She dismisses Pavel and takes a pair of nail scissors from the dressing table. She stands over Konstantin, wanting to press the small, sharp blades into his lips, pry them open so that the answers she needs to hear will spill out. How hard did you fight if only your hand is injured? Would you not fight to the death for your son?
She will not imagine Mikhail dead. He is not dead. She would know if he was dead. He is her son.
“Je t’aime, Maman,” he always told her as she tucked him into his bed. Antonina had encouraged him to speak the second language of Russian nobility since he was a toddler. “Je veux beaucoup de baisers,” he would add, and she would answer, “How many? How many kisses do you wish?”
Sometimes it was five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty. It was their bedtime ritual. She smothered his cheeks and hands with kisses, and he laughed and told her that her lips tickled.
She realizes now that it’s not her husband’s lips she wishes to cut open. She wants to puncture his neck, push the blades into the scab already there, into the slowly beating and vital artery. She wants to see a satisfying spurt of thick blood leap into the air, an arc of life that if left to pulse long enough will, eventually, lead to death. She wants to do this so badly her hands tremble.
But to what end? Yes, it would be vengeance, of course, an absurd and illogical retaliation for Konstantin’s lack of respect, for his stupidity. But Antonina also knows there can be nothing gained from his death. Killing Konstantin would be a mortal sin, sealing her fate in the afterlife. Worse, it would do nothing to return her child.
Still, she allows herself to slowly press the blades to his neck. His eyes open, as if she has called his name, and he looks up at her. There’s no surprise or fear in his eyes. What she sees is hope. Do it, his eyes say. Kill me, Antonina Leonidovna. I beg of you.
And when she understands that this is what he wants, she removes the scissors. Of course, she will not grant his wish. It simply gives her momentary relief to think of something besides Mikhail’s sweet chin, his smooth high forehead, his clear grey-green eyes. Instead, she presses the blade into the skin on the inside of her forearm, just below the lacy edge of her sleeve. She pulls it in a slow, hard line, as though the blade is the nib of a pen and her skin the parchment. As she does this, she continues to watch Konstantin. He stares at her arm, and she looks down as the beads of blood rise up along the slice in her flesh.
She feels no pain, and yet the cut has brought some hard, dark relief she can’t name. She throws the scissors to the floor and retreats to her chair.
The following day, people move about the bedroom as though it’s a hive. Konstantin is no longer the dull drone Antonina often believed him to be, but a useless queen. As in a hive, it’s as though all lives depend on that one life.
A second doctor joins Dr. Molov; Antonina doesn’t know his name and doesn’t care to learn it. The two of them bleed and cup the count. They force fluids into his body with a glass tube.
Father Cyril, the priest from the estate church, has become a permanent fixture, taking the chair in the opposite corner of the room from Antonina. And as well as Lilya, there are always too many servants. Antonina stays in her darkened corner in Konstantin’s high-backed leather chair, watching the endless movements around his bed. Tinka is in her lap.
Lilya had looked at the cut on the inside of Antonina’s arm, silently washing away the drying blood. She wrapped a strip of linen around it, brought her soup and tea with jam. She regularly bathes Antonina’s face and hands with a warm damp cloth and keeps a shawl around her shoulders, a blanket over her legs. She gently lifts Tinka from Antonina and takes her outside a few times during the day; she gives the dog food and water and brings her back.
Lilya is her maid but also her companion, her friend and Mikhail’s nyanya—his nanny. Since Antonina had come to Angelkov and found her again, Lilya has looked after her every desire, seeming to understand a need before it is spoken.
Antonina does not say anything now, except to ask every few hours, or perhaps every ten minutes: “Has there been another message from the Cossacks?”
Nobody answers her. After a while nobody looks in her direction when she asks her question, over and over.
That night in the bedroom, Lilya asks, “Shall I get your laudanum, Tosya?”
Antonina nods.
