The Revolution of Marina M.

1 St. Basil’s Eve

MIDNIGHT, NEW YEAR’S EVE, three young witches gathered in the city that was once St. Petersburg. Though that silver sound, Petersburg, had been erased, and how oddly the new one struck our ears: Petrograd. A sound like bronze. Like horseshoes on stone, hammer on anvil, thunder in the name—Petrograd. No longer Petersburg of the bells and water, that city of mirrors, of transparent twilights, Tchaikovsky ballets, and Pushkin’s genius. Its name had been changed by war—Petersburg was thought too German, though the name is Dutch.

Petrograd. The sound is bronze, and this is a story of bronze.

That night, the cusp of the New Year, 1916, we three prepared to conjure the future in the nursery of a grand flat on Furshtatskaya Street. From down the hall, the sounds of a large New Year’s Eve soiree filtered under the door—scraps of music, women’s high laughter, the scent of roasted goose and Christmas pine. Behind us, my younger brother, Seryozha, sketched in the window seat as we girls prepared the basin and the candle.

Below in the street, harness bells announced sleighs busying themselves transporting guests to parties all along the snow-filled parkway. But in the warm room before the tiled stove, we breathlessly circled the basin we’d placed on the old scarred nursery table, its weathered apron ringed with painted sailor boys, waiting for midnight. I stroked the worn tabletop where I’d learned to make my letters, those shaky As and Бs and Bs, outlined the spot where my brother Volodya gouged his initials into the tabletop. Volodya, now fighting in the snows of Bohemia, an officer of cavalry. And we brand-new women in evening gowns waited to see our fortunes. I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of that long-ago room, beeswax and my mother’s perfume, which I’d dabbed on my breasts. I still see Varvara in her ill-fitting black taffeta gown, and Mina in a homemade dress of light-blue velvet, and myself in russet silk with an olive overlay, my hair piled on my head, sculpted that morning by M. Laruelle in the Nevsky Passazh. My artistic brother, with his long poet’s locks, sported a Russian blouse and full trousers stuck into soft boots in shocking defiance of wartime custom, which dictates that even noncombatants strive for a military air.

I was a month shy of sixteen, the same age as the century, my brother one year younger. Waiting for midnight, our three heads converged over the basin of water: Varvara’s cropped locks, the dusty blue-black of a crow; Mina’s, ash blond as Finnish birch, woven into that old-fashioned braided crown she couldn’t be persuaded to abandon; and I, with hair the red of young foxes crossing a field of snow. Waiting to see our fortunes. Kem byt’? indeed.

It seems like a scene in a glass globe to me now. I want to turn it over and set the snow to swirling. I want to shout to my young self, Stop! Don’t be in such a hurry to peel back the petals of the future. It will be here soon enough, and it won’t be quite the bloom you expect. Just stay there, in that precious moment, at the hinge of time… but I was in love with the Future, in love with the idea of Fate. There’s nothing more romantic to the young—until its dogs sink their teeth into your calf and pull you to the ground.

What sign did I hope to receive that night? The laurel crown, the lyre? Or perhaps some evidence of grand passion—some ardent Pushkin or soulful Blok. Or maybe a boy I already knew—Danya from dancing class, Stiva with whom I’d skated in the park the day before and dazzled with my spins and reckless arabesques. Or perhaps even an officer like the ones who lingered before the gates of our school in the afternoons, courting the senior girls. I see her there, staring impatiently into the candle flame, a girl both brash and shy, awkward and feigning sophistication in hopes of being thought mysterious, so that people would long to discover her secrets. I want her to stay in that moment before the world changed, before the wax was poured, and the future assembled like brilliant horses loading into a starting gate. Wait!

My younger self looks up. She senses me there in the room, a vague but troubling presence, I swear she catches a glimpse of me in the window’s reflection—the woman from the future, neither young nor old, bathed in grief and compromise, wearing her own two eyes. A shudder passes through her like a draft.

Midnight arrived in a clangor of bells from all the nearby churches, Preobrazhenskaya, St. Panteleimon, the Church of the Spilled Blood, bells echoing throughout the city, escorting in the New Year. Solemnly I handed the candle to Mina, who pushed her spectacles up on her nose and bent her blond head over the basin. Precise as the scientist she was, she dripped the wax onto the water as I prayed for a good omen. The lozenges of wax spun, adhered, linked together into a turning shape, the water trembling, limpid in candlelight. To my grave disappointment, I detected no laurel wreath, no lyre. No couples kissing, no linked wedding rings.

Varvara squinted, cocking her head this way and that. “A boot?”

Seryozha peered over our shoulders. Curiosity had gotten the better of him. He pointed with a long, graphite-dark finger. “It’s a ship. Don’t you see—the hull, the sails?”

A ship was good—travel, adventure! Maybe I’d become an adventurer and cross the South Seas, like Stevenson… though the German blockade sat firmly between me and the immediate realization of such a heady destiny. Or perhaps it was a metaphor for another kind of journey. Could not love be seen as a journey? Or the route to fame and glory? Try as I might to tease out the meaning, it never would have occurred to me its final dimensions, the scope, the nature of the journey.

Varvara poured for Mina. The wax coalesced—a cloud, a sleigh? We concurred—a key! She beamed. Surely she would unlock the secrets of the world, the next Mendeleev or Madame Curie. No one considered that a key might lock as well as unlock.

And Varvara? The swirling dollops resolved themselves into—a broom. We shouted with laughter. Our radical, feminist, reader of Kollontai, of Marx and Engels, Rousseau and Robespierre—a housewife! “Maybe it’s a torch,” she said sulkily.

“Maybe it’s your new form of transport,” Seryozha quipped, settling himself back into the window seat.

She sieved the little wax droplets from the water and crushed them together, threw the lump in the trash, wiped her wet hands on a towel. “I’m not playing this stupid game anymore.”

Seryozha refused his turn, pretending it was a silly girl’s pastime, though I knew he was more superstitious than anyone. And behind us, in the red corner, the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin gazed down, her expression the saddest, the most tender I had ever seen. She knew it all already. The ship, the key, the broom.

With no more future to explore, and Varvara sulky with her news, we abandoned the peace and timelessness of the nursery to rejoin the current era out celebrating in the salon. No one had noticed our absence but Mother, who glared briefly but sharply in our direction, irritated that we’d missed the New Year’s toasts. Vera Borisovna Makarova wore a Fortuny gown with Grecian pleats and a jeweled collar, a Petersburg beauty with her prematurely silver hair and pale blue eyes. Mother took her social responsibilities seriously, orchestrating her parties like a dancing master, quick to spot a group flagging, a woman standing uncomfortably alone, men speaking too long among themselves. Our New Year’s Eve party famously brought together my father’s jurists and journalists, diplomats and liberal industrialists with Mother’s painters and poets, mystics and stylish mavens—in short, the cream of the Petrograd intelligentsia. Did this impress me? The British consul flirting with the wife of the editor of the Petrogradsky Echo? The decadent poet Zinaida Gippius in harem pants taking another glass of champagne from Basya’s tray? It was our life. I didn’t realize how fragile such seemingly solid things could be, how soon they could vanish.

In the dining room, we picked at the remains of the feast laid out on yards of white damask—roast goose with lingonberries, salad Olivier, smoked salmon and sturgeon and sea bass, the mushrooms we’d picked that autumn. Blini with sour cream and caviar. No boeuf Wellington as in past years, boeuf having disappeared with the war. But Vaula’s Napoleons glistened, and the Christmas tree exuded its resin, which blended with the smell of Father’s cherry tobacco, imported all the way from London by friends in the British consulate. Yes, there he was, in the vestibule, lounging in his tailcoat, his shirt a brilliant white. Handsome, clever Father. I could tell he had just said something witty by the way his dimples peeked out from his neat reddish-brown beard. And beside him on the table lay his gift to me in honor of my upcoming birthday—my first book of verse. I’d been obsessively arranging and rearranging the small volumes all day around a giant bouquet of white lilacs. I admired the aqua cover embossed in gold: This Transparent Twilight, by Marina Dmitrievna Makarova. It would be a parting gift for each guest. The poet Konstantin Balmont, a friend of my mother’s, had even reviewed it in the Echo, calling it “charming, promising great things to come.” I’d had more sensuous, grown-up poems I’d wanted to include, but Father had vetoed them. “What do you know about passion, you silly duck?”

Still, I agonized when anyone picked up a volume and paged through it. What would they think? Would they understand, or treat it as a joke? By tomorrow, people would be reading it, and around the dinner tables, they’d be saying, That Makarov girl, she really has something. Or That Makarov girl, what an embarrassment. Well, at least her father loves her. I tried to remember the ship, the South Seas, and told myself—who cared what a bunch of my parents’ friends thought? Varvara took glasses of champagne off Basya’s tray and handed them to us, “To Marina’s book and all the tomorrows.” She drank hers down as if it were kvas and put it back on the tray. Our maid scowled, already unhappy in the evening uniform she loathed, especially the little ruffled cap. She’d been on her feet since seven that morning.

The champagne added to my excitement. My father cast me an affectionate glance, and a sharp one of disapproval for my brother. He’d so wanted Seryozha in school uniform, hair shorn, looking like a seryozny chelovek—a serious person—but Mother had defended him, her favorite. “One night. What harm could there be in letting him dress as he likes?”

In the big salon, couples whirled and jewels flashed, though not so garishly as in the years before the war. In the far corner, the small orchestra sweated through a mazurka, and people who shouldn’t have, danced. A red-faced man lowered himself into a chair. My head swam in the heady mix of perfume, sweat, and tobacco. And now, a slightly fetid sweetness like rotting flowers announced the approach of Vsevolod Nikolaevich, our mother’s spiritual master, pale and boneless as a large mushroom. He took my hand in his powdery soft one. “Marina Dmitrievna, my congratulations on your book. We’re all so very proud.” He kissed it formally—the lips stopping just short of the flesh. He dismissed my friends at a glance—Varvara in her purple-black, Mina in homemade blue—as people of no consequence, and zeroed in on my brother. “Sergei Dmitrievich. So good to see you again.” He proffered his flabby hand, but my brother anticipated the gesture and hid his own behind his back, nodding instead. Unflappable, Vsevolod smiled, but took the hint and retreated.

Once the mystic was out of sight, Seryozha extended his hand floppily, making his mouth soft and drooly. “Wishing you all the best!” he snuffled, then took his own hand and kissed it noisily. It took many minutes for us to catch our breaths as he went through his Master Vsevolod routine, ending by reaching into a bouquet, plucking a lilac, and munching it.

I swayed hopefully to the music, my head bubbling like the champagne—French champagne, too, its presence in wartime negotiated months in advance—and watched the sea of dancers launch into a foxtrot. I was an excellent dancer, and hated to wait out a single number. Having removed her glasses, Mina squinted at what must have been a blur of motion and color while Varvara examined the Turkish pants and turbans of the more fashionable women with a smirk both ironic and envious. One of the British aides had just smiled at me over his partner’s shoulder, when a vision beyond anything I could have wished for up in the nursery swam into view: a trim, moustached officer with uptilted blue eyes, his chestnut hair cropped close, lips made for smiling. Heat flashed through me as if I’d just downed a tumbler of vodka. Kolya Shurov was back from the front.

Was he the most handsome man in the room? Not at all. Half these men were better looking than he was. And yet, women were already smiling at him, adjusting their clothing, as if it were suddenly too tight or insecurely fastened.

Kolya was coming this way. Mother was leading him to us!

“Enfants, regardez qui en est venu!” she said, glowing with pleasure. She always loved him—well, who didn’t? Look who’s here! “Just in time for New Year’s.”

He leaned in and kissed my cheeks formally, three times—for Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—and I caught a whiff of his cologne, Floris Limes, and the cigar he’d been smoking. He held me out at arm’s length to examine me, beaming as if I were a creature of his own invention. The blood tingled in my cheeks under his scrutiny, the warmth of his hands through the thin sleeves of my dress. My face flushed. I could hardly think for the pounding in my chest. “Look how elegant you’ve become, Marina Dmitrievna. Where’s the skinny girl disappearing around corners, braids flying out behind her?”

“She disappeared. Around a corner,” I said, an attempt at wit. I wanted him to know that things had changed since he’d last seen me. I was a woman now—a person of substance and accomplishment. He couldn’t treat me like that girl he used to whirl around by an arm and a leg. “It’s been a while, Kolya.”

“How I’ve missed beautiful women.” He sighed and smiled at Mina—she was blushing like a peony. My God, he would flirt with a post!

Now he embraced my brother, clapping him on the back, ruffling his hair. “And how is our young Repin? Nice shirt, by the way.” That shirt, which Seryozha had sewed himself and which my father had mocked. Kolya took him by the shoulder, turned him this way and that, examining the needlework. “I should have some made up just like it.” Who didn’t love Kolya? None of Volodya’s other friends ever paid us the least attention, but Kolya wanted everyone to be happy. No one escaped the wide embrace of his nature. “Are you still waiting for me, Marina?” he said into my ear. “I’m going to come and carry you off. I told you I would.” When I was a scabby-kneed six-year-old and he a worldly man of twelve.

Was this the ship, then, the wax sails? Kolya Shurov? Blood roared in my ears. The intensity of my desire frightened me, I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones. “You’re too old for me, Kolya,” I said. “What do I need a starik for?” But that was wrong, too, horrible. Oh God, how to be! I imagined myself a woman, but at times like this, I could not find my own outlines. For all my hours of mirror gazing, and the poems addressing my vast coterie of nonexistent lovers, I was a mystery to myself.

“Not so old anymore,” he said. “When the war’s over, six years’ difference will be—nothing.” He chucked me under the chin, as if I were ten.

“Kolya brought a letter from Volodya, children,” Mother said. Shame surged up where peevishness had been. How could I have forgotten to ask about my brother? What a self-centered wretch I could be. She produced an envelope and removed the contents, a sheet of long narrow stationery covered with my elder brother’s strong handwriting. We crowded around her as she read. “Dearest Mama and Papa, Marina, Seryozha, I hope this reaches you by Christmas, and that everyone’s well. I miss you profoundly. Feed my messenger and don’t let him drink too much. He has to come back sometime.”

Kolya lifted his glass of champagne.

“I have to admit, the war doesn’t go well. Heavy battles daily. I pray all this will come to an end soon.”

I could well imagine the cold, the wounded and the dead, the scream of the horses and the creak of wagons under the guns. This party now seemed a mockery, the whirling people dancing while my brother huddled in some miserable tent with his greatcoat wrapped about him.

“But Swallow”—his horse—“is doing well. He’s found a girlfriend, my adjutant’s mare. It’s funny to see how they look for each other in the morning.”

My mother wiped her eyes on her handkerchief, and gave a small laugh. “At least the horse is happy.”

“Brusilov”—the general of the Southwestern Army—“keeps our hopes alive. I admire him more than any man alive. The men are tough and true. With the help of God, we must prevail. Thinking of you all makes me feel better. Say hi to Avdokia for me. Tell her the socks are holding up. I kiss you all, Volodya.”

Mother sighed and folded the letter back into its envelope. “I don’t know how he can bear it. I really don’t.”

“His men would follow him off a cliff,” Kolya said. “You should be proud of him.”

She leaned on his shoulder. “You’ve always been such a comfort.” Then she spotted something—a quarrel brewing—that set her hostess antennae quivering, and she excused herself to attend to her guests.

Meanwhile, Kolya approached the table of books, picked one up and riffled through the pages, stuck his nose in and sniffed the verse. “Genius,” he announced. “I can smell it.”

“What does genius smell like?” Mina asked.

“Lilacs.” He sniffed. “And firecrackers.” He unbuttoned the chest button of his tunic and slipped the little book inside, pressed it over his heart, looking to see if I’d noticed. How could I not have? “I’ll read this on the train, and think of you.”

Yes, yes, think of me! But what did he mean, on the train? Was he leaving so soon? “Maybe you can just sleep on it, save you the trouble of reading.”

