by Janet Fitch
“You’ve been clever. Brushing your scent away like a little fox.” That rumbling voice I knew so well—low, gravelly, insistent, hypnotic. His hands inside his cloak. “Even when Shurov was here, I kept wondering—where was the girl? Sometimes I wondered if I’d killed you after all.”
Kolya had been here! Or was this just a ploy? You could never be sure with Arkady. Look down, look at nothing, think nothing. I was not here. I was in a different thread of time, where there is no Arkady von Princip.
“Why did you return, Makarova?” he said into my ear. “Had you heard that I was…incapacitated? That I was drooling, being fed kasha with a bib on my chest?”
“It was hardly my choice. Your brats dragged me here, remember?” Choking out the words, my bravery thin as air.
“You’re disappointing me.” He frowned. “Of course it was your choice. You’d hidden yourself away, like a little rabbit in a black velvet bag. And suddenly—out you pop. Walking around, brushing your hair, tucking in the kiddies. Why, if not to be found?”
I met his eyes. All pupil. No longer that piercing, clever gaze, no—a jittering, wild stare.
He reached out and ran his fingers through my disheveled hair. I shuddered at his touch. Sweat pooled in my armpits, the backs of my knees. He liked a room hot enough for orchids. The stab wound in my leg throbbed, the dead boy’s final act.
“But now you’re home.”
Alone with the minotaur, surrounded by bones, I stifled the cry that was exploding upward, it tore in my throat like a sharp-toothed rat.
He poured wine from a ceramic carafe, the liquid almost black as it splashed into the glass. That mocking smile as he held it out to me. “Blood of Christ?”
The relief to smell grape and not the earthy copper of blood as I lifted it to my lips. He’d probably broken into the monastery’s wine cellar. I drained it fast, hoping he wouldn’t see my hand shake. Too fast. A thin stream escaped and trickled down my chin. He took the vessel from me, and wiped my face with his finger. He lifted his own glass and drank. Now he opened a leather-covered book with his scabrous hand, hands that had always been so well kept but were now as mottled as his face, and his nails were long and dirty.
He smoothed the parchment pages. “So many centuries of human thought devoted to devils, revelations, wonders. Look at this.”
It was a book of martyrdoms. Saint Catherine on her wheel. Then, Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive. My nightmare. He stopped at the martyrdom of Saint Agatha, her breasts displayed before her on a tray, like pears in wine. My shivering increased. Would this be my fate? Parted from the breasts with which I’d fed my child? I found myself missing the old Arkady, a man merely running a gang of criminals. Not Gospodar in a cassock and cross.
“You have to appreciate the imagination,” he said, cocking his head to one side, considering the ways in which a human body could be harrowed. “I’m surprised the Cheka didn’t take these when they came for the rugs and the priests.”
He poured himself another glass. What I would have given for just a drink of water. Stop it. I had to listen now, I had to think. Find a way out of this room. I could twist that chain around his neck until his eyes popped out of his head. Knock the candles onto the table, ignite the papers, grab the gun…
He cleared off a spot among the books, the pistol seemingly forgotten. But I knew him. He had not forgotten it. I, who had once tried to cut his throat. And the scar on my palm was a daily reminder of my failure. From inside the breast of his cassock, he produced a squat metal tin, opened the lid. Inside, a powder, very white, like icing sugar.
“Know what this is, Makarova?”
“Cocaine. Marafet,” I said. “Stolen from operating rooms at the front.”
“From both sides. Red, White, it’s all the same.” He scooped up a pile with a long pinkie fingernail, set it on the back of his hand, divided the pile into two, then snuffed them up his long aristocratic nostrils, one, then the other. He tapped out more, held out his hand to me. I thought of our child addicts—whole detskie doma set aside for them. Orphans would do without food, without shelter, just to have this.
But I would not give myself over to him until I had to. He would have to win me inch by inch. I would not make it easy. I turned my head away.
He paused. I knew what he was thinking. Never say no to me.
But then he shrugged. A small victory. “It’s your loss.” He called over his shoulder, “Olimpia?”
