Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

I actually felt pity for the man. In another week, I would be as insane as he was. “My mother kept Italian greyhounds. The last one was named Tulku. But Red Guards shot him. He tried to bite one when they came to take her furniture.”

“Bastards. Dogs are far superior to people. They’re incapable of betrayal, for one thing.”

The cloth moved around my neck. I bent forward to let him wash my back, losing myself in the warmth and the rough cloth on my skin. He washed between my legs, down my thighs. “Tell me,” he said. “I want to know you as a child. I want to know everything. What did you play?”

I shook my head. I would sink beneath the lake, out of reach of the invader’s hand. The bells sang under water. He could never reach me there. If you are pure at heart…

“You’ll tell me eventually,” he said. “I’m all there is now.”

Something about that struck me hard as I stood there, dumb as a horse, with my fiery hand and my heavy tongue, being washed by this evil thing that had come out of the earth.

“I had a brother,” I said. “We were like twins. We had our own world, our own language. We invented our own games. Fairy tales, secret signs. He was a terrific mimic. We wrote our own plays—”

“And where is he now, this prodigy?” Arkady asked.

“He was in Moscow. With the cadets.” And now he was nowhere. I began to cry. I pressed my good hand to my eyes. All the fight had gone out of me. I needed someone to hold me, to pity me. Even him. Even him.

“Too bad,” he sighed, patting my shoulder awkwardly. “Dying like that, for a lost cause—Holy Russia or whatever. I want to die with my eyes wide open, believing in nothing.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your wish,” I said.

He took it in good spirits. Obviously my pain had put him in a cheerful mood. “Other brothers? Sisters?”

“My older brother fought with Brusilov. He’s in the Don with the Volunteers.” As if it were a matter of pride. Even now. I pictured Volodya on his beautiful Orlov trotter, Swallow. My brother’s shining hair and dark eyes, his cap just so, the horse polished like brown satin. Though I knew after years of war they were both roughened, it was how I liked to imagine him. Safe from all this squalor. What would he think of me now, my heroic brother—his sister a corrupt, corrupted, stinking piece of whoredom?

Suddenly my captor’s hand fell away from me. “That’s the connection, isn’t it? The older brother, the school chum.” He collapsed onto the empire chair. “Of course. So simple. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Drinking bouts, shared whores. Typical Petersburg boyhood. Signed up together, I imagine. Oh, I should have guessed.” Amazed at his own genius. His mind was like an elastic band that always snapped back to the same shape.

Angry as I was at Kolya, I trembled for him, to be the object of such a relentless obsession. And I knew, at that moment, that my lover would never return to Russia. He wouldn’t dare. Once you’d escaped Arkady von Princip, you were best off staying very, very far away.

Arkady stood, came close, sniffed my neck. “Have you always been in love with him? Tell me. Were you the little girl admiring your brother’s pal from behind the curtains? Letting him fondle you in the cloakroom?”

I was his prisoner, to do with what he liked, and still he was jealous as a schoolboy. “That was a long time ago.” But Tuesday was a long time ago, too.

“How old were you? Eighteen? Fourteen? Twelve?”

I felt a rush of perversity. It was like poking a snake, I couldn’t resist. I was sick to death of him. “You want to know? You want to know about me and Kolya? Yes, I was twelve and fourteen and eighteen. Everything you’re thinking and more. I was mad for him. I loved him more than any man alive.”

He squeezed the washcloth out into the basin, rested it on the side. “You might rethink that position. He may not be alive very long. Speaking of men alive,” he said, drying his hands on a towel, “guess who I ran into the other day?”

I did not give a damn.

“Our Dmitry Ivanovich. He’s been in Vologda with the English.” He shook out the towel and wrapped it around my shoulders.

I dried my hair with my good hand. Why did Arkady know my father’s whereabouts? He’d been interested in him even that first day, on Kamenny Island. Arkady was capable of saying anything to torment me, but that bit about the English sounded true enough. My father, still not reconciled to the fact that the future belonged to others.

The Archangel picked up the bloody basin and rapped on the door. It opened, and he handed the washbowl through. Then the Kirghiz and a younger man came in, carrying a small table and baskets of food. The younger man, a big-headed blond, found it difficult to keep his eyes on the table and the foodstuffs instead of on his master’s naked woman. I didn’t bother to cover myself. I was a horse, a cow. Shame belonged only to human beings.

They set out the feast before the Louis chair and the room filled with the fragrance of cooked food, meat. My stomach welcomed it with audible gurgles, that traitor. I hated that I needed to eat, hated that I needed him, my master, this ghoul. The men left silently.

Arkady sat in the chair before the low table and peered into the basket, his forefinger lifting the checkered cloth. “Yes, the noble Dmitry Ivanovich, somewhat the worse for wear.” He filled a plate—a small chicken, potatoes, mushrooms. I hadn’t eaten since morning, just a roll and some tea. My stomach growled viciously. “His mistress was with him.”

Hungry and burned as I was, I laughed. “You must be thinking of the wrong man.” I drank from his water glass.

My captor began to eat. “Viktoria Karlinskaya. Didn’t you know? It’s been going on quite a while.” He held out a piece of chicken to me on his fork. I reached with my good hand but he pulled it away. “No, open up.”

