One of the followers ran up the shoveled path—a tall, silent boy I hadn’t seen yet, his eyes a light brown, wearing a quilted hat pointed like a medieval helmet. How had he known to come? Did the man have a silent dog whistle?

“Ilya, bring a basin, a pail, and some burlap squares,” the master ordered. “And a rope.” The boy nodded, his earnest face knobbly like the knuckles of a hand. Prior to this moment, none of them would look at me directly, but before the boy ran back, he eyed me admiringly, even enviously. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my bloody hand.

Ukashin picked out some of the inferior pieces of offal and threw them to the dogs, who attacked them in a great outpouring of growls. “While we’re waiting,” he said, “find yourself a tree with a long sturdy branch.”

In a kind of trance, I found a suitable tree, a tall fir whose lowest branches he deemed adequate.

The boy soon returned with squares of burlap, a basin, and a pail in which rested a coiled rope, a small saw, and a hatchet. The burly headman indicated the organs spread out on the ground. “Take these to Katrina in the kitchen.” The boy filled the basin with them and carried them back to the house with the pride of Salome bearing the head of John the Baptist.

I thought I understood then what Ukashin would have me do—hang the deer in the tree, cold and safe, out of reach of winter’s animals. Using the hatchet for a weight, I threw the rope up and over the outstretched limb. It proved a dangerous choice, as I barely avoided catching the ax head in my skull on the way down. He had a good laugh at that one.

Next, we braced the stag’s legs apart, my instructor showing me where to cut holes in the hind legs to lace the rope through.

“Now pull it up,” he told me.

I took hold of the rope and hauled. The deer was too heavy.

“Oh, come. This is your kill. Pull it up!”

I put all the strength of my arms and legs into pulling it up, but it was hopeless. Yet I kept trying. I had to show him I wasn’t the little barynya expecting to be fed and cared for, that I would throw myself into whatever work he gave me, uncomplaining, to the point of the absurd. He let me struggle a good long time, too, hooting as I failed again and again, before he finally bent down himself and lifted the deer straight up in his arms, neat as a prince lifting a swan in a pas de deux. I shortened the rope, and the deer’s head swung two feet off the ground.

“We’ll want the hide, too,” he said.

There would be no shortcuts, evidently. Perhaps I would have to chew the sinews into cord, like the red Indians of my brother’s Zane Grey novels. So be it. Despite the bloody liver, I was feeling strangely well. And I found I enjoyed the man’s company. I liked his blunt solidity, his cheerfulness. It surprised me. I had been so prepared to dislike him, with all his mystical nonsense, but I had to admit that it felt good to be with someone who knew what he was doing, possessed the sort of understanding that inspired trust. Though I realized I had to be on guard against it. Alas, Beloved…

He showed me where to cut, around the hind legs at the thighs, a seam to free the hide from the flesh. Then I pulled the skin down, scraping and cutting the whitish membranes wherever they held fast, until I had the creature’s coarse gray-dun coat down around its neck and upper legs like a sweater pulled over a child’s head but not yet freed from its arms.

Stripped of its skin, hanging there, head down, legs splayed, the carcass looked terribly, touchingly human. Vulnerable and so light compared to the presence and power of the live stag—the heartbreakingly narrow legs, the slender waist, the narrow rack of ribs. I felt a shiver of recognition. It was like working on my own flayed body.

“Yes,” he said. “This is you. And you will eat it and continue to live. And when you die, something will eat you. Look at it.” He spun the deer on its rope. “Small isn’t it, to contain so much life? A dead man’s very similar. Imagine a battlefield full of dead men. A village. Walking into a village and seeing every man, woman, and child like this.”

A deserter. I’d been right.

I cut the hide away from the neck and the forelegs and set it in the snow. It steamed on the ground as the perfect hexagons of snowflakes drifted down over us, dusting the blue trees, soon to cover the pink blood seeping down into the white. Blood dripped from the hanging carcass into the bucket. I was tired but happy with my work, looking forward to going back to Avdokia’s room to sleep, to ponder what to do about the inconvenience. I held the knife out to Ukashin, but he raised his hands, as if it were red hot. “What, you think you’re done?”

What more was there to do?