“That’s the best way to learn anything. It’s how I got through school.” He grinned. “So organic. Excuse us, ladies.” He took my arm. “I need to talk to our poet.” He led me away, leaving Mina yearning toward him like a sunflower, blinking without her glasses, and Varvara regarding him uneasily as if he were an unsteady horse I’d seen fit to ride. Where were we going?

He pulled me after him into the cloakroom and closed the door behind us. It was warm and close and full of the guests’ coats and furs smelling of snow. The transom let in only a filtered light. I could feel his breath in my ear as I stood pressed against someone’s sable, leaned back into the softness. Everything about me had gone both soft and prickly as if I had a rash. I felt like a fruit about to be bitten. I wanted to call out like a child, Kolya is going to kiss me! For once, no one was watching. No Father, no Mother, no governess or nanny, not even the maid or the cook.

I breathed in his strange scent. When I was a child, I actually stole one of his shirts and kept it on the floor of my closet behind my skates, to smell it when no one was looking, a smell like honey. How many years had I waited for this moment, imagining it? Since the day Volodya brought him home, a lively, chubby boy who became our Pied Piper. You could say it went back further, maybe I’d been a greedy, lustful little zygote. But the moment had been prepared like dry straw in a hayloft, waiting for a spark. And when our mouths met, I knew exactly why we had never kissed before. If his mouth, his tongue, were the only food left on the planet it would be enough. I would have let him do anything, right there in my parents’ house, standing among the furs. I had always considered Kolya out of reach, but impossibly, unbelievably, here he was in my arms, his face, his breath. His arms around my waist, my mother’s Après l’Ondée rising from my breasts, mingling with the honey of his body.

“Are you going to wait for me, Marina?”

“Don’t make me wait too long,” I whispered. “I’m not good at it.”

“I’ll hurry then.” He was unbuttoning his tunic. Were we going to make love right here among the coats? But he removed something from inside his uniform, a velvet pouch, which he pressed into my hand, still warm from his body.

“What else do you have in there?” I joked, hooking my finger to the open cloth, pretending to peep in. “Tolstoy?”

“Only Chekhov,” he said. “He’s smaller.”

The cloth of the little sack was soft when I rubbed it against my face, my swollen lips. “What is it?”

“Open it.”

I tried to work the cord, but my hands weren’t quite attached to my wrists. Inside, there was something hard—a large circle. I held it to the light. A bangle, white or some pale color, enameled, with arabesques of gold and black. “To remember me by.” He rubbed his lime-scented cheek against mine. “Don’t forget me, Marina.”

As if I ever could. Even dead I would remember him. I held up my forearm to admire the gift. How perfect it looked around my pale wrist. I could wear it without attracting too much attention—clever Kolya. A ring or a valuable jewel might have elicited parental scrutiny. Was this my arm? The arm of a woman who had received love gifts? I felt the way a goddess must feel when worshippers deposit sheep and bags of grain at her feet.

We fell into another kiss—his mouth, his honey, the length of him pressed to me, the furs around us—when the cloakroom door swung open, the light illuminating us. It couldn’t have been that bright, but it felt like a policeman’s searchlight. “What the devil?” I only had time to catch one glimpse of Dr. Voinovich’s surprised face—my father’s colleague at the university—as Kolya and I lunged past him, pretending we had not just been all but making love among the guests’ coats. I avoided my friends’ questioning faces. I didn’t want to share this, see myself in their eyes, I wanted this moment just for myself.

In the salon, the orchestra had launched into a tango. I had never danced the tango outside of dancing class, but I could have followed Kolya through a Tibetan minuet. We found a place amid the couples and away from the hall, where I expected Father to appear any second for a cross-examination. Kolya held my right hand in his left, the other decorously pressed to the small of my back—yet I knew the decorousness was only a ruse. I could feel him appraising the curve of my spine, the flare of my hips, knowing how his touch filled me with heat.

We began to move together. The tango was suddenly no longer a series of awkward turns and memorized motions from dancing class, one’s dress becoming damp from a partner’s nervous palms, but a love affair, proud and challenging, a drama. How perfect for us. He wasn’t a showy dancer, but easy and sure on his feet. Although I knew some of the dips and fast turns, I saw that they were unnecessary—that this, the silent conversation, the question and answer between man and woman, was the real dance. Although I had never danced with him before, I could feel his every intention, the tiniest signals. What must it be to make love with him—the firestorm of passion we’d engender. I prayed the orchestra would never stop, but too soon Mother descended to take Kolya away to meet some of her people, consigning me to my friends, who suddenly seemed so very young. My ship had already slipped its moorings, the sails rising to the wind.

2 The Stray Dog Café

FROM THE WINDOW OF my salmon-pink bedroom, I watched the snow whirl and worked on an aubade to that cloakroom kiss—the fur, his scent. What do you know about passion, you silly duck? I kissed the bracelet on my arm. How would it have been if we had shed our clothes in the cloakroom, and made love among the furs? I unspooled scenarios in my mind: Kolya and I in years to come, separated by some circumstance—tragic—then him catching sight of me across a room, like Tatiana with Onegin. How he would remember that moment in that long-ago cloakroom, how he would yearn. I wept just imagining it.

I thought of Kolya reading my poems on the train today, on the way back to his unit, seated among the other soldiers. Would he recognize himself in the figure of the ringmaster with his shiny moustache and his gleaming buttons? That poem was a love letter. I knew there was danger in showing too much of my passion—it frightened people, like it had the boys I’d kissed in stairways and at children’s parties. I shrugged the shawl from my shoulders—it was so hot in here—opened the fortochka window, and paced, stopping for the hundredth time to look at myself in the vanity mirror: my red hair, the round dark eyes of a Commedia Columbine, the freckles and blush in my cheeks. My fat lips, still impressed with his kisses. “Lyubimiy,” I whispered. Beloved. I could smell him in my hair. I wondered if he could smell me, too—I wished I had a scent of my own and not Mother’s, but it was a little late for that. I could only find peace by imagining myself a few years hence, looking back at all this as if it was already done. I sat back down at my desk and wrote:

Someday it would be me who’d be quoted in girls’ diaries. Lovers would recite my verses in the depths of the night. I would be Makarova by then, the way people said Akhmatova or Tsvetaeva.

Akhmatova would do it with a gesture. And I put my left glove onto my right hand… Above my head, her profile hung in a frame between the windows. Seryozha had cut it for me from black paper. My muse, my lighthouse, with her Roman nose and bundle of long hair done up the way I wore my own. I imagined her at Wolf’s bookshop—maybe even today!—picking up my book of poems. Would she remember the girl she’d met one night at the Stray Dog Café? Under the glass of my desk, I kept the calling card she’d signed—the fine clear hand, the letters unconnected, the writing running uphill: To Marina—Bravery, in love as in art. A. I touched that A with my fingertips. Was I brave enough?

That Stray Dog world had already ended. I’d squeaked through the doors just as they were closing and managed to get down that famous staircase behind the Hotel Europa. How many afternoons I’d spent in the square, sitting on a bench under the statue of Pushkin, my sights on that subterranean entrance, hoping to catch a glimpse of her graceful figure, tall, stately, dark-haired, wearing a black shawl and her famous black beads. But I never saw anyone come in or out except men carrying crates on their shoulders. THE STRAY DOG ARTISTIC CABARET was a place of late night carousal, where the gods drank and smoked and recited, where they fell in love.

Mina and Varvara often kept me company in my vigil, attempting to appear blasé and sophisticated while eating nonpareils from paper cones. Varvara smoked her cigarette boldly in the open air, daring passersby to comment, meeting their disapproving eyes. Then came the autumn afternoon she’d had enough of my torment. She crushed her cigarette into the stone and said, “Why don’t we just go there sometime? This mooning around’s getting on my nerves.”

“They’d never let us in,” I said, but my heart already thumped with the possibility. Could we? They’d throw us out, but just for a moment, even an instant, to enter the holy of holies? It was like a door that I’d always believed to be firmly secured—and now she was questioning if it was even locked at all. “When would we go?”

“Tonight,” she said.

“We can’t,” Mina said, dropping a candy onto the pavement. “We have two tests tomorrow.”

But tests and grades were the furthest thing from my mind, which flew this way and that like a bird caught in a gallery, searching for an exit. Mother and Father were attending a party with the British second secretary and his wife… it would only be a matter of getting around Miss Haddon-Finch, our governess. Our nanny, Avdokia, wouldn’t tell. She enjoyed our small rebellions, sometimes even collaborated when she felt Father was being harsh. The Russian peasant is, at bottom, an anarchist.

First I had to set my trap. On the way home, I stopped at Wolf’s bookshop and bought Miss Haddon-Finch a special gift: Penrod, by Booth Tarkington, the latest arrival from England, having miraculously made it through the blockade. Not cheap, but it would be well worth it.

“Why, thank you, Marina, dear. What a thoughtful gesture,” she said that evening, stroking the cover of the book.

Seryozha was onto me instantly. He pounced the moment she left the nursery, forcing me to tell him what I was up to. I explained why I couldn’t take him—at fourteen, slender and small-boned, he was often mistaken for twelve—but he threatened to tell Father if I left him behind. He didn’t care about poetry, but the interior of the Stray Dog had been painted by Sudeikin, who’d designed sets for Diaghilev. Seryozha had to see it. “If I don’t go, you don’t go,” he said, and I could not persuade or bribe him.

That evening, with Mother and Father off with the British and Miss Haddon-Finch in bed with her book, we dressed in our most grown-up clothes and made our way to Mikhailovskaya Square. The night tasted of the coming frost, and the trees were already bare. Varvara stepped out of the shadows, and with her, Mina, who’d come despite her misgivings. She hated to be accused of being a grade-grubber and a baby. I held the finial of the stair rail, rubbing it with my palm as if I could receive an impression from it of all those who had touched it before me. At the bottom of the stone stairs, the black door called to me. It was one thing to dream, another to actually barge in upon one’s gods at play.

I took a step down, and another. A line occurred to me: In Petrograd, you go down into heaven. I took it as a sign, inspiration already arriving. How long did it take to traverse those dozen or so steps? The worn egg-shaped doorknob fitted itself to my hand. I trembled as I pushed it open.

No absinthe-reeking netherworld awaited us, no flocked walls or tufted sofas, no hookahs. Instead, we found ourselves in a smoky cellar, walls and ceilings covered with Sudeikin’s folk-style birds. People drank perched on straw stools at small tables, or along the banquettes that lined the walls. Smoke hung thick as fog, and on a bare stage a lithe dancer performed an angular modern choreography on top of a large mirror. “Karsavina,” my brother whispered excitedly. The great ballerina, on whom Fokine had launched so many of the Diaghilev ballets. We’d seen her at the Mariinsky Theater that season in Swan Lake, and here she was dancing on a mirror, one dark-haired Karsavina above and an upside-down one below, as if floating in midair.

We huddled in the entryway, trying to take in as much of the scene as we could before the portly owner, busy with the two gentlemen in front of us, could notice the presence of a quartet of underage spies and toss us out. Luckily, there was a disagreement over the admission price. “Hey,” the first man said, “you didn’t charge the people who came in just before us.”

“Yes, but they’re artists,” said the proprietor. “You’re pharmacists. Twenty-five rubles.”

I prayed they would argue until dawn. Those brilliant legs in their tights, multiplied by the mirror, formed a flashing kaleidoscope—she was close enough for us to see her little earrings, the pearls dangling. Although the pianist played a complex composition, to my ears cacophonous, she was able to find the line of it, while the audience members talked and watched and drank and cheered and stamped their feet.

Now came our turn to pass the Cerberus of the place, who scanned us with a jaundiced eye. “What have we here? Aren’t you a little young, kiddies?”

“This is Marina Makarova, the poet.” Varvara shoved me forward. “She just had a poem in the Echo.” It was true, though it was in the Children’s Corner.

He rubbed his moustache, tugged at his beard. “Give us a poem then.”

Which poem would open the cave of wonders?

I recited my “Waiting with Pushkin in Mikhailovskaya Square”:

“All right,” said the proprietor. “No drinking. You, sign the book.”

He motioned me toward the Stray Dog register. I eagerly scanned the pages, the names, the names! Blok. Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva. Accompanied by scraps of poetry, little drawings. I signed, and my brother sketched a fast likeness of me underneath, impressing our host despite himself. A harried waiter with a moustache set us up at a tiny table squeezed into a corner by a coatrack.

“Absinthe all around,” Varvara ordered with an imperious sweep of her hand. Knowing I would be forced to pay, if push came to shove, I was grateful when the waiter replied, “Kvas,” that slightly alcoholic brew. But we never did get a bill. We were Artists, even at that age. Superior to the gawkers and tourists.

Seryozha already had his sketchbook open on the table and was furiously drawing, trying to capture everything all at once: patrons, waiters, Karsavina. I did the same in my own way—memorizing, trying to stuff my eyes like a suitcase. Meanwhile, Varvara, unimpressed but pleased with herself, rolled a cigarette and lit it, posing, as Mina waved the smoke away. Sprawled with some other odd characters on stools sat the great Mayakovsky. The futurist poet was unmistakable—enormous, broad-shouldered, ferocious, towering over his friends even while sitting down. But where was his famed yellow blouse? He had dressed simply tonight, disappointingly conventional in a plain jacket, shirt, and tie. My brother was seized with admiration. Turning the page, he rendered the man’s brooding form, his dark brow and heavy jaw, his massive back and profile.

And then I saw her. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova—all those marvelous As. Like sighs. Her shawl, her profile, the glossy black hair, her fingers gracefully looped into her beads. She sat with the poet Kuzmin, whom I recognized by his sleepy eyes, his thinning hair. On her other side lounged a beauty with golden curls who looked like an actress. She whispered something into Akhmatova’s ear, making her laugh. I was shocked—I hadn’t imagined the Tragic Muse could laugh. She was actually quite lively. I couldn’t stop staring, while my brother’s pencil flew and Mina fidgeted nervously. “We still have those exams, they’re not disappearing.” Varvara pretended she came here every day of the week, sipping her kvas, exhaling smoke.

Now Seryozha was sketching a hulking boy with tawny longish hair who sat by himself in another corner—shapeless jacket, scarf around his neck—watching like a great hungry bear. I’d never seen him before, but recognized one like myself. I knew that hunger. His eyes were only for Vladimir Mayakovsky. His hand went into his pocket every thirty seconds or so, pulled out some pages, put them back in again. Poet.

After Karsavina, the great futurist loped up to the small, curtainless stage. It took him about four steps. I’d read his manifesto: Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the world. The past is too narrow. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics. Throw Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity. What an egotist! Throw Pushkin overboard? Pushkin loved freedom more than anybody. Mayakovsky confused me, upset me. I, too, believed in the Future, but this kind of sweeping dismissal frightened me. Secretly it made me feel like I, too, would be thrown from the ship someday. Yet if he thought so, why did he come here? The place was filled with the very artists his futurist manifesto had so viciously attacked. Yet none of them seemed to give it a second thought. That night I realized that poetry was a brotherhood—that you could be furious at your brother and yet enjoy his company more than the company of most.

But Mayakovsky didn’t read polemical work that night. Rather, he recited a long, complex love poem. Now I learned how vulnerable a man could be, even a terrifying man like that, protesting that he was only a cloud in trousers, proclaiming that love could turn his maddened flesh to sweetness. I tried to imagine being the recipient of such a passion. Would it frighten me?

“Look—it’s Vera Kholodnaya,” Mina whispered. Suddenly her fretting about the exams and her parents was forgotten as she watched the star of our silent kinofilm taking a seat near the stage. The most famous woman in Russia after the empress herself. The actress watched the poet, enraptured, and I saw that unconsciously, Mina sat up straighter, held her head more gracefully.

Next, an improvised play unfolded, the actors making fun of the gentlemen who’d paid their good money to see Karsavina and the immortal poets bestow their gifts—the so-called pharmacists. Two of them came to the stage to play soldiers in foxholes, and everyone laughed, including the men themselves. No hard feelings.

