“What happened, then? Or with Isaac or Aleksander Smagin? Did you turn them away or merely wither them with your disapproval? Are there others afraid to ask me because of you?”
“Others?” He pulled himself up straight and looked at her. “Who do you mean? And would you actually want to marry a man who places more value in his future brother-in-law’s opinion than his future wife’s?”
Masha altered her posture too, stiffened her back and lifted her chin, the pose in which she’d successfully calmed nearly a decade of excitable girls enough to educate them.
“Why didn’t you ask my opinion? Can’t I decide? Do you consider me at all? Am I even a person to you?”
“Pardon?”
She couldn’t believe how she was speaking now. Her words poured out, expressing things she had not even realized she felt. “Because I sometimes feel that you see me as an author, not a brother. A none-too-imaginative author, actually. Am I that cliché, the burdensome unmarried sister? The spinster inclining now toward hysteria?”
He made a noise through his nose. She wondered if she’d gone too far. Was he insulted?
“I don’t want to be a burden,” she said.
He still wasn’t looking at her. “Masha, I admire and respect you more than any woman.” He pressed his heart. “Is that what you want to hear? More praise? Because if you feel taken for granted, I’ll try to do better. I have many preoccupations, as you know.”
“This is what I mean. You’re speaking the words I want to hear. You add the appropriate gesture. But do you actually feel this?”
Something occurred to him then, and he looked up with a disbelieving expression. “Have you received a proposal, Masha?”
“Perhaps.”
Now she saw it, what she was really seeking. A glimmer of true alarm behind the lenses.
“From whom?”
“Does it matter?” she asked mildly.
“Obviously it matters!” Exclaiming made him cough—four or five times—then he continued in his reasonable voice. “Masha? Say you married Egorov, or some other nonentity, for how effectively he ran his soup kitchen. What then? He’d still beat you when he felt like it and whore around the town, and, even worse, bore you half to death.”
“You have a grim view of your sex.”
“I admit it. I know my sex well. As for the other half of humankind? The impression I get from many women, including our own mother—I’m speaking medically now, as well as as your brother. For many women marriage is—”
He untangled himself from the blanket and tossed it on the bed as he stood, but with the first step stumbled on one of his shoes lying there. “Damn it. My leg’s gone to sleep.”
“For many women marriage is—?” Masha prompted.
“Nasty, painful and ugly.” He meant the act for he looked away.
“Yet many seem to enjoy it,” Masha told him. “Even in pairs.”
Had she ever in their whole lives seen shock on that inscrutable face? For the first time, his lack of reply was not a conscious act, not due to reserve but to a complete failure of words.
“Anyway,” she went on. “Can’t the woman decide for herself? Because nasty, painful and ugly is what we get in any case.”
He threw up his hands. “Go ahead.”
“I’m going to marry Aleksander Smagin.”
And now something truly astonishing happened: an utter abandonment of restraint. Contempt settled openly on his face and disfigured it.
“Smagin? That bumpkin? The King of Persia?”
“Yes,” Masha told him. “You don’t approve?”
“I don’t!”
A knock came at the door. “Masha?”
It was Mother.
“Mamasha, we’re discussing something,” Antosha called. “Can it wait?”
“Of course. Yes.”
Masha could hear her retreating steps. She paused to allow them, bolstering herself further with crossed arms. “What’s wrong with Smagin, besides his handwriting?”
One finger raised, Antosha limped over and placed an ear to the door. Satisfied that Mother wasn’t listening, he uncrossed Masha’s arms and took her hands in his. Dropped them and instead cradled her face. The hands that wrote his stories, now holding her head. The kind downward-slanted eyes looking into hers.
“You’re a thousand times more intelligent than Smagin.”
“I’ll marry Isaac, then. I like the way he kisses.”
He let her go. She had to laugh. He was like one of those Abramova Theatre hams, or a commedia dell’arte clown. Lips jutting, brow sinking in moral outrage. Next he would be pounding his frail chest and sinking to his knees.
