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Chapter Text

Guilty, guilty banged the gavel, and its staccato ran a schism through Vanka Fyodorovna Karamazova’s head. Those three knocks, ringing hollow through her mind, every moment of every day, followed her down into the darkness of her dreams all the week after her brother Mitya’s conviction for a murder he did not commit.

The threat of winter loomed low and menaced the little town of Skotoprigonyvesk, the innocents and the guilty alike, on the eve of the trial. A light, feathering snow crusted the greenish bits of the grass, froze the shriveled brown leaves until they shattered like glass. Peasants in poor greatcoats split and hoarded wood in barren yards, ladies donned their calfskin winter gloves and strays ran for shelter. 

Injustice was burning a fever through Vanka’s breast. She felt it in her hands when she sat in the courtroom, righteous, full-throated rageful, almost holy. Mitya was a world away from her, just a few paces, and every eye on him. She stared from the gallery at the slump of his broad shoulders, the black curls at the back of his head, the way he folded his roughened hands upon the table. 

The prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovitch, spoke at length of the servant girl “ who had cut short her life in a fit of insanity. ” A young girl of poor education, to hear him tell it, nearly mute, scarcely one-hundred-fifty centimeters tall, horrifically plagued with epilepsy.

He had a thin, reedy voice. Vanka stared at the people, shifting in their seats, filthy snowmelt dripping from filthy boots, upon the courtroom floor, all wood-paneled like a box of kindling fit to go up in flames and shone to shining the color of a cello. 

Ippolit Kirrilovitch dredged up the sorry ghost of her, reading from her deposition. The lilt of her soft voice echoed in the undertow of his, so very near to her that Vanka heard it whispering in her ear.

“‘He would have killed me, I could see that he would have killed me.’” Those are her own words. I wrote them down and I remember them. She spoke at the inquiry, trembling even before us, though her tormentor was by that time arrested and could do her no harm. ‘When he began shouting at me, I would fall to my knees.’” 

Mitya, his broad shoulders shifting beneath his suit, had bowed his head as if in shame.

“The first person who cried out that Smerdyakova had committed the murder was the prisoner himself, at the moment of his arrest. Yet he has not brought forward a single fact to confirm the charge, nor the faintest suggestion of a fact. Is this credible? Is it conceivable?”

Not one member of the jury could conceive of the idea that a girl might be capable of such a crime, and especially such a girl as Ippolit Kirillovitch described.

None of them had known Pasha Smerdyakova like Vanka had.

The week after the trial, the snow flew with abandon.  

It was on the Sunday morning, that Vanka Fyodorovna Karamazova awoke late in the anemic winter sunlight, slapping weakly at a strange tickle on her face. It fussed along her lip, across her tongue— she leaned over the bed and spat twice on the floor.

It was a cockroach, landed on the ground, twitching weakly still in a pool of saliva.

Vanka recoiled in revulsion and spat again, then a second time, retching. She stifled a gag, then another. She groped around the floor haplessly for some object, found a slipper on the floor, and crushed the thing, scowling. 

When she glanced up, the young maid girl Polenka peered wide-eyed around the half-open door.

“Are you alright, Miss?”

“I’m fine.” Vanka said, and coughed again, pulling herself up to sit on the edge of the bed.

The girl turned to leave, skittish as a mouse.

“Polenka? I’ll not take any tea this morning.” 

“No tea,  Miss?” 

She shook her head.

“Can we expect you back for lunch, Miss?” 

Vanka rubbed both hands over her face.

“No, I don’t think I will be back for lunch to-day.” 

Polenka nodded, and disappeared. 

Vanka’s room was not much larger than a closet, and cluttered on every little surface— with books, papers, half-written or half-read letters. She had always been fastidious, but now she forbade even Polenka to enter or tidy her room, and was content to let it run to mess.

Why not , she sometimes thought, and threw a discarded letter on the floor. Hang it all , send it to hell! Send all of it to hell, and why not? 

She finished dressing, the cold air in her little room bracing upon her feverish skin, and passed down and out onto the street in a rush. The town of Skotoprigonyevsk was heavy with woodsmoke to-day, the sky bright gray.

She was in a truly foul mood.

Her own fallibility had become the source of intense irritation. Illness was just another inconvenience, and one she could not afford— there was too much to be done. 

Alyosha was optimistic that one of them would be allowed to see Mitya to-day. Or at least, he’d said he was.  

After the verdict was read, Mitya was to remain in custody while matters were arranged for his transport, along with a dozen fellow convicts, to Siberia. This was liable to take a long time, and for that, Vanka was grateful. Alyosha, Katerina Ivanovna, and herself had arranged a meeting of their illicit little counsel at Katerina Ivanovna’s in secret to-day, to discuss arrangements for a transport of their own design. 

She loosened her scarf as she walked down the street, the cold air easing the nausea that still twisted her gut.

The looks on the street as she walked past only increased her irritation. She met their eyes with measured indifference and bore the whispers, the coy, crooked little smiles of pity that the ladies on the street leveled at her, without turning her head. These people knew nothing, nothing at all, and so what might she care of their idiot opinions? It was only the occasional snickering that made the back of her neck boil with rage.

It was not far from Vanka’s lodgings to Katerina Ivanovna’s, and she arrived and rang the bell at the stoop, smoothing down the front of her coat. She made a careful show of wiping her boots, when the maids fetched her up, smoothed back her hair with one hand as she walked up the grimy stairs, ducking her head beneath the low doorway.

Katerina Ivanovna’s rooms were finely furnished in shining mahogany furniture, upholstered the color of seafoam. A crystal bowl of white geraniums upon the table filled the room with an overpowering perfume. 

The servant girls bade her to sit on the couch, persistently badgered her with offers of tea, which she took pains to politely refuse, their insistence only making her more irritable by the second.

It was warm in Katerina Ivanovna’s finely furnished rooms, and she felt that peculiar swimming feeling of fever, beginning in her head again. 

She’d been writing notes to herself, as of late. It seemed to her more important than ever, that she be sharp of mind. But more and more she found some scribbled diatribe, maddeningly vague, shoved away jammed up in the drawer of her desk that she could no longer parse any sense from, though she may well have written it only days before. The doctor had advised her rest, said she was suffering some form of nervous strain, his wrinkled chin wobbling with contempt. 

Damn rest. She was no shrinking violet, and the queer way he had assessed her, taking in her attire, her waistcoat, her riding pants and rough-hewn boots, had brought her to fantasize about striking him between the eyes. 

Rest was not what she needed. Idleness only drove her further to frenzy— what she needed was peace, peace and an end to all this ghastly business. 

Yes, she was most terribly irritable. 

At last Katerina came into the room, resplendent and pale in a fine pink satin dress, and found Vanka ensnared in this rumination, an utterly black expression writ across her face. At the very sight of her, Vanka softened. She stood from the little settee, gallant as a knight, took Katerina Ivanovna’s slender hand in hers and kissed it.

“Vanka, my dear, honorable Vanka— I do hope I didn’t leave you waiting too long.” Katerina smiled wanly at her.

“Not at all, Katya, please, don’t trouble yourself.“ Vanka squeezed her fingers, just slightly, but Katerina Ivanovna only slipped her fair hand away.

Katya’s luminous blue eyes looked dull, and when she smiled there were prim little lines around her mouth, though she was even more beautiful for it. This new suffering suited her, whether she was too proud to admit it or not. Vanka had begun to suspect, in those secret moments when all her adoration turned to loathing, that Katerina Ivanovna enjoyed every second of her suffering.

She looked exhausted, but strangely serene to-day, though Vanka knew very well this was subject to change at any instant. She sat down opposite Katerina, and for too long a moment, they were silent. 

“I greatly appreciate you having us to-day, Katya.” Vanka said.

Katerina stared at her a moment, smiling that quiet, tight-lipped smile, and then burst into tears.

“Oh, dear Vanka, how I hope you will forgive me for losing my temper with you. Oh, I am unhappy! It's my character, Vanka, only my awful, unhappy character, and you must never pay it any mind. You are honorable, most honorable. And I am humbled by your great service to your brother, and the great Christian gesture of it. I am so very happy, indeed, Vanka, that you came to me with this.”

“Please, Katya, don’t suffer on my account. I assure you all that business is already forgotten. None of us have been the best of ourselves, I most assure you, but you are a good woman. I came to you with this, though I know it is not so easy for you, precisely because of that, I mean the strength of your character.” 

Katerina Ivanovna looked up and met Vanka’s eyes with tears shining in her own, parting her lips to speak, and took a small breath. She paused then, for just half a second, holding Vanka’s stare in her own. 

It was terribly, terribly hot in Katerina Ivanovna’s rooms, with the little stove roaring in the corner like the furnace of hell. The stuffy air spun with the stench of geraniums and threatened to choke her.

Alyosha arrived at last, just then, at that very moment, before Katerina Ivanovna could speak. A dusting of tiny crystalline flakes of snow crowned his golden head, his boyish face reddened from the wind. 

“No word yet, I’m afraid. But I shall go again to-morrow, then the day after that, I promise you. As many times as it takes.” 

He turned to Katya and pressed her hand.

“Thank you for having us, Katerina Ivanovna. You look well.” Alyosha said, and sat down on the couch next to Vanka. 

The maids brought the tea again, that whole affair, and thrust a cup and saucer upon her before she could speak. Vanka tried to hide her disgust, holding the little porcelain cup on her knee. It smelled terribly bitter to her, in the closeness of the room, in that stifling heat. The very scent of it turned her stomach horribly, as if someone had a fistful of her guts wrenched in a strangling grasp. 

Alyosha began saying something then, about the matter of the 10,000 roubles, the matter of the contents of that certain envelope he had gone to great pains to review, all in a hushed tone of great importance, fixing the two ladies in his gaze with great gravity.

But Vanka could not pay attention. The pain in her guts was savage, brought a waxy sweat to her forehead. Her fingers sweat upon the handle of the little teacup, the spit in her mouth gone thick as syrup with nausea. 

There was a voice, speaking in very hushed tones, from the other room. It was terribly, infernally hot in Katerina Ivanovna’s little rooms, she thought to herself again, and could not stop glancing past the little door, closed to the next room. Sweat pooled at the small of her back. 

She fixed her eyes on Katerina Ivanovna, then on Alyosha, trying to keep the thread of who was speaking, still straining to hear that second conversation, taking place just beneath.

There were two voices. Two women, coming from behind that half-closed door. She was straining, straining, to hear what they might be discussing, but though every sound grated on her nerves, there was no making out the words. She was staring at Katerina Ivanovna’s thin, wasted face, and the almost hateful twist of her pretty mouth. The fair porcelain teacup in her fair porcelain hands.

There was a loud scuffle from the next room over. The sound of bodies coming to blows, a strangled scream, something heavy being thrown. 

Vanka looked around the room wildly, her eyes wide with fear, but Katerina Ivanovna was still speaking. No one seemed to notice what she heard, nor her terrible alarm. 

She looked down at her hands then and saw nothing, nothing, just darkness— staring down from the top of a long staircase done up in shabby red carpet. She blinked the vision away, staring at a little spot upon the floor, when the pain in her gut redoubled again, tried to wrench her over with brute force.

One of the girls in the next room was sobbing now. It was a terrible sound. Did no one else hear that terrible, terrible sound? Vanka winced. Her whole body felt weak with pain. The sobbing did not cease, sawing at Vanka’s raw nerves.

Why did someone not jump up to go and help her? 

Why did someone not go and shut her stupid wailing up?

Vanka closed her eyes and tried to breathe. It was so very dark on the stairs, without even a candle, and her nerves were wound so very, frightfully taut, and had been for so long— standing here on the landing, straining, straining to listen, and for what she did not know, when she couldn’t see a meter in front of her face, could see nothing but the darkness of the night in that stuffy old house, pressing in at her, beckoning to her from all sides. 

Vertigo overtook her. She lost her balance all at once with a sudden panic, tipping headfirst down the stairs. 

Vanka smacked her head hard against the wooden floor and sat up blinking. 

The pain had ebbed out, all at once, and left her weak. Hot, acrid tea wet her shirtfront like blood from a gutshot, the little cup and saucer smashed to splinters upon the ground. 

Katerina Ivanovna gasped with her hands over her mouth, her eyes going wide. Alyosha knelt next to her, a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at their shocked faces, scalded with shame.

“Oh! Oh! Vanka, dear— someone get the doctor! Alyosha, run for the doctor at once!” Katerina cried, jumping up from her seat.

“No, no. I apologize— really, there’s no need—” Vanka muttered.

“Apologize! I never heard such a thing. You are ill, Vanka, I see that now! You look terribly ill! The doctor, the doctor, I insist!” Katerina said.

Vanka pulled herself back up onto the settee, waving off Alyosha’s hand upon her shoulder.

“I most assure you, I am fine, Katerina Ivanovna. Trouble with my sleep, perhaps a little stress, that’s all. Only, I think I had best go home.” Vanka said slowly. 

Alyosha looked at Katerina Ivanovna. 

“I will walk you.” Alyosha said.

“No, please, don’t trouble yourself.” 

“Vanka, don’t be so foolish! We cannot possibly just leave you in this state! Alyosha, you shall bring her home, and we shall send for the doctor at once.”

“It’s not far, and I will come back directly.” 

Vanka nearly forgot her gloves, the maid fetching her coat for her. She took it from the girl, dumb and blinking, and bowed her head to Katerina Ivanovna, looking rather pale. She waved away Alyosha’s arm as he offered it to her, trying to help her down the blackened stairs.

The air on the street cooled Vanka’s face, flush with fever and shame, and she walked quickly, without speaking.

“I really must agree with Katerina Ivanovna, that we should fetch the doctor for you.” Alyosha put in at last.

“No, no doctor. A little rest, perhaps, rest is all I need. Damn it! What a melodrama I made of it, in there.”

Alyosha watched her for a long time.

“There’s no shame in being ill, Vanka.”

Vanka felt a twitch of grim annoyance. A stray dog galloped past them, tongue lolling out of its mouth.

“Who says I am ashamed? It is only such a great inconvenience, is all, on to-day of all days.” 

“I will come and tell you everything we speak about, when you are better.”

Vanka said nothing. They walked in silence, all the bare black trees clawing at the slate gray sky.

“This has all been very hard on our family.” Alyosha said. He looked at Vanka, as if trying to read her face.

“I shall feel much better, when one of us is allowed to see Mitya again.”

They approached Vanka’s lodgings, and Alyosha stopped, turning to face her.

“You are certain you won’t let me fetch the doctor for you?”

“Why must you all trouble yourselves so? As if I am worth such a fuss! If I am no better by tomorrow, then you go and fetch him, if that will ease your mind.”

“Alright, then. I will come back directly, first thing to-morrow.” 

He said, and they stood in silence half a moment. She was at the point of turning to go, but something in his face made her stop dead.

“I hope you know that you may always confide in me, Vanka.” He said suddenly.

Vanka stared at him for a second, then looked away. Her eyes fell upon a dead cat, lying frozen and flattened in the gutter by the front stair, guts a red smear frozen to the ground. 

“Yes. Yes, of course I know that. You worry far too much, Alyosha, and we’ve plenty to worry about now. Please, don’t put me on that tally— I’ll be just fine.” She smiled at him.

Alyosha smiled back. He seemed eased, if only a little, and it made her chest ache.

“I shall come early, tomorrow, then.”

“I will count on it.” Vanka said, and watched him turn to go.

Vanka came in the front door, nauseated again by the smell and the heat from the kitchen. Polenka peeked around the door at her with a meek smile.

“Back so soon, Miss?” 

“Just a little under the weather is all, Polenka. Please don’t trouble yourself with my supper.” She said, smiling wearily.

She climbed the stairs slowly, pulled firmly shut the door to her room. She wrenched open the rickety little window, cold air pouring in like silky water. She stripped off her greatcoat, the rest of her sweat-stained clothes. A fat, dark glut of blood darkened and soaked the seam of her trousers, the smell of blood mingling with the stench of tea.  

She slept a long time and woke all at once. Her eyes flicked open.

Somewhere far off outside, a dog was barking wildly in the black night. 

She blinked, staring into the gaping yawn of the little closet at one end of her room— certain she had shut it, as she always did. 

She became aware of a small noise, then. The slow, measured inhale and exhale of breath, like wind sighing through brittle leaves, just beneath hers. A nauseating smell like overripe roses filled the room. Her head was burning. She turned her face in the darkness and stopped dead, staring.

For a long moment she was still, trying to make sense of the impossible thing she was seeing.

She sat up on one elbow.

“Smerdyakova?”

Something in the darkness of the room seemed to pulse.

Smerdyakova sat at the foot of her bed with her hands folded politely on her lap, watching her sleep. There was no expression at all on her little marionette face. In the darkness, her features all in shadow, she looked inanimate, a player's mask. Slowly, she smiled her strange bashful smile, and tipped her head to one side.

“Hello, Miss. I’m most terribly sorry to wake you. I would have come earlier, only I did not get in until so terribly late, Miss.”

Her voice was exactly as Vanka remembered it– polite, clear as the ringing of a little bell. But hollow.

Vanka stared at her, blinking.

This is a dream, she thought. Smerdyakova is gone. Smerdyakova is lying rotten and wretched with her neck snapped in a pauper’s grave.

Vanka cleared her throat.

“What… what have you come for, Smerdyakova?” 

Her heart was pounding quite hard now. She was suddenly terribly aware of her nakedness, beneath the threadbare blanket.

Smerdyakova just went on staring at her. Her strange left eye twinkled, beetle-black in the dark. Her smile tightened up. There seemed to be a flush, high on the apples of her doll-like cheeks. 

All at once, cat-like, Smerdyakova lunged at her. Vanka screamed, Smerdyakova was on top of her now, the smell of her perfume dizzyingly sweet, stinking of rot. 

Vanka thrashed hard to throw her off, and Smerdyakova giggled— a high, manic, throaty sound. Roughly, Smerdyakova forced Vanka’s hands down at her sides. 

Vanka shivered with revulsion. Smerdyakova’s skin was cold and heavy and wrong against her.

Her smile had cracked into a grin now, and she was still giggling. Vanka thrashed beneath her, but Smerdyakova was strong. Her thighs squeezed tight around Vanka’s waist, then tighter still, until she feared her ribs would crack, driving the breath from her lungs. Her shined leather boots dug into Vanka’s hip bones, her cold little hands like vices around her wrists. Vanka stopped thrashing a moment, her breath like a hammer in her chest, shuddering hard in and out.

“What the hell are you doing?” 

“I came to ask you for a favor, clever girl.” Smerdyakova said, smiling down at Vanka. 

A sick, sick fear boiled in Vanka’s stomach. She felt her body begin to tremble.

“I’ll do whatever you want, you stinking bitch, goddamn it— now get off me.” 

“It would please me very much, Miss, for you to call me Pasha from now on.” Smerdyakova said.

“Alright. Alright, Pasha, then, if you like.” Vanka spat, trying with every breath to keep her voice steady.

Pasha’s face softened. She really did look pleased.

“Try and relax now, Miss. It’s not going to hurt. It only looks frightening.”

Vanka felt a nauseous sweat break out all down her body.

“What— what are you—?”

Pasha leaned in over her. Vanka twisted hard beneath her, her eyes going wide with insane terror. 

“No—- ” 

Pasha’s mouth was just inches above hers when she felt a gush streaming past her lips, down her throat, suffocating. Like a stream of cold vomit. Like someone breathing into her lungs and taking all her breath away.

Her left leg exploded into pins and needles. The left side of her face fell slack, slack, heavier and heavier— as though it were being dragged down into the earth, cleaving her head in two. Her left cheek hit the top of her shoulder. Her left arm, held fast in Pasha’s bony little hand, twisted in towards her chest and began to shake, then to tremor, then to spasm.

Something was shaking out of her. The room began to spin backwards, and then she was falling, falling, falling.

“Be calm , Miss, just stay calm. You don’t want to fight it, Miss.” Pasha said. 

