Ice Trilogy (3 page)

Soon Klim grunted, the way men grunt when they’re splitting logs, and then he was still. It was as though he fell asleep, lying on Marfusha like a mattress. She kept on moaning softly and stroked his curly head. Finally he rolled over, sat up, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“Lord
y...
what if there’s a baby?” said Marfusha, lifting her head.

Klim looked at her as though seeing her for the first time.

“Yull come tonight?” he asked hoarsely.

“Heavens, who’ll let me out?” she said, starting to button her dress.

“Come when it gets dark,” Klim sniffed.

“Klimushka, sweetheart, what’ll happen now?” she replied, suddenly hugging him close.

“Nothing will happen,” he muttered.

“Oh no, I gotta run,” she murmured.

“You go, I’ll come along after,” said Klim gloomily, chewing on a twig.

“It’s not wet on the hem is it?”

“Nuh-uh.”

I began to back away from the hut, then turned and ran home.

What I had seen in the hut shook me as deeply as the brawl in the ravine. I understood with all my small being that both things were very important for people. Otherwise they wouldn’t do them with such passion and effort.

I soon learned about childbirth from my brother Vanya. After that, the scene in the hut acquired another dimension for me: I understood that children are born out of a
secret groaning
, which is carefully hidden from everyone. Vanya informed me that children were only made at night. I began to listen carefully at night. And once, walking by my parents’ bedroom, I heard the same moans and growling. Returning to my own bed, I lay there and thought: What a very strange activity this is, making children. Only one thing remained unclear — why is it all hidden?

In the morning at breakfast, when Marfusha, Klim, and Father’s old servant Timofei were serving us, and everyone sitting at the table was, as usual, discussing news from the front, I suddenly asked, “But is Marfusha going to have a baby?”

The conversation stopped. Everyone looked at Marfusha. At that moment she was holding a porcelain dish from which the gray-haired, bulbous-nosed Timofei was ladling farina porridge onto our plates with his customary, long-suffering, anxious expression. Klim, standing in the corner of the dining room at the samovars, was filling glasses with tea. Marfusha turned redder than she had in the hut. The dish shook in her hands. Klim looked askance at me and grew pale.

Mother saved everyone. Most likely, she had guessed about the ties between the maid and the servant.

“Shurochka, Marfusha will have five children,” she said. Then she added: “Three boys and two girls.”

“That’s right,” Father agreed, frowning as he spooned jam abundantly over his porridge. “And then — another five. So that there’s someone to go to war.”

Everyone laughed approvingly. Marfusha tried to smile.

She had a hard time of it.

With each month the war intruded into our lives more and more. Vasily arrived home from the front. Not on his own two legs — he was driven from the train station in Father’s automobile. The automobile blew its horn three times, and we ran out to meet our war hero, who had written short but memorable letters. Vasily stepped out of the automobile and, leaning on the chauffeur and Timofei, began climbing the steps to meet us. He was wearing an overcoat and a peaked cap, and his face was very yellow. Timofei carefully held his wooden stick. Vasily smiled guiltily. We rushed to kiss him. Mama sobbed. Father walked over and stood nearby, gazing tensely at Vasily and blinking. His strong chin trembled.

In Poland, near Lovich, Vasily had been in a German gas attack. Although my brother had been poisoned with chlorine, the serpentine words “mustard gas” slithered into me.

Sitting in the parlor by the blazing fireplace, Vasily had tea and pastries and told us how he ran from the chlorine cloud; how he killed eight Germans with a machine gun; how two of his frontline friends were blown to bits by one shell, the warrant officer Nikolaev and the volunteer Gvishiani; how they silently took out the sentries with a horsehair string, “the Gypsy bride”; how to fight lice and tanks; what capital flamethrowers the Germans have; and what a multitude of Russian corpses lay in a huge wheat field after the Brusilov Offensive.

“They lay in even rows as though they’d been deliberately arranged. When they moved to attack the machine-gun nests, they were mowed down like grain.”

We listened, holding our breath. The glass of tea shook in Vasily’s yellow hand. He kept having to cough; his eyes teared up and were always red now, as though he’d just been crying. Vasily would grow short of breath when walking; to catch his breath he’d stop and lean on his walking stick.

