Midvinterblot

By Sergei Linkov

The first chapter of a forthcoming novel

My parents were entirely adequate. My father was a trapper; my mother was whatever the wives of trappers did in those days. Sometimes, when my mother partook of vodka, she would become convinced that she was the illegitimate daughter of some nobleman. She spoke of his estate on the Neva river, where she recalled herself toddling along poplar-line alleys and hiding alder cones under the Roman columns of the gazebo. She did not seem particularly interested in the role her own mother had played in all this: sometimes she was a cook or a washerwoman, other times a parishioner whom the mustachioed rascal had met on one of his contemplative rides. His horse had been a dapple gray Orlov mare, she was sure of it. 

By my fourth year we had reached an understanding: she would talk, and I would ask what various things had looked like. The chapel in the hazelnut grove had red painted eaves, which were to be avoided in the winter because of icicles. Dutch irises grew around the fountain where a nude mariner wrestled with a dolphin. There was once a viper in the peony bed, and she had cried until the farrier killed it with his hammer. My grandfather, who lived on top of the stove, was deaf and could neither confirm nor deny. 

Whenever my parents quarreled, my father would put his hands behind his back and say, “Yes, baroness! Yes, marquess!” This violation of her sanctity never failed to infuriate her, and, like a Steppe shamaness, she would clench her fists to her chest and invoke upon him bayonets and spears. 

My father would only laugh, and weave around her as though she were an angry laika dog. Sometimes I suspected that she only tolerated him because he rarely ventured into the house to begin with. In my earliest memories he resembled Ded Moroz, always arriving, his Cossack beard brilliant with frost. “Papa is here!” my mother would declare with a touch of cynicism. He would step over the porch with a hearty “Ah!”, shuffle a few times, and then lumber towards whatever it was he was seeking, his felt boots tracking the smell of wet animals around the house. Then he would disappear, and all three of us house-folk would peel potatoes and learn our letters by the phonograph and do a thousand little deeds to keep the world turning until the moment he next chose to arrive. 

I learned early on that if I wanted to find my father, my only recourse was to head for his workshop near the outhouse. The workshop was in a way my twin. He had previously dried his pelts in the main house, but this had nauseated my pregnant mother so much that she had threatened to go to a wise woman and have me aborted. My father had visited a few of the men who still owed him after Siberia, and they had brought not only the timber but a donkey cart and a trio of batraks who finished the workshop in time for her third trimester. The absence of my mother’s spirit within its walls had allowed it to retain a certain masculine incompleteness. I liked looking at the saplings of unequal lengths which made up its cantilever roof, their ends sticking out like rifles aimed at the sky. Sometimes, I would make a gun with my fingers and align it with the others. I would whisper “Pif, paf!” and imagine all of them firing together, and all of God’s cherubim and seraphs thudding to the ground. 

As a young child I was forbidden from entering the gestational sac of this surly twin, or from joining my father on his flights to the woods, but there were times when I would catch him outside, mending one of his traps or scraping the hide of one of the diseased reindeer that old man Babkin kept trying to sell him. We spoke little in those early years. I floated around his periphery, strutting like a clown in his snowshoes or pushing my toy soldiers into his snares. It amused me to see how many of them I could garrotte at once without any falling out. Under my bed, next to the pillowcases in which my mother hid her debutante gown, I kept a coffee tin full of gunless, limbless, headless veterans of my campaigns. A few I had tried to melt with the kerosene stove my father had taken with him to Siberia. I would watch him skin martens and stoats, stretching them comically thin and flicking his knife around their wrists and eyelids until the pelt would separate from the little crayfish-red creature inside. The furs would disappear inaccessibly into the workshop, and the carcasses would be sectioned with my father’s ax to be used as bait or sold for dog food.  It frightened me a little how all animals were the same inside. He would split the carcasses into sections with his ax and I would sit there and wonder, if I were to have all my skin peeled off, would I have the same pointy stick-tail and the same doll eyes? 

