The Lost Souls of Angelkov

by Linda Holeman

  As before, she doesn’t sit but stands, her hands clasped in front of her black taffeta waist as though at any moment she might lift them in prayer. She fixes her gaze on the ornate fringed draperies over the windows, and she stays like this, unmoving but for her eyebrows. He remembers that she requested the orchestra play Separation in F Minor. He can always recall a woman, and a piece of music.

  He’ll have the orchestra play it for her again tonight, and maybe she’ll look at him and recognize him. He wants her to know that he remembers her.

  He leans over and sends the message to the rest of the orchestra that they will play the Glinka nocturne as the final number.

  “Shall we announce the change in program to the audience?” the pianist asks him.

  Valentin shakes his head. He doesn’t care if the audience is displeased. He only cares about getting the attention of the Olonova woman, or whatever her name is now: she would have been married for years. Then again, her black attire suggests that she’s a widow.

  He lifts his bow and waits for the pianist to begin. He watches the woman as the sweet notes of the nocturne build, and when he touches his bow to the strings, she blinks—no, perhaps more of a flinch—then looks straight at him. He feels a surge of pleasure. In the next instant, though, he realizes that it’s as if she doesn’t see him. Her eyes shine, glittering and too bright. He can see the green even from this distance. But there’s no recognition on her face.

  In its place is something close to anguish. The song builds slowly, waves of fine notes, the strings of his violin trembling, tense, and her face reflects the poignancy of the music. And then she is gone. She leaves the salon as the last, lingering notes are played.

  Antonina wants to go home. She realized it was him, although not until the Glinka piece started. But she doesn’t want to speak to anyone; she feels as though she’s coming undone. She rushes out into the wide hallway of the Bakanevs’ palatial home, looking around for … for what? She can’t breathe.

  A servant sees her running by, one hand to her throat, and comes to her aid. He takes her to the cloakroom, although Antonina can’t initially remember what she had worn. When she finally points to the black velvet cape, she asks the servant to summon her barouche. All of this takes an interminable length of time. She goes out onto the veranda, to breathe in the fresh autumn air and cool her burning face.

  Setting his violin in its case, Valentin hurries out of the salon, smiling graciously, trying to sidestep those who wish to shake his hand or thank him for a pleasing performance. He doesn’t really expect to see the Olonova woman; she had been visibly upset, and has probably left by now. He goes to the veranda to smoke a cigarette. Other men are there, smoking and talking quietly.

  And she is there as well.

  “Excuse me,” he says, stepping up to her and bowing. “We’ve met. A number of years ago. Your name day celebration, I believe. Madame …?” He waits for her to introduce herself.

  “Countess Mitlovskiya,” she says, extending her hand. “Yes. I recognized you. I’m sorry—I don’t know your surname. But it’s Valentin Vladimirovitch, isn’t it.”

  He smiles, bright and pleased, as he lifts his lips from her gloved hand. “What a memory,” he says. He’s forgotten about the score he’d given her, inscribed with his name.

  She puts her hand back at her side. “The playing was beautiful. It’s a favourite of mine, Separation in F Minor.”

  “I know,” he says, and Antonina blinks, confused, and fusses with the handle of her small evening bag. Does he remember that night as she does, then?

  “I’m waiting for my barouche,” she says.

  “You live nearby, I assume, if you’re not staying the night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” he says. She is definitely not forthcoming. “Well, perhaps we will see each other again, then, when you call with your husband. I’ll be staying here for the next few months, teaching music to Princess Bakanev’s young nieces.”

  Antonina hears the question in his voice as he says your husband, and runs her hand down the full black taffeta skirt. “We don’t visit much. My husband is ill.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. Oh, here’s my carriage. It was very good to see you again,” she says, as a barouche with gleaming brass lamps, drawn by two fine dancing Arabians, pulls up to the front of the house. “As I’ve said, you play as beautifully as before. No, more beautifully, I’m sure,” she adds. “Goodbye, Mr.…”

  “Kropotkin.”