After the skit, she took the stage, her shawl wrapped about her, her long white hands, the grave white face. The voice that emerged from her lips was like that of a cello, a medium, and sent shivers through the audience. I had hoped she would recite her poem about this very place—“We Are All Carousers and Harlots”—but instead she recited poems about the war in a voice like time itself:

Such bravery—to offer Fate such a sacrifice. To give anything, even her lover, even her gift. I would never have had the nerve to tempt the gods that way. I was too greedy. My sticky-handed heart wanted everything—lovers, lyres, and laurel wreaths. Why did she have to show me the impossible heights? Her words tore my soul to shreds. The whole assembly, even Mayakovsky, thundered their applause as she returned to her seat, flinging appreciative shouts like garlands. Then she turned back into her other self, laughing and relaxed, as if she hadn’t just dared heaven to destroy her.

Gathering myself while I still had the courage, I wove my way to her table and stood before her. No sound would come from my mouth. Her eyes were very blue—blue and full of light. I’d thought they were brown. I managed to say, “These are for you,” and thrust out a fistful of carefully copied-out poems.

She considered me and my outstretched offering, her arm resting across the banquette behind her friend. Her eyes were mischievous and gay. “Recite one for me.”

Right here in front of Kuzmin? She was waiting—I couldn’t refuse her. Should I pick one that was most technically correct? Or the one I’d written about her? My voice hoarse, my lips dry, I began:

Her pretty friend applauded when I was done, and Kuzmin lit a cigarette and squinted against the smoke. But she, the poet, the eagle, simply nodded and extended a hand for the pages. “Marina Makarova,” she read from the page. “Are you in love, my dear?”

I nodded. How did she know?

“Is it going well?”

I laughed. What could I say? “He barely knows I’m alive.” She took a card from the table, the card of the Stray Dog Café, and signed it: To Marina—Bravery, in love as in art. A.

Now, in the salmon-pink bedroom, I began again the poem of the kiss, the furs, the fire, the snow.

3 The Coming of Varvara

VARVARA—FOREVER PUSHING ME ahead, opening doors I was afraid to pass through, even though behind them were things I desperately wanted. I try to remember how it was before she came, when it had been just Mina and myself. My life had been sweet and dull, a normal bourgeois Petersburg girlhood: studying, going to the kinotheater on Nevsky Prospect—at first accompanied by my governess but later with my brothers, with Mina. We watched detective films, westerns, romances, Kholodnaya in Children of the Century and Her Sister’s Rival. With her clear eyes and round face, Mina would grow to resemble her, though not back then, when she was still a chubby, bespectacled mama’s girl. Away from school, she and I spent most of our time together, but at the Tagantsev Academy, we kept to our own groups. I drifted restlessly between cliques—the literary set, those melancholic Ophelias, and the drama girls, livelier and more flamboyant but also histrionic and full of vicious gossip. Rather than follow me into such exhausting company, Mina retreated with one or two other misfits to study for the next exam and secretly eye the popular girls with an air of wounded longing.

Then Varvara came, the volatile reagent that forged of us a third element. We’d heard she’d spent the fall at the Catherine Institute, a school for the daughters of the aristocracy, but had been asked to leave after a month or two. Before that, they said, she’d been living in Germany, a residence already exotic and questionable, but had to return home because of the war. At the academy, Varvara quickly polarized girls into advocates and detractors—mostly the latter. But how brilliant she made us feel, how advanced. She galvanized us. I abandoned my theatrical crowd, and Mina her drones, and we began to spend all our time in one another’s company. While I had been reading Idylls of the King, Colette, and Dostoyevsky—and Mina her eternal Dumas—Varvara was already tearing through Hegel, Engels and Marx, Kropotkin, Gorky, and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?

I remember the first time I brought her home for tea, secretly hoping she’d say something shocking, so I could be a rebel-by-proxy—but she’d been irritatingly polite, her dark eyes glittering at the sight of the sandwiches. She’d praised the light streaming through the tall windows, the excellence of the cooking, the warmth and tidiness of the flat. But eventually she grew more talkative, telling Mother about her aunt in Germany, with whom she had been living when war broke out and the Russians were called home. “Really, it’s a shame we’re at war. We’ve got so much more in common with Germany than with England.” She had no idea that we had Volodya serving under arms or that Father was a sworn Anglophile.

“Weak or strong?” Mother asked, so picturesque in her blue silk blouse, pouring tea from the silver samovar.

“Strong,” Varvara said.

Mother asked casually, “And where does your family live, Varvara? Are you near here?”

In Petrograd you never had to ask, What does your father do? How much do you live on a year? What are your prospects in life? You only had to ask, So where does your family live? My mother was a master of strategy, a Suvorov of manners.

“On Vasilievsky Island,” Varvara said, accepting her tea, which was served in a cup and saucer, English style, rather than in glasses. She dropped two cubes of sugar into it. Three. Four. My mother’s good breeding wouldn’t let her stare. But Seryozha kicked me under the table, rounded his eyes.

“Is your father at the university?” Vasilievsky Island could be elegant near the Neva, especially in the vicinity of the Twelve Colleges of the university, which looked across the river toward St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Winter Palace. But away from the river it became more working class, slummier as you moved north and west, toward the factories and shipyards. Mother’s mind was a social card catalogue, narrowing, calculating. Vasilievsky Island. Four sugars! Bobbed hair. Terrible shoes. Widely traveled, lived in Germany, well spoken. Such horrible opinions! Professor’s daughter? I could hear the cards clicking. “Does he teach?”

“Il est mort.” She dropped the words onto the cutwork tablecloth like dropping a rat there, then reached for another sandwich. “Measles. We got it, too, but we recovered.”

“Ah, kak zhal’,” Mother said. What a pity.

Afterward, we retired to my bedroom. Varvara immediately fished a sandwich out of her pocket and wolfed it down. “Where do they get all the food?” she asked. “You have contacts in the country?”

I’d never thought about it. “Maryino…” Our estate near Tikhvin. “But it’s mostly timber. I don’t know… Vaula goes to the shops.”

“There’s nothing in the shops,” Varvara said, trying my bed, bouncing on it. “We haven’t seen butter in months. It’s fifteen rubles a pound if you can get it. We’re eating horsemeat, not minced pork and salmon. Come out of your dream world.”

I flushed. At fourteen, I never really considered where our food came from, not until that very instant. I was not a callous girl. I knew there were poor people, sad people—I wasn’t blind. But the mechanics of our own family, how we tied into the general suffering, wasn’t anything I thought about.

“Women work twelve hours a day in this city. Just a few blocks from here.” Now Varvara was prowling around my room. She opened my wardrobe and began examining my dresses as if she were thinking of buying something. “Old ladies, pregnant women. On their feet. Breathing lint, breathing mercury all day in the tanneries. You really don’t know, do you?” She pulled out a frock, deep green velvet with a large collar of Belgian lace, and held it up to herself in the glass. “Then they stand in the queues.” She must not have liked the effect, for she wrinkled her nose and shoved the dress roughly back into the wardrobe. “And when the shops run out, they’re out. Except for people with the kapusta.” Cabbage. Money. “For people like you, things appear by magic from under the counter, from a back room. I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting.”

I could feel tears welling up. Why was she attacking me? She turned her attention to my bookcase, pulled out a small volume—Coleridge. When she saw it was verse, and English to boot, she stuck it back on the shelf. “The police hold the lines back for you people,” she continued.

“Don’t say you people.”

“They take one look at your cook and let her go right in ahead of everyone.”

I tried to make a joke of it. “Maybe next time, we’ll dine chez vous. I’ve never had horsemeat.”

She plopped my white fur hat onto her unbrushed hair. “I’ll make sure you receive an invitation.”

I took her up on it, in that first bitter winter of the war. I knew I was a sheltered girl, spoiled even, but she shamed me for it. For instance, I’d been to England, and Baden-Baden and Venice, but not to the poor districts of my own city—say, the Lines of Vasilievsky Island. But Varvara did it every day, and though Miss Haddon-Finch made me promise not to take the streetcar with all the soldiers, the militarization of the city being what it was, I would be damned if I would insist on a cab and be ridiculed by Varvara again.

We got on the streetcar at Nevsky—it was already filled to capacity with soldiers, and more kept jumping on—and I noticed to my astonishment that not a single one paid the fare. The conductor didn’t demand payment, either. If these officials of the tram system were afraid, who would keep order if something happened? I clung tightly to my book bag, as Varvara had instructed, and tried to see out the windows, which were completely steamed over. It was impossible in any case, we were crammed in so tight. Snow had been falling all day, obscuring the city like a veil.

The tram groaned and squealed across the Neva, and Varvara pushed and shoved our way off near the university. My relief at being free of the rough hands patting me down faded as we began to work our way west past the wide streets called lines, once intended as canals but never dug. They formed long ugly blocks perpendicular to the Neva, and grew worse as we walked away from the university toward the docks in the four o’clock twilight. Men followed us, shoving one another. Some called out, “Hey, sweetie! Hey, darling!” “Krasavitsa moya!” My beauty. “Hey, Red, here I am. Give us a kiss!” Frankly terrified, I tried to swing along at the same pace as my long-legged friend, telling myself that Varvara encountered this every day. No wonder she exuded confidence. Nothing else would seem intimidating by comparison.

We passed a long red apartment house, where dirty children played in the wet snow and women loitered in the doorways, their drawn faces watching us pass in our school uniforms. “That’s a brothel,” Varvara said.

Prostitutki. I thought of Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment. The women called out to workmen and university students from their doorways as snow fell on bits of their ragged finery—a worn astrakhan coat, a hat with a drooping feather. A ragged child watched us as if we were queens, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“This way,” Varvara drawled. “That is, unless you want to meet them. They’re stupid as chickens.”

She led me through a dirty courtyard and into a back building, up some dark, sour stairs, then down a hallway to a battered door. She used her key. “Avanti.” She gestured, and I found myself in a dreary room taller than it was wide, dense with old furniture and decorated with pictures in ornate frames—gloomy oil paintings, several lithographs of Volga landscapes.

The place smelled of mold. Two dusty windows facing the yard provided a bit of illumination. In the red corner, an icon of St. Nikolas the Wonderworker hung behind a smoky blue icon lamp. And a portrait of our emperor, Nikolas II of All the Russias. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The emperor presided over Varvara’s home. We had a few icons, but never that.

“I know,” she said, following my astonished gaze. “I can’t believe it myself.”

A woman in rusty black silk sat in a chair so quietly that at first I didn’t see her. She gazed out the window, a book in her lap. That it was Varvara’s mother was obvious—she bore exactly my friend’s features—the high bridged nose, the sharp cheekbones, the black eyes—but with all the life drained out of them. Her mother didn’t turn her head, or acknowledge us in any way. I wondered if she really was a countess—hard to know given Varvara’s sense of humor. A maid came in, wearing a dirty gray apron and carrying a battered samovar. She had one white eye. We sat at a small table and allowed this pitiful creature to serve us tea weak enough to be mistaken for dishwater in etched tea glasses delicate as frost on a windowpane. She rolled as she walked, like a sailor. Varvara passed me a small sugar pot filled with little tablets. “Saccharine,” she said. “It’s sweet. But don’t use too much.”

She dropped the little pill into her tea, and I followed suit. Fascinating. Already a new world. The woman served some bread and hard cheese that tasted of nothing at all. That eye haunted me, like the vulture eye in Poe’s story. I loved the old man… The maid brought Varvara’s mother a glass of tea as she sat in her chair by the window. “When I was a girl,” the mother suddenly said in a cracked voice unsteady as the round wooden table, “my mother had a French laundress—Marie. And all she did was press pleats. Only pleats.” She imitated a laugh, like paper crinkling. “Now all we have is poor Dasha. Comment tombent les puissants…”

Varvara snickered, and her mother turned to her with the impossibly sad expression of a Byzantine saint. “That hair,” said her mother. “You look like a guttersnipe.”

“I am a guttersnipe,” Varvara said.

Her mother sighed and addressed the portrait of the emperor, or perhaps the saint. “You see what I must endure? Death will be a blessing.” She went back to contemplating the ruin of her life out the dirty window.

“Tell Marina about your matched team of white trotters,” Varvara said. “The countess was always particular about her horses.”

“Orlov trotters,” her mother said, her voice like leaves blowing across an empty square. “Polkan and Yashma. They were smarter than people. Which doesn’t take much.”

After another pale glass of tea, the servant brought out supper. The countess did not join us for a rotten cabbage soup with bits of some sort of chewy, gamy meat, but was served separately on a table before the window, with a napkin as a tablecloth and a small vase with a silk flower in it. Varvara nodded at me as I ate. Horsemeat. This beast in my mouth had once pulled a wagon. I chewed and chewed, the gristle preventing me from thoroughly masticating it. Finally, as discreetly as I could, I spit out the rubbery bit in my napkin.

Afterward, Varvara asked if I’d like a tour of the flat. It surprised me that she wanted to show me more of this squalor. Very seriously, she began with the windows, introduced in turn as left and right. The table. A narrow wardrobe holding her few clothes. Her bookcase, overflowing with historical and political texts, dictionaries in German, English, French, Latin, and Greek. The divan on which she slept at night—“Ma chambre”—over which she’d hung pictures carefully cut from journals. I made out Engels, Kropotkin, a wood engraving of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—which seemed in rebellious confrontation with the two Nikolases in the red corner. A small kitchen, in which we disturbed the servant at her own tea.

She indicated another door as “La chambre de ma mère” but did not, thank God, open it. I worried there might be a coffin hidden inside.

The conveniences were at the end of the outer hall, shared with the neighbors. “I’d recommend leaving that to the imagination.”

After that, my friend was eager to go. I approached her mother, mustered my best dancing-class curtsy. “Thank you for having me.” Varvara glared at me. Her mother returned my gesture with a reluctant nod of the head. “It’s good to see some people still exhibit a modicum of breeding.”

We walked quickly away from her building in the stunning cold and darkness. Varvara strode at double speed, still angry at the curtsy. We had to hook arms together against the stinging wind, the hard bits of snow jabbing our faces. I didn’t know whether to apologize for not believing her when she’d said she ate horsemeat, or express my sympathy at the way she had to live. I felt ashamed of my new warm coat, my white fur hat, my parents, our big tiled stoves, our bathroom, and that I never once thought them extraordinary.

We walked in silence down to the Nikolaevsky Bridge, where I could wait for the tram to take me home, although I planned to get off at the first stop and find a cab. The streetlights revealed nothing but snow falling and the rough white surface of the Neva. “So now you know,” she said.

What should I say? I’m sorry that you’re poor? “If only your father had lived.”

“Oh that.” Her breath was white, the snow building up on her black tam. “That’s just a joke. My father’s very much above ground, sad to say. Count Razrushensky—you’ve never heard of him? Union of the Russian People?” An archreactionary group, part of the Black Hundreds. The nemesis of liberals like my parents. “The People’s Will tried to assassinate him in ’06. Failed. Too bad. Bet your mother’s heard of him. She kept giving me those looks.”

The wind whipped around us as we arrived at the tram stop. It was hard to see anything now in the darkness, and the cold was punishing up here on the river. We clung to each other for that small bit of shelter. “But even if he’s reactionary, surely he would help his own daughter.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, speaking through her scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth, our backs to the wind. “It’s a game. Who will win. You really don’t know this?”

I shook my head. “Should I?”

“It’s sort of a well-known scandal.” She kicked one overshoe against the other to knock the snow off and keep some feeling in her feet. “He moved one of his women into the house with us. Told the countess to divorce him if she didn’t like it. Of course she wouldn’t. Too devout. But not too devout to spite him for the rest of his life.” We leaned on the frozen rails, staring up the Neva toward the Winter Palace, the lights pretty through the sifting snow. “So he’s on Millionnaya Street, living with his mistress—or one of them—and we’re on the Sixteenth Line, eating horsemeat.”

Other people’s lives were so confusing. “But why? Aren’t they still married?”

“No, of course you don’t get it.” She took my hand. “Sweet Marina. They hate each other, don’t you see? She’s doing it to punish him. To shame him. Living on the few rubles she gets from her tired old estate and parading her misery around Petrograd, you should see the pleasure she gets from it. It’s like something from Dostoyevsky.” She leaned into me. “And he loves seeing her suffer. Loves it. You can’t shame him. He doesn’t care what people think. I ran away to see him once. The servants wouldn’t even let me through the front door—left me sitting on the step like an orphan selling matches.” I could see her face, wild under the streetlight. “I wish they’d both die.”

