Other women wrote Antosha too, of course: Vermicelli, and the Maly actress who liked pink ties and curled hair, Kleopatra. Others with unfamiliar names. And not a single case of cholera occurred in the twenty-five villages under Antosha’s supervision. With the threat of the epidemic, their expected summer guests cancelled. Everyone was afraid of catching cholera on the train.
“Misha says I live in a flowerbed of beautiful women,” Antosha told Masha one morning. “But this is the bed I prefer.”
Just the two of them again. How she enjoyed those days alongside him in the garden. Physical work freed her mind. Past grievances dissolved. If someone proposed to Masha now, she’d refuse outright herself. She had her vegetable children. Into her palm she’d shaken seeds barely bigger than ones her own body wasted. Those she rinsed out with the rags, but these she sprinkled on the earth. And they grew! Hundreds of heads of cabbage, the cucumbers Misha filled his pockets with before he went out to the fields, and those terrifying artichokes. Onions, radishes, potatoes, potatoes, potatoes.
In the spring they’d lit bonfires in the orchard to protect the blossoming trees from frost. Apples, peaches, plums and fifty cherry trees that, though immature, all drooped with bounty now. Everyone clamoured for a share, Father for the fruit liqueur he enjoyed concocting, though wouldn’t drink, Mother for cherry pie, the starlings to gorge themselves.
“So we should stuff our faces,” Antosha told her, “or there’ll be nothing left for us.”
They filled their mouths. Juice dribbled down Masha’s chin and bloodied her dress; she only laughed. Sister and brother, side by side, wagering who could spit the pits the farthest.
Antosha trounced her, then said, “It still feels odd.”
“What?”
“To pick cherries and not get beaten for it.”
What to offer after this but silence? Soon it became a companionable one. Masha gathered the buckets, carried them to the kitchen. When she returned, Antosha was back among his roses, secateurs in one hand, sucking on the pad of his thumb.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
She meant his thumb, but he answered differently. “I’ve just tallied my literary achievements thus far this summer. Thanks to cholera, almost nil. And I’ve thought about literature even less than I’ve written it. Quite happily.”
“What have you been doing behind that closed door, then?”
He peered at the thumb. “I stare at the pile of pages that is Sakhalin Island and shudder.”
“Are you still working on that?”
He gave her a bitter smile. “Punishment is perpetual.”
This came too soon after his comment about the cherries. The morning’s dewy pleasure evaporated.
“I did finish two stories. One tolerable, one bad. Thank God we have no rent. But all in all, sister, I have but one regret.”
“Who?” Masha asked.
“Who?” He laughed. “What are you getting at?”
Since the mood was spoiled, why not say it? “I heard you were supposed to go to the Caucasus with someone.”
“And let an epidemic sweep through the district? And leave all this work for you?”
He gestured around them. She’d been right to trust him. He had a perfectly reasonable excuse, a noble one. But had he used it?
“Did you tell her that, brother? That you couldn’t go?”
“To her face? No. It’s prosaic to bring up work when a young lady propositions you. And you should see her when she’s disappointed. All the life drains right out of her. I can’t stand it.”
“How about in those letters you’ve been writing to her? Did you make it clear you weren’t going to interfere?”
He looked at her strangely. Did he recognize his own words and guess she’d overheard them, or did he hear the two words she’d left unsaid?
This time.
“Sister, Lika is very special. I think you understand that. I wouldn’t hurt her for anything. Don’t you want to hear my regret?”
Masha wiped the sweat off her brow. “All right.”
“It’s that I still think about that damned play.” He showed her his thumb. “A rose attacked me. See? It’s nothing. Just a prick of the skin. But how it hurts.”
3
IN AUGUST, OLGA WROTE. UNBEKNOWNST TO MASHA or Antosha, she’d been staying for months just eight miles away at a psychiatric hospital, working as an assistant.
Antosha urged Masha to go see her. “Bring her back if you can. I have no one here to quarrel with.” Melikhovo was still empty of visitors.
