Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

To the stars, that was the important thing here. This was what they thought about day and night: what lay beyond. They wanted to catch the stars in their beds, know how they danced, what held them and what forced them to blow apart. Stars in their matrix—how hot, how cold, how far, how old. They wondered about the sense of it all, the physical laws that weren’t opinion, that weren’t voted upon. There were no commissars here.

Every so often, the Third asked about Marusya’s past, what had brought her here that night in early spring. Whether she had ever spoken, if she had always been mute. But she simply ignored the questions. “You’ve had an education, though, haven’t you? You understand what we say. Every word, I’d wager. What happened to you?” But a shrug was the only reply he would get for his trouble.

They were lucky to have Nikolai Gerasimovich. Unlike the more theoretical physicists and mathematicians, he understood the needs of poor earth-bound bodies. He showed her the seeds he’d saved—cucumber and carrot, dill, onion sets and beets and even some seed potatoes in sand. He proudly showed her where his currant bushes and raspberries grew—their green buds had already begun to swell. He was the one who’d given Ludmila Vasilievna an herbal ointment for Marusya’s wounds. He showed her how to plant seeds in flats indoors and keep them watered under glass.

Now her silence had become a shimmering sari. It was both beautiful and comforting not to have to reply to people when they spoke to her. It energized her, left her with hands and actions alone. She would not have to lie if she didn’t speak, she would not have to explain or confess. How simple life was that way. Everything that was inside her stayed inside. Nothing spilled out. She realized how much of herself she normally leaked away, gave away to anyone and everyone. Now she listened, companionably, and worked. There was a poetry in it.

When it grew warm enough, she took their seedlings outside to bask in the lengthening days. Under the demanding eye of the Third, she dug the garden. It would be a big one. She didn’t like it when he tried to work alongside her. What if he had a heart attack? A stroke? She preferred it when he sat in the shade and explained about the varying atmospheres on other planets while she did the bulk of the digging.

Silence rinsed her bitter soul as clear as their well water, silence and starlight. The garden began to grow. The observatory stood above the plain, untouched as a holy city in a lake, and she lived safely at the secret heart of her own Svetloyar, and cared for her five beloveds.

IN ANY EARTHLY IDYLL, time and events will inevitably intrude, and so they did, in the form of a young astronomer and his family: a wife, a pretty but ill-looking blonde, and two children, a girl of seven, a boy, maybe five, his round head shaved against lice. The astronomer carried the boy to the house of the stars. Marusya met them at the door. “I’m Mistropovich. Rodion Karlovich,” he said, hoisting his son higher on his shoulder, that round head lolling. “I used to work here. Are they still here—Aristarkh Apollonovich? Nikolai Gerasimovich?”

The way the woman looked—dull-eyed—frightened Marusya. She thought of the Five, the Ancients, how frail they were. She was afraid of these new people. Not for herself but for her charges. Nothing must harm them. Not these visitors. She felt as protective as any peasant nanny as she stood in the doorway, barring their path.

“Please,” he said. “Just tell Aristarkh Apollonovich I’m here.”

Reluctantly, Marusya stepped back and allowed them to enter the great hall, showing them to a bench, indicating with her hand for them to wait there. “Water,” the woman said, “for the love of God.”

It was late in the day. The Five were already gathering in the salon for the evening’s cordials. How could she tell them, Beware, beware! She went to Pomogayush, caught his sleeve. “What is it, Marusya? What’s happened?”

She mimed the knock on the door. Showed the number four on her fingers. Their heights, small, medium and tall. And that two of them were ill—lines under their eyes for the dark circles. He rose with alacrity. “Somebody’s here. Something’s wrong.” And the others followed him into the hall. She tried to slow the others, waving them off, tugging at Ludmila Vasilievna’s sleeve, but they wouldn’t heed her.

“Mistropovich!” the Third shouted. And then they were out of Marusya’s hands, running to the strangers, embracing them, O Holy Theotokos! Bringing them into their parlor! The woman collapsed onto the sofa, the boy by her side. The gray-eyed daughter looked at Marusya curiously.

“I’m so sorry.” The man was weeping. “I just didn’t know where else to go.” They patted him and made conciliatory sounds, even Marusya could see how they loved him. He took the elders to one side and explained something to them very quietly but she could see his panic, their solicitous concern.

“Of course you should have come, of course,” said the First.

“We would have expected nothing less,” said the Second.

“Marusya, bring them some water,” said Ludmila Vasilievna.

The sick woman and her sick son terrified her. She wanted to throw them into the yard and bar the door, but she did what she was told and dashed to the kitchen to bring them their water.

The Third met her in the hall, as she was returning with a pitcher and glasses. “Marusya, listen to me. It’s cholera. Do you understand what that is?”

Cholera! Why in God’s name had they come here with it?

“There’s an epidemic in Petrograd. They were lucky to get here.”

The water. Cholera was transmitted in water. Sanitation in Petrograd had all but vanished. The plumbing was broken, people had been using the courtyards as latrines all winter, and then with the spring melt… oh God. The drinking water came right out of the canals, and water ran just inches below street level. Dead horses, garbage, no soap, people shitting everywhere, then pumping the same water. Everyone was in danger. The whole city could be infected by now. How many people—a thousand? Ten thousand? She did not want to think of the horror unfolding in the capital of Once-Had-Been. But what about the Five?

