by Janet Fitch
“When I gave you my poem—it was so crude. I regret it, I do…” Apologizing? For carving into my back like a cook scoring a ham? Like a boy gouging his name into a birch tree? Those letters I had to explain every time I removed my clothes, in every bathhouse, at the shore, with every lover. If I ever had another lover. Or saw the shore, or stepped again outside this room.
“After you left, I met a doctor in need of cash,” he said, licking his finger and rubbing it in the leftover powder, tracing his lips with it. “I bought his entire medical bag, quinine to forceps, including a perfect set of German steel scalpels. Straight blades and curved ones, some sharp on the inside and some on the outside. I could take out your gallbladder if I wanted to.” He smiled coyly.
A wave of hot nausea passed over me. I remembered dissecting a cat in biology class, or rather, Mina doing it. The pins, the glistening organs. Saint Agatha.
Olimpia crawled to him, her scored buttocks catching the light, like some big tailless cat. How long would it take to become Olimpia—destroyed mentally and physically, unselfconscious as a chimpanzee, incised intricately as a Byzantine plot? Even if she could escape, how would she live? She’d have to join a circus and display herself next to the lizard boy and the bearded lady. Or become a brothel’s specialty item, for the discerning client. She could run to some savage land, live among the Berbers…
I just prayed they’d had the sense to hide Iskra. That red hair, all of the orphans knew her. Would they know enough to put a cap on? Hide her among the babies of the Infant Ward?
“What are you thinking, Makarova?” The Baron’s fingers fluttered at his lips. “Plot, plot, plot. Remember the night you thought you could get the best of me? Your failed little rebellion. Let me see it.”
Other men might recall a sleigh ride, a certain small hotel. But our romantic reminiscences consisted of attempted escapes and strange sexual encounters deep in the labyrinth, upon heaps of bleaching bones.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He raised a snowy eyebrow. I could feel the collar around my neck. The candles oozed, drowning themselves in wax, guttering out one by one. I turned the palm out to him and held it so the candlelight illuminated the shiny surface of the burn.
“Come closer. My eyes aren’t what they’d once been…”
Said the blue-eyed wolf, “Granny, why are your eyes so big?”
He brushed the scar with his fingertips. My flesh tingled. He kissed the palm. The girl whimpered and tried to pull him away.
“Is the thing jealous? Here.” He took off an amethyst ring and pressed it into her hand. She put it on her forefinger, like a golf ball on a willow twig, and scuttled off to play with it. Over our heads, the crucified hands begged me, Do something! The air was making sparks in the darkness, and the smell of decay and chamber pots lingered under the fatty candles, and a cloying sweetness. The unmistakable smell—why had I not noticed it before?
On the windowsills, he was forcing hyacinths into bloom. Phallic columns rose from the cups. That pure life in this foul lair with the leaking roof and ruined plaster and hacked-up furniture. The flashing splinters of purple light distracted me, and the smell of the blooms—the thousands of humans Shinshen had enchanted, a field of sorrow. And if you walked through it, you could hear their whispers, Alas, alas.
The girl held the ring up to the firelight, her tangled red hair streaming onto her shoulders and down her back.
“So what happened to your men? Borya, Gurin.” Trying to remind him there was a time where he hadn’t decorated his walls with the relics of murdered orphans, when he’d still had some human qualities.
“Gone. Fled, departed. Auf Wiedersehen.” He held up his cross to the three directions.
Had they objected to working alongside children, thinking it beneath them to hang around barracks selling marafet and young girls? Or had they balked at his increasingly bizarre state of mind? Even the most evil of them could have recognized the madness of the object on the wall above his head.
“I prefer besprizorniki. They don’t haggle over percentages, they demand nothing but to serve me.” He watched the girl with the ring. “A sniff of cocaine from time to time and they’re as happy as rats in a wall. What could be better? The perfect operatives.” She burrowed her way under his arm. “People go out of their way not to notice them. Plus, if something happens to them, well…” He shrugged.
“Poor Snotty.”
He chuckled. “Yes, poor little waif.”
