A Russian Sister Read online

  Dedication

  For my sister, Beth,

  and my writing sisters—Kathy, Marina and Shaena

  Epigraph

  To women he always seemed different from who he was, so they loved him not as himself, but the man their imagination conjured and whom they’d eagerly been seeking all their lives; and when they discovered their mistake, they loved him still. And not one of them had ever been happy with him. Time had passed, he’d met women, made love to them, parted from them, but not once had he been in love. There had been everything between them, but no love.

  —ANTON CHEKOV, “LADY WITH THE LAPDOG”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Characters in the Novel

  Act One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Act Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Act Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Act Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Caroline Adderson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Characters in the Novel

  THE FAMILY

  Maria C. (Masha), a schoolteacher and amateur painter

  Anton C. (Antosha), a doctor and prominent writer

  Mikhail (Misha), their youngest brother, a law student

  Ivan, the second youngest brother, a schoolteacher

  Nikolai (Kolia), the second eldest brother, an artist, deceased

  Aleksander, the eldest brother

  Evgenia (Mother)

  Pavel (Father)

  Baby Evgenia, youngest sister, deceased in childhood

  Mariushka, the cook

  FRIENDS AND LOVERS

  Lidia Mizanova (Lika), a schoolteacher and aspiring actress

  Olga, an astronomer and mathematician

  Aleksandra (Vermicelli), a piano teacher

  Isaac Levitan, a prominent landscape painter

  Sophia K., a painter and salon hostess

  Aleksei Suvorin, a St. Petersburg publishing magnate

  The Lintvariovs, estate owners and family friends: Mama, Natalia (schoolteacher), Georgi (pianist), Elena and Zinaida (doctors)

  Aleksander Smagin, an estate owner

  Lieutenant Egorov, an army officer

  Bylim-Kolosovsky (B.-K.), a landowner

  Dr. Wagner, a zoologist

  Klara, Misha’s girlfriend

  Ignati Potapenko, a writer and agent

  Lidia Iavorskaya, an actress

  Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik (Tania), a writer and actress

  Granny, Lika’s great-aunt

  Act One

  1889–1890

  Masha: I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.

  1

  LIKA WAS HUDDLED BY THE COAT STAND, THE PALE fur of her collar half concealing her face. A blonde with thick sable brows and silver eyes. Masha was sure Antosha would love her. Love was just the tonic her brother needed, the best cure for his depression.

  “You found us,” she called down from the landing.

  “It was easy from your description,” Lika called back up. “Across from the Zoological Gardens. A chest of drawers.” This was Antosha’s name for the house after the two side-by-side bay windows on each floor. “And I saw the doctor’s plaque.”

  Mariushka, their old cook, had come upstairs to fetch Masha from the parlour. Her banister-clutching descent slowed Masha’s now. Something was the matter with the cook’s feet. She walked like she was stepping on nettles, and each stair plainted on her behalf.

  When Masha reached Lika, she kissed her dimples left and right. Lika smelled of winter crispness mixed with some hopeful scent she’d put on. Sugary snow powdered her shoulders; Masha brushed it off. She was a real beauty, a Swan Princess and, even better, oblivious to it. Though initially shy, she soon threw off a stove’s warmth. At school she sang in the hallways and acted out fairy tales. Her pupils adored her.

  Mariushka helped her out of her coat. Under it was a jacket the colour of a cantaloupe.

  “Oh, how pretty!” Masha said. “Isn’t it, Mariushka?”

  The old grump had a face like a fist, round and scored with lines. Also a scriptural passage ready for every occasion. “‘And why take ye thought for raiment?’ Wait. The jam.” She limped off to the pantry, then back with the dish filled for Masha. Making the sign of the cross over the door, she announced she was going to bed.

  “Come up,” Masha told Lika. “Some friends are here. And my brother.”

  “Anton?”

  Masha saw the hope now. “No. Misha.”

