Lady of the Snakes Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  Connect on Social Media

  Copyright © 2008 Rachel Pastan

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Pastan, Rachel.

  Lady of the snakes: a novel / Rachel Pastan.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3616.A865L33 2008

  813’.6—dc22 2007009586

  ISBN 9780156035057 paperback

  eISBN 9780547541242

  v2.0621

  For David

  Chapter One

  DURING JANE’S miserable twenty-hour labor, she thought a lot about Masha Karkova, who had died in childbirth in 1884 along with the baby she was carrying. Jane’s pain was in her back, and she crouched moaning on the rug in their tiny living room waiting for Billy to come and get her, and later she screamed staggering up and down the hospital room with its pastel prints and floral curtains, like a decent hotel only with cupboards that opened to reveal sterile pads and stainless steel. Dying seemed a likely outcome—much likelier than producing a child. As she cried Billy’s name she wondered if Masha had cried out for Grigory, and if so what he had done. Not pressed a tennis ball into the small of her back the way Billy was doing, the way they’d been taught in childbirth class.

  Not that it helped.

  Nothing helped. Not the breathing or the shower or the shot in her arm. Billy held her face in his hands. “The baby will be out soon,” he said. His face and the smell of her own sweat were all there was until the next contraction seized her. They coaxed her onto the bed and told her to push and she did, and the hospital gown came loose and the nurse kept tying it shut again. Who cared? Who cared who saw what now, or how many doctors, interns, medical students trooped in and out like packs of dogs?

  How distraught—ruined!—Billy would be if she and this baby died. Jane could picture him in the cemetery, his threadbare black socks showing beneath the cuffs of the tight suit he’d worn to his mother’s funeral. Oh, the pathos of those socks. “Billy,” she said, partly wanting to comfort him and partly to remind him of the names they had chosen for their child in case she died, though of course he would remember. Billy looked at her with a drawn, serious face, but now the doctor was talking. The pushing, which was only supposed to take an hour, had been going on for three, and they were going to try to vacuum the baby out with some kind of extractor. The medical staff didn’t seem to be worried about Jane anymore, only the baby, and that frightened her more than anything. The bright lights made yellow and purple starbursts float in front of her eyes. She didn’t want to die, as Masha had died; but surviving if the baby didn’t was a kind of hell she hadn’t imagined before. The thought seeped sulfurously through her veins and she couldn’t obey when Dr. Mooney told her, yet again, to push. She shut her eyes against the lights, but then Billy cried out and she opened them again. And there she was: Margaret Levitsky Shaw—Maisie—covered with mucus and blood, a full head of black hair sticking up on end. The room smelled of the ocean and of rust.

  The nurse wrapped the baby in a blanket and gave her to Jane, a bundle so light it seemed to weigh less than the completed chapters of her dissertation. The baby’s face was startled, her brow wrinkled, her head battered from the hard journey. Where had she come from? Jane thought of the passage in Grigory Karkov’s novel The Lime Trees when Yelizaveta and Sergey have their first child. For a moment she got lost inside the memory of that scene, the dim chamber with candles and hot water and the baby crying, and she forgot where she was until Billy said, “You were great, Janie! You were a force of nature.”

  Jane was back in the room again, uneasy. She had missed the first moments of her child’s life because she had been thinking about the Karkovs.

  * * *

  For a couple of days after Maisie was born, Billy got a substitute to take his classes and he and Jane lounged around admiring the baby. Wrapped in a blanket, smelling of skin and cotton and souring milk, Maisie slept in the bed between them. She was all face and bundled receiving blanket, her eyes a wide dark newborn blue, her tiny nostrils flaring as though she were considering the scent of the world. It was impossible to stop looking at her, trying to take in the fact of her existence. She was a new continent they had discovered, their private India, curled on her side like a bean and breathing noisily. Every few hours she woke up to mew and nurse. If she wouldn’t go back to sleep after nursing, Billy carried her around against his chest and crooned to her. One night (the second? the third?) Jane watched him—really watched him, as though he were a movie or a rare specimen of wildlife that had wandered in. She watched his tall frame move back and forth across the room, his sweet face thinned by exhaustion and scrupulousness, his thick, once-blond hair as soft as cat’s fur. More hair curled across his chest, and the baby clung to it with her brand-new fingers, while light from the streetlamp leaked in around the blinds. Jane lay in the rumpled bed propped up on pillows, knowing she should use the time he was giving her to sleep. But he was so beautiful and strange carrying the baby that she couldn’t shut her eyes. He seemed taller, as though he had already grown into this new role, and his face wore a more tender expression than Jane had ever seen on it. She was glad—even relieved—to see how clearly he loved their daughter, but at the same time a hiccup of uneasiness ran through her. She felt that she was on the outside. She felt she might cry, as she had cried twice already today, exhaustion hollowing her out and a powerful brew of hormones shooting poisonously through the emptiness. Jane didn’t cry often, and the feeling of tears in her eyes was almost as foreign as that of the milk on her nipples. She didn’t like the way so much emotion had moved in, a guest who’d left all the faucets dripping. Who was this Jane from whom unfamiliar liquids seeped, who lay beached like a whale against the pillows? Who was Billy with his darkening hair and his pale, broad shoulders hunched protectively over the baby? Maisie emitted quiet, intermittent squeaks like a smoke detector letting you know its batteries were running down. The light fell irregularly across the room in pale yellow strips through which the man and the child passed and passed again, swaying, gilded, dusty with light.

