Antonina can’t bear to remain near her husband’s body, with the servants pulling their hair and falling to their knees, kissing their crucifixes and crying out to God. She pushes through them and goes to her own room. She finds Lilya changing the linens. Tinka sits quivering on the window seat, her ears pricked forward at the cries from the hall.
Antonina knows Lilya hears the wailing and prayers, and understands that Konstantin is dead. But Lilya hasn’t rushed to Konstantin’s room like the others. Instead, she continues her work.
“He’s dead, Lilya,” Antonina says, unnecessarily. “Konstantin Nikolevich is dead.” Said aloud, the words sound odd. “The master—my husband—is dead,” she says a third time.
Lilya simply looks at her, a pillow half into a fresh case.
Antonina notices the intricate lace edging the case. She bought the bed linens in St. Petersburg over twelve years ago, for her trousseau. “My husband is dead, and my child … my child …” Antonina isn’t able to finish the sentence.
Lilya sets the pillow on the bed and comes to her, putting her arms around Antonina. “Sit down, Tosya.” Her voice is barely above a whisper.
Antonina lowers herself into the tufted chair near the fireplace, cautiously, as if a sack of flour has been strapped to her back and she’s unsure how to cope with its new and unexpected weight. As if it might throw her off balance if she doesn’t judge every movement. She closes her eyes and grips the arms of the chair; she’s overcome with vertigo even as she sits.
Lilya kneels in front of her. “Now it is just us, Tosya. Just you, and me.”
Antonina opens her eyes and looks down at her. She knows Lilya isn’t sorry for the loss of her master. She knows how Lilya feels about Konstantin Nikolevich. She sees that Lilya’s eyes are bright, her face calm.
Looking at her, Antonina knows there is something else she must speak to Lilya about. Soso. Yes, she must speak to Lilya about Soso. About the board around the horse’s neck. But not now.
Konstantin is buried on the third day after his death. The funeral is well attended, with more than three hundred people from across the province present for the service and Mass at the Church of the Resurrection. Antonina sees many familiar faces, including the violinist, Valentin Vladimirovitch Kropotkin, with others from the Bakanev estate. As well as all the servants, the yard outside the church is filled with Konstantin’s former serfs.
After the Mass, the procession follows the casket to the plot in the cemetery behind the church, the cemetery where Konstantin thought he slept on the grave of his son. The older women servants and villagers wail.
Tania is with the other house servants. Unlike many of them, her eyes are dry, her face emotionless. Antonina looks at her; the woman returns her stare.
The violinist is suddenly beside her, pressing Antonina’s hand between his. “My deepest condolences, Countess Mitlovskiya,” he says.
“Thank you,” she says, looking away from Tania as the priest’s prayers begin. The violinist bows and moves back into the crowd.
She hears the priest’s familiar words, but cannot think of Konstantin. It is Misha who is in her thoughts. Then, unbidden, the image of Felya comes again, and the board around his neck. She is aware of Grisha, standing behind her. He takes her elbow, once, as she stumbles on a clod of earth.
When the prayers are over, she sees Lilya go to Tania. She watches, slightly unfocused, as Tania shakes her head, her mouth moving. Finally she turns and walks away from Lilya.
As the mourners slowly depart and the grave is covered with soil, Grisha and Lilya stay with Antonina. Finally, when the three men with shovels bow to Antonina and leave, she turns to Grisha and Lilya. “I’d like to be alone, please,” she tells them, and they do as she asks.
Amidst the cracked and moss-covered headstones, Konstantin’s grave is a hump of newly turned earth. Antonina knows she should have a headstone carved for him. And yet there isn’t money for even this.
Father Cyril comes to stand beside her. “Perhaps, Countess Mitlovskiya, it would comfort you to also have a place to pray for your son as you pray for your husband.”
Antonina looks at him. “What do you mean, Father?”
“I’m suggesting a marker for Mikhail Konstantinovich. When you have a stone carved and erected for Count Mitlovsky, you can also have one made for your son.”
