But what if it was true?
No. That I would not believe. I might never be one with anyone—fine—but I would not let her kill my baby. I rejected her spell, I spat on it, I walked on it, I pissed on it. I would not believe. To think of how I’d cared for her. She was the reason I’d broken with Genya, the reason I’d gone to Kamenny Island to sell that pin. She had not defended me against my father that October night. I turned over and over, settling the sheepskin back on top of the quilt. As long as I could have my baby, I would endure the rest.
I had not realized how passionately I wanted this child until my mother tried to take it away from me.
81 The Hunter
THE STORM DID NOT abate. If anything, it worsened. Ukashin moved us into the heart of the house, the back parlor, closing off all the other rooms to conserve heat and firewood. We squashed into the workroom like kittens in a sack. After what my mother had said to me, it was agony to have to see her every day. I thought I would go mad. Everyone breathing each other’s breath and that sticky incense, the stove pushing smoke into the room as it would in a black izba. If it wasn’t for inflowing, I would have had to stop breathing altogether. Only under the earth was it still possible to inhale. Meditation was the only escape from the oppressive togetherness. I supposed my mother’s curse of eternal loneliness had not yet taken effect.
I sometimes ventured up the frost-coated stairs to the water closet just to be free of them all. The chamber pots we’d put there had frozen fast—we couldn’t have them in the room with us. They didn’t stink, though you had to wear your coat and hat and boots to visit the convenience. You might as well be outside. White rime built up on the bare risers of the stairs, showing our footprints. Outside, snow buried the first-floor windows, cutting us off from the world, mirroring what was going on inside our minds. Only in the window on the stairway landing could you see what was going on in the yard. Sometimes I stood there for hours, it seemed, in a trance, watching the trees lashing about like souls in some white hell.
Now that Mother had joined us, Ukashin more and more often turned his back on the others to focus entirely on his prophetess. He stopped leading the inflowing meditation, leaving it in the hands of Magda and Natalya. Instead he spent hours in communication with his priestess, meditating with her, or else painting or lying in his hammock, which he’d slung in the corner by the fire next to Mother’s chair. Through the buildup of snow, the storm’s roaring sounded more and more like the blood in my ears. The acolytes worked hard to regain their Master’s favor, as if the blizzard were somehow their fault, as if they could make things better by being perfect little disciples. Mother sat communing with the paintings they’d fetched from her lair and rearranging her little stones with the clicking sounds like waves turning pebbles on a beach. Her spirit guides watched us night and day.
Pasha was the first to collapse. He crumpled during a meditation session. Katrina, surfacing from her trance, jumped to her feet. “Pasha?” she called out, leaning over him but afraid to touch him. “Master? Pasha’s fainted!”
But the Master said nothing.
“He’s all right,” Magda said. “Let him be.”
It was frightening to see Pasha lying on the carpet. It reminded me of Andrei in the snow. Bogdan, our erstwhile doctor, knelt to tend to his fallen brother. Katrina hovered. She brought a cloth as white as her face and a jug of cold water. Wiping his face revived him, and he was terribly embarrassed. I myself was teetering on the tightrope between the need to inflow to keep hunger and terror at bay and my growing anger and anxiety about Ukashin’s detachment from the world he’d built, the one he’d stolen from Andrei Ionian.
Inflowing went on. The meals lightened to suit our more rarefied systems—thin oatmeal, cabbage, kasha, soup with floating bits of meat. The more resentful I became about the figure in the hooded cloak, the less the meat sickened me and the hungrier I became.
It struck me one day—the meat.
Fresh meat.
Not salted. Not smoked. Where did it come from?
Surely those two rabbits I’d caught the night Andrei died hadn’t lasted thirteen people this long, no matter how frugal we were. The vlivaniye was supposed to supply us with new ideas, but in fact I could see that the opposite was true. It kept us from thinking at all. As I fell out of step with the others and my dense body returned, I started to consider things more clearly. For one thing, I recalled the quiet departure of Bonya and Buyan. Ukashin never mentioned them, and no one asked, just as we’d never asked about Andrei’s sorrows. Those dogs hadn’t run off. We were consuming them, bit by bit.
There will always be enough if we believe. If we don’t repress the bounty with our doubts.
I wondered what else I’d missed amid so much inflowing. Harmony was lovely but I was the hunter—the fox, not the lamb. And the fox in me wondered—what really lay in the larder beneath the kitchen floor? I thought of the profligacy of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg. That green-painted door beckoned. What secrets might be hidden in the cold room where we used to keep Annoushka’s jams and the canned produce from our garden, barrels of apples and turnips in sand? That door made my palms itch. Nobody was allowed down there now but Katrina Ionian. Even entering the kitchen was a rationed act.
I woke in the night, squirmed into my coat, my hat, and quietly left the workroom. But instead of walking upstairs to the icy water closet, I felt my way along the hall lined with Ukashin’s spiritualist paintings toward the forbidden door. One painting, two, three. As children, we often played the game of Blind Man. You pretended to be blind and found your way about the house by touch alone. I found the kitchen door, and opened it. Inside, the oven was still warm from dinner, the air soup-perfumed. I felt along the soft wood of the chest, the table. I knew the door to the larder would be to the right. The iron knob was cool, and turned. Unlocked. Cold musty air rose from under the house as I slipped inside, closed the door behind me and inched down the steep stairs, holding the wooden railing.
Such a familiar smell enveloped me—mushrooms, cold dirt, apples, potatoes. I knew the shape of the room as I knew the shape of my lover’s hand. Shelves along three sides for preserves, starting just underneath the low ceiling and stopping around hip height. Bags and barrels tucked underneath. Boxes of sand for the root vegetables. I began examining the shelves with my fingertips, moving from left to right, top to bottom. Empty. Empty. All empty. A crock. The faint tang of pickles. Two more cold crocks—maybe more of that green wine Bogdan had made. Something brushed my face and I jumped. Strings of dried mushrooms. The dry crunchy whisper of braided onions. More empty shelves. My felt boot found a sack. I dipped my hand. Grain, cool through my fingers. Another—grain, but only half full. String after string of wizened ears—dried apples. I tore off a few, ate them as I went. Pairs of dried fish hung together, and the urge to eat one was overwhelming, but I resisted. It would be stealing—they belonged to the group. Hypocrite. I let Avdokia steal for me almost every day. But I wouldn’t do it myself.