A Russian Sister

by Caroline Adderson

  He stopped to pick; Isaac too. When Antosha straightened, Isaac did as well, a pair of convicts shackled together. Neither would meet Masha’s questioning eye.

  Back at the dacha, Masha found Lika at the washstand, splashing like a sparrow so no one would know she’d been crying.

  “I guess Isaac interrupted something,” Masha said.

  No reply from the sparrow, which made Masha feel quite terrible.

  Isaac came in a few minutes later. They packed then and left to catch the train as planned, Lika scrubbed pink and flashing lying smiles all around. But for Antosha, a mere nod.

  WHILE ANTOSHA WOULD SOMETIMES LEAVE A LETTER on his desk for Masha to chance upon, he’d never before put one in her hand. When she copied out his stories, he’d expressed no interest in what she thought of them.

  She should have just asked him. “Are you planning on getting married?” She opened her mouth to do it.

  No words. She was afraid of what he’d say. The floor would open and swallow her. She’d faint, and he’d let her fall to the floor. Or he’d lie.

  He watched her closely as she accepted the page. Masha sensed something like agitation. It made hers worse. Was it a proposal? Why seek her opinion? Did he expect her to approve? Lika had rushed out of the trees in tears. Why?

  It was Masha’s fault. She’d given them away to Isaac with a flick of her eyes. She hadn’t wanted them to be alone. But neither had she wanted to make Lika miserable. How had she sounded when she questioned her at the washstand? Not sharp, she hoped. She could be so sharp—frightening, Lika had once said. Masha hated that part of herself. She truly wanted to be kind, the way Lika had been kind to her when she’d cried over Georgi. Lika had consoled her like a sister. A sister, not a sister-in-law.

  Masha could be one, but not the other.

  She looked into Antosha’s eyes, impatient now, then began to read.

  Golden Lika! Come back and smell the flowers, walk, fish, blubber. Ah, lovely Lika! When you bedewed my right shoulder with your tears (I have taken out the spots with benzene) . . .

  She began reading from the top again, puzzled. She’d assumed that Isaac had been implicated in Lika’s distress as much as she was. That he’d burst in on her and Antosha because of Masha’s signal. But that wasn’t what happened.

  . . . and when you sat at our table and ate (if truth be told, far more than your share), we greedily devoured your face, your hair, your perfect form, with our hungry eyes. There being nothing else left to eat. Ah, Lika, Lika, diabolical beauty! Come back!

  Yours, Mr. Hunyadi Janos

  P.S. When you’re at the Hermitage with Trofimov, I hope you accidentally jab out his eyes with your fork.

  She handed him the letter. “You made Lika cry, brother.”

  This was not the reaction he wanted. The corners of his eyes had started to crinkle in expectation of her laugh, but now he drew back.

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “No. You wrote it yourself. ‘You bedewed my right shoulder with your tears.’ Antosha, Lika is my friend. I ask you to be careful with her feelings.”

  4

  THEY’D BEEN AT BOGIMOVO FOR TWO DAYS WHEN Masha returned from a walk to find Svoloch gone. Everyone helped with the search, including the family staying on the upper floor of the manor, the Kiseliovs, and the German zoologist, Dr. Wagner, in the dacha next to where B.-K. and his flame-haired mistress lived. They swarmed the park, beating the bushes, calling Svoloch’s name. The Kiseliov children, a boy and a girl, eight and ten, seemed to treat it as an amusing game, calling out in falsetto, or mimicking Dr. Wagner’s accent. The mistress, who could not understand what manner of creature they were searching for, made inappropriate honking sounds.

  Dr. Wagner was short with wiry hair, a dandy as well as a zoologist, always dressed in colourful paisley shirts. Though his field was arachnids, he was eager to meet a live mongoose. He was the last of the search party to give up, other than Masha.

  “If I recall correctly, they emit a high-pitched noise commonly called ‘giggling’ when they mate. Can you corroborate?”

  “No,” Masha told him. “Svoloch didn’t get on with his wife.”

  “That doesn’t preclude mating.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  By then it was dusk, nearly dark among the trees, the paths fading before their eyes. Masha found herself having to take the arm of this man whose scientific curiosity so outweighed his sense of decorum.

