Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  Jane looked at her watch. It was well after eleven. If Billy was asleep, she didn’t want to wake him. “I’ll call him in the morning,” she said.

  But in the morning, everyone overslept. Jane was awakened shortly after seven by the baby crying. She must have been on a different floor because the sound was faint and thin, but nonetheless Jane was immediately awake, the covers thrown back and her feet on the floor before she realized where she was, and that the baby could not possibly be her baby. Then came footsteps and Helen’s voice in the hall rousing Michael and Abby. “It’s late, hurry up!” she said. “You’ll be late for school!”

  Breakfast was a rushed chaos of toaster waffles and orange juice. Jane drank coffee and tried to make herself useful fetching syrup and clearing plates. Helen, in an old blue kimono and slippers, looked tired and kept apologizing.

  “It’s not usually this bad,” she said. “I guess I forgot to set my alarm, but normally Leonora’s up at six anyway!”

  “It’s fine,” Jane said. “You should see us at our house.”

  “Helen!” Paul called. “Where are my brown shoes?”

  “Mommy,” Michael said. “You didn’t sign my math test.”

  “Jane,” Helen said, “if you’re ready by eight, Paul can drop you at the train.”

  * * *

  The day before, Jane had been so impatient to start working that she’d barely glanced around the reading room. Andy Quinn, a Slavics guy from Minnesota whom she knew from occasional conferences, had said hello, but Jane had greeted him distractedly, and he’d let her get back to work. This morning, however, she looked around while she waited for the desk assistant to bring her requests. It was early. Andy wasn’t there nor anyone else she recognized. As she looked at the handful of bent heads, the twiddling pencils, the glowing laptop screens, a sudden wave of happiness unfurled inside her. It rolled across the room, a warm current, and she thought that she’d rather be here, in this reading room, which hummed soundlessly with diligence and discovery, than anywhere else in the world.

  By lunchtime Jane had reached October 1873, when Karkov had gone to Moscow to see about the printing of a new edition of his first novel, The Lime Trees. On October 10 Masha wrote:

  I hope he will do some things while he is there besides merely attending to business. He is so gloomy, it sets the entire household on edge. Even Auntie Anna Borisovna, half-blind, sweet-tempered, and indulgent as she is—the ribbons on her cap always bright, like spring flowers—mentioned that she thought the change would do him good. “Grisha seems rather grumpy,” she said with a kindly smile one afternoon after he had been to see her. Harsh words, indeed, from that old lady!

  Jane went back and read the entry again. What had stopped her was only a little thing, but still it sent her scrambling for her Russian-language copy of Dmitri Arkadyevich. Half-blind, sweet-tempered, and indulgent, the ribbons on her cap always bright, like spring flowers . . . All around her at the long tables, her fellow scholars turned pages with care, made notes, coughed, shifted in their chairs. What were they finding? What were they hoping to find? Would their disciplines be revolutionized by the work they did here? Would their own careers—their own lives—be changed? Did what happened in this room touch the world in any way? As Helen’s doctor husband touched it, by saving people or by failing to save them; as Billy hoped to with his law degree; as Karkov had with his novels.

  Anna Borisovna was Karkov’s great-aunt, and she had lived at Dve Reckhi all her life. She had never married, and she never, apparently, bothered anybody. Masha almost never mentioned her. It seemed she never did anything worth mentioning, except at Christmas when she played carols on the piano. Jane thumbed through Dmitri Arkadyevich until she came to the passage about the death of Nastasia, Mitya’s mother-in-law, a kindly old lady who never thought ill of anyone, least of all her cold-hearted daughter Olga, Mitya’s wife. Nastasia had come to her daughter for a long visit that spring and stayed on into the summer. Karkov wrote:

  Nobody minded, her mild presence upset nobody, except perhaps Olga Petrovna, who seemed to prefer not to be reminded of the past—of the fact that she had once been a tender, defenseless child, or that she was the daughter of such an ineffectual mother. She would have preferred to deny her bond to the sweet-tempered, indulgent old woman whose cap ribbons were always bright, like spring flowers.

