As I worked I had the sense of myself as someone I hadn’t really met yet, someone silent and deep, patient and strong—not like Marusya, whose storms were as violent as the ones on the sun—but whole and quiet under the chaos of my apparent self. Perhaps it wasn’t I who was chaotic. It was life itself. Existence was the whirlwind. I had just been too light to keep from being blown around in it. Now I felt a density forming within myself as I quartered this beast, hacking off great pieces and wrapping them in burlap, cutting out the pielike brains and folding them into the deerskin. “We’ll tan the hide with them,” Ukashin explained. “Make you a new pair of shoes.” He threw the head to the dogs like a boy throwing a ball to his scrappy chums. One grabbed it by an antler and ran off through the trees, the other in pursuit.

Shoes would be nice, but I understood that he meant more than shoes. He was inviting me to stay on, to become part of his community. I felt the falling snow caress my cheeks and nose, and thought of the spark of life that might be embedded within me, growing, cells dividing, a child. Our child! I stood there, my hand throbbing from the hard work. There were worse places to face such a future. Here I had a roof, Mother and Avdokia, a place I could live, work, and time to figure out my next step.

73 The Fire Child

I DREAMED OF THE night forest. Cold, black, and starless, the snow coming down. I had to gather wood for a fire, but in the dark, I could only assemble the smallest pile. I squatted as I lit those poor shreds with matches, but the wind kept blowing them out. I was about to give up when I discovered a beautiful lighter in my pocket. I vaguely remembered it, someone had given it to me. It lit right away, and I let the flame lick the sticks of kindling.

A fire was born in the dark. Warm, though when I passed my hand through it, it didn’t burn me. I picked the flame out of its nest and held it in my cupped hand. And I realized—this was my child. I felt it warming my face, like a kiss. It knew me. I passed it gently from hand to hand, marveling. I had to be careful—it was just a small flame, tender and bright. I always thought I would have a human child, not a handful of fire, but I understood, as it pushed the inky darkness away, that of course I would have a fire child. When I held it too close, it began to scorch my coat. I needed something to put it in—a lantern, a tin box, something to keep it from the wind. I held it as close as I could and fed it tiny scraps of wood, and to my delight, it consumed them. But how to keep it safe? I couldn’t put it down, certainly not in a pocket. How would I sleep? I had to ready myself with one hand.

When I awoke, the sun was already up—a dull December day, as much of a day as we were going to get. I immediately looked at my hand. Empty. Sniffed it. Could I still smell smoke? Maybe… the flame was deep inside me now, and I was the lantern. Yes, this was true, wasn’t it? Oh, but my neck ached, my shoulder, and my hand, which had butchered an entire deer the day before. I massaged it, tried to flex it open. It was swollen, painful. The room smelled of Avdokia—yeast and a slight tinge of lavender. I’d wanted to tell her about the fire child.

There was a slight knock on the door, and a girl’s face poked in, framed by smooth hair of silky brown, a girl like flowing water. I recognized her, my savior, the one who had brought me the potato when I was staging my sit-down protest. “Are you awake?” she asked quietly. “I’ve come to take you for the bath.”

“Where’s Avdokia?”

“With the Mother.” She held out my Misha clothes, but I could barely move my right shoulder, and my hand was cramped like a crone’s. She helped me dress, don my boots, my coat.

In the kitchen, redolent of kasha, two girls in patchwork sarafany glanced up from their work—the fierce black-haired girl who’d taken my chicken and a spectacular blonde grinding grain. The dark one squinted with suspicion, and the blonde avoided my eyes as if the sight of me might turn her to stone. My Ariadne steered me out the back door into the yard. Outside, patchwork people shoveled paths as fast as the snow could fall. They too studiously ignored us as we passed them. Was I still persona non grata? I would have thought that last night’s venison stew would have convinced them I was worthy of adoption. We followed the cleared path past some new, solid-looking wooden outbuildings I hadn’t seen before, but she led me on until we reached Baba Yaga’s hut—Maryino’s ruined bathhouse.

Blue smoke rose from the chimney. I fought the urge to rub my eyes. What magic was this? Our spellbound playhouse, with its rotten porch and caved-in roof. Today it sparkled like fresh snow, the window frames newly painted, the panes washed, the roof and the porch rebuilt.

She swung open the door, silent on newly blacked and oiled hinges, and we entered, ducking under the heavy lintel. The smell of fresh-cut birch met me—walls, floor, all neatly scrubbed and clean. It was already warm—alive again, this banya built by my great-grandfather. This was no sooty bathhouse like the one in Faina’s village. Ours had separate rooms for changing, soaking, and steam, and a cast-iron double stove with bright nickel-plated ornaments of scallops and scrolls.

“A good bath to you,” I said loud enough for Bannik to hear as I hung up my coat and hat on a hook by the door. I felt like I’d arrived at a clearing in the forest where the animals spoke and sorcerers plotted and witches sat ready with their tests. You had to treat the local spirits with respect.

In the anteroom, with its little table and glass window, some bread and dried apple had been laid out for my breakfast. I ate quickly, then disposed of my boots, my hopeless socks. Such ugly feet I’d acquired since my first bathhouse visit, on Kazanskaya Street—calloused, red and bruised, still painful despite the old woman’s stinking frostbite poultice in Alekhovshchina. Off came my student’s trousers, my black Russian blouse, my homemade drawers—all Misha’s impedimenta. The girl gathered them up and left them by the door. After I’d eaten, she offered me a glass of tea—mushroomy-scented and dark. “What is it?” I sniffed the liquid suspiciously.

She shrugged her small, fine-boned shoulders. “Something we drink.”