“But she’s an astronomer. What’s she doing there? Why isn’t she at the observatory?”
“I’ve just mentioned a possible reason,” he fondly said.
Masha drove off the next day to find the hospital, worried for Olga and nervous about the place. Had she been dismissed from the observatory, or had she left of her own volition? She’d practically lived there. And what would the hospital be like? Masha pictured the Zoological Gardens with lunatics in place of animals.
Along with those concerns, there was another. After eight months, a letter had arrived in Smagin’s unmistakable scrawl. You are to me even now the most enchanting and incomparable woman . . . Words that threatened to scratch open a mostly healed wound. Though the sprung carriage jostled her less than the one without springs, she was still rattled. Was she supposed to answer Smagin? Thank you, but I cannot accept such forward compliments. She wouldn’t involve Antosha again. She’d deal with the man herself.
Meanwhile, a sweet-sour odour kept wafting off the driver as they drove along, inclining her to nausea. One of their farm hands sweating off last night’s binge.
Formerly the hospital had been a manor house, red brick with a mansard roof and unusual embellishments: loinclothed Egyptian caryatids that stared stonily down from the facade, figures straight out of a delusion. Masha employed the knocker, but before anyone could answer, a young beardless man in a straw hat came around the outside corner of the building—a groundsman, she assumed.
“I’m here to see a friend who works here. Olga—”
He cut her off. “She’s a patient.”
“No.”
“There’s only one Olga. She helps him too. We all do.”
The door opened on someone she presumed to be the doctor, a short, broad-chested man more formally dressed. He was as muscular as an acrobat, better proportioned for the circus than psychiatry, his eyes strikingly dark, like jet beads on a mourning necklace.
“A friend of Olga’s,” said the groundsman.
The doctor introduced himself as Vladimir. He ushered Masha inside.
“Olga eschews praise, so I’ll give it to her friend. She’s a great help to me, in particular her insights with regard to our female patients.”
The empty hall amplified his quiet voice as they walked. If there had been shrieking madmen somewhere, Masha would have heard them. Everything looked clean. Some of her apprehension lifted.
“Any chance she could get away for a visit?”
“No one’s under lock and key here.”
Masha stopped. “You don’t mean she is a patient?” Olga was the last person Masha would suspect of mental frailty. She could barely articulate her next question. “How did this happen?”
The doctor looked at her. “I can’t disclose personal details. She’s responding well. She shouldn’t see you upset, though. Take a moment.”
Masha pressed her eyes to stop her tears. Olga’s peculiarities demanded reinterpretation. Her slovenliness, for example. Masha had always assumed it was an admirable disregard of opinion. But was it actually a symptom? When she took her hands away, the doctor was holding out his handkerchief. She shook her head and gestured that she was ready.
Poor Olga. Her intelligence made her lonely, and loneliness made her prickly. Masha’s artichoke friend.
They stopped before a closed door. Hairy knuckles rapped. Silence.
“Someone’s here to see you, Olga,” the doctor said.
Olga wasn’t necessarily eager to answer. There simply wasn’t far to go in what turned out to be a dim former linen cupboard. But at the sight of Masha, Olga’s unguarded expectation vanished and made plain a fact—that she’d been hoping for someone else.
She introduced Masha to the doctor, who turned to her with more interest now.
“The writer’s sister? What a delight. Please tell your brother he has many fans here. We often read his stories aloud in the evenings, thanks to Olga, who suggested this entertainment. Will you show her our grounds, Olga?”
Olga had sat down on the unmade cot and was staring at the floor, this woman who had perched on the windowsill at Bogimovo and crowned herself tsarevna. Her bun looked matted, like she didn’t take her hair down when she slept.
“Take a walk,” the doctor said.
Olga’s bowed shoulders lifted, then fell again.
He smiled at Masha. “I’ll leave you. Enjoy.”
As soon as he was gone, Olga said, “He’s dogged on the subject of exercise. Has us doing calisthenics before breakfast. Of course, the rest of us would prefer to lie in bed with the blankets over our heads. Sit, why don’t you?”