  They were standing just outside Antosha’s door, convenient for him to overhear their talk. She pictured him on the other side, stretched out on his bed, smoking and staring at the ceiling like one of his own disillusioned characters, brooding over the failure of his play. The Wood Demon, it was called. There is no play! said the Moscow Gazette. Instead, in these clumsily constructed scenes, we see a novel ineffectually squeezed into a dramatic form. How she hated the play, not for being a rambling mess, but for what it had done to him.

  “Misha’s our youngest brother. Well, Antosha is here, but I can’t promise he’ll show himself.”

  Masha started up the stairs, Lika in tow, toward the piano’s tinkling.

  Lika said, “You didn’t tell him I sent that letter, did you?”

  “You told me not to, so I didn’t. My friend Olga’s here too. She’s an astronomer at the Moscow Observatory. She’s giving me English lessons. We’re just about to begin. That’s Vermicelli playing.”

  “Vermicelli?” Lika said.

  Masha glanced back. Lika was looking at the paintings on the wall as she climbed. A few of Masha’s attempts at landscapes, nothings, and one small window into summer. The latter was by Isaac Levitan, who had given her lessons.

  “You’ll see why we call her that. So thin! Mother’s gone to bed. Maybe Antosha will join us.” Masha smiled over her shoulder. “He often does.”

  With the mention of his name, Lika’s face bloomed.

  Sometimes when newcomers visited, Masha felt a residual shame. It was irrational, a holdover from their indigent years. In fact, everyone thrilled to get the chance to see where a famous writer lived and wrote. If they were surprised that the rooms were modest, that Antosha was far from rich, why should Masha care? Lika was unlikely to judge them anyway. She lived in the Arbat district, déclassé now, with a querulous great-aunt she called “Granny.”

  Masha stuck her head into the parlour. The two friends there were old ones from their days in Professor Guerrier’s Higher Women’s Courses. Vermicelli—auburn-haired and gaunt, cheeks blotched with winter chapping. A piano teacher now, she moved her noodley fingers over the keys. Olga “the amazing astronomer”—Antosha’s name for her—sat at the table flipping through the primer, cigarette in her free hand, permanently slouched from her stooped love affair with the telescope. Tonight, inexplicably, she’d pinned a silk flower to her breast; it drooped as though it had the capacity to die.

  Back when they were Guerrier students together, a gaggle of friends used to descend on their parlour after lectures because
Masha had three dashing, artistic older brothers. Misha, too young during their heyday, was the only one at this shrunken gathering now, perched beside Vermicelli on the piano bench, facing the wrong way, squinting through his pince-nez. The only odd thing about the room was the missing pictures, the darker rectangles on the mustard-coloured wallpaper. They rebuked Masha every time she looked at them. Why don’t you paint something, then? These shadows marked where her brother Kolia’s paintings used to hang, sold after his death to pay his debts.

  “Everyone?” Masha announced as they stepped into the room. “This is Lika.”

  The other three looked up. A paralyzing spell fell over the little brother. Vermicelli’s cheeks grew redder, the skeptical slits of Olga’s eyes, narrower. The same thing happened when Lika and Masha left school together. On the street outside, men froze on the spot and women burned.

  Misha shook himself to life. “Tea?” he asked Lika. With her shy nod, he plunged, an unleashed retriever, toward the samovar.

  Everything about the little brother irritated Masha. How he combed his hair back from his forehead. His pince-nez and big ears. He had the same downward-slanted eyes as Antosha, but a broad fleshy nose, like it had been hastily formed from India rubber. Masha’s nose, in fact—a gift from Mother. Mainly it was his greed for attention that annoyed her, the consequence of having an older brother he could never hope to emulate, especially not in character. He was studying law, but aspired to be a writer too.

  Olga rarely smiled and didn’t now. She looked Lika up and down. When she’d fully appraised her, her eyes slid sidelong to meet Masha’s, one dark brow raised. Masha felt Olga’s searing judgment. To escape it, she crossed the room to where Misha was pouring Lika’s tea and set the jam dish down.

