“Ow!”
Nose scratched, hair pulled. Yet when Lika brought her refilled glass, Masha heard herself say, “Please. Let me hold her for just a minute.”
She might never be a mother. Or, then again, she might. Who could tell the future? Tania had decisive views on the issue: never. Marriage: never. “Why, when you can have a lover instead?” Apparently there was an effective means now to avoid becoming a mother by your lover. It cost thirty-five kopeks at the pharmacy and resembled sausage casing.
Tania lived to scandalize, but such good she’d done everyone. Masha was painting in earnest, and when she was ready, she’d apply for the College of Art. Tania had also orchestrated Antosha and Isaac’s reconciliation, dragging Isaac out to Melikhovo, where the two men embraced on the porch, then passed a happy weekend never mentioning their three-year quarrel. Antosha said that Tania was writing stories now and they were very good, which meant they were, for he was about as generous with literary praise as he was with apologies.
Masha bounced Christina and let her twist her nose again. Such a sweet, impish face. Oh, my darling baby.
Then Granny came into the room to collect Christina for her nap. Lika picked her up and gobbled at her neck.
“No one will ever touch you. No one will ever hurt you,” she whispered before handing her off.
NOW IN THE HOTEL ANGLETERRE, LIKA STOOD BEHIND Antosha’s chair, so he could lean into her as he confessed his dread. Every time he coughed, which he did continuously, the back of his head bumped against her body.
Lika stroked his hair. “This is why I couldn’t do it. Go on stage, I mean. The nerves!” She made her funny flapping gesture, mocking herself now.
Antosha used the chair to push himself to his feet. “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”
After he left, Masha repeated the warning she’d given Lika weeks before. “Ignati will be there.” Lika hadn’t heard from him since Christina’s birth.
She shrugged. “Masha, don’t blame him. I don’t. I thank him. I have my little girl.”
Then Antosha came back, but it was only to bid them farewell. “Ladies, I’m going to get my hair cut before the execution. I’ll see you at the theatre. If not, I’ll meet you back here.”
“You’re sitting with us, aren’t you?” Masha asked.
“I have a seat.” He smiled, then covered it to cough.
So it would be like The Wood Demon, when he never showed up in their box.
The image Masha would carry into the theatre that night was of the discovery she had made after Antosha parted from them. In the hotel lavatory wastebasket, a half-dozen folded squares of paper with scarlet roses bleeding through. Blood to accompany the execution.
HE’D BEEN RIGHT ABOUT HOW IT WOULD GO.
The lights dimmed until the only illumination came from candles guiding the stragglers to their seats. Of these there were many. People continued conversing in the aisles, making no move at all to sit. Yet before the audience had fully settled, the velvet layers of curtain opened, revealing a second makeshift stage and a painted backdrop of a lake. From the first moment there was a sense of prematurity, of starting too soon. No one was remotely ready for what they were about to watch.
Something must have been going on backstage. Those actually watching grew restless, causing an infectious murmur of discontent to spread along the rows. Finally, a man and woman bolted onto the stage and, in uncertain tones, began.
He: “Why do you always wear black?”
She: “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.”
Shock shoved Masha back in her seat. It never really left, not until the curtain came down at the end, though foremost in her mind were those tidy paper squares folded around his roses.
Life as it was. Long conversations filled with non-sequiturs that seemed pointless until the pattern emerged—a comically long chain of unrequited passion. An audience fed on slapstick and farce couldn’t stomach irony. There was hissing. People rose from their seats and left.
Their outrage only grew from act to act. It was as though the actors were in stocks, there to be pelted with jeers and insults. For one of Nina’s entrances, a pair of arms emerged from behind the curtain to shove her onto the stage. Greasepaint couldn’t conceal that she’d been crying, real emotion while the others delivered their lines by rote, as though they couldn’t fathom the meaning of what they themselves were saying. All the while Masha watched her namesake fumble through feelings she’d thought were secrets. Was that worse than what Lika endured—the stilted re-enactment of her mistakes, her life described as ruined, a wounded girl flapping around the stage? Her life heckled. Lika stiffened again and again, but said nothing.
It ended, thank God, before a full-blown riot ensued. Masha couldn’t bring herself to look at Lika. She gazed on the wreckage below—crumpled programs, cigarette stubs, smoke hanging over everything. Even then, the players and playwright crushed, snatches of vitriol reached them. “The fall of talent,” someone shouted at the empty stage.
Antosha wasn’t coming. Masha summoned the nerve to face Lika, now weeping quietly beside her.
I love him. I love him even more than before. A subject for a short story.
“Let’s go,” Lika murmured.