I loved my father’s flotsam, yet he seemed unsettled by mine. He treated my toy soldiers quite roughly, scooping them up in handfuls with snow and mud and all. The snowshoes, traps, axes, and setting tools that I touched were all moved back against the wall, even when I left them where I found them. The nature of having a child seemed to baffle him. I was all my mother’s. She called me inside every chance she could; she would have me fear damp and cold and germs and social democracy, and when I failed to fear any of them, she would fall into despondence. She wept into my tin of mangled soldiers once, telling me that they were presents from her real father, the nobleman, that she had once wed them to her Dutch dolls beneath the wisteria, and that one day the nobleman would return and take away all the other nice things I had, and then I would be as uncultured as every other brute boy in our village. I was frightened of her weeping, so I indulged her. We would sit by the fire and read Dumas and Cervantes, whom she told me I must not talk to other children about. They would not understand, she said, with times being as they were. She played Mozart on the phonograph and taught me a little bit of French. She made me do good deeds for my grandfather, and the two of us would squat domovoi-like in the nauseating heat above the stove while I rubbed his feet or helped him to eat his porridge. Every day I would soak a bit of bread in a dish of milk for our cat, a huge hairy thing named Gosha whom I sometimes kicked when she wasn’t looking. 

As I grew older, my mind came to be occupied with the unfairness of the fact that my father understood the chaos of a partitioned animal, and I did not. I stopped bringing my toys near him, and instead began to imitate him. Whenever I saw a creature hanging crucified in his big fleshing frame, I would pick up his scraper and toss it a few times at a globule of fat, before becoming overwhelmed by the outspanned vastness before me, red and white like the flag our neighbor Notkin brought back from Manchuria. Once, when I was eight years old, I decided that I would scrape one of the reindeer in earnest. It wasn’t long before I made a hole the size of a fingernail. He came up behind me and cuffed the back of my head. I toppled forward into the fleshing frame, and the pelt enfolded me like a caul. It smelled of goat milk. The scraps of membrane, softened by my tears, glued themselves to my cheeks. 

The next day, I stuck my left hand into an armed body-grip trap. The pain was bright and unctuous, like the rainbow film that forms on water where leaves are decaying. I wailed as it swallowed my wrist in its toadlike mouth, and my mother wailed with me. We turned the kitchen over like two bear cubs, knocking about her drawers in search of something that could open it. She must have tried every knife she owned; she even tried her favorite cake spatula that had the little brass cherub on it, the protuberance of its belly rubbed yellow with use. My wrist was covered in tiny cuts by the time she gave up. She even took me to the stove and made me climb up into my grandfather’s lair, the trap clanking against the walls so loudly that I became quite unreasonably embarrassed in spite of his deafness and my pain. Together, he and my mother squeezed at the mechanism, grunting and sniffing loudly, and yet I remained trapped. When my father came home, she pummeled his chest and told him that she despised him, that she would leave him without a pot to piss in, that she would fly into the arms of Lenin and satisfy every Bolshevik in the country rather than hide in his hovel a moment longer. He held both of her wrists in one hand and disarmed my trap with the other. 

I never understood children who were frightened when their parents argued. For me it was good sport. My blood sang for each of them; I bounced like a shuttlecock between my mother’s rage and my father’s indifference, and afterwards felt as satisfied as I did the morning after Maslenitsa. That night, I heard my father contorting her gamely against three different points on their bedroom wall while demanding to know if she thought Lenin could do this. Her responses to his questions were, quite confusingly, all breathless variants of “More, you kulak bastard, more!” I sat outside their bedroom door, as was customary for me when these things happened, and listened as her squeals reached an ear-rending crescendo, after which came the more usual wet noises of grown-ups making up. 

