This wasn’t a sorry thing to feel. But it was unsettling. Everything new is.
She lay down near her mother’s bed. She could sense the emptiness of Alexei’s and Luka’s mattresses, tied up and stacked on the chest like deadness itself, as if they might never again give off the warm boy smells of her brothers. She felt the drifting sadness of her mother. Natasha Rudina, unmoored, nearly unreachable. She tried to summon the memory of her father, but it was too dark, he wouldn’t come to her.
What she lay at the center of tonight: emptiness. Emptiness all around her.
In the morning, Elena heated up some water for her mother and steeped the flakes of powdery oats in a clay cup. Natasha Rudina stirred and opened her eyes but could not sit up. “Who’s there?” she called.
“It’s me, Mamenka,” said Elena. “Your mere daughter.”
It was as if her mother couldn’t see or hear Elena. “Maxim?” she said.
Maxim was the name of her dead husband. Elena’s father.
“Mama.” Elena let annoyance mask her worry. “Don’t you know where we are in this life?”
“I don’t have long,” her mother managed to say. “Call him here.”
No Maxim. No Luka. No Alexei. Only Elena. “Have some of this oat mash first.” She was brusque of tone, gentle of touch.
A spoon, then another. Some liquid dribbled out. Elena caught it and returned it to the parched lips. After the fourth swallow, Mama’s eyes closed again. She looked as if she were asleep, but she said one thing more, to the ceiling. “My mother gave the doll to me, and now you should have it.”
“Are you talking to me, Mama? To Elena?”
Only silence in return.
There was no tincture or tablet left in the doctor’s apothecary to help Mama now. Elena waited until her mother’s breath was regular — long shallow swoops, like winds too high up in the air to feel, yet still the high clouds pass by.
She stepped outside so she could hear herself be alive. Her breathing was more like gasping. The sun made a white hole in the blue sky, too sharp to look at directly.
Here comes the doctor, along the rutted road. He had managed to get hold of a cane for one hand and a chair for the other, and he was heading for the train platform. The steps would defeat him. But the Tsar appeared, in close-fitting gloves the color of a dove’s breast feathers.
The Tsar lit a cigarette and leaned over the edge of the platform to talk to the doctor. He didn’t descend. Well, he was the Tsar.
Other women and small children stayed their distance, but Elena drew close. After all, she had already met the man.
She listened. Peter Petrovich was confirming that there were no men to help to repair the trestle bridge. “In my younger days, I might have swung an ax to help. But it would more likely have gone into someone’s leg than the trunk of a tree.” The doctor laughed; Elena could hear shame in his joke.
The Tsar: “I’m told there is no parallel branch line to which this train can repair. We can’t locate an alternate route unless we retreat nearly to Moscow. And we haven’t the time. So it seems we must be neighbors until the bridge is fixed.”
“We can’t be as generous as we would wish. The scrappiness of our own circumstances in these hard times, you know. The general insult of rural life.”
“It is a wilding world, is it not,” agreed the Tsar. “C’est la vie. A train journey that ought to take a day or two lasts a week, what with upheavals, strikes, floods, and lines out of service. But don’t concern yourself with us. The train carries its own ovens and supplies, flour and sugar, dried fruit and hothouse flowers, cured meats and salted nuts, wines and cordials and juices of every variety. All we might require is fresh milk and eggs.”
“You, too? That’s all we require ourselves. But milk and eggs are in short supply in Miersk. Had we any, I’d trade them for something in the way of medicine.”
“How sad we have none to spare.”
“Anything? A tonic, even morphia to ease the pain? Not my own, I add.”
“Ah. Désolé. But I am called. I leave you to supervise.” Then, to Elena’s surprise, the Tsar stepped off the platform to where members of the crew were gathering with ropes and axes. “Gentlemen?” he said to them. They began to stride away, presumably toward the troubled bridge.
When they had gone, Elena said, “A magnificent man.”
“Thank you,” said the doctor. “I do try to make an impression.”
“I mean the Tsar, of course.”