Her words were all nonsense- nothing, anymore, moored to anything. 

Vanka heard a horrible, animal groan, and realized it was coming from deep in the pit of her throat. Pasha was holding her, holding her still and tight, more gently now, the only thing keeping her from shaking apart.

Her body shook, harder and harder. Lightning galloped through her bones. And then the surge swept up, and everything was collapsing, and the last thing that Vanka saw was Pasha looking down at her, her features all shattered and put back together again wrong, before she was sucked deep, deep into a void of nothing but thick, pure velvet black.

Chapter Text

“Miss? Miss?”

Vanka woke with a deep, sucking breath. She sat up and started so hard her head hit the wall. She stared at Polenka with very wide eyes, uncomprehending for a long moment. The sunlight beat a fierce pounding into her skull.

Polenka recoiled from her, blushing fiercely.

“So terribly sorry to bother you, Miss, but… Alexei Fyodorovitch— he is really insisting, this time, Miss, that he must see you now.”

Vanka swallowed thickly, blinking hard. Her head felt thick and heavy.

“Let me dress.” She grunted, pulling herself to the edge of the bed. Her words came out slurred and she hung her head, the room seeming to spin, a prism of discordant, unbearable brightness.

“May I send him up, Miss?”

“Just wait a moment, won’t you? I shall come down and fetch him myself.” Vanka snapped. 

Polenka scurried from the room, pulling the door closed behind her. Vanka hauled her body up from the bed. A fever chill rooted her feet to the ground, and for a long time she did not move, scarcely even seemed to breathe. 

Her little room was immaculately tidy. Someone had shelved and dusted all her books, her notebooks and letters sat in a neat little pile upon the cramped writing desk.

There were pretty little crystal bottles of scent lined up along her dressing table, a glass jar of hair pomade. The closet door sat cracked and crooked. Slowly, pulse thundering through her head, she pulled open the closet door. A sick stench of perfume assaulted her nose.

All of her suits were pressed and brushed, hung neatly one after the other, and shoved to the back of the rung. The closet brimmed with dresses, such strange finery she had never seen before— deep green velvet, shimmery wine-purple satin, black cotton fringed with lace the dull color of moth’s wings.

Very slowly she reached out to touch them, and recoiled at the unflinching corporality of the fabric, soft and cold beneath her shaking fingers. 

There was a small pile of hat boxes lined up neatly on the floor, and Vanka dropped to her knees, pulling off the lids, one by one— ridiculous little hats, like a society lady’s— with birdcage veils and fine little feathers, sculpted out in satin and velvet and suede, a pair of exquisite leather gloves. She sat back on her heels, her head spinning. She picked up a shoe, buttery black leather and a wicked little heel, and stared it with revulsion, throwing it at the back of the closet. Her hands were trembling. She wiped her sweaty palms over her thighs and tried to breathe. There was a terrible pain, a bolt of it through her neck, down one arm. Knelt down, tucked beside the hat boxes, she fished out a bottle of vodka and a package of sweets wrapped in sparkling pink waxpaper. She held the bottle of up to the light, watched the liquid slosh, better than half empty.

She knelt there a long time in the ringing silence, utterly stupefied.

I have lost my mind. I have finally, utterly lost my mind, she thought.

She remembered Alyosha, waiting downstairs, with a jolt of utter panic, and rushed to dress, staggering on her feet and catching herself upon the doorjamb when she stood.

She fished a suit out of the back of her closet. When she pulled off her dressing gown, discarding it on the floor, she stared down at her body like a foreign object. These were not her coarse underthings— bloomers made of satin with a little ruffle atop the thigh, clean white silk stockings, attached to a lace garter. She shivered hard with repulsion, cringing as she hurried to rip the stockings off in a frenzy, stripping until she was completely nude in the stark winter sunlight. When she pulled open the bureau drawer to dress, she found two more boxes of candy, alongside a little pile of neatly folded stockings, neatly folded, and rifled wildly in search of something she recognized. 

Her whole body felt burnt out and hollowed, shaken through and ravaged by fire and laid bare. The inside of her mind, dense and choked with soot, with utter blackness. She struggled a long while to button her shirt with trembling, jumping fingers. She considered, desperately, slipping out the back door and getting past Alyosha unnoticed. Yes, she decided, shrugging on her blazer, if she could only get past Polenka, that’s just what she would do.

When she opened the door she very nearly toppled the two of them down the stairs in her frenzy.

“Damn you! You frightened me.” She said loudly, laughing.

Alyosha stared at her in utter amazement, his boyish face blank with shock.

“I was only just going out, but I can spare a moment.” Vanka sniffed.

She was trying to sound dignified, but her voice was wooden and strange, she only sounded rude.

“I was hoping I might get more than a moment, Vanka. Is your appointment very— important?”

“Yes. Yes, it is, I’m afraid.” 

“Alright.” Alyosha eyed her nervously. “Vanka, I’m afraid I really must speak with you as soon as possible. If— if I’ve insulted you, in some way—”

“Insulted me? No, what on earth do you mean? Of course not! Why, have I given you that impression? No, that couldn’t be further from the truth, I assure you.”

Alyosha wasn’t looking at her.

She followed his gaze to the bottle of vodka on the floor. 

“Are you… well, Vanka?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m feeling quite better, to-day.”

Alyosha looked her in the eye. She tried to hold his gaze, but she couldn’t, something in his eyes scalded her, made her cringe.

Slowly, he nodded.

“Alright, then. I’m glad for your health.” He said at last, very slowly.

“I must tell you, Vanka, Katerina Ivanovna did not take so kindly to you slipping out on the doctor, the way that you did. We have all been terribly worried about you.”

“Well. My apologies, on that account. I wasn’t— I haven’t been feeling quite well. But I’m all better now. I will go see Katerina Ivanovna and make it all right with her to-day. I’m sorry, Alyosha, but I really must be going now.” She said, and couldn’t catch her breath.

“You will come see me very, very soon, won’t you, Vanka?”

“Yes, yes, of course I will.” She said, agreeable to everything in her desperation for him to go away. 

Slowly, Alyosha nodded. The brightness cut his eyes like blue crystals, astonished with luminescence. His brow was knit gravely, his mouth was sad. 

“Don’t run from me, Vanka. Please. Not now. We need each other more than ever now.”

She softened to him then, with something like a spasm in her chest. She reached out and pressed his hand, her skin cold against his. He looked down at her hand upon his, and saw that she was trembling.

“I won’t, Alyosha. I promise.” 

He smiled sadly at her, and kissed her on the cheek.

“I like what you’ve done with your hair.” He said, and smiled.

She stared blankly at him.

“Tha-ank you.” She faltered. 

She stepped back from him, and he took a half step back on the landing, looking at her strangely. Vanka shut the door in his face, and only then remembered she’d said she was meant to go out. 

She crouched down to the ground without knowing why, the doorjamb against her cheek, and listened a long while to the sound of his leaving.

She brought her sweaty fingers up to her head, pulling her fingers through her hair— and stopped short, feeling a starched lock of curls slip through her fingers, severed just above her jaw. Pomade left a sticky wax on her fingers.

She swallowed hard against a hollow moan that threatened to break free from her throat. 

She listened carefully, for a long time, at the door, to make well sure Alyosha was gone. She crammed her hat over her hair, feeling terribly ashamed at the thought that someone might see it, and rushed from the room, down the stairs and out the door, ignoring Polenka. She realized halfway down the street that she’d forgotten her greatcoat, but she did not turn back for it. 

Her boots embarrassed her terribly, scrubbed and freshly blacked and polished to shining. She stopped down an alley and rubbed them in some muddy snow, hoping to dull them.

She walked a long way, and watched the fine houses billowing with woodsmoke from their kitchens and hearths turn to an array of dirty little rowhouses, and finally, to shacks. She walked to the poorest edge of town, where stray animals roamed and yowled and dirty little children passed glances at her, the peasants turning to stare at her unabashedly.

She didn’t feel the cold, hardly felt their stares, though she felt inexorably laid bare before the world and everyone. All the world, the people, the cold and the light, seemed to run straight through her, like water.

Finally, she approached the rusty wrought iron gate at the edge of the cemetery. The trees, overgrown, dropped crystalline droplets of water down upon her head as she walked through the gate.

This is so stupid, she thought to herself, so frightfully, dreadfully stupid. You are stupid. No, not stupid—- mad. You are mad. You’ve gone utterly, inexorably, raving mad.

She stood a moment there on the path, the small blank headstones stretching out to the horizon before her, and felt a strange chill run through her. Her mind shouted at her, aghast in protest, But this is nonsense, utter nonsense. 

She realized, standing there, that she hadn’t any idea where to look.

She scanned the lot for a fresh-looking grave, and saw one atop the hill, but when she walked to it, the name was unknown to her. The chill was starting to set in on her now, and she shivered in a gust of cold wind.

She turned around atop the hill. The graveyard spun out all around her, seemed to go all the way to the horizon, under the endless expanse of high blue sky, rolling with billowing, bright clouds.

It was two hours or more she spent, wandering through pure delirium in that endless maze of lichen, sleeping names on crooked stones, until her nose ran and her hands were stiff and red.

Her mind raced with restless electricity, the cold numbed her and poured through her and emptied her of thought, until finally her eyes fell upon a small, fresh plot, the dirt showing black through the scrub of dirty snow.

PASHA FYODOROVNA SMERDYAKOVA, read the epitaph, and nothing more.

Vanka stood riveted to the spot. Her vision had gone strange, everything looked to her as if she were standing very far away, in the furthest corner at the back of her mind, looking out of her eyes from one end of a very long, dark corridor.  

Slowly, and after a long consideration, she took a breath and paced grimly forward, kneeling down. The stone was cold and rough beneath her fingers, unmistakably material.

She’d been ill. She’d had a nightmare and she was a fool, and nothing more. And a fool twice over, for coming here so ill. 

She stood and swiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. So she would make good on seeing Katerina Ivanovna’s doctor, after all, and the sooner the better.

A deep shiver wracked through Vanka, and she turned and walked quickly from the cemetery, suddenly very anxious at the thought of being seen. Yes, there was a heavy blackness in her head, she felt it pressing on her back, whispering down her heels, putting those horrible black thoughts in her head again.

The walk back was just as long and she felt none of it, walking in the cold, feeling very far out of her body.

She had only just reached the center of town, it’s unfathomable bustle of endless people, shouting and cramming against one another in their endless, beating cacophony, when the sound of her name startled her.

“Vanka! Vanka, dear, is that you?”

A large black carriage pulled to a stop alongside her. Agrafena Alexandrovna smiled down at her, a little velvet purple hat set atop her tress of black curls.

“Come up, come up, I insist!” Grushenka cried.

Vanka stared at her a moment, then acquiesced, clamboring up into the cab.

Grushenka sat alongside her awful cousin, Rakitin, the billowing skirt of her fine satin gown filling the cabin of the carriage. 

“Come here, you sly girl, and let me kiss your hand!” Grushenka cried, and she did. Her rosebud lips were soft and warm. Vanka blinked at her.

“Why, your skin is so terribly cold! And what are you doing, walking through town with no coat in such weather?”

Vanka blinked at her.

“I wasn’t going far.” She said dumbly.

Grushenka stared curiously at her, narrowed her crystal blue eyes.

“I was quite cross with you, you know, Vanka, dear, when you stood me up last night! But then when I saw you just now, I felt only happiness at the sight of my dear, dear new friend, and was absolutely certain you must have had only the noblest of reasons for such discourtesy.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Agrafena Alexandrovna, for that business last night. I hope you can forgive me.” Vanka said automatically, reeling back through her mind, desperately reaching for some sort of recall— and found nothing, only the total void of total sleep. 

“Oh, it is forgotten, my dear, forgotten already! How curious that I just can’t seem to stay upset with you!”

Tears sprang to Grushenka’s eyes. 

“Only, please, please don’t go back to all of that, that Agrafena Alexandrovna — we are sisters now! We have been sisters a while now, quite a while now, only I never felt I could call you a sister until now. You must not get shy in the light of day, now, Vanka— so please, please call me Grusha. It is such a very precious and important thing, I think, for a young woman, to have a girl friend, someone so close to her heart that she might call her a sister. Who can understand a woman, if not another woman? Men don’t know our hearts, our minds, not like we do in sisterhood. They may try, Vanka, God knows they try! But they are a completely different species, I fear, the company of even the best, the most honorable man can be no substitute for that of a sister! I have never had that, Vanka, never in all my life, and certainly not since I came to Skotoprigonyevsk so many years ago, in that wretched state. You have given such a great gift to me, Vanka, you can’t know how you have eased the sufferings of my heart in your seeing me. I confess to you, Vanka, though I am ashamed of it now, that I always have thought you such a man! With your boots, and your riding pants, and the way you speak! But now I understand you, I understand it all now— forgive me for laughing, but… When I sent you that note, I could not have imagined! I meant to give you a thorough scolding, I did, for skipping out on the doctor like you did, and neglecting to bring me that news from Alyosha, only when I saw you, in that splendid gown, I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and you struck me quite dumb! No, I dare say I think I quite understand you now, Vanka, and I am delighted, just delighted that it is so. Whatever I may have taken for, please, if you’ll excuse the coarseness of the word—- abrasiveness in you, was only shyness! A most peculiar shyness! Tell me, won’t you, is that it?”

Vanka stared at her.

“Yes, yes, I suppose it is so. I— never thought to call it that before, perhaps it is shyness…” She muttered, staring at Grushenka, and spotted Rakitin staring queerly at her. There was a sordid, almost crude smile, playing at his lips, like he was withholding a laugh. He turned and looked out the window, when she caught his gaze. She narrowed her eyes at him.

“You must never be shy to dress as a lady, Vanka! And to come to me as a lady, as a woman, with anything, anything in that heart or that strange, surprising head of yours! We are sisters now! Oh, how you shocked me, to come to me as such a lady! Wearing your fine clothes out only at night! I never imagined you owned such fine clothes! It must be down to habit, habit, is that it, from studying alongside all those boys? Very ergonomical of you, I have a great deal of respect for that. I have a great deal of respect for you, Vanka. You are truly an original woman! And I dare say I am one, too. It is all the harder for us, to find our sisters in the world! And now I’ve found you, so late, and so near to me all this time. How you’ve surprised me, my dear new friend! Never, ever did I suspect you to be such a lady, though still you walk at night and drink vodka like a man! No, not a man, like a scoundrel, you strange wonderful creature!” 

Vanka’s head was reeling, dazed by her onslaught of words, the utter nonsense of it all. The jostling of the carriage, moving through the streets, and all the world rushing by, made her feel ill.

“I am… glad for our sisterhood, too, Grusha. Very glad of it.” She said woodenly, startled once again by her turn to speak.

“Won’t you come over again and play your guitar for us? I will send for champagne, for vodka, even, if you like! I would be so glad of it. It has all been so terribly sad, so terribly, terribly heavy on my soul, these past months! You can’t know how your company has eased my heart. And all the things I never knew of you, Vanka!”

Vanka stared at her in silence for too long. She saw an emergence of concern upon Grushenka's fair features, her dark brows furrowing, and still was struck so dumb she could not speak. At last, she tried to take a deep breath and felt a stabbing hook of pain, just beneath her ribs. She tried to hide her wince.

“I’m afraid I am otherwise engaged tonight, Grusha, perhaps some other time. I have only a little time, really, if you could leave me here… we are not so far from my lodgings now.”

Grushenka hailed the carriage to a stop with one little, velvet-gloved hand. People streamed by, bundled tight in the chill, the sun sunk low in the late afternoon sky.

“Of course, Vanka, dear. You come by whenever you like, but do make it soon, won’t you?”

She only nodded stiffly, clamoring down from the carriage and out onto the street. She stood there and watched it go, staring after it a long time, and only once it was gone, swallowed up by all the milling crowds of people, did she look around and realize she had only the faintest idea where she was. 

It had gotten most dreadfully cold, in the lateness of the afternoon. The sun sank and melted towards the horizon in a slow frigid burn, the low smoggy sky glowing orange as Vanka walked aimlessly across the bridge and towards her lodgings. People bustled everywhere, bundled tight in swaths of gray and brown and black, in and out of shops, the ladies in the market square closing out their wares for the day as she passed.

Vanka walked slowly through the market in a daze, unseeing and unhearing, when a little hand fell upon her arm and she startled, wheeling around.

A short young woman stared up at her. Her clear, brilliant gray eyes shone with reverence, an expression of immeausurable sadness writ upon her freckled face.

“Vanka Fyodorovna, Miss, please forgive me for bothering you. I am certain you are very busy, doing many important things.” 

Vanka recoiled from her, uncomprehending. The girl took Vanka’s hand in her own, bowed deeply at the waist, and fiercely kissed it. When she straightened up she stared at Vanka with tears shining in her eyes. She held Vanka’s hand tight in her own, and spoke in a shaking voice.

“I have read the letter you delivered to us, Miss, and I cannot express to you how very, very much it has meant to me. Your gift and your great act of kindness has meant everything, everything to my mother and I, but nothing so much as that letter. We are humbled by such a great kindness, I cannot thank you enough. Your gift and that letter have brought us— a very great deal of peace.” 

Vanka stood struck dumb, people streaming past them on the frozen street.

It took a long moment for her to remember Marya Kondratyevna. 

Hot tears poured down the girl’s cheeks, her little button nose gone red from the cold.

“We are leaving Skotoprigonyevsk very soon, finally, you see— on the charity of your good heart, and if I should never see you again, I could not pass up the chance to thank you again now. I will remember you all the rest of my life, Vanka Fyodorovna. Always, for the rest of my life I shall love you and be grateful for you. You are an angel to us, Vanka Fyodorovna. After— after— it happened, you see, and— and the service, was so--- Your coming to us has brought me great peace, Miss Vanka Fyodorovna.”

She squeezed Vanka’s hand then, her eyes to the ground, and spoke in a very low voice.

“Even just to know… that she trusted you with such a letter… has meant a great deal to me. You know it is not so easy for us. I should always, always remember you, Miss Vanka Fyodorovna.” 

All the breath had gone from Vanka. Marya Kondratyevna's little hand was warm in hers. When she opened her mouth to speak, she stood for a moment, choking, almost drowning, in the rushing, freezing light.

“I am… glad for your peace, Marya Kondratyevna.” She said very slowly, her voice coming out thick and dumb.

Chapter Text

It was three days Vanka passed, too frightened to sleep. 

She tried to reason through it with the reason that had failed her. Her head felt soft. As if full of cotton. All the world had taken on a quality of unreality, a ridiculous farce, everything skewed over sideways.

She was ill, she’d known that. She just mightn’t have expected that this illness might go to her brain. Some inner crutch had lapsed, and all that laid before her now was only a strange, sick dream. 

If she believed that, truly believed that, why did she not swallow her pride and go to Alyosha, as she had promised to do, tell him at last that she was most terribly ill? Or at the very least go home, go to sleep. Perhaps she only need lie down and close her eyes to wake back up and find the world quite unchanged. If that was so, and she had decided, most firmly, that it must be so, why was she out walking again?

Her little room terrified her now, full of items that were not hers. But to be out on the street terrified her, too— that she might run into someone who would begin at once to speak to her about something she had apparently said or done in her own absence, and she would be struck utterly dumb again.

What was the use of proof to believing? The fabric was soft under her fingers, and every time she opened the closet to peek, the garments were still there. She had felt that vile cold skin upon her own, too, heavy and thick and rubbery, even when Pasha’s grave had begun to settle into the earth. She had traced her fingers over the name there, chiseled into coarse stone— that touch was real, too, and the teeming dirt, rich and black as chocolate cake under her boots above Pasha’s head and all the worms that now ate of her rotten little body like soft fruit. 

Two things, two inexorably incongruent things. She tried to hold them together in her mind, felt the chord of her failed reason hook and tremble inside her. Pasha was dead and she had come to her, come upon her, come unto her— it could not be true, it truly had happened. She could feel the touch of her dead skin upon her bare wrist even now, cold and scalding. 

