Light formed a dome around the candles, polishing these youthful faces into a Vermeer-like serenity, licking at their closed eyelids. The tallow smoked and sweated, and the chunk of incense in its blackened pot wove complex patterns in the air.

  The gypsy struck a small gong.

  “Think of exhaling long strands of light,” Natalya whispered from within her trance, gesturing with an impossibly graceful arm to evoke strands emerging from her lovely mouth.

  I did my best, imagining producing long glowing threads from my lungs. I imagined wrapping the light around myself, then sending it snaking down the hall to tickle Avdokia’s ear. How sad she’d been to watch me move from her room to the sort of women’s dormitory or nunnery that had been set up in the old nursery. You’re with them now?

  I’d sent her a quick wink as they removed me. Don’t worry, it’s still me.

  I gathered my strands, wove a glowing sling, and laid my baby in it. I threw a brilliant fine Orenburg shawl of light around Maryino, in glowing protection against the predations of the outside world. I tried not to think of Lyuda’s warning in Novinka’s blacksmith shop. They’re not all that safe there. Watching the reflection of candles in the sparkling-clean windows, I wondered about the civil war unfolding somewhere in the night. How lucky I’d been to find my old nanny and my mother here. I would get through the winter with them, out of harm’s way. I had been truly, undeservedly fortunate so far. I hoped my luck would hold.

  At last the pocket doors slid open with a bang, and the Master entered as if to a fanfare of trumpets. In unison, the students rose, folded their hands—fist below, flat palm above—and bowed to him. I imitated them as best I could, even to the degree of kowtow, and remained in the bow as he bowed in return and settled into my grandfather’s chair. I could feel Dyedushka’s fury. I was surprised his chair didn’t burst into flames. Finally we straightened and returned to our patch of carpet.

  Wearing a Mongolian robe and Persian slippers that turned up slightly at the toes, he looked less like a mystic than a lost member of the Marco Polo expedition. The devil was tickling me ferociously. I fought it, strangling it in my throat. I had to get used to this. Ukashin lifted his hand and the others watched him hungrily, as if he were going to ascend bodily through the ceiling. “The devis have brought to us a traveler,” he said, gesturing toward me like a sultan in a ballet, “who has come to us after a long and hard journey.”

  They turned to me at last, these lovely faces that had purposely avoided meeting my eyes even at the simple meals I’d begun to take with them. “Welcome!” “Welcome, traveler.” “Glad you’ve come.” Their unpracticed smiles and the warmth of their greetings shocked me.

  I certainly didn’t want to become another string in their cosmic harp, yet it hadn’t occurred to me how it would feel to be welcomed anywhere at this point. Except for Natalya, no one had done more than move over on a bench for me. Now they all seemed quite human, eager to accept a new member to their circle. I reminded myself that this was a ritual greeting, not just for me but for anybody anointed by their leader. But it felt personal. Whoever I was—boy, girl, pregnant or not—I was welcome to share their meager rations of bread and all the incense I could inhale.

  “The Mother herself called this traveler,” said Ukashin from his throne, where he sat with one leg tucked up underneath him, his skull gleaming in the candlelight. He looked into each face, making sure he had been understood. How reverently they returned his gaze, how solemnly, like little children being warned not to touch the stove. “Introduce yourselves.”

  He nodded at Helen of Troy. In a throaty, resonant alto, she replied, “Katrina. Ionian.”

  “And you?”

  The lean, bony-faced boy who had brought the butchering materials. “Ilya. Ionian.” He had a shockingly deep voice that would be an asset to any men’s choir.

  “We don’t use patronymics or family names,” Ukashin explained to me. “It’s of no importance ‘who’ you were. Only ‘what’ you are. We will be your family now.”

  I tried to memorize the names. Katrina. Ilya. Bogdan—lithe, with the heroic eyebrows. Lilya, a nervous girl from the henhouse with a pointed nose. Natalya. Gleb, quiet, like a Swiss shepherd. Anna, a motherly brown-eyed blonde who ran the workroom. Andrei, the intelligent. Pasha, the adorable dark-bearded woodcutter. And Magda, the gypsy, who sat at the Master’s right hand.

  “And you? Who are you, traveler?” He indicated me, both hands pressed together like a spear.

  Something in me was loath to say it. I was prepared to go along with their nonsense, to work hard, keep quiet, and not ridicule their faith or his authority, but why must there be one more persona, one more disguise of self? One more set of rules? If I wanted to join something, I would have joined the Bolshevik Party. Couldn’t I just be Marina Marinovna Marinovskaya, daughter of myself? Or, like Odysseus, No Man?

  The Master was waiting. I felt the force of his presence, the weight of his will, waiting, demanding that I submit, while I struggled with my own natural inclination ever to meet force with resistance. But I had to be realistic now. I was alone and pregnant and friendless. I’d burned every bridge, cut every tie. Of what importance could this be, another name to add to my list? Marusya, Misha, Kuriakina, Makarova were no more representative of my essential self than Ionian. I was not a mother’s or a father’s or a husband’s or a lover’s or the man in the moon’s. I belonged to the Future alone. However, if I was to live, it would be because I’d accepted a berth here. The dead are forever nameless, while the living have to declare themselves sooner or later. We have to be this and not that.

