Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

The man in uniform whispered something to the Odessan, who turned away from the rest of us to reply.

“It will be here,” said Arkady. “In good time. Three hundred fifty thousand gold francs can’t be sewn into someone’s clothes.”

All at once, the picture came into focus. This money wasn’t moving on its own. Arkady must have sent Kolya to the West to sell the valuables of the Formers and return with the gold. But Kolya hadn’t fulfilled his end of the deal. Ha! Of course he hadn’t. Three hundred fifty thousand gold francs would buy a lot of women, a lot of wine, in Paris during a war. That was where I came in. Ya, hostage. And it was all for this—for some underground organization hatching a counterrevolutionary plot.

“The Czechs won’t wait,” said the small black-eyed man. “They’re already moving.”

The Czechs? I remembered reading about the Czech Legion in the papers. Tens of thousands of Allied troops stationed east of Moscow who had been trapped in Russia after the peace was signed. The government couldn’t exactly march them out through Germany—it would violate the treaty. I thought it had been decided to send them out through the Pacific, via the Trans-Siberian Railway, then sail them back to the West. But it seemed these people had something else in mind.

“It will be here in time,” Arkady said languorously, stretching his long legs.

The Odessan spoke again to the man in the army uniform.

“But how can you be sure?” the man blurted out. In English. “Really, after all, the man is a criminal.” Ah, of course. If Father was involved, the English wouldn’t be too far behind.

“The criminal,” Arkady corrected, in his own English.

The Englishman’s face flushed in ugly patches, and his nostrils flared like a hound’s scenting the wind. His accusing glance leaped at the Odessan. Why didn’t you tell me the bloody man could understand me? “The Czechs are depending on us.” His voice strained with the effort of trying not to shout. “So far as I can see, this has been just so much stalling and excuses. I think the money’s long gone and this one has no intention of providing—”

“Our experiences with the baron have been entirely satisfactory,” said the neat man with the black eyes.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Father. He’d been silent up to now, his forehead perspiring. He said it in Russian, sharply. “Due to the confidential nature of this meeting, I suggest that only essential personnel be present for the rest of this negotiation.”

“We’re all essential,” the woman spoke up, insulted, eyes flashing. “Aren’t we all at risk?”

“He means my personnel, Madame Karlinskaya,” Arkady interrupted her, lazily looking over his shoulder at me, at Borya at the door, at Gurin cleaning his fingernails by the fireplace. “These are my most trusted staff, Dmitry Ivanovich.” And to put a point on it, he kissed my hand. He might as well have put his hand up my skirt.

Father blanched white. His lips moved silently. He was fairly chewing on his beard. Finally he couldn’t contain himself any longer. “I must insist. For security’s sake.”

“What’s going on?” asked the Englishman in his native tongue.

The Odessan spoke low to the Englishman. Father wouldn’t look at me, only at Arkady.

“You aren’t accusing my people of being unreliable, are you, Dmitry Ivanovich?” Arkady said mildly. Please God, make this not be happening. “Maybe Borya here? Or Gurin? Or is it my lovely… companion?”

I could see the horror redouble in my father’s face as he realized that Arkady knew exactly who I was. “That girl…” he spluttered. Don’t say it, Father. Don’t. “Is a Bolshevik spy.”

My blood turned to metal.

The smile fell from Arkady’s face. This was not how he imagined this game would play out, and he wasn’t a man who liked being surprised. He couldn’t really think I’d sought him out for the Bolsheviks, could he? That I was a plant? Not that I was in any position to go around telling secrets, locked in that room, but the idea that I had played him for a fool… not good. “Are you sure, Dmitry Ivanovich? Are you very sure?” In one swift motion, he rose and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck like a rabbit, dragged me to the fireplace to push my face inches from my father’s. I could feel the fury in his grip. He would kill me. “This girl?”

I thought I would die. The anguish on my father’s face. I once would have done anything to bask in his love. “I’m not,” I pleaded. “I swear to you. He’s holding me hostage.” Please, Father.

Arkady pulled my hair, holding me to one side. “Is she or isn’t she, Dmitry Ivanovich? Time’s short. This is no light matter.” He twisted my hair harder, hard enough to make my eyes water.

My father’s voice was soft, thick. “God save me, yes.”

“What are you waiting for? Get rid of her!” Karlinskaya shouted.

I could have screamed out Papa! But I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I wanted him to remember me just like this. I wanted him to remember that I didn’t ruin him in front of all these people the way he had just ruined me.

The others were already packing up, grabbing their hats. “Nobody move,” Arkady said. “Keep an eye on them,” he told Borya, and hauled me out the door.

Outside, I slipped on the ice like a dog on a polished floor as he pulled me to the middle of the yard and shoved me to my knees in the frosty dirt. “I should kill you right now. Give me one reason not to.” He pulled out a revolver and pointed it at my head.

Were these to be my last minutes on earth? Was this frozen, rutted yard all of life there would ever be? I talked fast, trying to keep the tears from my voice. “How could I have imagined where you were taking me? How could I have planned this?”

“What did you tell them about me? Who did you tell?” He circled behind me. I tried to turn, but he grasped my hands and forced them behind my head.

“Nobody! If I was a spy, I’d have turned you in that first day on the islands. You’d be in the Peter and Paul Fortress by now.”

