Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  Jane’s eyes moved back and forth from the novel to the diary and back again, translating, comparing. Masha hadn’t worked on Dmitri Arkadyevich with her husband. It had been copied by Anton Bek, the gray-eyed peasant boy Karkov had plucked from the fields when he found out how well he could read and write. Masha hadn’t seen so much as a draft of it until it was published. Karkov could have talked to her about what she had thought and felt, except that Jane was quite certain they were not, at that point in their marriage, having that kind of intimate conversation. The only alternative was that he had read Masha’s diary—read it and stolen what he had found there! Tolstoy was known to have mined Sofya Andreyevna’s diaries, but for content only, as far as Jane knew; he hadn’t lifted whole sentences practically verbatim. She remembered what Sigelman had said: “I wouldn’t overrate her influence.” What would Sigelman—what would Shombauer—say to this?

  The moon rose and the house grew colder. How must Masha have felt when she found out? Jane thought of all the ways Karkov had used his wife—all the ways men had used women for centuries: for sex, for meals, for clothing, to take care of relatives and visitors. The world had changed a great deal, thank god, even if it still had a long way to go.

  Something startled her then—a sound that she could not at once place. It was a kind of bleat from behind her that, turning, she realized was Maisie in her room across the hall. She looked at the clock and saw that it was almost one. It was cold and still in the study, dark except for the pool of lamplight on the desk. Maisie bleated again, softly. Jane switched off the lamp and went to stand beside her door. She turned the knob and crept into the room where the girl lay with her eyes shut, squirming, her bottom in the air. Jane resettled the blanket and stroked the warm bird-boned back. She could feel the rigid muscles relax under her hand. Maisie turned onto her side and clutched her stuffed duck, her knees tucked up to her chin and her hair splayed across her face. She was so perfect, Jane thought, when she was sleeping.

  Chapter Four

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Jane used what scraps of time she could scrounge to look for more concurrences between Masha’s diaries and Karkov’s novels. It was late November and freezing cold, though it hadn’t snowed much. The grass lay brown and shriveled along the pitted sidewalks, and ice crept slowly out across the lakes. In Jane and Billy’s house the storm windows rattled in their frames. Through them they could see the narrow yard, the chain-link fence lined with frosted arborvitae, and the cold black stone of the Moravian church beyond.

  Jane read and reread the slim published volume of Masha’s diary excerpts, as well as the printouts of the passages she had typed into her laptop when she’d been doing her dissertation research. She finished Dmitri Arkadyevich, trying to keep Masha’s words in her head as she read, but nothing jumped out. She began to doubt she’d found anything in the first place and had to go back several times and look at the concurrent passages side by side. Whenever she had the words laid out in front of her like that, the excitement returned and she felt sure she couldn’t have stumbled on a single instance of something, nor some random accident or illusion of translation. (She’d looked up the passage from the novel in the original Russian to make sure.) But by the next day, the uncertainty would be back.

  There was no time to reread any of Karkov’s other books. The end-of-semester push was on for both Jane and Billy, and on top of that, Maisie was having trouble sleeping. It seemed to have started suddenly, but maybe it wasn’t really sudden. Maybe it had been coming on for weeks. In retrospect the somnolent whimperings and the extended bedtime rituals—the repeated, plaintive calls for more kisses, for forgotten stuffed animals, for the exorcism of shadowy monsters behind the door—were perhaps not events in themselves but coming attractions for the horror movie that was playing now.

  Now Maisie was up two or three times a night and sometimes more. It was like having an infant again, the upstairs hallway a nightmare path more familiar in the dark than in daylight, buzzing with dream fragments and the endless refrains of recorded lullabies. Jane and Billy were beyond tired: they were exhausted, haggard, fuddled with fatigue. Falling behind in her work, Jane worried about tenure, even though she wouldn’t be up for it for years. Still, what if she had moved her family halfway across the country only to fail them? What if they had to pick up and move all over again? She pictured herself at some third-rate university in Tuscaloosa or Albert Lea, teaching four preparations a semester. She could see the sparse, understaffed library, smell the odor of low standards and mimeograph machines. Otto Sigelman stopped by to smoke his pipe in Jane’s office now and then, and he seldom failed to make some sly, gleeful comment about new hires who lost focus and failed to make the grade.

