Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  Down in the kitchens and from out in the yard, Tanya could hear people shouting, pots clanging, dogs barking, footsteps running. In his bed by the door, Ilya woke up suddenly and, hearing the commotion, began to cry. It was as though the whole estate had awakened suddenly, like Ilya, into tears. Tanya felt that, as soon as she stepped out into the hall, she would be caught up in a whirlwind, as though the house had come free of its foundations. Her mother, with her calm gray eyes and purposeful footfall, was the steady axis around which the house spun. Her absence sent them tumbling through space.

  In Madison Jane flung herself at the single waiting taxi. A man in a tweed overcoat cursed at her. From the back of the cab, moving down the empty streets, she watched as the big white flakes immolated themselves on the windshield and filled up the deserted hospital turnaround. The main doors were locked and she had to go in through the emergency room. The night triage nurse told her how to get to the pediatric wing.

  Inside room 3308 it was dark. Gradually Jane made out the bed against the wall. Maisie was curled in the corner, knees to her chin. She wore a miniature hospital johnny that fell open to reveal the diaper underneath. The cotton blanket had been kicked aside. Tied to the metal bed frame was a bunch of Mylar balloons that rattled quietly as the air eased them back and forth. A cot took up most of the rest of the floor space, and Billy lay sprawled across it with his mouth open, snoring, all his clothes on.

  Jane stepped quietly to the foot of the bed. Maisie’s face looked tight and private. Wires emerged from under her gown and wound back to a big machine against the wall. What was it for? Maisie’s chest rose and fell. She was all there: head, chest, legs, feet, fingers, and toes. Jane felt dizzy with relief. She sat down on the edge of the cot and put her hand on Billy’s back, but he didn’t wake up. She slipped out of her heavy wool coat, spread it on the floor, and lay down.

  Tanya stepped out of bed. The stone floor was cool under her bare feet as though the stones retained the memory of the cold, clear stream that had once poured over them. She went to the window. Out in the yard, a dog trotted across the dusty lane. Chickens pecked in the dirt. Old Alyosha sat propped under a tree snoring, his beard in his lap. Then the sudden sound of footsteps rang down the corridor and she heard her father’s angry voice, shouting.

  “Zinaida Andreevna!” he called. “Alyosha! Where is everybody? Where’s my wife? Hasn’t anybody seen her?” Her mother’s voice was always like the stream running over the stones, but her father’s, raised in anger, rattled like hail on the nursery roof.

  Sometime later Maisie’s cheerful, imperative voice woke Jane. “Daddy!” Maisie said.

  Jane struggled to open her eyes. A gray dawn crept in under the blinds, and she could hear carts rattling by in the hall, voices, the patter of soft-soled shoes. Billy lay asleep on the cot, snoring softly.

  “Daddy! Daddy, wake up!”

  Jane pushed herself up off the floor. Maisie opened her eyes wide at the sight of her and reached out her arms. Jane lifted Maisie up, wires trailing like tentacles. She clung to Jane, warm and fierce and heavy. “Mommy!” she cried happily. “Mommy, look at me! I’m sick!”

  An orderly knocked on the door and wheeled in breakfast, French toast strips steaming under plastic wrap.

  Billy opened his eyes. He sat up and yawned, stretching, filling up the small room.

  “Look, Daddy!” Maisie said. “Mommy came!”

  “Hi, Billy,” Jane said.

  Billy looked at Jane, his tight jaw tawny with stubble. “Just in time for the recovery,” he said.

  Chapter Ten

  MAISIE GOT BETTER as quickly as she had fallen sick. During the morning she was quiet with tired blue circles under her eyes that matched Jane’s, but at lunch she ate a whole cheeseburger and a plate of fries, and after that it was hard to remember—almost to believe—that she had been seriously ill. The supporting evidence was all around them in the form of the hospital and its busy denizens, the doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists who came in and out with their white coats and their stethoscopes. They checked the machines Maisie was hooked up to, checked Maisie’s lungs for functioning as if they, too, were machines. Jane found that she had trouble taking any of it seriously. Maybe it was denial. She was hardly even frightened when, later in the afternoon, while Maisie was sleeping and Billy had gone home for a shower, one of the monitors began beeping piercingly, a beam of noise stuttering out through the room.

