“Have I?” He breathed out a cloud of his smoke, and I had to back away. In my head, the hurricane roared. My stomach lurched and I vomited into the snow as he watched with amusement.

I’d never conceived with Genya, though I wouldn’t have minded. The last time we made love was right before he went out for the defense of Petrograd in March—I could have had his baby already. Thank God I hadn’t with Arkady, I would have known by now. No, other than the filigreed love letter he had cut on my back, it was only in my darkened spirit that he’d left his impression. But between Kolya and me, there had always been such a strong charge of nature. My body wanted Kolya, ached for him. Such a stupid beast—it didn’t know we were through. I imagined my reddest inner chamber, like a velvet-lined boudoir all prepared for this small guest.

Ukashin lifted his face, listening to the song of his dogs baying a higher, more excited note. I had to get away and think. He knew too much, noticed too much, and I had learned a few things, one of them being that men who knew things about you were people to be avoided. It was flattering to be understood but dangerous. A good man didn’t need to be intriguing. This one, drawing on his tobacco, squinting against the smoke, looked like a rug merchant waiting for a client to make up his mind. I could see him in a fez in a coffee house sucking a hookah, the patience of centuries behind him.

What if I really was pregnant? Only the single most disastrous thing that could befall me right now, being so far from Petrograd. The city at least had hospitals and a modern attitude toward women.

I counted the months since the October celebration—November, December, January… July. A summer baby, if this was true and not some game he was playing. I glanced again at the broad shoulders in the shaggy coat. But I knew he was right. I could feel it. Bozhe moi. I was frankly terrified. What did I know about children? Didn’t every woman want a child? Just as Russia was about to be torn apart like an old dress, what could I hope for here—to give birth in a bathhouse? Or roll in herbs in hopes of a miscarriage? In Petrograd I could have an abortion in a modern mothers’ hospital. Unless a certain thief found me first. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about my future.

An abortion… was that what I wanted?

Yet how could I have a baby? I couldn’t even diaper Faina’s brat. Any child with me as a mother would be in sorry shape indeed. And with Kolya Shurov, that womanizer, as a father? My own mother hadn’t had a shred of maternal instinct, but at least she had a responsible husband and the comforts of home, the protection of money, servants, food on the table. A child of mine would be tossed into this world with nothing, dragged behind me like a goat behind a cart.

Somewhere in the aspens, we heard the bay of the dogs. He threw the cigarette into the snow. “They’re onto a deer. Get your gun.”

I’d forgotten Kolya’s gun. How on earth did he know? No time to wonder. I pulled my glove off with my teeth, dropped it to the snow. The headman placed his warm hand on my shoulder as my bare fingers found the butt, the trigger. In a great crash, a young stag bounded out of the brush, leaping ten feet or more as the dogs bounded after it. “Shoot it.”

Smoothly, with shocking grace, I extended the weapon, closed one eye, sighted ahead of the leaping deer.

“Now,” he said.

The blast echoed. The stag dropped to its knees, then over onto its side in the snow, and was still. It was nothing short of a miracle. I’d killed it with a pistol I’d never fired, at forty feet. It was impossible, yet it had happened.

Amazed, I gazed at the pistol in my hand, but it was as plain and heavy and dumb as ever. The bull-necked man let go of my shoulder. Suddenly I was cold again.

The rest of the scene unfolded in slowed-down time. The dogs catching up with the beast. The master calling them off. Their wavering in the snow halfway between the stag and where we stood. On second call, they came racing toward us, tails all awag. “You see?” As if we had been having an argument and the deer was the proof of his point. “It’s better when you don’t think so much,” he said. “Let doubt fall away, let confusion fall away. This is the true path. Davai. Let’s see what you brought for our table.”

We walked out into the snow toward the fallen creature. It lay there, real as a rug, one leg doubled under itself, its dainty cloven hooves, its rack of antlers, three points on each, its soft brown eye turning glassy. A second eye just above the first one showed where the bullet entered.

“You can give life, you can take it.” He handed me the hilt of a deadly looking knife, its blade slightly curved.

I watched myself, under his instruction, slitting open the body of the stag I had killed, beginning at the genitals and slicing all the way to the throat. “Don’t nick the organs,” he said. “Steady…”

I placed my fingers inside. Hot. Wet. I guided the knife carefully, keeping the point away from the guts. The belly steamed in the frost, and with the steam rose a strong smell that should have been disgusting but wasn’t. This was us—the heat, the beast’s life, locked into this meat. My life and this life I might possibly be carrying. Fresh blood stained the snow bright red.

“Lung.” He pointed. “Heart. Liver. Kidney.” The white lung, the red heart, purplish liver, blue kidney, the heavy red coils of the intestine. The machinery of the body. It was clean and intricate, and the man kept his hand on my shoulder, pointing out what needed to be done. I cut the membranes, scooped out pounds of slick, warm animal guts, laid them out in the snow. I was careful to pinch off the bladder, to get the entire intestinal tract. The dogs crept closer, on their stomachs, whining, until they were within ten feet of the steaming mass, but he stopped them with a single gesture, one blunt finger pointing. Then he knelt and took the bloody knife himself, sliced off a strip of the liver and held it out on the blade. “For the hunter.”

Raw? He expected me to eat it raw? I had avoided squeamishness so far, but this piece of bloody meat?

“This is your kill. Life and death. Eat.”

