Between dances, the Master fell into the seat next to mine, clapped me on the shoulder. “We’ve had a theorist and a prophet, and now we have our bard!” He kissed me on both cheeks. “We must talk. We need more of this. Maybe you’ll write us some songs… and an invocation.”

At one point I caught a glimpse of Pasha and Katrina disappearing together into the hall. Did the Master notice? But he was drunk, busy dancing with Natalya. Yes, a real carnival was taking place, and Ukashin was allowing it. This must have been what the Laboratory was like before the spartan life of Ionia. Andrei had fallen asleep at the table. Gleb and Ilya were arm wrestling. This was the time I could have had Bogdan if I wanted to, but it came to me—there was no one guarding Mother’s door. I would never again have a chance like this. I practiced invisibility, blending with the woodwork as I slid out of the room and glided up the stairs.

78 The Mother

FIVE INSET PANELS MARKED her door like the spine of a forbidden book, and the scent of an oily incense emanated from the other side. I knocked softly, Fais dodo. The wooden knob turned freely, warm as flesh in my hand. A cloud of incense spilled out like smoke from a badly ventilated stove. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

In the otherwise lightless room a small comma of flame burned in blue glass at eye level, farther away than was possible given the dimensions of a space I knew as well as I knew my own body. Maybe it was the effect of a darkness like the inside of a jewelry box upholstered in smoke and black velvet, but I was afraid to take a step, as if I might fall down into limitless space.

“Mother?”

Behind the flame, I could just make out two icons with overlarge Byzantine eyes, weirdly animated, as if they weren’t painted but lived within their frames in two dimensions. The darkness was impenetrable but for that small blue flame and those saints.

Then came a clicking sound like the turning of a handful of pebbles from near the flame. It made me aware of the uncanny quiet of the room. I couldn’t hear the party directly below us, perhaps because of the heavy carpet under my feet. It made me dizzy, standing still.

A shadow slipped between me and the flame. A ghost, a spirit. I remained perfectly still, like a rabbit eluding a hawk, which sees only movement. Colored patches appeared in the air, and my scalp tingled, the tips of my fingers went cold. Click, click.

“Mama?”

The elongated form discouraged my approach. My mother was not a tall woman. What if it was not her at all? Perhaps that was why they’d kept me away from her all this time. But it had to be Vera Borisovna. Avdokia wouldn’t have lied about that.

The very air shimmered and swirled, alive as a Viennese ballroom. Was there a drug in the oily incense? I wouldn’t have put that past Ukashin. And here I’d imagined my mother up here with a blanket over her knees, reading Madame Blavatsky.

“Mama?” I whispered.

She didn’t turn but stepped aside so the two accusatory icon faces could observe me. I had the strangest feeling that she was watching me through their eyes, as one might spy on other restaurant patrons through a well-placed mirror. Click, click went the stones. “It’s Marina, Mama.”

“Approach.” The clear high voice came from very far away, the words formed as if she’d had to push them through thick cloth.

With one foot, I felt my way ahead. “I’ve been here for months. They won’t let me see you.”

Her hands appeared, white in the darkness, pushing something around atop an inlaid table that I remembered being in the upstairs hall. Her forearms rested on the dark wood. I saw she was arranging tumbled stones—clear, pointed, smooth—some glowed amber, others red, blue, pale cloudy jade. Yes it was my mother, luminous but indefinite, like the underpainting of a portrait. “Did you know I was here?” She hadn’t seen me since the night Arkady came to claim me. “Why don’t you say something?” I reached out and pulled back the hood draped over her head. Her hair tumbled down, loose, white, wild like a stormy sea.

She continued to swirl the stones on the tabletop.

“Will you stop doing that?” With a sweep of my hand I sent the stones flying. They bounced and scattered, some hitting the wall. “Look at me! You haven’t seen me for almost a year! Don’t you care that I’m here?”

She lifted her blue eyes to me then, wide and transparent as tumbled quartz. “I see you. I’ve seen you all along.”

What was she talking about?

“In the snow. In the tower. In the forest and the storm. Come. Marina. Come home.” She lifted her hand to the room’s corner. I followed her gesture. “Stop there,” she whispered. “It’s too far. Marina!” Her voice rose in urgency. “Heed me!”

