It shocked me, after the peace and beauty of our exercises, to see such heartlessness. The intelligent was a bore, true, but he didn’t deserve to be belittled. How Ukashin delighted in the man’s humiliation, how deftly he turned the others against him. His advocacy for darkness along with the light was certainly in evidence. No one said a word in Andrei’s defense. The intelligent rose, trembling, glancing from face to unsympathetic face. I put my hand on the books and smiled. I’ll read them. He nodded, but that stricken expression was terrible to behold. He turned and left us to his tormentor.

Ukashin was in a fine mood after that, like a man who has just vandalized a shop and walks away with expensive goods in his arms. As he ate, he asked for people’s dreams, as if nothing had happened. They were all eager to share. Bogdan dreamed of food—whitefish soup and caviar, asparagus with hollandaise. “Tonight don’t forget to take some sacks with you and bring some back,” Ukashin said. “We could use some caviar around here.”

Anna had dreamed of sewing a shroud, but no one would tell her whom it was for. She was afraid. She didn’t want to finish it. I tried not to interpret—it was awfully personal for Ukashin to ask everyone to share their dreams in a group. The woodcutter, Pasha, dreamed they were all back at the Laboratory and the Cheka was coming. Everyone stood against the walls and became the walls, so that when the Chekists broke in, the place was empty.

“Yes, we will learn to do this,” said the Master. “People are fools. They look, but they don’t see.”

Gleb, the furniture maker, with his bland face and colorless hair, shared a dream about a village girl he’d come across, washing clothes in the river. He watched her from the trees—her breasts, thinly clad in her slip, her skirts tucked up around her, her long hair covered with a kerchief. She saw him and called him to her, teasing him. It was excruciating to have to listen to him describe how this village girl had him make love to her there on the banks of the river. He blushed and stammered, but still he kept on talking. It was agonizing to watch.

“Is she here?” Ukashin asked.

Gleb nodded, swallowed.

“Who was it?”

“K-K-Katrina Ionian.”

Katrina listened, barely flinching, keeping her head cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening to a tram driver call out stops, and none of the stops was hers. But down the table, Pasha’s eyes flashed, and his lips turned down within the nest of his dark beard. Such intrigue! It seemed that the ban on sex could not quite eradicate the passions in young healthy people. Ukashin gazed at Gleb from under his emphatic eyebrows. “Yes.” He nodded as if this were important information. “I see.” As if he were unaware of the havoc he was stirring up. That devil. “We’ll do something with that.”

The night before, I’d dreamed I was a fox in autumn, the forest swirling with falling leaves. Ukashin’s dogs were hunting me—they’d picked up my scent. I’d doubled back along branches and crawled under logs, every trick I had, but I was getting tired. I wasn’t going to make it. He would get me one way or another. I certainly wasn’t going to turn a dream like that over to this fakir. But my face must have revealed my resistance, for he turned to me immediately. “And what did you dream, Marina Ionian?”

I shrugged, laughed apologetically—stupid, useless me—glancing around the table. “Sorry—I’m a heavy sleeper. I never remember them.”

He gave an exasperated sigh. His broad shoulders sagged with disappointment, but I suspected that, too, was an act.

“I wish I did remember. I envy all of you, having these nightly adventures.”

He leveled onto me the force of his gaze, that heavy bull’s face with the plum-dark eyes, but in turn I became a lump of clay. All he could do was harden me. He moved on to more pliable targets. Magda, the gypsy, leaped to share. In her dream, an enormous black horse flew into the window of the women’s dormitory while the rest of us slept. It took her on its back, and they flew out over deserted villages and empty fields. “The world had ended,” she said. “Everybody was gone, it was just me and the horse and all the land.”

You didn’t have to be an alienist to understand what that was about. Ukashin nodded as she spoke, but he was watching me, fingering his broad moustache.


Ukashin choreographed dances and exercises around our dreams. I actually felt a little left out, but I continued being unable to remember. The less he knew about what transpired in my psychic life, the better. Especially because he often figured in my dream life, and the way he did had to be kept absolutely to myself. The whole place was awash in repressed sexuality. But all romance had to be focused on Ionia as a whole—and especially on our admiration for and fascination with our charismatic Master. Andrei continued to improvise mystical compositions at the piano, while Ukashin took care to compliment him, at least for a while. During the Practice, they achieved some sort of rapprochement that nevertheless failed to prevent periodic jibes and mockery during the daytime hours.

One night we entered Magda’s dream of the flying horse, imagining riding the terrifying beast out the windows on a star-filled night, carried by the Master’s rumbling, rich voice, which became the horse, racing and plunging. What a feeling—the huge glossy horse beneath me, icy wind in my ears. What ecstasy to ride thus, over the sleeping world.

“No, not sleeping, my children,” the Master told us. “Deserted. The snowy fields have returned to rest. The roofs in the villages—fallen in. No lights, no hearth fires. We fly for how long? A year, a moment, eternity? From now on, this is how it will be, just you and the horse and the wind. You are the master, a god, but absolutely alone. The world has ended, but you were spared because you were airborne. You’re now past the end of the world. There are only the other dimensions now.” Achingly alone, all but for the diabolical horse.

It felt just as it had when Seryozha died. All gone. Mother, Father, Volodya, Kolya. There was no one. The terror of that, the searing grief. But one small thought glimmered, like one small star. The baby. I would not be the only one who survived the end of the world. The horse plunged on while the flame rocked in the lantern.

