Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  Jane wondered what, if anything, Sigelman might use it for, this old-fashioned box in the unfinished basement next to the sewer pipe. She looked at the pipe, as thick around as the trunk of a good-sized tree, through which all the waste in the house flushed away, coffee grounds and dirty bathwater and excrement. And then from nowhere, Shombauer’s voice was in her head. Worthy only to keep company with shit, it said, and suddenly Jane’s heart was racing and her breath came in fast shallow gasps, and she looked wildly around to see if she was still alone. But the house, except for the rumbling of the furnace and the rhythmic sloshing of the washing machine, was silent. She leaned against the washer and pushed herself up, crossed the room to the box, and opened the lid. The metal was cold and grimy, and the hinges squeaked as the top came up. Inside, there was a large shoe-box, grimy and dented and wound around with tape. Hardly knowing what she was doing, Jane reached in and lifted it out.

  The box had a distinctive smell, not musty, as might have been expected, but earthy, like mushrooms or like moss growing on trees. There were two layers of tape: an older layer of thick, silvery duct tape that had been snipped open, and over that, now fastening the lid to the box, several rounds of packing tape that glowed oddly in the dim basement light. It was, she saw, the clear pink packing tape of the kind she had seen on Sigelman’s desk. She tested it with a fingernail. It was shiny and dust-free, obviously put on recently. She thought of Pandora and also the Japanese fisherman of the folktale, and how they had both been warned. But there was no question of not opening it. As Sigelman himself had said, she might die tomorrow. She found a screwdriver in a heap of tools in the corner and used it to cut through the tape.

  Inside, the yellowed, heavy paper of the past, three separate bundles of it. Three letters, though the envelopes were gone. The one on top lay slightly askew, and it looked flatter or cleaner—some subtle difference Jane couldn’t quite pin down that made her sure it had been recently placed on top of the others. It was so impossible—that she had found this, that she was here to find it—that for a moment she knew she must be dreaming. That seemed no reason, however, not to continue. She unfolded the first bundle of paper, sat down on the floor (the clammy, gritty surface of which seemed to undercut the idea that she was dreaming), and began.

  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 underlies everything as I move about the house. I seem to feel the hard dirt road 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.

  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 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 had come to the river to find.

  I don’t know how to describe my state of mind at that time, how crushed I had been by death and by duties, by the hundred mouths and hands reaching for me every hour of the day! And then, freedom—my burden of griefs falling away like a shed skin, the moon shining and the river flowing and my mind like a swept room.

  I got up and carried the basket down the road toward Kovo. When I grew tired, I lay down in a field. I had never slept outside before and the smell of the earth damp with recent rain was sweet to me as I lay in the grass under the brilliant stars.

  It was a kind of madness, I suppose, as though my mind had broken under the weight I had been bearing all those years, a mountain on my back. And yet it was also a kind of blessing. An ecstasy.

  But you may believe me, Varya, when I tell you it will not be repeated. Nothing in this world could compel me to leave my children again—nothing but that which I dare not name. If the worst happens, I beg of you in the name of God, look after them! They have borne enough already. We have not been the closest of sisters, but the children have your blood, too, Varya. Make of them what you will—society ladies and members of the Horse Guard—I don’t care! Only comfort them, and try to love them a little. Kostya’s health is delicate, and the twins must not be allowed to tyrannize everyone. Katya especially needs a kind hand to guide her. I don’t know what she may have told you about this business with her father and that young man, but I gather from your letter perhaps too much. You may guess what the effect of the knowledge of this and other such—occurrences—has been on me over the years. The shame and revulsion, the recriminations, the cold sheets, the crockery smashed on the floor. I have pleaded with him, I have wept silently at midnight. I have torn out my hair. But nothing changes! I can change nothing in the end it seems except my own feelings. And so, inch by inch, I have dragged myself out of the quicksand, more or less. I have come to some sort of dispassion, if not exactly peace.

  But let us not speak of this anymore.

  God keep you, Varushka.