“Have you been seeing Isaac?”
“Do you prefer him to Smagin? Because for me, either will do. I want a life.”
“Isaac has the French disease.”
This sobered her, but she managed not to show it. “In that case, it’s Smagin, which is good since I’ve already written to him. He’s coming next weekend to ask for my hand. I’ll be here too, to give it. Is there anything you need from Muir and Mirrielees when I come back down?”
“Masha,” Antosha said. “You have a life. It’s here. With us.”
“Well, write if you think of something. I’m going back now. I only came to give you this happy news.”
AS SOON AS SHE WAS ON THE TRAIN, MASHA LAID ONE arm along the window ledge and wept uncathartically. In her mind these futile tears simply mixed the colours into a muddied mess. All she really wanted from Antosha was what everyone else wanted from him. If he couldn’t say the words, not even to her, perhaps she should have asked him to write them out.
On second thought, she’d read too many of his letters to expect comfort by those means.
She straightened and, blotting her eyes, forced herself to think of Smagin. Of Aleksander! In a few days he would nod goodbye to his icons, to his starched mother in the misaligned picture on the wall, to Kalina showing all her teeth, and step joyfully out of his crooked house.
“Xenia! Olga! Mikhail! Let’s go!”
He wouldn’t beat her. She was more likely to beat him.
And so she gave herself up to the idea, willingly, stood before her pupils all week feeling nostalgic for them already. Antosha had put his finger on the worst thing she’d have to suffer as a married woman. She would laugh out of boredom and then, for a little variety, burst into tears. Or perhaps she would, like Natalia, start a peasant school. She’d have a garden, and eventually human instead of vegetable children. Girls. The first she’d name Evgenia, the others after friends.
She would tell him the moustache chafed.
She would show him exactly how she wanted to be kissed.
BUT IN THE BACKGROUND OF THESE MUSINGS, AN unanswered question needled her: Why had Antosha lied about his manuscript? He could have said that he had appointments. Why even mention this book? She sensed it had something to do with the purpose of the place, which was suffering. The suffering of children. His own suffering as he journeyed there, the family’s too. His other lies were rational; this one was not.
The night Misha had discovered the manuscript, she’d lifted out the stack of pages from the drawer—his longest work by far. She’d read random passages, footnotes, whole chapters. It was a scientific book, meticulously detailed, even the horrors. In the past, every letter he left out or put into her hand had contained a message. A message to her. For the first time, reading this, she couldn’t understand him.
THE EVENING BEFORE SHE WAS TO MEET SMAGIN AT Melikhovo, she tried on her dark green dress. Again! It was like forcing her hand into an unstretched glove. She pictured Smagin—Aleksander—dropping to his knees to propose and her bursting open at the seams as she accepted him.
Voices sounded in the hall. The key scraped, and Misha stepped inside, surprised to see her there holding her dress closed at her nape.
“I thought you went to Melikhovo.” To whoever was in the hall, “Masha’s here.”
The voice
that replied was female. “Your sister? Lovely.”
She ducked under Misha’s arm like a slippery child. No taller than a twelve-year-old, frizzy brown curls framing her face, Masha recognized her at once from Tverskaya Street. Topsy-Turvy Tania.
Tania seemed oblivious to Masha’s discomfort. She came right over, smiling warmly, and pressed Masha’s available hand. “I’ve heard so much about you from your brothers.”
“Nicer things from Antosha,” Misha said, opening a cupboard. “I left a bottle, Masha. Or did you drink it?”
“Anton worships you,” Tania said.
She was such a curious creature, tilting her head, an animal inquisitiveness in her expression. Masha detected no trace of affectation. No self-consciousness either, let alone shame. Didn’t she know that Masha knew about the scandal? Wasn’t she embarrassed?
“We’re going to the theatre.” Misha crossed the room with the bottle in one hand and the pickle crock under the other arm. “I would have invited you, but I thought you were at Melikhovo.”
“I’m going in the morning.”
“Please come with us,” Tania said.
