The Revolution of Marina M.

10 International Women’s Day

IN THE MIDST OF that terrible winter of 1917, after weeks of twenty, thirty below zero, the weather suddenly turned fair. Overnight, thermometers soared from four below to forty degrees, just in time for the International Women’s Day march. Had the weather not cooperated, who knows whether events would have unfolded as they did? That short warm spell changed the world.

What is history? Is it the trace of a footstep in wet cement? Is it the story of important men in smoky rooms and on battlefields? The inevitable outcome of great impersonal forces? Or is it a collision of chance events—like the sudden rise of the mercury on February 23, 1917, in the midst of a hungry midwinter and a ruinous war? The day before, Putilov locked out its thousands of workers—the owners claiming there wasn’t enough materiel to keep the factory running, though it was more likely in retaliation for striking. So the essential ingredients happened to come together on that one day—thousands of unemployed and striking workers, warm weather, and the Women’s Day march.

I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.

But up on Furshtatskaya Street, it could have been any Thursday morning. An old woman walked her dog, which trotted ahead, visiting huge piles of snow. A wagon clattered by. Dvorniks’ brooms swept passages and pavements in front of chic apartment buildings. Father, leaving for the Duma that springlike morning, briefcase in hand, had a swing in his step. He wore his fedora instead of a fur shapka. When he was gone, I shook Seryozha awake. They’d closed school in anticipation of huge crowds turning out for the march, hoping to keep the children off the streets—though of course the opposite was likely. My sleepyheaded brother slunk further under the covers, his tangled blond hair on the pillow. I shook him again. He rubbed his eyes, stretched, peered at the clock, groaned. “You go. I hate crowds. Anyway Papa said to stay in.”

“We’re not staying in. Get dressed.” I threw his clothes at him. Father had warned us last night, “There’s likely to be trouble,” but what were the chances I’d stay home with eighty thousand women, strikers, and soldiers’ wives coming out to demonstrate? I fetched the water pitcher from my brother’s dresser and prepared to anoint him with it. A half hour later, we emerged onto Liteiny Prospect, already teeming with people marveling at the mild weather—shopkeepers chatting with customers, the florist with the greengrocer. The air vibrated with life. Of course Seryozha dawdled, having to admire every window display—the antiques shop, the stationer’s. Like a cop, I took his arm and marched him forward to Mina’s flat on Nevsky Prospect.

The Katzevs’ apartment at the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky smelled of kasha. Mina was still finishing breakfast, but Varvara already had her coat on and she paced like a caged leopard. Mina’s mother, Sofia Yakovlevna, poured us glasses of tea and insisted Seryozha sit down and try a savory cheburek. Everyone there petted Seryozha. It was a boyless family, and how they spoiled him—Mina’s two younger sisters vied for his attention, her mother plied him with snacks and praise. Then Mina’s father, Solomon Moiseivich, a bearish, jovial man, appeared from the photography studio off the sitting room carrying a big box camera, tripod, and case. He squeezed my brother’s skinny shoulder. “Ah, my young assistant’s arrived. I can use the help today, believe me.”

A rapturous look replaced Seryozha’s former sulkiness. He loved this old man—a real artist who praised my brother’s sketches and silhouettes and brought him into the darkroom whenever he could. Seryozha picked up the heavy camera case in which Papa Katzev kept his film, though I’m sure it weighed thirty pounds. But he would walk through hell to protect Katzev’s film, even if his arms fell off.

“You children stay with Papa,” Sofia Yakovlevna called after us. “If anything happens, come right back up.”

Solomon Moiseivich kissed his wife on her plump cheek. “They’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

A skeptical smile edged along her maternal face. It was highly unlikely that the photographer, under a black cloth, could keep an eye on anyone, let alone four young people. The younger girls clamored to be brought along, wheedled and protested at being kept inside, but she would not be budged.

In the street, the sun splashed the storefronts, gilding churches and washing the faces of apartment houses all down Nevsky Prospect to the Admiralty needle. It poured over idle office workers and sleepy clerks, haulers and porters. It felt like a holiday. Carrying the big camera, Solomon Moiseivich shouldered and Excuse me’d his way to the curb, and we four filled in right behind him, Seryozha guarding the camera case as if bandits would come and rob him of it.

Around us, the crowd thickened—well-heeled ladies, gentlemen smelling of cedar chips, pale shopgirls and carters, carpenters and doormen, schoolkids on their day off, laughing and shoving. Even a few drunks came out to soak up the sun. A vendor moved among us selling sunflower seeds. “Watch your purse,” a young man told his pretty wife.

A sudden whiff of cigar smoke made me think of Kolya. “Look, here they come.” A man who looked like a poolroom sharp in his checkered coat and flat cap pointed toward the Admiralty.

At first I saw nothing. Then, way up at the end of Nevsky, a black dot appeared. A bit of red. As I watched, the dot grew into a bobbing mass, adorned with small smears of scarlet. Now a noise, faint, like the whispering of waves on a pebbly beach, a low gravelly chatter, arose and soon echoed off the buildings and rolled down the boulevard. The marchers were chanting but we weren’t close enough to hear the words.

“They said there might be a hundred thousand out today,” said the man in the checkered coat, chewing a handful of sunflower seeds and spitting the shells on the ground.

Varvara squeezed my arm. I squeezed back. We felt the shimmering possibility that things could be different. No—they were already different. This column of black coming toward us felt like history itself. Mina chewed her chapped lips and eyed the policemen shifting nervously from foot to foot, holding their truncheons behind them. If her father hadn’t been three feet away, she would have bolted. The presence of the police made my stomach hurt. What if they went wild, as they did the day the women stormed the bakery?

Closer the marchers came. So many women… my eye had only beheld such numbers on the parade ground of the Field of Mars. But these weren’t soldiers. They were simple workers, mouths open, chanting, We want bread. Bread! Was that too much to ask? Now we could read the banners: DOWN WITH HUNGER. BREAD AND JUSTICE! WE WANT BREAD AND THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY. There would be no more pretending that the city didn’t see them. Their footsteps resounded on the wooden paving blocks, their high voices begging for justice. I was too young to have witnessed the Revolution of 1905, when the poor had come to petition the tsar and were slaughtered. Their reward? Twelve more years of hunger and oppression, and a few crumbs of concession to the middle class, like the powerless Duma. I prayed this time would be different.

Now they were upon us.

Such faces! Bathed in morning light, on this miraculous day, it was as if God himself had blessed the procession, had dipped in gold their banners, their shabby coats and worn scarves. Shy women marched arm in arm, in fours and fives, tens and twenties, unused to such boldness, following behind their more determined sisters holding the banners. What desperate bravery at a time when it had been declared that any two people assembling in public could be arrested. How must this feel to them—to emerge from their dark airless slums, hidden away in the shadows of the factories on the outskirts of the city, to walk in the sunshine down the most glittering street of them all? To bear witness to all they had suffered and demand that justice be done?

I wished Mother could be here, Father, too, so that they could see this woman. This one, with the white scarf pulled low on her forehead marching along with her friend with the large bruised eyes. They smiled, awed by their own audacity. These women stitched our boots, wove the cloth we wore, cut our coats, fashioned the buttons, knit our underwear and our hose. These women—and men, too—wouldn’t stay hidden with their suffering one more day. Meanwhile, Seryozha expertly handed frames of unexposed film to Solomon Moiseivich and stacked the exposed ones into the case, his fears forgotten. If Kolya could only see all this, surely he wouldn’t be able to maintain his cynicism about the people’s cause.

Now a group of stylish women passed by under the banner: SOCIALIST WOMEN STAND FOR NEW LIVES. I could well imagine myself among them. A young woman in a tricorn hat and bobbed hair could be me in a year or two. It was their march to begin with, but their movement had been joined not just by a phalanx but by an army.

A tram running alongside the marchers braked to a stop, its female driver getting out and leaving her tramload stranded. Her car blocked the one behind it, and soon the smell of static electricity and the screech of hot metal stained the air. How comical the passengers looked, peering out the windows, confused to be so at the mercy of the working class. Varvara laughed. “You’re not going to make that appointment,” she called to the bewildered passengers still in their seats.

Then came the families of the soldiers, solemn as a religious procession. FEED THE CHILDREN OF THE DEFENDERS OF PEACE IN THE HOMELAND begged a banner held by a woman in a blue scarf, surrounded by soldiers’ wives with their half-grown children, old people, mothers and fathers. They seemed even more unsure of themselves than the workers did, unpracticed in the art of public protest, driven by desperation. INCREASE THE FOOD RATION FOR SOLDIERS’ FAMILIES! FOR THE DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM AND THE NATIONAL PEACE!

We all felt the sea change, even Mina. “Feed the children!” we shouted. “Feed the soldiers’ families! Urah!”

“Look, Marina!” Varvara nudged me. “It’s Belhausen.”

Belhausen knitwear! I even recognized the woman who had taken the stack of flyers from Varvara that night. Their banner proclaimed: IF A WOMAN IS A SLAVE, THERE WILL BE NO FREEDOM. LONG LIVE EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN! We waved and called out, and perhaps they recognized us, but in any event, the woman raised a hand in salute.

A song began among the textile women. Varvara knew the words:

Mina took a step back. She caught my eye—vengeance?

The police, so vastly outnumbered, could do nothing but bounce on the balls of their feet.

“They said it wasn’t time,” shouted a sharp-chinned woman holding a banner on a pole that seemed too large for her hands. PUTILOV WORKERS SUPPORT WOMEN’S RIGHTS! “Our brothers told us it wasn’t time. But when the women say it’s time, it’s time! A pregnancy only lasts nine months, brother—the baby comes whether you say so or not.”

The women cheered, and we joined them. Suddenly, a well-dressed couple stepped back from the curb. Then other onlookers began pressing back toward the buildings. Mina instinctively took my arm. “What’s happening?” A buzz of anxiety arose from the crowd, and then someone shouted “Cossacks!” “Seryozha!” I called, but my brother remained at Katzev’s side, handing him another frame of film. Mina pulled me toward their door as the Cossacks—the knout of the tsar—emerged from Liteiny Prospect mounted on flared-nostriled horses.

Mina stood on tiptoe. “Papa!” she shrieked.

I dug my nails into Mina’s arm. Solomon Katzev didn’t move and Seryozha remained steadfast beside him. The mounted men gathered at the edge of the march, and their officer urged his horse into the mass as you would urge it into a river. Whip raised, the bayonet of his rifle gleaming, saber at his side. I clung to Mina. We could smell the sweat of their horses as they passed, heard the creak of their saddles, their black capes flung behind them. One by one, the Cossacks waded into the frightened column. Poor women, little boys, old men, all edged backward to give these fierce men passage. But the whips stayed on their shoulders, rifles on saddles, savage sabers at their sides. Not one Cossack lifted a hand against the demonstrators. They simply rode through.

Urah! It was a miracle. Everyone—protestors, onlookers—threw their arms in the air and cheered, wept. The sound made the horses wheel, white-eyed, necks lathered from fear, but the Cossacks kept them well in hand. Sobbing, shouting, I embraced Mina, Varvara, and a woman in a sealskin coat standing behind me. One of the riders nodded at the crowd, touching his shaggy hat in the flick of a salute. Solomon Moiseivich came out from under the cloth, and I saw him squeeze the bulb of the shutter.

“You should have been there, Mama,” said Mina, slurping up the golden broth swimming with noodles as steam coated her glasses. “They didn’t fire. I couldn’t believe it.”

“We saw it all from the window,” said her sister Dunya.

“Nothing happened anyway,” said their little sister, Shusha. “You should have let us go.”

Sofia Yakovlevna shook her head. “You could all be murdered.”

We drank our rich, fragrant soup while Varvara imitated the woman from Putilov. “A pregnancy only lasts nine months, brother—the baby comes whether you say so or not.”

“Well, this pregnancy’s lasted twelve years,” said Mina’s old uncle Aaron. “The baby’s going to be huge.” Like everyone today, he was thinking of the failed Revolution of 1905.

“Three hundred years, if you ask me,” said Aunt Fanya, a tiny hunchbacked lady with Mina’s sharp sense of humor.

After the meal, Papa Katzev and my brother retreated to the darkroom. While we waited to see what they had captured of the day, Mina’s aunt taught us to play American poker using buttons from the sewing box as chips. I loved the names—her aunt used the American words: hold, call. Aces and eights. Of course Mina, our mathematician, won handily, but gradually the rest of us caught on. As we played, Uncle Aaron talked about his days in New York organizing garment workers before being deported. I had no idea that Mina’s family was so political.

I was raking in my first pot when Seryozha appeared in the studio doorway, his hair damp and hanging over his eyes, accompanied by a strong draught of vinegary chemicals. “We’re ready.”

We pressed into the close confines of the darkroom—like a little theater—arranging ourselves around the wooden sinks with their enamel trays. I never tired of seeing an empty sheet of paper become a scene, a portrait, that magic, although my eyes smarted from the fumes. “Everybody in?” said Solomon Moiseivich, then he turned out all the lights but one, coated in red paint. He placed a large negative onto a square of white, shut the frame, and turned on the light. “One,” he slowly counted, “two, three,” then turned it off again and slid the paper into the first tray of chemicals.

Before us bloomed an image on the white page—the first line of marchers, the empty cobbled street ahead of them, their dark figures entering from the right, as if from the past, walking onstage, their mass dividing the sheet in half. I could see history’s footprint in that moment. I had been there.

11 The Two Mariyas

TWO DAYS LATER, I sat with Mother at a table for six at the Hotel Europa, a spacious room decorated in the art nouveau fashion. All around us, soignée women lunched, well-dressed families fussed over pretty children, and business associates tucked into steaks and roasted chickens. At the end of the long room, a string quartet stitched a Bach concerto onto the fragrant air, while not five hundred yards away on Nevsky Prospect, strikers milled behind a cordon of soldiers. How ridiculous to be waiting here for the appearance of Great-Aunt Mariya Grigorievna and elderly Cousin Masha, visiting from Moscow.

Mother removed her gloves, slowly and beautifully, a small performance in itself, glancing about to see if she knew anyone, and of course she did. We ordered tea, which came in traditional glasses with silver holders. I studied the waiter, a somber long-faced man who resembled Pasternak. He looked like he’d been born old, as if joy had never crossed that masklike face. Did he hate us? Did he secretly hope we would all choke on our sturgeon in cherry sauce? This dumb show of privilege—the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask. But who? Not Mother. Certainly not Great-Aunt Mariya Grigorievna, whom I could see approaching, regal in an old-fashioned hat decorated with a crow’s wing, followed by dour, sharp-faced Cousin Masha in a purple velvet beret.

We exchanged obligatory kisses, for which I had to hold my breath—my great-aunt smelled of roses kept in a box with dried bones and vinegar. Masha smelled of violet eau de toilette and an illicit cigarette. The host seated my great-aunt and placed her snuffling pug in her lap. “What is happening to this place?” she spluttered. “Your local orators have been holding forth all morning. We’ve almost converted to Bolshevism and it’s not even lunchtime.”

Mother laughed. The traitor! She supported Father’s dreams of a constitutional monarchy, but when she visited her family, sometimes her politics grew hazy.

Cousin Masha, a small homely woman with the rabid self-righteousness of someone who’d taken up plainness as a cause, thrust out her sharp chin. “Don’t laugh, it’s perfectly horrid. ‘We demand a Workers’ Soviet. We demand ice cream on Tuesdays and an automobile for every scrubwoman.’ Our nerves are worn to a thread. To a thread!” Now I couldn’t help laughing, and she glared at me, as if it had been me protesting under her window. I was glad we had a seat between us. Cousin Masha was a pincher and a tattletale, eager to spot one’s sensitivities and air them in public.

The waiter handed us menus, large and tied with a golden cord and tassel. Mother turned pages. “Mitya hopes the unrest will pressure the emperor to agree to parliamentary concessions.”

Good for her. She hadn’t forgotten us entirely. Great-Aunt Mariya snorted. “Dmitry Ivanovich won’t be satisfied until the Union Jack flies over the Winter Palace.” She set her dog on the chair between herself and Mother and opened her menu. “Thank God it’s still Russia—or at least it was the last time I heard. It is Russia, isn’t it, Masha?”

“One might wonder,” Masha said, scowling at a fat businessman who was laughing too loudly behind her.

“The emperor’s father would know what to do with those demonstrators,” said my great-aunt. “They’d be on their way to Siberia by now.”

Why was I here, dressed up in navy silk like a fool to flatter the vanity of this old party? Just because she was a rich relation without children? It was intolerable. Only the day before, I’d helped lead a walkout at school. How exciting it had been to speak out for freedom, for the eight-hour day and the end of labor militarization, instead of suffering through geometry and Milton. The teachers either sympathized with us or retreated in the face of our agitation, and in afternoon history class, Varvara led a vote to strike. It passed unanimously. Even Mina, when she saw that it was inevitable, voted yes. News spread like a fire from classroom to classroom that the senior girls were walking out. The junior girls voted to join us, even the lower school. It was hardly a tools-down strike at Putilov, but we felt part of the great upheaval.

And now, I had to listen to what the emperor’s father would do to the strikers. My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.

“Would you like some tea?” Mother asked her aunt. “Or wine? Mitya and Seryozha should be along soon, but we should go ahead and order.” She summoned the long-faced waiter with a nod.

“Tea. Ceylon.” My great-aunt petted the snuffling Potemkin. “And some milk in a dish.”

“And a little Madeira,” Masha added, smoothing her curled collar. “I think I’ve earned it, don’t you?” I imagined she must secretly dream of Spain. A scarf tied gypsy style over her forehead, guitars in a star-filled night. I imagined her drunk and humming the “Malagueña” in their big dark apartment in the Arbat.

“Really, we’re grateful the police have kept their heads so far,” Mother said. “The Kadets are cautiously confident that the emperor will come around, as long as no violence occurs.” She stroked her napkin as if it were a nervous cat. “If he doesn’t feel it’s a defeat.”

“The Kadets should come to my hotel room,” said Masha. “They could listen to the speeches without waiting for the newspaper.”

“They’re calling for abdication.” Mariya Grigorievna’s jowls trembled. “Fifty yards from the Winter Palace. It’s treason.”

Abdication? That hadn’t been among the demands of the International Women’s Day march. My God, how far things had come since Thursday. I writhed with impatience to finish this visit and find out what was going on in the street. The collar of my dress rubbed against my skin, making it itch.

