Lady of the Snakes Read online

  By 1884 the publication of Dmitri Arkadyevich was five years behind him and still Karkov was not near to producing a new novel. The manuscript for the book he was at work on in the early 1880s has been lost; after the death of Maria Petrovna in the summer of 1884, he abandoned it in favor of the story of an itinerant pilgrim of the kind that occasionally wandered through the countryside around Kovo. This work, as we shall see, is much concerned with death (and the related issues of folk cures, superstition, and spiritual redemption), doubtless provoked by the sudden passing of the novelist’s wife.

  * * *

  Maria Petrovna, confined with her seventh pregnancy, died on August 2, throwing the household into a state of grief and confusion. Maria’s sister, Vera Petrovna Lensky, who came to Dve Reckhi from Moscow to help care for the children as well as to attend her sister’s funeral, wrote to her friend, the Countess Lydia Stogova, “You have never seen anything like the sorry state of affairs here! The children, poor darlings, weep and stare and refuse to bathe. Katya is so upset she will speak to no one. The servants go around with tears streaming down their faces and spill the soup. And as for my brother-in-law! He has shut himself up in his study and refuses to come out. I have never seen a man so destroyed by grief. What will become of this family, I don’t pretend to guess.”

  Jane closed the book and shut her eyes, her tired brain trying to make sense of the passage, which seemed to raise more questions than it answered. Delholland did not, after all, come out and say that Masha had died in childbirth, though that was certainly the implication. What did “confined” mean, exactly? Why did people still employ coy language to talk about childbearing? She thought of her own obstetrician, who had used language to obfuscate in a different way, speaking of the “discomfort” of labor.

  But even if Masha hadn’t died in childbirth, there was no reason to believe she had taken her own life. There were lots of ways to die, especially in 1884 in the middle of nowhere. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, influenza. Vanya, Masha’s sixth child, had died of pneumonia just two years before his mother’s death, when he was only four.

  Jane had thought she’d known how terrible a blow that must have been, but now that Maisie was born, she felt the horror of it in a new way, in her bones. Masha had not written much about her feelings—or anything else—in the months following Vanya’s death, but Jane recalled this passage:

  I would have thought my Vanyushka’s dying—and my own subsequent collapse—would have driven Grisha to the other side of the Earth to escape. But in fact he has been at dinner every night, Anya says, pale as death and hardly touching the soup but scolding the children if they fail to eat, or forget their table manners. Forms of behavior are what we have to fall back on when the pit of Hell gapes, he says, and I am grateful to him for having any idea of how to proceed, as I have none.

  U menia net was the Russian for the last phrase—literally, nothing is with me, nothing in my pocket, nothing in my house. Net.

  U menia net, Jane thought, curling up on the floor among the stacks of books and the dust bunnies, her head resting on the Delholland biography. Was it possible—was it?—that after two years of trying, Masha had given up the struggle to proceed with life? Could she have killed herself? Jane thought about it, making an effort but failing to imagine it. Suicide just wasn’t possible for the Masha Jane knew, especially not with a child inside her on the verge of being born.

  And yet Jane found her mind could not quite let the idea go. Who, after all, could say what another person would do? And how scholarly was it to assert that she knew Masha so well—so intimately—that she could rule out the possibility? Might Masha have found, at the moment of crisis, that she could not bear to bring another child into the world? Another hostage to fortune; another baby to replace Vanya, who could never be replaced? And what if she had experienced postpartum depression with her other babies, as the passage about throwing herself off the roof suggested? Could the anticipation of that, too, have deranged her? I have none, Jane thought again, and the words, written over a hundred years before, made her shiver.

