The author thanks the usual coterie of early readers, in this case Liz Bicknell, Betty Levin, and Andy Newman.
Special gratitude to Sophia Lubensky, author of the Random House Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms.
Any infelicitous misapplication or dismissal of their good advice is the author’s fault.
For Matt Roeser’s cover art, which inspired a passage in the chapter titled “The Immortal Hen of the Tundra,” the author is especially grateful.
Before.
UNTIMELY THUNDER
The World in Curtains
The World in a Graveyard
The Doctor’s Curse
Farther Afield
Tea Brewed from Salt Tears
Double Lightning
Thunder on the Rails
The Accidental Guests
Mamenka’s Gift
The Apple
The Porridge
Pay Attention Day
The Ghostly Daughters of Miersk
The Egg
Next.
IRON HORSE, CHICKEN HOUSE
Two Girls Misplaced
Trapped
Surprise Day
The Hand at the Window
The Morning Is Wiser Than the Night
You’re Not Yourself Today
Two Cats
Discovery
The Hut in the Woods
Onward to Saint Petersburg
And Onward to Saint Petersburg
The Reluctant Student
The Progress of Dumb Doma
Two Moons in the Long Wet Night
Miss Yaga
A Grey Rainbow
Next Next.
SAINT PETERSBURG, SAINT PETERSBURG
Sharing
Vitebsky Station
Curses and Penalties
A Fresh Enchantment
The Hunger of Children
The News of the Evening
Landfall
Traffic
The Floating Pavilions of the Tsar
The Treasury of Marvels
Admission Denied
The Tsar of All the Russias
Meanwhile on the Other Side
A Divertimento
The Presentation of the Gift
Vanished
The Marvels Deliver Their Opinion
Under Arrest
Later.
FIRE AND ICE, ICE AND FIRE
A Wasp in the Jam
Brother Uri
An Audience with the Tsar
The Second Night of the Festival
The House of Solitary Confinement
North
Together
The League of Freed Prisoners
The Snow Tornado
Moths
Perplexity
Myandash
The Sneezing Cave
Žmey-Aždaja
The Starry Crown
Still Later.
HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN
The Teeth of the Beast
The Dragon-Tooth Boy
The Part-Time Hero
A House Has Its Secrets
Armies Meet by Moonlight
The Immortal Hen of the Tundra
The Norway Geese
On the Bridge Near Archangel
The Kitten’s Advice
The Word of the Tsar
All Aboard Who Are Going Aboard
The Graveyard in Springtime
The Doctor’s Advice
After.
THE HEELS OF MILITARY BOOTS, STRIKING MARBLE FLOORS, made a sound like thrown stones. The old man knew that agents were hunting for him. He capped the inkwell and shook his pen. In his haste, he splattered the pale French wallpaper around his desk. That will look like spots of dried blood, he thought, my blood.
He wrapped sheets of paper around his forearms, then pulled down the sleeves of his monk’s robe. He threw on his greatcoat against the cold. He put his steel-nibbed pen in his breast pocket. Were he lucky enough to survive, he might leave record of how he had come to this.
This is where I am inclined to start, with my own abduction. You will think me overly interested in myself. Or worse, melodramatic. I can’t help that. If you’re ever dragged from your chambers at midnight, blindfolded and gagged, without being told whether you’re off to a firing squad or a surprise birthday party, you’ll find that you turn and return to that pivotal moment. If you survive the surprise.
Sooner or later you realize that everything you experience, especially something like being arrested, is never only about you. Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught you up, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps; individuals play for time.
When soldiers broke down the door to my palace apartments, I thought I was headed for a rendezvous with death. The men were rough, the way young men frightened of their own strength can be. Their mutters, their coded syllables, I couldn’t understand them.
I was rushed down a back staircase, I was hustled toward a carriage. Before they knotted a blindfold about my bleeding head, I saw ravens fighting over the corpse of a rat. Ravens aren’t usually nocturnal, but hunger can be.