Where were Father and Seryozha? They had decided to walk, but it was taking longer than it should. Or rather Father had wanted to walk and invited Seryozha along. The truth was, he didn’t want to spend too much time with the two Mariyas. “Too nice a day to ride,” he’d said. Seryozha had been pleased but wary, like a boy befriended by a bear.

They didn’t appear until we were finishing the soup, Seryozha trailing behind Father with a head-down sulky look. They must have quarreled. My brother let himself be kissed and dropped into the empty chair between me and Cousin Masha, his mood dense and volatile, like the atmosphere on a hot, cloudy planet. Father greeted the old ladies with false heartiness, taking the chair between Mother and Mariya Grigorievna after my aunt removed Potemkin. Though Father despised the bug-eyed dog, he disliked Cousin Masha even more. “You’re both looking well. Quite hale and hearty. Sorry we’re late. Ran into a bit of trouble on the way.”

Mother glanced over at her gloomy son with alarm. “The strikers? You should have come with us.”

“Just some hooligans. It was nothing.” Father glared at my brother, who pretended to study the menu. His lips trembled, I could tell he was trying not to cry. “If it had been Marina, there would have been a bloody nose or two now.”

Now I noticed the dust on Seryozha’s school jacket, the torn sleeve. He’d gotten into a fight—how could that have happened with Father right there? Were they boys he knew? Or just street boys attracted to his long poet’s locks and vulnerable, dreamy face? He must have been dawdling, looking in a shop window. Father would have had to go break it up—how furious he would have been at having to rescue his son from little toughs. Nobody’s going to fight your battles for you, son… yes, I could see the clench of his jaw under his red-brown beard.

“Was he in a brawl?” asked Mariya Grigorievna, pressing her hand to her throat, as if Seryozha were a dangerous thug instead of an artistic fifteen-year-old.

“Hardly,” Father said drily. “But he attracts it. Walking around like that. He might as well have a sign around his neck.”

Mother glanced across me, sympathetic but helpless. “But you’re all right?”

My brother wouldn’t look at her. His nose was red. He stared down at his menu. “Just fantastic,” he replied.

Mother wiped her mouth, sipped her Riesling, and nervously rearranged her silverware. Father ordered a glass of vodka and veal cutlets and took up his charming self like an actor stepping into a familiar role. He asked the old ladies whether they had anything special planned for their stay and how things were in Moscow. Meanwhile, Seryozha took out his notebook and began to caricature them—Masha with her cunning face, sipping her wine, her hat like a dripping egg. Father with his pipe. Jowly Mariya Grigorievna and her jowly dog—as they talked about the wisdom of sending money out of the country.

Father allowed himself the passion of his disapproval. “You can’t be serious. It’s unpatriotic. In the middle of a war.”

“I’m as patriotic as you are,” my great-aunt said, stiffening. She, who had wanted the strikers sent to Siberia. In Seryozha’s drawing, her hat looked ready to fly away with her. “But one must also be practical.” My brother wrote that as a caption below, One must be practical.

We were all relieved when the main course arrived. As I thought of the strikers, the sturgeon stuck in my throat—too fatty, too sweet, and the quartet sounded treacly, like putting lip rouge on Bach. The diners tucking into their meals seemed repellent, callous and greedy. Now Cousin Masha launched into a critique of modern child rearing, which started as an excoriation of my brother but ended as a rant about Mother and Uncle Vadim and how spoiled they’d been. Her spite hung in the air like oily smoke. “My parents said nothing good would come of it. That it would come back to haunt you in the end.”

“Les enfants terribles,” agreed Mariya Grigorievna, but in a tone of indulgence, even approval. “With all your little tricks. You used to absolutely plague that nanny—do you still have her?”

“Avdokia? Oh yes, she’s very much with us.” Mother was happy to turn to more pleasant family memories. “Still the same. Inventing ever more elaborate curses for the insufficiently devout.”

“Your father just gave you everything you wanted.” Masha wouldn’t let it go. She was on to her second Madeira, and little patches of red bloomed on each bony cheek. “Praised you for putting the right shoe on the right foot, as if you’d done something miraculous.”

“My father was a kind man,” Mother said, quietly but firmly. I remembered Dyedushka’s huge eyebrows and muttonchop whiskers, his French walking stick. The way he teased you. The candy in the little drawer in his desk.

“And look where it got you,” said Cousin Masha with an extra jab of malice.

Mother blotted her mouth with a snowy napkin. “And where is that, Masha, dear?”

The old cousin shrugged as if it were obvious, cutting her chicken eyes at Father. His prestige in Petrograd—his articles, his law practice, his teaching at the university, membership in the Duma—meant nothing to her. Father didn’t come from dvoryanstvo. He worked for a living, so family legend had it that Mother married beneath her. Impoverished Masha, who’d sponged off Mariya Grigorievna for years, took great solace in that prejudice. She was an incurious woman, uninterested in the world, in other people, new ideas, progress, or change. Only the workings of her own social class and her tenuous foothold in it drew her. She feared that Mariya Grigorievna would leave her fortune to Mother instead of Masha, her deserving companion.

Father clamped his pipe between his teeth and made a show of patting himself down for a means of lighting it. “Excuse me, ladies, I must find some matches.” Leaving us alone with the two Mariyas.

“Gone to the bar, most likely.” Mariya Grigorievna fed a shred of rabbit in sour cream to Potemkin off her fork. I could hardly watch it, but Seryozha’s pencil flew, making skritching noises on the paper. I wished I could follow Father’s lead and abandon ship, but I felt sorry for Seryozha, didn’t want to leave him alone with the Moscow harpies.

Now that Father was gone, their attention turned to me. My great-aunt asked about my plans for the future. Mother spoke up. “Marina will be entering Petrograd University in the fall,” she said with some pride. “She’s been admitted to the department of philology.”

So there.

The old lady tucked her chin, making many of one. “You should save the money. A girl hardly needs that kind of education. It will only give her ideas.”

I couldn’t keep still one more minute. “I believe that’s the point,” I said.

Seryozha snickered. Encouraged, I continued. “In your day, it was enough to look pretty and know what fork to use. Today we want to do things, not just sit there like painted dolls.”

Potemkin’s eyes regarded me with horror, just like his owner’s. “In my day, a young lady at least knew how to comport herself and not go running around contradicting her elders.”

I felt Mother’s hand on my arm, stilling me, but I had the bit in my teeth. “A month from now, you won’t recognize this country. Our lives are about to change forever, while you’re talking about comportment and feeding rabbit to your dog.”

She picked up another piece of meat and held it to the small beast’s mouth. “A whole month? I don’t recognize it now. And if I feed him rabbit, why shouldn’t I? It’s my money, my dog.”

“You see, Vera? You see?” Cousin Masha finished her second glass of Madeira. “Mother was right—sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.”

Mother rubbed her temples. “Masha, dear, your mother was a horse’s ass. That’s what my mother used to say.”

Great-Aunt Mariya Grigorievna laughed out loud. “So true. Forgive me but she really was.”

Masha’s face turned dark with fury. I was glad not to be seated next to her. She would have pinched me. “Waiter!” she called out. The man with the long face was at her side in a moment. “This fish has gone off.” She pushed her plate away from her. The man took it without comment, though she’d eaten half.

At last Father returned, white-faced, his pipe trailing the scent of his tobacco. “There’s been some trouble down by Gostinny Dvor. Shots fired. We should all avoid Nevsky for the next few hours.”

“Who shot? The soldiers or the strikers?” How could I get around my parents and find out what was going on?

“I’m ready to avoid the entire mad city,” said our great-aunt, placing her napkin on the table, signaling the end of the meal. “We’ve met with our bankers, I see no point in lingering, do you, Masha, dear?”

“I should say not,” said our disgruntled cousin.

“We can be back in Moscow by morning.” The old lady stuck her face nose to nose with the pop-eyed pug. “What do you say, Potemkin? Let us leave the asylum to the inmates. Maybe next year they’ll have come to their senses.” She stood and we rose to kiss her and Cousin Masha. Mother embraced her old relative with an affection that surprised them both, knocking their hats together.

It was the last time we ever saw the two Mariyas.

12 Incident at Znamenskaya Square

IN THE WATER-GRAY first light, the sidewalks already exuded a bristly, nervy energy. I hurried after Seryozha. For a change, he was the one who’d woken early, rousing me from sleep, determined to spend the day at the demonstrations—with Solomon Moiseivich. I understood. After our luncheon at the Hotel Europa, I needed no urging.

Fresh posters had been stuck to the walls overnight, and groups of people stood around reading them.

“Guess you better go home now, kids. Papa’s mad,” joked a man in a corduroy cap.

“This time we’re ready for Papa.” His friend rattled a bag in the palm of his hand. It jingled, full of metal.

“The reserves don’t want this fight any more than we do,” said an old man with hands the size of dinner plates. “They’ll come over to our side.”

“Yeah? You saw ’em yesterday. Move along. Bugger off.”

Seryozha, halfway down the street, called to me to hurry. But I wanted to hear what the workers were saying. “What happened yesterday?” I asked the man in the corduroy cap.

“Police fired on the crowd up near Gostinny Dvor.”

I was glad Seryozha couldn’t hear that. “Are you worried? About being sent to the front?”

The man with the metal said, “Nobody’s going anywhere, devushka. It’s them’s going somewhere. Straight to the devil is where.”

As we approached Nevsky, we could see the demonstrators already crowding the boulevard. At the Katzevs’ building Varvara had just arrived. She rushed up to us. “They’re rallying out in the districts. Bigger crowds than yesterday. The government’s raised the bridges—as if that’s going to do any good.” Raising the bridges on the Neva was a time-honored tactic but an iced-over river in February was not much of a barrier. “Everyone’s running across. The police don’t dare shoot. They know the least spark and—babakh!” She flung her hands upward and out. I could picture the workers, their dark coats and caps, running across the frozen expanse. Small figures against white like living sheet music. The city was coming together like two halves of a brain—what the reactionaries feared most. “It’s beyond protest now,” she said. “It’s revolution.”

Revolution. The great brazen sound of the word rang in my bones, resounded in the bell of my chest. It had us hypnotized, promising resurrection, a cleansing, after which Goodness and Future would emerge like the shining city of God.

We climbed to the fifth floor—Seryozha running ahead—but by the time we got to Mina’s, her father had left. “Come in, have breakfast,” her mother urged, but we grabbed Mina and fled back down to the street, resisting her sisters’ pleas to take them along. Sofia Yakovlevna let loose a skein of warnings that trailed after us like scarves.

The rising sun fingered the tops of the buildings as we came out onto the street. A crisp winter day. The soft snow that had fallen during the night gave the gathering crowds a holiday spirit. The transparent blue of the sky arched above us like the dome of a church. Seryozha raced ahead, not caring that he was alone, watching for Solomon Moiseivich. Varvara thought he was most likely to be photographing workers crossing the river and gathering at Palace Square. Sullen-faced soldiers clustered on corners and mounted police trotted in the streets. I fell back with Mina, who was having trouble keeping up. She stopped to catch her breath, bent over at the waist, bracing herself on her knees. “Do we really have to run? Won’t they be coming this way?”

In a gathering chorus, church bells rang out. It was Sunday. Kazan Cathedral, the Lutheran church, the Armenian church, the Church of the Spilled Blood all sounded their benedictions. A good sign.

“Listen.” Varvara stopped us with outstretched arms. She didn’t mean the bells. Yes, from the direction of the Neva they came. Little black figures, the swaying red banners. Steam rose from the assembled mass, so many lungs, and as the bells faded, the sound grew deep and wide, a song. At first you couldn’t hear words, but then they became clear. “Arise, arise, working people. Arise against the enemies, hungry brother!” Homemade banners and signs from factories swashed overhead, METAL WORKERS NO. 14, ADMIRALTY SHIPYARD ON STRIKE! But also newer, more militant slogans: DOWN WITH THE AUTOCRACY! RUSSIA OUT OF THE WAR! SOCIALISM MEANS STRENGTH OF THE MANY! It thrilled me to see their demands, right out in the open. The emperor’s father would know what to do. At the curb, we caught up with Seryozha, his sketchbook open, attempting to capture the flow of humanity. A man, skin burned by some kind of chemical work. A tall woman in a white scarf, a chin like a doubled fist, leading a chant: Give us bread! Give us peace! Faces Kolya might have picked to be his messengers.

Suddenly Varvara grabbed my arm and stepped into a passing line of strikers.

My brother and Mina stood frozen like two rabbits on the curb. “Come on, Seryozha!” I called. But he pointed in the direction of the river and Solomon Moiseivich, and soon I lost sight of him as the marchers swept us along in the opposite direction, east, away from the river and toward Gostinny Dvor. Varvara was practically jumping with excitement. “Where are you from, brothers?” she asked the men marching with us. A blond man with a big moustache and a thick patched coat black with grease replied, “Ericsson.” The big manufacturer of telephones and other electronic devices. These men were taking a tremendous risk striking—it was one of the militarized industries. They weren’t just putting their jobs on the line. Their strike was tantamount to treason. Their bravery made me feel very young and frivolous, like a colt who’d decided to follow its mother in harness. People at the Hotel Europa stared at us from the window as we marched by. I wondered if the two Mariyas were still in Petrograd, if they could see me.

A young worker with elfin ears wedged himself between me and Varvara, draping his arms heavily over our necks. “What are you girlies here for? Bit of fun?” He smelled sharp and bitter—he’d been drinking. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to be a bourgeois missy. He was “the people,” after all. But Varvara had no compunctions. She shoved him off, sent him staggering into the men behind us, shouting at him, “Where’s your discipline? This is a strike, not a social hour!”

The Ericsson men laughed. “That’s the way, little sister,” said the blond man with the moustache, while our would-be Romeo shrugged, wiped his nose on his coat sleeve, and spit—not quite at us, but close enough.

A wave of song reached us from up ahead. We followed with our own wave, hearing the same melody from various sections of the boulevard like a rolling echo. Soldiers leaned out the window of a military hospital, waving handkerchiefs—my soldiers! Businesses were mostly closed, the streetcars abandoned. Some of the strikers were trying to turn one of the trams over. People stared at us from the cafés. No one had told them that the revolution had arrived. Arise, arise, working people…

As we approached the intersection at Sadovaya Street, cracking sounds echoed off the buildings. I stopped, confused, but people around us began to turn, break off. They were shooting at us! Or someone was shooting, it was hard to tell who. We followed the Ericssons, dodging behind Gostinny Dvor, the great department store, zigzagging past the Assignation Bank and around to the Chernyshevsky Bridge, then back onto Nevsky. The excitement! Our blood was up and I could understand how soldiers were able to run into the gunfire of enemy troops. When we rejoined the demonstration, there were more strikers than ever. Workers in an upper-story tailor shop waved red flags.

At last we poured into Znamenskaya Square, the plaza before the Nikolaevsky train station. And I saw that we were just one of many streams flooding in from all four directions to meet in the grand circle surrounding the statue of Alexander III, the emperor’s father, on his flat-footed horse, the tsar’s expression equal parts indigestion and disgust.

So many people, and they kept coming, pressing us farther into the square. No one could scare us away now—we were too many. How glad I was that Seryozha and Mina hadn’t come after all. They would have been apoplectic at the gunfire and panicky at the size of the crowd, whereas Varvara was thrilled and singing at the top of her lungs. And I was at one with these brave people, ready to change the fate of a nation.

Speakers climbed onto boxes to address the demonstration. “The old order has led the country to ruin!” shouted a gray-haired woman, hatless in a simple coat and dark skirt, pointing up at the statue. Her voice would have been the envy of a regimental sergeant major. “This is not the war to end all wars. It guarantees there will be more! It strengthens the autocracies! Forced annexations cause hatred among the peoples! Only socialism can guarantee a lasting peace.”

“Russia out of the war!” responded a handsome bearded student who had appeared at my side. He flashed a brilliant smile at me.

“Up with the people’s socialism!” Varvara shouted.

The gray-haired woman ceded the soapbox to a younger man. “We call for the return of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! We call for the arrest of the tsar’s ministers.” He pointed back up Nevsky, the way we’d come. “They’re huddling right now in the Mariinsky Palace. They’re rolling down the shades, they’re putting out ‘for rent’ signs!”

“Down with the autocracy!” “Arrest the ministers!” We cheered him on. “We demand abdication!”

I could taste it. It was so close, the new world. It was right at my lips like a red, red apple. We would make a new life for Russia with our own hands. What a day! Just to express such thoughts in broad daylight! Surely the revolution had arrived.

Then something happened in the crowd. I stood on tiptoe trying to understand. The blond Ericsson man pointed. Mounted Cossacks had arrived on their excited horses. We all stood as still and silent as Alexander III above us, waiting for what would come. I was afraid to breathe. “Steady,” said the Ericsson next to Varvara. “We’ve been here before.” My skin prickled under my coat. I clung to my friend as the horsemen rode by in double file, stitching their way through the crowd like thread through black cloth. I could smell the horses, hear the jingling of their spurs so close, the horses’ metal shoes scraping the pavement.

As at the Women’s Day march, they did not strike us. They had not given in. Shouts rose up from the crowd—“Comrade Cossacks!” “Urah!” And the sky seemed flung over us like a bright bolt of silk on a seamstress’s table, like a banner of heaven.

The speakers resumed their exhortations, the crowd more excited and confident than before. The student and I and Varvara exchanged quick bursts of conversation between speakers, praising this orator or that for a turn of phrase or a bit of information. What a day! I thought about this handsome student, just the kind of boy I really should be going with, instead of the opportunistic Kolya. He was at the university, studying law. I didn’t ask if he knew my father.

Now the crowd lurched forward again, sending me crashing into a striker. I clutched his belt to avoid falling. “Volynskys!” someone shouted. One of the elite Life Guard regiments, the tsar’s most loyal troops. Oh God. A bespectacled Volynsky officer on a nervous chestnut horse pointed his saber and sent a detachment of mounted guards into the crowd. “If they come close, put your coat over your head,” said the striker ahead of us. He took off his cap and showed us the metal sheet he’d put inside. “We’ve learned a few things. You’ll be fine.”

Then they came, riding at a slow trot. People shrieked and tried to move away. “Brother soldiers!” the striker called toward the horsemen. “We’re on the same side!” They unsheathed their swords, but after a moment it was clear they didn’t want to use them.

“Disperse!” a mounted Volynsky called out. “All you people! Please! We don’t want to use force! Please leave.”

“Hold your ground!” demonstrators cried out all around us. Varvara took my arm. She linked her other arm to that of the Ericsson man next to her, and the bearded student took mine. “Brother soldiers!” The strikers were calling to the mounted Volynskys. “Join us!” The tinny taste of panic settled in my throat. The crowd lurched again and I stumbled, cried out, falling, skinning my knees, then was grabbed back to my feet by Varvara and the student. The officer on his wheeling horse called again for the demonstrators to disperse. “You have two minutes to clear this square!”