  “In nature, the sexual instinct is unconnected to affection. That’s a human complication.”

  Did he expect her to comment? Now she was flustered as well as panic-stricken.

  At last they emerged onto the linden avenue leading to the house. The lamps were already lit, and Masha saw figures moving across the windows. When Dr. Wagner began to titter suggestively, she wrested free her arm.

  “I was merely conjecturing about the giggle,” he said as she picked up her skirts and ran.

  A lamp waited for her in the vestibule. The barely furnished rooms, bereft of rugs, were echo chambers. She followed the mealtime clamour to the dining room, where Mariushka had set out cold fare. The whole search party was noisily digging in. Mother noticed her first.

  “Masha! Did you find him?”

  Mariushka looked almost jubilant as she served. Masha marched over to her.

  “You let him out.”

  By her expression, Masha knew she hadn’t. Mariushka was a terrible liar, would sputter and shift from warty foot to warty foot, denying she’d broken a plate or let the samovar boil dry. She was firmly planted now.

  “My tongue is not deceitful!”

  Mother came and put an arm around Masha. Masha threw it off.

  Had anyone even searched the house? She called Svoloch’s name down the hall and into the high-ceilinged gloom of every room, half-heartedly, because if he was in the house, he would have joined them at the table, jumped brazenly on it and snatched whatever took his fancy. Unless he’d got himself trapped. She stopped calling and listened instead. They were talking about her in the dining room, deciding who should go after her.

  In the drawing room that Antosha had claimed as his, she threw herself on the divan. Blew out the lamp and abandoned herself. Like Svoloch in his basket, her weeping was an animal inside her clawing to get out.

  “Why are you crying?”

  Antosha, silhouetted in the doorway. She heard a squeak and sat up, expecting to see his smile and Svoloch squirming in his arms. Another joke. But it was only the floor giving its opinion as he crossed the room.

  He looked down on her, a shadow with the ghost of a handkerchief held out.

  She took it, and he sat beside her, shifting in discomfort, while she wept it to saturation.

  When she’d calmed enough to hear him, Antosha said, “He’s wild, sister. It’s been hell living with him, you have to admit it.”

  Meaning he was prepared to let Svoloch go? That he’d be glad if the animal died? Everyone had rejoiced over Mrs. Svoloch beaten to death by the floor polisher, her beautiful corpse tossed onto the ash heap. Still weeping, she could feel how uncomfortable Antosha was with her emoting. She thought of Lika crying in the woods, bedewing his shoulder. Antosha had probably recoiled. Or perhaps he’d changed the subject, as he did now.

  “I meant to ask what you think of these Kiseliovs. Not as fun as our Kiseliovs. The adults, I mean. The children are a delight. Remember that summer?”

  Kiseliov was also the name of the family from whom they’d rented a dacha five years before.

  Antosha went on. “Spectacular fishing. Spectacular dairymaids. Isaac was giving you painting lessons.” He laughed. “Wasn’t that when he proposed? I bet you’re glad now that you refused.”

  She blew her nose in his sopping handkerchief and handed it to him. “I didn’t refuse. He dropped the matter.”

  “Thank God. Let’s hope he doesn’t break Lika down.”

  How hard did he hope this? Here was another chance to ask wh
at his intentions were with Lika, but his mention of Isaac’s proposal brought the memory back. Just now she’d overheard them deciding who would come to her. Antosha had come that time too, when she’d been crying in confusion in her room.

  The moon made plated rectangles of the windows. Masha saw Antosha’s profile clearly, handsome even as he frowned over the thought of Lika and Isaac.

  “Did you speak to him? After he proposed to me, I mean,” Masha asked. “Did you say something to him?”

  Antosha looked at her. “Isaac? I can’t remember. It’s ancient history.” A flickering thought caused his brows to lift. “You’re not in love with him, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Isaac is, as you know, polyamorous. It would not be pleasant to be married to him. Where did you put the lamp? And can I find a match? Damn that mongoose. Are you ready? We’ll find our way if we hold hands.”

