A Russian Sister Read online

  Skirts rustled disappointedly to the tea table and back. Eventually they rustled home.

  Lika and Vermicelli rushed to catch the horse tram, which passed in front of the house every hour. Olga took her time leaving. She punched her arms into the sleeves of her balding coat, drew a glove from one pocket, then the other. Masha, sensing that Olga was choosing her departing words for maximum effect, braced herself.

  “Your gloves aren’t the same.”

  “Yes, a mismatched pair. The story of my life. I grabbed whatever was on the table.”

  Olga stamped her feet into her galoshes, pulled on her cat-fur hat. There was a singed patch at the front from when she’d accidentally set it on fire with her cigarette. Masha handed her the English books.

  “I always ask myself why you do it,” Olga said.

  “I’d like to teach it. I’d earn more from an extra class.”

  Olga smirked. Briefly, Masha was puzzled. Then she realized Olga meant Masha’s matchmaking. She countered with pity. Olga had no family. Where was she going now? To the observatory, or home? She moved rooms so often Masha had no idea where she lived. In a burst of solicitude, she pecked her friend’s cheek.

  “Get off me,” Olga snapped, before stepping into the frigid night.

  “Good evening,” Masha called back in her knock-kneed English.

  She shut the door and turned to face Antosha. Should she go in and ask what he thought of her new friend? How frustrating that Lika had been stricken by that stupid-making shyness. And that Olga was so damn prickly and rude. He’d dragged himself away from his desk, depressed as he was, only to be insulted. Better not disturb him a second time.

  As Masha started up, the stairs issuing their plaints all the way, Olga’s insinuating comment came with her. I always ask myself why you do it.

  Why shouldn’t she invite friends to come by? Olga knew how they’d suffered since Kolia’s passing. If she could see Lika at school with her trilling voice and contagious cheer, she’d understand. No, a misanthrope like Olga never would. She seemed to think a sister caring for her brother was unnatural. Caring for her brothers.

  At the top of the stairs Masha paused and conjured their family portrait in her mind. Two parents—another mismatched pair—flanked by their offspring. On one side, the three eldest—Aleksander, Kolia, Antosha. Then the three youngest—Masha, Ivan, Misha. But now Kolia had been painted out.

  Well, there never was such a portrait. And it was not as though they had gathered as a complete family in recent years. At the moment, Father was inflicting himself on their brother Ivan, the other teacher in the family, in his country schoolhouse far from Moscow.

  A completely unhappy family.

  MASHA DREAMED A FACE THAT NIGHT. EYES GLANCING sidelong in a hairless china head. Then the tattered, sawdust-stuffed body joined it. Her own doll, the one toy she’d brought from Taganrog to Moscow when they’d fled. It seemed a curious choice, both to bring and to dream. A doll who wouldn’t look her in the eye.

  But then, in that discomforting logic of dreams, the face came to life. The cherry mouth opened to cry. The doll still wouldn’t look at Masha. She was angry. Masha woke in the dark, chill room.

  She’d had a sister, Evgenia, Mother’s last child. Masha was six when she was born. How could she have forgotten her, her own living doll, adored? Pale flossy hair and black currant eyes, plump clapping hands.

  She died, leaving Masha with only brothers. Four now.

  2

  JANUARY CAME. NOTHING HAD CHANGED SINCE THE night Masha invited Lika. Winter still blustered around the chest, every drawer filled with grief. If anything, Antosha’s mood had worsened.

  They’d been close since their childhood in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, where they lived in a flat above Father’s shop. Father—their undoing. A hypocrite, he made a show of his devotion, kowtowing to the priests, yet at the shop he rigged his scales and dyed old tea leaves to sell as new. And his hand was heavy. He yearned for God’s mercy, but had none for his sons. Masha had been exempt as the only girl, but every punch and kick, every blow of the cane that struck Antosha, she felt too.

  They took small revenge in a favourite game. When Father was out, they put on his church coat, one sleeve each, and, holding the other by the waist, bumped around the house in tandem, arguing. We’ll sit. No stand! On the sofa. No, the chair! They kept each other in stitches straining the patriarch’s seams. To this day Masha felt they were conjoined. She couldn’t be happy if Antosha wasn’t.