  Was it an obvious trope, ribbons like spring flowers on an old lady’s cap? Was it a Russian cliché that Jane was for some reason unfamiliar with? No, no, it couldn’t be. Holding her breath, Jane lifted the book snake and gently turned the page. She put the weight down again, trying to remain calm, to be skeptical, but her heart began to beat fast as she read (just as she’d known she was going to) that Anna Borisovna, like Nastasia, soon suffered a bad fall.

  October 19

  Some days she is lucid. Other days her mind wanders and she addresses herself to people who aren’t there. Or at least, we with our feet firmly planted in this world do not see them. It is possible, I suppose, that they exist simultaneously with us but invisibly, their voices whispers of breath against our ears that we take for a breeze, or the reverberation of a door shutting.

  October 21

  Today Anna Borisovna was lucid for several hours in the morning and asked to be moved to the little room at the top of the staircase. We protested. Wouldn’t she miss her view of the orchard! And it is drafty up there in the attics, no matter how well the windows are chinked. But she was determined. She smiled her sweet, humble smile and told me she didn’t want to die in this big, sunny room that we would want to use for other purposes. She didn’t want her death to taint it for us. And so we moved her—Ivan Stepanov on one side, Grisha on the other. We carried up her icons and made her as comfortable as we could.

  In chapter 36 of Dmitri Arkadyevich, Grigory Karkov had written of Nastasia:

  On the last day of July they moved her, at her request, to the little room at the top of the staircase.

  “Please,” Mitya had begged. “Won’t you miss your view of the orchards? The plum trees are such a deep purple, and you can watch the children chasing the birds away. Besides, it’s drafty up in the attics!”

  “No, Dmitri Ivanov,” the old woman said, smiling faintly, her face seeming as smooth and unlined as a child’s in the early morning light. She did not want the shadow of death to hang over the cheerful room, which they would want to use later for other purposes, and for once in her quiet life she was quite insistent.

  They carried her icons up and made her as comfortable as they could.

  Jane’s eyes moved from the printed page to Masha’s diary and back again. She felt as though she’d broken through the surface of the world and found another world, shadowy and haunting, waiting underneath. Carefully, so as not to break the spell, she turned to the next entry and read Masha’s thoughts on Anna Borisovna’s death.

  October 27

  Anna Borisovna died last night, peacefully, in her sleep. We all miss her—her warmth and calmness, her kindness, her quiet, lovely blue eyes. She asked for so little and left such a little mark on the world! No children or household of her own. She leaves behind nothing but our love for her, and our memories—which for the children will begin to fade before very long.

  Often I have envied her peaceable nature, but now that she is gone it seems a terrible thing to have left the world with so little mark upon it. Is it not perhaps better to storm and rage like Grisha, and yet to leave such a legacy as he will leave? Works of genius that will never be forgotten. Of course, it is more difficult when you are a woman.

  Still, even the lark bequeaths us her song.

  Chapter Nine

  AROUND NOON Jane was startled by the touch of a finger on her shoulder. She looked up to see Joyce Winterson, the grande dame of Russian folk literature. In her stretch pants and bright blue beads, with the warm smile she always had for you whether she remembered who you were or not, she looked more like an eccentric grandmother than the publishing dynamo
and star Stanford professor she was.

  “So good to see you again, dear,” she said to Jane. “I thought it was you when I came in, but I didn’t want to disturb you. You had that absorbed look. I hate being interrupted, don’t you? And yet the only way to avoid it, I find, is to work in the middle of the night. No one ever calls between one and four! Well, except my daughter Julie, but she’s living in New Zealand and she can’t keep track of the time difference.”

  “I can’t work in the middle of the night,” Jane said. “I wish I could.”

  Joyce smiled. “You’re still young,” she said. “You have plenty of time to develop insomnia.”

  Joyce was having lunch with Andy Quinn, who must have come into the reading room, too, while Jane was engrossed in the diaries. Joyce invited Jane to join them. “You can’t do good work on an empty stomach,” she said, patting her own plump middle. “I tell my internist, each of these extra pounds is a Slavic Review article!”