Outside in the cold, stars nailed down the sky. They drove to the hotel. Masha hoped that Antosha would be there. She couldn’t be angry with him. Not yet. He’d been punished enough for now.
They checked the lobby. No Antosha, and no message at the desk.
Back in her room, Lika went to change and wash her face, while Masha stood at the window, even more agitated at the thought of Antosha wandering and coughing in the cold. Lika came back and lay on the bed like a figure on a tomb, swollen eyes closed, hands clasped on her chest. How hurt she must be. Nina, Lika. He had barely bothered to change her name. The ineffectual way he disguised Isaac came to mind. Blue eyes, blond hair. At least in Masha’s case, should anyone think it was her mooning for the young writer Trepilov, she was protected by Maria, the most common name, Masha its common diminutive. But no one would mistake her because there was no outward resemblance except a sharp, sharp tongue. Which didn’t move now. What to say?
Lika spoke first, just as Masha thought she must have fallen asleep. “How I miss my Christi. I can’t bear to be away from her. Why do I go away? Granny’s there, of course, but when I come back, we fight. We both want her for ourselves.”
Why had she come? Masha had warned her, but about the wrong thing. Ignati had never showed. Or perhaps he’d hidden behind a pillar.
“I hated that Irina.”
The aging actress in the play, she meant. Trepilov’s mother, lover of the famous writer Trigorin, who seduces Nina.
Lika put on a mocking voice. “‘Am I really so old and ugly? If you leave me for a single hour, I shall never survive it . . .’”
It was from the scene where Irina realizes that Trigorin has his sights on Nina. She wants to leave at once, to keep them apart. She fawns over him to get her way, my wonderful magnificent man, my master . . . you’re the best of all the modern writers, the only hope of Russia . . . But before they leave, Trigorin sets up a rendezvous with Nina in Moscow.
“Irina knew he’d take up with Nina anyway. She was just asking not to hear about it. At least Nina loved him back. I hated him. Mother showed me off, made me play. I hated them all.”
She opened her eyes and looked at Masha. Five-kopek pieces with tarnished edges, filled with tears. She was the most incomparably beautiful creature. Spectacular. It was why Masha had brought her home, why Antosha had fallen in love with her. Or so she’d thought.
Of course Antosha knew what had happened to her. He must have sensed it at once. The broken child in each of them pushing and pulling, then finally clasping hands.
“Poor Nina.” Lika stared at the ceiling now. “How wonderful the play was, Masha. Wonderful and sad. Oh, your brother’s a bastard. I’ll tell him so myself. But poor, poor, Nina. I thought my heart woul
d break. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost my Christi.”
Nina’s baby dies. Christina was alive. He’d actually learned something from “The Grasshopper”—how to use another’s life and yet make her feel lucky for it.
It was past midnight by then. Antosha wasn’t coming. The only place he could be, aside from the icy bottom of the river, was at Alexei Suvorin’s. Masha came and kissed Lika.
“Good night, dear friend,” Lika said. “Thank you for everything.”
THE SERVANTS MUST HAVE GONE TO BED, FOR ALEXEI opened the door to her himself, alarming with his white beard and black Satanic brows.
Smiling as though nothing was the matter, he said, “He turned up a half hour ago, but won’t see anyone. Except, perhaps, you.”
Alexei led her through the chandeliered entry hall, down the rose-carpeted corridor. Paintings flashed past her eye. She could hear the birds rustling in their gilt prison on the landing.
He knocked on Antosha’s door but didn’t wait for a reply. From the darkness, Antosha spoke.
“I beg you, don’t turn on the light.”
Aleksei did. Masha squinted. Electric lights were so cruel. There was Antosha lying with his face to the wall, the blanket over his head for good measure.
“Your sister’s here.”
Masha went to him and bent over his shrouded form. “Where have you been, brother?”
He answered from under the blanket. “Walking the streets. Sitting on benches. I’ve decided. If I live another seven hundred years instead of seven? I won’t write another play.”
“Congratulations,” Masha said.
“Nonsense,” Alexei said. “It was the acting. Awful sets too. A few tweaks and it will be perfect. I made some notes.”
Antosha coughed for a spell, then his hand emerged and felt around blindly for Masha’s. She made it available; he squeezed hard.
“You’re not angry?” he asked.
“No.”
“I can’t bear it when you’re angry with me.”
She was sure of it then. All those secrets her namesake had spilled? Her yearnings for love? They weren’t mockery or betrayal. He understood and loved her most.
“Go to bed, sister. I’m taking the early train tomorrow. When you come to Melikhovo, bring Lika with you.”
