Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“And they’re the workers,” Kolya said. “Soldiers are another story.”

Now it was the peasant nodding. He poured vodka all around, even for Faina and me and the granny, so we could toast. “To Russia,” then to luck, then to the harvest. We drank, and I thought of this suffering land, bored full of mouse holes, the mice scurrying in before the storm.

AFTER THE RICH SUPPER, the family treated us to a bath in the village banya. My stomach purring with the good meal, vodka pulsing in my veins, my clever lover at hand, my aching carcass free for the time being from that infernal wagon. And now a bath! What more could a mortal ask for?

We crossed ourselves as we descended into the log-and-earthen hut by a pond not quite iced over, glazed by sharp moonlight. Kolya, comically humble and visibly drunk now, gestured and wished us a good bath, loud enough that Bannik would be satisfied, as if he were actually afraid of the little bathhouse devil. Oh, I remembered Avdokia’s stories about Bannik, what he had done to this or that relative of hers in the village when his rules were disobeyed or when some naughty young girls tried out some magic spell that went terribly awry. We never used the Maryino bathhouse. Father didn’t believe in it. We have indoor plumbing, damn it all. We’re not savages. I thought of him as we ducked under the low entrance to the log shed—first the headman, then Kolya, then the patriarch, followed by Faina and myself. Where was Father now? In what godforsaken hut in Perm or boardinghouse in Omsk did he sit with his reason and his outrage, now hopelessly aligned with reactionary forces in Siberia?

In the anteroom, under the log beams, we stripped off our patchy clothes and modestly entered into the steam, redolent of fragrant pine. Faina teased me about my short hair, that I made a very pretty boy. I made excuses, saying that I’d had scarlet fever earlier this year. Ivanych threw water on the hot stones and disappeared in a fine mist. It was lovely here, the pine perfume satisfying something in me so primal I hadn’t known it existed. It had taken a revolution to bring me here. Compared to this close, dark, scented lodge, the banya on Kazanskaya Street was a sewer illustrated by Daumier.

I eyed Faina with her big belly painted red-gold in the stove light. I wondered if she would give birth here—I had heard that village women did, the reason why proper relations with Bannik were essential. I caught Kolya glancing at her ripe figure, her round haunches and luxurious poitrine, her blond braids. Did he want her? I was thin and ragged now, and my inky cropped hair could not have been terribly picturesque. My toenails looked like rawhide. I rubbed balls of dead skin off my feet, wondering if Kolya had tired of his boyish lover. Did he miss the women in Paris, perfumed and tantalizing? Was a woman like this more enticing?

Ivanych, drunk, held forth about the goings-on of the village, who had it in for whom, and assuring us that no one in the village council put up with the Kombedy and its finger-pointing. Then he moved on to the former landlord, Kachanovsky, who’d cut a stand of timber that belonged to him, Ivanych, and he’d taken that devil to court and won. It was the great triumph of his life. I couldn’t help but notice his body, which was very white and surprisingly well built. He was younger than he’d appeared in his clothes. I tried not to look at the grandfather, sunken chest and little potbelly, his sparse nest of pubic hair. Instead I sank into the clouds of fine steam as one would sink into a lover’s arms. Ivanych threw more water on the stones, and Faina beat him with the birch twigs she’d been soaking in a wooden pail.

The peasant was evaluating me as well. He seemed to approve of me, nodding. I actually thought he was going to say something kind. Instead he turned to Kolya and said, “You flog her good and proper, I see.”

Kolya had to tear his eyes off Faina’s breasts in order to respond. “Every Sunday,” he replied. “That way she knows what day of the week it is.”

Ivanych nodded again, wiping sweat down his wiry arms. His eyes were very pale under the dark brows. “Only one way to remind them who the man is, eh, boy?”

With a shock, I realized that this ignorant sot had seen my scars and assumed Kolya had been their source. Probably couldn’t write his own name, yet he had no trouble reading the signs of violence on a woman’s body. I waited for Kolya to stand up to him, to admit he was joking, that he’d never do such a thing, but my lover just grinned, drunk and too interested in the grain we were buying off this peasant to disagree. “She’s a tough one.” He swished the flail in the bucket, then switched his own back. “She looks sweet but she’s the very devil. Her parents didn’t tell me about that. They were just happy to get her off their hands.”

And they laughed together. Hee hee hee.

Though I knew it was a charade and he didn’t believe a single word he was saying, I wanted to kill him. I thought of those women in the bathhouse on Kazanskaya Street, of Arkady’s peasant woman. Think you could take three lashes? Whose fault was it that I bore these scars? Or had he forgotten? I knew he would say it was just part of the masquerade, but he was going too far now. He was way over the line.

“Show them a strong hand,” Ivanych continued. “Or before you know it, they’re ruling the roost and you’re sitting on the eggs.” He drained his vodka and handed it to Faina to refill, as if she were stupid as a cow and hadn’t understood what he’d been saying.

When she turned to pour, by the glow of the flames I saw her pale skin crisscrossed with the uneven scars of lashings, one over the next. Ivanych beat her with a whip, as though she were a criminal or a serf. To do such a thing to a beautiful woman. To any woman. I hoped Kolya saw it and understood that these were not just empty phrases, not things one said as admission to some men’s club in the hinterlands. His joke was her nightmare. No wonder she stiffened when her husband came home, no wonder she sat so silently. I tried to catch Kolya’s eye, but he was having too much fun playing the rural idiot. He only saw her breasts with their egg-size nipples, her white haunches, her lovely face. And at that moment, I hated him.

