Afterward I dried my freckled skin with my dress and put it back on, lay in the soft grass under the birches as Ginevra scolded. What would happen if you’d drowned? and so on.
“I’ve lived here all my life,” I said. “I’m not suddenly going to put on a corset and play the fine lady.”
“Then I wash my hands of you. You heartless thing!” She wept as she marched off. Oh, the blessed quiet as she was gone! As if a tear in a fabric had been stitched closed. The humming of bees swelled and ebbed. I wrung out my hair and braided it. I felt Maryino recognized me as the same child who’d collected flowers and climbed these trees. I missed Seryozha. Where is the other one? the big maple asked. But he was gone, lost to the land of men. Why did everybody want a boy to hurry up and become a man, but nobody wanted a girl to become a woman? As if that were the most awful thing that could befall her.
Ignoring the harshness of the twigs and rocks underfoot, I walked barefoot to the springhouse, drank the icy water from my hand. The bathhouse lay buried in vines, which Seryozha and I used to pretend was Baba Yaga’s hut turning around and around on chicken legs. Turn and face us. Maybe Genya and I could come here someday, clear out all those vines. We could bring the Transrational Interlocutors and create our own Commune of the Future. Though Genya detested the countryside. To him it represented every backwardness. It made me laugh—he and my father shared at least that.
Back at the house, I uncovered a sickle in the garden shed—a bit rusty—and decided to mow the overgrown yard. I was tired of sitting around all day with a book and a compress on my face, the bourgeois miss. I took the little blade and began to slash at the thistle and fennel where we’d normally have set tables and chairs and eaten under the canopy of trees. The work proved harder than I’d expected.
“Marina! What do you think you’re doing?” Avdokia flew out onto the veranda. She must have seen me from the window. “You’re going to cut your foot off!”
Blisters were already forming on my palms. My arms itched, the sun was hot, and my nose ran from the pollen.
“When I was your age, I would have killed not to have to mow one more inch.” She pulled the sickle from me, examined the little crescent of steel. “Look how dull that blade is. Shame. Lyudochka! Lyudochka!” Her niece appeared in the open doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. “She’s going to cut her foot off. At least sharpen the blade for her.” The old woman sighed deeply. “That Grigorii’s got it coming.”
The girl led me back to the shed. On a shelf she found a stone, dark and heavy. She sat on a stump and drew it along the blade. “I’ve got the laundry or I’d help you. The old lady’s right—when you’re not here, Grigorii and Annoushka don’t do anything but sit on the porch on their asses drinking kvas. Your grandfather would have put the fear of God into them. He was a real baryn, that old man.”
It smelled like rain. I could hear it in the heavy metallic thrumming of the cicadas. I cut weeds for a while longer. Though the urge to do it had gone out of me, I knew Lyuda was watching. It certainly was much easier with the sharp blade. Soon I’d cleared a scrap of yard. Then I sat on the steps admiring my work and staring at my blisters with pride.
Lyuda brought me a glass of cherry water and we gazed out at the wind rustling the hazelnut bushes and the larch, fingering birch boughs like an invisible hand combing through a girl’s long hair. A long way off, I could see Ginevra and Mother coming back from a walk. They looked like a painting together, dressed in white blouses with their white parasols, and I felt a wave of intense nostalgia, as if I were already looking at a past time. How precious all this was, how soon it might be gone. It only made it more poignant and beautiful in my eyes.
One afternoon Mother received a letter—a group of her friends was planning to visit. Such joy! Suddenly she remembered that she was the mistress of Maryino and not just a pale captive. She summoned the steward, waiting for him in the salon at the little writing table exactly where her father and grandfather once sat, and I noticed that upon stepping inside the doorway, Grigorii reflexively removed his cap. She told him that guests were coming, that he must clear the yard and the path to the aspen grove, fill in the worst of the potholes on the drive, “and for God’s sake repair that shutter.” Not a quiver in her voice or the slightest apology.
Soon long tables stretched underneath the trees, and the rooms filled with guests. The house itself seemed happy, and though I still tried to portray myself as the despairing urbanite, the longer I stayed the happier I grew. I noticed the art collector Tripov among the guests who arrived from Petrograd. Perhaps it was he who had organized the excursion as an excuse to pay court to Vera Borisovna.
