TWO OFFICERS CARRIED Father up the building’s back stairs, like a delivery of coal or potatoes. He was frozen again, his body as stiff as rigor mortis could have made it, but by now almost a week had passed since his murder. Once they thawed, his limbs would move; his fingers and his spine as well. He was wrapped in layers of coarse cloth, and the officers, breathing heavily from the climb, set him on end and leaned him against the doorjamb. “Where do—” one said, and I interrupted him, impatient to have them lay his body down.
“There.” I pointed at the table at which Varya, Dunia, Father, and I had gathered most evenings to eat. We had a bathtub, but Father was at least six feet tall. Even had his limbs been pliable, we’d have had to fold him into it, and once we had it would have been a trial to get him out. The table was long enough to seat four to a side, but when the officers laid him down on it, his feet stuck out over the end.
“Thank you,” Dunia said, and she curtsied as she bid the officers a good day, reflexively polite under even such peculiar circumstances as these. They left through the apartment’s front door, the shorter of the two wiping his palms against the seat of his trousers, as if to rid them of the memory of so distasteful an errand. Whoever had tied Father up in his winding sheet was a professor of knots, but Dunia, who hated to cut a good length of twine, waved my scissors away and went on picking at them with her fingers. Perhaps it did take, as she said, only minutes to untie them all, but the last of the gray winter daylight was seeping away and it was dusk and time to light the lamps when she coiled the unbroken length of it around her fingers. She put the looped twine in her apron pocket and gave it a pat. I could see it was something she would keep, something she held valuable, whether it was Father who made it so or what she considered the inherent value of a long piece of twine. Dunia’s passions, like her reverence for Singer sewing machines, tended to the pragmatic. Or maybe I wanted to think of her as lacking in romantic attachments. I wanted to believe that her having provided my father sexual relief had been a chore like any other, washing the sheets no more involving than what she’d done while lying on them.
Unwrapping the body was a clumsy operation. To give us enough room to work, Dunia and I pushed all the chairs back from the table and against the wall. I had insisted Varya return with me to the apartment, but as soon as we began she ran away and hid herself in Father’s bedroom. Dunia took hold of the crude winding cloth and pulled, while I made sure Father’s slowly turning body didn’t roll from table to floor. Under the layers of sackcloth was one of linen, stained yellow in places, a long, rust-colored line where the fabric had pressed against the autopsy incision. From the base of his neck down to his groin, he had been cut open and sewn shut with large, clumsy stitches. The incision was a straight line, neatly centered except for the interruption of one small semicircle: a detour around the umbilicus. A coroner, perhaps the same one we saw examining Father after he was pulled from the river, had opened him just as he would his Gladstone bag. He’d cut into his stomach, looking for his last meal of poisoned cakes and wine. For that’s what all the newspapers had reported, how much cyanide my father had swallowed without its having any effect on him. Dunia took the piece of linen with the long rusty stain, folded it once and then again, until she had pressed it into a small square she set on the shelf where we kept our bowls and dinner plates. To whom did that belong, I wondered? Mother? Me?
The bed where Dunia slept was in an alcove adjoining the kitchen, and off its mattress Dunia pulled a sheet and handed it to me. “Do it as you would if we were changing linen on a sickbed,” she said. She took hold of Father’s arm and cold flank and pulled him onto his side, hauling his body toward her so I could spread the sheet over the part of the table that wasn’t under him. When she let the body go, it rolled back to where it had been. Then we traded sides of the table and repeated the motions, and when we were done he was lying on Dunia’s bedding.
“Won’t it get soiled?” I said stupidly.
“We’ll need it to turn him. After we wash the front, we’ll have to wash the back.”
