Her blue kerchief before me, she shook her head. “You have to think of yourself now. Your baby. This was not your quarrel.”

“You want me just to forget? Like it never happened?” I could still see him, his face to the sky, praying for help, praying for release from his suffering. How he fell on me. The blood in the snow.

Avdokia sighed as she hauled herself to her feet. “You have such a tender heart, milaya. I pray for you.” She sat on her bed next to me, her arm around my waist. I took a deep, shuddering breath. Her warm smell, so familiar. Oh couldn’t we go back to the way it was? “Don’t lose everything for that sad man. He’s gone, poor thing. But you’re still here. You have to live on. Ask yourself, who was he to you really?”

Who was he? Why would she ask such a question? In truth—an annoyance, a pedant. I knew nothing about him. But when a human being unburdens himself to you, you become part of his troubles. “Does it matter? He didn’t deserve to be so reduced. You didn’t hear him crying. Ukashin took everything from him.”

“Listen to me.” She pressed my face between the palms of her bent old hands, exactly as she used to do when I was a child and she needed to talk to me seriously. Her little eyes in their nest of wrinkles, her nose and her chin practically touching. “Things are going to happen to you in your life far worse than this, Marinoushka. It’s a terrible thing to say to a young person, I know. You’re still seeing him out there… God knows how he got your gun. But the thing is—where are you going to be when that one puts you out? What use will you be to anyone if you don’t make it? Let Andrei go. He’s in God’s hands now.” She crossed herself. “May God have mercy on the living and the dead.”

But my old nanny hadn’t been there. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen his face when he talked about kissing his children goodbye. What would you have done?

I slept in her bed with his glasses curled in my hand.


I heard them through the door, making dinner. No one said a word. I didn’t come out. I turned my face to the wall. Avdokia brought me soup with a good piece of meat in it. I ate it while she watched me, hoping I would talk to her, but I had nothing more to say. Not to her, not to anyone.

Later in the evening, Natalya’s pretty face poked through the door, her water-brown hair, my swan. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you coming for Practice?”

“No.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” she said. “He fell into doubt.” As though he’d fallen from a tram. Belief was like that. When you fell, you cracked yourself open. And what would it take for this pretty butterfly to doubt her Master? Whose death would it take? Mine?


He sent for me, late. This time, Bogdan was the messenger. “He wants you.” Avdokia was the one who made me get up, put my slippers on me. “You have to go. You can’t hide in here forever.” And so I went.

In the front parlor, I could feel the just-completed Practice, like a violin that was too high to hear, an invisible cloak of scented silk. I didn’t want to feel its beauty, didn’t want it to dissipate my disgust. Bogdan left me with a guilty shrug.

“Sit down,” Ukashin said quietly. I was afraid of him. I tried to remember my courage, but where had it fled?

I sat on the carpet, and to my horror he came and sat right in front of me, our knees nearly touching. I was terrified to be so close to him. What was he going to do to me? He had already been threatening to put me out, and that was before my outburst.

“You’ve had a shock,” he said. “To have him do this when he was with you. And with your own gun. I don’t blame you for being upset. I’m upset, too.”

I saw again the bright bloom of Andrei’s blood, the way he’d crumpled to the ground, still strapped into his skis. A wave of comfort suffused me. I didn’t want it. I knew it was a lie, that he was doing it to me, but I needed comfort, too. I was not as strong as I pretended to be.

“I know you’re thinking you should have done something,” he said, his voice low, confiding. “If you’d only said the right words. That you should have steadied him, brought him back to the light. Supported his path instead of fanning his doubt.”

It was true. I didn’t try to make him feel better. I’ve never been in that position.

“He trusted you,” he went on in that kind voice. “He liked you. That’s why I sent him with you. To see if he would reach out. But you didn’t help him. You failed him.”

Oh God, that was true, too. But I had to remember, I wasn’t the reason for his suffering. I was only a tool.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “You didn’t know what you were doing. I worried about this from the beginning. You act without thinking.”

I gazed down at the carpet, the stylized pomegranates and deer. I didn’t want him to confuse me. It was he who had betrayed his friend. Andrei had no one, and that was Ukashin’s fault, not mine.

“Look at me, Marina Ionian.” I lifted my eyes, so very weary. “Am I angry?” In his face, no anger, only tenderness, a little tiredness, that of a man with many responsibilities. For all of Ionia. How human he looked right now. It surprised me after my accusations. “Each of us is seeking something here, Marina. Some want a more radiant path. Others, fellowship. We all have our own reasons. Even you.”