  I cleared my voice and christened myself. “Marina. Ionian.”

  What weird ritual could possibly have been missing that night? We intoned syllables—ho hee hu ha—vocalizing on the in-breath as well as the out-breath. We gathered the breath in our arms, then flung it up into the sky as if flinging confetti, lowering our hands back to the earth as the small glowing scraps rained back down upon us. My head buzzed. Ukashin drummed on a wide flat drum, and we moved to his varying tempos like so many life-size marionettes. The intelligent, winded from his exertions, finally removed himself to sit at the piano at the back of the room and accompany our exercises with long staccato themes cribbed from Stravinsky.

  Our gestures gradually became larger poses, with much use of flexed hands and feet. We began using one another’s bodies as counterweights, like acrobats, leaning upon each other, balancing in strange postures. What joy! The boy with the heroic eyebrows, Bogdan, partnered me with a sureness that could only belong to a dancer. That’s why there were so many dancers at the Laboratory. I stepped on his thigh and stretched out into space. He held me aloft, and I wished I could have stood on his hands. I could feel strength returning to my body, the energy I’d once had, which my recent life had sapped from me. Then the tempo changed, became more fluid. They stopped their balancing, and ringed the carpet, grasping hands, creating a perfect circle.

  “Marina Ionian, come sit by me,” Ukashin commanded.

  Disappointed, I went and sat on the floor by his chair like a chastised child, as they reformed their circle. Suddenly they bowed their heads, chins on chests, arms at their sides, as if they had all gone to sleep or fallen under a spell. Then slowly they began to turn, their arms coming up along their bodies, crossing on their chests. They twirled faster, and their arms rose and spread, as if lighter than the surrounding air. Then one hand floated up, one hand sank down, and they spun, their heads tilted to the side, eyes closed, as if dreaming. How beautiful! Perfectly tuned. Yes, now I saw it.

  After several minutes, the circle began to move, each person still spinning within the slow, stately procession. It reminded me of the motion of planets around an invisible sun. So synchronized was their spinning that they maintained their distances, their perfect circle, even while rotating around their own individual axes. I had no idea how they did it. Their eyes were closed!

  “Don’t watch,” Ukashin said above me. “Feel.”

  I felt their energy like a gas or a liquid filling the room. Whatever they were doing with their bodies, they were creating something absolutely real. Ukashin put his hand on my shoulder, its warmth suffusing me. “Can you see yourself there?”

  I nodded, despite my pledge not to believe in anything, not to be sucked in by this dark-eyed mystic with his bald head and his bull’s neck.

  “You have to stop throwing yourself into things,” he said. “You must wait and enter properly. All your life, you’ve been like a wild animal who finds itself inside a house—a panicked horse, slipping and knocking into everything, disrupting the bric-a-brac.” He smiled and squeezed my shoulder. “Likely to break a leg.”

  He was right. Such a familiar sensation, crashing into things, causing my own chaos. But tonight I sat, my legs tucked under me, and felt. I took in their beauty, their peace, their dreamlike engagement as around and around they went, let it enter me. I wanted it. It was as if the room had lifted from its moorings, had risen out of this world to enter another state altogether. I was embarrassed even to be thinking in such terms. That was for my mother and her spiritualist crowd—another dimension. But the longer I watched, the more strongly I felt energy rising inside me, up my spine, and lighting my mind like a lamp.

  “Now tell me, what do you feel, Marina Ionian?” said Ukashin in a low voice.

  The energy in the room was so strong that I found it hard to speak. “Peaceful. Awake.”

  “And what do you see?”

  Such beauty. A glow filled the room, and it seemed so much brighter than it had been before they’d started spinning. To think something like this could happen in a place where we had once lain on couches reading Dickens. “Radiance.”

  “Very good. I think you’ll be happy with us, Marina Ionian.”

  I imagined they could do this for days and never have to stop to eat or drink or sleep.

  “One hand receives blessings from spirit. Information, order, energy. The other hand gives it to the earth. We’re the link—that’s what we were made for. We hold together the light and the dark. Material and immaterial. Thus the human.”

  But there was no darkness in this room, only light, and this feeling of rising.

  “Religion makes the mistake of forswearing darkness, forswearing the body,” he continued. “But to forswear darkness is the worst thing. That’s inviting it to approach from the unguarded door and run rampant. We’re going to see worse in these times than we’ve seen so far. Each side trying to hold the light exclusively will create its own darkness. We’re lucky we came to this place.”

  Trying to hold the light exclusively…yes. I had lived with Varvara, with Father. I knew what people who had no doubts about their rightness could do. We had been ruled by tsars who believed that God himself had put the scepter into their hands, and look where that had gotten us. “But they call you Master. Don’t you worry about that?”

  A mischievous smile was only half disguised by his big moustache. “Oh, I can be as wrong as I can be right. I’m no saint. Darkness only becomes evil when it falls out of connection with the light.” He gestured to the spinning acolytes, his hand like that of a sorcerer who had created these creatures out of the air. “What you see is the Process, the power that turns the universe. Think how the earth turns from dark to light to dark to light. If it was stopped, even by the triumph of the light, the world would end. Everything flying off into space, and then—gone. Brahma awakens from his dream.”

