Pasha was the first to collapse. He crumpled during a meditation session. Katrina, surfacing from her trance, jumped to her feet. “Pasha?” she called out, leaning over him but afraid to touch him. “Master? Pasha’s fainted!”

But the Master said nothing.

“He’s all right,” Magda said. “Let him be.”

It was frightening to see Pasha lying on the carpet. It reminded me of Andrei in the snow. Bogdan, our erstwhile doctor, knelt to tend to his fallen brother. Katrina hovered. She brought a cloth as white as her face and a jug of cold water. Wiping his face revived him, and he was terribly embarrassed. I myself was teetering on the tightrope between the need to inflow to keep hunger and terror at bay and my growing anger and anxiety about Ukashin’s detachment from the world he’d built, the one he’d stolen from Andrei Ionian.

Inflowing went on. The meals lightened to suit our more rarefied systems—thin oatmeal, cabbage, kasha, soup with floating bits of meat. The more resentful I became about the figure in the hooded cloak, the less the meat sickened me and the hungrier I became.

It struck me one day—the meat.

Fresh meat.

Not salted. Not smoked. Where did it come from?

Surely those two rabbits I’d caught the night Andrei died hadn’t lasted thirteen people this long, no matter how frugal we were. The vlivaniye was supposed to supply us with new ideas, but in fact I could see that the opposite was true. It kept us from thinking at all. As I fell out of step with the others and my dense body returned, I started to consider things more clearly. For one thing, I recalled the quiet departure of Bonya and Buyan. Ukashin never mentioned them, and no one asked, just as we’d never asked about Andrei’s sorrows. Those dogs hadn’t run off. We were consuming them, bit by bit.

There will always be enough if we believe. If we don’t repress the bounty with our doubts.

I wondered what else I’d missed amid so much inflowing. Harmony was lovely but I was the hunter—the fox, not the lamb. And the fox in me wondered—what really lay in the larder beneath the kitchen floor? I thought of the profligacy of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg. That green-painted door beckoned. What secrets might be hidden in the cold room where we used to keep Annoushka’s jams and the canned produce from our garden, barrels of apples and turnips in sand? That door made my palms itch. Nobody was allowed down there now but Katrina Ionian. Even entering the kitchen was a rationed act.


I woke in the night, squirmed into my coat, my hat, and quietly left the workroom. But instead of walking upstairs to the icy water closet, I felt my way along the hall lined with Ukashin’s spiritualist paintings toward the forbidden door. One painting, two, three. As children, we often played the game of Blind Man. You pretended to be blind and found your way about the house by touch alone. I found the kitchen door, and opened it. Inside, the oven was still warm from dinner, the air soup-perfumed. I felt along the soft wood of the chest, the table. I knew the door to the larder would be to the right. The iron knob was cool, and turned. Unlocked. Cold musty air rose from under the house as I slipped inside, closed the door behind me and inched down the steep stairs, holding the wooden railing.

Such a familiar smell enveloped me—mushrooms, cold dirt, apples, potatoes. I knew the shape of the room as I knew the shape of my lover’s hand. Shelves along three sides for preserves, starting just underneath the low ceiling and stopping around hip height. Bags and barrels tucked underneath. Boxes of sand for the root vegetables. I began examining the shelves with my fingertips, moving from left to right, top to bottom. Empty. Empty. All empty. A crock. The faint tang of pickles. Two more cold crocks—maybe more of that green wine Bogdan had made. Something brushed my face and I jumped. Strings of dried mushrooms. The dry crunchy whisper of braided onions. More empty shelves. My felt boot found a sack. I dipped my hand. Grain, cool through my fingers. Another—grain, but only half full. String after string of wizened ears—dried apples. I tore off a few, ate them as I went. Pairs of dried fish hung together, and the urge to eat one was overwhelming, but I resisted. It would be stealing—they belonged to the group. Hypocrite. I let Avdokia steal for me almost every day. But I wouldn’t do it myself.

My worst fears had proved correct. The cellar held nothing but empty shelves, empty sacks. In the sandboxes, a few cabbages lay buried like severed heads, along with some turnips, maybe, or beets. A barrel of apples. And that was all. Thirteen people could not live off this for the rest of the winter. Maybe there was more hidden away somewhere. Perhaps they’d only brought in what was needed to last through the storm.