  “A couple of years ago we had an assistant professor, Sarah Darling,” Sigelman said one afternoon, crossing one stumpy leg comfortably over the other, his thin gray hair sticking out in all directions the way Maisie’s did first thing in the morning. “Very serious girl. Very hardworking, though I personally didn’t think she was too smart, Princeton or no Princeton. Short hair—cut like a man’s, you know—and lots of earrings, everywhere. Not just in her ears either, from what I understand.” Sigelman paused to suck on his pipe and squint nearsightedly at Jane, who kept her expression carefully neutral.

  “The students fawned on her, as you might expect. The girl students worshipped her and the boy students wanted to fuck her. Well, maybe the girl students wanted to fuck her, too, who’s to say, and as it turns out they would have had a better shot at it—ha! At least until poor Sarah fell in love with a theater professor from Superior. Superior—can you imagine! She didn’t even teach drama, this northern love goddess. She taught acting. As though anyone attending UW Superior could have the slightest chance of success as an actor!”

  Here Jane could not resist interrupting, “Didn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger go to UW Superior? Or was it Stevens Point? You’d have to admit he’s somewhat successful.”

  Sigelman lowered his scraggly eyebrows. “If by successful you mean wealthy,” he said, “I wonder how you rate your chances of success in any field.”

  “When and if I become a full professor, I expect to be able to afford a decent car,” Jane replied, but Sigelman ignored her.

  “Poor Sarah Darling,” he continued. “She started spending all her time on Interstate 94 and, of course, in bed, rather than doing her job. In what morsels of time she had left over, she was writing a book, a study of images of women. By which she meant body parts. Breasts and vaginas as seen in, I don’t know, flowers, teacups. Snowdrifts. That kind of crap. Of all people she picked me to show it to! She wanted my advice.”

  “Which was?” Jane asked. She looked up at the clock on the wall, wondering how long Sigelman was planning to stay. His pipe was almost out, but sometimes he didn’t notice.

  “I told her it scarcely mattered that the windows didn’t open up here on the fourteenth floor, because she had already as good as committed suicide!” Sigelman’s face lit up at the wit of his own remark, his eyes glowing with malicious light. Then he took his pipe out of his teeth, frowned, dumped it out into the teacup he’d placed in readiness on Jane’s desk, and began to fill the bowl with fresh tobacco. “You didn’t like my story,” he said, glancing up at her.

  “Oh, was I supposed to like it?”

  “You’re not an idiot,” Sigelman told her. “That’s a compliment! You just need to work on a thing or two.”

  “You mean, like my sense of humor?”

  Sigelman coughed and spat into his dirty handkerchief. Outside the window the sky was already growing dim. Lights were coming on in the concrete and brick buildings spread out below. Cars crept by on University Avenue, headlights sallow in the afternoon gloom. “Maybe you missed the point of the story,” he said. “The point is—”

  “I know what the point is,” Jane said.

  “The point,” Sigelman said, “is that nineteenth-century literature was written by men, mostly about men, and largely for a
n audience of men.”

  “And that anyone who disagrees with you is by definition a fool,” Jane added.

  Sigelman smiled his ugly smile. “Poor Sarah,” he said again. “She was a nice girl, really. And not unattractive. A love affair of that kind is almost never a good idea for a young scholar. Sex itself, of course, can loosen the body and focus the mind. I personally have found frequent sex to be conducive to some of my best work.”

  “Are you making an offer, Otto,” Jane said lightly, “or just trying to see if you can make me uncomfortable?”

  Sigelman laughed.

