Sisters of the Cross

by Alexei Remizov

  1. The songs that figure in the next few paragraphs echo plots and motifs taken from old Russian heroic poetry (byliny).

  “Vera! Verochka! Verushka!”

  Marakulin had been sitting all day from morning till evening, writing out in semiuncial an old Russian humorous tale, a rare and profitable commission that had come to him like some refreshing manna from heaven. He gave a sudden start and did not complete the ingenious scroll in the elaborate twists of one capital letter.

  And from the stairway he could hear ever more insistently the sound of a familiar name: “Vera! Verushka! Verochka!”

  “Akumovna, who are you calling there?” said Marakulin, losing patience and looking in at the kitchen.

  “I’m calling Vera,” said Akumovna, without turning round. “Oi! The shameless hussy!”—and she stamped on down the outside stairs.

  It was late—about eleven o’clock—and the windy sunset had already spread its dust-laden fires beyond the Obukhov Hospital. With the brief night came mists, seeping in from the marshy outskirts farther up the river. And in the yard, piled high with rubbish, crushed stone and bricks, children were still hollering, and a balalaika was strumming its heart out. There was an abundance of these poor un-Russian blessings in the Burkov yard,1 and, placing cushions on the windowsills and tormented by the sultry heat of stony Petersburg, people stuck their rumpled heads out of the windows in the hope, most likely, of gaining a breath of cool air.

  The India ink on Marakulin’s pen was drying and the letters ceased to form themselves properly. He thought that Akumovna would return no more and be lost—with her mysterious, unresponding Vera—somewhere in the rubble strewn in front of Burkov House. When he heard stamping sounds again in the kitchen, it was not Akumovna’s voice that accompanied them, but rather the tones of an older child or young girl chattering on, now breaking into joyous laughter, now into aching lament. With a certain feeling of relief he drew the curtain back over the window and went on with his work as before.

  Marakulin’s copying work was dear to his heart, and he wanted to finish it without fail, since he had been working at it for nearly two months. It was Sergei Aleksandrovich who had procured this rare work for him before he left for the summer tour. Marakulin was due to be paid a whole fifty rubles for it, and his affairs were definitely looking more hopeful.

  “Who have you got living in your kitchen now?” Marakulin asked the next day, when Akumovna was setting out Adoniia Ivoilovna’s red, singing samovar.

  “Verushka,” replied Akumovna, “—the miraculous one,” she added with a smile and looking at you from time to time from some other place, as might a holy fool.

  Then the slop-basin was brought in, not by Akumovna—she remained standing in the doorway—but by the “miraculous” Verushka.

  She was a young girl, an adolescent of about fifteen years of age, no different from the many other girls in and around Burkov House who were in service as nannies, and her figure was fully formed. But when Marakulin looked at her more carefully, he discovered in her eyes something unusually close to him that he knew so well, but that he could not put a name to, nor remember where he had seen something like that before: some sort of tiny flame—no, something else besides, which there could be no hiding. It would shine out from under the eyelids of a person even when asleep.

  “Shall I call you Vera?”

  “Verushka or Verochka,” the girl replied, quietly somehow, and gloomily, stumbling over the words; then as though embarrassed for some reason, she took a step back.

  “And even Verochka, how about that?” said Marakulin, looking at her with a kind of delight and suddenly rising to his feet.

  But she went out into the corridor to hide behind Akumovna, and when she returned to the kitchen she was tapping about with something or, God knows why it happens with people, could it have been his heart beating?

  “Sir, I really want to ask you one thing: don’t touch her!”

  “How could you even think of such a thing? Don’t be ridiculous!” he said, but he sat down like someone who had been caught out.

  “I’m afraid of Vasily Aleksandrovich,” Akumovna went on. “When he comes back from his dacha, it’s terrible. Every time he wants something, and nothing is ever enough for him. There are these others, too, idlers who hang around outside the doors at night.”

