Mikhail and Margarita

by Julie Lekstrom Himes

  Perhaps Margarita had spent time in a room such as this, waiting, uncertain of her future. He felt calmer for that, as though this room, and his anticipated journey, might be a kind of pilgrimage. He leaned his head against the wall and listened for the train’s departure.

  The door opened and a short, diminutively built man entered, dressed in a manner not dissimilar from Bulgakov and carrying a leather valise. He pulled one of the other chairs around and sat opposite him. He had a trace of a smile, one of confidence, as though he’d already predicted his next meal to be a pleasant one. It was clear who was being detained and who was not.

  He wet his lips before he spoke. “My name is Pyotr Pyotrovich,” said the man. “I understand you desire to travel to Ulan Ude today. This has become a problem, yes?”

  Pyotrovich brought his case to sit on his lap. He withdrew a photograph the size of a standard sheet of paper and showed it to Bulgakov. Its features were made grainy and indistinct in its enlargement. “Do you know this man?”

  It was Ilya. Bulgakov nodded.

  Pyotrovich produced another. This one was Margarita. It was of better quality. Pyotrovich let him take it.

  She’d been beaten. The right side of her jaw was swollen, discolored. Darker matter was near her ear—what else could it be but blood? Her lips were parted as though she would speak to this. But it was her eyes: they stared straight through him. They harbored an expression he’d never seen in her before. He was wholly responsible for this.

  “It was taken after her arrest,” said Pyotrovich. He sounded almost apologetic for her appearance. “It was handled poorly,” he added. He took the photograph and Bulgakov’s hands fell lightly to his lap.

  Pyotrovich sat back. “We have reason to believe that Ilya Ivanovich is planning to effect her escape.” He paused slightly, perhaps hoping for a reaction, but then continued. “If you help us apprehend him, we will release her.”

  Could he believe this? Could such a promise be true?

  “Given the dimension of his crime,” said Pyotrovich. “Other things—using fabricated travel documents, securing a train ticket by illegal means—such would be forgivable, of course.”

  What did this agent think he could do? Did it matter?

  “May I see her once more?” He reached for the photograph.

  Pyotrovich seemed to hesitate at first.

  Bulgakov studied its shadows, the points of light in her eyes that had captured the flash of the photographer’s bulb. The flatness of the page belied the curves of her face, its texture, in a way that seemed deliberate. Would she describe the ache of bruised flesh? Invite him to touch it himself? Tell of other humiliations suffered? Would she teach him what was worthy of fear? He was willing to learn.

  “It is imperative we secure Ilya Ivanovich. He is a traitor.”

  It seemed like a gift, only she appeared skeptical. Did he trust this man with the moist lips, the close-set eyes? This one responsible for her battered face?

  “All other matters are secondary, in fact,” said Pyotrovich.

  Bulgakov perceived the faint sense of opportunity. Not unlike the man who’d sold him his ticket. Someone savvier would negotiate.

  He studied her eyes. She wasn’t thinking about him. She might never again. “I’ll do anything,” he said.

  Pyotrovich seemed pleased with Bulgakov’s answer. He returned the pictures to the valise. He provided Bulgakov with new papers and a second-class ticket and a story. He was traveling to Irkutsk for the Arts Theater. A fledging provincial theater there required some stewardship; this was as a favor to Stanislawski and wholly sanctioned by the authorities. It was actually plausible. Pyotrovich told him he would be contacted when he arrived.

  Pyotrovich reached into his valise one last time and produced Bulgakov’s pocket watch. The gold shimmered white for a moment. “It can be calming to mark the passing of time while traveling across the steppe,” he advised. Bulgakov returned it to his pocket.

  It seemed to fill the same space as before, as if nothing about its workings had been changed by its passage through these other hands. It still looked like a watch. It could still provide time.