Were you listening, Olimpia? Did you understand you were as expendable as that boy? Just because Arkady fucked you and spent hours cutting you, didn’t mean you were any more valuable to him than any of the others.
But she was too busy playing with the big amethyst ring—holding it up to the light, trying it on her fingers, threading it into her hair.
The blood in my dress had crusted over in the heat. Snotty had never had a chance. I would have to account for that someday, among my many crimes. But today, I could be as savage as I needed to be to get back to my redheaded baby.
“Ask me something, Makarova. Something you’re just dying to know.” His arm resting on the girl’s shoulder.
I reached out and poured myself some wine. “Why did you let me go that night at the dacha?”
He pursed his mouth into that ridiculous moue, mocking the naiveté of my question. “To see what it felt like, of course.” He crossed his legs, balancing his worn slipper on the toe of his old sock. “I had already tasted the lord’s vengeance. I wanted to know how his mercy felt. What would it be to let you go, to give up something rare and beautiful. It pained me to see you fly across the frosted fields, disappearing in the moonlight. If you only knew what I gave up for you, my lovely, treacherous Makarova.”
He has not forgotten you.
The child’s hands pleaded with me. No! Don’t walk down that road!
Softly shall you sleep in my arms…
But how many roads were there? He’d narrowed them all. And that child couldn’t know what had transpired in that room on Tauride Street. He didn’t know what I knew about this man. Those weird moments of connection amid the outrages, the bizarre playfulness along with the pain, the sexual intensity along with the domination. Confessions, and not only mine. I saw a crack of light in the darkness.
But then my breasts tingled. And back at Orphanage No. 6, an infant was waking. My milk let down. Within moments, my dress was soaked. My body, wanting only to feed, to nurture, had betrayed me. And Iskra. I quickly sat back, away from the candlelight, hoping he could see only my silhouette. I crossed my arms to staunch the flow. I had to distract him, get him talking. “Did Akim tell you he saw me? On Kamenny Island?”
“Long afterward. That’s exactly what I meant. Men think first of themselves, even the loyal ones. Akim was too quiet. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch. Cassius has a lean and hungry look.”
Akim had salved and bandaged me, tended me like a mother, when this man had carved his poem into me. Yet the Kirgiz hadn’t sympathized with me overmuch. If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. He could have freed me, but never did.
My bodice was drenched in milk. My poor ignorant body—all it knew was that it was time to feed the baby. It didn’t know what danger it put us in. And that girl sitting right where I’d seen him shove my pistol, oblivious at the chance of freedom.
“Why did you come back, Makarova? When you were warned not to return. You knew the price. And yet, here you are.”
I put my chips on noir. “I didn’t want to,” I said. “But it was eighteen months—I thought perhaps you might have forgiven me.” My treacherous Makarova. Yes, Baron, it was my specialty.
“Bored, I imagine. In whatever outpost you’d gone to ground. You’re a passionate woman, you’re like a fire in the snow. You didn’t belong out there in the straw with the hicks. So you took your chances. Knowing what you needed was a consort, a king. A lord.” He recited from the Greek. “Recognize it?”
“Homer?”
“He lifted her up into his golden chariot and bore her away lamenting.”
The abduction of Persephone by the Dark Lord. To be his consort in the Underworld.
Alas, alas.
The girl tried turning his face toward her, the way a child tries to get the mother’s attention, hands on his long gaunt cheeks, but he swatted her away. “Stop it, Olimpia. The grown-ups are talking now.” He poured more wine.
What I wanted was water, but didn’t dare draw any more attention to myself than I had to. I wanted him caught up in his words and to forget to look at me, let him be lost in a dream where we were king and queen, ruling the dark kingdom side by side as jaguars prowled and flowers wept.
“Tell me how you’ve missed me. Tell me about Shinshen. But first, why don’t you get out of that wet dress?”
24 Death and the Maiden
The reflection of candlelight in the black windows drew my desperate gaze. I could break one, climb out, jump. It was only the second floor. I could survive the fall, run home barefoot. The orphans did it, escaping the detsky dom. Find Iskra, and run. I’d have to get out of town, even if it meant on foot. But I hadn’t saved my girl from the Virgin of Death just to give her to the Archangel.
