She petted me, kissed me again. “Yes, well, since when did you listen to anyone?”

“How is Mother?” I asked.

“Ai… don’t ask,” she said. “Let’s get you inside. Have something to eat.” She wiped her eyes on her apron. “And catch that chicken! We’re not above eating. Even on the astral plane, you should see them put it away.”

I lunged for the chicken, but it ran from me. Right up to Avdokia, who caught it. We walked to the chicken coop and she tossed my pullet in—the only white one—the others eyeing it with suspicion.


Warmth. That’s what I noticed when we entered through the kitchen. How warm it was! The fine young woman, my savior, ground flour in a mill clamped onto the table. Something boiled on the stove in an enormous cauldron. Cabbage. The girl smiled shyly with her eyes but said nothing. The cabinets still showed their painted birds. We left our wet boots by the door, donned felt slippers, and retreated into Lyuda’s and Olya’s old room behind the kitchen.

The bright painted bed that they’d shared, mother and daughter, was gone. The room held only a crude cot covered with a quilt made from the same rags the young people had been wearing. But the stove! Even this room was merry with heat. Avdokia’s shawl hung on a peg, and in the red corner hung a hand-colored print—a cheap reproduction of the Virgin of Tikhvin. Home. I was home.

I sat on the bed. The wildly varied quilt was made of velvet and charmeuse and wool. Dark colors, city colors, interlaced with squares of vivid cloth that would have done well at a village fair. Avdokia lowered herself down next to me, slow and heavy, stiff with age. The rigors of the previous year had left their mark on her ancient body, despite her well-fed look. “How’s Mother?” I asked.

A great shuddering sigh went through her.

A torn space opened inside me. “Alive?”

“Oh, yes, yes, she’s alive, God bless us,” Avdokia said, yet her hesitation was confusing. “Oh, how can I begin to tell you, Marinoushka, what our lives have come to?” She gazed down at our interlocked fingers, mine hard, weathered but strong and young, straight-fingered, hers twisted as the roots of an old olive tree. “It’s such a long story, my pet, my dove.” She tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “A strange story, stranger than I can say.”

“I want to see her,” I said.

“A moment, sweetness, and listen to me.” Patting me as she had when I was a child headstrong with some urgent idea, she wetted her thin lips, obviously trying to find the way to begin. But her aged brain could not find the end of the string. “Let me tell the story, so you understand. She’s alive, but not the same. Poor Verushka, strong and weak in all the wrong ways. This year, when you disappeared, when that devil, when he…” The tears started again. That cursed night when Arkady arrived. “Well, it was just too much for her. For her mind. After everything—your father, and poor Seryozha, the flat… you don’t know what we’ve been through.” She spoke to our hands, stroking mine rhythmically as she would pet a small dog. “We searched for you. Even went to the district soviet for all the good it did. Like telling a hedgehog to fly.”

Behind the kitchen door, soft voices, then a harsher one. A clatter of dishes. And from somewhere else, the unlikely Eastern sound of some stringed instrument. She leaned closer. “Well, after that, she took to her bed, not talking, or worse, talking to people who weren’t even there. Like you. And Seryozha. ‘They’re gone, sweetheart,’ I’d tell her. ‘Gone to heaven.’ But she said no, you were playing tricks on her, like you used to when you were young. Other times, she’d scream that the Cheka were coming, that they were going to burn the house down. She’d claw at the wallpaper until I had to wrap her fists, swaddle her in the blankets.” She took a shuddering breath. I put my arm around her. “The neighbors complained. The whole house was against us. You remember what it was like. It only got worse.” I could see their faces, the tired suspicious women and their hard husbands living in our flat. “I was half out of my mind. So I did the only thing I could think of—I called Vsevolod.” Master Vsevolod, with his stink of incense and his boneless white hands. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “And he brought in that one.” She nodded at the door, her face pale as cake flour. “You know, the devil waits for an invitation. Forgive me, child. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Past her face, out the frosted window, snow built up along the limbs of the old apple tree, quite bare now. In the spring, I would see it full of sweet white flowers—if I were still here. “No, you did the right thing,” I said. Her pale, ancient face twisted with guilt, her small, tortured mouth. What did she have to be sorry for? It was I who needed forgiveness.

“Well, this one knows a good thing when he sees it. Vsevolod must have told him.” She was whispering hard now. “So gifted, he called her, a seer. Of course she could see her dead children. ‘No one ever dies… they just live happily in the land behind the sunrise’—anything he could think of.” Her face darkened with rage. “Yes, and suddenly rivers will swim upstream and the dead sit up in their graves and ask for tea with two lumps of sugar. Ai, the lies he told her! You’d have thought the very walls would cover their ears and run away. But I kept my mouth shut, God forgive me.” She crossed herself. “We needed him, milaya. We were being evicted. We would have been on the streets and not a soul would have lifted a finger to save us. This one had a circle living in a big dacha on Aptekarsky Island.”

What wasn’t happening up on the islands?

“That devil talks to her once—once!—and suddenly she’s out of bed, ordering me to pack, when before she wouldn’t get out of bed to save her own life. ‘Prophetess…’” She snorted, wiped the tears tracing the riverbeds of her wrinkles. “Of course he had eyes, he could see. The flat. The furniture. He asked her about the photograph of Maryino. I saw exactly what was on his mind. Maybe I’m a prophetess myself, eh?” She chuckled despite herself. “Oh, you’ll see, they’re a regular pack of idiots. My poor lamb could never resist a grand role. Anything you put in her head becomes real. So now she’s gifted. She’s reading the future in the ice, in a bowl of soup. Such imagination. Like mother, like children.”

