Somewhere in the aspens, we heard the bay of the dogs. He threw the cigarette into the snow. “They’re onto a deer. Get your gun.”

  I’d forgotten Kolya’s gun. How on earth did he know? No time to wonder. I pulled my glove off with my teeth, dropped it to the snow. The headman placed his warm hand on my shoulder as my bare fingers found the butt, the trigger. In a great crash, a young stag bounded out of the brush, leaping ten feet or more as the dogs bounded after it. “Shoot it.”

  Smoothly, with shocking grace, I extended the weapon, closed one eye, sighted ahead of the leaping deer.

  “Now,” he said.

  The blast echoed. The stag dropped to its knees, then over onto its side in the snow, and was still. It was nothing short of a miracle. I’d killed it with a pistol I’d never fired, at forty feet. It was impossible, yet it had happened.

  Amazed, I gazed at the pistol in my hand, but it was as plain and heavy and dumb as ever. The bull-necked man let go of my shoulder. Suddenly I was cold again.

  The rest of the scene unfolded in slowed-down time. The dogs catching up with the beast. The master calling them off. Their wavering in the snow halfway between the stag and where we stood. On second call, they came racing toward us, tails all awag. “You see?” As if we had been having an argument and the deer was the proof of his point. “It’s better when you don’t think so much,” he said. “Let doubt fall away, let confusion fall away. This is the true path. Davai. Let’s see what you brought for our table.”

  We walked out into the snow toward the fallen creature. It lay there, real as a rug, one leg doubled under itself, its dainty cloven hooves, its rack of antlers, three points on each, its soft brown eye turning glassy. A second eye just above the first one showed where the bullet entered.

  “You can give life, you can take it.” He handed me the hilt of a deadly looking knife, its blade slightly curved.

  I watched myself, under his instruction, slitting open the body of the stag I had killed, beginning at the genitals and slicing all the way to the throat. “Don’t nick the organs,” he said. “Steady…”

  I placed my fingers inside. Hot. Wet. I guided the knife carefully, keeping the point away from the guts. The belly steamed in the frost, and with the steam rose a strong smell that should have been disgusting but wasn’t. This was us—the heat, the beast’s life, locked into this meat. My life and this life I might possibly be carrying. Fresh blood stained the snow bright red.

  “Lung.” He pointed. “Heart. Liver. Kidney.” The white lung, the red heart, purplish liver, blue kidney, the heavy red coils of the intestine. The machinery of the body. It was clean and intricate, and the man kept his hand on my shoulder, pointing out what needed to be done. I cut the membranes, scooped out pounds of slick, warm animal guts, laid them out in the snow. I was careful to pinch off the bladder, to get the entire intestinal tract. The dogs crept closer, on their stomachs, whining, until they were within ten feet of the steaming mass, but he stopped them with a single gesture, one blunt finger pointing. Then he knelt and took the bloody knife himself, sliced off a strip of the liver and held it out on the blade. “For the hunter.”

  Raw? He expected me to eat it raw? I had avoided squeamishness so far, but this piece of bloody meat?

  “This is your kill. Life and death. Eat.”

  He was waiting. I took it into my mouth. Hot flesh. I chewed. It was milder than I expected, even a little sweet, easy to eat. I was hungry. The protein sat better than I would have imagined, and I felt the vigor of the deer entering my own blood. He ate a piece himself, then cut two more and threw them to the dogs.

  One of the followers ran up the shoveled path—a tall, silent boy I hadn’t seen yet, his eyes a light brown, wearing a quilted hat pointed like a medieval helmet. How had he known to come? Did the man have a silent dog whistle?

  “Ilya, bring a basin, a pail, and some burlap squares,” the master ordered. “And a rope.” The boy nodded, his earnest face knobbly like the knuckles of a hand. Prior to this moment, none of them would look at me directly, but before the boy ran back, he eyed me admiringly, even enviously. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my bloody hand.

  Ukashin picked out some of the inferior pieces of offal and threw them to the dogs, who attacked them in a great outpouring of growls. “While we’re waiting,” he said, “find yourself a tree with a long sturdy branch.”

  In a kind of trance, I found a suitable tree, a tall fir whose lowest branches he deemed adequate.