Feeding me like a squirrel he wished to tame. But in the end my stomach was more insistent than my pride. I ate, bite by bite—chicken, warm bread, salad. “You’re still wrong.”

“She’s an attractive woman,” he continued. “Married to an SR of some prominence. You people are so civilized. No pistols at dawn.”

It was impossible. Ridiculous. Though my parents’ marriage certainly wasn’t the warmest, it went against everything I knew about Father. Arkady was playing with me. I concentrated on the sensation of his crushing my fist around the shard of glass. I wouldn’t believe anything he said—even if he said the sun rose in the morning.

He pressed a piece of bread to my lips and I chewed it. “Ask me a question,” he said.

“Why are you like this?” I asked.

“A person can’t see what I’ve seen and not be affected by it,” he said, and stroked my wet hair. “You won’t be the same, either, after this is all over.”

I was glad he thought it would be over. That was cause for hope.

A few nights later, he urged me to recite poems for him. I considered poets I thought he’d like. Pushkin? Groan. Lermontov? Better. I tried the symbolists, the acmeists. He pronounced Blok “dreary” and Akhmatova “a frigid bitch,” but he adored the mocking, incendiary Tsvetaeva, especially the poem “We shall not escape Hell, my passionate sisters…” He had me recite it three times, savoring the lines,

…we sing songs of paradise

around a campfire with thieves,

we, the careless needlewomen

(all we sew splits at the seams!),

prancers, players on the panpipe,

the whole world’s most rightful queens!

…in the jails and in our revels

we have given up the skies…

…on starry nights, we stroll among

the apple trees of paradise…

Yes, this was the place for Tsvetaeva. Akhmatova was too reserved, too mournful and ready to grieve. Tsvetaeva knew what it was to make mistakes out of passion, how to let the madness in, let it flare and dance. Arkady lay with his head on my bare breast. I was unfortunately getting used to all this. My captor, my enemy, my lover… the saddest man I ever met.

“Tell me one of yours,” he said. “They say you write all the time.”

I poured myself another vodka, knocked it back. “I burn them as I go.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that.” He stood up and glanced around the room, pressing his long fingers to his mouth. He began searching. He tapped briefly on the open writing surface of the escritoire but didn’t touch any of the drawers. He peered behind the ugly landscape painting, a hiding spot that wouldn’t have occurred to me, then went straight to the bookcase and methodically began shaking out the books. I knew he would find them eventually. His delight was almost comical as the loose pages fluttered out from a volume of Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches like so many gulls. He gathered them up from the floor and brought them to me, rustling them, and settled in for a show.

I sorted through them, all my characters. Persephone, tragic Pandora, Ariadne. The woman of Kitezh. Frankly, I’d never had a better audience, more intent, more focused.

Oh the squawking these days

             Women fight for bones

                           Someone’s being murdered

                                     In the building next door.

And the bells of Kitezh

                                     Grow faint

Once I heard them singing.

              But now it’s only streetcar bells

                           Except very late at night…

                                      Shhh!

                                                There?

                            No.

                                      Only a late tram.

I shared one I’d written in the voice of the sorcerer Koshchei the Deathless as he speaks to his soul, which lies hidden

inside a golden needle,

      inside an egg,

            inside a duck

                  inside a hare,

                        inside a chest of gold

                              at the bottom of the sea.

In the poem, the soul’s so very lonely that she wants to join with him again. But he will not give up his power for his soul, no matter how lonely they both are or how much misery it causes them.

“You really believe I have a soul hidden away somewhere, like a dog’s buried bone?” He laughed, his head on my shoulder. “That I could just unlock the chest of gold, and my soul and I would be one again for all eternity? As I recall, Koshchei dies when he and his soul are reunited.” He tipped the bottle back, then held it to my lips.

The vodka had ceased to burn, ceased to taste like anything. I drank and wiped my chin on the back of my hand. “Yes, but think of the suffering of keeping them apart. All this power, this greed,” I said. “To what end?”

He was silent for a time. “What’s the point in a soul if it kills you? Would you rather have life or a soul?”

“What’s life without a soul?” I said. “It’s not even life.”

“So Russian.” He laughed. “It’s why I’m the new prince of Petrograd and you’re a naked girl in a room.”

Sometime around dawn, I must have passed out. A long, headachy sleep, with scraps of nightmares slicing this way and that.

I woke to full daylight, and flew from the couch as if it were on fire. What in the devil had he done to me while I slept? Poured candle wax between my shoulder blades? The pain was as bright as branding irons, phosphorescent. I raced to the mirror that hung between the windows and, twisting around, tried to see my back in the glass. Stretching, craning, my skin burning.

When I saw what he’d done, I clapped my hand over my mouth.

He’d incised into my back a fiery alphabet, a network of cuts, delicately inscribed, oozy red upon the white flesh. A poem. For me.

salA

devoleB

ton llahs eW

esoht raeH

slleB

niagA

And I knew, as surely as I’d known anything in my life, that I would never walk free of this nightmare.

THE KIRGHIZ FOUND Me in a state of shock, naked, my back a mass of bloody cuts. He stopped when he saw me, holding my breakfast in a bag. I looked at him over my shoulder, gazing into the intricacy of his hard-burnished wrinkles. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t soften. What those old eyes must have seen.