Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

A shadow slipped between me and the flame. A ghost, a spirit. I remained perfectly still, like a rabbit eluding a hawk, which sees only movement. Colored patches appeared in the air, and my scalp tingled, the tips of my fingers went cold. Click, click.

“Mama?”

The elongated form discouraged my approach. My mother was not a tall woman. What if it was not her at all? Perhaps that was why they’d kept me away from her all this time. But it had to be Vera Borisovna. Avdokia wouldn’t have lied about that.

The very air shimmered and swirled, alive as a Viennese ballroom. Was there a drug in the oily incense? I wouldn’t have put that past Ukashin. And here I’d imagined my mother up here with a blanket over her knees, reading Madame Blavatsky.

“Mama?” I whispered.

She didn’t turn but stepped aside so the two accusatory icon faces could observe me. I had the strangest feeling that she was watching me through their eyes, as one might spy on other restaurant patrons through a well-placed mirror. Click, click went the stones. “It’s Marina, Mama.”

“Approach.” The clear high voice came from very far away, the words formed as if she’d had to push them through thick cloth.

With one foot, I felt my way ahead. “I’ve been here for months. They won’t let me see you.”

Her hands appeared, white in the darkness, pushing something around atop an inlaid table that I remembered being in the upstairs hall. Her forearms rested on the dark wood. I saw she was arranging tumbled stones—clear, pointed, smooth—some glowed amber, others red, blue, pale cloudy jade. Yes it was my mother, luminous but indefinite, like the underpainting of a portrait. “Did you know I was here?” She hadn’t seen me since the night Arkady came to claim me. “Why don’t you say something?” I reached out and pulled back the hood draped over her head. Her hair tumbled down, loose, white, wild like a stormy sea.

She continued to swirl the stones on the tabletop.

“Will you stop doing that?” With a sweep of my hand I sent the stones flying. They bounced and scattered, some hitting the wall. “Look at me! You haven’t seen me for almost a year! Don’t you care that I’m here?”

She lifted her blue eyes to me then, wide and transparent as tumbled quartz. “I see you. I’ve seen you all along.”

What was she talking about?

“In the snow. In the tower. In the forest and the storm. Come. Marina. Come home.” She lifted her hand to the room’s corner. I followed her gesture. “Stop there,” she whispered. “It’s too far. Marina!” Her voice rose in urgency. “Heed me!”

And I knew. She was seeing me in my desperate walk through the forest. Right now. In a parallel time. It was her voice I’d heard telling me to stop and take shelter.

“Why did you call me here if you didn’t want to see me?”

She shook her head, and from her throat emerged bubbling laughter—like the water in a springhouse, cool and clear. Was she mad? Or was this a private joke? “Mother—”

Those clear, translucent eyes were on me again. “Don’t mistake me for the one who was. What you remember is a bit of golden shell. The egg has vanished.”

How had she heard that? The hair stood up all over my body. Where was my mother? I wanted to shriek. What have you done with her? The woman who loved hats and parties, who’d translated Apollinaire head-to-head with Anton, who loved white lilacs and risqué Pierre Louÿs novels. This Vera Borisovna wasn’t even looking at me. Rather, she scanned me, as if I were a landscape painting too large to take in at a glance.

Then the thought came to me with the force of a blow—this was who she’d always been. Yes. Now I saw her, the mystic who’d always been waiting. I saw her the way you finally see the stones at the bottom of a pool when you stop wading and the water stills and clarifies around your feet. She’d only been playing the role of mother. It was that other person, the spoiled housewife, the glamorous society fixture, who’d been the impostor. She had stepped out of that suit and now stood revealed.

She settled her hood back over her hair. She had what she’d always wanted. No children, no husband, no earthly cares. It wasn’t luxury she’d sought—it had never been about that, not beauty, not art. It was transcendence she was after. Ukashin gave her that psychic space, protection, freedom. And what did he get in return? Money, this estate, a mystical figurehead to awe the faithful?

“What about Father?”

She gestured circles with her hands, as if clearing a window or washing a horse. “So much motion. So much red. Your father has that as well.”

Yes, I had that red. It bubbled up now, clouding my aura. She had been posing all those years as my mother, as a devoted wife. I found myself suddenly furious with her. “So you do remember him,” I said. “Your husband? All those years, was that nothing?” Why was I defending him? As if he were still Papa, and not the politician who betrayed me though it meant my death.

“Some realities are tangential.” She shrugged. “It’s no one’s fault.”

Her detachment made me want to slap her. “I saw him, you know. Back in April. He’s in league with the counterrevolution, plotting away. He exposed me as Red. Thought I was a spy. I was almost killed.”

“White becomes red, red becomes white.” Her voice, far away again. “Seryozha’s here.” She glanced up, the way you notice someone entering a room—in that same corner, where there was no one. “Can’t you see?” She held her hand out to my right, where I saw nothing. “He watches you. He misses you. He’s been trying to communicate with you.” She nodded into the nothingness. “Yes, I know.”

I gazed into the dark spot where her focus was trained. I smelled gunpowder. My hair felt electrified. Was it possible she could see my brother between the worlds? What if all this Ionian nonsense was true—energetics and folds in space-time? Ukashin said there was no death, only transition.

“Don’t look. Feel him.”