  Your sister,

  Masha

  Jane blinked. She looked up, looked around the basement again—washer agitating, furnace chugging, dust, cardboard cartons—then read the last long paragraph again. Young man? What business with Katya’s father—with Karkov—had caused Masha to plead and weep? Jane could think of only one thing, but then sex—sex and infidelity—were on her mind. Surely it wasn’t possible that some (all?) of Karkov’s dalliances were not with peasant girls but peasant boys? That was what the letter (she read the long paragraph a third time) seemed to say. No wonder Sigelman had taken it! It wasn’t because o
f what it proved about Lady of the Snakes at all.

  With confusion, excitement, and trepidation, she put down the letter and picked up the next. This one was also in Masha’s hand, but addressed not to her sister Varya but her daughter, Katya. It was dated only “Spring, the Year of our Lord 1884.”

  Dearest Katya,

  I hardly know how to begin to explain to you how it is that your mama has—it hardly seems credible even as I write it—run off and left those who have most claim on her. I love you, Katushka—you and your brothers—more than life itself! And yet I know how much it must have hurt you, waking to your mother’s absence—as though the sun had decided one morning not to rise. I can only say I have felt it coming over me all spring, like the sap rising in the trees. I have felt it—and fought it—for your sakes, my dearest ones. But in the end I could resist no more than the tiny snail resists the ocean tide.

  How different the world looks outside of the sorrowful boundaries of Dve Reckhi. /All day long the countryside is mine and mine alone—the dusty road under my feet, the meadows blooming with flowers and the sweet smell of hay, the sun before me in the morning and at my back in the evening, and at night the yellow horns of the moon over my shoulder, lighting my path.

  I know you, my dear, have had more than your own share of pain. First Vanyushka’s death, and then this business with your father, and now my absence. I hope you can forgive God for taking your brother, and your father for what he cannot control any more than a plant can opt not to turn its face to the sun. The moth flies into the candle and is burned; we know its urge toward the flame to be a mistake, and yet it cannot help being attracted to the light! So it is with him. And the boy is gone. I trust there will be no others, for some time at least. This has been the pattern over many years, just as the pattern of the seasons follows heat with freezing. You should put it from your mind, my darling, if you can.

  And God grant that you find it in your heart to forgive me, too.

  I pray that you are well, and that you are working hard at your studies and especially at the piano. I know Vladimir Vladimirich is not all you would hope for in a music master, but you must make the best of it. God has given you a talent, and such a gift must be nursed like a baby, for to neglect it would be as sinful as to neglect one of God’s living creatures.

  Today it rains and I have taken shelter in this little church where the icons seem to turn their forgiving faces toward me. Yesterday, when it was fine, I walked up into the hills. The cliffs are parched and rocky there, and the dirt is the rosy color of the rising sun. I followed a path which rose and fell, now steeply, now gently, through mossy trees and across bare, pebbled slopes. /After some time I reached a high meadow with sheep grazing and it seemed I could see all of God’s creation before me—grass and trees and a little brook, its water bubbling and sparkling between its cool banks, and far below the izbas of the villagers and the domes of the distant church echoing the vast dome of heaven itself.

  I saw a large sunny rock some distance off and thought it would be a fine place to sit and eat a piece of bread I had with me, so I started toward it. But as I approached I saw that the ground around it seemed to churn as though the grass itself were alive. I came cautiously nearer and saw that the earth was covered with snakes, which were emerging from a crevice beneath the rock! They moved slowly at first as they wriggled from the darkness into the light, and then as the sun touched them they began to twist and glide, spreading out in all directions as though the field were a great lake into which God had thrown a stone and the serpents the shimmering ripples. I stood transfixed, and occasionally one of the creatures would glide close by my feet, moving soundlessly through the grass on its way. I saw that the sheep were huddled together at the far end of the meadow, but I was not afraid. I knew God had not led me here to injure me, but rather to reveal the glory of his creation and lead me the next step on my way. I seized two of the adders as they passed near my feet and opened my braided basket and flung them inside. They were sleepy and slow moving—smaller perhaps by half than the grass snake I had already with me. Inside the basket they hissed loudly but the lid was tied on, and I was not afraid.