Lilya brings the bottle and a spoon, and Antonina opens her mouth and swallows, three times.
“Now a glass of wine,” Antonina says.
“You don’t need wine with the laudanum.”
“I do,” Antonina answers.
Lilya pours her a small glass. Antonina drinks it, sitting on the edge of the bed, and then hands the glass back to her maid.
Lilya helps Antonina out of her clothes and puts a nightgown over her head, doing up its many tiny buttons. She settles Antonina under the fresh sheets and turns down the lamps so there is only the faintest glow illuminating the shadows. She opens the tall windows just enough for a cool, fresh spring breeze to billow the curtains. Antonina feels the night air on her face.
Does Mikhail smell this same breeze? Is he in a clean bed?
She looks at the journal on her bedside table. She hadn’t wanted to go to Mikhail’s room, somehow thinking that if she left it exactly as it had been, it would help him come home. But this afternoon she could no longer sit in Konstantin’s busy bedchamber with its whispers and unpleasant odours. She suddenly wanted—needed—to be close to Mikhail’s belongings.
When she opened his door, something between a moan and a sigh escaped her lips. She looked at it all—his bed and wardrobe, his bookshelf and desk, the low footstool near the fireplace where he liked to sit, his boyish collections of rocks and jars of dead insects and the pictures he’d painted—and held on to the edge of the door frame. When she was no longer dizzy, she closed the door and went to his bed. She lay down on it, burying her face in her son’s pillow. But the servants had changed the linens and all she could smell was laundry soap and starch. She got up and went to his wardrobe, pulling out tunics and jackets. She held each to her face, weeping. She carried one tunic—there was a splotch of ink on the cuff, so she knew it had somehow escaped laundering—back to the bed. She lay down again and held it against her face, breathing. Finally, in the unwashed tunic, she could smell her son.
After some time, she got up and sat in front of his desk. She ran her fingers over Mikhail’s lessons books, stopping at a journal with a soft calfskin cover. It made her think of his small leather music composition booklet, which held some fugues and nocturnes of Glinka’s she had transcribed into easier keys for him. Of course, now he could play the originals with ease, but he had kept the book, using it to write down his own melodies. He carried it with him always, along with a little sharpened stick of charcoal, because, he had told her, he never knew when he would hear something beautiful in his head. She thought, suddenly, of how he had grabbed the booklet from the piano as he ran from the music salon. Did he still have it?
She picked up the calfskin-bound journal, running her hand over its soft cover. It was a gift given to him at a neighbouring Christmas party that year. When he showed it to Antonina, she said he should write down his thoughts on its stiff, creamy pages. She told him she had always kept a journal, and that it is a lovely thing to write what one is thinking or wondering about.
A week later, Mikhail sat at the breakfast table across from her, writing in it while she read and drank her morning tea.
When Konstantin came in, he asked, “Are those lessons, Mikhail?”
“No. I’m writing my thoughts in my journal, Papa.”
Konstantin slammed his hand on the table. Antonina’s tea sloshed into the saucer. “Men do not waste time on such things, Mikhail. This is a woman’s pastime. Put it away.”
Mikhail very slowly set his pen on the table.
“Close that book, I said.”
“I’m waiting for the ink to dry.”
“Don’t let me see you with it again,”
Konstantin threatened, then left without eating breakfast.
Once the front door slammed, Mikhail picked up his pen and dipped it into the ink.
Antonina drank her tea.
She opened the leather journal and drew in a deep breath.
His handwriting. His words. His thoughts. She closed the book and put her hand over her eyes. Eventually she rose, leaving the journal on the desk, and went to her room, separated from Mikhail’s by a large linen storage closet. She took the vodka from her wardrobe and a glass from her washstand and carried them back to his room.
She filled the glass and took a drink, and then another, and finally read the first entry, dated January 8, 1861.
My friend Oxana Alexandrovna gave this book to me for Christmas. Mama has said that I should use it to write what I am thinking about.