  CHAPTER 29

  Margarita arrived at the Oserlag camp in Irkutsk Oblast, near the town of Tayshet, six weeks after leaving Moscow. No one spoke to her for the first day and a half other than to tell her to move along or that she was taking too much time in the latrine. On the third morning her clothes were stolen. She was one of the first to rise with the buzzer, still only sleeping fitfully. The back of her head ached continuously. At that hour, all within the barracks seemed grey: a fine crystalline snow had blown all night and the small, square-paned windows set high under the eaves perfused the room with a steely light. The box which had held her things at the end of her bed board was empty. She closed its lid, confused, then opened it again. Around her, others were getting up, sighing, groaning in the damp chill. She went to open the one assigned to the woman who slept below her but stopped as realization set in. Again she opened her own. She touched its bottom. There was only sawdust in its corners. The other women seemed quieter than the mornings before, as if they were watching, waiting for her response to the deed. But perhaps she imagined this. A sudden gust of wind outside lifted. Soon the second buzzer would sound, instructing them to assemble in lines to go to the dining hall. She wrapped her arms around her torso. All she had was the one thin shirt she wore. She would certainly die here. The wind rose again as if in agreement. On the other side of the barracks came a woman’s laughter. It disappeared, then more whispers. That was what they all wanted. Margarita pulled the thin blanket from her bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. A few bunks away, a woman stopped and looked at her. In the dim light she could make out only her long thin face, her dark eyes, her collected disinterest.

  The woman on the bed board below groaned loudly and sat up.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Margarita touched the upper board. It seemed strange she’d gone unnoticed but in truth, Margarita had only the vaguest recollection of those preceding days.

  The woman looked at the underside of the board over her head. “Well, you certainly smell better than the last one.” She stood up. She was about Margarita’s age, stocky in build, measurably shorter, with a round face and small eyes. Her skin was pale and chapped from the cold. Her light brown hair had a boyish cut. She squinted at Margarita.

  “What’s wrong—goddammit, you’re crying.” She swung her arm as if she intended to hit something but it veered through the air and stopped awkwardly. Her arm was a stump, amputated below the elbow.

  “I’m not crying.” Margarita stared at her arm in a way she would not have done in her other life. The woman continued to rant.

  “If you cry, you might as well dig a hole and lie down in it.”

  “They stole my clothes,” said Margarita.

  “Who stole them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The woman shook her head strangely, then turned and walked up the central aisle of the barracks. As she passed each bunk, she opened other boxes, pulling out garments and gathering them over her arms. Cries of protest followed her and women went rushing to their boxes. Halfway down, she turned around, and headed back toward Margarita. Several women tried to grab back their clothes but she pushed them off. She stood in front of Margarita again, her arms overflowing. A thin, fortyish woman appeared at her elbow. She handed Margarita’s cardigan back to her, then plucked a blouse from the amputee’s arms.

  “It was ugly, anyway,” she sniffed at Margarita. A handful of other women came forward for similar exchanges. The amputee dropped the rest on the floor and others reclaimed them.

  “I’m a problem-solver,” she said, grinning.

  “You’re a cow,” said one of the women, shaking the dust from her slacks as she retrieved them from the floor.

  The amputee
’s name was Anyuta. She sat across from Margarita at the long benches of the dining hall during breakfast. Women jostled on either side of her, but she refused to budge. She talked while she ate, fixing her gaze on Margarita. It was difficult to focus on what she was saying.

  “You’ve got great eyes,” said Anyuta, the way one might compliment something they’d like to borrow. Anyuta dropped her fork on her plate and covered her own eye with a fist. Her other arm moved in tandem as if wanting to mimic its mate. “I’ve got BBs for eyes,” she said. A woman passing behind Anyuta stopped and looked at Margarita.

  “Anyuta has a new girlfriend,” she announced. Her tone was mocking yet there was something else about her expression. The woman raised her eyebrows, then left. Anyuta didn’t say anything but continued eating. A buzzer sounded. She reached across the table for Margarita’s plate.

  “I’ll take that.” She stacked it on her own without waiting for an answer and carried both dishes away.