But my Petrograd mind was already flying, calculating: half a pound of grain a day per person. How long could these sacks last? Two, maybe three weeks at most. Eight chickens at one chicken a day… fourteen fish, in soup…

We weren’t going to make it.

No wonder he’d introduced inflowing. No wonder.

I was halfway up the stairs when I saw the flicker of a candle under the door. I flew back down and wedged myself behind the sandboxes and barrels, lay down on the cold earthen floor at full length, my head under the lowest stair. The smell of earth and apples. Childhood. The creak of the stairs under a soft-shod foot. “Marina, I know you’re down there.”

Magda Ionian. Did she know or was she just guessing? Had she seen me get up? Had she counted the sleeping bodies? I could hear her breathing. I inflowed through the earth, my breath just a wisp. She was examining the stores, rattling the crocks, counting the fish. I could hear their dried skins rasping together. I wasn’t here, I told myself. I was within the earth, with just a siphon to the surface. I wasn’t breathing; the earth was breathing me. She held the candle aloft, as if I might be clinging to the rafters. “If you’re stealing, he’ll put you out, Mother or no. She can only protect you for so long.”

Then her shuffle on the earthen floor grew near. The candle threw its light over the sandboxes. Theotokos, protect me. Would she see where I’d left my handprints in the sand? She looked, but she didn’t see. I could hear her sighs of frustration. Yes, doubt, Magda. You’re cross, you’re tired, you’re hearing things. It’s so cold down here. Your pallet by the stove misses you.

What was she waiting for? Did she think I would pop up like a rabbit in an amusement-park arcade?

She sneezed. Her candle’s light was weak and unsteady, the dust and cobwebs thick under the stairs. At last the light moved off, and the old steps creaked. She closed the door behind her.


In the morning, she never took her eyes off me. I did nothing that would give myself away. I stretched, practiced inflowing, ate breakfast as innocently as a lamb. I am the hunter. She would not catch me asleep. “You’ve got cobwebs in your hair,” she whispered, passing behind me.

“But not in my eyes,” I said.

Avdokia caught our exchange. Her eyes shot a warning: Don’t bite the tiger’s tail! But my teeth craved it. My dense matter. My fury building as I watched Ukashin meditating with Mother, their backs to us. It won’t live, she’d said. Not if I trusted that larder. We must have eaten half our stores the one night of the Great Feast of the Golden Egg. Without such an elaborate gesture, we might have made it. What were you thinking, Taras Ukashin? No matter what his failings, I’d always considered him a practical man, but Andrei was right. The well-being of Ionia had never been foremost in his mind. It was fascination he sought, adulation, keeping us under his sway. I didn’t know what he was planning or if indeed he had a plan at all. Maybe my mother told him the sky would open up and rain down pirozhky with meat or, better yet, roast beef. Maybe he really did believe in inflowing. Or had finally realized the enormity of what he’d done and was too guilty to face us. But I was past wanting his answers. Whatever he’d planned or hadn’t planned, his future wouldn’t include me or my child. Because this baby needed to live. It had to.


On each trip to the chamber pot now, I hid something on top of the wardrobe in the cold women’s dormitory. All the things I’d brought with me—my Vikzhel papers, my clothes, my gun. The letter opener from Ukashin’s campaign desk for good measure. I watched for the end of the storm. The wind still gusted, and snow flew, but I could feel the blizzard tiring, like a man continuing an argument long after his initial passion has faded. Now it was only habit. The gypsy caught me up there once. “What were you doing in here?”

I forced myself to peer through the windows and not look in the direction of the wardrobe. “Seeing if the storm’s over yet. I’m sick of breathing everyone’s farts. I need to get back to my traps. Soup’s getting thin, don’t you think?”

“The devis will provide,” she told me.

“Believe what you want,” I replied, pushing past her. “I prefer rabbit to dog meat.”

“Doubt’s a contagion,” she called after me. “He should put you out now.”


It was hard. I could no longer lose myself for hours inflowing. I felt every bit of my hunger, the need to leave while I could still walk. Now I saw them as they were. Natalya, becoming ghostly, paper thin. Ilya’s hands shaking. They couldn’t see they were fading away. Inflowing worked, but only because the trance lifted you out of your body. We were starving, though our spirits felt bright. It was a lie. They should kill off those chickens now and conserve the grain. But still the chickens clucked on in their overturned baskets. Pasha passed out again during dinner, Lilya during inflowing. Ukashin didn’t even deign to turn around and see what had happened.