The Midwife of St. Petersburg (17 page)

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arrests. Fear jumped to Karena’s throat. If they questioned Sergei, what would he say? Could he convince them he was not there? Would he even try? And what about herself?

“And now some of these very soldiers will billet here on Peshkov land,” Madame Yeva said. “Matters are turning severe. Your papa is very worried.”

“Then the officers are coming here to interrogate us?”

“Most assuredly, they will ask questions. Your father wants Sergei prepared to deny he was at the meeting last night. At any and all costs.”

“Have they arrested anyone else? anyone who may have seen who was at the meeting?”

Madame Peshkova’s lips tightened. “It is too soon to know, but we must take precautions. Josef has a plan to try to protect Sergei. I can tell you no more now. But all this is very serious, and your father may pay a heavy price.”

Karena looked at her for a horrified moment. She nodded in silence, then hurried into the front hall, anxious and uncertain. She caught up her blue headscarf from the hall table, intent on finding Sergei. Afterward she would go to the bungalow to tell Uncle Matvey the dark news.

A plan to protect Sergei … What could it be?

K
arena left the manor house and hurried down the porch steps and across the front yard toward Uncle Matvey’s bungalow. The wind kicked up, and she felt the warmth embrace her. Straight ahead, she could see the bungalow with peasants hard at work in the surrounding fields and, in the distance, silos and barns silhouetted against a clear August sky.

She did not see Uncle Matvey sitting out on the porch as he often did when writing, nor was Ilya about; perhaps he was still with Sergei in the fields overseeing the peasant workers. In a few days, most of them would be conscripts in the army and be replaced by their fathers. The older women worked alongside the young girls; they lived in thatch huts on the other side of the field where a small river flowed. The women worked a communal plot of land where they grew their food and shared it according to the mouths to feed in a particular family.

Individual ownership and thought were not prevalent. The concept of the rugged individualist was not part of their culture. They worked alongside their men, bent over for hours, uncomplaining, their blue head scarves reminding Karena of faded cornflowers.

Karena was used to the sight of the peasants working long and hard days and thought little about it, though Grandmother Jilinsky wondered
with a shake of her head how they could endure. “If I bent over for more than five minutes at a time, I would not be able to straighten again.”

Karena reached the field nearest the bungalow and saw Sergei, who looked her way and waved. She beckoned him to come. He walked toward her carrying a sickle over his shoulder.

She waited, breathing the fragrance of earth and ripened wheat.

He came up, taking out a kerchief to wipe his face and neck, soiled with harvest dust and sweat. He slapped at an insect.

“Sergei the farmer,” she teased, knowing he balked at the notion. “You should take over the lands after Papa. You could marry Anna and have many children.”

He laughed, showing white teeth. He always seemed to know when she was teasing him. “Papa wants me to become a lawyer, remember?” he goaded back. “The only thing I like about farming is eating the harvest. It is
you
who will stay here and marry Ilya and have many children. But I am full of rebellion. ‘Sergei the radical!’ ” His brown eyes were humorously challenging.

“After last night, do you make light of such a matter?”

His grin faded, and a furrow appeared between his brows as he glanced toward the road.

“Yes … last night. Not good, Sister. Not good at all.”

“What happened to Lenski? And did Ivanna come?”

“She’s here and safe. She had nothing to do with what happened last night. They are both in hiding. For my safety as well as theirs, I wasn’t told where they are. Nor do I care to know right now. The secret police have their ways of making most any man tell all.”

“If Ivanna’s in hiding with Lenski, his reputation with the Okhrana will place her in danger too. You haven’t told me whether she’s also a revolutionary.”

He looked away and shrugged, pulling the stopper from his canteen
of water. “They would question her most severely if they thought she had information.” He scowled. “If they associate you with me and Lenski, they could do the same to you. Ilya was right. I was a fool to bring you there.” He drank thirstily.

Karena glanced toward the road uneasily. “Mama sent me to call you back to the house. There may be serious trouble. Officers in the secret police are in town asking questions. One of them is Tatiana’s fiancé, Colonel Kronstadt.” She explained the message from their father. Sergei listened, shifting his sickle as he looked toward the village.

“Yes, I saw the soldiers ride in early this morning. As for trouble, there’s always a cauldron brewing somewhere. If it’s not terror from the autocrats, then it’s terror from the corrupt police, or war with Germany, or famine and death.” He looked toward the horizon, as if he could see German and Austrian troops. “There is no hope for this life, Sister.”

“I’ve never heard you so pessimistic. If you believe there’s no hope, why risk so much for a revolution?”

“Sometimes I wonder why I bother. If it weren’t for Papa, I’d leave Russia tonight. I mean it. I’d go to London and try to emigrate to New York. Freedom is already planted there.”

“Uncle Matvey believes in hope for this life, and even afterward. I’m finding the research he’s doing most interesting. God has a plan to reveal himself to mankind, a Messiah who will be a Redeemer. He hasn’t wound up his universe like a clock and gone off and left us. Maybe you should talk more seriously to Uncle about what he’s discovering.”

One corner of his mouth tipped. “I’ll read his book when it comes out—if it doesn’t bore me to death.”

She folded her arms. “You sound just like Tatiana. Sometimes you see nothing but what’s before your eyes. Uncle says God’s dealt with every generation of the past, and we’ve many lessons to learn from them. We’re not the smartest generation that ever lived.”

He smiled affectionately. “Lectures, lectures. My sister the preacher.”

“Well, we must have hope, Sergei. People cannot live without hope—a cause to live for and even to die for, if need be. But the sacrifice must be worthy of the cause.”