The only other furniture that fit the dim room was a chair and a small desk piled with books. The tang of stale tobacco and unwashed body hung in the air. There was a curtain on the opposite wall, so logically a window. In three steps Masha reached it.
“Don’t,” Olga groaned. “I like it dark.”
Astronomers do. They need darkness. Masha remembered visiting the observatory, the starred vault of its ceiling mysterious and holy. Olga some kind of priestess.
“I’ll just let in some air.” She raised the sash, then went back and sat on the chair. She’d brought gifts but waited to present them.
“Why are you here, Olechka? Did something happen at the observatory?”
Olga wriggled one finger into the ratty bun. “They made it impossible. They undermined my work. They stole it. They harassed me.” Grievances expressed flatly, with none of her energizing invective. Masha had no doubt who “they” were. She remembered the hostile looks they’d received walking down the hallway, and how Olga had warded off their evil eyes by flicking ash off her cigarette. Now she was in a mental hospital to be cured of female brilliance.
“I’m working here now,” Olga said.
She pointed at the books. She was mainly the doctor’s secretary, but she’d read enough now that they discussed diagnoses too. Mostly they treated depression, hysteria and chronic onanism, though she suspected the latter was a fraud.
“Really, Olga?” Masha said prudishly.
Finally, a soupçon of disdain. “A man will go mad if he seeks pleasure on his own. What’s his recourse? A prostitute. How convenient. And what are women to do? Never feel pleasure?”
“They get married,” Masha said.
Olga gave her a devastating look. “As if that guarantees pleasure of any kind.”
Masha thought of Smagin’s letter then, a possible case in point. She waited for Olga to say that the doctor was an idiot and that she already knew twice as much as he did. That she didn’t depressed Masha. It meant her cure was working.
She lifted her bag onto the desk and began to unload it. “I brought cherry preserves. And you can never have too many handkerchiefs, according to Mother.”
“Nothing from Antosha?” Olga averted her eyes.
“He wants me to bring you back. It will be peaceful at Melikhovo. We have no visitors. Will you come?”
This time when Olga touched her head, she seemed to realize how frightful her hair was. She pulled out her pins and proceeded to rake her hair with her fingers. Masha hadn’t seen it down since their Guerrier days. Olga had always been thin, but now she looked as emaciated as Vermicelli. After fashioning a bun barely more kempt than its predecessor, she stood and motioned for Masha to follow.
She had not answered the invitation.
On their way, some of the doors they passed were ajar or wide open. The doctor’s, where he sat writing at his desk. In another room Masha glimpsed rows of cots, most neatly made, and an old woman standing at the window twisting her fingers into shapes against the light.
They stepped outside. To the left was a kitchen garden where Olga said they grew their food. Several people were hoeing—patients, Olga confirmed. She pointed to a bench farther along a path where the lawn reverted to meadow. Beyond were woods. The clouds had amassed in earnest now. Flat-bottomed, they seemed heaped upon a plate.
No sooner had they reached the bench than Olga said, “I forgot my tobacco. Wait.”
Masha watched her go back and procure a cigarette and a light from a man in the garden. He was the person Masha had met out front. She recognized the straw hat.
Olga returned at a slower pace. “There,” she said, finally sitting beside Masha. “I exercised.”
All this time Masha had been waiting for Olga to respond to her invitation. Should she be like the doctor and gently press? Or should she bully her like Olga had bullied her at Bogimovo? Or just drop it? Really, she felt so sorry for her.
Finally she said it plainly. “Will you come to Melikhovo?”
The cigarette tremored as Olga brought it to her lips. “I’m thinking about it. You asked why I came. I’ll tell you.” She brushed ash off her skirt. “Have you heard of invisible stars?”
“No.”
“Dark stars. Newton’s Law proves they exist, though no one has ever seen one.”
“What are they?”
“Stars of sufficient mass and size to acquire an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. Gravity renders them invisible. Tonight, look up. Then you’ll understand.”
