He squeezed the washcloth out into the basin, rested it on the side. “You might rethink that position. He may not be alive very long. Speaking of men alive,” he said, drying his hands on a towel, “guess who I ran into the other day?”
I did not give a damn.
“Our Dmitry Ivanovich. He’s been in Vologda with the English.” He shook out the towel and wrapped it around my shoulders.
I dried my hair with my good hand. Why did Arkady know my father’s whereabouts? He’d been interested in him even that first day, on Kamenny Island. Arkady was capable of saying anything to torment me, but that bit about the English sounded true enough. My father, still not reconciled to the fact that the future belonged to others.
The Archangel picked up the bloody basin and rapped on the door. It opened, and he handed the washbowl through. Then the Kirghiz and a younger man came in, carrying a small table and baskets of food. The younger man, a big-headed blond, found it difficult to keep his eyes on the table and the foodstuffs instead of on his master’s naked woman. I didn’t bother to cover myself. I was a horse, a cow. Shame belonged only to human beings.
They set out the feast before the Louis chair and the room filled with the fragrance of cooked food, meat. My stomach welcomed it with audible gurgles, that traitor. I hated that I needed to eat, hated that I needed him, my master, this ghoul. The men left silently.
Arkady sat in the chair before the low table and peered into the basket, his forefinger lifting the checkered cloth. “Yes, the noble Dmitry Ivanovich, somewhat the worse for wear.” He filled a plate—a small chicken, potatoes, mushrooms. I hadn’t eaten since morning, just a roll and some tea. My stomach growled viciously. “His mistress was with him.”
Hungry and burned as I was, I laughed. “You must be thinking of the wrong man.” I drank from his water glass.
My captor began to eat. “Viktoria Karlinskaya. Didn’t you know? It’s been going on quite a while.” He held out a piece of chicken to me on his fork. I reached with my good hand but he pulled it away. “No, open up.”
Feeding me like a squirrel he wished to tame. But in the end my stomach was more insistent than my pride. I ate, bite by bite—chicken, warm bread, salad. “You’re still wrong.”
“She’s an attractive woman,” he continued. “Married to an SR of some prominence. You people are so civilized. No pistols at dawn.”
It was impossible. Ridiculous. Though my parents’ marriage certainly wasn’t the warmest, it went against everything I knew about Father. Arkady was playing with me. I concentrated on the sensation of his crushing my fist around the shard of glass. I wouldn’t believe anything he said—even if he said the sun rose in the morning.
He pressed a piece of bread to my lips and I chewed it. “Ask me a question,” he said.
“Why are you like this?” I asked.
“A person can’t see what I’ve seen and not be affected by it,” he said, and stroked my wet hair. “You won’t be the same, either, after this is all over.”
I was glad he thought it would be over. That was cause for hope.
A few nights later, he urged me to recite poems for him. I considered poets I thought he’d like. Pushkin? Groan. Lermontov? Better. I tried the symbolists, the acmeists. He pronounced Blok “dreary” and Akhmatova “a frigid bitch,” but he adored the mocking, incendiary Tsvetaeva, especially the poem “We shall not escape Hell, my passionate sisters…” He had me recite it three times, savoring the lines,
…we sing songs of paradise
around a campfire with thieves,
we, the careless needlewomen
(all we sew splits at the seams!),
prancers, players on the panpipe,
the whole world’s most rightful queens!
…in the jails and in our revels
we have given up the skies…
…on starry nights, we stroll among
the apple trees of paradise…
Yes, this was the place for Tsvetaeva. Akhmatova was too reserved, too mournful and ready to grieve. Tsvetaeva knew what it was to make mistakes out of passion, how to let the madness in, let it flare and dance. Arkady lay with his head on my bare breast. I was unfortunately getting used to all this. My captor, my enemy, my lover…the saddest man I ever met.
“Tell me one of yours,” he said. “They say you write all the time.”
