Sisters of the Cross

by Alexei Remizov

  “Around the whole wide world like a rolling stone!”—those were the words of parental blessing that Akumovna received from her father, and it was clear that Akumovna thought that those words condemned her to wander around the whole wide world.

  She spent less than six weeks at home, and those in the vegetable garden. While her father was still alive things may have been bad, but now when her father had gone, the daughter-in-law became worse than any wild beast; she would chase the girl around, nagging her to death. Six days after the festival of St. Flora and St. Laura, Madame Buianova took Akumovna into service at her mansion at Turii Rog, six versts from Sosna Gora.

  Life was good on that estate. Madame Buianova became fond of her. She was just a little older than Akumovna, who was thirteen, while the mistress was sixteen. The master, Buianov himself, was not young; he was old enough to be grandfather to either of them. He often went into the city on business, and when he was at home he was always busy—there was a great deal of land and forest to look after, as well as lakes. He really knew how to manage his estate, and he loved the land. At Turii Rog hemp grew so densely that you couldn’t walk through it, and there were hens feeding in the fields. But the mistress was always on her own, with just Akumovna for company, like a little sister. She used to take her around everywhere with her, into the fields and into the woodland—into the thickets for mushrooms, and into the pinewoods for berries. In the pinewoods, in hot places where the sun beat down, there were red berries growing; it was good to take the fruit, as they tweaked off walnuts and gathered acorns to make coffee. Otherwise the mistress would lie down under a pine tree and send Akumovna to bring flowers. Akumovna would bring back many different flowers—the blue ones she used to weave into a wreath, while the mistress lay under the pine tree, weeping. Akumovna would decorate her with different flowers, all blue, and kiss her all over. She herself had sharp, joyful eyes, with black hair braided with a red ribbon.

  Akumovna spent a whole year there, never parting from her mistress. They showed her everything, teaching her how to iron clothes and how to wash them. Before the Feast of the Intercession of the Virgin the master went off to the city and fell ill. What happened to the master they said was this: he was being tormented; the woodlands and the waters have their own masters. In Turii Rog there had been dense, impassable woodland that a beetle couldn’t fly through. Buianov cleared the forest, and where there had been no way through to the lakes, he had made roads around them and cleared them here and there. But they, the spirits, did not like that. They would gather together and appear before him from time to time and reproach him for doing them to death. That was why he was being tormented, so people said. They sent a message from the city to the mistress in Turii Rog. She got ready and departed.

  “My mistress gave me strict instructions,” Akumovna used to tell people, “to look after Krasotka the cow, to check her every night. There were many cows, but only one Krasotka, the favorite. Krasotka had a calf, and that was how all the trouble started. There was a wedding in the village. I asked for time off to go to the wedding, promising to be back by midnight, but I got carried away watching what was going on and did not get back till two in the morning. However, Krasotka had given birth to her calf at midnight and killed the calf by kicking it. ‘Only one of us can live here,’ the herdsman said, ‘either you or me.’ They would drive out either him or me. Then I went to the young master, my mistress’s brother, who was in charge of the estate, but I was afraid to go in to see him. I scraped at the door and then turned back. ‘Well, what is it, Beetle?’—the young master had heard me. ‘It’s my fault, master. We have had a misfortune!’ ‘Come here,’ he said and let me in. I went down on my knees before him and told him everything as I was weeping. ‘Get out and pack up your things.’ And he drove me out. I went to my own room—my tiny room behind the dining room—but which things to take I didn’t know. None of it was mine, and I wept. I kept on weeping all night. The next morning the young master comes in. ‘Have you gathered all your things together?’ he asks. I say to him once more: ‘Forgive me, master, it was my fault!’ ‘Be quiet, and don’t you dare to cry, or else I’ll have you hanged!’ And off he went. I’m thinking: well, he won’t hang me, he’s just trying to frighten me. But for some reason I have a feeling of fear, I am afraid of something. It was Saturday, and they were heating up the baths. I had scrubbed down the sweating-shelf, laid out the beer and was on the point of leaving, but the master was already approaching. I ran to the door. ‘Stand still! Have you gathered all your things together?’ I gave him my wonted reply: ‘Forgive me, master, it was my fault. Don’t drive me away!’ He thought for a moment and said: ‘If you agree to live with me, then stay. Otherwise, off you go!’ And he pushed me out of the bathhouse. And I don’t want to go away, to be driven away from my mistress, and where would I go in any case—back to my brother’s, to the place where the daughter-in-law lives? I walk up and down, weeping. The herdsman made it clear: ‘Only one of us can live here, either you or me!’