  The boy soon returned with squares of burlap, a basin, and a pail in which rested a coiled rope, a small saw, and a hatchet. The burly headman indicated the organs spread out on the ground. “Take these to Katrina in the kitchen.” The boy filled the basin with them and carried them back to the house with the pride of Salome bearing the head of John the Baptist.

  I thought I understood then what Ukashin would have me do—hang the deer in the tree, cold and safe, out of reach of winter’s animals. Using the hatchet for a weight, I threw the rope up and over the outstretched limb. It proved a dangerous choice, as I barely avoided catching the ax head in my skull on the way down. He had a good laugh at that one.

  Next, we braced the stag’s legs apart, my instructor showing me where to cut holes in the hind legs to lace the rope through.

  “Now pull it up,” he told me.

  I took hold of the rope and hauled. The deer was too heavy.

  “Oh, come. This is your kill. Pull it up!”

  I put all the strength of my arms and legs into pulling it up, but it was hopeless. Yet I kept trying. I had to show him I wasn’t the little barynya expecting to be fed and cared for, that I would throw myself into whatever work he gave me, uncomplaining, to the point of the absurd. He let me struggle a good long time, too, hooting as I failed again and again, before he finally bent down himself and lifted the deer straight up in his arms, neat as a prince lifting a swan in a pas de deux. I shortened the rope, and the deer’s head swung two feet off the ground.

  “We’ll want the hide, too,” he said.

  There would be no shortcuts, evidently. Perhaps I would have to chew the sinews into cord, like the red Indians of my brother’s Zane Grey novels. So be it. Despite the bloody liver, I was feeling strangely well. And I found I enjoyed the man’s company. I liked his blunt solidity, his cheerfulness. It surprised me. I had been so prepared to dislike him, with all his mystical nonsense, but I had to admit that it felt good to be with someone who knew what he was doing, possessed the sort of understanding that inspired trust. Though I realized I had to be on guard against it. Alas, Beloved…

  He showed me where to cut, around the hind legs at the thighs, a seam to free the hide from the flesh. Then I pulled the skin down, scraping and cutting the whitish membranes wherever they held fast, until I had the creature’s coarse gray-dun coat down around its neck and upper legs like a sweater pulled over a child’s head but not yet freed from its arms.

  Stripped of its skin, hanging there, head down, legs splayed, the carcass looked terribly, touchingly human. Vulnerable and so light compared to the presence and power of the live stag—the heartbreakingly narrow legs, the slender waist, the narrow rack of ribs. I felt a shiver of recognition. It was like working on my own flayed body.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is you. And you will eat it and continue to live. And when you die, something will eat you. Look at it.” He spun the deer on its rope. “Small isn’t it, to contain so much life? A dead man’s very similar. Imagine a battlefield full of dead men. A village. Walking into a village and seeing every man, woman, and child like this.”

  A deserter. I’d been right.

  I cut the hide away from the neck and the forelegs and set it in the snow. It steamed on the ground as the perfect hexagons of snowflakes drifted down over us, dusting the blue trees, soon to cover the pink blood seeping down into the white. Blood dripped from the hanging carcass into the bucket. I was tired but happy with my work, looking forward to going back to Avdokia’s room to sleep, to ponder what to do about the inconvenience. I held the knife out to Ukashin, but he raised his hands, as if it were red hot. “What, you think you’re done?”

  What more was there to do?

  “You have to butcher it before it freezes. Start with those.” He indicated two strips of meat on the inside of the deer, to either side of its backbone. “Reach in and pull.”

  How easily they came free, surprising me. A long strip of meat, nice as anything served at the Astoria Hotel. He laid out a burlap square and I set the fillets onto it. Now I understood. And as tired as I was, I saw he was right. If the unbutchered deer froze, we’d never be able to pull the meat free. We’d have to chop the flesh from the bone with an ax.

  Now the work grew hard—severing the legs, the neck, the spine. I fought against the queasy sense of having murdered a person, and now tormenting its savaged body. It brought me back to the basement of Gorokhovaya 2. The dispassion with which one body could torture another. This strange thing, life, built upon such a fragile bit of flesh.

