Lady of the Snakes

by Rachel Pastan

  Olen hesitated a moment, then passed her over.

  The baby was warm. Her face tilted up toward Jane’s as she slept. It was a squarish, pink face with dark lashes, very different from Maisie’s, which had been peachy white at this age, large and round. Still, the sensation of holding an infant was intensely, viscerally familiar. It flooded back to Jane so strongly it was almost like a blow, making her want to cry out. Was this really what Maisie had been like—a small perfect bundle with tiny starfish hands? This baby was soft beyond description, utterly other and yet entirely human. What Jane remembered with her conscious mind was something else entirely: tears and kicking, and the stink of old milk, and the different, permeating stink of the diaper pail. Overhead she heard the clomp of Olen’s boots. What would he bring her? What did he have, secreted away up there? She had no idea, but the knowledge that it was nearby, that she would see it, filled her with ripples of warmth. How could she have thought she could give this up—the electric current, the thrill of pieces coming together? How, even for a moment?

  Olen was gone a long time. Jane didn’t hear his footsteps anymore. The sun broke briefly through the clouds and then went away again, leaving the room dim. Jane could feel the air thickening and smell the cool, sharp scent of approaching rain. It was strangely calming, sitting still, holding a baby, as life went on elsewhere.

  At last Olen came back into the room. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand. “This is a sample,” he said.

  Only a sample? “Maybe you should show me the whole thing,” Jane said. “How do you know this was what interested him?”

  “Let’s go slow, shall we?” he said.

  Jane passed him the sleeping baby, taking the papers in exchange. It was an oddly freighted moment, as though she were actually trading one for the other—a baby for some pieces of old paper in Cyrillic script. And then, as she looked down at the top page, a glass shade seemed to fall, shutting out everything else in the world.

  The paper was thin and brittle, yellowed, and the handwriting was hard to read, but Jane could see at once that it was Masha’s. It was not a neat copy but messy, with many crossings out and arrows leading to new sentences scribbled in the margins. The handwriting itself was loose and irregular, nothing like the careful characters Masha formed when copying out Karkov’s manuscripts. The passage written here began in the middle of a sentence, obviously a portion of a longer document.

  early in the morning up into the dry hills. The sun was up. The sun was nearly always up these days, crossing the searing sky in a slow, relentless arc, cloaking itself in misty gray for a short while only in the silent hours. The hills were patchy and scrubby, rocky in one place, covered with a tumbling carpet of white flowers in another. Berry bushes grew in great, prickly swaths, noisy with birds. The birds squabbled and nested, gathering twigs and straw, eating bugs. But it was not the birds she had come for.

  Up and up she climbed, her skirt heavy with dew, her bare feet so calloused they barely felt the rocky trail beneath them. Here was a ridge, and here at last the great dead stump of a tree whose roots still spread across the ground and into it, reaching deep into the cold earth, disturbing it, forming crevices and chambers there in the dark. The low sun was hidden still behind an outcropping of rock, and she sat on the ground and waited for the warmth to reach it. Today was the day, she was almost certain. When the sun reached the clay and the clay warmed, the serpentine messengers of Baba Yaga would writhe and tumble

  When she finished the first page, Jane glanced up at Olen, who was watching her intently while pretending not to. She dropped her eyes again before he could say anything, and she turned the page.

  out of the earthen tomb and, like Lazarus, shed their old dead skins and be reborn.

  On and on it went. It was Lady of the Snakes, there was no question about that, a passage from about two-thirds of the way through the novel when the Snake Woman goes up into the hills and watches the asps emerging from their winter hibernaculum.

  Or rather, it wasn’t Lady of the Snakes exactly, but a version of it, a draft. Jane was pretty sure some phrases were different, and the passage about the birds was new to her. There was no doubt in her mind, however, what she was looking at—Masha’s handwriting, Masha’s descriptions, Masha’s experiences.

  Lady of the Snakes was Masha’s.