  “If only my mistress would come back, but she is away day after day. It was Saturday, and they were heating up the baths. I had scrubbed down the sweating-shelf and laid out the beer; I was hurrying to get away before the master came in. I was frightened and afraid of something. And now here he is, coming in: ‘Well, do you agree?’ ‘Yes, all right.’ You see, I was just a young girl. I didn’t understand. ‘Go and get undressed, so I can have a look at you.’ I went in and started to take my clothes off. The next day the master went into town—on that first day he had not touched me—and brought me a silk headscarf from town and a ribbon for my hair. I told the old nurse about this (she was an old woman who was still living in the house). ‘That’s all right,’ said the old nurse, ‘only ask him to pay five hundred into your savings account, as security,’ although I didn’t know what savings account she was talking about. You see, I was just a young girl. I didn’t understand anything. The old nurse called me that evening. ‘Serve the master the samovar and stay with him.’ The master’s room was right next door to the dining room. I put on the silk headscarf, braided the ribbon into my hair, served him the samovar, and sat down at the table. I was shaking all over….”

  Indeed, Akumovna felt disgrace, sullied and shamed; she wanted to hang herself. Her mistress had returned, and here she was, walking around in such a state! The mistress calmed her down, promising to bring up the child. She forgave her for what had happened to Krasotka and did not drive Akumovna away. Then Akumovna gave birth to a boy, and soon afterward the mistress herself had a child, also a boy. The children were brought up side by side, one nurse looking after both of them, and they were taught together. When they were both nine years old, they were taken away to Petersburg and the mistress’s brother adopted Akumovna’s son. They used to come back only for the summer holidays, and for Christmas and Easter. Both of them finished their schooling in the same year and became officers, only spending a little time in the country and then back to Petersburg. When Akumovna’s son was young, he was gentle and kind, but when he grew up she began to be afraid of him. Sometimes he would give her such a look that, far from her wanting to utter a word, she just wanted to hide away from him.

  All the same, time does not wait, time will have its way; the old master died because they suffocated him. The woodlands and the waters have their own masters, that’s what they say. Real misfortune befell the old master and the mistress’s brother. On the local saint’s day seven people had their throats cut on the main road; a search was started for who had done it. The road led straight to the manor at Turii Rog, and they put the master in jail for covering up the tracks of the murderers. He spent a year in jail. When he was released, he was ready to go abroad, but he died. Akumovna had not seen him when he was dying. She had only seen him when he came out of prison, and she could not recognize him; he had gone black as earth. His lungs had collapsed, that’s what they said.

  Once more Akumovna remained with her mistress, as in the old days. The
y went out together for walks in the fields and the woods, as before. Akumovna would gather different flowers and weave the blue ones into a wreath, while her mistress was lying under a pine tree, only now she was not weeping, she was asleep—the mistress had taken a drop too much, she had long since got used to drinking. She would have a drink, eat a bit of minted ginger cake, and drop off to sleep.

  Come the spring, the mistress’s brother died. Then in the autumn they brought Akumovna’s son from Petersburg to Turii Rog; he had asked to be brought there before he died; he was suffering from consumption. He was buried in the Turii Rog cemetery. They gave his uniform and his cap to Akumovna. Then, before a year had gone by, the mistress also died. On the day of her death she dreamed that the old master had come and with him a white dog. And they buried her mistress.

  Turii Rog had become empty; Akumovna was the only one left. The young master did not want to keep her in his service and dismissed her after the funeral. So she was left completely alone. As for crying, she didn’t—when things are really bad, people don’t cry.

  For the very last time she went around the open field, the wood, and the thicket; for the last time she sat for a little in the pine forest at the sunny spot where the red berries were growing, and beneath the pine tree where her mistress used to lie down. She made her bows to the wood, to the open field, to the pine forest, to the tree, and then off she went. She walked along the main road from Turii Rog past Sosna Gora, past her brother and the daughter-in-law, past Vasily’s cottage. Past the cemetery with the crosses that marked the graves of her mother and father, keeping straight along the road from Turii Rog, around the whole wide world like a rolling stone.

  And it took her more years than one to walk from Turii Rog to Petersburg, and until she reached the city, on her way she would walk beside the plow, and work the scythe, and live in the ravines like a gypsy.

  Akumovna has been living in Petersburg for nine years. Her son’s cap and uniform were stolen from her a long time ago on the road from Turiy Rog to Petersburg, and all she has left is the memory of him; she sprinkled his warm boots with naphthalene, and they are in a cardboard box up under the ceiling, along with his galoshes.

  Akumovna opens up the box at holiday times, saying: “I shall have a look at those things, just like looking at him himself.”

  For nine years now Akumovna has been living at the cheap end of Burkov House on the Fontanka, winter and summer, the whole year round; she has never been farther than the Hay Market and the fish stalls, but Akumovna longs for the fresh air:

  “If only I could breathe a bit in the open air,” she says from time to time with a smile and looking at you as might a holy fool, from some other place, humble, holy, unhappy, with no family left to her anywhere in the world.

  1. A cemetery in Petersburg.

  The two rooms remained empty all autumn, but by the start of the winter they had been taken and Marakulin had two new neighbors: Vera Nikolaevna Klikachova, who was studying at the preparatory school on Nadezhdinskaia Street, and Vera Ivanovna Vekhoriova, or Verochka, a pupil of the theater school.

