A Russian Sister Read online

  Sakhalin Island.

  Such a trip would kill him. His health was already compromised, though no one spoke openly of it. Neither did they mention what Kolia had died of. A sick man in a penal colony full of murderers. Shackles and gallows and the lash. Despite this cartographic proof right in front of her, it was easier to believe in Hell as a physical place than Sakhalin Island. Children were cowed into obedience by the very mention of it.

  She turned and saw her girls, their braided, calculating heads lifted, watching her. Is it Geography now, Miss? She waved to keep them adding. Later, she anesthetized them with verses to memorize. This way she got through the day.

  When she finally found herself alone among the empty desks, she went to the window and looked out. Below she saw not the Dairy School courtyard, but the one in Taganrog. The high red-brick wall around it, wooden gates shut. The storehouse made of the same bloodshot brick where Antosha used to hide after the beatings. Aleksander, Kolia, Antosha, punished with relish; when they howled, Father beat them harder. The other two crawled off to secret refuges, but she always knew where to find Antosha.

  Inside, the storeroom was crammed higgledy-piggledy with wooden crates, the air heavy, an olio: tallow, sardines, sulphur, cloves. Mice droppings. The used tea leaves drying on newsprint sheets. She would creep in and find him squeezed behind the crates. To this day, certain combinations of odours made her ill. She couldn’t bear cheap tallow candles.

  Her head throbbed. Outside the window, the weak light gave way to dusk while the impassive Dairy School cows lined up in the frozen yard, tails flicking as they waited to be milked.

  BY THE TIME MASHA LEFT SCHOOL HER SENSES HAD fully returned. The tram stank of wet sheepskin and fur, and the bodies of people terrified of visiting the baths in winter.

  The observatory was tucked behind a wooden fence, its tower rising from a complex of white buildings. No one seemed to be around, just the bearded watchman who led her to Olga’s office, tsking about the snow she’d tramped in. Masha hadn’t seen Olga since their awkward parting the night Lika visited. The English lessons had ceased; apparently, Masha was too stupid. Masha was afraid of Olga at the best of times, which only made her more admiring. Few people inspired fear in Masha. But Olga was also the only one of her friends who’d been involved with Antosha and still remained close to both of them.

  She wasn’t in her office. “I’ll leave a note,” Masha told the watchman, who shuffled off, muttering into his beard.

  Of the several desks in the room, she knew Olga’s by the chaos of books and papers, the nebula stain on the blotter. Masha smelled her cigarettes, could picture her here with her male colleagues, a star herself surrounded by beards.

  Loving Olga had been a difficult proposition, Antosha had told her back in their Guerrier days. Yet her difficultness seemed to be the very thing he enjoyed—her exasperated intelligence and her pride. Her shabby clothes. He loved to open the door for her just to hear her snap, “I’m capable of doing it myself. You men are not as essential as you think.”

  “What are you snooping around for?”

  Masha swung around. Olga, unsmiling in the doorway. “You are here,” Masha said.

  “I was in the tower. The watchman found me. What do you want?” She sounded angry, but probably wasn’t. She headed straight for her desk, where she retrieved her tobacco pouch from a drawer.

  “Did you see the papers today?” Masha asked.

  “I try to avoid them. Why?” She lifted out a pinch of brown strands and turned her back. Her pincushion bun sagged at her nape, off-centre.

  “There was something about Antosha. Olga, I’m upset. Even Misha’s upset.”

  “Is he getting married?”

  “What?” Masha recoiled like she’d been slapped. “He’s in Petersburg. Apparently he’s planning a trip.”

  “To Sakhalin Island, you mean? Yes, he wrote me.”

  This was more of a slap than the marriage joke. He’d confided in Olga but not his sister.

  Olga put out her tongue to seal the cigarette. “Don’t pout. He said he’s written you too. He wants us to look up some things for him. Apparently our library’s better.”

  She searched through the littered desk for a match and, to Masha’s amazement, struck it with her thumbnail. The flame burst. Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked.

  “They’ll never let him go.”

