The sun’s energy was brighter, clear and intelligent. “Your light body is activated,” he lectured. “Open your eyes, look around. You’ll know this to be true.” And when I looked, the Ionians had become floating bodies of light, suffused with bright handfuls of energy like glittering fistfuls of confetti.
I gazed at my own arms, astonished. I could have sworn I saw light like fine hairs rising from them. Movement in the hair and in the beards of my friends, light concentrating in their organs. Yet still I heard Andrei saying, You don’t care, as long as he keeps you fascinated. Well, I was not Andrei, willing to sit in a corner while the others did their Practice, feeding on self-righteousness, alone, hungry, and miserable.
Those nights I lay on my pallet, trying to see if I could still detect that glow, testing to see if it was only hypnosis. But it was becoming harder to tell what was suggestion and what was real. We were eating very little, and the near fasting exaggerated the effects. I turned over, trying to sleep, but the energy was far too high. I thought of Andrei in the icehouse, his blue face, his bloody head. Don’t listen to him, he begged me. Don’t fall under his spell.
But I couldn’t be both here and there. Andrei, you shot yourself with my gun, but I didn’t shoot you. You made your choices long before. You should have left when people started kissing his hem, but you could not open your hand.
I know I was a failure, he replied. But don’t succumb as I did.
His feud was with Ukashin, but it wasn’t my fight. The Earth Devi was supporting me now. It wasn’t about the Master. The teaching wasn’t the man. The former could be good while the other was corrupt, couldn’t it? Andrei could not do the inflowing, dissolving himself, because he loved only ideas. And without a body, there was nowhere for the light to come in. It entered the skin, it filled you like a wineskin.
Though the days were dark and the wind shook the house, the sun grew inside us, rushing through the glowing sea anemones of our nerves, our blood vessels like rivers. Sometimes I jerked crazily. Ukashin said it was because I was leaping so far ahead of where I’d been in my Practice, bringing in far larger quantities of energy than my body was accustomed to. The energetic channels had to expand to accommodate the new current, and sometimes there were kinks. I sweated, I shook. Natalya created a dance—coiling in, then uncurling. When others joined her, it became a flower. But no more would Andrei accompany our dances on my mother’s old piano.
We would not be ready for total inflowing for months, he said. But I could attest that the Practice was already making changes in us. For one thing, food seemed sickening now. We had to be urged to eat. When did that happen, in the Russia of 1919? Avdokia dropped the big pot onto the table with a clang, as if she wanted to startle us from our high vibrational hum. As we passed our bowls I could hear her grumble. “Living on light… we’ll see how well that works.”
Ukashin lowered his spoon. “The ignorant suffer most, because they brace for the worst. Fear closes you off. You have to be porous, like a sponge.”
After she left, we could hear her clattering in the kitchen. I wanted to laugh, imagining her curses, her comments about sponges and the Master. She couldn’t see what we saw—that we were feeding on radiance, living in radiance.
After the dishes were cleared, we brought out our projects, shoes and hats. Ukashin played his flute. The disciples sang. Though our voices were not as strong as before, they were purer. Small motions captured my eye. I was transfixed by the movement of the hanging spindle—long and slender, of carved wood like a top—that Anna used to spin flax. The spinning reminded me of the earth and the stars. Like a wedding ring hung over a pregnant belly—will it be a boy or a girl? I never did that. No wedding ring.
My head shimmered with strings of sound—the storm’s vowels, oooo ooo oooo. The consonants: Ts, the sizzle of the peppering snow. K—Crack! Crash! The wind clawed the windows, battered the house as if shot from a fire hose. Eeee.
“Why shouldn’t it storm?’ said Ukashin, brandishing his flute like Aaron with his staff. “Why should nature cut itself down to fit our capacity for experience? Don’t be afraid. Embrace it. Look at Marina. Tell us the storm, Marina Ionian. Be our bard.” He leaned back in his chair.
I rose, the storm in my mouth. I am the storm. The size of it rose within me, the power. I felt its rage and envy, its hunger. I gloried in my own strength.
Their faces startled, mesmerized.
With Andrei, the house of death awaiting them all.
The thrill and the heart of the chaos, its inhuman force and destructive joy surged within me. The throne, empty. Yes. He could not invite the devil in and stop it halfway. The storm served no one but itself.
Suddenly heads swiveled to the door.
My mother stood in the doorway, hovering, in an aura of powder, like a moth. Her long white hair unbraided, her pale cloak awry. Ilya, at her side, her indecisive shadow, looked terrified. “Taras?” came the high, tremulous voice I knew so well.
Already Ukashin was moving toward her, taking her white hands.
It was as if some fantastic figure who lived across seas seven times seven had appeared in our humble izba, summoned by my words. “The wolf,” she hissed. “Don’t you hear it?” My mother’s terror ratcheted up their anxiety, even higher than my poem had. “Scratching, scratching. Don’t let it in!” She pointed toward the north, and the storm’s volume rose at that moment, as if in reply. Let me in.
The Master held her thin hands between his own. “We won’t let it, Mother. What shall we do? Tell us what you see.”
“Rub the sills! Have them fetch fir and juniper. Lay them across the doorways. Don’t let it in!”
Ukashin looked around. His eyes settled upon Pasha. “You. Cut some boughs, bring them in.”
He was going to send Pasha out into that storm? Yes, he was the woodsman, but he was also guilty of a secret personal love, something that excluded the Master. This would be a two for one. It was not a joke to send someone out for the storm to eat. But Pasha rose without hesitation.