  * * *

  Jane’s graduate student friends came by with flowers, plastic pastel keys, stuffed animals, Chinese food. Sitting on the couch, Jane nursed the baby and ate Szechuan shrimp. She was glad to see them, to be reminded of who, until a few days ago, she was. She was glad, too, to get a chance to show Maisie off, and she liked seeing Billy hand out beers and brag.

  “Don’t be fooled by her apparent ignorance,” he said of the snuffling baby with her plump cheeks and paintbrush hair. “She’s extremely bright. She understands
Russian already.”

  “Of course she knows Russian,” said Catherine, a second-year student, a thin young woman with bright copper-colored hair who worshipped Jane a little. “Jane’s been reading Karkov out loud to her for nine months!”

  Jane patted Maisie’s back, trying to get her to burp. The baby’s head wobbled against her shoulder, and Jane lowered her face to feel the silky hair against her skin. “And Karkova, of course,” she said. She was writing her dissertation on Grigory Karkov’s heroines as versions of his wife, Maria Petrovna Karkova, and much of her material came from Karkova’s diaries, which had been mostly ignored since publication of an excerpted edition in 1970. Masha was Karkova’s pet name, used by those who knew her intimately. Jane used it only in the privacy of her own head.

  “How long till you get back to Maria Petrovna?” Jane’s officemate, Laura, asked. She knew that Jane’s heart lay with the diaries. Jane would have liked to write her dissertation on them directly, but her adviser, who was not interested in feminist points of view, hadn’t allowed it.

  “Maria Petrovna is always with me,” Jane said grandly. “Did I show you guys what Shombauer sent?” Shombauer was the adviser, an elderly German, the first woman ever to get tenure in the department. Jane handed Maisie to Laura and got up slowly, the episiotomy stinging. She hunted around among opened packages and stacks of journals and balled-up sweaters and extra receiving blankets until she found an old-fashioned silver rattle engraved with Maisie’s initials. “Isn’t that something?” she said. “Isn’t it so Shombauer?”

  “A peace offering!” Laura bounced the baby in her arms. Jane watched Billy watch Laura as she held the baby with one hand and reached for her beer with the other. Laura’s sweater had slipped down to reveal the thin burgundy strap of the kind of bra Jane had almost forgotten existed.

  “I won’t drop her,” Laura told Billy.

  “Why a peace offering?” Catherine wanted to know.

  “Laura means Shombauer’s whole attitude when I told her I was pregnant,” Jane said. She imitated her adviser’s Hamburg accent, not very nicely: “‘I thought you vere dedicated to the verk!’”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Karkova had six children and ran Dve Reckhi and copied out Karkov’s books and wrote those amazing diaries,” Jane said. “And Shombauer thinks I can’t write a dissertation and take care of a baby!”

  “She doesn’t know how good a husband you have,” Billy said.

  Jane smiled at him. Maria Petrovna had had a notoriously bad husband. When he wasn’t writing his novels with their unflattering portraits of her, he disappeared for days at a time, cavorting with peasant girls as though determined, in this arena at least, to compete with Tolstoy.

  Maisie looked uncomfortable in Laura’s arms. She turned her birth-battered head from side to side and smacked her lips.

  “She wants to nurse,” Jane said.

  “Didn’t you just nurse her?” Laura asked, handing the baby back.

  Jane felt a sting, as though Laura had criticized her. What did Laura, with her thin bra strap and her round recreational breasts, know about anything? “Her stomach is the size of a walnut,” she said lightly, lifting her shirt and unsnapping the nursing bra, pushing the pad out of the way. She was glad to have Maisie back in her arms where she belonged. Nothing was sweeter than holding her daughter, except for all the times she longed to put her down.

  The baby latched on unevenly and tugged hard. Jane grimaced, unlatched Maisie with her pinkie, tried again. Billy brought her a cushion to rest her arm on. Embarrassed by the production, Jane went on talking about Shombauer. “I thought she’d guessed. I was sure it was written all over my face. But no, she had no idea, she was completely shocked!” The still unaccustomed tingle of milk moving through her and the awkwardness of holding the baby in the right position made it hard to keep the thread of the conversation. She thought of her adviser with her pale eyes and her thick accent and her soft, white, fluffy hair that conveyed a false impression of grand-motherliness. At heart she was hard and uncompromising; Jane knew that. Jane had always admired her for it. She spoke six languages, wore expensive suits, gray shoes with straps across the instep, large gray pearls at her neck. When Jane had said she was pregnant, Shombauer’s eyes had gone cold and inhuman so that she looked suddenly like a fish, a dangerous fish, maybe a barracuda.

  “Pregnant,” she’d spat. Her mouth puckered as though the word itself were sour.