Father sent him to Piatigorsk to take the waters.

Then a year later in Moscow my oldest brother took his own life, firing a revolver at his temple and a ladies’ Browning at his heart simultaneously. Vanya said that Vasily shot himself because of a married woman with whom he had been hopelessly in love even before the war.

Father kept growing wealthier and ever more dependent on the war. His business moved up in the world. He acquired many new acquaintances, mostly among the military. He began to drink more, and more often, and was rarely at home, saying that now he “lived on the road.” Various thin-eared, energetic young men darted about him; he called them his commissioners. Now he was
involved
not only in sugar but in many other things as well. When he shouted into the telephone, bizarre phrases would reach my ears: “American rubber will grab us by the throat one of these days,” “There’s a shipment of crackers gone criminally missing in the warehouse,” “Those scoundrels from the land committee of the southwestern front are cutting me without a knife,” “Six cars of soap shavings have been delayed at the junction,” and so on.

My grandmother, who was quietly living out the remainder of her life in the house on Ostozhenka, said one time at Easter, “Our Dimulenka has completely lost his head with this war: he’s chasing seven rabbits at one time.”

And at the time Father really did remind me of a man in torment, racing hopelessly after something nimble and elusive. He himself grew no livelier for the race; on the contrary, he seemed to ossify, and his immobile face frowned even more. It seemed that he had completely stopped sleeping. His eyes shone feverishly and settled on nothing, roaming constantly when he had tea with us.

Another year passed.

The war had made its way into all the cracks. It had slithered out onto the streets. Columns of soldiers marched in the cities; at the station, cannons and horses were loaded onto the trains. Mama and I stopped visiting Basantsy — it was “restless” there. Our entire family settled in Petersburg. Relatives were left behind on the estates. The wartime capital taught me three new words: unemployment, strike, and boycott. For me they were embodied in the dark crowds of people on the streets of Petersburg who wandered about glumly, and whom we tried to pass by as quickly as possible in the dark, in our automobile.

Petersburg began to be called Petrograd.

In the newspapers people wrote mean poems about the Germans and drew caricatures of them. Vanya and Ilya liked to read them aloud. All Germans were divided into two types for me at that time: one was fat with a meaty, laughing face in a horned helmet, a saber in hand; the other was thin as a stick, in a peaked cap, with a monocle, a riding crop, and a sour, disdainful expression on his narrow face.

My older sister Arisha brought home a patriotic song from school. In her singing lessons, the whole class was composing music to the verses of some provincial teacher:

Arise, Russia, oh great and spacious land,

The mortal fight is now at hand,

With the Germans’ dark force,

With the Teutonic knights’ horde!

Nastya and Arisha accompanied with four hands, and I sang with pleasure, standing on a chair.

When we moved to the big city, I noticed that everything happened faster than in Basantsy or Vaskelovo: people moved and talked more quickly, drivers raced along and hollered, automobiles honked and rattled, gymnasium students hurried to school, newspaper hawkers shouted about “our losses.” Father would enter the apartment, throw off his sheepskin coat, eat hurriedly, close himself in his office with his assistant, and then take off in the automobile with his commissioners and disappear for a week. Mama also moved much faster; she was always going somewhere and buying something. We went visiting often and quickly. I had a lot of new friends — boys and girls.

I was being intensively prepared for the high school: I studied Russian and arithmetic with Didenko, and French and German with Madame Panaget. Lessons progressed much faster than before as well.

Even our two pugs, Kaiser and Shuster, ran faster now, barked louder, and pooped on the rug more often.

We celebrated Christmas 1917 at the large house of Father’s new friends. By that time Father had suddenly stopped all his trips and given himself over entirely to a new, menacing word which, like a powerful broom, had swept “trains of chipped lump sugar” and “cars of soap shavings” out of our home. This word was “the Duma.” Like fat Patsiuk from Gogol’s Christmas story, it had entered our parlor and settled in for the duration. Along with it, Papa’s new friends began to come by and sit until late at night. Almost all of them were outwardly identical and entirely different from my tall, gaunt father: they were short, lively, sturdily built, with shaved wide necks, clipped beards, and curled mustaches; they smoked a lot and argued incessantly. Then, once they’d had enough arguing and smoked until they were hoarse, they would write something, dictating to one another at the same time, then father would drink wine with them and they’d go off to dine at Ernest or the new Donon’s. Now father was involved only in politics; he would go to meetings of the mighty, mysterious Duma, and in conversations with Mama often talked about some kind of abscess that was “just about to burst” and how “we must seize the moment.”

