Everything appears to be turned around. The house is bigger inside than it is from the outside and the son, not the father, is the one giving orders. Counsel is given a bed in the barn and in the middle of the night, the wife comes to him. In the morning, Counsel goes back to the house, noticing, once again, that the outside dimensions do not match the inside space. They offer him breakfast, but this time there is a gun on the table and the conversation is loaded with threats and innuendos that make Counsel realize the boy and the father know where the woman spent the night. He says his thanks and walks out backwards because he is afraid of what will happen if he turns around. And then, as he rides off, he realizes that there had been milk and eggs on the table, but no sign of a cow or chickens anywhere.

What is the purpose of an event that gets folded into the other dramas but is never sufficiently explained? I believe that it is there as a marker of the other place. Its essential difference from the primary place adds tension and provides momentum because we want to understand it.

What are we to make of this? The house and the family never appear again and Counsel too recedes into the background as the narrator brings other characters forward. But the burr continues to prick. What is the purpose of an event that gets folded into the other dramas but is never sufficiently explained? I believe that it is there as a marker of the other place. Its essential difference from the primary place adds tension and provides momentum because we want to understand it. We want to know what it means. And because Edwards chooses not to supply any answers, we continue to wonder about it even after we finish the novel. That household that both was and wasn’t hospitable, that both did and didn’t offer nourishment, shelter, and human companionship was an unusual experience for a white man, particularly one of Cousnel’s standing in the world, but as I thought about it I realized that the trickery Counsel was exposed to was the common experience of disenfranchised people. First, he is stripped of family and livelihood. Next, his hosts in the other place tease him with food and companionship that he might partake in, but can’t assume is freely offered. He is trapped by people who can, at any moment, turn on him. Small pox did to Counsel what the institution of slavery did to the African American, and the strange house is what allows us to see that. But we see it only upon reflection. It is not immediately evident and this is what gives it its power.

With a narrative gap, we do not know the true state of things. Is the house small or is it large? Did the wife come to Counsel’s bed out of her own volition or was she a pawn of the man and the boy? Nothing makes sense here in a rational way, but there is a psychological appropriateness that allows us to willingly suspend disbelief.

The Beginning of Spring^[6] by Penelope Fitzgerald is a taut, humorous, and enormously compelling short novel. It is set in Moscow in 1913, when the first signs of the coming war and revolution are apparent. The novel follows Frank Reid, an Englishman who runs a printing business and maintains a British household within Russian traditions. The novel begins with the mysterious departure of Frank’s English wife and ends with her just as sudden return. Her departure upsets the life Frank has designed for himself, where his duties as father, husband, and foreign industrialist are finely balanced. If he is to function, he must first find a nanny for his children, a necessity that brings him into contact with a strangely aloof and resourceful young Russian woman, and necessity gradually shifts to romantic interest. Though these events are compressed into one month, we watch Frank Reid’s life change irrevocably as he discovers the mysteries and passions he’s excluded from it.

The Beginning of Spring
BY Penelope Fitzgerald
(Mariner Books, 1998)

The primary place is his Moscow household, a tightly organized English oasis, and the other place is the dacha, an old and decrepit country house that sits in the middle of a birch forest, far from civilized society. The children used to visit the dacha with their mother, and the reader understands that it is everything the Moscow house and Frank Reid himself, is not. Even though we do not go to the dacha until close to the novel’s end, it is the holder of all the reader encounters that is not English and orderly. That is, the dacha represents the other side of life that, from the beginning, exerts its pull on the characters in various ways. By the end of the novel it has become the place the children and their nanny must escape to. They know, in an inexplicable way, that it contains a link to their mother.

On the first night at the dacha, Dolly, the oldest child, wakes up because she hears the front door open. She tiptoes down the stairs and follows Lisa, their nanny, through the dark forest. “Dolly began to see on each side of her, among the thronging stems of the birch trees, what looked like human hands, moving to touch each other across the whiteness and blackness. […] Dolly saw that by every birch tree, close against the trunk, stood a man or a woman. They stood separately pressing themselves each to their own tree.”^[7] Dolly never asks Lisa to explain what she sees that night in the forest and the strange tree people haunt the ending of the novel, surrounding the resolution of human events with questions. Nature, passion, mystery: these qualities are everywhere at the dacha. They were what Frank Reid’s wife was searching for when she left her comfortable existence, and will be what Dolly will grow up knowing is important.