  Sheltering the girl from the street, Akumovna jealously guarded her from the idlers around Burkov House—from Stanislav the clerk and Kazimir the fitter. Quite often in the evening, when it was still light, she locked up the kitchen and brought the girl into her bed, with the three icon lamps that never went out for security. And she called Vera “the miraculous one,” because a miracle had been wrought upon her.

  “She is miraculous,” said Akumovna, “because until she was five she was mute and could not speak. They showed her to the doctor Nikolai Frantsevich, but with no result. People advised her mother to take her to the icon of the Sorrowing Virgin, and to the icon of St. Matriona she went barefoot many times. Afterward, on the Friday before St. Elijah’s Day, they went to the gunpowder works—there’s a religious procession on that day carrying twelve icons and up to a thousand small ones. They stayed until the service was finished and were about to set off for home, when the girl asked for something to drink: ‘Mother, give me a drink!’ From that time on she has been able to speak.”

  Vera’s father was in the bookselling trade: books, hooks, buttons, various bits of this and that. Vera’s mother was a sickly woman, but she would go out to do hourly paid work, washing floors, cleaning rooms. They lived in a corner on Kuznechny Lane beside the palmist’s house where those frightening venetian windows are. Vera was beginning to grow up, so they gave her over to be trained as a gold-thread sewer. She spent a year doing that, but she was no good at it—her eyes started to ache, so she went to work as a nursemaid. But then one day her father was running away from a policeman and carrying his stall across Vladimirsky Prospekt at the Five Ways crossroads, and he fell under a tram that crushed him. And it was just about this time that Vera lost her job. They really found it hard to make ends meet. Vera’s mother had the idea of trying to send her to her uncle who was working as a janitor on Murinsky Prospekt in Lesnoe district—he might be able to find her a place. So the little girl set out, arriving at Lesnoe in the evening. As she was walking along the road looking for the building, she stopped outside a hotel to listen to the band. As she was standing there listening, openmouthed and with her eyes sparkling, an unknown gentleman came out of the hotel with a lady on his arm, and he gave Vera such an affectionate look. Then he stopped walking and began to question her in a kindly tone. She told him about everything right up until when she had stopped to listen to the band. Well, what good luck that was, he said; they just happened to be needing a nanny, and the wages would be very good. Vera was delighted and agreed to work for them. They hired a cab and took her to where they lived, which was close by. Everything had turned out so well! It was already late and dark by the time they reached their destination, and they sat Vera down to have supper with them. After they had fed her, the gentleman led her into another room—the room across the corridor that was to be her bedroom. During the night he came in again. She wanted to cry out, but he put his hands over her mouth. That’s how it all began. Vera came to, and it was morning. She came out of her room, and there was a corridor. She wandered along the corridor, looking for the gentleman and his lady, and landed up in a buffet. Apparently she had spent the night in a hotel! She asked the waiter in charge of the buffet where the gentleman and his lady were. The waiter laughed—there was no gentleman or lady, but if she wanted, then let her come and work for him as a nanny for his children. That was a pretty fix: if she didn’t agree, it would be terrible going back to her mother. And if she did agree, well, supposing the waiter stifled her mouth with his hands as the gentleman had done yesterday? Both choices were frightening, but there was no third way out. So in the end she went as a nurse to the waiter’s famil
y. It turned out that he had many children. She struggled along and coped somehow for about a week. After the week was over, as she had now become used to things, the waiter moved her into another room where she could sleep away from the children—there were so many of them—it would seemingly be more comfortable for her there and more peaceful. And again the same tune was played: first the boss himself—the waiter—and after him the district policeman. As soon as night had fallen, someone would come without fail—up to five men each night would be brought to lie with her. And they wouldn’t let her leave that room, and she did not see the children any more; they had a new nurse now. She wept, but what of it—they only laughed at her. And Vera managed to get away from the waiter only through a miracle. By a lucky chance a fire broke out in the hotel, otherwise she would have been there forever. In the confusion she managed to escape from her room and took to her heels. She ran to Kuznechny Lane, to the corners where the palmist lived, but her mother was not there—she had died of cholera. That was another pretty fix: there might be nothing to do but go back to her room with the waiter. But the janitor’s wife took pity on her. Like Antonina Ignatievna, Mikhail Pavlovich’s wife—she used to visit the brother in the harbor district—she was softhearted and knew Antonina Ignatievna and sent her off to see her at Burkov House in case they could find a place for the poor girl. Instead of Antonina Ignatievna, Vera ended up with Akumovna.

