Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  It wasn’t until her second year of graduate school that Jane had discovered Karkova’s diaries, which had been published only in a slim, highly abridged edition and never translated into English. Slowly she saw how Karkov had taken Masha—the facts of her childhood and her physical person, her joys and terrors, even the stutter that sometimes plagued her in society—and twisted them, showing everything in its worst light, to create the character of Olga in Dmitri Arkadyevich, the only one of his novels critics ever compared to Tolstoy. At the same time, he took the best of himself for Mitya—poor Mitya, who married Olga Petrovna, the beautiful woman who tormented him with her sly stupidity, with her jealous fits and her hypochondria!

  When Masha read Dmitri Arkadyevich (she had been his copyist for the first three novels, but this book had been transcribed by a bright peasant boy from the estate), she wrote in her diary:

  Well, I have read it. At first I wept for myself and for what people will think. And indeed they will consider it true, or mostly true. But what is odd is that as I read I was so drawn into the story that I ceased to care that this was how Grisha saw me, or that he would expose us to the world in this manner. He is a cat burglar for art, sneaking around in the dark. He would steal anything for his work—words, secrets—whatever he could get his hands on. He is like a sponge, soaking up the nectar and blood of life and wringing it out on the pages of his novels.

  I do not mean that to sound so cold and terrible. Despite everything, I admire him. There is no question he is a great genius.

  It was when she read this that Jane’s heart began to harden toward Grigory Karkov and open toward his wife.

  The light from the television flickered as the basketball game went into overtime and the baby slept and the steam rushed into the radiators, and Jane’s thoughts gathered like a great wave.

  “Billy,” she said. “I’m never going to finish if we don’t get someone to help with Maisie!”

  The words seemed to hang in the air, visible, spelled out in neon. It was as close as she could get to saying what she felt: that she would die if she couldn’t finish her thesis, and that not finishing seemed increasingly likely. Even as each day saw her work pushed along a little further, the amount not done seemed to yawn wider still, until she felt she was teetering on the edge of a precipice of mental dullness and misjudgment, of things undone.

  Maybe it was just the lack of sleep.

  Billy nodded. “I was thinking about that, too,” he said.

  And just like that, Jane’s heart lifted. The canyon at her feet shrank to a muddy ditch. His words unlocked her, made her feel again that he knew her, that they were traveling through life together on the same tidy ship, standing at the rail and seeing the same view: hills and valleys and shadowy, unknown forests.

  “It’ll be good for Maisie,” Billy said. “To have someone else besides just us in her life.”

  Of course it would! Jane thought. Why did she assume that what was good for her would be bad for her daughter? What kind of oppositional nonsense was that? The warmth she felt for Billy was liquid, pervasive: very much, in its physicality, like her love for the baby.

  She sat down next to them on the couch and leaned over to press her nose into Maisie’s head, feeling the steady thrumming pulse, breathing in the clean astringency of soap and the ripe peach smell that seemed to be the essence of her. She stretched out on the sofa, thinking how lovely it would be to work without one ear always cocked—to dive deep down into the ocean of Masha’s world like the swimmer she was. No more of this wading, this dog-paddling she’d been doing. She thought how much she loved Billy, and how far she had come from the house on Euclid Avenue where her parents had their own spheres (his the third-floor study with its view of the backyard and the tops of the Berkeley Hills, hers the kitchen, the living room, the cluttered front porch). She was ready to embark on the adventure of her own existence as soon as she could get a little more sleep.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN MAISIE was almost two, they moved to the Mid-west. Jane landed a job at the University of Wisconsin, and Billy was accepted to the law school there. Jane was going to replace Otto Sigelman, the man who had almost single-handedly rescued Karkov from a waning reputation. Not that Karkov had ever exactly had a place in the pantheon. His novels sold briskly in their time, and they were well regarded, but he was never considered to be in the same category as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev—or even Goncharov.