An orator still on his soapbox called out, “We’re not clearing out! You clear out!” He turned to the line of soldiers, reaching his arms out to them, and shouted, “Brothers, we’re your comrades! We’re your brothers, your wives and fathers. Soldiers, don’t fire on your family! We’re hungry—we’re not your enemies!”

“One minute!”

There was no chance of clearing this enormous demonstration. I couldn’t have taken a half step to the left or right. It would be now. Either they would let us go as the Cossacks had, or we would die today in Znamenskaya Square. I held my ground among the Ericssons, gripping Varvara and the bearded student until my arms were numb. I could see a few of the Volynskys’ faces, hard, thin-lipped, pale.

The officer let his horse turn and raised his saber. “Fire!” he shouted.

I closed my eyes as the first shots were fired. They sounded like crackling wood in a hearth. Screams. But everyone held fast. Then a cheer rang out. “Urah!”

“They’re firing into the air,” shouted the bearded student.

We loosened our grip on one another and shouted out, “Brother soldiers!”

People were throwing things at the officer. “Go back to your tsar!” “Here’s a warning!” “Your day is over!”

A bugle sounded. I felt like a warhorse, my nostrils flared with excitement. Was this it? Had the revolution really come? The man on the box shouted, “Up with the Republic!” and another wave of shots rang out. This time he crumpled, fell to one side, disappeared. “Hold your ground!” “Run!” “Don’t panic!” shouted voices all around me, barely audible over the screaming. People were pushing and pulling. I held on to the student, but where was Varvara?

“Sons of whores!” “Here they come.” “Hold your ground!” The crowd lurched again and I stumbled, falling, grabbing at people who were also falling. The student’s shoulder caught my jaw. Then we saw the horsemen, charging. I couldn’t hear my own screaming in the roar around me. How enormous were those steel-shod tons as they knocked people to the ground. A demon bay with a nasty wide stripe down its nose and blue eyes charged us. A woman in its path tried to run, but somebody pushed her down in his own terror, and she fell under the horse’s hooves. She curled into a ball trying to protect herself, her hands up around her head. The soldier did nothing to turn the horse away but let it rear and trample her. I screamed. People tore at the rider’s stirrups, but he wheeled around for another charge. With outstretched sword, he rode at us—those blue eyes, that blaze, the thunder. The saber entered the chest of the bearded student at my side, piercing him through like an olive. The soldier lowered his sword so that the student fell off by his own weight, then spurred his mount forward to the next victim.

I knelt by the young man who had stood by me for the previous hour. His dark eyes held all the surprise and anguish in the world. Blood guttered in his mouth as he tried to speak. It gurgled from his chest and pooled into the snow around him. “Shh…” I kept saying. “Tishe…” I held his hand between my own as my dress soaked up his blood, and watched his face grow paler. I couldn’t breathe. My mind simply could not comprehend what was happening.

“Marina!” Varvara jerked me up by the arm. “Let’s go!” But I didn’t want to leave him. What if he was trampled? “He’s dead, Marina,” she said. “They’re coming back!” She dragged me away, and we ran, slipping and staggering toward the north side of the square, away from the train station. Another assembly of soldiers at Suvorovsky Prospect picked people off as they fled.

We stumbled into a café that was filling with fleeing demonstrators, and huddled with the startled customers—travelers and tarts with their finery and cheap jewelry. The waiters had closed the curtains, but I peered between them out at the street. A worker held a cloth to his neck while blood poured through his fingers. All through the vast square, people scattered, leaving behind bodies in the snow like so many bundles fallen off a cart.

Varvara wrapped her arm around my waist, her head pressed to mine. Through the parted curtains, we watched men—workers and students with red crosses on armbands—dart back into the square to retrieve the wounded, slinging them over their shoulders and carrying them away. How naive I’d been, thinking I knew what a revolution was. Thinking that we could demand change and it would be given to us because we asked. I shivered, seeing the student’s blood on my dress, my coat, my shoes. His face, the way the sword impaled him. The blue eyes of the horse, the rider. I couldn’t stop shaking.

“You’re all right.” Varvara held me by the shoulders. “Look at me, Marina.” Her face swam into view. “We’ll get those bastards back. This isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.”

But it seemed like the end to me.

13 The Autocracy Has Spoken

I DIDN’T REMEMBER COMING home, whether people stared at me, covered in blood. Avdokia was there, her soft wrinkled face gray with worry. She laced her arm around my waist and walked me to the bathroom. She got me out of my things, though I was shaking, shaking… took off my coat, my dress, my shoes, soaked in his blood, sticky. I lay in the deep white tub, hot and pink. My lungs ached, my body ached. How could I have thought we could win our freedom? That things could be different? I should have known the weight of what held us down. How thick the walls. How final, how useless.

My old nanny wrapped me in thick towels, put me into a nightgown and a robe. She sat me at my vanity table and combed out my wet hair. Framed in the mirror’s reflection, a perfect fool. No heroine, no revolutionary. Only a pale, frightened girl, so much younger than I thought I was. The picture of Kolya and Volodya smiled up at me from under the glass. It meant nothing to me. Like something from another world.

She tsked and tugged at my wet hair, her little gnome face gazing at me in the mirror over my shoulder. Questions struck me like hard bits of snow, like sand. Wheres and whys, hows. I didn’t want to talk, only to be cared for like a child. She led me into the nursery, where we knelt together in front of the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin, who knew everything. The lamp flickered in the dimness. My nanny prayed for me, thanking the Virgin for bringing me home safely. I didn’t have to pray. The Virgin knew what had happened. It was too late to pray for the student. Time flowed but one way. I only thanked her that Seryozha had not been there. Then she put me to bed.

Later, I heard my parents come in, speak to the servants. I heard Avdokia telling them I wasn’t feeling well and had fallen asleep. After a while, Seryozha slipped in, sat on my bed, held my hands. He knew what had happened at Znamenskaya Square. “Forgive me,” he kept saying. I could tell he felt cowardly, as though he’d abandoned me. But there was nothing to say. I squeezed his hand. I missed him, I missed the way it had been when it was just the two of us in our beautiful child’s world. Games in the bushes and trees in the Tauride Gardens, our secret language, Rakuku. I missed my own life as if it were already over.

Mother opened the door, dressed for a party, smelling of Après l’Ondée. Her gown rattled with crystal beads like hail on pavement. And here was Father, in tailcoat and brilliant white shirt, threading cufflinks into his cuffs. Soldiers had fired on starving workers and they were going out to a party. What kind of a world was this? I thought of the way the young speaker had fallen from his box, shot like a duck on the wing. I remembered how the soldiers prevented people from leaving the square by forming two lines, the front on one knee, the back standing, and picking us off as we fled. After they were gone, Avdokia came and sat by my bed and stroked my hair. “Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Don’t you know if anything happened to you, I couldn’t live one day?” I held her hand pressed next to my face and wept.

I dreamed of horses, of being crushed, of falling under a carriage, my leg caught in the traces, being dragged along the ground. I dreamed I was riding a horse over a jump and it caught a hoof, threw me, then fell on me. I wept because I had died and hadn’t even had time to live yet.

Gunfire awakened me. I thought I had dreamed it, but no, there it was, the now familiar crackling. Whom could they be shooting now? Surely the workers had gone to bed long ago. Was it people they’d arrested—could they be executing them? I sat up, turned on the small lamp. Three a.m. How I wished that Kolya were here, someone I could really talk to. But he would never understand me. He would never understand what it felt like to take another’s cause as his own—or, rather, to see his own in another’s. Volodya would understand, but he was far away, in the snows of Galicia.

Instead, I padded to my bookcase and picked out an anthology of poetry, to see if anyone had something to say to me tonight. I kept thinking of Akhmatova’s poem, the one she read that night at the Stray Dog. What would I give now for the people to have their wish? Yes, my happiness, yes my laurel wreath. What a child I’d been.

I sat up in bed, reading, seeking consolation from poets to whom none of this would have been a surprise—Pushkin, Lermontov—when I noticed my door silently opening, as if pushed by a ghost. Was it the student? “Hello?” I whispered.

“It’s me.” Varvara slipped in, carrying an old portmanteau bag. She dropped it onto my bed. “She kicked me out, the witch.”

The high prattling of gunfire still rang out. She’d come all the way from Vasilievsky in this? She sat on my bed, sniffed the lavender cloth with which Avdokia had wiped my face, threw it back in its bowl. I didn’t want to see her. Her being here brought it all back—the stifling crowd, the horses, the woman curled on the ground. “Who let you in?”

She grinned, bouncing on the bed. “I bribed Basya to leave your back entrance open. Don’t be angry. Of all nights, we should be dancing for joy!”

She had lost her mind. We’d been in a massacre. It could have been us. I’d seen a beautiful young man bleed his life out on the stones of the square. I turned over and put the pillow over my head.

She pulled it away from me and threw it on the floor. “The soldiers are in mutiny, Marina. It’s moving among the barracks like a grass fire. Can’t you hear it? They’re rising up. They won’t do it anymore.”

The soldiers who had shot at us today? Please, Holy Mother…

“After the attack today, the strikers went to the barracks and talked to the soldiers. The Pavlovskys broke out to see for themselves. They clashed with the police. We’re not talking strikers now. There’s no going back. It’s mutiny.” The Pavlovsky regiment. The soldiers were fighting with the police. Watch the soldiers, Kolya had always said. I found myself shaking again. Varvara reached into her boot and pulled out a bent papirosa, the cheap cigarettes comprising an inch of bad tobacco and three of cardboard holder. She opened the fortochka and smoked, blowing the fumes out into the night. I could hear the gunfire louder on the clear air. “They’re all coming out. The Volynskys, the Pavlovskys, even the Preobrazhenskys.” The most prestigious Life Guard units. She exhaled a stream of smoke. “Just think, Marina—a quarter of a million soldiers are stationed right here in Petrograd. Add that to a city full of striking workers. That’s storing your powder next to your kindling.”

I thought of the soldiers in Znamenskaya Square. Could they have changed that quickly? Shooting workers at noon, then supporting them at midnight?

“They’ve voted to join the revolution,” she said. “They don’t want to fight the people. Shoot women, children. You saw them today. They hated what they were doing.”

“You mean they’re out there running around? A quarter million soldiers?” I wanted them to support the workers, but I thought of the soldiers on the trams—and imagined the havoc they could wreak. “What if they break into the wine shops?”

“No, no, no. You still don’t understand.” She threw her head back impatiently. “They’re forming soldiers’ councils—soldiers’ soviets. They’re voting for deputies. They’re shooting their officers.” She flicked the end of her cigarette out the window, kicked off her boots, and got into bed with me. She smelled of tobacco and pencil shavings. “There’s no turning back. If it doesn’t succeed, they’ve signed their own death warrants. Better get some sleep, Marina. It’s going to be quite a day tomorrow.”

14 In the Land of Red

THE NEXT THING I knew, Varvara was shaking me. The clock read 7:00 a.m. Still dark. She’d already dressed—her coat buttoned, her hat on. “Come on,” she whispered. “Get dressed.” There would be no school today, and I’d imagined I would spend my hours quietly reading, writing, trying to recover my soul.

“I can’t. Not after what happened.”

“Listen.” She gestured, finger in the air. Nothing. An absolute silence had replaced the percussion of the night. She sat down on the bed next to me. “This is it. It’s mutiny if they fail. But if they succeed, it’s revolution. For that student—let’s be there. His death was for a reason, Marina. He believed in it. How about you?”

I didn’t want to see anybody else die. Yet what kind of coward wants to see justice but isn’t willing to stand up for it? The Lermontov lines from last night’s reading returned to me:

Perhaps this was the moment.

I found an old dress and some boots and followed her down the hall. Seryozha poked his head from his room. “Where are you going? You’re not really going out today?”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I’m not a complete coward,” he said.

“It’s not a test,” I replied.

Outside, the streetlamps glowed, eerie halos of yellow, and my eyes stung from smoke. The three of us crept through the shadows to the end of our block, where soldiers fortified a barricade with sandbags and metal braces. The mannequins in the milliner’s window goggled at the strange sight of soldiers loitering, rifles slung over their shoulders, their officers snapping orders. Seryozha dug out his notebook and sketched the unlikely juxtaposition of the heads and the dark silhouettes of the servicemen.

“I thought you said they’d got rid of their officers,” I whispered to Varvara.

“You’ll see. Follow me.”

We doubled back, cutting through dim courtyards, startling a group of drunks sharing a bottle around a small garbage fire. One of them threw an empty bottle after us, laughing as it shattered.

Below Basseinaya Street, a luxury motorcar roared around the corner in the snow, twenty soldiers impossibly balanced on running boards and clinging to the bumpers, standing on the seats. They held their bayoneted rifles out like porcupine quills. Flags flew from the car’s hood, and some men fired into the air for no reason other than to hear the revolutionary music. Seryozha and I dived back into the passageway, where other people had taken shelter. Varvara, however, remained unprotected at the curb, enthralled by the danger and the chaos. In the crowded passageway, I rested my head on Seryozha’s shoulder. I could feel him trembling. “Let’s go back,” he whispered.

Honestly, I had been thinking the same thing, but I would not dishonor that student’s death by spending the day with Mother looking through photo albums and writing odes. “We could go to Mina’s,” Seryozha said. “It’s closer, and we don’t have to cross the barricades.”

I understood—he didn’t want to be left alone on the street. He wanted me to see him to some safe harbor. I owed him that much.

The black door opened. Still in shawl and nightdress, gray braid over her shoulder, Sofia Yakovlevna appeared in the lamp’s glow. “What on earth?” She pulled us inside the familiar apartment, smelling of kasha and the coats hanging in the anteroom. “What are you doing here? Don’t you know what’s going on?”

“The soldiers have broken out of barracks,” Varvara said. “It’s revolution.”

Gunshots echoed off the tall buildings on the Liteiny side, illustrating her point. “So I hear,” said the older woman.

Seryozha craned to look past her. “Is Solomon Moiseivich…”

“He got a call from a friend at the Echo. He left like there was a fire.” Worry rose from her round figure like heat from an oven. “He’ll either be shot or have photographs to live on the rest of his life.”

She led us into the parlor, where a sewing project covered the table under the milk-glass bowl of the chandelier. Seryozha picked up a scrap of the fabric, a pretty rust-colored wool with a small paisley print, and fingered it appraisingly, like a tailor. “It’s a dress for Dunya,” said Mina’s mother. The middle daughter, Dunya, the family beauty, with her shining dark hair and eyes. “She’s growing so fast. Like a sunflower.”

I wondered how my mother would describe me. Certainly not as a sunflower. I thought of Sofia Yakovlevna, sewing here in her robe in the early hours. How she welcomed us in. Mother wouldn’t have answered the door in her nightdress if the end of the world were at hand.

The older woman lit the spirit flame under the samovar just as Dunya came out from her room, tucking up her braids. “Give them tea, Dunechka. I’ll finish dressing and get breakfast started.”

“We’re not staying,” Varvara said bluntly.

“Surely we have time to eat,” I said. I was in no hurry to leave the warmth of the flat for soldiers driving around shooting in the air.

Seryozha found a loose scrap of the fabric and a threaded needle and began to sew—a sight that would have given Father a seizure. As Dunya prepared the tea, I examined the photographs that decorated the walls. Writers, actresses, singers, the most famous artists in Russia—all of them had sat for Solomon Moiseivich. Maxim Gorky as a serious young man, surprisingly handsome in a dark Russian blouse. Chaliapin, big and pale-haired, with luminous eyes above a dark fur collar. Mendeleev as an old man, his long ragged beard and wise eyes. And what would today bring?

The telephone rang. It sounded like an explosion. Dunya ran to the hall to grab it before it woke everyone. “Oh yes, Dmitry Ivanovich.” We could hear her high voice. Seryozha gazed down at his handiwork as if he’d never seen it before. “They’re right here. Marina?” It was up to me. Dunya rounded her eyes in alarm as she handed me the receiver.

“Yes, Papa?”

He didn’t bother to greet me. “I thought as much. It’s an insurrection, a military insurrection, and you’re out wandering the city? I can’t pick you up, I’m going to the Tauride Palace. The emperor has suspended the Duma. You are to remain at the Katzevs’.”

I traced a stripe of their rose-and-green wallpaper with my finger. “Yes, Papa.”

“You are not to move until I can send someone. Do I have your solemn promise, whatever it’s worth these days?”

“Yes.” In a way, I was relieved by his abruptness. He wasn’t asking for an explanation. There was no need to lie or beg forgiveness.

“I don’t know what you’re using for brains, but I suggest you try something else. It’s inexcusable to impose on the Katzevs, but there’s nothing for it. Let me talk to Sofia Yakovlevna, and for God’s sake, stay put.”

Mina’s mother stood in the hallway, dressed now but with her gray hair still undone. She took the receiver reluctantly. My father at the best of times intimidated her. “Yes. Of course… it’s no trouble, really. As long as necessary. Don’t give it another thought, Dmitry Ivanovich.” She paused. “And good luck—all our hopes are with you.”

It struck me again—this was real. Even my father was part of it.

Varvara knelt on the window seat to look down into the intersection. “Now that’s a beautiful sight,” she said. “Now that’s poetry.” I peered over her shoulder. In the warming light, the streets had been transformed. Red rags hung from windows and from streetlights. Red flags decorated commandeered motorcars and festooned the fronts of abandoned trams. Red had been tied onto horses’ bridles and around the coat sleeves of workers. Krasniy, krasiviy. Red, beautiful. Twins.

Mina emerged from her room in a thick sweater and skirt, her ash-blond plait still untidy from sleep. She knelt on the cushions of the window seat and pressed her face to the cold glass. “Why aren’t you out there, Robespierre?” Her new name for Varvara.

“We’re just getting something to eat,” she said. “You coming?”

“Sure,” she said. “Who wouldn’t want to be shot by some drunken soldier?”

Soon the phone started ringing and did not stop. A friend reported that a police station on the Vyborg side was on fire, another that there was fighting on the Liteiny Bridge. Mina’s youngest sister, Shusha, improbably dressed in a revolutionary ensemble of red flannel nightshirt and a red ribbon tied around her forehead like a fillet, found a set of old brass opera glasses through which to better examine the insurrection below.