I nodded. The two of us stood, each on one side of the table, and looked at the body between us. The scar on my father’s flank gave me a turn. I knew what it was, but I hadn’t remembered its size. June 28, 1914. The Romanovs were on holiday, in the Crimea; Alyosha was in good health; Father, Varya, and I had gone home to Pokrovskoye, unaware we’d been followed by a woman from Petersburg. Spring was short that year, and the summer days were long and already uncomfortably hot. The horses slept fitfully downstairs, swishing their tails in the heat. Fruit on the trees ripened early and fell before it could be picked. As I lay in my bed at night, I’d hear the thud of plums dropping from their branches onto the ground below. Used to the bustle of the city, I found it too quiet to sleep after dusk and had fallen into the habit of reading all night and sleeping during days that were too hot to enjoy on the prickly back of a sweating, lethargic horse. That’s what I was doing when Father was attacked—sleeping. Having received a telegram from an acquaintance asking his help in securing a political appointment, he was walking to the post office to send his reply. But the telegram had been a ruse; the conspirator who followed us home was lying in wait for Father and accosted him in the street outside the door to the post office. No sooner had Father put a coin in the left hand of what appeared to be a beggar than Khionya Gusyeva—for that was the name of the wicked woman who was said to have been a prostitute back in Petersburg—stabbed him with the right, dragging her knife upward and nearly disemboweling him on the street. He walked, staggered, back home, holding his intestines so they wouldn’t spill out from his side, and I woke during the ensuing commotion, one neighbor screaming for a doctor, others running in and out the front door, my brother covering his eyes and bellowing the way he did when frightened, Varya whimpering and wringing her hands.
Mother and the doctor laid Father on the kitchen table, cut off his blood-soaked trousers, and found a wound the length of his forearm, from it protruding wet pink bubbles of flesh. Surgeries, one and then another and another, were required to prevent peritonitis. It took many months for Father to improve, and he never recovered completely. He was in pain for the remaining two and a half years of his life; he slept poorly and grew to depend on tinctures of opium or chloral hydrate added to his glass of Madeira for the few hours of oblivion they promised.
“Come, light the stove,” Dunia said as she filled a kettle.
“Varya,” I called down the corridor, and, noting how it hurt my throat to raise my voice, “find his cloak and prayer rope.” No answer. “Varya!” I said, louder. I knew I was coming down with something worse than a cold.
“Shouldn’t he … don’t you think he might want to wear his better clothes?” Varya answered after a silence, referring to the chest filled with blouses he had been given over the past years, gifts he never wore, in every color of silk, with collars, cuffs, and hems embroidered by his admirers, a few by the tsarina herself, whose needle produced work as subtle as an artist’s brush, motifs of flowers, vines, birds.
“No,” I said. “It has to be the cloak.” For I intended to return Father to the days when he had no enemies, before he ever set foot in Petersburg. To a time when none of us could have imagined that anyone would ever bear him malice, much less find reason to kill him. “On the top shelf, Varya. You’ll need a step stool. It’s all there—the cloak, his plain blouse, the old tunic and trousers.” With tattered hems and holes at the knees. Everything washed and folded and set carefully aside and out of reach, as if he’d planned for the day when he would once again put them on and leave this city. At last it had arrived.
Varya came back with the clothing and stopped at the kitchen door, her face averted.
“What are you waiting for?” I said, annoyed by her hesitating, her tendency to do any chore in twice the time it would have taken me.
“His eyes,” she said.
“What about them?”
“Are they closed?”
“What does it matter?” I said. “He can’t see you, you know.”
“I won’t come in unless they’re closed. I won’t, Masha. You can’t make me.”
I pushed the hair up off his brow, where it was matted, half-stuck there with blood. I swallowed. “The left is swollen shut and the right is half open, no more,” I told her.
Varya began to cry. It wasn’t the sound to which I objected but the way she tried to stop it, holding her breath and then, when she couldn’t hold it any longer, letting it out with a rush and the bleat of an inadequately swallowed sob. “All right,” I said, “all right.” I tried to gently force the parted eyelids together, but as soon as I took my fingers away, the lids returned to where they had been, revealing a sliver of pupil and a bit of blue. The white was red, completely shot with blood.
I don’t know that there is anything more unsettling than the open dead eyes of a person you love, eyes that can no longer return your gaze. Back home, in Siberia, it was said that if you were to look into the eyes of a corpse, you would see your own death reflected back at you. Looking at Father, the only thing I understood was why people covered the dead’s faces, blindfolded them, weighed their eyelids down with coins—whatever it took to stop the devil from speaking through their silence, from telling you you were looking at yourself. Although I don’t know why people said it was the devil talking. God would say the same thing, I think. “Never mind, Varya,” I said. “This isn’t—don’t do anything you don’t want.”