Snow sifted through the rails of the bridge, onto the tails of the iron seahorses. I leaned against her, put my arm around her waist, rested my head against her shoulder. My stomach rumbled with the unaccustomed foulness of the meat I’d eaten. “There’s nobody who can help? His family? Hers?”

“Well, that’s the hell of it,” she said, turning around, pressing her back to the railing, scowling at some passing men, wiping her eyes with the back of her knitted glove. “We’re all so very proud, aren’t we? She won’t take a kopek from his family. Hers doesn’t have anything.” She pulled her scarf up higher, so there was only a slit in it for her glittering eyes—was she going to cry? “His brother once offered to take me to his crummy estate outside of Tver, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be raised by a bunch of reactionaries in the middle of nowhere. That’s why I ended up with my aunt in Germany. But then the war had to come along. So here I am.”

I slung my arm around her shoulders as she started making terrible sucking noises. She didn’t even know how to cry properly.

A few minutes later, I got on the tram by myself. It was less full than it had been, but I was still squashed in with everybody else, hanging from the strap as soldiers took up all the seats. They asked if I had a boyfriend, how old I was, where I lived. They wouldn’t stop talking to me, some standing right next to me, pressing up against me, but I would not get off, I would take it all the way. I felt that I owed Varvara that much, to understand what it was to be her.

Finally, I made it home, back to our comfortable flat, with Basya straightening pillows and the scent of Vaula’s cooking wafting in from the kitchen. Mother came down the hall, perfumed and dressed for the theater, hooking a pearl earring in place. I could have wept.

4 The Hospital

LETTERS FROM KOLYA APPEARED following New Year’s—addressed to my family: “Dear Makarovs,” with a few cheery anecdotes. Nothing for me. Couldn’t he have written to me separately, or at least enclosed a private note? Was he ashamed of his interest in me? Where were the love notes I’d been so eagerly expecting? I wrote poems about him, about trees come to flower and then withered by ice. A man at the front imagining home, a faithless lover, a walk into bullets. I wrote letters to the regimental address. Why don’t you write? I’m waiting but I’m not good at it, Kolya. I wrote poems about fever, I wrote about mud, I wrote about the sloppy end of winter, the thawing Neva heaving from the pressure of spring, so that it sounded like gunfire. My passion, once aroused, was difficult to dampen.

Late in the spring, I received a letter. It looked as if it had been mauled and then dropped in the mud. Its date: January 1916.

And a little line drawing of a fox in a ringmaster’s shiny boots and top hat.

That summer the Russian army broke through the Austro-Hungarian lines on the Southwestern Front, a stunning advance that took pressure off the French and the British at Verdun and knocked the Austrians out of the war. Called the Brusilov Offensive, it proved the Entente’s greatest victory. And yet the flood of the Russian wounded, the terrible numbers of the dead, undercut any mood of rejoicing. For the city was more than the imperial capital, it was the great staging area of the war—whole districts devoted to barracks, to shipbuilding and munitions factories. Soldiers drilled in the middle of boulevards, and crowded every tram. We could watch the country’s lifeblood pouring into the war like water onto sand. We had front-row seats. The stores, as Varvara had told me that first year, were stripped to bare shelves, but the hospitals were full, and new ones were opening all the time. Even the Winter Palace housed the wounded.

Mother’s friends and their daughters donned the short white veil of the volunteer nurses, a brave red cross sewn upon the apron, but Mother couldn’t bear the sight of wounded men, not with Volodya at the front. Every amputee reminded her of the danger. In lieu of nursing, she organized a sewing circle among her friends, making swabs and rolling gauze for use on the battlefield. My school friends knitted scarves and socks. I tried, but I was no Seryozha. My scarves resembled great tangles of hair.

It was Miss Haddon-Finch who suggested that she and I could help the war effort by assisting the British embassy with its program of distributing parcels—clothing and tools, boots and underwear, evaporated milk and sugar—to wounded Russian soldiers returning home to distant villages. “The British want to show their appreciation for their sacrifice,” she said. I quickly agreed. Anything was better than sitting on a summer’s day rolling gauze. A young adjutant at the embassy gave us a list of questions we should ask the men. They seemed awfully dry, more like a census—name, region, district, and so on. Profession? Married or single? Number of children? Literate? But I supposed they gave married men more than the single ones, and something for the children, books if they could read. Our job was just to take the information. The packages would arrive upon discharge.

My dread grew with each block as we took a cab up to the great military hospital on Vasilievsky Island, grim in the summer heat. Its vast foyer echoed—even there, beds had been set up. I wasn’t a squeamish girl, but I still remember my terror at seeing wounded men lying right in the open, soldiers moaning, hobbling on crutches, their heads encased in bandages. My governess had that English confidence, though, young as she was, and I followed her brisk steps as she approached the desk where a formidable nurse wrote in a ledger.

“Izvenite,” said Miss Haddon-Finch. The woman refused to acknowledge our presence. She tried again, louder. “Excuse me, please? I’m here to visit the soldiers. We were sent by the British embassy. For the discharge packages.”

“What packages?” the woman snapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Miss Haddon-Finch again explained our purpose in halting Russian, but it just irritated the big nurse all the more. “I don’t have time for this,” the woman fired back. “Escorting British ladies around like it’s an exposition. Do you think this is a museum? I’ve got dying men to think about. We don’t even have enough beds. Are the English going to give them to us?”

My governess couldn’t understand such rapid speech, but she certainly could guess that her request wasn’t being properly received. It brought out her military side, this plain young woman in shirtwaist and boater, daughter of a colonel in the Indian army. “I beg your pardon,” she said in English, the way the British did, which was anything but a plea for forgiveness. “I’d like to speak to your superior. I’m here on behalf of His Majesty the King. I resent being treated like a beggar.”

I translated quickly for her, proud of her starch, and the irritable nurse got up and found a soldier into whose hands she could deposit us.

I explained our purpose to him, showing him our forms and questions. He asked a heavier man, perhaps a doctor, who shrugged—What’s it to me?—and the soldier led us up the wide stairs, through some swinging double doors into a great airless ward that smelled of carbolic and human waste. The heat! And the stench. Once you have smelled the stink of decaying bodies, you never forget it. The cheap tobacco the soldiers smoked was a blessing. Both my governess and I stood a few feet inside the doorway, afraid to move another foot closer. There were so many men, a vast stockyard of the wounded—a row against each wall with an aisle down the middle, long as a soccer field. Those who were not in too much pain stared at us, calling out for help, for attention. “Barynya!” Miss! “Water, there’s no water.” “Help me!” The smell, and the shouting… I grew woozy and turned back to the door.

“Stop it,” my governess said, grabbing my arm. “Imagine your brother. My brother. Don’t be afraid of them. They’re in pain.”

She started at the first bed, by the door on the right. She tried to speak to the man, who had some sort of box keeping his yellowed sheet from his feet. “What happened?” she asked in her halting Russian. “Trench foot, barynya.” he said. Clean-shaven, but a peasant, his lined face, his short nose, his bright eyes. Puzzled by the Russian phrase, she turned to me to translate.

I was burning up, and the stink made me queasy. I could smell his decaying feet. It was dead summer. Why didn’t they open the windows? “Are you hot, soldier?”

“Better than being cold, barynya.”

“This lady has some questions for you,” I said. “The English are giving packages on discharge. To thank you for fighting.”

“They’re going to thank us for fighting,” he told the man lying next to him, whose head and left eye were swathed in soiled bandages. “Why don’t the tsar thank us?”

“Thinks he already did,” said the man beyond the one with the bandaged head. “One less arm to wash.” They all laughed their way into coughing fits.

“Sorry, miss. I shouldn’t joke around. Just been in this bed awhile,” said the first.

The man across the way groaned rhythmically. “Help me… help me…”

“What’s wrong with him?” my governess asked.

“Gangrene, miss,” said the first man.

She shuddered, touching the little locket around her neck that held a picture of her brother, fighting in France somewhere, probably Verdun. “Maybe we should just find out which ones are being discharged.” She was a great one for systems. She would have made a good soldier, despite her weakness for romantic novels. She stopped a small nurse carrying a pan covered with a cloth. “Can you tell me which men are to be sent home?”

“How should I know?” the nurse said. “If they get better they go back to the front. If they get worse…” She shrugged. “The amputees go home. Why don’t you start there?”

“But how will we know?” she called after the woman, already bustling away.

“It’s on the chart,” the nurse called back over her shoulder.

Despite the noise and the heat and our confusion, we began to go down the row, studying the charts that hung at the foot of the beds. Trench foot, shrapnel, bayonet. Amputation. Gangrene. Bullet in the head, bullet lodged in the spleen, in the spine, in the groin. Paralysis. Amputation. “We’d better split up,” she said. “It’ll go faster.”

Talk to them myself? To the man groaning on the other side of the row? “But won’t you need me to translate? What if they don’t understand you?”

“I’ll do fine,” she said. “Go.” She gently pushed me toward the other row.

I took my forms and my pencil and, quietly terrified, approached the first bed. “Water,” begged the man with gangrene. He smelled awful, his thin face yellow with fever.

A nurse bustled by. “Excuse me. This man is thirsty,” I said.

She stared back at me with the white eye of a startled horse. “Water’s in the hall. Get it yourself.” I didn’t know what to do, I wasn’t a nurse. But I got his cup from the side of his bed, took it out in the hall—at least it was cooler there—filled it from a large urn, and took it back. I tried to hand it to him, but he couldn’t sit up. He just lay there, calling for water. There was nowhere to sit. What should I do? I could feel my helpless tears welling up.

“I’ll give it to him, miss,” said the man in the next bed. He sat up in his dirty nightshirt and I saw that he’d lost a leg. I tried not to stare, but I didn’t know where else to put my eyes. He took the cup from me, reached across the narrow gap between beds, and held up the soldier’s thin head, his neck like a flower stalk, and began dripping water into the fevered man’s mouth.

An amputee! I remembered what I was doing there. “I’m taking information,” I said. “For packages. For men who’re going to be discharged.”

“Theotokos be praised,” he said. “Not a moment too soon.”

Name? Region? District? Profession? Married? Children? Mardukov, Foma Fomanovich. Peasant. From Irkutsk Oblast, Cheremkhovsky District, village of Kuda. I laughed. “Really?” Kuda meant “which way.”

“Yes, if you go there, you’ll be asking, too,” he said. His whole demeanor brightened at the small contact. I’d thought he was fifty but he gave his age as thirty-five, married with four children. “She wrote to me, barynya. Look.” He reached into his boot—his one boot, standing by the bed… where was the other, with his leg? Did they bring the leg with him or leave it on the battlefield? I could feel that other boot calling to this one. He handed me a soft piece of paper, grimy from handling.

I opened it. It wasn’t a woman’s handwriting. Lettered, not cursive, full of misspellings. My dear Fomusha… I didn’t know if I really should be reading it. I tried to give it back to him, but he indicated with a rolling of his hand for me to keep it. “Read it to me, miss. I’m a poor simple man, I never learned how.”

I read his own letter aloud to him. “My dear Fomusha, I pray that this letter finds you well. We are fine. The goat had twins, at last.” I glanced at the date—February 1915. Over a year ago. “Little Vanka cut a tooth, he’s been bawling about it for weeks.” And soon Foma would hold him, he’d be walking by now, wouldn’t he? Talking? I didn’t know much about children.

“She’s a wonderful woman, my Rozochka.” His lined face smiling, the creases like the rays of the sun.

“The Krylovs’ izba burned down last month. Is it cold there? The winter’s been terrible here. You should see Grisha—he looks just like you.”

“He’s almost six now,” said the soldier.

“Sonnechka had her baby, a girl. The rye looks good, and the wheat, too, though harvest’s the devil without you.”

He examined his remaining foot, thick-nailed, and sighed. “At least I’ll be home. A thousand thanks, miss.” He took the letter and folded it, put it back into his boot.

I moved to the next bed, the occupant already waiting for me. All of them had something they wanted to tell me, more than region, district, village, profession, married, children. They showed me letters, pictures. They were shy about discussing their wounds, but their bodies spoke for themselves. Trench foot spoke of water-filled ditches where they stood for days and weeks. Their coughing told stories of battlefield gas. Suppurating wounds under dirty bandages gave testimony to the lack of care the nation gave its conscripts. How could we make wounded men sleep in such foul surroundings, such narrow beds? With stale sheets and pillowcases. Everything yellow and gray—walls gray, the floors yellow. And the inescapable heat. My dress was already soaked. I kept thinking that these could be the very men Volodya described in his letters. He spoke of their bravery, their camaraderie. I tried to flag nurses as they bustled about so importantly, yet no one had time to change a man’s bandages, get him a glass of water.

Though filthy and neglected, the men who were not racked with pain or delirious with fever were for the most part surprisingly cheerful, happy to share their information, whether they were likely to be discharged or would be healed only to be sent back. I tried to get them to talk about the war, but they wanted to talk about their villages: Kuda and Polovodovo, Tarkhanskaya Pot’ma, Sosi, Gus’, Veliky-Dobrovo. A soldier from Ryazan Oblast, patched about the head and left eye, asked if I might write a letter to his wife. He was exceedingly polite: “A thousand pardons, miss, but it would mean everything to her.” I had an entire ward to get to—Miss Haddon-Finch was already way ahead of me—but I saw no point in bustling around like these nurses, too busy to get a man a glass of water. We would finish the ward today or we’d come back tomorrow. Meanwhile, I would attend to this man. I tore a sheet from my own notebook and took his dictation. He watched me, head cocked to better view the page, the way children watch a magician performing.

He paused. Awareness of my youth and station prevented him from saying more. “You say the rest.”

“I think of you every day, the sun in your hair,” I said.

“Yes, say that. The sun in her hair… she’s got such pretty hair, too. Blond braids like that.” He showed me with his big hands, his fingers could hardly close around them.

“How should I sign it? What does she call you?”

From the expression on his face, the sly grin, it was probably dirty. “Say Senya.”

“With all my love, Senya.”

I continued to the next bed, and the next. Men from villages whose names sounded like fairy tales told me their specifics. How sheltered I’d been. I could really see how Volodya must have changed since leaving us to fight with these men, for here was Russia, here in these beds. These eyes, clear or red or yellow or bandaged, these men young and not so young. The giant wounded body of Russia. What did I know of these lives? I felt my privilege, my foreignness as a girl from Petersburg, with its quays and canals, its classical buildings, its foreigners and colonnades, its seafront. Compared to the Russia of these men, this was Finland, Paris, a polonaise, a tango, dueling pistols at dawn. It was silver and lilac, Great Peter’s dream.

Big men tossed in fever or lay listless, laughed off the loss of a leg, an arm, yet still believed in the emperor and the healing power of the holy icons worn beneath their dirty shirts. I thought about the poet Walt Whitman, whom Balmont had translated into Russian. It was said he’d served as a field nurse in the American Civil War.

Where was our Whitman? I wondered, imagining he was here somewhere, in a trench or a hospital like this one, putting it all into words that would reach across time to break your heart. Maybe this Brusilov Offensive would be the thing to break through and end the war. But the looks of this ward made me wonder. I asked a few of the men about the offensive, how it seemed to be going, but none of them had any idea. They went where they were told; they trusted in God.

I gazed back at the crowded ward, like a terrible mirror house. How many men lay mangled in wards like this in Russia right now, their bodies ruined? Could we really afford to lose so many? Wouldn’t we run out of arms and legs? Though they said we were winning, I couldn’t help wondering what losing would look like. I thought of Volodya… but there were no officers in these wards, only common soldiers. Bad luck to think it. He’ll be fine…

And why did I think Volodya and not Kolya? He could have been shot just as easily. And yet somehow I felt he would be protected—if not by God or the Virgin or spirits then by his own buoyancy. Surely he, if anyone, would know how to evade the bullets and grenades. Yet I knew this was childish thinking. Kolya Shurov was only a man like any of these, blood and muscle, with arms and legs that could be lost, flesh that could be torn, eyes that could burn. Charm couldn’t dissuade bullets or bayonets, land mines or poison gas. But still, I couldn’t quite believe it. Volodya was heroic, an officer of cavalry, the type who could be killed defending somebody else, could trip a land mine. He would be the one to lead any charge. I prayed God to bring him back, safely and soon.

