I had to stop her screaming. I couldn’t believe my own mother was afraid of me. It was a nightmare. “Please, I’m not hurting you!” I reached out, but she shrieked again before I could touch her, shrinking from me as though I held a hot torch, a live viper. “Ukashin!”

  “I’ll stay away,” I said, backing up until I hit something that clattered—her vanity table. “I’m way over here.” Please, Seryozha, help me. You were always her favorite. Come and deal with this. I was never good with her.

  The door opened and light from the hall fell across the carpet. The Master staggered in, stinking of sweat and wine. How huge he looked outlined against the light from the hall, like a genie released from a bottle, filling the doorway. “What’s going on in here?”

  My mother cringed before her icons. “She’s been tormenting me.”

  He lowered his great bull’s head as if he would charge me. “I see.”

  “I just wanted to talk to her.” I still clutched that clear piece of tumbled quartz.

  “Forgive us, Mother.” He crossed the room and yanked me out by the arm, shoved me into the hall, and closed off the Mother’s world behind us.

  I stood in the hallway holding my wrenched shoulder, hot tears shamelessly streaming, gulping air that hadn’t been stained with that acrid smoke. I wished to God I had never opened that door. I’d been operating under the illusion that I was special, that I could walk a tightrope between worlds, a privileged character, the Daughter. But I was not special in any way. No father, no mother…now I was truly here, fully in the hands of this cosmic bully and his mad priestess. There would be no other future.

  79 Andrei Ionian

  MY PUNISHMENT WAS TAILOR-MADE to fit the crime. The night after my transgression, the Master stopped me in the hall. “Andrei needs to learn about hunting. Take him with you in the morning.” And turned away. There would be no argument. How appropriate to consign me to Andrei Ionian, depriving me of the one thing I needed after that encounter with my mother: solitude. I needed time to think, to make some plans. Now I would have the professor dogging my days with his steady stream of philosophy and gangly obliviousness.

  The following morning, I got him onto a pair of homemade skis, and soon we left the house behind, smoke trickling from its chimneys, the dark wood of the outbuildings slowly diminishing to train-set size, like toys dusted in soap flakes. I needed to sort out my thoughts about my place at Ionia, my responsibility to the baby, and the way Mother had looked at me like someone examining a stamp through a magnifying glass. The way she’d shrieked for Ukashin. But Andrei could not be still. The very air around him crackled with anxiety. For someone who extolled the virtues of the present moment, could Andrei be any less present?

  He launched into a lecture about his favorite subject, simultaneous incarnation, the proposition that we live many lives at once in parallel streams of space-time. This was what my mother had been talking about—seeing Seryozha at four, Seryozha as an old man, a soldier, a dog, a dancing master. I only wished it were true. Then I might be back before the revolution, living with my child and my clever husband, hosting Wednesday at-homes in turban and pantaloons, smoking a little cigar and writing my decadent poetry, instead of stranded in this mystical commune, trapping small animals in the bitter cold. But Andrei wasn’t content with imagining it: he wanted it to literally be so. Mathematically provable.

  Well, who was I to criticize? My job was to show him hunting, and that’s what I would do. I pulled my scarf over my nose and mouth and kept moving.

  “You see, it’s all our perspective.” It was the Ionian catechism—things that appeared separated on the third dimension were simultaneous when seen from the fourth, more so from the fifth, and so on. He panted to keep up with me, his breath a plume of vapor, but the flow of information never stopped. “You have to look at the position which encompasses the highest point of view.”

  He was so desperate that I understand. I saw that for an intellectual like him, the need to be understood was a trap. Once caught, he just kept tightening the noose around himself. He would be better off just admiring the beauty of his system for his own sake. I couldn’t help wondering, what was my own trap? Reflexive hope? The yearning for peace? No, those held no allure. Passion. And the need to see what happened. One’s strength, overdone, was one’s weakness.