  “Mr. Kropotkin,” she echoes, and then turns and goes down the steps.

  He leans over the railing, watching as the driver climbs down and puts out his arm. He’s tall, with black, windblown, wavy hair, and dressed informally. The woman puts her hand on his arm as he opens the door and helps her inside the barouche. There’s something odd about the situation: the man acts too familiar to be a footman.

  Valentin turns to one of the guests smoking a cigar nearby. “Excuse me,” he says, “but that woman … Countess Mitlovskiya … do you know her?”

  The man takes the cigar from his mouth, emitting a fragrant stream of smoke from between his lips. “We haven’t seen her out for some time. Her husband is very ill. A brain malady now, I’ve heard. Sad story, the Mitlovskys. Victims of the unrest: the son disappeared in some unresolved crime, and the husband lost his arm. The estate’s in a bad way, apparently.” The man stops, aware that he has said too much to the musician. He blames the many glasses of champagne. “She lives on the next estate,” he says, making it clear the conversation is over. “Angelkov.”

  The next morning, Antonina lies in bed, thinking of the strangeness of seeing Valentin Kropotkin at the Bakanevs’.

  Misha had been playing Glinka’s nocturne the last time she saw him, and although she’s played it many times herself since then, to hear it fully emerge so beautifully from the small orchestra was overwhelming.

  It’s been over twelve years since she saw the violinist making love to her mother. She doesn’t remember the last time she envisioned it—surely many, many years ago. Those fantasies are gone now; in her grief and worry over Misha, her body is more of a burden than anything. It has to stay strong only so that she can run the estate and keep the search for her son alive, somehow.

  After Mikhail was born, Konstantin came to her infrequently, perhaps once every few months. She had wanted another child—children, in fact, after she had experienced the deep joy Mikhail brought—but once he had his son, Konstantin appeared uninterested in that part of their marriage. She had not needed to imagine the violinist’s embrace to withstand her husband’s touch; he didn’t touch her.

  She has known about Tania for a long time. Walking past Konstantin’s bedroom one afternoon a few months after Misha’s birth, she had seen him whispering in the laundress’s ear, his hand possessively on her waist. She immediately found Lilya and asked her if the count bothered her, or any of the other younger female servants. Lilya had firmly told her no. “It’s only Tania, then?” Antonina said, and Lilya nodded.

  Antonina doesn’t care. In fact, she feels sorry for the laundress. She is old, almost Konstantin’s age, her auburn hair threaded with grey and her eyes hooded. Passing the huge laundry room, Antonina has seen her stirring the vats of boiling water and bleach, her face wet with steam and her shoulders rounded. When she occasionally came face to face with Tania as the woman carried a stack of ironed sheets down the hallway, Antonina saw only weariness. How can she blame the woman for what she is forced to do?

  Still, there were times when Antonina grew lonely enough to go to Konstantin’s bedroom. Usually he reacted as though she were behaving in a wanton fashion by coming to him instead of waiting for him to come to her, and refused her.

  In the last three years, they hadn’t come together at all. Even when she told him that all she wanted was company, to feel his arms around her as she fell asleep, he wasn’t interested.

  The decanters of wine and bottles of vodka helpe
d, as they had helped her through many times of her life.

  Now she cannot rely on Konstantin for anything. The last times she tried to question him on their financial situation, all he would repeat was that the servants had stolen everything.

  After Lilya has helped her dress and done her hair, she writes a letter to Konstantin’s lawyer, Yakovlev, in Pskov, asking him to come to the estate. She needs money. As she sends Lyosha off with the letter, she finds herself thinking of the taste of mushrooms, freshly picked, and made into a soup with potatoes. Since the spring she hasn’t thought about what she puts into her mouth, just chewed and swallowed without tasting. But on this day she has a desire for mushroom and potato soup.

  She goes to the kitchen to ask Raisa to prepare the soup for dinner. Raisa shakes her head, telling her there are no mushrooms.