Now that I’d released her, Varya stepped into the room, her face averted from the table and its occupant. She laid Father’s clothes on the seat of one of the chairs pushed against the wall and crept away. I almost went after her, but there was no way to pity my sister without pitying myself, and that—that wasn’t possible, not now. Dunia said nothing. Standing at the head of the table, one foot braced against its trestle, she took hold of the sheet and pulled Father’s body toward her until his feet slid up onto the table’s other end.
“All right, then,” she said, “water must be hot by now, hot enough.”
He was still frozen, enough that his heavy head didn’t fall back when it was no longer supported by the table, but it looked so unnatural that I couldn’t help but put my hands under it while Dunia placed a basin on the floor below, took the kettle from the gas ring, and poured water over his hair. Saturated with blood, it spilled down into the basin in steaming red streams. We traded places. She held his head and I unwrapped a cake of imported soap, a gift I’d saved for a special occasion. This wasn’t the one I’d imagined, of course, but I was glad to have something a little ceremonial. I lathered Father’s hair, and then Dunia rinsed away the suds, stained brown, and I soaped the hair again and still once again until, after the third washing, the tinge of blood faded away, the soap foamed up white. There was a long gash in his scalp, and each time Dunia poured water from the kettle’s spout, it lifted the flap of skin, showing me the crushed bone beneath. He’d cheated death so often I’d come to believe he’d never die. But he was mortal after all, my father, made of flesh and bone that could be crushed.
“I think … I think we had better …” I said, staring at the gash and feeling so sick at the sight of it that I failed to say what I meant: that the wound had to be closed somehow, his body made whole, to the degree we could. But when I looked up, I saw that already Dunia had fetched her mending basket and was searching in it for thread the same color as his hair. I pulled the sheet so that once again his head rested on the table and his feet hung off, and Dunia set a lamp next to his head. With her needle and thread she sewed the wound closed with tiny stitches. When she’d finished she bit the thread off and, with her lips so close to the place she’d sewn, kissed Father’s wet head.
I was surprised I could see that and not cry—a measure of my shock. Dunia had done so good a job that even when his hair was combed back from his face, the gash was no longer visible. The soap, made with oil from the laurel plant, had a delicate, astringent smell, and I turned the bar over and over in my wet hands to make the lather to wash his face, his ears, his throat. So strange to push my fingers through his beard and feel lifeless cold skin beneath, strange to feel his nose and his brow, to wash the crease beside each nostril and wipe the foam away from his lips, as if it mattered. As if he would taste and find it bitter.
Neck, shoulders, chest: we took turns soaping a cloth, running it over his torso, rinsing it, wringing it, washing the skin again. At first Dunia tried to follow and catch the dripping water with her basin, then gave up and set bowls and saucepans on the floor under the table’s edge. But it didn’t matter; everything was wet, slippery with suds.
“Towels,” I said, going to fetch them from the closet.
We worked on, in silence, as night pressed against the windows, and there was peace in the room, a calm that, like the warm soapy water, washed over and over me. Though I’d never before readied a body for burial, it was as if I had rehearsed all these unfamiliar motions, accomplished them so many times I required no direction, and Dunia and I spoke little as we worked.
“Varya?” I called every so often, wanting her with us, not for her help but because I saw how she was hiding from the one thing that could bring her any solace.
The body, doused over and over with hot water, eventually thawed in the warm kitchen, whose walls had begun to sweat and drip. Soon it was possible to flex the elbows, pull his arms far enough from his sides to soap his armpits. I looked at his ragged fingernails, which were unusually clean—from his three days in the river, I guessed. For some time I considered them, then I took Dunia’s sewing scissors from the basket and, careful not to nick the damp, wrinkled tips of his fingers, cut each nail. So many years of city life. My father’s arms were not strong and sunburned as they had been when I was small. The black hairs stood out against skin that was pale, white. Clean and manicured, my father’s graceful hands now looked like a saint’s or a nobleman’s. They looked as if they’d been fashioned to hold a chalice. The only thing to mar their beauty was the one fingernail that had remained black for years now.