  Jane looked at the machine. It was a heavy box like an old-fashioned record player, covered with dials and buttons and numbers and plugs. All the numbers, glowing green, had gone to zero. Heart rate: zero. Respiration: zero. A flat line.

  Jane looked harder. There on the bed before her lay Maisie, manifestly breathing. Her hair was messy and her fingernails had Play-Doh under them and her gown had gotten twisted so the electrodes taped to her chest were clearly visible, the chest itself moving up and down. The sun streamed through the window that overlooked the parking lot. Somewhere a truck was backing up, its distant mewling a faint counterpoint to the deafening alarm emanating from the machine. For a minute, maybe two, Jane stared. She wasn’t frozen with fear but rather suspended, expectant, as though some great change were about to take place and she was waiting to see what it might be.

  A nurse arrived, walking fast in her white cross trainers, her turquoise V-neck bunny-printed blouse flapping. Without even glancing at Maisie, she pressed a button on the machine. The noise stopped. In the silence the low, background hum of the heating system seemed suddenly very loud. The nurse adjusted the electrodes on Maisie’s chest. “These things are always coming loose,” she said. The numbers jumped and Maisie, who had slept peacefully through the machine’s siren, woke up and began to cry.

  Jane sat on the bed. “It’s okay,” she said. Only now that it was over was she suddenly terrified.

  “Mommy!” Maisie cried, burying herself in her mother’s lap, her head hard and damp against Jane’s stomach. Jane felt Maisie could tell she’d just stood there, that she’d done nothing at a moment that might have been crucial, although it had turned out not to be.

  “I’m here, Maisie,” she repeated. “I’m right here.”

  And still, all the time, a part of her mind was busy thinking about Masha and the letter and the story of Lady of the Snakes, a world away from this buzzing hospital with its wires and antiseptics and nurses dressed in cartoons. A world where a child as sick as Maisie had been would have died already, where desperate mothers clung to the most tenuous threads of hope: superstition and prayer. The dry road ran up the hill. This was the world that could create someone like the Snake Woman; that could value her. A woman walked along the road carrying a basket. Masha had lost her beloved Vanyushka; but Jane, because she lived in an age of medical technology, of oxygen tanks and antibiotics and bronchodilators, had been spared.

  * * *

  Billy came back a little later. He stepped into the small room like a storm cloud: big, brooding, smelling faintly sharp, like ozone. The sight of him made Jane extremely tired. The thoughts she had had so recently in Helen’s kitchen—how lucky she was to be married to Billy, and how she was going to work harder to let him know she knew it—had dissolved in the face of his actual presence, and she felt her anger rising to meet his. She didn’t know where it came from, but she could taste the bitterness of it in her mouth. He seemed to blame her for where they had ended up—this hospital room with its liver-colored floor and its hallways full of sick and injured children—and she supposed she blamed him, too. Or, if blame were too hard a word, they each took out on the other their fear and their hatred of the place.

  Billy removed his gloves finger by finger, unbuttoned his big blue-black overcoat, but didn’t take it off. “How are things?”

  “Good,” Jane said. “They say she’s doing very well. She should be able to go home tomorrow.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Which doctor? Ratzenberg or B
illings?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said.

  “Old or young?”

  Jane hadn’t noticed.

  Billy sighed. He looked up at the ceiling as though commiserating with an invisible ally there.

  Jane shut her eyes and leaned back against the wall.

  “What’s wrong?” Billy said.

  “Nothing. I’m just a little tired.”

  “Go home, then. Get some sleep. I’m here.”

  She looked at him. He looked back, irritable, impatient. She could see his hands balled up inside his pockets.

  “Okay,” she said. She stood up. They were face-to-face, six feet apart, but Jane felt she could barely see him. “I’ll be back by ten.”

