The Revolution of Marina M. by Janet Fitch

Author:Janet Fitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

45 The Errand

NO WAY TO HAVE something in these hungry days without the world knowing about it and hating you for it. When Avdokia let me in, I smelled incense—Master Vsevolod must have been there. Even though Mother no longer had tea and mille-feuilles to offer him, I was pleased to discover that it was actually a friendship. I had assumed the worst about him—unfairly, as it turned out.

Avdokia crowed as I dropped my heavy prizes on the table, the meat, the oil, the flour, which I’d carried home most of the way on my back, fully prepared to shoot anyone who got near me. She sifted the silky flour between thumb and forefinger. “Wheat flour! Theotokos be praised.”

Mother said nothing. She’d turned inward again since our ejection from Grivtsova Alley. The fight with Genya, the attack on the Virgin, the terrifying walk back to the flat through the storm had snuffed out her time with Anton like a lamp at bedtime. Avdokia volunteered to brave the kitchen to cook the meat. She would be better able to withstand the catty remarks of women trying to guess where that delicacy had come from than I would. Envy ran thick as cold oil in the collectivized flat. Mother buried herself in her Blavatsky, and I thought about Kolya and what he was doing with the frightening, intriguing man whose company I’d just left.

Later, as we ate our heavenly dinner, real wheat pancakes and fresh meat, my nanny and I plotted what to do with the money and the rest of the food. We decided we would first buy a small load of firewood. Avdokia knew a woman who knew a man in the Haymarket who had a source. “We’ll trade for a bit of the flour.” But how to get the wood back here? If only I had a little sled…just a board with wooden runners and a rope to pull it with.

Mother cried out when I broke apart a drawer of the chifforobe using my hands and feet. “That was a wedding gift from my grandmother,” she sighed.

I didn’t bother looking for tools. Even in the old days, we never had any. We’d used other people as our tools—plumbers and shoemakers and tinkers and tailors, the dvornik. And now we were paying for it. No awl, no hammer, no ax—we were little better than cavemen. These days tools were rarer than radium. Though nails were easy. Every bit of wood came with some—all you had to do was burn it. Everyone’s bourgeoika stove was full of them. Maybe I should look for a hatchet while we still had the money.

I emptied the bullets from Anton’s gun and used the butt to hammer the runners to the bottom of the drawer’s face using nails from the stove. Soon I’d fashioned a crude sled, no worse than many I’d seen in town. I punched two holes in the walnut slab and threaded a drapery cord through for a strap.

“Barbarians.” Mother turned away, unable to watch the destruction of the beautiful armoire.

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