“What happened?” Varya and I had asked, curious to know what an exorcism was, when he came home the night the finger was injured.
“Nothing,” Father said. “She fell asleep and stayed asleep for many hours, and when she woke up she’d forgotten why she’d been put to bed.
“There’s only this.” He showed us the index finger of his right hand, the flesh under the nail bruised.
“What is it?” we asked.
“The devil,” he said, smiling. “He nipped me on the way out.”
I never forgot the girl’s name; it was Elizavetta, and she’d lived in the Convent of the Holy Trinity. The prioress had summoned Father. She said Elizavetta had been visited on eleven consecutive nights by a demon with which she’d had intercourse, and now she was suffering convulsions and vomiting up pins and feathers, buttons, bottle caps. She blasphemed and made lascivious gestures. Her personality changed abruptly from that of a sweetly selfless, shy young woman to a coarsened whore who alluded to sexual behaviors assuredly unknown to a virginal nun in a convent. She told of a fantastic past life in which she had been a temple prostitute who performed intercourse with strangers. She’d lived in ancient Babylon, she said, and to ensure the fertility of crops, she had to open her thighs to anyone who came to worship Astarte.
“Hush, child,” my father had said. He sent the prioress away, pulled the blankets off the girl, bathed her, dressed her in fresh nightclothes, fed her broth, and sat for two days with his hand on her forehead. He allowed her to get up and urinate in a chamber pot, but that was all. If she tried to leave her bed, he held her down. Finally, he told us, the fever broke, and then she had no memory of what had happened to her.
If only someone could have done that for Father, I couldn’t help thinking, if only I had been able to keep him home, safe, until the devil had passed him by. I went from fingers to toes, washing between them, cutting their nails as well, and Dunia, seeing I had skirted my father’s private parts, washed these without comment. She soaped his thighs and I his shins; each of us took the knee closer to her own side of the table. We turned him then, and that was difficult. Even with both of us on one side, pulling and lifting the sheet, it was no easy thing to turn Father onto his front so we could soap his back. And no easy thing to discover there were another two bullet holes in the poor man, one just inside his left shoulder blade and another a few inches below it. By the time we had finished washing his body and had turned him back over so he was again faceup, we needed baths ourselves, soaked as we were with perspiration and dirty water. I used my own comb to part his wet hair as he used to do, down the center. My hands were raw and waterlogged, my fingers stung, and my knees shook. I sat in one of the chairs we’d pushed against the wall.
“We’ll take a break?” I said, and Dunia nodded. She looked at me with her hands on her hips.
“You have a fever,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes.” I shrugged. Dunia confirmed her observation by feeling my forehead and declared she was going to brew tea. I tried not to think about what might be in it. Dunia kept a lot of poisonous-looking dried plants in the pantry.
THE OPEN EYE made no difference once Father was dressed, as it is the custom, when preparing a holy man for burial, to put his cloak on backward and cover his face with the hood. Around his head we placed a crown of paper, upon which I had written the proper words: Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal one, have mercy on your servant. In his right hand went his crucifix, in his left a prayer rope with its knots and beads. We tore two strips from the bottom of his cloak and bound them around his body in the customary manner, crossing over his chest, hips, and legs, and then it was done. We mopped and dried the floor and moved him to his bed by dragging the table through the door of his bedroom, first sliding a carpet beneath the legs of the table so it would travel more easily.
“He is ready, Varya,” I said to my sister, once Dunia and I had moved the body to the bed and returned the dining table to its place, and she came to sit with us beside him, one of his daughters on each side of the bed, Dunia at its foot.
Dunia had forced her foul-tasting medicinal draft on me and, after I vomited in the sink, told me not to complain, because that had been the result she intended. In the hours remaining until morning, when Sergei Gavriilovich, the coffin-maker, would come to measure Father and build him a box, it was our duty to stay with his body, reading from the Psalter, and we did this, taking turns, passing the book back and forth over his corpse.