  “That’s okay,” Billy said. “I’m happy to spend the night.”

  “No,” Jane said. “You slept here last night.”

  “I really don’t mind,” Billy said.

  “That’s nice of you,” Jane said. “But I’ll be back.” Billy exchanged a glance with the ceiling again. “Whatever you want,” he told Jane.

  * * *

  On the drive home the city looked different, transformed by the snow that had fallen overnight. The trees looked softer, bulkier, while the houses seemed skulking and withdrawn under their white hoods. In the parking lots of stores and in the corners of gas stations, towering edifices of plowed snow stood like barrow mounds. What was she doing here? How had she come to be here, in this frozen place, when in California the bougainvillea would be spilling red and magenta over the arbors?

  At home, standing under the snow-peaked overhang, Jane couldn’t get the front door open. She put in her key but the deadbolt wouldn’t budge. It took her a minute to understand that the door was already unlocked. She turned the knob. What was wrong with Billy, leaving the house open? Then she saw the figure on the sofa and jumped.

  She had forgotten Felicia would be in the house.

  Felicia wore ripped jeans and a heavy fisherman’s sweater that reached almost to her knees. Her hair was pulled back in a tight braid, and her face looked particularly pale and freckled behind her gold-rimmed reading glasses. Books and papers lay scattered around her on the couch: The Lime Trees, Sigelman’s 1971 edition of Dmitri Arkadyevich, a stack of Xeroxed articles, and Jane’s own Russian-English dictionary, which usually sat on the corner of her desk in her study. Felicia’s well-thumbed and much annotated copy of Lady of the Snakes.

  “Hi,” Felicia said, closing the book she was reading around her finger to hold her place. “How’s Maisie?”

  Jane looked at her, curled on the couch like a cat. There was no reason for her not to be there, but it didn’t seem right. The whole house seemed suddenly wrong, dusty and askew, the window frames too dark, the shades flimsy and tattered, the floor bare. Then it struck her: someone had put away the toys. The rug was an unbroken oval of blue, like a pond after somebody has drowned.

  “Better,” Jane said.

  “I was worried,” Felicia said. “It was so scary, watching her struggling to breathe.”

  Jane put down her bag. She took off her coat and hung it up. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure it was.”

  “Usually she’s so animated,” Felicia said. “I knew something wasn’t right because she was just sitting there. It was so unlike her.”

  “I’m going upstairs to lie down,” Jane said. “I have to be back at the hospital in a couple of hours.”

  Felicia blinked behind her glasses. “Will Billy be back later, then?” she asked.

  * * *

  Jane lay on the bed in the dark, unable to sleep. She knew she should get up, she should take off her clothes and get under the covers, but she was too tired. Too tired to get up and too agitated to sleep. Through the window she could hear cars passing, guttering through the slush. The room was stuffy. Someone must have turned up the heat. Behind her closed lids she saw Felicia, lying on the couch downstairs reading Jane’s books, her hands all over them. She saw her unbraiding her hair until it fell across her shoulders like a shower of gold. She saw her stretch, saw the wool of her sweater slide across her breasts, saw her pale long bare feet, toenails painted orange, the silver ring on the left big toe.

  It was Billy’s sweater. Billy had lent it to Felicia when she had mentioned that she had neglected to pack anything warm. There was no reason she shouldn’t be wearing it, but still, seeing her in it made Jane suddenly see things differently, the way an outsider might see them. The distant husband and the voluptuous, blond student. What could be more obvious than that?

  But no. How far she had fallen even to consider it! Billy, distant or angry though he might be, would never stoop to that. It went against everything he stood for, against the entire way he saw himself: a decent man, an upstanding man. Honorable. No, Billy could be uptight, judgmental, inconsiderate, but faithlessness was not among his faults. Not all men succumbed to blond young women. Not all blond young women were interested in seducing older men. Why should they be? Besides which, Felicia had a great deal to lose—the roof over her head and her Ph.D. adviser in one fell swoop. She was too smart, surely, for that.