She wouldn’t look at me now, not at me or Kolya as she gave her husband his glass. Her eyes were cast down for shame, knowing what we’d seen.

“Yes, you have to beat the devil out of them,” her husband continued, tiresomely. “They have to learn respect.”

“A kiss might do the same,” I said bluntly, surprised at the clarity of my own voice in the shadowy bath. “Violence wins fear, not respect.”

Kolya laughed all the louder. He was really soused. I was on my own. So be it.

“You’ve been living in town too long, devushka,” Ivanych said, waving his finger at me. “Come live out here. We’ll get rid of some of those modern ideas.”

I sat up straighter, didn’t try to conceal the fury I felt like coals burning in my heart. He was threatening me? This illiterate bastard? And Kolya was going to let him? There was a gun in the pocket of Kolya’s coat not eight feet away. I imagined holding it to Ivanych’s forehead. Still want to beat me, Uncle?

“Let me switch you,” Faina said quickly, changing seats, and began to lash me with the birch flail, slicing through the steam and making the room even hotter. I cringed with every lash. Soon I felt faint with the heat. How far we were from civilization in this hut, as if we’d gone not only miles but years. So I was my father’s daughter after all. So much for my Princess Natasha peasant dance.

“I have to go out.” I rose from the bench, stumbled for the door.

“Yes,” Faina said, taking my arm. “Let’s go for a plunge.” We ran out into the cold night, dashed barefoot across the boards laid over the pond’s lip, then crashed into the water. The shock, the intense pleasure, made me forget for an instant everything but the body and the night and the glow of Faina’s white shoulders bobbing in the water next to me. How wonderful to be out of that hut, away from that man. I could feel the steam rising from me in the icy water. She floated beside me, a white mountain.

“My scars—that’s from something else,” I said. “He’s never raised a hand to me.”

“May you never know,” the pale form replied.

“You could leave,” I said. “Come with us.”

“You’re very young,” she said, swimming away.

I pedaled in the dark water. I knew it was cold but still didn’t feel it.

She surfaced close by me, sputtered, wiped the water from her face, steadying herself with one hand on my shoulder. “Take my advice. Don’t have children,” she said. “They stake you like a cow so the wolves can eat you alive, until there’s nothing you can do but pray for death.”

“Maybe he’ll get in an accident,” I said, imagining plausible ways such a man could lose his life.

“Then we’d all die. There’s no way out.” A splash, and I felt the touch of a snowflake fall against my face. She continued, “When I was a girl, an old woman gave me a pillow of herbs. She said, ‘Sleep on this, devushka, you won’t get a child.’ And I laughed at her. ‘Why would I want that?’ I said. ‘Every woman wants children.’ I didn’t know what she was telling me.” She caught her breath, there in the dark. “Some days I want to kill them all, myself as well, just bring it to an end.” She swam to the edge and climbed out, a huge, full-bodied white blur in the dark, wringing out her long braids.

I followed her. I wished I had a word of comfort for her, but all I could do was loop my cold wet arm around her neck and press my forehead to hers. She was weeping, silently, as she must weep at night not to wake the children. This was the benightedness the Bolsheviks were trying to end. But could they get here fast enough to save this woman? It made me sick to think how Kolya laughed when Ivanych talked about beatings. Faina was caught in a terrible net just like the one Arkady used to wind between his fingers. How could I bear to go back in and see that man and hear Kolya’s coarse jokes? I wished we could leave this second, flee this house as one would flee a massacre.

When we bedded down that night in the straw, Kolya put his drunken arms around me, but I pushed him away.

“Oh, don’t be like that. Look, you’ve got your feathers all ruffled.” He tried to kiss me, to make it up to me, but I turned over. He kissed my shoulder instead, murmuring in my ear. “What is it? The banya?”

“What do you think?”

“That was just talk, milaya. You know it’s how men talk. He’s got to think I’m just like him.”

“Why don’t you beat me and really show him? Did you see her back?” I still saw it, crisscrossed like a slave’s.

“Oh, my little poetess. You take everything too much to heart.” He rolled onto his back. “In a week, with any luck, we’ll be back in Petrograd, having a laugh. You’ll forget all about this. It’s their problem.” He shook me gently, trying to shake loose my determination not to forgive him. I only stiffened. “Come on, ma petite. Where’s your sense of humor?”

My sense of humor, where could it have possibly gone? “I think I left it in the hut there. Why don’t you go look for it?” I could smell the vodka on his breath, you could have set fire to it.

“Look at us. Who would have imagined, five years ago, we would end up like this, having a fight in some godforsaken barn?” He tickled my ear with a piece of straw. I knocked his hand away. “Marina, this is life,” he sighed. “I can’t edit it for you. We’ll be back in Cherepovets in three days. I’m doing great with this guy.” He shook me gently. “Come on. Look, some peasant beats his wife. It’s going to make headlines all over Russia? I mean, where have you been living—in a candy box?”

Yes, I knew this happened, I’d seen it on women’s flesh, but I’d never seen it written so starkly on a woman’s body besides my own. That beauty, who wanted to die. I hated what I was seeing in Kolya now: he wanted what he wanted and the plight of others left him cold. “Just leave me alone. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.”

I could feel his restlessness in the dark, the crumpling of straw as he tried to find a comfortable position, an irritable rustling against the contented clucking of the chickens, the nickering of the horses. I was tired and fell asleep easily. At some point I heard the barn door open and shut again.