I wasn’t shot. Instead, I was locked in a tower on the outskirts of the empire.
At first I scraped the wall with a sharp stone to mark the days. I bunched the scratches in sevens. Then I fell sick, and lost count while in a fever, and when I recovered, I was too discouraged to begin again.
But this story is not about me.
I should explain about living in custody.
From the start, food and medicine came up to me daily, in a bucket tied to a hoist. Right away, I began to send letters by return bucket. One letter a day, for several years. Begging the Tsar to forgive me my part in the plot, to release me. Explaining to him, as I do to you now, how it all came to pass. It was a gamble. Tsars resent insubordination. I was imprisoned for helping a prisoner escape from prison. Ironic, isn’t it.
I didn’t know if, at the bottom of the rope, my letters were laughed at and thrown away. Or if my entreaties were sent to the court of the Tsar. Now and then, however, more writing supplies arrived.
I was afraid that one day the Tsar might become tired of hearing from me and order me killed. I tried to keep my letters vivid so he would wait for each one daily. The Scheherazade strategy. Though I may only have been entertaining my anonymous sentries below.
In those years I didn’t see a human soul, except through the gaze of my memory or my imagination.
I had a single narrow window. I could identify anything viewed from a distance: the celestial parade, the windswept barrens. Nothing near.
With my good eye, I saw birds and landscape, landscape and birds. The birds came close at first — larks, curious wrens, stupid pigeons, as I thought then. They soon learned that I wouldn’t spread crumbs for them on my window ledge. I didn’t have enough to spare. They stopped visiting.
At first I watched the birds against the sky, their shadows against the ground. Then I followed birds in my mind. I thought of it as peering with my blind eye: seeing what the birds could see, or had seen in the past, about what had happened to bring me to this prison tower. I put together what I knew for certain with what my visions now told me. I wrote what I saw to the Tsar.
Take, for instance, those birds. Everywhere, birds. Have you stopped to think that on a sunny day, almost every bird casts a shadow?
It’s true. When an eagle floats over the icy peaks, his shadow slides upslope and down, a blue cloth. The hawk and the hummingbird: big shadow and small. Even the duck in a millpond drags her ducky umbrage in the mud.
The sparrow in cities, on a spree with her thousand cousins. Have you noticed? As sparrows wheel over the basilica, they scatter shadows like handprints on the spiral wooden
ribs and ribbons of those turnip domes. Sparrows even come between the sun and the high windows of the Winter Palace of the Tsar. How dare they, the Tsar said once. He had a headache.
I know this because he told me so. I once had the ear of the Tsar.
Anyway.
Yes, all birds cast shadows on bright days. Except for one. The Firebird, bright soul of all the Russias, casts no shadow.
You can’t be surprised at that. What, after all, could the shadow of light be? No such thing. It is a trick, a paradox. It hurts to think about it.
However, they say any mortal boy or girl who can snatch a tail feather of this bird … well, that child can make a wish that will come true. Why a child and not, say, a robber-baron industrialist or a society dame? Or even some goofy naturalist collecting specimens in the badlands? I don’t know. The stories are always about children.
Now, in his line of work, a monk meets few children. If any of them ever made wishes that came true, they didn’t tell me about it. Why should they? I might not have believed them anyway. Not back then.
I didn’t understand the business about Firebirds and children and wishes. I guessed the Tsar didn’t either. So in this chamber haunted only by myself, I let my mind unspool. I suppose you might think I was going mad. Think what you like. In my raveling thoughts I flew away, as if my spirit were nestled in the breast feathers of some passing hornbill or waxwing.
I flew to observe children, their dark secrets, so I might better understand the origin of my own darkness. I also flew to understand my young accomplices in crime, to put myself in their shoes. In one case, felted peasant boots laced with rawhide cord. In the other, fine French slippers suitable to wear to a ball.