  And if it were true, after all, it would certainly open up some interesting literary possibilities. Each chapter of Jane’s dissertation explored how a female character from each of Karkov’s five major novels could be read as a version (seldom a flattering one) of his wife. The protagonist of Karkov’s final novel, Lady of the Snakes—Dama Zmiev in Russian—had required a somewhat tortuous argument: that she was a kind of anti-Masha, embodying the freedom and power that Masha, as a married woman of her time, could never have. The narrative described the woman (she was unnamed throughout the novel) leaving her five children in the middle of the night and wandering across the countryside as a mystical healer, ministering to the peasants. She carried live snakes in her basket and cured the sick. At the end of the book, she committed suicide. Could Karkov actually have modeled the Snake Woman’s death on his wife’s? How neat—and what an extraordinary scholarly scoop—if he had.

  Poor Masha! Jane thought, as she had thought so often before. The journals revealed a woman of warm intelligence, enormous energy, a sharp eye for the natural world, and a haunting, lyrical prose style. How had a woman like that survived the life of constraint and restriction fortune had dealt her, stuck in the provinces, mired in her traditional role? Not that she wasn’t lucky in many ways. She was a member of the upper classes; she had servants and clothes to wear and good food to eat. The estate might be losing money, but actual poverty wasn’t a threat.

  Nevertheless, Jane thought. Nevertheless. Nineteen years of living with an unfaithful, irascible husband; of looking after a large family (making clothes, ordering meals, supervising education, nursing the sick); of managing the sprawling, unprosperous estate; of being her husband’s scribe (making fair copies of the scribbled drafts of three of his novels at night so he had clean pages to begin with the next morning); and then losing a child on top of all that! I might well have killed myself, Jane thought, under the weight of it.

  And certainly, if Masha had taken her own life, the family would have done everything they could to conceal it. Maybe the evidence of the cause of death had been destroyed and that was why Delholland’s sentence was ambiguous. Why, after all, if Masha had died of some common disease like influenza, had Delholland not just gone ahead and said so?

  I’ll have to look into it, Jane thought, drifting off to sleep on the floor with all the lights on, as soon as I can find the time.

  * * *

  Billy went back to work. In the mornings he set the alarm for 6:30 and was out the door by 7:15, clips around his ankles to keep his cuffs out of his bicycle chain, having downed two cups of coffee, a yogurt, and a piece of toast. Jane had to drink milk—five cups a day, the doctor said. She forced herself, trying not to picture the hot udder of its origin. She’d spent the summer she was twelve on a farm in the San Joaquin Valley, but the close straw-and-manure smell of the barn had sickened her, and she’d kept her distance from the cows. Now she more or less was one.

  This morning Maisie nursed at five and then blessedly went back to sleep till almost eight. Jane nursed her again and then got out of bed and carried her down the hall into the kitchen. The little table was covered with newspapers, empty cups, wilted flowers in a carafe. She thought of Masha, of her description of the dawn, gray and silent and grim as a cat hunting. She thought of Masha’s rants and recriminations against Grigory, out all night somewhere, Katya ill and little Nikolai teething and Grigory’s mother and sister visiting from Moscow. And here was Jane, fortunate in her good husband and free of visiting relatives (her mother, in from California for a few days, had stayed in a hotel).

  But still, Jane’s life was transformed as suddenly as a plot of land was transformed by a developer. This is what women’s lives are like, she thought with a start in the dim kitchen, her bare feet cold against the linoleum. It had never occurred to her—not really—that women’s lives were still so deeply different from men’s. Now she saw it, and i
t shocked her. She had thought the world had changed since Masha’s day, but here it was, its iron demands the same as they had always been. She had thought she would not live as Masha had lived, always for others, but now this was her life: nursing and walking, eating cheese and crackers with a free hand. Changing diapers, changing her own milk-soured shirts. Sitting in the glare of the blank computer screen in a spare half hour. At night she slept in bursts with the baby wedged between her breast and Billy’s back, her nightgown pulled up to her neck. Just finished nursing, ready to nurse again. Home alone with Maisie, it was impossible to get anything done. She couldn’t understand it; the baby slept eighteen hours a day. Still, six o’clock found Jane in her bathrobe on the old brown couch exhausted and hungry, the baby curled against her chest or latched on to her nipple, which had been stretched so much it looked like a caterpillar.

