He knew so many things. So unlike Father, who knew how to be witty and withering and give speeches after dinner. Ukashin was more interested in the how of things than the why. This world was not a mystery to him, not a disappointing thing to be transcended, as it was to my mother and Andrei. I could well believe that he’d spent years traveling in the remotest areas of the world, learning the skills of the simple people as well as studying with their holy men. He liked secrets of all kinds. As did I.

He showed me another kind of trap, which used a notched stick and a sapling’s natural spring. When an animal was snared, as he demonstrated, the stick fell away and the tree sprang upward, carrying the trapped animal with it, breaking its neck. “Now you do it.” He had me set the trap, and I laughed with the glee of a small child as it sprang free. “You’ll do well, Marina.”

It had been so long since I’d done anything right, I felt like the sun had come out. Perhaps this—Ionia, my Trud—would work out after all.


Without Ukashin, trapping day after day was not so much fun. But I stuck to it and I learned. My bare hands bungled the knots when I attempted to tie them gloveless in the cold, so I learned to tie my nooses ahead of time and carry the prepared traps with me in my game bag. I immediately added Misha’s trousers under my skirts and his shirt under my linen blouse for extra warmth, and borrowed a quilted hat to wear under my scarf. Warmer, I could stay out for hours learning my territory, discovering game trails, sketching unfamiliar tracks, and generally feeling my way into my new role. I sat with Ukashin at breakfast as he identified the animal tracks I’d seen. Snowshoe-shaped marks—squirrel. Pine marten with its delicate toes. Fox—doglike but smaller than his hairy hounds. “If you see Commissar Fox,” he said, “you have my permission to waste a bullet.”

My first successes brought me the respect of my fellow Ionians. Yet it took a while to get used to seeing the dead in traps, stiff and miserable-looking creatures resembling executed prisoners hanging from gallows—their blank eyes, their curled front legs. Tried and found guilty of counterrevolution and speculation. The sentence, death.

I skinned them quickly, trying not to notice just how much they looked like newborn infants as I pulled them from their pelts, the naked wet torsos delivered from bloody fur. I had to remember how sweet the meat would taste. The baby inside me cried out for it. Life and death, krasniy, krasiviy, krov’. I brought the pelts to Bogdan, whom the Master had taught to tan them. Soon squirrel and rabbit-fur collars, earmuffs, and mittens appeared in the Ionian wardrobe. These small deaths warmed us in countless ways.

The longer I worked outside, the better I liked it and the less the cold bothered me. I was becoming a harder woman than I’d been—a paradox, as motherhood to me had always implied a fleshy and vulnerable femininity. And I was becoming acquainted with Maryino in an entirely new way, these familiar woods and meadows in their winter disguise. The silence refreshed me after the hothouse currents of workroom and dormitory, the secret enmities and collusions, the spying and the dramas. Here, despite the cold and the physical demands, I could find the peace and privacy I craved.


One day as I returned to the house after making my rounds, I glimpsed a flash of red against the white. The fox! Traveling merrily across the crusty drifts, probably returning from sniffing around our henhouse. It stopped for a moment and regarded me conspiratorially before trotting away on its fine black legs. I felt such a rush of pleasure, watching it pad along the hard-packed snow. It was only after it was gone that I remembered Ukashin telling me to waste a bullet if I saw it.

Normally I didn’t let myself think about Kolya. I pushed him away from my consciousness like pushing an unwanted guest out the door. Yet why didn’t I shoot the fox? I thrilled at the sight of the clever red creature, so much like Kolya himself that it made me laugh. Cocking a snook at me in my prehistoric snowshoes, my patchwork and sheepskin and rabbit-fur mitts. I remembered Kolya breezing through the kitchen, grabbing one of Annoushka’s fresh sweet rolls on the run, and when she protested, holding it in his mouth and growling at her. Or dreaming away in a hammock, smoking one of Father’s pipes. The creature reminded me of Kolya, and I loved it as I loved that impossible man. I knew then that I would never be free of him. This fox would be my secret. Although I was happy enough with Ionia, to have a place among them—and a place to get away from them—still one needed one’s secrets or one could hardly be called human.


The weather grew foggy, and gloom set in—monotonous, melancholy weather. Christmas came and went without mention. The Master, like all true revolutionaries, had a calendar of his own, complete with events we could look forward to. We celebrated a Day of the Earth Devi and a Fast of Jericho. There were new dances to learn and long mystical hours when Ukashin led us to higher levels of existence, full of transparent fiery beings.

But the child was a clock in my body whose face I could not see. I needed to know the date. I kept my own calendar in my notebook, playing with the dates in brief poems. The word at the end of the second line gave me the month, and the one at the end of the last line was the day. Dekabr’, December: deliver, decide, derail, detail; Yanvar’, January—yearn, yeast, year. For the numerals—odin, dva, tree, chetiri, piat’: ordinary, drainpipe, tyranny, chinstrap, poultry. For the teens and twenties, two words. Fourteen, chetirnadsat’: constant nullity, clever notion. Twenty-two, dvadsat’-dva: devil’s deal. Dying day. I wrote a poem in honor of each passing day. Poets are the spies of the world, and every poem is a code.


The year 1919 arrived without fanfare. No wax to be cast, no wishes made, no tangos. I looked back at the snow-wrapped house like gingerbread covered in white icing, nestled in its yard among the new outbuildings, and thought of that St. Basil’s Eve so long ago, the smell of pine and goose and winter lilacs, Après l’Ondée and kisses among the snow-perfumed furs. Only three years ago—had a person ever changed as much as I had? Or a country?

