Finally, he stopped. “Today you are the rabbit.” He gestured all around us. “Where are you hiding, Citizen?”

I interrogated the sparkling meadow, the depth of the dark pines, the allée of big lindens with their smoky cloud of bare branches, the dense copse of aspens, the smudge of undergrowth at its verge, bilberry and blackberry and little firs. I pointed to where the undergrowth was thickest, among the red willow twigs and blackberry bushes. “There.”

His heavy face nodded once under his astrakhan hat. “Molodets.” Excellent. “Citizen Rabbit can’t afford to be caught in the open. He wants to be in the deep underbrush, where Chairman Wolf and Commissar Fox can’t follow him. Come.” We approached the aspens and began skirting the wood, the edges where trees had once been cut and berry bushes flourished. He pointed to a thin trail of trampled snow. I would have missed it, but Ukashin’s keen eyes missed nothing. I clearly had a long way to go if I was to be a hunter in anything but his imagination. He squatted on his haunches and parted the brush like opening a book. A tunnel, a tiny trail in the snow. He pointed to a long double footprint and a small one. A rabbit, bounding—I could see it. “Now find the narrowest part of this trail.” I hung back. It looked impassable to me. “Go on.”

I fought my way through the twigs and low branches that caught at my sheepskin, my scarf, my face. But sure enough, the tunnel narrowed further in a U of snow between two close trees. “Over here,” I called out.

Silently he followed me in. We squatted on our haunches, low, reading the trail, but my legs weren’t as strong as his. They wobbled, they burned.

“Citizen Rabbit, how tall are you?” He positioned the loop of wire a foot in the air. “Like this?” He had such a knack for creating fun, excitement out of the most ordinary thing. Without that talent, he never could have kept his little band of followers as enthralled as we were. Little wonder the others envied me, able to spend this kind of time with him all by myself.

I lowered his hand six inches.

“Now find a branch. Maybe a sapling, like this.” He formed a gap about an inch in diameter with his ungloved thumb and forefinger. “Take the saw.” He handed me the hacksaw from the workroom.

I found an aspen sapling that would serve us.

“Cut it at an angle.”

After I’d done it, almost cutting my hand in the process, he lashed it with some of the cord Anna had given us, then jammed the sharpened end into the snow. I watched him tie off the knot, trying to see how he did it, but my nose was running unstoppably, and my head ached. It was so cold I could barely focus. He took twigs and used them to steady the snare over the little trail. “That’s one. You find the next one.”

We circled around the back of those bushes, deeper into the wood, and where small firs had begun to grow among the thousand-headed aspen, I found another rabbit trail. I’d never noticed them before, much trampled among the twigs and trees, exactly the kind of terrain one avoided when walking in a forest. “Mouse,” he said, and pointed. Tiny splayed toes and the line of a tail in the snow. “Weasel”—five-toed prints, wider than they were long. “Deer are like hearts in the snow,” he said. “Get us another deer, Marina, and you’ll be queen of Ionia.”

He knew so many things. So unlike Father, who knew how to be witty and withering and give speeches after dinner. Ukashin was more interested in the how of things than the why. This world was not a mystery to him, not a disappointing thing to be transcended, as it was to my mother and Andrei. I could well believe that he’d spent years traveling in the remotest areas of the world, learning the skills of the simple people as well as studying with their holy men. He liked secrets of all kinds. As did I.

He showed me another kind of trap, which used a notched stick and a sapling’s natural spring. When an animal was snared, as he demonstrated, the stick fell away and the tree sprang upward, carrying the trapped animal with it, breaking its neck. “Now you do it.” He had me set the trap, and I laughed with the glee of a small child as it sprang free. “You’ll do well, Marina.”

It had been so long since I’d done anything right, I felt like the sun had come out. Perhaps this—Ionia, my Trud—would work out after all.


Without Ukashin, trapping day after day was not so much fun. But I stuck to it and I learned. My bare hands bungled the knots when I attempted to tie them gloveless in the cold, so I learned to tie my nooses ahead of time and carry the prepared traps with me in my game bag. I immediately added Misha’s trousers under my skirts and his shirt under my linen blouse for extra warmth, and borrowed a quilted hat to wear under my scarf. Warmer, I could stay out for hours learning my territory, discovering game trails, sketching unfamiliar tracks, and generally feeling my way into my new role. I sat with Ukashin at breakfast as he identified the animal tracks I’d seen. Snowshoe-shaped marks—squirrel. Pine marten with its delicate toes. Fox—doglike but smaller than his hairy hounds. “If you see Commissar Fox,” he said, “you have my permission to waste a bullet.”