  She looked up again at last. The paper fluttered in her lap as a breeze blew through the room, and she held the manuscript carefully in place, her palms against the edges, instinctively touching it as little as possible so the oil of her skin wouldn’t degrade the paper. She tried to read Olen’s expression, but she was too agitated to see or think clearly.

  “There’s more?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “And what did Sigelman say? What did he tell you it was?”

  “He said,” Olen said slowly, “that it was a copy of Lady of the Snakes. Not particularly valuable, but of personal interest to him because everything in Karkov’s hand was interesting to him.”

  Rage flooded Jane. She could feel her eyes bulge with it. Sigelman had found this and meant to hide it—to suppress it—to make sure no one ever got so much as a glimpse of it—least of all Jane! That no one found out that Grigory Karkov had not, in fact, written Lady of the Snakes, but that his wife, a nineteenth-century housewife, had. He wanted to slam the door on Masha, to push her back into the dusty corners of literary history when she belonged, as Jane had always suspected, in the clear bright center limelight. And these faded pieces of paper proved it.

  “It’s not nothing,” Jane said as calmly as she could manage. “In fact, it could be very important.”

  “What is it, then?” he asked, his black eyes fixed on her.

  “It is a manuscript of Lady of the Snakes. It’s a draft—maybe even a first draft, with changes and corrections. What’s interesting about it is that it’s in Maria Karkova’s handwriting, not Grigory’s.”

  “You mean, he dictated and she wrote it down?”

  “No. That’s not what I mean. They never worked like that, and even if they had, he would have made the corrections and emendations himself. What I mean is, she wrote it!” The words sailed across the room, filling it with light. Jane sat up straighter in her chair.

  “But she wasn’t a writer,” Olen said.

  “I think she was.” She knew it was true—knew it absolutely—the knowledge going deeper than the sum of the reasons she’d given him, though as explanations they were good and sufficient. You couldn’t look at the manuscript and not see whose it was.

  Olen stared across the coffee table at the paper in her lap as though the force of his will could make the Cyrillic script give up its secrets.

  “Can I see the rest?” Jane asked.

  He looked back up at her, a new, angry glint in his eye now that he knew for certain that Sigelman had tried to make a fool of him. “Why did he lie about it?” he asked.

  “Because he’s a chauvinist bastard!” Jane cried, no longer able to control herself. “He doesn’t want anyone to know!”

  Olen reached out for the papers, still holding the baby in his other arm. “I’ll have to think about this,” he said.

  Jane forced herself to pass them back, watched him grip them too tightly, crumpling the pages slightly. “Listen,” she said urgently. “Sigelman has been known to steal documents he’s interested in.”

  As though she herself would never do such a thing!

  Olen looked a little calmer now that the papers were back in his possession. “Let him try,” he said.

  Lightning split the sky as Jane drove home toward Madison. Rain washed over the car in gray curtains, pushed aside by her wipers one moment only to fill the windshield again the next. She peered through the torrent of rain at what she could see of the road, black and slick and curving through the cornfields. White headlights coming toward her, red taillights marking the way ahead. The noise of the rain pelting her roof was so loud she could barely think. She kept seeing Sigelman’s
smile in her mind, his bald, spotted head. Masha’s book, she thought. Masha’s book! Masha had wrung the luminous sentences of Lady of the Snakes out of herself, had spoken honestly about the lives of the peasants she had lived among. She had made a mask of her own face, her own searching and losing and finding, and let it speak. Somehow, in the short months between her shameful return to Dve Reckhi and her death, she had found the energy and spirit—found the time—to write it.

  And when she was dead, when her body was safely buried in the graveyard by the birch grove, Karkov had stolen her words and palmed them off as his own. Well, he had done that before, hadn’t he? Jane had already proved that with the concurrences from the diaries. The only difference, this time, was the scale of the theft. What depths would men sink to in order to further their own careers, Jane wondered, speeding home through the silver needles of rain, furious and euphoric.

