GUEST OF HONOR
Image created from licensed stock photograph.
Katya Apekina's second novel, Mother Doll, from which this piece is excerpted, is available to order from Overlook Press.
Creating stresses in the social fabric was one of Fräulein Agata’s great joys, so when the general’s friend, a society lady, asked her to bring the school’s top students, my German teacher brought us instead. None of us marriageable by real standards—me, basically a penniless orphan, Hanna, not a student and Jewish enough not to mix her milk and her meat, and Olga, with a pince-nez and stern expression that Freud would have described as castrating. It’s possible Elsie was with us too. I keep forgetting about her.
We arrived sweating from the bike ride. The house was quite grand and beautiful. Girls from my school lived in houses like this, but I had never been invited inside of one. The servants wheeled away our bikes and took our coats, leaving me self-consciously crossing my arms. I was in one of Hanna’s old dresses and the silk pattern hung loosely where it had been filled out by my cousin’s ampler breasts. We had arrived fashionably late and were led through the halls past paintings of the hostess depicting her as she had been in the previous century. I remember thinking that the house must have been designed by the architect to build anticipation, the echoes of the party bouncing toward us as we approached. It took everything in me not to be overcome with excitement, break into a trot, and rush the dining room at full tilt.
Fräulein Agata could feel the excitement too. She was blushing, readying herself for trouble. We passed a room full of wicker birdcages; the tiny colorful canaries inside flitted about and sang nervously. Our teacher made us stand and look at the birds for a moment, let us smooth down each other’s hair and regain our composure, as the servants waited, holding open the doors to the dining room. The guests were seated at a long table with a dark green tablecloth. It was a beautiful room, with silk walls, exquisite wood, a chandelier fitted with little electric bulbs, an enormous fireplace in full flame. Outside, it was already starting to get dark because the days were getting shorter and the clouds were hanging low over the river.
The general wasn’t there, but there were other inbred aristocrats. Lots of golden epaulets and wives with heavily powdered faces. Scattered among them were guests like us, meant to evoke “exotic color”—a political prisoner recently returned from Siberia, a French perfumer with a bell-shaped nose. Seated next to the hostess was her brother, who wasn’t all there. He had a napkin tucked into his collar. He gave the impression of being slovenly, though there was nothing specific that I could point to as being out of place. He was focused monomaniacally on the arrival of the food, a fork and a knife in his hands, like an illustration in a children’s book.
“He’s a very talented mathematician,” Fräulein Agata whispered to Olga, and maneuvered her to the empty chair beside him.
The perfumer was already holding Hanna’s hand and kissing it up to the elbow in the French fashion, so she was stuck sitting by him.
The hostess introduced me without getting up from her seat to the man who had just returned from Siberia. He was dressed strangely, with a yellow silk scarf tied in a bow around his neck, a splotch of blood on the lapel of his jacket, an aloof look that Fräulein Agata and I both found quite intriguing. Fräulein Agata seated me beside him so I could be her little puppet.
She arranged my arms and tilted my head at a becoming angle. It was a game we called “Doll.”
“Isn’t she a beauty,” she said to the man. She used me often in this way. The attention was ostensibly on me, but the interesting stuff was happening between them.
“Beauty,” I said to the man, “is, in my opinion, entirely overrated. My mother was beautiful, and it got her absolutely nowhere.”
Fräulein Agata nodded. She’d heard me talk about my mother like this many times. She rearranged my hands and squinted at the results.
A man across the table tried to join our conversation. “Isn’t beauty enough for its own sake?”
Fräulein Agata ignored this idiotic sentiment.
“She wasn’t using her beauty toward good,” Fräulein Agata said. “We all are given talents, and it is a crime”—she tilted my head—“a sin, to waste them.”
This got the man next to us to crack a smile. “A sin,” he whispered dramatically, and crossed himself.
“You laugh, but you don’t agree?” Fräulein Agata said, turning the force of her charm on him like a hose.
She took my hand under the table and squeezed it. I could imagine that in her sleep she might appear quite ugly. But awake, her face was full of such cleverness and animation, I didn’t know how it was possible for any man to resist her.
On the other side of her was the empty chair at the head of the table reserved for the guest of honor.
“Who is the guest of honor, I wonder.”
“Probably Elijah,” Fräulein Agata said to me, but for the benefit of the man, perhaps to show him I was Jewish, or merely to show off her knowledge of these things.
The hostess was seated far down the table on the opposite end, looking at each of us through her lorgnette with disappointment. Marriageable or not, Fräulein Agata reminded us on our way there, we had the commodity of youth. And it was true! The powdered women tensed and exchanged looks when their husbands tried to engage us in conversation.