Now my mother had friends to walk with through the pines and the aspen grove, to show off the village church to and play cards and guessing games, to ride in the wagonette to other estates. We sat at night at the long table covered with white tablecloths under the trees, and my mother laughed as her guests shared their gossip—who was having an affair with whom, what had happened at so-and-so’s birthday party, a neglected painting that turned out to be a Rubens, a remarkable man who taught spiritual dances and had such an original point of view. Mother wore a long gown of lilac linen. She glowed in the unearthly summer twilight, which would go on until the sun briefly dipped below the horizon before returning in an hour or so—like a child who will not go to bed.
“How has Dmitry Ivanovich fared in this auto-da-fé?” Ilona Dahlberg asked, her crimped gray hair in its elegant chignon.
“He’s managed to keep a toehold,” Mother replied. “You know he’s the most stubborn man. He says Tereshchenko’s an excellent minister, though he’s no Pavel Nikolaevich.” Paul Miliukov, a true intelligent, still led the Kadet party, but he’d become increasingly counterrevolutionary in his views.
“Dmitry Ivanovich had better hang on tight,” said the art dealer Ryazanovsky. “It’s not over yet.”
“It seems my husband’s excellent on the high wire. Who knew? Maybe he has a new career,” said Mother, making them all laugh. She tinkled her fork against her wine glass, lifted it. “I’d like to propose a toast. To long summer nights with good friends. And no more politics. Toujours gais, mes amis.”
Avdokia got wind from somewhere that the barynya had been swimming au naturel and deputized her niece as my watchdog. “And if anything happens to her, you’ll wish you’d never been born,” she’d warned her. I could imagine Lyuda’s mockery as soon as my nanny’s back was turned. A strong, spirited girl, she was delighted to be freed from making beds, doing laundry, and clumsily serving meals. Now her only responsibility was to tramp the countryside with me and make sure I didn’t run off with a deserter or drown in the Kapsha. She was not afraid of swimming, though she paddled with her head above the water like a dog.
And at last I found a postman for my letters. Because I still didn’t know the address of the Poverty Artel and couldn’t address them to “a murky courtyard off Grivtsova Alley,” I addressed them all to Mina, with instructions on how to deliver them.
“What is it?” Lyuda asked, weighing the package in her hand.
“Letters. For my boyfriend in Petrograd,” I said.
She touched the address written on the brown paper. “And this says where it goes?”
I showed her the word, Petrograd. Held out the silver ruble. “This is for the postage, and you keep what’s left. Will you do it?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t I?” She tossed the coin in the air and snatched it as it fell, fast as a snake on a rat. Could I trust her? She could easily throw the letters away and keep the ruble for herself. But who else did I have? She was more trustworthy than Grigorii. She took the package and put it in the basket with our lunch.
We stopped in the shade of a small copse of birches, where the grass was high. She spread out a tablecloth and we sat. I emptied my skirtful of daisies and began to weave them into a chain for my hair. “What’s Petrograd really like?” She spoke of it as if it were the sunken city of Kitezh, not a place one could trav
el to in two short days. “Bet you people wear different clothes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, eh?” We could hear the bells of the village cows grazing close at hand. “They say even the workers eat roast beef.”
“We haven’t seen beef since the war began,” I said. “You probably have more here than we do.” I wove the green daisy stems together, breathing their bright, bitter smell, staining my fingers. “In Petrograd the bread queues stretch around the block.”
The dappled sun caressed her broad face and her blond plait. “Is that why you’re here? For the food?”
I wiggled my bare toes dark from dirt, noting with satisfaction the calluses forming on the bottoms. “My father doesn’t like my boyfriend. He’s trying to break us up.” When I said it that way, it seemed so simple. The world’s oldest story. “That’s why I need you to mail the letters. I don’t want him to forget me. My father hates him. He’s so sure he knows what’s best for everyone.”