  After work, she gathered the post from the table in the hall and stood riffling through the stack. Another begging letter from Kolia’s mistress. Masha recognized her inebriated scrawl and closed the shutters around her heart. The first anniversary of Kolia’s passing would come in June. She and Mother planned to go to Ukraine, where he’d died, for the ceremony. Would their sorrow ease then?

  She slipped that envelope to the bottom of the pile. At the top now was a letter from Ivan, probably complaining about Father’s visit. She dropped it on the table. Then one from Father, no doubt filled with complaints about Ivan. That went on the table too. Most of the rest were for Antosha, publishing business, but some were personal too, such as the next addressed in a familiar hand, though Masha had never met the woman. The frequency of her letters had acquainted Masha with her writing.

  Antosha was a celebrity. In restaurants waiters quoted him lines from his own stories, which he hated. His comings and goings were publicly noted. Things he would never reveal to his family came to them as literary gossip, such as his relationship to this exotically named actress living, according to her stationery, in the Hotel Madrid. He’d met her the summer before in Odessa, or so the papers had reported. Kleopatra. The envelope reeked of scent.

  Masha knocked once on Antosha’s door before opening it, giving him no time to arrange his face. The cheerful bowtie contrasted with the expression above it. Dullness. Fatigue. Was he unwell? Her heart lurched at the thought.

  “Are you working?” she asked, though the answer was self-evident.

  “It’s all right. Come in.”

  He signed the letter he was writing using his whole arm, like he was dashing off a sketch, and dropped it on the postal scale he kept on his desk. She watched him take out the scissors to trim the margins, then weigh it a second time. This was his inner conflict dramatized—the desire for fine things measured against the family’s former destitution. Antosha felt compelled to save on postage, yet the paper and ink were of the finest quality.

  “You’re not throwing those out, are you?” She pointed to the unusable strips. “Why not write a story on them?”

  No smile for her quip. He merely took the letters from her and shuffled through them, stopping briefly at the one from Kolia’s mistress. Kleopatra’s letter he slipped in a drawer.

  “That one has a lot to say,” Masha chirped.

  No reply. He was not in the mood to joke about his affairs.

  Some of Misha’s law texts were piled on his desk. You take all the women and then you take my books, the little brother would howl. These looked like treatises on prison management. She saw the word “Siberia” and shuddered. How could this help Antosha’s depression?

  She was distracted then by an unfamiliar object next to the grim tomes. A small bronze horse flanked by a pair of empty inkwells.

  “From a patient,” Antosha told her.

  As a doctor, he often took goods in lieu of payment—an embroidered cushion, a freshly caught perch wrapped in the Moscow Gazette. He fed them all more on ink than on his meagre doctor’s earnings.

  “Sad,” he said. “She lugged it over in her bag. Lift it.”

  The base was marble. “Ooof.” Masha set it down again. “You’d think the owner of such a thing could pay her doctor.”

  “She couldn’t even pay for the prescription. She just sat there blinking at it. I thought she couldn’t read.”

  “Illiterates don’t generally own fancy inkwells.”

  He s
quared the stack of letters for later reading. “Exactly my conclusion.”

  “Did you give her money? Are you sending more to his mistress?” Kolia’s, she meant. “She’ll only drink it.”

  “Last time she said she had no coat.”

  Antosha looked up at Masha now and squinted. This was their usual disagreement; his charity, her common sense. If not for her, he would work himself to death.

  But there was something else on his mind, for he stood then. “Sister. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Oh, Antosha. The birds freeze in flight. And it’ll be dark soon. How about tea?”

  Winter was no excuse. He waved it off.

  In the hall the coat stand, with all it held, stood like an upright bear. They bundled up, and it became a stand again. Outside, it was harder for Antosha’s weak lungs to draw a cold breath. He rasped. By the time they’d reached the far side of the Garden Ring Road, his beard and eyebrows were beaded with ice.

  “Your face is a chandelier,” Masha said.

