August 12
So much superstition living alongside so much faith! Some will give their last kopek to the priest when he comes through the village, sanctifying unions that may already have borne the fruit of two or three children. Others dispense with Christianity altogether and worship the old gods. For them, the rivers and streams are full of rusalki and other nymphs, and the moon waxes and wanes at the pleasure of the old Baba.
Yesterday I found a snake living under the chicken coop. Ivan Stepanov will kill it when he finds it, but I cannot bring myself to mention it to him. For Evil dwells among us—who dares to deny it? It is only through the Devil that we can know that God exists, for we see the works of Satan everywhere around us, while God has hidden His face.
No more concurrences, however, or evidence of despair.
“Ten minutes for items from the vault,” came the call of one of the desk assistants.
Jane looked up and was surprised to see that she was one of the last readers left. Andy Quinn was gone, as was everyone at the tables close to hers. Hastily, she gathered up her belongings, separating her own papers from the archive materials. Getting to her feet, she flipped through the last pages of the volume she had been reading, skimming to get a sense of what came next. The pages did not flow evenly under her thumb, however, but flopped together at the end. Something was behind them. Something was jammed between the last page and the cover. Jane flipped to the back to see what it was and found that some papers had been wedged in, age adhering them to the inside cover. Brittle, yellowed pages, folded into quarters. Jane eased them free and unfolded them carefully.
Masha’s handwriting.
“Dear Varya—”
Jane’s eyes skated over the first few sentences, taking nothing in. It was a letter, apparently, from Masha to her sister at court in Moscow. “Items for the vault,” the desk assistant repeated.
June 11, 1884
Dear Varya,
I received your letter yesterday, and although I thank you for your kind offer, I cannot spare Katya just now. It is true as you say that she has been through a difficult time these last months—largely through my own fault, as no one knows better than I! But it seems to me that to send her away just at the moment is not the best course. We have wasted already too much time each trying to make his own way through the darkness, and now I feel strongly that we must hold together. Nor can I satisfy your other concern and account to you for my recent illness or what you call my “peculiar behavior.”
You inquire as to whether the “entire incident” has passed from my mind, but it has not. In fact, every detail of those days seems burned into my memory, and I am convinced I will never forget a moment of it. I do not, of course, talk about it with anyone, but it haunts me—as though it underlay everything as I move about the house. The hard dirt road seems to lie just under my shoe at every step. I remember the first night when I awoke in the dark and the room seemed to pulse with the sound of a voice so deep it was beyond hearing except as a kind of distant thunder. I rose from my bed and drew the curtains. The light of the full moon flooded in, and so I did not need even a candle to dress.
Outside it was cool and the wind moved the new leaves of the birches. I walked across the lawn and out into the meadow and down to the river in the dark, my feet seeming to know where they would go. It did not feel like walking, but rather as though I were gliding through the whispering grass. Yes, yes, the grass said with its ten thousand tongues, as I moved through it in the dark down to the water’s edge.
At the river, the water was black and gleamed like obsidian in the moonlight. I sat down on a rock and watched it—moving and yet seemingly still, like the earth itself, which feels solid under our feet, yet which we are told is actually a sphere of rock and fire spinning through space. I thought how cold the water would be if one plunged into it—a searing cold like fire that would cleanse me at once of misery and mortality—and for a moment it seemed that this was what had called me out of my warm bed—the dark voice of the river.
After I had sat there for some time—minutes or hours, I could not say—I saw something rising out of the dark water. It was like an emanation of the water itself—a gliding blackness which slid up onto the bank and paused, then coiled and lay still. It was a snake—a large one. Probably it and I, if laid side by side and nose to nose, would have covered just about the same amount of ground.
“Ma’am?”
Jane looked up. The desk assistant stood in front of her, a young man in a blue shirt smiling apologetically.
“Yes?” Jane blinked, seeing him indistinctly. It was as though she were in a fish tank and he were outside the glass.
“It’s after five thirty. All materials from the vault need to be returned.”