Sofia Yakovlevna, carrying in a bowl of steaming kasha, stopped to admire Seryozha’s embroidery. They were sunflowers, for Dunya. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

He smiled wryly, painfully. Their perception of him was so different from the prevailing one in our household.

We ate breakfast with the whole family, Mina’s aunt and uncle—awake and dressed now—jumping up periodically to take the glasses from Shusha and monitor the situation below. As we finished our tea, our young sentry reported, “Something’s happening at the police station.”

Varvara leaped up and grabbed the glasses, focused, pressed them back into Shusha’s hands. “They’re breaking in. Let’s go!” She dashed to get her coat. I only hesitated a moment before I followed her.

Mina stared after us. “Are you crazy?”

Sofia Yakovlevna stepped in front of me. “Marina, your father! Don’t make me a liar.”

I loved her, this kind, worried woman, but I couldn’t spend the day embroidering as the revolution was being born. I wanted to breathe its air, see its beautiful wings unfold. “I’ll come right back, I promise.” I didn’t want to shove her out of my way, but I feinted left and darted right and ran past her, putting on my coat as I went.

Down at the station, a group of soldiers rhythmically hurled themselves against its locked doors as others urged them on. “Come on, boys!” “Heave-ho!” “Eyy ukhnem…”—the song of the Volga boatmen. Strikers and ordinary citizens pressed in to watch.

My heart was flying in my chest, thinking of yesterday’s massacre. What if the police came rushing out? But I hadn’t seen a policeman since we’d arrived on this side of the barricades. At last the doors gave way, tearing at the locks. The black maw of the station gaped like a mouth in an O. But now the soldiers hesitated, clustered on the steps, speaking among themselves.

“What are they waiting for?” Varvara shouted. “Why don’t they go in?”

“It might be a trap,” replied a soldier with a pale face and bloodshot eyes. “They could be waiting for us. Leave this to us, little comrade.”

Finally, a small group of soldiers decided there was nothing for it but to go in, rifles leveled, bayonets fixed. In a moment, a second group followed them. Then workers entered, pouring through the gap like water through a sluice. Varvara flashed a grin, tipped her head toward the opening. She wanted us to follow them. I backed up to join the crowd of the less determined as she vanished through the broken doors. After yesterday, I preferred my blood inside my skin. I knew Sofia Yakovlevna was watching from the windows, so I turned and waved. She could honestly say she’d never let me out of her sight.

After a few minutes, people reappeared in the doorway. They were handing out boxes of papers, dumping them onto the sidewalk. I joined the human chain. The piles grew. As we waited, I picked out a piece of paper from the mass. Boris Vissarionovich Agazhanian. A report from a police agent. His address, his place of business. They were dumping police files, the hated surveillance that all Russians suffered. The country was riddled with agents—every dvornik was paid to report on the comings and goings of the house. And if you were involved in public life, nothing you did would go unnoticed. For a prominent critic like Father, an outspoken Kadet, frequent contributor to liberal journals, it took day-to-day courage to go about his business. He knew every word and action would be recorded, reported, anything could be used against him. Varvara probably had a dossier by now. Maybe I did, too. We threw hundreds of these files onto the pavement. A young, nimble striker lit the corners of the pile with a seriousness of one lighting a candle in church. Black smoke feathered up. I set Boris Vissarionovich Agazhanian onto the flames, set him free from his petty sins, the gossip of his neighbors, the political innuendo. He and the others. A spark fell onto a woman’s skirt and she quickly batted it out. When the bonfire grew too hot, we threw the files in from a distance.

Then a man appeared in the broken doorway. He stopped on the step and gazed bewildered at the crowd. Others emerged, like ghosts from the underworld. Two, three, then a dozen, wearing gray pajamas. They were letting the prisoners go.

“It’s your lucky day, Comrades!” an old man shouted out to them. “You’re free!” One after another, they began to realize that their situation had changed for the better, and they melted into the crowd. Znamenskaya Square was not the end, after all, but only the beginning.

After dark Solomon Moiseivich returned to the Katzev flat, ash from the fires dusting his greatcoat, smearing his face. Seryozha jumped up to take the camera and tripod from him. Sofia Yakovlevna ran to him, smiling with relief as she helped him out of his coat and brushed at soot with vigorous blows.

“They broke into the police station,” Shusha clamored. “Varvara went in.”

“Telephone’s out,” Mina said.

Shusha twirled on the parquet, her red ribbon flying. “Look, I’m a mutineer.”

“Greetings, Comrade,” her father said with a laugh. He sat heavily in his chair at the table.

His wife went to get him his dinner while Dunya pulled off his boots. “Korolenko down the hall says the emperor’s sending troops from the front. Is it true?”

“There’s a lot of territory between here and the front,” the big man said, sighing with pleasure as the boots left his feet and his slippers replaced them. “Many things can happen before then, child. Every hour it’s something new.” He pulled Shusha toward him, kissed the side of her head.

“They broke into the police station. Marina was there! They let the prisoners out.”

Sofia Yakovlevna gave me an exasperated look as she set her husband’s soup before him. She was still angry at me for not coming back after the police station. Instead I’d followed Varvara up to the Arsenal. We’d heard that soldiers had broken in and were handing out rifles and pistols to the strikers like prizes at a fair. If the people were armed, surely the revolution would not be put down so easily. They would defend themselves. They would not be mowed down again. I saw it for myself: soldiers passing crate after crate to the crowd, the people breaking the wooden boxes open. Even though I knew it had to be, it was a chilling sight—the wartime arsenal of Russia delivered into the hands of the revolution. I hadn’t seen Varvara since then, she’d been lost in the crowd.

Now the bearish photographer squeezed Seryozha’s skinny arm. “I hope you’re rested. We’re going to have a long night. Ready?”

It was one in the morning when Seryozha woke us. No one had gone to bed, we slept in the parlor. Too much was at stake. We crowded, bleary-eyed, in the darkroom, our faces painted red from the safety light. Solomon Moiseivich’s deep round voice rang out in the dark. “I got a call early this morning. Vasily Rodionovich from the Echo said the Pavlovsky regiment was breaking out of barracks, headed for the Winter Palace. Marching behind their regimental band. I dressed so fast I almost forgot my shirt.” Into the bath went the first print. The photograph bloomed: a ragged parade crossing Palace Square.

He indicated with a flick of his fingers for Seryozha to transfer the paper to the next tray while he took down another square of processed film, exposed the next shot. I could hear Uncle Aaron’s wheezing. The chemicals were hard on the old man’s lungs, they stung the eyes. Mina shoved her glasses back up on her nose. Seryozha poked at the paper with tongs.

A line appeared… a roofline bisecting the paper, studded with the familiar statues decorating the Winter Palace. We stared into that sink as if into a scrying basin. And against the glowing white of the sky, clear as ink on rice paper, a tattered banner flew, dark against light. I knew it was red. History was emerging from its shell like a chick from an egg.

“And the emperor?” Sofia Yakovlevna whispered.

“Still at Stavka,” her husband replied. Stavka, staff headquarters at the front. “But they took the Winter Palace. The sentries surrendered without a fight. They all but handed over the keys to the tsar’s washroom.”

Without a fight. I thought of those guns handed out today. I no longer believed in miracles.

A new page hit the developer. Upon the familiar stone steps of the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma, a man harangued a large crowd. I recognized the long, equine face and squarish head of cropped hair—Kerensky, the radical lawyer and Duma member. Father considered him a rabble-rouser, vain and emotionally unstable. But he got results. He wore a military tunic instead of the usual frock coat and tie, and the photo caught him midbreath, giving an impassioned speech. “What did he say?”

Solomon Moiseivich indicated with lifted palms for Seryozha to keep agitating the print. “He called for seizure of the telegraph, the railway, all the government offices. He demanded the ministers be arrested.”

Other elements in the Duma were moving ahead of Father. The telephone was already out, they must have taken it. Again, I felt the thrill of the burning police files. This was really happening. And we were all part of it, together, the whole country moving into the unknown.

My brother pulled the photo into the stop bath as the big man continued his story. “Kerensky’s playing liaison between the Duma and the Workers’ Group. It’s now called the Workers’ Soviet. He shuttles between them like a tennis ball. The Duma’d better do something, or the Soviet will.” We demand a Workers’ Soviet. We demand ice cream on Tuesdays and an automobile for every scrubwoman. So they had their Soviet now. What else might have happened while we dozed in the Katzevs’ parlor? I could not believe how fast the world could change once it started to move.

In the tank, a hall with pillars and red flags appeared on the sheet, hundreds of pale faces. “This is the Soviet. Think, Mama, this morning these people were prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Now they’re meeting with delegates and writing proclamations.”

Sofia Yakovlevna covered her mouth, her eyes glittering but unsure.

“But which one is the government?” Shusha asked. “The Soviet or the Duma?”

“It remains to be seen, my dove,” her father replied.

As we settled down to sleep that night, all of us stinking of the darkroom chemicals, there was one image I could not get out of my head. A rough band of common soldiers, eighty men or more, posing for Solomon Moiseivich around a commandeered automobile, grimly defiant, each face fiercely focused. Men who just yesterday had been about to be shipped to the front to fight in this hopeless war were suddenly masters of their own fate, history thrust into their hands. What would they do with such unexpected power? You could see it in their eyes, behind their defiance—a terrified confusion. Today they were for the revolution, but what about tomorrow? They themselves did not know.

15 Visitors

GUNFIRE SOUNDED THROUGHOUT THE following day. Whoever was shooting—police, officers who’d escaped the mutineers, workers—it was clear that the regime wasn’t handing over the keys to the tsar’s washroom quite so easily. Varvara never returned, and gunfire or not, Seryozha had left with Solomon Moiseivich, propping a note on the divan where he’d slept, a drawing of him bearing the film case behind the bearded photographer, followed by a parade of armed mice.

I did my best to be cooperative, to make it easier and more fun for everybody to be locked up in the apartment. I played poker with the girls and Aunt Fanya, rounds of chess with Mina. I even let her win. She was a sulky loser and hadn’t had Dmitry Makarov to teach her the moves of the masters. I taught Dunya to waltz as her little sister banged out Tales from the Vienna Woods on the piano. I won a bet with young Shusha by walking on my hands all the way down the hall. All this was to make it up to Sofia Yakovlevna for defying her the day before. She was always so kind, so tolerant. But she was accustomed to her own girls, who did exactly what she said.

I even offered to help with lunch. I stood in the small kitchen, chopping cabbage inelegantly before a tall window filled with plants in pots. I’d never cooked anything in my life. Sofia Yakovlevna chopped onions the way a gambler shuffles cards, not even looking at her hands and the flashing knife. “You let that girl influence you too much,” she scolded me as we worked. “We love Varvara, but such an angry girl I’ve never seen. You be careful. She’s going to bring such trouble down around her. I can see it as if it were written on her face.”

“She’s more bark than bite,” I said, sucking my finger where I’d nicked it with my knife—it was scalpel-sharp.

The older woman wagged her head, neither yes nor no. Lifting the cutting board over a pan smoking with oil, she scraped the onions in with a whoosh and a sizzle, the delicious smell blooming. Steam coated the window. Broth boiled in another kettle. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Listen to me. I know she’s your friend, but she’s going to bring misery to everyone around her. You keep doing what you’re doing. Go to school, write your poems. You’re not a revolutionary—you’re a girl from a good family who has such wonderful prospects if she doesn’t get swept away by all this.”

She looked at my pile of mangled cabbage and sighed. “Like this.” She took the knife from me, cut an even wedge from a second cabbage, and began slicing it so thinly you’d think she was shaving its face. She watched me as I tried again, using the blade as she’d showed me. Uniform shreds of cabbage peeled off the wedge. Her smile worked its way from behind her sternness like sun from behind a cloud. “See? You’re not so hopeless. You should get that cook of your parents’ to show you a few things—someday you might have to live in this world.”

Just the words I’d thrown at my great-aunt.

We sat down to lunch, jumpy from the sound of gunfire in the street. Suddenly shots rang out above our heads. Were they shooting from the roof? Now it was returned, and bullets shattered the masonry around our windows. One broke an upper pane. Dunya screamed. “Get down!” Uncle Aaron shouted, and we all dived under the table, grabbing for each other’s hands. Dunya was crying. Her aunt held her. “Tishe, tishe…” Sofia Yakovlevna prayed a Jewish prayer. I had never heard her speak in the language I assumed was Hebrew. We waited to see if there would be more gunfire, but it seemed to be over. We had just begun crawling out from under the table when we heard the thunder of booted feet in the hall. Fists pounded on the door, then something harder—a rifle butt.

“Oh God, here they come,” Mina whispered and we crawled back under. “Shh,” her mother whispered. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

“Search party,” a man called out. “By the power of the Military Revolutionary Committee, open this door!”

“I’ll get it,” Uncle Aaron said, crawling out backward. I could see his feet in their worn slippers, the heels he never pulled up when he donned them. “Coming, Comrades!” Cold air wafted in from the hall, and heavy boots stamped into the flat, all we could see from under the tablecloth.

“Are you here alone, Grandpa?”

“The family’s under the table.”

“Tell them to come out.”

Dunya and Shusha were crying. Mina held my hand tightly as we came out to face five unshaved, grim soldiers, three with rifles, bayonets fixed, two with pistols, drawn and ready. Crude red armbands decorated the sleeves of their patched greatcoats. It was one thing to see mutineers on the street busy breaking into a police station or throwing rifles to a crowd, but quite another to have them just a few feet away pointing their guns at you. Mina was crushing my hand.

“Someone’s firing from these windows,” shouted the eldest, with a squared-off beard and close-set eyes, his cap cocked back on his head. “Hands where I can see them.”

We held our hands in the air. “Please… there’s no one but us, Officer,” begged Sofia Yakovlevna. “I swear to God.”

The man laughed harshly. “No more officers now, Mama. Only men. Spread out, boys. Rykov—you watch them.”

A red-eyed boy who looked like he hadn’t slept in days pointed his pistol at each of us in turn as we all listened, following the crashing progress of the searchers through the flat. I silently prayed we would live through this. The gun jerked from me to Sofia Yakovlevna to Shusha in her red ribbons—as if any one of us might attack him if he blinked. He was going to kill us by accident. “We’re not going to hurt you, son,” said little, hunchbacked Aunt Fanya. “You don’t have to keep pointing that thing at us.”

“You shut up, Grandma, unless you want to eat a lead sandwich,” he said.

Then we heard it. Gunfire, directly above us. Whoever was shooting had made it to the roof. The mutineers emerged from the rooms at a run and thundered back through the front door. “Sorry, citizens!” shouted the square-bearded one as they flew from the flat.

It took a moment for the blood to return to my head. I felt dizzy. My hands shook. They’d only been in the flat a minute, two at most, like a vicious thunderstorm. We could hear their boots on the roof. Shots. Scuffling, screams. It went on and on—what were they doing to him? Finally, we saw the body, flung off the roof and down into the street. Now the sound of their boots, clattering back down the staircase, and the slam of the door as they left the building.

Uncle Aaron and Aunt Fanya went back to their bedroom to lie down, and Sofia Yakovlevna moved the rest of us into the photography studio with its black curtains, its windows facing away from Liteiny, where most of the gunfire was coming from. She built a fire in the studio stove to take off the chill, though our mood was damp as the Baltic. I peered through the gaps in the curtains, watching people moving along the sidewalks. One group was busy breaking into a food store. Soldiers came out of a wine shop, their arms full of bottles. I felt less like the girl who’d burned the police files and more like I had yesterday—vulnerable, overwhelmed. Uncle Aaron thought the shooter was an officer enraged at the mutineers, deciding to revenge himself on the disloyal troops.

I thought about Volodya, handsome in his fur-lined greatcoat. What would he do if his troops mutinied? Would he bend, like the little birches? Would he understand the great sea change that had come, that the masses could not suffer anymore, that they’d risen up? Or would he insist on discipline? O Holy Theotokos, I prayed, let him be wounded… not really wounded, just a graze, or a touch of fever… lying in a tent, out of the way in some field hospital. Let him not be telling his men to get back in line, to salute and march on.

Shusha curled up in an armchair and mournfully ran her red hair ribbon through her fingers, sucking her thumb as she hadn’t done for years. Mina went into the darkroom to investigate the damage. Dunya sat with her mother, staring sad-eyed at the door. I could still hear the man’s screaming. What was he thinking, shooting at the soldiers? How many of them did he think he could kill? A whole revolution? Yet I would never forget the vicious reprisal, either. One death did not salve another.

We could hear Mina sweeping up glass, the delicate clatter as she deposited it in the waste can. I knew Sofia Yakovlevna was thinking of her husband, in the thick of it with his camera. And my brother, having at last found something he would die for.

Dunya started weeping again. “They didn’t have to kill him.”

“It’s out of our hands, Dunya, dear.”

Dunya wrapped her arms around her mother and pressed their foreheads together. I envied them.

“Shushele, why don’t you get the magic lantern? We haven’t seen that in a long time.”

The girl jumped to her feet and ran to the shelf where the lantern and the slides were kept. Yes, it was exactly what we needed. The Katzevs had a marvelous collection of hand-painted glass slides from their mother’s own childhood—of Afanasyev fairy tales and Jewish stories and travelogues. As Shusha set up the old projector, Mina emerged from the darkroom, smelling of the vinegary stop bath. “Aren’t we a little old for this?” she said when she saw the projector.

“You don’t have to watch if you don’t like it,” said her little sister. “Dunya, you choose.”

It was nice of Shusha. After the afternoon’s incursion the gentle middle sister seemed the hardest hit.

“Vasilisa the Beautiful,” Dunya said softly.

It was my favorite, too. “God, the one’s sucking her thumb, the other’s talking to magic dolls,” Mina said, leaning next to me by the curtained windows.

Sofia Yakovlevna ignored her, waiting for Shusha to put in the first slide, which depicted a pretty little girl and a stout father in a long boyar’s caftan. She began telling the story of Vasilisa, whose dying mother leaves her a magic doll. “Zhili-buili, once upon a time, there lived a merchant who had a daughter named Vasilisa the Beautiful…” The slides were exquisitely painted, sharp and vivid, not like the factory-made things one saw in most people’s nurseries. “When she was nine, her mother fell deathly ill,” she continued in a voice both soft and rich. “She called Vasilisa to her side and gave her a doll. Not just any doll, mind. A magic doll. She told her daughter that whenever she needed help, she should take the doll out and give it a little to drink, a little to eat. And then the doll would tell her what she needed to do.”

Shusha was having trouble removing the slide. “Oh let me do it,” said Mina impatiently. “You’re going to break it.”