After the beginning of the war, the banker Riabov became Father’s best friend in Petrograd. He was also in the Duma.

I fell in love for the first time in my life with the Riabovs’ eleven-year-old daughter, Nika. It was Christmas morning and we children were acting out the Christmas story. The Riabovs’ older son, Riurik, played Herod; Nastya, the angel of the Lord bringing good tidings; Vanya, Ilya, and Arisha, the three kings; Vasilisa, the Mother Mary; and some overgrown high-school student was Joseph. Children we didn’t know well played angels, devils, and slaughtered infants. Nika and I each played two parts: first, Herod’s soldiers searching for male children; and then the ass and the ox who warmed the Christ child in the manger with their breath. The Christ child was played by the Riabovs’ youngest son, Vanyusha, who was five. When he was successfully born in the second act, and Nika and I fastened on the cow and donkey papier-mâché masks and readily poked our muzzles forward to warm him with our breath, Vanyusha burst into tears. We looked at each other through the cutout eyes and giggled quietly. Nika’s brightly sparkling black eyes framed by the donkey’s enormous eyelashes, her soft laughter, and the fragrance of some saccharine-sweet perfume elicited an unexpected rush of tenderness in me. I took her moist hand and didn’t let go until the end of the act.

I sat next to her at dinner, crowding out a little girl. My feelings for Nika grew with every dish that was served. I chatted with her, talking all kinds of nonsense. While we ate crepes with caviar, I pinched her on the elbow in nervous gaiety; over tea and biscuits, I stuck her finger in my dish of apricot preserves.

Nika laughed.

And there was understanding in her laugh. It seemed she liked me too. After dinner a children’s masquerade and dance was held around the Christmas tree. And when the men set off upstairs to smoke and play cards, and the ladies headed to the veranda in the winter garden to trade news, it was proposed that the children play charades. Two lovely English governesses helped us.

“Whaaat to due wiss ziss pepper?” the redheaded, incredibly freckled governess asked, painstakingly pronouncing the Russian words as she pulled little slips of paper with our names out of a box pasted with stars.

“Bark at Nika!” I shouted louder than the others.

We barked at her, sprayed her with water, and carried her around the Christmas tre
e...

Nika laughed for me with her black eyes. I wanted terribly to do something with her so that everyone else around would disappear. The scene I had witnessed in the hut had nothing to do with this feeling. Nika, being the older of us, understood me. She suddenly decided she wanted to switch her wolf mask for the Baba Yaga witch mask.

“Sasha, let’s go, you can help me,” she said, running up the stairs to her room.

Once in her room, she ignored me, but her face burned with excitement as she fell on her knees and began to search furiously through a starry violet bag of masks.

“Where is i
t...
? Oh,
mon Dieu
! Here it is!”

I kneeled down next to her, hugged her tightly around the neck, and kissed her cheek.

“Sasha, you’re so funny,” she muttered, staring at the big-nosed witch mask.

I kissed her again. My heart fluttered. She turned toward me, closed her eyes, and pressed her face to mine. We froze. And for the very first time, I felt that time could stand still.

“Now who do you think could be hiding in here?” came a feigned query, accompanied by the loud rustle of skirts.

Hateful time started up again. And along with it the mistress of the house and a lady with a green fan entered the room. I didn’t have time to release Nika from my embrace.

“They’re being amorous!” the lady exclaimed rapturously, aiming her lorgnette at us. “Nina Pavlovna, just look at them! How sweet!”

But Nika’s homely, taciturn mother was clearly displeased. She looked at us — we were blushing and pressed to each other — attentively.

“Put on the masks. And go downstairs,” she said.

We grabbed the tiger and Baba Yaga masks and ran downstairs.