When I told Varvara what I was doing with the wounded men, she shook her head slowly, said the only cure for what was going on in this country was to end the imperial nightmare and agitate for a socialist state. She told me to read Das Kapital. “Better to work for change that affects everyone.” I knew she was right, yet what about the man in this bed, groaning, his body in plaster? Sometimes simply holding someone’s hand was better than all the Hegelian dialectics in the world. Varvara had not seen the glow in a man’s wounded face as I approached his bed, how happy he’d been to be asked the most mundane questions, how glad to simply have been sought out and addressed as a man.

I moved to the bedside of a soldier with a blond beard. His leg had been amputated at the knee, and the smell was nauseating. Sick as he was, his letter to his sweetheart brimmed with affection and humor:

The man in the next bed smoked a twisted cigar. “She’s probably sleeping with the foreman, brother,” he interjected. “Women don’t wait, and that’s the truth.”

I flushed, thinking of the boys I’d kissed when I thought Kolya had forgotten me. Wait for me…

“Shut up, Yid,” the blond man said.

“I bet you get back, there’ll be another kid who looks nothing like you.” The cynic was reading a book. The first literate man I’d seen here.

“Keep it buttoned, or I’ll shove your face in,” said my soldier. “She’s a treasure, barynya. She’s my angel.”

“Should I put that in?” I asked. “My treasure, my angel?”

“Yes, write it all down.”

I added these to the other phrases. “What else?”

A tear rolled down his cheek into his beard. “Tell her I’ll be back soon, I’ll warm her up and how…” Then he remembered who he was talking to, a sixteen-year-old studentka. “A thousand pardons, barynya. Forgive me, I’m not used to fine company.”

I wanted to see the title of the volume the other soldier held in his hands. “What are you reading?” I asked him.

“Nothing for you,” he sneered. “Barynya.”

My eyes watered as though I’d been slapped in the face. The other men had been so grateful… he obviously had a poor opinion of women.

“Bedbug! Louse. Don’t listen to him, barynya.” My bearded private defended me, though he could barely lift his head for fever. “If I could get out of this bed, I’d beat his Yid head in.”

Finally I could see the title of the man’s book. Chernyshevsky’s radical Chto Delat’? What Is to Be Done? It made me all the more curious about this rude fellow to see that he was reading the same book Varvara was so fervent about. “You’re not an officer?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, smoking his twisted cheroot. “If I were an officer would I be here? No, I’d be in Tsarskoe Selo on a featherbed, eating eggs on toast.”

“You got that right,” said my bearded man.

I finished his letter and moved to the bedside of the literate man. The smell of his cigar was sharp and bitter.

“Mind if I ask you some questions?” I asked. He wasn’t an amputee and probably would be sent back to the front, but he interested me.

“Why not?” the man said. “I have a few moments.” He put his book on the gray sheet, his cigar stuck between his teeth.

His name: Evgeny Isaakovich Marmelzadt. From Petrograd. Unmarried. No children. Profession, typesetter. Literate. “Why aren’t you an officer?”

“Steblov, tell her why I’m not an officer.”

“’Cause he’s a Jew, barynya. Who’d follow him anywhere except to the pawnshop?” The blond-bearded soldier laughed.

Marmelzadt took his cigar from his teeth. “I rest my case.”

An odd little man, rude and yet willing to talk. Thinning sandy hair, a wide bony jaw. Unlike the other men, he wasn’t intimidated by my clean clothes and educated speech. In fact I had the feeling he considered himself superior to me. “Excuse me, Evgeny Isaakovich, can I ask you one more question?”

“Maybe. Let’s hear it.”

“Do you think the offensive will succeed? That we’ll win the war?”

He smiled a rancid little smile, reading the tip of his cigar as if a joke nested in its glowing nib. “Everyone’s going to lose this war, little missy.” He squinted, sticking it back between his teeth. “Walk away from your pretty streets, your Nevsky Prospect. Stop looking at yourself in the mirror long enough to take a good look around.”

“But Brusilov—”

“Forget your Brusilov. He can’t save it. This whole country is sinking like a stone. It’s rotten, everything in it is rotten. These poor fools can hang on to their saints and their tsar as much as they like, but when this offensive fails, then you watch. You heard it here first. Thank me later.”

I felt his disapproval like a lash—especially the part about looking at myself in the mirror, which of course I did constantly. But I needed to know what someone other than my father thought. I wanted to argue with him—his words cast such a chill, even on a hot day. As I moved on, I felt his gaze following me. I thought of him as we took a cab all the way back to Furshtatskaya Street.

5 Fathers and Sons

AUTUMN. THE BRUSILOV OFFENSIVE died and crumbled in the mud of Galicia—just as the sour-faced soldier had predicted. Not enough support at the right time, Father said. Territoriality, shortsightedness, and squabbling among the generals had undermined our best hope for victory. Gloom pervaded the house—gloom at school, irritability in the street and in the classrooms. Mother decided to cheer us one night by pulling out an old photo album with silver hasps. We curled up with her in the little sitting room that served as our library, me on one side, Seryozha on the other. Above her hung the Vrubel portrait of her as Igraine, all sea and mist. Near the Russian stove with its blue tiles, Miss Haddon-Finch worked on a jigsaw puzzle while Avdokia sat on a little rush-bottomed chair mending a hem. The scent of cherry tobacco wafted down the hall. All was as it used to be when we were small, and we sat next to Mother, watching her turn the big black pages of the old album like pages in a book of fairy tales. For a moment, I could forget the war, the men, even Kolya, just to dwell there, a little girl, smelling Mother’s perfume.

Verushka and Vadik, Maryino, 1879. Two small children, regal in their little chairs in a garden shaded by an arbor, having their tea under a much younger Avdokia’s watchful eye. “We were considered the prettiest children in St. Petersburg,” Mother said, as if it were a simple fact, like days in the week or the orbit of Mars. “People used to stop us in the street to admire us.”

Our nanny, now old and stooped in her little chair, smiled down at her mending. “Such a pair. Little Vadik—akh, there was a handful. And you weren’t so easy yourself. Our little tsarevna.”

Old photographs tipped in against the large black pages, each image titled in white ink, first in Grandmère’s spidery writing, then later in Mother’s pretty Catherine Institute hand.

“Your brother, where is he now?” Miss Haddon-Finch paused, a piece still in hand, above her jigsaw puzzle—the Houses of Parliament. Father had it sent from England for her birthday. She had a bit of a crush on him.

“In America.” Mother sighed, turning the page. “Last we heard. But the war…” We hadn’t seen him since the summer he’d taken a dacha on the Gulf of Finland, ten years ago. He didn’t come back when war broke out, and Father saw that as tantamount to treason. In Vadim’s last letter—sent from California—he’d included a photograph of himself painting on a stony beach. Dressed in a pair of pants tied at the waist with a rope, he was lithe and finely sculpted as an Assyrian bas-relief.

“You must miss him very much,” said Miss Haddon-Finch.

Vera and Vadim, The Lido, Venice, 1891.

“Yes, I do,” Mother said.

Young, on a boardwalk, Uncle Vadim in a white suit with a straw hat, looking exactly like Seryozha. And Mother, simply garbed in a long white dress, carried a hat as big as a carriage wheel. How relaxed and happy she looked that long-ago day, like a Manet, her hair in the breeze. She always looked happiest with her brother. In pictures with Father, she appeared elegant but always slightly tense. In this picture, she was sixteen, just my age. Two years later, she married Father. It gave me a haunted feeling, that someday I would see pictures of myself as I’d been this year and turn the page to find myself at university. And then what? A wedding picture with Kolya? Posing with a group of fellow poets on the Black Sea? Living on foreign shores, like Uncle Vadim? I imagined the album would end with me, fat and gray-haired, my descendants gathered around me.

Dmitry and Vera, St. Petersburg, 24 June 1893. Their wedding portrait. They stood side by side: Father, the young lawyer, his gaze leveled at the camera, with his well-modeled face and clever dark eyes, hair combed back, sensual lips—before the beard shielded them—in a bit of a smile, and Mother ethereal in her wedding kokoshnik, the Russian-style crown threaded with pearls. Her expression was a bit more guarded in her oval face, her large clear pale eyes. They were both so supremely confident for such young people, gazing out from the picture as if they knew they would be the center of whatever circles they found themselves in. But gone was the freedom my mother embodied in the picture with her brother in Venice two years before. This photograph spoke more of ambition than affection or affinity.

“Your school called today,” Mother said to Seryozha as he turned the page, toying absently with his unruly blond hair. “Unfortunately your father was home to take the call.”

Seryozha winced. Mother’s disapproval was one thing, but Father’s was of a different order of magnitude. Father had done well in school and loved every moment of it. He had been president of the debating society, the geography club, the English club, and editor of the school literary journal. He’d dismissed Seryozha’s tales of boys who mocked him, tripped him, made sure his books fell in the mud, and the jaded or aggressive schoolmasters from whom little help was forthcoming when this bullying was reported. As a woman from minor aristocracy, Mother didn’t care much about academics and liked having her youngest at home, sketching, amusing her. Consequently, my brother had developed a repertoire of mysterious ailments, most of which required a great deal of bed rest.

“I think I have that disease they have in Africa, where they fall asleep right where they stand,” Seryozha said, turning the page. “In the middle of walking to work or milking a goat.”

“Oblomovka,” she said. Oblomov, the hero of the famous Goncharov novel, about a useless young nobleman who can’t get out of bed. She kissed him on the cheek. She never petted me or Volodya this way, but Seryozha was the baby of the family, her special pet. For my part, I would rather go to school every day of the year—even if I were beaten bloody—than sit at home day after day. If it had been me, I would have taken up Father’s offer of boxing lessons. But avoidance was Seryozha’s way, and there was no talking to him about it. His stubbornness was a strange bedrock beneath his seeming weakness and passivity. He could not be forced into anything.

A strong waft of cherry tobacco entered the room, followed by Father in a dark red-and-blue dressing jacket and slippers of Morocco leather. He settled into an armchair and flicked on the reading light. We all tensed a bit, watching as he unfolded his paper and began to read with an exaggeratedly casual air. A lawyer at heart, Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov liked to surprise his prey.

“I’ve been talking to Konstantin Guchkov down in Moscow,” he said, shaking out the page. “He’s offered to arrange a spot at the Bagration Military School. Just as soon as we’re ready.”

Seryozha kept his head down and pretended to study a photograph of Volodya on a rocking horse.

“The school tells me you’ve been absent four times in the last month,” he continued. “Really, it’s got to stop.”

Miss Haddon-Finch rose and excused herself for bed. She didn’t care for family quarrels. Avdokia, however, remained stubbornly in her chair.

Father put down the paper and took out his gold Breguet pocket watch, which Mother had given him as a wedding present, and checked the time against the clock on the wall. He wound it, placed it back in his pocket. “Lying in bed when good men are at the front. It’s a disgrace.”

I could see the life draining out of Mother’s face. “He needs time to develop,” she said. “Surely certain allowances can be made. You know how horrid those boys are.”

Father turned the page of the newspaper on his knee. “All boys are horrid. Trust me, my dear. He’s got to get used to it. The best thing about this Moscow idea is getting him away from you. You coddle him as if he were six.” He nodded at us on the settee. “Look at him. Do you think that’s good for him?”

It was hard not to see it from Father’s point of view: the three of us tucked up over sweetened tea and butter cookies, petting Tulku, Mother’s little greyhound, and examining old photographs, while men slogged through the mud of Galicia and the Ukraine, leaving their arms and legs behind. “He’ll be sixteen soon, and clearly he’s not university material—”

“I’m going to art school,” my brother said, sitting up, putting a little space between himself and Mother. “I’ve decided. Golovin will recommend me.” Mother’s cousin, the scenic designer for the Alexandrinsky Theater.

Papa studied his youngest son over his pipe, removed it. “You’re talented enough, son, but I don’t see you with the ambition to launch a career. You’ll expect people to intercede on your behalf, open doors, make exceptions, do your talking for you.”

Mother turned the page in the photo album, her foot circling, like a cat twitching her tail. He had boxed us in, for which of us would dare speak up for Seryozha when to do so was to illustrate the correctness of his view?

“The sad truth is that there are only two people here who can make sure you find your way in the world, son. Yourself, and me. And as far as I can see, only one of us is taking that responsibility seriously.”

I ached for my brother—my father was always picking on him—but on the other hand, I couldn’t disagree. Seryozha could be both lazy and impervious to argument, his own worst enemy. Lying there, looking at picture albums… compared to those men in the Oborovsky Hospital, where I’d spent my summer, their stoic good humor, even when missing a leg or an eye—or even compared to Kolya or Volodya—he was a disaster.

Father took his pipe tool from his pocket and dug the ashes from the bowl, knocked them into the heavy ashtray. I gave Seryozha a look that meant “Say something.” If he didn’t want to be shipped off to military academy, he had better defend himself.

Seryozha tried his voice. “Look at Uncle Vadim. He’s got a career.” Our uncle traveled the world painting, taking photographs, illustrating articles in magazines—exactly the kind of life both Seryozha and I dreamed about.

“Vadim,” Father said disgustedly. “These are grave times. We need serious men now, not globe-trotting dilettantes.”

My mother blanched, closed the big album. “I find it… reprehensible that you would take out your feelings about my brother… on our son.” I knew what it cost her to state her feelings so openly. Propriety was as much a part of her as her own skin.

Seryozha set up very straight. Avdokia, behind my father and out of his view, crossed herself.

“We will not be raising any Vadims, my dear,” he said crisply, packing his pipe from a roll of tobacco he kept in his pocket. “Your brother has shirked every responsibility except for his own pleasure since the century turned.” He lit up with a flourish, puffed self-righteously, and sat back, gazing at her with the hard, cool expression he normally reserved for legal adversaries.

Mother sat very still, very erect, her mouth in a thin straight line, smoothing the cover of the album in her lap, a soft green calfskin.

But Seryozha heard the threat of the Bagration school quite clearly. “I can do better,” he said. “Two more years at Tenishev, and I’ll be out of there—it’s not so long, really. I guess I can stand it.”

“You guess?” Father’s eyebrows peaked.

“I mean, I will.” My brother stood. “Really, I will.”

Father let him stand there awhile, fixing him with his butterfly-pinning stare. “Give me your solemn word—as my son—that you will stop shaming your brother and the men who are out there dying for our country. I won’t have it.”

“I’ll go every day. I swear.” Wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

“Good.” He shook out his paper with a snap. “Avdokia, I’d like some tea now.”

6 Bread, Give Us Bread

A BITTER COLD BUT windless day, a light snow sifting out of the fog like confectioner’s sugar. After school, the three of us were on our way to see a new Vera Kholodnaya picture. We passed a bread line outside a bakery—every day they seemed to get longer. So many sad, tired people, weary shoulders drooping, waiting for their daily loaves. The city had become a waiting room—the part not already a barracks or a hospital. Ever since the offensive broke in September, a gloom of hopelessness had fallen over the city. Strikes had become a regular feature of life.

Varvara stopped to talk to a woman near the head of the queue. “How long have you been standing here, Grandmother?”

The woman gave us a keen assessment with her small colorless eyes. “She asks how long we’ve been here, the little missy.” The women standing around her laughed. “Only since eight this morning, sweetheart,” she said sarcastically. “Nichevo.” It’s nothing.

“Worse every day,” said a sweet-faced woman in front of her in a badly knitted rose shawl. “Soon I won’t bother going home. I’ll just bring a cot and a stove and a chamber pot and have my mail forwarded.”

“It’s the Jews,” an old woman said. She pulled something from her handbag, held it out to us. A pamphlet, worn and badly printed: THE JEWS ARE PROFITING FROM YOUR BLOOD AND SWEAT. THEY BOUGHT OFF THE DUMA! SHUT DOWN THE JEWISH DUMA!

