The Lost Souls of Angelkov (52 page)

Konstantin dies an hour later. His eyes are sunken, the skin on his face like roughened vellum, as deeply grooved as the hide of some exotic foreign beast—an elephant or a rhinoceros.

Olga comes in with a tray of glasses and a small silver teapot. She looks from the priest to her mistress. Setting the tray on the nearest table with a clang, she hurries to the bed. She stares at Konstantin, crossing herself over and over, then begins to wail. Within moments the house, so unnaturally silent for the last few days without Konstantin’s usual raving, comes alive with crying and moaning. Footsteps sound on the stairs and along the hallway, and the doorway fills with the last of the servants—both from the house and from outside—crowding to look at their dead master.

Antonina can’t bear to remain near her husband’s body, with the servants pulling their hair and falling to their knees, kissing their crucifixes and crying out to God. She pushes through them and goes to her own room. She finds Lilya
changing the linens. Tinka sits quivering on the window seat, her ears pricked forward at the cries from the hall.

Antonina knows Lilya hears the wailing and prayers, and understands that Konstantin is dead. But Lilya hasn’t rushed to Konstantin’s room like the others. Instead, she continues her work.

“He’s dead, Lilya,” Antonina says, unnecessarily. “Konstantin Nikolevich is dead.” Said aloud, the words sound odd. “The master—my husband—is dead,” she says a third time.

Lilya simply looks at her, a pillow half into a fresh case.

Antonina notices the intricate lace edging the case. She bought the bed linens in St. Petersburg over twelve years ago, for her trousseau. “My husband is dead, and my child … my child …” Antonina isn’t able to finish the sentence.

Lilya sets the pillow on the bed and comes to her, putting her arms around Antonina. “Sit down, Tosya.” Her voice is barely above a whisper.

Antonina lowers herself into the tufted chair near the fireplace, cautiously, as if a sack of flour has been strapped to her back and she’s unsure how to cope with its new and unexpected weight. As if it might throw her off balance if she doesn’t judge every movement. She closes her eyes and grips the arms of the chair; she’s overcome with vertigo even as she sits.

Lilya kneels in front of her. “Now it is just us, Tosya. Just you, and me.”

Antonina opens her eyes and looks down at her. She knows Lilya isn’t sorry for the loss of her master. She knows how Lilya feels about Konstantin Nikolevich. She sees that Lilya’s eyes are bright, her face calm.

Looking at her, Antonina knows there is something else she must speak to Lilya about. Soso. Yes, she must speak to Lilya about Soso. About the board around the horse’s neck. But not now.

Konstantin is buried on the third day after his death. The funeral is well attended, with more than three hundred people from across the province present for the service and Mass at the Church of the Resurrection. Antonina sees many familiar faces, including the violinist, Valentin Vladimirovitch Kropotkin, with others from the Bakanev estate. As well as all the servants, the yard outside the church is filled with Konstantin’s former serfs.

After the Mass, the procession follows the casket to the plot in the cemetery behind the church, the cemetery where Konstantin thought he slept on the grave of his son. The older women servants and villagers wail.

Tania is with the other house servants. Unlike many of them, her eyes are dry, her face emotionless. Antonina looks at her; the woman returns her stare.

The violinist is suddenly beside her, pressing Antonina’s hand between his. “My deepest condolences, Countess Mitlovskiya,” he says.

“Thank you,” she says, looking away from Tania as the priest’s prayers begin. The violinist bows and moves back into the crowd.

She hears the priest’s familiar words, but cannot think of Konstantin. It is Misha who is in her thoughts. Then, unbidden, the image of Felya comes again, and the board around his neck. She is aware of Grisha, standing behind her.
He takes her elbow, once, as she stumbles on a clod of earth.

When the prayers are over, she sees Lilya go to Tania. She watches, slightly unfocused, as Tania shakes her head, her mouth moving. Finally she turns and walks away from Lilya.

As the mourners slowly depart and the grave is covered with soil, Grisha and Lilya stay with Antonina. Finally, when the three men with shovels bow to Antonina and leave, she turns to Grisha and Lilya. “I’d like to be alone, please,” she tells them, and they do as she asks.

Amidst the cracked and moss-covered headstones, Konstantin’s grave is a hump of newly turned earth. Antonina knows she should have a headstone carved for him. And yet there isn’t money for even this.

Father Cyril comes to stand beside her. “Perhaps, Countess Mitlovskiya, it would comfort you to also have a place to pray for your son as you pray for your husband.”

Antonina looks at him. “What do you mean, Father?”

“I’m suggesting a marker for Mikhail Konstantinovich. When you have a stone carved and erected for Count Mitlovsky, you can also have one made for your son.”

Hadn’t Konstantin, in his madness, once suggested the same thing? A look of horror crosses Antonina’s face. “No,” she says loudly. “What are you talking about?” Her voice rings in the still air. “My son isn’t dead. He doesn’t need a marker.”

“Of course, of course, my child,” the priest says in a soothing voice. “I simply meant it might bring you comfort to have something tangible to pray to.”