  That began to change in 1963 when Sigelman published Second to None, his brash, brilliant, aggressively argued study of Karkov’s work. Over the next ten years, Sigelman was everywhere, giving papers on Karkov from Boston to Paris and Istanbul and retranslating, as well, the two best-known novels, which appeared in shiny new editions fronted by his incisive and entertaining introductions. Sigelman was a bigger-than-life figure, a Hungarian-Jewish émigré who had made his way to America by sea, stowing away at the age of sixteen (so the story went) on a rat-infested cargo ship ferrying a load of shoes to the stinking port of Wilmington, Delaware. He had worked his way up into New Jersey as a janitor, a newspaper hawker, a dishwasher, and a busboy, attending school at night until he got a scholarship to Rutgers University. Eventually, amazingly—through native brilliance and enormous effort—he found his way to graduate school at Columbia. There, working with Leon Novitz, he achieved the nirvana of a Ph.D. Once arrived he made his mark: he shone. He charmed everyone with his accent, his erudition, his smiling arrogance, his searing commentaries and luminous translations. His life seemed a metaphor for the times, for postwar America. It had been an early student of his—probably also his lover—who had edited the diaries of Maria Petrovna after they came to light in the hands of Karkova’s great-granddaughter Galina Pisareva, who had escaped from the Soviet Union with her parents as a child.

  When Jane got the phone call about the job, she went to see Shombauer in her office with its creaking oak floors and silver-framed certificates and shelves of books and bowls of fresh flowers. As she came in she noticed that the head of a freesia had fallen onto the carpet, but she stepped carefully over it, leaving it where it lay. Shombauer liked everything to be in order—every footnote, every reference, every flower. There was nothing to be gained by pointing out a flaw.

  “Good for you, Jane!” Shombauer said when Jane told her the news. “I’m so pleased.” And she looked pleased: pleased for Jane, and pleased with herself for having a protégée who’d landed such a good position. “Wisconsin, eh? I thought Otto Sigelman would never retire!”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting him,” Jane said. “I decided to study Russian after I read his translation of Dmitri Arkadyevich. Not that he’ll probably be around much.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be poking his nose into things,” Shombauer said. “You’re young and bright. He’ll take an interest. It could be useful for you, too, as he still has a lot of influence. Just don’t talk to him about your so-called literary interest in Maria Petrovna.”

  “Why not?” Jane said, more impatiently than she meant to. The first thing she planned to do after she got out from under Shombauer’s supervision was to write a paper on Karkova. “It’s because of him that the diaries are in print at all.”

  “But only as ornament,” Shombauer said firmly, raising her voice to make sure Jane remembered who was who here. “Only to burnish Karkov’s reputation. Otto was always sorry there were no riveting literary memoirs about Karkov of the sort, for example, that Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote about Osip. This was the best he could manage.”

  “I think Karkova’s journals might stand up to Nadezhda,” Jane said boldly.

  Shombauer frowned. “That’s exactly the sort of thing you shouldn’t say to Sigelman,” she said. “I remember some years ago at a conference in Stockholm, that woman Danielson gave a paper about Sofya Andreyevna’s journals, talking about them the way you proposed to write about Maria Petrovna’s.”

  Jane said nothing, though in her opinion Sofya Andreyevna—Tolstoy’s
wife—was hardly much of a stylist. She certainly wasn’t in Masha’s league.

  “I remember at the bar afterward,” Shombauer went on, her silver rings glittering, the heavy pearls she wore at her ears dragging down the pendulous flesh. “Otto was ridiculing the paper and Danielson and especially the diaries. ‘Worthy only to keep company with shit!’ I believe he said.”

  Jane must have looked shocked, because Shombauer smiled.

  “He always had a memorable way of speaking,” she remarked. “And he’s destroyed more careers than—” Shombauer cut herself off, but Jane wondered if she had been going to say “than I have.”

  * * *

  Rather than live in campus housing, Jane and Billy flew out to Madison over the summer and bought a house: brown shingles with a wide, weedy front lawn. Marigolds and zinnias were planted along the weathered rail fence, and the front yards all along the street were crowded with flowers and tricycles. Neither the houses themselves nor the lots they sat on were large, but Jane felt almost as if she were moving to the country. The whole city with its lakes and wide views of the sky and its smells of algae and grass had an expansive feeling about it after the ancient brick and dirty streets of New England, the way the buildings there crowded in on each other like jungle plants jostling for light.