So very confused was Vanka’s exhausted mind, working incessantly upon itself, that she blinked out of this waking sleep to find herself standing in the center of an empty room. Bare tree branches, dragging a hollow staccato across the roof,were the only sound. 

She was staring out through the broken-out window, a thin stream of moonlight casting long slanting shapes off of the furniture- rough wooden table and two poor, rickety benches, strewn with dead and shriveled leaves. It was a full-throated warm winter night, the air licking her skin like cold water, the moon a high paper lantern. She was poorly dressed again, in her shirt and her riding pants, her feet without socks in her leather boots, close and slick with acrid fever-sweat.

Her body came back to her by degrees, and then she lifted her hands and stared down at them. But why have I come to the summer house? 

The soft rustle of crinoline struck her like spiders crawling up her back. Vanka wheeled around with a shudder.

Pasha was immaculately and strangely dressed. In a long, lacy frock, pink glowing yellow in the moonlight. Fine, white silk stockings and a long blue coat, all velvet, unbuttoned and trimmed to the floor in fur. She held a parasol closed at her side, in one leather-gloved hand. 

Pasha smiled, and when she took a step towards her Vanka paced back in step from her, all the way to the wall, her gaze locked upon her with insane terror.

She walked past her without saying anything, leaning her little parasol against the mildew-spotted wall. She looked up at Vanka, her eyes sparkling with a certain obscure knowing.

“Won’t you sit and speak with me a while, Miss?”

Pasha stared at her almost sarcastically. All the sickly tint of her skin had ebbed out and left her dreadfully pale, made the pools of purple beneath her eyes look like bruises. Her hair shone like light on dark water, darker still than it had been in life, finely curled and set. She looked like a foreign traveller, in her fine clothes. But in the winking, shining left eye that still drooped, the iris that still dragged and caught, lolled and listed awkwardly— she revealed herself unchanged. 

Vanka’s hands shook with a sudden rage. It swelled up in her chest like a galewind, black and wretched, until she felt she would fling herself upon her at once.

To her utter shock, Vanka felt her fists go slack. She paced forward very slowly. When the bench pulled out, it made a tremendous shuddering scrape across the floor, the branches knocking on the roof. She sat down opposite her.

Pasha smiled, she almost seemed to preen. The very air around her seemed to shimmer, to breathe. 

Such a feeling of disgust arose in Vanka then as she had never felt in all her life. A mutiny of revulsion crawled through skin, sitting down so politely and meekly across from this creature. For, beneath all of her fear and rage, Vanka was feeling a most intense curiosity and would not, on any account, have gone away without satisfying it. 

“You…” Vanka said very slowly, “Are not real.”

Pasha folded her little gloved hands upon the table and leaned in.

“And how have you come to that, may I ask, Miss?”

“At your grave.” Vanka said deliberately, meeting her eye.

Pasha sat back on the bench. Her dark eyes were bright with mischievous excitement, as though she were laughing at her.

“What's the good of believing against your will? Only, I must ask you, Miss. What is it, then, that you suppose I am?” 

“A dream and not a dream.” Vanka said slowly. “It appears to me that I have walked about, talked and seen, and now I can’t remember a thing. Sometimes… I don't see you, don't even hear your voice, as I did last time, but I guess what you are thinking, for it's I, I myself speaking, and not you.”

“I am glad you treat me so familiarly.” 

“But it’s exactly the opposite. I’ve only just told you. There’s no familiarity in it, and if there is, it’s a poor relation. You are an illness, my hallucination.”

Pasha stared at her almost with pleasure.

“Do you know, you have not changed one bit?”

“They told me at the end of your life that you would end in madness. That your reason was impaired. Was it?”

“Is your reason impaired, Miss?”

“Yes, I quite think it is so."

The moonlight through the trees cast shadows like antlers dancing through the room, falling jagged across the table. Vanka leaned forward, and thought for a long time before she spoke.

“Were I to entertain that which I most certainly cannot, that you truly are real. Suppose, in the sake of experiment, that I take it on as some absurd fact. Fine, then. Why on earth have you come?"

Pasha stared at her a long moment. Finally, she drew herself up where she sat with a breath, and placed her hands on the table. She fixed her gaze upon Vanka’s face, her eye wandering as if she were deep in thought.

“Before time was, by some decree which I could never make out, I was pre-destined to be a lower form of life than yourself. When I could have been genuinely good-hearted, and not at all inclined to violence. Well, they chose their scapegoat, and so, your life was made possible. Yes, that is how it is on earth. Somebody takes all the credit of what's good for himself, and nothing but nastiness is left for me- why? Why was I, of all creatures in the world, doomed to be cursed by all decent people, and even to be kicked? God preserve me from it, but one can't help complaining sometimes. I’ve thought about it quite a lot, I have. Finally, it doesn’t bear thinking about, and I just throw it all up! No, Miss— I don't meddle in that. I didn't create it, I am not answerable for it. I know, of course, there's some secret in it, but of course, they don't tell me the secret for anything.”

She broke off here, all at once, and peered at her, as if waiting. A smile played at her lips. 

Vanka narrowed her eyes.

“Who doesn’t tell you the secret for anything?”

“Should you really like to know, Miss?”

“Speak it out, damn you.”

Pasha smiled with delight. She really was preening now, almost girlish, taking up a most supercilious tone.

“I serve a new Master now, Miss. As you know I am very devoted.  I serve a larger aim now. I go where I please and do as I please, for the most part, and when the Master has an errand for me, I do it most happily and scrupulously, and I shall never, ever have another man to be Master over me again. And I tell you sincerely I am most, most pleased with this new appointment."

“You speak in riddles, you damned thing, and tell me, of all things, that the devil sends you to me?”

“Believe me, he has his motive in it. My Master leads you to belief and disbelief by turns. It's the new method, so I’m told, only I’m afraid I don’t know much about it… Would you believe me, Miss, if I told you that is quite beside the point to me, now? Though in life I used to sit and brood on such things. I have found out I was wrong, Miss, in life, and never so spectacularly pleased to have been found wrong! Maybe not so wrong, that there was no creation, Miss, as I see it quite clearly now that there really was no creation. But what I failed to understand, then, Miss, about the sun and the moon and the light, was that nothing is created nor destroyed. It all just takes new form, all this living and dying, this consumption and excrement— it is all just a great exchange, a great seam-ripping and re-fitting, Miss, all just a very great exchange of particles, the likes of which you or I never imagined.” 

“What on earth should the devil care for me ?”

“Oh, my Master loves all humans, Miss! He takes a particular fascination in every single one of you, I most assure you. The conquest of these insect souls is priceless, quite priceless to him! I mean, some of them, really Miss, they can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within a hair's-breadth of being turned upside down! You will always believe what you like, Miss, for you are a clever girl indeed, but you fancy yourself a great deal more clever than you really are. I shall not hold it against you, for I am the same, you know. Yes, there are two sorts of truths for me now, in my work: one, their truth, which I know nothing about so far and may never know at all, and the other all my own.”

“What, then even you don't believe in God?” 

“What can I say? That is, Miss, if you are in earnest—” 

“Is there a God or not?” 

“My dear Miss, upon my word I don't know!” She blurted out, and covered her mouth with her little gloved hands.

“There, Miss! I've said it now!” 

“You don't know, but you see the devil? No, you are not someone apart. You are myself, you are I and nothing more."

“Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you, that would still be true. Je pense, donc je suis, I know that for a fact. All the rest, all these worlds, God and even Satan, even now all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all that exist of itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a peculiar outward-projected dreaming in my mind— or, if you like, Miss, of your mind?”

Vanka stared at her for a long moment, and passed her hands over her exhausted face. She let out a low moan and started, absurdly, to laugh.

"Oh, this is all so terribly, frightfully stupid... In fact, talk any nonsense you like. You won’t drive me to frenzy, as last time. I'll get the better of you. I won’t be taken to a mad-house!"

“Oh, Miss, please, don’t be like that. I may be here for a while, yet. I urge you, just try and open your mind to me. You'll see how well we can get on.”

Pasha’s eyes flicked to one side, then, and the back to Vanka’s, and she smiled. All at once there was a strange flickering glow upon her pale face. 

“Good Lord, Miss, what on earth are you doing out here?”

Vanka turned, and before her in the doorway stood Grigory Vassilyvitch. He held a lantern aloft, squinting queerly at her in his dressing gown and cap, a rough old overcoat strewn over his hunched shoulders. She jumped up from the table and wheeled around. The room lay before her empty and still.

She turned to face Grigory, and when she opened her mouth to speak, she couldn’t. He sighed and shuffled stiffly towards her, pulled off the old stinking overcoat and draped it over her shoulders. His wet, foul breath so near her face made her shiver in disgust.

“And not even an overcoat, Miss! You could catch your death. Who are you meeting, here?” He said gruffly, peering at her with a furrowed brow.

She startled at these words, drawing back from him with wide eyes.

“No-one, Grigory, no-one at all.” She said. Her voice sounded upon her ears faint as a child's, and she realized she was trembling.

“No-one, eh? Are you ill?” He grumbled, staring hard at her.

“It’s only that I’ve been thinking of Father. That’s all.” 

Grigory grunted, pursing his lips, and looked away from her.

“Your good Father’s gone to his fate, now, Miss. May God have mercy on his soul.”

He placed an arthritic hand upon her back and ushered her towards the door.

“Come to the house, Miss, and I shall ready the carriage to bring you home. It is a great scandal, Miss, a young lady walking alone at night! A very great scandal! Only imagine what could have happened to you— you ought to be terribly ashamed.” He wheezed, limping along beside her.

They passed out into the garden, breathing silver with moonlight. Vanka followed him, dumb and mute as a child, up the little path and into the servant’s lodge. Grigory Vasilyvitch set the lantern heavily upon the sparse wooden table. Vanka stared at Marfa Ignatveyna, lying with her back to the room, still sleeping, a soft dull lump beneath a threadbare blanket.

Grigory pulled on his boots in silence with a heavy grunt. Vanka's head turned. She stared past the kitchen and into the tiny room down the cramped hall, the narrow little bed that sat empty now, cold and still and perfectly made up. A shudder ripped through her chest, and all at once, she did not know why, a sort of sob broke out of her, silent and without tears.

Cringing, she lifted the heavy overcoat from her shoulders, oily in her hands, and placed it very carefully across the back of one of three small wooden chairs at the table.

“I am going now, Grigory Vasilyvitch. Do not trouble yourself with the carriage for me.” Vanka articulated faintly.

“What?” He said gruffly, looking up at her. 

Vanka turned then and walked out of the servant’s lodge. She heard Grigory stumbling after her down the path, calling out her name, and ducked behind the long shadow of the bathhouse. She scaled the garden wall and jumped over.

Dmitri Karamazov could not sleep in prison. He got up, in the very late night and the cold that seeped through the stone walls, and paced. Outside the window he could see the cold of the sky, the shivering stars, and thought of nothing else but Grusha. He wept for the thought of her black satin hair. He prayed for her soul, wept for her goodness, so not of this earth, that she hadn’t abandoned him even now. 

Late at night when the guards were asleep, he pulled from beneath his spare, filthy straw mattress the lists Vanka had scrawled out for him. Unfamiliar figures, the English language that came to him unknowable as latin, the words tasting foreign in his mouth. In the morning, alone, when the sky bled pink and the little finches outside shook snow from tiny wings, he beat himself upon the breast to keep from weeping, to remind himself that his heart still beat with blood, with life.

He watched the migratory birds from that little high window, the ones who had resisted that call and stayed behind, for whatever earthly reason only God and the birds might know. He watched the fall of sunlight, upon the wings that knew of warmer, gentler places very far off from here, and tried to know what they knew. 

When sleep would not come, Alyosha prayed. This dread that came upon him late at night was of God, too, as all things. If anyone had seen him in his rooms at night they would have thought him in a perfect frenzy- pacing across the floor only to fall to his knees, his lips moving and pouring out a silent soliliquy, until his body ached into the floor and the floor ached into his body. Sometimes he managed only two hours restless sleep before he woke with the light, and he always woke with the light. Dreams came upon him rapturously, so fiercely did they run through his soul that he spent all the next day walking as if in a vision, and rarely felt tired.

It was one such night, that with a startling impact upon the window his whispered, ceaseless prayer fell silent. He sat still for a long time without moving, staring up at the glass. A smear of muddy darkness upon the pane dimmed out the thin, shattered light of the stars. An owl, perhaps , he thought to himself, when he rose to look. 

The street down below was empty, save for the small, crumpled body of a cat, lying twisted in the road. 

By the time she reached her lodgings Vanka was staggering. She climbed the stairs slowly, her feet seeming to drag, and stumbled on the landing. She caught herself on the wall, vision swimming, going dim and dark until she couldn’t see from her left eye. A terrible despair twisted her heart, her left ear begun to ring.

Her legs dragged with every step, going numb. She threw herself onto the door of her room, only just making it inside before her strength failed her, and she collapsed heavily to the ground.  Her jaw locked first, with a hollow moan, and then her arms. Her right leg turned inward, twisted up, as the room began to spin. Though she could not see, she heard her boots drumming a staccato on the floor as she began to shake. The very last thing she felt, as that great dark undertow rushed to devour her whole, was a pair of small, cold hands, taking her head and holding it still, gently caressing her hair.

Chapter Text

Though she had collapsed on the floor, Vanka awoke in her bed. She sat up blearily. Little candy wrappers in orange and pink scattered the bedspread. Across the pillowcase was a red-brown smear, and she brought her hands up to her face, searching for where she might be bleeding. Her face felt strange and numb, but nothing hurt.

She smeared a hand across her mouth and looked down at her palm, smeared with a messy mouth print. Vanka cringed with disgust, rose out of bed with a great rustling of fabric, and found herself still tightly fastened into an utterly ridiculous gown— black with pink pinstripe, edged all out in fine black lace and tiny fabric buttons. She still wore even a pair of little heeled boots, laced up with pink velvet ribbon. Sweaty, she cursed under her breath and bent down to wrench the shoes from her aching feet. Her vision went dark and bleary a moment when she stood. 

Vanka opened the door on the landing just a crack and peered out, making sure no one waited there for her. The boarding-house was still and silent. Every step felt like stepping on knives when she stole across the hall and into the powder room, unsteady on her feet. 

She closed the door and looked down at the ridiculous garment, cursed again, and pattered across the hall and into the washroom, slamming the door. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and stopped dead, struck furiously ashamed by the garish and unrecognizable picture of her face that stared back at her now.

She attacked the dress, fumbling with the laces at the back for a long time. The laces dug into her fingers as she struggled with the damned thing, short of breath and craning over her shoulder to try and see what she was doing. Finally she gave up with that, and managed to struggle free by wriggling the top of it off over her head. Her ribs ached as if bruised from the damned thing, and she shucked off the skirt and the petticoat, lastly, the vile little silk stockings and the garter, too, throwing all of it in a heap onto the floor. She stood, sweaty in her chemise, and fetched a clean towel, dipping it into the basin and scrubbing at her face, the towel coming away blotched in red from her mouth, black from her eyes. She picked the little black ribbon out of her expertly pin-curled hair and threw it in the rubbish bin.

She opened the bathroom door slowly and peered out, finding the landing empty again, and dashed back into the safety of her room.

It was not half so tidy this time, with sweets wrappers strewn across the foot of the bed in soft pastel colors, a bottle of red wine thick as blood upon the dresser aside a little tipped-over teacup, still stained in dregs of red. Little boxes stacked up on the floor beside the writing-table now, and all her candles were quite burned down. 

Most curiously of all was a string of fine pearls, laid out neatly upon the dressing table, sitting right aside the bottle of wine. Vanka picked them up, holding them to the light in bewilderment, fingering the tiny little golden clasp.

She knelt by the bed, fishing underneath the slats, feeling around for the envelope she’d hidden there. She fished it out with a great sigh of relief and knelt on the ground, counting out each bill rapidly under her breath, carrying the tally in her pounding head. She cursed, gathering the bills back up and shoving them back in, when her eyes fell upon a little crumpled piece of paper, strewn on the floor.

She unraveled it upon her knee. Alyosha’s script was by now to her as familiar as the cadence of his voice, urging her in his deliberate, distinct script to come that afternoon to the monastery, that it was a matter of greatest importance. She cursed again, rushing to her closet to dress. 

She brushed out the stupid little curls as best she could, fastened up her brown tweed blazer, and rifled through her closet a long time in search of her plain wool greatcoat. When she slipped it over her shoulders, she was dismayed to find it had taken on the stench of its fellows in the closet, stinking with a cloyingly sweet perfume.

It was bitter cold, a fresh thin bluster of snow dusting everything. It was a long walk, and though she’d left in a hurry she walked now in a sort of wander, casting glances around her uneasily on the street. She was very near the monastery, walking down the wooded path, when she heard a far-off voice, muffled in the winter landscape, crying out behind her.

“Vanka! Vanka Fyodorovna, is that you?” 

Vanka turned and looked over her shoulder.

Mikhail Rakitin was coming up the path behind her, tall and thin and swathed in black woolen coat. The wind blew his wild dark hair up off of his forehead, and he sped up to a loping jog to catch up to her.

Vanka turned back away from him and continued walking.

He fell into step beside her with his hands in his pockets. His coat, though fine, looked as if it hadn’t been brushed in days. His spectacles were foggy and spotted with moisture, high atop his beaklike nose.

For a while, he didn’t say anything. 

Finally, he pulled out a silver cigarette case with a flourish and proffered it to her.

She glanced at him in bewilderment, shaking her head.

Rakitin shrugged, striking a match and lighting up his cigarette. He placed it between his lips and pulled off his glasses, trying to wipe them on the breast of his coat.

“Ah, blast these damned, infernal things.” He cursed around the cigarette in his lips, giving up at last and dropping the spectacles, and the cigarette case, into his pocket. He took a drag and blew out a long stream of smoke. The smell of the tobacco was rich and woody against the stark, sharp smell of the snow.

“Ah! I’ve got one for you, Vanka Fyodorovna. I once met a monk in Moscow who smoked like a chimney— an Elder, if you can believe that. Sitting in the monastery with the holy bible in one hand and a cigarette in the other, pausing every other line when he delivered his teachings for he was so terribly short of breath. I am sure it must have been a great financial strain on the monastery, I dare say so, to support such a prolific habit. That man, who had sworn an oath of poverty, was never, never I tell you, too poor for a cigarette! I used to sit in his chambers with my eyes watering, trying not to interrupt his vast theological ramblings with a cough! And if anyone ever challenged him, he told them that to his mind there was no sin in it, as he was only in such a hurry to meet the Lord! I thought it the stupidest , the most confounding thing, and that man was no fool, I tell you. Perhaps one of the greatest theologists I have ever met. But I left as staunch in my atheism as ever, I tell you— only, I had picked myself up a habit. What proselytizing!”

He finished this tirade with a flourish, taking in and blowing out a very great plume of smoke, tossing a stray wisp of hair back from his forehead.

Vanka glanced sideways at him, furrowing her brow with an odd smile. The monastery was in sight now, as they approached the edge of the forest path.

“Ah, so you don’t like that one? That’s as one prefers, then. Pay me no mind, Vanka Fyodorovna. I am only a fool, just a terrible fool. Sometimes, I confess, I’ve begun to suspect that is just what they keep me around here for.” He raised his eyebrows at her.

Vanka said nothing to this, and they walked alongside one another for a while in silence. The shadow of the church fell over them, as they walked around the side.

Rakitin kept glancing askance at her, his gaze lingering. Finally, he tossed his cigarette carelessly to the ground, and looked away. 

“You aren’t wearing your pearls, Vanka Fyodorovna.”

Vanka blinked.

“What?”

“Your pearls, Vanka. I only noticed you aren’t wearing them, to-day.”

“I don’t own any damned pearls.” She said.