“You’re not convincing me.” Suddenly, a hot liquid hit the top of my head, seeped down my neck and into my bandages. Urine trickled into my hair, my eyes, my mouth—hot and stinking in the cold.

“Who was I supposed to tell?” I screamed. “I am not a spy!” He came back to stand before me, but all I could see were his worn boots. “I once passed on his dinnertime conversations to a Bolshevik friend, and he found out. He threw me out of the house. Now he thinks I’m trying to get back at him. It’s just an accident.”

He yanked my head back by my hair. My eyes smarted. He looked like a furious ghost, like the king in Hamlet. “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t have signed your death warrant for mere dinnertime conversation.”

“He doesn’t know you. What you might do…” But he didn’t care to ask, either. The sight of his back turned as Arkady dragged me off—I would take that to my grave.

A man came running out of the dacha, Borya on his heels. “Von Princip!” the man shouted.

Arkady turned his head, a reflex, and it was all the opening I needed. I scrambled up and broke for the woods like a rabbit heading for its burrow. I plunged into the trees, weaving blindly among the shaggy trunks of spruce and pine. A bullet zipped past me like a giant wasp. Another zinged by. I was making my way by touch alone through the dark, stumbling over frozen hummocks. Bullets continued crashing into the trees, but there was no way Arkady could see me now, a black form in the darkness. Was he following me? I didn’t stop to look.

How long did I run in those woods? Five minutes? Twenty? A year and a day? Terror stretches time—all of hell can exist in a moment. I had no idea where I was going except away from him.

The trees ended abruptly. Before me lay a field dappled with swaths of old snow, the moon like a policeman holding his searchlight aloft, raking the bare strips. The observatory glowed on the heights, its dome round among the trees. I stood, panting clouds of vapor into the icy air.

I had just this one chance. The Archangel would never grant another.

ZHILI-BUILI, ONCE UPON a time, five old people lived on a hill not so very far from the capital of Once-Had-Been. Their minds stalked through the corridors of the universe, galaxies without end. Every night the domes filled with the vast cotillion of the stars, the swirling waltz of the infinite. Comets streaked frozen tails past their five wrinkled foreheads, painting them with light. Constellations dotted their white hair and glazed their spectacles. Nebulae nested in their eyebrows. They knew where stars were born, and where they died, and why, and how. White giants studded their frail arms, yellow dwarfs gleamed in their lapels like diamond stickpins. They were the Five—pyat’.

The First studied the fingerprints of the stars, caught them coming and going.

The Second photographed their passports.

The Third pondered the possibilities of their planets.

The Fourth measured the distance to the end of the night.

And the Fifth, the starushka, she catalogued them, soup to nuts.

Like Chinese celestials, they lived above the wreckage of the world and quietly kept the heavens in their place. As with the city in the lake, the air around them chimed with the subtle music of contemplation, though here it was the music of genius, of Great Time and the secrets of creation, without boundaries or edicts.

Snow melted. Mud came and went. Leaves budded tender on the birches. The rains came, then the sun. The grass grew tall in a yard that must once have been a lawn of some majesty. The days lengthened, shortening their working hours, for they, like owls, saw better at night.

And what became of that other place? The capital of Once-Had-Been? They could see it when the day was clear. Twenty miles away, no more. But to them it was of less consequence than dust on the telescope’s lens. Mausers and collectivized flats, the fate of the bourgeoisie, the crush in the train stations, Kommunist and holdups in snack bars, madmen with their strings. How much better to keep one’s eyes on the sky.

The domes shone in the moonlight like the breasts of women. I had followed that gleam to the only unlocked doors in all of Russia, the doors to the house of the stars. I had to find a hole and jump down it. But this was no hole. It was the portal of heaven.

An Ancient stood at the top of the steel stairs under the vast central dome, gazing down through the eyepiece of a mighty telescope into the night sky, when the girl, the girl without a tongue, found her way in. Voiceless at the bottom of the stairs, she waited, still steaming from her run, a girl with great sad-clown eyes. Her ears rang from gunshot blasts. Finally he heard her heavy breathing, noticed her down there in the gloaming. He closed his notebook and descended, slow, majestic in velvet skullcap, unkempt white beard, coat and gloves. Time finally slowed. She could feel her heart, steadying. All around her, busts of famous astronomers gazed down from their circle in the dim hall.

The Ancient gestured for her to follow him down a cold marble corridor to a door. Inside a warm room nestled among rugs and furniture, even a straggly plant, glowed four more ancient faces, their spectacles flashing under the glaciers of furrowed brows.

“We have a guest,” said the First.

The Second turned on his wheeled chair. He had a beard like a double ax and was holding a photographic slide and a magnifying glass between his fingers. “Oh Lord, what next?”

“Are you from the village?” asked the Third, the only clean-shaven one, wearing a knitted hat. He had a sprig of green in his hand, though it was too early for green. “Has something happened?”

The girl eyed the pattern in the rug, pomegranates and deer. Bukhara. So many lives she could have had.

“What do you want then?” asked the Fourth, frail and cantankerous, hunched in on himself, pencil in hand, a slide rule. “Speak up, girl!”

But the girl discovered that her voice had been taken from her. She saw herself as if from a distance, very small. Small and insignificant, and what could she have to say that would make any difference? She had lost her tongue and felt no urge to find it. Better to be a stray cat, a donkey, nobody at all.