He picked up one of his little statuettes. “Don’t make assumptions. Sleep, Marina.”

Waves of drowsiness crashed over me. “This isn’t really necessary,” I said, trying to stave off my exhaustion. “You don’t have to go through all this. I’m obviously not a virgin.” I slipped off my felted footgear and climbed in under the sheepskin, fully clothed. Ah, it was so soft, so warm…

“Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.” He turned on the desk lamp, pulled down a volume from Grandfather’s library, and began to read.

I tried to stay awake, concentrating on the hardness of the floor through the mat, the same floor where I’d played when Grandfather wrote his letters. Casta diva, che inargenti… Running my fingers through the long, shaggy tufts of the sheepskin, lamplight flickering. My boat soon drifted from the dock.

I dreamed I was back in Petrograd. I had my son with me. My son! We were on Grivtsova Alley. He was a beautiful child, a solemn little boy with eyes like black olives, about seven years old. And there was something I had to do—deliver a book, a very important book. The child had to come with me, I couldn’t leave him. So I tucked the book under my arm, got the boy into a jacket that was too big for him—Genya’s?—and wrapped my old scarf around my head.

How poor the city was now. Dark and broken in the moonlight, the pavement half submerged, water everywhere. I was sad that my son had to see it this way. He would never know what it had been like when it was the imperial capital. But the book was the thing, something momentous about it, utterly precious. And I was the only one who could deliver it. People had died for this book. It was up to me to preserve it.

I walked as fast as I could holding my son by the hand. His legs were so short, he stumbled as we dodged piles of soggy furniture, signs, clocks, trams lying on their sides. As we turned a corner, I sensed we were being pursued, and I caught just a glimpse of a face under a broad-brimmed hat before it melted into the shadows.

We took shelter on the portico of Kazan Cathedral with its forest of columns, the church in ruins now, and I saw that it was not a man at all who pursued us but a wolf. A white wolf with pale eyes. I ran across Nevsky, pulling the child, splashing into the first lit store, the old Granitsky flower shop. I bolted the door, doused the lights. My poor little boy was soaked to the bone. What if he caught a chill? There were no doctors anymore—it would be entirely my fault. I held him under my coat to warm him. All around us, the unearthly scent of the hothouse flowers. The quarrelsome shopgirl said there was a customer at the door. Don’t open the door! I screamed.

Strong hands shook me, pulling me from the dream like a child from the womb, still surrounded by the scent of cold flowers. “Marina. Wake up.”

I fought to sleep’s surface.

“Tell me. If you tell me, you’ll never have this dream again. I swear.”

So I told him. The boy, the church, the wolf.

76 Krasniy, Krasiviy, Krov’

A RASHY DAWN ALREADY filled the windows when I woke again to find Ukashin still in his folding chair, writing in a notebook at his portable desk. Had he been awake all night? His dogs lay curled up with me, their rough hair so much like the sheepskin’s long tufts that I’d been unable to tell the difference. They sighed and stretched as I propped myself on my elbow.

He turned, leaning back in his seat, regarding me with his pen in hand. “How do you feel, Marina Ionian?”

I nodded. I’d slept quite well, as he had said I would. Gone was the ruined city, the broken church, the wolf, the man in the hat. The water, the boy in Genya’s coat. “Fair. And you?”

How smug he looked. Delighted, as if we’d made the most wonderful love. But it wasn’t my body he’d wanted at all. It was the thing I’d withheld from him—my dreams. He had me sleep in his study so he could seize what he wanted like a little bird rising from the wheat. Well, now he had it. What would he give me in exchange? Safety? Could he repair the city? Could he bring the wolf to heel? He closed the book he’d been reading. “I’ve been meditating on you. Your situation. Your Trud.”

The word meant “work,” “labor,” but here the sense was deeper. Trud, I knew, accelerated your spiritual development in some way very personal to each individual. Each acolyte at Ionia had his or her own Trud—couturier, chef, carpenter, chemist, teacher. I was the sole exception. I’d been waiting for my assignment, but I hadn’t realized that it would depend upon my dreams. But of course. First you had to give him a window into your soul. Then the Trud would conform to the landscape of your psyche. I couldn’t help but be intrigued. What would he give me? What did he see my soul lacking? He lit one of his disgusting cigarettes, crossed his legs, and gazed out at the day, presumably at the disciples clearing paths, before regarding me with the full attention of those dark eyes. I waited for my morning nausea, but it didn’t come.

“You,” he announced, “shall be our hunter.”


Krasniy, red. Krasiviy, beautiful. Krov’, blood. Nothing exists without blood. Before the red of politics, before the red of art, blood was the first red, primeval. It was to be my trade.

My first assignment was to strip the parlor of its telephone wire. My father’s precious telephone. How upset he would be to see me pulling it out, his necessary connection to the modern world. It had taken him years to have that line put in. Whenever he was in residence, the telephone saw more of him than we did. Strangely appropriate that my first labor required me to remove it. We were oddly progressing into a timeless past, and that long-ago future world of telephones and automobiles could not have imagined this one, with hand-dipped candles and homemade furniture.

Outside, the day had dropped its garments of mist and cleared to a brilliance we rarely saw at Christmastime, the sky a Byzantine blue, crushed lapis. From the workroom, I could see Ukashin’s dogs race across the sparkling snow. I envied those who’d gone out to work clearing paths, cutting wood, even tending the henhouse. After I’d pulled the wire, Ukashin had me sit at the plank table in the workroom and laboriously strip the rubber casing from the copper. My hands bled. Alongside me, Gleb the woodworker planed a birch log, and Anna the couturier sang softly while she quilted rags onto a backing. In the corner, Bogdan heated something on the primus stove—glue?—and the stink of it threatened to reengage my morning sickness. Except for Anna’s lovely voice, we worked in silence.