I closed my eyes and tried, but couldn’t sense anything more. I passed my hands through the space but it was neither cold nor warm, gave no whisper or rustle. I would have given anything to believe he was here, reaching out to me. Seryozha! But I didn’t need a visitation to know that my brother was near me. He would always be near me. But oh, to see his face again—his slightly pointed ears, the way he read while biting his nails abstractedly, the way he mimicked Papa scolding him.

“How old is he?” I asked, my eyes still closed.

“A small boy. Though sometimes he comes as an old man. It depends.”

This was crazy. I opened my eyes. “He’ll never be an old man. He’ll always be sixteen.”

“In some of the streams he dies young, in others he lives to be an old man, or a soldier, even a priest.”

That made me smile. I could only imagine how my sharp, attentive brother would imitate her now, mocking her mystic face. “And what about me? What do you see for me, Mama?”

That glowing spiritual expression dropped away. She lowered her gaze.

I stepped on one of the oracular stones, slipped, caught myself, picked it up. Smooth and hard. I wanted to throw it at her. Not even a word about the baby?

“Go now.” She looked away from me, chin against her shoulder—that profile, still as beautiful as when Vrubel painted it.

What did she see that made her lower her eyes? I felt as if the ceiling were coming down on me. “Tell me.” I grabbed her by the arm, pulled her so she had to face me.

Her eyes looked wild, as if she were in a snare, cornered and fighting for a way out. “The strong must suffer everything, everything! Don’t you understand?” She struggled to break free of my grip, but though she may have been a prophetess she wasn’t much of a wrestler. “I can’t be upset. Let me go! Ukashin!” she called out. Her voice was shrill enough to carry downstairs. “Taras! Andrei!”

“Don’t scream, please.” I let her go, holding both hands up in surrender. “For God’s sake, Mother.”

She only became more agitated. “Ukashin!”

I had to stop her screaming. I couldn’t believe my own mother was afraid of me. It was a nightmare. “Please, I’m not hurting you!” I reached out, but she shrieked again before I could touch her, shrinking from me as though I held a hot torch, a live viper. “Ukashin!”

“I’ll stay away,” I said, backing up until I hit something that clattered—her vanity table. “I’m way over here.” Please, Seryozha, help me. You were always her favorite. Come and deal with this. I was never good with her.

The door opened and light from the hall fell across the carpet. The Master staggered in, stinking of sweat and wine. How huge he looked outlined against the light from the hall, like a genie released from a bottle, filling the doorway. “What’s going on in here?”

My mother cringed before her icons. “She’s been tormenting me.”

He lowered his great bull’s head as if he would charge me. “I see.”

“I just wanted to talk to her.” I still clutched that clear piece of tumbled quartz.

“Forgive us, Mother.” He crossed the room and yanked me out by the arm, shoved me into the hall, and closed off the Mother’s world behind us.

I stood in the hallway holding my wrenched shoulder, hot tears shamelessly streaming, gulping air that hadn’t been stained with that acrid smoke. I wished to God I had never opened that door. I’d been operating under the illusion that I was special, that I could walk a tightrope between worlds, a privileged character, the Daughter. But I was not special in any way. No father, no mother… now I was truly here, fully in the hands of this cosmic bully and his mad priestess. There would be no other future.

MY PUNISHMENT WAS TAILOR-MADE to fit the crime. The night after my transgression, the Master stopped me in the hall. “Andrei needs to learn about hunting. Take him with you in the morning.” And turned away. There would be no argument. How appropriate to consign me to Andrei Ionian, depriving me of the one thing I needed after that encounter with my mother: solitude. I needed time to think, to make some plans. Now I would have the professor dogging my days with his steady stream of philosophy and gangly obliviousness.

The following morning, I got him onto a pair of homemade skis, and soon we left the house behind, smoke trickling from its chimneys, the dark wood of the outbuildings slowly diminishing to train-set size, like toys dusted in soap flakes. I needed to sort out my thoughts about my place at Ionia, my responsibility to the baby, and the way Mother had looked at me like someone examining a stamp through a magnifying glass. The way she’d shrieked for Ukashin. But Andrei could not be still. The very air around him crackled with anxiety. For someone who extolled the virtues of the present moment, could Andrei be any less present?

He launched into a lecture about his favorite subject, simultaneous incarnation, the proposition that we live many lives at once in parallel streams of space-time. This was what my mother had been talking about—seeing Seryozha at four, Seryozha as an old man, a soldier, a dog, a dancing master. I only wished it were true. Then I might be back before the revolution, living with my child and my clever husband, hosting Wednesday at-homes in turban and pantaloons, smoking a little cigar and writing my decadent poetry, instead of stranded in this mystical commune, trapping small animals in the bitter cold. But Andrei wasn’t content with imagining it: he wanted it to literally be so. Mathematically provable.

Well, who was I to criticize? My job was to show him hunting, and that’s what I would do. I pulled my scarf over my nose and mouth and kept moving.

“You see, it’s all our perspective.” It was the Ionian catechism—things that appeared separated on the third dimension were simultaneous when seen from the fourth, more so from the fifth, and so on. He panted to keep up with me, his breath a plume of vapor, but the flow of information never stopped. “You have to look at the position which encompasses the highest point of view.”

He was so desperate that I understand. I saw that for an intellectual like him, the need to be understood was a trap. Once caught, he just kept tightening the noose around himself. He would be better off just admiring the beauty of his system for his own sake. I couldn’t help wondering, what was my own trap? Reflexive hope? The yearning for peace? No, those held no allure. Passion. And the need to see what happened. One’s strength, overdone, was one’s weakness.