“Take it off. It’s all right. Don’t be shy, it’s just us.”
“I don’t want her watching,” I said, stalling for time.
“Olimpia likes to watch,” he said.
In other words, he liked Olimpia to watch him. I wondered how many women he’d brought here and made her watch him fuck them. Or maybe it was just his orphans. He came to where I sat on the rush-bottomed chair, pressed up behind me, lowered his voice, speaking in my ear. “I smelled it on you when you first came in. La maternité.” He ran his hands over my shoulders, my neck, sniffing me.
I was in danger of vomiting.
The girl hissed, her upper lip drawn back over her teeth. I swear she was growling. She was going to be worse than useless in any plan to escape. She would attack me herself if she could, so jealous was she of her place in this hell.
He unbuttoned my buttons one by one, patient even when they stuck. Tormenting the girl while indulging himself and terrifying me—what could be more delightful? Except to call in all his foot soldiers and let them watch too. “I’ve thought of your body so often in these long months.” His rumbling voice still held its erotic charge. “That scent, your hair. Are your nipples still pale? Are you wet, Makarova?”
He unlaced my camisole, woven by women I actually knew, and pulled it off over my head, freeing my breasts, hot, full, sticky, aching. I’d never missed a feeding before. He groaned. “No, they’re dark. Enormous.” He squeezed one, and the milk spurted out like a statue in an Italian fountain. He leaned over and licked me. “Sweet.” He lowered his face to my breast, and fed where Iskra’s sweet lips took their nourishment. To my shame, it felt good, the full breast releasing. My innocent body, my culpable soul. Feeling a desire, with Iskra in danger. Tears slid down my face, as I stretched my head back, the better to let the milk flow.
How long had he been watching me come and go at Orphanage No. 6? Like Hades watching Persephone picking flowers. Enjoying his power. All those nights I’d felt him there in the dark. I again prayed that Nonna had the sense to cover Iskra’s ginger hair. They could be looking for her right now. Perhaps he wanted a redheaded Holy Family to accompany his bizarre Christ. Don’t. Don’t think. There was no Iskra.
He pulled me to my feet, one arm around my waist—how strong he was, still. I could feel him inside the wool of his cassock, bumping against me as he caressed me. The girl crouched, bleating, trying to get his attention. Staring at me, my body big and earthy compared to her small, scarred self—a woman’s body, heavy boned, full grown, and his hands on me, the tentlike protuberance.
“It’s Shurov’s, isn’t it?” he murmured into my neck. “You wouldn’t have dropped a litter for just any Ivan.”
“No. It’s my husband’s.” He was still obsessed with Kolya. Even now.
“Kuriakin? That oversized baby?” He laughed. “No. I can’t imagine him packing the ammunition. No, it’s Shurov’s. The Circassian cavalier.” He knew that story too, the one I’d told the little girls about Iskra’s father. Maybe he knew when I’d gotten off the train. Maybe he lived in my head.
“So how did it feel? The alien presence inside your body. Sucking your lifeblood like a tumor. And then the birth—all those hands and feet? The enormous head.” He shivered, imagining the sordidness of my delivery. “Descending, tearing your flesh, squalling its way out. Was it terribly, horribly painful?”
“It’s Nature, Arkady. We’re all in her hands. Even you.”
He stopped kissing me, pulled away. The look on his face, one of disgust. As if I’d shat in the wine. “Nature? That giant sow with hairless piglets burrowing in at its bristly teats, squealing and rooting? I despise her. If there’s death, I want to do the killing. If there’s pain, I want to inflict it.” He grimaced, showing his yellow teeth. “Nature, the termite queen. White and blind, enormous, the abdomen extended, eating, living, ejaculating offspring. I won’t be used by that.”
How he loathed what he could not control—the animal self, over which he had no say.
He was now pacing the room, agitated, distracted. I had to keep him talking. Yes, yes, the terrible termite queen…“But Nature uses you with every heartbeat. Your cells divide, living and dying without your permission.”
“I won’t be used by her! My will is my own, my pleasure—my own. Not like you, spawning, gushing fluids.” He stopped at the table to look at his horrible book.
