The latticed walls of the pavilion allowed her a glimpse inside, and she saw a woman-a young woman in a black evening dress-reclining on a low wicker chaise, reading a book and smoking a long cigarette, the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder wedged between her white teeth.

The woman looked up and smiled at Galina. “Come on in,” she said. “I'm Countess Vygotskaya. New here?"

Galina found the entrance-just a simple arch-and sat on the proffered stool.

The woman reached for the ashtray and stubbed out her cigarette, still exhaling long twin snakes of smoke through her narrow nostrils, exquisite like the rest of her. The black strap of her dress slid off her too-white shoulder, and her black curls seemed too black, almost blue. Galina felt intimidated by this woman-not just the aristocratic roots or her beauty, but the way she carried herself. The air around her grew cold and clear, studded with tiny ice crystals, and Galina's breath caught, as if in the middle of a January night. “You've heard about me, of course,” the woman said.

"No,” Galina admitted in a quiet guilty voice. “But I'm sure that-"

"Of course you have,” the woman said. “The Decembrists’ wives. I was one of them."

Galina nodded. “I hadn't realized."

"Neither had I,” the woman said mysteriously. And added, noting Galina's perplexed look, “How difficult it is to be an icon."

Galina thought of the story. The Decembrists’ Revolt left her cold in high school, when they covered that part of Russian history; the Byronic appeal and the misguided liberalism of their useless gesture never quite did it for her. But now she supposed she had a reluctant admiration for the young officers who rode into the Senate Square of St Petersburg to challenge Czar Nicholas and the absolute monarchy, and were greeted by cannon fire. On the back of her mind she always wondered what happened to the soldiers under their command-dead, she supposed, cannon fodder. Only the officers were important enough to secure a place in the history books. They were exiled to Siberia except the five executed outright. Galina dimly remembered something about ropes that gave and broke, and the unprecedented second hanging.

And this is where their wives came in-she imagined them often, those beautiful rich ladies who abandoned everything to follow their husbands into the frozen woods and summers ringing with mosquitoes, to the place away from civilization and any semblance of everything they knew.

It occurred to her only later in life that the women were held up as an example of selfless devotion and obedience-at first, she could not realize why they went. She had been too young for the notions of love and tragedy inextricably linked to it then. Now she was too skeptical of both. In that she differed from her classmates who usually listened to the stories of the revolt and the Decembrists’ wives with an expression of almost religious fervor.

"Did you ever regret going to Siberia?” Galina asked.

The woman lit a new cigarette and breathed a slow bitter laugh. “Me? I never went. That is, I went to Moscow. The shame was too much.” The gaze of her large dark blue eyes lingered on Galina's face. “But you wouldn't know shame, would you?"

"I do,” Galina started. “I-"

"Guilt is not the same thing,” the Decembrist's Wife interrupted her again. “Shame is something that is done to you from the outside."

"Why didn't you go then?"

The woman shrugged her shoulder. Voluptuous, Galina thought, that's the word they used to describe women like her. “Because they expected me to, I suppose. Because I was just an appendage. Because it didn't matter what I wanted. The men always ask me, ‘Didn't you love your husband?’ Women never do-fancy that."

Her languid eyes fixed on Galina for a moment before looking away, at the burning tip of her cigarette. “What do you think?"

"It's not about love,” Galina tried to explain and stopped, short of words.

"Those who went abandoned everything,” the woman said. “Those who stayed abandoned their husbands. I had abandoned both. A friend of mine went, and she could never write to her family. She left her children behind, and her family loathed her for it. Mine loathed me because I didn't."

Her name was Elena, and she ran away from her home in St Petersburg suddenly filled with empty echoes after her husband was put in stocks and shipped somewhere unimaginable. She realized that she could not win. No matter what she did she would be either a bad daughter to her father, the widowed Count Klyazmensky, or a bad wife to her husband Dmitri. The truth was, she was tired of both men in her life, and she packed two modest trunks with clothes and knick-knacks she couldn't quite dispose of yet, handed the keys to her house on the Neva embankment to her housekeeper, and told her coachman to take her to Moscow. Everyone assumed that she was going shopping, and out of the corner of her eye she saw people-even servants!-shaking their heads with disapproval.

In truth, she wasn't sure what she wanted to do in Moscow. She could visit some remote relatives, but her heart wasn't in it. She could take rooms and cloister herself from the world. Instead, she wandered down to the Moscow River embankment and watched the frozen river, green with crusted ice, with black cracks showing the sluggish black water underneath. She shivered in her furs and wondered if the water was as cold as the air that clouded her breath as soon as it left her lips. She stayed there until the stars came out.

The night had a different color here-farther south, the blue of the sky had grown deeper, more saturated, and the stars had become large and yellow, not the white pinpricks she remembered from St Petersburg. She missed the aurora borealis.

A movement on the ice caught her attention-she squinted at the dark shapes, worried that some clueless peasant children had wandered onto the ice, thick but liable to split open every time a smallest child set a lightest foot on it. She was about to call out, to tell them to get back, when her breath stopped fogging the air; she forgot to breathe. The shapes crawled out from under the embankment on which she stood, covered in mud and raw sewage, and they were not children at all but grown women. Pale filthy women, dressed in nothing but thin linen shirts.

They crawled on all fours like animals, until they reached the first patch of open black water. They slid into it, one by one, noiseless as seals. Before Elena could break her stupor or call for help, they re-emerged, sleek and clean, the linen clinging to their young bodies, their wet hair plastered to their faces and necks. As she watched, they gathered on the ice where it seemed more solid and held hands, forming a circle like peasant girls did at weddings. And they started dancing-moving around in a circle, faster and faster, until Elena felt dizzy. And then their bare feet left the ice, and the women danced in the air, water on their shirts and faces frozen. They looked like ice sculptures come magically to life.

Elena leaned over the embankment, her heart racing. In the back of her mind she knew who these women were-rusalki, spirits of drowned girls, but she wanted nothing more than to join them. There was nobody around, and she climbed over the parapet, awkward in her heavy skirts and coat, but eager. She could not remember the last time she had such a longing to join people.

She stepped onto the ice; the women seemed oblivious to her approach. She skirted far around the black dizzying splotches of open water. The ice creaked under her shoes. She was close to them now. Just as if someone had given a signal, all of the faces turned toward her, and she heard a thundering, roaring noise as the ice cracked under her feet, opening a black rift across the river. Her feet slid from under her, and the black water reached up, seizing her chest in its icy embrace. It flooded her mouth opened in a scream, washed over her eyes, twined her hair around her neck. She felt hands on her shoulders and arms, and grabbed at them. But instead of pulling her to safety, the women laughed and pushed her down, down, deep down into the black water where even the wan starlight could not reach.