  “She’s a miraculous girl!” said Akumovna, “but there’s only one thing I’m afraid of. It’s the way those idle folk hang around outside the doors. It’s terrifying.”

  The endless summer wore on, exhausting in its monotony. The weather was intensely hot, and all over Petersburg, on every street, the standpipes appeared—as usual they were resurfacing the roads—and there was no way you could get through either on foot, or in a vehicle, and there was just that stifling heat.

  In the evenings sitting by the samovar Akumovna would tell Marakulin’s fortune, just as in the winter she had sat by the samovar doing the same for Adoniia Ivoilovna. She was bounteous and made endless forecasts not only on the king of clubs, or the king of the cross, as Akumovna called him, but also on the other kings and queens—clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades, whichever cards came out for him, in order to know their fate and the more reliably to learn who they were and what their thoughts were.

  The cards did not lie. It was always one and the same thing, a kind of meaningless muddle: a little monotony, a little money, a little change, a few tears and some annoyance, a young lady, your own house and belongings, an important, noble-looking gentleman with a document, a government building, the young lady’s boredom, a little unpleasantness, your own worries, talking to yourself. And Marakulin was constantly left with talking to himself.

  Akumovna would lay out the cards for the last time and begin to whisper the final words: “For the house. For the heart. For what will be. For how things will end. How things will abate. How things will astonish. Tell the whole truth with an open heart. What will be will be.”

  And for the last time it came out one and the same way—one card: a kind of meaningless muddle and talking to yourself.

  The cards did not tell lies. Only sometimes they probably became bored and got angry. They began to laugh at us and would forecast some big change, or else they would show the high road, a great deal of money and the fulfillment of desires.

  Sitting over the cards, Akumovna would often remember her mistress and the old master, her mistress’s brother and her own son—who had what dreams, what they led to, and what they meant.

  “Now our priest at Turii Rog was a good sort, and a great one for repentance, our Father Arseny,” Akumovna remembered. “Just before he died, he stood up and asked: ‘Are the horses ready?’ ‘What horses do you mean, Father?’ ‘Well, you see,’ says he, ‘I’ve just married a young couple, and they’ve invited me to go abroad to their wedding feast!’ With that he died. Then, six days before the old master died, my mistress dreamed that she had lost the shoe off one foot. And just before she died, I dreamed that I was seated in front of a stove that I had stoked up. The wood burst into flames and started to break up. I cut up some bacon fat, put it in a pot and placed it in the stove. The pot broke into two halves, the logs started spattering, and there was smoke everywhere…. My father never gave me a proper blessing. ‘May you wander around the whole wide world like a rolling stone!’ And that’s how everything has turned out!”

  “And what about your brother and his wife?” asked Marakulin.

  “Well, it went on as before. They were having a difficult time with no woodland, no fuel, no meadow grass. Then their youngest daughter, Fedosia, my niece, went every day to Turii Rog to do weeding on a piecework basis. The young master, young Buianov, took a fancy to her. He liked to play around, so he took her on as a house servant for a month. When that month finished, he kept her on for a further month after that, and so it continued for the whole winter. My brother knew what was going on, but said nothing to his wife. They had no woodland, no fuel, no meadow grass, while from the master they would get firewood and money, so it was to their advantage. So Fedosia carried on living there right through the winter. However, in the week after Easter the master went off to the city and got married there. And Fedosia went back home to her father, and now they all found out. Her brothers started to reproach her: how could she have turned out to be like that with this sin of hers. They pecked at her like ravens and finished her off. She couldn’t stand it any more, and nine days before the Feast of the Virgin she died. She was just over twenty and still very young. Then my cousin Vasily got frostbite and lost both feet at Shrovetide.”