“Yes,” Jane said automatically. “Yes, I’m done.” Her eyes slid down to the page again.
It seemed to me that the snake was watching me—waiting to see what I would do. It flicked its forked tongue in the moonlight as though it would taste what sort of creature I was. It raised its head and, although remaining as silent as the moon, it seemed as though all the sounds of the night—the wind in the grass and the creaking trees and the cold water flowing over rock—were funneled through it, and I picked it up and put it in the basket I was carrying. The snake was
“You need to stop, now.”
But Jane couldn’t stop. The sound of Russian roared in her ears like the ocean into which the drab syllables of English fell like pebbles.
The snake was heavy and silken like a woman’s breast—and yet strong and muscled too, like a muzhik’s back. And so I felt that I had found what I
A cold hand touched her arm. Jane looked up to see who had gotten into the fish tank with her. It wasn’t the rosy-cheeked desk assistant but an older man—perhaps fifty—gray-haired with pale, graying skin and a beaky nose, his eyes sharp behind his red metal-framed half-glasses. “I need you to return the material now,” he said.
Jane stared at him, blinking in confusion. “I just—” she said.
“Now.”
She folded the letter and put it on the table, coming to her senses. “I’m sorry,” she said.
* * *
She took the El back to Evanston and walked from the station in a daze. Masha had, apparently, left the house secretly in the night, just as Karkov’s Snake Woman had! She had found a snake by the river and picked it up. What had happened to her after that? How was it possible? It had never crossed Jane’s mind that parts of the Snake Woman’s story other than the suicide might have had any basis in fact, but apparently they had.
And what was the letter doing in the diary? Jane wondered about this as she turned the corner and saw the lights glowing in the window of Helen’s house, none of the curtains drawn, the house ablaze like a beacon in the darkness. Could it have been put there in later years by an unknown hand? Was it only a draft? Had it, possibly, never actually been sent?
Immediately inside the front door, Helen was waiting for her. She was talking, but Jane had missed the beginning of the sentence and couldn’t follow what she was saying. Her tone was urgent, and from the expression on her face, you would have thought Jane was a child who had taken a bad tumble from a bicycle or had a close encounter with a vicious dog.
“I was out,” Helen said. “He left a message on the machine.” She pushed something toward Jane—a slip of paper with a phone number on it. Jane looked at it blankly, as she had at first looked at Masha’s letter blankly, unable to take in its meaning. “I tried your cell,” Helen said, “but it must have been turned off.”
“I forgot to charge it,” Jane said. Then her heart seemed to stop beating, and her skin went cold. The area code was 608—home—but the number itself was unfamiliar, ending ominously in a triplet of zeros. She knew what it was, what it had to be, as Helen, obviously, had also known. She was in the kitchen now. The phone was in her hand, the plastic receiver once white but gone gray with fingerprints and grime, sticky with jam.
&nbs
p; “University Hospital,” said the voice on the other end.
Jane’s heart thumped and her fingers felt stiff and clumsy. Words tumbled out, fragmentary, confused. Her voice seemed to have become detached from her, struggling on its own to convey the necessary information like the frantic body of a decapitated chicken. “This is Jane Levitsky. I got a message. My husband—I don’t know—I’m not at home. Shaw, that’s the name. Maisie Shaw, Margaret Shaw. Would they be in a room? How do I. . . ?”
The voice on the other end was calm, as though Jane had asked for the billing office. “Yes, Mrs. Shaw. Just one moment, please.” The tapping of computer keys. Then, “I’ll connect you.”
There wasn’t any air. Jane felt her heart in her throat, a tightness, a suffocating pulsing. She thought, So this is what people mean when they say that. Then the connection was made, there was a ring, and the phone was picked up.
“Hello?”
It was Billy’s voice.
Jane worked to push some words out of her mouth. “Billy—it’s me. I got your message. What happened? What’s wrong?”
