Her expression could have melted a heart of stone. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “My strong, brave girl.”
She would still sacrifice her life for my mother, her first love. I could take care of myself, yes, but who would take care of Avdokia? Maybe I should put this off another day or two. But no. I would never forget Arkady’s lesson, taught to me with a shard of glass—I still bore the scar. You waited. That was stupid. Only amateurs wait.
My nanny snugged my scarf around my neck. “I only wish I could hold that baby,” she said. “Yours and Kolya’s—heaven help us.” I rested against her, her arms around me as she tipped the last of the barley tea into my mouth.
“How can I leave you?” I said.
She smoothed my hair. “Go, while I can still stand it,” she breathed in my ear.
My old love, my nanny, with her ancient gnarled hands. She helped me on with my sheepskin and felt boots for the trip to the icy loo. If I only could carry her—my Vasilisa doll—with me in my pocket, I would feed her crumbs, and she would teach me how to throw a comb that would become a forest, a towel that would become a river, and I would outwit all the sorcerers and stepmothers and Baba Yagas from here to Tikhvin. But I would have to do my best on my own.
From the windows in the dormitory, I could not see as far as the henhouse for the fog. The wild horse of the storm had finally run itself out, and the softness of the powdered air hid the damage. Below me, snowdrifts covered the roof of the kitchen porch. I opened the window and sat on the sill, strapped hard into my snowshoes, my game bag snug across my chest, my scarf wrapped around my face. In my pocket, I touched Andrei’s glasses for memory, if not for luck. Without him, I might still be down there inflowing with the rest. I said a prayer and dropped into the unbroken white.
82 Wonderworker
I SMELLED THE village before I saw it. After the long fast, I was weak as any invalid. I struggled the last half mile, stopping every other minute to corral my last reserves of strength. The snow had hardened a bit with the wind, but was still incredibly deep, and often I’d had to strike out cross-country across fields where fallen trees barred the road. Finally I smelled chimney smoke—welcome as a brass band. People cooking, bread baking. Salvation. A dog barked. Peasants called to one another in the fog, exchanging thoughts about the storm as they dug out narrow walkways between snowbound izbas and the lane.
A sledge passed, loaded with hay. I trembled, leaning into a tree and fighting for consciousness, thinking of the girl I’d once been, waiting just here that evening after my long walk from Tikhvin. How strong I’d been then, how confident of my powers compared to this scarecrow, this ghost I’d become.
A burly man in a greasy coat and leather apron came out of the forge with another man. Together they stood smoking on the porch, shook hands and parted. Soon the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer filled the morning. So much activity! In my half-starved, unreal state, this tiny village was dizzying as Petrograd.
Finally a brisk young woman appeared on the porch of a prosperous izba with four windows past the blacksmith’s shop. She was eating an apple. I left the safety of the trees to approach her. It had been so long since I’d spoken to anyone not Ionian. She raised her head, squinting at me. I could only imagine what I looked like these days in my homemade fox hat and sheepskin and felt boots, my game bag, my patchwork sarafan with the trousers underneath, my face wrapped in a thick woolen scarf. I lowered the scarf.
I don’t know what I expected. A smile, an embrace? At least the welcome I’d received the last time I was here. But it wasn’t forthcoming. Her mouth gaped open in shock. Was I so changed? “What are you doing here? Are you crazy?” She lowered her head, her back half turned, checking up and down the lane. She tossed the apple, half-eaten, picked up a broom and swept the steps. “You’ve got to get out of here,” she hissed. “Don’t you know what’s going on? I can’t be seen with you. You’ve got to leave.”
But I was too weak to leave. I needed to eat, to rest, to collect myself and make plans. “I can’t go any farther. I’m pregnant. I need food. They’re starving out there at Maryino.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do about it?” She swept angrily. “They should have thought about that when they moved out there. We have our own problems now.” A cluster of peasant women were watching us from the porch of another house. “Damn those busybodies,” she said under her breath. “Now you’ve done it. Sveta!” she exclaimed, leaning her broom against the house. “Good to see you! Mama’s going to be so happy!” She pulled me in for an embrace. In my ear, she whispered, “Go to Olya’s. Two houses from the end. And don’t come back. I can’t do anything for you.”
“Thanks.” The smell of her apple followed me like a perfume as I headed down the lane. To think I’d taught Lyuda how to read. We’d swum in the river together, climbed trees, picked berries. But the revolution was still going on, and people had changed. I was the one who had to keep up. I walked down the lane, trying not to gape like a rube on Nevsky Prospect. But the colors were dazzling. I’d been locked away in another world. Here were children and horses and old people, but there were hidden worlds, too. I had to be the hunter, not blunder in, keep my wits about me. Lyuda’s fear had been palpable. Why? Had there been an expropriation? Had the Cheka arrived? Something had changed since I’d been out at Maryino if she was afraid to even talk to me now.
So I was to be Sveta, some cousin or other, visiting Auntie Olya.
Avdokia’s half sister’s house was small, sad, with an old coating of blue paint worn mostly to the boards. The path had barely been cut—it looked stamped, not shoveled. Some neighbor had broken her out, but that was all. What had been a front porch was only a tunnel, the roof heavily laden. I took off my snowshoes and propped them by the door. It was private here at least, down the end of the lane, away from the village center. I was about to knock on Olya’s door, then thought better of it. If I were truly some distant cousin, I wouldn’t be standing on the front porch like a census taker.
It was warm inside and shockingly crowded. Little tables, pieces of lace, rugs, even an ugly chandelier with a milk-glass bowl crammed the small cabin to the rafters, all bits and pieces of our bourgeois life at Maryino. On the tables stood portraits of my family in silver frames. It was a museum of a former life, a former world. I could not even be angry at her. They were only things, and things had no feelings. What would I do with them, anyway—sell them? If anyone deserved the booty, it was Olya, who had washed and dusted and polished them all these years. And yet I couldn’t deny a small sense of betrayal.
“Olya?”
The place was damp with steam, and a great pot boiled on the stove. “Olga Fomanovna?” I called from the doorway. I’d never used her patronymic. No one ever had, not in my hearing.
She looked up from a load of laundry she was ironing, a sheet on the board. She reminded me of a bigger, softer Avdokia, twenty years younger. Same father, different mother. Women wore out quickly in the villages. Her mouth made a perfect O.
“Sorry to barge in. Lyuda said you’d be here.”
“Marina Dmitrievna! No, no, please, come in, come in!” She looked around the place, suddenly aware that I was seeing the extent of her plunder, and her hands flew to her mouth. The sheet started to burn. She put her iron upright just in time.
“It’s been a while,” I said.
“You’ve seen Lyuda, then?”