  Their first night actually living in the house, after the moving truck left and Maisie was asleep, Jane and Billy sat on the back steps looking out over the little yard: dandelions, a scraggly rosebush, a small pear tree with a few hard pears on it, an overgrown hedge of blackberry brambles and jewelweed separating them from the neighbors on either side. It was a beautiful late summer evening. The sky towered over them, a pale luminous blue shot through with gold. Somewhere a marching band was practicing. Jane, sitting a step below Billy, leaned back against his legs and said, “There’s a passage in Maria Petrovna about walking through a meadow where she talks about a great calmness descending. She says, ‘Derev’ia shevelili list’iami . . . The trees shook their leaves like young goats shaking the buds of their new horns—and the river surged over the rocks—and I felt that I myself was a river, with life surging through me.’ And then something about seeing her role in the scheme of life: ‘mother to my children, mistress of my household, and, above all, child of God!’”

  “Is that how you feel?” Billy asked. “Like a child of God?”

  Jane laughed. “I feel something. Filled with a great calmness, the way she says. Like this is a good place.”

  Billy picked a pebble off the steps and tossed it across the yard. It hit the arborvitae at the back of the property and disappeared. “Everything you feel,” he said, “did Maria Petrovna feel it first?”

  She turned and looked at him. He was smiling.

  “I hope not!” she said.

  “I hope not, too,” Billy said.

  She took his hand in both of hers. “For instance, I love you more than she ever loved Grigory.”

  “That’s not a terribly high standard,” Billy said. “He was an asshole.”

  “People love assholes,” Jane said lightly. She kissed his hand, his long fingers, his bony knuckles. She didn’t want to argue, especially not on their first night. She wanted them to be happy. She moved up to the step he was sitting on and kissed him, and he kissed her back. The sky had faded rapidly from blue to purplish gray and was moving on quickly to charcoal as though to help veil the million distractions—boxes to unpack, floors to sweep, neighbors to meet and lectures to prepare and textbooks to buy—that might make their minds wander just when they ought to be thinking of nothing but each other. Since Maisie was born, they no longer made love the way they once had, working up through all the rainbow shades of touch. Instead, sex had become a white blaze: intense, rushed, the entire scope of their sensual relationship compressed into a taut kinetic coil. Jane pulled Billy down from the stoop onto the dark lawn, pulled him on top of her, saw with pleasure that a few stars had pricked through the blackness over his head. The wind moved in the trees in their yard and the yards around them. The grass beneath her was prickly after the long dry summer, but Jane didn’t care. It was theirs: their grass, their pear tree, their pink, scraggly rose.

  * * *

  One of the most exciting things for Jane about her new job was how close it brought her to Chicago, the city where so many Karkov papers were housed. One of Grigory and Masha’s sons had fallen in love with the daughter of an American diplomat and followed her back across the ocean in 1899, all the way to the Midwest, and he had arranged for many of Karkov’s drafts, notes, and letters to be housed in a special collection of the Newberry Library. It was a scandal at the time, taking it all out of Russia. Later, in the sixties, Galina Pisareva—descended from the Karkovs’ daughter, Katya—had donated Masha’s diaries as well, so that the writings of the two progenitors were now once again housed under the same roof. Jane hoped to get down to the Newberry before too long. Funded by a grant, she had done a lot of research there the spring before Maisie had been born, and she’d taken other, shorter trips both before and after. The later visits were mostly for fact and reference checking, but she had looked a bit, when she’d been there most recently, into the idea that Masha might have taken her own life. She hadn’t found anything definitive in the diaries, no death fantasies or glaring symptoms of depression. There were a few passages that were suggestive, but nothing you could be sure about. For example, in reference to Grisha’s infidelity:

  I thought I had ceased caring about it long ago. I thought I had come to understand him—even to accept him—with all his faults and mortal failings, that after all this time I finally felt free to be myself without reference to him: apart from him. That his foul actions in no way diminished me.

