The Faraway Bride

Seryozha

Seryozha has come home to Manchuria with a wife, Tanya, and a feverish longing to crawl back into the egg of yesterday. He kicks stones, whistles flatly, and watches his dog splash in a toy river that mirrors the golden spring of his childhood. His marriage is exquisite and unbearable; a stranger can lie in his arms all night and never be known. His reluctant maturity pulls the whole family's waiting into motion.

Wilfred Chew

Wilfred carries one hundred and fifty yen on his conscience like a splinter of shell, and argues the Reverend Oswald Fawcett's ghost into approving it. His brain, Chinese-born and London-trained, seeks compromise: angels need bodies, bodies need dinners, and prayers for blankets once arrived on a coolie's back. He believes he was elicited by many prayers at once — old Malinin's money, old Malinin's blindness, a beautiful heiress for a daughter-in-law — and he intends to be useful.

Anna Semionovna

Anna keeps house, plans curd cakes and the killing of chicks, and sits on the porch in the dust she claims is not for watching the road. Her presence is tempestuous, her words hardly ever kind, yet Old Sergei feels safe near her as in a rough straw bed after groping in the dark. When she announces, in her usual unloving tone, that Seryozha is coming round the corner, the discrepancy between voice and words shakes the house.

Old Sergei

Nineteen years of marriage have taught Old Sergei that humiliation is better than silence, and that Anna's petulant departures are a kind of company. He spreads small snares for a kind word and never catches one; still, wherever she sews, he sits near. When Seryozha's far-off shout of 'Mamma!' reaches him, his homely room becomes a quivering jungle, the dresser an anonymous obstacle, and the door a squat pillar of light he must grope toward.

Pavel Ostapenko

Pavel holds forth at his own table with staring rufous eyes, a gold-red beard working like a latch, and sweat among the auburn hairs on his breast. He praises his wonderful wife and pities friends with scolding, silk-stockinged, chicken-ruining spouses, while Varvara watches furiously to see whether the gentle strangers dare notice. His talk is the humming noise around the glass globe in which Seryozha and Tatiana sit, and when the women leave, it becomes the only thing left to understand.

Tatiana Ostapenko

Tatiana is Miss Ostapenko of Mi-san, near Seoul, a fortune and a beauty who has been betrothed seven times and married, some say, to a devil. Wilfred Chew finds her pure and icelike, a little like the late Queen Alexandra; Seryozha would rather be alive with Sonia Matvievna than dead with Tatiana Pavlovna. In her mother's studied Japanese garden, her whistling runs like a rill of coolness through the September heat, and in Pavel's parlour her stare with Seryozha builds a thin glass globe no one else can enter.