A Russian Sister

by Caroline Adderson

  “By September, I’ll be home.”

  Words spoken as solemnly as a vow. Even if he did survive, five months without him may as well have been five years. Her legs trembled. He wrapped his arms around her and held her until the shaking stopped.

  Meanwhile, Lika stood flapping her hands and acting as though she were in a crying competition with them.

  “It will hurt less if you make it quick!” Ivan shouted out the window of the train.

  Antosha let Masha go. From his pocket he pulled a package wrapped in coloured paper. For Lika. Greedily, she tore it open.

  His photograph. “Allow me to read you the inscription, Jamais,” he said, which gave him an excuse to wrap an arm around her shoulder and bend close. To the dear creature who scratched me and sent me running to Sakhalin Island. I advise all suitors to wear thimbles on their noses. He turned it over. P.S. This gift obliges me to nothing.

  He kissed Lika’s forehead. Until the third bell rang and broke their mutual trance, he spent his last moments with her. Then, without a backwards glance, he boarded. The last Masha saw of him was the joyful streak of his yellow jacket through the window as the train slid by and tore her in half.

  7

  SCHOOL ENDED. THEY GAVE UP THE CHEST OF drawers house; they couldn’t afford it with Antosha gone. Misha and Father went to relatives, and Mother and Masha, with Mariushka, left for Ukraine.

  Such a paintable countryside—green meadows, willow stands and farmsteads, quaint towns strung together with telegraph wires. It all flashed past Masha, barely remarked upon, for Antosha was presently travelling in the opposite direction, to that unpaintable place. Masha and Mother were bringing their fears for his life to Luka, where Kolia had died the year before.

  As well as sorrow, the dacha at Luka held pleasant memories, mainly from their first summer there, when an enduring friendship had developed with the owners of Luka, the Lintvariovs. The fishing was excellent too, the walks poetical. Almost every day Masha had found a subject to paint—the nightingale nest on her windowsill, the orchard, the charmingly down-at-the-heel manor house. There were two Borzois, long-haired as Bohemians, one black, one grey.

  The plan this summer was to stay until Kolia’s memorial ceremony at the end of June. Unfortunately, Natalia, the exuberant, big-boned youngest of the Lintvariova sisters, was away helping with her newborn niece in Moscow. Her eldest brother was under house arrest there for advocating for representational government. Once Natalia was back, she and Masha would travel on to Yalta for a seaside holiday.

  Driving up the long avenue now, Masha reinterpreted the dusk. Not night falling, but the deep shadow of last year’s tragedy still hanging over everything—the peeling shutters, the perpetual puddle in the courtyard, the half-feral pigs rooting in the grounds. It no longer seemed charming, but depressing. Gloomy.

  The whitewashed dacha was just visible on the other side of the orchard. They followed the path and mounted the steps to the broad veranda where Kolia had lain coughing in his hammock. Once inside, the first thing Masha did was check for the nightingale nest. Gone! The odour of fresh paint hung in the room. Worse, propped up on the dresser was a letter Antosha had written Natalia. She’d left it for Masha, probably thinking she’d find it funny.

  Dear Little N,

  I regret to inform you that this summer I won’t be visiting because in April I’m departing for Sakhalin Island, returning in December. Bears and fugitives abound there. In the event I fall prey to Messieurs les Wild Animals, or some vagabond carves me up, remember me as fondly as I do you . . .

  “December!” Mother cried the next morning. “I thought he said September!”

  Masha had held off showing her the letter. There was no point in both of them fretting all night. Now they were heading out the door with Mariushka, who carried on the broad shelf of her hip the copper basin containing the sponge, soap and towels. At the sight of the hammock, Mother stopped. She’d walked right past it yesterday.

  “Everywhere I look, I see Kolenka. My poor Kolenka.”

  Masha saw him too, his scarecrow body—sticks stuffed inside his clothes—his flat suffering face. With each cough, the hammock had swayed.

  “Mariushka, is he in heaven?” Mother asked.

  Mariushka, stumping down the steps, grunted that it was for God to decide, not her. She sounded dubious.

  “They knocked down the nightingale nest,” Masha said bitterly.