  “But it’s September. The woods are full of them.”

  The older woman nods, bowing slightly. “Yes, countess. But there is no one to fetch them. We are all doing the jobs of three or four.”

  Antonina looks at her. “I understand. Thank you, Raisa. Do you have a basket?”

  “A basket, madam?”

  “I’ll go and pick them. I did it as a child.”

  Raisa looks at Antonina’s feet as she hands her a woven willow basket and a small, sharp knife. Antonina follows the woman’s gaze to her pink silk slippers.

  “My boots are under the bench,” Raisa says, and then crosses herself. “I beg your pardon, countess—I know they’re old and cracked, but you’ll ruin your slippers and hurt your feet.”

  Antonina sees that the boots will be too big. She could go to the outer room where her riding clothes are kept and put on a pair of fine leather boots, but their heels would make it difficult to walk in the forest. Instead, she smiles her thanks at Raisa. She puts on the woman’s boots. As she walks across the yard, they rub the backs of her heels through her thin stockings, and she knows she’ll have blisters.

  Grisha is on his way to the stable.

  “Thank you for driving me to the Bakanevs’ last night,” she says to him as she walks beside him. She hadn’t spoken as he helped her out of the barouche when they arrived back at Angelkov, just run up the veranda steps, dropping her gloves. Grisha had called to her, picking them up and giving them to her. He saw she had been crying.

  “But it appears you did not enjoy yourself,” he says now, glancing at her basket and knife.

  “For mushrooms,” she says. “The Bakanevs were very hospitable. But I felt out of place.” She stops.

  Grisha stops as well. He appears distracted, brushing his hair back over his ears with his fingers time after time. His hair is very thick, and doesn’t stay in place. Antonina thinks of brushing back her son’s hair from his forehead.

  “And still nothing from the man Lev? He took the money and simply disappeared?”

  Antonina has asked Grisha this so many times, but she must ask again.

  Grisha clears his throat. “You know I continue to do what I can to find your son.”

  She closes her eyes for a moment, and Grisha berates himself.

  He had watched Antonina fall into her state of grieving when the initial planned retrieval of the boy was ruined, and then the situation grew worse daily. After questioning Soso the first time, Grisha had gone to the storeroom to challenge him again, a week later. But Soso was gone. When he asked Lilya about him, she shrugged and told him that he had decided to leave the estate; he was a free man now, wasn’t he?

  “He told me he would send word when he was settled somewhere, but I doubt that he will.” She shrugged a second time, her lips pursed, making it clear to Grisha that she really didn’t care.

  Grisha had studied her expression. He was very sure she knew nothing about Mikhail’s disappearance. Soso had said he wouldn’t tell her, and Grisha knew he was right; she was too close to the countess. “You really have no idea where he is?”

  “I told you, no. Why do you care?”

  Grisha didn’t answer, walking away. Lilya was his only thread to Soso, who in turn was his only connection to Mikhail. Lev had disappeared. Grisha had Fyodor and Lyosha follow him the day the man had come to the estate with the letter from Misha, demanding more ransom money. They had watched the village hut he went to, all night, but in the morning discovered he had somehow disappeared.

  Grisha had already been to all the villages, looking for Soso. He again searched, this time for Lev, but with no luck. Although he sometimes feared that they’d killed the child and left the province, he also knew the depth of their greed. He told himself they would keep the child as long as they believed they could extort more money.

  He had trouble being around Countess Mitlovskiya, and slept little, thinking of it all: the count’s worsening health, the countess a ruin, Mikhail’s face in the clearing.

  He had suffered his own silent remorse until today. Upon awakening, he found a note under his door. He was to bring the second payment to an izba in Tushinsk the next afternoon. Mikhail Konstantinovich would be waiting.

  He looks at Antonina in the scuffed servant’s boots, the basket on her arm. “I believe today will be a good day, countess,” he finally says, wanting to tell her the news but knowing he mustn’t, not until he has the boy.

