Which brings me back to this mess of pages. Whether it is any good or not, I have no real idea. I think so—I hope so—but you will know better. And if it is—any good—Grisha, I give it to you. I know how you have struggled the last years, with life and writing, both. I have seen the pain etched on your face and watched as you tried to ease it, not always as others would have liked you to. But even if you haven’t always been a good man, you have certainly been a great writer! I have no doubt your works will outlive us. And although the words have been stopped up in you for some years, I am confident they will flow again as they have before. If my pages can buy you some time and a bit of peace with the greedy world, I give them to you gladly.
I have never had any real ambition. I did not write what I have written with any thought of publication, but only because I could not help myself. It flowed out of my pen like blood from a slashed vein when God knows my attention was needed elsewhere. When the nurse banged on the door and I pretended to be sleeping, or I feigned not to hear the twins fighting or Nikolka wailing in the yard. So I know a little bit what it’s like, Grisha, not to be able to help yourself.
Take this work. Give it your name, as you gave it to me. God knows I would never have written it if I had not learned about words what I have learned from you. In that sense you are its legitimate father—its genuine progenitor.
Masha
Jane sat back on the cold floor, reeling. Masha had seen Grisha clearly for what and who he was, and loved him even as she hated him. She had struggled to live the life she was given as well as she could, and out of that struggle had come the most amazing things: her flight from Dve Reckhi, the Snake Woman, these pages, and this extraordinary gift.
If my pages can buy you some time and a bit of peace with the greedy world, I give them to you gladly.
I know your words will flow again.
But his words hadn’t flowed again, ever. They had died instead, as though her death had stilled them.
It’s as though he needed Maria Petrovna for the novels, Sigelman had said once, he who knew Karkov better than anyone in the world.
I think it will go badly with me. Here was the end of Masha’s life—here were possibly the last words she’d written—and still Jane did not know, not absolutely, how she’d died. Had the child, stillborn, literally torn her apart as she’d feared it would? Or was her fear of a different kind, a fear of the life that would await her after its birth, when she’d once again find herself bound to Dve Reckhi, mother of yet another new baby? Had it been—that prospect—too much to face? Jane imagined the swift-moving Vaza after a rain, the black sky sparkling with stars, the black river noisy with its hurry to get to the sea, Masha’s legs soaked already from the long grass of the hissing meadow—tipping from one darkness into another—taking her child and her words with her.
Was the alternative any better? Masha in her bed with the child stuck inside her unyielding bones, a river of blood soaking the sheets, running in rivulets across the floor. Masha’s face convulsed with pain, trying not to scream because of the living children nearby—or perhaps screaming anyway, beyond caring, or even beyond remembering that she had children. Was this better, death not chosen but blindly assigned by fate while every atom of her being struggled to live?
Jane sat on the cold floor with her face buried in her hands. Impossible to say which was worse—as impossible as to know which way it had happened. But it didn’t matter, not now. Not ultimately. How Masha died changed nothing. What mattered was how she had lived during the thirty-five years she’d had. What she had written, and how she had loved, with what courage and generosity. Jane knew she herself would never be capable of it.
Sounds from upstairs startled her, and she got up off the floor and dug in her purse for a tissue. The envelope she had brought with her was in there, too, and she pulled it out and set it on her lap as she blew her nose.
Olen came back into the room looking marginally less exhausted. “Well?” he said.
“There’s some amazing stuff in here,” Jane said. “Thank you.”
Greg nodded, but he didn’t ask what she had found. She could see it was all he could do to stand in the room.
“I brought you something,” Jane went on. She picked up the envelope and put it down on the coffee table next to Masha’s farewell letter. “The originals are in here, and also translations I did of them for you. I’ll tell you the whole story sometime, but just briefly, there are two letters from Maria Petrovna and one from the Karkovs’ daughter, Katya. I don’t know who they really belong to. But you’re the descendant. So I thought I would give them to you.”
Greg glanced at the envelope. “Where did you get them?” he asked.
“From Sigelman,” Jane said. “Without his permission.”
Olen’s face took on a new expression, as though Jane had suddenly become more interesting.
Jane looked at him: at his gaunt body and his purple-shadowed eyes and the white scalp showing through the buzz-cut hair. How was he going to manage? How was he going to keep things together, raise his daughter all by himself? For him, as for so many, there would be no choice between working and taking care of a child. He would have to do both, struggle through as best he could, and alone. Who was she, then, to feel that working and raising children at the same time was impossible, a mountain too steep to climb? Her heart stirred, her energy seemed to flow back to her, just a little. Who, after all, was to say what was impossible? We were born naked and we learned to sew clothes out of animal skins. We were earthbound and we invented the airplane, the rocket ship!
“I’ll call you,” she said. “About the papers, and to see how Caroline is.” She picked up her purse and slung it over her shoulder. “Only answer the phone sometimes, would you?”
His mouth twitched ambiguously. Jane chose to believe he was trying to smile at her. He was doing what he could.
Chapter Twenty
MAISIE DIDN’T WANT to go to the sibling class recommended by Jane’s obstetrician. “I don’t want a baby sibling,” she said without looking up from her drawing. She sat at her little table under the window, bearing down so hard with her wide-tipped marker that the ink bled through onto the wood.
