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.
A light fine snow drifted down on us as Ivanych loaded his grain into the wagon inside the barn, out of sight of the neighbors, and Kolya put the bright gold coins into his hand, French francs with their cockerels. The horse tossed his head, eager to be off. Six poods of grain, more than two hundred pounds. He’d thrown in a flat of eggs and two rounds of cheese besides. Faina wouldn’t meet my eye. Was she ashamed of her confidences? That I understood the extent of her plight?
We climbed up into the wagon, and Ivanych opened the barn door and the gates. His wif
e came out to watch us leave, hiding behind the manner we had seen at the beginning—abrupt, formal, indifferent. But before she shut the gates, she hurried up, thrust a jar of jam into my hands, and gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. Then she shot Kolya the strangest look. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes held such a hunger, such longing, her lips slightly parted, as if for a kiss. And his expression…the way his eyes held hers. A secret communication. What in God’s name did they have to keep secret? Kolya shook the reins and the gray headed off.
68 A Delightful Man
THE HORSE PULLED US through the sifting snow. It built up on his wide rump, traced the arch of the shaft bow over his shaggy neck. Next to me on the bench, Kolya lounged cheerfully, humming “All Along the Volga.” I felt queasy and our departure nagged at me, the glance Faina and Kolya had exchanged. I rolled the jar between my mittened hands. Something had happened between them last night. Their brief exchange was too familiar, unspoken but urgent. On either side of us, pine forest closed in. No distance to pull back, no horizon line, no relief from the pressure, only two vanishing points, one ahead and one behind. He noticed me examining him and smiled. “Stupid muzhik really thought he’d put one over on us. We could have walked away with the floor and he’d have been lying in the straw, congratulating himself.” He grinned at his own cleverness, the fox’s triumph over a folktale goose.
That look, her eyes, the barn door closing. The jam. Her smile for me—almost an apology. No, not almost. A real apology. Yes, that was right, Kolya had left Ivanych the floor. The floor would have been too hard to steal. But a ripe, sad wife was as easy as eggs in an unguarded henhouse.
“Where did you go last night, when you went out?”
“To Prince Yusupov’s,” he said. “He was hosting a ball. Why?” Such a display of innocence.
I knew a sophisticated woman would tuck it under her wing the way a swan tucks its head. Akhmatova would not make a scene. She’d say, Women have experienced such things since love began. She’d be casual, shrug off her pain with words so exact they would be like lancets. They would drain the wound, and she would go on.
But I was not that girl. My suffering wasn’t picturesque, it was hot and deep as an inflamed wound. I hadn’t thought twice when he went outside last night—but the longer I thought about the way Faina looked at him, the more sure I was. He’d met her somewhere, maybe in the bathhouse or in a shed, and they’d consummated what began in the izba, that electrical storm.
To think he’d returned across a continent for me! Through a war! Had braved Arkady von Princip for my sake. How could he have done all that, then sneaked off with a peasant woman six months along? Of course she was beautiful, but my God! And for her part, what if she’d been caught? Kolya could drive away, but Ivanych might beat her to death.
The snow drifted down, frosting our coats and scarves, the horse’s heavy clip-clop. Soon we’d need a sledge. But how could I go on? Still he prattled, his bad conscience filling the air with noise, pouring words into the gap between us, like a stream plunging into a chasm. Who cared about his stories, his daring escapes and colorful encounters in exotic places, the Russian d’Artagnan and Ali Baba rolled into one? I knew him for what he was now. An ordinary man, a bit frightened, full of bluster.
My stomach lurched as the wagon swayed and slid in the ruts. The jam sat heavy in my lap. I wanted to smash the jar into his face, to crush his head with it like an egg. I tried to hate her, her doll’s face, her red cheeks, the wide-set eyes—but I couldn’t. I didn’t blame her. A woman like that, in this hinterland, wouldn’t have many chances to enjoy a man like Kolya. No village Romeo could ever compare.
But Kolya! To bring me all the way out here, then go with her? I tried not to imagine their grappling. They did it in the bathhouse, I was sure of it. It would still have been warm. I knew how sweetly he would have spoken to her, said things no one had ever told her before. He would know just how to soothe her anxiety, get her out of her clothes, his lips to her round breasts, his clever touch. How she would groan as he brought her off, maybe for the first time in her life.
The horse stumbled on a patch of ice and we jolted together. “Steady!” He laughed. “He had a little too much to drink last night with the cows.” I wanted to wipe the little smirk from his face. So pleased with himself. He had stolen her under the very nose of the violent husband. Serves him right, he was probably thinking. And then filling my ears with talk talk talk. Would he never be quiet?
I was tired of his cleverness. I felt like the illusionist’s assistant, having rolled the strings and fastened the pulleys, seen the doves stuffed into his pockets. How many other women had he had since those days on the Catherine Canal? He might have had me in the afternoon and gone with another woman in the evening. I thought I might vomit. I thought of all the women we’d seen on this trip alone, wives and daughters, nieces and wards. I’d seen the flashing eyes of girls unused to gallantry, and Kolya was as tuned to feminine desire as a stationmaster to the ticking of the wireless.