  The authorities, she meant. This was probably true. In her panic, Masha hadn’t thought of this. Except for long-ago explorers and now jailers and the condemned, and any family they dragged into exile with them, no one had seen the place. Yet every word Antosha wrote, every word published in the country, had to be approved by a censor. Anything he had to say would be critical and therefore forbidden, so why would they let him go?

  “Since you’re here,” Olga said, heading for the door, “come see the tower.”

  “Is it allowed?” Masha asked.

  “I’m allowing it.”

  Masha trailed her down a polished corridor. The place was not as deserted as it had seemed. Some doors at this end were open. Several times a scientific head lifted to watch them pass, spectacled eyes unwelcoming. Masha felt uncomfortable. Olga kept her chin high despite her stooping shoulders. She flicked ash off her cigarette.

  In her cryptic, ill-humoured way, Olga had managed to reassure Masha that Antosha wouldn’t go. But she still didn’t know why he wanted to.

  “He said he feels stagnant,” she told Olga. “But that’s hardly a reason to go to such a place.”

  They’d reached a set of steps at the end of the corridor. Olga paused. “He’s an expert observer of suffering. I think it’s a form of homeopathy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like cures like. It’s just an idea. Please don’t share it with him, or he’ll have my head. Doctors don’t like to be diagnosed.”

  She climbed the steps and opened the heavy door at the top. Masha felt as though she were being invited beyond an altar screen, into this circular room lined with dark wood cabinets filled with mysterious devices. In the centre was a large round table on which several charts were spread, weighted at the corners with books. Their embossed titles were in German. The telescope of polished brass stood before one of the windows. The instruments, the books, the arcane charts—all of it filled Masha with awe.

  But it wasn’t the science that Olga wanted to show her, for she pointed up to the vaulted ceiling. It was painted with gold stars, each in its own piece of sky enclosed in a border of white and gold.

  “It’s beautiful.” Masha turned a circle as she looked up. “I’d like to paint it.”

  IT WAS NEARLY DARK WHEN SHE STARTED FOR HOME. The actual stars were out, but crossing the Crimean Bridge, she saw the frozen river as an unreflecting void. Her desire to paint had briefly revived in the tower, only to freeze in her veins again. What was the matter with her? Everyone said she was as good a painter as Kolia, that she could have gone to the College of Art if women had been allowed.

  Perhaps it was because of Kolia that she felt indifferent. If she began painting again, it would mean he was really gone.

  For the first time she considered seeking out her old teacher, Isaac Levitan. He’d been Kolia’s friend, and was Antosha’s too. A family friend. One year he summered with them, which was when he gave her lessons. Isaac was always tender with his advice to her. With anyone else’s shortcomings he’d let rip, for he took bad painting personally. With her, he’d simply circle his long finger over her composition and ask, “Where are you, Masha?” Meaning, what part of herself had she put in the landscape?

  But Isaac was a success now, like Antosha. His opinion of himself had always been mighty; why would he have time for a dabbler, even one personally connected to him? Besides, she was always embarrassed in his presence, because that summer, in a manic fit, he’d fallen to his knees and proposed to her. She’d been so taken aback, she’d packed up her things and run.

  When she got home from the obser
vatory, there was indeed a letter from Antosha. She tore it open, hoping it would deny the Sakhalin Island story. Could you please find out the following? Enclosed was a long list of information required to plan his suicidal trip. Olga would help her, he said.

  Olga had been right. When wasn’t she?

  At dinner, after Mother left the table, Masha mentioned to the soon-to-be lawyer the other thing Olga had said. “Olga thinks they won’t allow it.”

  “Probably not,” Misha agreed. “Except he does have the backing of Alexei Suvorin. He’s rich enough to pull strings and pay bribes. But still. It’s unlikely.”

  All they could do now was wait for Antosha to return from St. Petersburg and explain himself.

  Meanwhile, they hid the news from Mother, who was thankfully not a reader of newspapers. Not a reader at all, not even of Antosha’s stories. She would listen to them when they were read aloud, glowing with pride, though Masha suspected that her mind was actually elsewhere during these times, that it was the sound of his quiet voice that lit her from within, not the words themselves, for she often laughed at the wrong times. Worse, she once referred in company to Antosha’s “poems,” humiliating the family, though Antosha had only laughed.