  I worked like a medical student, separating the meat along its natural lines of musculature. One flesh-being dissecting another. I thought of the cat we once dissected in physiology class at the Tagantsev Academy—or rather that Mina dissected. I’d cringed and hung back. I didn’t want to see a cat all open like that. Back when there still were cats. But I wasn’t a girl in the academy anymore. I had nursed the dying, I had cleaned their shit. Perhaps I wasn’t the chaos I’d imagined.

  As I worked I had the sense of myself as someone I hadn’t really met yet, someone silent and deep, patient and strong—not like Marusya, whose storms were as violent as the ones on the sun—but whole and quiet under the chaos of my apparent self. Perhaps it wasn’t I who was chaotic. It was life itself. Existence was the whirlwind. I had just been too light to keep from being blown around in it. Now I felt a density forming within myself as I quartered this beast, hacking off great pieces and wrapping them in burlap, cutting out the pielike brains and folding them into the deerskin. “We’ll tan the hide with them,” Ukashin explained. “Make you a new pair of shoes.” He threw the head to the dogs like a boy throwing a ball to his scrappy chums. One grabbed it by an antler and ran off through the trees, the other in pursuit.

  Shoes would be nice, but I understood that he meant more than shoes. He was inviting me to stay on, to become part of his community. I felt the falling snow caress my cheeks and nose, and thought of the spark of life that might be embedded within me, growing, cells dividing, a child. Our child! I stood there, my hand throbbing from the hard work. There were worse places to face such a future. Here I had a roof, Mother and Avdokia, a place I could live, work, and time to figure out my next step.

  73 The Fire Child

  I DREAMED OF THE night forest. Cold, black, and starless, the snow coming down. I had to gather wood for a fire, but in the dark, I could only assemble the smallest pile. I squatted as I lit those poor shreds with matches, but the wind kept blowing them out. I was about to give up when I discovered a beautiful lighter in my pocket. I vaguely remembered it, someone had given it to me. It lit right away, and I let the flame lick the sticks of kindling.

  A fire was born in the dark. Warm, though when I passed my hand through it, it didn’t burn me. I picked the flame out of its nest and held it in my cupped hand. And I realized—this was my child. I felt it warming my face, like a kiss. It knew me. I passed it gently from hand to hand, marveling. I had to be careful—it was just a small flame, tender and bright. I always thought I would have a human child, not a handful of fire, but I understood, as it pushed the inky darkness away, that of course I would have a fire child. When I held it too close, it began to scorch my coat. I needed something to put it in—a lantern, a tin box, something to keep it from the wind. I held it as close as I could and fed it tiny scraps of wood, and to my delight, it consumed them. But how to keep it safe? I couldn’t put it down, certainly not in a pocket. How would I sleep? I had to ready myself with one hand.

  When I awoke, the sun was already up—a dull December day, as much of a day as we were going to get. I immediately looked at my hand. Empty. Sniffed it. Could I still smell smoke? Maybe…the flame was deep inside me now, and I was the lantern. Yes, this was true, wasn’t it? Oh, but my neck ached, my shoulder, and my hand, which had butchered an entire deer the day before. I massaged it, tried to flex it open. It was swollen, painful. The room smelled of Avdokia—yeast and a slight tinge of lavender. I’d wanted to tell her about the fire child.

  There was a slight knock on the door, and a girl’s face poked in, framed by smooth hair of silky brown, a girl like flowing water. I recognized her, my savior, the one who had brought me the potato when I was staging my sit-down protest. “Are you awake?” she asked quietly. “I’ve come to take you for the bath.”

  “Where’s Avdokia?”

  “With the Mother.” She held out my Misha clothes, but I could barely move my right shoulder, and my hand was cramped like a crone’s. She helped me dress, don my boots, my coat.

  In the kitchen, redolent of kasha, two girls in patchwork sarafany glanced up from their work—the fierce black-haired girl who’d taken my chicken and a spectacular blonde grinding grain. The dark one squinted with suspicion, and the blonde avoided my eyes as if the sight of me might turn her to stone. My Ariadne steered me out the back door into the yard. Outside, patchwork people shoveled paths as fast as the snow could fall. They too studiously ignored us as we passed them. Was I still persona non grata? I would have thought that last night’s venison stew would have convinced them I was worthy of adoption. We followed the cleared path past some new, solid-looking wooden outbuildings I hadn’t seen before, but she led me on until we reached Baba Yaga’s hut—Maryino’s ruined bathhouse.

