Every night, Tonya remains slack atop the pech’, as the baby rustles angrily on her belly, roots for a nipple. She feels her bowels burning, her breasts leaking, maybe her heart breaking, whatever is left of it. If Valentin has indeed received her letters, he has still not deigned to answer. Valentin Andreyev has reached the future, his future, and she is in the past, and the space between them is infinite.
There is shouting from outside, but no knocking. Lena is on her hands and knees in the crib, sobbing, and Tonya has to scoop her from the basket, hoist her onto a hip. Nelly rolls to one side on the mattress nearby. Nelly has been crankier than normal. Kirill and Nelly are trying to have a baby, and Tonya takes long walks with Lena every day to avoid their lovemaking.
She needs to find her own place to live.
‘Open up, comrades,’ comes the command, but Chekists are already barrelling in. Their leather coats make them look like flayed animals.
The deputy declares that they are here for grain, for the surplus grain, that is being hidden in this village, in every home. His soldiers begin to overturn the farm tools, the horses’ harnesses. They rip and rummage through everything they find: the kettles, the pots, the churn. They pilfer a bottle of barley liquor. Aside from the deputy himself, they are all clearly drunk, so drunk they wouldn’t see surplus grain if it fell on their faces like snow.
Lena is still hollering. Wearily Tonya takes her to the rocking chair, lowers her blouse, and tries to latch the baby on, but Lena, worked up to a fury, only writhes on the breast.
Nelly sits up and stares across the room. She is whey-faced. ‘Get out of my home,’ she says, in a snarl.
For a second Tonya feels that Nelly is looking right at her.
‘It is not normal times. We are at war,’ the Chekist deputy replies, without emotion.
‘You mean with Germany still, with the Kaiser?’ Tonya asks, over Lena’s howling.
‘No.’ He spits. ‘We’ve just signed a peace with Germany. We are at war with the White Army, comrade, the forces who fight for the Tsar. Vladimir Lenin has called upon the Russian people to help weed out all enemies of the revolution.’
Tonya removes the baby from her breast. Having fed for hours, Lena has sniffled and snuffled herself to sleep at last. The room is quiet. Nelly is at the wheel, spinning hemp, eyes large and unfocused. Kirill stands, head lowered, in front of the small shrine to St Nicholas. He says the same prayer again and again, one of the Psalms: De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine.
From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord.
Nelly has started her monthly bleeding. It was a week late, giving rise to such high hopes. Tonya wants to tell her friend to eat more. To smile more. To cease the weekly gatherings with the village ladies, who burst with new suggestions for what Nelly needs to do to get pregnant: Consume these herbs and not those ones. Stop sitting on cold surfaces. Spin your wheel a certain number of times before you stop.
Tell Kukolka to leave your home for good.
‘Let us alone for a moment, Tonya,’ says Kirill, without looking.
Lena appears settled in her blankets, so Tonya throws her shawl around her shoulders and slips outside. The night sky is slung low, and the moon casts the village in an icy light, but the air is fresh, tickly. A sign of spring. The timing must seem cruel to Nelly, for spring is symbolised by eggs. New life. New beginnings.
Maybe next month.
Behind the houses of Popovka, beyond the trees, lies the path that leads to Otrada. Once it was wide and cleared away enough to allow carriages and sleighs, and once there were harvest parties and dinners with neighbouring gentry families and music and merriment. The change took place gradually, over Tonya’s childhood. The fields turning muddy. The forest turning darker. Mama turning inwards.
One person, or two people, could live off the land at Otrada easily. The vegetable plots, the orchards, the deep larders; Tonya knows it all better than anyone. And nobody would bother her.
People may soon forget that the estate was ever there.
New beginnings.
There is a sound. Someone dressed in a sheepskin coat is walking along the village lane, leading a horse by the nose. It’s the stranger from the day Lena was born. He doffs his hat, showing a glimpse of short, white-blonde hair. His eyes are light, startling. He is younger than she remembers, perhaps not quite thirty.
‘It’s you,’ she says plainly. ‘I didn’t know how to find you.’
‘Were you looking for me?’ he asks.
‘I wished to thank you. My daughter is six months old. I don’t know what I would have done without you. I’m Tonya,’ she adds.
‘Sasha,’ he says. ‘Sasha Ozhereliev.’
He bids her a good evening and Tonya returns it, his name flickering in her memory. Sasha Ozhereliev. A village outcast, rumoured to have murdered his wife and her lover, years ago, it would have been. He’d been banished into the wilderness, coming into town rarely, only to be sneered back out again.
But perhaps the presence of the Cheka has emboldened him. The villagers are not the only authority around any more.
‘Sasha Ozhereliev has been coming around since before the Chekists,’ says Nelly, in snipped tones. ‘Since the Tsar abdicated at least. I believe he has something to do with the attacks on the estates, Tonya. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one who killed your father!’
‘Is there reason to think that he killed Papa?’ Tonya asks.
‘He’s a killer! What more reason do you need?’
If Nelly were her usual self, and not this facsimile, Tonya would confide right now that she, too, is nearly a killer. That Dmitry died because of her. But there are already whispers enough about her in Popovka, by now more so than about Sasha Ozhereliev. No baby will be born to Nelly and Kirill until Tonya leaves, is what the villagers say; maybe Kukolka wants Kirill for herself! It’s wrong that he lets her live with them, but he was always weak, wasn’t he, when it came to that family! Poor, poor Nelly!
‘There may be more to his story,’ Tonya says instead.
‘There isn’t,’ retorts Nelly. ‘Some people just don’t belong here.’
As spring turns to summer Tonya works the fields again with the others. The soil is shuddery-soft, like fresh clay. She binds, threshes, weeds until the skin comes off her hands. Lena is an early walker who stays at Tonya’s heels like a sheepdog. Refuses to be left behind with anyone. The peasants are increasingly rankled, rubbed wrong by the demands of the Chekists. Tonya can feel the anger coming off the others as she works, and out here, now that the hours are long and the fields are long too and the people are tired, the murmurs become raised voices: It’s because of Kukolka, all of their bad luck! And where is Nelly, why does she not come to work? Where is Nelly?
Tonya asks herself that question too when she sees Nelly at home, sewing a shawl that never seems to end. Nelly will look at Lena and then at Tonya and the look says, Some people just don’t belong here.
At last Tonya receives a reply in the post. Valentin has gone away to the front, it says. I will pass on all messages to him when he returns. Yours sincerely, Viktoria Andreyeva. Tonya stares down at the note, the loop of letters. Viktoria Andreyeva. She remembers Viktoria Katenina, with those eyes like milk saucers.
She doesn’t remember Viktoria Andreyeva.
Valentin is married.
Sasha Ozhereliev seats himself at the table but declines the offer of bread or tea. Lena is eating a baked potato, shoving it in with both fists, and Sasha reaches into his coat, produces a wooden miniature sleigh for which the baby lunges. He catches her and sets her gently on the ground. Lena wobbles away, prize in hand, and Tonya hides a smile.