That made me smile. Even our scientist wanted the reassurance of a story, her mother’s voice, this tale of a girl who has a secret way of finding help in a wild world. I was sorry Seryozha wasn’t here. He’d never heard Sofia Yakovlevna do her slide show, and these were wonders he would appreciate. But I thought of him on the streets of Petrograd at Solomon Moiseivich’s side and knew he needed to be there. Father always accused me of not letting him grow up. Maybe it was true at that.

Halfway through the story, the flat’s doorbell rang. “Pretend we’re not here,” whispered Dunya.

“I’ll go,” I offered, but Sofia Yakovlevna shook her head vehemently. “You girls stay out of sight.”

But when she opened the door to the flat, it was Varvara’s voice we heard, already in the parlor talking to Aunt Fanya. She followed the old lady in, her bobbed hair matted, her clothes wrinkled. “What are you doing back here in the dark?” she said, then saw the slide on the wall, Vasilisa feeding the doll to help her with the witch Baba Yaga’s impossible chores. “Really? Fairy stories, today of all days?”

“The soldiers broke in,” Shusha said. “Someone was shooting. They threw him off the roof. It was horrible.”

Mina’s glasses picked up the light from the magic lantern’s flame. “The one guarding us almost shot us.”

“I’m sure they weren’t looking for chubby chemistry students,” Varvara said cheerfully. Her good mood seemed tasteless, as out of place as a polka at a funeral.

“They didn’t spare him,” I said.

Our gloomy faces should have told her how bad it was, but she just shrugged. “It was a risk he took.”

“You didn’t hear him,” I said.

“You’re not asking me why I’m here.” She grinned, fairly dancing on the balls of her feet.

“You got hungry?” Mina guessed.

On Sofia Yakovlevna’s face, a mixture of fear and curiosity. “Would you like some shchi? Marina helped me make it.”

Varvara’s smirk told me what she thought of my embryonic culinary skills. “Oh she did? Very domestic. No, I’m fine. Dandy.” She used the English word. Now that she had our attention, she went to the studio costume rack, plucked a tricorn hat with a plume off the shelf, and dropped it onto my head. “Your Imperial Majesty!” She bowed. “Where are you right now?”

“Stavka,” Shusha said. “That’s what Papa said.”

“A good guess, my kitten, but in this case—wrong.” Varvara took my hand as if we were dancing a quadrille and led me to the velvet armchair where Solomon Moiseivich so often photographed clients. She seated me in it, then handed me a vase as a scepter. “His Imperial Highness is on his special train, returning to Petrograd.”

“Bozhe moi,” said Sofia Yakovlevna. Good Lord.

“Accompanied by a trainload of loyal troops.”

This was it—the tsar would crush the revolution. The mutineers would go to the firing squad or to the front, and all would be back to the way it was before.

“Yes, you’ve decided to end this revolt business once and for all.” She shook the plume, tickling my nose. “Show us who’s boss—or so you think. But here’s the thing. What you don’t know is that the telegraph workers are on our side. They report straight to the Soviet.”

“How do you know this?” Mina demanded, folding her arms across her chest.

“I’ve been spending time at the Tauride Palace. At the Soviet. And as we speak, it seems, the railway workers are shifting and shunting His Imperial Highness around like a badminton cock. ‘We’re so sorry, Gospodar, there’s snow on the tracks. We’ll have to send you to Petrograd by way of Pskov! Such a nuisance, I know! But there’s nothing for it.’”

The genius. It took my breath away.

“And listen,” Varvara said, squeezing my shoulder. “Wherever he stops, his soldiers—his most loyal troops—get wind of the revolution and melt away like cheap candles. He’ll be lucky to have a footman left by morning.”

Sofia Yakovlevna opened the dark curtain behind her, letting in the afternoon sun and dispelling the last of our dreaminess. Her face looked older in the winter light. “What about the other troops? The ones they sent when the mutiny broke out?”

“That’s the best of all,” Varvara said, perching on the arm of my chair. She smelled sharp and stale—how long had it been since she’d bathed? “Evidently some of the tsar’s advisers think a slaughter would look bad to the Allies. The troops have been told not to come into Petrograd. They’re sitting at Dno, waiting for orders—which aren’t going to come.” The crooked grin widened. She looked like a child at Christmas who actually received the pony he asked for. “Check and mate.”

And it occurred to me then that my friend had been born at just the right time. More than any of us, me or Mina or even Father, she was in exact alignment with the times. Its dangers weren’t dangers to her; its violence matched her own.

Mina’s mother paced, her hand to her mouth, trying to understand what it would all mean for her family. She and Aunt Fanya began to talk, and Mina joined them.

“You stink,” I said to Varvara. “Where did you sleep last night, a kennel?”

“At your house, actually,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.” Was she joking? “Basya let me in.”

Though Varvara was my friend, I was absurdly irritated with our maid. It wasn’t very loyal of her. But Basya was a sly character, always looking for some gossip, some trouble to stir up. She probably just liked putting one over on the baryn.

My dismay must have been obvious, because she added, “Are you upset? Where else was I supposed to go?”

“You could have stayed here,” I said.

“Too far.” She added in my ear, “And I don’t think Mama Katzev likes me very much. Look at her.”

Mina’s mother stood with her arms crossed, exactly like Mina, anxious-eyed, as if Varvara had swept in a bit of gunpowder on her skirts. “She’s okay,” I said. “But I wish you wouldn’t use my place. Father’ll go crazy if he finds you there.”

“He sleeps late. We’re out by six, me and the comrades.”

I turned so that Sofia Yakovlevna couldn’t see my face. “What?”

Varvara laughed. “You have something against the comrades? The Ericssons? The women from Belhausen? You might have to wash your hairbrush, but—”

“Tell me you’re joking.” Would she really do that, bring the devil knew who into my parents’ flat? Into my bed? “Varvara, you didn’t.”

“Come on. Be a sport. You want me to sleep in a doorway?”

I wanted to strangle her. “Listen, you can stay, but don’t bring anyone else. Promise me.” She was laughing. “Varvara! It’s not funny!”

But she clearly thought it was. “What’s the matter? You marched with them, you braved arrest. We’re talking about a bed you’re not even using.”

Was I being hypocritical? I would march with strikers but not allow one to sleep in my bed? Then I thought of the soldiers, the screams of the man on the roof. And frankly, just the thought of unwashed strangers…

“Just promise. I’m serious.” I pulled a lock of her hair, twisted it around my finger. “Or our friendship is done.”

Her eyes grew glossy with unexpected hurt. Her mouth worked, pressing back a tremble. And I realized with a shock that I was all she had. She had no family, no close friends… if she lost my confidence, she would have no one at all. I let her go.

She gave one shuddering sigh and embraced me. Kissed me as though she was going away, searched my eyes. “You know you’re being completely selfish and ridiculous—but I promise. I was just kidding, anyway. But don’t say things like that.” She took my hands. “Still love me?”

“Of course,” I said. “You might have a wash, though.”

“Burzhui. Look, I have to get back to the Soviet—I just wanted to tell you about the railway. I miss you. You should come with me.”

But I would not.

When she turned back to the others, she put her swagger back on, like a favorite coat, hitched up her skirt revealing the gun in the waistband. “In five years we’ll all look back, and today will seem like another century.”

On March 2, our fourth day at the Katzevs’, Father came to fetch us. It was just after breakfast, and I’d made the kasha myself. He wore a fresh shirt and smiled like a man who, having walked through a storm, feels the sun drying the clothes on his back. He followed Uncle Aaron to the table, the old man still in his robe and slippers. In his arms, Father held a sack the size of a young sheep. He wouldn’t sit down. His brown eyes glittered, laughter in them, and amazement.

“What do you hear in the Duma, Dmitry Ivanovich?” Sofia Yakovlevna asked. “Is this going to end?”

“He’s abdicated,” Father said. “He’s signing today.”

Abdication. The tsar was removing his crown, setting it down on the grass, and walking away.

Abdication, a great brass bell, solemn, resonant, deafening.

Abdication, the word that had sounded so treasonous that day at the Hotel Europa. So radical when the strikers had called for it that day in Znamenskaya Square.

We gazed at each other like simpletons, and every face bore the same expression as our sluggish minds struggled to absorb the sound, the sense, the moment we learned we were free.

A Russia without a tsar. I sat very still, questioning my arms, my legs, my feet resting on the soil of a land that no longer had a ruler. The light filled the windows as it had the morning before, one still broken—the same light, but without a tsar.

“What about the tsarevich?” Uncle Aaron asked.

Father shook his head. “He abdicates in favor of the Grand Duke Michael, but Michael won’t take the crown without assurances, and he’s not going to get them.”

The crown of Russia had gone from most precious object to poisoned apple, a rotten, stinking potato nobody wanted.

Again, that grave smile. “The Duma Committee’s forming a Provisional Government,” Father said. “Prince Lvov, Miliukov… Kerensky, of course. I don’t know by whose authority, but what else is there? The reins are dragging on the ground.”

Sofia Yakovlevna closed her eyes and inhaled as if a fresh fragrance had entered the room. “Did you think you’d live to see it, Dmitry Ivanovich?”

“Something in me always believed,” he replied. “Though I never imagined it would come in this way.”

Shusha twisted and squirmed in curiosity. “What’s in the bag?”

“Go ahead, open it,” Father said. “From Vera Borisovna and me, a small token to thank you for your kindness, keeping the children so long.”

Shusha began removing packages from the sack, Mina and Dunya carefully peeling their wrappings away. “Oh my God, it’s butter!” Mina exclaimed. A pound of butter wrapped in cheesecloth. A small sack—sugar! Dunya licked her finger and stuck it in the bag, then it went right into her mouth. Her eyes closed. They’d been using saccharine for two years. “Oh, it’s too much, Dmitry Ivanovich,” their mother said, eyeing the whole chicken he’d included. Marmalade. A dozen eggs, individually wrapped in gauze. Aunt Fanya held up a bottle of cognac. “Santé, Dmitry Ivanovich!”

“I think we’ve taken up enough of these good people’s time, Marina. Get your brother.”

I hesitated, looked over at Sofia Yakovlevna. I didn’t want to be the one to tell Father that his son had found another father who understood and appreciated him, that he’d defied orders to follow him into the dangerous city.

“He went out with Solomon Moiseivich,” Sofia Yakovlevna said simply. “He’s helping with the camera.”

My father nodded, as if my brother’s absence were the most natural thing in the world. Now I saw how stunned he was, how truly off his normal balance. The workers, the soldiers, the Russian people he’d fought for but never trusted had just handed him his dearest wish. He’d been surprised into power.

16 Resurrection

VOSKRESENYE, WE SAY. RESURRECTION. We awoke to discover that what we had thought to be eternal, the absolute dictatorship of the Romanovs, had turned to sand. Snow fell that following morning, but by afternoon, a brilliant sun came out, dazzling us. I walked through the neighborhood just to see what the world looked like without a tsar. The air tasted sweeter. The stately houses on Furshtatskaya Street seemed newly washed. A religious feeling welled up in me, that life had been transformed, not just politically but spiritually. It felt like Easter, and I wasn’t the only one who sensed it. People smiled and greeted one another: “Good day to you!” “Good day to you, too!” “Do you believe it?” “Could you ever guess?” On a whim, I bought a huge bouquet from a shop on Liteiny exactly where I’d seen barricades just a few days earlier, and walked around handing out flowers—spicy red carnations and little chrysanthemums. People tucked them into their buttonholes and hats. They seemed euphoric but dazed, as if they were walking in a dream or had been deafened by a blast. I saw that miracles were shocking, as overwhelming as disasters.

On street after street, people broke the Romanov double-headed eagles from fences and buildings. They wrapped them in ropes and pulled, and if they didn’t come loose, they’d smash the stone with crowbars and hammers. “Do it!” the crowds cheered. “Heave-ho!” Pulling off those eagles, with their savage beaks and claws, was like pulling the nails from our own hands. We climbed down from our cross. We were risen.

The new Provisional Government took its first steps away from the rule of autocracy. Under the august leadership of Prince Lvov, a dedicated liberal and the central figure of Father’s Kadet party, eight basic resolutions became the law. I was amazed how far these liberal gentlemen were willing to go. The document granted freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, a constituent assembly elected by universal and secret ballot, men and women alike. It provided for the dissolution of the police “and all its organs” in favor of a militia whose officers were elected and controlled by the city. It declared amnesty for political prisoners and authorized protection for the soldiers who had mutinied, giving them the same rights as civilians when off-duty. It abolished rights based on religion, nationality, and social origin. A daring piece of work.

Kadet Paul Miliukov, the new foreign minister, asked Father to join the foreign office. “You know, I’d rather help draft the constitution,” Father had said that evening, though I could tell he was thrilled at the posting. “But I’ll go where they need me.” They knew he had foreign contacts, and doubtless saw that as more valuable than his legal skills. I thought of Great-Aunt Mariya Grigorievna. Dmitry Ivanovich won’t be satisfied until the Union Jack flies over the Winter Palace. But we were ahead of the English now. Unlike them, we had no king.

But there was another government in Russia as well. The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, elected by the factory committees and the army units, met in the opposite wing from the Duma in the Tauride Palace. Which was the real government? Each body thought it was in charge. The Provisional Government behaved more like a ruling body, with its statesmen and sense of decorum. It continued the war and made policy. But without the support of the workers and the soldiers, its power was only hypothetical. How galling Father found the situation—the Soviet calling the shots, when he himself wasn’t sure the Provisional Government even had the right to govern.

Instead of police, now armed militias called Red Guards patrolled the streets. Neighborhood committees sprang up that were responsible for everything from food distribution to house maintenance. Without police, Avdokia darkly predicted mass drunkenness and looting, but instead—for the most part—you saw a determination to prove that we didn’t need an emperor to govern ourselves as modern, civilized people.

Everyone was part of the revolution now, from bankers to textile workers, even our schoolmistresses—all moving forward together on the same great ship, which had finally left port. It reminded me of the legend of Kitezh, the holy city that sank beneath Lake Svetloyar to keep it out of the reach of Tatar invaders. Legend had it that one day the spell would break, and the city would rise again. That’s how we felt—the three-hundred-year Romanov siege had been broken and the city was rising from under the waters.

The Soviet’s first act in power was a call for elections in the army. From now on, soldier committees would run their units, not officers. Father was apoplectic. “Command isn’t a popularity contest,” he fumed. “We’re still running a war out there!”

“They’re organizing themselves,” I said. “Would you prefer them running amok? If it wasn’t for the soldiers, we’d still have the tsar.” I stirred my morning kasha, which I preferred these days over Western eggs and toast.

“Marina. Don’t let your idealism run away with you,” he said. “I’m all for democracy, but war can’t be won by soldiers’ committees. There has to be discipline, and there has to be expertise.” Vaula brought him his boiled egg in its cup. He cracked the egg smartly, lifting the top off like a brain surgeon, making sure it was properly cooked, with a runny yolk. Mother was sleeping in, but Seryozha and I were back in school.

“Lucky Volodya’s popular,” I said. “Maybe they’ll elect him.”

Father wiped his mouth, checked his Breguet watch. “That’s something to be hoped for. The one silver lining is that these hundreds of so-called soldier delegates are now full voting members of the wise and beneficent Soviet. They’re descending on the Tauride Palace en masse. It’s a mess. They outnumber the workers ten to one. There aren’t enough chairs.” He chuckled, finished his English tea. “The Soviet can’t get a thing done. It’s going to give us time to put our own house in order.”

The rage for elections and committees was contagious. At the Tagantsev Academy, we voted in student committees on policy, curriculum, maintenance, and food supply. The teachers had their own committees, but we got an equal voice—just as in the government and the Soviet. Varvara—and surprisingly, Mina—sat on the academic policy committee, while I signed up for food supply. A provisioning unit. These were exciting times, and I forgot about Kolya for days on end. It was the food supply committee’s responsibility to walk to the district food depot early in the morning and collect the school’s bread and milk. A special perk of the job—we were often accompanied by boys from the nearby Herzen School, which made the assignment far more attractive than arguing over whether there should be calculus in the mathematics curriculum. One boy in particular, Pavlik Gershon, caught my eye. He helped me carry the big milk can, and we talked about Baudelaire. He asked me to go skating after school. “Why not?” I said.

Varvara was the one who heard about the revolutionaries returning from Siberia, where many had been in exile for decades. We bought flowers and trooped down to the Nikolaevsky station—now called Moskovsky—to wait for them. Znamenskaya Square was full of people holding flowers and banners and singing “La Marseillaise.” It still made me queasy to be here, I couldn’t stop seeing the dying student, the snow scattered with bodies. I wished I had known his name. I wished I could tell him that today we would welcome the exiles home and that his death had been part of that. I wished I could tell him I would never forget him, never.

We worked our way through the crowd to the station only to find that the militia was keeping spectators out. Standing to one side, we watched groups of dignitaries arrive. I recognized Kerensky—now the minister of justice—with his military tunic and brush-cut hair. Varvara elbowed me as a handsome old woman in a big fur hat was ushered inside. “Vera Figner,” she said. She’d been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Alexander II, an act Father thought had done more to hurt progress in Russia than anything Nikolas II could have dreamed of. But Varvara stared in wonder. “Twenty months in solitary in the Peter and Paul Fortress,” she said. “Twenty years in the Shlisselburg.”

Now a good-looking but rather messy woman with a cigarette in her mouth approached the guards. Her appearance raised cheers from the crowd. “Vera Zasulich, the writer,” Varvara shouted in my ear. I recognized the name—a radical writer whose work my friend admired, one of a group of Marxist socialists who’d broken with their Bolshevik brothers and joined the more inclusive Mensheviks. Behind her, a group of young people demanded entry. “Delegation from Petrograd University and from the polytechnic college,” their leader announced, unfolding some papers. The militiaman studied the documents with the elaborately thoughtful expression of someone who could not read. “Pass,” he said, and in they went.

Suddenly Varvara was on the move, her arm linked in mine. I clutched the flowers I’d brought and Mina clung to the belt of my coat. “Delegation from Petrograd Tagantsev Gymnasium,” my friend shouted over the din, and showed what looked like a hall pass. The militiaman glanced at it, then at us—at me with my flowers; at Mina, the intellectual, with her glasses; at Varvara, confident with her red armband—and waved us inside.

Following Varvara like ships behind an icebreaker, we threaded our way through the throng and out onto the platform. The station was less crowded than the square outside, but it teemed with people holding bouquets and banners, civilians and students and soldiers alike. The dignitaries spoke cordially among themselves on the platform. Paul Miliukov and Vera Figner eyed each other nervously. We could hear the crowds outside singing.

