Выбрать главу

“So you were one of Vsevolod’s… circle,” I finished, not wanting to insult him. “My brother used to do a great imitation of him.” I attempted it, the hunchy obsequiousness, the flabby lips, rubbing his hands.

“He was a kind man, though,” Andrei said. “He didn’t deserve the treatment he got from Taras, and me.” He balled up the paper from the fish and threw it into the woods.

“Was this at the Laboratory?”

He looked impossibly sad. “We should get going,” he said.

We finished the tea, and I led him off into the pines that grew tall on this side of the river, giving off a jammy smell. My first trap bore fruit.

“Oh look, you got one!”

Citizen Rabbit, condemned for crimes unknown. I slid the tip of my knife to find the precious wire buried in its neck, worked the noose open. In better times I would have cut it, but in better times I wouldn’t be doing this at all. I dropped the dead weight of my catch into my game bag, then showed Andrei how to reset the little snare, steadying it with twigs over the game trail. He watched me with the same bemused curiosity I’d had in the days when I watched Mina dissecting things in the biology lab at the Tagantsev Academy—interest without any intention of trying it myself. I would make Andrei set the next one. I stood, straightening my legs, rubbing the circulation back into them.

The next trap also paid off—a large hare had been caught around its neck and foreleg. I could feel its struggle before it finally froze to death. In the spring, I planned to catch rabbits alive and breed them. That way we would have fresh meat next winter without expending all this energy on hunting—though it had been designed for my psychospiritual advancement and not just as a way to feed the tribe. Then I caught myself. Next winter. As if I would still be here. Not a chance. Certainly the civil war would be over by then. Things would start to improve and there would be food in the city. My child would grow up there. I would not be fooling with rabbits by then.

I made Andrei reset the trap, bend the sapling down to the ground, lacing it into the notched twig. Set them well, Ukashin had said. Even a rabbit will avoid a snare if he’s been caught once and fought his way free. Only a person is stupid enough to be caught twice.

The intelligent bashed himself in the face a couple of times, but eventually reset the trap. He beamed with his accomplishment.

“When I think of the man I was,” he said, “I want to shake him. So confident, so naive. It took the revolution to awaken us from our dream of life. Perhaps that was its true purpose.”

“The revolution’s purpose was to free the worker, to feed the poor, not to awaken the bourgeoisie. If we could have fed the people, given them hope, we wouldn’t have needed the Bolsheviks to be our alarm clock.”

He blew into his thin long hands, rubbed them and put his gloves back on. “Nevertheless, it was a liberation,” he said, picking up his ski poles. “You were never yourself back then. You were the Good Husband, the Publisher, the Dutiful Wife. Even you. Rebellious Daughter? Daddy’s Girl? Girl of the Season? The revolution made short work of all of that. It exploded all the roles.”

“You think we’re free now? Or are the new roles just less obvious?” I had been the Rebellious Daughter, also the Good Girl, and yes, Daddy’s Favorite. And now I was the Mystical Orphan, the Haphazard Acolyte, the Husbandless Mother-to-Be. Kali, Bringer of Death. It hardly seemed an improvement.

“I’ve refused to take on any new roles,” he said. I could see his energy had returned with his meal. “For the first time in my life, I am just a man. Only a man feels, only a man lives. A Publisher can’t feel hungry, but I feel my hunger. What does a Good Husband feel? Nothing. He’s a construct. I feel. Everything drops away but what’s meaningful. Noumenon. Ding an sich. A rebirth.”

I looked at us both, in our rags and patches. Ding an sich. The thing in itself. Kant in the woods. Platonists in sheepskins and quilted jackets. It made me laugh.

He couldn’t really think this was freedom. Under one role there was always another. But I didn’t have time for this house of mirrors. I had traps to check before the snow. “Tell me about my mother. Does she ever come out of that room?”

“She used to come out for Practice.” He skied along in my wake, bumping the backs of my snowshoes with his tips. “She’d visit the workroom… we often played the piano together. She has such beautiful technique. So sensitive. She sometimes plays my own compositions. Occasionally she invites me to her room for tea.”

I liked the idea that they were friends, that she had someone to talk to besides Ukashin. “Do you ever talk about Petrograd, the old days?”

“We never talk about personal things. We speak of the work, her experiences on the astral.” He paused, remembering her, then his face darkened. “But Taras doesn’t like us interfering with her. He wants to be her sole contact. As you’ve seen.”

“But you’re the one guarding her door.”

How sad he looked. “She can’t be disturbed. Changes are going on now. I’m no longer privy to the discussions.” The bitterness around his small mouth. “There’s a new darkness around us, haven’t you noticed? No one talks about it. Have they said anything to you?”

Me? I was the lowest on the ladder of initiation. “No one talks to me,” I said. “But I’ve felt it, yes. I thought it was the war… the violence. Red versus White. It’s probably reverberating all over the world, even onto the higher dimensions.”

“That’s not how it works,” he said. “The disturbance is above, and manifests on this level. Energy goes from higher to lower. The war is a disturbance in the higher dimensions, materializing in the third. That’s your mother’s work, to keep it from coming through.”

I didn’t like the idea of war in the higher dimensions. I liked my higher dimensions abstract and orderly and beneficent if possible. This was spooky, like devils in the bathhouse, witches curdling the milk. “I thought you were a scientist.”

“There are all sorts of beings on every dimension, Marina.”

We moved through the pines. Traveling on this side was easier, as some of the trees had been cut, though cover for small game wasn’t quite as good. I saw something in the snow that made my heart leap. Split-hoof tracks, pretty as name-day roses. I crouched down to study them. Here were the small tracks of a mouse, and oval prints with small forward toes—marten or sable. A crow strutting. And, queen of my dreams, those delicate hoofprints of deer. Recent, too. Nothing else had degraded their edges. They were imprinted on top, firmly as a rubber stamp.

I rubbed my nose with my mitten, trying to warm it, pulled my scarf up again. If I got a deer, Ukashin would be appeased, and I would be taken off the punishment list, brought back into the breast of Ionia, forgiven my trespasses. I could feel my day brightening.

Andrei hung over my shoulder like a man reading another’s newspaper. “What do you see?”

I pointed. “Deer tracks. Here, and here.”

I scanned the trees, and there, between trunks, something large and gray moved silently. I yanked my glove off with my teeth and took the pistol from my pocket, held my other hand out to silence Andrei. As quietly as I could, I began to approach in the creaking snow. I had to get closer. There was no way to kill anything from this distance. As I moved, I was already thinking how I would get a deer home, whether I would have to hoist it into a tree, and with what. As I neared, I heard a crash. The intelligent had caught his ski and fallen into a clump of evergreens. The big shape vanished.