  “Lika teaches with me at the Dairy School.”

  Everyone called it by that name, after the farming family that ran it. They’d diversified from cows to girls. Misha mooed, as he did every time the place was mentioned, and checked to see if Lika laughed.

  “Infant,” Masha told him. To the others she said, “Lika was a Guerrier student too.”

  Vermicelli said, “Were you? So were we! All three of us. Not Misha obviously.”

  “They wouldn’t have me,” Misha quipped.

  “What fun we had. Remember Professor K.’s lectures? We thought he was going to eat us with his eyes. Is he still there? Then we’d come to Masha’s . . .”

  Vermicelli prattled on, revealing in her every gushing word how dull her present life was. Masha still felt Olga’s dark eyes on her. If she turned her head, who would she see—the amazing astronomer or that precocious seventeen-year-old Guerrier star who had corrected so many professors? The younger Olga was only proud, not jaded like her present self.

  Olga cut Vermicelli off. “Do you speak English?” she asked Lika.

  “Me? Goodness, no.” Lika nodded to Misha to keep adding sugar.

  “Pull up a seat if you want, then,” Olga told her. “You can’t be more hopeless than Masha.”

  Lika shrank back from this harsh stranger with absolutely no dress sense. Masha, quick to show that she wasn’t offended, exaggerated her smile. Demeaning comments and outright insults were Olga’s endearments. If Olga ever complimented her, then Masha would be hurt. But as she took her place at the table, she remembered her confusion during the Wood Demon catastrophe two weeks before. Olga had squirmed in her seat heaving sighs. Did it mean she liked the play? Masha herself had stopped watching. It was too painful, and she was preoccupied with the conundrum of what to tell Antosha afterward. The truth would not do, but anything less would insult him more.

  Olga hadn’t liked the play. To put it mildly.

  She turned to Masha now and, to prove her “hopeless” verdict, commanded her to say a word in English. “Any word.”

  Masha opened her mouth. Nothing. Everyone laughed. “Anyway,” Masha said, laughing too, “I only want to read and write it.”

  “I know an English word,” Misha announced. Lika had remained standing; he brought her tea. Adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat and smiled all around. “Lawv.”

  Olga erupted in cackles.

  “What did he say?” Lika asked.

  “It’s what I carry here,” Misha told her, thumping his chest hard. “Lawv.”

  Love, he meant.

  “I assure you,” Olga told him. “There’s no such word.”

  Masha looked curiously at Olga. Was she criticizing Misha’s pronunciation, or did the English really not have a word for love? This would explain the dried-up few Masha had met. Or was Olga making a philosophical declaration? As for Masha, she’d seen enough suffering among her friends to wisely sidestep the affliction in any language.

  Misha slipped out of the parlour then, just as Masha had hoped. He wouldn’t be able to resist telling Antosha about Lika. Masha stood up from the table.

  “I forgot something.”

  Olga sighed.

  Masha went after Misha, stopping on the landing to listen without showing herself. He was knocking on Antosha’s door.

  “Brother? There’s a spectacular girl here. Blond curls. Grey eyes circled in black. Like five-kopek pieces tarnished at the edges.”

  No reply that Masha could hear. Smiling, she slipped back in to face Olga, who asked, “Shall we conjugate, or couldn’t you find your brain?”

  “I’m ready.”

  Of course, Antosha would want to see what passed for spectacular according to the little brother. Lika would lift his mood and therefore Masha’s. If not, then his depression was greater than his curiosity. He had twice as many reasons as the rest of them—Kolia’s death and his demonic failure of a play.

  Olga nudged the open primer toward Masha and took a long drag on the cigarette. “I think we may as well review ‘to be.’ You’ll have forgotten.”

  True. Masha looked down at the page. It was the different alphabet she found so vexing, with its treacherous non-equivalents. B and H, for example. Completely different letters!

