One night, Aleksander even had a go at Masha. He brought up her suitors. It upset her so much she forbade herself to think of the encounter. Accusations from so antagonistic a person didn’t merit reflection.
But Olga’s assessment of her elder brothers came to mind then—their contrasting temperaments and its cause, the miracle that Antosha had risen above the fate of the other two. And so she found herself on Antosha’s side again.
The whole family under one roof proved too much for him. On Easter Day, as soon as it was polite to, Antosha escaped to Moscow and stayed there until his three brothers had left. When he returned, it was only for a week, setting the pattern for the coming months—visits to friends, a Volga River cruise with Aleksei Suvorin. Masha kept busy in the garden.
Now when he was home, neither of them mentioned Lika.
Send me your news, Masha. It’s medicine to me, better than creosote and cod liver oil . . .
WHEN ANTOSHA RETURNED TO MELIKHOVO THAT JULY, the writing cottage was finished. With its steeply pitched roof and gingerbread eaves, it would, he joked, attract fairy-tale visitors, lost children, heroic woodsmen, and witches disguised as beautiful women. Masha had it painted pale blue and white, the door red.
One afternoon she was returning on foot from the fields, arms swinging freely in the heat. Her secret pleasure that summer was going without the restrictions of a corset, feeling the sweat trickling down her back. She passed through the cooler orchard, where the swallows skimmed the ground around her feet. Nearing the cottage, she heard a familiar kettledrum laugh.
“Two desks will fit. We’ll write together. You can finally start that play of yours.”
“If I ever finish with Sakhalin Island.”
Ignati? Relief washed over Masha. Lika was back, thank God.
“What takes you so long? I can’t comprehend it,” Ignati said as he and Antosha stepped out the red door together. The dachshunds burst out too. Ignati saw Masha standing there and waved in an exuberant arc. “Hello!”
“Is Lika with you?” she called back.
His “no” sounded so matter-of-fact that Masha assumed he meant Lika was in the house. She glanced over her shoulder, then back at Ignati, his grin still fixed in the middle of his beard. Antosha looked away.
“She’s still in Paris,” Ignati said. “Busy with lessons. I brought you a gift.”
It took a moment for her to comprehend what he was saying. He’d taken Lika off to Paris, then left her there with his angry wife? And now he dared to turn up and greet Masha, Lika’s friend, as though he’d done nothing wrong?
“May I have a word with you, Antosha?”
Antosha followed her along the path and into the house, coughing all the way. Mariushka was just bringing a tray of tea things from the kitchen. Antosha held the door, keeping the dogs out with his foot. In passing, the cook said, “Tea’s served on the veranda.”
He nodded. “Please let Ignati know. I’ll join him in a moment.”
As soon as they were closed up in his study, Masha cried out, “I knew this would happen! He’s deserted her!”
Antosha coughed again. “Varvara’s with her. Masha, he told me it was tough going with the wife. Lika had no sympathy for her. He was being pulled in both directions. He had no choice but to leave before they ripped him in half. You have no idea what that feels like.”
No, she didn’t. They looked at one another, Antosha through the pince-nez, and neither moved. How many times had she stood in this room as still and silent as this moment, holding the tray of boiled instruments, the hands of the clock scraping its own face? She’d watched him lance and staunch and stitch and had trained herself not to gag. This skill she put to use now.
A trapped fly battered itself against a pane, while outside, a bird sang. No, it was Ignati whistling as he passed the window, hands pocketed, his big chest thrust out. Masha let him move through her peripheral vision, but Antosha turned his head. Ignati noticed them and made an exaggerated gesture of surprise. Pinkie finger crooked, he mimed drinking tea. Antosha laughed.
Sheepishly, he turned back to her. “I’m sorry, sister, but he amuses me. I know he’s a rake, but I’m so tired all the time. Dead tired. He has such energy. He makes me feel alive.”
Just as Lika used to—before Masha stupidly sent him to apologize. Then he’d tossed her aside. No, he’d handed her over to Ignati. She remembered the moment now, Ignati ransacking his pockets for the fare while the droshky driver waited. You’ll repay me, I’m sure, Antosha had told him.