  “Thank you,” Jane said. “I’d like to.”

  The sun was out and the banked snow was melting, dark trickles spreading across the sidewalks. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it, and the air was stirred, damp, suffused with the smell of earth. Joyce strode along, leading the way. Her leather coat flapped in the wind, and her gray hair was wild, her bright red lipstick unevenly applied.

  It was warm in the dingy Polish diner with its scalloped paper place mats and metal napkin dispensers, its heavy chairs with patched vinyl seats—something of a relic in this neighborhood of sushi bars and high-end coffee shops. Steam fogged the glass doors.

  “The pierogi melt in your mouth,” Joyce said. “And I dream about the potato pancakes!” She slung her big lumpy purse over the back of her chair, flung off her coat, and lit a cigarette. “Jan!” she exclaimed as the waiter approached. “How’s your wife? She must have had that baby by now! What was it, another boy? Send her my regards. I’ll have the golabki, please, to start with. Andy? Jane? Stuffed cabbage for everyone?”

  The waiter beamed, poured water, brought an ashtray, disappeared. Andy blew his nose into a rumpled handkerchief and produced pictures of his children.

  “Thomas is the older one. He’s four,” Andy said. “Ben is twenty-two months.” He passed around a snapshot of the two boys posing with Santa Claus.

  “How sweet they are!” Joyce said. “They change so fast at that age. A new milestone every hour, practically!”

  “My daughter’s just between them,” said Jane, who hadn’t thought to bring along a photograph. “She’s two and a half.”

  “You could betroth them,” Joyce suggested. “Not that it would matter, of course. I tried so hard to convince Victor, my oldest, to marry my neighbor’s daughter. A beautiful girl—and wouldn’t you know it, she became a radiologist! My daughter-in-law the doctor, it might have been, but he wouldn’t even ask her out. I was young then and still thought I could influence them, but of course you can’t. Still, I kept trying, with Lily and Julie. By the time Luke came along, I had finally given up. Beaten into submission!”

  “How many children do you have?” Jane asked.

  “Just the four.” Joyce took a long drag on her cigarette.

  “My god!” Jane said. “How did you manage it?” She looked at Joyce, whose work she had always admired, with a new respect. Four children!

  “God only knows,” Joyce said, flapping her hand to disperse the cigarette smoke that gathered around her head, remarkably similar in color and texture to her hair. “Harold was out of the country half the time, consulting about communications systems. Well, I had a live-in nanny for a while. And I always only cooked once a week. Soup or chili. Sometimes meat loaf. When that was gone, we lived on cereal and peanut butter until it was Saturday again. The kids were all very self-sufficient. They learned to put themselves to bed because I would get involved in something and forget, and they always wrote their own homework excuse notes. They had my signature down pat. When I think about it now, it horrifies me! But they all grew up, one way or another. Though I notice none of them is jumping right into having children of their own.”

  The food arrived.

  “People are having children later these days,” Andy said as Jan, the waiter, set down the plates of watery, pale green cabbage studded with gray bits of meat. “My wife and I were both thirty-eight when Thomas was born.”

  “It’s not that.” Joyce shook a flurry of salt over her plate. “They’re absolutely petrified of parenthood!” She dug into the food as though she hadn’t eaten for days. “What are you working on, Jane?” she asked through a mouthful of cabbage.

  Jane did her best to describe her research without mentioning either the concurrences or her questions about Masha’s death. Just the fact that she was looking at the diaries as texts of interest in their own right was enough to raise the bushy eyebrows of Andy Quinn. “Karkova was very interested in folk figures,” Jane said, knowing this would interest Joyce. “She wrote about the peasants’ beliefs. About Baba Yaga, and snakes sucking the rain from the sky.”

  “A common but intriguing idea,” Joyce said, running a piece of bread around her plate. “Very ancient. It probably goes back to the Neolithic Eye Goddess, the rain spinner, whom we sometimes see represented as a snake. Also as a frog or a butterfly—anything that transforms itself. Parthenogenetic. The goddess-as-snake can give rain or withhold it, just as she can give fertility or withhold it.” She stuffed the piece of bread in her mouth, wiped sauce from her chin.

