Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

I leaned against the house, taking great breaths of cold air in the twilight, shivering in jags, but I could not force myself to go back inside. That fox had been a messenger for me. I felt the noose around my own neck, the wire cutting into me. If I had been trying to ignore the message, the rabbit was the confirmation. What was I going to do?

The porch door opened. Footsteps on the stairs. A dirty dog jumping on me. I kneed the beast aside. “Marina,” the Master said. “You can’t stay out here forever.”

“I can’t do this anymore. Ilya wants to do the hunting. Give it to him.”

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

I was shivering, but I would not go back in.

A patient hunter himself, he lit one of his cigarettes and smoked it, threw a stick for his dogs. When he was done smoking, he took my elbow. I didn’t want to but it was too cold to resist. I let him lead me back into the house, into the warm kitchen. The hare was gone, the half-butchered rabbit. Either he or Katrina had finished my work for me. Only the fox remained. The girls had vanished, though the pot of borscht on the stove was fragrantly bubbling.

If I stayed here, I would end up as dead as that fox. That’s what it was telling me. As dead as the rabbits. If not in body, then in spirit. Gutted. The snare hadn’t been built for me, yet I was already caught in it. I saw.

The Master ran his fingers along the guard hair of the fox’s red tail—my secret rebel—its tragic pointed nose. He picked up the animal and draped it over my shoulder, the way a man gives a woman a fur scarf, placing it on her neck to see the color against her face.

“Please don’t,” I said, turning away.

“You are the hunter, Marina. This is your Trud. I didn’t make this up. It came to you in a dream. It’s for your good, not ours.”

I trembled, the way a horse shudders to rid itself of a fly. I wished he would take the fox off me. “Why? Ilya wants to do it. You took it away from him. Give it back to him.”

“But you are the one who is hunted. You must become the hunter,” he said, stroking the dead creature lying on my shoulder. “You must think like a hunter, Marina. Lie in wait, read the tracks. Notice where the trail narrows, when you’re being led to the noose.” He took the fox off my body, held it out to me. “You pity this fox? He was not supposed to die—is that what you think? But he was a greedy, foolish thing. He wasn’t paying attention. A ridiculous little person.”

Yes. Careless, ridiculous, greedy. And so easily—dead.

“He dropped his guard. But you must not follow suit.” Ukashin took my bloody hand in his. He studied my face, his dark eyes urgent. “You are the hunter, Marina Ionian. Say it.”

My mouth was so dry. “I am the hunter.” The fox thought it was clever, but it had been foolish and had paid the price. I could not fall prey to my own vanity. I must not think myself too clever. That was a fox’s snare, its downfall. Maybe Ukashin’s, too. “Again.” His dark eyes very serious. “Say it.”

“I am the hunter.” I could feel my trembling ebb. He laid his arm across my shoulder, let his strength flood into me. I bent my head, leaning on my hands against the table. Either I was the hunter or I was the prey. There was no third option.

IN LATE FEBRUARY, UKASHIN announced the Great Feast of the Golden Egg, to celebrate the birth of the fifth world. We’d had fasts before, but a feast? Now? We had months to go before we could plant anything, and months after that before reaping. Did we really have the larder for it? The idea reminded me of the story about a legendary city in the mountains of Georgia under siege by the Tatars. Desperate, almost out of food, the citizens decide to gorge themselves with their very last stores in clear view of the enemy. It broke the siege, the Tatars figuring that it was pointless to besiege a city with unlimited resources. Perhaps this was Ukashin’s way of reassuring us that there would always be bounty—if we only believed.

I asked Natalya if she really thought we had enough food for a feast. “Master says worry creates a field which itself pushes away that which you desire. If we all stay in harmony across the dimensions, there will always be enough. Someday he’s going to teach us how to absorb energy right through the skin, like the trees and the grass do. There are masters in Tibet who taught it to him.”

So they believed, and there was no quarreling with it.

And how could I help falling into the spirit of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg along with the others? First we threw ourselves into a frenzy of cleaning—washed all the clothes, scrubbed the house from the doorstep to the bathroom ceiling, mucked out the workroom, aired the bedding, swept the floors, beat the rugs, cleaned the windows. We were two weeks in preparing, and I think that was the point, to give us something to look forward to, something to focus on, something besides the length of the winter and the scantiness of our means, the frustration caused by Ukashin’s prohibition on “special friendships” within the blissful collective.

“Marina Ionian.” Ukashin stopped me on the porch as I was putting my gear on to check my traps. “I’d appreciate your composing some verses for the holiday. Everyone’s making an offering, and I would like this to be yours.”