Jane lowered her swollen body heavily into the chair opposite her daughter. “Well, you’re going to have one, Maisie. This class is going to be a lot of kids just like you, learning about what it’s like to be a big sister.”
“What about brothers?” she asked. “Don’t they have to go? Why can’t I be a brother?”
“Brothers, too,” Jane said. “Big sisters and brothers, I should have said.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because. I was just thinking about you.” She leaned forward to tuck a curl behind Maisie’s ear.
“It’s just one night,” Jane said. “You’ll see the place where the baby will be born, which is a lot like the place you were born.”
“The hospital. I went there with Daddy when I couldn’t breathe. They had French fries there.”
Jane looked at her in surprise, though it wasn’t really so strange Maisie could remember that. “Actually,” she said, “it’s a different hospital.”
Maisie was three now, her vocabulary ballooning. She was taller, “Why?” too, and had better control of her body. She was still stubborn but more able to express her obstinacy in words, so there was less screaming. And she was becoming interesting, argumentative, always looking for holes in what Jane said. This was its own challenge, of course, but one Jane felt better equipped for.
“What are you drawing?” Jane asked, spreading her legs in an attempt to better balance her bulk.
“This is an anaconda. It’s a hundred feet long. It eats crocodiles. What do anacondas eat again, Mom?”
“Waterbirds, I think,” Jane said. “Tapirs. Maybe crocodiles.”
“People,” Maisie said, her marker squeaking across the paper.
“No, not people,” Jane said. “People are too big for anacondas.”
“It’s some kind of piglike thing. But, Maisie, anacondas do not eat babies. Nothing eats babies. Moms and dads and big sisters take good care of them.”
Maisie put her marker down and looked at her mother. “Why?” she said.
* * *
Partly because the job was no longer so new, Jane found teaching easier this year. She had a better idea of what was expected of her, what the students could manage, and how to present her ideas in ways that made sense to them. She was beginning to see that she could challenge them and co-opt them at the same time, meeting them halfway even as she drew them toward her. She was beginning, too, to develop a more balanced, coherent view of Masha. She could see now that she had pitied and championed Masha for too long, creating, out of her own needs and wishes as much as out of the evidence around her, various Mashas of her imagination.
She drove to Iowa every few weeks to visit Olen, play with the baby, and sort carefully through the papers in the Crawford’s Best carton. She read Masha’s diaries again. She made notes for something that was too long for an article but might possibly someday be a book, tentatively titled “Lady of the Snakes: Maria Karkova and the Aesthetics of Attribution.” Her own baby stuck its knee into her stomach, fluttered, turned over. She noticed and did not notice. Soon it would need her full attention: her arms, her voice, her wakefulness. But not yet. For now, shy vampire, it funneled her blood through its body, but otherwise it mostly left her alone.
She was just getting ready to go home from campus one afternoon when she heard someone out in the hall fumbling with the lock on Sigelman’s office door. She hadn’t seen him all semester. He had been ill, or at any rate reclusive, holed up at home, sending Felicia in to fetch books and journals. Jane sat another moment at her desk, assuming it was Felicia in the hall, but after a long minute had passed and the slow rattling of the knob went on and on, she heaved herself up out of her chair and went to see.
Sigelman stood hunched over his doorknob, his key grasped awkwardly in his trembling hand. What little hair remained to him had yellowed over the course of his illness, and his red-veined eyes blinked dully in the general direction of the keyhole.
“Otto?” Jane said. “Do you need a hand?”
He looked up at her and his thin, dry mouth compressed with determination. He fit the key into the lock and turned it. “No thank you,” he said hoarsely. Jane was about to make some neutral remark when he straightened up, forced his lips into a cadaverous grin, and said, “What did you do to get Olen to go back on his word to me? Fuck him? Did you want to defeat a sick old man as badly as that?” He leered at her swollen abdomen.
Jane thought of Felicia’s story about Sigelman from so many months before, the student raising her hand and saying, “I’m not used to that kind of language,” and Sigelman replying, after a torrent of obscenities: There, now you’re used to it! But you could never get used to Otto’s pugnacity. To his meanness. To his conviction that his way was the only way. Well, his way was crumbling now, and there would be no going back. Times changed, the culture changed. The canon changed. Fewer people read Grigory Karkov—Sigelman had said so himself. But Jane would bet that within a few years more people would be reading Maria Karkova than ever had before. If Jane had anything to do with it, they would.
And so she smiled at Otto Sigelman as the baby kicked and kicked again inside her, restless, energetic, alive, eager to get out into the fray. “Did you hear Greg Olen is publishing a novel?” Jane asked.
“Vanity press, no doubt,” Sigelman said.
Jane laughed, suddenly glad to see the venom was still in him.
* * *
At the hospital they admitted Jane right away and took her up to the fourth floor. Everything seemed to happen very quickly. One minute she was taking off her clothes and the next she was crouched in the bathtub, her arms braced against the slippery rim, screaming. Billy held her steady. His shirt was splotched with water and the dark room stank of chlorine and antiseptic. The pain eased and Jane moaned with relief, resting her head on the cold porcelain. “I want the epidural now,” she told Billy.