“They’re all right for now. It’s only contagious through contact with bodily fluids,” said the Third. “Not breathing or touching them. Understand? It’s the dehydration that kills them. They need water, and we will have to keep everything perfectly clean, especially our hands. Their wastes need to be sequestered—away from the water and the vegetable garden. God knows what must be going on down in the city. Are you ready for this?”

She nodded vigorously. She wanted them out of the observatory, silently begged with tugs and gestures for the Third to let her bring them out of doors. She led him to the spot where she often slept, in a pleasant grove of trees, away from the well, away from the garden. He concurred, and the rest agreed. They brought cots into the clearing. The husband washed and gave the boy water with salt, while Marusya helped the wife hold her cup, dipped the precious liquid between her chapped lips. “I’m so sorry,” the father kept saying. “People are dying in the streets—you can’t imagine. The hospitals are no better than giant latrines.”

Each patient was assigned a bucket and a pillow. The husband dug a pit for their waste and lined it with pine boughs. He held the wife’s hand, stroked the son’s shaved head. “Don’t be frightened of the girl. Her name is Marusya. She’ll be your nurse while you’re so sick.”

“I don’t like her,” the little boy said. “Don’t leave, Papa.”

“I have to. I have work to do, and someone has to look after Katinka. But Mama’s here, and Marusya will take care of you. She doesn’t speak, but she can hear.”

The boy started to cry, and the mother, who was also weak, reached across from her cot and held his hand. “Where’s my brave little boy?” And Marusya remembered another little boy, how scared he was whenever he was ill. She found it hard to be angry with these people for their illness. Now that they were in the pines and not in the observatory, she could find her pity again.

Within hours, their symptoms worsened. They trembled, they vomited. Marina would have been disgusted and helpless with pity, but Marusya stoically supported them to the pit, where they shat so loosely that it might have been urine. She wiped them on pages of a thick German astronomical journal, then washed her own hands in water she kept boiling over a fire pit the husband had dug and filled with wood. The wind was sweet in the pines, but she had never seen such sick people. She washed their hands and her own until they puckered. The Third Ancient brought a host of supplies to her clinic in the trees—a glass straw for each of them so dirty fingers wouldn’t reinfect the water as they drank. He brought her a little bottle of chlorine to add to the patients’ drinking water, just in case.

“This is food for you,” he said, giving her a packet in paper. “Don’t touch it with your hands, if you can avoid it. Just to be safe.” He tucked a fork and a knife in her pocket, wrapped in a napkin, then gave her a rag and a stack of towels. “Don’t touch anything with your hands. Wrap your hands when you use the pump.”

Marusya kept the cauldron of water boiling day and night. Carried pails of clean water back to their sad camp. Pomogayush brought salt and a clutch of desiccated sugar beets from last year’s crop to mash into the water and help fight dehydration. He’d imagined they might take the beets to the stars, not to a makeshift clinic in the trees.

When the patients could no longer make it to the latrine, and all the sheets were soiled, and the oilcloth over the cots just too hard to keep clean, she made pallets of long grass and sweet ferns and fennel on the ground, and hour after hour sat next to them and forced warm, slightly sweet, slightly salty water into their dry mouths. She was stubborn as a donkey when they waved her away. She held the buckets under their mouths for them to vomit into, then forced more water into them. Marina would have become discouraged, but Marusya would not be dissuaded by their pleas, their vomiting, their moaning, their shitting themselves, or their shivering and sweating as they lay on the ferns and pine needles, which she periodically gathered and piled up for burning. The boy told her about the dog they had to leave behind, about his friend who got sick first, about how he was going to go up in a rocket ship. He wept and asked for Mama. She moved them close together so the woman could hold his hand, though she could not lift her own head. The father came to their hideous camp several times during the day. She made him wash and wash. He had to think of his girl. He had to think of the Five. His boy and his wife were in the hands of Fate now.

They shat into the grasses, and Marusya raked them and put down new. They shook in the warm summer air and vomited into their buckets, which she rinsed with boiling water and chlorine, then threw the contents into the woods. When they were done they lay on the straw and moaned so pitifully she wished she were deaf as well as mute. Often she couldn’t decide which end to serve. Each time she gave them more salted water with mashed beet and tried not to think about the fate of the city. No medicines, no clean water, the sick dying by the thousands. And what would become of all those bodies? What of her mother, Avdokia, Anton, Mina and the Katzevs?

The nights were warm and brief. The crickets droned, mosquitoes bit. She dozed but did not sleep, watched over her patients like the moon. She didn’t drink except with her own glass straw. She ate bread and the cucumbers she and the Third had grown, all with a fork and knife. She slept with her hands in her pockets for fear she would touch her mouth in her sleep, and dreamed of the wards and sickrooms of the capital of Once-Had-Been.

Three days she worked at them, three days of terrible struggle. She had no thoughts, only images. Sunlight through the trees. The explosive birth of stars. Her own hands, cutting grass with a sickle she’d found, sharpening it on a whetstone produced by the Third. The stars of the wildflowers she sprinkled on the grass between the woman and the boy so they could look across the flowers as they gazed into each other’s faces.

On the fourth morning, the husband stood on the brink of the lawn, looking in at their stand of pines. The wife was sleeping, holding the dead boy’s hand. Marusya stood by her own cot and waited. She had nothing to say. He came closer. She mimed “sleep” and pointed to his pretty wife.