  Maisie wanted to nurse all the time. She liked to sleep in Jane’s arms. She hated the bassinet with its quilted lining and screamed when Jane put her in it, her face going red and her fat limbs flailing. No matter how deeply asleep she seemed to be, the minute her back was cradled by something unbreathing, she knew it and startled awake. “Clever baby,” Billy said, but he didn’t have to hold Maisie while trying to open a can of soup, or read the mail, or go to the bathroom.

  Jane tried working with Maisie on a cushion in her lap, but it would slide, and it was hard to hold her arms up over the baby to reach the keyboard. She tried holding Maisie in one arm and writing longhand but her words slipped diagonally down across the page, unintelligible. Her back ached. Her mind felt damp and boggy. “Peanut,” she crooned. “Radish seed.” She rubbed her cheek against the baby’s downy hair, kissed her feet, held her close. “Mommy needs to get some work done. Why won’t you sleep?”

  Maisie mewed like a kitten and yawned, her whole face caught up in it, her startled eyes seeming to wonder what was happening. Already those eyes were changing color from that deep ocean blue to a paler, odd bluish brown like the outside of an oyster shell. When she looked at Jane, her gaze was steady and thoughtful as though she were on the verge of comprehending who Jane was. No one had ever looked at her like that before.

  In the evenings, when Billy was in charge, he put Maisie in the bassinet and let her scream.

  “How can you leave her there?” Jane asked, coming in from her study to stand in the doorway.

  “She’s screaming anyway. What difference does it make where she does it?” Billy said, looking up from his lesson plan or his magazine, or the bowl of cereal he was eating since no one had made dinner.

  “It makes a difference,” Jane insisted.

  “Sometimes people need to be left alone,” Billy said. “Even babies.”

  Maybe he was right. Maisie was certainly calmer with him. Why was that? How could Maisie, at one month of age, even distinguish one person from another? Although Masha claimed her babies could always tell her apart from the wet nurse who had nourished them from their first hours: “If Kostya turns to Yelizaveta Pavlovna with delight as though her round white breasts were twin moons, still he turns his face to my face as though I were the sun, bringing light and warmth and joy.” Jane did not feel that Maisie absorbed joy from her. The baby looked at her with the same troubled, anxious expression with which she regarded the rest of the world, as though the street, her crib, and her parents were all seeded with explosives and you never knew when something was going to go off.

  * * *

  Maisie had not been a planned child, but Jane and Billy were married; they were old enough. They had met in college, in Thad Everhardt’s Karkov seminar. Billy was an English major dabbling in Russian literature. He liked Karkov, but he wasn’t a devotee like Jane, who banged on his dorm room door early one Saturday morning in December of their freshman year, her dark hair studded with snow, her eyes alight. “Get your boots on,” she’d said, and dragged him outside, where the year’s first snowfall had already blanketed the streets. They had been friends then, not quite dating, but her mittened hand held on to his all the way up to the quad, where she let go to pull a book out of her pocket. It was Dmitri Arkadyevich, the Sigelman translation, which they had been assigned for class.

  “Listen to this,” Jane said, and she read out loud: “‘As he stood in the street and watched the first flakes float down from a sky the color of goose feathers, Dmitri Arkadyevich felt his heart lift and swell until it seemed to fill his chest with a passionate fluttering. . . . ’”

  When she finished the passage, she held out her arms to watch the flakes catch in the palms of her mittens. “I love it!” she said. “It snowed exactly once in my whole childhood. We really only knew about snow from TV.”

  “We used to build snow forts,” said Billy, who had grown up in Connecticut. “Me and my brothers. Snowballs, ice balls. We used to hide in the bushes until the bus stopped at the corner, and when the driver opened the doors, we’d throw our snowballs in and run.”

  “That’s terrible!” Jane put her hand to her mouth and tasted the pure cold, her tongue pushing through the snow to the wool of her mitten, which tasted so different, so animal.

  Billy laughed.