“Tania likes your paintings.”
She’d been before. Was Misha using her room for assignations? For—it made her squirm to think it—orgies? Surely the landlady would have complained about excess traffic in the stairwell and peculiar noises.
“I do like your paintings,” Tania said. “This one in particular.” The one of Melikhovo in winter, she meant. A pink and red cake in the snow, the arched veranda where Antosha had stood watching her trudging approach the week before. “Watercolour is so difficult.”
“Do you paint?” Masha asked, letting go of her dress to take the glass Misha held out.
“No, but I can tell. It seems like poetry. It’s harder to write a really good poem than a story. The way the pink reflects on the snow in the shadow of the house. Because that’s true, isn’t it? Shadows aren’t necessarily grey.”
“Isaac taught her,” Misha said.
“That explains it.”
She said something next that Masha took at first to be preposterous. That she should apply to the College of Art. “They’re taking women now.” Then, “Your dress is undone. Turn around.”
Masha obeyed, felt the fingers start up her back, fastening her, as the vodka warmed her from inside. Then they stopped.
“Were you getting ready for bed?”
Masha nodded. “I have an early train tomorrow.”
“Misha. Drink up.”
Tania tossed back her shot, cuffed Misha on the shoulder, then walked backwards to the door, smiling the whole way. “I’ve been waiting so long to meet you, Masha. I’m sure we’ll see each other often now. I’ll bring you a poem.”
Not in the least embarrassed. She didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.
Good for her.
Misha shook the brine off a pickle, tucked it in his pocket and crunched a second as they went out the door. He waved goodbye. They hadn’t even taken off their coats.
As soon as they were gone, Masha peeled herself out of the dress and left it in a pile while she went to the window and peeked out the curtain. A moment later, they came out of the building and started down the street. There was nothing amorous between them, Masha could tell by the easy way they’d been, and still were, conversing. She couldn’t hear them, but she saw Tania’s dramatizing hands and the friendly distance they held between them as they walked. So small, yet so audacious. Was she real?
“I’ve been waiting to meet you too,” Masha said.
No moon tonight. The stars stared down the night all on their own. The sky seemed sprayed with them, and those were only the ones she could see. The ones allowed to shine, or that allowed themselves to. She peered at the blackness and thought of Antosha’s monk and his sparkling prophecy. What would her future as a wife be?
SHE SHOULDN’T HAVE DRUNK THE VODKA. INSTEAD OF helping her sleep, it kept her tossing in bed, fretting about the coming day and how she would have to face Smagin, face and accept him. He was a good man. Why did she feel that she was being punished?
Antosha’s manuscript came to mind again. The passage about the flogging. He’d described it with such clinical precision. Every five blows the executioner had taken a little break to give his poor tired arm a half-minute’s rest.
The prisoner’s hair is stuck to his brow, his neck swollen; his body, still covered by weals from the previous lashes, has already turned crimson and dark blue; the skin splits from every blow.
The drawer in Antosha’s desk had a lock. He often locked it because sometimes he left money there. But it was unlocked that night. He hadn’t been hiding his manuscript. It was under the ledger, the ledger he knew she’d take out to do the accounts. It was she who was meant to find it, not the little brother.
Punishment is perpetual. You can never come back from that place. You’re there forever. The children too. The children stay.
The storehouse door always creaked to announce her. Sulphur, cloves, tallow. Motes in the air. She would listen for his breathing and sometimes hear the scurry of mice. This was why Antosha loved mice. Before she came to him, they came first, while he lay, insentient, numbed, so still that they weren’t afraid of him. Each beating Father gave thickened him, became protection from the next. Layer upon layer, redundant, for soon he learned to secret elsewhere the true and tender part of himself, his feelings too. Not in the bottle, like his brothers. In the inkwell. He did his crying on the page.
But first came the mice. The bright beads of their eyes, their curious glances as they went about their business reminded him that he was still alive and would one day grow up, and no one would beat him then.