  “And now Antonshevu’s gone too. He told us he’d be back in September, not December. He never mentioned bears or Frenchmen with knives.”

  “Mamasha. Stop,” Masha begged. “You’re making it worse. Let’s visit the grave when we’re done bathing. You’ll feel better then.”

  “I doubt that!”

  The orchard was racketing with bees. As they walked through it, Masha remembered one of the few funny moments from the summer before. “The Artist,” as Antosha had called Kolia, dozed on a rug; Mother, exhausted from nursing him, leaned back against a tree, chin wilting on her chest. While Masha sketched this pitiful scene, Georgi’s playing filtered down from the house. Georgi was the youngest Lintvariov, Misha’s age, a concert pianist then labouring over the dolorous second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Along came Antosha with his fishing rod. At the sight of them he shouted, “Why hold back, Georgi? Let’s have something really sad!”

  In the bathhouse now, Mother stepped out of her drawers, then sat on the bench and picked them up with her toes. “You might have babies one day, Masha. Then you’ll understand my loss.”

  “Might I?” Masha snapped. It enraged her when Mother said things like this. Did she think she was mooning around waiting for a man? And if one did come along, who would do the accounts, hire the servants and look after her and Father?

  Mariushka slammed down the heavy basin and went to work on Mother’s buttons. Masha took out her combs. She glanced at Mother’s doughy body as, garment by garment shed, it was revealed. Fully dressed she looked thin, but her clothes hid flesh that had loosened with each child she’d borne. Seven, including their brief sister Evgenia.

  Mother glanced down at herself just as Mariushka pulled out her hairpins. Braids tumbled down veined breasts. Mariushka dipped the sponge and squeezed it over her head. Mother looked so abject then, grey-haired, grey-skinned, naked and dripping, that Masha had to ask herself why anyone would want to be a mother.

  What an ordeal to be bathed by Mariushka! Then, thoroughly soaped, blinded by the sting of it, savagely scrubbed, they felt their way out of the bathhouse and stepped into the wide green river to rinse.

  KOLIA’S GRAVE WAS ON A HILL. THEY CLIMBED TO IT and, breathing hard, arranged their offerings before the wooden cross: sweets Mother had brought from Moscow, wildflowers Masha had gathered into a bouquet as ragged as her dead brother. They settled on their knees in the grass. Lord, give rest to the souls of Thy departed servants in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness frayed sheet torn into strips, then into squares sighing, and sorrow have bled into, burned. Pardon every transgression which they have committed, awful things he said at the end, whether by word or deed or thought lies. Took commissions, never finished. Drank the money. Shamed them. Antosha waking every pile of rags he found lying in the street searching for him. For Thou art a good God and lovest mankind; because there is no man who lives yet does not sin.

  The tears came and they choked on them. Mother collapsed onto her side and howled. In the face of this animalistic display, Masha stopped weeping to comfort her. She remembered Mother bent over the cradle in Taganrog when Evgenia died, Masha eight years old, flinging herself across her back, wrapping her arms around her waist, rocking with the force of each howl. A lurching pony ride of grief.

  Eventually, Mother quieted. They sat in silence, Masha wrung out too.

  A range of timbered hills stretched to the right. To the left, beyond an expanse of fields, stood the village with its bulbed white church. Below, t
he Psiol flowed past a tumble-down mill, past the pits dug by potters, the red clay piled up on the banks like strange geological formations. Just the sort of view Antosha loved to get right on the page. The previous year, or the one before, Masha would have come back and tried to paint it.

  Overhead, a circling hawk touched them with its shadow. Mother gasped and crossed herself. Even Masha shivered, though she didn’t believe in omens. She helped Mother to her feet.

  As they neared the dacha on their way back, they heard Georgi practising, the same minor phrase over and over. He was incapable of playing anything happy!

  Masha said, “I’ll go up and say hello.”