  Laughing transformed him. His muscles relaxed and his face opened up. Other people were like that, Jane knew, with insides and outsides, like geodes, but with her, everything was on the surface. “My brother never did anything like that,” she said, thinking of Davis with his comic books and his chemistry set. She could feel Billy watching her, feel his eyes fixed on her. He was so close she could see the individual snowflakes landing on his short, blunt, dark eyelashes. When he kissed her, she kept her eyes open and he did, too. His eyes were pale blue mixed with gray, and his lips were cold at first, but in a minute they were warm, and to her surprise her own chest, like Mitya’s, filled with a passionate fluttering as she and Billy stood kissing in the snow.

  …

  It was November, the year was winding down. Each day was the coldest Maisie had ever known, each night the longest night. Jane was at her desk one evening working on 1873. It was a bad year for the Karkovs. They were in debt, and Masha’s youngest sister, Sofya, died of scarlet fever. Words poured out of Masha as she grieved—memories of Sofya as a baby blowing kisses from her pram, as a little girl splashing in the river, all dressed up for her first ball. There was a long description of the funeral: the icy rain, the family huddled together watching as the box was lowered into the muddy earth. It was clearly the model for the funeral of little Igor in Karkov’s novel Silent Passage. “And then the wind came up and rattled the skeletal oak leaves still clinging to the branches of the trees that lined the cemetery wall. The sleet hissed against the coffin as the men lowered the ropes. It was unbearable to leave her there, alone in the cold and wet,” Masha had written, and Karkov’s novel, too, mentioned the skeletal oak leaves and the sound of the sleet.

  Distracted by the noise of the television through the closed door, Jane got up and went into the living room, where Billy sat on the couch watching the basketball game, the baby in her red onesie curled like a bug on his chest.

  “You’ve got to see this, Janie,” Billy said. “Two minutes left and the Celtics are down by five.”

  Jane’s eyes were filled with tears, her mind caught in the wet Russian graveyard with the cold rain and the mud and the wind whipping the heavy branches of the trees back and forth, everyone clutching their hats and weeping. “Maria Petrovna’s little sister died,” Jane said. She was partly crying for herself, too, though she could hardly admit it: for how hard her own life felt to her, even though she knew herself to be lucky. Lucky! Only twenty-five and already she had a good husband, a healthy child, a promising career. What was wrong with her that she didn’t feel her own luck? That she had felt happier before—before Maisie—was a truth too awful to acknowledge for more than an instant before shutting it out again. The days dragged on, hour after tedious hour, watching Maisie like watching grass grow. She didn’t do anything. She slept and ate and fussed and looked
around. She needed Jane—profoundly, entirely—but not because of who Jane was. It was Jane’s arms and breasts Maisie needed: her animal warmth. Jane might as well have been a wet nurse. The fact that she loved Maisie, that she would without hesitation step in front of a moving car for her, was irrelevant. What kind of a mother—of a person—was she, to feel this way? Better to cry for Masha and the dead.

  Billy stretched his long legs out into the middle of the room, his big Converse All Stars planted firmly on the rug. “They all died,” he said.

  Jane wondered if he was thinking of his own mother. Sofya died, Jane thought; they all died. Billy’s mother, also named Margaret, had died two summers after they graduated, and one day this infant Margaret would die, too. She looked at Billy, but his eyes were still on the television. Maybe he wasn’t thinking of his mother. His face was set in a laconic concentration that was similar to the expression he wore during sex. Sometimes he seemed to disappear inside his skin as if inside a locked room. If Jane asked what he was thinking, he was likely to smile and shrug and say, “Nothing,” or else to mention sports. Jane wondered if, as she did, he missed the time they used to have just to be together, talking or going to the movies or riding their bikes around the reservoir. She was afraid to ask him. For the first time there were things about herself she didn’t want Billy to know. So she, too, she supposed, was locking herself away.

  Outside the window a few flakes of snow swirled around the streetlight. Jane thought of the passage in Dmitri Arkadyevich that she had read to Billy that December morning when their life together was itself a white, blank field of untrodden snow; when Karkov had still been her hero rather than the ambiguous figure he had now be-come—charming, immensely talented, volatile, faithless.