As a Jew, Mina turned away, disgust and a trace of fear on her face. I, too, felt the assault. Father was a member of the Duma—a legislative body of limited powers dominated by businessmen, landowners, and aristocrats. It was hardly a “Jewish Duma,” and shutting it down wouldn’t do anyone any good. But neither of us said anything.

Varvara held up the leaflet and shredded it slowly before the woman’s eyes, letting the pieces fall like big, untidy snowflakes. “What garbage.” She sniffed her glove. “Protopopov’s stink is all over it.” The emperor’s reactionary minister of the interior, a well-known anti-Semite. “The government waves the Jews in your faces to distract you. Can’t you see? They don’t want you to think about how the war’s going. It’s the government that’s sending all the food to the front, and the hell with us. This line wasn’t here two years ago, was it? It’s all going to the war.”

The women glanced about them uneasily. To have someone speak like this on the street was dangerous for all concerned. But Varvara persisted. “Yes, your husbands, your sons. For what? Do you know what this war is about? It’s a big land grab. The tsar and the king of England, the kaiser—all cousins, squabbling among themselves. Dragging us along behind them. Ask yourself, who’s making the money here? Nobel, Putilov, Westinghouse, Dinamo.” The big factories, manufacturing munitions. “They’re the ones who want this. They don’t care how hungry you are.”

These women were actually listening to her. It did my heart good to see that old harridan chewing her cheek in fury.

“You want to shut down the Duma?” my friend scolded her. “Fine, shut down the Duma. Cut your own throats while you’re at it.”

The woman in front of the anti-Semite, a blond housewife with dark circles under her eyes, spoke up. “They say he’s got syphilis, Protopopov. That he’s completely insane.”

“Protopopov’s not going to stop until there’s no food left in the country,” Varvara said. Funny, Father had said the same thing just the night before.

The old hag chimed in. “They say the Germans are giving the Jews a million rubles to get us out of the war.”

“I’m leaving,” said Mina, her gray eyes burning behind her glasses. “I’ll see you at the theater.”

But Varvara barely heard her. She was just getting started. “The Germans don’t have to pay anybody. Are you joking?” she shouted. “We’re losing the war all by ourselves!”

Behind her, a raw-boned baba with a mottled face leaned in. “I heard the grand dukes are sending all the gold to Germany—in coffins of dead prisoners of war. For when Germany wins the war.” I hadn’t heard this one yet. The rumors never ceased to amaze me.

The old Jew hater revved up again. “If only the tsar would come back from the front. He doesn’t know what’s happening here.”

“He doesn’t?” Varvara spat. “With police spies everywhere? Nothing happens in this country he doesn’t know about.”

With the mention of police spies, the women quickly dropped their gazes and clamped their lips together.

Suddenly, a woman shouted back to the queue from the bakery’s doorway. “They say there’s no more bread. They’re completely out.”

The women pressed closer. “Sure they are.” “Hoarders!” “Thieves!”

“They’ve still got food!” “Speculators!” “If we had a fat wallet, they’d find some!”

The women crowded forward as someone inside struggled vainly to lock the doors. The women beat on the metal, shouting, “We want bread!” “Hoarders!” “Scum!”

I thought that we should leave, too. Something was about to break. Women put their shoulders to the door, ten of them, twelve. They heaved against it—one, two, three—and finally burst into the shop. In a moment, they dragged the owner out, a tubby, bald man in an apron, bellowing and threatening, waving his meaty arms to try to free himself from the crowd of babushkas. “There’s nothing, I swear on my children’s heads! You can’t squeeze blood from a rock!”

“Yes, but you can squeeze our blood!” a woman cried out. “Speculator!” Someone hit him over the head with her handbag, and they began to claw at him. It was terrible. The poor man could hardly help it that he’d run out of bread. Others who’d rushed inside wrestled a big bag out into the doorway, tore it open, and began scooping flour into upturned skirts and aprons, into purses and hats. There was flour after all! There was flour—and sugar, too! Here were more women, more sacks, everything covered in flour. Women hunched over, scurrying away with their prizes. How stupid, how credulous I’d been for having believed the man when he said he had nothing, for having worried about him! For people like you, things appear by magic from under the counter, from a back room. I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting. He had been holding back flour for the rich, who could pay double, quadruple the price, just as Varvara had said. A speculator! In wartime!

The melee spread out as the infuriated women broke into other shops. “We want justice!” “We want bread!” Varvara was out of her mind with excitement, shouting, “Bread and justice!” I knew she thought of this as a righteous demonstration of legitimate anger. Maybe in the abstract I might have thought so, too, but right now it was becoming a dangerous mob. I pulled her into a doorway where we could watch without being arrested if the police started rounding people up. Varvara’s burning eyes memorized the scene. She trembled like a warhorse, thrilled and alert at the mayhem. I could feel how she itched to run out among them, breaking windows and flinging flour and dry goods into the arms of the crowd.

Constables soon arrived, sorely outnumbered. The women moved around them. One grabbed a woman and punched her. Right in the face! In broad daylight. I clapped my hand over my mouth and shrank back deeper into the doorway as other women surged to her defense, grabbing him, tearing at his uniform. He’d lost his hat. Another constable knocked a woman down, then kicked her again and again with his heavy boot. I was paralyzed. Could this be real? Could this be happening in my Petrograd? I clung to Varvara in the doorway. “We should go.”

“You go,” Varvara said, her eyes glittering. “This is history. We’re watching history.”

Then I heard the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobbles, and eight mounted Cossacks burst into view, plowing headlong into the crowd. The women screamed and scattered, running in all directions. The sound—hooves, and blows, and the cries of women… right here on Liteiny Prospect, where my mother bought flowers. This was the reason the people never protested, I realized, watching the Cossacks strike human flesh—unarmed women—with their cudgels. This was the reason people put up with so much. This was the whip at the end of the arm.

At last we fled, the two of us slipping around the corner into a courtyard, then into the courtyard behind that, unshoveled, an uneven rut of a path leading us through. I rarely went this far off the main boulevard. After a few courtyards, I didn’t even know where I was anymore. We came to a dead end in a tiny ten-by-ten courtyard, where a pasty-faced woman lounging in a doorway with a young girl drenched us in her laughter. Something hit a wall behind us. We didn’t turn to see what it was. We turned and scrambled back until we found an opening onto a quiet side street—no one running, a dog sniffing at a pile of snow, a horse pulling a wagon piled with rags.

Varvara hugged me, twirling me off my feet, kissing my cheek, as if we’d just passed a school exam. “They’re not sitting still for it. Oh God, did you see?” I thought of the baker’s bloody face. The way the policeman kicked that woman. Had Varvara incited it all, ramping the women up about that ugly pamphlet? Her delight frightened me. People had been hurt! Why was she dancing around like a lunatic?

We found Mina sitting alone in the third row of the theater, eating Jordan almonds out of a twist of paper. “I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said, moving down in the row. Now she eyed us more closely. “What happened?”

“It was a riot,” Varvara said. “You should have stayed.”

I sat with my friends, facing the flickering screen, but I didn’t even notice Kholodnaya’s performance. I was still vibrating with the violence I had just seen—not a shooting in a detective kinofilm, but right in front of me, blood and flour and the music of smashing glass.

One didn’t have to get very far from Nevsky Prospect after all. The war was coming to us.

7 A Sleigh Waited

OUTSIDE THE TAGANTSEV ACADEMY, a sleigh waited. In the low passenger seat, a young officer sat with a rug across his lap, snow piling on his astrakhan cap and the shoulders of his steel-blue army greatcoat. We were accustomed to the sight of young officers waiting for senior girls. The horse stamped, the bells of its harness cheering the dull, powdery air. Small puffs of vapor rose from its dark nostrils. I froze in place on the steps. Varvara collided with me, and Mina dropped her book. This was not just any officer. That rosy, well-shaved face with its frosted-over moustache did its best to maintain its casual air and not burst out laughing.

I didn’t let myself run to him. I had waited enough—he could wait for me now. “What are you doing here?” I called from the steps.

He unhooked the bearskin rug. “Thought you might like to go for a spin. Join me in a cup of hot chocolate. A soldier’s dream of home.” The horse stamped in the cold. Who else would know it was my favorite color of horse—dappled gray with dark, intellectual eyes? The driver on his high seat dusted himself off. I could feel the girls behind me whispering. It would be all over school by tomorrow. Did you see Makarova with that officer? I had never inspired any gossip, it was about time I did. Let them talk about me for a change.

Varvara gave me a skeptical look: You’re not falling for that, are you? while Mina scrambled to pocket her spectacles, the better to be seen. The horse switched its tail. I could feel my ship tugging at the dock, impatient to move out to sea. Kolya Shurov was waiting to carry me off, as he promised he would. Was I one to shirk the call of adventure? I was not. I walked to the sleigh, let him take my book bag, settle me into the small seat. We decorously kissed cheeks—an old family friend—and I caught a whiff of his cologne, Floris Limes. He hooked the rug over us. “Davai, davai!” he shouted to the coachman up on the box. Let’s go! The broad-backed driver slapped the reins, and the sleigh lurched forward, breaking free from the ice.

How warm it was under the bearskin rug, the snow tickling our faces, the song of the runners. “I wrote to you constantly,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever respond?”

He put his arm around me, pressed close. The smell of him, I almost fainted.

“I wrote when I could. In wartime you have to know it’s hit or miss.” I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. But that letter from January didn’t get to me until April.

We trotted up the Fontanka, past the Ciniselli Circus and the Engineers’ Castle and across the end of the Summer Garden with its famous fence of gilt and iron. “On nights in bivouac, I imagined us just like this. This sleigh, this snow, this light.” He closed his eyes and recited, “O madman, tell me—when, where, how / Will you forget them, in what desert? / Ah little feet, where are you now?”

He was reciting Pushkin for me. I was witness to a Kolya I’d never seen before, a Kolya come a-wooing. It was intoxicating. He was trying to seduce me—an old family friend no more. I saw that he thought of himself as a Pushkin—romantic, spontaneous. He caught my indulgent smile and knew he’d been caught at it. He took off his glove, slipped his hand inside my muff. We intertwined fingers, our hands a new creation.

Soon we entered the open Field of Mars, where he and Volodya had paraded with their regiment two years ago August before they’d shipped out to the front. “Faster!” he called to the driver. “Let’s fly!” And we sailed through the lilac shadows of the winter afternoon—the city powdering itself in snow like an old empress before her dressing table. We flew up Millionnaya Street, where Varvara’s father lived, and out onto Palace Square. “Around!” he called, and we circled the Alexander Column as though we were in a crazy chariot race, then left behind the red Winter Palace and the yellow General Staff Building and the Admiralty with its gilded steeple, to cross St. Isaac’s Square with the cathedral dome blurred in the falling snow and past the Bronze Horseman—Peter forever rearing, facing the river.

We slowed and turned southward, as did his hands under the rug, tracing my thick woolen stockings up to the long bloomers, inching above the garters, finding naked flesh. He was shameless. Such pleasure. I let my head rest on his arm, my eyes closing. Oh God, the moan that escaped me—I hoped the driver was discreet. When I opened my eyes, I saw the impish look on Kolya’s face as he undid the bow at the leg of my knickers. How far would he go? I tried to stop the progress of his hand, but it was like trying to stop the assault of an army. I felt the honey dripping from me—I had to admit that doing this in a sleigh right in public made it all the more exciting.

“Tell me you love me,” he said. “Tell me what was in those letters.” Cupping my bottom in his hand.

“You better stop,” I said.

“Why?” Kolya said. “Don’t you like it?”

There was no answering that. Onward we went, and I realized I must have seen couples do this a thousand times. What a child I was not to have noticed. I groaned again as he caressed the soft skin, my wet warmth, and I clung to him, to his heavy overcoat, to a bucking release that I’d only experienced in the slightest bit alone with my legs wrapped around my pillow. Who was shameless, after all?

“Driver, a left.” We turned onto the Catherine Canal Embankment. “Third door.”

“You said we were going for chocolate,” I sighed.

“I’ll make you some,” he said.

The sleigh pulled up in front of an apartment house near the Bank Bridge, where the griffins grinned with their golden wings, bridge cables in their teeth. “Whose house is this?”

“A friend.” He unhooked the rug on my side. “They’ve left it to me.”

I’d been by this building a thousand times. The windows looked haughty to me, judgmental, staring down at my wobbly-legged, flushed-face condition, my hat all askew.

People were walking by on the embankment. I wondered if anyone could tell what we were about to do. If anyone would recognize me. Kolya squeezed my shoulder. “Are you afraid? I can take you back if you want.” Bravery, in love as in art. No, there was no turning back. He would soon return to his unit, or something else would intrude. I knew this afternoon would never come again. He heaved himself out of the sleigh, took my arm. I noticed I was almost as tall as he was now. Had I grown in a year? I raised my fur collar against my burning cheeks as Kolya paid the driver. And it struck me in this moment what a timeless scene this was—the man paying the cab as the woman waited, half hidden in the collar of her coat. How many men, how many women had lived this exact moment? I felt so at one with them, through time. Now I was the woman, and he was the man. Our time and place, now.

Together we walked to the building’s front door and up a short flight of stairs. I would tell no one about this—not Varvara, not Mina. Part of being a woman would be to have just such secrets. He unlocked a door on the second floor. We hung our coats and hats in the entry. He removed his tall boots, and I my slushy overshoes. I threw my book bag in the corner. Inside, a warm sitting room awaited us, with small side chairs and a wide divan covered in olive velvet. Would it happen here? My heart pounded so hard I missed what he said. He repeated himself—“It’s too hot, don’t you think?”—and opened the fortochka in the tall casement window overlooking the Catherine Canal. The delicious coolness mixed with the heat was like a cold cloth in a fever. He bent over and touched my heavy coiled hair, breathed in the scent as if it were a flower. I offered my lips, but he only touched them with a finger, rolling the lower one down ever so slightly.

I hadn’t even noticed the gramophone with its green bell until he went to it and, after cranking it vigorously, lowered the arm. Strains of the tango from New Year’s Eve emerged into the air. He held out his hands to me, he in his cavalry uniform, khaki tunic with gold buttons, blue breeches with their double red stripe, standing in his gray socks, perhaps knitted by one of my classmates. His cropped brown curls lay flat to his scalp, the moustache he sported nestled into the corners of his upturned mouth like twin commas, those clever blue eyes alight…

We began to dance. Not the relatively decorous tango of that New Year’s salon, but pressed together from breast to knee. I felt him hard against me, the full length of him. Now it was not the suggestion of lovemaking, but the thing itself. He pressed me back, our feet turning but deftly, never tangling. I surprised him with a tango kick. He laughed. Better watch me, Kolya. I could follow, but there were other sides to me as well, even as a sixteen-year-old virgin. The play of the gaze—the look away, then suddenly, nakedly, back. The very air leaned against us like a dog hoping to be petted.

“I knew it would be like this,” he whispered into my hair. “I could dance with you to the end of time. Remember how you danced Swan Lake?”

I was seven years old. I’d just seen the ballet, had to show everybody the white swan and the black. “I’m a glutton for attention.”

“You believed it—that’s what I loved. The way you threw yourself into it. I knew you were those swans. I saw how you would be someday. Glorious. I’ve been waiting for you, Marina.”

I had been waiting as well. All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk. And he knew me—he had always known this lay under school uniforms and children’s party clothes, inside the camisole with the blue ribbon. He knew me at six, had waited for me as a peasant waits for the pears to ripen in summertime, watching that tree all the time he goes about his hoeing and reaping. Now he would reap the rewards of his patience.

He pulled a tortoiseshell hairpin from my coif, then another. My hair started to fall, uncoiling heavily over my shoulders, the great mass of it, a Niagara of russet. I had never imagined inspiring the look on a man’s face that he beheld me with right now, the wonder with which he touched my thick locks, lifting them in his palms like a bouquet of roses. He hadn’t seen my hair down in years. He buried his face in it, his hands. It was going to be hopelessly tangled—I helped him tangle it more. It would be a nest for us, like two thrushes in a thicket.

