No one had ever mentioned Andrei as the founder of Ionia. Avdokia said Vsevolod brought Ukashin to Furshtatskaya, not the two of them. “So tell me,” I said, hoping I could console him. He was having some kind of breakdown. “Nobody talks about how it started.”
I smiled to encourage him, all the while thinking: You must be the hunter. Think like a hunter. If I was truly a hunter I would double back and try to kill that beast. Even if I only succeeded in wounding it or scaring it, it would avoid us. But I had Andrei to think about. I couldn’t leave him now, and I couldn’t take him with me.
“I wrote the book. I gave it to you when you first got here.” The Structure of Reality by A. A. Petrovin. Why had I not guessed? “You see? I had the idea years before I ever laid eyes on Taras Ukashin. Vera Borisovna could tell you. Vsevolod—” But then he remembered, the Ionians had abandoned Vsevolod and the others at the Petrograd dacha, left them in the lurch. Everyone who could have vouched for him had already been betrayed. “Taras could tell you—”
“Maybe I should ask him.”
That got me a laugh, a single bitter Ha! “Yes, you do that.”
Here was the river. Thank God. The snow coming down in thick, fat flakes now. It had already started to obliterate our footprints. I scanned for that thing, tracking us. It could be circling; it could be ten feet behind. “Hurry, please.” I unstrapped my snowshoes and climbed down the short face of the riverbank, strapped myself back in. “Hand me your skis, Andrei,” I said. But rushing him only made him clumsier, and he was more interested in his tale than in our pressing need to get away from this place.
“Maybe I am the fool. I was dazzled by him myself.” He’d bent over to loosen his ski, in the process dropping his glove, his pole. “He came to my office, wanted to talk about my book. We talked until six in the morning.” Finally he got a ski off and handed it down to me, but the cold was getting to him, and his hands trembled. “He wanted to know all about my work. And in return he told me about his travels. Egypt, China! Where hadn’t the man been? He studied with Sufis and Tantric Buddhists. Secret practices no one had ever recorded.”
I eyed the far shore longingly. Would we ever get there? His breath came short as he bent over the straps of his remaining ski. “He wanted to get his knowledge out into the world. I told him about my dream to create a society of brothers conducting research into the very shape of reality.”
Would I have to climb up there and get that other ski? “Really, we need to go.”
He ignored my urging. “You don’t know what it is to be alone your whole life, Marina, and then meet someone like that. We became the dearest of friends. The happiest time of my life—I’m not embarrassed to say it.”
I could imagine. All Ukashin’s formidable personality and charm descending upon the poor undefended intellectual. It must have been overwhelming. It must have felt like love.
Finally he got the other ski off and handed it to me, but he slipped on the rocks coming down, scraping his cheek and tearing his pants. Down on the snowy river, I put his skis back on him, strapping him in. For a brief moment I imagined doing the same for my child, buckling his skis, tying his little skates. I would be a good mother. If I survived.
He picked up his ski poles and pushed off across the white expanse. “I introduced him to everyone he knows. They embraced him as one of their own. I opened every door for him. He never would have had access to those circles if wasn’t for me.”
It was with relief that I saw the red twigs of riverbank willows poking up through the snow. We were across. I could exhale.
Now it was as if he’d forgotten he was crossing a frozen river. He was back in that office in Petrograd, his own parallel stream. “My wife hated him, of course. She knew he was up to something. Well, I couldn’t see it. I was mesmerized. He understands people, you see. He reads them like you read those tracks. He knows what you want. He makes you feel special, like you can do great things.”
I knew the truth of that. It worked until he turned on you, as he had Andrei, and perhaps me as well.
“I don’t know what people want. I don’t understand people. I’ll admit it. To have a friend in him… I felt like I’d been asleep my whole life, just imitating a human being, and now I was awake. I felt like anything was possible.” Understand why I trusted him, he was saying. Why I loved him. And he still did. I eased my pace, and he stopped, inhaling a chugging breath, trying to calm himself. It wasn’t exertion. But it was now only another half a mile to the house. I felt safer. I didn’t think the wolf would follow us so far. So I let him talk. Why not?
Replacing the pistol in my pocket, I put on my mittens. “Tell me about the Laboratory.”
He started moving again, climbing the little rise. They had discussed renting a dacha to conduct their research, in a resort town on the Gulf of Finland. Without the skeptical wife, no doubt. “Just a dream, I see that now. A toy. Before October, you couldn’t find five people in Petrograd willing to give up their roles for such an experiment. But after, that was another thing. Taras came to my home. My boys were already asleep. He always came late—it drove my wife mad. ‘He’s a free man,’ I told her. ‘You don’t know what to do with a free man.’ ‘I know what to do with him,’ she said. ‘Just give me half a chance.’ Honestly, I wish I had.”
But then they wouldn’t have been here. The place would have been abandoned, in a shambles. I scanned the trees ahead through the falling snow, and I imagined I could smell dinner cooking. I had the rabbit and the hare in my bag; it was good enough.
Ukashin had been the one to find the dacha. “He told me he’d found the perfect place for our Laboratory. The Gromov dacha, you know where that is?”
A huge place with massive gardens on Aptekarsky Island.
“I thought it was far too large for our needs. There were only eight of us, after all. But he predicted there would be many more. Well, he was right about that. But I had pictured philosophers, scientists, authors. Cultured people. Not dancers and lunatics.” Snow gathered on his hat and shoulders, his brow and moustache. His glasses steamed over.
“And where was Mother in all this?”
“Vsevolod brought us to your old flat. She was down to one room by then. It was a shame to see how low she’d fallen. We took her to the dacha that very night. Almost like old times.” But by then, the Laboratory was already out of control. “Shopgirls, spiritual thrill seekers. Morphine addicts. His so-called followers. And I was helpless to stop it.”
“I’m sure you did what you could,” I said, sounding like Sofia Yakovlevna. We were almost within sight of the house now. I took a couple of steps up the hill but failed to entice him onward.
“I couldn’t stem the tide,” he said, growing more upset as he told the story, as if pleading his case before a judge. “Who would follow Andrei Petrovin? By then it was all Taras the Magus. He stole it from me! Imagine how it feels to hold your dream in your hands only to watch it fed to the dogs. Thrown into the fire, your life’s work!” A sob caught his voice.
Yes, I could imagine. I’d felt something similar when I’d seen the lists of the executed in Krasnaya Gazeta. Here’s your revolution. See what we’ve done with it.
“We were supposed to be a circle of equals. All of a sudden we had people who’d never heard of Steiner or Blavatsky. They just wanted to open their mouths like baby birds and have us feed them. They kissed the hem of his coat. It was disgusting. By that point he was styling himself as a holy man. He spent hours creating rituals for our little acolytes to enact. ‘Go find five things the color green.’ And they would do it! And the women—I shudder to tell you what went on there. ‘How can you do this, Taras?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t what we talked about at all.’ He said, ‘People are animals, my friend. They want to know where they stand. Are they up? Are they down? They don’t come to us to have us ask them, ‘Well, what do you think?’ They’re waiting to be told. Would you withhold that from them?”