  “Repeat: I am, you are, he is, she is . . .”

  “I am. You are. He is . . .” She tried a sentence. “He is man.”

  “A man,” Olga corrected, snuffing her cigarette in the tray.

  Masha glanced back. Antosha! He was framed in the doorway—clothes and bearing elegant, face so kind. Because of his eyes. His eyes were kind even when he wasn’t. He wore the enigmatic half-smile he reserved for playing host.

  “Brother,” she said. “Please join us.”

  “I’ve just come to say hello.” He nodded first to Vermicelli, who was blushing now as well as chapped.

  “Have some tea,” Masha tried.

  Misha slipped in from behind Antosha. “Olga’s teaching Masha English. Apparently she needs a good caning.”

  Antosha nodded. “When I was in school, the master used to tie the stupidest boy to a stepladder and invite the rest of us to spit on him.”

  Masha felt herself wince, but Vermicelli bested her by crying out, “But not you! You weren’t spat on!”

  With this outburst she looked like she’d fallen in the borscht. She spun around on the bench and started pounding out another song.

  “The piano’s rented,” Masha reminded her.

  The plunking stopped.

  Antosha turned to Olga next. “Amazing astronomer, how are the stars?”

  Olga scowled, as was her way. “Quite brilliant. If you squint, you just might see your name written up there.”

  Then, still in the doorway, not acknowledging the stranger in the room, Antosha detached, the way he often did in a group, sinking into his own thoughts, presumably of imaginary people who hopefully didn’t too much resemble living ones they personally knew. Or perhaps he felt stifled by the currents of female admiration swirling in the room. Their banter had stiffened when he appeared. Dialogue should sound natural, should roam like a dog sniffing at non-sequiturs. It never did in plays.

  Or maybe it was Lika. Masha hoped so. He was gazing str
aight ahead, deliberately avoiding her. No, he was staring at the shadow of Kolia’s paintings on the wall, rectangular placeholders that they used to remember their poor dead brother. Still, Lika must have been flaring in his peripheral vision. In her pretty jacket, she was the brightest thing in the room, even counting the lamps and the candles on the piano, staring in open-mouthed wonderment at the author in the flesh.

  “Antosha?” Masha said. “I’d like to introduce Lika, who teaches with me.”

  Finally he looked at her, smiling halfway again. “Hello, Lika Who Teaches with Me.”

  Lika dropped her gaze.

  “All the blood’s rushed to her face.” Olga pointed. “She must have read your stories, Antosha.”

  “I have.” Lika clutched her heart. “The one about Kashtanka is my favourite. The poor little dog. Also, ‘The Kiss.’”

  “I write too,” Misha said.

  “Tell them what you really want to do,” Masha told her.

  They all waited for Lika’s revelation, which Masha knew to be utterly commonplace. The longer the poor girl twisted her hands, the more affected it seemed, though both brothers appeared mesmerized.

  “Go on,” Masha said.

  At last she flung out her arms and flapped them. “I’d like to be an actress. It’s my one dream. But it will never come true.”

  By Olga’s slitted look, Masha guessed that she’d been waiting to pounce.

  “An actress? Antosha, why don’t you write a play for her? I’m serious. That Wood Demon lacked something. Perhaps you felt uninspired.”

  “Olechka,” Masha hissed.

  Antosha betrayed no sign of offence. Unruffled, ever the perfect host, he warmly told them, “I have work. Please, ladies. Enjoy yourselves.”

  Bowing, he backed out of the room. And though Olga had been the one to drive him off, she called out after him, “But, Antosha. We can’t live without you!”

  Spoken only half in jest.

  NO SURPRISE THAT AFTER ANTOSHA LEFT, THE EVENING dribbled into tedium again, into conjugations, Chopin, and Misha telling Lika all about himself. Law school meant little to him; like Lika, he had a beautiful dream. He bragged about the editors he was friendly with, without mentioning that these contacts came through Antosha.