  After their meal, the prisoners boarded a bus. The exterior of the windows had been painted in whitewash. Anyuta moved in behind Margarita in line. As they came down the aisle, she grabbed Margarita’s arm, propelled her into an empty seat, and sat down beside her. Margarita studied the window. In places, she could see the blur of dark objects. A car, the building beside them, the vague movements of people. Bubbles in the wash had flaked away leaving scattered pinholes. She leaned closer to peer through them but saw only crisp fragments. Ahead, the windows around the driver were clear. She lifted up to look but was suddenly blocked by the head of a woman who sat down in front of her.

  “There’s not much to see,” said Anyuta, almost apologetically. “Just a chickenshit town.”

  Were they going to the town?

  Anyuta shook her head. To the factories beyond. They were building dormitories for the workers.

  The bus began to move. Shadows passed across the white blur.

  “What’d you do?” Anyuta’s voice was close to her ear.

  At first Margarita thought she was asking of her occupation.

  “My sister’s husband died,” said Margarita. “I tried to sell his clothes on the black market.” She’d made up this story before arriving at the camp. “We needed the money.”

  Through the window dark shapes flickered across the paint followed by stretches of only white. Forests and fields? She began to feel queasy and closed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry about your sister’s husband,” said Anyuta.

  Margarita turned back to her. Anyuta had been staring at her hair; she averted her eyes. In the white light cast by the wash, she seemed more acutely weathered than before.

  Margarita asked why she was there.

  Anyuta made a face.

  “My father was a kulak,” she said. She smiled suddenly. “Do I look like a kulak’s daughter?” She studied the window as if watching a scene unfold. The empty sleeve of Anyuta’s jacket was partially collapsed; its end was folded over and fastened with a straight pin. It rested against her trouser leg opposite its fuller mate as if unaware.

  She made a sound like a small sigh.

  “He’d take me fishing,” she said. “I was small and afraid of their teeth.” She shook the empty sleeve. “He’d pull the hooks from their mouths, then he’d string them on a pole and carry them to the village. He’d call on everyone to admire ‘Anyuta’s catch.’ As if he was proud.” She glanced at Margarita. “I was bothersome for my mother. I talked too much.” She smiled. “I still mind their teeth, you know.”

  The bus slowed and the forms through the window took on angular shapes. Buildings. A car. This was the town. Moisture from the breath and perspiration of so many bodies had condensed on the inner surfaces and with the slowing of the bus, voices from the prisoners behind and in front of them began to lift in protest to the stifling air. On both sides, arms went up and windowpanes were dropped down. Crisp snowy images of brick and planking and glass darted past. A brief chorus of gladness rose up as the cold whiffled through the bus. The guard who sat next to the driver came down the aisle waving a baton from side to side and ordered the windows shut.

  “No one’s supposed to see us,” said Anyuta.

  In his wake, from the front to the back, the windows rose up again. Margarita half-stood and watched as the world slid away. Once they were closed, she sat down. Rivulets of water now streaked across the glass. The air was cold and damp.

  She’d heard of prisoner jobs in the towns, outside the camps and the typical work sites. Jobs with less supervision. She would have to get one. She would have to be seen as trust-worthy. She studied the empty sleeve beside her. Perhaps Anyuta could help her. Anyuta the problem-solver.

  “Is it hard to get a job in the town?” she wondered aloud.

  There were always such jobs, Anyuta told her. The people who took them would try to escape and get caught. She held up her hands as if firing a machine gun. “Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch,” she said, sweeping it at the seat in front of them.

  The woman across the aisle looked at Anyuta then away as quickly.

  “They always get caught,” Anyuta repeated. She touched Margarita’s sleeve. “Don’t get caught,” her BB eyes pinned her back. “Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch,” she warned.

