And to this day

           each form, each face

Bears a bit of eggy trace

And by the fire

                              late at night

                 Each,

                (fingering

                a shattered shard of the Primordial Egg)

                       falls silent,

                       dozy, dreaming of

                              that sweet embrace.

Bright jars of bilberry jelly appeared from the cellar, and giant squashes. Berries in syrup. Bogdan produced a large crock of wine. There was much disappearing behind closed doors in groups of three and four and six, the sounds of rehearsals. I composed my poem and spied on Mother’s room. Perhaps she would emerge for the feast.

The fatted calf was slaughtered—or, in our case, chickens, three of them, big and plump, and I was the executioner, untouchable. I am Kali, Bringer of Death. Lilya couldn’t bear to do it herself. I borrowed the ax from Pasha and chopped them on the larch stump, threw the heads to the ever-hopeful dog Bonya. We plucked, we roasted. Ilya brought sprats and salmon from the smokehouse. My own miniature Egg was not to be denied—I nicked a sprat and wolfed it down right there in the kitchen, head and all, the oily deliciousness bringing tears to my eyes. I licked my fingers and silently dared Katrina, who stared, horrified, to say something about it.

The celebration began at sundown. I spent the afternoon braiding the girls’ long tresses alongside Anna, who showed me intricate variations as the acolytes took turns sitting on a stool in front of us. My own hair had grown out a bit from Misha’s inky crop and Anna trimmed it every week to remove the black ends from my fox-red locks. For the feast, she plaited me a crown, threaded it through with green cord.

Amid the bustle and laughter, I saw how much we needed this, saw the wisdom of this extravagance. We’d missed Christmas and New Year’s and Epiphany. No birthday or name day had been acknowledged. This would be all of them rolled into one. I touched my crown and wondered how I looked. There were no mirrors at Ionia. Ukashin felt they were especially harmful to women, that they pulled our souls out of our bodies and left them floating between dimensions, and I wondered if that wasn’t true enough, though I would have liked to have seen my own face that day. I felt the neat crown, my bones, the arch of my brow, my lips, soft. Did I have circles under my eyes? Was I still attractive? Would Kolya want me if we met again? Me with his child in my arms.

We watched the last low, red rays of the winter sun descend, turning the snow to blood. Anna, once the principal alto of the Mikhailovsky Theater, began to sing “Along the Quiet River.” From the hall, Ilya joined her, and then Katrina’s soprano—my God, the Mikhailovsky Theater really lost some talent when these three left Petrograd. The other girls took up the song, and the men.

There is no sound on earth as beautiful as the harmony that can arise from a group of people who sing together day in and day out. Floating on a current of song, we descended in a procession in that lilting, gliding step I’d finally mastered—male, female, male—down to the front parlor, where the rugs had been rolled up and the long plank table had miraculously appeared. We never ate in this room, preferring not to sully it with such third-dimension activities. But here it was, the table, covered with patterned quilts and decorated with colored eggs and pine boughs. Already enthroned at the table’s head, looking like something out of One Thousand and One Nights, was our master, while at the table’s foot, his regular chair from the back parlor was draped in a blue cloth. Could it be that Mother was coming down at last?

We circled the table seven times—once for each of the seven dimensions—to finally stop at our places, marked by elegant place cards painted by Lilya. Ukashin filled a goblet from a big crock of wine and we passed it from hand to hand around the table. Bogdan beamed with pride as he handed it to me—herbal, sharp, and green. Under normal circumstances I would have drunk deep, but the smell was abhorrent in my current condition, and I was happy to pass it on. The baby was more enthralled by the marvelous smells emerging from the kitchen. Hurry up! it shrieked as the elaborate toasts unfurled, to the heavens and the earths and the devis and guardians, the Mother. Hurry up and bring out that rabbit stew! I want bread! Roasted chicken!

The open seat awaited.

Avdokia stood in the doorway, and with each toast, a new unspoken comment radiated out from her eyebrows and her big nose, her mouth growing smaller with disapproval. Idiots. Swindler. I knew she was afraid. What will we all eat come spring? Yes, it was foolhardy to have a feast, my sweet old dear. Yes, it was insane. But we were not driving this train, she and I. We had not laid the rails.

At last she and Katrina began bringing in food. Oh glorious! Ruby borscht and big round loaves of bread. Pickles and smoked sprats followed by russet chickens in nests of potatoes, eggs dyed golden with onion skins and red with beets. Who could begrudge such bounty? We gorged, we drank. Calories pumped through my body, as intoxicating as wine, the baby floating in that heavenly sap of my blood. We sang old children’s songs. Ukashin told a funny story about the Laboratory, and suddenly they all began to open up, trying to top one another with stories about the strange characters they had left behind, encounters between socialites and beggars, a man who kept a lizard in his mouth. Ukashin laughed and told jokes and drank right along with his disciples. Even Andrei drank, though it seemed to make him all the more melancholy. But for the rest, how they needed a night like this, of revelry, of bounty. Healthy young people couldn’t live on oatmeal and the fourth dimension forever. All that vitality and beauty and smoky desire needed to have its day.