  At night I dream I am back at Dve Reckhi and that Vanyushka is still alive. When I awake I am grief-stricken, but then I remember that Vanya is with God, and that God is watching over you as He does all of us.

  One day, little bird, you will spread your wings. Until then remember how your mother loves you, and know that wherever God leads me—even unto the searing celestial blue of Heaven itself—I will watch over you.

  Kiss your brothers for me.

  Your loving,

  Mama

  The third and final letter was not written in Masha’s hand, and it was shorter than the others. It was dated exactly two months before Masha’s death.

  June 2, 1884

  Dear Aunt Varya,

  Thank you for your kind letter inquiring as to the state of my mother’s health. I am sorry you have got no reply from my father. He has been very distracted and anxious of late and spends most of his time out of the house. He prefers hunting with his dog to being here at home, or at least he says he is hunting but who knows what filth he is really up to. I told you what I saw in the spring and although it is true that Bek is gone, I do not see why he should be the only one. My mother says I should put it from my mind and I know she would not like me writing to you about it, but I must talk to someone! She does not seem to understand how serious and disgusting an affair it is. She says to trust in God, but what Papa did is against God. Well, Mama did not see what I saw, and in broad daylight, too! How she can stay under the same roof as him I cannot understand. And she will not let me go to you in Moscow, though I have begged on my knees.

  At least Mama’s health is somewhat better. The worst effects of the snake bite have worn off, and the doctors no longer fear for her life. The swelling has gone down and the fever has passed, and she is able to sit up in an armchair and look out of the window. How she came to be bitten by the serpent is still not clear, but she had developed a strange and frightening attachment to the creatures and had come into possession of some adders, the bite of which is known to be fatal. Why she felt compelled to carry them with her I cannot say, and she either cannot or chooses not to. Neither do we have any idea what she was doing in the Feska church where she was found half-dead with a clutch of letters in her shawl. I want to write that she has not been at all herself since they found her, but I wonder now who she ever was that she could do what she has done. Or Papa, either. Everything I thought to be true seems to me now to have been a lie, as though the world had turned itself inside out like a glove so one can see all the seams showing.

  I will keep you informed of events here as best I can.

  Your faithful niece,

  Katya

  Jane looked up. She seemed to have been reading forever. She knew it could not have been more than ten or fifteen minutes, but in that time everything seemed to have shifted. As Katya had written, the world had turned inside out, like a glove. She had thought Masha had sacrificed her life to her family, but in fact she had abandoned her children and wandered in some kind of ecstatic, dissociative state around the local countryside. She had thought Masha had been devastated by Grisha’s infidelities with milkmaids, but instead it seemed she had accommodated what were apparently homosexual liaisons! Jane knew who Bek was: Anton Bek, who had apparently taken over from Masha not only as Karkov’s copyist, but his sexual partner as well. That was the thread that held these letters together: the references to Karkov having what were presumably sexual encounters with boys. It was clear enough why Sigelman wanted to suppress them. What Jane was less sure about was why he hadn’t just destroyed them. Was he unwilling to erase anything that had to do with Karkov, even if he didn’t want anyone to see it? Or was it out of a kind of perverse desire to amuse himself—to follow through on the joke about sewage, the fact that these letters were written by Karkov’s female relatives dovetailing perfectl
y, for him, with the nature of the behavior they alluded to?

  And from where had Sigelman stolen the second two?

  The washer jolted to a halt and suddenly the room was silent and still. Still trembling, Jane stood up and moved the laundry into the dryer. She had forgotten about Billy for the span of time she had been reading, but now she remembered again. Naked flesh, the coldness on his face this morning at the breakfast table. With an effort she concentrated on Masha, on Karkov, on the melodrama of a hundred years ago that was so much bigger and more complicated than her own tawdry but familiar story. She thought of what Sigelman had said: You wouldn’t believe, now, all the things you’re going to survive.