  “Funny you should mention the rain,” Andy said. “I’ve just been rereading that wonderful tale of Karkov’s, ‘The Little Rain Cloud.’ That’s the one where the boy finds the snake in the dried-up streambed, but instead of killing it he befriends it, and the snake brings the rain that saves the harvest.”

  Jane put down her fork. “I’d forgotten that story!” she said. “What I remember is the one where Baba’s snake-dragon servants kidnap a youth on the night before he’s going to marry a maiden.”

  “That’s right,” Andy said. “And the maiden has to rescue him from Baba Yaga’s hut before she eats him.”

  “Baba Yaga’s always threatening to eat everybody,” Jane said. “But she seldom seems to actually get around to it.”

  “Still, the skulls on her fence presumably came from somewhere,” Joyce said.

  “Living skulls, with fire for eyes,” Jane said.

  “Poor Baba Yaga!” Joyce said. “Always hungry! Always bony-legged, no matter how much she eats.”

  “She certainly eats a lot,” Andy said. “Enough for three men, enough for ten men. There’s always something in her oven.”

  “Yaga the destroyer!” Joyce went on. “Queen of the Underworld with her iron teeth and iron breasts—fingers floating in her soup!”

  “And yet,” Jane objected, “she’s also the beneficent mother. She gives horses, and guidance. She presides over the birth of children.”

  “Yes, sometimes,” Joyce conceded, running a hand through her hair with a sigh and lighting another cigarette. “But I always think she’s happier as the carnivorous crone. Nurturing can be so exhausting! Besides, she gets to fly through the night in her mortar, sweeping away her tracks with a broom. Who wouldn’t want to do that?” Her eyes fell to her empty plate, and she looked around for Jan. Smoke seeped delicately from her nostrils.

  “In one journal entry,” Jane said, “Maria Petrovna talks about snakes eating their young to protect them, and how humans might want to do that, sometimes.”

  “I always thought Maria Petrovna had a ruthless streak,” Joyce said. “Don’t you find that, Jane?”

  Jane shook her head. “No. She’s strong, certainly. She protects her children and she runs the household and so on. But I think of her as essentially nurturing. Deeply maternal.” She thought of Masha regally sweeping through the big house with her head held high. But was that the right image? What about Masha sitting tensely at the long dining table while Grigory’s endless visitors made sycophantic remarks? Or
lying awake at 2:00 A.M. wondering if Grisha was going to come home that night? What about Masha and Karkov in bed, conceiving one of their many children? No, no—her imagination balked at that.

  Joyce ran her finger around her plate. “That’s the image she creates on the page,” she said. “But think about Olga Petrovna.”

  “That’s fiction!” Jane objected. “Karkov’s fiction. And, besides, Karkova never expected an audience for her diaries.”

  “Every writer imagines an audience,” Joyce said. “Even if it’s only an audience of one.”

  It was midafternoon by the time Jane and Andy got back to the Newberry. Joyce had left them after lunch, saying she had some shopping to do.

  “She always does that,” Andy said as they hurried back up Walton Street. “An hour in the archive and she’s done. Wait and see, she’ll get three articles out of the work she did this morning!” He shook his head admiringly.

  “Maybe she uses magic,” Jane suggested. She thought of Joyce laboring away in the dead of night, as the magic doll in the Russian folktale had weeded Baba Yaga’s garden and picked the dirt out of the witch’s wheat under the light of the moon.

  * * *

  That afternoon—or what remained of it—Jane noted two more particularly striking entries about snakes for inclusion in her “animals” folder.

  June 28

  The peasant is no friend to the snake. He fears and loathes the sturdy viper in whatever vestments, whether the rusty-red of the earth, the dull brown color of the muddy river, or the cold, clear black of a moonless sky. Considerably smaller than her harmless cousin the grass snake, the viper is marked by a zigzag trail running down her back like a ribbon of black lace. Along each side she bears a series of roundish spots, as though some child had marked her up and down with sooty fingerprints. And on her head is stamped the form of a small, shadowy heart.