I flew to have something to write to the Tsar, to extend the number of my own days in light.
Those pages are now lost, along with so much else. Here is my effort to re-create them, before the darkness finishes its claim upon me.
The girl has never gone into a theater. But the doctor once told her what it was like, so the girl thinks she knows.
She thinks a theater is like this room in their home. This one room. There was another room once, a kind of shed, and that was for goats. But the last remaining goat was hungry and ate the rope that tied the door shut, and got out. Then something ate the goat. When the shed fell down because it was mostly sticks to start with, the family burned it for heat. So now they live in a one-room house. Simple, but it has a stage at the far end. So it is a theater.
Yes, it is, the girl insists to her two brothers. The nook could be a stage. Why not? Everybody thinks it’s only a bed built into the wall, with curtains you can draw together to keep the warmth in. But you can make a world of the bedclothes. When the curtain opens, a stone can be a pig, a feather can stand for a whole bird. A crumb: a feast. Whatever you can think of — there it can be.
“Sit down, the show is about to start,” says Elena. Luka and Alexei, the brothers, are older, and practice skepticism. “Shhh. The performance can’t start if the people aren’t paying attention.” Maybe a magpie is perched on a windowsill, looking in. Trust me. It’s possible.
“This is the best show I ever saw,” says Luka, the firstborn. He has attended no shows but hers. “Look at those bed curtains. I’d pay good money to see these bed curtains four times a week. Look at those moth holes. Such drama.” He makes a retching noise.
“I hope there’s a dragon,” says Alexei. He’s the middle child, and more prone to tenderness.
Luka agrees. “A dragon diving at coaches on the high road to Warsaw. Terrifying the horses. He especially likes to eat fat rich old countesses. First he burns their double chins off with his breath, one at a time …”
“If you don’t quiet down, there will be no show,” says Elena. So her brothers settle. She pulls the curtains back to show them the world she has made.
Usually it’s a world of brown hills, a blanket mounded around pillows. An edge of the sheet shows from underneath, and that can be the shore of the sea. The blue stripes on the mattress ticking, waves coming in.
Now and then Elena makes some old familiar folktale happen here. More often, Mama’s magic nesting doll stands in a valley. Nearly round on the bottom, like a pear, and softly narrower on top. The shape of a slow teardrop: that’s a mother for you.
The trick about this doll, the magic part? She opens in halves, and inside her is another mama doll just like the first, except smaller. Inside that one is a third, and if you keep opening mamas, you find a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. The seventh doll is a painted baby. It keeps its own counsel and doesn’t open.
Sometimes the play is about six mamas searching for their lost baby in the mountains. They take turns climbing the hills and rolling down the slopes, calling, “Baby, baby,” until one of them finds the infant in a cave of wrinkling blanket. The wooden chinking sound as they collide is chiding, kissing, scolding. It means the family can be put back together again.
Putting families back together again. Perhaps an impossible exercise. We shall see.
When the play is over, the boys clap nicely enough. Alexei admits, “I’d rather there were a dragon.”
“Here’s your dragon,” says Luka. He’s found an old sock that belonged to their father, back when he was alive and needed socks. Through the holes in the toe, Luka sticks his two fingers. The dragon flies above the world, snapping its two-fingered mouth and crying in a spooky Luka voice. It dives to snip at Alexei’s nose. Hard. Alexei yelps and swears.
“Show’s over,” declares Elena, upstaged, and flicks the curtains closed. Annoyed. She doesn’t like the story to get away from her. Luka stomps off to check his traps and snares. Alexei changes his clothes; he has a job as a houseboy.
That’s what it used to be like. Once upon a time. Today, however, the boys aren’t in the little hut. Elena has just come in from the village well. The room has a stillness that seems potent, if tentative. The winter light on the bare floorboards is splotchy from the grime on the windows. It looks like residue, something having been washed away. Well. Much has been washed away.