One man with whiskers who was in charge of something in the customs office told us a story that was meant to be amusing, about someone who had tried to smuggle fabric without paying the necessary tariffs on it.
“How did he smuggle it?” my teacher asked, trying to rush him along to what must have been the good part.
“He had hidden it under another bolt of fabric!” the man said.
Nothing about his story was proving to be interesting. “I thought you were going to say he tried to smuggle it in a horse,” my teacher said.
“Like a true Trojan,” I giggled.
“How would that work?” Olga said, squinting at us across the table.
“In a carved-out compartment!” We were laughing, though it was very stupid.
“Gibberish,” Olga scolded us, though she was laughing a little too.
Hanna tried to join in our fun, but the French perfumer was using her fingers to stroke his own nose.
The shape of it, I heard him tell her, amplified smell. Then he began to list the flowers that did and did not keep well in suspensions.
“Unsurprisingly,” he said, “night blossoms work best.”
Fräulein Agata leaned over me to talk to the man with the yellow scarf. There’s no reason to be coy here. I might as well tell you who he was. Osip Valeiravich. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was a figure of some significance. To me, certainly, because I married him, but to the larger movement as well.
Osip was back after being sent away for two years to Eastern Siberia for organizing against the imperial government. He was at the party to gather money for striking factory workers. It was fashionable to give money to liberal causes. Everybody in these aristocratic circles liked to act as though they were sympathetic to the workers and the peasants. Up to a point, of course!
“What was it like in Siberia?” Fräulein Agata asked Osip in a voice that to me did not sound entirely natural.
“Cold,” he answered, and looked at me, as though I were the one who’d asked.
“How cold?” she asked breathily.
He got up and scraped his nails along the frost on the window, then stood behind my chair and pressed his icy fingertips against my neck.
I gasped.
“I see,” Fräulein Agata said. “Very cold.” She took his hand off my neck and rubbed it to warm it up.
The hostess called down the table and asked whether she was giving palm readings, and if so, to do her.
But then, suddenly, it was I who was up and kneeling before the hostess. It felt like Fräulein Agata had an ability to bend things around to her will, so no matter what you did you always ended up where she wanted.
I took the hostess’s skeleton hand, loose glove of skin held in place with many large and heavy rings. All eyes were upon us. Hanna looked on hopefully. Olga pulled her pince-nez out of her sleeve and scowled.
“This man was Rasputin, the “holy man” who fucked his way through town. He was the tsarina’s favorite charlatan. Everyone at the table was standing and clapping in confusion as they batted away birds. ”
I looked at the faint lines crossing the hostess’s palm.
“I hear . . .” I began, “the galloping of hooves.”
The hostess furrowed her brow and nodded.
“It’s getting louder. Louder!”
And then, in truth, I did see a vision: blood, buckets of blood pouring through the street. The hostess’s severed head, rolling like a cabbage down a stairwell.
I stopped at “blood, buckets of blood” and trailed off. Even that was too much. The hostess withdrew her hand sharply, her rings banging against the table.
I heard Olga snort as she suppressed a laugh, and a man with golden epaulets shook his head and looked down into his empty plate. At that moment, the servants came in, carrying the tureens of soup, and the hostess took her annoyance with me out on them, causing the first servant in the procession to halt abruptly, and the ones behind him to trip over one another, sloshing soup onto their smocks.
We were not to begin eating, much to the chagrin of the hostess’s brother, until the guest of honor arrived, and nobody knew when this would be. There was some grumbling from the male guests, some loud sighing from the female guests. The hostess reached for her brother’s collar and pulled out the tucked napkin, but he defiantly tucked it back in.
I hovered uncomfortably, then went back to my seat, which was now occupied by Fräulein Agata.
Osip was telling her about the labor camp in Siberia, how the grizzly bears had gotten into the graves and developed a taste for human flesh. You could see buttons frozen in their scat.
“Thank God you got out,” she said, touching his elbow. Fräulein Agata switched her allegiances easily. An imperial general, a Socialist revolutionary, it was all equally exciting.
Osip looked at me but I felt suddenly shy, so I drifted my gaze over to the hostess’s brother, watching him go into the kitchen and come back with a bowl of soup just for himself. He sat down and slurped it loudly as the rest of the table watched. I could feel Osip’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t look away.
This soup dispute probably would have escalated further, but then the door blew open, and the guest of honor arrived. The perfumer’s nostrils quivered, though it didn’t take a special nose to smell him. The man who came in stank like a goat. He had a long beard that hung to his belly button. He laughed as he entered. He’d opened all of the birdcages in the other room, and now the little canaries were flying in desperate circles around the dining room. One flew right into the window behind me. Another was perched on this man’s shoulder, edging its way toward his beard, which was thick and long and seemed to contain food.