  As I waited for him to catch his breath—a painful sight, hands on his knees, gasping—it occurred to me that this reassignment must be Andrei’s punishment as well as mine. But what had been his crime? Not keeping me from Mother’s room? On the icy, misted air, I could hear the rooster bragging how he’d made the sun rise. I hiked on, trying to get away from the tide of nervous chatter, which resumed as soon as he could speak.

  I stopped on top of a rise, alone for a short moment. Overhead in an ancient apple tree, ravens cawed and clicked their strange squirrel sounds and dropped twigs on my head. I no longer saw them as harbingers of doom, but welcomed them as clever companions whose language I could almost decipher. I stroked the apple tree’s trunk, its spiraled bark like a shirt wrung out by a beefy washerwoman. Its deformation probably had saved it from many a woodsman’s ax. It looked like a claw, an old man’s hand. What do you have to tell me, Tree?

  Endure, it said.

  I used to ride here with Volodya, the two of us on his bad-tempered pony. He’d put me in front and let me hold the reins, tall grass brushing our bare feet. We’d stop to let Carlyle eat the fallen apples, the fruit small and hard. In those days when you looked back at the house, you would always hear music, Mother playing her piano, Olya singing while she hung the wash in the summer sun.

  Now all that was gone. Just me and the tiny passenger. What kind of a life was I facing? What did Mother mean, the strong must suffer everything?

  Andrei finally managed the hill, his skis splayed in a gawky V. His scarf, tied across his nose and mouth, had grown thick with frost. But still he talked on, about the folds of space-time: “So you’re you now, but also you at eight walking with your mother, going to fetch some sweets. And eighty, leaning on your daughter’s arm.”

  “But we still have to live here and now,” I said. “I don’t see why this is so important to you.”

  “It’s essential. Vital! If we could figure out the mathematics of the parallel streams, we would be seen as magicians. Time travel, jumping between alternate lives would become a reality. Seeing the intention of the entire structure. That’s what we should be studying, not whirling around with our eyes closed.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose vigorously. The crows cawed in response.

  But I liked the whirling. Opening the vortex, we called it. It was my favorite thing at Ionia. It made you less hungry, more peaceful, and the room held that beautiful energy. We got along better afterward. “What about the sacred spiral? I would have thought you’d approve.”

  “We should be examining the layers of existence. It’s a different order of magnitude.”

  “But it’s right out of that book you gave me, The Structure of Reality.” The spiral was the gateway to higher dimensions. What could he object to in its embodiment?

  “You’re dancing it. It’s not the same as engaging here.” He knocked on his forehead. “You can draw a motor, too, but it won’t take you to Moscow.” He sighed, whacked a tree trunk with a crude ski pole. “But nobody cares. It’s too much mental work. I’ve failed here if you can’t see how it matters.” I could see I’d offended him.

  We started down the hill toward the aspen copse, the trees all talking to each other, their roots entwined. “I wrote a poem about parallel time streams,” I said. He seemed so bitter that no one cared about his cosmic theories, I thought it might cheer him. “Want to hear it?”

  “Go on.”

  On the pond,

  a girl

  etches figures in the ice.

  Redheaded as an oriole

  She poses, arabesque.

  Across the park,

  a woman

  stands on a fourth floor window ledge,

  Caught between freedom and despair

  Her falling hat frees crimson hair

  Passing below,

  the crone

  seems to recall some still-life story

  of her own, but when?

  She catches the hat,

  Midair.

  It’s just her size.

  Racing ahead,

  the flameheaded tot

  giggles, naughtily.

  Glancing back at Gran,

  trips and tumbles

  A creaking tram arrives

  They board and vanish, life after life.

  He said nothing at first, the crunch of snow under his skis. “Yes, but don’t you want to know why? It’s the manifestation of a universal truth, not just inspiration for a poet’s reveries. Such a bright girl, too. I’d had such high hopes for you.”

  How tedious he was. He fell in love with patterns, ignoring the very things worth living for—the body in motion, the beauty of these frosty woods, a line of verse. Every bit the spaceman that Varvara was. Who was he to have hopes for me anyway? “I’m a disappointment to many. You’ll have to queue, I’m afraid.”