“You are whistling in the dark, as the Americans say.” He popped the stopper back into his canteen. “Think about it, Karena. There is little hope for us. Russia’s army is not ready for war. We will be defeated. Then what?”

“To say such a thing borders on treason.”

“You remember what Uncle Viktor said? It was months ago when he came to visit, but it still holds true. Did he not say what I’m saying now? His words were softer, more palatable, but the truth comes out the same.”

“Boris received papers this morning to report for military duty,” she said dully. “Natalia is most unhappy. You are likely to be called too. If not today, tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “Uncle Viktor will see that I am not conscripted. Papa told me so this morning.”

She wondered how Papa could be so confident. Were they not all depending too much on the position and authority of General Viktor Roskov?

“I am to be pressed back into the university to become the family lawyer. The bourgeois!” he scorned. “And I ask you, Sister, this war with Germany and Austria, why should Russians fight for France? Tell me that! Napoleon hurled his might against us, did he not? Had it not been for Russia’s glorious winter—”

“France is now Russia’s friend. You know that. What will you do about last night?”

“Do not speak of the matter. You were not there, remember?”

“The officers will ask questions,” she warned. “You must be ready. Papa has a plan to protect you.”

His eyes narrowed. “A plan?”

“Mama did not explain. She’s worried. You’d best go home quickly.”

He frowned. “Papa is not a Bolshevik. He should not get involved.”

“He is already involved, as am I. Nothing could go wrong, you told Ilya, remember? And now look. You see what happens when we associate with rebels?”

“Right now, I’m only wondering why the person watching Grinevich failed to warn Lenski in time. Perhaps he turned traitor. Am I to blame because that jackal Grinevich hurls himself into the meeting? A goat among starving lions will be pounced on every time. Still, I had nothing to do with Grinevich’s black eye.”

“He has more than a black eye. His ribs are broken. He has a concussion.”

His mouth hardened. “I’ll lose no sleep over him. He’s a spy for the czar.”

“For the czar! Grinevich? How do you know that?”

“I know. That’s all.”

“He doesn’t seem wise enough for that.”

“Spies watch us all the time. ‘Shadow people,’ Lenski calls them. They set traps. They join our ranks. The czar’s police are all alike, sworn to our demise, to our silence. And that includes Tatiana’s man, Kronstadt. The autocrats have nothing on me. Even so, I’ll go back to the house. I want to know what Papa wrote in that message.”

Sergei flicked her braid, grinned bravely, and left her on the harvest path holding his sickle. She watched him walk briskly across the field toward the manor.

Heaviness weighed upon her. She didn’t share his confidence.

She took in the bountiful scene of harvest, and a sadness descended upon her. It was carried on the wind that rushed through the sea of grain, in the leaves turning from green to sienna, and in the call of a solitary bird escaping the approaching winter.

She remembered a verse Uncle Matvey had underlined in his Bible, and the words struck her now with their sudden, personal meaning.

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,” she murmured.

Karena neared her uncle’s bungalow and saw that the window curtains were down.
Most likely being washed again
. Grandmother Jilinsky complained the blowing dust made them impossible to care for properly.

Nostalgia stirred as her gaze stopped on the apple tree growing close to the side of the bungalow. In summer it cast a pleasant shade over the porch, and in winter it stood strong in a world of limitless white. When the snow arrived this year, only Grandmother Jilinsky would be living there. Uncle Matvey would be gone, and Ilya would be on the front lines in Poland. There’d be no time on the battlefield for his favorite pastime of reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and writing poetry.

“Karena?”

She turned. Ilya walked toward her, the wind flapping his sweat-stained shirt. She was disturbed, for as much as she’d tried in the last few years to think of him as her love, somehow the feelings were not there. She’d known him since they were children, and he was more like a brother. She sighed, trying to shut out the image of Alex on the road that morning. She’d deliberately kept him out of her mind all summer, but it seemed he could walk in anytime he wished and unsettle her heart for days.

She waited for Ilya, another reluctant farmer. She forced a smile, seeing the dust rise from under his heels. His hair glinted with reds and golds, and his eyes made her think of pools of water—silent, still. He was tall and lean, strong from his years of working the land.

Ilya, too, had met disappointment this summer. He’d finally given up pursuing poetry and writing at Warsaw University, where once Uncle Matvey had held his professorship. He had resigned himself to the family’s expectation of managing the land and said he was grateful to Josef for the opportunity.

Her heart sympathized with him; he would fit better into the world of literature and opera than a life of growing wheat for the government. She imagined him as he wished himself to be, an aristocrat, discussing the works of Russian and Polish writers while the classical music of the Russian grand master Tchaikovsky was playing in the background. But ethnicity, social class, money, and war brought the inevitable defeat of dreams. Ilya’s parents had both been Jewish.

As he walked up, a thoughtful frown on his face, she assumed he did not know about last night.

“Where is Sergei going in such a hurry? To keep the noon meal with Anna?”

“Have you seen her this morning?” she asked.

“Yes, I saw her about. Is anything the matter?”

Relieved, she shook her head. “Not if you saw her this morning. But I need to tell you about Sergei. He’s in trouble. For that matter, we all are. Something happened last night.”

He took her hands between his calloused ones. They looked at each other, any pretense of happy times ahead shed like autumn’s leaves.

His voice dropped. “Grinevich, last night?”

She nodded. “You know what happened?”

“Sergei mentioned it when he arrived this morning.” His fingers tightened around hers. “I warned you to not go. Why did you not listen to me, Karena?”

“I told you. I expected assistance from Lenski’s sister at the medical college. Now that no longer matters. I was told this morning I will not be
going to St. Petersburg with Uncle Matvey next month. There are no finances to spare for this year.”