Afterward, when I was leaving with the others to ascend to the dormitory, Magda stopped me on the stairs. “He wants to see you. Wait in his kabinyet.” His office. Her nostrils flared with jealousy, her flashing eyes reduced to suspicious half-moons.

I imagined it was a privilege to be called by the Master to his kabinyet in the middle of the night, but I would have traded places with her in a second. His was the room at the head of the stairs that had once been Grandfather’s study. I knocked, but no one replied. He must still be with the others. I saw that Mother’s door lay unguarded—maybe I could slip across. But no—Magda lingered on the stairs, watching. Always someone watching. One couldn’t take a breath that wasn’t measured and reported. When would I see her? I wanted to tell her about her grandchild, about Kolya and Petrograd, and find out for myself if she was a captive or a voluntary recluse.

Now, under the scrutiny of glowering Magda, I had no choice but enter Ukashin’s study. Inside, his two smelly dogs lifted their heads, but they went back to sleep on the carpets that completely obscured the room’s wide floorboards, as if it were a Turkish seraglio. A portable campaign desk rested where Grandfather’s huge pigeonhole desk had always stood. It must have been something when the peasants claimed it. I hoped they all got hernias trying to carry it down the stairs. He used to let me open its myriad small drawers, each holding a different wonder: medals, postcards, pastilles for us children. Matchboxes, receipts, and letters. The desk had a secret drawer that looked just like all the others, but it was really only half as deep. Behind it lay a concealed second drawer that held just one lock of hair, a dusty dark brown tied in a thin, sea-green satin ribbon. It had been given to him by the great Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. He would hold it and sing quietly her famous “Casta diva” from Norma.

In its stead, the campaign desk seemed provisional, its edges studded with cigarette burns, its surface filled with mystic clutter—statuettes of Buddhas and fat goddesses, a curved letter opener with an Egyptian god on the handle.

Amazingly, in their cases above the windows, Grandfather’s books had survived the expropriation. I ran my hands along the beautiful gilded spines, pulled down his copy of War and Peace. I kissed its binding as if it were Dyedushka’s own soft, wrinkled face, still hearing Norma in my head. Dyedushka and Tolstoy, born the same year. I imagined them together in a garden somewhere, in the shade of green trees, talking and drinking tea. That whole generation, gone. Now my parents’ fading away, too, and soon, mine. All the children, going down before the scythe like waves of corn. Though Andrei would say it only appeared to be so from the limited viewpoint of life in the third dimension. As if that could make me feel any better. What did it matter what this life looked like from higher dimensions? We humans were stuck to this one like flies in sorghum.

Yet there was still this. I sat at the Master’s desk and turned the thin, handsome pages of the thick book. It was all here—memory, the Russian language, Tolstoy’s art—connecting us all, me and Grandfather and Mother and my child to come. The glory of this life, the earthy third level.

The dogs stirred, and then large warm hands enveloped my head on either side, so firmly that I could not jump. The carpets had silenced his footsteps, so I hadn’t heard him come in. I could see him in the window’s reflection, the bulk of him, his shiny shaved head, the wide moustache standing away from his face. “What’s in this head of yours, Marina Ionian, I wonder?” he murmured, low but clear. “If we peeled all this away, what would we find?”

“Mattress stuffing,” I replied. The suggestion of anyone peeling my flesh made me shudder.

“Haven’t I given you what you wanted, what you needed?” he said quietly into my ear. “Family, shelter, a place to rest?” I could feel his voice in my bones, though he touched me only with his hands. He could crush my skull like an egg. His hands smelled of clove and incense and a bit of dog.

I tried not to struggle or show any panic. I would remain as composed as my mother, my grandmother.

“You swore you wanted to join us. You declared yourself Ionian. But you insist on holding yourself apart.” I started to protest but he stopped me before the first denial escaped my lips. “Don’t. I’m stating a fact, not entering into a dialogue.”

Yes, it was a fact. He dropped his hands and I corkscrewed my neck, as if he’d had me in a headlock. This room was too small for the two of us. I felt as though I were inside a boxing ring.

“What am I to do with you?” He moved away. “If it wasn’t for the child, I would send you out to sleep with the chickens.” He leaned over to pet his dog.

I rose, carefully, on the pretext of putting the book away. “I’m tired—do you mind? I’d like to go to bed now. Was that what you wanted to tell me?”

“The thing is, what will you tell me?” He turned around, and the way he searched my face, I felt like a horse, a dog—my eyes unable to meet his. “Who are you, Marina? Why have you come to us? What do you want from us?”

I forced myself to return his gaze. His bulging eyes glistened like polished stone, so dark I couldn’t differentiate the pupil from the iris. “It’s no mystery. I came home and you were here. That’s all.” I tried not to swallow, but the tightness in my throat commanded it. “I don’t want anything. Just to get along.” If only he would let me talk to my mother.

He collapsed into his desk chair, rubbed the top of his bald head again as if to clear his thoughts. “I like you, Marina. You keep me awake, like a faceful of cold water. Maybe that’s why you came—to be the pebble in my shoe.” He kept staring at me. “But I forgot. You’re so tired. Lie down and rest.” He gestured, open-palmed, to the carpeted corner farthest from the windows, where a pallet lay covered with a sheepskin. “Go ahead. You’re exhausted. You can hardly keep your eyes open.”

And suddenly I was exhausted. And that pallet looked so welcoming, with fluffy curls of the sheepskin, after the long day, the late night, the emotional strain. Or was it a hypnotist’s trick? A lecher’s ruse? “Is this a proposition?”