  Though I had sworn I would keep a certain distance, I could not help yearning to experience what I was seeing. To have found such pure beauty hidden in the midst of want and terror and material hopes, classes at war, the convulsions of a new nation—it was a miracle. It wouldn’t be hard to believe that the Ionians were holding the world together themselves, and that this room was an energetic anchor that went all the way to the center of the earth.

  I could only imagine how Varvara would explode if she could hear me. How does this produce more food to feed the people? How does this provide justice? To her, these beautiful, glowing faces would be just a handful of delusional young throwbacks who should be working for the betterment of the nation—creating posters about public health, taking classes on Plekhanov and Marx. How is spinning around going to solve the problems of the socialist republic?

  But I understood with startling binocular vision how it was both absolutely irrelevant, and yet in some strange way more relevant than the latest decision of Comrade Lenin and his Central Committee. I saw how, like poetry, the inner life was both more and less important than the clash of armies. Perhaps this was why I had come to Maryino, what had propelled me through the blizzard—the need to find a clearing in the greater blizzard. Just to feel myself alive, to be. And now that I had that little flame to consider, I didn’t want to go careening about the country like a ricocheting bullet. Maybe I needed to know where I was on the very largest scale of things. So that I could become the still point for this creature spinning inside me.

  75 Dreams

  IF THE FRONT PARLOR served as their sacred Practice space, the back parlor housed everything else: workshop, art studio, dining room and, no doubt, medical center. Half-finished chairs teetered, basted patchwork clothes lay atop mountains of rags. A painting lurked under a spotted cloth, while amateurish clay bowls dried on a plank. The big room smelled of clay and raw wood, turpentine. As we sat down for breakfast at the long, raw pine table, the chair at its head stood empty. Even vacant, it vibrated with the Master’s vitality, wafting his traces of clove and sandalwood. Natalya slid down on the bench for me, yawning, heavy-headed from sleep. I stepped over, steadying myself on her shoulder, slipping into the spot between her and Bogdan, my new friends. Outside the windows, the late winter dawn blued the sky. It was good to have friends again. I’d missed that.

  “I brought something for you, Marina Ionian,” said Andrei the intelligent, seated at the foot of the table. He passed two books up the table to me. He’d not spoken to me since warding me off from Mother’s room, and now he brought gifts? They were the first books I’d seen here. One, small and fat, was bound in royal-blue cloth, the other, slender, was clad in worn burgundy calfskin. The disciples handed them to me with oddly guilty expressions. The first was called The Structure of Reality by A. A. Petrovin, the second was The Evolution of Man by N. D. Tomashevsky. I opened the first. Charts and diagrams, complex spirals and starlike radii punctuated thick unbroken paragraphs that went on for pages.

  The intelligent’s blue eyes shone behind his spectacles. “It’s the mathematical basis of Ionia. It lays out the structure of multidimensional reality.”

  The slightly humorous dismay on the faces of the other disciples reminded me of a classroom of children steeling themselves for a teacher’s lecture on comportment. “Are you familiar with the term déjà vu? That peculiar feeling of familiarity, that you have been here before, that we have had exactly this conversation sometime in the past?” He pointed quickly to one of the Ionians. “Gleb scratching his head just so and the snow on the trees just in those same clumps. All of it so familiar. But where does this feeling come from? Such a common phenomenon, throughout all cultures, all time. But what is it? Is it a message from the Beyond?”

  Avdokia staggered in bearing an enormous towel-wrapped crock, which she dropped onto the table with a bang. When she opened the lid, a grippingly nostalgic fragrance filled the room. Not quite déjà vu, but close. Oatmeal. While everyone else in Russia ate kasha, we Makarovs always ate oatmeal. It was the English tradition. If the English ate shaving cream with their bacon and eggs, we would have, too. My old nanny flashed me a semaphore of horror when she spotted me on the bench listening to the man’s earnest explanations, the books at my elbow, wearing my patchwork sarafan and white head scarf. I could hear her thinking, Holy Theotokos, protect us. Her big nose and chin came together across the thin line of her lips. Don’t trust them an inch. Flicked her eyes over to the gypsy. Especially that one.

  But even Magda could not dampen my mood this morning, nor could this storky intelligent. The regularity of the group’s routines and the intensity of the evening Practice made me feel better than I’d felt in a long time. The morning sickness had gone. I tried to pay attention to Andrei’s lecture, to illustrate my dedication as a new Ionian, while bowls were passed and filled.

  “Such things aren’t mysteries,” he said, his voice full of gravitas. “Or only insofar as we fail to understand their inherent structure.” He pointed his spoon at me. “We understand that fevers aren’t caused by demons. We know you don’t get rid of them by waving dead cats over your head.” He ate, and a bit of glutinous porridge appended itself to his bottom lip, where it wobbled precariously. It took everything I had not to stare at that lump of cereal rising and falling and instead gaze into his impassioned blue eyes behind his spectacles.