I was stung that my nanny thought I was anything like Vera Borisovna.

She grinned a toothless grin and patted my knee. “All of you. Not a streak of sense in the whole family. So there we were on Aptekarsky. The Laboratory, they called it. The lunatic asylum, if you ask me. God preserve us.” She spat. “All Vsevolod’s people were there—the Gromitskys, the Kovelovs. Living cheek by jowl with people right off the street.” She lowered her voice again. “He loves that—you’ll see. Plagues them, stirs them up, sets them against each other. Your mother notices nothing.”

I tried to imagine a commune full of bourgeois spiritualists and beggars, orchestrated by the man who sicced his dogs on me. And my mother prophesying while Avdokia cursed every soul. I rested my head on her shoulder. I was at the end of my strength, bone-weary, not just in my body but in spirit as well. What I wanted was right here—the familiar smell of her dress, the birds painted on the kitchen cabinets. This was why I had come. “Don’t let him send me away,” I said.

“No, sweetness. I have a few tricks up my own sleeve.” She smiled and kissed me, petted me as if I were six. “But stay out of his way. Remember, we need these people more than they need us.”

“I’ll be as silent as a whore’s conscience.”

She rose and looked into my eyes, one of her pale brows arched in skepticism. “Chu chu chu. Just don’t stir them up. Stay here until I can talk to him, see what I can do. Whatever happens, don’t react. It’s lucky the earth is still solid under our feet and doesn’t go flying up into the sky.”

She left me there in the small bare room. I lay drowsing on the cot, listening through the stout walls of the old house to voices, muffled laughter, the sounds of a hammer, the clatter of pots. Out the window, I watched one of their ragged number go past with that same gliding walk. Further on, a boy and a girl I hadn’t seen before shoveled snow, making a soothing chop and hiss. Soft footsteps in felt boots shushed in and out of the kitchen. I smelled pungent sour cabbage, and bread baking. After a while, my nanny brought me back a bowl of soup and a piece of black bread. Gradually the noises settled, doors stopped opening and closing. I was happy to just fall asleep in Avdokia’s bed. I was home.

72 The Master

I SLEPT ON FOR two days, rising only to use the chamber pot, eat, and fall asleep again. I dreamed I was in my lean-to in the woods, but I discovered a set of stairs that led down to an entire underground house. How had I missed them? It was warm and a young man who seemed to know me lived there. We’d gone to school together. He fed me and we talked about Lermontov. In another dream, there was a bathhouse in a goat pen, and a fire-spotting tower on the rooftop of the house on Furshtatskaya. I was aware of Avdokia going to bed and getting up, but still I dreamed on.

On the third day, I awoke to gray light, a snowy day, her empty bed. I waited to see if she would return, but when she didn’t, I got up and cracked the door. The kitchen was empty, scrubbed and clean as an English doctor’s office. Two loaves of bread cooled on the hearth. Wherever did they get the flour? Certainly a bunch of ragged intellectuals couldn’t have brought in a harvest—it was impossible. How long had they been here? Since May? June? I could hear the scrape of wooden dishes in the back parlor and a sonorous voice. Their leader must be holding forth. A younger man spoke, then, deferential. Their master again. I knew Avdokia had warned me to stay out of sight, but everyone was occupied, and I itched to see what was going on in the other rooms. I crept down the hall, the back parlor smelling of sawdust and linseed oil, turpentine. A workroom. I imagined this mad gang carving strange totemic symbols—Lord knew for what purpose.

Whatever they were doing in the back parlor, the front one lay virtually empty but for the unfamiliar Bukhara carpets that had replaced our cheerful Finnish ones. My grandfather’s wonderfully hideous Alexander III chair also remained. I remembered him sitting in it reading, an embroidered cap on his head, his legs stretched out on a stool. Strange paintings now hung along the walls in dark blues and purples featuring snowcapped mountains, veiled women, and deer. No evidence of the sofas and wicker armchairs in which we’d lounged and told stories and played games. No striped shades and cutwork curtains on the bare windows. The izbas of Novinka must be well decorated these days, rich with candlesticks and clocks and pictures of our Golovin ancestors.

Well, candlesticks could go to the devil. Let the peasants use them in good health. They’d left the house intact, that was the important thing. Oddly enough, they’d also spared the upright piano. It was amazing they hadn’t stripped it for the wire. And the carved wooden stairs had been left unmolested. I ran my hand along the heavy wooden banister. How I’d loved sliding down this as a child, imagining daring escapes. But another Marina couldn’t help but calculate how many weeks such a piece of wood could serve a Petrograd bourgeoika.

Upstairs, it was all the same as ever—the red-painted hall, the moldings carved from silvery birch. Capacious, with windows at each end and the strong scent of cedar wood. I crept to the door of Mother’s room. She’d never been an early riser, and she took over my grandmother’s room after her death, as it was the farthest from the kitchen, with its smells and morning bustle. I pressed my ear to the door. Had Avdokia told her that I’d come home?

I noticed a musky smell—leathery and resinous. The olive-eyed leader was standing right at my elbow. I jumped. How was it that I hadn’t heard him? He was too solid a man to have climbed the carpetless stairs without my hearing, yet here he was, his shining bald head, dressed in a sheepskin vest. He took my wrist, not hard but in a way that prevented resistance, and pulled me from the door. “I thought I told you to leave,” he said, his brow wrinkled in long folds, his voice controlled but commanding.

I stood as straight as I could, my arm clamped in his grip, fear lying thick in my throat. “I’m Marina Dmitrievna Makarova and this is my house.”