Hadn’t Konstantin, in his madness, once suggested the same thing? A look of horror crosses Antonina’s face. “No,” she says loudly. “What are you talking about?” Her voice rings in the still air. “My son isn’t dead. He doesn’t need a marker.”
“Of course, of course, my child,” the priest says in a soothing voice. “I simply meant it might bring you comfort to have something tangible to pray to.”
She hates Father Cyril at that moment, and decides she won’t return to the church. She will pray to her own icons in her bedroom.
The morning after the funeral, Grisha’s presence in the kitchen surprises Lilya. She ignores him, arranging a breakfast tray to take to Antonina’s bedroom.
“Tania told me that yesterday you said she was to leave Angelkov,” he says. “You don’t have that authority.”
Grisha doesn’t like Lilya’s boldness. He has always felt sorry for Tania. He gave her a small packet of his own rubles when she came to his door to say goodbye, carrying her belongings. She told him she was glad to leave Angelkov with all its misery; she had planned on moving to her old village right after the funeral. Lilya had nothing to do with her decision. “I wouldn’t take orders from her anyway,” she added. “Tell the countess … tell her goodbye from me. That I wish her well.”
Now Lilya shrugs. “We all know there’s no reason for her to stay, with the count dead. I wanted to save the countess the distress of having to speak to her.” She fusses with the cutlery on the tray. “Don’t we both want as little anxiety as possible for her? Besides, Nusha can look after the laundry now. There is so little, with only the countess to attend to.”
“How is her mood today?” he asks Lilya.
“Her mood? What do you suppose? Besides, why are you asking me?”
“You know her better than anyone,” Grisha says.
“What do you mean?”
“She shares her thoughts with you, doesn’t she?”
“Maybe,” says Lilya cautiously.
Grisha picks a brown, speckled egg from a bowl on the table, tossing it in his hand. If Lilya didn’t know better, she would think he was nervous. Grisha is never anxious, or even excitable. In fact, he usually has a strange, unnatural calm. “Has she spoken of anything out of the ordinary? Acted … I don’t know … differently in some way?”
He can’t stop thinking about her, about what they shared in the dacha. He doesn’t know what she’s feeling. What she’s thinking about him. He offered to stay and help her at Angelkov. She accepted his offer, but has anything changed?
Lilya tilts her head. “Naturally, she’s in a terrible state what with the old man’s death, and her son still missing. You really need to ask me about her mood?”
He can tell that Lilya knows nothing more. She can’t hide things from him the way she can from Antonina.
“All right,” he says, and leaves, the egg still in his hand. He has forgotten he’s holding it.
Lilya has never been sure how she feels about Grisha. Lyosha adores him, and looks upon him as a big brother. And she must admit, Grisha has been good to the boy. There is a special patience in him she sees only when he deals with her brother. Grisha has been more of a protector to him than Soso ever was.
A few minutes later, as she stands outside Antonina’s bedroom, she thinks of Grisha again, and of the way Antonina had returned after the night of the thunderstorm, when old Mitlovsky had spent hours in the cemetery. At the time, Lilya couldn’t put her finger on it, but something didn’t feel right about Antonina’s story. Now Grisha comes poking around about how her mistress is feeling. Never before has he asked her about the countess in a personal
manner.
Lilya doesn’t like it. She takes a deep breath and calls, quietly, through the door. “Tosya, your breakfast.”
At the low, answering murmur, she manoeuvres the tray against her hip and turns the crystal doorknob.
A few minutes later, her breakfast untouched, Antonina asks Lilya to sit down.
Lilya turns from the bed, the coverlet still in her hand.
“I want to ask you something,” Antonina says from her chair near the fireplace, Tinka on her lap. “Please, sit with me.”
Lilya drops the bedding and lowers herself into the chair on the other side of the fireplace.
“Have you heard from Soso?” Antonina asks.
“Why do you ask about my husband now, Tosya? Is it that you just lost your own?”
“I want to know if you know where he is, or what he’s doing.”