“Our pleasure exists because Nature uses us.” I began to inch toward the couch. “Time moves on, and we can’t do a thing about it.” How fast would I have to be to reach that pistol? Would the girl side with me or with him? Would she cry out, warn him?
“What can we do? There’s the Roman solution, of course.” He turned the page, glanced up, and caught me in a half crouch, moving toward the cushion. The next moment, he was beside me.
Instead of the gun, I picked up the tin of marafet, sat down in the seat he’d abandoned. “I think I’d like to try it after all.”
Makes it easy for them, when they pull your teeth out. They don’t care about anything. That’s what I needed. Not to care about anything but putting a wrench in the inevitable.
“You’ll like it. Everyone does.” He seated himself next to me, took the tin from me and scooped out some of the powder with his nail, depositing it onto the back of his hand, dividing it in two. I lowered my head and sniffed as they had done.
It burned. And a bitter taste descended the back of my throat. Then numbness. I glanced up. So? Was this it? He lifted his hand, indicated I still had more to ingest. I took the other one, which burned even worse, making my eyes water. But suddenly the room brightened. Darkness that had seemed impenetrable now showed me its secrets. It seemed less sordid, and facing this way, I no longer had to look at the terrible Christ. My heart churned, missing beats.
“There, that’s not so bad,” he said. Like a nanny, having given you your castor oil.
But this was more than not bad. I felt my alertness expand, my terror stepped back to give it more room. The air shimmered. My headache vanished, the stab wound, my bruised ribs where the children had kicked me. No wonder the orphans liked this—no wonder. You stepped aside from all the damage to body and spirit. I felt reckless and savage. The room around me illuminated as if lights had been turned on—the fire, reflections off the bookcase doors, the mirror, the jewels.
The girl tugged his arm—she wanted more—but he brushed her off. When she became more insistent, he cuffed her, shoved her. “I’m talking to Makarova now.”
The girl coiled, drawing her knees up to her breasts, keening. Yes, Olimpia, this is your master. This is your lord. I’m taking your place and he’s going to put you out with the cat.
The drug plashed inside my brain like
a snowball crashing against a window. All hail Queen Persephone.
I wondered when they had last slept.
Arkady snaked his long arm around my waist and drew me to him, bending me back in his embrace, biting me, gripping my haunches, licking my hot leaking breasts, and I was amazed how it felt. I wanted him in my own disgusting way. He aroused me. I could see the termite queen, fat and blind and working her monstrous jaws below the earth, expelling her thousands of nymphs, so pale they were transparent. It was a sexual image. I found it grotesquely compelling.
“Tell me how you couldn’t stay away,” he growled in my ear. He was stroking himself under his cassock. “Tell me I’m the only one who was ever enough for you. That’s why you’re here. You don’t have to be embarrassed about it. The others couldn’t satisfy you. Eunuchs, imbeciles, that preening poppet Shurov.” That gravelly voice, urgent—he was talking to me and to himself. He grabbed my hand and wrapped it around his member, that monstrosity, and worked it up and down. I remembered it all, but my fear stood to one side and let this crazy desire well up. “I terrify you, but who else can give you this? Who knows you like I do? I know you’ve missed me. I forgive you. You can’t imagine how many people have waited for my forgiveness in vain. But I give it to you, my bride, my queen.”
The girl on her knees flashed her teeth from behind the forest of her scars like a monkey in a Rousseau painting. Like a William Blake tiger. I was taking her place. Yes, he was mine, Olimpia, he always had been. I had returned to take my seat on the black throne. Maybe I could drive her mad, and she would light the drapes on fire.
“Tell me no one excites you the way I do,” he said. “Tell me what you were doing in Samarkand or Arkhangelsk, waiting for me.”
“I was here the whole time,” I said. “Watching you. I stalked you through the streets—did you sense it was me? I wanted you, but I was afraid, so I watched. You felt me, didn’t you? When you fucked her, you imagined it was me. You never wanted to fuck children. You were waiting for me to return to you. Remember how we’d made love? Like gods. You don’t need this girl. Tell her to go away.”