“I wasn’t seeking anything.” I wanted more than anything to push myself back from him, but then he would know how frightened I was.

“You wanted sanctuary,” he said. “A home. A place in the world. And I gave it to you, didn’t I?”

I had made this happen. Again, I had forced my way in. I was the one. He’d wanted to send me away that first day. Oh God, I wished he had.

“But you can’t both tear down your home and have it,” he said. “And your child can’t be born into a snowdrift. I want you to have it here.”

In that exact moment, I felt a fluttering, like an eyelid’s tic, in the depths of my body. The fetus had chosen this moment to awaken.

He was impossible to escape, those bull’s eyes, sad, piercing, his drooping moustache, the big nose, the planes of his face, the mole on his forehead, the lines on the dome of his head. “The dead hold no grudges, Marina. They know everything, understand everything.” Insistent, warm. “Andrei sought understanding,” he continued. “It was his life’s purpose. Now he’s released from the blindness of this world into the Great Knowledge. A violent release, but he didn’t know how else to accomplish it. He’s where he always wanted to be. He has transcended to the upper dimensions.”

How awful to say he was better off dead. But much of what this hard man was saying was true. The more he spoke, the less sure I was. I felt his words like a current, urging me onto the river of his story.

What would you have done?

He reached out and took my hand. His flesh like wood, denser than ordinary flesh. I felt a great rush of grief—for Andrei, and myself, and all the people caught in their traps, and those who don’t know how to save them. What a world of suffering we live in. I felt unmoored, drifting and spinning in the tide.


Andrei’s suicide lingered. It tapped the windows, clung to our faces and hands. The possibility of doom darkened the edges of the Ionian dream, and the weather did nothing to lessen it. Metel’, we say. Blizzard. The compressed savagery of the season came down as if trying to scrape us from the face of the earth. The nearness of death was a smell in my hair like gunpowder. How small and alone we were here, the country around us not Russia but Death.

The blizzard raged. Wind shrieked at the corners of the house; the trees streamed, tugging at their roots. Branches rattled against the walls. Bad luck had arrived. Ukashin’s dogs mysteriously disappeared. Nightmares swept the dormitories. We no longer shared our dreams in public, teasing out their meaning. Ukashin met with each of us privately in his kabinyet to unburden us, to explain away the darkness.

I dreamed I was feasting with Taras Ukashin, gorging on dates and almonds, colored eggs and mulled wine. We made love on the sheepskins while Andrei Ionian stood outside in the cold, miserable, with only that sheet around him, his blue face pressed to the window.

The temperature continued to drop. Outside the kitchen, the glass tube with its mercury spine showed forty below. There’s a hardness to the air when the thermometer falls this low. The cold is a knife gouging any bit of exposed skin. It slashes your cheeks. You have to close your eyes or your eyeballs freeze in your head.

The Master ordered everything to be brought into the house—meat from the smokehouse, chickens from the coop, everything edible carried down to the larder under the kitchen. I could not stop thinking about Andrei in the icehouse. I was not so sure that the dead forgive us everything.

Bad-tempered Lilya and I brought in the chickens from the henhouse, collecting them one by one and conveying them under our coats. She left the rooster to me. I tackled him, wrapped him in my sheepskin as he madly clawed me. I was afraid I’d break his neck or one of his feet. We stashed them under baskets weighted with wood in Avdokia’s room and stood by the hot stove, waited for the shivering to die down before going out again. The boys brought firewood into the hall, and the girls melted snow in barrels in the kitchen. It was as if we were preparing for a siege.

No more could I escape to tramp the woods. I would experience Ionia undiluted, the full force of the communal mind.


We assembled in the Practice room. The Master had an announcement to make. “It is time to accelerate your advancement, the adept along with the novice. All together as one.” He would introduce a new Practice—vlivaniye. Inflowing. It was a technique known only to a few dozen human beings on earth. The excitement in the faces of the acolytes was as if he’d announced to a bunch of children that the Sugar Plum Fairy was coming to visit. “A secret teaching,” he said, “kept for thousands of years among the Brotherhood of the Sun.” A sect of monks in the Tien Shan, the eastern Himalayas, where he had spent time learning their mysteries. They took in energy directly from the earth and sun right through their skins. Hale and hearty, they lived to a great age, and some had not eaten in fifty years.