The motherly nesting doll, called the matryoshka, watches from the shelf with the holy ikon and the cold unlit candles.
Elena sets down the pail of water. She draws near to the curtained side of the room. She pauses and she says a prayer, and then she opens the two sides of the drapes as quietly as she can.
Here is the world she sees. It looks a lot like the world she plays. A rolling landscape of upland meadows, sudden woolen cliffs. The world steams, and it smells of camphor medicine. It groans and turns in its bed.
“How are you feeling today, Mama?” whispers Elena.
The world does not answer.
“Would you like the matryoshka to hold?” asks the girl.
The world does not answer.
So Elena goes out. Can you see her? Over there, on the path by the fence made of wire and disoriented wooden rails. Now in the shadows of the juniper, now coming into the light. There.
She’s about this tall. Her faded scarf is slipping backwards off her snarly hair because she’s been running.
A few crows lift out of her way, but not far. A girl is no threat to them.
She pauses for breath. Her hand is at her side, she has a stitch. She leans against a stone wall that supports a rusty gate — the way to the land of the dead.
Two churchyard rooks look at her sideways, considering.
A red squirrel in a rotting tree scolds her. The creature is mangy, and it probably has rabies. Still, she mutters, “Please,” and then, “Forgive me,” and then she puts her hand in a hole in the tree. She takes out two acorns and sets one back on the wall. One for him and one for her. “Sorry, sorry,” she murmurs. Three more, and she drops them all in her apron pocket. It’s stealing. It isn’t fair, but she’s bigger.
Then she swings the gate open.
The churchyard is dank. What small snow there was this winter has been reduced to translucent mush. Last year’s grass l
ies exposed, wetted down and combed all in one direction. The girl pinches a fistful of tatty pinks and whites hardly out of the ground. Then she walks past the few carven stones and worn obelisks to the meadow beyond, where the poor are buried.
She doesn’t know how to find her father here, for there are no markers. Still, she has a game she plays with him. She closes her eyes and spins around and lets the blossoms scatter in a wheel about her. “Have I found you, Papa?” she calls. She doesn’t bawl, for this is an old game by now, she is used to it. She hopes that, sometimes, some flowers fall on his grave. That’s all she hopes.
Today, though, before she leaves, she drives her hand into her apron pocket. She grips a few acorns. “Look, Papa,” she says. “I promised to help take care of Mama, but this is all I have to bring home. There’s nothing else for us.”
If the spirit of her father has an opinion about this, she can’t make it out.
Any cemetery is already a ghost village, but this one is a ghost village planted within a ghost village. Outside the graveyard gates, there’s too little sound of human bustle. The child just stands there amidst the silence of phantoms, fists clenched, in a wheel of scattered pinks. From up above it would make a pretty enough sight, peasant girl in a circle of torn blossoms. One might do a painting. Some colors and a brush, a square of flawless white.
Lifting away, the rooks drag their shadows across her upturned face. She sees them but she doesn’t see them. She is thinking of her father and of her mother, and how hunger is like a shadow that makes everything wobble in its outlines.
I do not mean to make her seem pathetic. She is only a common child. Perhaps you already think a peasant child not worth your time and attention. Perhaps you are right. I shall lay it out for you, and you can decide.
That’s how it is, that’s how it was, that’s how it was going. Every day was pretty much the same, until the day of the doctor’s curse. That child’s life and mine began to go awry on the same day.
Things can start happening anytime, anywhere. Prisons, gardens, palaces, woods. This particular stumble of fools began outside Elena’s hutch of a house.
The doctor was shivering on the step, his back to the closed door. He was really a doctor for horses and sheep, but last fall the báryn, that local lord fancypants, had given up. He with his big house and his big mattress stuffed, it was said, with big cash — he had decided to move his flocks off the estate. Get out while he could. So work for an animal doctor, for everyone, grew scarce. “Too sad,” said the báryn. “We’ll meet again in happier days, if they ever come. Good-bye.”