He unbuttoned my brown school dress, pushed it from my shoulders, let it fall to the floor, and traced my bared, lightly freckled shoulders with his fingertips. Touching the ribbon on the front of my slip, untying it, pulling it from me, kneeling before me. I stepped out of it and he pressed the fabric to his face. I thought I would faint with the pleasure. When had I ever seen anything so erotic? He ran his hands up my thick wool stockings, pressed his cheek against the plush of my Venus mount. I held him there, knew he could smell me through the cotton lisle. He rubbed his face, his head, like a cat in catnip. I wished I had worn newer underwear.

Suddenly he lifted me up and threw me over his shoulder—the Rape of the Sabines!—and carried me, laughing and shrieking, into the other room. He dropped me onto a white eiderdown with enormous pillows. The brass bedstead knocked on the wall. Outside, snow fell into the frozen canal, onto the griffins of the bridge, and beyond, softening the lit windows of the Assignation Bank Building. I felt sorry for those people bent over their ledgers. Poor everyone who wasn’t us.

Kolya sat on the edge of the bed, untied the bow of my corselette. Finally, fear came licking at me, as I perceived for a moment the seriousness of my position. I rolled away from him, sat up. “You won’t make me pregnant? I would die. I’d kill myself.”

He put his fingers across my lips. “I wouldn’t. I’m not some sweaty ignoramus. I never leave it to chance.” He reached into his tunic and pulled out small square packages, put them on the bedside table. Rezinky. Preservativy. I knew what they were, I’d seen them in my father’s drawer. “I’ll never hurt you, Marina, I promise you that.”

I got up and stood before him, suddenly serious—grave, even—and undid the buttons of my corselette, watching him as I opened them one by one. To hear him inhale as he saw my breasts, I knew they were beautiful. Not apple-round, like the Venus de Milo’s, but wide set and full at the sides. Now I unbuttoned his tunic, then his shirt, pulled it off. The intoxicating smell of him, warm honey and musk, rose from his chest. He was hairier than I had imagined, gold and curly. I ran my hands over him, the miracle. I pulled him to his feet so I could press my breasts against him. So many textures—the cropped hair, the shaved face, that curly moustache, the softness between his shoulder and chest, the nubs of nipples standing up now, yearning for mine. I brushed against them with my own.

We shucked off the rest of our clothes, which tangled and gripped us as if they didn’t want to allow the final frankness, but soon we achieved our undressing—admiring one another in flesh so long guessed at. Of course I had two brothers, so the male member was no mystery to me, but never had I seen one rampant, not in life. I had once stumbled on a book of Japanese pornography in the library of one of my mother’s arty friends. That shock, the giant hairy mollusks of the women and the stair banisters of the men. Kolya was, happily, neither outsize nor frightening but rather thick, in a nest of golden brown. I thought it would be hard to the touch, but it was velvet, like the inside of my arm, or a horse’s nose. Veined and soon moist. He pushed my hand away.

“Don’t you like it?”

He laughed, rolling his head, his eyes to the ceiling with my ignorance. “Yes, but a man can only take so much before he goes off.”

So much to know. We knelt on the bed, thigh to thigh, our kisses deep and hungry, while a kaleidoscope of sharp feelings tumbled within me: Would it hurt? Would it be the same after? Would he boast? Laugh at me? Ah, but I had waited my whole life for this pleasure, my bottom in his hands, the bright universe of his touch, this lively desirous body, the muscular flesh, the intensity of my own sensations as his fingers moved, guiding me in the tiniest tango, my body impulsively kicking and gripping as he talked to me as though I were a skittish horse. “You’re so passionate. I knew it would be like this. Don’t stop, I want to see you…” A warmth passed through me, so explosive he had to hold me up.

What is virginity? Is it innocence? Ignorance? Fear? Unripeness? I was his pear, dragging down the branch with all my ripeness. I wanted his teeth to burst my skin, his hot mouth to tear me apart. And yet he ate slowly, with exquisite attention.

There was no end to the surprises. I lay upon the hill of huge pillows, and watched him smooth the preservativ over himself. He traced me like an artist with his brush. While his fingers had been surprising, his sex felt enormous—would it really all fit? He pushed, then stopped and rubbed me gently. I didn’t care if it hurt, I wanted him. I pulled him down onto me. I wanted to feel his full weight on me, embrace the length of him, his chest flat against my breasts. Was I too small? It turned out I was equal to the task. A sensation not like anything in a book. Stretched beyond myself, intense, not wanting to stop, wanted him all inside me, not just his member but his whole body. Who needed flesh if it was going to keep me from merging with absolute sweetness? Now we rolled and switched places, me on him, urging him with my hips as I’d urge a horse from trot to canter. Then the darkness took me again, a sparkling wave from groin to head, and gasping, I sagged onto his chest like a drowned woman flung onto a beach.

Afterward, we lay together, his flagpole clad in the preservativ bright with my blood. He handed me a towel with which to clean myself, but I was too lazy. I wrapped my legs around it and lay there with my head on his shoulder, drunk with the smell of him and the slow ticking of my body unwinding. So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge. I dozed, inhaling him—the scent came from his armpits, that honey musk smell, and a muskier one from the nest down below. I fell asleep wrapped in my own hair.

He woke me sometime later. He’d lit the lamp, was passing a box of chocolates before my face like smelling salts. Swiss chocolate, a big red box. I took one, and it was all part of the afternoon, the chocolate melting in my mouth, the fragrant bed, the liquid between my legs, the reflection of us in the bare window. My hair was an explosion of tangled red. It looked like we’d fought a war on the white sheets, completely untucked from the striped mattress ticking, the puffy eiderdown crushed, everything soaked with our sweat.

“We have to go soon. Come on. I’ve drawn a bath for you.” He kissed the top of my head, got up, found his shirt on the floor, put it on.

It was almost six by the clock on the bedside table. If I missed dinner, my family would wonder what had happened to me. “I could call them, say I’m going to be late.”

“You don’t have to eat every chocolate in the box.” He squeezed my breast, slapped my bottom.

I took another chocolate, just for that. “Everybody always says that. But let’s stay here forever and eat every chocolate in the world.”

“I adore you, Marina,” he said, buttoning up his tunic. “But I’ve got some people I’m meeting in a few minutes. It’s why I’m in town. Not just to explore delectable young women.”

“What could be more important than that?” I wanted more. I wanted to take up residence in the nexus of pleasure called Kolya Shurov. “Take me with you.”

“It’s army business. I hardly think you’ll pass muster.”

Reluctant to move, yet knowing I must, I shuffled into the small bath perfumed with the fragrance of milled soap. I gingerly lowered myself into the water. It was just as well we had stopped when we did. My body probably couldn’t have stood another assault. I washed, wincing at the abrasions, dried myself off using the one bloodied towel in order not to shame the maids too much. The face before me in the mirror was bright, smudged, a little stunned. Who are you? I asked, touching my fat lips, gazing into my stupefied dark eyes. This is what a woman who has just made love looks like. The next room of the self.

“When will I see you again?” I asked, attempting to brush my tangled hair with the help of some borrowed brushes, my clothing mostly restored. Propriety was pure disguise.

“I’ll send you a message,” he said. “Wear a red ribbon in your green coat after school so the messenger will know you.”

Was Father looking at me strangely? Did Mother really not know? Couldn’t they smell him on me? Couldn’t they tell? I ate quickly and tried not to look at Seryozha. I was sure he’d noticed a change, if only because of the waves of happiness rising off me. Luckily Avdokia ate in the kitchen with the cook and Basya. My nanny was clairvoyant—she wouldn’t be fooled for an instant. I watched plain, good Miss Haddon-Finch debone her fish and wondered if she’d ever had such an afternoon. Or my parents, for that matter, seated at their two ends of the table. Had they ever been capable of such ardor? The shrieks, the groaning, the sweat, the torn-up bed. I doubted it. They didn’t even sleep in the same room.

Seryozha caught my eye, cocked his head. What? I smiled like the Mona Lisa—perhaps this was her secret. Father spoke of a conference with members of his political party, the liberal Kadets. Something about the tsar. “We’re offering the emperor a way out,” he said to Mother, spearing a piece of sturgeon and some potato on his fork. “Constitutional monarchy. He could preserve his crown, but he won’t see it that way…”

“Surely he will,” she replied.

I was usually quite interested in politics, especially after the bread riot—not to mention the rebuke from Marmelzadt and Varvara’s constant agitation—but tonight all I could think of was the feeling of my bare breasts pressed to Kolya’s chest, all the ways we explored our love in that white bed. I finished my meal as fast as I could, and excused myself. I would write a real aubade this time, an ode to those cropped curls, all the textures of him. I knew I would love hairy men for the rest of my life.

I sat at the vanity table in my salmon-pink bedroom, brushing my hair. It still smelled of him. Beneath the glass lay a picture of Kolya and Volodya taken in the south two years before, sitting on a rocky hillside. Such confident young officers in the pure hot sun. I was about to kiss his sweet face when Seryozha entered. He closed the door, stood behind me sternly, as if he were Father. “Who is it? Tell me.”

I coiled my hair back into its decorous coif, replaced the pins. There was no point in trying to conceal my love. I was too eager to talk about it. “It’s Kolya. He’s here on leave. He was waiting for me after school in a sleigh with a gray horse.”

My brother’s sternness softened, replaced by uncertainty, a flicker of pleasure, then envy, and back to uncertainty. “Did you…?”

I nodded.

He came closer, crouched to look over my shoulder, eye to eye with me in the vanity mirror. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. He put his head on my shoulder and we stayed that way for a long time. When he stood, I saw he was weeping, though whether it was from losing me and childhood or envy, it was hard to say.

I could not stop thinking about sex. I imagined everyone naked—Vaula, the dvornik, people in the street. I imagined them making love and tried to decide which ones were still virgins. My new eyes caught couples who had clearly just made love saying goodbye at cabs and couples on street corners preparing for an assignation. Their energy set them apart, brightness bursting from them like little colorful suns. I imagined who would be prim and who would be passionate. I felt my way into the lives of old couples strolling along, fires dampened but still slightly warm. The ugliest sight: couples who had not made love for years. You could see it by how they walked together. No affectionate touch. No tango. How could they bear it, linked to a person for whose body you didn’t yearn? No one escaped my scrutiny—bourgeois men and women, my own father and mother. The unemployed, my teachers, people in the shops.

How loathsome suddenly became the routine of schoolgirl life. Geometry, French, Russian literature, English. Voice lesson with Herr Dietrich, dancing class with M. Dornais. It seemed like a joke. Although I enjoyed being handled by those nervous boys in dancing class as much as I ever did. Perhaps more. I felt them so keenly now, the hands on my skin, a glance to my bosom. I imagined undressing Danya Bolechevsky, pimply but receptive, and Sasha Trigorsky—his erect carriage, what else might be erect? Men in the streets, at Wolf’s bookstore—no one escaped my lascivious scrutiny.

Every day I wore a red ribbon through the buttonhole of my green coat no matter how bitter the cold: twelve degrees below zero. It had been a terrible winter, but I was a furnace. I emerged through the school gates in a fever, head held high, so the ribbon would be visible. Walking down to Mina’s apartment, or to Konditerskaya Sever on Nevsky for chocolate, I waited for his summons. Who would it be today? He liked to use the most outlandish people he could find, it was part of the surprise. Would it be the cripple dragging himself along on a sledge? The freezing newsboy? The man with a great red birthmark? I stopped on the Anichkov Bridge, where the four bronze statues of horse tamers struggled with their mounts—two of them were very much in danger of being trampled. And I wondered who I was in this drama—horse or a groom? Straining at the bridle or trying not to be trampled as I attempted to turn that great passion to my own purposes? Everything seemed like a metaphor these days. I was wide open to the world, waiting for the one who would stop me and hand me a small white envelope. At last, a Nevsky prostitute approached and handed me an envelope with a red seal. I tore it open—his paper, the finest, from Michelet’s. Just like Pushkin’s.

Underneath the words, a little drawing—a nude girl dancing with a bushy-tailed fox. I had to laugh, though the message wounded me. How could he not be as eager as I to spend every moment in bed? Still, when we did meet, my anger would be quickly absorbed in the unfolding desire. Our passion took more weight and dimension each day, like a fast-growing young bear.

One night, our family attended the ballet—with our parents’ friends the Gromitskys. It was Karsavina in Les millions d’Arléquin. Both Seryozha and I had been besotted with her, ever since that night at the Stray Dog. “I wish we could have The Firebird,” Mother complained to Madame Gromitsky. “It’s not right that the French should get all our moderns.” The Mariinsky Theater, under imperial patronage, had to follow imperial taste, and thus far the tsar only endorsed the classics. Even the Harlequin was a stretch. Balletomanes like Mother resented the fact that the Parisians were able to delight in the bright creations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—productions never staged in Russia.

Karsavina, I decided, had definitely torn some bedsheets.

In the interval, Seryozha and I remained in our seats. I hated breaking the lingering trance and Seryozha was finishing some sketches. Now Mother exclaimed, “Oh look, it’s Kolya. What a pretty girl—Kolya!”

My lover was coming up the aisle escorting a beautiful woman in a low-necked black gown, his hand on her back. I wanted to vomit. As they approached, I held my hand over my eyes as if to cut the glare of the lights. Where could I hide myself? Go away, Kolya! How could he? So much for the fox and the girl. Was this what he was doing instead of meeting with me? If I hadn’t been caught in the row, I would have run away weeping. Shamelessly he approached, broke out in a grin. Now he was greeting my parents, introducing this creature, Valentina somebody. I tried not to look, but how could I not? It was like an overturned cart, an auto wreck. And the beast winked at me! As if we were in collusion. As if this were all a great joke! As if I were so sophisticated that I would know it was still the two of us and not give a thought to the exquisite woman he stood next to. “Are you enjoying the ballet, Marina Dmitrievna?” he asked me.

The nerve! “I was,” I said.

He leaned past Seryozha and pressed a note into my hand, rolled my fist around it. A page torn from the program. Tomorrow at 4. Without fail. And a drawing of a fox in jail, its nose sticking out from the bars, tears dripping from its eyes.

8 No Gentleman

ON THE STEPS OF the school, Varvara showed us a pamphlet from her schoolbag, glancing around to see that no one was looking over our shoulders.

“You’re going to end up in prison,” Mina said.

“They say you’re not a real revolutionary until you’ve served time,” she retorted.

It was 3:30. “I have to go. Kolya’s waiting for me,” I said. Already my eyes ached in the vicious cold, my lashes coated with ice. How could Varvara even think of standing around in this weather handing out leaflets?

“Yes, run to your lover. Go on,” Varvara sneered, wrapping her scarf around her head and neck. “When people ask where you were in January 1917, what are you going to say—I spent it in bed with Kolya Shurov?”

But there would always be more textile factories, more miserable women. I was flopping, drowning in air after Kolya’s appearance at the Mariinsky. I needed his apology, an explanation, reassurances that I was still the one.

He answered the door in the apartment on the Catherine Canal. Food and flowers crowded the table in the sitting room behind him, but I remained rooted in the entryway, my overshoes leaving a puddle on the parquet. He tried to take my coat, but I shrugged him off. I was not letting him touch me until I got a straight answer. If I let him get close, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my fury. “Just tell me one thing. Are you sleeping with her?”

“Who?”

Such innocence. “Just don’t.”

“Oh, don’t be like that.” He returned to the divan, to the table spread with the feast, as I remained in the anteroom. “At least have a glass of wine before you cut my head off,” he said, seating himself. “And these macaroons are divine.”

Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds in hell and was doomed the moment they slid down her throat. “Tell me now.”

“Take off your coat. You’re making me sweat.”

It was terribly hot in there, it was true. But I didn’t dare. I had to resist, keep anger alive, get to the truth. “What am I to you, Kolya? Am I another name in the roll call of seducible schoolgirls? Is it me in the afternoon and Valentina in the evening and Katerina before breakfast?”

He sighed and rubbed his face with one hand.

“Is she better than me? More exciting, a woman of the world?”

He laughed. “No one’s better than you, and that’s the truth,” he said. “Valya’s—just someone I know. I’m doing some work for her. I didn’t sleep with her, I promise.”