  A few days later, brother Ivan’s letter arrived. There was no train beyond a certain point, he needlessly informed them. Antosha would have to go on by horse and carriage, and boat, perhaps even on foot, as the convicts did. Ivan too was concerned for his health.

  Mother got to this letter before Masha did and afterward required nightly propping up.

  “Do you remember Taganrog?” she moaned from her bed when Masha came in one night with her compress.

  “Of course I do. I was ten when we left.” She laid the damp cloth across the corrugations of worry on Mother’s forehead.

  “I mean when Father went bankrupt and left us on our own.” She stared up with small, frightened eyes. “Those men banging on the door, demanding their money. I was alone with four hungry children. Father said not to sell anything, that he would send us what we needed, but he didn’t. He didn’t!”

  “Don’t think of those times, Mamasha. They’re over.”

  “Are they? It was Antosha who saved us. A sixteen-year-old boy. What will happen to us if he goes to Sakhalin Island?”

  Masha settled beside Mother on the edge of the bed, when she would have preferred to flee the room and those memories. “He won’t go. Misha says they won’t allow it.”

  Mother’s handkerchief was lost somewhere in the bedclothes. Masha blotted her tears with the hem of the sheet.

  In those years, Father had whistled too often inside the house and brought the misfortune of bankruptcy upon them. He’d worked his way out of the peasantry only to destroy his business. Aleksander and Kolia were studying in Moscow by then; like a coward, Father had run off there. He was supposed to find work. Instead he’d had an attack of religiosity and decided to pray in every single one of Moscow’s multitude of churches.

  Masha went out with Ivan and Misha to catch songbirds. To this day she could conjure the feel of a bird trapped in her skirts, its frenzied wings beating against her thighs. Feel the animal-gnawing of their hunger too. A bird would fetch a few kopeks in the market, enough to buy a pirozhok.

  Antosha took charge. He sold the furniture, put the rest of them on the train and stayed behind himself to finish high school. He paid his tuition by tutoring, even sent money to them. The following year, when he joined them in Moscow, Father had finally found employment as a live-in watchman in a warehouse across the river. But there still wasn’t enough to live on, so Antosha began writing stories.

  “I’ve just lost Kolia,” Mother whimpered. “Why can’t Antosha stay home and write about things in Moscow, as he always has?”

  “IT SAID HE WAS GOING TO COLLECT STORY IDEAS,” LIKA told Masha at school that week. She’d read a different paper. The news was spreading fast.

  “That’s rubbish,” Masha replied. Stories he plucked from the air.

  “Well, he’s truly heroic.”

  A dreamy look crossed Lika’s already dreamy face; her silver eyes practically filled with clouds. She was eighteen but sometimes seemed like a Dairy School pupil herself, romantic on the one hand, like now, but also adolescent in her complaints. It was terribly dull at home, she’d told Masha. Just her and Granny going at each other.

  The word “heroic” made Masha bristle. As soon as Antosha returned from St. Petersburg, he’d be heaped with this sort of adulation. It would encourage him in his folly.

  Lika was still lost in thought in the doorway of Masha’s classroom, effectively barring her way. Masha was to meet Olga at the Rumiantsev Library. The easiest thing was to invite Lika along.

  When they arrived together, Olga was already hunched behind a book-laden table. She scowled at the sight of Lika but soon reassessed her opinion. When would the ice break up on the Kama River? Lika found out first.

  Obviously she was intelligent; she’d been a Guerrier student too. Not only that—if a slim blonde with silvery eyes asked for the books, the clerks would run for them.

  4

  ANTOSHA RETURNED FROM ST. PETERSBURG ONE night at the end of the month, after Mother and Masha had already gone to bed. Mariushka’s frantic shrieks woke them. They rushed to the dining room and found him chasing the fat cook around the table, imitating her distressed-goose gait.