  Elena Lintvariova answered her knock. Both elder sisters were doctors, Elena the plainest one. They’d all inherited their philosophical mother’s dark eyebrows, but Elena’s face was long and earnest, pinched with worry for her patients, her sister Zinaida in particular. Zinaida was their household saint, blind from a brain tumour and in constant, unmentioned pain, yet carrying on—not just valiantly, but gaily, treating the peasants in their free clinic in the morning, then laughing on the terrace when they read out Antosha’s stories in the evenings. By contrast, Elena seemed to have taken a vow never to smile.

  She embraced Masha, then held her at arm’s length to ask, “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  Elena saw through her. “And so will Antosha be.”

  Masha shook herself free. “How do you know?”

  “The weather’s an unknown, true. But he’s a medical man.”

  Masha burst out with the bears and vagabonds, though she’d thought Mother hysterical for doing the same thing. “They’re an unknown too. And how will being a doctor help against a bear? They don’t ask your profession before they eat you.”

  In a soothing tone, Elena said, “You are so close. I understand. Mother and Zinaida are resting, but why don’t you say hello to Georgi? You know where to find him.”

  Embarrassed now, Masha followed the music to the drawing room.

  The Borzois were dozing under the piano as Georgi played, their wavy coats spread out like silken mats. Georgi had been cast in the family mould too, but he also resembled the dogs. Long nose, long waves of hair falling in his eyes, prettier than handsome, despite his attempts at a beard. The prettiest of the Lintvariovs, in fact—almost delicate compared to sturdy Natalia.

  Georgi looked up then and saw her in the doorway. In the second that his eyes held hers, Masha noted ambivalence. Here was something she hadn’t considered: If coming back revived for her and Mother the terrible memory of Kolia’s death, wouldn’t it do the same for the Lintvariovs? Perhaps they hadn’t even wanted them here, but felt it would be a sin to refuse them.

  She waited for Georgi to finish so she could say hello and leave. Lika came to mind then, playing “Un petit verre de Clicquot” that night and having no awareness of her effect. Masha noticed one in herself now, a decided lightening, as though there were homeopathic properties in a minor key. Or perhaps she simply wanted to get away from Mother. When Georgi reached the end of his piece, she asked if she could stay.

  “That depends,” he said.

  “I’ll be quiet.”

  One Lintvariov eyebrow rose. “Hang that. I want applause.”

  Thank God, someone with a sense of humour! She entered and collapsed on the divan.

  So those sanity-preserving visits began on the first day.

  MOTHER’S MEMORIES OF KOLIA WERE MATERNALLY DISTORTED. He’d had the sweetest disposition. (A happy drunk, in other words.) He would have been a great artist. (Had he bothered finishing his commissions.) At breakfast, Masha listened to her deluded prattle, waiting for the right moment to set down her coffee cup.

  “Well, Mother. I think I’ll go up to the house and see if the post has arrived.”

  “I hope Antonshevu has written us.”

  Masha wasn’t only annoyed by Mother, she realized after a few days. She was angry. Angry at Kolia for how he’d wasted his life. And if she was angry at him, then her grief must be nearing its end, or one stage of it, at least. There was no room in her heart to grieve for him while she worried about Antosha. Where was he now? Was he keeping warm and dry? Were the people that he met honest, or the thieves and murderers that they feared?

  If Georgi wasn’t at the piano, Masha would usually find him wandering dreamily through the big, dusty house, playing the air, his untucked shirt billowing and a Borzoi or two stepping elegantly behind him.

  “Oh, Masha,” he’d say. “Thank you. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

  While Georgi played, Masha would look at the pictures. The landscapes were uninteresting, places without feeling, too dull to visit, or worse, idealistic scenes of peasant life. The portraits were better. There was a pleasant one of their father, his expression tinged with regret, as though he were apologizing for dying prematurely and dooming his family to the numberless ranks of half-broke gentry forced to rent to holidaymakers.

  Georgi paused in his playing. “That’s Papa.”

  “Yes.” From what Natalia had told Masha, he was of a completely different species from theirs. The Lintvariovs were radicals; they, nothing. This was something for which Antosha was frequently criticized in the papers. He rejected all labels, was neither radical nor reactionary, but a writer and a doctor who happened to be in possession of a conscience.

  Masha said, “He bests the priests.”

  “You mean the beard?” Georgi stroked his own wispy chin. “What do you think of mine?”