And I knew. She was seeing me in my desperate walk through the forest. Right now. In a parallel time. It was her voice I’d heard telling me to stop and take shelter.

“Why did you call me here if you didn’t want to see me?”

She shook her head, and from her throat emerged bubbling laughter—like the water in a springhouse, cool and clear. Was she mad? Or was this a private joke? “Mother—”

Those clear, translucent eyes were on me again. “Don’t mistake me for the one who was. What you remember is a bit of golden shell. The egg has vanished.”

How had she heard that? The hair stood up all over my body. Where was my mother? I wanted to shriek. What have you done with her? The woman who loved hats and parties, who’d translated Apollinaire head-to-head with Anton, who loved white lilacs and risqué Pierre Louÿs novels. This Vera Borisovna wasn’t even looking at me. Rather, she scanned me, as if I were a landscape painting too large to take in at a glance.

Then the thought came to me with the force of a blow—this was who she’d always been. Yes. Now I saw her, the mystic who’d always been waiting. I saw her the way you finally see the stones at the bottom of a pool when you stop wading and the water stills and clarifies around your feet. She’d only been playing the role of mother. It was that other person, the spoiled housewife, the glamorous society fixture, who’d been the impostor. She had stepped out of that suit and now stood revealed.

She settled her hood back over her hair. She had what she’d always wanted. No children, no husband, no earthly cares. It wasn’t luxury she’d sought—it had never been about that, not beauty, not art. It was transcendence she was after. Ukashin gave her that psychic space, protection, freedom. And what did he get in return? Money, this estate, a mystical figurehead to awe the faithful?

“What about Father?”

She gestured circles with her hands, as if clearing a window or washing a horse. “So much motion. So much red. Your father has that as well.”

Yes, I had that red. It bubbled up now, clouding my aura. She had been posing all those years as my mother, as a devoted wife. I found myself suddenly furious with her. “So you do remember him,” I said. “Your husband? All those years, was that nothing?” Why was I defending him? As if he were still Papa, and not the politician who betrayed me though it meant my death.

“Some realities are tangential.” She shrugged. “It’s no one’s fault.”

Her detachment made me want to slap her. “I saw him, you know. Back in April. He’s in league with the counterrevolution, plotting away. He exposed me as Red. Thought I was a spy. I was almost killed.”

“White becomes red, red becomes white.” Her voice, far away again. “Seryozha’s here.” She glanced up, the way you notice someone entering a room—in that same corner, where there was no one. “Can’t you see?” She held her hand out to my right, where I saw nothing. “He watches you. He misses you. He’s been trying to communicate with you.” She nodded into the nothingness. “Yes, I know.”

I gazed into the dark spot where her focus was trained. I smelled gunpowder. My hair felt electrified. Was it possible she could see my brother between the worlds? What if all this Ionian nonsense was true—energetics and folds in space-time? Ukashin said there was no death, only transition.

“Don’t look. Feel him.”

I closed my eyes and tried, but couldn’t sense anything more. I passed my hands through the space but it was neither cold nor warm, gave no whisper or rustle. I would have given anything to believe he was here, reaching out to me. Seryozha! But I didn’t need a visitation to know that my brother was near me. He would always be near me. But oh, to see his face again—his slightly pointed ears, the way he read while biting his nails abstractedly, the way he mimicked Papa scolding him.

“How old is he?” I asked, my eyes still closed.

“A small boy. Though sometimes he comes as an old man. It depends.”

This was crazy. I opened my eyes. “He’ll never be an old man. He’ll always be sixteen.”

“In some of the streams he dies young, in others he lives to be an old man, or a soldier, even a priest.”

That made me smile. I could only imagine how my sharp, attentive brother would imitate her now, mocking her mystic face. “And what about me? What do you see for me, Mama?”

That glowing spiritual expression dropped away. She lowered her gaze.

I stepped on one of the oracular stones, slipped, caught myself, picked it up. Smooth and hard. I wanted to throw it at her. Not even a word about the baby?

“Go now.” She looked away from me, chin against her shoulder—that profile, still as beautiful as when Vrubel painted it.