  CHAPTER 30

  In the summer of 1826, Prince Sergei Volkonsky and the other Decembrists walked six thousand kilometers from St. Petersburg to the silver mines of Nerchinsk, a penal colony near the Russian-Chinese border. One foot of each man was shackled to the same-such foot of the prisoner preceding; the alternate foot was chained to one in the rear of him. Thusly, in lockstep, they came to know each weedy hillock, each crusted rut of the road that was Levitan’s Vladimirka. The Russian steppe extended an indecipherable distance in all directions until it met with the towering sky. There it formed an encircling seam of which they were forever captive, low and at its center. After the second week, they rarely looked beyond the edge of the road and when they did, it only served to renew their utter despair for the years that remained of their still young lives. There could be no better prison, said Volkonsky to his friend, Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, chained to his rear. No stone wall could so completely extract all hope from a man’s breast. Trubetskoy did not respond. The failure of their revolt, their failure to wrest from the Tsar even those most modest concessions for representational governance no longer caused him to wonder. Indeed, how could the Tsar, no different from any Russian, understand freedom, trapped in a land that went on forever yet never changed?

  Ilya said nothing when Bulgakov first opened the door of their shared compartment. He’d been reading the paper; it came to rest in his lap as Bulgakov struggled to enter with his luggage. It seemed to Bulgakov that he himself was the more surprised. He consulted his ticket. He was in the correct berth. How was he to explain this cosmic alignment?

  “This isn’t entirely coincidental,” said Bulgakov. He shut the compartment door. “When you told me of her destination, I immediately requested relocation to a nearby town.”

  “Have you been to Irkutsk in January? You may rethink your fortune.” Ilya resumed his reading. He seemed too accepting of this happenstance and while he may have found Bulgakov’s explanation absurdly thin, he did not appear to consider him a threat.

  The compartment was small and clean, though there was a musty odor. Its walls were paneled in honey-colored wood. Two benches faced each other with a short table between. The longer of the two would serve as a bed; above it, a narrow door concealed a second berth which could be prepared as well. The window was hung in velvet drapes; beyond, a wintry Moscow rushed by. The train jerked suddenly and Bulgakov reached for the wall beside him.

  If Pyotrovich could detain Bulgakov on the platform, why would he let Ilya proceed? “Aren’t you afraid of being caught?” Bulgakov asked. He’d lowered his voice.

  Ilya paused before answering. “There is no crime in riding a train.”

&nbs
p; Pyotrovich would want to catch him in the act, convict him of the greater crime.

  “I’m visiting my brother,” said Ilya.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed you had a brother.”

  “He would likewise be surprised.” Ilya shook his head at the page as though amused. “It seems a company of workers, led by an up-and-coming Stakhanovite, worked for days on end to surpass all timelines for the laying of pipes between a reservoir and their town’s cisterns. Unfortunately, they connected the lines to a sewage tank. Thousands were sickened.”

  “There may be opportunities to visit her,” said Bulgakov. “I’ve heard such can be true.”

  “I’m surprised this was published,” said Ilya, frowning at the byline. “Stupidity is not generally a problem here. Ah—of course—he was revealed as an enemy of the People. Wreckers we have by the thousands, idiots nary a one.”

  “I’m willing to wait for her,” said Bulgakov.

  With this declaration, Ilya reassessed him. His expression seemed something akin to sympathy. He raised the page again, as though to hide it.

  “I can ask the porter about moving to a different compartment,” said Bulgakov.

  “There is no need,” said Ilya.

  Bulgakov recognized the suitcase on the rack above; the one with the hidden compartment. It seemed then there were three of them traveling together: two men and their shared purpose. The newspaper fluttered slightly. After a while, there came the sound of snoring.

  Beyond the outskirts of Moscow there were provincial towns. Beyond these were villages strung along the rails, some with only a handful of unpainted huts. Occasionally and in a seemingly arbitrary manner, the train would stop and allow its passengers to disembark. Older folk, women mainly, clad in layers of shapeless black cloth, waited on the platform with baskets of prepared foods at their feet. Bulgakov tried to engage them with simple questions, of their livelihood, their families. They answered by indicating with their fingers the number of coins required for a sampling of food. As if it was inconceivable they might share the same language of the travelers. Bulgakov wondered of the content of their days when the rails were quiet. They wouldn’t wonder of him, he knew, as though, like his language, his life was impossible to comprehend. After a day even such scraps of civilization were gone and there was only hour after hour of empty steppe.