The intelligent’s blue eyes shone behind his spectacles. “It’s the mathematical basis of Ionia. It lays out the structure of multidimensional reality.”

The slightly humorous dismay on the faces of the other disciples reminded me of a classroom of children steeling themselves for a teacher’s lecture on comportment. “Are you familiar with the term déjà vu? That peculiar feeling of familiarity, that you have been here before, that we have had exactly this conversation sometime in the past?” He pointed quickly to one of the Ionians. “Gleb scratching his head just so and the snow on the trees just in those same clumps. All of it so familiar. But where does this feeling come from? Such a common phenomenon, throughout all cultures, all time. But what is it? Is it a message from the Beyond?”

Avdokia staggered in bearing an enormous towel-wrapped crock, which she dropped onto the table with a bang. When she opened the lid, a grippingly nostalgic fragrance filled the room. Not quite déjà vu, but close. Oatmeal. While everyone else in Russia ate kasha, we Makarovs always ate oatmeal. It was the English tradition. If the English ate shaving cream with their bacon and eggs, we would have, too. My old nanny flashed me a semaphore of horror when she spotted me on the bench listening to the man’s earnest explanations, the books at my elbow, wearing my patchwork sarafan and white head scarf. I could hear her thinking, Holy Theotokos, protect us. Her big nose and chin came together across the thin line of her lips. Don’t trust them an inch. Flicked her eyes over to the gypsy. Especially that one.

But even Magda could not dampen my mood this morning, nor could this storky intelligent. The regularity of the group’s routines and the intensity of the evening Practice made me feel better than I’d felt in a long time. The morning sickness had gone. I tried to pay attention to Andrei’s lecture, to illustrate my dedication as a new Ionian, while bowls were passed and filled.

“Such things aren’t mysteries,” he said, his voice full of gravitas. “Or only insofar as we fail to understand their inherent structure.” He pointed his spoon at me. “We understand that fevers aren’t caused by demons. We know you don’t get rid of them by waving dead cats over your head.” He ate, and a bit of glutinous porridge appended itself to his bottom lip, where it wobbled precariously. It took everything I had not to stare at that lump of cereal rising and falling and instead gaze into his impassioned blue eyes behind his spectacles.

The others either ate in resigned silence or suppressed giggles, heads lowered to avoid catching his eye. Bogdan cast quick sympathetic glances toward me. Manipulating his long pianist’s fingers, the schoolmaster went on to explain how the universe was constructed—as a series of folds, like a Japanese paper flower. “What appears to be a linear phenomenon, when seen from the next level up, is actually folded space-time.” He certainly didn’t make himself popular by monopolizing the conversation, but perhaps on the next level up he was scintillating. “So a phenomenon which appears to move from A to B to C can actually be A and B and C simultaneously. See?”

I nodded politely. I figured I could catch up when I read the books. But now he’d moved from paper flowers to soap bubbles collecting around a soap bubble inside a soap bubble. Interlocking spheres. “Everything is happening inside the same moment, or what appears to be a moment linearly, in this dimension. But there is no linear time in the dimensions above. So in déjà vu, you’ve accidentally jumped to the next level and glimpsed one of the infinite parallel realities. The question is how to prolong that instant, how to investigate it.”

Suddenly the Ionians straightened from their slumped positions of polite boredom. The sleepiness in the air vanished. The Master had arrived.

They rose as one and waited until he had settled himself into his chair, a figure both formidable and whimsical in Russian blouse, shaggy vest, striped velvet trousers, and house slippers. All he lacked were bandoliers and a curved dagger at his belt. “Good morning, children. Has Dyadya Andrei donned his professor’s hat?”

Laughter, so far suppressed, rushed out like wind through chimes. Andrei’s lecture came to an abrupt end, his face gone pale.

“Such weighty matters, Andrei.” Ukashin frowned, though we could see he was teasing. There was a smile under his moustache. “Too much theory first thing in the morning. Less thinking, more dancing, eh?” He ran his hand over his gleaming head—he must have just shaved it—and gazed down the table directly at me. “Is life to be lived, do you think, Marina Ionian? Or contemplated, with the thumb in the mouth?” He reached out and shook the boy Ilya’s shoulder. “You don’t just read an opera score, do you? You sing!” The tall boy with his prominent Adam’s apple grinned. I could feel the pleasure he took in being singled out.

