A sensible move, but I felt disoriented as Natalya helped me into these odd archaic-feeling garments. The blouse was embroidered, everything clean and smelling of the iron. But now I had nothing. No coat, no normal clothes. And Ukashin had my weapon, which had been in the coat pocket. I felt vulnerable in a way I hadn’t felt before, vulnerable and tended to at the same time. I would have to sniff my way across this terrain very carefully, like a little fox crossing a river, testing the ice.

74 The Ionians

IN THE LANTERN-LIT front parlor, cross-legged on the carpets facing my grandfather’s empty chair, the patchwork disciples sat deep in meditation. My benefactress leaned in next to me. “Breathe in the chaos of the world. Breathe out order.” The smoke from their billowing incense burned my lungs, seared my nostrils. Her command made no sense. Why would anybody want to breathe the chaos of the world into her own body? I already held far too much of that particular substance. What if this was real, and I was absorbing the gigantic trash heap of the world, its suffering, its waste, its hunger, its rage?

“Wouldn’t it be better to inhale order and exhale chaos?” I whispered.

She raised her lashes to regard me, as if from a long way off, her eyes dreamy water-green. A smile for my ignorance, my lack of spirituality, played about her petal-pink lips. “But it’s how we heal the world.”

I tried not to smirk, but somehow I doubted that this small group of Petrograd nincompoops could staunch human misery by sitting on a carpet in a candlelit room, breathing. I decided my lungs weren’t up to such heavy planetary responsibilities. Instead I breathed in their order and breathed out my own chaos, hoping no one would notice, the way people throw trash out their windows into the courtyards.

There was no clock in sight. Was it midnight? Two in the morning? My God, how long could a person breathe in and out, even if you thought you were saving the world! Bored, I amused myself by examining my new coreligionists in the cult of whatever this was, Ukashinism. Here they all were, the entire community, ten of them, not counting the absent Master, my mother, and the unregenerate Avdokia, no doubt cursing them all from behind the closed door of the servants’ room. Five men and five women, each more beautiful than the last, except for the gangly, bespectacled intellectual. Most appealing, I decided, was the long-lashed, dark-bearded, romantic-looking youth who chopped their wood. If I were looking for a conquest I would start there. His lashes flickered as he concentrated. Or the boy with firm broad shoulders and heroic dark eyebrows that met in the middle. The gypsy girl’s fierce beauty begged for gold around her neck and dangling from those ears. The blonde from the kitchen this morning could have lit up the room all by herself—Helen of Troy was their scullery maid. All wore multicolored homemade clothing, vaguely folkloric, and not a one was older than twenty-two except the storklike intelligent, a decade older and decidedly uncomfortable with the long sitting. He rocked from side to side, occasionally uncrossing his legs.

Light formed a dome around the candles, polishing these youthful faces into a Vermeer-like serenity, licking at their closed eyelids. The tallow smoked and sweated, and the chunk of incense in its blackened pot wove complex patterns in the air.

The gypsy struck a small gong.

“Think of exhaling long strands of light,” Natalya whispered from within her trance, gesturing with an impossibly graceful arm to evoke strands emerging from her lovely mouth.

I did my best, imagining producing long glowing threads from my lungs. I imagined wrapping the light around myself, then sending it snaking down the hall to tickle Avdokia’s ear. How sad she’d been to watch me move from her room to the sort of women’s dormitory or nunnery that had been set up in the old nursery. You’re with them now?

I’d sent her a quick wink as they removed me. Don’t worry, it’s still me.

I gathered my strands, wove a glowing sling, and laid my baby in it. I threw a brilliant fine Orenburg shawl of light around Maryino, in glowing protection against the predations of the outside world. I tried not to think of Lyuda’s warning in Novinka’s blacksmith shop. They’re not all that safe there. Watching the reflection of candles in the sparkling-clean windows, I wondered about the civil war unfolding somewhere in the night. How lucky I’d been to find my old nanny and my mother here. I would get through the winter with them, out of harm’s way. I had been truly, undeservedly fortunate so far. I hoped my luck would hold.

At last the pocket doors slid open with a bang, and the Master entered as if to a fanfare of trumpets. In unison, the students rose, folded their hands—fist below, flat palm above—and bowed to him. I imitated them as best I could, even to the degree of kowtow, and remained in the bow as he bowed in return and settled into my grandfather’s chair. I could feel Dyedushka’s fury. I was surprised his chair didn’t burst into flames. Finally we straightened and returned to our patch of carpet.

Wearing a Mongolian robe and Persian slippers that turned up slightly at the toes, he looked less like a mystic than a lost member of the Marco Polo expedition. The devil was tickling me ferociously. I fought it, strangling it in my throat. I had to get used to this. Ukashin lifted his hand and the others watched him hungrily, as if he were going to ascend bodily through the ceiling. “The devis have brought to us a traveler,” he said, gesturing toward me like a sultan in a ballet, “who has come to us after a long and hard journey.”

They turned to me at last, these lovely faces that had purposely avoided meeting my eyes even at the simple meals I’d begun to take with them. “Welcome!” “Welcome, traveler.” “Glad you’ve come.” Their unpracticed smiles and the warmth of their greetings shocked me.

I certainly didn’t want to become another string in their cosmic harp, yet it hadn’t occurred to me how it would feel to be welcomed anywhere at this point. Except for Natalya, no one had done more than move over on a bench for me. Now they all seemed quite human, eager to accept a new member to their circle. I reminded myself that this was a ritual greeting, not just for me but for anybody anointed by their leader. But it felt personal. Whoever I was—boy, girl, pregnant or not—I was welcome to share their meager rations of bread and all the incense I could inhale.