  Despite all the things that were distasteful about him, Jane liked Sigelman. The way he talked was a knife stuck in the balloon of academic-speak, and keeping up with him conversationally was exhilarating. Her other colleagues were pleasant enough and not unfriendly, but the truth was they bored her a little with their gossip and their chatter about conference hotels and their children’s soccer leagues. As though determined to convey that they were just ordinary people despite their Ph.D.s, they seldom talked about literature. Jane preferred Sigelman, cranky as he was, who (when he wasn’t indulging in cautionary tales) would talk about The Lime Trees or Dmitri Arkadyevich for an hour or more, sucking on his pipe, his eyes moistening, as though the characters were old friends from better days. Sigelman, who was almost never boring.

  “Yes, sex is all right,” he said again. “It’s love you have to watch out for. Obsessive love. You’re probably safe, though, I’d guess. Happily married how long now? Four, five years? Long enough for the dullness to set in.”

  Jane didn’t answer. The dullness, she thought. It sounded dire and inescapable, like the scurvy, or the change.

  “If you’re going to be obsessive about anything, it had better be your work,” Sigelman advised. “That’s the most rewarding thing, anyway.”

  “What are you working on, Otto?” Jane asked, quite ready to change the subject.

  “I’m pursuing an idea or two,” he answered vaguely, running a hand across his brown scalp. “Of course, what one wishes for at this point is new material. The archive at Pushkinskii dom, the Leninka, the Newberry, the Beinecke (not the same, of course, since Alexis died)—everyone’s been through them all. Everyone scrabbling like dogs over the same old bones! Still, Stephen Olen will die one day.” Stephen Olen was the grandson of Grigory and Masha’s son Konstantin, the one who had married the American diplomat’s daughter and smuggled his father’s papers out of the country.

  “What about Galina Pisareva?” Jane asked.

  Sigelman waved the name away. “She’s got nothing,” he said. “I should know.”

  He clearly wanted her to ask about this, so Jane let it pass. “But you think Olen might have some papers of interest? I thought the family had donated everything long ago.”

  “I’m willing to bet he does,” Sigelman said with a cold voracity, his blue eyes glinting like chips of ice. “Difficult to know for certain as you can hardly get a civil word out of the man. Still, I hear his health is poor.”

  Jane sat up straighter, bothered by this remark as she had not been by his misogyny or his attempts to shock her. She wondered suddenly if she had underestimated him.

  “So, Sarah Darling didn’t get tenure?” she said, rearranging some papers on her desk, trying to convey the air of someone with much to do, which she certainly was.

  “Well, it was a close thing,” Sigelman said. “In the end the department decided not to recommend her by just one vote.” He held up his stubby forefinger, its horny nail cut short and blunt like the butt of an ax, to show her: one.

  * * *

  That night Billy had a late review session and didn’t come home for dinner, and after the review session he called to say he was going out for a beer with a couple of other students. After she put Maisie to bed, Jane began rereading War and Peace, which she would be teaching the following week. She loved Tolstoy, but she also resisted her own feelings of admiration, resenting the way he’d had the world at his feet while Karkov—admittedly not quite as talented—had always gotten so much less attention than he deserved.

  Tonight, though, it was hard to concentrate. She found herself feeling about the book the way so many of her students did: nine hundred thirty-six pages! How was she supposed to get through all of that? It was unbelievable how much time and energy teaching, and the preparation for teaching, required. Certainly it was satisfying work some of the time, but it wasn’t where her heart lay. She longed for the Christmas break when she could finally get down to Chicago, get her hands on the actual volumes of Masha’s diaries. It was hard not to daydream about what she might find there: evidence of suicide, or more passages that Karkov had stolen, or who knew what? If nothing else, Jane had an idea for an article about images of nature in Masha’s writing and how her descriptions of animals (birds, snakes, deer, mice) reflected the place of women in nineteenth-century Russian society. “The Bird in the Nest” she could call it. There were a few passages in the published excerpts and in her notes she could use, but there was no substitute for concentrated work at the archive itself.

  The moment Billy walked in the door Jane said, “I’m thinking about going down to Chicago for a few days during the winter break!” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she knew they had been the wrong ones. Why hadn’t she said hello first? Why hadn’t she gotten up from the couch and kissed him? “Hello,” she said belatedly. “Did you get a lot done tonight?”