Rakitin stopped walking. They were at the back of the church, now, the wind buffeting all around them.

“So it’s like that, then, is it? Is it, Vanka Fyodorovna?” Rakitin cried.

She stared at him in astonishment.

“Are you not you pleased with them? I assure you, if you aren’t, you can tell me. On whatever little honor I have, Vanka, I shall not be offended. Yes, maybe it was stupid of me, what do I know? What do I care, for a thing like that? Throw aside all your sensibilities, speak plainly to me. Damn you, you infernal creature, I insist on it. In fact, I beg you to! Is that what you like, Vanka Fyodorovna? To make a man beg you? We’re modern people, Vanka. Some might say strikingly modern. I certainly never knew you were so modern. What would please you more, Vanka?”

Rakitin grabbed her hand in a crushing squeeze, pressing it in his, to his chest. He was very close to her now, dragging her in towards him by the arm.

“Diamonds? Sapphires? Rubies? Books or brandy? Perhaps a pistol would suit you better, you can fix it right between my eyes, how would you like a thing like that? I’ll tell you once, you need only tell me. I should like very, very much to please you, to please you always, Vanka. You need only say the word. Just say the word, Vanka Fyodorovna, and I shall get it for you, whatever it is you desire.” 

“Unhand me.” Vanka whispered very slowly, her voice breaking with disgust. 

She wrenched her hand free of his, and took a deliberate step away from him, her face a perfect paroxysm of helpless, boundless rage. 

Rakitin let out a mirthless laugh, looking down at his shoes. He swiped at his nose irreverently, then looked back up at her, his clear blue eyes burning with shame.

“You are a strange, strange woman, Vanka Fyodorovna. A greater mystery than perhaps I have ever seen. But I am determined, bound and determined , I quite assure you, to figure that mystery out.” He said, and turned to leave, flicking open again his cigarette case.

Vanka fled from him in the other direction. Her hands began to tremble, and her head to spin. She was feeling a peculiar, slipping dizziness, her breath coming hard in her chest.

Not here, not here, she thought madly to herself, not here, do you hear me, you wretch, you disgusting little thing, do you hear me?

She broke for the path, scanning her eyes nervously around the barren wasteland of snow, trying to escape without being seen. Rakitin was nowhere in sight, and she was almost to the tree line when she heard Alyosha’s voice, calling out behind her. She went dizzy with panic—- by the time she considered not turning around at all she had already stopped dead, staring down at the limp brown grass poking through the thin dirty snow.

She turned around.

Alyosha peered at her with a furrow to his brow she had never seen before, and his jaw was firmly set.

“Come inside with me. Sit for a minute, won’t you? Only a minute, that’s all I ask. It’s cold, out here.”

Vanka bowed her head in a nod, and followed him inside without saying a word. The heavy door fell shut behind them with a resolute wooden thud.

Alyosha sat first, as if to put her at ease, looking to her carefully. Vanka collapsed down on the pew several feet away from him, not far from the door. For a while, neither of them spoke. There were little votive candles lit in every corner, animating the tortured glowing serenity on the faces of the ikons. It sounded like a seashell, in that great gloaming ampitheatre, the wind outside breaking over the creaking walls. 

“I won’t pretend that I know what’s on your heart, Vanka. I feel that I’ve quite lost track of you, now.” 

Alyosha sounded almost bitter. Vanka had scarcely ever heard him sound so bitter. She stared down at the ground, bracing herself for a thorough scolding. She could not help, truly, the cringing, mirthless smile that came across her face just then, and so she kept her head bowed, and this unwilling gesture of penitence annoyed her even more.

“All I’ll ask of you, Vanka, is that whatever feelings you may have, you will reserve that burden for me, and only for me. Mitya is terribly burdened already, with all he is facing now. I cannot bear the thought that he should feel abandoned by his own sister now, too, at this hour of his greatest trial, when he needs us all so terribly.” 

Vanka raised her eyes to glance at him like a guilty dog, waiting to hear what she had done wrong now. How stupid, how very, hopelessly stupid this all is! 

Vanka nodded, and again her lips threatened to spasm into a smile. Damn it! Damn this infernal farce! What shall he think of me, then, if I were to stand up and stick my tongue out at him? 

“You really want to know, Alyosha, what I think of Dmitri Fyodorovitch now?” She said quietly.

Alyosha exhaled.
“I think it better, Vanka, if you are burdened, that you give it to me. Leave it with me, than to put it on Mitya.”

Vanka took a breath and drew herself up.

“I think he is a terrible scoundrel, and a drunk, and what’s more, a fool, a terrible fool, too.”

Alyosha’s face did not move. He looked at her as if with great sorrow. She felt a tickle of annoyance upon her neck, scratched at it restlessly.

“I think that he is the cause, the very cause of all of this— this utter wreck we are all embroiled in now. And if he is burdened , Alyosha, then perhaps he deserves to shoulder that burden, and let it torment him all his life. Perhaps it may finally teach him some responsibility! The eldest of us all, God forbid it! He thinks much of himself because he was once an official, but never seems to pay any mind the fact that he was relieved of that position. And though he may not be a murderer, he very well may have been, hadn’t— well. We all know what happened to Father, and I don’t wish to repeat that business in this holy place. Mitya conducts himself as a child, with the strength and the lust for drink and women of a grown man, and he sees no fault in it. Such brutes are the ruin of everything. So, since you asked me to say it all plainly, Alyosha, that is what I think of Mitya. But he is our brother, and so I have put myself at great, great personal risk to save him from this fate of his own design. But I reserve my right to think him a brute. And if I tell him so, you will have to excuse my poor manners. This has all put me in a truly foul mood, and been a very great strain on me. If you wish to be burdened, Alyosha, then I should suggest you go to Mitya directly, for I am not so burdened as you might think. In fact, I dare say I find my opinion entirely justified.”

Alyosha listened to all of this in mute, sad silence, and raised his face at last to look at her with a pained expression. Vanka felt at that moment utterly exhausted, and before he could speak, she stood and left the church, not trusting her tongue to hear whatever he might have to say.

Vanka walked at a clip from the monastery all the way back into town, her heart thundering in her ears. She made it to the treeline before she was certain Alyosha was not following her, feeling quite certain that if he dared come after her again she would fly into a proper rage, even strike out at him. By the time she arrived on her street, the wet wind had picked up, thick clumps of snow beginning to fall.

She shut herself up in her little room. She stood for a moment in total inanimate stillness, feeling that hot energy race through her, rooting her to the spot. Her mind was working at something.

Before she could think, her mind churning, she slowly, deliberately opened the closet and hefted the bottle from the floor. She let the cork tumble to the floor and drank deeply. The foul stench of it burned through her nose and chest like kerosene, she took in the burn as if breathing, and felt it run down her chin. Finally, she set the bottle down upon the dresser. Her head was rushing, heart beating in her temples all at once. She felt, all at once, reckless and somehow giddy. Her hands seemed almost to itch when her blurry gaze focused, all at once, upon the dresser. 

The pearl necklace was delicate in her hands when she lifted it, tangled it through her fingers like the hair of a lover, glinting softly in the light.

She twisted and twined it through her fingers, a cat’s cradle, a child’s game, her head feeling hot and dizzy. Each pearl was a little pinpoint of pressure against her knuckles, and when it burst it burst gloriously, sending a shower of pearls flying like marbles all across the floor.

She watched them roll until all was still and silent again. She turned her attention to the closet, plucked a gown from it’s hanger and heard the tear of a seam, cast it to the floor. She pulled down another. She lifted the bottle from the dresser and dumped it over the fabric, watching dark stains bloom upon dark satin. The room stank of liquor and perfume. She picked up the box of little candies from the dresser and deliberately plucked each of them free from their wrappers, dropping them one by one onto the heap of fabric at her feet. She ground them in with her heel, smearing chocolate into fine silk like soil, like shit. 

She lifted one of the little glass bottles of scent to the waning light and let it drop. It made a magnificent little explosion of colored glass upon the floor. She ground it into the floorboards beneath her boot and could have laughed. 

Oh, why hadn’t she thrashed Rakitin? How very pleased she might have been, to see his stupid face with fat gluts of blood pouring from his nose down his poorly shaven chin. Yes, he never could have imagined a woman so modern as that!

She pulled the drawer of her desk open too hard and it tumbled out and onto the ground. She searched for her penknife and fetched it, pulled open the dresser drawer. She sifted out a translucent silk stocking with the tip of the penknife, skewered upon it. It came apart when she tore it in her hands like gossamer, like spider’s silk— how easy it was to push her fingertips right through the pristine, delicately woven fabric. She pulled out a hanger, considered the gown before her—- garish and ridiculous, and drove the penknife straight through the abdomen, dragged it down like she was gutting something. The fabric resisted until her wrist shook, her mouth twisting hatefully, cutting a great autopsy from rib to pelvis, tearing through the layers of cotton and crinoline.

Sweating now, head spinning, she dropped to her knees and pulled out the hat boxes in a great tumble, set to tearing out the stupid little dyed feathers one by one, as if plucking a dead bird. She scowled with the effort, for they were terribly affixed, and let the feathers float through the air. When the hat was defeathered, she put her penknife through it’s crown for good measure and left it there, sticking right up. 

She reached up onto the dresser and retrieved the bottle again, considered the spare inch or two of liquid sloshing around the bottom, and drank it down, her head tipped all the way back.

She lifted a shoe from the closet, retrieved her penknife. The supple, sweet leather gave way to her carving with ease, like a pen to paper. She took care with each letter, carving deliberately, as if penning a letter to a lover, CUNT.

Vanka sat back on her heels. Her stomach was burning and she was sweating terribly. Her knee was terribly sore, she realized. She sat back and realized she’d been kneeling upon the broken glass. Blood bloomed through the thick fabric of her trousers. She was still and silent a long time. A horrible despair broke over her, drunken and dizzy. It was too quiet, too still, in the sudden wake of her frenzy. She stood up and fetched her great-coat.

Her fists clenched and opened at her sides. She felt hot blood running from her knee in the chill, warming her. It made her feel queer and giddy to be out on the street so drunk, crazed, stinking of sweat and drink and blood. The snow was coming down now, thick and slow flurries, falling in clusters, shuttering and spinning through the early evening air. 

The little drinking-house on the street was warm, aglow with voices and greasy little lamps high upon the peeling walls. She entered as though entranced, her head beginning to ache harder. She slumped down heavily in the corner near the wall. When the pretty, rosey-cheeked little barmaid asked her what she wanted to drink, she told her brandy, and drank off three glasses in quick succession, rubbing at her tired eyes.

Her rage softened, coiled tight around her. Blood ran down into her boot. A certain tension in her shoulders seemed at last to relax, even while her fists tensed up. She sat for a half an hour, nursing her rage. The room was warm and much too loud, it made her cringe and wore heavy upon her overblown nerves, crowded close with men who stole sidelong glances at her. She had made a game of it once, to meet their gaze until they looked away. But she did not feel so up to looking anyone in the eye, just now. She stood up and swore when she swayed on her feet, a sudden rush to her pounding head. She left her money on the bar and left without a word.

When she staggered back outside, the merry noise of the little room now at her back, she stepped out into a still, dark street. She turned over her shoulder. The door fell closed from her fingertips and all the noise and the people were gone with it, and all was utterly silent, the windows still and dark.

A fresh layer of softly fallen snow lay untouched and sparkling on the street, the very air glowing blue. Vanka turned slowly around until she saw a small figure standing in the middle of the road, beneath the lamppost with hands folded, as if waiting for her.

Flakes of white settled upon her nest of dark curls. 

“You vile, wretched little beast —” Vanka cursed, staggering, lunging towards her in the snow.

“You’re lying again. You haven’t given it up at all, have you?” Pasha said, looking up at her with some surprise.

Vanka reached her just then and seized her roughly, shoved her up against the lamp post. The light above them spasmed and flickered wildly.

“I’ll drag you out, you wretch. I’ll burn you out, I’ll thrash you out. I’ll unmask you yet.” Vanka growled, her fingertips digging viciously into Pasha’s bony shoulders.

Her breathing went heavy, but instead of cowering, she only began to smile, looking up at Vanka with a strange, sly look in her eye.

“Well do it, then. If I am only a figment of your imagination, after all. Why shouldn’t you? Cast me out at once, if I do not please you.” 

Vanka growled, letting go of her. She paced back and forth in the snow in great, wild arcs, putting her hands to her head.

“I’m ill, I’m only most terribly ill, that’s what it is. You are my illness.”

“I quite agree with you on that point, Miss.” 

“What the hell should I care for your agreement?”

“We’ve been in agreement about a great many things, Miss.”

“Oh, leave off with you!” Vanka cried in annoyance, turning on her heel.

“ Rakitin ? Rakitin ? You vile, stupid little thing… filth runs to filth, is that it? My God, how you’ve humiliated me.”

“So it’s me now, Miss? When just before I was only you.” 

“Hold your tongue, you bitch, or I’ll cut it out!”

Vanka passed both hands over her face, staring at her, eyes wide with horror.

“Maybe… maybe you truly are real. Whatever stupid vileness is within you seems to me now beyond anything I would be capable of dreaming up.”

Pasha tipped her head to one side, still smiling.

“That’s probably quite true. Your vileness is all your own, Miss, and separate from mine, even now.”

“What right should you have to speak of my vileness, when you are the  vilest, most rotten thing of all?” 

“I’ve had a chance to go fishing in that head of yours, Miss. I found it illuminating.” 

“You know nothing of what’s in my head.” 

“But I do, I think you’ll find. In fact, I think you’ll find you’ve got something of what’s in my head now, too.” 

“There is nothing at all of any interest to me in your sick head.”

“But you’ve got it all the same, Miss.”

“What did you say to Mitya, damn you?”

“I thought you put it quite well, yourself, Miss. I assure you, nothing you were not already thinking.” 

“Damn you. Damn you. And may I ask, by the way, just the sum of my money that you saw fit to gift to Marya Kondratyevna?”

Pasha’s face went very strange and still then. Her eyes went glassy, the corners of her mouth spasmed. 

“Do not speak to me of Marya Kondratyevna. In fact, Miss, I ask you kindly not to ever even say her name.” 

Vanka took a very deep breath, rubbing both hands over her numb face.

“What do you want with Grushenka? What on earth are you troubling her for?”

“I lost my life , in no small part, over that woman. I should’ve liked to have met her once, to see whether she was really worth all that dreadful fuss.” She couldn’t hide the disgust that edged into her voice, then.

“You’d better tell me what it is you’ve come for. You’re dead. You chose to be dead.” 

“But I explained it all to you quite plainly, Miss, at the summer house. You mean to tell me you don’t understand?”

“I understand nothing, nothing from you.”

Pasha was silent a while. She stared down at the snow, drew a wandering line with the toe of her boot.

“Why do you suppose you were you born as you and I born as myself, Miss?” Pasha said suddenly, and looked up at her. Her big black eyes glistened, wide like a child or a little doll.

Vanka stared at her.

“You’re talking nonsense again. Utter, utter nonsense. Trying only to do my head in.” 

“Have you ever thought about it, Miss? I dare say that you never have. There was a time, Miss, when I used to think about it rather often.” Pasha said, her voice dropped to a low whisper.

Vanka felt a strange prickle of fear on her scalp, staring at her. Pasha sniffed, straightening herself.

“I died so very young, Miss.” 

“That was your fault.” Vanka said irritably, not looking at her. “‘ Of your own will, so as to cast no blame on anyone but yourself.’”

Pasha was quiet awhile, staring down at the ground.

“That’s one perspective, Miss. I have access to quite a great deal of perspective, from where I am now.”

“And where are you, now?” 

“I am with you , Vanka.” She said plainly, and looked at her then. She looked rather frustrated, a strange flush come upon her dead white face. She shifted as if to pace, her hands moving fitfully, but did not make more than a step in any one direction. “In all the world, in all time and space. It’s strange, I know. I’ve come back to you. The trouble is, I just can’t stop thinking. There are a great many things I did not get to do in my life, Miss, that I should have liked to.”

Vanka recoiled in disgust.

“Is that it, then? That I’m meant to be— used, for your every stupid whim?”

Pasha was quiet a long time. She did not meet her eye, but stared at the ground. She worried a hangnail between her teeth for only a second, then seemed to remember herself. She looked every bit a child, her face drawn closed in consternation. 

“And why not, Miss? If everything is permitted, and I find it within my power, after all. Then why shouldn’t I?”

Vanka stared at her in stupefication, her lips drawn low in a snarl of pure disgust. 

“Oh, what a sorry beast I created when I deigned to interfere in your sick, stupid mind.”

“We used to have such conversations, Miss. When you actually cared to speak to me. I wish you would be so open with me now. We have such a lot we could talk about.”
“I’ve nothing to say to you.” Vanka said irritably, and turned to go.

“I’ll tell you the whole of why I’ve come, if you like, and plainly. Though you are not so easy to speak to, taking every chance as you do to degrade me even now.” 

Vanka stopped. She turned around. 

“Speak it out, then, you little creature.” 

Pasha straightened up. She seemed to become animate again, that smile playing at her lips, her left eye wandering askance.

“I serve my Master always. I told you, he takes an interest in every human soul, that’s true. And it’s true, too, that I am not sure about God. I am quite against , quite on the other side of things, you see. But I really do care for you, Vanka. How I’d hate to see you go the way your father did. I told you, once, didn’t I, that of all his children you are the very most like him? You were insulted, but I meant it quite earnestly.”

Vanka felt a strange chill down her spine. Pasha’s eyes shone as she spoke, and she paced closer towards her, until they were just a step apart.

“You still don’t understand?” She said, and tipped her head to one side. 

Vanka was rigid where she stood. Beneath the feathery lace collar at the neck of Pasha’s dress, Vanka glimpsed a vicious ring of bruises upon her delicate neck. She smelled almost alive in the sterile, frigid still of the fresh-fallen snow.

Vanka shook her head, struck mute with fear. The only sound in all the world was the slow shudder of her breath. 

“I’ve come to correct you, Vanka. Divine intervention. Suffering for your sins whilst you still have time on earth may spare you great suffering, later on. That is what they tell me. I am here to repay you. For all the love you shunned from me and all the cruelty you reveled in. And if I should take something for myself, well, then, I hope you won’t begrudge me it. And even if you do, it’s no matter. I don’t hold anything against you. I see it very clearly now, that you were suffering.”

She reached out then, and took Vanka’s hand in her own, lacing their fingers together. Her skin seemed to hum with all night and all darkness, a very great buzzing of energy. Vanka stood paralyzed, her every word striking her like ice in her soul.

“It is a very great relief to the suffering heart, to turn around and place all that suffering on another. I quite understand you in that way, Vanka, I dare say I understand it all… you and I are so terribly similar. I hope you won’t think me heartless. I love you very much. Suffering is what you need. I am not the one who made the verdict, please understand. If you insist on putting it so crudely, then yes, if you please. I am going to use you. Just as you used me.”

Chapter Text

The Moscow years had been so terribly lonely. Vanka had forgotten that, forgotten it well, among other things. She’d lived on the strength of her work, in a hard-fought, lonely kind of freedom . When she remembered it later she would remember it that way, and no more. Strike through the bitter parts, better that way.

She’d loved the Greeks, the antiquity of their approach— falling upon ideas like a chisel to a block of stone, their stoicism. She’d gotten good work out of it, and that was the end.

Nevermind the nights that she drank until heat ran and roved through her body like a wild drum and she laid on her back on the floor and let it pound through her like the wild run of beasts through her blood, staring up at the ceiling yellowed by candlelight and cobwebbed in shadow.

She’d seen visions in that dizzy spinning, in the shadows there, saw it etched inside her eyes when she fell asleep that way and woke in the morning stiff and crooked and cold as a corpse from sleeping on the floor.

She’d dredged her body up, washed and gone to class. She’d met daily the gaze of men and boys who jeered and prodded her and found in her stoicism that she was more a man than any of them, a man twice and thrice their stature, and some of them, some, not many, had known it too, and disparaged her more for it.