“I’ll go tell someone.”
But the pain was starting again. She could feel it deep inside her the way you feel the tracks tremble before the freight train roars into sight and flattens you. “Don’t go,” she begged him.
“But I—”
“Don’t go!” You were supposed to breathe into the contraction but she couldn’t breathe. The pain rose up all around her like a wall of fire, cutting her off from air and light.
The nurse was there, a big bosom in a white shirt. “Sshh,” she ordered, holding a finger up to Jane’s face, and Jane was silenced, a child before a stern teacher.
“She wants an epidural,” Billy said.
“She’s doing all right,” the nurse said.
“No, I’m not,” Jane whispered. The room, which had seemed dark a moment before, was suddenly too bright, the awful light ricocheting from wall to wall.
“Where’s the doctor?” Billy asked.
“It’s not time for the doctor yet.”
An argument seemed to start up but Jane couldn’t follow it. She was shivering and she knew if she didn’t stay very still, she would vomit. The pain subsided only to roar up again, breaking over her like a wave in a storm, burying her, smashing her onto the shore, crushing the air from her lungs. She shut her eyes and tried to imagine herself somewhere else—a sunny garden, a forest glade, at home in bed. But there wasn’t anywhere else. There was only here, this room, this cold tub, this awful light that shone straight in through the skin of her eyelids. And the pain. The next thing she knew she was standing dripping on a tile floor, and then she was in bed with a rough cotton blanket across her middle. A lot of people were in the room. “It’s almost time to push,” someone said, and she looked up and saw the doctor standing by her feet. She tried to smile but it came out more like a grimace. “Hi,” she said.
The doctor wore a white hat and a green smock. Translucent rubber gloves sheathed her hands. “You’re doing great,” she said, and Jane felt better, although she knew she had nothing to do with it. She was barely there.
“Are you going to give me the epidural now?” she asked.
“You went too fast for an epidural,” said a voice beside her ear. She turned and was surprised to see Billy’s face. She had forgotten about him.
Only now that the pain was coming again did she realize it had been away, and she braced herself as it took her and wrung her out like the mangle women used to use for laundry. She would have thought she had no breath for screaming, but she was screaming anyway.
“Push!” the doctor said, and she pushed. Something moved inside her, shifting, the way the plates of the earth shifted against each other. The pain reached deeper.
“Again!” a voice commanded, and hands on either side of her held her legs wide.
“More, more! Good work. I can see the head.”
How funny that they called it work. Work was sitting in the library with a pencil in her hand. Work was tapping the computer keys or standing in front of a classroom, talking. Work involved her mind, whirring. It required volition. She pushed. The baby moved through her, slowly, like a rose opening its petals. The pain was a crown of fire between her legs. Her body blazed. She groaned and clenched her teeth and pushed.
“Okay. Now stop,” the doctor said, but she couldn’t stop. Deep inside her something moved, like a bone dislodged from a throat.
* * *
In the spring of 1878, after Vanya was born, Masha Karkova had written:
So many babies I have had now, and each one so different, his own person even from the moment of birth! This one is like a sparrow with his quick, darting eyes and his fragile bones, the sweet, musical sounds he makes lying in his basket in a sunny corner. In moments of despair I have felt each new child like another silken thread, bi
nding up my soul. But on happier days I see each one—not so much as a new beginning, but as a new note in a complex harmony, adding depth and resonance to a tapestry that already exists.
And a few weeks later:
How quickly he grows! The others are all so big and he longs to join them. He stretches his tiny legs, flaps his arms, desperate not to be left behind. Stay, stay, I cry. The others dart through the meadow in the golden light. They can scurry and forage, they do not need me. It is only the little one and me floating together in a milky hum, a warm cocoon. A few months, and then he’ll break free and crawl away. I will be alone then, my soul ringing with emptiness.
On a white, icy January morning shortly after the birth of her son, Thomas Levitsky Shaw, Jane Levitsky sat at her desk thinking of the different moods of motherhood—joyful, oppressive, tedious. Peaceful. Exhausting. Still, she felt good today. She felt awake and alert, full of a powerful, roiling energy. She had been thinking about the biographical introduction she would write for her book, and today, a Saturday morning with Billy and the children downstairs watching television, she sat at the keyboard and began to write.
In the early spring of 1884, a Russian countess rose from her bed in darkness, carefully skirted the maid sleeping on a mat by the door, and stepped silently out into the moonlit hall. It was cold, all the fires burned down. She walked down the corridor past the dimly visible portraits of her husband’s ancestors, posed photographs of her children, gilded icons. Behind the door on the left, her eldest son and daughter slept in a little room with a vaulted ceiling and a view of the river. On the right, in the big nursery, the younger children slept with Marya L’vovna, their nurse. She could hear them breathing in the still night. Someone coughed—probably Konstantin, whose chest was delicate. He often coughed in the damp night air.
All her babies but one. Her sweet Vanya (called Vanyushka) was dead. They had buried him in December 1882, in the bitterest cold of the year.
Lady of the Snakes Page 31