  Blue smoke rose from the chimney. I fought the urge to rub my eyes. What magic was this? Our spellbound playhouse, with its rotten porch and caved-in roof. Today it sparkled like fresh snow, the window frames newly painted, the panes washed, the roof and the porch rebuilt.

  She swung open the door, silent on newly blacked and oiled hinges, and we entered, ducking under the heavy lintel. The smell of fresh-cut birch met me—walls, floor, all neatly scrubbed and clean. It was already warm—alive again, this banya built by my great-grandfather. This was no sooty bathhouse like the one in Faina’s village. Ours had separate rooms for changing, soaking, and steam, and a cast-iron double stove with bright nickel-plated ornaments of scallops and scrolls.

  “A good bath to you,” I said loud enough for Bannik to hear as I hung up my coat and hat on a hook by the door. I felt like I’d arrived at a clearing in the forest where the animals spoke and sorcerers plotted and witches sat ready with their tests. You had to treat the local spirits with respect.

  In the anteroom, with its little table and glass window, some bread and dried apple had been laid out for my breakfast. I ate quickly, then disposed of my boots, my hopeless socks. Such ugly feet I’d acquired since my first bathhouse visit, on Kazanskaya Street—calloused, red and bruised, still painful despite the old woman’s stinking frostbite poultice in Alekhovshchina. Off came my student’s trousers, my black Russian blouse, my homemade drawers—all Misha’s impedimenta. The girl gathered them up and left them by the door. After I’d eaten, she offered me a glass of tea—mushroomy-scented and dark. “What is it?” I sniffed the liquid suspiciously.

  She shrugged her small, fine-boned shoulders. “Something we drink.”

  So I drank it, sitting there naked and louse-infested, flea-bitten, and probably pregnant at the little table. The girl shed her own garments—the short jacket, the patchwork sarafan in blues and greens, the coarse linen blouse—and emerged lithe and smooth as a mermaid, her neat small head perched atop a long neck like a flower on its stem.

  The tea, its earthy, musty taste and smell, lifted my tiredness without really waking me, gave me the strange sense that we had been thinned into two dimensions, as if we were painted on an urn. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. Eternal Keats. I imagined Genya, thinking of me. I held the fire baby in my palm. He was its father as much as Kolya. We were still married, still had that tie. As I gazed at the girl, I kept hearing Swan Lake’s “Dance of the Little Swans.” That magical tune wound through my head like a refrain in a music box.

  I tossed down the rest of this murky tea and weightlessly followed the girl into the washroom, where she opened a spigot and a sweet rush of hot water surged into her crude wooden bucket. Steam coiled and plumed in the air. She poured water over my head, my shoulders, and I was in ecstasy. Thanks to the tea, I could turn my head freely again, and my hand and shoulder had stopped aching. She produced a comb and a thick bar of soap with which she soaped my dirty black locks. In Petrograd you could get a funt of potatoes for such a bar. Then she carefully combed through my sudsy hair, and I realized she was crushing lice between her fingernails without a word or a comment. What discretion, what tenderness. If I was drawn to women, this would be the kind of girl I would want. I imagined how envious Kolya would be if he could see me now, with her soaping my hair, massaging my scalp, pouring the water through.

  Daylight peered through the steamy window of the mist-filled room, sweet with the resinous scent of the logs, the frostbitten sun pressing its face to the glass, envying our coziness. My toes tingled in the hot water. Such a cruel, primal difference between those who had fuel and water and those who didn’t. I remembered all those miserable buckets of water I had milked from the pump on Grivtsova Alley and lugged up a thousand steps to boil on our tiny stove.

  Laughter roiled around inside me as the girl massaged my knotted shoulders, my right arm, my hand, like a page tending his knight after a battle. She expertly kneaded my horrible feet, unflinching. I turned so she could wash my back. The shame I normally felt was absent. My scars felt like a warrior’s scars to me now rather than a slave’s lashes, the mark of campaigns survived. And her tenderness was a revelation. This is what Arkady could never imagine. Simple human charity. Who had ever simply cared for Caliban, wanting nothing in return, a touch without fear? Who said I would never hear those bells again? Here, in the bosom of this strange community, I heard them chime.