How warm she felt, delirious with fever. We’d had a bad night, her up coughing as I held her, willing her to breathe. I brushed oven soot off her coverlet and pressed two fingers to the bones of her wrist.
My gaze flicked to the icons in the holy corner opposite, the golden faces of the tsar and the Black Madonna shining above the rose-scented candles burning there. Would the saints take her from me? How could I live without Mamka? We would bury her next to Papa in the pine grove.
The thought sent me rushing back to the samovar. I touched one finger to the metal side. The water was finally heating and soon it would hiss with steam.
I opened the izba door, shielding my eyes from the blast of sunshine, and with my apron waved out the soot from the oven.
I looked up and my heart banged inside of my chest when I saw two men coming down our front path, one skeleton-skinny with a springy step, leaning on a black cane, the other round and big, both in city clothes. Taxmen. Their carriage rested at the head of the path in the sun, loaded with household items: a brass birdcage, a baby carriage, and a tall clock.
I hurried to the samovar. How to hide it behind the oven? It was too heavy with water for me to carry by the silver handles. I wrapped my arms around the cylinder and lifted it, the heat searing through the linen of my apron and sleeves. The hot water inside sloshed against the metal as I stepped behind the oven and set down the samovar there, my chest and arms on fire.
I rushed back to the open door just as the men arrived.
“Fathers,” I said, using the most reverent form of greeting we all did. I bowed low to the skinny one and stared at his boots. My arms and chest pounded with the burns.
“Don’t kowtow to me,” the skinny one said. “I’m no father of yours. I need to speak with Rafa Rafovich Kozlov immediately on imperial business.”
“My papa’s dead,” I said into the leather. I brushed the water from my eyes. I had to keep my wits about me and, above all, keep my temper down.
The old man pushed by me. “Get up, I said. Why do you live so far from the others in town?”
“It’s just a short walk from Malinov.”
I stood and watched him take in the room, his weasel eyes magnified in his wire-rimmed spectacles. He was a census man from the zemstvo, his face lined and cracked like a dry riverbed, his mustache waxed sharp at both ends: a bureaucrat taxman, the most hated kind in the village.
The other man I recognized as Mr. A., a large man and good-natured, owner of the Malinov general store in town. He brushed the bottoms of his felt boots against the doorjamb and entered. He held a little paper book close to his face and wrote in it with a pencil stub.
The old man walked about the room as he spoke. “One room country dwelling known in the local parlance as izba.” Suddenly the man turned. “Does a person named Taras Walidovich Perminov live here?”
“He once was my Papa’s apprentice.” This was true, after all. Taras’s alcoholic parents had sold him to Papa. I pointed to the far wall. “Sleeps in the toolshed through that door.”
“Back from prison?” Mr. A. asked, writing something in his little book.
The tiny pencil in his big hand made me want to laugh.
“Yes. Back two months now. But he’s not here.”
The old one stepped toward the beautiful corner and eyed the icons. “Where is he? On what business?”
St. Petersburg, of course, but what to say? Since Taras had been back from prison he’d been going to secret meetings there and I’d found pamphlets in his boots.
“Only God knows.”
The two exchanged a look.
The prickles on the back of my neck rose. “He served his time.”
Mr. A. stepped toward me. “I heard he met a bad element there….”
I took a deep breath. “Prison changes a person.”
“Turn around,” the old man said to me.
I stared at him for a long moment, and then quickly turned.
He considered my figure. “Are you and this Taras to be married?”
“No,” I said.
“Unmarried women pay additional tax.” With one hand, he grabbed my jaw and forced open my mouth. “Good teeth. You may be the only unmarried one in Malinov. Most have a passel of brats by your age.”
That was certainly