  And yet now the cycle is starting over again—the awful spiral that starts on an ordinary summer afternoon and ends in Hell. Grisha disappears after dinner. I catch a glimpse of him from an upstairs window strutting down the road in the direction of the fields with his gun, and somehow I know where he is going. I tell myself it may not be so, that he may return for supper with a brace of snipe slung over his shoulder. But at supper his place remains empty, as I knew it would.

  “Where is Papa?” the children clamor.

  “Out shooting,” I tell them. “He won’t be back until very late.”

  And he is not. The zala clock strikes twelve, it strikes two. The moon comes up. I cannot sleep. Soon, the sun, too, rises.

  And now, at last, as though ushered in on the first golden rays, he comes. I hear the door. I hear his stealthy footsteps stealing up the stairs. I get up from the bed, pull my dressing gown around myself and open my bedroom door just as he is creeping past, as quietly as he can.

  For a moment, seeing me, he freezes like a fox in the hen-house caught in torchlight. His black eyes glow and there is straw all over his clothes and in his hair. A smell rises from him as though he had swum hard in a salty sea.

  And then he laughs! Ha-ha—he cannot help himself! He is giddy with hilarity—abashed, but deeply pleased with himself. He revels in everything, even in my catching him.

  For what, after all, can I do? Nothing! He knows this. I know this. I am bound to him as a martyr is bound to the stake, while he is free as a hawk.

  Or this brief fragment, written shortly after Nikolai’s birth:

  When I was a young woman, it seemed to me that I could shape my own destiny, but now it seems that destiny has overtaken me. Sometimes I struggle against it like a hare caught in a trap. Sometimes I feel like two women—two souls—struggling together in one body, and I wonder which of them is going to triumph in the end, the one that finds peace in the great blue sky God shows us; or the other one.

  Still, there were hundreds of pages of the diaries nobody, as far as Jane knew, had yet read carefully. She had broached the subject of suicide with Shombauer, who had asked, reasonably enough but very sharply, “And your evidence is what?” She had e-mailed the biographer, Delholland, who had e-mailed back, “Although it’s
true that death certificates from Kovo from that era have been largely destroyed, I am confident that Maria Petrovna died in a manner relating to her well-advanced pregnancy,” a reply that did not inspire as much confidence as Jane might have wished, but that was, nonetheless, hard to argue with. She had put the idea away then, feeling she had pursued it as much as she could for the time being. Finishing her dissertation to Shombauer’s satisfaction turned out to be more work than she had anticipated, and even with babysitting (they could only afford part-time), Maisie slowed her down more than she liked to admit.

  Now, however, as an assistant professor faced with the task of turning the dissertation into a book, she allowed her mind to play over the possibility again. If she could prove that Masha had died as the Snake Woman had—if a letter existed, for instance, that hinted at it; if unpublished parts of the diary not yet scrutinized by Jane painted a clear picture of depression—that could be enough to write at least a speculative chapter. Coupled with the argument that Karkov was unlikely to break his pattern of basing his female protagonists on his wife, such a theory, if argued convincingly, could significantly boost her chances of publication.

  For the first few weeks of the semester, though, it was all Jane could do to keep her head above water, lecturing, consulting with teaching assistants and undergraduates, going to meetings. She tried to get to know her busy colleagues: the chair, John Lewin, with his thin, harried face and walrus mustache; Carmen Bilinsky, who had a joint appointment in Slavics and religion; Franklin Donovan, the white-bearded, Birkenstock-wearing Sovietologist; and the others. She had a pleasant office with a view of the lake and more bookshelf space than she could at the moment begin to fill. She had never had her own office before, a place to work where nobody could come in without knocking; a heavy wooden door she could lock and pretend not to be there the way Otto Sigelman did in the office next door. Even though he was emeritus, he seemed to come into the office most days of the week. Jane could hear him moving around sometimes, hear his mini-blinds rattling open or shut, and then someone out in the hall would knock and he would be very quiet until they went away.