I thought of those young Communists in the canteen at Smolny, creating slogans for public health propaganda posters. So now I was to do agitprop for the Golden Egg. A commission—well, I could see by the look in his popped black eyes that there would be no getting out of it. Yet perhaps I could turn this to my advantage. “All right. But I need a place to work without disturbance. Could I use your kabinyet? The energy is very creative there, and no one would bother me.”

The Master lifted one of his pointed eyebrows, mocking me, knowing it was low-level extortion. Maybe I could slip out and see if Mother’s room was unguarded. “For an hour. Before dinner.”

I sat at his desk, taking the opportunity to look through his papers. He had an atlas of central Asia, an ethnography of Siberian shamans, and The Way of the Pilgrim, plus the Vedas and crumbling little books in alphabets I didn’t recognize. All his small amulets, a jewel-handled dagger that would bring a nice chunk of money even in the lowest village in Russia. Powders and herbs tied in little bags. A trunk, much traveled and securely locked. No bed, only the pallet and a pile of sheepskins on the carpet.

Across the hall, Andrei sat reading in front of Mother’s room, his back against her door. What was she doing in there, month after month? She must be mad by now.

Yet how pleasant it was to sit in a room by myself. I put my feet up on the rung of the campaign desk and felt like a king. I turned my attention to the Cosmic Egg. I knew what the Master wanted—some sort of faux-mystic rubaiyat full of “wherefores,” but even in contemplating it, my mind became a cart stuck up to its axles in mud. After trying to push myself out a few times, I gave up and leaned on a wheel, smoking. I would have to leave the cart mired there and walk away.

Yet the Egg, the Egg! Painted, shining, like a glorious Easter egg. Pagan, primordial. Not the relatively long succession of God-days of Genesis, but Creation as a hatching, pecking its way through the shell. All of existence. Imagine that bellyache. Hard enough to be pregnant with one little human. Imagine the fluttering, the pushing and shoving, the straining, having all creation inside you, waiting to be born.

And why would there be this expanding potential when before there was sweet, dark Nothing?

The Egg rolled onto the stage

Alone.

There, I had a start.

No one in the house.

                  No audience, ushers, snacks at intermission.

          No intermission.

                                 No Time.

          In darkness, resplendent, gold.

Now the question.

                    “Why am I here, if I may be so bold?

                                     Why need a One?”

                 The hall made no reply.

Then deep inside the Cosmic Egg

Its guts

                        began to seethe

                                       with a nascent Universe.

Heartburn. How its back ached!

With Time, and Space, matter,

                      At the heart of Nothing.

            “Cut it out,” said the Egg. “I’m trying to

            sleep!”

       But Eros stirred the pot.

Of course! How else did the world come into being? Desire. Something wanted something. How did anything happen here?

          And Things started taking shape

                                  In that close darkness

                          Like crystals growing in a cave.

Oh, the things of this world!

Spinning stars of the Milky Way,

                Romanian bonds and Latvian blondes

                       The velvet antlers of springtime gods,

                The ticking sheets of racetrack odds.

The Egg tossed, sleepless and terrified.

                      Things were waiting to be born!

                      Doorknobs, drains, and philosophes,

                               Pipes and prisons,

                         barbershops,

                             Samovars, love notes,

                                               Dostoyevsky

                         Iambs and Macbeth,

                        The sword of Orion

                                 The Rock of Gibraltar

                       The Caspian Sea and

                                 Africa’s Horn

Catherine the Great and Terrible Ivan and

                        The Brazen Horse and Horseman.

                    How it ached and bulged and cried

                        Its mystic precincts wrapped so tight

                        About the awkward baby!

I was positive that this was not what my client had ordered, but I felt the rush, the joy, of saying something quite true and equally unexpected. I had not lost the most essential part of myself. More than any lover, any scheme, this moment, my own creation.

At last, a tiny

              C

              R

             A

C

             K

appeared

           no bigger than a sigh

Come out! said Desire. Davai, davai!

And like a Siberian prison break,

             Like a bomb in an underground vault

                      Creation

                                 B L A S T E D

                                                O U T

                                                            !!!

And out rushed oceans

               Himalayas

                       Krakatoas,

                                warring nations,

              Oedipus and Elementals,

Principles and heavy metals.

           The wise

                     the slow

                         the cruel

                              the dreary,

All dimensions         every city

Rushing, crashing, spinning away

Rocketing red and fiery across the dazzled brow

                       of Nothingness

Till Nothing itself became a memory.

But that couldn’t be all, not in a universe quickened by desire. Things just didn’t keep spinning out and out. They settled down, they found relationships, they invented work and machines and childbirth.