She was talking in riddles. Masha slumped helplessly. “But do you feel better here?”
“I feel useful. Look—”
She pointed at two women walking in the distance along the edge of the trees, one with a basket. Both were studying the ground. Looking for mushrooms, Masha assumed. The breeze stirred the trees around them, creating undulating patterns in the foliage.
“The younger one is Katya. She dissociates. You wouldn’t believe what was done to her.” Olga spat out a thread of tobacco.
It was getting cooler, and Masha shivered. “Dissociation. Is that like psychic blindness?”
“Psychic blindness is a normal momentary phenomenon.” She held her next drag inside her. It released with her words, and the breeze snatched it away. “Why didn’t he come with you?”
“Antosha? He’s working,” Masha said.
“He should come here. See what it’s like.” She turned to Masha. “He could put it in a story.”
A drop of moisture hit Masha’s cheek from the p in Olga’s “put.” This sounded more like the old emphatic Olga. Or maybe it was rain. Masha held her palm out to the sky.
“I’ve been thinking about him a lot here. Differently now, as a psychiatrist might. He’s a real case history. Just compare him to how Aleksander and Kolia turned out.”
Masha withdrew her empty hand.
“Why were they ruined and not him?”
“Kolia’s dead,” Masha said. “Please don’t speak ill of him.”
“Where is Aleksander? You never mention him.”
“In St. Petersburg. He’s married. He has two boys. Let’s change the subject. I didn’t come here to have my family insulted.”
Olga stopped, but her eyes stayed narrowed. It was the look Masha always thought of as “waiting to pounce,” but the next thing she said was benign, so Masha relaxed again.
“And you love country life?”
“Yes! You should see my garden.”
“Is Antosha still in love with Lika?”
“They’re writing a lot of letters. I’m staying out of it.”
Her brows sprang up with mock surprise. “Are you? You didn’t use to. You used to bring us all around after lectures. Ekaterina—remember her? Sticking her bugs with pins? Dunia and Vermicelli. Me. Others too. The
re was that girl with a wine stain birthmark on her neck. What was her name? Your brothers argued about what country it was shaped like. “Atlas,” they called her. There was something unsavoury about the whole situation. Dunia called your house Masha’s Brothel.”
It took a moment for Masha’s shocked tongue to move. “This is your illness speaking, Olga. Tell me that it is.”
Olga turned to Masha and did something she’d never done. She smiled, showing all her teeth, which were jumbled and nasty. Masha stood up and for a minute could only stare. Then she turned and walked rapidly away, arms swinging, trying not to cry. She took the path around the house. The hoeing man, probably one of the incurable masturbators, straightened and watched her pass. God knows what he was thinking. When she was sure she was out of Olga’s sight, she broke into a stumbling run.
Olga wouldn’t have caught up, except that Masha had to wake the slumbering driver. Then the rain started in earnest, and his shaking hands fumbled with the slippery carriage top. Olga hurried out with Masha’s empty bag. When Masha reached down for it, Olga seized her arm and pulled her into a long, desperate embrace.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean those words for you. I’m terribly unhappy. There’s a note for Antosha in your bag.”
As they drove off, Masha refused to look back. The unsheltered driver, rain running down his collar, cursed on her behalf. Masha’s Brothel? They asked to come. They wanted to, Olga just as much as any of them.
Rain blew onto the seat. She lifted the bag into her lap. The smell of the driver reminded her of Kolia and turned her stomach. Olga was right about that. Kolia had been a drunk, and Aleksander was one still. Whenever they invited Aleksander, they prayed he wouldn’t come. He hadn’t for years, not since Father left the warehouse and came back to live with them again.
Then she was lost in those bad memories. The storeroom. The terrified birds twitching in her skirt. Their first year in Moscow, before Antosha joined them. Two cellar rooms, Father’s screaming and his uselessness. Begging the bishop for a free place at the school. She’d prostrated herself before him, but he’d refused her. Antosha’s arrival saved her.
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