  When Akumovna remembered Turii Rog and Sosna Gora, she would come up with things that you would never think would enter her head at Burkov House.

  “The barley will already have ripened by now, thank God!” she would say, crossing herself. “God forbid we should get rain.”

  Vera had become used to Marakulin and was no longer shy with him. He had become used to her, too, and liked her coming into the room, first Akumovna entering with the samovar, and then Vera with the slop-basin.

  “In the next world devils give communion to other devils and to sinners from a slop-basin” Marakulin once thought, remembering what Akumovna had seen in her visit to hell. And he smiled for the first time since the other Verochka’s departure.

  And Vera smiled back at him, as though she had read his thoughts, and for a long time he remembered her smile, that of an older child, or else a young girl.

  And what a void there seemed to be, when Vera found herself a job and moved from Akumovna’s kitchen up to the fourth floor in the “wing,” as the back end of the block was called, looking out onto the Belgian Society factory.

  Akumovna began to disappear quite often, going to visit her miraculous girl, the light of her life, her darling Vera. She was probably teaching her how to clean a room, how to soak birchwood, and other such things. So Marakulin was left completely alone, and everything seemed empty.

  Some gentleman from the wing got into the habit of leaning out of his window in the evening, facing Marakulin and whistling at him. From the way the man never took his eye off him, Marakulin became certain that the whistling would never stop, all of which made him furious, so willy-nilly he had to draw the curtain and sit in the stifling heat.

  He felt empty, and anger was choking him.

  In the mornings he read the newspaper, seeking out with impatient glee, and taking malign pleasure in every murder, fire, disaster, flood, avalanche, or earthquake. In his malicious delight he believed that anyone could be frightened and terrified, could have their innermost being and their soul turned inside out—and then the evening’s self-satisfied impudent whistling would stop ringing in his ears.

  But there must have been something amiss with Vera’s new position; something must have happened. It had been impossible to protect her from the idlers, most likely—and no one could possibly keep a proper eye on her anyway, she was so
shameless.

  Akumovna broke off her fortune-telling, and in tears began to speak about Vera: “I shall go to the tsar himself; as before God, I shall place my hands together and tell him everything.”

  “They won’t let you in, Akumovna.”

  “I’ll go in naked; as before God, I shall place my hands together and tell him everything.”

  “They won’t let you in naked, either.”

  But she insisted on what she was saying; she believed that the tsar would intervene and the girl would come to no harm. She carried on insisting for a long time, and then suddenly she fell silent: she was resigning herself. And Marakulin could hear her whispering the final words with which she would leave this mortal life—retribution and reward for all that had happened: “No one should be blamed.”

  “Then who is guilty, Akumovna?”

  “I’m an ignorant person, I know nothing,” she replied, smiling and looking at you from time to time from some other place, as might a holy fool.

  The summer was dragging on endlessly, exhausting in its monotony. Marakulin could not wait for the holidays to come. They were holidays, after all!

  The first to return was Vasily Aleksandrovich, the clown. He had been putting on a summer performance in Petersburg, while living at a dacha outside the city in Shuvalovo. He would visit the flat only occasionally, and then only look in for a moment. His “slave” Kuzmovna was also in Shuvalovo with him. After Vasily Aleksandrovich, Sergei Aleksandrovich returned, having finished his summer travels. From the warmer climes or, as Akumovna put it, from the country where they ride on bulls, he brought back with him a hundred jars of honey—he was a great one for looking after provisions. Shortly after Sergei Aleksandrovich, Vera Nikolaevna also returned with fresh fruit jam from her mother in Kostrinsk, her desolate, little, white old city with its fifteen white churches. After Vera Nikolaevna Adoniia Ivoilovna herself reappeared.