He was waiting. I took it into my mouth. Hot flesh. I chewed. It was milder than I expected, even a little sweet, easy to eat. I was hungry. The protein sat better than I would have imagined, and I felt the vigor of the deer entering my own blood. He ate a piece himself, then cut two more and threw them to the dogs.

One of the followers ran up the shoveled path—a tall, silent boy I hadn’t seen yet, his eyes a light brown, wearing a quilted hat pointed like a medieval helmet. How had he known to come? Did the man have a silent dog whistle?

“Ilya, bring a basin, a pail, and some burlap squares,” the master ordered. “And a rope.” The boy nodded, his earnest face knobbly like the knuckles of a hand. Prior to this moment, none of them would look at me directly, but before the boy ran back, he eyed me admiringly, even enviously. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my bloody hand.

Ukashin picked out some of the inferior pieces of offal and threw them to the dogs, who attacked them in a great outpouring of growls. “While we’re waiting,” he said, “find yourself a tree with a long sturdy branch.”

In a kind of trance, I found a suitable tree, a tall fir whose lowest branches he deemed adequate.

The boy soon returned with squares of burlap, a basin, and a pail in which rested a coiled rope, a small saw, and a hatchet. The burly headman indicated the organs spread out on the ground. “Take these to Katrina in the kitchen.” The boy filled the basin with them and carried them back to the house with the pride of Salome bearing the head of John the Baptist.

I thought I understood then what Ukashin would have me do—hang the deer in the tree, cold and safe, out of reach of winter’s animals. Using the hatchet for a weight, I threw the rope up and over the outstretched limb. It proved a dangerous choice, as I barely avoided catching the ax head in my skull on the way down. He had a good laugh at that one.

Next, we braced the stag’s legs apart, my instructor showing me where to cut holes in the hind legs to lace the rope through.

“Now pull it up,” he told me.

I took hold of the rope and hauled. The deer was too heavy.

“Oh, come. This is your kill. Pull it up!”

I put all the strength of my arms and legs into pulling it up, but it was hopeless. Yet I kept trying. I had to show him I wasn’t the little barynya expecting to be fed and cared for, that I would throw myself into whatever work he gave me, uncomplaining, to the point of the absurd. He let me struggle a good long time, too, hooting as I failed again and again, before he finally bent down himself and lifted the deer straight up in his arms, neat as a prince lifting a swan in a pas de deux. I shortened the rope, and the deer’s head swung two feet off the ground.

“We’ll want the hide, too,” he said.

There would be no shortcuts, evidently. Perhaps I would have to chew the sinews into cord, like the red Indians of my brother’s Zane Grey novels. So be it. Despite the bloody liver, I was feeling strangely well. And I found I enjoyed the man’s company. I liked his blunt solidity, his cheerfulness. It surprised me. I had been so prepared to dislike him, with all his mystical nonsense, but I had to admit that it felt good to be with someone who knew what he was doing, possessed the sort of understanding that inspired trust. Though I realized I had to be on guard against it. Alas, Beloved…

He showed me where to cut, around the hind legs at the thighs, a seam to free the hide from the flesh. Then I pulled the skin down, scraping and cutting the whitish membranes wherever they held fast, until I had the creature’s coarse gray-dun coat down around its neck and upper legs like a sweater pulled over a child’s head but not yet freed from its arms.

Stripped of its skin, hanging there, head down, legs splayed, the carcass looked terribly, touchingly human. Vulnerable and so light compared to the presence and power of the live stag—the heartbreakingly narrow legs, the slender waist, the narrow rack of ribs. I felt a shiver of recognition. It was like working on my own flayed body.

“Yes,” he said. “This is you. And you will eat it and continue to live. And when you die, something will eat you. Look at it.” He spun the deer on its rope. “Small isn’t it, to contain so much life? A dead man’s very similar. Imagine a battlefield full of dead men. A village. Walking into a village and seeing every man, woman, and child like this.”

A deserter. I’d been right.

I cut the hide away from the neck and the forelegs and set it in the snow. It steamed on the ground as the perfect hexagons of snowflakes drifted down over us, dusting the blue trees, soon to cover the pink blood seeping down into the white. Blood dripped from the hanging carcass into the bucket. I was tired but happy with my work, looking forward to going back to Avdokia’s room to sleep, to ponder what to do about the inconvenience. I held the knife out to Ukashin, but he raised his hands, as if it were red hot. “What, you think you’re done?”

What more was there to do?

“You have to butcher it before it freezes. Start with those.” He indicated two strips of meat on the inside of the deer, to either side of its backbone. “Reach in and pull.”

How easily they came free, surprising me. A long strip of meat, nice as anything served at the Astoria Hotel. He laid out a burlap square and I set the fillets onto it. Now I understood. And as tired as I was, I saw he was right. If the unbutchered deer froze, we’d never be able to pull the meat free. We’d have to chop the flesh from the bone with an ax.

Now the work grew hard—severing the legs, the neck, the spine. I fought against the queasy sense of having murdered a person, and now tormenting its savaged body. It brought me back to the basement of Gorokhovaya 2. The dispassion with which one body could torture another. This strange thing, life, built upon such a fragile bit of flesh.

I worked like a medical student, separating the meat along its natural lines of musculature. One flesh-being dissecting another. I thought of the cat we once dissected in physiology class at the Tagantsev Academy—or rather that Mina dissected. I’d cringed and hung back. I didn’t want to see a cat all open like that. Back when there still were cats. But I wasn’t a girl in the academy anymore. I had nursed the dying, I had cleaned their shit. Perhaps I wasn’t the chaos I’d imagined.