“He trusted you,” he went on in that kind voice. “He liked you. That’s why I sent him with you. To see if he would reach out. But you didn’t help him. You failed him.”
Oh God, that was true, too. But I had to remember, I wasn’t the reason for his suffering. I was only a tool.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “You didn’t know what you were doing. I worried about this from the beginning. You act without thinking.”
I gazed down at the carpet, the stylized pomegranates and deer. I didn’t want him to confuse me. It was he who had betrayed his friend. Andrei had no one, and that was Ukashin’s fault, not mine.
“Look at me, Marina Ionian.” I lifted my eyes, so very weary. “Am I angry?” In his face, no anger, only tenderness, a little tiredness, that of a man with many responsibilities. For all of Ionia. How human he looked right now. It surprised me after my accusations. “Each of us is seeking something here, Marina. Some want a more radiant path. Others, fellowship. We all have our own reasons. Even you.”
“I wasn’t seeking anything.” I wanted more than anything to push myself back from him, but then he would know how frightened I was.
“You wanted sanctuary,” he said. “A home. A place in the world. And I gave it to you, didn’t I?”
I had made this happen. Again, I had forced my way in. I was the one. He’d wanted to send me away that first day. Oh God, I wished he had.
“But you can’t both tear down your home and have it,” he said. “And your child can’t be born into a snowdrift. I want you to have it here.”
In that exact moment, I felt a fluttering, like an eyelid’s tic, in the depths of my body. The fetus had chosen this moment to awaken.
He was impossible to escape, those bull’s eyes, sad, piercing, his drooping moustache, the big nose, the planes of his face, the mole on his forehead, the lines on the dome of his head. “The dead hold no grudges, Marina. They know everything, understand everything.” Insistent, warm. “Andrei sought understanding,” he continued. “It was his life’s purpose. Now he’s released from the blindness of this world into the Great Knowledge. A violent release, but he didn’t know how else to accomplish it. He’s where he always wanted to be. He has transcended to the upper dimensions.”
How awful to say he was better off dead. But much of what this hard man was saying was true. The more he spoke, the less sure I was. I felt his words like a current, urging me onto the river of his story.
What would you have done?
He reached out and took my hand. His flesh like wood, denser than ordinary flesh. I felt a great rush of grief—for Andrei, and myself, and all the people caught in their traps, and those who don’t know how to save them. What a world of suffering we live in. I felt unmoored, drifting and spinning in the tide.
Andrei’s suicide lingered. It tapped the windows, clung to our faces and hands. The possibility of doom darkened the edges of the Ionian dream, and the weather did nothing to lessen it. Metel’, we say. Blizzard. The compressed savagery of the season came down as if trying to scrape us from the face of the earth. The nearness of death was a smell in my hair like gunpowder. How small and alone we were here, the country around us not Russia but Death.
The blizzard raged. Wind shrieked at the corners of the house; the trees streamed, tugging at their roots. Branches rattled against the walls. Bad luck had arrived. Ukashin’s dogs mysteriously disappeared. Nightmares swept the dormitories. We no longer shared our dreams in public, teasing out their meaning. Ukashin met with each of us privately in his kabinyet to unburden us, to explain away the darkness.
I dreamed I was feasting with Taras Ukashin, gorging on dates and almonds, colored eggs and mulled wine. We made love on the sheepskins while Andrei Ionian stood outside in the cold, miserable, with only that sheet around him, his blue face pressed to the window.
The temperature continued to drop. Outside the kitchen, the glass tube with its mercury spine showed forty below. There’s a hardness to the air when the thermometer falls this low. The cold is a knife gouging any bit of exposed skin. It slashes your cheeks. You have to close your eyes or your eyeballs freeze in your head.
The Master ordered everything to be brought into the house—meat from the smokehouse, chickens from the coop, everything edible carried down to the larder under the kitchen. I could not stop thinking about Andrei in the icehouse. I was not so sure that the dead forgive us everything.
Bad-tempered Lilya and I brought in the chickens from the henhouse, collecting them one by one and conveying them under our coats. She left the rooster to me. I tackled him, wrapped him in my sheepskin as he madly clawed me. I was afraid I’d break his neck or one of his feet. We stashed them under baskets weighted with wood in Avdokia’s room and stood by the hot stove, waited for the shivering to die down before going out again. The boys brought firewood into the hall, and the girls melted snow in barrels in the kitchen. It was as if we were preparing for a siege.
No more could I escape to tramp the woods. I would experience Ionia undiluted, the full force of the communal mind.
We assembled in the Practice room. The Master had an announcement to make. “It is time to accelerate your advancement, the adept along with the novice. All together as one.” He would introduce a new Practice—vlivaniye. Inflowing. It was a technique known only to a few dozen human beings on earth. The excitement in the faces of the acolytes was as if he’d announced to a bunch of children that the Sugar Plum Fairy was coming to visit. “A secret teaching,” he said, “kept for thousands of years among the Brotherhood of the Sun.” A sect of monks in the Tien Shan, the eastern Himalayas, where he had spent time learning their mysteries. They took in energy directly from the earth and sun right through their skins. Hale and hearty, they lived to a great age, and some had not eaten in fifty years.
“Imagine the freedom,” he said. “To no longer have to feed on matter that feeds on other matter. To concentrate energy directly from the cosmos. If people knew, all wars would cease, all craving would vanish. People would know there was always enough to sustain them. That they were truly sons and daughters of the universe.”
Vlivaniye became our lives. Sealed together by the storm, we were one body, one consciousness. And I went under like a diver, I plunged. In the end I could not bear the loneliness of being outside the circle. I had to trust that there was a boat rocking above me, my own rationality, and that when I returned to the surface it would still be there, and I would not be lost in a featureless sea.
Ukashin taught us that the material body wasn’t solid but rather permeated with radiant matter capable of absorbing energy, as a sponge can be filled with water. We held on to his voice as if it were a rope across a vast chasm of space.
First we inflowed with the earth. I was surprised how much I enjoyed descending into the ground, passing the tunnels of moles and lairs of badgers, the nut-filled hideouts of squirrels and rabbits—how surprised they were to see me! I visited foxes with their tails around their noses, and sleeping bears, and proceeded down through the roots of trees, breathing through the earth, reaching the glowing gems and veins of metals. You were safe down there. Nothing could hurt you with the earth tucked in over you. Cross-legged on the carpet, we breathed in the planetary emanations, and they felt like kindness, forgiveness. All things began and ended in earth. Crops, trees, animals. How alive it was, how generous. At least I could say, This was my home. Safe from guilt, safe from the past, safe from Andrei, safe from the Master himself.