And yet who would have had the strength to cut such a tree, I wondered, and move all that wood? I shrank back against the cover of some little pines to watch and wait. Perhaps Mother and Avdokia had a man living with them, or someone from the village. But it might be someone else—squatters, deserters. The double windows had been hung, windows I’d never actually seen in place, only stored in the shed. The steps had been swept as well, and paths dug out from the house to the outbuildings and into the woods. The industry was clear, and recent. So tidy that I couldn’t imagine it was deserters. It had to be peasants, though this was tidy even for them. A Cheka outpost? No—Lyuda would have told me. She wouldn’t have let me walk into something like that.

Perhaps it was my father come back after Red Terror, waiting things out for another try at Petrograd. I thought of the conspirators assembled in the dacha at Pulkovo. But I couldn’t imagine them digging paths. They would have tried to be as inconspicuous as possible.

I crouched in the trees. The chicken’s warm fluttering under my coat felt like my heart held gently outside my body. I’d traveled so long, all this way, but had no plan, only the destination.

A woman in a patchwork quilted coat emerged from the kitchen door and walked away toward a shed, a basket over her arm. She moved gracefully, as if she were being watched. Like a dancer onstage. No, this wasn’t my father and his cronies. Then a man emerged from the same door, a handsome young one in a black beard and, like the girl, in thick padded coat that looked like it was quilted from rags, and a strange patchwork hat with a point on the top. He picked out some wood from the pile, carried it down the stairs to the stump, and proceeded to split it for kindling. He was precise and unhurried, like a woodcutter in a fairy tale. It all seemed so… enchanted. He stopped for a moment as if sensing something. I hunched down with my chicken. Could he smell me in the snow? Was it that frostbite medicine, which smelled like dead herring? He listened, then went back to his work. He didn’t work like a laborer. I couldn’t describe it, but it was as if he were playing a role onstage: the Woodcutter.

The woman came back from the shed like a maiden in a processional. What in the devil was going on here? Who were these people? Some sort of stranded theater troupe? Had I stumbled into the world of my childhood fantasies? I sidled along through the trees toward that shed. As I got close, I could hear squawking and crowing inside, and my chicken started to rustle and claw me. In the house, dogs barked. I opened the shed door a crack. A chicken coop, nicely appointed, lined with wood chips and shavings. Twenty fat hens flapped their wings and a tall black rooster ran at me, trying to fight me.

I latched the coop and backed away, looking for the best place to hide. Then suddenly two huge dogs appeared on the porch. They hurled themselves down the steps, racing toward me. I opened the chicken coop and closed myself inside moments before the dogs crashed into the door, their weight heaving the boards. They continued barking and growling while the rooster attacked me from within. I gave him a good kick while keeping my shoulder to the door, praying someone would rescue me. Had I been through all this only to be mauled by dogs?

“Bonya. Buyan,” a man’s voice clearly articulated. The growling and scratching stopped immediately. “Come out, thief.”

I cracked open the coop door. “I’m not a thief.”

“Don’t try my patience. Show yourself.”

I opened the door and slid out. The dogs sat on either side of a broad-chested, moustached man wearing a long sheepskin coat, Mongolian style, and an astrakhan hat. Behind him stood a motley array of young people, all in the strange colorful dress I’d seen before. The older man appeared to be unarmed, but I kept one hand up, the other pressing my chicken under my coat. “I’m not a thief. This is my chicken. I came with it. I bought it in Novinka. I have grain for it, too.”

He tilted his head at a dark-haired girl who’d come to his side. She had an eyebrow that grew together in the middle, like a gypsy’s, and she had a gypsy’s confident stare. She approached me and I pulled the white chicken from the warmth beneath my coat. It began to flap and struggle as soon as it was exposed to the light and the cold. She took it from me by its feet.

“And the sack,” said the man, and she took that as well.

She brought my belongings to him, and he began to go through them, keeping one eye on me. The others watched from the porch, as if there were to be a horse race or a public hanging. “Who are you people?”

The man’s eyes, black and slightly popped, like glass eyes in a case, ran over my face and form. He was dark, with a bull’s neck and a shaved head, a long moustache, and a ring in his ear. He continued examining the contents of my bag. He produced the jar of jam, which he opened and sniffed, tasted; then the small bundle of grain, which he rolled between his fingers. Then my women’s clothes, my peasant’s dress, which he fingered, then lifted to his nostrils. It was obscene. I knew then that he knew Misha was really a woman. He would call my bluff, as they said in poker. But he didn’t. He just stuffed it all back in the bag, threw it at my feet.

Now he walked a circle around me, hands behind his back, as if I was a bit of statuary someone had deposited in his yard. Pulled off my cap and dropped it at my feet in the snow. “Who are you?” he asked in perfect Russian.

“Misha,” I said. “What about you, Pops?”

He glowered at my insolence. “How did you find your way here? Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m from here. I knew the way.” I didn’t want to say how. For all he knew I was the son—or daughter—of a servant. “I was living in Petrograd, but it’s a bad time in the city. I decided to come back.”

His face betrayed nothing. He came closer, sniffed my hair. He looked like the strong man in a circus, and he smelled of something. Incense? Saddle leather? “You’ve been in the village. What do they say about us?”

“They didn’t say anything. Only that your business was your own.” I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed ahead, like a good soldier.