A chain scraped against the parquet. My heart jolted upward as if it would leap from my mouth. What was there, a wolf on a chain? A bear?
To my astonishment, from the shadows emerged a naked girl, limbs glowing by reflected firelight, maybe fourteen years old, slight as a deer. Small breasts, pronounced ribs—and her hair was red. Like the other two girls. They all had red hair.
And I had hoped he’d forgotten me.
His eyes met mine over her head as he held out his hand for her. This was in tribute to me. In my honor.
She snuffed up what was offered, straightened, wiped her powdery nostrils. Her dark eyes glittered. And then I saw—she was covered with scars. An intricate web of lines and dots like an engraving on a ten-thousand-ruble note. My wounds were nothing compared to this. It must have taken him months. Did he numb her with cocaine? She kissed his hand—for what? Scarring her like that? Chaining her like a wild animal? For I saw, he had a leather collar on her neck, a chain through the loop. I sweated through my woolen dress, my hair was damp. I could smell my fear, like dirty metal, like the dankness in drains.
The girl pressed into him, half hiding. The Kirghiz had said the Archangel was not himself, but as he watched, seeing I fully appreciated his masterpiece, I knew that in fact he was very much himself. This had been in him all along.
The scarred girl peered out at me, a pale streak behind his black form. Olimpia. It meant something. Who was Olimpia? It itched, like a rash. Poor girl, he’d scarred even her face. She stared out at me through a forest of arabesques like a panther through jungle grass, her eyes dilated with the drug. Her blood-red hair merged with the scars as if to continue the pattern.
“Olimpia doesn’t speak,” he said, stroking her tangled hair. “The perfect confidante.”
Had he cut her? But once I too had been a silent girl after my time with this man. Sometimes words just fail. Sometimes what has happened to you is so terrible, your mind can’t hold it. Her chain told me she’d tried to escape, maybe more than once, before he put that collar on her. He’d never done that to me.
Then I remembered—Olimpia. The mechanical doll in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. You wound her up and she danced. The very symbol of captivity.
“And you’re the Sandman.” I had to resist him as long as I was able, before he did this to me. I had to show I knew him, was not intimidated. I still had a mind, a voice, a self. If only for a few more hours.
He smiled. That wide mouth, like a toad before swiping a fly. “You always were quick, Makarova. I never have to explain myself to you. You don’t know how I’ve missed you, really. You have no idea.”
It was something I could do for him that his children could not. He could talk to Olimpia and the others all he wanted, bathe in their adoration, but none of them could hope to understand him. They couldn’t satisfy his craving to be known. Ask me a question. An Olimpia couldn’t soothe his vanity, appreciate his wit. Not one of them could fathom his loneliness, to which their slavish, absolute devotion ironically sentenced him.
Olimpia whined. Had she seen that she, who had endured so much, was only a facsimile, and I the original, in whose image she’d been created? Yes, she had. And she was jealous. Ridiculous, and yet I could imagine myself after six months with him, chained and tormented, praised and petted, utterly dependent. You could come to something resembling love. Lost between hatred and gratitude, fear and admiration, erotic pleasure and humiliation—anything was possible. He could become the world for you. And what would you have without him?
But
I gave him a taste of another mind at work. I could enter the loneliness of his labyrinth—at least partway. “So how long have you been the Orphan King?”
He ran his hand down her back, her hip—gazing at her with affection, as if it had been someone else who had cut her, chained her, kept her stinking.
“It was a gradual transition. The robbery business had grown out of date. All the rubies in the Peter and Paul Fortress might buy you a tin of marafet. Whereas a side of beef could buy you an army.” He sighed, returning to his hideous book.
“And your men?”
He shrugged. “A man learns one thing, and that’s what he wants to do until the day he falls into the grave.”
Had he killed his gang? I wouldn’t care if he had. All except for the Kirghiz. What had they done for me? Listened and joked while I was locked in that room on Tauride Street. Played cards. I hoped he’d killed them all. “Did they object to your new business? Cocaine, young girls?”
