I know I’m being provocative with the title. Epigenetics is the study of the influence of environment on the expression of our genes. Epi is the Greek word for ON or ABOVE. And I am using soul to designate the essence of who we truly are. Thus I want talk about the environmental conditions that shape up, that makes us into us. If I was born into a different economic, cultural, or/and social situation, would I still be me? Or would I be some different version of me?

Everyone is born with a certain potential to grow up a particular kind of human. Parents often wonder how set in their ways their kids are from a very early age:
“He has always been an introvert and shy with other people and nothing changed when he became an adult”.
“She was always a performer — the whole world was her stage and she was never afraid to speak het mind even in front of the most intimidating crowds.”
This is who he is and this is who she is, and nothing we do as parents can change the outcome. That’s a common trop of raising kids, particularly difficult kids. (If the kids is angel, then obviously it was always because of the wonderful job the parents did.)

Well, to certain extent this is true — kids are born with certain eye color and what we do as parents (feed them more carrots) isn’t going to change brown eyes to blue without medical intervention. But the inborn predispositions are never the end if a story. Environment does matter. It just matters in ways that we cannot fully control or understand. In a rough sense, environment makes particular traits that individuals were born with more or less prominent. An introvert by birth can become more outgoing as an adult given the right conditions. For example, America rewards extraverts and so there is an environmental pressure to suppress introvert behaviors — conditioning does work! We can think of this in a similar way to genes being turned on and off by environmental conditions. A person still has only the genes he was born with, but which of those genes are expressed depends on where and how he is raised.

I was born an introvert and by nature require strong roots to a place and people. But I am also a refugee. I was forced to become more social because I was lacking means of communication. And I became even more home-focused because my home was gone…taken away, and I was set adrift in a world I didn’t really understand. So my soul is shaped epigenetically, so to say.

Shaping a soul and character via their environment is a great tool for story-telling. Most of my stories are about the effect of living on the living (or the dead). My latest story, Tinker’s Daughter, is all about how a series of tragedies molded the character of a little girl into something both great and perhaps ugly over time. I am telling the origin story of Baba Yaga. And as part of that telling, I am describing the lives of peasants and crafts people in Saint Petersburg around 1850s.

Without giving away any of the story, this painting by Sergei Chudanov really struck me as prescient for a subplot of my story:

Here’s a small clip from Tinker’s Daughter:

The fire must have started close to the workshop and spread into the dining area. From the outside, Manya saw that there wasn’t much left of the great room or their workshop. The walls were black, and the only window — their vitrina — was blown out. All of their valuable and difficult-to-replace tools were probably too damaged to be used again. All of the furniture that her father had handmade for their workshop over the years was nothing but ash. But from street level, it was difficult to see just how badly their bedroom up above was burned. Certainly, it had to be bad. Yet Manya was unprepared to see the total loss of everything they owned. Every toy, every book, even the little portrait of her mother hanging over her bed was utterly destroyed. Manya hoped to be able to salvage a few personal things beyond the secret box, but there was nothing up there but ash and ice.

“Wow,” said Peter, crawling into the room after Manya. The floorboards made an ominous groaning sound. “Whoa!” he yelped and grabbed hold of the door frame; his eyes as huge as saucers. “I don’t think the floor will support us.”

Manya pressed her hand down onto the wood, and the ice covering it cracked. “I suppose not.”

“What is the thing you came to get?”

“It’s a copper box about the size of a chair cushion,” Manya said.

“Why copper?”

“It has a high melting point, so it wouldn’t be destroyed in a normal house fire. And we insulated it with rock wool.”

The boy looked at her in awe and fear. “You knew about the fire in advance?”

“Of course not. But fires do happen. And copper is good material. That’s why they use it to make roofs. Didn’t you notice how green the roofs around Saint Petersburg are? That’s copper exposed to the elements. Our box is bright orange. It was my job to keep it polished.”

The boy nodded. “My da teaches me about metals, too,” he said. “But I didn’t know about the roofs.”

“Well, once you do, it’s obvious.”

“Yeah. So where is your box?”

“It was hidden over there.” Manya pointed to place across the room that looked the most charred. One of the walls there was partly burned away—they could see outside to the street—but the wardrobe that hid the dumbwaiter still stood. Manya’s father had built it to last.

“How do we get it?” asked Peter. Without any emotional attachment to the place, the boy was much more practical. “The floor won’t support even me,” he said. Manya considered it. She wasn’t that much bigger than the boy, but he was right — they couldn’t get there by walking across the fire-damaged boards.

