to stay here and take this.”
I followed and found him ramming a shirt into his rucksack on the bed. The room was warm but dark and his bed sat neatly made in one corner, a fire glowing in the little iron stove. A thin slant of light hit his collection affixed to the wall—my father’s old knives, a scythe as tall as a young boy. The woodworking tools he’d crafted himself lay neatly arranged on the workbench: maple-handled awls and chisels, a tiny iron letter “T” that he used to brand his initial into the knife handles.
“I could have been halfway to Lake Baikal, but I’m here.” Were those tears? He needed me to keep him calm, for Mamka couldn’t take another one of his episodes. Plus, Mother and I were lucky he brought us food. Taras could live alone in his little hut in the woods and let us starve.
“Your friend isn’t coming around?” I asked.
Vladi, Taras’s fat little former cellmate, came to the izba at the most difficult times, expecting to be included in our meager meals.
“He called a meeting in town.”
“All right.” I closed the door. “Just this once.”
We both knew the rules. I gave him massages and let him watch me undress in exchange for his protection. No mouth-kissing allowed. No touching below the waist.
Taras slipped his shirt over his head and stood, a shaft of light across his chest, his eyelashes spiky with unshed tears. I ran my fingertips through the haze of dark hair in the valley of his chest, down his smooth belly, like the underside of a turtle’s shell, rippled and hard. Everything about Taras was large. Feet, arms, eyes, as if he’d been born of a giantess. I smoothed his front tattoos, a catalog of his time in Russian prisons. On one shoulder, a hand clenched around the stem of a tulip. On the other, a rose-entwisted dagger. I ran my thumb across my favorites, the two cherubs at flight on the smooth skin of his chest, fat, flying babies holding a banner, which said in blue script: ничего не верить. Believe in nothing. How different he’d looked before he went away to prison, softer and slender, his skin smooth and ink free. Back when he smiled and called me Pet.
“Hurry, now,” I said. “On your belly.”
Taras lay facedown on the bed. I pulled off my wrapper, straddled him, and felt the muscles in his back through my thin bloomers. I released the stopper from the vial and Taras breathed deep at the first smell of peppermint.
“Slowly…” he said.
“Quiet. Mamka is right outside.”
I poured a pool onto the small of his back and spread out the oil, to his shoulder blades, over the most magnificent tattoo of the Virgin Mary and child in the heavens, two angels floating above them. My fingers kneaded his back, his skin chamois-leather soft, and rubbed the great clouds and the Virgin’s dress. The peppermint oil grew warmer as my fingers found the knots in his back and glided over the mounded scars of bear claw wounds, thought to be good luck by many. The only good luck about those scars was that Taras stabbed that bear before it could maul him worse.
“You should have a tattoo, Inka.”
A shudder ran through me. The thought of a needle piercing my skin made me sick.
“Maybe a tiny rose. Next to your eye?”
“On my face?” The horror of it. “Never.”
After a few minutes of kneading the knots from his back I stood.
He swallowed hard. “Go ahead. Slowly, now.”
Looking anywhere but at him, I undid the buttons of my chemise and slid it off. I didn’t have to look to know he was rubbing the front of his pants.
“Keep going,” he said.
I stepped out of my bloomers and stood as he watched. As he rubbed harder, I sent myself away, to Mount Olympus, to the entrance gate tended by the seasons. I floated through the clouds, over the gods in their crystal palaces, feasting on nectar and ambrosia to stay immortal.
All at once, I bent to retrieve my chemise. “That is all.”
Taras sprang from the bed, wrapped his hand around my upper arm and squeezed. “Stop teasing me. You do it on purpose.”
He squeezed tighter and I grew faint from the pain. “No marks. Remember?”
Taras released my arm, bit the stopper from the vial and poured it down my chest. He kissed my neck and pulled at my breasts with oily hands.
I shoved him away, but he returned, this time