Yes, Moscow had been tough. It had made her tougher.

But the drink insisted on her. She ran a long way from it, back home from the city to the place she’d never known, and found it waiting for her there again. 

It was a long, hot, idle summer. She shut herself up in her room at night. It had become to her a very quiet drowning. She sat long hours at her desk. Even at night, the summer heat was oppressive, omniscient. Something was working at her mind, creeping it's way through the underworld of dreams where she couldn't glimpse, could only hear it moving. It seemed to her there was never everyone sleeping at once in that big bellows of a house, crawling with rats and knocking with coarse echoes, never altogether alone.

And always, too, a silence, a silence that seemed to move as she moved, a darkness that swam into her as she breathed into it, on summer nights when the air was so thick it could smother.

It was hard drink to stop up that silence, tender balm of that carefully hidden poison. It was weakness. It was foolishness. It was all evils of men. It burned the evils of thought right out of her head. The drink followed her to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s house, there it's tender seed of origination-- she fled back to Moscow. But something already had it’s claws in her.

She turned her nose up at it in public. Sneered at abasement. Succumbed alone. She would be made no hypocrite, she would be no fool. 

Nights in late summer, when the fields were high and golden, just before the weather turned. She’d been drinking a bacchanal and sick in the mornings, and always a soft, small hand slipping the glass towards her that began to list in her groggy hand. She’d spent too much time on the ancients and her mind had gone Pagan, that was what was wrong. It was only that the weather wasn’t breaking. Blazing early autumn nights even the stars seemed drunken, shining high upon the sky like Cana of Galilee, and she found herself creeping barefoot down the stairs again.

It was so cold in the prison it seemed to seep out of the walls. 

Vanka sat waiting a long time, in the filthy little visitor’s room. Sweat poured from her fevered brow. She kept swiping at her nose. 

Every sound made her itch. Somewhere in the darkness she heard the dripping of water, echoing as if through infinite space. A strange, convulsive shiver attacked her spine and wrenched her neck to one side. Somewhere else nearby, perhaps the next room over, she could hear a quiet and frantically whispered conversation, a very great deal of weeping. Finally, the tandem voices lapsed into quiet, tearful prayer, joined as one. “ Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…”

Her whole body clamored to flee. At last, after a small stuffy eternity of waiting, she heard a procession of heavy bootfalls coming quickly down the corridor, and straightened up in her seat.

The little room was so close that Mitya nearly had to duck his head to come through the doorway. In just a few weeks since she had seen him last, his hair had gone shaggy, falling into his eyes. He did not smile when he saw her, only fixed her in his sad gaze. He glanced over one broad shoulder at the guard, who cast a lingering glance at her pale, drawn face, and left them without a word. Mitya sat down slowly opposite her.

Vanka’s heart pounded in her ears, startled at the sight of him. For a moment they sat in silence. Mitya did not look at her, staring down into the woodgrain of the table as if lost in thought. Finally, he spoke first.

“I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I came to give you an apology.” Despite her best efforts to conceal what was rising up her throat, she only sounded irritable. She scratched at her neck.

Mitya said nothing, setting his broad hands clasped upon the table. The shackles were thick and rusty upon his powerful forearms. Vanka felt certain, for just a second, that she was going to be sick.

She swallowed thickly, and spoke at last, with difficulty, her voice gone guttural with the gag she was holding back.

“It is true, that I’ve been angry with you. But I lost my temper. I should like for us to be friends, Mitya. I feel that’s of the greatest importance to me now.” 

A sad smile spread across Mitya’s weathered face.

“Friends?” 

He reached out and placed his large hand over hers, his skin warm and rough and calloused. 

“This hard place has softened my heart, Vanka. I know, it must sound strange. After everything, everything is over-- you are still the blood of my blood, the blood of my heart . That cannot be changed.” 

Vanka’s face fluttered in a spasmodic smile, and tears sprang to her eyes. She glanced up timidly and met his gaze, and for just a second, she saw, acutely and clearly, just what he would look like with his large powerful body laid out upon the filthy floor, thick hot blood gushing and bubbling from his opened neck.

She averted her gaze quickly to the table, and laughed a strange, mirthless laugh, passing her hand over her mouth. Sweat poured down her back.

“I don’t think I have ever understood you, Mitka.” 

Dmitri looked at her. He broke into a sudden laugh.

“I think I could say the same for you. Ah, that’s a start, isn’t it? To have it all out?” Mitya said, smiling at her. His big brown eyes sparkled in the low grimy light, crows feet at the corners.

Vanka felt a convulsion run down her spine, and struggled not to show it, certain she was about to be sick.

She stood up very suddenly then, and stuck her trembling hand out to him, swiping a hand over her mouth.

“I will come again, very soon.”

Mitya gave her a strange, quizzical look then, and stood. He towered a head taller than her. He bypassed her proffered handshake, placing his shackled wrists over her head and pulling her in against him in a crushing hug.

“Until next time, my dear baby sister.” Mitya said, and even kissed the top of her head.

Vanka swallowed the bile in her throat, tried to hold her breath. His grasp was suffocating, the musky smell of him made her skin crawl. She felt, suddenly, every bit a child. She wanted to scream, to weep, to push him away and run, tensing up to conceal the way his touch made her shudder, the way that the strength of their bodies pressed together drove the handle of the knife in her pocket into her hip.

By the time she stumbled back into the summer house, the sun was long down, the winter night black and full wild. She struggled through the new snow up to the doorway, nearly tripping into the room. 

“Come out, you little wretch! You think I’m frightened of you? I know you’re watching me!” She bellowed, her voice brash in the frigid air. 

Drink made her fierce and hot, her cheeks burning, her chest swelled with rage.

For a long time, the summer house stood still in frozen silence, no sound but her own labored breathing, making clouds upon the air. She stood and watched the door, her chest heaving up and down. A shifting of silence pricked up her ears. Her jaw ached with the ringing taste of iron and bile. 

“You oughtn’t shout like that, Miss. You’ll bring Grigory Vassilyvitch running again.” 

Vanka reached a fumbling hand into her pocket and flung the knife at Pasha’s feet.

“What the hell is this?” She spat. Vanka stared at her with eyes wide and burning, her greasy hair come loose.

Pasha only stared at her, her black eyes wide and blank.

“You’ve come back here again. Why? Why here?”

“Don’t you dare laugh at me. Not now, you wretch, I’ll thrash you.” Vanka raved.

“Miss, I told you everything twice over already, most directly.”

I mean to use you. Just as you used me.

A supernatural terror made Vanka’s legs go numb, dizzy with horror.

“What, to murder ?” 

All the life ran from Vanka’s face. She sat down heavily on the bench and put her head in her hands. She looked back up at her, her lip trembling.

“I had no part , do you hear me, in that sick thing you did to my father.” She said hoarsely.

“I assure you, we can speak plainly to one another, now.” 

“I’ve nothing, nothing, to say to you! You are an illness. You are—- some spot of mold in my soul, and nothing, nothing else!”

Pasha sighed, looking insolently at her.

“That’s as one prefers. You may say what you like, as you ever and always will. I won’t begrudge you it.” 

Vanka flew off the bench and grabbed her then by the arms, slamming her down on the table. The edge of it drove into her spine, knocking the breath from her lungs, and she gasped an indecent gasp of pain or fright, staring up at Vanka’s eyes. Vanka clawed her nails into her until her arms ached from the effort, taking great, heaving breaths.

“You’ve done enough for Mitya already, you bitch. Release me . I am nothing like you, nothing .” Vanka seethed, and shook her. “I would never hurt my father. I will never hurt my brother. I’ll sooner go the same wretched way you did.”

“Try it, then. Go on, why don’t you? Dash your cup, for that insect, go on.” Pasha gasped, her voice gone faint, her eyes gleaming, and started to laugh. 

“Why don’t you do it? If you’re so very certain! But you may find it harder than you think. I warn you, it takes a great deal of conviction.”

Vanka slammed both her hands around her throat, pressing down upon her with all her weight. 

“You demon, you cunt… I won’t listen to another word of your filth, I won’t, I won’t— I will not kill my brother.” 

Pasha let out a strangled gurgle, her eyes rolling back in her skull as her head throttled against the table.

Vanka bore down harder upon her, her arms beginning to shake, feeling Pasha’s thin, sinewy neck collapse and crunch beneath her hands. There was something terribly wrong, in the way her bones shifted, in the soft, bruised gristle of her flesh—- as she dug viciously into cold, rubbery skin, vertebrae slid and grated against vertebrae, she felt with her grasping fingers just where Pasha’s neck had snapped.

A splitting pain began to ring out in one side of Vanka’s skull. She tried to gasp for air, but there was nothing there, her chest a dull black void. Her ribs ached a cavernous ache, just as her left leg began to judder. The strength was ebbing out of her, the back of her head going heavy, one side of her face going slack. 

She collapsed backwards, hitting her head on the floor. She lay there in delirium, heavy as lead. Tree branches scraped across the dilapidated roof with a sound like the rattling of bones.

Pasha rose slowly from the table, carefully smoothing down her hair and her dress.

“That's enough, Miss.”

The breath rushed painfully back into Vanka’s chest. There appeared to her then to be crooked, crushed little brown wildflowers, growing up through the floorboards. All smelled of the tender, sleeping rot of dead grass. The room spun and tilted on its axis. There was someone pacing, or standing, very near to her. She was staring at the mud caked to the laces of his heavy black boots. 

Vanka lay there on the ground, blinking away the strange vision. She tried to lift her head, to pull herself up, and couldn’t— the centrifugal force of the spinning was fearfully strong, pinned her dead to the ground like a taxidermy butterfly.

“You said that I humiliated you, Vanka. I don’t think you know what that means.” Pasha said quietly, pacing the floor, her little heels making a hollow sound.

The cold seeped burning into Vanka’s skin.

“Your Mitya is an insect. You said it yourself. He would agree to the same. Your precious Mitya, Vanka? He humiliated me. You have never been humiliated, Vanka. You don’t know the meaning. You may be right, I’ve come to realize, that we are not so similar as I’d once imagined. You’ve never been made to beg for anything in all your life.” Her high little voice had gone thin with excitement, her breathing ragged.

Vanka’s eyes slid blearily closed, then open again. It was a thin, dim, horrible memory— soft silver rain fell in a whisper upon the garden, on the ground with mud down the front of her dress.

“He terrorized me. You never quite understood that, though I put it to you most openly. I appealed to you, to you , and no one else. Who else could I have turned to?” 

Vanka tried again to pull herself upright, and the whole world tipped over, a terrible rush of vertigo. Her back was against a wall, her eyes screwed closed, a man’s hot low voice, stinking of stale sweat and scotch.

I’ll thrash you, I’ll crush you like a fly, I’ll pound you to a bloody pulp, as in a mortar.

Vanka shuddered. A terrible, terrible shame, like that she had never felt in all her life, crawled like lice across her body. She saw again, in her mind, that powerful body laid out, the blood running from his split skull like port wine.

Pasha paced restlessly across the bare wooden floor. She wrung her wrists compulsively.

“What was I supposed to do? You laughed at me. You said it was only words.” 

Vanka pulled herself upright, breathing hard.

“Leave him. Leave him, Pasha. He’s had enough. I beg you, please, please just leave him.”

“I could have left him. To his fate. To his sentence. It’s what he deserves. I could have been pleased with that. But you meddled , Vanka.”

“Let him go. This is between us, let it be between us. Torture me all you want, if you want someone to torture.  Leave Mitya alone.” 

Pasha stared down at her a moment. Finally, she tipped her head to one side, frowning down at her.

“Playing the martyr doesn’t suit you, Vanka.”

“I’m no martyr. And neither are you.” 

“Siberia could have humbled him, I’m certain, but you took that chance away. See, you agree with me, in principle, always in principle . Those thoughts that you take such pains to shove down? I know them all. You oughtn’t be so afraid of it. What a beautiful thing you would be, if you allowed yourself the privilege of your own judgement. Oh, Vanka— I’m not asking anything of you I didn’t give to you myself.” 

Alyosha found Lise Khoklakova in her bedroom. The housemaid deposited him at the door with a fretful glance, even crossing herself before she scurried off, as if in great fear.

Lise was sitting in her wheelchair. She looked like a doll in her dollhouse. Her tiny round window, high upon the wall, had been shuttered tight, and she sat in near darkness, holding her stitching in her lap.

When Alyosha came in, holding his hat in his hands, she sat for a long while pretending not to notice him, focused solely on her stitching.

“Hello, Lise.” Alyosha said at last. 

She smiled, not looking up at him.

“Hello, Alyosha.”

“How are you, to-day?” He asked, eying her carefully.

“Is it really true, that they’re sending Mitya to Siberia? Mother is such a terrible gossip herself, but she thinks me morbid now, and won’t tell me a thing!” 

“I would rather we not speak about that, Lise. But, if it is really true no one has told you, then yes, it is all true, I am afraid.” 

Lise clapped both hands over her chest and cried out.

“Oh, how terrible! I’m sure all the young ladies who were so very present at the trial are positively tying themselves to the railroad tracks to protest for your handsome brother’s release!” She said, and giggled. She batted her eyes at him for affect. He stared at her.

“Like I said, Lise, please– let’s not speak of such things.”

Lise sighed an exaggerated sigh, picking up her stitching once again. She put in a few stitches emphatically in silence.

“You know, Alyosha, I really do like your sister.”
Alyosha’s brow furrowed.

“So she’s still been coming to visit you, then.”

“Oh, yes! She comes all the time now. We are getting to be such great friends!”

Alyosha paused. He seemed to be thinking, a certain darkness come over his face.

‘What… do you and Vanka talk about, Lise?” 

Lise giggled, peering up at him.

“No, silly, your other sister. Alyosha, why didn’t you ever tell me you had another sister? She is much more interesting than the rest of you! You’re all so stuffy all the time! She brings me sweets, sometimes, and she plays her guitar for me. I leave the window open, and she comes in very late. I’m always to tell her, When Katerina Ivanovna comes. Oh, the things we talk about! She tells me the most terrible stories. She says I am a very clever girl, and quite like she was at my age!”

Alyosha stared at her for a long moment.

“I don’t believe anything much larger than a bat might fit through that window there, Lise.” 

Lise smiled down at her lap. 

“You don’t know everything, Alexei Fyodorovitch.” 

She pressed her sewing needle into the pad of one slender finger, and watched a fat jewel of blood well up.

“Sometimes she brings Vanka with her, too. But of course, that’s in the daytime. Then we have to talk to Mama, too, of course, and that makes Vanka terribly nervous. And I’ll tell you this, too, though maybe I shouldn’t—- how we sit and we laugh and laugh at you! And how very silly you looked in that old cassock, and how very pious you are, even now! Is it true, you naughty boy, that you were such a bully when you were little? Shouldn’t a boy of nine or ten know that it’s not polite to go pulling on little girl’s hair and pushing her down in the dirt? Being younger’s no excuse, Alyosha, none at all, when she was so much smaller than you even then. You ought to be ashamed! How she hated you then Alyosha, and how she hates you even now! Oh, my dear Alyosha, and just imagine, I used to think you such a saint! You were never like that with me. But you’ve got your sins, too, don’t you? Only very well hidden.” 

Alyosha sat very still, his gaze riveted on Lise. For a long time he was silent. He looked away from her and passed a hand over his mouth.

“I’m glad to hear you’re making friends, Lise.” He said, distinctly, very quietly, and got up and left without another word.

Chapter Text

At just a little past eight o’clock in the evening, the lodger on the uppermost floor summoned for the maid, Polenka.

She hardly opened up at all, just slipped one slender hand through the crack of the door, sending her at haste to Grushenka with a note and an over-generous tip.

Polenka spared a glance over her shoulder in the entryway, hesitating just half a moment, before she carefully unfolded the note, holding it close to her face in the spare, glimmering light. It was nothing remarkable— only a simple request, made most respectfully by the mysterious Miss Vanka Fyodorovna in a few short lines, whether Grushenka may hold the carriage for her— she’d reconsidered, and would come by directly.

Polenka was back, flush in the face from the winter's chill, within half an hour— delivering quite an ecstatic note from Grushenka, insisting that Vanka Fyodorovna should stay put: Grushenka would come by to fetch her with the carriage in another hour. 

Grushenka, in fact, did not arrive until more than two hours later, and at nearly eleven. But Pasha was glad for the extra time— she drank off two little glasses of Vodka, brushed her clothes three times over, rearranged once again the torn-up scraps of paper upon the writing desk, and took  very great care in deliberating what shoes to wear, finally settling for red over black.

She had never in all her life touched drink before she died. Well, save for just once, in her final, calamitous summer. It had come as a great surprise to her, the bottle of brandy stashed so shamefully away in Vanka’s writing desk. To think of Vanka, proper Vanka, so very sensible all the time, abhoring Mitya his drunken revelry, drinking alone in her room— it was absurd. It had given her a wicked thrill, to know Miss Vanka's great secret, and a greater one still, to lift the poison to her lips and drink deep of that secret well.

Didn’t people very often go on drinking bouts after someone died? She knew that much. 

What could it matter to her now, if she looked a fool? That was, perhaps, a tremendous idea— let her play the fool. All the better that Vanka should look a drunken fool, Fyodor Pavlovich’s daughter after all. 

On the evening she left for Mokroe, she packed her suitcase neatly, and resolved in her mind to make a very great mess.

The night was a black tunnel of wind. When she made her way out to the waiting carriage at last, Grushenka was in quite a state of agitation, dressed all in black, as if in mourning. She grasped her hand quite tightly, just as the carriage lurched to a start. Rakitin sat beside her, uncharacteristically silent. 

“Oh, how glad I am, that you changed your mind, Vanka! I’ve been so frightfully nervous, to go back to that awful place…” 

Pasha blinked at her.

“Only for a day or two, didn’t you say? Take heart, perhaps we might even have a bit of fun.” 

Grushenka smiled, almost tearfully, pressing Pasha's exquisitely gloved, rather limp hand.

She had expected in full to despise the bitch. Much to her own surprise, and in spite of herself, she found her interesting. People had never been so interesting, when she was alive. Grushenka was earnest in all things, even or especially in her foul moods, a biting wit, and, best of all, never boring. It quite suited her, Grushenka’s ability to hold a conversation all on her own, with only the slightest prodding— it was easy to get caught up in the maelstrom of her words, quite easy to be agreeable with her, drawn into her confidence by proximity, by her desperate longing for a proper friend. Pasha thought she could manage that, or at least, was not doing too poor a job at nodding along. Though it was somewhat unclear to her even now, Pasha had gathered enough from the torn-up notes that foolish Vanka had left in the wastebasket: Grushenka was no fool, a woman among men. She had a certain sum, secret, as far as Pasha could discern, even from Mitya, hidden away in Mokroe. And she was now most anxious to fetch it. The idea that Grushenka would confide in her what even Mitya didn’t know was fantastic, almost stupefying. How could it be true at once that the woman was not a fool, and yet, she spilled her guts as if sick to do it, at the slightest provocation? All to someone who hardly had to spare a word at all.

Grushenka, and her secrets, too, remained uncharacteristically silent on the way to Mokroe, and even slept with her face leaned against one window, the moonlight washing her black hair blue. 

Pasha stared unabashedly at Rakitin in the darkness a long time, trying to assess him, but he was still very pointedly avoiding her gaze. He dug around in his pocket for the dozenth time, fishing a cigarette out of his silver case.

Pasha kicked him viciously in the shin. 

He startled, and when he gaped at her, his cigarette stuck ridiculously upon his lower lip.

“Can’t you leave off with that? Look at that, Grusha’s already fainted dead away from your fumes , you beast. Stay, what’s wrong with you? You’ve had not a word to say to me, you coward.” She whispered.

He stared at her in astonishment.

“You really may be the devil in the form of a girl, Vanka Fyodorovna.” He said softly at last.