  They never went to the Zoological Gardens. It wasn’t an outing if you only had to cross the street. Also, Antosha disapproved of the place with its distant howls and cries; an “animal graveyard,” he called it, for all the creatures that died of malnutrition or froze. His horror notwithstanding, a running joke had developed between her brothers. Each blamed the elephant when they passed wind.

  In late January it was an abandoned place, trees rimed, paths glittering in the dusk. Masha leaned into Antosha as they shuffled along, clinging arm in arm, heads nearly touching. Just like when they shared Father’s coat.

  “Are you worried about money again?”

  He spoke into his fur collar. “The play was a setback. In all ways. But I expected it. Everyone warned me. Unfortunately, knowing in advance you’ll be tied up and spat on doesn’t make it any easier.”

  She flinched. “You’re so used to praise.”

  “It’s not that. They made such a mess of it. Why should I try, when no one will understand what I’m doing?”

  Several times during these broody weeks she’d yearned to point something out: perhaps the theatre wasn’t his forte. He wanted it to resemble life, but in life he shrank from anything theatrical. Scenes of any kind repelled him. Arguments, wounded feelings.

  She asked, “You won’t write another, then?”

  “Another play? Never.”

  She pulled her arm free to shake his hand. “Congratulations. It’s decided. Stick to stories.” Now he could cheer up.

  He didn’t. They walked on in silence, until she could no longer stand it. “Brother? I can’t feel my feet.”

  He pointed to one of the pavilions, and they hurried toward it holding hands. Inside, a dim room with a vaulted ceiling, a row of cages on one side. The lanterns probably burned all day. Most prominent, though, was the urinous stench.

  “It smells like Father’s breath,” Antosha said, and Masha laughed.

  They stamped and shook themselves to bring their blood back. She knocked the ice off his face with her glove. Then they noticed the matted heap in one of the cages, emaciated and dull-coated, its back leg rubbed hairless by what was surely a redundant shackle.

  “Excuse us,” Antosha said.

  “It’s like in your stories,” Masha said, drawing closer to the bars. “Whenever anyone’s depressed, they lie with their face to the wall.”

  “Do they?”

  The bear was hibernating, no doubt, but eventually it would waken, and that would be worse.

  “Her son was a convict,” Antosha said.

  “Who?”

  “The woman who brought me the inkwell. She must have been pawning everything she owned. She complained about a stomachache. Only after my examination did she blurt out the truth. Maybe you don’t remember this. In Taganrog we could see them marched off to Siberia from our window.”

  “I remember spitting sunflower shells out that window.”

  “Marched off to slavery. We can’t get away from it.”

  Their grandfather had been a serf—Father, too, until he was sixteen and Grandfather bought the family’s freedom. But Antosha was speaking about more than their personal history.

  “Isn’t the theatre slave to its old forms, children to their parents, and women to men? But here’s the thing, Masha. When she told me about her son, I didn’t feel sorry for her. I actually envied the son getting away.”

  She heard his tone, saturated with indignation and pain, but was still confused. “I’m not following you, brother, and I badly want to.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” It was the keeper stumbling in in his navy greatcoat, all brass-buttoned and outraged to see them there. “I just about locked you up. Get out!”

  It was dark by then. Despite the moon standing sentry, they had to feel their way down the path toward the lights along the Garden Ring.

  “I sense there’s something you’re not saying,” she told Antosha.

  In fact, he’d told her everything.

  “There’s a sort of stagnation in my soul, sister. I’m not disappointed or tired. Not even depressed. Everything’s suddenly uninteresting to me. I’ve got to do something to rouse myself.”

  At that moment, she slipped on the ice and nearly lost her balance. Somehow, in the darkness, Antosha caught her arm in time. “A broken leg I don’t need,” she said when she’d got herself firmly planted again. “You keep me on my feet.”

  From under his breath, his promise: “I always will.”

  ONLY MASHA WAS ALLOWED NEAR ANTOSHA’S DESK. The next morning the Queen of the Nile’s letter lay there as open as a woman spread across a bed. Masha would read it in due course anyway as part of her organizational duties. Now or later—what difference did it make? Every year after Epiphany, they sat down to this task. Personal letters and literary letters filed according to the author.