The doctor laughed as he scraped and lurched, beginning to retrace his steps. “He’s magnificent, all right,” managed Peter Petrovich. “A magnificent butler.”
“What’s a butler?” she cried.
The doctor paused for breath and called over his shoulder to Elena, “A butler is a servant who opens doors for others. But not for us.”
“But he left you to supervise.”
“I am supervising myself home to my chair and its wife, the little footstool. I decree this to be Supervise Yourself Day.”
So Elena felt sadder, but a little more at the center of her own world. Back to normal. A butler might be a novelty, but he wasn’t a Tsar.
So few are.
She walked around the train from front to back and then to the front again. It was such a brief train, she could circle it in moments. First the sentinel engine with its funnel smokestack and its iron belfry. Then the tender car, for the carrying of fuel. Next, plain as stale brown bread, the utility carriage and rolling bunkhouse, with a row of little windows running high up along each side. A swinging walkway spanned the coupling between the third and fourth carriages.
The last car, the fancy one, was lined up with the station platform. It looked like a toy of the sort Alexei had described from the báryn’s house, but life-size. Elena admired it even more today. Upon its lacquered evergreen paint glowed gold numbers and some words in a golden foreign script. Wooden slats paneled the sides. The polished copper roof was bowed, and a row of scalloped spikes ran along the center.
The silence of this car seemed a decided policy.
A central door, bolstered with iron braces, was flanked by draped windows. Today none showed a hand on the glass, not even a finger.
“Come along,” called Grandmother Onna, out on her morning rounds. “Elena, I have discovered an old bagel from before the Crimean War.”
Elena waved the old woman by. Yes, the girl was hungry. But her hunger was curiosity. She wanted to see if a new door on the edge of her world might open to her. After all, a hand, but for glass, had almost touched hers. After all, the butler who blocked the way had walked off with the crew.
She didn’t have long to wait. At midmorning the door near the center of the magnificent carriage swung halfway open. A figure looked out.
The shadows were too deep for Elena to make out details, but she was pretty sure it was something that she hadn’t seen in some time. A girl her own age.
“Are you going to run away?” asked the girl. “If not, then talk to me quickly, while the others are at their morning devotions, and I am free to disobey them.”
The girl inched partway into the light. A fold of white serge skirt with blue piping. Showing a length of stockinged calf that would have scandalized the grown-ups. The glamorous newcomer: “Why are you the only child who comes to stare?”
“The few other children are infants, or toddlers at their mothers’ aprons.”
“How can that be?”
Elena took a breath. This was her private world, after all. Its sorrows belonged to her, they weren’t to be aired out like merchandise for examination by the Tsar’s family making a tour of the provinces.
She gave a half-answer. “All the older boys in the village, and the men, were rounded up by your Tsar.” Too late, she remembered that the man in the trimmed goatee was a butler, not the Tsar; she hurried on. “Our settlement here, it’s hardly a village. An outcropping of houses to support our báryn’s household and farms, no more than that. But our men
and boys were taken away a few days ago, and no one knows where they’ve gone.”
The girl produced an apple from the shadows and crunched into it. Elena’s stomach turned with greed. The newcomer continued. “What about the village girls?”
“A few years ago, the other girls my age, older and some younger too, went out to pick berries.”
The stranger waited.
Elena continued, “They didn’t ever come back.”
“Lost their way, I guess?”
Elena hurried past the hard part. “They couldn’t. So now there’s only me, only me and some runtlings and babies. My older brother was taken away by the soldiers, who also took the celibate village pig.”
“Celibate?”
“Ah, there was only the one pig.” Grandmother Onna’s joke, meant to distract.
“But what happened to those girls?”
Elena held her ground. “I’ll tell you another time.”
“Who knows if there will be another time? Tell me now. I never get to talk to anyone my own age, and I’m tired of my books.”
“Don’t you have any sisters or brothers?”
The girl didn’t seem to mind that Elena had asked a nervy question herself. “No sisters and no brothers,” she replied, taking another big bite, and another. A chunk of apple skin and flesh fell to the floor of the doorway. Elena felt like a dog, wanting to lunge for it, but she stayed herself, and managed to say, “Is the butler your father?”
