Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

I started to cry. I didn’t even bother wiping my tears. I had to do this, crying or not.

I needed something I could count on to burn. I thought of the paper I carried. My Vikzhel documents, ruble notes, what good would any of them be to me if I were dead? Though if I lived… then I remembered—the map! It was as if the sun had broken through the snowstorm. I fumbled it out from my coat pocket and, trembling, shredded it and tucked it into the tiny pile of kindling, trying not to knock the whole thing over with my circus-bear hands. Gently, I lit the third match and holding one hand in the other to stabilize my grip, touched the corners of the paper, shielding it between my palms and my body. Please, God, let there be light. I barely breathed. Live or die.

The ecstasy, to see flame lacing through the tiny twigs! As though I had given birth to a fire child. I fed it tenderly, a bird feeding its nestling, an inch of dried twig at a time. Once or twice, I did so clumsily and watched in horror as it guttered, shrank, threatening to die. I breathed on it as if it were the flame of life itself. The relief as the heavenly streaks of red and orange crept back. Carefully I fed it slightly larger, finger-size twigs, trying not to topple the cone of sticks, which was starting to glow. I braced a couple of flat pieces of bark against the small tepee and—heaven!—they, too, began to smolder, and with a bit of breath, ignite.

Only then did I dare put my gloves back on, and I forced myself to use the last daylight to collect firewood, reluctant to move away from my fire child, to leave it to the wind, which was getting worse. I’d cleared just about all the easy wood already, and had to move in wider circles. I worked as quickly as I could, piling my gleanings alongside the fire, to shelter it. Finally, as the light faded, I sat down on the mat of fir boughs under my lean-to, my women’s clothes wrapped around my legs where the sheepskin wasn’t long enough to cover them. The fire fed busily before me, the stones warming and reflecting the heat. I hadn’t understood their function before. And it occurred to me that I just might survive this. An hour or two ago, I was ready to die. Who would have guessed I had it in me?

Night fell like a blanket over a birdcage. One moment it was light and the next, the darkness was complete but for the glow of the fire. The trees, growing so close together, protected me from the worst of the wind, but the pines groaned overhead like ship masts, and my fire seemed very small in a very large world. In its flickering, the trees appeared to dance, which elevated my uneasiness where I huddled in my sheepskin. Yet I was warm, I had this fire, I had food, I wasn’t dead yet.

An owl began to hoot—if it was an owl, in the middle of a snowstorm. It should have been huddled in the hollow of some tree. Every hair on my body stood out sharp as a pine needle. Owls were omens of death. I didn’t believe in omens, but out here, with nothing but forest for miles in any direction, it was hard not to read messages into the slightest event.

Suddenly a giant shape swept over me. I ducked and screamed, almost tumbling into the fire. It disappeared between the tree trunks. How could an owl that size—wings perhaps three feet across—fly between such closely spaced trunks? Was it real? Had I imagined it?

I listened with every bit of my skin and ears, I listened with my very toenails. I thought of wolves. Could they smell me even in a snowstorm? The sausage in my sack, the cheese? Wolves are afraid of people, I reassured myself. Wolves avoid men unless they’re sick or starving, and it was too early in the season for wolves to be starving. Not like us poor humans. Wolves weren’t on rations, there was no speculation in the forest, only animals living their own secret lives. Life all around me. I felt the animals just out of range of the fire, among the crazy shadows.

Thank God for this fire, the fingering flame—red and beautiful. I took off my gloves and dried them on the rocks. I stuck my boots out toward the fire, warming the leather while I gnawed tiny bites out of the sausage, frozen hard, and bits of cheese, spoonfuls of viscid jam. The snow fell like a curtain outside the small dome of light. How grateful I was that something had moved me to come into the forest and build this shelter, that something had helped me. It had to be—it wasn’t the kind of thing I could have done on my own. Maybe it was Seryozha, watching over me from the other side. Or the Virgin of Tikhvin. The fire snapped, and I watched the sparks uneasily as they rose into the dark, worried that they would drift into my brush pile and burn secretly, bursting into flame as I slept. But burning alive was not the worst fate I could imagine, not right now. Anything to feel warm.

Something was stinking. My boot was on fire. God! I jumped up and I stamped it out in the deepening snow. My boots were so poor to begin with—there was barely any sole left. I didn’t want to imagine what I had done to them in my carelessness. I huddled miserably back under the lean-to, cold again, keeping my boots a respectful distance from the fire this time and putting off the moment I would have to leave it and crawl into the brush-pile coffin.

Gazing into the firelight, I tried to think of something to look forward to. But the place where my dreams nested lay empty. The one thing I’d always dreamed of—marrying Kolya Shurov, being with him for life—had been extinguished. A dream concealed like a jewel you discovered to be a useless piece of glass. This was all I had—this hundred-something pounds of bone and gristle and poorly functioning organs sitting on twigs under a pathetic lean-to in the middle of a forest in a snowstorm. I felt as hollow and collapsed as an old sack and so weary I could have slept sitting up.

I was loath to abandon my beautiful child, but I was running out of firewood and the storm was gathering strength. I had to sleep. Carefully, I urinated on the other side of the fire—the last thing I wanted to do was let my pants down, but it would be impossible once I’d sealed myself into my burrow. Finally I crawled inside the brush pile, inching backward so my head would be at the tallest spot, carefully trying not to displace the fir boughs. I brought the food sack in after me. It was probably the wrong thing to do, but I was damned if I was going to leave it out to feed the animals. Finally, I pulled the mat of boughs in after me to stop up the small entryway.