  We reached the logged stretch, overgrown with blackberries and willows, their bare red twigs sticking up from the snow like the fingers of a frozen traveler. Andrei panted and coughed. I was tempted to send him off into the bush ahead of me, like a beater, to flush the game. I wanted to sneak up behind him and scream, “Wolf!” I knew exactly why Ukashin used him as a scapegoat and court jester. He was so wretchedly earnest. Too much air, Ukashin would say, too little earth. Though didn’t we all suffer from the same complaint? Truly, which of us Ionians wasn’t too much air, too little earth? It was lucky any of us had a roof over our heads. Without Ukashin, Ionia would have starved long ago.

  “Hold up!” Andrei was caught. He tried to free himself and toppled over like a rootless aspen.

  I tried not to laugh. I was tempted to suggest maybe he could leap over into a parallel time-space stream where he was graceful and useful and quiet. But it wasn’t his fault, he really was helpless, and one didn’t add to the suffering of others, even if they were annoying. I went back to help him, got him out of the snow, set his ski out for him to step into, and strapped him back onto the raw birch plank. I even set his hat back on his head and handed him my bottle of tea wrapped in birch bark.

  After that he fell silent for a while. Perhaps he was finally noticing the beauty of the woods, the finely etched branches of maple and birch, the little berries the animals would come again and again to eat. The first trap of the day lay empty, also the second. I had to keep setting new traps in wider circles, I even crossed the river now. It took longer, but we needed the meat. I still could hear Natalya reassuring me that groceries would manifest themselves if we didn’t repress them with our fears.

  Andrei was wearying, forcing himself forward into the heavy snow. I stopped at a favorite spot with a view of the river and the low round ball of the sun, always near the horizon in these winter months. He stood next to me, gulping the frigid air, taking in the mesmerizing display of black marks on the white birches, vivid against the white sky, like the masterful strokes of a Chinese brush.

  “You know, we’ve met before, Marina.”

  “We have?” I squinted at him. Tall, storky, in his quilted coat, squirrel-skin gloves, and felted hat. Emaciated, his lips blue. “When was that?”

  “At a party. You wore a rust-colored dress and danced a tango with a young officer. You were laughing. I never see you laugh like that here.”

  He’d been there, that New Year’s Eve, the night we cast the wax. He had seen me with Kolya…how was that possible?

  Master Vsevolod. Andrei must have been one of Mother’s table-rappers. Of course. “I’ve been here three months and you’re just telling me this now?”

  “We don’t speak of the personal,” he said, slightly mocking. “The past is irrelevant.” He sighed. “But your mother and I were once great friends.”

  I wanted to hear more about my mother, but we needed to get going if I had any hope of crossing to my other traps and getting back before the weather turned ugly. Already the belly of the sky hung low and fat and was turning the yellow-green of impending snow. We were going to be in for it.

  We made our way down to the frozen-over river and took off across the crisp whiteness of the open snow, stopping in the middle to listen to the muffled gurgle. There is no greater pleasure, any Russian will tell you, than standing on a frozen lake or river and contemplating hidden currents under the snow. I thought perhaps I should try ice fishing. Overhead, an osprey circled. The eagles didn’t leave in the winter. I couldn’t imagine the fortitude to last out these brutal winters in a nest of twigs. Even Andrei stopped talking to hear the river’s quiet music.

  On the other side, where once little boys had watched me swim naked, not understanding their own excitement, we stopped for our lunch. A good spot, though cold as the heavy clouds descended. We sat on a fallen fir. The white birches were scarred where deer had chewed on them. I shared our luncheon of dried perch and black bread, a red egg left over from the feast—a love offering from Avdokia. I peeled it and ate half—yolk, too—and gave the other half to Andrei. He gnawed the bread with his eyeteeth. It was not quite as tough as rock, but getting there. The fish was full of bones, but nice and salty. I forced myself to eat it flake by flake, careful not to drop any with my freezing hands.

  “So you were one of Vsevolod’s…circle,” I finished, not wanting to insult him. “My brother used to do a great imitation of him.” I attempted it, the hunchy obsequiousness, the flabby lips, rubbing his hands.