I poured myself another vodka, knocked it back. “I burn them as I go.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that.” He stood up and glanced around the room, pressing his long fingers to his mouth. He began searching. He tapped briefly on the open writing surface of the escritoire but didn’t touch any of the drawers. He peered behind the ugly landscape painting, a hiding spot that wouldn’t have occurred to me, then went straight to the bookcase and methodically began shaking out the books. I knew he would find them eventually. His delight was almost comical as the loose pages fluttered out from a volume of Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches like so many gulls. He gathered them up from the floor and brought them to me, rustling them, and settled in for a show.
I sorted through them, all my characters. Persephone, tragic Pandora, Ariadne. The woman of Kitezh. Frankly, I’d never had a better audience, more intent, more focused.
Oh the squawking these days
Women fight for bones
Someone’s being murdered
In the building next door.
And the bells of Kitezh
Grow faint
Once I heard them singing.
But now it’s only streetcar bells
Except very late at night…
Shhh!
There?
No.
Only a late tram.
I shared one I’d written in the voice of the sorcerer Koshchei the Deathless as he speaks to his soul, which lies hidden
inside a golden needle,
inside an egg,
inside a duck
inside a hare,
inside a chest of gold
at the bottom of the sea.
In the poem, the soul’s so very lonely that she wants to join with him again. But he will not give up his power for his soul, no matter how lonely they both are or how much misery it causes them.
“You really believe I have a soul hidden away somewhere, like a dog’s buried bone?” He laughed, his head on my shoulder. “That I could just unlock the chest of gold, and my soul and I would be one again for all eternity? As I recall, Koshchei dies when he and his soul are reunited.” He tipped the bottle back, then held it to my lips.
The vodka had ceased to burn, ceased to taste like anything. I drank and wiped my chin on the back of my hand. “Yes, but think of the suffering of keeping them apart. All this power, this greed,” I said. “To what end?”
He was silent for a time. “What’s the point in a soul if it kills you? Would you rather have life or a soul?”
“What’s life without a soul?” I said. “It’s not even life.”
“So Russian.” He laughed. “It’s why I’m the new prince of Petrograd and you’re a naked girl in a room.”
Sometime around dawn, I must have passed out. A long, headachy sleep, with scraps of nightmares slicing this way and that.
I woke to full daylight, and flew from the couch as if it were on fire. What in the devil had he done to me while I slept? Poured candle wax between my shoulder blades? The pain was as bright as branding irons, phosphorescent. I raced to the mirror that hung between the windows and, twisting around, tried to see my back in the glass. Stretching, craning, my skin burning.
When I saw what he’d done, I clapped my hand over my mouth.
He’d incised into my back a fiery alphabet, a network of cuts, delicately inscribed, oozy red upon the white flesh. A poem. For me.
salA
devoleB
ton llahs eW
esoht raeH
slleB
niagA
And I knew, as surely as I’d known anything in my life, t
hat I would never walk free of this nightmare.
51 The Meeting
THE KIRGHIZ FOUND Me in a state of shock, naked, my back a mass of bloody cuts. He stopped when he saw me, holding my breakfast in a bag. I looked at him over my shoulder, gazing into the intricacy of his hard-burnished wrinkles. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t soften. What those old eyes must have seen.
“You’ve got to get me out of here,” I whispered hoarsely. “He’s not going to stop. He’s never going to stop, is he?”
I was searching for a shred of humanity. Yes, there it was—I could see the pity in his eyes. He put the bag on the desk and filled my pitcher with water from a pot. But what he said was, “If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods.”
Yet he came back later with bandages and iodine. Yes, Arkady’s men would know how to treat knife wounds. They would have had numerous occasions to perfect their art. He cleaned and dressed my flesh, quickly and efficiently, and changed the dressings each day afterward. But the marks would never fade entirely. Alas, Beloved, we shall not hear those bells again. I heard voices in other rooms, people in the street, hail on the roof, the snapping of fire logs, but under it all was silence.
The twelfth night Arkady came early, in a brisk mood. He held up my laundered slip in his bony hands. “I thought we’d go out. Let’s get you dressed, shall we? Would you like that?” His blue eyes were all concern.
He was going to take me out?