LIKA CAME AND STAYED THREE DAYS, HELPING TO NURSE the wounded playwright through what he claimed was “influenza.” Whether she gave him the promised dose of her anger, Masha didn’t ask. She doubted it. It would hardly have affected him anyway once the news arrived: The second flight of The Seagull had been met with rapturous applause.
Masha and Lika returned to Moscow together, Masha to work and Lika to Christina.
Three weeks later, Christina was turning two. Lika invited Masha to celebrate. A party of four: Christina, Lika, Granny, Masha. Masha brought a honey cake from Melikhovo, a book with twenty sweet chapters stuck together with icing. She didn’t tell Mother who it was for.
But on the day of the party, a note came saying that Christina was unwell. The doctor says her chest is full of phlegm. She’s wheezing terribly. We’ll postpone.
Then no word for four days, so Masha went around to the Arbat flat. Strangely, the stairwell smelled more strongly of incense than of cat. She found the door ajar.
The priest had just left, Granny told her, sitting all alone in the cold parlour in her crow garb. There was no expression in her voice, just the unadorned words.
“Poor Lika. What an angel she has lost.”
First came that familiar twice-lived feeling when she recognized scenes she’d read or even copied out. Usually an urgency would gather around these moments no matter how quotidian and fill her with the sense that her life did have meaning. That it was real, or at least worth noting. Sometimes tears sprang to her eyes.
But now her eyes felt as dry as the unlit samovar on the table. As though she’d wept so many tears in the theatre for the imaginary child that there were none left for the real one.
Granny said, as though reciting, “May the Lord console my Lika and lead her toward a good and sensible life. Will you help her?”
“Yes.” Masha gestured down the hall.
“Don’t. She wants to be alone with her.”
The cake was already five days old by then and stale, yet when Masha got back to her room, she didn’t throw it out. A story that would never be read, only seen. She left it on the sideboard and watched as, day by day, the mould crept over it. The bugs came too, from their winter crevices and, at night, mice.
Finally Masha took out her paints.
She cried then, for Lika too, who was left with nothing now. Soon Masha had to set down her brush so she might sob into her hands, the way she had in the theatre. The actress who played Nina had been so good. Bravely fighting back the jeers, she’d captured Lika perfectly, all in white—even her face, streaked with grease paint. Already she was growing famous for this role, for single-handedly keeping the play alive.
Masha saw it then—the mirage. One image of Lika producing another, the second producing a third, endlessly transmitted on stages around the world. The monk had claimed that a great bright future awaited humankind.
She’d asked her brother, “Do you believe that?”
“You have to give people some hope.”
Here it was. Years from now—even a hundred years, Masha was sure—Lika would be there, as radiant as ever, flapping her thin arms.
Author’s Note
THIS NOVEL IS A WORK OF IMAGINATION BASED on fact. Passages from actual letters appear in dialogue. Quoted letters have been paraphrased, rephrased and occasionally redirected to other recipients, and events rearranged or condensed. Much is omitted in the service of the narrative and much imagined, particularly Lika’s backstory. Many details and lines are borrowed from Chekhov’s stories and plays, for which I clasp the author’s warm and generous hand in gratitude.
Thanks are also owed to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Access Copyright Foundation, the BC Arts Council, Bruce Sweeney, Patrick Crean and Jackie Kaiser. I’m grateful to Rimma Garn for applying her Russian sensibility to the manuscript.
Marina Endicott, Shaena Lambert, Kathy Page and Barbara Lambert, without your insight and encouragement, these pages would be empty.
About the Author
CAROLINE ADDERSON is the author of four other novels (A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, The Sky Is Falling and Ellen in Pieces) and two collections of short stories (Bad Imaginings and Pleased to Meet You), as well as many books for young readers. Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The winner of three BC Book Prizes and three CBC Literary Prizes, she was also the recipient of the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement.
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Also by Caroline Adderson
NOVELS
Ellen in Pieces
The Sky Is Falling
Sitting Practice
A History of Forgetting
SHORT STORIES
Pleased to Meet You
Bad Imaginings
Copyright
A Russian Sister
Copyright © 2020 by Caroline Adderson.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published by Patrick Cr
ean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photograph (woman) by Ildiko Neer/ArcAngel
Cover photograph (Moscow) by Viacheslav Lopatin/Shutterstock
EPub Edition AUGUST 2020 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-2683-1
Version 07072020
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-2681-7
FIRST EDITION
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: A Russian sister : a novel / Caroline Adderson.
Names: Adderson, Caroline, 1963- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020022218x | Canadiana (ebook) 2020022221x ISBN 9781443426817 (softcover) | ISBN 9781443426831 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8551.D3267 R87 2020 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
LSC/H 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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