This wrought a great grin from her, her eyes flashing, and he smiled in return, lighting his cigarette. She pulled herself to the edge of her little seat.

“Give me one of those, then, if you insist. Why shouldn’t I? I’ll stink of it anyway, sitting next to you.” 

He raised one eyebrow, nearly sneering.

“Why? So you can wake her, coughing like a chimney-sweep, as you do?”

“Sure, if you like. She’s much better company.” 

He rolled his eyes as if humoring a child, fishing out his cigarette case and passing one off to her. He was fumbling about for a match when she sat forward and placed a hand upon his knee, pressing the end of her cigarette against his, and puffing until it lit. 

He went dead still, looking into her eyes as if searching for something. She sat back in her seat with a quiet smile, sliding open the window and blowing a long stream of smoke into the night air.

“Do you know what Alyosha thinks of you? I mean, honest to God, what he told me?” Rakitin asked.

Pasha rolled her eyes, stifling a cough with her hand on her chest.

“ Alyosha, Alyosha, Alyosha … it’s all Alyosha with you, isn’t it? Shall I give you the pearls back, so you might gift them to him instead? There’s no shame in it, your secret is quite safe with me, I assure you. It’s plain to see you’re quite enamored.” 

Rakitin sat back and smiled, shaking his head.

“You really are disgusting, do you know that? It’s no wonder the rumors that fly about you, when you talk like that. I should be embarrassed to be seen with you .” 

“Oh, please do enlighten me, about these rumors. I want every sordid detail.” 

Rakitin assessed her with his eye, a strange smile still upon his lips, and sat forward.

“Is it true, for example, that they only sent you to a boy’s school to keep you away from the other girls?” 

Pasha grinned, dragging on her cigarette.

“You would just love that, wouldn’t you, you masturbator?”

Rakitin shook his head, staring at her in plain-faced fascination, almost with awe.

“My God you are foul. I don’t think I’ve ever met a man so foul.”

“Is that all? Yes, you’re very disappointing, aren’t you? I’ve heard that one before, I’m afraid.” 

“Oh, no, I’ve better ones, about you. Things I wouldn’t dare repeat, in the presence of a lady.”

“Speak plainly, Misha— what two ladies discuss in private is no one’s business but their own.”

“You really want to know? Don’t you know, once something’s gotten into that rotten head of yours, there’s no getting it out again? I’d shudder to contribute to that cesspool you’ve got in there. I’d just hate to be liable for the corruption of a fine young lady.”

She stared at him, thoroughly unimpressed.

“I would be most surprised, Misha, if you knew anything at all that I don’t.” 

He leaned in very, very near then. An excited, agitated gleam caught in his eye in the soft darkness. 

“Alright, then, I’ll play, if you’d like. What in the hell was going on with you and that little maid-thing you used to have? My God, what was her name? Offed herself to get away from your harrassment, the poor little wretch, to hear them tell it.”

Pasha’s eyes went very wide, and she choked on a puff of smoke, sputtering, failing to stifle a great cough as she started, raucously, to laugh.

Grushenka stirred, then, lifting her head, and Pasha promptly threw her cigarette out the window, doubled over, weathering a guttural coughing fit. 

Grushenka looked between them, bleary-eyed, as if out of some joke.

“Nevermind her, just having one of her nervous fits. Female hysteria. You know it well.” Rakitin said, most earnestly.

“Homosexual.” Pasha choked.

“The way you two carry on! Like children!” Grushenka cried. She nodded at the cigarette in Rakitin’s hand. “Give me one of those, too, then, if the both of you are going at it.” 

It was very late, by the time their little party arrived at the inn in Mokroe. Rakitin, the picture of chivalry, extended his hand and helped Grushenka first down from the carriage, then retracted his hand from Pasha at the last second, right behind Grushenka’s back, fixing her with a sour, blank expression right in the eye. She could not resist the wry smile that broke from her, and jumped down from the carriage, sticking out her tongue at him. He dropped his head and swiped at his nose, concealing his grin.

Grushenka had sent ahead to Trifon Borrissovich, the innkeeper, to let him know they would be coming, most strictly on only business this time. Though he wasn’t pleased, she had offered such a sum as he could not refuse— understanding, of course, that Mitya would not be present this time. He received them at the front of the little inn with broad arms crossed, acquiesced with curt nod to Grusha’s request that they would require one more room than previously accounted for in her letter, and rushed at once to have it done up.

It was terribly warm and loud inside the inn. There was a large group of men, playing an impassioned game of cards, in a little room off to one side. The table was laden with paper notes and emptied glasses shimmering in the thin warm candlelight, the men puffing on pipes, swilling vodka and punch, shouting and staggering about. There was a rather pretty young man in the lobby, sitting, quite nearly asleep, in an overstuffed armchair. He raised his head, spotted Rakitin, and went wide-eyed immediately, springing up from his seat. He and Rakitin embraced in a brotherly, vigorous handshake.

“Pyotr Fomich, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Grushenka said, rather faintly. In the sudden light of the tavern, Pasha could make out the deep pools of gray beneath her saddened eyes, a bruising sleeplessness. The young man turned himself to Pasha then, and bowed his head, smiling at her with a big, open smile. He had a pleasant, boyish face, a mop of shining golden hair, and was dressed rather stylishly.

“I was not expecting to see you, my friends! What brings you to Mokroe?”

Grushenka opened her mouth and faltered, just a half-second, and Pasha took the lead, linking her arm in Grushenka’s.

“Some most urgent business. You see, we were not planning to come, only I got myself in such a bind... Grusha dear is helping me out, you see. She’s got a head for business that I don’t, I’m afraid. I won’t bore you with the details— in fact, I wouldn’t even if I understood them myself.” 

Grushenka laughed, placing her hand upon Pasha’s arm, and Kalganov laughed, too. Pasha noticed the dimples on his face. 

“Will you be joining the festivities?” Kalganov asked.

“Oh, I must be getting to bed, I’m afraid, I’ve such an awful headache…” Grushenka said. 

“I don’t fault you for it, I’m afraid all these people are most terribly dull. A hand with your bags?”

“We would much appreciate it.” Grushenka agreed.

Trifon Borrisovich met them on the stairs and took half of the bags from Kalganov while Rakitin stood nearby quite uselessly. Trifon Borissovich was a large man, leading the way upstairs, speaking over one broad shoulder, apologetically, that the last of the rooms was still being done up. 

Pasha trailed rather listlessly behind, and caught a moment on the landing. The walls were a sad, deep blue in the dim, the carpet ragged. She was very still, standing, struck still, in a pool of shadow that the light did not touch. The door to one of the rooms stood less than half-open, aglow in a wash of soft light. She stared inside, rather wide-eyed, at the innkeepers daughters, dressed as housemaids— they were busy at work dressing the bed. The sheet billowed between them, caught upon the air, for just a moment—- it flew up and obscured both their thin, wan, plain faces, before floating back down upon the poor, sagging little bed. When it did, the younger of the girls was staring at her, right in the eye. Pasha startled back a little, dropping her gaze to the ground, and wandered forth into the little drawing room across the hall, smoothing down her skirts.

Grushenka, tired from the journey, plopped into an overstuffed armchair, her satin and taffeta skirt billowing up. She stifled a yawn with one small, chubby hand, and Kalganov deposited their luggage nearby. Trifon Borrissovich was nowhere to be seen. Pasha paced into the room, and stopped by her suitcase. Her eyes flitted from Grushenka, to Rakitin, and then lingered on Kalganov.

“Shall we have a nightcap?” 

“Oh, I’m sure it can’t hurt, can it?” Grushenka sighed, gazing quite sadly at the dusty blue curtains with her chin resting on her hand.

“Shall I send for something?” Kalganov asked at once.

Pasha cast him a sly smile, flicking open the clasp of her bag.

“A lady never comes ill-prepared, Pyotr Fomich.” She said, pronouncing every syllable of his name, and produced a bottle of spirits, the liquid glinting soft golden in the low light.

She lined the little sherry glasses along the table and passed the bottle, most offhandedly to Kalganov. He poured our four little glasses as Pasha settled herself in a chair, dragging the little overstuffed footstool nearer her with the clawed heel of her little red boot.

It was her he went to first, placing the cut crystal glass in her gloved hand. She looked up at him, and smiled. 

“And what do you do, Pyotr Fomich?” 

He passed off the other two glasses to Grushenka, and settled down into the last of the chairs, crossing one leg over the other.

“I am studying divinity. That’s how I became acquainted with Rakitin, at the monastery.” 

“I see. Atheist?” 

Grushenka stifled a wicked smile with the back of her hand, despite herself, and Kalganov’s mouth dropped open, as if made bashful by the bluntness of her question.

Pasha looked innocently between them.

“Oh, is that really such a scandalous question, in our present company? You ought to hear the way Rakitin speaks, in the presence of ladies.” She said, and spared a glance at him.

He sat obstinately, and did not take the bait, puffing at his cigarette rather sullenly, his glass untouched. 

“Agnostic, perhaps, shall we say.” Kalganov said, rather shyly. “And you, Miss?” 

Pasha smiled, considering this.

“Devout atheist, all my life, I confess it.” 

Kalganov smiled, narrowing his eyes good-naturedly at her.

“One doesn’t so often meet a lady atheist.” 

Grushenka sipped delicately from her glass.

“I daresay you’ve never met a lady like our dear Vanka. She is University educated, in Moscow, didn’t you know? Alongside some of the brightest young men of her generation. One of the very first of her creed.” 

Pasha smiled unpleasantly, swirling the drink in her glass.

“Oh, please, let’s speak of something else. Pyotr Fomich, what brings you to Mokroe?”

Kalganov looked surprised to be put on the spot. There was a boyish flush to his face, and he brushed away a lock of golden hair absently.

“My uncle is here on some business— my other uncle. He doesn’t make it to the province often, you see, so I thought I ought to come and show him around... Someone ought to, at least, lest the first cardcheat he meets win the shoes off his very feet. I daresay I’m not doing a very good job… God only knows what’s going on down there now, after the first few rounds I couldn’t stand to watch anymore. He’s bought a new revolver he’s terribly fond of, some blasted illegal American contraption, I think it is, that he found somewhere in Germany... He means to take us out shooting to-morrow. That is, I suppose, if he’s still got it by to-morrow.” He said, and smiled.

“Oh, an American gun, how nasty!” Pasha laughed.

Kalganov sipped from his glass, and looked up at Pasha.

“You ought to come with us.” 

Pasha looked at Grushenka and grinned.

Rakitin stood, then, and without a word he sank his glass entire in one deep drag and left the room, hefting his bag without turning to say goodnight to anyone. 

Pasha sipped her spirits and made an effort not to smile.

Grushenka watched him go, but addressed Kalganov with the practiced manners of a lady, smiling nervously.

“Oh, I’m not sure… we’re here on business, as I told you. And I rather hate guns…” Grushenka said softly.

“It’s not so frightening, I assure you. We have some great fun. And why not, two modern ladies like yourselves?” 

“I’ve important business, directly in the morning, with Vanka.”

She cast a glance at Pasha and bit her lip. “But, I suppose, if we should be back before lunch and see you all then… we might accompany you.”

Trifon Borrisovitch interrupted their rather miserable little soiree, just then, with a pointed, lingering glance at the bottle on the table. He informed them, with a rather curt glance, that the last of their rooms was ready, and promptly took his leave of them.

Pasha sank the rest of her glass, passed a glance between the two of them.

“I believe we’ve been sent to bed.”

It was no more than half an hour when Pasha, already terribly bored without need of sleep, was in the hall again, without gloves nor hat, and stocking-footed. She considered, for a long moment there in the hall, trying Rakitin, and even stopped to listen at his door a second— but heard nothing. At last she slunk to the door at the end of the hall, rapping softly, three times. 

Grushenka answered the door in her dressing gown, her beautiful black hair trailing loose down her shoulders.

“Grusha, dear, I’ve come to trouble you for a mirror, my room doesn’t have one.” 

Grushenka cast a glance over her shoulder, biting her lip a little bit.

“Oh, come in then.” She said at last.

Pasha entered, and plopped down at the dressing table, the poor little upholstered stool squealing beneath her weight. Grushenka hovered nervously by the bed until Pasha turned halfway around, looking strangely at her, the almost guilty look on her round, lovely face.

Finally, she noticed the large silver flask that sat upright on the nightstand. 

“I’m not making a habit of it, I swear. I’m only so terribly nervous.” Grushenka said, sitting fretfully on the edge of the bed.

“I’ve not said a word.” Pasha said blithely, turning towards the filthy mirror, and setting to work on her hair.

Grushenka took up her flask and drank, then laid back on the bed.

“Just imagine, what Mitya would think of me.” She said miserably.

“I daresay the two of you make quite a pair.” Pasha said, a hairpin clasped between her teeth.

Grushenka sat up, stared at her a moment, and threw a dusty, needlepointed pillow at her from across the room.

“Oh, don’t be horrible, Vanka! And what is with you , you infernal girl, inviting us to go bloody shooting blasted guns to-morrow?” She cried.

Pasha smiled.

“I only think you could use a bit of fun, Grusha, that’s all. And as for inviting us, that was all Kalganov.” 

Grushenka laid back on her elbows, smiling at her.

“Vanka the altruist, is it? Only looking out for me? And who is this Kalganov , I thought it was Pyotr Fomich to you?” 

Pasha smiled.

Grushenka passed her hands over her face and groaned.

“Just look what you’ve done to my poor cousin! Who do you suppose has to deal with that, when you slink off to do whatever the hell it is that you do, when I’m not seeing you?”

“Oh, do spare me, Grusha, a woman can only listen to so much on Schiller. I only spent an evening with him, half an evening, if you want to know—- and he’s been following me around like a poor little puppy ever since. Really, I could kick him sometimes. I can’t stand it any longer, I mean it, we ought to put him in a box and ship him back to Madame Kholakova…” 

Grushenka stifled a giggle with her hand.

She got up from the bed then, drank deeply once more from her flask, and wandered over to the dressing table.

She leaned her cheek against the top of Pasha’s head. Their pale faces, leaned together, stared back at them through the green film on the mirror, the crack splitting Grushenka’s sad, pretty face in two.

“Oh, you wicked, evil girl. How very dearly I am going to miss you.” Grushenka said thoughtfully. Pasha tried not to make a face. 

“Please, Grusha. I don’t take well to sentimentality, so kindly spare me.” 

“How is it you are so different with me now, than when we met? I see you one day, so serious, all buttoned up to the neck in your suits with your glasses so high on your nose, so very far from me all the time—- and then you come to me like this. I’ve never seen anything like it. I daresay you are quite two people, Vanka. Where on earth have you been hiding this other self?”

Pasha looked at her through the mirror. For a long time, she was silent. Her face was dead still, nearly inanimate, underwater somewhere deep in the green-brass murk of the mirror. Grushenka’s brow furrowed, just a little bit, and something soft and quiet, something like fear, passed through her eyes.

Somewhere downstairs there was a great bumping noise and a roar of raucuous, delirious laughter. The trance was broken, Pasha was animate once again, glancing down, and smiling. For too long a while still, she was very silent, carefully pinning up each tendril of her hair.

“Maybe, it’s quite possible, I’ve been somewhere in here, like this, just as I am now, all along. And it’s only that I never paid me any notice until now.”

Grushenka stared at her, her blue eyes bright in the dim. She picked a pin from the dressing table thoughtfully, and took up a lock of Pasha’s hair, satin as cold water, weaving it most delicately into place around the hairpin.

“You are a very, very strange creature, Vanka Fyodorovna.”

Chapter Text

Grushenka came to Pasha’s door early the next morning, looking pale in her fur-trimmed overcoat, hat arranged carefully upon her shining black curls. 

Pasha wore a bright, lurid red gown— black velvet bow adorning the throat, a long black overcoat, trimmed in velvet. Her hat perched precariously atop her head. Grushenka fixed her with a prim smile as though preparing for battle. For a second, her gaze lingered over Pasha’s shoulder, fell upon the little dressing table and mirror there. Pasha fixed her with a strange, wooden smile, and pulled the door closed behind her back.

Rakitin waited for them outside, stolid and silent in the morning fog. 

“Remind me, please, who it is we’re meeting.”

“Just an acquaintance, that’s all. I’ll go up quite alone.” Grushenka said sullenly. Pasha watched her a second. No one spoke on the journey, which was not long. Already, Pasha could feel herself growing annoyed. Grushenka looked out the window and sighed. Her clear blue eyes looked watery and sad in the rushing light.

Finally, they arrived at some little business or other, the darkened windows quite unmarked. It looked like a bank, some sort of stuffy little civil office— the clerk looked up at them through a pair of little moonish spectacles, and upon Grushenka announcing herself, rushed to fetch her upstairs at once.

Rakitin sat down on a little chaise, crossing one long leg over the other. Pasha stood for a second and then sat down in a chair opposite him, already bored. He lit up a cigarette and pretended not to notice her. Pasha sighed. He did not look up.

She sat forward in her chair, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Who are you hanging around with, that tells you such wretched little things about me?”

Rakitin said nothing, not even looking at her.

“Oh, come out with it. Are you really so sore over last night?” 

“I haven’t said anything to you.” Rakitin said flatly, taking a drag of his cigarette.

“Oh, leave off. I’m so terribly sick of you!” Pasha said, with real disgust, standing from her chair.

The clerk peered surreptitiously at them over his spectacles.

She pushed through the door, out onto the dull, rather muddy street, leaving behind that stuffy little room. 

Just across the street and on the corner, there was a shop that caught her eye, and she crossed the cobblestone road with her skirt in her hand.

The shop bell dinged when she walked in, but there was no one at the counter. All was perfectly quiet and still. The sound of her heels echoed on the floor.

Dress forms and pale cloth mannequins lined every wall, dressed in shimmering gowns and intricate, sculptural little hats, dripping in jewelry and flowers. It was warm in the shop, dust wheeled through the air over everything. 

Her eyes flitted along the beautiful rolls of fabric stacked up to the ceiling upon high shelves— glowing mossy velvets and shot silk that shone in the light, ruffles of gathered lace like wedding cake, all that finery that pulled the breath from her lungs and made her ache and swell with shame and burning envy all her life. 

A potbellied little man, with luminous brown eyes, emerged from the back room. His white hair and moustache were finely pomaded. He was dressed impressively, in a perfectly tailored suit and a waistcoat of fine green corduroy, the chain of a golden pocketwatch gleaming from his breastpocket. He smiled kindly and rushed to greet her.

“Good morning, Miss.”

She turned around, nearly startled. She smiled at him and nodded woodenly, almost shyly. 

There had been no shops like this one, this fine, in Skotoprigonyevsk for a long time. But at one time, there had been. She remembered being very small, walking hand in hand with Marfa Ignatyevna to the market, her eyes firmly fixed on that glowing window. 

She turned her back to him, pacing among the dress forms. She traced her fingertips, feather-light, along a billowing sleeve adorned in tiny velvet bows, green-and-cream colored pinstripe in silk.

“Have you an event coming up, Miss?”
“What event?” She murmured.

“Oh, any event. I meant it only by way of making conversation— we do it all, Miss, even for fancy-dress balls and the like.”

Pasha hardly heard him, dragging her fingertip along the skirt of a tall mannequin, exquisitely swathed in satin, pink as a freshly gut fish opening itself softly for the knife, a long train and full skirt, full billowing sleeves, trimmed in powder-blue lace.

When the clerk spoke next, he was quite near, just at her elbow.

“Oh, that is one of our very finest, Miss. Inspired by a trip I made abroad with my wife, the first time we saw Versailles. That very fabric was sold to me in Paris, I say I’d never seen anything like it. We bought by the roll, that year, and had quite an odyssey of getting it all back to Russia!” 

“And these are designs of your own making?”
“Oh, yes, Miss. Myself and my wife and our daughters have owned this place a great many years. All of our garments are made to specificity, by us, and only mere suggestions—- we can alter anything you like.”
She turned around, and stared at the man just a second too long. She finally cleared her throat, spoke quietly.