While she thought of something to say, Masha let her gaze fall. Piled neatly on his desk were the hundreds of pages of The Island of Sakhalin. Until he’d mentioned it a few minutes ago, she’d almost forgotten the book. Forgotten his trip. Yet all this time—nearly four years—he’d been returning there on the page. No one ever came back from Sakhalin Island. Tears threatened, and she released him from her judgment yet again.
“In your stories,” she said, “people are always dreaming of a better life. Like in ‘The Black Monk.’ Remember? The monk says that a great bright future awaits humankind. Do you believe that?”
“You have to give people some hope.” He coughed. “I’ll make him leave in the morning.”
“Thank you. Please tell Mariushka I’ll have dinner in my room.”
That night Masha lay on her bed under Kolia’s painting of Antosha. Young and handsome, he was turned three-quarters, long hair hanging over one eye. And right in the centre was a bare patch of canvas, as though someone had sliced off his ear and stuffed the hole with batting.
She wished she were deaf. Such a jolly meal they were having four rooms away. Later they conversed as they fished in the pond, words mingling with the evening vespers of the frogs.
“Fishing or writing?”
“Fishing.”
“Fishing or vodka?”
“Fishing.”
“Fishing or fucking?”
A long pause. “Fishing.”
In the morning, Masha found Ignati’s gift on the dining table, a set of English watercolours in a wooden box. She unlocked it with the key. The inside label was indecipherable. She’d forgotten all her English.
Compartments to hold the coloured tablets, a slot for brushes, a lidded jar and mixing trough. Two drawers for storing paper. She picked out a tablet. Ultramarine. The whole sky compressed into a wafer. She sniffed it, then touched it to her tongue. Though it nearly broke her heart, she shut the box in the china cabinet. If Lika came back in one piece, then she’d use it.
THAT MORNING, AS WELL AS THE PAINTS, THERE WAS A note from Antosha saying that he’d gone with Ignati to deliver The Island of Sakhalin to his publisher. It was a lie. A week later Misha came across the manuscript while searching Antosha’s study for cigarettes.
“He quit smoking,” said Masha, who was in the study doing the building accounts that night. “They made his cough worse. It’s bad enough.”
“And what? He threw them out? He could have donated them. So much for being a man of charity.”
Misha opened the lower drawer of the desk, and there it was. When Masha expressed her surprise, he barked a harsh laugh.
“He wasn’t in town to deliver any manuscript. He was running around with Potapenko. I saw them at the Hermitage. Now that the scandal’s died down, it’s safe for everyone to show their faces again.”
Masha tried not to let the little brother see how much the lie stung. Why hadn’t Antosha simply left? Or told the truth? Probably because she disapproved so much of Ignati. She was only mildly interested in Misha’s gossip.
“Which scandal now? The papers are full of them.”
He perched himself on the edge of the desk and looked down at her with an odd expression—a pitying one. “The papers wouldn’t touch this one, sister. They wouldn’t get past the censor. You don’t know? Lika didn’t tell you?”
Told her what? Lika wasn’t giving Masha the full story of what was going on in Paris. But Masha, who had copied out so
many lines, was practised at reading between them. A young woman, abandoned by her bored lover, falling into “poor health.” It didn’t take much to imagine the plot. Every train station book-rack carried numerous versions of it, both titillating and cautionary.
Misha went on. “I’m talking about the scandal in the Hotel Louvre and Hotel Madrid. Once the little girls were evicted, everyone scattered, Ignati to Paris, followed by Lika. Antosha to Yalta—”
Masha looked up. “He went for his cough.”
“—Isaac to Europe.”
The mention of Isaac brought heat to her face. Once she’d cooled, something else sank in. The little girls. They’d been talking about Antosha’s Sakhalin Island manuscript, so she naturally thought of the child prostitutes. And then she thought of Lika, similarly handled. She settled the pen in the stand next to the postal scale and stared at it, unable to speak.