  He extended his. It looked silvered, a steel gauntlet. Cold. Her mind darted around. How funny that she noticed its movement, as though it wasn’t her mind but a bird hopping between related memories. Related, but only after the fact. For there was that other proposal, which had also evaporated. And was he going to marry Lika?

  “Do you remember your conversation with Lieutenant Egorov?”

  “Who?” Antosha asked, not following her logic. But then he did, and his tone cooled. “Ah! Egorov. Yes. I do remember.” Now he was irritated, either by the unpleasant recollection, or because he’d spent hours searching the estate and wanted his dinner. “What do you want to know?”

  She remembered Egorov with fondness. His deep stare and crooking finger. His slightly stooped back in his grey uniform, the clean skin on the dome of his head as he ducked out of the library after he’d proposed, rushing off to find Antosha.

  “What did you say to Egorov?”

  Antosha sat for a moment with his head bowed. How delicate a man he was, how different from, say, Dr. Wagner, the zoologist. When he finally spoke, she smelled his breath. Georgi’s had a tea smell, but Antosha’s was always tinged with sweetness.

  “Do you know where we met Lieutenant Egorov and the others?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He shifted farther away, angling his gaze so the moonlight seemed to shine out of the lenses of the pince-nez. The sound of laughter reached them. Masha heard a stomach grumble but couldn’t tell if it was hers or his.

  “We met them one evening at a house in town.”

  He coughed, little huffs into his fist, out of embarrassment or to stop her from asking more. The sound deepened, and soon his whole body began pitching forward and back like he was riding a slow-moving horse. He felt around for the handkerchief, which had fallen beside his feet. Alarmed, she picked it up and pressed it into his hand, this cold scrap of material that she’d vindictively soaked, waiting to see if when he lifted it off his mouth, he would have anything to show for this racking labour.

  “Oh, brother. Are you all right?”

  He held up a hand to silence her.

  It was only a few minutes, but it felt like an hour before the coughing stopped. He wiped his lips with the handkerchief—unstained, thank God—and returned it to his pocket.

  The thing about Egorov was that Masha hadn’t even considered him a suitor. But after his proposal, she’d ached over his bald head and blinking eyes for many months. He never came back. And neither would Svoloch. Some creature would murder him, or some hunter shoot him. She knew that these two disappearances, eight years apart, had nothing to do with each other, but the way they were talking now, in near-whispers in the dark, complicated her feelings after the fact.

  “I wish I wasn’t human,” she said.

  “‘A chicken is not a bird, a woman is not a human being.’” When she stiffened, Antosha hastened to add, “I’m joking, sister! I didn’t coin the expression. Come here. Come.”

  He held her to his chest, kissed the top of her head. “Tomorrow we’ll look again. We’ll visit every estate in the district, every peasant hovel. We’ll find that little devil. I promise. And still you cry!”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” she told him.

  “I know your age,” he said.

  IN PARIS, THERE WERE NIGHTCLUBS THAT DEFIED imagination. Men wrestled boa constrictors, and chorus girls kicked their legs as high as their heads. Masha had overheard her brothers discussing these wonders the day after Antosha returned from Europe. She heard Misha’s eager queries about the brothels.

  A brothel was what Antosha had meant by “a house in town.”

  Antosha had answered Misha that the ones in Paris were no better than anywhere else, that his favourite experience had been in Siberia with a Japanese whore who’d made intercourse seem like advanced equitation.

  Then he offered an older brother’s advice. “Listen, Misha. You must be careful when you go to brothels.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Misha said.

  “I’m not speaking about diseases. Well, not only. In every establishment, you’ll find a particular girl, happy-seeming and preternaturally kind. She’s always young. It’s an act. The happiness, I mean. You destroy them when you touch them. Understand?”

  “Snore. Any other advice?”

  “Yes. Don’t use so many adverbs when you write.”

  Masha thought back on this unpleasant conversation—unpleasant to her—as she unpacked her trunk in Bogimovo. She knew Moscow’s brothels were mainly clustered along Sobolev Lane, though she’d never seen them. She did remember the wretched establishment in Taganrog, though, and how she and Mother had accidentally found themselves passing it one day. A woman’s glove was nailed to the door right through the palm, the empty fingers curled.