Mama told me I must not be shy, and to write about the things that make me happy and things that I do not like. She said that it is private, and no one need ever read it.
Antonina stopped and took another drink. She touched the uneven lines and splashes of ink.
Mama told me it would be good practice for me to write in French, but I don’t want to. I still make too many mistakes in my French. Monsieur Thibault tells me this every day.
I don’t like writing out my lessons for him. I always get ink on my fingers and on the pages, and he shakes his head and looks sad. And then when it is time for Monsieur Lermontov to hear my practising, he makes loud, angry noises with his tongue, and says my hands on the keys do not look like those of a careful boy.
Starting today I will try to be more careful.
Antonina finished her vodka and poured another glass. She has not seen the tutors since the day Mikhail was taken. Are they still in their rooms in the servants’ quarters, waiting for Mikhail to return, waiting to be summoned to resume their work with him?
There are pages torn from the journal. The next entry was three weeks later.
I have been practising, but I am not any neater. Monsieur Lermontov will be very cross when he arrives later today. When he is like this I have a bad feeling in my stomach, like when I eat too many of Raisa’s poppy seed rolls, and then I do not play as well. He sometimes tells Papa when my practising doesn’t go well, and knowing Papa is displeased makes my stomach feel worse.
But if Papa isn’t home and he tells Mama, she nods at him but then makes funny faces at me when he’s not looking. Mama never gets angry with me.
Antonina pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve and held it to her eyes for a long moment. Then she took another drink and continued reading. The next entry was at the end of February.
I like my room, but it is very big and sometimes noises come from the fireplace. Last year I told Lilya I was too old for her to sleep on her cot at the foot of my bed anymore, but some nights I wish she was still here like before. When I was very small and had bad dreams she would carry me to Mama’s bed and I would stay the night with her. But if Papa came in from his room in the morning and saw me there he would grow cross with Mama and tell her I was not a baby and that I must sleep in my own bed. Papa calls me a little soldier and says soldiers do not sleep with their mothers, and they do not cry.
I try not to cry because I know it makes Papa cross. But I don’t want to be a soldier. Mama told me her brother Viktor Leonidovich was a soldier and he died. I don’t want to die like Uncle Viktor.
When I was a very little boy and Papa went to the city, I always slept with Mama and Tinka. Sometimes Lilya would stay with us too, sleeping on Mama’s settee, and in the morning when I woke up and saw Mama and Lilya talking and laughing I always felt happy. Mama doesn’t call me a soldier. She calls me her petite souris.
March 14
I have five friends: Andrei Yakovavich and Stepan Yakovavich (they are brothers) and Oxana Alexandrovna and Yuliana Philipova. There is also Ivan Abramovich. I don’t like him as much because he is mean sometimes but he is blind in one eye and Mama says maybe that makes him sad and maybe that’s why he is mean so I must be kind to him anyway. All my friends live on other estates and we only get to play together sometimes.
At home I like playing with Lyosha. He is much older than me but he is nice. He is Lilya’s brother. He shows me how to tie special knots in ropes, and he tells me stories about the horses. He works in the stables with Fyodor, and sometimes, after I have done my practising and finished my lessons, Mama allows him to take me to the stables. Lyosha shows me how to hold my hand flat with a carrot on it and let Dunia eat the carrot. Dunia’s lips are soft and whiskery and tickle my hand.
I try to remember not to speak French with Lyosha. Mama told me it was not polite, because the servants don’t speak French and if we do that in front of them it might make them feel left out. It is all right if we’re alone, Mama says. But Papa speaks French when the servants are with us.
Once, when Mama and Papa took me with them to visit Prince Usolotsev, his boys ran away from me and hid and didn’t play with me. Mama found me and hugged me and said she was sorry I was left out. She said she knew how sad that felt, because sometimes she feels left out too. I don’t know who makes her feel left out. I won’t ever speak French to Lyosha because I don’t want him to feel sad like I did. Or like Mama.