“I guess we go back down and try from the bottom,” Manya said. She didn’t like that they would be so visible to the crowd of gawkers below.

“Who had the room next door?” Peter asked. The wardrobe stood against the wall that the Remeslenniks shared with their neighbors. They couldn’t modify the outside walls of the tavern and thus built the dumbwaiter into the interior wall, taking some space from that room and their own for the lifting car and the mechanism to move it.

Manya looked at the boy with admiration. He did have street smarts, after all. “Let’s go!” She crawled out of the doorway and made her way to the room next door. The boy followed.

The Boodin Tavern had a simple layout upstairs, a long hallway that stretched from the stairs going up next to the kitchen to an identical staircase at the opposite end of the building. There were six rooms on each side.

The tinker had installed two steam engines in the tavern, one at each end of the building. The larger engine operated the pump to move the water from the river into the kitchen and communal bath. The Boodins had two adjoining rooms above the bath and behind the kitchen on the ground level, the warmest place in the building. The pumping and heating system worked so well that the tinker had orders to install something similar in half a dozen buildings along the river bank. Had…

Manya and her father had the room in the farthest opposite end of the corridor from the Boodins’ rooms, above the workshop and next to the stables. And because they needed high heat for their work, there was a small but very efficient furnace there as well. The result was that the tinker’s bedroom was just as warm and cozy as the Boodins’. When rooms were let for the night, most visitors asked to stay in the warmest rooms, especially in winter. The bedrooms at the ends of the second-floor corridor were thus highly prized and always occupied. This was the opposite of other taverns, where there really was only one side of the building that was warm and thus coveted by travelers. That furnace also drove the little steam engine that pulled the hidden dumbwaiter up and down inside their wall.

Still crawling on their hands and knees, Manya and Peter got to the room directly adjacent to her bedroom. The door was locked, but Peter pulled out a bunch of metal twigs and got it opened in seconds.

“Mama likes to lock doors,” he said with a sheepish grin.

“And you like to open them,” Manya said. The boy shrugged. It was a useful skill.

The room next to the tinker’s wasn’t as badly burned, but everything inside was ruined due to fire, smoke, or water. That made Manya less embarrassed to go in somehow. She had never broken into someone’s home before. But the dumbwaiter was in the wall between this room and theirs, so if they were to retrieve the box, they would have to do so from this side.

“Where’s your copper box?” asked Peter. He had already correctly guessed the direction and was crawling toward the far wall.

Manya followed him, but slower. Her bone leg was giving her troubles; the artificial foot was locked into the right-degree angle to the bone leg and kept getting caught on things. She almost lost her felt boot several times and had to pull it back up — not easy — not to mention the need to readjust the straps every few minutes. Her stump was being rubbed raw.

“Manya? Where is the box?”

“Shh. Don’t use my name. People know me here.”

“So, what do I call you? Hey you?”

“Call me Misha.” That was the best Manya could do on short notice. They should have thought about this earlier, she realized.

“Whatever, Mishka.” Peter made a point of twisting the name into a pejorative.

Manya just let it go. What was the point? It was probably more authentic that way, anyway.

“Where is it? You have to tell me some time,” he bugged her.

“Yes, I know,” Manya said and let out a long sigh. “My father built a special lift inside the wall to make it easier to come and go from our room to the workshop below. We hid the box inside, between the floors.”

“Clever.”

“Yeah. My father is very clever. He is a tinker, you know.”

“So how do we get to it?”

Manya considered the problem. The dumbwaiter was set inside a large wardrobe with a hole on the bottom that went through the floor to the workshop below. The pulley cables were set almost at the ceiling, hidden behind the wardrobe molding. Manya’s father had to duck when he used it, but Manya was short enough that she could easily stand inside the lift car and ride up and down. But from outside, the wardrobe looked just like any other heavy piece of baroque-style furniture that was popular in the capital. Baroque construction can conceal a lot of secrets.

In the workshop, the entrance to the dumbwaiter was hidden behind a fake wall that was hinged like a door and had a bunch of shelves full of useless knickknacks to hide its function. Visitors to their workshop were easily distracted by curiosities. Manya had kept some of her old wound-up toys and sample automatons on those shelves. They were all gone now, obviously. The loss hurt; each one of those objects carried memories.

“Manya? Sorry, Mishka?” Peter called out to her. “What now?”

“Can you kick through this wall here?” Manya asked.