“Monsieur d’Amboise? No, no, he’s a servant.”
“Servant? Whose servant?”
“The old witch.” The girl twitched her head, indicating someone else in the carriage with her. “She thinks she’s praying right now, but actually she’s asleep. So I crept forward. How old are you?”
Elena said, “I can’t remember. How old are you?”
“The same age as you,” said the girl. Elena wasn’t sure if the visitor was being saucy or agreeable. “I’m the same size, don’t you think?” the newcomer continued. “So perhaps the same age.”
“I can’t see all of you,” Elena pointed out. “You could be stout as a barrel.”
“Hardly. I watch my fork and I leave most of my dinner on the plate. I must be trim to appeal to admirers.” She sounded disgusted, superior. A little like Luka.
Dinner on a plate. Again, Elena struggled to speak about something other than food. “Do you need to escape the old witch? Do you need someplace to hide?”
“There is no place to hide,” said the girl. “For the preservation of my virtue, I’m watched by any number of beady hawk eyes. The butler among them. Also Miss Bristol, my governess. But Monsieur d’Amboise is out on an emergency mission with the crew, and Miss Bristol has the vapors. So this is my escape from chaperones. This is as far as I can go.” As if to prove it, from inside the carriage a hoarse voice began to cough and carry on in an aggravated moo.
“Ekaterina?” demanded the voice. “Where have you slipped to?”
“Bumblebees and bumbershoots, she’s back among the living,” whispered the girl. Ekaterina. “I must disappear. J’arrive,” she trilled over her shoulder into the carriage. Then she hurled what was left of her apple toward the dead weeds fringing the tracks.
Diving, Elena caught the apple.
The girl called Ekaterina laughed. Elena would give a lot to be able to toss off a laugh of such loftiness.
As she pulled back into the shadows of the carriage doorway, the visitor said, “What would you want with my half-eaten apple?”
“The half you didn’t eat,” panted Elena; that’s who she was.
So that night Elena cut what was left of the apple in four pieces, and she and Grandmother Onna each had a slice. The third was put aside for her mother, who was dozing, or something like dozing. The fourth quarter was set in a cloth for the doctor.
Grandmother Onna: “It is not the season for apples.”
“That train is a magic train,” said Elena. “It has a butler in it, and he serves Baba Yaga. She is riding in the carriage. She has a voice like a crow with the croup.”
“Yesterday the Tsar, today Baba Yaga. Tomorrow the train will house Saint Nicholas. Let me tell you, if Baba Yaga gave you this apple, it’s probably poison. Never eat any magic food, or you must serve the underworld for seven years. Yum, this is good.” Grandmother Onna licked her fingertips.
Then she put on her shawl and pulled it tight. “I need to go see how the doctor is faring. I’ll bring him his portion. Bar the door when I leave, Elena. With strange men in the village, one can’t take any chances.”
“There’s nothing to steal in here,” said Elena.
“You heard me,” said Grandmother Onna. “What men might steal from girls, girls never miss till it’s gone. Do I hear you promise to bar the door?”
“Yes.”
“Till tomorrow, then. Think about what you would like to ask for, since there are no eggs or milk. I’d accept a saddle of beef without a murmur of complaint.” Elena could rarely tell if Grandmother Onna was being amusing or just stewing in the vagueness of old age. She hobbled away into the dark, saying her prayers aloud.
“Old Saint Nicholas, young Saint Mark,
Keep me safe in the pesky dark.
Saint Olga of the High Himalayas,
Send me a set of cashmere pajamas.”
The next morning, Elena loitered in the shadows as the crew assembled with axes, flasks, and coils of rope. The butler carried tiffins of porridge. The smell was substantial and regal. To a hungry child, the aroma of a hot meal can be diverting, can swipe away all conviction. Elena swore she would not shame herself by begging, but she couldn’t be sure she could resist that strategy if need be.