It appeared that my escapade with the trap had worked: I was now interesting to my father. The very next day, he opened the workshop doors for me, and the smell of rawhide rolled out to welcome me like the tongue of a tired hunting dog. I remember the rows of pelts hanging from the ceiling, each with its own kind. In the front were the stoats with their heraldic tips, then the martens and the nacreous mink, and other mustelid cousins whose names I didn’t even know in those days. After them came the foxes, arranged from sandy to red to blue, flanked by two magnificent silvers. Further to the back were other assorted creatures: winter hares, squirrels with ear tufts and without, a wolverine, moles, tricolor hamsters, and a few odd round disks I later found out were beavers. Lynx and wolves hung bonelessly along the walls, their puffy paws reaching almost to the floor. The entire back wall was enveloped by a flaccid brown bear. Acting on a childish compulsion, I pressed my cheek to its flank and closed my eyes. My father laughed, and told me that it was mine as much as his now, because he would never sell it as long as he and the Tsar both lived. On the floor beneath it were a couple of burlap sacks. I tugged one of them open, and caught a glimpse of something that looked like a large pink egg encrusted in pearls. My father told me to leave my mother’s things alone, so I did.

First, my father taught me to arm and disarm traps, and which setting tools were used for which. After that, he taught me to skin, and then to scrape. I learned that the best way to stop him from hitting me whenever I put a hole into one of the squirrels he gave me to practice with was to make a quick cut somewhere on the palm of my hand and squeeze out a few tears, at which point, as always was the case with hurt children, I would become my mother’s problem. She would douse my extremities in iodine and tell me about the horrors of lockjaw, but it didn’t matter. She no longer owned me. I knew the filthy smell of a wolverine’s accidentally punctured guts, and how to find and gather she-wolf urine on the snow, and many other things I was certain no mother in the world could possibly know.  

When I turned ten, my father started taking me into the woods with him. It was hard going at first with my prepubescent calf-legs; his territory was, if he were to be believed, the largest of any trapper in the village, and some of his sets were miles apart. He knew each trap like his own child. It was as though I had a hundred siblings, each with their own talents and peculiarities—the reliable older sister whose teeth had been bent by an escaped bear in ‘05, the nervous cousin who snapped at rustling leaves, the quintuplets who lay in a row along a copse of aspen trees and gleefully snapped up the smallest stoats. He spent a good part of our excursions doting on them, feeding them oil and cleaning the gristle from their mouths; he preferred to carry out his repairs in the field, as though afraid that taking them out of their cradles in the leaf litter would make them all start crying. When he found one that didn’t belong to him, we would cut it or trigger it with sticks and pinecones. It was all because of the Bolsheviks, my father would say; they wanted everything taken from everybody. When he’d trapped in Siberia, he said, every man, whether freeman or contractor, was a brother. Bolshevism, Menshevism, socialism, capitalism, all were left at the feet of the Urals, and men would walk innocent as lambs into the Arcadia of the north. 

I always appreciated these anti-Bolshevik activities for the breaks they afforded us, and for the opportunities to hear him talk. A topic we both enjoyed was his holy hierarchy of furbearers. The sable was the God-king of them all, and the lynx with its painted eyelids was his Virgin Mary. After that came Prince Winter Ermine and Duke Summer Ermine, and the mixed nobility of mink and marten. Foxes were good old workhorses, reliable but not particularly interesting. Wolves were for aviators, wolverines were for explorers, and weasels were for paintbrushes. He disliked raccoon dogs, whom he considered to be unpleasant and effete creatures. 

He held a particular hatred for beavers. They were eternal saboteurs; they crawled out of the rivers of Canada and Scandinavia by night, greasy and eel-like, and schemed in their unnatural little huts about how best to disrupt the Russian fur trade. He would tell me, spittle flying in little arcs from mouth to beard, how he couldn't get for his fourteen beaver pelts what the most snot-nosed cheese-loving French Canuck prick could get for three, how one day he would burn them and do his bit to exorcize Russia from their malevolent influence. Any Russian seen wearing a beaver hat, he would say while smacking his boots deep into the snow, ought to be lined up against the wall. I would follow him bow-legged as I planted my feet into the divots he left behind, imagining ladies and dandies fleeing from an anti-beaver Black Hundred, hiding in beaver dams with their sodden muffs and cravats, being dragged out screaming as the beavers held out their arms in pitiful resignation. Then the general would give the order for every one of them to be killed, and the patrols would march home with bucktoothed and pompadoured heads on their bayonets.

