“Now tell me, what do you feel, Marina Ionian?” said Ukashin in a low voice.

The energy in the room was so strong that I found it hard to speak. “Peaceful. Awake.”

“And what do you see?”

Such beauty. A glow filled the room, and it seemed so much brighter than it had been before they’d started spinning. To think something like this could happen in a place where we had once lain on couches reading Dickens. “Radiance.”

“Very good. I think you’ll be happy with us, Marina Ionian.”

I imagined they could do this for days and never have to stop to eat or drink or sleep.

“One hand receives blessings from spirit. Information, order, energy. The other hand gives it to the earth. We’re the link—that’s what we were made for. We hold together the light and the dark. Material and immaterial. Thus the human.”

But there was no darkness in this room, only light, and this feeling of rising.

“Religion makes the mistake of forswearing darkness, forswearing the body,” he continued. “But to forswear darkness is the worst thing. That’s inviting it to approach from the unguarded door and run rampant. We’re going to see worse in these times than we’ve seen so far. Each side trying to hold the light exclusively will create its own darkness. We’re lucky we came to this place.”

Trying to hold the light exclusively… yes. I had lived with Varvara, with Father. I knew what people who had no doubts about their rightness could do. We had been ruled by tsars who believed that God himself had put the scepter into their hands, and look where that had gotten us. “But they call you Master. Don’t you worry about that?”

A mischievous smile was only half disguised by his big moustache. “Oh, I can be as wrong as I can be right. I’m no saint. Darkness only becomes evil when it falls out of connection with the light.” He gestured to the spinning acolytes, his hand like that of a sorcerer who had created these creatures out of the air. “What you see is the Process, the power that turns the universe. Think how the earth turns from dark to light to dark to light. If it was stopped, even by the triumph of the light, the world would end. Everything flying off into space, and then—gone. Brahma awakens from his dream.”

Though I had sworn I would keep a certain distance, I could not help yearning to experience what I was seeing. To have found such pure beauty hidden in the midst of want and terror and material hopes, classes at war, the convulsions of a new nation—it was a miracle. It wouldn’t be hard to believe that the Ionians were holding the world together themselves, and that this room was an energetic anchor that went all the way to the center of the earth.

I could only imagine how Varvara would explode if she could hear me. How does this produce more food to feed the people? How does this provide justice? To her, these beautiful, glowing faces would be just a handful of delusional young throwbacks who should be working for the betterment of the nation—creating posters about public health, taking classes on Plekhanov and Marx. How is spinning around going to solve the problems of the socialist republic?

But I understood with startling binocular vision how it was both absolutely irrelevant, and yet in some strange way more relevant than the latest decision of Comrade Lenin and his Central Committee. I saw how, like poetry, the inner life was both more and less important than the clash of armies. Perhaps this was why I had come to Maryino, what had propelled me through the blizzard—the need to find a clearing in the greater blizzard. Just to feel myself alive, to be. And now that I had that little flame to consider, I didn’t want to go careening about the country like a ricocheting bullet. Maybe I needed to know where I was on the very largest scale of things. So that I could become the still point for this creature spinning inside me.

75 Dreams

IF THE FRONT PARLOR served as their sacred Practice space, the back parlor housed everything else: workshop, art studio, dining room and, no doubt, medical center. Half-finished chairs teetered, basted patchwork clothes lay atop mountains of rags. A painting lurked under a spotted cloth, while amateurish clay bowls dried on a plank. The big room smelled of clay and raw wood, turpentine. As we sat down for breakfast at the long, raw pine table, the chair at its head stood empty. Even vacant, it vibrated with the Master’s vitality, wafting his traces of clove and sandalwood. Natalya slid down on the bench for me, yawning, heavy-headed from sleep. I stepped over, steadying myself on her shoulder, slipping into the spot between her and Bogdan, my new friends. Outside the windows, the late winter dawn blued the sky. It was good to have friends again. I’d missed that.

“I brought something for you, Marina Ionian,” said Andrei the intelligent, seated at the foot of the table. He passed two books up the table to me. He’d not spoken to me since warding me off from Mother’s room, and now he brought gifts? They were the first books I’d seen here. One, small and fat, was bound in royal-blue cloth, the other, slender, was clad in worn burgundy calfskin. The disciples handed them to me with oddly guilty expressions. The first was called The Structure of Reality by A. A. Petrovin, the second was The Evolution of Man by N. D. Tomashevsky. I opened the first. Charts and diagrams, complex spirals and starlike radii punctuated thick unbroken paragraphs that went on for pages.

The intelligent’s blue eyes shone behind his spectacles. “It’s the mathematical basis of Ionia. It lays out the structure of multidimensional reality.”

The slightly humorous dismay on the faces of the other disciples reminded me of a classroom of children steeling themselves for a teacher’s lecture on comportment. “Are you familiar with the term déjà vu? That peculiar feeling of familiarity, that you have been here before, that we have had exactly this conversation sometime in the past?” He pointed quickly to one of the Ionians. “Gleb scratching his head just so and the snow on the trees just in those same clumps. All of it so familiar. But where does this feeling come from? Such a common phenomenon, throughout all cultures, all time. But what is it? Is it a message from the Beyond?”