My face burned, and bile welled up in my chest. What a child I’d been. Though I’d known what he was, I thought I was the exception, that I possessed some unique attraction. But everyone had something special, didn’t they, if only the glamour of novelty? I’d really thought that his struggle to return to me proved his love, proved that I was essential to him. What a fool.
I remembered a woman I hadn’t thought of for years, the vinegar-voiced wife of a writer in my parents’ set. Everyone loved him. That delightful man, they said. Always a smile, candy for the kiddies, compliments for everyone from grandmothers to housemaids. And I used to wonder, How could such a delightful man be married to such a sour-faced bitch?
I’d always assumed it was money. But now I understood that perhaps she hadn’t always been so tart. Perhaps she’d once been a clever, gay young thing herself, smarter, jollier than the rest, someone to whom he’d returned again and again, someone he might have pursued across a landscape like a roe deer, until she fell to his bow.
Now I imagined having such a man for a husband, having to endure the humiliation, the shame, the knowledge that he might pursue any kind of prey, though he’d seemingly already caught what he wanted—or wanted at the time. There was always more room in his game bag. And he intended to fill it, and keep filling it. Playing the delightful man wasn’t a pastime. The game was the man, the man was the game.
At last, Kolya picked up on my mood. “God I’m so tired of Russia.” He sighed, slapping the snow off his cap. “I don’t care if I never see another pine tree as long as I live. I can’t wait for Spain—Jerez, Valencia.” He exaggerated the foreign sounds. “Those perfumed nights.”
I would not listen. I had to stopper my ears to resist the sweet singing of the sirens. I would not wreck upon those rocks again. I would not become the sour wife, drinking my pint of vinegar with my morning meal.
I studied the dizzying motion of the passing trees, like a book’s pages flying past us. A book that I would never read. “I’m not going anywhere with you.” You’d kiss any girl, beneath any moon.
He stared at me as if I’d grown a second head.
“You’re disgusting. You slept with her. Don’t bother to lie.” The horse nodded rhythmically, its fuzzy ears collecting snow.
He laughed then, eyes wide with amazement that I could have such a thought, bearing his innocence aloft like a regimental flag. “Oh, little Marinochka,” he purred, dropping his chin into a pose of gentle disappointment, his voice dripping honey. “Is that what this is all about? All this pouting?” He tried to touch my chin, as one wags a child’s, to tease it, but I knocked his hand away.
“I could kill you. I’ll cut your throat while you’re sleeping.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re jealous of a barefoot peasant with four kids?” His pointed eyebrows were clownishly skeptical. As if this were an impossible interspecies mating, like a man and a giraffe. “I’m sure she signs her name with an X.”
; A wave of nausea came over me. “I’m sure you didn’t ask her to sign her name.”
The idea of myself in Petrograd with him as he did his speculating, undermining the struggle of the people—for what? A better man would just admit it. If he had gotten on his knees and begged my forgiveness—She was sad. She doesn’t have much in her life. Think of that beauty going to waste. It broke my heart that that pig was the only one who would ever touch her. How could I refuse her?—I might have forgiven him. But not this. Whom did he think he was lying to?
So many years I had clung to this dream. Since childhood. If only we could be together, I’d thought. Well, now we were.
“I’m not going on with you. I can’t even look at you.”
“You want to go back to Five Huts?” He made an extravagant show of turning back to examine the misty road, the boughs of the frosty trees practically touching the wagon, the hummocks of frosty dirt. “Or are you getting out right here?” He pulled the horse to a halt in the silent forest and turned all the force of his personality onto me. “I didn’t sleep with her, Marina. I swear to you. You’re being completely unreasonable.”
I gazed into that face. Snow gathered on his cap, on that ridiculous beard. I felt like clawing my own guts out. How stupid could I be? You couldn’t expect the fox to change its ways. Either you loved it or you didn’t. And I loved it, God help me. But I didn’t have the fortitude for this. I would not become pinch-faced Alla Fyodorovna, feeling my love cut out of me with a dull knife every day. I hadn’t the depth for Akhmatovian calm, my great soul expanding like a velvet purse. I would shrivel into some sort of vicious reptile. We had to part. Nausea overtook me, and I vomited off the side of the wagon.
“You’re tired and upset. Lie down in the back,” he said. “We’ll be in Cherepovets in a few days, we’ll load the train, be back in Petrograd by Thursday. After that we’ll go anywhere you want. We never have to do this again.” He gave me a sip from the canteen of hot tea. Suddenly, I saw that he, too, was tired, the skin pressing into his cheekbones. His uptilted eyes looked lined. Funny, I always thought of him as a force of nature, as little capable of tiring as the Neva.