“You have to butcher it before it freezes. Start with those.” He indicated two strips of meat on the inside of the deer, to either side of its backbone. “Reach in and pull.”

How easily they came free, surprising me. A long strip of meat, nice as anything served at the Astoria Hotel. He laid out a burlap square and I set the fillets onto it. Now I understood. And as tired as I was, I saw he was right. If the unbutchered deer froze, we’d never be able to pull the meat free. We’d have to chop the flesh from the bone with an ax.

Now the work grew hard—severing the legs, the neck, the spine. I fought against the queasy sense of having murdered a person, and now tormenting its savaged body. It brought me back to the basement of Gorokhovaya 2. The dispassion with which one body could torture another. This strange thing, life, built upon such a fragile bit of flesh.

I worked like a medical student, separating the meat along its natural lines of musculature. One flesh-being dissecting another. I thought of the cat we once dissected in physiology class at the Tagantsev Academy—or rather that Mina dissected. I’d cringed and hung back. I didn’t want to see a cat all open like that. Back when there still were cats. But I wasn’t a girl in the academy anymore. I had nursed the dying, I had cleaned their shit. Perhaps I wasn’t the chaos I’d imagined.

As I worked I had the sense of myself as someone I hadn’t really met yet, someone silent and deep, patient and strong—not like Marusya, whose storms were as violent as the ones on the sun—but whole and quiet under the chaos of my apparent self. Perhaps it wasn’t I who was chaotic. It was life itself. Existence was the whirlwind. I had just been too light to keep from being blown around in it. Now I felt a density forming within myself as I quartered this beast, hacking off great pieces and wrapping them in burlap, cutting out the pielike brains and folding them into the deerskin. “We’ll tan the hide with them,” Ukashin explained. “Make you a new pair of shoes.” He threw the head to the dogs like a boy throwing a ball to his scrappy chums. One grabbed it by an antler and ran off through the trees, the other in pursuit.

Shoes would be nice, but I understood that he meant more than shoes. He was inviting me to stay on, to become part of his community. I felt the falling snow caress my cheeks and nose, and thought of the spark of life that might be embedded within me, growing, cells dividing, a child. Our child! I stood there, my hand throbbing from the hard work. There were worse places to face such a future. Here I had a roof, Mother and Avdokia, a place I could live, work, and time to figure out my next step.

73 The Fire Child

I DREAMED OF THE night forest. Cold, black, and starless, the snow coming down. I had to gather wood for a fire, but in the dark, I could only assemble the smallest pile. I squatted as I lit those poor shreds with matches, but the wind kept blowing them out. I was about to give up when I discovered a beautiful lighter in my pocket. I vaguely remembered it, someone had given it to me. It lit right away, and I let the flame lick the sticks of kindling.

A fire was born in the dark. Warm, though when I passed my hand through it, it didn’t burn me. I picked the flame out of its nest and held it in my cupped hand. And I realized—this was my child. I felt it warming my face, like a kiss. It knew me. I passed it gently from hand to hand, marveling. I had to be careful—it was just a small flame, tender and bright. I always thought I would have a human child, not a handful of fire, but I understood, as it pushed the inky darkness away, that of course I would have a fire child. When I held it too close, it began to scorch my coat. I needed something to put it in—a lantern, a tin box, something to keep it from the wind. I held it as close as I could and fed it tiny scraps of wood, and to my delight, it consumed them. But how to keep it safe? I couldn’t put it down, certainly not in a pocket. How would I sleep? I had to ready myself with one hand.

When I awoke, the sun was already up—a dull December day, as much of a day as we were going to get. I immediately looked at my hand. Empty. Sniffed it. Could I still smell smoke? Maybe… the flame was deep inside me now, and I was the lantern. Yes, this was true, wasn’t it? Oh, but my neck ached, my shoulder, and my hand, which had butchered an entire deer the day before. I massaged it, tried to flex it open. It was swollen, painful. The room smelled of Avdokia—yeast and a slight tinge of lavender. I’d wanted to tell her about the fire child.

There was a slight knock on the door, and a girl’s face poked in, framed by smooth hair of silky brown, a girl like flowing water. I recognized her, my savior, the one who had brought me the potato when I was staging my sit-down protest. “Are you awake?” she asked quietly. “I’ve come to take you for the bath.”