  Men went out of exigency. Masha had learned this years back when Anosha was studying medicine. Kolia and Aleksander stopped by one evening. Neither was sober, and they were less so by the time they left. Masha moved in and out of the room, unnoticed. They were laughing over a case study Antosha was writing for his course, about a young railway clerk so afflicted with “spermatorrhoea” that he was continually soaking his own trousers, the unmistakable legacy of “onanism.” She was unfamiliar with these words.

  “And what did you prescribe?” Kolia had asked.

  “Nux vomica, potassium bromide and a month of daily baths each a degree colder than the previous.”

  “Hasn’t he ever heard of a whore?” said Aleksander. “What does he think they’re for?”

  Which was when Mother, normally docile, came flying into the room, raging at them for their vile talk, in front of their sixteen-year-old sister no less. Chastened, her crazy lumbering brothers surrounded Mother, fell to their knees and kissed her hands. Kissed up her arms all the way to her elbows, begging for her blessing, which of course she gave.

  Then they thundered out, probably to Sobolev Lane, so they could relieve themselves in the medically recommended manner, unlike that dolt of a railway clerk.

  THE NEXT DAY, ANTOSHA BORROWED ONE OF B.-K.’S troikas and three of his model horses. Pulled by these satisfied beasts, they set out to search the neighbouring estates. Antosha brought along a photograph taken during his homeward journey—he and a sailor also mad enough to buy a mongoose, posing with their folly in their laps.

  “What are they?” asked the first landowner, a short man with a purplish, capillaried face.

  “They’re like minks, but tamer,” Antosha told him.

  “The eyes are different. The pupils.” Masha made a sideways motion with her finger.

  “What an evil-looking snout. Do they bite?”

  Antosha and Masha exchanged sheepish glances.

  “God in heaven! I hope I don’t run into it.”

  Yet they secured permission to speak to his labourers. The first hut they knocked at, a woman answered who could have been twenty or fifty. Fear sprang onto her face, and she bowed and stepped aside to let them in the black hole where they lived—one room, most of it taken up by a chimney-less stove. Soot had painted the ceiling, and Masha could s
ee a dark band around the walls level with where the smoke hung when the stove was lit. On the stove’s shelf lay an old woman who had apparently soiled herself. Or the stench came from the scarlet-faced baby screaming in the wooden cradle hanging from one of the beams. The snoring heap on the sleeping bench contributed his alcoholic fumes. Through this thickened air, a corps of flies wheeled.

  Masha stayed by the open door where she could steal breathable gulps of air. What made the room seem more pathetic than squalid was that someone had actually tried to better it. Pasted sadly around the icons were paper wrappings from sweets and labels off vodka bottles. And most of the country lived like this.

  The woman and two others began scurrying around with a cockroach-like alacrity. Antosha, who showed no sign that he shared Masha’s repulsion, asked them not to bother with the samovar. He took out the photograph and explained why they were there. After much back and forth, they at last understood that he wanted the animal returned alive.

  “No tea. No, thank you. But may I?” He gestured to the unheeded baby.

  One of the women—the mother was working in the manor, they explained—lifted the baby out of the crib. Antosha wiped the streaming mucous off its nose with his handkerchief. The screams grew louder. He peeped under the dress, then gently removed the ragged garment, revealing a bulbous stomach blotched with red.

  Did they have water? Someone shuffled out on bowed legs and came back with a basin of what looked like weak tea. Antosha unwound the sodden napkin, revealing the fat worm of the infant’s sex. Then he seated himself on the bench by the drunkard’s blackened feet and laid the screaming, naked child along his legs. He dipped his handkerchief in the basin and squeezed it out over the distressed brow, letting the water run onto the dirt floor. The baby stopped crying at once and stared up at Antosha. Sleep hurriedly replaced the child’s astonishment.

  Antosha asked for a fresh napkin, put it on the baby himself, dressed him again, and laid him in his cradle. So deeply did the baby slumber, his arms and legs hung limp. Antosha might have been placing him in a coffin. Would someone soon be doing this very thing?