“Until it’s not,” he said. He kept walking, his gait that of a military man, commanding. Perhaps he was a deserter, a noncommissioned officer hiding out, hoping to avoid the new draft. But who were these others? I counted six of them, four young women, including the gypsy, plus the young man who’d been chopping kindling and an older one in wire spectacles, his hair a wild bush—an intelligent if ever I’d seen one. Behind them, I could see what they could not—myself as a child, peering out from the lilac bushes beside the kitchen door, sticking out my tongue, and the ghost of my Golovin grandmother standing on the porch, preparing to summon her coachman to escort these strange people off the land.

“Go back to the village,” he told me. “Tell them monsters are living here.” He made a terrible grimace, and the others laughed. “With three legs and four heads. We’ll come and eat their children if they’re not good. Go on. Pick up your things and go.” He turned back to the house.

I picked up my bag. “My chicken,” I called after him.

He gave the order like a king expecting to be obeyed. “Give it its chicken back.”

The dark-haired girl handed me the white chicken, which I put back under my coat. That was it? He was sending me away? Returning me like a flat of bad eggs? “I walked all the way from Tikhvin. I slept in the forest. And now you’re going to shoo me away like some stray dog?”

“Isn’t that what you are?” he asked.

“I belong here.”

His people waited like children, not sure what was going to happen. Obviously few people said no to this man, this sergeant or corporal or whatever he’d been at the front.

“Suit yourself.” He turned and mounted the porch steps as if rising to a dais, and his entourage followed him like little ducks. They all went inside, and left me standing in the yard.

Snow fell softly on my cheeks, like the lightest touch of hands.

Well, I wouldn’t leave. I would stand here until they gave in, until someone took pity. I had foisted myself on the most hard-hearted of peasants, I would not be turned away now. Because I had no other ideas. I had reached the end of my resources. I walked out to a place where they could all see me—the larch stump, which was as wide as a table. I sat on it and watched the house, glancing up at the windows, wondering who was watching me. Nothing mattered but to be here, to spend the night under this roof again. I was home and here I would stay. I would simply outlast them. For the first time, I understood that the secret of resistance wasn’t heroism but simple pigheaded balk. There was no question of a fight—I didn’t have the strength—but I would shame him, if nothing else.

I toyed with the hatchet, slicing off shards of wood into smaller and smaller bits. I breathed great clouds of steam, my legs crossed, like a homeowner relaxing in his yard, smoking a cigarette. Yes, I was home. I knew that ownership was a thing of the past, but nevertheless, in some gut-level way, this was mine. The frosted gingerbread of the old-fashioned house, built by my great-grandfather for his bride, the allée, the aspens and forest, the river. How funny that it took a revolution for me to care, to feel its deep roots entwined with my own. Yet the larch had been cut down, as our family had been cut down. So which was the metaphor?

So many evenings on that broad porch. White nights and fireflies, our songs and plays. The tables and chairs set out in the yard for lunches and dinners with visitors. Lying on the musty cushions of the wicker chaise reading Oliver Twist and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo on drizzly summer afternoons. Wordsworth and Keats… Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art… The requisite nap in the white-curtained nursery, the silence of those hot hours. Yes, the house knew me. If it were a puppy it would leap up and lick my face. It was these strange people who didn’t belong. Someone inside played the flute, a mournful, quarter-tone Eastern melody, bizarre yet pleasant on the frosty air.

I balled up some snow, packed it tight and threw it against the front door. It plashed with a satisfying splat, the dry new snow bursting against the glass and the wood. It was getting colder, but I would not leave. I wondered what time it was, but the sky was still a uniform yellow-gray.

In a little while, a lovely doe-eyed girl with a finely drawn face and motley coat came out, and, holding her head high, she marched up to me and put something on the stump. Steaming—a potato. She gave me a single strong look, as if to say, Don’t lose hope, then marched back to the house, slim and straight as a birch tree. I cradled the potato in my frozen hands, let it warm me, pressed it to my face. I had a friend here. And a potato. I was rich indeed.

I waited until the potato had cooled before I ate it. The snow built up on my sleeves. I didn’t brush it off, in hopes it would stir greater pity. I fed the chicken little bits of grain from my sack, its head peeping out the V of my coat. My ears were freezing under the poor cap, but I didn’t want to wrap my head in the scarf. I wanted them to see me, this poor boy they were leaving out in the snow. I wanted to pluck their hearts. I’d already won one of them over—how difficult could the rest be?

The front door banged back, and in the opening stood a tiny, bowlegged figure in a blue head scarf. “Merciful Virgin, you’re alive! Marinoushka!” She broke into a tottering half run, holding the railing, sidestepping down the porch stairs, running to me, clutching at me, kissing my hands in their dirty gloves, holding my face, crushing me to her. The chicken clawed at my stomach. I pulled it out, set it free. How I had missed her! And when I lifted her, how heavy she was for such a tiny woman—she weighed as much as a barrel of wheat. “Avdokia, you’re so fat!”

She laughed as she wept, touching my short hair. “You look just like blessed Seryozha,” she said, “may he rest in peace. Oh, my child. Look at you. Oh, sweet lovey. I can’t believe… we thought… we were sure…”

They must have thought I was dead. Murdered. How awful. I hadn’t thought about them, what they might have been going through. I had only thought of my own torment. I felt like Theseus, who, upon coming home from Crete, had forgotten to change his sails from black to white, causing his father’s suicide. The hell they must have lived, all these months. As I had when I heard of Seryozha’s fate. “Shh. I’m here now. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. And you’re here. You’re safe!” I twirled her around, her chubby hunched little body. “What’s going on around here? The boss told me to clear off, but I’m not going to.”