  “Will it, Grisha? Will it?”

  He smiles, nodding at her basket and knife. “You will have fresh mushrooms.”

  One side of her mouth lifts in a wry smile. “Yes,” she agrees. “I will have fresh mushrooms.”

  Grisha reaches up one more time, trying to tame his hair.

  In the forest, Antonina smells the wet, musty odour of the fallen leaves and remembers the pleasure she had as a child, hunting for mushrooms with one of her brothers or her governess.

  She picks her way through swampy thickets, looking for the tiny curve of a cap in the midst of the leaf litter and broken branches and moss that cover the ground. When she spots one, she bends, scraping away damp earth with her fingers, cutting the mushrooms: orange milk mushrooms and perfect red saffron milk caps. From time to time she finds the special veshenka mushrooms growing on the base of a tree.

  When she returns to the house a few hours later, her basket full, the front door is locked. They no longer have a footman at Angelkov, standing in the vestibule to attend to the door, to usher in guests, accept calling cards, and take wraps and coats. There are no visitors anyway.

  She goes around the house and enters the kitchen through the servants’ entrance. She leaves the basket of mushrooms on the table. Raisa isn’t there, but a large vat of water bubbles on the stove, and there are potatoes cut on a board.

  Walking and kneeling and digging have tired her out; she is unused to exercise now. She doesn’t even have the energy to unhook and pull off the boots in the hot kitchen. As she slowly climbs the winding staircase, she notices the layer of dust on the edges of each step, as well as a rip in the thick Persian runner. The brass rail of the banister is turning green. There simply aren’t enough servants to look after the house. Olga has stayed, although Antonina has recently noticed that Lilya now wears the housekeeper’s ring of keys on her belt. She hasn’t asked her when this happened, or why.

  In her bedroom, Antonina sits in the tufted armchair near the dead fireplace and laboriously unhooks the boots. She kicks them off, leaving them where they drop. Her stockings are stuck to her heels with spots of blood where the skin has been rubbed raw. She lies down, staring at the ceiling. There’s no air in the room; it’s sultry and smells stale. Everything is as she left it: the bed a rumpled mess, the towel thrown beside the basin of now scummy water, her nightdress on the floor beside the wardrobe.

  She gets up and opens the window. The air outside is warmer than in the room—probably the last real heat of fall. She drinks a few mouthfuls of vodka from the flask in her wardrobe and again lies down on the unmade bed. She studies her fingernails: they’re broken and rimmed with dirt from picking the mushrooms. One fly then another have come into the bedroom t
hrough the open window, and buzz angrily in the hot, still air. After a while she turns onto her side, closing her eyes, hoping for a few moments of sleep. She puts her hand under the lace pillow. She spreads her fingers, savouring that tiny bit of cooler linen. The tip of one finger touches the little velvet bag she keeps there.

  She pulls out the bag and opens it, taking out the cherub that fell to her from the church ceiling back in June. She runs her dirty fingers gently over the small gilded body, the wings and tiny feet. Grisha had expertly glued the wing back on; the seam is almost invisible.

  Through the long, hot summer, she has kept her hope alive for Mikhail. She goes to the church every day and prays for at least an hour, although never again has she had a vision or received a sign.

  There’s low thunder in the distance now. Antonina closes both hands around the cherub and presses it to her chest, closing her eyes.

  The air changes overnight. The next day is crisp and fresh, although the sun still shines.

  Antonina is on the front veranda in the afternoon, looking at the crows in the pines and noticing that the birches have suddenly turned, their yellow leaves twirling on their stems in the slight breeze. She doesn’t want to be inside: even though Pavel is attempting to soothe him with the chloroform, Konstantin is shouting.

  She sees Grisha mounting his horse, and she calls to him. “Where do you go, Grisha?”

  “I have business in Tushinsk.” The sun is glinting off his hair. Antonina notices the depth of colour, so black it shines blue in the sunlight.