First Grisha’s questions in the kitchen and now this. “No. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care. I told you that. I told you I don’t feel anything for Iosef Igorovitch.”
“All right,” Antonina says. “But if you do hear from him or anything about him, maybe from one of the other servants, will you tell me?”
“Why don’t you ask Grisha?” Lilya says.
Antonina frowns. “Would Grisha know his whereabouts?”
Lilya shrugs, picking at a loose thread on the brocade of the cushion on the chair. “Grisha thinks he knows everything about everyone,” she says, and Antonina hears an undertone. “And maybe he does. At least for now.”
The last two words make Antonina uneasy. “What do you mean—for now?”
“For as long as he’s at Angelkov. Which might not be long.”
“You’re mistaken, Lilya. He hasn’t spoken of leaving any time soon.”
Lilya is thinking of what Lyosha told her, about Grisha becoming a landowner, and he his steward. “He might say that to please you. But now that he has his own land, do you really think he’ll stay on?”
Antonina studies Lilya. “How do you know this?” Antonina can’t imagine Grisha—private, discreet Grisha—talking to any of the other servants about the six versts she and he had discussed just before Konstantin died.
Lilya’s face is composed. “One hears things.”
Antonina sees that Lilya is being purposefully cryptic. But why? “That’s all, then, Lilya.”
Lilya gets up and walks to the door. As she opens it, she glances over her shoulder at Antonina, and in that instant something in her face unsettles Antonina even further.
Antonina knows sleep will be impossible that night. She drinks three glasses of vodka, which calm her enough so her teeth don’t ache from holding her jaw so tightly. She lies on her bed, but images—Misha without his warm coat, Konstantin’s dead, bluish face, Father Cyril suggesting a marker for Mikhail, the butchered horse—distress her so much that she has to sit up, staring into the darkness. She needs to think of something else.
She opens the tiny corner of thought she tries to keep locked: Grisha in the dacha.
But as she remembers she and Grisha together, something crosses her mind. She had been so distraught in Tushinsk, seeing the child in Mikhail’s talmochka, and as she untangles the thoughts from that day, she thinks about the man—what was his name? Lev?—who brought the letter from Misha. Was he the man she’d seen Grisha talking to? Surely not, or Grisha would have told her.
But she also remembers seeing Grisha holding a package out to the man. What was it?
She leaves Tinka on the bed and pulls a shawl over her nightdress and opens her door. Lilya is asleep on the pallet, her mouth open and one hand flung up beside her head.
Antonina is annoyed. Tomorrow she will tell Lilya she doesn’t want her sleeping outside her door as if she’s a child who might wander in the night and get into trouble. But as she silently goes down the stairs, she asks herself if this isn’t what she’s doing. She knows she’s had too much vodka.
There are so few servants left that she has no fear of running into any of them. Two dogs—piebald harriers, once used for hunting but now simply hanging about waiting to be fed, since there is no hunting at Angelkov this fall—jump up from the veranda as she comes out the front door. She snaps her fingers once and they drop back down, their chins on their paws. Her steps uneven, she walks through the still, chilled night, past the stables and outbuildings, past the servants’ quarters, down the winding road lined with bare linden trees. Her heart lifts when she sees lights in the house with the blue shutters. She imagines Grisha sitting by the fire, reading. She just wants to ask him about the man in Tushinsk.
Is this all?
Or does she want to be in his presence because she wants to feel like a woman? She knows she wants to feel his arms around her, strong, capable arms, his voice telling her it will be all right. That she needn’t be afraid, that her son will come back. That she won’t lose Angelkov. That he won’t leave her.
She wants to go to his bed.
Already unsteady, she trips over something on the road—a stone, a branch—and comes down hard on her knees, skinning her palms as she reaches forward to break her fall. She sits back on her heels. An owl hoots, and she shivers. At that moment Grisha’s lights go out.
She stands and slowly walks back to her own house. Her footsteps are loud on the cinder drive. Surrounded by the bare trees, in complete darkness, the manor is suddenly ominous. It no longer feels like home.
