I nodded. “She didn’t want to be seen with me, though. Class enemy and all.” I took off my hat.
“Oh, don’t mind her.” Olya came away from the laundry, took my hat and bag, helped me off with my coat, hung it on the hook by the door. “Now that she’s on the village committee she thinks she’s Lenin’s right arm.” She nodded approvingly. “Married the blacksmith after all. That girl always had an eye to improving her lot. I told her the blacksmith would be good for her, didn’t I? She runs him like a horse around a ring.” The words poured out of her, probably in an attempt to distract me from the familial furniture and bric-a-brac. “Remember when she wanted to go to Petrograd and work in a factory? She certainly came to her senses. Sit down, sit down!” She pulled out a chair from the lace-covered table.
I recognized the chair, too. It was one that used to sit at the little desk in the front parlor where my mother opened the mail. Somehow the sight of that chair loosened the grief of having lost her. I settled down into it. Now I was glad to let Olya babble away.
“We don’t get many visitors, as you can imagine. Can I make you some tea? Let me heat the samovar. Did she tell you she had a letter in the paper, my Lyuda? Imagine! Look, there on the table.” She handed me a yellowed issue of Bednota, a badly printed newspaper intended for peasant consumption, folded back to a page of letters and reports from the villages. A complaint about a certain corrupt party official in Ryazan Oblast headed the page.
“Look—right there.” Flushing with pride, she pointed to a report below the Ryazan one. From “Correspondent L. G. Fedeyeva.” Lyuda, writing for Bednota. She described the cooperation of the Novinka Village Committee of Poor Peasants with a Red Army food detachment to expropriate the hoarded goods of the kulak Zuborin. How many poods of grain they had located under the floor of his barn and so on. It ended, “The Speculators and Kulaks might think they’ve put One over on Soviet Power but they will not Succeed because we Know Them.”
Because we Know Them. I shuddered at the thought of the savagery behind that simple statement. One might think there would be safety in these tiny hamlets, but it was the opposite. “What did they do with him?”
“Zuborin?” Olya sighed, fishing coals from the stove to put in the samovar. “He really was a terrible man. Everyone was afraid of him. Up there safe and sound at Maryino, your people never knew what our lives were like here. We had to pay Zuborin to graze our animals. His grandfather bought up all the common land with Emancipation. Those bastards have lorded it over us ever since. Think they own the village. Only last year, he beat an old man to death, didn’t he? An old man who owed him money.”
The outrage on her face told me it was true. But then something crossed it, something not so pure, a slightly sly look. “And we owe so much more grain to the provisioning this year…” She began straightening the room, swatting her rag at the lamps and tabletops, squaring chairs, not looking at me. “The workers used to leave us grain and seed and take the rest. That was bad enough. But now it’s different. The soldiers are hard, even the workers now, when they come through. They take their quota off the top, and if there’s not enough left for planting, it’s too bad for you. So what are you supposed to plant in the spring? When Zuborin’s got hundreds of poods hidden under his cow barn—everyone knew it. Why should we suffer for a man like that?” She shrugged. “The devil take him.”
So now it was to be peasant against peasant, all the wounds of the village since Emancipation resurfacing. The villagers had offered up Zuborin. “Did they kill him?”
She went back to the stove to recover her iron, spat on it, began to iron the sheet again. “It’s a hard world these days, Marina Dmitrievna, a hard life. At least they left the family. Except Motka. They took him for the army.”
When she was done catching me up on village gossip, she put the iron up and went to fuss with the samovar, pouring tea. “How strong?”
“Medium,” I said. I turned the fragile, soft pages of the newspaper back to the beginning. The issue was dated January 19. Epiphany. Two months ago. The broadsheet bawled about an English threat from the north. Blockade along the Baltic coast. Wrangel in the Caucasus—that was a new one. Joining forces with Denikin, threatening Moscow. Kolchak in the east. Soviet Russia, as far as I could tell, was surrounded, cut off not only from Europe but from the Ukraine, the Don, and Siberia. Only its red beating heart was left. Without Don coal, without Siberian grain, I couldn’t imagine how Petrograd was suffering by now. Of course Kolya would be right in the middle of it. He must have made a killing with our bags of grain. And may he never have a day’s peace with it.
“And how is Avdokia? Still putting on airs?”
This was how her sister saw her—as the one who had escaped. My dear Avdokia, whom I’d left to Mother, to live or die. All depended upon what I could do with Olya right now.
I began to wonder, why hadn’t anybody told the Red Army about us? The villagers owed us nothing. Why would Correspondent L. G. Fedeyeva, a rising revolutionary star, protect the Ionians in general and a former landowner in particular? No wonder she wanted to be rid of me. Maybe she was holding us in reserve, a card up her sleeve in case of emergency. More likely she was afraid of turning us in at this late date, afraid she would be accused of sheltering the aristocracy. A born politician, you had to give her that.
Olya finished the sheet she’d been ironing, folded it gently. No, not a sheet. It was a priestly gown. I couldn’t help but smile. She was doing the priest’s laundry. Didn’t she see the contradiction—Lyuda on the committee, a party candidate, maybe even a member by now, with a mother who still did the priest’s linens? Then I noted the icon in the red corner, the little flame. The family had one leg in the past, one in the future. Hedging their bets.
I sipped my tea—roasted barley—and she opened a tin with a flowered top. Oh that smell! Inside were the sweet fennel cookies she used to make at Maryino. I took one, dipped it in my tea. The taste threw me into a parallel reality, one where I was a child of seven and bees hummed in the lilac bush out the kitchen window. Flowers on the cabinets, my doll Natasha having a tea party with me. “You still make these…” I could hardly speak or choke it down for the nostalgia of it.
“I don’t have so many visitors anymore. Have another.”
That licorice smell, the slight sweetness. How far I’d come to end up a half-starved pregnant woman of nineteen with my possessions in a stained game bag. It made me cry, my mouth full of longing. I wanted more. I wanted to eat the whole tin.
“So they’re having a hard time out there, are they?” Olya asked, sitting down at the table, folding her strong, reddened hands before her.
I was relieved she’d brought it up herself. “How did you know?”
She raised her palm. Isn’t it obvious? My gauntness was evidently clear, even in all these layers of clothes.
And here I’d been trying to think of a tactful way to work up to the desperate situation at Maryino. “They’re not practical people, Olya.”
She smoothed out the tablecloth. “I heard they have a wonderworker.”
What on earth had Ukashin done when they came through in the spring? Thrown some energy into an old lady and convinced her to cast away her crutches? “I wouldn’t exactly call him a wonderworker.”
“Not him. Her.” She lowered her voice, as if the stove imp might hear us. “Vera Borisovna.”
I almost dropped my tea glass.
“They say she has powers.” There was awe in her voice, and her eyes were bright—so like her sister’s, but with an innocence untainted by contact with the outside world. “The priest says she’s a sorceress, that all them out there is devils.”