Lying in the darkness atop the aromatic pile, I wrapped my woolen scarf all around my head, covering my eyes, and waited for sleep. The fir boughs had been a stroke of genius, thick enough to keep me off the icy ground, something I could be thankful for. I turned, ever so gently, onto my side, hands plunged in their gloves under my armpits—at least the gloves were dry and hadn’t burned. I couldn’t draw my knees up more than a few inches without touching the side of the burrow, so I lay shivering and miserable and colder than I could ever imagine being. I tried to breathe slowly, intentionally. Master Vsevolod said there were yogis who breathed through their skins alone, who could stop their heartbeats for half an hour at a time. They could be buried alive for three days, then dug up, and they would sit up smiling. My mother would listen, her blue eyes shining, rapt at such nonsense, while Seryozha imitated him behind his back. Now I wished I had learned a few of those esoteric arts, instead of making fun of them with my brother.

I fixed my mind on things that were hot. A crock of soup. A train’s boiler. The sun on the lavender fields—the very smell of sunshine. A candle burning in the nursery. I saw a line of camels crossing bleached dunes, heading to Bukhara. I imagined the city’s square blazing at midday, the wavering lines of heat, its giant tower like a rook in chess. I saw my uncle Vadim lying out on rocks in California wearing nothing but a loincloth. I walked the long allée at Maryino in the summertime, the sun pouring onto the red valerian and Queen Anne’s lace. I climbed with Seryozha into the stifling hot attic, the smell of cedar chests and old wedding dresses.

Seryozha. At least one person I hadn’t disappointed.

From my grave, I could hear the roar of the storm, but muffled. Idyosh, na menya pokhozhii… Tsvetaeva’s great poem, the poet speaking to a casual cemetery visitor from under the earth. Passerby, stop! Read—my name was Marina. But there wouldn’t be any passersby here. None who could read, anyway. Only a red fox, perhaps, with his sensitive nose, sniffing at this pile, smelling the sausage, knowing something strange was buried here. I prayed the animals would not try to dig me out. I had to hope the storm would do for them what it had done for me—send them to their burrows for shelter.

My exhaustion was absolute, but I was shivering too hard for sleep. How long would this night last under these leaves? Without even knowing it, I began to recite “Winter Evening”: Darkness spreads across the sky, / whirlwinds whip the snow around; / first the storm cries like a child, / then it bellows like a hound. I might be buried in a brush heap in the middle of a nightmare, but I still had this. I had forgotten. I had been so busy throwing Pushkin from the ship of modernity, I had forgotten that he was in my bones, my hair, my fingernails. I was made of Pushkin, as was every educated person who spoke the Russian tongue. I knew reams of his lines. Oceans of them. Now I had to beg his pardon. Alexander Sergeevich, forgive me! Help me. Keep me warm, blessed companion.

Memories came back to me of reciting these classic verses in my Makarov grandmother’s stuffy parlor, her potted palms and cutwork lace, the rustle of her black taffeta dress. She would give me a silver ruble for a recitation, but only if I didn’t make a single mistake. “Not so Wagnerian,” she would correct me. “This isn’t opera, child. You must think it, and then breathe it out, like an intelligent person, not a trained monkey.” She was the one who gave me poetry. Not my mother at all. My father’s family. Distant and conventional though they were.

This poem—once I’d learned it, I’d recite it in the nursery for Seryozha as we sat by the window, watching the snow as it fell. Those nights we’d listen to Avdokia tell her stories about growing up in Novinka with its peasant cottages, just like in the poem, as if she’d lived in Pushkin’s time.

And so I passed the night, shivering and whispering Pushkin to myself like a nun saying her rosary as the storm roiled outside my burrow. Like bells sounding out the liturgical hours were these bells of meter and rhyme. I remembered all of “The Gypsies.” Aleko, who wanted freedom for himself but not for Zemfira, his gypsy love. I always thought I would be a Zemfira, but now I saw I was Aleko, trying on a foreign life but unable to sustain it.

After “The Gypsies,” huge parts of Eugene Onegin came pouring from my lips, lips that had been born to speak them. There with me in that cold retreat came maddening Onegin, with his Byronic pose, and naive, book-mesmerized Tatiana and her dangerous love for him. I recited her famous letter, the dearest verse in the Russian language, as she admitted her passion, baring her heart to his cynical eye: Ya k vam pishu—chevo zhe bole? I write to you—what more to say? Oh, to someday create lines a hundredth, a thousandth as immortal as these! I vowed to the close darkness and to the storm and the branches and the heavens above that if I lived through this night I would dedicate myself to poetry alone and leave passion to those better able to withstand its fury.

I AWOKE TO BLACK and the scent of evergreens. I couldn’t believe I’d slept but I must have. In the darkness, the shelter actually seemed warmer—like a bear’s den. I had lived through the night. Thank you, I prayed to the brush pile. Was it morning? There was no way to tell. I didn’t want to emerge too early, like a misguided crocus, to find it was still night, or be caught in the blizzard. But I didn’t hear anything, and after a few minutes I reached for a stick, and thrust it between the layers of boughs sealing off the mouth of the lean-to, working my arm through the brush until I felt snow. Carefully, I turned over onto my belly—and, yes, through a patch of snow I could see a faint glow—daylight.

I clawed my way out like a chicken from an egg and burst into the world so violently that parts of the shelter collapsed. It was a bitter morning, but the gray light was as good as rainbows in the falling snow. Oh praises, oh glory and hosanna, the wind had stopped blowing! Bless Pushkin, Seryozha, the Virgin, and anyone else who had joined me in that grave through that long night.