After the meal, the offerings began. Natalya and Bogdan presented an original pas de deux to the accompaniment of Andrei’s piano. It was about the love affair between the moon and the sun. I recognized bits of Ukashin’s energy-accumulating choreography grafted onto modernist stylings from the Diaghilev ballet—The Firebird particularly. Oh, such grace in our midst! Natalya’s lithe legs dabbed and fluttered like the legs of an egret through a marsh, and her turns and arabesques were kissed with moonlit delicacy. Bogdan’s robust sun courted her with flashy leaps and turns. That such artistry, such ability, should dwell among us seemed unthinkable, like watching Karsavina dancing on the tiny stage at the Stray Dog. He lifted her on his shoulder and carried her away, careful to avoid the beams.

Then brown-eyed Anna rose and began to sing—of all things—the mezzo’s great “Habanera” from Carmen. Miraculous—the gentle girl who sewed our rags and patches strutted around the table, transformed into the sultry Spanish seductress, while Ilya, Katrina, and Lilya played the other parts. Flush with food and wine, framed by those bright faces, Ukashin looked like a crow among songbirds, his plummy eyes slightly glazed. Was he drunk? Who could tell? The man had the energy and strength of four. There wasn’t that much wine—it had just gone to everyone’s heads.

When the “Habanera” finished and its performers rejoined the group, water and wine were passed around again. Ukashin rapped the table. “Marina Ionian, you think we have forgotten you?” He swept an expansive gesture in my direction, almost knocking over his big goblet.

All these lovely faces. My friends. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake after all, this feast, this place, my having landed here, even with my doubtful heart. At that moment, I felt such love for these exceptional people, their sweetness, their dedication. Taking pleasure in one another’s unlikely company. I rose and recited my poem.

The Egg rolled onto the stage

Alone.

No one in the house…

Moving my gaze from face to face, as each imagined the Egg’s emergence. Was it a prison break? Or an expulsion from paradise? Ukashin remained unreadable, like a match behind a hand on a battlefield. He was wondering, I could tell, if I was sincere or mocking him. But there was no mockery in my poem. I had found the place where I could write without lying. I’d left that cart behind where it belonged.

And by the fire

                              late at night

                 Each,

                (fingering

                a shattered shard of the Primordial Egg)

                       falls silent,

                       dozy, dreaming of

                              that sweet embrace.

The company was silent as the poem, which, like a thick, fatty yolk, dripped from their faces. Still dreaming around the fire, fingering their own bit of the cosmic shell, perhaps remembering their own mothers, their own homes, which they’d abandoned to follow the Master. They turned to Ukashin, waiting to see if it was all right to approve of me.

Slowly, a smile appeared on his complex face. I could see him congratulating himself on his own wisdom, having gradually led me into harness like a skittish horse. And now that the others saw it was good, they felt free to applaud and embrace me.

It was an evening full of wine, more singing, skits and monologues—it reminded me of long summer nights here when I was a child. Four of the girls sang in close harmony. Boys did Cossack dances with knives in each hand. Magda danced a real gypsy dance, with much flashing of teeth and shaking of shoulders, claiming her rights as the authentic Carmen. Even Ukashin made an offering, an athletic Circassian dance. He was at least forty but as energetic as a twenty-year-old, doing the spins and leaps and even walking on his hands! Urah! The windows dripped with steam. I spun and clapped and whistled with the others. But the chair at the foot of the table remained empty. I wondered if Mother could hear this up in her lair, if the sound of our gaiety reached the fifth dimension, or if she’d had to place a wet cloth across her brow and cotton wool in her ears.

Between dances, the Master fell into the seat next to mine, clapped me on the shoulder. “We’ve had a theorist and a prophet, and now we have our bard!” He kissed me on both cheeks. “We must talk. We need more of this. Maybe you’ll write us some songs… and an invocation.”

At one point I caught a glimpse of Pasha and Katrina disappearing together into the hall. Did the Master notice? But he was drunk, busy dancing with Natalya. Yes, a real carnival was taking place, and Ukashin was allowing it. This must have been what the Laboratory was like before the spartan life of Ionia. Andrei had fallen asleep at the table. Gleb and Ilya were arm wrestling. This was the time I could have had Bogdan if I wanted to, but it came to me—there was no one guarding Mother’s door. I would never again have a chance like this. I practiced invisibility, blending with the woodwork as I slid out of the room and glided up the stairs.

78 The Mother

FIVE INSET PANELS MARKED her door like the spine of a forbidden book, and the scent of an oily incense emanated from the other side. I knocked softly, Fais dodo. The wooden knob turned freely, warm as flesh in my hand. A cloud of incense spilled out like smoke from a badly ventilated stove. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

In the otherwise lightless room a small comma of flame burned in blue glass at eye level, farther away than was possible given the dimensions of a space I knew as well as I knew my own body. Maybe it was the effect of a darkness like the inside of a jewelry box upholstered in smoke and black velvet, but I was afraid to take a step, as if I might fall down into limitless space.

“Mother?”

Behind the flame, I could just make out two icons with overlarge Byzantine eyes, weirdly animated, as if they weren’t painted but lived within their frames in two dimensions. The darkness was impenetrable but for that small blue flame and those saints.

Then came a clicking sound like the turning of a handful of pebbles from near the flame. It made me aware of the uncanny quiet of the room. I couldn’t hear the party directly below us, perhaps because of the heavy carpet under my feet. It made me dizzy, standing still.