I stared at him blankly. Was there such a place as Out? Where one would be permitted to walk, dressed and booted, outside these walls? Not free, of course, but at least in the world? I hadn’t dressed since the day he’d cut me. I couldn’t bear anything pressing against my back.
He slipped the cotton lisle down past my head, pulled it gently over the bandages, tenderly even. As if cutting my flesh had been some necessary operation and he was my solicitous nurse. Yet I’d been so sure I’d never leave this room alive. I knew there was no way he was actually letting me go, that he was just expanding the walls of my prison to include the night and new air, but I’d take any scrap of it, anything, even a firing squad.
He helped me into my clothes, my coat and scarf, and turned the key in the lock. The door swung outward. It seemed impossible. Another room. Fresh air, cold compared to the hothouse I’d been living in. The shock of seeing the flat again. Men, just in the next room, playing cards amid rolls of rugs, racks of coats, objets d’art that hadn’t been here when I’d arrived. They looked up and quickly back at the worn fans of spades and diamonds. All this time, they’d heard my screams, knew exactly what I’d endured, and not one of them had so much as lifted a finger. They were just so many dogs that showed their bellies to the leader, the most vicious of them all. I felt their eyes on my back as Arkady led me on. I wished I could burn the house down with all of them sealed into it. Then I would hear their screams while I played my own game of cards.
The other rooms of the enfilade swarmed with men, eating, carrying boxes and bags, flour and cans, even a live goat, its hard hooves clicking on the parquet. I felt like a long-lashed dairy cow being led to the milking shed before a pack of wolves, though none of them dared so much as glance at me. Queen of the Underworld with her Dark Lord.
We descended the small elevator to a long car waiting at the curb in the icy night, a Benz Söhne with a surrey top. Little Gurin sat at the wheel like a monkey in a leather cap, and next to him, burly in a thick coat, sat the bearded man with the heavy eyebrows, St. Peter. He glanced at me without curiosity from under his astrakhan hat. As usual, Arkady cut a poor figure in his old coat and crushed fedora. He clearly relished the masquerade, his power concealed inside his shabbiness. I wondered what he wanted. What was his game? I knew him well enough by then to know there was a reason for all this. He looked far too pleased with himself for my liking. I slid across the seat. It occurred to me to keep on going and I grabbed the door handle on the street side, but Arkady yanked me back by my coat collar. “Oh, don’t leave us so soon, Makarova. You’ll miss the fun. Won’t she, Borya?”
The heavy-browed man turned and scratched his forehead under his hat with the thin barrel of his Mauser. Everyone had them now, it seemed—the Cheka and the criminals alike. You could tell the Mausers from the regular guns by the sound of their rapid fire, Petrograd’s nightly lullaby.
I made the mistake of sitting back against the upholstery, and my unhealed wounds sent me jolting upright again. Gurin wrenched the car from the curb and I had to clutch Arkady to keep from falling backward. But I was out, that was the thing. I wanted to stick my head out the window as Tulku used to do, drink in the Tauride Gardens, the icy night. I couldn’t imagine where it would end, but for the moment I was moving away from that prison.
“Smile.” Arkady grinned like a corpse. “Breathe.” He demonstrated deep breathing, theatrically throwing his head back, his arms wide on the seat as we careened through the pitch-dark town. “Ah, Petrograd. I love this city.” At this hour, streets that would once have been teeming with pedestrians traveling to and from the theaters and restaurants were as deserted as those of a town emptied by plague. No one walked on the ice-glazed pavement, no lights appeared in the windows. Only when we crossed Nevsky at the train station did we see any signs of life.
The Benz Söhne slid on the frozen road, Gurin neatly avoiding all the potholes and detritus. The wind tore in through the car’s open sides. I reluctantly accepted the bearskin rug over my lap and pulled it to my shoulders. I could still smell the bear. Arkady worked his hand under my skirt and warmed it between my legs as a man rests his hand on a dog’s head, as if no one else were in the car. Yes, I had submitted, utterly, I was hollow as a gourd. Arkady’s woman.