“I’ve not much time today, I’m afraid, but I should come back very soon, and place a very large order with you. Pull this one for me, if you would be so kind. Might I take your card?” She asked.

“Certainly, Miss, certainly! I shall pull anything, anything you like.” The shopkeeper made haste to fumble beneath the counter for a card and pressed her hand when he handed it to her, his skin like paper against her glove.

“I urge you, Miss, do send ahead for when you mean to come, and I shall clear my entire day to see to you!”

Her face went flush, and she smiled.

“Oh, please do. That is most kind of you, sir, and shall be entirely worth your while.”

“May I take down your name, Miss?” 

She paused just a moment then, for long enough that he looked back up at her, his pen hovering.

“You may call me Pasha.” 

He looked up at her from the pad of paper he scrawled on, as if in waiting.

“Just Pasha. If you must.”

Pasha dashed back across the street with his card tucked in her glove, and pushed through the door too hard. 

It was strange, the way at that very moment, Grushenka burst through the door opposite her. The same man as before had his arm thrown quite familiarly around her shoulder. She was smiling, and laughing too loudly at something he’d said, but looked rather faint. 

The man kissed her hand with a hearty laugh, and Grushenka left him in a flurry of pleasantries, taking Pasha by the arm and quite spinning her out the door to the waiting carriage.

Pasha noticed the fat envelope tucked beneath her arm in her fine black shawl, Grushenka clambered up into the carriage without a hand from anyone, and the valet hardly waited for Rakitin to get in before they jolted off at Grushenka’s signal.

They rode in silence a moment before Grushenka sighed, reaching for her little black pocketbook.

“Avert your eyes, Mikhail, for I’ll not take a scolding from you to-day, not on any account.” She said, and pulled the little silver flask from her pocketbook, drinking deeply.

“A job well done.” Pasha said, and held out her hand. Grushenka passed her the flask, wiping her lips delicately with her little monogrammed handkerchief, flashing a smile at her. The flask was whiskey, strong and foul, set Pasha’s nose burning.

Rakitin turned towards the window with a little huff not unlike disgust, and Grushenka and Pasha met each other’s eyes. Grushenka bit her lip to stifle a wild, inappropriate laugh.

They were very nearly back at the inn, when a little carriage coming up the road pulled up aside them and stopped, the valet halting the horses and holding out a gloved hand.

Kalganov’s golden head popped out of the window and he grinned at them. Pasha quite pounced over Grushenka, their faces side by side in the window.

“Good morning, ladies! Are you headed off on your business, or returning already?”
“Returning! Grusha was wonderful, you know, just a remarkable head for business, this one! And you?” Pasha called back cheerily. The feather on her hat poked Grushenka in the mouth and she made a face, pushing her away.

“Returning, you say? That’s capital luck, we’re only just setting out!” 

“We will be out directly!” Pasha called back, and slammed the little window shut without further word.

“Oh, now why did you say that?” Grushenka whined.

“Come now, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“And what am I to do with this!” Grushenka cried, showing her the envelope.

“Oh, I don’t know, shove it down your stocking! We’ve an American gun to shoot, Grusha.”

Rakitin, sitting nearest the door, flung it open without a word and sat obstinately in his seat, not moving to get out.

“What, Mikhail, you’ll not be joining us?”

He looked up at her hard then.

“I’ve little interest in your adventures, I’m afraid.” He said.

“Well, there you are, leave it with this one, then.” Pasha said.

Grushenka sighed wearily and passed the envelope to Rakitin, trying to meet his eye. 

Pasha jumped down and gave Grushenka her hand before the Valet could.

It was a poor little caravan Kalganov and his party had rented, and the wood creaked when he gave each of them a hand up. Pasha straightened her little hat as she sat on the shabby, wooden bench seat, and Grushenka next to her.

They came to a great barren field, stalks of dead grass straggling through the crust of snow. The winter sun above was bright and warm, blown over by a rolling reel of brooding clouds. 

The valet and the servants rushed to set up a number of little wooden targets, riddled with holes. There were two other men from the inn with the little shooting party, who stood about Kalganov’s uncle, laughing their bellowing gentlemen’s laughs.

Kalganov’s uncle stood by the carriage and produced a little wooden box. He carefully lifted off the lid, delicately lifting out a wicked-looking little revolver, with a very long barrel that shone dully in the light, the butt a dark burnished wood polished to shining.

“A Colt Paterson I am told, quite a new invention, the seller told me these are quite rare, even in America. It is quite possible this is the only one on Russian soil.” 

He cleared the chamber and handed the gun, much to her surprise, directly to Grushenka. She balked a little, holding it tentatively in her small, gloved hands, like a dead thing.

Kalganov’s uncle laughed heartily, and she passed it back to him, smiling nervously. He turned and loaded it swiftly, with a flourish, and looked up at each of them through his bushy eyebrows. 

“And now, ladies, I shall ask you to stand back a few paces, and I will show you how it’s done.” 

He positioned himself before the little wooden target with one hand tucked into his vest across his chest, straightened well up, and took his aim. He fired a bullseye directly, at his first shot.

His gentleman friend shot next, and the two of them back and forth several times, before finally it was passed over to Kalganov.

He reloaded it expertly, his uncle watching his every move with scrutiny, standing behind him with a meaty hand clasped upon his shoulder.

Kalganov looked good with a gun in his hand.

He stood tall, with his shoulders thrown back, and shot one-handed, like his uncle. His face in profile went still and serious, and he took a breath, going very still, and hit the target three times in a row, just a little off of center. 

Kalganov’s uncle clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“There, there! Your aim is getting better already, far better, would you look at that!” He chuckled paternally. 

Grushenka declined quite politely her turn to shoot, even with some goading, and finally their company gave up on her, greatly tickled by the idea of shooting guns with such ladies, and finally, turned their attention to Pasha.

She pulled off her gloves and stepped up in front of the little target, and Kalganov’s uncle placed the gun in her hands. She hefted it again, holding it up, pointing it.

“Just like that, that’s capital, capital stance, my dear! Now, you must mind the kickback, my dear, mind the kickback, it’s a right devil, I tell you!” He repeated, grinning.

She wished silently that he would shut up and let her focus, straightening her arm and trying to align herself towards the target.

She took a breath and shot, firing wildly off to one side and kicking up dirt, several metres off from the target.

Their quiet laughter chagrined her, despite herself.

“A good try, my dear, certainly a capital attempt! Have another try.”

She took a breath and straightened herself up again, her arm buzzing, her ear ringing. She shot again, and it went even further afield. 

Kalganov was quite close to her, before she knew he was there.

“May I?”

She blinked, holding the gun out to him, and he placed a hand on her shoulder, gesturing towards the target.

“It’s the kickback that’s getting you, you’ve got smaller hands. Try it with both hands, like this.” He said, and his hand was over hers, warm in the chill.

“Feet together.” He said, tapping her boot with his. She did as he said, and both his arms were around her now, his hands on her hands. 

“Ready your aim.” He said quietly, and his voice sent a chill down her, so close and so warm next to her ear, still buzzing and ringing wildly. The wind tossed her curls into her eyes and across his cheek. He pretended not to notice that her hands were shaking. He leaned his head over her shoulder, his eye in line with hers, and closed his eye in concentration.

“Bring it just to your eye, that’s it, and your eye to the target, that’s right. Keep your arms straight, that’s good— and just breathe.” 

She drew a long breath, and he did it with her.

“And fire?” She murmured.

“And fire.” He said, and nodded once.

She shot straight through the outer edge of the target. The men applauded her and she smiled, turning to look at them. Grushenka smiled broadly at her, and Kalganov stepped just away, standing right behind her.

She turned and lined up the shot just as he’d shown her, took three deep breaths through her nose, and fired. 

She shot a near bullseye, then, clipping right through the center of the target. Grushenka cheered wildly for her and the men joined in, she turned with her hair whipping against her face to the little shooting party and grinned. Her ears were ringing so wildly she felt as if she could lose her balance. When she passed off the gun, still laughing, Kalganov kept stealing little glances at her. 

“Oh, hand it over, then.” Grushenka said suddenly.

Pasha turned to her, the wind whipping at both of them, catching and toying with the coats and hair, the light rushing over the landscape, dark to light. And held out to her the gun.

Her black coat caught in the wind and fluttered. Kalgnanov stood at her elbow, and she turned just halfway, only to glance at him, a twitch of annoyance to her lip.

“Oh, I’ve shot before, Pyotr Fomich. It’s only been a while.” 

He blinked with some surprise, and put up both his hands, falling back to watch. Grushenka straightened up and leveled the gun.

She stood like that for a very long moment, just breathing. Some of the party exchanged little glances between each other. The expression on her face was total, a grim set to her soft jaw. Finally, she closed her eyes for just a second longer than a blink, and fired. 

The little target, utterly riddled with holes by then, tipped over. It smoked dully in the dirty gray snow. Grushenka turned, her eyes fell on Pasha, and she smiled.

What followed the little shooting expedition was a very lively dinner at the inn, where they were joined by an impossible procession of faces and names that Pasha was introduced to, and forgot instantly. Her head had begun to ache dully, a dagger at her temple, tripping and doubling and starring vision. 

Dark fell very early, and the little banquet room glowed with candles, the strange low light glinting on everyone’s faces like a row of icons in a church.

Kalganov’s uncle held court with his gentleman friends at the head of the table, leaving Pasha, Grushenka, and Kalganov to their own devices at the far end of the table. Grushenka ate heartily, and drank even heavier when they brought champagne, until even her little button nose was pink, and she was talking quite animatedly, and kept grasping Pasha’s arm. The room was warm and blown out with drink, and every time Pasha brought the little champagne glass to her lips, she smelled the gunpowder on her hands through her glove, and she drank more than she ought to, for the pleasure of smelling it again.

By this time they were well into a procession of little desserts, coffee and brandy, champagne, caramelized pears, little dishes of ice cream, vodka and hot punch— and the sugar made her feel just slightly sick.

Grushenka was telling a very long tale about a business deal gone wrong, but she seemingly kept getting the long list of persons involved names wrong, and Kalganov was making a valiant effort to listen, nodding along and leaning in across Pasha, who sat quite silently in between them. His eyes were dim and cloudy with drink, and he had a stupid little smile on his handsome face.

She looked down at her hands, and vaguely thought—- are we dreaming?

The tavernkeeper’s daughter kept rushing in and out. She had been waiting upon them all evening, setting out the courses upon the table, rushing to fetch bottles and whisk away finished dishes or empty the ashtrays.

Pasha could not stop staring at her.

Her white-kerchiefed head and the rough cotton of her dress. The alert and calculating eyes that skittered away from every gaze. Her rough, freckled hands upon the tablecloth as she bustled in and out. Her narrow little face, lit up in the candlelight like an oil painting. 

Grushenka was clinging to her arm now, going quite on and on at length about something, but none of the words reached her, until the moment she stopped talking.

Pasha turned to face her then, blinking, her face quite blank. Grushenka bit her lip, looking away.

“I daren’t say, no, not here. Not here. No, I daren’t at all, forgive me for even starting in, saying anything at all— it’s so terribly base of me.”

Kalganov was gone from his seat, attending some matter with his uncle at the head of the table, and the cacophony of voices cupped her ear like a shell, a dull mute roar that flattened out the thoughts in her head. 

“What?”

Grushenka said nothing, turning her attention back to folding down the edge of her handkerchief, guiltily avoiding her eyes.

“Out with it. I insist. Speak plainly.” Pasha said, and the clip in her voice made Grushenka look up at her.

She sighed, looking down at the handkerchief that she folded over and over in her hands.

“I will tell you first off, Vanka, I am as good as married to a convict. His innocence is quite beside the matter— he is a convict all the same. Though he is an innocent man, and none could convict his soul, none but us believe in him, in his innocence, and so he is a convict, you see, all the same. You would not imagine the looks that have been cast at me. I hardly walk anywhere anymore, and never alone, I tell you, I always take my carriage now. I thought I was quite used to it, to the way they all speak about me, but now… now I feel quite differently, and I know I was a fool when I thought their words and their looks could never harm me anymore. I tell you all this, Vanka, because I may surprise you now, and I should like for you to understand me. For I want you to know that should it be true, I should not care. You are my friend, my very dear friend, and I should not care at all.”

Pasha stared at her.

Grushenka averted her eyes, sighed helplessly, and dropped her voice to a very low whisper.

“It is only that I have wondered… whether or not it’s true, what they say of you and Katerina Ivanovna.” 

Pasha blinked at her.

In her mind, so powerfully it struck her blind, she saw a dream. A flash of candlelight upon an ivory satin skirt, brushing against her thigh, the bodice of a woman pressed to her own chest, soft ringlets of golden curls, a feeling of constriction in her chest, as though her heart was going to explode and come pouring forth out of her mouth. The kind of delight that would make you think of driving a scabbard through your heart, that fierce, that hot, that unendurable— the feeling of a woman to another woman.

Her face went suddenly very flush, recalling quite a different memory— the long train of a pretty dress pressed against her pelvis, heart beating frantically and pretty flushed and freckled neck so very near her open mouth.

She sat back a moment in her seat, going hot all over from the strength of that memory, of two memories held in tandem.

“Myself and Katerina Ivanovna.” She repeated, and took up her glass again. She took a sip, and stared down into the little crystal prism.

“I daresay, Grusha, that absolutely everything you’ve heard about me is true.”

Grushenka’s blue eyes went very, very wide then, and for a split second, with a violent flip of her stomach, Pasha wondered whether she’d made a horrible mistake.

But Grushenka only nodded, not saying anything, and reached out and pressed her hand. Grushenka was, at last, about to say something, when her eyes flitted to the head of the table, and Pasha’s gaze followed hers.

The innkeeper had been at the head of the table for some time, conversing with the men over their game of cards, but he was silent now, standing there, his hands at his sides curled to fists. His daughter stood at his side, whispering something in his ear behind a cupped hand.

He waved her away, passing a hand over his aggrieved face. 

“What’s that, dear? Do speak up, now.” Kalganov’s uncle addressed the girl, whose eyes went wide. She tucked her chin against her chest, and it was Trifon Borrissovich who spoke.

“Oh, it’s nothing, gentlemen, I assure you… don’t concern yourselves. That damned beast has been at my chickens three times since the snow fell, he is annihilating our flock. But it’s no matter, no matter… we shall put the traps out again. Don’t concern yourselves.”

“Did you hear that gentlemen?” Kalganov’s uncle spoke in a deep, drunken baritone, turning his twinkling eye upon the party. “We’ve a foxhunt on our hands.” 

One of the men cleared his throat, stamping out his cigarette, and cast a grin at the man sitting at his elbow, the room gone quite silent now.

Kalganov was watching all of this, and starting to smile, too. A very large German in a fur coat sank his drink, and stood up from the far side of the table with a grunt.

“A foxhunt, is it?”

A ring of soft laughter rippled the room. Everyone was looking at one another.

“I daresay, it is the least we could do to repay your hospitality. We’ve a very capable battalion at the ready, sir. Should you allow us, we’d be most obliged to rid you of this beast.” 

Trifon Borissovitch scratched his red nose, standing there with his arms crossed over his barrel chest, and the edge of a smile twinkled in his eye.

Kalganov stood then, and straightened his jacket, and there was a new mischief shining in his eyes. 

She stood from the table then. Yes, she decided, she would quite like right now to kill something, to savage something. Grushenka’s hand on her arm went slack, and she stared up at her in amazement.

A chuckle ran through the undercurrent of the room.

“Perhaps the lady fancies a fur stole?” One of the men said, and grinned.

Pasha’s face was hot with drink, feeling almost unsteady on her feet. 

“The lady is a natural deadeye, gentlemen. I saw her shoot a bullseye just today.” 

She looked at him and smiled, despite herself.

“It’s true, it’s true, don’t sell her short! Tell Mishka to ready the horses. Gentlemen, fetch your coats. The hunt is on!” Kalganov’s uncle said, slamming the table with both fat palms.

Chapter Text

Upon her feet now and far too late, Pasha realized that she had drunk too much. She had scarcely pulled on her coat and Kalganov was leading her by the hand down the darkened hall with the wallpaper peeling off, the light all waxy and glowing yellow, pulling her outside into the wild black tangle of night. 

Trifon Borrisovitch walked ahead without a coat, lantern light swaying crazily across the snow, and she shivered in the sudden cold— the flat barren land, the great black sky looming, glowing in white. The chicken coop, encrusted in filth and stinking pungently, the chickens torn and mangled bodies laid waste to in the snow, feathers blowing softly. 

There was a rowdy giddiness kicking up, and Kalganov pulling her up onto the back of a horse. She very nearly pitched over the other side, clinging to his back so as not to fall, and then her arms were wrapped around his waist, and she could feel the steady sure drunkenness of him, his golden hair brushed against her temple, the heat of his live, beating body beneath his clothes. 

They followed the men into the forest, their voices a discordant distant cacophony of giddy shouts and hushing, there was a dog running loose alongside them, she only glimpsed its lithe gray shape, running alongside, weaving through and under the darkness. A great yellow half moon hung in the sky like half of a fat cut pear, the stars shivering above them.

She could not keep up with the whirl in her head, could not tell whether the rush of heat within her now was drink or fever or something else. She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek against Kalganov’s shoulderblade, the motion making her dizzy.

The trees clawed the great shivering sky above and she clung to the warm solid body against her, voices splitting off and echoing out through the woods one by one, then going silent, until they were quite alone.

A wild cry far off and Kalganov turned over his shoulder to grin at her, snapped the reigns and they were off. The cold night air whipped at her, and she started to laugh, then, for no reason at all. They chased awhile, in the darkness, after that wild sound, drawing into a clearing, atop a little hill. The scrub of field laid out below them in the low belly of a little valley, and Kalganov drew the horse up to a stop, hopping down and holding out his hand to her. She took it and hiked her leg over, jumping down after him.

Her foot twisted and sunk in the mud and she cried out, stumbling against him.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“Ah, blast it—- I’m fine, just fine, don’t fuss.” She grumbled, and hobbled on his arm to the edge of the treeline, a little scrub of brush. Panting, he pulled off his coat and laid it upon the ground, settling in on his stomach, lying aside it.

She joined him, hiking up her skirts and dropping ungracefully to her knees, lying atop his coat.

He pulled out the gun and aimed it down the valley. The only sound was the bare rattle of the dry little leaves above them, shuddering in the thin icy wind. They settled in, side by side, and were silent a long moment, Kalganov scanning the valley for movement, Pasha staring at the flat barren landscape, at the profile of his face, at the moon.

“There!” His whisper, urgent, cut through the chill of the air, and he straightened up, leveling the gun.

She stared down into the gulley, peering in the darkness, at the lithe form streaking across the landscape. Kalganov readied the gun and stared, but did not move. He held his breath.

She stared at him.

“Come on, shoot, what are you waiting on?” 

He exhaled.

“Give it to me, then!” She whispered, and held her hand out to him. Kalganov weighed the gun in his hand, as if to pass it to her, and finally, he clicked the safety into place.

“Let it live. I don’t want you to.” He said, and smiled at her guiltily.

She stared incredulously at him.

Kalganov turned over and laid on his back. He clicked the safety into place, laying the gun across his chest.

Pasha started to laugh, then, and laid down beside him, staring incredulously at him.

“My God, you’ve the heart of a woman or a little child!” She said, turning to look at him.

He was embarrassed, she could see it in his smile, even in the drunken darkness.

“And you’ve the heart of a man.”

“To the devil with those chickens, is it, then?” 

“They’re not my chickens.”  

This got a snort of laughter from her.

“Shall we go back?” Kalganov asked, looking at her.

“Would you like to?” 

“It’s terribly cold.” He confessed, smiling bashfully at her.

He holstered the gun and stood, brushing dry grass from his front, and held out a hand to her.