Avdokia staggered in bearing an enormous towel-wrapped crock, which she dropped onto the table with a bang. When she opened the lid, a grippingly nostalgic fragrance filled the room. Not quite déjà vu, but close. Oatmeal. While everyone else in Russia ate kasha, we Makarovs always ate oatmeal. It was the English tradition. If the English ate shaving cream with their bacon and eggs, we would have, too. My old nanny flashed me a semaphore of horror when she spotted me on the bench listening to the man’s earnest explanations, the books at my elbow, wearing my patchwork sarafan and white head scarf. I could hear her thinking, Holy Theotokos, protect us. Her big nose and chin came together across the thin line of her lips. Don’t trust them an inch. Flicked her eyes over to the gypsy. Especially that one.

But even Magda could not dampen my mood this morning, nor could this storky intelligent. The regularity of the group’s routines and the intensity of the evening Practice made me feel better than I’d felt in a long time. The morning sickness had gone. I tried to pay attention to Andrei’s lecture, to illustrate my dedication as a new Ionian, while bowls were passed and filled.

“Such things aren’t mysteries,” he said, his voice full of gravitas. “Or only insofar as we fail to understand their inherent structure.” He pointed his spoon at me. “We understand that fevers aren’t caused by demons. We know you don’t get rid of them by waving dead cats over your head.” He ate, and a bit of glutinous porridge appended itself to his bottom lip, where it wobbled precariously. It took everything I had not to stare at that lump of cereal rising and falling and instead gaze into his impassioned blue eyes behind his spectacles.

The others either ate in resigned silence or suppressed giggles, heads lowered to avoid catching his eye. Bogdan cast quick sympathetic glances toward me. Manipulating his long pianist’s fingers, the schoolmaster went on to explain how the universe was constructed—as a series of folds, like a Japanese paper flower. “What appears to be a linear phenomenon, when seen from the next level up, is actually folded space-time.” He certainly didn’t make himself popular by monopolizing the conversation, but perhaps on the next level up he was scintillating. “So a phenomenon which appears to move from A to B to C can actually be A and B and C simultaneously. See?”

I nodded politely. I figured I could catch up when I read the books. But now he’d moved from paper flowers to soap bubbles collecting around a soap bubble inside a soap bubble. Interlocking spheres. “Everything is happening inside the same moment, or what appears to be a moment linearly, in this dimension. But there is no linear time in the dimensions above. So in déjà vu, you’ve accidentally jumped to the next level and glimpsed one of the infinite parallel realities. The question is how to prolong that instant, how to investigate it.”

Suddenly the Ionians straightened from their slumped positions of polite boredom. The sleepiness in the air vanished. The Master had arrived.

They rose as one and waited until he had settled himself into his chair, a figure both formidable and whimsical in Russian blouse, shaggy vest, striped velvet trousers, and house slippers. All he lacked were bandoliers and a curved dagger at his belt. “Good morning, children. Has Dyadya Andrei donned his professor’s hat?”

Laughter, so far suppressed, rushed out like wind through chimes. Andrei’s lecture came to an abrupt end, his face gone pale.

“Such weighty matters, Andrei.” Ukashin frowned, though we could see he was teasing. There was a smile under his moustache. “Too much theory first thing in the morning. Less thinking, more dancing, eh?” He ran his hand over his gleaming head—he must have just shaved it—and gazed down the table directly at me. “Is life to be lived, do you think, Marina Ionian? Or contemplated, with the thumb in the mouth?” He reached out and shook the boy Ilya’s shoulder. “You don’t just read an opera score, do you? You sing!” The tall boy with his prominent Adam’s apple grinned. I could feel the pleasure he took in being singled out.

“You don’t admire a pattern for a coat, do you?” he asked brown-eyed Anna. “‘Oh, what a lovely pattern. Look at that clever design!’ No. You make the coat and go for a walk.” Bestowing his smile on her. She absorbed his charm with an indulgent smile of her own, like a fond mother.

“But surely you must agree, Taras, that understanding must come first,” interjected the gawky professor.

“Must I agree?” He watched the flaxen-haired goddess Katrina fill a bowl for him, set it before him. The glance that passed between them—so intimate… was there more here than I had suspected? I smelled sex in the air, though maybe I was just overly sensitive after Kolya’s night with the village temptress. Natalya had told me that separate relationships between the community’s men and women were strictly forbidden. But maybe the Master was the exception. “Katrina Ionian,” he asked the blond girl, “what do you think?”

She just laughed. “I’d rather eat.”

“Exactly,” concluded the master, tucking into his breakfast. “We would all rather eat.”

“But surely—” Andrei tried again.

“But surely—” Ukashin echoed him, his mouth full, imitating his disciple’s fish-gulping-air expression, detonating another round of giggles as the intelligent sat trying to collect himself. Where did this unprovoked cruelty come from? Was it for my benefit, or did he always do it?

“But surely, what do we have if we don’t have our reason, if we don’t examine these things—” the intelligent spluttered.

“What do we have, Professor?” Ukashin prodded him. “No doubt you will tell us.”

The poor man was on the verge of tears. “A travesty,” he replied. “A puppet show.”

Ukashin held out his arms, hands dangling at the wrists, and began to jerk like a puppet, his dark eyes wide and unfocused, as the other man sat, straight-backed and stone-faced. The success of the depiction seemed to encourage the Master. He rose and began to wheel about, unsteady on his feet, jumping and collapsing. He moved to my side to examine one of my new books with an expression both studious and ridiculous—quite a performance.