  This, too, seemed wrong, implying that it was only all right for him to be gone all evening if he had used his time productively. (But if she’d asked, instead, “Did you have fun?” wouldn’t that have been just as bad, suggesting he was out pleasing himself while she was at home stuck with the household drudgery?)

  He looked at her sharply. Or maybe the look wasn’t really sharp but only seemed so. It was five degrees outside and he had walked up from the bus stop, so his face wasn’t as mobile as usual: maybe that was all it was. His face was changing as he approached thirty, thinning out so you could see the structure of it, the bones asserting themselves beneath the flesh.

  “Speaking of the break,” he said, “I’m going to do a three-week - internship at this environmental law firm. Vince introduced me to one of the partners.”

  “Oh!” Jane said. “That’s great!”

  * * *

  A dream seemed to have found Maisie. There was a repeated nightmare in which a tiger (Maisie pronounced it “tigow”) played a starring role, and also a box, though Jane could never get any clear idea what kind of box it was.

  “Do you think it’s a big box?” she asked Billy. “Open or closed?” They were in bed, reading for a few minutes before they slept. That was all they did in bed, lately: read and sleep.

  “What difference does it make?” Billy said.

  The brown reed shades moved noticeably as cold air seeped in around the windows. Cobwebs hung from the corners of the ceiling, and the heavy secondhand oak bureau listed on the warped floor. In the distance a train whistled.

  “I’m just wondering,” Jane said. “What do you think she’s actually frightened of? Monsters? Ghosts?” Did Maisie know about ghosts yet?

  “She’s frightened of the tiger and the box,” Billy said. He turned a page of his magazine, his voice strained with the effort of patience.

  “But what do they mean?” Jane persisted. “What do they signify?” Stop talking, she told herself. Just close your mouth.

  “Jane,” Billy said. “It’s not a literary dream. It’s just a plain old nightmare.” He tossed the magazine on the floor and switched off the light.

  The moaning and the rattling grew louder as Maisie, like a hiker with a bell traversing bear-infested woods, tried to ward off the dangers lurking behind the trees. The fiery-eyed dream tiger and the mysterious, implacable box.

  Jane threw back the covers to get up.

  Billy reached out and held on to her arm. It might have been the first time he’d touched her all day, an
d she found to her distress that her instinct was to flinch.

  “This is insane!” he said. “She needs to go to sleep!”

  “She can’t sleep!” Jane said. “She’s afraid.”

  She got up and pulled her bathrobe around her as she strode down the hall. The cold floor squeaked under her bare feet, like ice getting ready to crack. Jane lifted Maisie out of the bed. “Sshh,” she said. “Mommy’s here.”

  “Tigow, tigow!” Maisie cried. Tears streamed down her face.

  Jane sat in the rocking chair and held Maisie close. What was wrong with Billy? What cold chunk of adamant had lodged in his chest where his heart used to be? “Sshh, sweetheart,” she said. “There’s no tiger.”

  “Tigow,” Maisie said, pitifully.

  “No, no tigows,” Jane said.

  “Not tigow!” Maisie wailed. “Tigow! Tigow!”

  “Tiger,” Jane said.

  “Wight.” Maisie sank like a rag doll against Jane’s chest, a mollified god.

  * * *

  Jane had lunch at a coffee shop on State Street with Felicia Noone to discuss Felicia’s thesis, which Jane had agreed to supervise. “But you can’t cover all Karkov’s female characters,” Jane warned when Felicia sketched out her ideas, heavily influenced by Heldt, about how women in Karkov were idealized and demonized simultaneously. “Why don’t you focus on three or four?” She envied Felicia, who, like Sigelman, could spend every moment on her work if she wanted to. Not that she did want to. She had other ways of spending her time. Sometimes Jane wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. She remembered how, when she was pregnant, hours would slip away while she dozed in a hard chair in the stifling library or stared at the computer screen, unable to bring her mind to bear on the words floating there like foam on the surface of the ocean. How terrible it had been—time lying all around her and she unable to gather it up, to make it hers, to put it to any decent use! Time like fruit left rotting on the vine.