  Vera Nikolaevna was a thin young lady, so very slim that you felt afraid on her behalf, particularly when she sat up all night reading a book. What is it that keeps a person alive? She had not a drop of color in her face, and her eyes seemed lost, like those of wandering Holy Russia herself.

  She had been living with her mother in the old provincial town of Kostrinsk; the house she owned had burned to the ground and all its contents had been destroyed. In fact, they could have saved something from the fire, but her mother, old Mrs. Klikachova, had stood with their icon right against the flames and would not let them carry anything out, so that everything had been consumed. If you let the fire swallow everything and offer no resistance, then it will return your goods a hundred times over, that’s what the old woman had been thinking a week before when the table and the icons had made terrifying cracking sounds. The old lady had not realized about the omen in time, and therefore everything had been consumed. After the fire they were living in the old bathhouse. Vera Nikolaevna had been through the old town school in Kostrinsk, and would have lived the rest of her life in the bathhouse, if a certain young woman, who had been exiled from Petersburg, had not started to teach her and put her through four years of grammar school education. Vera Nikola­evna went to the provincial capital of the province, passed her examinations and then spent three years in the medical school attached to the hospital. After that she went to Petersburg and was finishing the Nadezhdinsky course.

  Vera Nikolaevna did not find it easy to study, and sometimes it was so difficult that she was reduced to tears. But she would not give up; she was such a hard worker. After the Nadezhdinsky course she wanted to work for her leaving certificate, to go to medical school.

  Vera Nikolaevna was earning her living by working as a masseuse and never had time to sit down for a moment. Full of cares, she walked to work and to her classes, laden with textbooks on medicine. It was difficult to get a word out of her; she rarely entered into conversation and said little about her life. She mentioned only her mother and Mariia Aleksandrovna, the exile from Petersburg who had taught her and accustomed her to studying—those were the only people she ever talked about.

  Vera Nikolaevna’s mother, Lizaveta Ivanovna, had lived since her childhood in Kostrinsk, that desolate, little, old white city on the River Ustiuzhin with its fifteen white churches, in Kostrinsk, the first among weeping cities for the peal of its mourning bells. Old people can remember what Lizaveta Ivanovna was like when she was young—a great one for drawing people in, a leader in the round dances, a teller of tales and a lover of old things. They remember how she was married in the cathedral and how the archpriest, who knew both bride and groom, kept on getting their names mixed up, and the old washerwoman Inchikha shook her head sadly, knowing in her own prophetic way that the couple would not live together for long, that some third person was standing between them beneath the marriage crown. The old woman knew, but she kept silent about it.

  Inchikha was beside Lizaveta Ivanovna both when her husband was dying and when the house was burning down. It was from her that Lizaveta Ivanovna learned to carry nothing out of the house, but to surrender everything to the fire. And this was not all that she taught her; she vouchsafed all her intricate, prophetic knowledge of how things are, for Inchikha had a great store of wisdom and it seemed she knew everything that man was fated to encounter. That was the judgment of people in Kostrinsk. So she went quietly to her grave, leaving one person in place of her in this world; Lizaveta Ivanovna would pronounce a special prayer to God for Inchikha, because the old woman had passed on to her all her knowledge and had done more for Lizaveta than can be done by a mother and father. She had done so much for her that it seemed there was nothing left for anybody else to do. That was the judgment of people in Kostrinsk.

  It was now about ten years since Inchikha had died and the house had burned down. And living in the old bathhouse, Lizaveta Ivanovna had long been dreaming of building a new house for herself, as new and solid as the one that had been consumed in the flames. Every summer she brought in beams from the forest and piled them up in her vegetable garden. She also went for a blessing to Father Ivan Kronshtadtsky in Kronshtadt, bringing him as a gift an old icon of the Stroganov school. And she received from him a payment of one hundred rubles to make a start on the building. How many times did exiled architects draw up plans for her of the house to be built, and she examined them carefully with her sharp eyes—looking for this, that, and the other: had they not left out the larder, the storeroom, the outside porch; was it all laid out in their plan as it had been in the old house that had burned down? But her new solid house she simply never built. The beams rotted in the vegetable garden, the plans were carefully preserved in their box, and the hundred rubles, the holy father’s gift, never got as far as Moscow. Never in her whole life had she possessed so much money. Lizaveta’s husband had been a petty clerk in Kostrins
k, earning a pittance, and the priest’s rainbow-colored note had been consumed before her eyes: it was spent on all sorts of trifles—little boxes were brought as gifts from Kronshtadt, boxes necessary and unnecessary, boxes broken and boxes intact, and every little thing and every little box had its purpose, while the largest box was to be used as she might think fit, and that idea swallowed almost fifty rubles. How could they possibly have managed to get a house built?