And now there is a curious stretching-out of the neck, the sounds of retching. The prisoner doesn’t utter a word, simply bellows and wheezes; it seems as if, since the punishment began, a whole eternity has passed, but the overseer is only calling “Forty-two! Forty-three!” There is a long way to go to ninety.
And Masha would creep in, just as quietly. No need to speak.
SHE DIDN’T GO. SHE STAYED THE WHOLE WEEKEND IN Moscow. Shortly, a letter from Smagin arrived saying that he’d travelled to Melikhovo with his honest heart full of hope.
Maria, it cost me great effort to refrain from having a scandalous row. I hated you and would have crushed you if you’d dared show up to face me. Only your brother’s constant hospitable welcome saved me.
7
WEEKS BEFORE THE PREMIERE, ANTOSHA went to St. Petersburg so he could attend rehearsals. So he could explain the play. A comedy, three female parts, six male, four acts, a view of a lake, a lot of talk about literature, not much action, one hundred and eighty pounds of love. Such a peculiar title. The Seagull.
He sent Masha her ticket and a note. Ignati had acted as the play’s agent and would be there with his wife. Tell Lika not to come . . .
Masha arrived the day of the premiere, stepping blearily down from the all-night train, scanning the platform. There he was, her stern-faced brother, coughing as he paced. From his overcoat pocket, he took a square of paper, spat and repocketed it. Then he saw her and, unsmiling, raised one hand, more a gesture of resignation than a greeting.
Outside the station, the sky was a blue Masha always thought of as imperial. Antosha looked older in that brighter light, ashen and grim, an undertaker not a playwright.
“It’s a déjà vu. Remember The Wood Demon? They don’t know their parts. They understand nothing. The acting is horrible. Only the actress who plays Nina is any good.”
He helped her into the waiting carriage. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“I wouldn’t miss it, brother.”
He climbed in beside her, nodded to the driver to start. “And of all the disasters? Miss Mizanova showed up yesterday.”
“What?” Masha looked at him in surprise. “She told me she wasn’t coming.”
“She’s staying at the Angleterre. We’re going there now. Did
you hear that, driver? To the Hotel Angleterre.”
Before Lika ran off to Paris, she’d sworn to Masha that she and Antosha were still friends. Since her return, she’d been a frequent welcome visitor to Melikhovo, still Father’s favourite and Antosha’s too, it seemed. During these visits, the baby went unmentioned. Lika left her in Moscow with Granny, who was looking after her as joyfully as she had looked after Lika.
Antosha and Lika’s rekindled affection accorded to his pattern: a long flirtation, a brief affair, his withdrawal. Dunia had been the one to spell out the latter for Masha. “He cannot tolerate extended intimacy. He reacts to it the way others react to pain.” She then went on to describe in unseemly detail the physical retraction that accompanied the emotional one. It was the last time they spoke.
For others, such as Olga, the possibility of friendship remained (though they rarely saw her now, despite her proximity). But where Olga never stopped grasping at Antosha, Lika returned from Europe with someone she loved more. And so Antosha enjoyed her company most. Their friendship blossomed until it resembled nothing more than a long and settled marriage—teasing affection, loyalty, bickering and, Masha assumed, sexlessness.
Christina. Her name was never breathed in public. If Masha hadn’t been an intimate, she might not have known the child existed. Masha first saw her at the Arbat flat, shortly after Lika returned, when the baby was nine months old and crawling, Lika chasing her around the parlour, shepherding her away from the samovar in case she tried to pull herself to a stand with the tablecloth. A determined little lamb with a nimbus of white curls. Intelligent too—quite aware that she was running her mother ragged. Her pink face shone with mischief, though some of the shine was her copious drool.
When Lika picked her up, Christina squirmed to be released, just like Svoloch when Masha had trapped him in an embrace. Twisting for freedom.
“You need more tea.” Lika plunked the small damp personage into Masha’s lap. Christina turned and, smiling, seized her by the nose. Her nails, though tiny, proved as sharp as claws.
A Russian Sister Page 30