This man was Rasputin, the “holy man” who fucked his way through town. He was the tsarina’s favorite charlatan. Everyone at the table was standing and clapping in confusion as they batted away birds. The servants quickly returned and laid all the food out now upon the table. Blintzes and piroshkis, caviar in all colors, pigs stuffed with lambs, lambs stuffed with pigs. I don’t know. Everything. I had never seen such a spread.
The hostess was babbling about what an honor it was to have him in her home. Even her brother stood up a bit as he kept eating. Rasputin was flanked by an entourage, some dressed like him in peasant clothes, others in elegant suits. Bird shit was landing periodically on the tablecloth, which everyone was pretending was not unusual in the least.
My teacher stared at Rasputin, mesmerized. He was a gross old goat, and yet, I felt something too. A pull as erotic as quicksand.
Rasputin took the hostess by the shoulders and embraced her warmly. “Thank you,” he said, “for inviting me into your home.”
He stared out at the table of food before him. Then he stuck his dirty thumb into the raspberry jam. For some reason we were all still clapping, even as he stuffed that thumb into the hostess’s mouth. Her eyes went round. Fräulein Agata opened her own mouth, ready for a similar sacrament.
Before taking his seat, he had me stand and twirl around. I felt his gaze like a wind blowing through me. “No, dearheart, that won’t do,” he said, and made me switch seats with my cousin. It was embarrassing, me in her dress from last season, being scrutinized and rejected in this way.
The French perfumer was disappointed in this outcome, as well. He tried to protest, at which point he was ejected from the party and his seat was taken by a man in Rasputin’s entourage. A nervous-looking type who must have been hired by the tsar to monitor things. He took no interest in me at all. His eyes were locked on his charge.
We all watched a canary disappear into Rasputin’s beard and thrash around in there.
“He’s found something, the little one,” Rasputin said. “Let’s give him some cake!”
The servants immediately brought out cake.
“Let them eat cake!” I heard Fräulein Agata shout, louder than she had probably meant to, but then Olga and I took it up as a chant. The call from the French Revolution. We were feeling rowdy and things seemed to quickly devolve.
Rasputin had his hands on both of Hanna’s shoulders and was murmuring some sort of gibberish and she was looking down, smiling bashfully and twisting the end of his beard around her finger. I got up and went over to them, not sure how to put an end to it. He was used to getting his chicken cooked a certain way and Hanna seemed more than happy to oblige. Fräulein Agata got up and joined me, and then Osip did too, all of us trying to pull Hanna away from this madman. By then the hostess finally had enough of us and kicked us out.
My cousin made a scene. She went half limp and we had to drag her out the front door. The servants threw our bicycles down the stairs, and we walked them along the river, taking turns getting on once in a while to show off in front of Osip. It was unusual back then for anyone to have a bicycle.
Hanna was glum. She kept dragging her feet.
“Oh, Hanna,” Fräulein Agata comforted her as we walked along the Neva. “There will be more parties. It was enough to have been picked.” If Rasputin had picked my teacher, I’m sure we never would have left the party. But now that we were gone, her allegiances were with the revolutionary and Rasputin was a dirty old goat.
In the blue light of the afternoon, snowflakes began falling into the river and disappearing. It was a few days away still from freezing. When I was little, Osip had been there for the bloody massacre on this river. Unarmed protestors were slaughtered by the Imperial Guard in front of him. Shot and chopped up to bits just for asking for better working conditions. This led to the revolution in 1905, the one that ultimately didn’t take. But the next one would. I had no inkling yet that I would be a part of it.
The vision I had seen when looking at the hostess’s palm—where had it come from? I don’t think I had any talents in clairvoyance, but it wasn’t that far off from what did happen. Now that I’m dead and on the other side, I can see the way time is not a line, it’s more like a spiral, and that I was young and porous enough to stumble into the knowledge swirling around me.
Katya Apekina is a novelist, screenwriter and translator. Her new novel, Mother Doll, is coming out March 12, 2024. Her debut, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, was named a Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Buzzfeed and others and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and and on the shortlist for Stanford Libraries’ 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Katya translated poetry and prose from Russian for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George grant, an Olin Fellowship, and a 3rd Year Fiction Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis where she did her MFA. She has done residencies at VCCA, Playa, Ucross, Art Omi: Writing and Fondation Jan Michalski in Switzerland. Born in Moscow, she currently lives in Los Angeles.