“Do go on,” I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.

“She wants to get some things out of the country. That’s all, I swear to you.” He laid his hand over his lying heart.

“I saw you. I saw how you touched her. You have slept with her.”

“A long time ago. She was Volodya’s girl. We were just doing some business, I swear to you. She wanted an escort to the ballet, and I figured, what’s the harm? I can’t exactly take you.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Imagine your parents. Your father. I don’t want him putting two and two together too soon… God. But listen, I have something to tell you—I didn’t want it to be like this, but I’ve been recalled. I’m leaving tonight.”

My anger ebbed with this blow. He couldn’t leave now. I needed time to sort out this Valentina thing, to forgive him. But there wouldn’t be time. And the truth was that I ached for him. My arms ached, my breasts, my body was a mass of frustration and yearning. “Swear, Kolya. Swear you didn’t sleep with her. I’ll never forgive you if you’re lying.”

He stood, held my hands, pulled me into the room. Looked deep into my eyes, his blue ones, for once, not laughing. “She’s just an old friend. I swear.”

He unbuttoned my coat, hung it on the back of a chair, knelt and pulled off my galoshes, led me to the feast.

Persephone was doomed with only six pomegranate seeds, but I ate macaroons and drank sherry wine and devoured the feast I had come for—his flesh, the red-gold fur, making love in four different ways until we lay exhausted on the mattress.

We rested our heads on the heaped pillows, listening to the wind roar outside, shaking the windows. He opened the fortochka, chilling the room. I pulled up the eiderdown. Briefly I thought of Varvara, out there on Vasilievsky Island, standing before the gates of a factory, handing out those incendiary leaflets, and felt guilty for abandoning her. I ran my fingers through the hair on his chest, traced the line down to his navel, lower, to the leonine forest of him.

“And what were you going to do for her, your friend Valentina?”

“An export job,” he said, linking my fingers with his, biting them systematically at the knuckles. “She has some things she wants sent out of the country. Actually, your father should do the same. Time to close up the bank accounts, pack up the silver, convert cash to jewelry and art. Get it out to Sweden. England, even.”

They’re smuggling the gold out in coffins. “It’s really that bad? Did you tell Father?”

“Let’s just say he wasn’t amused. He practically called me a traitor.” I could see that had hurt Kolya. He was only trying to be helpful.

“Brave of you,” I said. To advise Dmitry Makarov to prepare to abandon Russia, especially now, when he was working around the clock, writing speeches, articles, meeting with the Kadet party? Foolhardy. The Kadets had been trying to persuade the emperor to accept a constitutional monarchy, ever since the death of Rasputin. But the tsar was unable to see that it was the only way to keep his crown while allowing the country to move forward. An absolute monarch, he felt that sharing power was as bad as abdication.

I examined our fingers entwined. Someday would we wear matching rings? “Every day, I think today’s the day that the revolution will come. But it doesn’t. The people just keep suffering. Striking, protesting—it keeps going on.”

He reached past me to the bedside table, fishing out a cigar from the ashtray, relighting it. “Watch the soldiers,” he said. “When the army goes over, then you’ll see your revolution. The monarchy will collapse like a thatched hut. I just don’t want to see your family trapped inside. You Makarovs mean a lot to me.”

He was starting to scare me. “What about your assets, Kolya? Are you taking them out? Or is that just for others?”

He pulled me to him, cradled my head in the hollow of his shoulder, kissed my temple, worked his hand into my hair. “I come from a long line of gamblers, milaya. The factory went under years ago. The estate was gone before I was born. My only assets in the world are the ones you like so well.”

Was Kolya poor? I hadn’t ever thought about how he supported himself. He couldn’t be flat broke, could he? He did all the things Volodya did—bought uniforms, dined in restaurants, went out carousing. But when I thought about it, I realized that he didn’t have an apartment. At university, he’d lived with Volodya. We took him on vacation with us. Did my parents know he was poor? They must. It was only I who had missed the clues. I, who thought I saw everything and complained that others were insensitive. I was as guilty as anyone. Poor Kolya!

“I tried talking to Vera Borisovna,” he continued. “She reassured me, ‘Russia is built on stone, Nikolasha, the stone of the Russian soul. Never forget that.’ But the thing about stone,” he said, stroking my bare thighs with his fingertips, “is that water seeps into the cracks. And when it freezes, the stone splits and crumbles to dust. Stone’s of no use in times like these. We need to be flexible, like the little birches trembling in a summer breeze.”

Honestly, I was shocked to hear him talk like this. In my family, we spoke of honor, of country, of duty. Of holding steadfast to certain virtues. “What kind of Russian are you, Nikolai Stepanovich?” I asked, only half in jest.

Kolya calmly gazed at the tip of his cigar. “I’m the citizen of a country of exactly one.” He reached for his ashtray, put it beside him in the bed. “Shurovistan. But you’re welcome to visit. I give you a lifetime visa.”

Wind blasted the windows. I thought of the workers in this cold, the women queuing for bread. “Varvara says there’s going to be a general strike. Surely that can’t be ignored.”

“Oh, it will be. They’ll get double barrels for their trouble. The emperor won’t give an inch.”

“Not even a general strike? It’s been terrible. You haven’t been here, you don’t know.”

He crouched over me, playfully growling like a bear. “Not even a general strike.”

I fought not to let his proximity distract me. “They’re going to start rationing bread, Kolya! The people won’t stand for it.”

He bit my neck just above the shoulder, sending shoots of pleasure down into the soil of me. “You’re out of your depth, Marina,” he whispered in my ear. “Let the workers take care of themselves.”

I pushed him away. “What am I supposed to do, play Marie Antoinette in the sheepfold?”

He knelt, waving his pole at me. “Baaah.”

“They’re chaining them to the workbench. It’s illegal to complain. If you do, it’s to the front with you.”

He groaned and flopped into the eiderdown, which inflated around him like a cloud. “No! Right from the Tagantsev Academy to the front?” He was laughing at me. “Will they give you a chance to change clothes?”

I pinched his nipple, and he grabbed for my wrist. We struggled until he had me pinned on the mattress, damp and fragrant. He straddled me, his face hovering above mine. “So now you’re a radical? Do I address you as Comrade Marina?”

“Yes!” I tried to roll out from under him.

“So it’s the workers you love now, not Kolya and his rapier?” Which was already alive again.

“I’m serious, Kolya.” But my claim sounded ridiculous even to me, lying there wet with my arms pinned, Kolya rubbing himself against me.

He switched to holding my wrists above my head with one hand while he put on a fresh prophylactic with the other. “I can see how serious you are. I’m so impressed.”

I struggled to throw him off me. “Stop it! Listen to me. This is important.”

He groaned and rolled off me. “Is this what you want? My last night? Okay, here it is. All the emperor cares about is the war. Workers in Petrograd are starving? Nobody cares. As long as they produce, to hell with them. And if it takes chaining them to their benches, that’s what will happen.”

I felt desire’s sharp ebb. The shock of what he’d said propped me on one elbow. “That’s what you think? Are you really so indifferent? I thought you were a good man.”

He got his cigar lit, exhaled the fumes, a man of the world. “Good or bad, it’s what’s happening. Nobody’s asking me.”

I sat up, looking down into his face. “I’m asking you.”

“As long as his armies are supplied, the emperor will send the country to the devil. And my job in this mess is just to see that the army’s supplied.” He exhaled away from me.

“Well there’s a safe job. When men are losing their lives.” I didn’t know what I was arguing about now, only that I wanted to hurt him for being so callous about the fate of the people. Or was it to punish him for taking Valentina to the ballet? Or because he was leaving me again? “Maybe you’re speculating yourself, while Volodya’s fighting in the cold.”

His rosy face went hard then. He started collecting his clothes. “You want me to get my head blown off? You’re asking me what I think—I think this country’s as corrupt as old eggs and I’m just trying to survive it.” He found his underpants and got into them, buttoned his shirt. “Do you believe it’s a valiant thing to die? I’ve seen this war. You haven’t. It’s a communal grave for valiant young men. And reluctant ones, and ignorant ones too. They all die the same. Where are my damn pants?”

I’d hurt him. I never knew I could do that. I’d thought he was impervious. “I’m sorry, Kolya, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It’s not what I think at all.” I had his pants and clung to them, I wouldn’t let him take them away.

“I won’t die for this country,” he said. “Not for God and not for you. If you’re a Bolshevik, you’ll at least understand that much.”

But I didn’t understand. Heroism was a very real value in our house. Patriotism. Volodya was at the front, absolutely ready to die for ideals, for country, and this was what was admirable about him, although perhaps all wrong—his unquestioning valor. Kolya’s relativism, his pessimism—I didn’t know what to think. Logically he was right, but there was something upsetting about a man without loyalty, without an idea of honor. I wept. I was only sixteen, and I loved him ferociously. How could I ruin our last hours together trying to figure it out? What I wanted was his love, his body, his smile, his scent, his weight. I threw his pants under the bed, held my arms out to him. “Sorry, sorry…” Holding him, rocking him. Kolya, my fox, generous, clever man. He was not evil, not an abstract symbol of indifference to suffering. Who didn’t have contradictions?

And I more than he, as it turned out.

9 Do Not Awaken My Memories

HE RETURNED TO HIS regiment, leaving me as sad and useless as a single glove. People, once lively, now flattened to puppets, mouths opening and closing unconvincingly. My ears were stuffed with wax, my eyes smeared with grease. I couldn’t find a place to put myself. I eyed every cripple and dwarf. I put away my green coat. I could barely brush my hair. Our fight left a stone in my breast. How could I have accused him of such crimes on our very last afternoon?

In front of the school, everyone stopped to wrap scarves tighter around their necks and draw them up around their mouths and noses. Varvara and Mina had been doing their best to cheer me up, each in her opposite way—Mina by letting me talk about him endlessly, commiserating, wanting to hear every detail, and Varvara by jeering at my lovelorn fog. “Yes, yes, he’s gone. The world doesn’t revolve around Kolya Shurov’s sky-blue eyes.”

“She’s heartbroken,” Mina said, drawing me close. “Leave her alone.”

Varvara hoisted her schoolbag on her shoulder. “Come with me,” she said. “Talk to some people worse off than you.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Mina said. “You’ll get yourself arrested. Anyway, it’s got to be ten below. Let’s get some hot chocolate.”

“Come on, Marina.” Varvara twined her arm through mine. “Let’s make ourselves useful. You’ll feel better. Remember when you went to the hospitals? We need you. You need to see what’s going on. Mina, you coming?”

“I’m getting chocolate. Marina, it’s dangerous up there.”

But maybe the danger would help wake me up out of my funk. I let Varvara trundle me onto a tram going north across the Liteiny Bridge into a grim working-class neighborhood on the Vyborg side of the Neva. Vyborg, where the big factories were, with the workers’ tenements crouching in their shadows. We got off and walked past the Finland Station and into the backstreets within clear view of the Crosses—Kresty Prison—and the Arsenal plant. It summed up everything—the elegant palace side of the river could have been a thousand miles away. We entered a gloomy courtyard. I was glad just to be out of the wind. But then I saw the women, ragged, blue-faced, queuing up for a single water pump. The ice, their wet shoes. It was a disgrace.

Varvara helped them pump, for which they were grateful, and got them talking. The stories made me shiver with pity. Nobody cares, said Kolya. Husbands at the front, sick children, food shortages, no fuel. Horrific tales of the granny in the building who took care of the babies of the working women when they were at the factories. “She waters down the milk and keeps the money herself,” a youngish woman told us, her eyes black with weariness. “I’d go to work, too—my old man’s not well—but I can’t leave the kids with an old witch like that. You might as well put them out on the river.”

I let Varvara ask them questions—not name, district, region but rather about their lives—while I pumped their water, the cold biting my hands as my gloves grew wet. At least I had galoshes. She talked to them about the militarization of labor, about socialism, about the war. Mostly they were worried about bread rationing. “They say it’ll be just a pound per person,” said a woman with anxious eyes and sunken cheeks, a soldier’s wife. “My husband’s fighting for what? A pound of bread a day? How are we supposed to live?”

I pumped her water and let my sorrow over Kolya spill into sympathy for this wretched woman. I was no good at agitating, but I could do this, stand in the icy dark courtyard of a tenement under the walls of the Arsenal and listen to half-starved women complain about bread. Their misery had to end. My problems with Kolya seemed laughable compared with trying to keep a tenement warm, the rent paid—some families didn’t even have the whole flat to themselves, just a corner of it.

Two days later, we returned to stand at the gates of the Belhausen knitwear factory. Varvara pulled a sheaf of leaflets from her school satchel.

The flyer was illustrated by a simple graphic woodcut of workers—women and men marching shoulder to shoulder as a frightened owner tumbled away. For the literate, a more detailed argument accompanied it below. The wind shuffled the flyers in Varvara’s gloved hand.

But the members of the Workers’ Committee had all been arrested. It had been in the papers. Where had these flyers come from? Who gave them to her?

“Better you not know,” she said mysteriously, trying to impress me with her radicalism. “That way if we’re arrested, you can’t tell them anything.”

“We’re not going to be arrested,” I said. “Varvara, tell me. I can’t be arrested. My father will crucify me.” If talking to the women in the courtyards was suspicious, leafleting factories was flat-out illegal. I’d be expelled a semester short of graduation. I’d never see the university.

“Do you want to help these women or not? Look—stand over there.” She pointed to a streetlamp around twenty feet away, ducking her head against the wind. “If you see cops, start singing. Put those voice lessons to work.”

The cold reached everywhere—inside my scarf, inside my nose, freezing the hairs. This was insane. The light was already fading. I had no idea where I was—in front of some factory in Vyborg on a rough, uncleared lane. I would have left, but I feared losing my way in a dangerous slum. “What do you want me to sing?”

“How about ‘Do Not Awaken My Memories’?”

A song about a seduced and abandoned girl. “Very funny.”

But I thought of those women at the pump, their blue faces, their ragged clothes, and Kolya’s callous statements, and took my place under the streetlamp to keep watch, my eyes stinging in the cold, my nerves thinner than a violin E string. At five o’clock, a whistle blew, signaling the shift change. Women began to file out of the factory through the big gates. Varvara stood at the gate, holding out a leaflet. Some eyed her and shouldered past, while others were too beaten down even to look. But several accepted Varvara’s pamphlet. Each time felt like a triumph. One woman took half the stack and put them under her coat, scurrying away into the dark, reminding me that other women took far bigger risks than we did.

The city was on the boil. Strikes and bigger strikes, on the Vyborg side, on Vasilievsky, on the Okhta side, and in the south at the big plants—Putilov, Nobel, Arsenal. There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss. Yet Mother insisted on a party. “I can’t,” I told Father. “It seems so hard-hearted. When people have so little.”

“I know,” he said. “You’re a good girl. But we still have to live our lives. We can’t go about in horsehair and ashes. Leave this to the politicians. You should have your party.”

“It makes me sick,” I said.

He stroked my hair, smiled. “How many times will you turn seventeen? Enjoy it. The country will still be here to worry about the day after.”

I felt like an absolute fool, standing among well-dressed schoolchildren with my hair done up like a fancy cake, eating Vaula’s “larks”—crispy pastries that looked like small birds—and talking about a skating party in the Tauride Gardens. This was no longer me. I’d had my first love affair. I’d waited in the cold at the Belhausen factory gate, braving arrest, agitating on the Vyborg side. Right now, soldiers’ wives were freezing in their corners, their children were drinking watered-down milk, workers were being forced to labor despite horrendous conditions, bread was being rationed. What was I doing playing children’s games and drinking hot chocolate? Mina stayed with me, trying to make me laugh, while my hapless brother fended off the forays of flirtatious girls. Varvara ate four pastries and got into an argument with Sasha Trigorsky. I missed Kolya like fire. Did he even remember my birthday? Although it shouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t know who I was, didn’t know what to feel. It took everything I had not to throw a tantrum, as if I were seven and not seventeen.

Afterward, in my bedroom, I felt just like the wind blowing from all four directions, every possible emotion, one minute coldly furious, weeping the next. I wrote a poem.