“You know what I remember?” she said. “Him bawling out Annoushka because she overcooked his eggs. Three minutes. I gave you a timer. What have you done with it?” What a perfect imitation! “And it had to be served in a little cup, or it went right back to the kitchen. The Englishman—that’s what your grandpa called him.” She dropped her voice, brushed her jowls to suggest Dyedushka’s bushy whiskers, and pounded her fist into her hand, the way Grandfather used to punctuate his pronouncements. “Why can’t the Englishman eat kasha like everyone else?”
“He’s still like that,” I said. “Teaching the world how to live.”
“So tell me about the boy.” Her wide-set blue eyes were eager for gossip.
“He’s a poet. A worker and a poet. He calls himself a bargeman-Keats.”
“What’s a Keats?” she asked.
I recited Keats’s love poem to Fanny Brawne, one of my favorites, and translated it roughly for her.
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die…
She fell back on the tablecloth, pretending to swoon. “He really talks like that? The blacksmith can barely open his mouth. But why a bargeman-Keats?”
I pulled out the sandwiches Olya had made, black bread with smoked fish, handed her one. “Bargeman-Keats means that when people look at him, they see the bargeman, but not the Keats. He’s a giant. He could pull a plow without a horse. My father wants a son-in-law who will fit in his egg cup.”
Lyuda laughed open-mouthed, her head thrown back. What a fine-looking girl she was, wide hips and heavy breasts. More a match for Genya than I was. “All our boys are gone,” she said. “There’s only a bunch of ugly old men, halfwits and peewees. Why isn’t your bargeman-Keats in the war?”
There were several answers to that. Draft dodger, only son, Bolshevik. “He doesn’t believe in the war,” I said.
“Who does? It’s just that our lot can’t get away with it.” She licked her lip, a bit of sour cream from her sandwich escaping her mouth. “My mother thinks I should marry the blacksmith. What do you think? He makes a good living, but he’s old, thirty at least, and stupid as a sheep. Maybe I should run off to Petrograd,” she said. “Get a job in a factory, go dancing all night.”
I imagined those women at the pumps on the Vyborg side and the Belhausen women. Many had started out as peasant girls themselves. “You might not want to go dancing after standing in a dark barn all day, working at a loom until your legs swell and you can’t breathe for the dust in your lungs.”
“You think this is any better? Stuck with kids and old geezers, trying to bring in a harvest? Sending our money to you lot so you can drink champagne and eat roast beef?”
My face went fiery red. Before the revolution she wouldn’t have dared. But she was right. It was unfair, unjust, and yet it was how we lived. I never really explained that part to Genya. I lay back and watched the spruce boughs in their circles soughing in the wind. Maryino wasn’t just a beautiful retreat. It was a means of production, as Varvara would say. How Lyuda must hate me.
“Akh, don’t look like that.” She brushed crumbs off her lap, threw a bite of bread to the birds. “I’m just saying it’s pretty but no paradise. You’ll see me in Petrograd soon enough.”
I chewed on that as I ate my sandwich, then shimmied up the tilted trunk of one of the old birch trees, where I could sit in the fork about eight feet above ground over Lyuda and drop catkins down on her. The breeze sent the bright green of the boughs into motion.
She pulled the letters out of the basket and was looking at the words again. Running her fingers over the address. “Look, here’s something you can do for me,” she called up into the trees. “Teach me to read. Do that and I’ll send your letters for free.”
I’d brought a trunkful of poetry, but even I could see that none of it would be suitable for the purpose. Mother’s cache of Blavatsky and Steiner, doubly useless. If only Ginevra’s Austen and Dickens were in Russian, that would have been ideal. In the end I wrote a ballad for her myself, the story of a cow from Novinka who came to Petrograd to make her fortune. I had the cow fall in love with one of the horses on the Anichkov Bridge and become a singer at the Stray Dog Café. I was proud of how fast she caught on. Soon she was reading everything—labels on tooth powder, tins of sardines. It wouldn’t be long before she was reading my letters, if she hadn’t started already.
Replies began to arrive from Petrograd, from a “Nadezhda Lyubova”—Hope of Love.
Smuggler
thief
red-headed
-handed
where are my lips?
Where is delight?