At last a train came rumbling in, brakes screeching against the great iron wheels filling the air with hot ozone, the cars grimy with mud and soot, the windows frosted over. The crowd pushed forward in anticipation of the doors being opened. Then the exiles emerged holding their pitiful sacks of belongings. Thin, worn, exultant, each stopped in the doorway for a moment as he or she took in the size of the welcome. I could see they were overcome with emotion. These men and women had been exiled for ten, twenty, thirty years. Now they were home. Not only home but welcomed by an entire city. Lovers who had not seen one another in half a lifetime embraced. Families and old comrades pounded one another on the back. I held my gloved hand over my mouth and wept as people around me shouted and cheered.

An elderly woman emerged from one of the cars, pausing on the step.

“Urah!” the crowd roared. Varvara shook me, pounded my back. “It’s Breshkovskaya!” This was the one we’d all been waiting for. The Grandmother of the Revolution, the newspapers called her. This squat, wall-faced woman, born to nobility, had already spent twenty years in Siberian exile by the time I was born. In her few short years of freedom, she’d founded the Socialist-Revolutionary Party—the SRs, the original party of radical rebellion—just before she was rearrested, in 1905. She’d been in Siberia ever since. And here was Kerensky, kissing her three times. I’d forgotten he was an SR. As justice minister, he was the one most responsible for this amnesty.

“What an ungodly idea,” my father had said. “Bringing the revolutionaries back to Petrograd. That man is a menace.”

How old she was, standing in the train doorway, her white hair under her crushed hat. What a life she had lived. What courage, what fortitude. She waved to us with a white handkerchief clutched in one hand, carpetbag in the other. And so the revolution emerged from the train to meet the revolution. I felt as though we were her brilliant child, showing our fine work to our teacher, bathing in her esteem. We did listen, the crowd was saying. We never forgot you.

17 White Swans and Black Sheep

EVERYTHING AT THE MARIINSKY Theater spoke of the new era. Workers and soldiers I’d marched with now sat on gilded chairs, shoulder to shoulder with my bourgeois family, waiting for the performance of Swan Lake. Mother chatted self-consciously with our guests, the English second secretary, his wife, and an attaché, but I noticed she’d left her sealskin coat on, so she would not have to reveal the cut of her elegant clothes. The bones of her face stood out anxiously, and small lines grooved her mouth. The group exchanged commonplaces about mutual friends, as if nothing in the least bit extraordinary was happening, while the shabbily clad women workers seated in front of us estimated aloud how much fabric it must have taken to create the ornate curtain. I tried to imagine how it must feel to enter this gilded hall after a long shift at Okhta or Belhausen. Their factory committees had evidently distributed free tickets. “I thought it would be bigger, didn’t you?” said one in a red scarf. An older woman examined the tiers of loges. “Glad I’m not up there. I’d be afraid to open my eyes.”

I felt suddenly protective of the ballet. Would they like it? Would they find it stilted and ridiculous? What if they didn’t understand? Would there be a riot? Or would they love it, these workers, these soldiers, who might only have ever heard a guitar or a wheezy accordion? I couldn’t wait for them to witness the power of the orchestra, the artistry of the dancers. This was their culture, their birthright. I prayed the introduction would go well.

Seryozha, next to me, drew the trio of women before us in their scarves, posed against the backdrop of the baroque curtain’s swags and tassels. I Thought It Would Be Bigger, he titled it. Behind us, the imperial box, whose coat of arms lay shrouded in white, was filled with the exiles I recognized from the train station: Breshkovskaya, in the same crushed hat she’d worn when she arrived. I couldn’t stop turning and staring, so miraculous to see them in seats just a month ago reserved exclusively for the imperial family.

The soldier next to Father chewed handfuls of sunflower seeds and spit the shells on the floor. My father surreptitiously kicked them off his shoes while keeping his careful composure. I understood why the man did it—to show that the place didn’t intimidate him, when clearly it did. Suddenly, the attaché flinched, as if stung by a bee, and recovered a paper airplane that had hit him in the back of his head. We turned to see who’d thrown it. Pavlik Gershon waved from the balcony.

My brother eyed him. “What happened to Kolya?”

“You mind your own business,” I said.

The lights dimmed. People called out as if some trick was about to be played on them, and the jarring notes of the orchestra tuning added to their anxiety. But with the tapping of the conductor’s baton and the first woodwind notes of the overture, they quieted down, and at last the curtain rose. First there were gasps, whispers, then laughter as the new audience beheld the stylized movements and the men in hose. The soldier next to my father hooted merrily, “Hey, Prince, you forgot your pants!” The dancers in the corps bravely forged ahead despite the catcalls. Father’s face betrayed nothing, but if Mother had been a horse she would have bolted.

Soon the grace of the ballerinas began to charm the newcomers, and the jester’s athletic leaps drew vigorous shouts of approval. What a thrill for the dancer—knowing that this was a spontaneous, visceral reaction to his art! Audience and performers were getting to know each other, minute by minute gaining respect for one another. When the soldier next to Father called for the dancers to drink from their goblets instead of twirling around—“You’ll never get drunk that way, Ivan!”—others shushed him. Yet I sensed the orchestra rushing, trying to get through it. When the curtain closed, Mother sat back as if she’d just run a mile and fanned herself with the program.

I prayed that the second act, with its brooding music and mysterious dark woods, would be more gripping. The sighs as the curtain rose were as sweet as music to me as the viewers beheld the blue enchanted trees, the lake of the stage. The company’s von Rothbart performed in fine, defiant form with bravura leaps and wonderfully evil wings. Poor Prince Siegfried, however, was catcalled for his handling of the hunter’s bow. At last Karsavina entered as Odette, the enchanted swan. Oh, her slim white-clad figure with its crown of feathers, so pale against that otherworldly background. She balanced en pointe on those impossibly slender legs, alone in the center of the big stage. Even the soldier who had been spitting sunflower-seed shells on Father’s shoes stopped to gape. I watched the returnees. Had they ever dreamed, in their prison cells and cold nights of exile, that someday they would watch Swan Lake from the tsar’s own box, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd all around them?

“I didn’t think I’d survive that,” Mother sighed, tipping back her champagne flute. “‘Hey, Prince, you forgot your pants!’”

“I thought it very democratic,” said Mr. Sibley, the British second secretary, taking blini from Basya’s platter. “I’ve always supported audience participation in ballet.”

I refused to laugh along with the rest of them. Those soldiers didn’t have chandeliers and dining rooms waiting for them. Those workers weren’t drinking champagne and sneering at anyone, they were curled up on thin mattresses, trying to snatch a little sleep before their shifts in the morning.

Seryozha pressed his hands to his cheek, fluttering his eyelashes, and nodded over toward Miss Haddon-Finch, who was doing her best to flirt with the attaché. She looked almost pretty tonight, with high collar and cameo pin, as she tried to engage him in conversation. But his answers were short, perfunctory. Instead, he set out to flatter me, the daughter of the household and presumably a more useful connection. “That dress is lovely, Miss Makarova. The blue sets off your hair. It’s like a painting.”

How I hated a snob. “But it’s not blue. It’s green. A beautiful Irish green.”

Seryozha snickered. Even Miss Haddon-Finch smiled. Mother glanced at me with twitchy-tailed irritation. Stop it.

Getting nowhere with me, the attaché turned his attention to Father, and the two of them reminisced about Oxford. Sibley, too, was an Oxford man, and Father launched into recollections of the year we spent at Christ Church while he was lecturing on international trade law. Seryozha mimed falling asleep in his plate. He ate a potato and asked to be excused. “Sorry—homework,” he said. I prepared to follow suit, but before I had a chance, Mother shook her head. Don’t even think it.

Square-jawed Mrs. Sibley, congenitally cheerful, brought up the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway, which took travelers all the way from Petrograd to Vladivostok. “What an adventure, don’t you think?”

“Two weeks on a train, to end up in Vladivostok?” My mother laughed. “What could be better?” She’d returned to her witty self.

The Englishwoman turned to Father. “Dmitry Ivanovich, surely you would be interested in seeing the vast hinterlands of your country.”

Father smiled, amused at the very idea. “I’m afraid I’m in rare agreement with my wife.” He tapped the lip of his flute to signal Basya to pour more champagne. “However, the Trans-Siberian’s more than a mere outing, Mrs. Sibley. It’s our hope for the future. Siberia holds eighty percent of our wealth—our grain, our ore. Alas, the rail system’s a shambles. Without it we can’t get the raw materials to the factories, food to the front. I don’t have to mince words with you, Sibley. We have everything we need to push the Germans back to Berlin but workable rail stock.” He shook his head before taking a bite of Vaula’s golden trout.

Sibley sprinkled caviar on a blin with a small bone spoon. “I do hope you’ll persuade Miliukov of the urgency. It won’t be difficult to secure our help.”

I bet not. The British would sell their own mothers to keep Russia in the war. The British had declared their support for the Provisional Government within hours of the abdication. They didn’t care who was running things as long as the Russians kept throwing bodies into the machine.

“This new coalition—what’s the feeling about the commitment?” asked Sibley. “The SRs especially.”

“La guerre, toujours la guerre.” My mother traced a plume in the air, as if she could clear the war talk from their minds with the impatient gesture. It was spoiling the effervescence. “We’re educated people. Surely we can talk about—the weather?”

“It’s not our war,” I blurted out.

Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.

Now I was in for it, but I couldn’t stop myself. “We had no say in it. The people want peace. They’re demanding it. It’s why they toppled the tsar.”

Miss Haddon-Finch flushed, red creeping up her ears. “Men serving in other countries are depending on Russia,” she said tremulously. It wasn’t like her to express a strong opinion on politics in our house, but I’d forgotten about her brother, fighting in France.

Mother said to Mrs. Sibley, “Our eldest, you know, is with Brusilov, at the Southwestern Front. Cavalry.”

“And his men favor a fight to victory,” Father said, his eyes leveling at me. “It’s only our local untrained reserves who talk about retreat. Where are you getting your ideas, Marina?”

As if I hadn’t seen the banners, hadn’t noticed the queues.

“The people have no idea what they want,” Father continued. “Remember the signs? On one side they said, ‘Down with the war,’ and on the other ‘Down with the German woman.’” The guests all chuckled. “They just don’t know what’s involved. We have alliances, as Miss Haddon-Finch so kindly pointed out.” The Englishwoman blushed, pleased to be noticed by Dmitry Ivanovich, in whom she placed much more store than in any wet-lipped attaché.

I suddenly saw my father through the eyes of the Ericssons, through the eyes of the women at the pump. The arrogance of him, when it was the courage of those people that had brought him into power. “How can you say you know what the people need if you’re not listening to them? They can’t fight anymore. They need the war to end.”

“Marina, that’s enough,” Mother said.

Father’s fury was apparent in the tightness of his mouth, the way he looked away as he sipped his champagne.

But he would hear me out. “What about our soldiers—fighting without guns, without boots? What about our own hungry workers? They didn’t agree to those alliances. But they pay the price.”

Mother arched her neck in a slow, resigned circle, her eyes closed. All she cared about was that I was ruining her party.

“Everyone’s suffering, Miss Makarova,” the British diplomat replied gently. “France has been a battlefield for three years.”

Father picked up his napkin ring and dropped it gently on the tablecloth, tapping it, something he did when he was concentrating. “If Russia pulls out, millions will die. You want that on your conscience?”

I heard in my voice that horrible tremolo it got when I felt passionate about something. “You’ve seen the queues.” I addressed the second secretary. “The people work all day and queue all night. There’s no bread. No fuel. Boys drilling on Liteiny are barely Seryozha’s age. How much longer can you expect us to hold out?”

“It’s complex,” said Mr. Sibley. “Is this what young people are thinking?”

“Russia will not abandon its allies,” Father said firmly. “A commitment’s a commitment. And I’ve seen your marks for German, my dear. They’ve never been that good.” In Russian he added, “One more word and you’ll take your meal in the kitchen. You’re being insufferable.”

I collected my plate, my knife and fork, and stood with what gravity I could still muster. “I’m afraid you must excuse me then.”

In the kitchen, the servants looked up from their tea—Vaula cutting a cake, Basya with her feet up, waiting to clear and bring out dessert, Avdokia mending my nightshirt. Clearly I’d interrupted a juicy bit of gossip, probably about us.

“I’ve been exiled,” I said and put down my plate among them.

“At least it was a short walk,” said Basya. Avdokia frowned. Vaula tried not to laugh.

18 Cirque Moderne

SUCH FREEDOM, TO WALK alone in the evening with friends, unhampered by parental rules, participating in the serious discussions that had become daily life in the city. Everywhere people were arguing, voicing opinions, joining committees, trying out lines of reasoning, flexing political muscle. We were talking about the war as we drifted across the Field of Mars in the enchanted, unearthly northern spring twilight. “The Germans will bring back the tsar,” said Pavlik. “They’ll reverse everything we’ve achieved.”

In the half-light, it was still bright enough to see the color of the girls’ spring coats. Also the heavy length of Pavlik’s eyelashes. The trees smelled fresh and the square glowed, the long yellow buildings dizzying in perspective, an uninterrupted pattern of columns and windows. Seryozha lagged behind, thinking his own private thoughts. Here on these broad parade grounds, we’d sent Kolya and Volodya off to war. Here we’d buried 184 martyrs of the revolution just two months ago, a solemn day. I would never forget the sight of those coffins next to their resting places, imagining the student in one of them. And our parents walking in procession with members of the Provisional Government, everyone singing “You Fell Victim” until your heart would burst.

“That’s a spurious argument and you’re a capitalist dupe, Pavlik, like all the Defensists,” Varvara called over her shoulder. “If we stop the war, the German workers will win their soldiers over, just like we did, and the kaiser will fall. We have to stop the shooting, and bring them over to the revolution.”

I wasn’t really in the mood to argue tonight. The beauty of the evening made me think of my fox, my real lover. If he were here, we wouldn’t be talking about the war, wasting the spring twilight. We’d stroll in the fragrant air, our footsteps matching, and stop to kiss on the bridge over the Winter Canal. We’d be in bed before the hour was out. What I would give just to press my forehead to his, drink in the honey smell of his skin once more.

“What do you think of this new Bolshevik?” asked a girl from our school, Alla, trailing behind us. Recently, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had returned from exile, and his April Theses had just run in the Bolshevik newspaper Rabochy Put’. “They say he’s against the Republic.”

Varvara sighed, as if Alla had woken up in the third act of a play and asked for a précis. “First, he’s not new,” she replied. “And second, he’s not against the Republic. He’s against a parliamentary republic, a bourgeois republic. Your papas, thinking they speak for the people. He wants a soviet republic—by direct representation.”

“What we need are free communes,” said another Herzen boy, Markus, an anarchist. “Lenin talks about the ‘withering away of the state,’ but the essence of the state is that there’s never a good time to wither.”

“The Bolsheviks will do it,” Varvara said, sticking her chin out.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Markus said.

They were two of a kind. They stopped to light cigarettes together, sharing a match. I thought he would be perfect for her, but she’d scoffed when I suggested it. “Anarchist utopian.”

We crossed at the Trinity Bridge over the black water of the Neva, passed the brooding bulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the art nouveau Kschessinska Mansion, now the headquarters of the Bolshevik Party. The ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska had received it as a gift from her lover Nikolas II. I wondered where she’d gone. Paris? The tsar himself was under arrest, somewhere in the Urals with his family. Oddly, since his abdication he’d quickly become irrelevant. Nobody clamored for his head on a pike. Aside from a few aristocrats who might secretly dream of restoration, no one thought about him anymore. Varvara examined the windows of the mansion, probably hoping to catch sight of Lenin’s big bald head.

Our destination loomed into view—the vast, rickety hall of the Cirque Moderne, the radical venue for speakers of all left-leaning political stripes that spring, and a magnet for students from all over the city. Where once the Stray Dog had been Mecca, now it was this old wooden hall on the Petrograd side of the river. Pressing inside, we joined the thousands already listening to the orators in the cavernous smoky gloom. It smelled like bodies, wet wood and cheap tobacco, old boots. About five dim bulbs lit our way as we clambered up into the rickety tiered benches surrounding the stage on all sides. We had to climb nearly to the ceiling. I imagined what the woman who’d worried about the loges at the Mariinsky would think of this. I could tell that Seryozha was nervous as we squeezed in among the university students, workers, soldiers, retirees, and wounded veterans. Pavlik climbed in next to me.

Down in the very center of the hall, a common soldier, stocky, square-shouldered, was addressing the crowd, speaking about the war in the name of his comrades. “Show us what we’re fighting for,” he shouted up to us all. “Is it Constantinople? Or a free Russia? Or the people on top? They’re always asking us for more sacrifices, but where is their sacrifice?”

If only my father could hear this. If only he’d listen more to the Russian people and less to his friends in the British embassy and the Kadets and industrialists. Where are you getting your ideas, Marina? Pavlik handed me a chocolate, smiled. He really was very sweet. How infinitely better this was than wandering the lengthening evenings thinking of how little Kolya cared for me. He never responded to my letters. My brother took out his notebook and sketched the soldier, and the next one who ventured to speak.

The best speaker was a small fiery man with wild black hair and a pince-nez named Leon Trotsky. They all had something to say, but I had waited for this one. What a speaker! He’d been the leader of the Soviet of 1905 and had just returned from exile. Trotsky made us understand that this moment was a fuse and that we held the match, that the whole world was on the brink of revolution. All we had to do was light it. He was a cauldron melting the crowd into a single substance, and we threw ourselves in.

“Russia has opened a new epoch,” he called to us, “an epoch of blood and iron. A struggle no longer of nation against nation but of the suffering oppressed classes against their rulers.” The roar of applause in that barn left no confusion as to what it meant to believe in revolution. He talked about the achievement of the revolution, our impact on the world.

I’d always thought that once the tsar was gone, the wheel would stop, or at least pause, giving us a chance to get used to things, but now I could see that the revolution was just beginning. It would become a way of life as people clarified and changed their perceptions of what they thought could and must be done. Already, between February and May, my father’s superior in the foreign office, Paul Miliukov—a constitutional monarchist and one of the leading lights of the Kadet party—had been run out, replaced by Mikhail Tereshchenko, a nonparty beet-sugar magnate from the Ukraine. Now there was a new coalition of ten capitalist and six socialist ministers. The socialists, still trying to find common ground, had committed to continuing the war and calming the masses. But like Lenin, the man onstage had another idea. “Only a single power can save Russia—the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! All power to the Soviet!”