“The Mother herself called this traveler,” said Ukashin from his throne, where he sat with one leg tucked up underneath him, his skull gleaming in the candlelight. He looked into each face, making sure he had been understood. How reverently they returned his gaze, how solemnly, like little children being warned not to touch the stove. “Introduce yourselves.”

He nodded at Helen of Troy. In a throaty, resonant alto, she replied, “Katrina. Ionian.”

“And you?”

The lean, bony-faced boy who had brought the butchering materials. “Ilya. Ionian.” He had a shockingly deep voice that would be an asset to any men’s choir.

“We don’t use patronymics or family names,” Ukashin explained to me. “It’s of no importance ‘who’ you were. Only ‘what’ you are. We will be your family now.”

I tried to memorize the names. Katrina. Ilya. Bogdan—lithe, with the heroic eyebrows. Lilya, a nervous girl from the henhouse with a pointed nose. Natalya. Gleb, quiet, like a Swiss shepherd. Anna, a motherly brown-eyed blonde who ran the workroom. Andrei, the intelligent. Pasha, the adorable dark-bearded woodcutter. And Magda, the gypsy, who sat at the Master’s right hand.

“And you? Who are you, traveler?” He indicated me, both hands pressed together like a spear.

Something in me was loath to say it. I was prepared to go along with their nonsense, to work hard, keep quiet, and not ridicule their faith or his authority, but why must there be one more persona, one more disguise of self? One more set of rules? If I wanted to join something, I would have joined the Bolshevik Party. Couldn’t I just be Marina Marinovna Marinovskaya, daughter of myself? Or, like Odysseus, No Man?

The Master was waiting. I felt the force of his presence, the weight of his will, waiting, demanding that I submit, while I struggled with my own natural inclination ever to meet force with resistance. But I had to be realistic now. I was alone and pregnant and friendless. I’d burned every bridge, cut every tie. Of what importance could this be, another name to add to my list? Marusya, Misha, Kuriakina, Makarova were no more representative of my essential self than Ionian. I was not a mother’s or a father’s or a husband’s or a lover’s or the man in the moon’s. I belonged to the Future alone. However, if I was to live, it would be because I’d accepted a berth here. The dead are forever nameless, while the living have to declare themselves sooner or later. We have to be this and not that.

I cleared my voice and christened myself. “Marina. Ionian.”


What weird ritual could possibly have been missing that night? We intoned syllables—ho hee hu ha—vocalizing on the in-breath as well as the out-breath. We gathered the breath in our arms, then flung it up into the sky as if flinging confetti, lowering our hands back to the earth as the small glowing scraps rained back down upon us. My head buzzed. Ukashin drummed on a wide flat drum, and we moved to his varying tempos like so many life-size marionettes. The intelligent, winded from his exertions, finally removed himself to sit at the piano at the back of the room and accompany our exercises with long staccato themes cribbed from Stravinsky.

Our gestures gradually became larger poses, with much use of flexed hands and feet. We began using one another’s bodies as counterweights, like acrobats, leaning upon each other, balancing in strange postures. What joy! The boy with the heroic eyebrows, Bogdan, partnered me with a sureness that could only belong to a dancer. That’s why there were so many dancers at the Laboratory. I stepped on his thigh and stretched out into space. He held me aloft, and I wished I could have stood on his hands. I could feel strength returning to my body, the energy I’d once had, which my recent life had sapped from me. Then the tempo changed, became more fluid. They stopped their balancing, and ringed the carpet, grasping hands, creating a perfect circle.

“Marina Ionian, come sit by me,” Ukashin commanded.

Disappointed, I went and sat on the floor by his chair like a chastised child, as they reformed their circle. Suddenly they bowed their heads, chins on chests, arms at their sides, as if they had all gone to sleep or fallen under a spell. Then slowly they began to turn, their arms coming up along their bodies, crossing on their chests. They twirled faster, and their arms rose and spread, as if lighter than the surrounding air. Then one hand floated up, one hand sank down, and they spun, their heads tilted to the side, eyes closed, as if dreaming. How beautiful! Perfectly tuned. Yes, now I saw it.

After several minutes, the circle began to move, each person still spinning within the slow, stately procession. It reminded me of the motion of planets around an invisible sun. So synchronized was their spinning that they maintained their distances, their perfect circle, even while rotating around their own individual axes. I had no idea how they did it. Their eyes were closed!

“Don’t watch,” Ukashin said above me. “Feel.”

I felt their energy like a gas or a liquid filling the room. Whatever they were doing with their bodies, they were creating something absolutely real. Ukashin put his hand on my shoulder, its warmth suffusing me. “Can you see yourself there?”

I nodded, despite my pledge not to believe in anything, not to be sucked in by this dark-eyed mystic with his bald head and his bull’s neck.

“You have to stop throwing yourself into things,” he said. “You must wait and enter properly. All your life, you’ve been like a wild animal who finds itself inside a house—a panicked horse, slipping and knocking into everything, disrupting the bric-a-brac.” He smiled and squeezed my shoulder. “Likely to break a leg.”

He was right. Such a familiar sensation, crashing into things, causing my own chaos. But tonight I sat, my legs tucked under me, and felt. I took in their beauty, their peace, their dreamlike engagement as around and around they went, let it enter me. I wanted it. It was as if the room had lifted from its moorings, had risen out of this world to enter another state altogether. I was embarrassed even to be thinking in such terms. That was for my mother and her spiritualist crowd—another dimension. But the longer I watched, the more strongly I felt energy rising inside me, up my spine, and lighting my mind like a lamp.