoloch’s banishment. Masha’s visit to the Zoological Gardens haunted her. No one had expressed sympathy, let alone recognized her particular loss, except Lika now. Masha was supposed to be annoyed with Lika over last summer’s nonsense with Isaac and Sophia. She was annoyed, but at the same time grateful to have her feelings understood.
“I can’t see such a lively creature locked forever in a cage,” Lika said.
She was still standing in the doorway. Masha replaced the pen in its holder and invited her in with a nod.
The summer must have been on Lika’s mind too, since she brought it up herself next.
“I’d planned to write you from my aunt’s. But things happened.” She leaned forward on her elbows, so a shard of light from the window cut her cheek. “You warned me about Isaac. I should have listened.”
“Yes. He has a tendency to want to shoot himself.”
The summer he’d proposed to Masha, Antosha and Kolia had found him in a nearby cottage, sleeping with his gun.
Lika shuttered her face with her hands. “I wish you’d spelled it out.”
Her dress was light blue, her hair yellow. When she dropped her hands, she was a study in primary colours—cheeks and lips red. Masha remembered drawing her and then crumpling the page. The insufficiency of black and white.
“I’ll tell you everything,” Lika said. “But you mustn’t tell Antosha.”
She began with that troubling incident, the day they picked strawberries, when she and Antosha had finally evaded Isaac and found themselves alone in the woods.
“Except we weren’t.”
Masha, who had heard Antosha’s version of their argument, couldn’t think what she meant. “You ran into a woodsman?”
“No. Remember how Antosha said that Trofimov had come?”
“That’s who you met? Trofimov?” Masha laughed.
“In a way.”
Masha leaned back, fully attentive.
“Don’t you sometimes wonder where all these people come from? The people he writes about, I mean. They’re so real. So heartfelt. They hardly seem imaginary.”
Some weren’t. Recently Antosha had published a story featuring a barely disguised Dr. Wagner, right down to the paisley shirt. Thankfully, a man of pure science was unlikely to read “The Duel” and see the nasty sort of person Antosha had turned him into. There were plenty of other examples in his work, explicit lampooning even. Borrowing from life was a life-like writer’s prerogative.
Lika said, “I think Trofimov is real. He’s the part of your brother that can actually love, not just joke and tease.” She held up her hand to stop Masha from contradicting. “Please don’t bring up his charity. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about feeling something.” She pressed her chest. “He either can’t—or won’t—let himself. It was Trofimov who kissed me that day, I’m sure of it. And then Antosha—how would he put it? He drove a fork into his eye.”
Masha recognized the words from Antosha’s letter. I hope you accidentally jab out his eyes . . .
“There’s a look he gets,” Lika went on. “Like he’s on a commode and straining, but no emotion will come out.”
Despite herself, Masha burst out l
aughing, because Lika had no idea how often Antosha was in just this position. But what childish logic. Because Antosha wouldn’t babble love talk, he was incapable of loving? Even as she thought this, an uneasy feeling settled on her. Olga had hinted at something similar. Yet Antosha certainly loved her, his sister, in his wordless way.
But there was this fact to support Lika’s assertion: Their summer at Bogimovo had been a happy and productive one for Antosha. His only frustration had been that Lika wouldn’t answer his teasing letters. That she wouldn’t return. Could it be that her absence was the reason he’d been so happy? He could be in love with her if she wasn’t there crying all over him.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Lika said. “I think it’s sad. For me, of course, but for him as well.”
Heavy footsteps sounded in the hall. A door creaked, then the steps resumed, coming nearer.
“And so you took Isaac as your consolation prize?” Masha asked.
Until that comment, Lika seemed to have softened to the point of bonelessness in the desk. Now she pulled herself up straight.
“Is that what Antosha thinks?”
Her grey eyes flicked toward the door, causing Masha to look over her shoulder to their walrus-like custodian leering in.
“You may close the door,” Masha told him in a tone he hastened to obey.
“Wait,” Lika said. “How’s your daughter, Mr. Abramtsev?”
The walrus turned back, not leering after all. “The same. Pray for her.”
“I will. And for you I’ll sing.” She produced a few lines of some folksong that obviously meant something to him, for he beamed. Then, bowing, he continued on his rounds, opening doors along the corridor in search of someone with a heart.
Masha remembered something else Olga had said about Antosha. That he only wanted Lika for her body. But didn’t he want her kindness too, just as Masha did?
After the interruption, the rest of the story came spilling out. What was going on while Antosha was sending Lika letters and photographs of imaginary suitors. Lika had to walk around to tell it, pacing from desk to desk, flapping as she spoke.
A Russian Sister Page 18