What was the government waiting for? Here was a clear message, impossible to misunderstand: end this war, redistribute the land, feed the people, and achieve peace.

After Trotsky, another man took the stage, a pro-war Defensist, but he didn’t stand a chance—it was like having to sing after Chaliapin. “The war is Russia’s face to the world,” he argued to the enormous crowd. “If we retreat, we’ll be putting out the welcome mat! With the tsar we were subjects, but with the kaiser we’ll be slaves. The worker will be back under the lash. The only way to establish ourselves in the world as a true power is to continue the war and uphold our alliances.”

I had heard this argument before and had never been able to counter it. People booed and hissed, but others shouted, “Let him talk!”

Up in our section, something was happening behind us. “The poet!” “Go on, kid.” A big young worker stood on his bench and began to speak—no, he was reciting a poem! Lucky for him he had a deep actor’s voice and was able to create a pool of attention around himself. His poem likened a burning police station to a garbage incinerator, then to the blast furnace of a great factory, and finally to the gaping mouth of a lying old man. His shock of tawny blond hair looked familiar. Suddenly I recognized him—the boy from the Stray Dog Café! The one who wanted to show his work to Mayakovsky. Tonight he wore a carrot in the buttonhole of his jacket, the long green ends dangling, and he signaled the end of his poem by unthreading the carrot and biting off the end. Had I imagined it, or had he grinned right at me as he sat down? I felt it all the way through my coat, my layers of clothes, directly into my body. I quickly turned and faced front, my heart thumping around in my chest like a bird in a hallway, looking for an exit.

Onstage, an older woman now addressed the hall. I tried to concentrate and not to check if the poet was still looking at me, but when I managed to see past all the heads, he was gone.

The soft deep voice in my ear startled me. “Not her again.” The boy had moved down to a seat right behind us. I could hardly hear through the thunder in my ears, my freckles were on fire. “She looks like a teacher I once had. I keep thinking she’s going to give me a whipping.”

It would hardly do to let him see how thrilled I was. “Maybe you need one,” I replied, not turning.

Seryozha laughed over the drawing in his lap. Pavlik glanced back over his shoulder, annoyed with this interloper. The Tagantsev girls watched the whole thing closely, storing up gossip for the next day.

“If it was you, who knows? I might let you.”

Varvara made her black eyes bulge with exasperation. Can’t you leave off for a moment?

He held out the feathery end of his carrot, tickling my nose. “Here’s the whip.”

I laughed, brushing the leaves away.

“Kuriakin. Gennady Yurievich.” The poet held out a giant hand. My hand vanished in it, and yet we shook. It was a softer hand than I had expected, more flexible. “Call me Genya.” Genya. I shivered.

“Do you mind?” Pavlik said.

Genya stuck his big face between Seryozha and me and ignored every signal from Pavlik that he was unwelcome.

“Makarova. Marina.” Then I added, “This is my brother Seryozha.” Surely I couldn’t be accused of flirting if I introduced my brother.

Down on the stage, the woman argued not only for the end of the war but also for the end of state power and for worker control of the factories. Markus shouted his approval, pounding on his knee. “Yes! Exactly!”

Genya eyed the sketch my brother was working up. Now I saw that it was of the poet reciting over the heads of the crowd. He cocked his head for a better angle. “I even look halfway intelligent. Most appreciated.” How heroic he was in Seryozha’s eyes, broad-shouldered, chin tilted up, soldiers and sailors gathered around him. “Look, let’s get out of here, Makarova Marina,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot in here, and I’ve had enough of the sermons.”

Pavlik crossed his arms peevishly as I left with the boy from the Stray Dog Café. “I’ll be back,” I whispered to Seryozha as I climbed over him. “If not, go home with the others.” His face was still red from being caught admiring the handsome young poet.

Outside, the air was fresh and the night finally dark, splashed with stars like flour slung into the sky. In the absence of police, all sorts of sinister people scuttled in the shadows, but who would bother me with this giant, this Genya Kuriakin? He was like a figure from a folktale, an indomitable Ilya Muromets. And the way he’d chosen me, plucked me from the crowd as a boy picks a flower from a meadow—it was so easy. As simple as destiny. Genya, a name like grain on the tongue, like a gift in the hand. That hard G grabbed you, the ya declared itself again. Ya, I.

We strolled along the Petrovskaya Embankment, where the river sparkled, shattering reflections of the lights from the bridges and the Winter Palace. The whole right side of my body turned rosy with this boy’s proximity. Walking with him was like standing next to a furnace. “I’ve seen you before, you know,” he said. Had he seen me that night at the Stray Dog after all? I didn’t reply. There was time. We had all the night ahead. “At Wolf’s bookstore. You wore a green coat and a white hat, and you were looking at poetry.”

I must have been hunting for my own book, seeing if any had sold. I wanted to tell him that, but it would seem like I was trying to impress him. And he probably wouldn’t consider my stuff poetry anyway—it wasn’t very futuristic. But this was poetry, too—this, the fragrance of sex and possibility. It was a scent that surrounded me ever since I’d started up with Kolya. As if I’d passed through a mirror and found I’d become beautiful, or interesting, something other than myself. It was foolish and vain of me, but right then I felt as if I could stretch out my arm and the bridge itself would sidle closer, rub up against me like a cat.

Genya Kuriakin leaned against the balustrade and reached out toward my face. I stood very still as he carefully picked up a lock of my hair that had fallen loose and tucked it back in. “Yes, a green coat and a white fur hat, a ribbon in your buttonhole. I wrote a poem about you. Do you want to hear it?”

“If it’s any good,” I teased him.

He stepped away from me and began:

Poor poet. I could well imagine his anguish as I examined his book, then put it back, unread. With that red ribbon in my buttonhole, waiting for Kolya. It was for valor in bed, Genya—that battleground. “Yes, I remember.”

He kissed my palm, as if he were drinking from it. “No, you don’t. But that’s all right. You can remember this instead.”

We continued walking along the quay. The stars were winking on, and the warmth of his arm around my shoulder made my coat unnecessary. Then the moon began to rise, fast, illuminating his face, his eyes. Were they green or brown? His nose was long and bumpy, it had been broken. When we stopped again, I pulled the carrot from his buttonhole, took a bite, and threw the rest into the water. He kissed me then, suddenly, carrot still in my mouth, with all the awkwardness of unstudied desire. This was what young people did, I thought—simple and open, not a practiced seduction. Not hidden away in some stranger’s decadent flat. I felt younger than I had before, lighter, as if I’d been allowed to go back and try a new path.

He talked and talked. He’d come from a town in the Volga called Puchezh, north of Nizhny-Novgorod, where his father was a priest. Genya was a Bolshevik, he’d been to jail or so he said, he hated religion. He lived with a group of poets in a flat near Haymarket Square, and contributed to a journal called Okno—The Window. He considered himself a futurist. He loved Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and with bashful pride he admitted that his Okno friends had published a volume of his poetry called The Brief Memoir of a Clay Pigeon, the very book I’d picked up and put down again.

I didn’t volunteer any information about my own family—it was too embarrassing to say that my father was a Kadet member of the Provisional Government, that my mother was a Golovin, that we lived in a twelve-room flat on Furshtatskaya Street. Instead, I told him about the poets I loved, that I was graduating soon, on my way to university. “I write, too. Poems. That’s what I was doing at Wolf’s that day. Seeing if any of my books had sold.”

“I should have known. I felt it. More than just a beauty.” He leaned his back against the balustrade, folded his arms. “Well? Let’s hear one.”

I loved that he assumed I could just rattle one off, that he assumed it would be worth hearing. But which? The poem I’d written about the death of the student at Znamenskaya Square? That would impress him with my revolutionary fervor. But instead, I recited one written by the girl in the white fur hat, so we could be formally introduced.

I couldn’t see his face in the dark. He was too quiet. I’d embarrassed him. Oh I should have done one about the insurrection. “You think it’s kitsch.”

He laughed, wrapping his heavy arm around me, resting his cheek against my hair. “No, it’s perfect. Just right. I was afraid you would be clever, all hard and brilliant. I hate cleverness. Without blood and bone, there’s no poetry—there’s nothing.”

What gods had favored me with this chance meeting? I felt I was teetering on top of a needle twenty feet in the air. The Neva flowed deep and wide before us, plashing, speaking its indecipherable truths, like Fate itself, unknown. Everything I’d thought about the future was dissolving in my hands. As Mina would say, I’d not taken variable x into account. And here he was, variable x. Genya plucked at my coat. “Why don’t you wear the green one? And the furry hat?”

“It’s spring,” I laughed. “And ermine would scarcely do for the Cirque Moderne. Trotsky would hardly approve.”

“He’d make an exception for you. Haven’t you heard of Marina Makarova, Comrade? The poet with the head of fire and the voice of flame? Surely you can’t begrudge her a hat. No? I didn’t think so. He says it’s all right.”

Who would have guessed it? A romantic. A man who wrote poems about burning police stations, a Bolshevik. He held me tight, buried his face in my neck. “I love you, Marina Makarova.”

How my body missed a man’s embrace. Kolya had never said he loved me. No one ever had. “You can’t love me. You just met me.”

“I don’t care. I love you. Just say my name.”

“Genya Kuriakin.”

“Say it again.” He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, as if I was a child, shouting, “Say it! I want to feel the syllables climbing your beautiful throat, the corners of my consonants stuck in your teeth, my vowels sticky on your tongue!” He spun me around, making me dizzy. His silky hair smelled of trees, of hay and meadows. When he slid me down his body, it was like sliding down the trunk of an oak.

He pressed my palm to his lips as if his face were freezing and my hand the only warmth. “Marry me, Marina. You will, won’t you?”

I laughed out of sheer happiness, the lunacy of it all. “But what shall be our wedding ring?”

“How about Saturn? He’s got rings to spare.” He reached up and pretended to grab Saturn out of the starry sky in one enormous fist and slid the ring onto my finger. “A perfect fit.”

And so we were wed.

19 At Haymarket Square

HOW COULD I HAVE lived in the same city as Genya all these years and never seen him with his pack of fellow poets, conferring in cafés, reading on street corners? They called themselves the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now. They were everywhere, reading under the General Staff Building arch, in Haymarket Square, and on the banks of the Pryazhka River right under the windows of the great Alexander Blok, which is where I first met them. It was a clear provocation, one generation of artists trying to outrage their elders. A young man of twenty-five or so was reciting a zaum poem to the perplexity of the passersby—trans-sense language poetry invented by the avant-gardists Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, whom I already knew Genya adored.

A girl in a worn skirt and wrinkled blouse handed around a cap, but the haphazard audience, two sailors and a whore, only made fun of the poet. After he was done, Genya introduced us. The poet was Anton Chernikov, the editor of their journal and the leader of their group. I was dismayed by his look of frank horror as he took in my neat shoes, my hat, my hair, and the kiss Genya planted on my neck, his arm around me. I knew I had little hope of ever winning him over. His sneering face would never accept me, the bourgeois miss. More personable was a tall strapping paint-splattered blond, Sasha Orlovsky, an artist, and Gigo Gelashvili, an earnest, shock-haired Georgian poet. He had a gift for rhyme, and a little crowd gathered as he recited—a woman selling pirozhky, a drunk, and two dockworkers. I looked up to see if Blok would appear in his fifth-floor window, but the curtains remained drawn.

The girl with the cap was called Zina Ostrovskaya. She said nothing at all when Genya introduced us, just stared in disgust. She reminded me of a small vicious animal, like a mink or a ferret. Her poetry, when it was her turn, proved sharp and political. But Genya was their star. People heard him a block away and came to investigate. Idlers stopped to listen in the warm afternoon. The whores especially admired him. He incorporated everything from zaum to the language of the street, biblical cadences and Russian mythology. As a finale, he sang a sailors’ song to the tune of the Orthodox liturgy, which brought shouts of encouragement and a clattering of coins from the loitering sailors and longshoremen.

Afterward they lounged in the sun and counted their money, ate sandwiches out of their pockets. It seemed that the Transrational Interlocutors, or at least their core group, lived together near Haymarket Square in a place they called the Poverty Artel, an artel being a small factory, which in this case produced poetry. “We pool our poverty and divide it among our members,” Genya joked. I wondered if these street-corner performances were enough to live on.

“Oh, we do all kinds of things,” he said. “Painting houses, putting up handbills. Anything people have for us.”

And how had they managed to avoid the draft? He shrugged. “Gigo and Sasha have student deferments. I’m an only son. Anton here was discharged for mental instability.”

“Unsuitability for service,” corrected the scowling avant-gardist, crushing out a cigarette.

“The apartment’s in Anton’s name.” My new love tossed a piece of his sandwich to a strutting seagull. “Nobody’s registered but him, just in case the government changes its mind. Makes us a little harder to find.”

I wanted to visit the Poverty Artel, but Genya was oddly shy about letting me come over. I couldn’t understand. I had no compunctions about being alone with him, about moving on from kisses to love. I even made Seryozha go to a drugstore and buy condoms, over his vociferous protests. I had to bribe him with a set of pastels. What was Genya waiting for? “It’s a flophouse,” he said. “You don’t want to see that.” And when he walked me home to Furshtatskaya Street that day, and we kissed in the parkway under the bright-leaved trees, I asked him to come up with me. He gazed at the fancy plasterwork and the iron balconies, at a woman coming out to walk two matched Borzois, and shook his head. “I’m not going in there.”

“Come in the back way then. That’s what Varvara does.” And then into my salmon-pink boudoir.

“I don’t go in the back way,” he said stiffly.

I was mortified. I had offended him, suggesting he use the servants’ entry. “Well, come in the front, then, and meet my mother.”

“Some other time,” he said, chastely kissing my temple.

Yet later from our windows I caught sight of him, loitering in the park strip under the shade of the burgeoning trees.

I sat at my place at dinner, imagining how this would all look to Genya: Mother in her filmy summer organza; Father relating amusing anecdotes about the foreign office; Tripov the art collector, his fat fingers bedecked with rings; the Gromitskys quarreling about their visit to Capri; Basya in a starched apron and cap, handing around asparagus. How Genya would mock all this, and rightly so. The chatter and clatter of silverware seemed almost unbearable to me now, the ludicrous epergne spilling over with roses, the chandelier whose crystals Basya had to disassemble and soak one by one. These days it was becoming dusty. She did as little as possible, and with ever greater insolence—Mother was becoming afraid of her. The revolutionary feeling was growing in the city, even in her own home. I could see my mother’s eyes stray from time to time to the chandelier, to the little strings of dust, and I noticed that she avoided looking into Basya’s face as she offered more wine. I missed what people were saying as they tried to draw me out. I was further and further away, thinking about Genya waiting for me in the parkway, in the silvery White Night. Tonight I would make love with him. Even if it was behind a statue in the Summer Garden.

Finally the dishes were cleared, and I seized the moment to flee. I threw on a light shawl and ran down to Furshtatskaya Street. It was almost ten, a warm June evening—bright enough to read a newspaper. The leaves cast shadows on the ground. For a moment I thought he hadn’t come. But there he was, standing under a tree in the eerie dappled shade of the northern summer evening. I ran to him, kissed him breathlessly, tilting my face up to him as if I were trying to kiss the sky.

We walked together slowly through the cool silvery streets toward the Summer Garden. He kept stopping to look at me, or walked backward in front of me. How different it was to be with Genya. When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me. Genya bent toward me as if I were the source of light. Strange—for once I didn’t feel the impulse to show off for him. Mother always scolded me for my blurtings, my “antics,” my tendency to tell people more than they ever wanted to know. “One attracts others with mystery,” she said, “not by turning one’s pockets inside out.” Genya treated me as if I were as mysterious as a hidden spring. I loved seeing myself through his eyes. Everything around us shimmered in this dream light. I felt drunk, though I’d only had one glass of champagne. “You’re like a ghost in that dress,” he said.

“I’m a corpse—is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not a ghost then. A sleepwalker. In a white nightgown,” he said. “Barefoot, with a candle in hand.”

I’d worn a white dress intentionally. I wanted to glow in his memory, to haunt him, yes, the way Kolya had once haunted me. I hummed the dreamy grand waltz from Sleeping Beauty, taking his hand and turning under his arm.

In the Summer Garden, the unearthly twilight shifted through the old trees, illuminating the mossy sculptures lining the gravel paths. Every lover in Petrograd was out tonight, breathing with us the green of the linden trees as birdsong tumbled liquid through the air.

“I want to do something astonishing,” Genya declared. “Something heroic. Kill myself in your honor. Swim to Antarctica. Fight a duel.” He mimed fencing an imaginary adversary on my behalf. He bit the shoulder of my thin dress, tugged at it like a dog. “I’d like to tear this off with my teeth,” he said in my ear.

“Please! Not in front of Diana.” Clutching demurely at my bodice, I pointed at the glowing bare-breasted huntress with the moon in her sculpted hair.

“She doesn’t like me,” said Genya, resting his cheek on top of my head. I wasn’t a short girl but he towered above me as we gazed at the glaring goddess, poised with bow and arrow.

“She doesn’t like men.”

“And why should she? Why would any woman?” He rubbed his stubbly cheek against mine. “Big hairy protuberant fellows. Always knocking something over or giving a speech. If I were a woman I’d have nothing to do with any of us.” His breath was sweet and smelled of fennel seeds.

As a schoolgirl, I’d imagined I’d walk here someday with a lover in summer just like this… though I always pictured characters from Pushkin: a man in a swallowtail coat, me in a summer gown and bonnet. The idea of Genya in breeches and a swallowtail coat made me laugh. A bearskin and bast boots were more like it. Or chain mail.

“Come home with me tonight,” he said, in the shadows of a lesser path, leafy and fragrant. “I wish I had some better place to take you… but I told the boys to clear off. We’ll have it to ourselves.”

So it had come at last. I passed my hand back and forth, so that the shadows of the linden leaves cast their shapes on my palm. His proposal was certainly better than the idea of bringing him into my fussy bedroom with its trinkets and albums, the vanity table with all the pictures, the crocheted bedspread. He simply would not have fit.

Sadovaya Street was thick with people strolling, taking in the magical night. Haymarket Square was bustling with its long lines of stalls—vendors of pirozhky and ice cream, old clothes and hats. A potbellied man had a bear on a leash and was making it dance. Watching the bear lumbering on its hind legs—the leather collar on its neck, the chain—Genya’s eyes filled with tears. “Poor thing,” he said. “You can see how he hates this. The revolution should take bears into account.”

Suddenly, someone in the crowd behind us screamed, “Thief! He’s got my handbag!” Other people took up the cry. “Catch him!” “Get him!”