When the men were gone, Elena headed for the platform. Ekaterina waited for her in the doorway. Something unfamiliar organized the girl’s expression. Her very eyelashes seemed combed and contented. Elena didn’t know the word privilege.
Though Elena’s chief interest was food, she didn’t want to appear greedy. “You’re free to come out?” she asked the witch’s girl.
“It’s a morning for hair-washing,” said Ekaterina. “Mine is accomplished. But it’s my great-aunt’s turn. So with Miss Bristol whipping soapsuds in the china basin and Monsieur d’Amboise off playing woodland hero, I am released from French and English grammar for a while. A relief, c’est vrai.”
She stepped forward onto the platform. The sun adored her on all sides. She fanned her hair in the light, drying it further. Longer and somewhat lighter than Elena’s, and full of verve. Corn silk dipped in beeswax. It almost hurt to look at.
“I didn’t know that Baba Yaga ever washed her hair,” said Elena.
“What has that got to do with anything?”
Elena believed that Baba Yaga had rather little hair, so it couldn’t take long to wash. “Isn’t Baba Yaga the old witch you mentioned?”
“Heavens, no — that was just an expression,” said Ekaterina. “I must have been talking about Miss Bristol or my great-aunt. They can both be nasty when they are crossed. Baba Yaga is only a storybook creature.”
Here Elena found herself stuck. It seemed a long time since the tragedy of the village daughters. She was out of practice with talking to girls her own age. She didn’t remember how much disagreement is considered tolerable in talking to a friend. Still, the term friendship didn’t apply here, so she dared insist, “You’re wrong. Baba Yaga is fatally real.”
“She’s a storybook character. I even have a book with her in it.”
“Show me.”
This was a nervy demand. But though she could hardly read, Elena had a hunger to look. After the disaster, the schoolteacher had left for a position in a more populated settlement, taking the village storybook with him.
“Show you?” The rich girl sounded appalled. But apparently she didn’t want to risk losing Elena’s company, for she admitted, “That’s easy enough. It’s in my chamber, which is separate from my great-aunt’s parlor. I can sneak in and g
et it.”
Ekaterina crossed to the open door of the carriage. Such elegance in how she slipped away into the dark. Your own chamber, thought Elena.
When the girl reappeared, she had a book in her hands.
“Come here and see.” She sat on the doorsill of the carriage, patting the floor next to her.
“I mustn’t,” said Elena.
“What’s the harm? There’s no one to mind. You can’t look at a picture from that far away, nor from upside down. I insist.”
She sounds like someone used to getting her own way, thought Elena.
Conscious of the tatters in her shawl and the holes in her stockings, Elena climbed to the station platform but crouched as far from the doorway as she could get. The high-toned girl sighed and came forward. She knelt down opposite Elena so that their knees were almost touching.
“This is a book of Russian legends. I received it as a gift on Saint Nicholas Day.”
Ah, gifts, thought Elena, but leaned forward eagerly.
“We want the story of Vasilissa the Fair.” The girl turned the pages too quickly, passing other pictures that Elena wanted to look at. “This page always frightens me, but look. Here, the only witch on this train. Baba Yaga. Only four inches high. A drawing in a storybook, nothing more.”
“Saint Nicholas is in the prayer books, and he is real,” argued Elena, but she pressed the matter no further. She leaned close.
“I hope you don’t have lice.”
“I do not.” Elena couldn’t afford to act offended if she hoped to be thrown some more uneaten rubbish. A flowery, tallowy scent wafted from the carriage. Soaps and lotions. Also the steam of hot water, which can smell like iron. Beneath that moiled an aroma of wheat porridge and perhaps some fruit stewed with cinnamon.
Her stomach announced itself. She was mortified. That creak of hunger, another kind of thunder.
The girl asked, “How do you know you don’t have lice?”
Elena puzzled to answer in wit rather than anger. “Lice would find little reward in my hair. They hop elsewhere.” She examined the page with greedy eyes. “Baba Yaga wouldn’t be a sensible home for lice, either,” she said, pointing to the balding scalp of the famous old witch.
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