We had just one rifle—an ancient Berdanka my father loved deeply and disallowed me from touching. Sometimes he would shoot at wolves in the distance, and then my breath would catch curiously in my lower belly as we dashed together to where they had fallen, like children mounting an assault on a neighbor’ snow castle. I loved the way a spray of blood, if ejected from a certain angle, would form plump redcurrants on the surface of the snow. Sometimes, while my father was occupied with strapping the limp beast to the sled we carried for this purpose, I would gather these currants and put them in my mouth. They tasted like the rusty aftermath of pulling a milk tooth. 

On the way home, my father would tell me stories about Siberia. “You think you've seen stoats?” he would say. I would play along, and insist that I had in fact seen stoats. Sighing, rubbing the back of his hand across his ruddy forehead, he would tell me that the things we hunted weren't stoats, but stretched out roof rats. The real stoats, he said, he'd left behind in Siberia. You only had to go to a woodpile with a laika or two, any woodpile you wanted, and the stoats would pour out like sailors from a burning warship in Tsushima, ten, twenty, thirty; you had to keep your trousers tucked into your socks or else they'd run up your legs and bite your balls off. 

And, above all else, Siberia had sables. Once, we found a trap containing a single black paw. A bloodless spur of bone protruded from it, chewed to a dagger-sharp point. My father became convinced that it must have belonged to a sable. This is what sables did in Siberia, he insisted, his voice curiously plaintive. They were not like their drab cousins the martens. They alone, among all of God's furbearers, held the forbidden knowledge of their own beauty. To lose a foot and spare their coat was a trifling thing to them. In the northernmost reaches of Siberia, where warships slept like enchanted maidens and icicles grew under the sea, there lived certain ancient sables who had four stumps and could do nothing but crawl like caterpillars. But their coats were the most golden, and their guard hairs the most pearlescent, because their children and grandchildren fed them and honored them as the greatest of their tribe. And yet if you cut off their tails, or even tore out a chunk of their fur, they would go mad with grief and eat their own innards. My father had seen a sable, hounded to the edge of a muddy bog, curl up on the ground and refuse to go a step further, so unthinkable it was for it to soil its fur. And, if raccoon dogs were being trapped further west each year, my father would reason, then why was it so impossible that one day the sable too might reach us?

At the time I had little idea of what a sable was. I only knew that it was like a marten but bigger, brighter, more expensive, more diaphanous, more. In my daydreams they were beloved chimeras, wolf-sized and radiant, the color of the midnight sun. They never did anything like eat or defecate; rather, they would lie somnolent in the branches of the tallest pines, ambling up only to position themselves in relief against the dawn and dusk. I even imagined them with discoid halos sometimes, like those of Orthodox icons. I thought about how strange it was that we lived in a world in which we could kill them.  

A long time passed before I got the chance to kill anything. Wolves and foxes caught in foothold traps could be shot by my father, and when it came to smaller creatures our body-grip traps did our work for us, so that we could go about and pluck them like apples in an orchard. However, there were times when an unusually large marten would be caught by the leg, or a stoat would be found breathing with half its chest caved in, and for times like that my father taught me how to kill them the right way. It looked simple enough—he would press the heel of his right hand into the back of the creature’s neck, tug quickly on its tail, and the little furry body would join its more fortunate brethren on his belt. We weren’t knackers after all, my father would insist; we did not want our prey to suffer, and that put us above animals, who above all else loved the taste that suffering added to meat. That was why we had guns and traps and they did not, and every other opinion on this topic was, according to him, born of the hysteria of city folk who knew nothing of the world. Even when we used our hands to kill, we did so mercifully, as if we were chastising wayward children. 