“She’s okay. Jane? She’s going to be fine. Okay?” Billy’s voice was loud, distinct and definite. Stern. “She was coughing. A lot. She was having trouble breathing. Not—Just lying there, trying to breathe. She won’t, they said there won’t be—the doctors. Any brain damage.”
Jane could not speak. All she could hear of what Billy had said were the two last words. “Is she okay?” she asked. And again, “Is she okay?”
“She’s right here. They put her in an oxygen tent for a while. She has some kind of virus with initials. Respiratory something.”
“Is she all right?” Jane asked again. She felt if she asked it enough perhaps Billy would say something that would make her believe his answer. What this might be, she could not imagine.
“She’s all right. Jane? Listen to me. She’s all right. She just, she has to stay here a few days. I think—”
She interrupted him. “I have to go. If I leave right now—I think there’s a bus at seven.”
* * *
There was, but Jane didn’t catch it. Helen drove her to the station. She got a neighbor to watch the kids and drove Jane into town, but it was rush hour. The traffic was terrible. Five minutes late and the bus had gone. Jane wanted to scream. She wanted to throw herself to the floor like a toddler herself. She wanted to propel herself by the force of her will backward through time. If the neighbor had gotten there a little faster, if they hadn’t missed the light at McCormick Boulevard, if the sun hadn’t fallen at the angle it did, its glare creating havoc at the entrance to Lake Shore Drive!
If she hadn’t found the letter, she would have been back at Helen’s house a few minutes earlier.
It was no good. There was nothing she could do except buy a ticket for the nine-thirty bus and sit on a molded plastic chair to wait, her suitcase between her knees.
“Come back to Evanston,” Helen urged. “Have dinner with us. I’ll get you back here in plenty of time.”
Jane shook her head. She could barely speak. “I’ll stay here,” she said, and Helen kissed her, a light, dry kiss, full of regret, like a moth brushing against her cheek, before disappearing back into her incomprehensible life.
Jane was hungry, but getting out of the chair seemed impossible. Her limbs were heavy and unwilling. When she saw the pay phones against the wall, however, her muscles seemed to come to life all by themselves, propelling her up off the seat and across the floor.
The phones were filthy and defaced, studded with chewing gum. The first had no dial tone and the second would not accept her phone card, but using the third she finally got connected to room 3308 and listened as the phone in Maisie’s room rang and rang without anyone picking up. What did that mean?
She sat down again. The fluorescent lights buzzed, a baby cried, an old woman shuffled across the floor dragging her belongings behind her in a bulging garbage bag. Jane, who under other circumstances would have looked away, stared. The homeless woman was stooped over, not tall to begin with, her long white hair knotted and wild. She wore a faded, shapeless cardigan over a long skirt that dragged behind her with a horrible swishing sound as she went, sweeping the filthy floor. She looked up and saw Jane watching her, changed direction and hobbled over to where Jane sat, stopped in front of her, and held out a dirty purse. Jane saw how hollow her cheeks were, although her stomach seemed to bulge under the layers of clothing. She had no eyebrows over her yellow eyes and she smelled like hard-boiled eggs and filthy wool, thawing mud and decay. Jane fumbled in her black leather satchel for her wallet and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. She knew it was bribery—attempted bribery of a God in whom she did not believe. Of Fate. Of the hag, Baba Yaga, spinning out the length of each life in her hut behind her fence of bone.
The old woman looked at the money. She looked at Jane with her yellow eyes. Jane looked back. She thought of the slow stream of pilgrims who came to Dve Reckhi and were offered shelter in the kennels, of Karkov’s Snake Woman walking the dirt road, her clothes yellow with dust, her children crying for her, wondering where she was.
Russian women fended off witch’s curses with milkweed collected on Saint Nicholas Day, and by wearing belts, and with the juice of radishes or rainwater collected during a storm’s first thunderclap. Jane reached into her purse again and found an emery board, a pack of gum, a crumpled tissue, and a flyer for a lecture on poetry of the Soviet era. She took the gum and handed it to the woman, her hand accidentally grazing the hag’s bony, filthy hand.