She hates Father Cyril at that moment, and decides she won’t return to the church. She will pray to her own icons in her bedroom.

The morning after the funeral, Grisha’s presence in the kitchen surprises Lilya. She ignores him, arranging a breakfast tray to take to Antonina’s bedroom.

“Tania told me that yesterday you said she was to leave Angelkov,” he says. “You don’t have that authority.”

Grisha doesn’t like Lilya’s boldness. He has always felt sorry for Tania. He gave her a small packet of his own rubles when she came to his door to say goodbye, carrying her belongings. She told him she was glad to leave Angelkov with all its misery; she had planned on moving to her old village right after the funeral. Lilya had nothing to do with her decision. “I wouldn’t take orders from her anyway,” she added. “Tell the countess … tell her goodbye from me. That I wish her well.”

Now Lilya shrugs. “We all know there’s no reason for her to stay, with the count dead. I wanted to save the countess the distress of having to speak to her.” She fusses with the cutlery on the tray. “Don’t we both want as little anxiety as possible for her? Besides, Nusha can look after the laundry now. There is so little, with only the countess to attend to.”

“How is her mood today?” he asks Lilya.

“Her mood? What do you suppose? Besides, why are you asking me?”

“You know her better than anyone,” Grisha says.

“What do you mean?”

“She shares her thoughts with you, doesn’t she?”

“Maybe,” says Lilya cautiously.

Grisha picks a brown, speckled egg from a bowl on the table, tossing it in his hand. If Lilya didn’t know better, she
would think he was nervous. Grisha is never anxious, or even excitable. In fact, he usually has a strange, unnatural calm. “Has she spoken of anything out of the ordinary? Acted … I don’t know … differently in some way?”

He can’t stop thinking about her, about what they shared in the dacha. He doesn’t know what she’s feeling. What she’s thinking about him. He offered to stay and help her at Angelkov. She accepted his offer, but has anything changed?

Lilya tilts her head. “Naturally, she’s in a terrible state what with the old man’s death, and her son still missing. You really need to ask me about her mood?”

He can tell that Lilya knows nothing more. She can’t hide things from him the way she can from Antonina.

“All right,” he says, and leaves, the egg still in his hand. He has forgotten he’s holding it.

Lilya has never been sure how she feels about Grisha. Lyosha adores him, and looks upon him as a big brother. And she must admit, Grisha has been good to the boy. There is a special patience in him she sees only when he deals with her brother. Grisha has been more of a protector to him than Soso ever was.

A few minutes later, as she stands outside Antonina’s bedroom, she thinks of Grisha again, and of the way Antonina had returned after the night of the thunderstorm, when old Mitlovsky had spent hours in the cemetery. At the time, Lilya couldn’t put her finger on it, but something didn’t feel right about Antonina’s story. Now Grisha comes poking around about how her mistress is feeling. Never before has he asked her about the countess in a personal manner.

Lilya doesn’t like it. She takes a deep breath and calls, quietly, through the door. “Tosya, your breakfast.”

At the low, answering murmur, she manoeuvres the tray against her hip and turns the crystal doorknob.

A few minutes later, her breakfast untouched, Antonina asks Lilya to sit down.

Lilya turns from the bed, the coverlet still in her hand.

“I want to ask you something,” Antonina says from her chair near the fireplace, Tinka on her lap. “Please, sit with me.”

Lilya drops the bedding and lowers herself into the chair on the other side of the fireplace.

“Have you heard from Soso?” Antonina asks.

“Why do you ask about my husband now, Tosya? Is it that you just lost your own?”

“I want to know if you know where he is, or what he’s doing.”

First Grisha’s questions in the kitchen and now this. “No. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care. I told you that. I told you I don’t feel anything for Iosef Igorovitch.”

“All right,” Antonina says. “But if you do hear from him or anything about him, maybe from one of the other servants, will you tell me?”

“Why don’t you ask Grisha?” Lilya says.

Antonina frowns. “Would Grisha know his whereabouts?”

Lilya shrugs, picking at a loose thread on the brocade of the cushion on the chair. “Grisha thinks he knows everything about everyone,” she says, and Antonina hears an undertone. “And maybe he does. At least for now.”

The last two words make Antonina uneasy. “What do you mean—for now?”

“For as long as he’s at Angelkov. Which might not be long.”

“You’re mistaken, Lilya. He hasn’t spoken of leaving any time soon.”

Lilya is thinking of what Lyosha told her, about Grisha becoming a landowner, and he his steward. “He might say that to please you. But now that he has his own land, do you really think he’ll stay on?”

Antonina studies Lilya. “How do you know this?” Antonina can’t imagine Grisha—private, discreet Grisha—talking to any of the other servants about the six versts she and he had discussed just before Konstantin died.

Lilya’s face is composed. “One hears things.”

Antonina sees that Lilya is being purposefully cryptic. But why? “That’s all, then, Lilya.”

Lilya gets up and walks to the door. As she opens it, she glances over her shoulder at Antonina, and in that instant something in her face unsettles Antonina even further.