“Lidia Iavorskaya and Topsy-Turvy Tania,” Misha said, and instantly she was subsumed in relief. Not actual children, then.
Misha was such a gossip. Here he sat, the little brother whom she’d bossed her whole life, ears sticking out, wearing a superior expression behind his pince-nez. Anything literary thrilled him, because, Masha liked to think, he had no talent. The truth was he did—he published his stories regularly—but compared to Antosha, he was a nonentity. How dispiriting would that be? She felt a swell of sympathy for him.
And then he spoiled it. “Oh, sister. It was ooh-la-la.”
Masha wouldn’t countenance lewdness. “Leave.”
But he wouldn’t, not until he’d finished his malignant talk. It was the parties he wanted to tell her about. “Those two were hostesses.”
Lidia and Tania. Masha pictured them walking away from Isaac on Tverskaya Street, Lidia with a crimson ostrich roosting on her head. Tania the bright little woman she’d mistaken for Lidia’s daughter from a distance.
“Were you even invited to these parties?”
“I was. Topsy-Turvy invited me. Lika introduced us. I met Isaac there. He was a regular, but only if Antosha didn’t show. Will those two ever make up?”
Lidia, he said, had been living in the Hotel Louvre, Tania in the shabbier Hotel Madrid. Tania was an actress too, but also a writer. The two hotels were connected through a corridor that everyone had dubbed the Pyrenees.
Tania was the one who had spilled the beans about “The Grasshopper.” Masha remembered now.
“Do you know why they call her Topsy-Turvy?” He made a gesture, like he had upended a glass. “Inverted. A devotee of Sappho, if you follow me. Dancing and refreshments in the Louvre and various other entertainments available in the Madrid. Everyone welcome. Anyone could join in. Do you follow? The continual stream of merrymakers crossing the Pyrenees finally tipped off the management. Anyway, the little girls ran off to Naples and apparently caused some scandal there.”
He seemed to want to stun her, and he’d succeeded completely. On the ledger before her, the numbers she’d been trying to add made no sense.
Then he softened, as though he regretted his own salaciousness. “Actually, Tania’s nice. I think Lidia’s the debauched one. And poor Lika. She really got in over her head. The night I went there, she ended up crying on my shoulder about how she’d botched everything. Potapenko’s the worst sort of man. She should have picked me. Why didn’t she?”
“I suppose you went too,” Masha said.
“Through the Pyrenees?” A hand on his chest, an incredulous face. “Me? Sister, I’m no explorer. Besides, I only heard about it after the fact.” He frowned. “I just want to meet a nice girl and get married. Don’t tell the big brother that.”
SO RISIBLY INNOCENT WAS MASHA, EVEN HER OWN dreams mocked her. At the Dairy School her pupils, her little girls, vanished. She had to go looking for them. She climbed the stairs, opened the door on a smoke-filled room. A man fell flat on his back. There can never be too much vodka, only not enough. And dancing, naturally. Dancing and blindly running their hands over each other’s faces and bodies. Double the fun. In the middle of it all, the most beautiful bird flapped its wings and croaked. It was Lika.
Someone leaned close to ask why she wasn’t singing.
“I don’t know the words,” Masha said, tearful and confused.
She woke remembering how she’d smelled and tasted a woman on Isaac. But was it Lidia and Tania both? All the while, she’d been falling straight into the storm. Thank God she hadn’t gone back to see him.
But why did Antosha lie about delivering his manuscript? What other lies had he told? And how was she supposed to pretend that she didn’t know these things when he came home?
As it turned out, she had time to practise keeping her face straight. Antosha went for an extended stay with Alexei Suvorin. Was it the scandal that kept him away, or her? Meanwhile, Lika’s letters to him continued. The ones to Masha were a quarter as thick.
Exciting news! I’m going to Switzerland after all . . .
Autumn came, and Masha began teaching again, hurrying back and forth to Melikhovo to help with the harvest. Every weekend Father asked why she hadn’t brought Lika with her.