A few afternoons later, she tries to distract herself in her bedroom by reading, but after some time she comes to the conclusion she’s already read the passage she’s attempting to concentrate on. She realizes she finished the book before Konstantin died. As she descends the staircase to go to the library to fetch another, she pauses at the landing window. It looks onto the front grounds of the estate and the long drive leading to the road. The sun is shining in a deep blue sky, and Antonina sees Grisha speaking with a man. She can only see the top of the man’s hat, black, with a brim, his shoulders in a fine black coat with a grey lamb collar, and the toes of polished black boots.
Grisha does not wear a hat, and even from this distance Antonina sees the sunlight gleaming off his hair.
As Grisha shakes his head, the other man tilts his face, glancing at the house. Antonina steps behind the curtain, but not before she has a glimpse of the man’s features.
He walks back to his horse, its bridle held by Lyosha.
After the man has ridden away, she sends for Grisha. He stands in front of her in the study. The cold fall air has ruddied his cheeks.
“You are well, Antonina?” he asks.
“The man you were speaking to. What did he want?”
Grisha doesn’t answer for a moment. “It was the music teacher from the Bakanev estate.”
“The violinist,” she states.
“He said he was the music teacher.”
Antonina waits a beat. “What did he want?” she asks again.
Something shifts in Grisha’s face. “He came to pay a call of condolence.”
Antonina thinks of her gloved hand between Valentin’s at the funeral.
“I told him it was impossible, you weren’t receiving. I am correct in this, am I not”—he glances at Pavel passing the open door—“Countess Mitlovskiya?”
“I suppose so.”
“I asked why he thought he could simply arrive only a week after the funeral, without a social appointment or at least a calling card in advance, and expect to be received. He hasn’t the manners you are due.”
“But you sent him off without speaking to me first?”
Grisha’s eyes move from her eyes to her mouth, back to her eyes. “You wanted to see him?” When she doesn’t answer immediately, something makes him asks, “You know this man?”
Why does she feel guilty? She’s done nothing wrong. “He played at my father’s estate, a long time ago, before I was married. And then I saw him again, at the musical evening at the Bakanevs’.”
“And you recall him from all thos
e years ago?” Grisha pictures the other man’s face. It’s manly and yet somehow—he wants to use the word pretty, although that’s not it exactly. It’s the kind of face that would appeal to some women. But far too delicate for a woman like Antonina, he thinks.
“Did you not consider asking me if I would receive him?” she asks again. “Is it not my choice whom I see, even if they appear in an unconventional manner?”
Grisha feels scolded. “I was simply protecting you, Antonina,” he says, holding back sudden anger. “It’s not as though you generally welcome visitors, even those you know. I assumed you wouldn’t wish to be called upon by a near stranger.”
Antonina is oddly flustered. She shakes her head, her lips tight. “The point is, you can’t make decisions for me.”
“I can’t?” Grisha says, his voice cold, and Antonina swallows. “Isn’t that what you’ve asked me to do with the estate? Make decisions?”
“Well, yes, with the estate,” she answers, emphasizing the last word. “Not with my personal life.”
The air is heavy, as though loud, harsh words have been exchanged, though neither voice has been raised.
“As you wish,” Grisha finally says, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a small square. “Here’s his calling card. Should you wish to receive him, you may send word to him.”
“Thank you,” Antonina says, taking the card by the very tip of one corner, so that there is no chance her fingers will touch Grisha’s. She is afraid of what will happen should she come in contact with him, afraid of what she might do. The small square vibrates, just a little, as they both hold the card for those few seconds. Are her fingers trembling, or his? He lets go of the card, and she tucks it under her belt. “Thank you,” she says again. “I’ll look at my calendar.” They both know this is a ridiculous statement. What would Antonina have on her calendar? “And if I wish to have him call, I’ll decide on a day, and pass it on to you.”
The Lost Souls of Angelkov Page 33