  You hellishly elegant man, you are ordered to show up. Curl your hair and wear a pink tie. Forget the theatre. I have.

  Was this Kleopatra a prostitute? Then Masha thought, If she interests him, if she rouses him from his stagnation . . .

  She’d invited Lika for this purpose, but less cold-bloodedly than Olga had intimated. Despite the fact that Masha was eight years older—or because of it, perhaps—Lika frequently sought Masha out at school, for advice, or to restore order in her classroom, or to stage-snore beside her during assembly. Often she waited for her at the end of the day. All this had started before Lika learned who Masha’s brother was, so she obviously liked Masha for herself. For this reason, Masha hadn’t at first wanted to bring Lika home, because whatever happened there would affect the currently happy situation at work. The Wood Demon forced her. But now she could leave the cheering up to this Kleopatra person and keep Lika for herself.

  She folded the scented letter back into its envelope. Under it was a note from Antosha. He’d taken the morning train to St. Petersburg to visit his publisher. Good.

  Masha had been a guest of Alexei Suvorin herself a few years before. His ceiling-high aviary came to mind, a live pine tree growing inside it, filled with flitting finches and canaries. Antosha would benefit from Suvorin’s luxuries—lavatory, a footman, multi-course inebriating meals. Their eldest brother, Aleksander, lived in Petersburg too, and Antosha enjoyed his company in small doses, or tolerated it, at least. Most importantly, Alexei Suvorin was like Antosha’s better second father. Antosha would return pampered and renewed.

  She dropped his note in the wastebasket. Nudged the blotter, which already lined up exactly with the edge of the desk. The postal scale was true. Air, it showed, weighed nothing. Why did she feel so restless?

  Antosha had begun writing to support the family while he was studying medicine. Comic tales about Police Inspector Moronoff, about Kreepikoff who sneezed on a general at the opera, about Skribblich the clerk. Hundreds and hundreds of sketches, satires and riffs. Masha would copy them out to send to journals, so in a way she wrote them too. At least she was the person second clo
sest to the work, having formed the words with her own hand and picked her way through the crossings-out and blots before anyone judged them perfect. Her script was neat, with no mistakes. Unlike life.

  Not restless—useless. Useless to him.

  The bronze horse reared between the inkwells. Antosha had filled them. She unscrewed the cap on the pot, dipped his holy nib. A drop clung to the tip, their whole past contained in it.

  A black black tear.

  3

  MISHA FLUNG A NEWSPAPER DOWN IN FRONT OF Masha. It was one of the liberal-leaning papers; they were praising Antosha. The first writer to visit Sakhalin Island. The first to catalogue the injustices of a penal colony.

  “This can’t be true,” she said. Then she remembered that grim pile on Antosha’s desk, “Siberia” stamped on the spines. She turned her fury on the little brother. “He’s been reading your books. Did you encourage him in this?”

  Misha’s big ears turned an indignant crimson. “He didn’t tell me anything. You’re the one he talks to. I thought you knew.”

  She had to leave for school. Somehow she finished dressing, caught the tram and got herself into the classroom. Her mouth opened and closed, words coming out. Antosha had written about this condition in a story. Psychic blindness. When someone sees without understanding.

  It couldn’t be true. Half the things she read about him in the papers were lies.

  Meanwhile her girls worked out sums on their slates, the chalk clicking hollowly. They dared not speak. They thought she was in a temper over something, but it was disbelief and horror. The woman who’d brought Antosha the inkwell must have felt just like this. She’d opened the paper and learned that her son was heading off to Siberia. Antosha had gone to St. Petersburg to seek permits to do the same, not, as Masha had thought, to carouse with his publisher.

  On the classroom wall hung a portrait of Tsar Aleksander III, his moustaches waxed, thinning peninsula of hair on his pate. Next to him the map of Russia was fixed with pins. Masha went and found the place—shaped like demon pinchers reaching down. She put her finger on Moscow, then moved it northeastwardly across the Urals, to Siberia. She had to take a step to get there. But Antosha’s destination was worse than Siberia, and farther. Two more steps. Across the vast amoral emptiness of Siberia too, well beyond where the rail line ended, to the Okhotsk Sea.