The house seemed so empty once Mother’s guests departed, leaving behind a slight air of mourning, though summer was still high. After dinner, we sat on the porch listening to the nightingales, Mother curled in Grandmère’s rocking chair, Avdokia with her pipe, Olya on the old bench by the door. Ginevra wrote a letter by lamplight, waving the moths away, while Mother rocked, her eyes half-closed, humming, then began to sing in her pure, lovely voice, “Au clair de la lune / Mon ami Pierrot, / Prête-moi ta plume / Pour écrire un mot…”
The tune enveloped me. She used to sing when I was young, but rarely did anymore. I listened, then quietly, hoping she wouldn’t stop, started to accompany her. My voice was lower than hers now, and she began to improvise harmony above, her voice embroidering itself through my melody like silk thread through plain cotton. I could recall how fiercely I had once loved her, the most beautiful of all the mothers, the most talented, the most sophisticated. The other girls envied me. She invented games for us, fashioned puppets and creations in paper—it was how Seryozha got his taste for constructions. She read to us, and sang. If she had not settled for becoming an ornament, a fashionable wife, she might have been an artist herself. Tonight she let down her talent, like the hair of Rapunzel. We sang “Gentil Coquelicot” and “Fais Dodo, Colin,” as the crickets chirped and fireflies winked in the long grass.
Lyuda joined us on the porch after the washing up, and she and Olya sang an old song about sweethearts parted by war, how youth would be wasted and lovers would die, the world would ever come between them. When Avdokia sang with them, their harmonies blended with hair-raising beauty, like one woman at three stages of life. Their song shook tears from me. Then Annoushka started one, even sadder—“I Walk Alone upon the Road”—and each woman, joining, added her own unique timbre and temperament. In the glowing half-light, we drank from the ancient spring that ran, deep and sweet and cold, beneath us all.
22 The Harvest
SUMMER EDGED TOWARD FALL, filled with checkered lilies and cornflowers, and still we remained at Maryino. I’d lost Lyuda to the hard labor of the wheat harvest and began to wonder if Father was ever going to
bring us home. Letters arrived for Mother from her friends in Petrograd, and for me from Nadezhda Lyubova. I can’t think about anything but your hair. But bad news came from Father. His letters complained about Kerensky and the difficulties faced by the new government: coup attempts first by Lenin’s gang, then by the rightists led by General Kornilov. Kerensky’s appointed himself commander in chief, he wrote. It’s Alice down the rabbit hole. The Kadets resigned en masse, but I continue in harness. I’ll stay until I’m fired. Boycotts and walkouts make a splash, but then where are you? Tereshchenko manages to navigate the zigs and zags, but the situation’s volatile. A Bolshevik demonstration was recently fired upon, and of course they’re making political hay of it. I recommend that you stay in Maryino until things settle down.
Mother and I strolled along a path that had already begun to close in now that the harvest was taking priority. The wind set the aspen leaves to rustling on their white branches. “You don’t put your hair up anymore,” Mother said, touching the long braids I wore. “You look like a little girl again. Sweet years…”
I laced my arm through hers. Her perfume was still the same. But now we were two women, the same height, though she was the slimmer, the more ethereal. “A little change is a good thing, Marina,” she said. “But one needs tranquillity to absorb it. Too much change and it’s just a hurricane. We don’t have time to make sense of it as we’re tumbling down the street.” She peered into a thicket. “Those blackberries are ripe. Pick some.”
I went into the deep grass and picked the black ones into my old straw hat, trying not to let the wicked thorns tear at me and avoiding the wasps growing drunk around the burst fruit. “Mama, what is it you think Papa is so mad about? Is it Genya? Or is it me? He’s not really a worker, you know. He’s a priest’s son and a poet.”
The wind in the trees was an ocean’s rumble, that wide, many-voiced murmur—like a rumor moving through a crowd. She sighed, pushing her hair back under her hat. “Can’t you see how impossible it is? Although I’m sure it’s exciting…the lure of the forbidden. You’re curious. You were always sensitive about the lower classes. Worrying about the coachmen out in the snow, remember? And there’s the revolutionary cachet…”