But they all watched enviously when the Master sat next to me on the bench and cut off a length of wire with his pocketknife. “Observe, Marina Ionian.” He transformed his hand into a sniffing animal, its finger-snout testing the air. “Citizen Rabbit, on a brisk winter day.” The rabbit, sniffing, finally stuck its head into the wire loop he’d fashioned. “Okh! Too bad.” Ukashin pulled the loose end, and the noose closed around his wrist. “Unlucky rabbit. Unlucky for him, but for us—rabbit stew. Thank you, Good Citizen.”

He loosened the loop from his arm and placed it before me on the table. The others studied it with intense interest. Anything the Master did or said was a subject of utter fascination to them. “You have some string, some cord?” he asked Anna, who immediately produced a length of rough cord from a shelf nearby. She handed it to him on both palms, as she would have handed over her own dress or her firstborn child if he had wanted it. She had woven it herself out of some kind of plant fiber.

He tied the copper telephone-wire loop onto the cord, kinking the wire to keep it in the knot, then waved the trap in front of my face. “Come, let’s try it out on some real rabbits.” Rising, he put his warm hand on my shoulder. I felt the others’ longing for just such a touch.

The kitchen windows had steamed over, the air dense with the fragrance of cabbage soup. Katrina and Avdokia glanced up from their work—the one curious, the other alarmed to see me in the company of the Master. On the closed porch, Ukashin donned his greatcoat and astrakhan hat, and I put on my coat, which had been returned to me, smoked clean. With a flourish, he reached inside his own coat and produced my gun, handed it to me. And I understood that in sharing my dream, I had passed a test. Returning my revolver was a mark of his faith in me. I bundled myself into scarf and mittens, and Ukashin handed me a pair of ancient snowshoes. They must have been lurking in the attic for decades, for we never came to Maryino in wintertime. They’d been fitted out with new lacings—perhaps from the deer I had killed.

“Doubles?” I asked, showing my backhand.

He chuckled. I was glad he appreciated my sense of humor—nobody else around here had much of one. The dogs barked and jumped on us as we walked out into the sparkling white of the hard frost. He stopped on the steps and lashed my feet into the snowshoes, then applied a set of larger, newer ones constructed from bent willow, bast, and deer hide to his own felted boots. With these items secure, we stepped out onto the crusted snow, shadowed blue, pink, lilac, and green—and headed toward the glittering lindens at the estate’s entrance.

It was extremely cold and clear, windless, dazzling. What a day! Ukashin took off across the pristine meadow at the same speed with which he would have walked across a room, but I straggled behind him, gasping for breath. There were skis on the porch, and I wondered why I couldn’t have used them. But he hadn’t given me time to suggest it, and now he was too far ahead.

Finally, he stopped. “Today you are the rabbit.” He gestured all around us. “Where are you hiding, Citizen?”

I interrogated the sparkling meadow, the depth of the dark pines, the allée of big lindens with their smoky cloud of bare branches, the dense copse of aspens, the smudge of undergrowth at its verge, bilberry and blackberry and little firs. I pointed to where the undergrowth was thickest, among the red willow twigs and blackberry bushes. “There.”

His heavy face nodded once under his astrakhan hat. “Molodets.” Excellent. “Citizen Rabbit can’t afford to be caught in the open. He wants to be in the deep underbrush, where Chairman Wolf and Commissar Fox can’t follow him. Come.” We approached the aspens and began skirting the wood, the edges where trees had once been cut and berry bushes flourished. He pointed to a thin trail of trampled snow. I would have missed it, but Ukashin’s keen eyes missed nothing. I clearly had a long way to go if I was to be a hunter in anything but his imagination. He squatted on his haunches and parted the brush like opening a book. A tunnel, a tiny trail in the snow. He pointed to a long double footprint and a small one. A rabbit, bounding—I could see it. “Now find the narrowest part of this trail.” I hung back. It looked impassable to me. “Go on.”

I fought my way through the twigs and low branches that caught at my sheepskin, my scarf, my face. But sure enough, the tunnel narrowed further in a U of snow between two close trees. “Over here,” I called out.

Silently he followed me in. We squatted on our haunches, low, reading the trail, but my legs weren’t as strong as his. They wobbled, they burned.

“Citizen Rabbit, how tall are you?” He positioned the loop of wire a foot in the air. “Like this?” He had such a knack for creating fun, excitement out of the most ordinary thing. Without that talent, he never could have kept his little band of followers as enthralled as we were. Little wonder the others envied me, able to spend this kind of time with him all by myself.

I lowered his hand six inches.

“Now find a branch. Maybe a sapling, like this.” He formed a gap about an inch in diameter with his ungloved thumb and forefinger. “Take the saw.” He handed me the hacksaw from the workroom.

I found an aspen sapling that would serve us.

“Cut it at an angle.”

After I’d done it, almost cutting my hand in the process, he lashed it with some of the cord Anna had given us, then jammed the sharpened end into the snow. I watched him tie off the knot, trying to see how he did it, but my nose was running unstoppably, and my head ached. It was so cold I could barely focus. He took twigs and used them to steady the snare over the little trail. “That’s one. You find the next one.”

We circled around the back of those bushes, deeper into the wood, and where small firs had begun to grow among the thousand-headed aspen, I found another rabbit trail. I’d never noticed them before, much trampled among the twigs and trees, exactly the kind of terrain one avoided when walking in a forest. “Mouse,” he said, and pointed. Tiny splayed toes and the line of a tail in the snow. “Weasel”—five-toed prints, wider than they were long. “Deer are like hearts in the snow,” he said. “Get us another deer, Marina, and you’ll be queen of Ionia.”