My first successes brought me the respect of my fellow Ionians. Yet it took a while to get used to seeing the dead in traps, stiff and miserable-looking creatures resembling executed prisoners hanging from gallows—their blank eyes, their curled front legs. Tried and found guilty of counterrevolution and speculation. The sentence, death.

I skinned them quickly, trying not to notice just how much they looked like newborn infants as I pulled them from their pelts, the naked wet torsos delivered from bloody fur. I had to remember how sweet the meat would taste. The baby inside me cried out for it. Life and death, krasniy, krasiviy, krov’. I brought the pelts to Bogdan, whom the Master had taught to tan them. Soon squirrel and rabbit-fur collars, earmuffs, and mittens appeared in the Ionian wardrobe. These small deaths warmed us in countless ways.

The longer I worked outside, the better I liked it and the less the cold bothered me. I was becoming a harder woman than I’d been—a paradox, as motherhood to me had always implied a fleshy and vulnerable femininity. And I was becoming acquainted with Maryino in an entirely new way, these familiar woods and meadows in their winter disguise. The silence refreshed me after the hothouse currents of workroom and dormitory, the secret enmities and collusions, the spying and the dramas. Here, despite the cold and the physical demands, I could find the peace and privacy I craved.


One day as I returned to the house after making my rounds, I glimpsed a flash of red against the white. The fox! Traveling merrily across the crusty drifts, probably returning from sniffing around our henhouse. It stopped for a moment and regarded me conspiratorially before trotting away on its fine black legs. I felt such a rush of pleasure, watching it pad along the hard-packed snow. It was only after it was gone that I remembered Ukashin telling me to waste a bullet if I saw it.

Normally I didn’t let myself think about Kolya. I pushed him away from my consciousness like pushing an unwanted guest out the door. Yet why didn’t I shoot the fox? I thrilled at the sight of the clever red creature, so much like Kolya himself that it made me laugh. Cocking a snook at me in my prehistoric snowshoes, my patchwork and sheepskin and rabbit-fur mitts. I remembered Kolya breezing through the kitchen, grabbing one of Annoushka’s fresh sweet rolls on the run, and when she protested, holding it in his mouth and growling at her. Or dreaming away in a hammock, smoking one of Father’s pipes. The creature reminded me of Kolya, and I loved it as I loved that impossible man. I knew then that I would never be free of him. This fox would be my secret. Although I was happy enough with Ionia, to have a place among them—and a place to get away from them—still one needed one’s secrets or one could hardly be called human.


The weather grew foggy, and gloom set in—monotonous, melancholy weather. Christmas came and went without mention. The Master, like all true revolutionaries, had a calendar of his own, complete with events we could look forward to. We celebrated a Day of the Earth Devi and a Fast of Jericho. There were new dances to learn and long mystical hours when Ukashin led us to higher levels of existence, full of transparent fiery beings.

But the child was a clock in my body whose face I could not see. I needed to know the date. I kept my own calendar in my notebook, playing with the dates in brief poems. The word at the end of the second line gave me the month, and the one at the end of the last line was the day. Dekabr’, December: deliver, decide, derail, detail; Yanvar’, January—yearn, yeast, year. For the numerals—odin, dva, tree, chetiri, piat’: ordinary, drainpipe, tyranny, chinstrap, poultry. For the teens and twenties, two words. Fourteen, chetirnadsat’: constant nullity, clever notion. Twenty-two, dvadsat’-dva: devil’s deal. Dying day. I wrote a poem in honor of each passing day. Poets are the spies of the world, and every poem is a code.


The year 1919 arrived without fanfare. No wax to be cast, no wishes made, no tangos. I looked back at the snow-wrapped house like gingerbread covered in white icing, nestled in its yard among the new outbuildings, and thought of that St. Basil’s Eve so long ago, the smell of pine and goose and winter lilacs, Après l’Ondée and kisses among the snow-perfumed furs. Only three years ago—had a person ever changed as much as I had? Or a country?