The first opportunity that presented itself to me was a winter ermine caught by its back half. We stood and watched it for a while as it swung back and forth from our tree set like the pendulum of my mother’s Schwabian cuckoo clock. Then, my father prodded its spatchcocked hindquarters with the barrel of his rifle, broadening its trajectory so that it came smacking into the spruce trunk on the backswing, and said, “Go on, son, do like I taught you.” 

I remember I sweated, and how tacky the insides of my woolen gloves became. I grabbed the set’s chain, and the ermine froze in space, stabbing its sharp little front feet into the air. Chak-chak-chak-chak! it began to cry. When I took hold of its tail, a thin string of dung protruded from its rear. That, to me, seemed like the saddest part of it all. 

As soon as I brought my other hand close to its head, the ermine lanced its teeth into my thumb. It twisted, constrictor-like, around my wrist. I panicked; I began to play the ermine like an accordion, jerking my hands apart as the leaden pain crashed and splattered. It became imperative to me that I endure; that if I did not, some terrible secret would be spilled, and then all of Russia, every last Bolshevik and beaver-wearer, would go up in flames. I scrunched up my eyes, squeezing my tears back inside whatever organ tears came from. Wandering swamp-lights spun in my lower intestine. And then my father was laughing, so hard that he went down arse-first into the snow. “Kyril,” he wheezed, wiping mucus from his beard, “What the devil is wrong with you?” 

The ermine, I realized, had been dead for some time. My father disarmed the trap, and let it slide into my hands. I stroked it, from ears to base of tail as my mother had taught me to stroke anything, leaving streaks of blood on its fur. Suddenly remembering who I was, I held it out to my father. He wrinkled his nose a little, as he used to do when I left my mutilated soldiers lying around. 

“You can keep it,” he said. “It’s your Cross of Saint George.” 

I did keep the ermine. I skinned it, salted it, tanned it with its own brains like they did in Siberia. I spent a good few days breaking it on the handle of a broom, and then hung it with tacks beneath the crucifix above my bed. I was quite proud of my idolatry; of the way my mother crossed herself and whispered “O, bozhe moi!” every time she saw it, and of how convinced she was that it was rabid. She took to reciting the Lord’s Prayer with me every night, after which she would always offer me a glass of water, her knuckles sharp and white as she watched me drain it. Even during the day, she would suddenly slide a glass across the table towards me, or start pumping water whenever we happened to be outside at the same time. But her suspicions were for naught; I never developed hydrophobia, or began foaming, or renounced Christ. I did not even renounce her old world of Mozart and D'Artagnan and French orthography, even though I sometimes wanted to. On occasion, I asked her to play the more bombastic parts of Mozart’s Requiem. I would rest my head on her shoulder, her plait of marten-colored hair tickling my nose, and imagine two tiny canine teeth piercing me with each pulse of the trumpets. She in turn would sit very still, in terrible fear, it seemed to me, of the moment when the recording would end. 

After that, I killed a great many animals. Stoats and martens and mink, hares with the eyes of schizophrenics, hamsters and voles whose bodies seemed to crumble like zefir at the lightest touch; I even clubbed foxes—the most beautiful ones, whose lucent coats would be irrevocably ruined by a gunshot. I began to intuit that only the loveliest things in the world were worth killing. The reason our world lacked taste and kindness nowadays was that beautiful things were safe, and nobody wanted to make martyrs anymore. It was just when this principle had become to me a holy truth, reinforced in Sunday school by the raven-haired Mikhail Vsevolodovich falling headless at the feet of Bhatu Khan, that the first gunflashes of the Great War shone above Stallupönen and Tannenberg like the white hands of the midnight Zorya.

About the Author:

Sergei Linkov was born to Russian immigrant parents and resides in South Africa. He is a junior doctor, and frequently draws on his experiences with rural medicine in his writing. He has previously been published in The Metaworker.