  Jane turned over. She opened her eyes and stared at the darkened door. What kind of thinking was this, weighing consequences as though that was all that would prevent the thing from happening? Who was she—who had she become—to think this way?

  To distract herself, she fished her own copy of Lady of the Snakes out of her bag, which was lying on the floor by the bed, found the passage she had been thinking of in the hospital, and began to read.

  The dry road ran up the hill with fields of wheat on either side of it. It was hot, and the young wheat waved in the hot wind as though struggling to get free, but the cracked earth held it fast by the roots. Grow, the earth commanded, and the wheat grew, fecund and bountiful. All summer it would swell, day after day, like a woman heavy with child, until the men lined up with their scythes in the fields and hacked it down.

  The road itself was yellow, caked hard, and dusty. In rain it was worse, a river of mud. A woman walked along the road carrying a basket. Plenty of people walked up and down the road which cut through the countryside of Kovo, winding from town to town and within sight of a few grand houses: tradesmen and messengers; pilgrims with worn clothes and calloused feet, begging from house to house, some on the way to the distant monastery at Travenko, others, having found it not to their liking, returning.

  The woman carried herself proudly, head up and shoulders back. Her hair was full of the dust of the road. Her clothes—not a peasant’s clothes, not a pilgrim’s—were dusty too, although well cut and in good repair. On her feet she wore a pair of stylish boots caked with the fine, yellow dust, and she limped a little as she walked, as though her feet bothered her. She looked like a lady, but no lady would be walking such a road alone, or looking rumpled as though she had been sleeping in a ditch, or be so conspicuously without a hat. She walked without turning her head, a big covered basket over her arm. She kept a steady pace, until all of a sudden she stopped and sat down by the side of the road. She set down her basket and pulled off her boots. She wiped her face with a handkerchief already stained with dust. She looked one way up the road and then the other and, having ascertained that nobody was coming, she pulled off her stockings as well. Then she got up and walked away, leaving her boots lined up neatly on the side of the road as though expecting someone—elves perhaps—to take them away and clean them.

  The red sun was low in the sky when the woman came into the village—a few poor houses roofed with thatch, gray smoke rising like flights of pigeons from the stovepipes, dirty children shouting and throwing sticks. The woman went over to where the children were playing. As she approached, they fell silent and stared at her. One boy was taller than the others with thick, shaggy hair and eyes of different colors, one blue and one gray, like the same sky in different weathers. It was to him that the woman addressed herself. Her voice was clear and low and she spoke gently, in a way he was not used to being s
poken to. He had to take a step closer to hear her.

  “Is anyone in the village ill?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Is anyone ill?” she repeated. “In your village.”

  “Only old Lyubov,” the boy said. “She has the fever.”

  The woman nodded. She must have been tired after all that walking, but she still held herself erect. The children did not notice the dark stains on the road where she had walked. Perhaps she had stepped on a stone in the road and that was why her feet were bleeding. “Which house?”

  The woman sat down in the dirt beside the hut. It was nearly dark now, the first stars lying scattered across the sky where Baba Yaga had flung them like so many handfuls of salt. More and more appeared until the bowl of darkness brimmed with a million diamonds. The horns of the waxing moon rose slowly in the east. After a long time, as though in response to a signal, the stranger leaned forward and undid the fastenings of her basket. She reached inside and took something out, then did up the fastenings again. The object in her lap was long as an arm and gleamed faintly in the moonlight—but darkly, not as metal gleams, although it was sleek and curved as a Cossack’s sword. The woman held it up in both hands, and as she did, it collapsed in the middle like a rope and slithered slowly through her fingers. A soft hissing sound slipped from between the woman’s teeth as she held the snake up to her face and brought it toward her, almost as though she intended to kiss it. The snake stared at her, motionless, its flat, pale snout turned up, the black slits inky in its golden eyes. Its forked tongue went out—once, twice, three times—and then it struck, its mouth open wide and its teeth bared, the hollow, poison-filled fangs aiming for her cheek.