  “Yes,” Jane had said. In the low plastic student chair, she’d felt ill and bloated and slightly dull-witted. Her jeans were unbuttoned under one of Billy’s T-shirts and her feet were already swollen inside her tight leather boots: three months along. She looked up at Shombauer across the oak desk. “But I’m ahead of schedule on my research. Even if I have to slow down for a month or two, I’ll be fine.”

  “Fine,” Shombauer repeated. “Fine.” She let the word hang in the air between them.

  Jane looked at all the books on the long shelves, hundreds of books that Shombauer had read, analyzed, critiqued, written. She felt the weight of them in the room, smelled the dusty smells of paper and glue, just like in her father’s office back in California when she was a child. She had always loved the smell, but now she had to breathe through her mouth so it wouldn’t make her sick.

  Shombauer looked at her hard with those cold eyes: pale stones. “You can’t serve two masters,” she said, leaning forward, her hand resting palm up on her desk, gray and thin. An old woman’s hand. “It’s not possible!”

  Jane sat up straighter. “I’m my own master,” she said, and Shombauer leaned back again in her chair.

  “Of course,” she said, and smiled. It was a thin gray-pink smile, like a scar.

  Now Catherine said, “It’s not easy to surprise Shombauer.”

  Jane’s huge granite breast ached like an arm that has fallen asleep as the baby sucked. She felt tired, suddenly, and would have liked to lie down.

  Catherine held the silver toy out toward Maisie, who, never pausing in her sucking, eyed it warily as it winked and clanked. Laura began to talk about trying to catch a movie.

  “Don’t go yet,” Jane said, although she felt if she shut her eyes she would fall asleep.

  “Tell us a Maria Petrovna before we go,” Catherine said.

  “How about the one about the pigeons, Janie,” Billy said. “It’s nice and morbid.”

  Jane made a face, but she liked that one, too. In the middle of the night when Maisie screamed inconsolably, it was good to know others had also experienced this despair in the face of what one was told brought so much joy.

  “This is from right after her first child was born,” she said. “‘He is an angel, but my mind is so black with suffering that I can hardly bear to look at him. Grisha does not even know he is born yet—his son with his father’s black hair and pale knowing eyes! I have sent Ivan Stepanovich to look for him, but he is nowhere to be found . . .’ And then, ‘Just gazing at the child’s tiny face, so like his father’s, makes me want to climb up on the roof with the pigeons and throw myself into the street!’” She quoted in English since Billy was there, but she could have done it in Russian equally well. She had a gift for the language and translating came easily to her. She’d been surprised when she got to graduate school that it wasn’t like that for everyone. Russian was another medium; speaking it was like swimming in a rough salty ocean instead of the bland turquoise swimming pool that was English.

  “That’s interesting,” Laura said. “Do you see a lot of that suicidal ideation in the diaries?” She stretched, exposing her firm, tanned stomach, her silver navel ring with its onyx bead. Jane’s own stomach was white and soft and bulky as a pillow, mottled with blue, the purple-black seam of the linea nigra barely faded. Her hair was stringy and she had dark circles under her eyes. She looked to see if Billy was looking at Laura, but he was making faces at the baby over Jane’s shoulder.

  “Not that I can think of,” Jane said.

&nb
sp; “Let us know if you start to feel like that,” Catherine said. “We’ll make sure you get Prozac.”

  “I’m okay,” Jane said. “Though I was kind of preoccupied with death during the labor. I kept thinking about how Maria Petrovna died in childbirth.”

  Billy put his arm around her.

  “Karkova died in childbirth?” Catherine said. “I don’t remember that.” She was more interested in Akhmatova than in the male novelists, but she was sharp.

  “Yes,” Jane said, leaning back into the warmth of Billy’s arm. “She was pregnant with what would have been their seventh child.” But suddenly she wasn’t sure. Usually she was confident in her recall of fact. She wondered whether her confusion could be related to the hormones.

  Catherine shrugged, losing interest. The light was fading outside the apartment windows. It was time to go.

  Laura got up. “Maybe she did commit suicide,” she said, putting on her coat. “If she wanted to throw herself off the roof after one kid, imagine how she felt at the prospect of seven!”

  Catherine carried the plates into the kitchen, came back, and kissed Jane. “Are you all right? You look exhausted,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” Jane said, yawning. “I just need to catch up on my sleep.”

  But after they left and Billy took Maisie so Jane could get some rest, she couldn’t sleep. She lay on the rumpled sheets of the bed that was no longer ever made and thought about what Catherine had said. She knew she couldn’t possibly be wrong about the way Masha had died, but nonetheless the need to confirm it drove her out of bed and across the hall to her study. She would sleep better after she had looked it up.

  The study was a tiny room, hardly bigger than a closet, dominated by a poster of the Kremlin domes. The secondhand desk was littered with the jade figurines her father had brought back from China when she was a child, little dogs and long-billed birds and smiling men with braids. Books in English, Russian, and German crammed the brick-and-board shelves, and papers were piled everywhere. She dug out a copy of James Delholland’s biography of Grigory Karkov, sat on the floor, and opened to the passage on Masha’s death.