“Did you see the look on that blonde’s face?” Arkady said to the heavy-browed Borya.
“She shouldn’ta held the goods in her corset,” said the man with the Mauser. “That was her first mistake.”
In a short time we were out of the city, heading south toward the Pulkovo Heights. The moon rose in the east like a voyeur peeping through a blind. A beautiful night in any other life, the road slick and shining, the smell of the surrounding fields. In the daytime, the Benz Söhne would have been sunk in mud to the running boards, but the temperature had dropped and set a fine crust on the land. Here and there, I could detect the trench lines we had dug against the German advance. That, too, seemed like years ago, those days working alongside the women, their camaraderie. What I wouldn’t give for a friend.
The men talked about the job they’d pulled the night before, a theater robbery. I wondered if they had attacked one of Krestovsky’s snack bars. Beautiful Galina and her pretensions to poetry. Did they still gather at the apartment on Sergievskaya? Or had all the poets gone their own ways, each scrambling for a livelihood and a bit of bad bread? Maybe it had been collectivized by now. Arkady kissed my neck, sniffing me as he massaged me under the bearskin. “We made the front page of the Petrogradsky Echo—third time this week. The new Cheka head, this Uritsky, vows to clean us off the face of the earth. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, as there is officially no crime in Petrograd?” He snorted, “I’d like to see him try to get rid of me. I heard someone stole his hat right in the corridor at Smolny.” Uritsky was Varvara’s boss. He was the new chief of the Petrograd Cheka? I filed that piece of information away in a secret drawer in my head.
In the distance, the pale dome of the Pulkovo Observatory gleamed on the heights. Someone was working up there tonight, some quiet scientist for whom this madhouse on wheels would seem stranger than all nine moons of Jupiter.
We turned into a smaller lane, bumped and slid through a small forest of bare birches and thin evergreens, to a log dacha, smoke curling from its chimney. The men got out. If I ran now, how far would I get? To the observatory? I estimated I’d make it no farther than the dacha gate before I felt a bullet between my shoulder blades.
I climbed out of the back, Arkady taking my hand. My breath was full of frost. “You’re going to
like this,” he said. And we all marched down the crunchy frozen path under the blistering stars to the old dacha.
A small group watched us enter, four men dressed in a variety of styles and a woman, full-lipped with thick reddish-blond hair. The room was rich with fragrant fir-smoke and tobacco. The mood was tense, as though a heated discussion had just ceased when we entered. They cast sharp glances at each other. What have we gotten ourselves into? I could almost hear them asking themselves.
Borya took up guard post near the door, Mauser at his hip, arms crossed, dashing my hopes of a quick bolt to freedom.
I squeezed myself into a corner, hoping to be ignored, wondering how I would be perceived by these people, a charcoal-eyed girl in my old coat and tattered gloves, my shawl and boots. I recognized a familiar scent married to the fir: cherry tobacco. There. By the mantelpiece, in a worker’s black blouse and a full beard, his corduroy trousers stuck in his boots, Father had already seen me. He’d been smoking a clay pipe but it now hovered halfway to his chest as he stood, frozen in horror, taking in my wasted face, my bandaged hand, the company I kept.
Shame rose up in me like water in a fountain, filled me so quickly with its hot roaring substance that I felt I might be knocked off my feet. I wished I could melt into the floor like butter. Had Arkady planned this all along? Of course he had. His blue eyes danced with fun. If I’d had a knife—even the edge of a can—I would have cut his throat.
And who might these other people be? The woman in her modest black dress wasn’t tall, but deep-breasted, her bright hair in a tight chignon. The man seated across from Arkady had soft brown hair and a drooping moustache. He nervously fingered his workman’s cap, resting on the table. Arkady tossed his own disreputable hat beside it, letting his pale rat’s nest sprawl on his cadaverous head. I saw the fun he was having at Father’s expense. Arkady reached behind him and pulled me to stand next to him, the way a man pulls a woman to the roulette table for luck as he places his chips on rouge. He was parading me before my father like a trophy of war, like the cursed captives of Troy.