“You like the idea of gunfights and daring daylight robberies. You think drugs and young girls are beneath me. But drugs and young girls are the very staples of civilization.” He turned to the girl, squeezed her shoulder. “This is the rock upon which I will build my church. There’s an endless supply, and you can use what you can’t sell.” He grazed a line from her mouth with a long dirty fingernail. “And children are so loyal. It doesn’t matter what you do. They defend the brute father, the hysterical mother. Tell me, what do children want?”
I thought of my baby, sleeping peacefully in Room III, having no idea Mama was gone, Mama the Archangel’s prisoner, on her way to death or worse. “A family,” I said.
“No, no.” He brought his face close to mine, fire in his mad blue eyes, my small figure there in the reflection of the candles. “They want a lord. Someone into whose power they can give themselves absolutely. And I am the Lord of Lords. If I am on their side, what have they to fear from God or Man?”
He picked up the gun and tucked it into his belt. “Come. I want to hear everything. Tell me where you’ve been, who you’ve been fucking. Bring the wine.” The tin disappeared inside his cassock.
He picked up the candelabra and, impervious to the hot wax dripping over his skin, he carried the flame into the shadows. The gun winked at me in his belt. “You’re thinking again,” he said, not turning. “I advise against it. One step outside this room, my tots will fillet you like a salmon.”
I could already feel this girl’s collar coming around my own neck. He set the candelabra down on a low table. A broad divan swam from the darkness. It spewed stuffing as if from multiple stab wounds. He sat on it and patted the cushion next to him, but I’d shared one too many divans with the Archangel. I knew what it was to serve our Lord. I took a rush-bottomed chair, across from him.
“Oh, don’t be like that.” He pouted. “After all we’ve meant to each other…” He removed my gun from the belt and stuck it behind the cushions. Daring me to try to take it. Olimpia knelt right on top of it. Her arm around his neck. Get the gun, Olimpia! I could smell that divan—it stank of bodies, turned earth, sex, bad dreams. He must sleep there at night. Probably with the girl. Maybe with all of them, piled onto him like sled dogs.
He was humming. Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen. Death and the Maiden. His love song. Softly shall you sleep in my arms…as he poured another glass of black wine. “Give this to your new mistress, Olimpia.” It trembled in her hands. She would rather throw it in my face. “Nicely…You don’t want to displease her. She’s a very dangerous person.” He encouraged her with a nod, as you would coax a bashful three-year-old.
The girl came around and held out the glass, her dark eyes sullen with banked resentment. She stank like a beast. I remembered how lovingly he’d washed me in levkoi soap—my hand still on fire where he’d seared it on the stove. His soaping of my body, my ruined hand, the smell of dooryard stocks…
I drank. The goblet now in my scarred right hand. It was all starting again.
When I lifted my eyes, a sight cut across them, like the lash of a whip.
On the wall over the divan, lifelike in the flickering flames, hung a large icon, a life-sized crucifixion. And affixed to the Christ’s painted arms—the small hands of the orphan. Like purple flowers,with nails through the palms.
Was killing and dismembering of the orphan boy not enough? He had to do this? Yes, to remind his flock just how far he would go. In case anyone forgot. And he lived with it every day, as another man would grow plants on the windowsill.
“You like my painting?” the Antichrist asked. His eyes alight with fun. The Archangel is not himself…But he was. He’d only been restrained before, by the world, by the men he worked with. Now there was no one to stop him.
I was never going to get out of here alive.
He glanced up at the wall above him. “Do you find it too baroque? But Christians are literal, with their relics and stigmata. The body and the blood.”
On the wall alongside it hung a Vladimirskaya Theotokos clutching her child. Was that to be next? A real-life mother and child?
Iskra!
I must not think it. He could read my mind, and he must never know of that redheaded infant waiting for me back at Orphanage No. 6.
“Imagine how it feels to be a city’s nightmare,” he said in a voice that pressed onward, hypnotic, rumbling, drawing you forward. “The power of that. Like this story you’ve been telling. Shinshen—isn’t that his name? Shinshen the Immortal. Not original, but compelling.”