“You don’t admire a pattern for a coat, do you?” he asked brown-eyed Anna. “‘Oh, what a lovely pattern. Look at that clever design!’ No. You make the coat and go for a walk.” Bestowing his smile on her. She absorbed his charm with an indulgent smile of her own, like a fond mother.

“But surely you must agree, Taras, that understanding must come first,” interjected the gawky professor.

“Must I agree?” He watched the flaxen-haired goddess Katrina fill a bowl for him, set it before him. The glance that passed between them—so intimate… was there more here than I had suspected? I smelled sex in the air, though maybe I was just overly sensitive after Kolya’s night with the village temptress. Natalya had told me that separate relationships between the community’s men and women were strictly forbidden. But maybe the Master was the exception. “Katrina Ionian,” he asked the blond girl, “what do you think?”

She just laughed. “I’d rather eat.”

“Exactly,” concluded the master, tucking into his breakfast. “We would all rather eat.”

“But surely—” Andrei tried again.

“But surely—” Ukashin echoed him, his mouth full, imitating his disciple’s fish-gulping-air expression, detonating another round of giggles as the intelligent sat trying to collect himself. Where did this unprovoked cruelty come from? Was it for my benefit, or did he always do it?

“But surely, what do we have if we don’t have our reason, if we don’t examine these things—” the intelligent spluttered.

“What do we have, Professor?” Ukashin prodded him. “No doubt you will tell us.”

The poor man was on the verge of tears. “A travesty,” he replied. “A puppet show.”

Ukashin held out his arms, hands dangling at the wrists, and began to jerk like a puppet, his dark eyes wide and unfocused, as the other man sat, straight-backed and stone-faced. The success of the depiction seemed to encourage the Master. He rose and began to wheel about, unsteady on his feet, jumping and collapsing. He moved to my side to examine one of my new books with an expression both studious and ridiculous—quite a performance.

It shocked me, after the peace and beauty of our exercises, to see such heartlessness. The intelligent was a bore, true, but he didn’t deserve to be belittled. How Ukashin delighted in the man’s humiliation, how deftly he turned the others against him. His advocacy for darkness along with the light was certainly in evidence. No one said a word in Andrei’s defense. The intelligent rose, trembling, glancing from face to unsympathetic face. I put my hand on the books and smiled. I’ll read them. He nodded, but that stricken expression was terrible to behold. He turned and left us to his tormentor.

Ukashin was in a fine mood after that, like a man who has just vandalized a shop and walks away with expensive goods in his arms. As he ate, he asked for people’s dreams, as if nothing had happened. They were all eager to share. Bogdan dreamed of food—whitefish soup and caviar, asparagus with hollandaise. “Tonight don’t forget to take some sacks with you and bring some back,” Ukashin said. “We could use some caviar around here.”

Anna had dreamed of sewing a shroud, but no one would tell her whom it was for. She was afraid. She didn’t want to finish it. I tried not to interpret—it was awfully personal for Ukashin to ask everyone to share their dreams in a group. The woodcutter, Pasha, dreamed they were all back at the Laboratory and the Cheka was coming. Everyone stood against the walls and became the walls, so that when the Chekists broke in, the place was empty.

“Yes, we will learn to do this,” said the Master. “People are fools. They look, but they don’t see.”

Gleb, the furniture maker, with his bland face and colorless hair, shared a dream about a village girl he’d come across, washing clothes in the river. He watched her from the trees—her breasts, thinly clad in her slip, her skirts tucked up around her, her long hair covered with a kerchief. She saw him and called him to her, teasing him. It was excruciating to have to listen to him describe how this village girl had him make love to her there on the banks of the river. He blushed and stammered, but still he kept on talking. It was agonizing to watch.

“Is she here?” Ukashin asked.

Gleb nodded, swallowed.

“Who was it?”

“K-K-Katrina Ionian.”

Katrina listened, barely flinching, keeping her head cocked slightly to one side, as if she were listening to a tram driver call out stops, and none of the stops was hers. But down the table, Pasha’s eyes flashed, and his lips turned down within the nest of his dark beard. Such intrigue! It seemed that the ban on sex could not quite eradicate the passions in young healthy people. Ukashin gazed at Gleb from under his emphatic eyebrows. “Yes.” He nodded as if this were important information. “I see.” As if he were unaware of the havoc he was stirring up. That devil. “We’ll do something with that.”