  By the time she got to Madison, the downpour was over. The storm clouds had drifted away to the east. Jane parked the car on the street and went up the path into the house in the weak sunlight. Inside, the rooms felt warm. Jane went around opening windows, turning on lights. She made herself a sandwich and carried it upstairs to her study, where she got her copy of Lady of the Snakes off the shelf. Then she sat and looked out the window at the thin trunks and drooping branches of the wild chokecherry trees disappearing slowly into the dusk, not eating, not reading. Just holding the book.

  Suddenly, she was so exhausted she could not keep her eyes open. She pushed herself out of the chair and staggered into the bedroom, feeling as though someone had hit her over the head with a hammer. She lay down on the unmade bed and shut her eyes. The only other time she remembered feeling this fiercely tired was when she had been pregnant with Maisie. Even the fatigue of sleep deprivation was not like this, not so sudden and ferocious.

  And then, as this thought drifted aimlessly across her mind, a jolt of adrenaline shot through her, making her open her eyes. Staring at the dusty blades of the ceiling fan, she thought about how strange her appetite had been the last few weeks, and how her breasts had been sore in a way that made her think she was about to menstruate, but how, now that she thought of it, she never had. She thought about her distraction, her depression, her inability to concentrate. She had thought these things were artifacts of what had happened with Billy. She thought about the episode of nausea at Sigelman’s and the other episode early this morning here at home. She tried to remember the last time she and Billy had slept together, and then she did remember. It had been late March, downstairs on the living-room couch. And now it was almost June.

  Chapter Seventeen

  JANE HAD OFFERED to pick Maisie up in the car, but Billy said he would bring her on his bicycle. Jane watched for them from the couch through the front windows—it was a beautiful evening now that the rain had cleared—and at last they came into sight around the corner. Billy was pedaling hard to get up the hill, while inside the orange trailer he towed behind him, Maisie rode in luxury. Jane went out to the porch, her heart seeming to rise and sink at the same time, as if it were a rope in a pulley. Billy parked the bike and helped Maisie out, and they came up the steps hand in hand. He was wearing bright blue cycling pants and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. The muscles of his thighs and biceps were clearly visible, and his hair was plastered with sweat. Jane felt the coldness settling through her as it always did now when she saw him, even though she could see how hard he was working to be the person she wanted him to be. He stood in front of her, awkwardly cordial, his eyes full of hope and despair.

  Jane knelt down to hug Maisie, burying her face in her daughter’s hair as much to avoid having to look at Billy as to feel the warm silky curls against her skin. There was no way of knowing what Maisie understood, but she had to feel the awkwardness. Jane pulled her up onto her hip, startled by how heavy she was. She had to brace herself against the porch railing, shifting her weight to counterbalance Maisie’s. Maisie’s growth was a clock, marking the brutal passage of time. Soon Jane wouldn’t be able to lift her at all.

  “Thanks for bringing her,” she said.

  “It wasn’t a problem.”

  “I would have been happy to come and get her.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  “Well, I would have.”

  Billy turned away and looked out across the street at the familiar view of the brown-shingled Olson house, at the daisies and sweet peas in Mrs. Olson’s yard, the view that had, until so recently, been his. “Nice evening,” he said.

  “Isn’t it,” Jane said.

  “That was some rainstorm, though.”

  She watched him, trying to figure out what she felt. Angry, certainly, and vulnerable. How could things ever get back to the way they had been, even if she wanted them to? Jealousy was like a knife slicing her open. Was he still dreaming of those big, shapely breasts, the full, mobile, skillful-looking mouth? Had the sex been better with Felicia? Jane had watched herself, an hour before, change out of her baggy pants into denim shorts and a tight T-shirt, put the small gold earrings with the green stones in her ears, as though the way she looked might make a difference to anything.

  Now she forced herself to answer his pleasantries with her own.

  “Yes,” she said. “A lot of rain.” She blushed at the banality of this and at the chilliness she heard in her own voice. Maisie squirmed to get down, and Jane set her on her feet. She ran into the house and turned on the television, confident no one was going to stop her.