  “Look how she hobbles!” he called to Mother and Masha in the doorway. “Just let me see what’s ailing you, Mariushka.”

  “No!” she screeched.

  Mother laughed as she hadn’t since Kolia died. Masha, in her nightdress, hair undone, leapt into the game, catching Mariushka’s arm, solidly muscular from decades of stirring kasha. She got her to sit, whereupon Mariushka threw her apron over her face. Antosha pulled off her dirty slipper, then her oft-darned stocking, long and stained like a bull’s entrails. A stream of muttered prayers issued from under the apron.

  He sat across from her. “I’m not going to hurt you, Mariushka. I just want to see what’s wrong. Look at me. Look.” He shook her hideous foot.

  Mariushka tore off the apron and glared out of her clenched face.

  “Ready?” He pushed back the horned toes, ran his thumb across her sole. Gently. He was a wonderful doctor.

  “Ah!” Mariushka screamed. “You’re tickling!”

  He took her biggest toe between his fingers. “Magpie, magpie . . .” Utter seriousness. “. . . cooked the porridge. Fed it to the children.”

  Masha felt the grin spread across her own face, a great rush of hilarity, as though he were playing this joke on her.

  “She gave some to this one. And this one.”

  As he pulled each rinded toe, Mariushka howled. The last was so mashed it barely resembled a toe.

  “But she didn’t give anything to this one, who hasn’t done the chores. Nothing for you!” He let go her foot. “They’re just warts, Mariushka. I’ll mix you an arsenic paste.”

  Mariushka snatched her stocking and slipper and huffed off, flushed and making spitting sounds, which none of them took seriously. Then Mother came and kissed Antosha’s forehead.

  “Welcome home, Antonshevu.” She blotted her eyes on the sleeve of her nightdress. “You’re not going to Siberia, are you?”

  “Go back to bed, Mamasha. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  As soon as they were alone, Masha went to the cupboard for the vodka, still smiling like her face might crack. “After that performance, brother? I’ll never get to sleep.”

  “Was it better than The Wood Demon?”

  She set down the vodka and glasses and the plate of Mother’s gingerbread from the sideboard. As she poured, she fixed him with a look of mock astonishment.

  “Did I hear right? Was that your long-departed sense of humour?”

  She joined him at the table. They raised their glasses, drank, nibbled some gingerbread to soak it up. Antosha made a face over the gingerbread, preferring something salty with this
vice. He loosened his tie.

  “And Father’s still away. I forgot. Could Ivan be persuaded to keep him, do you think?”

  “Unlikely. He keeps writing to ask us to take him back.”

  He smiled at her. How well he looked—a healthy colour to his face again. From chasing Mariushka, yes, but he’d had the breath to chase her. Masha didn’t want to say anything that might dampen his mood, but at the same time she was desperate to unburden her worry. She brushed at the gingerbread crumbs on the tablecloth.

  “Did you get the permit you were seeking?”

  “I was trying to get a pass from the head administrator. The usual Janus-faced bureaucrat.”

  She looked up, hopeful now. “So you didn’t get one?”

  “I got a press card. We’ll see if that gets me on the island.”

  “You’re really going?”

  He heard her anguish, she was sure. His eyes let hers go, and he glanced at his nails, which were, as always, immaculate and trimmed. She’d kill herself if she cried now or made some kind of scene. That was no way to manage him. He’d withdraw, and everything would be spoiled.

  He leaned back, hands behind his head. Stretched out one long leg, then the other. “I’m hoping to go. But it’s complicated, as is everything. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before I left. I wanted to—but then you would have held me back, wouldn’t you?”

  There was hope. It was “complicated.” Nothing was certain. The main thing was not to show she disapproved or worried. To keep him happy. Then the trip would come to nothing, and they would go on living as before. Before Kolia died and before he decided to write that bewildering play.

  Masha tucked her cold feet under herself and raised her hands to fashion a temporary braid. For once, her hair obeyed; wavy brown hanks clung to each other like vines. She smiled—a facsimile, but never mind. Antosha smiled back, possibly as falsely. Or perhaps he was relieved that she’d controlled herself.