I had no idea whether Admiral Kolchak had broken through the Urals or what had become of the Ukraine or what was happening with the Volunteers under Denikin. Was Red Russia completely surrounded? Had we surrendered? Were the English in Petrograd? Out here, who would have told us? If what the Ionians believed was true, Mother would know. But if she hadn’t wanted to know these things when she lived in Petrograd, why would she pay attention now? How I itched to broach that door with its five inset panels. I tried to manage it periodically, even now, but one couldn’t be more closely observed if one were an invalid’s goldfish. And I was lucky to be here, lucky for the respite from the world’s convulsions. If I could make it to July, I’d have a baby to bring home to Kolya, or I could travel elsewhere, I could make up my mind, or perhaps the world would make up my mind for me.

In February, I turned nineteen. Only Avdokia knew—and conceivably Mother, though she’d made no effort to contact me. Avdokia, my angel, my savior, continued to take care of me, even more so once she learned about the baby. There was always more in my bowl at dinnertime than was strictly my share. The meat on my tongue, warm and necessary, was the product of my own dark handiwork. What a drive for life lay inside all this killing, feeding the life growing inside me. Though the whole program of Ionia was intended to quiet the body, my own was becoming more greedy, more desirous. There were times I thought I’d go mad with desire, for Bogdan, or Pasha. Even Ukashin started to look appealing. I almost succeeded in inveigling Bogdan down to the Practice hall in the middle of the night, full of energy from our evening’s exertions. But in the end he wouldn’t. He leaned against the wall, his fingers stroking a thick eyebrow. “Try to understand, Marina. It’s not the Laboratory anymore. Only us, you understand?” He left me there with my frustration like a pot of soup boiling over, the smell of scorch following me around in the air.

I missed Kolya, growling with a sweet roll in his teeth.

The suffocating closeness made me want to flee or start a fistfight. You could die from a thousand tiny cuts: hurt feelings, revenge, petty jealousy, jostling for favor. Who sat closer to Ukashin at dinner, whose dreams were chosen for a dance and whose overlooked. Whose question was considered seriously and whose mocked. You never knew. The safest thing was to lie low and not care too much. He liked keeping everyone guessing. Natalya was up, Katrina was down, Magda always on the lookout for a moment to attack. Bogdan the favorite, then it was Gleb.

I began taking refuge in the bathhouse after my trapping was done, to pass a private hour writing, dreaming, and just staying out of the house as much as I could. Natalya, mistress of the bathhouse, took to leaving small bundles of wood for me by the anteroom stove. These winter poems captured my sense of the life going on within the seemingly silent frozen landscape and the hidden life of the human heart. I wrote a poem about the animals in their dens, dreaming of their vague and shifting memories of spring. Only when the sun had lowered almost to setting did I venture home with a rabbit or two in my game bag and a new poem in my book.


It was when I was coming back in the sifting white of the afternoon after one such session that I again caught a glimpse of red through the trees. I hadn’t seen my ruddy friend for some time, and the sight cheered me more than a hundred rabbits. I marveled at how close he was letting me come, as if he was waiting for me. I left the path to edge even closer. Then I realized—he was too still. Bozhe moi, he had walked into one of my snares. One of my earliest traps, which I never checked anymore because it was so close to the house. Suspended in the little trap, all four legs on the ground, was one long frozen board of Reynard, his black nose lowered in shame. This clever fellow, caught in a snare just large enough for his head. I could see how he’d worn his neck hair bare trying to free himself from the wire, spinning around and around, trying to attack his enemy but unable to fight, unable to flee.

I knelt next to him, tears freezing to my face, stroking his pretty coat. “What were you doing here? This wasn’t for you.” The misery on that pointy face devastated me. Ukashin said that a fox could smell a mouse under three feet of snow, that he could run along the tops of logs and sniff out every danger, using his bushy tail to brush away his own scent. He wasn’t supposed to die! He was supposed to live and laugh at all of us as he stole our hens away.

The snow came down harder as I opened the noose, sliding my knife down the wire, freeing the fox. He was horribly light for his size, so thin, nothing but bone and fur. Nothing edible. His death was for nothing, taking that bit of light and joy from the world.

I returned to the house, threw my sad harvest of rabbit, hare, and fox onto the kitchen table, and though it was forbidden, went into Avdokia’s room, where I lay down on her bed, coat and all, and buried my nose in her quilt, inhaling her smell of yeast.


Magda eventually found me and shoved me out into the kitchen. Katrina Ionian stirred something on the stove, reluctant to witness our warden manhandling me. If I had not gotten my feet under me, surely she would have dragged me in by my hair. The furry pile of dead animals was right where I’d left it, the rabbits and the fox, waiting for me to skin them and cut them up. “You think you’re better than us? That you deserve special favors because you’re the Mother’s daughter? I see you.” She pointed at her eye and then at me in a strangely menacing gesture, as if she would cast a spell on me. “Now get to work.”

I picked up my knife and turned dully to my kill.

I skinned the hare and pulled it from its coat, still a moment that disgusted me. Opened its belly and pulled out the entrails, cut off its head, cut it into sections. The rabbit was smaller and, even worse, more infantlike as I drew it out of its skin. The fox lolled on the other side of the table, all the joy and mischief gone—from me as well. This wasn’t a prize, this Trud. I was the hangman, whom everyone respected but no one wanted to invite to the christening. I started to gut the rabbit only to discover a clutch of babies in its womb. I felt sick. I set down the knife, wiped my hands on a dishcloth, put on someone else’s quilted hat, and went back out into the snow.