R. Morris: The Gentle Axe

She ought to go back for her galoshes.

She walked without any sense of where she was going. She heard the lampposts singing, shaken by a wind that went straight through her, despite her shawl. Then she heard the jangle of a passing sleigh and the muted clip of hooves. The horses were almost on her before she saw them. The driver’s green caftan passed in a blur, his words-whether for her or for his team-stifled by the damp air.

It was the man’s eyes that had amazed her, Porfiry Petrovich’s eyes. Or more specifically his eyelashes, blond to the point of transparency. Once she had noticed them, she could not look away. He blinked a lot, and there seemed to be some point to his blinking. Expectancy, or cunning, but a peculiarly feminine cunning, somehow also benign. She’d found it hard to understand what he was saying, so fascinated was she by his lashes and the effect they had on his face. And of course, she was tired.

She blinked herself, as though by imitating him she would come to understand him. Was it really true that he had let her go? And had he really meant to have them return the money to her?

Perhaps it was all a trick. If so, it was just as well she had refused the money. Ah, but to go home with nothing, after a whole night! She couldn’t go home, not yet. She ought to go back to Fräulein Keller’s to get what was owed her.

Zoya had come to see her. That was what she had been told. “Zoya is here for you,” Fräulein Keller had said. “She wants to talk to you about your little one.” But it made no sense. If Zoya had come to Fräulein Keller’s, who was looking after Vera? And when she had gone out into the cold night, there was no sign of Zoya. Just him.

Lilya shivered and let the spasm take hold. She gave in to her weakness for only an instant, holding one blink of her eyelids longer than the others, and in that instant she was back home, cuddling her sweet-souled, beautiful daughter, kissing her cheeks, stroking her hair, whispering promises, never, never again will I leave you, this will last forever, this laughing, crying, clinging moment.

The fog was beginning to clear. Perhaps she had held the blink for longer than she intended. But she was relieved to find herself still standing.

Lilya pulled her shawl tight about her. She had come out into Sadovaya Street. To her right, dim shapes formed into the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary across the Haymarket, above the canvas-covered stalls. She felt comforted by the appearance of the church. A bustling crowd filled the cobbled square between. But in the same way that she was able to see more, so too was she more visible. Faces turned toward her, hostile, mocking, contemptuous. And yet some of the men who pointed her out for ridicule were among those who came to the basement of the milliner’s shop, at a different hour, for a different purpose.

She turned her back on the Haymarket, to face north, toward Yekaterininsky Canal, or the Ditch, as it was known. She crossed Kokushkin Bridge over the frozen canal back into Stolyarny Lane. There was the building that housed the police station ahead of her, and she remembered again his impossible eyelashes. His eyes, she now remembered, were the color of ice, but whether that color was black or silver, she could not say. She was tempted to go back inside just to find out. And while she was at it, she would demand the money after all.

Then without her thinking about it, the rest of him suddenly came back to her. Fat-that was it. He was a fat little man, with a proud paunch out front. But every part of him, almost, seemed to have something swollen about it, from his big, close-cropped head to his plump hands. How strange and improbable those eyes had seemed in all this. How calm and unexpected and alert, but above all how kindly.

Perhaps she would go back inside. And tell him everything. But then again, what was there to tell?

She kept on walking as far as Srednyaya Meshchanskaya Street. So she was going home after all, and with nothing to show for the night.

She could not face going back for her galoshes.

The snow in the yard was stained with blood. A pig had been slaughtered there that morning. A peasant couple butchered the carcass in the open. They paused in their task to watch her across the yard. The two of them lifted their cleavers in warning, as if they suspected her of being intent on stealing their meat. Their expressions remained blank.

Lilya entered a narrow passageway at the rear of the courtyard. Its darkness shielded her from their scrutiny. She reached out one hand to grope her way along the wall, but with the first step she took, her foot kicked over an unseen obstacle, setting off an almost musical reverberation. A metal pail lay on its side, a dark stain hastening from it. Before she knew it, the peasant couple were at her shoulder, screaming abuse.

“That was our blood, you careless bitch!”

“You’ll pay for it, whore!”

As she fled their stabbing fingers and careless blades, she felt a gob of hawked mucus strike her cheek. She could still hear their shouts as the door to the back stairs closed behind her.

The stench of cabbage soup and urine hung in the stairway. Even so, this felt like a refuge. The gloom welcomed and concealed her. The temperature, though chill, was a degree warmer than outside.

Lilya hauled herself up the stairs with both hands together on the grimy rail, her feet slapping on the worn-down wooden steps.

She heard the door she had just come through clatter in its frame, then hurried footsteps hammering. Somehow she managed to pick up her own pace. She did not look back.

But she was still four flights away from her landing and the footsteps were gaining on her. Then, unexpectedly, they stopped and a door below slammed.

She turned a corner and pushed her way through hanging laundry. It seemed to cling to her face, dragging her back and down. Doors stood open on this landing. Sullen, consumptive faces looked out, waiting for something but not her.

She trudged on, light-headed, her legs uncertain and aching. In a niche on the next half-landing she fancied she saw a figure hanging back, a dark shape in dark shadows. Were those eyes that flashed in the gloom, or white sparks firing in her brain? Dog-tired she was, so tired that it was not inconceivable that her nightmares had come ahead to meet her.

It felt as though the steps were moving beneath her feet now, swaying and sinking, their height increasing, so that it required the courage of a mountaineer to scale each one. And now they had no substance. Her feet sank into them. They were like the marshes the city had once been built on.

She found herself unable to go on. She looked down at her feet. The space between two boards gaped. She closed her eyes and teetered back, the wild lurch in her belly bringing her around. Her head was a dead weight. Somehow she found the strength to lift it and look up. There, ahead of her, was her own landing. The sight of her door spurred her on to a final push.

She fell into the room, gasping at the sudden heat here, but too exhausted to make sense of it. She simply allowed the hot dry air to enclose her in a swooning embrace. And now little Vera was rushing at her, cannoning headfirst in her shrieking delight at her mother’s homecoming. Her daughter’s unquestioning love overwhelmed her. She felt undeserving of it. At the same time she had a sense of the child, so fierce in her innocence, as being eternally closed to her, strange, other, and somehow out of bounds. And there did seem to be something different about Vera today. But again Lilya was too worn-out to pursue the impression. Instead she gave in to tears. She was wracked with the pain of pure feeling, of feeling too much for too long. She allowed herself no memories, no longer entertained dreams. She kept her ideas down to the most essential. Whole areas of moral and mental life were closed to her. All that was left was the intense feeling of the moment.