March 22
My two favourite things to do:
1. Anything with Lyosha.
2. Playing the piano, but not with Monsieur Lermontov. When I play alone, or with Mama, I feel very quiet inside. Even if the music tells me it needs to be fortissimo and my fingers are very hard on the keys, I still feel quiet. I feel the way I do when Mama hugs me tightly, or the way I used to feel when I was so little and Lilya sang to me in bed at night.
I have always played the piano. Mama says that when I was only a baby she held me on her lap while she played. She says that I must have heard the music she played even before I was born, when I was still an angel, and that’s why I can play the way I do. I don’t remember being an angel, but I do remember being very little and sitting on Mama’s lap in front of the pianoforte and Mama putting my fingers on the keys. I also remember when we played our first duet together. Mama cried, but she said it was not because she was sad. She said sometimes people cry when they are very, very happy. But I think that maybe only girls do that. I have never wanted to cry when I am happy.
I always hear music in my head, and I can make that music with my fingers. It is very easy, and it pleases Mama so much. It is my best time, after my dinner in the nursery with Lilya, when I come downstairs to the music salon and play for Mama and Papa. It is the only time I see them both smile at the same time.
Papa smiles when he stands on the veranda and looks at the fields, or when he puts me on the tallest horse and I hold the reins very tightly and pretend I’m not afraid. He also sometimes smiles when Grisha talks to him about the papers they look at together at Papa’s big desk in his study.
Mama smiles more than Papa. She smiles at everything I say or do, and she smiles when she talks with Lilya and with all the servants.
Sometimes, especially when it rains all day, and I come to Mama to kiss and hug her good night and tell her je t’aime she smiles, but her eyes are wet. Once when I asked her why her eyes were wet she told me that she had looked at the rain too long. I believed her when I wasn’t as old as I am now. Now I know that can’t happen. It probably was because she was very, very happy.
March 23
I hope that I get a dog for my birthday or for my name day. I had a lap dog, a Bolonka like Tinka, but he got sick and then he died. That was just before Christmas. I was very sad, and Mama said that as soon as it is spring and the weather is warm I will get another one. I want to get a bigger dog this time. It will be a boy dog, and I will call him Dani.
April 6
What I am most afraid of:
Being a soldier.
The noise the wind makes in my fireplace sometimes.
Papa when his mouth is straight.
When the dogs in the yard ba
rk too long at night.
Something bad will happen to Mama if I am not with her.
That was the last entry.
When Antonina couldn’t cry anymore, she took the book and went back to her bedroom. Now, in the near darkness, she caresses its cover with her hand and thinks about her son and a dog named Dani.
“Tinka?” she calls. She hears the dog’s short claws scraping at the edge of the bedcover. At almost twelve years old, Tinka is no longer able to jump up onto the bed. Lilya picks up the little cream- and caramel-coloured Maltese and sets her beside Antonina. The dog licks the back of Antonina’s hand and then walks to the end of the bed and turns in a circle four times before lying down.
Antonina remains still as Lilya moves about the dim room, putting away clothing and straightening bottles on the dressing table. There is nowhere for her to be, nothing for her to do. She is just waiting. Waiting takes a huge amount of energy; she is so tired all the time. She knows the men search the same trails, ride through the same villages. She doesn’t ask to go with them now; she doesn’t have the strength.
Outside her door, there are hushed voices and many footsteps. Very quietly a man says, Countess Mitlovskiya? It might be one of the doctors, or the priest.
Lilya goes to the door, opens it and speaks, then closes it and comes back to the bed. “Nothing important,” she says, looking down at Antonina. “You must try to find peace, sweet Tosya.” She brushes Antonina’s hair from her forehead, and then leans over, kissing the smooth, warm brow. Her lips stay an extra few seconds on Antonina’s skin, and at that Antonina draws in a quavering breath.
The Lost Souls of Angelkov Page 7