The street woman grinned, showing her shriveled gums. She unwrapped three pieces, shoved them into her maw, and sucked, throwing the paper wrappers to the floor. Her toothless gums made loud, wet, slurping noises as she moved away, leaving in her wake the smells of urine and mildew. Jane thought of Baba Yaga’s hut scurrying through the forest on hen’s feet. Tangled rye was Baba Yaga’s hair, blini shingled her roof.
Masha had written:
When I grow old, I will be a joyful crone. No children to look after, no husband, no household, no servants, no guests no carpets no stables! Only the flax to spin and the stove to feed. Only myself to please, and no fear of either life or death. Yes, old age is the recompense for enduring a woman’s life! If one knows what to do with it.
But she hadn’t even made it to forty.
* * *
The bus was nearly empty. Jane had a double seat to herself but she couldn’t sleep. Out the window the sky was dark and dull, crisscrossed with the lights of airplanes. On the highway they passed an identical Van Galder coach going the other way, bound for Chicago, and as it flashed by, Jane felt she could see her former self inside it, yesterday’s self, sharp and self-absorbed, thrilled with anticipation. How could that self and this one be the same? How could she have been so preoccupied with Masha’s life when her own was breaking open?
But no, Billy had said that Maisie would be all right. He had said—what had his words been? There won’t be any brain damage. Jane shut her eyes and tried to calm down. She opened them again and looked at her watch. It was 9:55. The bus was scheduled to arrive in Madison at one A.M. She knew she should try to get some sleep.
When one of her children was sick, Masha remained by the bedside day and night. When Vanyushka was dying, she nursed him round the clock. When Katya fell from her horse, when the twins had measles, when Kostya’s delicate chest kept him indoors one winter, Masha was not off in Kovo or Moscow, but home at Dve Reckhi where she belonged. Or so Jane had always believed. She thought of the children in Lady of the Snakes—of Masha’s real-life children—waking one day to their mother’s absence. In the morning, Tanya opened her eyes and saw the sun streaming in the window. It fell in a golden band across her bed, thick as a tree trunk. Something was odd. That was how Karkov’s final novel began. She thought of Joyce Winterson saying, “I always thought Maria Petrovna had a ruthless streak.”
They were almost in Beloit now. Jane promised herself that if Maisie
would be all right, she would work less and spend more time at home with her. She wouldn’t travel. She would stay in Madison where she could see Maisie every day. But a high, single-minded, almost childish voice inside her head chimed in, What about the letter, then? The letter, tasted but not consumed? What about other manuscripts tucked away in odd corners and library shelves and the backs of closets all over the world—not just in Chicago but in New York, London, Moscow, Helsinki? Were they all to be lost to her now, lids closing them away in leaden chests without keys? Words she would never read until someone else found them, plumbed them, published them?
From her bed Tanya could see dust motes floating in a band of sunlight. The air was hot. Usually her mother woke her early, when the sky was pale like an egg about to crack open and release the day. She turned her head and saw that her brother Fedya was awake. His round, pink face wore a worried look. His brow was furrowed and his gray eyes were like water in a storm. Beyond him, in the bed nearest the door, her other brother Ilya slept peacefully, curled up with his knees to his chin. He always kicked the covers off in the night.
“Fedya,” Tanya whispered. “Something’s wrong.”
But no, this was nonsense. This was melodrama. There was no God to receive Jane’s bargaining, to let Maisie live or die according to what Jane would give up. If there were—If there were, she would give up anything, of course! Her own life! But that wasn’t the way the world worked. She would not have to relinquish her work, Masha, her quest for tenure, giving papers at conferences. Her constituted existence.
She sighed, shifting on the hard seat. If she had been at home when it happened, what could she have done? Billy had been there. Billy had done everything she could have done. The bus sped north. It began to snow. The big wipers clacked and the tires hissed. Across the fields, distant lightning illuminated farmhouses and groves of stark, leafless trees that vanished the next instant into the purple darkness as though they had never been. Thundersnow.
Lady of the Snakes Page 14