So I drank it, sitting there naked and louse-infested, flea-bitten, and probably pregnant at the little table. The girl shed her own garments—the short jacket, the patchwork sarafan in blues and greens, the coarse linen blouse—and emerged lithe and smooth as a mermaid, her neat small head perched atop a long neck like a flower on its stem.

The tea, its earthy, musty taste and smell, lifted my tiredness without really waking me, gave me the strange sense that we had been thinned into two dimensions, as if we were painted on an urn. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. Eternal Keats. I imagined Genya, thinking of me. I held the fire baby in my palm. He was its father as much as Kolya. We were still married, still had that tie. As I gazed at the girl, I kept hearing Swan Lake’s “Dance of the Little Swans.” That magical tune wound through my head like a refrain in a music box.

I tossed down the rest of this murky tea and weightlessly followed the girl into the washroom, where she opened a spigot and a sweet rush of hot water surged into her crude wooden bucket. Steam coiled and plumed in the air. She poured water over my head, my shoulders, and I was in ecstasy. Thanks to the tea, I could turn my head freely again, and my hand and shoulder had stopped aching. She produced a comb and a thick bar of soap with which she soaped my dirty black locks. In Petrograd you could get a funt of potatoes for such a bar. Then she carefully combed through my sudsy hair, and I realized she was crushing lice between her fingernails without a word or a comment. What discretion, what tenderness. If I was drawn to women, this would be the kind of girl I would want. I imagined how envious Kolya would be if he could see me now, with her soaping my hair, massaging my scalp, pouring the water through.

Daylight peered through the steamy window of the mist-filled room, sweet with the resinous scent of the logs, the frostbitten sun pressing its face to the glass, envying our coziness. My toes tingled in the hot water. Such a cruel, primal difference between those who had fuel and water and those who didn’t. I remembered all those miserable buckets of water I had milked from the pump on Grivtsova Alley and lugged up a thousand steps to boil on our tiny stove.

Laughter roiled around inside me as the girl massaged my knotted shoulders, my right arm, my hand, like a page tending his knight after a battle. She expertly kneaded my horrible feet, unflinching. I turned so she could wash my back. The shame I normally felt was absent. My scars felt like a warrior’s scars to me now rather than a slave’s lashes, the mark of campaigns survived. And her tenderness was a revelation. This is what Arkady could never imagine. Simple human charity. Who had ever simply cared for Caliban, wanting nothing in return, a touch without fear? Who said I would never hear those bells again? Here, in the bosom of this strange community, I heard them chime.

After I’d been soaped and rinsed to impossible cleanliness, we moved into the steam, the fiery heart of the banya. Outside the window, the masses of snow in the dark branches of the firs blurred like memories dimly recalled. I ran my hand along the great logs that comprised the walls and could see the trees they had been, their heads in the sun, creaking in the wind. Logs that might have been masts of great ships. The girl threw a dipper of water on the stove, spawning a satisfying hiss and cloud. I stretched on the newly planed bench, imagining my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather here, felt caps protecting their tender ears, sipping tea with compote, listening to the gossip of provincial uncles and aunts. My mother and her brother, petted and praised, the most beautiful children in Petersburg.

“Are you allowed to speak to me?” I asked the girl.

She nodded but dropped her eyes, the lashes so long they grazed her cheeks.

“What’s your name?”

“Natalya,” she confessed softly.

“I keep thinking I’ve seen you before. Did you go to the Tagantsev Academy?”

She laughed, a bright tinkly laugh, and small dimples pierced her cheeks.

“Did you work at Smolny? In the canteen?” Now I just wanted to tease her, see those dimples. Little bells shimmered in the air. “At the Stray Dog then? Dancing on a mirror?”

“Perhaps at the Mariinsky?” she said shyly.

Of course. The tulle, the little tiara. The song in my head, “Dance of the Little Swans.” The thin strength of her high flat chest, the knobby arched feet. The way she had massaged me so expertly. “You left the Mariinsky for this?” I was astonished. No one had more privileges than the dancers at the Mariinsky, except maybe the Kronstadt sailors. “I heard you got category 1 rations.” Who would give up such a thing? Rations were dearer than gold.

Her expression grew stern, or as stern as she could manage with that sweet face. “There’s more to life than rations.”

“More than category 1 rations?” Maybe she really was a swan, and not a person at all.

“You’re still walking in your sleep. You won’t even know until you wake.” She took birch flails from a nail on the wall and put them in a bucket, released hot water onto them.

I lay back, feeling the sweat bead on my body, pooling between my breasts, dripping down my ribs and filling my navel. Maybe it was the tea, but now I could clearly see that my breasts were noticeably swollen, my nipples dark as saddle leather. How had I missed that? My aching hips had seemed like a product of hard travel, and that infernal nausea… the fact of my new condition should have been evident to me, but I’d been moving too much, too fast to notice. Blown about in the wind.

Such an odd thing, to live in a body. This portable shell, this suit of meat and bone. Just the same as the one I’d dismantled the day before. I looked at my skin, flushed in the heat, my sweat, my navel, my knees. It didn’t belong to me, not really. We were only using these bodies. They belonged to nature, lived their own lives, had purposes separate from our own. So who was the “I” within this body? A mere passenger? Hostage? Fellow traveler? Especially the female body, with its surprises and indignities. How much easier it was for a man to be a rationalist. As a woman, I might consider myself solely as my will, the sum of my talents and failures, my experiences and dreams, a poet, a rebel, the maker of my own destiny. But in fact I was a consciousness riding on the train of my body. An oblivious passenger, heading along rails I never put there. What was this female body? A prison? Or could it come to be a home with its own strange logic? I sensed that the Master and I could have an interesting conversation about this.