  “Did you have a good weekend?” Billy asked.

  It was on the tip of Jane’s tongue to tell him she was pregnant, but she didn’t dare to. For one thing, she wasn’t even sure she was. Maybe she was just tired out from the strain, or maybe she was coming down with something. She thought about telling him about Masha, but wasn’t it her preoccupation with her work that had alienated him in the first place?

  “It was all right,” she said. “See you Friday.”

  “I didn’t say good-bye to Maisie.”

  He came into the living room and knelt down to kiss their daughter, who was sitting on the couch with her arms around her knees, her eyes glued to the screen. Her fingernails were dirty and there was a hole in her sock. “Have a good week, okay?” Billy said.

  “Bye,” Maisie said absently. Jane waited for her to grab him or to cry or to insist he take her with him, but she just sat, sucking on her index finger. She had shut down, apparently, which was a reasonable response to the way her world was lurching. Certainly it was easier to handle than hysteria, but Jane found herself wishing that someone here could manage to express an authentic emotion. If they couldn’t be happy, wasn’t it better to be grief-stricken, or furious, rather than frozen into expressionlessness?

  Billy stood up and looked around the room. “The house looks good.”

  Jane made a show of looking around. “Does it?” she said.

  Billy nodded. “You know what I’ve always liked,” he said. He pointed to the plaster archway that opened between the living room and the dining room, and they both stood there for a moment, gazing at it. “It’s so graceful.” He ran his hand through his sweat-stiffened hair and sighed. “If anything happens,” he said, still looking at the archway, “a clogged drain or anything, just give me a call. I can come over and take care of it.”

  Why was he being so nice? It was making Jane crazy. There he stood on the rug in his tight blue cycling clothes like a melancholy superhero, wanting to do good. She longed to say that she could take care of a clogged drain herself, but they both knew she couldn’t.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The late spring light was fading as Billy climbed onto the bike and rode away. Fireflies blinked in the grass, and the house felt empty and still. A new program came on the TV, and Maisie settled in to watch it, and suddenly Jane knew why Billy was acting so nice. He wasn’t trying to make a point, or put her at a disadvantage, or even atone for what he had done. It wasn’t even necessarily because he still lo
ved her. He was being nice because he was nice. He was, despite that one neon exception, a nice person, a decent guy. She thought of Greg Olen and the pleasure he took in annoying his wife. She thought of Otto Sigelman and Grigory Karkov. She thought of her father. She could not deny that she was drawn to men like that—men who weren’t nice at all. Still, she had married Billy. She felt a sudden pride in that, despite everything.

  * * *

  All week Jane waited to hear from Olen, to see what he had decided about giving her access to the rest of Masha’s manuscripts and any other papers he might have. But he didn’t call. He had said he’d never sell his family heritage, but Jane was worried. He had a new baby to support, and a teaching job that sounded like it was only part-time, and there he was, sitting on a pile of gold. What if Sigelman called back and offered him ten thousand dollars or fifty thousand? What if Sigelman staked out the house and waited till no one was home and broke in through a back window? Jane could picture it—the shattered glass, the old man huffing in, black leather gloves on so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. She wouldn’t put it past him.

  She bought a home pregnancy test and it came out positive. She wasn’t surprised, but still her hands shook as she stared at the stick, and when she tried to toss it into the trash, she missed and had to pick it up off the floor and place it in among the dirty tissues and slimy soap wrappers and used threads of dental floss. Even then it seemed to glow unnaturally—peacock blue—and she covered it over with some toilet paper so she wouldn’t have to look at it. What on earth was she going to do?

  She called her doctor, but panicked and put down the phone when the receptionist picked up. She tried calling Olen, but nobody ever answered. She thought about going to see Sigelman, but until she decided about the letters, it seemed better to avoid him. There was too much to think about, too many decisions waving frantic arms, like children competing for attention. It made her want to stay in bed all day with the curtains closed.