I felt a thousand knives pop open inside my skin, piercing me from the inside out. That cursed story. Why had I even begun to tell it? I had forgotten the power of words. They shaped the world. Naming, they called forth the thing you named. That story was the Ariadne thread that led him out of his labyrinth. He’d followed it through the streets and canals until he’d found me. I’d been telling Arkady a bedtime story every night—a tale starring himself. It had landed me here more surely than the train from Vyatka.
“You’ve only added to my legend.” He stretched his arm along the back of the divan under that horrible Christ, stroking the girl’s hair. “When I heard it, I knew you hadn’t forgotten me. However far you’d fled, Bukhara or Samarkand, you hadn’t been able to stop thinking about me, the Sandman. Shinshen the Immortal.”
And it was true. He lived in my brain, squatting there like a poisonous toad. So careless of me, to have thought he would have forgotten me. When perhaps my hands would become the Vladimirskaya Theotokos’s, and the Child—oh God. The Child…
“Ask me a question, Makarova.”
“Why would you do that?” I spluttered. “Kill that boy. Cut off his hands, and do that with them?” I pointed with my chin. “How can you sit there with that over your head and talk to me as if it’s nothing?”
He stroked Olimpia’s cheek, tracing a whorl from her nostril around her cheekbone. “What good is a lord unless he is terrifying? My children would have been disappointed if I’d simply given him a stern lecture—such as I’m sure your liberal papa would have done with your pathetic brother Sergei. That’s no way to run a kingdom.”
Had the girl seen it? Had she heard the screams? How could she twine herself around him that way, just under the hands of a murdered child, and kiss that repulsive mouth? Though some dark part of myself knew exactly how. Life had trapdoors, and once you fell, the water swirled in the opposite direction. Up was down, down was up. You came to accept the laws of your new universe, its boundaries exactly the shape of your lord. You submitted. I’d been halfway there myself when he’d made the mistake of taking me to the dacha that night. I’d always thought that was the worst night of my life, but it had been a moment of grace.
What a fool, to have come back here. To have thought the nightmare was over. When it was just waiting for me.
I would never be free of him. Not when we both were above ground. One of us had to die. I remembered when Varvara had said she would capture him and kill him for me. And I said I wa
nted to do it myself.
Now I had only Iskra to weep for me. Alas.
The fire crackled and spit into the black gloom. Its flickering light revealing the holes in the ceiling where the plaster had fallen through, the stains on the walls. Arkady’s sordid, tawdry magnificence. Yet he was all the more dangerous for being half lost in a dream. I felt the madness calling, like a guitar string that resonates to the one beside it. Persephone had eaten only six pomegranate seeds in hell, and I had eaten far weirder fruit than that.
The Archangel applied another helping of cocaine to his long nose. The girl came for her share, but he elbowed her aside and offered the next application to me. It gave the soldiers bravery, they said. But I didn’t trust it. I had to keep my wits about me. I would not end up on that chain. Or on that icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos with my child.
“You might as well,” he said, lifting his hand again. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
We’d see about that.
Olimpia whimpered, but he sniffed it himself and put the tin out of her reach on the low table. Sulking, she curled into herself at the far end of the divan, picking at the shredded upholstery arm over which her chain dangled.
“This is all your doing,” he said, wiping his nostrils. “After you, I saw what a bore my life was, squeezing the last ruble out of the city of Petrograd—what kind of a life was that? The luster was gone, the pleasure. You’d left me hungry for poetry. Look at this. Olimpia, show her.”
But she pretended she hadn’t heard him.
Never say no to me. He grabbed her by the chain, fast as a mongoose, swept her out of her seat and down onto her knees. Her eyes glittered tears of humiliation and rage, as she lifted her arm so I could more closely examine the lines, the whorls, and the dots of her flesh.
“Now, tell me that’s not beautiful.”
It was. Fine work done on a living canvas, no less monstrous than the tiny hands of Christ. He would do this and probably fuck her while the blood dried. If this was what he’d done to her, what did he have in store for me? I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I’d rather die all at once.