  “He was a kind man, though,” Andrei said. “He didn’t deserve the treatment he got from Taras, and me.” He balled up the paper from the fish and threw it into the woods.

  “Was this at the Laboratory?”

  He looked impossibly sad. “We should get going,” he said.

  We finished the tea, and I led him off into the pines that grew tall on this side of the river, giving off a jammy smell. My first trap bore fruit.

  “Oh look, you got one!”

  Citizen Rabbit, condemned for crimes unknown. I slid the tip of my knife to find the precious wire buried in its neck, worked the noose open. In better times I would have cut it, but in better times I wouldn’t be doing this at all. I dropped the dead weight of my catch into my game bag, then showed Andrei how to reset the little snare, steadying it with twigs over the game trail. He watched me with the same bemused curiosity I’d had in the days when I watched Mina dissecting things in the biology lab at the Tagantsev Academy—interest without any intention of trying it myself. I would make Andrei set the next one. I stood, straightening my legs, rubbing the circulation back into them.

  The next trap also paid off—a large hare had been caught around its neck and foreleg. I could feel its struggle before it finally froze to death. In the spring, I planned to catch rabbits alive and breed them. That way we would have fresh meat next winter without expending all this energy on hunting—though it had been designed for my psychospiritual advancement and not just as a way to feed the tribe. Then I caught myself. Next winter. As if I would still be here. Not a chance. Certainly the civil war would be over by then. Things would start to improve and there would be food in the city. My child would grow up there. I would not be fooling with rabbits by then.

  I made Andrei reset the trap, bend the sapling down to the ground, lacing it into the notched twig. Set them well, Ukashin had said. Even a rabbit will avoid a snare if he’s been caught once and fought his way free. Only a person is stupid enough to be caught twice.

  The intelligent bashed himself in the face a couple of times, but eventually reset the trap. He beamed with his accomplishment.

  “When I think of the man I was,” he said, “I want to shake him. So confident, so naive. It took the revolution to awaken us from our dream of life. Perhaps that was its true purpose.”

  “The revolution’s purpose was to free the worker, to feed the poor, not to awaken the bourgeoisie. If we could have fed the people, given them hope, we wouldn’t have needed the Bolsheviks to be our alarm clock.”

  He blew into his thin long hands, rubbed them and put his gloves back on. “Nevertheless, it was a liberation,” he said, picking up his ski poles. “You were never yourself back then. You were the Good Husband, the Publisher, the Dutiful Wife. Even you. Rebellious Daughter? Daddy’s Girl? Girl of the Season? The revolution made short work of all of that. It exploded all the roles.”

  “You think we’re free now? Or are the new roles just less obvious?” I had been the Rebellious Daughter, also the Good Girl, and yes, Daddy’s Favorite. And now I was the Mystical Orphan, the Haphazard Acolyte, the Husbandless Mother-to-Be. Kali, Bringer of Death. It hardly seemed an improvement.

  “I’ve refused to take on any new roles,” he said. I could see his energy had returned with his meal. “For the first time in my life, I am just a man. Only a man feels, only a man lives. A Publisher can’t feel hungry, but I feel my hunger. What does a Good Husband feel? Nothing. He’s a construct. I feel. Everything drops away but what’s meaningful. Noumenon. Ding an sich. A rebirth.”

  I looked at us both, in our rags and patches. Ding an sich. The thing in itself. Kant in the woods. Platonists in sheepskins and quilted jackets. It made me laugh.

  He couldn’t really think this was freedom. Under one role there was always another. But I didn’t have time for this house of mirrors. I had traps to check before the snow. “Tell me about my mother. Does she ever come out of that room?”

  “She used to come out for Practice.” He skied along in my wake, bumping the backs of my snowshoes with his tips. “She’d visit the workroom…we often played the piano together. She has such beautiful technique. So sensitive. She sometimes plays my own compositions. Occasionally she invites me to her room for tea.”

  I liked the idea that they were friends, that she had someone to talk to besides Ukashin. “Do you ever talk about Petrograd, the old days?”