“We haven’t seen her for so long, God bless her.”
“She’s still abroad, Father. She’s studying to be a singer.”
Masha, too, could lie.
A FLUSH TOILET WAS INSTALLED AT MELIKHOVO IN early October, while Antosha was still away. Father refused to try it. There was something indulgent, and therefore sinful, in easing the discomforts of life; only by embracing suffering could they comprehend Christ’s. Mother was more willing, but confessed she found it repulsive to move her bowels under the same roof where she ate. After four days, she was reaching for Hunyadi Janos’s promised relief. Mariushka had been persuaded to pull the chain on the cistern, but the violent swirl of the water made her scream.
Finally, Antosha came home. Brom and Quin rushed to the vestibule where he was stepping out of his muddy galoshes. They cavorted around him, reciting Shakespearean sonnets. Antosha headed straight for the water closet, set down his suitcase and peered in at the new apparatus. With a smile and a nod to Masha in the hall, he stepped inside and closed the door.
The dogs sniffed the hotel labels on his suitcase, then settled dotingly in front of the door, heads cocked, waiting for their oft-absent master to re-emerge. Watching this lesson in devotion, Masha felt heavy not just in her heart but in her thickening body. The stolid weight of herself. She perspired more. A veil of sweetish odour covered her, similar to Antosha’s cloying exhalations. The sweetness of rotting things.
Then an elephant sounded off in the lavatory. Quin let out a surprised bark like a higher-pitched fart. This was something they hadn’t considered before the installation—the presence of a listening audience, private moments given a porcelain echo. How would Antosha adjust, this man who cherished his privacy to the point of secrecy?
She was still thinking of the parties in the Louvre and Madrid and his unimaginable participation. How he’d been the one to take Lika there.
Yes, there had been many improvements at Melikhovo of late, largely due to Antosha’s increase in income. While away, he’d written to tell her how to spend it. The money was thanks to Ignati acting as his agent. Apparently Ignati’s own exigencies made him an expert at squeezing out of publishers what was owed. Masha supposed she should be grateful, particularly for the toilet, but she couldn’t be when her comfort had its source in such a reprehensible cad.
Meanwhile, Lika’s letters to Masha were so giddily cheerful that Masha knew she must be feeling the inverse.
The mountain air makes you drunk. It’s better than champagne. You should see the pretty brown cows with their necklaces of bells . . .
Masha pictured the cows clattering into the Dairy School courtyard, bulky with bovine destiny. Herself watching from the window with her unfortunate friend’s head resting on her shoulder. Seven months after her flight from Moscow, Lika had left the swelter of Paris to spend the summer in Switzerland. The
math was elementary.
Take pity on me.
5
MASHA’S UPSETTING ENCOUNTER WITH ALEKSANDER the previous Easter happened the night Masha and Mother had tried to teach his boys to play whist. Either too young or too stupid, they couldn’t follow the rules at all. The elder taunted the younger, who commenced wailing. This brought Aleksander flying into the room to knock their heads together, literally, and send them off to bed.
Mother, upset by his behaviour and, no doubt, the memories it stirred, retired herself, leaving Masha alone with the ogre.
Like Antosha and Misha, Aleksander’s eyes were weak, but he favoured spectacles of tinted glass over a pince-nez. His long beard and shorn head exaggerated the length of his face. Though he could be jolly, his vileness while drinking overshadowed all his better moods. Masha tried never to rile him, but that night his rough behaviour disgusted her too much.
“You’re a harsh father,” she told him, collecting up the abandoned cards to lay out a game of Patience. “I would have thought you’d have a gentler touch with your own children.”
“And you know about raising children?”
“I’m a teacher.”
He brought the bottle and two glasses over to the table.
“No, thank you,” Masha said.
“Go on.” He took a seat across from her. “Don’t be such a bitch. Have a drink.”
She should have left the room too, but then ill conduct would triumph, so she stayed, keeping her eyes fixed on the cards.
He filled the glasses. “Why don’t you have children?”
A Russian Sister Page 28