  “The moustache is a success.”

  The eyebrow rose again, he with it. He went to the mirror, turned this way and that. After a minute of this, Masha clapped her hands.

  “Back to work.”

  Georgi loved to be managed like this, differently than she managed Antosha. These were classroom methods. Beaming at her, he said, “You’re saving me from myself, Masha.”

  An hour later—sometimes she lost track and it became two—Masha returned to the dacha.

  “It takes you long enough to check the post,” Mother would tell her. Then, noticing Masha’s empty hands, she’d begin to wail. “Why hasn’t Antosha written?”

  “I’m sure he has. We’re just farther away.”

  “I’m worried about his health!”

  Finally they did get a letter, written from the Volga steamer he had boarded after the train. The best thing about the boat, he reported, was the toilet raised like a throne. Too bad he was constipated and couldn’t use it. But he’d slept “artistically” all night, and his money was intact. The countryside would be pretty if the sun would come out.

  Constipated? This was so like him to focus on the trivial. His life was in danger!

  No word about when he was coming back.

  SINCE THEY’D STARTED VISITING UKRAINE THREE YEARS before, Antosha dreamed of buying an estate there. Last year a landowning friend of the Lintvariovs, Aleksander Smagin, offered to show him his. Antosha ended up visiting Smagin several times, usually with Misha or Ivan. Though the trip took a full day, Smagin would drive them back to Luka himself. Soon Natalia was teasing Masha that she was the reason he kept coming.

  “Just think, Masha. If you marry Smagin, your children will turn out like this.” She stuck her face into Masha’s, crossed her eyes and sang a rendition of Alabiev’s “The Nightingale.” “Oh, my nightingale, my cross-eyed nightingale!”

  She exaggerated. Smagin’s eyes were only close-set. His moustache drew more ridicule. Behind his back, everyone called him the King of Persia.

  The same day Georgi astonished Masha by shaving off his failed beard, the King of Persia showed up. Mrs. Lintvariova ushered him in wearing a wide, well-meaning smile. There it was, the coarse boot-brush fringe even more comical compared to the delicate feathering above Georgi’s lip. Mrs. Lintvariova, buxom in her striped dress, gave Smagin an encouraging nod.

  He smoothed the moustache and strode over, extending the same hand to Masha. His grip was moist. Mrs. Lintva
riova invited him to sit—beside Masha! Thankfully he declined.

  “After that long drive, I prefer to stand.”

  For several minutes Mrs. Lintvariova managed the small talk ineffectively. She was a great reader of Schopenhauer and liked to lead the conversation toward a ready quote.

  “Well, Aleksander. We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people, don’t we?” She opened the French doors. “Where are the pigs?” she called, and the Borzois heaved themselves up in unison and tore outside. She stepped out after them, closing the doors behind her.

  “She says such wonderful things,” Smagin told Masha. “Yet I have no idea what they mean. I guess I’m simple. I’m just a farmer. How are you? It’s been a year!”

  Masha shot an entreating look at Georgi, who played on, seemingly oblivious to the visitor.

  “You look so well,” Smagin told her.

  “Do I? I’m not, actually. You know Antosha’s on his way to Siberia? The post is excruciatingly slow in bringing news. Mother and I are quite ill with worry.”

  Was the moustache false? A theatre prop? It had that look. He kept patting at it as though it might come unglued. In her mind Masha spun a scenario to write to Natalia. She’d say that it got stuck on the bottom of his boot and that despite the whole house pitching in to search, they couldn’t find it.

  “Your brother’s a brave man, I’ll give him that. Foolish perhaps. I prefer to stay close to home. Yes, I’m a homebody. It’s too bad you never came visiting with Anton last year. It would have been my great pleasure to show you around my estate.”

  Hands clasped behind his back, he began to pace. His breathing matched his heavy steps, air bristling through the moustache as he waxed on—what he grew, the horses he owned. “All of them named in honour of the royal family. Aleksander, after our beloved Tsar, not me! He’s an Arabian. Fifteen hands tall. Do you ride?”

  “No.” She sat up straight on the divan. Georgi, she realized, had segued into “Nightingale.”