They crept back into the little inn, whispering back and forth like little children, through the entryway, looking around with wide eyes. The first level was deserted, the innkeepers daughter clearing away the remnants of their bacchanal, the candles burned down low. She could hear someone doing the washing up, at this late hour, the light in the kitchen still on.  They stumbled up the stairs and padded in careful silence past Grushenka’s door. Outside the door of Pasha’s room, he drew his hand away from hers, stepping just back, and she turned to look at him full in the eye then, and did not break her gaze.

“I daresay Rakitin will have very little to do with you ever again, after tonight.” 

“What do I give a damn about Rakitin?” Kalganov said, and he took her face in both his hands and kissed her.

His dizzy mouth was sweet with champagne. His kiss was arresting, pressing her back against the door, until she nearly stumbled on her limp ankle. Her hands ran over his waistcoat, his broad hands taking her lead, wrapping around her waist. 

Finally, after a moment, she broke from him. He stared at her— his eyes were starry, a little nauseating, almost smitten. She nearly tried to conceal the grimace upon her face, but ultimately gave it up. Slowly, she watched a certain realization flit through his eyes. She smoothed her hands over the front of his waistcoat, an exquisite corduroy.

“I believe you’ve had a lot to drink tonight, Pyotr Fomich. As have I. I think I’d like to retire, now.” She said, rather coldly, and fixed him in the eye.

He drew back. His face fell.

“Oh– of course. Of course.” He said, all at once very sobered, looking a bit ridiculous.

“Thank you for obliging me, on that little expedition, Pyotr Fomich.” 

“It was my pleasure. My sincerest pleasure, Vanka Fyodorovna.” He stared at her for a moment then, nearly breathless, and finally, he took her hand in his.

He bowed his head and she tried not to cringe, but he did not kiss her hand— only made her a sort of bow, then, and pressed his forehead to her hand. He pulled away, straightened up, still staring at her. She made a strange, unconvincing smile, groping behind her back for the doorknob, and slipped into her darkened room.

There was one candle on the dresser, burnt very low. She went to the vanity, then, shedding first her gloves, and next her coat, with a deep, sighing release of breath— and then stopped. There was a lingering smell of cigarette smoke, pungent and rich, blooming in the still, close air.

She turned around, then, from the vanity, and let out an entirely incredulous sigh, lip curling back in disgust.

“My God this is pathetic. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something so pathetic. What, were you only going to sit there all night?”

Rakitin was sitting in the dark, in the little armchair in the corner, quite still— simply watching her. All at once, he moved very silently, quickly in the darkness, and caught her up with an arm around her waist. He was drunk. She could smell it on him.

“You didn’t go to bed with him.” His voice was low and hoarse, a little wild. 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Why?” He asked, glancing nervously into her eyes.

“Why?” She repeated, and scoffed, looking up at him. 

He stared at her with a burning sort of fascination.

“Because I am an emancipated creature. Because I wish now to do only what pleases me, and nothing more, and nothing less.”

He was nearly trembling, his fingertips curling around her waist. 

“Yes. Yes, you are.” He breathed.

“What are you doing here? Hiding away in my room? Don’t you know- I could scream right now, and I could level you. You would be ruined .” 

He swallowed. His eyes darted wildly across her face.

“I wanted— I wanted to see what you would do. If you should really take it that far. You’ve the power to destroy me, to dash all my hopes to nothing, don’t you know that? Yes, of course you know that. I can see it in your smile every time you look at me. I was-- curious. Curious despite myself. I wanted to know if you would do it.”

Pasha let out a long, slow breath. She brought her hand up to his face, cradled his cheek, almost gently. His skin was sweating, her hand was sweating. He leaned shamelessly into her touch, his eyes falling closed.

“Oh, Mikhail. And you would let me, wouldn’t you?” She said, very quietly.

He did not move, he scarcely breathed. She felt the way his body bowed, entirely, to her slightest touch.

“I would. Yes, I would.” 

"I know you would." She breathed, she articulated every syllable. He turned his face, then, his hand alighting to her hand, cradling the back of hers, and pressed a kiss against the beating of her wrist.

The furious beating of his blood so near set her pulse thundering. On wild impulse, unthinking, she seized him up by the hair.

“I am liable to take you for all you are worth, right now, and throw you over in an hour, if the mood strikes me. And should we meet on the street in a week from now, I may even turn up my nose at you, or pass right by you as though we’d never been acquainted. Do you understand that? I am a newly liberated creature, and I live on the strength of my whims, and nothing, nothing more, and no man or woman will ever have dominion of me, ever, for so long as I live.”

His drunken eyes did not move from her face, drinking her in in full. 

“I’d not seek to be your master. I can see quite clearly that you are not the kind of woman to submit to anyone.” 

When Vanka woke she was alone and covered in fever sweat. She sat up fast and her head spun, looking wildly around the room for a clue of where she was. Her stomach twisted painfully, as if seasick. Mokroe. Somehow, she knew that much. She knew that Grushenka was here, and Rakitin, too, and someone else she couldn’t remember— though why they had come, she had no idea.

She wrapped her dressing gown around herself, rifling through the suitcase full of petticoats and elaborate three-piece dresses with billowing sleeves, and finally gave up in a rage, wrapping her dressing gown around herself. She stood a long moment in the middle of the room, thinking. 

She stood in the hall with her arms crossed around her chest, glancing furtively down the grimy hallway to make sure no one was around, and knocked upon the door. There was a great slumping and dragging noise from within the room, and a sound like something being knocked over.

She was irritable, at the point of raising her fist to knock again, when Rakitin finally pulled the door open, only an inch. He peered out at her suspiciously, and when he saw her face, opened it just a few inches more.

“What do you want?” His black hair stood up at all angles, and he looked as though he hadn’t shaven properly in days. 

She pressed forward into the room, forcing him to stand back from her, and he closed the door abruptly behind himself, looking at her in bewilderment.

Without a word she flipped open the lid of his trunk, atrociously packed, and picked out a pair of gray woolen riding pants, which she folded over her arm. She grabbed his black coat off of the chair, rifled through the trunk a moment more, and then turned to him.

“Take off your shirt.” 

“Excuse me?” He balked at her.

“Your shirt. I require it. Take it off.”

He stared at her with an expression of utter disdain and confusion, and then, with a throaty sigh, cast off his dressing gown, discarded it on the bed, and then his shirt, and handed it to her.

His bare pale chest was wasted and thin, covered in a pitiful amount of black hair. She turned towards the door and he followed after her, leaning on the doorframe as if to stop her leaving. 

“And what am I to wear, your dress?” He cried.

“Whatever you please.” 

He snorted bitterly. He crossed over to the nightstand and sat down heavily upon the poor little sagging bed. He retrieved his cigarettes, rifling around for a match.

She paused a second. Her mind was working, at what she could not think.

“Where is Grushenka?” 

He looked up at her as he lit his cigarette, his bushy eyebrows knitting together.

“Well gone by now. As you’d expect.” 

“What, and the carriage, too?” 

“Naturally, of course.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Why, you act as though you didn’t know.” 

A peculiar feeling of danger was stirring in Vanka’s stomach. She left his room and returned to her own, finished washing and dressing in a hurry, searching a long time on the floor and even under the bed for a second and less garish pair of shoes, but could not find any. Finally, she laced up the red boots with an air of grim indignation. She shoved all of her foreign belongings into her suitcase and zipped it shut. 

She left the inn and started walking down the road, rather aimlessly, her skin crawling, swarming. It was another unseasonably warm day, the wind ran across the flat land in great buffeting sheets. There was a little tremor in her step, the sunlight turned her stomach feverishly. She fingered the paper notes in her pocket uneasily, setting off in search of a place to hire a carriage.

She did not make it very far when an urgent hand fell upon her arm, grabbing her. She wheeled around in a bolt of total panic, and found herself staring up into Alyosha’s face.

She dropped the suitcase down at her feet and was about to say something, but his expression stopped her dead and dumb. He did not relinquish the grip upon her shoulder. He peered anxiously into her face, brow furrowed, his gaze scanning her face gravely. There was a tremendous anxiety in his sorrowful eyes.

“Vanka, please, listen to me. Don’t say anything. Just listen. I know everything. I spoke to Lise. I’ve been at the monastery. I believe I know what’s happening to you.” 

She looked blankly at him. An unmistakable fear passed through her eyes.

Her mouth twitched spasmodically into a frozen, mechanical smile, and her eyes went blank and dim, rolling and then closing slowly. She went unsteady on her feet, her head just barely tipping back. The air left her lips in a sort of collapse, a soft, deep, crushing release. The barest scrape of noise, from deep in her chest.

His grip on her arm tightened, ready to catch her, fearing she was going to faint. She recovered herself immediately, and took a deep breath in. She looked him full in the face, her right eye gone wider than her left, which lolled and listed a second. She blinked it free. 

“Do you know what I think of you, Alyosha, my dear little brother?"

She smiled sweetly, without showing any of her teeth, and tipped her head to one side.

"I think you can go to hell.” 

Her smile dropped all at once to a scowl, and she wrested her arm free from his grip. She picked up her suitcase, still looking him in the eye, and turned, leaving him where he stood.

Chapter Text

Grigory Vasilyvitch had, as of recently, become troubled by dreams of frogs. 

Teeming, writhing hoards of them. How horridly they swarmed and trampled, clamboring over one another to get to one another to get to no ends. 

They multiplied. In a little pool of tepid water. Endless, raving, mad, meaningless perpetuation, until the little pond was rife with tadpoles. So thick the gelatinous, stinking, living water became with writhing life that there could have never been enough insects for them to eat— and, finally, with toothless, hungry baby-maws, they began to devour one another. Eventually, the strongest of this cannibal crop, ravenous in their dumb violent infancy, began to sprout limbs. Legs and more legs, tiny gummy fingers, too many limbs, too many digits, made monstrous by their greed.

They struggled up through the muddy bank, dragging themselves on their squirming, milk-pale bellies. An almost endless procession of life, spouting forth from that cesspit, claustrophobic, indiscriminate fucking and eating and shitting and roving, mad, teeming life. 

Their new bodies boiled in the sun, grew thick with warts and stinking sores. Free now of the slick, rancid slop in which they had spawned, metamorphosizing, they took to the earth in droves.

And he could only watch. In the dream, he was not he, he was not there, he was nothing— maybe the sun. Burning ire down upon this endless, festering propagation.

It was always the same. He woke night after night with a frightful start beside Marfa Ignatyevna, who did not stir. He sat up on the edge of the bed, prayed with each wheezing breath. He dreaded sleep. He sat up late and read the holy book with failing, cataracted eyes— read of pestilence, of plague. He fretted. He prayed. Redoubled in his piety, he bore these nightmares in stolid silence, and he and Marfa Ignatyevna’s marriage grew more silent than ever. 

Outside, the winter ebbed and flowed. Snow melted into lush, thick fog and dirty slush, then froze over again. Even the sun was white, in the low gray sky. Every morning he dragged his aging, aching body to the garden to chop wood, that ceaseless work, to keep the chill at bay. The cold wore on Marfa Ignatyevna’s aging joints. Each day anew, he stood in the cold and the air was silent but for crowcalls, the skittering of slim gray hares in the brittle winter-brown brush. The fog made him cough, thick and wet, early in the morning.

Even in the chill of morning, his dreams remained, maddening, incomprehensible. Burning a hole in his head. Cacophonous, sweltering, stinking, teeming. With frogs.

The landscape they crawled through was arid, visions of a drought as such unseen in all his life filled him with a terrible foreboding— a drought that could bring Russia to its knees. The sun bleached their bulbous eyes red, split their skin with blistering heat. They feasted with mindless gluttony upon flies, upon locusts, in the waste. Maggots crawled through their leather flesh, burrowed into their warty skin, and teemed with yet more life. He dreamed of tadpoles: white, wriggling forms of soupy, slippery, living mucous, like sperm, writhing in filthy water hot as blood, under a burning sun.

The snow seeped into the silent earth and was drank up. All the world was dormant, deeply sleeping, a thicket of bramble. And slowly, it grew colder, and colder still. The very air froze solid and blue. 

Deep in the crucible of deepest winter, a storm drew in over Skotoprigonyvisk. It was not snow that fell, but pure ice— it fell in sheets, it smashed in windows, leveled roofs. The cacophony woke himself and Marfa Ignatyevna, who stared at him with wide dark eyes. Finally, after hours, it subsided into silence. The rising dawn was little more than a smudge of gray.

Grigory Vasilyvitch pulled on his coat, his boots, and set out into the garden. Globes of ice the size of tiny fists, stamping to slush beneath his boots. Sheets of ice cut through the trees, frozen in the perpetual motion of their violent fall. The air hung wet and violet with fog. He shuffled, hacking, up the path, and stopped dead.

It was a poor little stable they’d had, he’d known for years. More than once, as a young man, he’d climbed to the roof himself to repair what he knew needed replacing. 

Now, the whole structure had buckled, failed spectacularly. He raised his lantern and looked upon a great collapse. Lying, crushed in the ice, was the old ass that had lived in that stable since the children were small. 

He drew a hand over his whiskery face and sighed. A thin trickle of blood trailed from the poor animal’s nose in the slush. The beast looked peaceful. Frost glittered the coarse fur, long black lashes laid against the fuzzy cheeks, blowing softly in the frozen wind. He stared, a while, at the animal, and finally, turned and trundled back to the servants quarters. 

It had been a good animal, he told Marfa Ignatyevna more than once. Had worked hard, back when there was work to be done. A docile creature, broken of any stubbornness. It was only right, to bury the poor beast.

She watched him quietly. The death of the animal had troubled him, troubled him more deeply than she might’ve guessed. She had been resigned in marriage to him long enough to tell, when something was weighing upon his mind. 

By next afternoon, the sun had burned off all the fog. Unseasonably warm, water ran from the thin brown trees, washed rivulets over the dead grass and was drank in by the silent, ravenous earth. A proper mess of mud and slop.

Grigory Vasilyvitch, faithful, donned his boots and his coat, and fetched the shovel. He dragged the animal from the debris by the haunches, in the chill of morning, down the garden. 

It would have been no small feat, to bury such a beast, even in his youth. But he was not dead yet.

It was a good animal, and he would do right by it, even as the rest of the village poor seemed content to leave their spent livestock rotting in the road. That sloth, he knew, was a sin. It was a terrible affront to God, to expose a creature’s flesh to that final indignity out in the open. It would bring vermin, it would bring stench. It would breed pestilence. 

Sweat pricked the back of his neck, where the sun burned. He shed first his hat, then his gloves, and finally, the coat too, slung across the stump upon which he chopped wood. 

The grave that he hacked into the earth began, slowly at first, to pool with water. First, it was ankle deep. His arms burned with exertion, his chest burned from his hacking. When had he begun to cough and hack like such an old man? Soon, the mud slopped over his boots, pouring in. His clothes were filthy, mud smeared his shirt, soaked with sweat. He grit and gnashed his teeth against the work.

Had he been a younger man, he might have rushed into that storm. Foolish, cowardly in his old age, he had been.

After the grave was dug, he would see to the house. One of the windows on the upper level had been knocked out by the storm, the glass glinted down, mean and sharp, gaping blackness within.

He slipped around in the mud, and stubbornly redoubled his efforts, baring down. He had sinned in thought, and now he would correct it in deed.

It was a sin, it was sloth, when he had looked up at that window and thought to let it be.

What did it matter? No one lived here anymore. The Master was dead. The children did not come around. Soon, he had wagered, the house might even be sold— and what would become of himself and Marfa Ignatyevna then? They had grown old, much too old to start over somewhere else, too old to be of much use.

There was no one to serve anymore. The days were long. The house was silent.

What kind of man can leave a thing to rot in the open? The ass had been a good animal. It had worked hard, thanklessly, without complaint, for great many years, even when the load asked of it had been too heavy. Such a creature deserved dignity, a proper burial.

This , digging a grave, though he was old and ailing, though the work was back-breaking, this he could still do. He was not, yet, too decrepit to board up the windows in the attic.

Grigory Vasilyvitch worked until the late afternoon sun blistered the back of his neck. He muttered to himself, a sort of feverish repetition, with every haul of the shovel over his creaking shoulder, until his body was numb and weak with exertion. He took no notice of the unseasonable heat, of the tremors wracking through his ailing arms— he was in a trance, suspended in a veil of gossamer. 

Finally, he broke at once out of this reverie. The sun had sunk low in the sky. It was winter once again. He stood in a deep gash in the earth, full of mud. A deep chill wracked through his old, soaked bones. He stood, staring.

Ribbons of oily mud spiraled through the water, buffeting a little box to him, rocking and bobbing side to side like a cradle. He stooped down and reached out, wiped a filthy, weathered hand over the filthy, weathered surface. A cross. Carved boldly upon the wood, there upon the lid of the tiny coffin. He started back, with a strangled yelp of terror, as if it had burned him to touch it. His hand flew to his mouth. A startled curse had escaped him. Filth smeared his face, his mouth. He felt the mud of the grave, cool upon his weathered cheek.

Grigory Vasilyvitch dragged his exhausted body back to the servants quarters, clutching his chest. His heart pounded fit to explode. He staggered in, filthy and wide-eyed.

Marfa Ignatyevna fell still at her work. He felt seen to the bones by her stare, then, as if she knew everything. 

Guiltily, madly, he’d reburied the little coffin— frightful of being caught, like a murderer.

He was silent and morose. Aching, he ignored his exhaustion as he cleaned his boots, washed the mud from his skin, laundered his filthy clothes in a rusted, dented little tin tub in the kitchen. And all the while, shame flayed him to the bones. He kept seeing Marfa Ignatyevna’s face in his mind. In the way she had looked at him he saw himself through her eyes, the way he had looked to her then. Filthy and raving mad, like a man possessed. 

A terrible fever drew Grigory Vasilyvitch in that night. Come morning, he could not rise. That fever kept him, three long days and nights.

Late on the second day, Marfa Ignatyevna sent for Doctor Herzenstube.   Grigory Vasilyvitch remained unaware that he had come, unaware of anything. Held fast in the troubled, fitful sleep of his fever, he dreamed of frogs.

It was a barren, starved landscape they ravaged. Locusts gorged upon entire harvests and the frogs gorged upon the locusts and the livestock fell where they stood and the people starved in their beds.

On the third night he woke, in cold and darkness. To the crying of a babe. Marfa Ignatyevna slept beside him and would not wake, slept like a stone, as if some spell had been drawn over her.

He staggered from the bed, grumbling. His head was splitting, swimming. His hand jibbered when he stood. It was terribly, damnedly cold in the little lodge.

The children, the children were crying. He could not think. The cold seeped into his bones and ached them upon rushing from bed, pricked his skin with gooseflesh. It was with a stumble he wrenched on his boots. Raving with fever, he did not reach for his coat, for the lantern. Wood, wood for the fire, for the babes. He had slept too long. The fire had died, the children would freeze. 

It was dark, dark in the garden, black as pitch. No breeze ruffled the still, frigid air, shining like cut crystal. The frost cast everything over in the graywash of dreams.

There was a horrible gash in the earth that seemed to yawn at him as he passed, still and foreboding in the night, a box with pure black inside.

Grigory Vasilyvitch was growing dizzy. He took up a log from the ground and swayed, standing back upright. He was breathing heavy when he laid it upon the chopping-block.

Hadn’t anyone been looking after the babes? He and Marfa had fallen terribly ill, and no one had noticed. How long was it, had he slept? He was sleepwalking still, sleep clawed at his eyes, he could’ve laid down in the bed of soft winter straw and slept there, blanketed in the cold. It was with bleary, blinking eyes he fixed the log upon the block with a steadying hand, reared back his hatchet, and brought the chopping blade down upon his hand.

A wild howl cleaved the night in two. Fingers fell and scattered upon the ground like fat spider’s legs. All the birds exploded from the trees, startled blind up into the night, cacophonous. Black blood spattered thick upon the matted, sleeping grass.