A skinny young urchin flashed by with the woman’s purse. There were no police anymore, so the crowd went running after him, men and women, baying like hounds. They soon caught the culprit—oh the shouts and the curses! They boiled up like noxious gas as they beat him, others soon joining in. Please stop it, I prayed, tears dripping down my face, clinging to Genya. It reminded me of the day of the bread riot, and how the baker had been beaten and the woman punched. “Someone’s got to stop it,” I said. The boy disappeared in their midst like a small fish in the center of a sea anemone.

Then Genya was shoving his way through the horde, pulling them out of his way, into the ugly inner circle. Their faces were so puffy with fury and a horrible glee that they were unrecognizable as human. He grabbed people by their collars and flung them aside to reveal a boy about Seryozha’s age, broken on the stones. “Isn’t that enough?” he shouted at the crowd. “Didn’t she get her miserable purse back?”

A man with a face like a knobby potato kicked the boy one more time. “That’s what we do with thieves. He’ll remember that the next time he thinks of stealing something.”

His face streaming with tears, twisted in pity, Genya picked up the limp and bleeding body, lurched to his feet, and carried the boy on his shoulder away from the crowd. I followed him through the square and he turned down a passage into a courtyard. A woman pumping water into a pail glanced up at us with little interest, as if we were hauling coal. Genya carried the battered boy up a steep stairway, arriving in a dark, dirty hall. I had to reach into his pants pocket for his key, at which he gave me a ghost of a smile. The boy moaned. I unlocked the door.

Here it was, the Poverty Artel. Three windows overlooking a courtyard. A divan and a cot, some mismatched chairs and stools, a table covered with manuscripts. Newspapers plastered the walls. But the divan had been neatly made up with sheets and a pillow. Genya lay the thief there, the boy’s purple face already swelling, his eyes shut tight as a newborn’s. “Stay with him. I’ll get some water.” My would-be lover grabbed a jug.

I sat next to the boy, praying he wasn’t terribly hurt. The thief keened and moaned. I took his hand—hard and dirty—and hummed a song my mother used to sing when I was small. Fais dodo, Colin, mon petit frère… While we were waiting for Genya to come back, the boy turned and squinted at me through terrible swollen eyes. “I don’t want to die. I’m afraid,” he whispered through his split lip, his broken teeth.

“You won’t,” I said, and tried to shape my face into a reassuring smile. “He’s getting you something to drink.” All I could do was hold his hand.

I thanked God when Genya finally returned with the pitcher of water. The urchin’s head was swelling into something unrecognizable. We switched seats. Genya took a rag—no, a nightshirt—and sponged the boy off.

“I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.”

I sang for a while, low, sad songs, until the boy’s breathing slowed. The bird nests, but I am an orphan, I have no home…

We spent the rest of the night watching him sleep, like worried parents. Was he asleep or unconscious? “Shouldn’t we get a doctor?” I asked. “What if he…” But I didn’t want to say die… dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.

“There’s no doctor,” Genya said gently.

“We could fetch him to the hospital…”

“They wouldn’t take him. Look, we’ll think of something in the morning.”

He held my hand, and recited the poem I had written about the light in the window—he remembered it. All we could do was keep this boy company. So that’s what we did. I couldn’t help but imagine how it would be to watch a child who was ill, a little boy with a fever. This was what was meant by love—not passion, not a game of pleasure.

I fell asleep on the cot, on top of the blankets—the sheets were far too grimy—but Genya stayed awake all night in the chair by the divan, putting cold compresses on the boy’s swollen head.

When I woke in the morning, Genya stood at the window. “He’s dead.” The frail lifeless body, the purple battered head, a pink stain on the pillowcase. “I’m going to take him down. Let them look at their handiwork.” He lifted the small form, the head flopping. I opened the door for him and locked it behind us, followed him down the narrow, foul-smelling stairs out into the courtyard, then the lane. As we walked, Genya began to sing “You Fell Victim,” the song they’d sung when they buried the martyrs of the revolution. People stared as he carried the fragile corpse through the workaday streets and into Haymarket Square, moving through the stalls selling hats and fruit and cucumbers, past tinkers and candle makers. His song gathered a crowd. He propped the boy up against a post and addressed them. His voice carried far into the square, reciting a poem he must have written while I slept:

The onlookers were silent. A middle-aged woman clutched a handkerchief to her mouth. A man in a leather apron took off his cap.

Genya left the boy to them and walked me back to Furshtatskaya Street.

20 Into the Countryside

THE SMELL OF PIPE tobacco lay thick in the hall that morning. I was hoping to go straight to my room—I was dead tired and smelled from sleeping in my clothes on that squalid cot—but Miss Haddon-Finch flew out from the salon and stopped me from getting any farther than the vestibule. “Marina!” Red-eyed and rumpled, she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. “Where have you been? We’re all beside ourselves… your mother… your father! We thought you’d been murdered. Seryozha told us about the boy… what were you thinking? With everything else Dmitry Ivanovich has to worry about?”

“I’d like to go wash up now,” I said. “It’s been a terrible night.”

“He wants to talk to you. He’s in his study.”

They must have wrestled it out of my brother. He’d never have shared this unless coercion was involved. Well, they knew now. All right, so what? It wasn’t as though we’d done anything, much as we’d wanted to. Ironic. But even if we had… I was a grown woman now. I’d seen four people die right in front of me. I supposed I could face my father’s disapproval. I straightened myself, took a deep breath, wiped my hands on my coat.

He was waiting in his study, his cheek on his hand, elbow propped on the green leather top of his desk. Dressed, but not carefully. His collar was askew, and his skin looked rough and bloodless. This is what he’ll look like when he’s old. “Close the door,” he said.

I did. I decided to speak before he could, so he couldn’t draw out the suspense. “A boy was beaten last night on Haymarket Square. My friends took him back to their room, and we tried to save him. He died this morning.”

He gazed at me wearily across an open book… Dickens. I recognized the volume, one of a set. His eyes the same brown as my own, though this morning his were drooping and bloodshot, yellow in the whites. “Friends, you say. Your brother told us you’ve taken up with a self-proclaimed poet, some young roughneck you met at a radical meeting. Is that why you took off so quickly last night that you could hardly push in your chair?”

“Yes. But not the way you’re thinking.” Though it was, of course.

He rubbed his eyes, pulled his palms down his face, as if he could wipe off the sight of me. But there I was again. “Well, you’re a graduate now. A young woman. I just thought you had more respect for yourself. An awareness of your position in life.” He gestured for me to sit in a spindle-backed chair.

Were we really going to have this conversation? My position in life? I would not sit down. This was going to be a very short interview. “We sat with the boy, and that’s all.”

He tapped his letter opener on the desktop, turned it, tapped, and regarded me from under his curly eyebrows. “If you don’t understand what I’m saying, I don’t know how at this late date to convey it to you.”

I felt like I was being slowly rolled in slivers of glass. My palms sweated. My neck sweated. I could smell myself—I stank. “You can’t. It’s too late.”

“You didn’t think for a minute what a turmoil your behavior would cause.” He steepled his hands, matching fingertip to fingertip.

“I’m sorry. There was no telephone—”

“All that education, the talent, the brains—our confidence in you. For what? So you could run around the streets of Petrograd like a cheap slut?”

I was too tired to defend myself. I struggled not to cry. “Everyone grows up, Papa.”

“Running around with God knows what kind of hooligan—someone you picked up at the Cirque Moderne.” He snorted as if that was the rudest irony of all. “All those years of care, and you throw yourself away with both hands.” He’d never looked at me with such despair. It was like watching a carriage toppling over. I could do nothing to stop it. “It’s my fault, I know. We’re all so very modern now. Don’t discipline the children. It’s simply not done.” His mouth hooked downward in its nest of brown beard like a mask of tragedy. “Do we need to go out and get you a yellow card?” The document prostitutes carried to show they’d registered with the police.

I imagined Seryozha, cowering in his room, sick with shame at having informed on me. And Mother, too, nowhere in sight. I’m sure there had been a terrible fight. Father began to call me names—old-fashioned names, trollop, jade—trying to make me cry, his voice louder and louder.

I wanted to hurt him back. “What is it that you object to most? That I’m not virginal or that he’s not one of us?”

Suddenly he was himself again, Dmitry Makarov, the lawyer. “I thought you said you hadn’t done anything with him.”

“Oh, so now you believe me.”

“There have been others?” His complexion was ashen.

I had no apologies, no argument to make. This was my life. Someone so out of touch had no right to dictate its shape or content.

“I’m not your father,” he said. “Women like you are fatherless.”

The father I knew could never say this to me, never. Waves of nausea flooded over me. I was too shocked to weep. “Is it all right if I go now?”

“Go. It disgusts me to look at you. Stay in your room until I decide what in the world’s to be done with you.”

I went. How clean it was, the freshly made bed. It smelled good and light streamed in through the lace curtains. I washed, then sat at my vanity. Slut. Jade. Trollop. Those words, coming from my own father’s lips. What did they even mean? I looked in the mirror. I looked… pugnacious. Was I a slut? I certainly liked being handled by men. Sex, the life of the senses, it was very strong in my nature. I didn’t want to hurt my father, but women like me always hurt their fathers, because we couldn’t stay little girls. Funny, when I really had been sleeping with someone, he’d never known it.

Avdokia woke me in the afternoon, coming in with soup and a cucumber salad, cold chicken on a tray. “It’s the big worker boy who hangs around, isn’t it?” she whispered. “I’ve never seen Dmitry Ivanovich in such a state. He went off to the foreign office on an hour of sleep, poor man. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

“And what lesson is that?” I said, clearing off the desk so she could lower the tray. “We tried to save a boy’s life, a pickpocket being beaten by a mob. Papa’s jumping to conclusions.”

“A pickpocket.” She shook her head, sighed, sighed again, as if there were no more oxygen in Petrograd, as if it had been raised to Himalayan heights and she had to labor to fill her lungs. “May the Holy Theotokos have mercy.”

“We sat with him all night. He was young. It was terrible. His head was as big as a watermelon.”

“Eat some soup, sweetheart.” I took a hot mouthful to placate her, but eating was the last thing on my mind. I could still see the crowd’s savage glee, the boy’s battered head, the way he hung limp in Genya’s arms. My father’s face. I might never eat again.

“Dmitry Ivanovich is a changed man since joining the government,” my nanny said, hanging up my clothes. “You can’t waltz around like it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s been working so hard, he’s got so much on his mind. Oh, why did you have to go off last night? They were having a nice party here. That boy—it’s not going to go well.”

When I tried to go out to the toilet, I found the door of my room had been locked. So it had come to this. He didn’t know what to do with me, so he’d locked me up until he could formulate his plans. I couldn’t bring myself to pound on the walls. It was hardly the Crosses. I used the chamber pot, sat down to write. After a while, I heard knocking on the wall from the nursery next door. Seryozha. Fais dodo… trying to apologize. I didn’t knock back.

That evening I heard my father and mother quarreling: Reputation. Your daughter. That hooligan. Part of me wanted to announce that I’d sacrificed my precious virginity not to that hooligan but to Kolya Shurov, trusted family friend. Would he like that better? What was worse, my class treachery? Or that I’d ruined his perception of me as a pure vessel, inert and worthy to be passed along to an approved husband? Either way, I’d proved to be a stony field, an intractable horse, useless for the task assigned it.

Avdokia came and went with food and the chamber pot, her eyes red from weeping. “Pray, Marinoushka. Pray for forgiveness.”

On the fourth day of my comfortable imprisonment, Miss Haddon-Finch let herself in. “I’m here to help you pack,” she said briskly, no nonsense. “We’re leaving. For Maryino.”

The country? We never went this early. “It’s only June.”

“It’s been decided.” She opened my wardrobe, began taking out summer clothes, piling them on the bed. “This has all been very hard on your mother, not to mention Dmitry Ivanovich. They’ve decided it will be better if we got away for a while. We could all use a little peace and quiet.”

But she forgot to lock the door. I shoved past her and marched down to the dining room, where they were eating breakfast. Mother was still in her dressing gown, Father ready for work at the foreign office. Seryozha, also up and dressed, tried not to look at me.

“What if I won’t go?” I said.

“Are you moving in with your hooligan?” Father asked, sipping his coffee. “Is he ready to support you?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Did he have to be so extreme? Move in with Genya in that squalid room of his or break it off with him? Out of sheer defiance, I wanted to say yes, I’ll move in with him. But that was going too far, even for me. I had to think. Did I really want to move in with Genya? Even if I tried it for the summer, what would I do about university? I possessed no money of my own. Father had me in a corner. He wanted me to see that I had no choice but do what he said. To recognize my position. In other words, surrender.

“I’d prefer to stay here,” I said.

“But you love Maryino,” Mother said in her filmy morning coat. “We all could use some time to reflect—”

“The answer is no, you cannot stay here,” Father interrupted her. “You’ll go with the household or you’ll find some other accommodation. You can’t come and go, doing what you like with whomever you like, and come back here. It’s not a bordello.”

There was no point in arguing that a bordello was the very opposite of the freedom he described. “I could live with the Katzevs,” I said. “Surely Sofia Yakovlevna would let me.”

“Forcing them to house and feed you for months at a time? They’re not wealthy people, Marina. For someone who claims to be so sensitive to the plight of the common man, you’re embarrassingly self-involved. The Katzevs have children of their own to think about. Consider the example you’re setting for the younger ones. No, you pride yourself on being an adult, but you’re still thinking like a child. Now, you’ll pack, and tomorrow you’ll accompany your mother to the countryside.”

Yes. I saw there was no other way. “At least let me say goodbye.” I had to tell Genya how it stood with us, that I wanted him, but I had to go.

“There’s the telephone. Be my guest,” Father said, gesturing to the hall.

Mother sighed, stirred her tea. Seryozha twisted in his seat, his face red and blotchy, guilty as a dog who’d eaten your shoes.

“You know he doesn’t have one,” I said. “Let me see him once more, and I’ll go.”

“Write him a note and I will mail it for you.” Buttering his toast.

I couldn’t very well say I didn’t know Genya’s address. So I wrote a hurried note, telling him that my father was sending me into exile in the country for the summer but I would be home by fall. I’ll wear Saturn’s ring, and I’ll think of you. I addressed it to Gennady Kuriakin, Grivtsova Alley, east-side courtyard, second floor, room 8. I’d have to pay Basya to deliver it. The idea of Father intercepting it was too grim to imagine. And what if he decided to confront Genya face-to-face? Hideous. I hated to let Basya know such intimate details of my life, but it was better than Genya’s never knowing.

While I packed, Seryozha slipped into my room. He was crying. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what to say. They were so worried—”

“You could have said I was at Mina’s.”

“They called Mina’s.”

I sighed, folded nightgowns. “Well, I guess we’ve got a long summer ahead of us.”

“You maybe. Not me.” He ran his hand over the eyelet lace of my summer bedspread. “I’m going to Moscow. I’m leaving in five days.”

I stopped folding.

“For Bagration Military School.”

I clutched the ruched cotton of my nightgown. “He can’t do that.” My brother pretended to count the bands on my bedpost with his thumbnail. I grabbed him, turned him around, tried to force him to look me in the eye, but he wouldn’t. “You can’t. You’ve got to tell him right now you won’t go.”

“But I want to go.” He twisted away from me. “I need to. I need to start my own life.”

I held my hands to my mouth, as if something were about to fall out. My heart maybe. “Seryozha, you’ve heard them talking at the Cirque Moderne. You know what’s happening out there. Don’t get on the wrong side of this!”

“It’s already been decided,” he said. My little brother. It was just what Miss Haddon-Finch had said. But somebody had decided—it wasn’t Fate. It could still be undone.

“No.” I batted the neat piles of clothes off the bed onto the floor. “Let’s run for it. We can go, right now.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, sitting down at my vanity. “What are we going to do, sell newspapers?”

“Maybe Solomon Moiseivich would give you a job. Apprentice you. You can’t let him do this. You’re not cut out to be a soldier.” The idea made me dizzy with terror.

He bristled. “How do you know? People survive it. Look at Volodya. Papa’s right. I have to stop dodging these things.”

I knelt by his side, took his hands in mine. “Please, I’m begging you… this is not a fight you want to join.”

He was about to cry, this would-be officer. “Don’t say any more.” We stayed like that for a long time. I wept, I think he did, too. After a while, he stood, then I did. We kissed three times, formally, and I had to let him go.

It rained the morning we left, a real soaker. In the first-class compartment, I sat with Avdokia, her arm around me, her smell of yeast, my head on her shoulder. Out the fogged-up window, the slums of the Vyborg side rolled past, the very seedbed of the revolution. Mother, with her hands folded in her lap, occupied the forward-facing seat alongside Miss Haddon-Finch and her little Italian greyhound Tulku. He stood on her lap to look out the window, leaving his nose print on the glass. But Mother’s eyes were closed, shutting out the sorry scene rumbling by, factories and tenements, as well as the squalid one inside the compartment—namely, me.

Miss Haddon-Finch wept quietly, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, her spectacles fogging up. I couldn’t tell whether they’d held her responsible for my supposed “disgrace.” Was she afraid she was going to be dismissed? I hardly needed a governess anymore—but there wasn’t time for arrangements to be made, and Mother would need some adult companionship. She couldn’t exactly dine with Avdokia and her half sister, Olya, every night. Or was the Englishwoman frightened at the prospect of a long summer alone with Mother in the depths of Russia, without her Dmitry Ivanovich?

It was the one positive note—I wouldn’t have to see Father all summer. His arrogance had grown worse now that he was in the Provisional Government. I couldn’t stop thinking of Seryozha at the Bagration Military School and all that it meant. I knew what kind of boys these officer cadets would be, sharpening their cruelty on the softest in their midst. After a few months of torment, he would prefer the enemy at the front! Or the unthinkable could happen—he could become one of them and call it growing up.

And my sweet Genya—how long would he wait for me? Would he write poetry for some other girl, someone he saw on a bridge, drawn to her shape reflected in the water? I tried to remember the feel of his arms, his body, the taste of his lips, his smell of hay and fresh wood. We had never even made love. It made me cry all over again. Avdokia petted me, murmuring, “We’re in God’s hands, Marinoushka. Tishe…” Quiet now.

21 Maryino

WE SPENT THE NIGHT in the market town of Tikhvin, in a small hotel near the station, and the next day, we rode up to Maryino. The weather was dusty and hot. I was sullen, and Mother had a headache. We drank tepid water from a flask, and Miss Haddon-Finch tried to teach us a game, spying something beginning with a certain letter, but no one wanted to play. Only Avdokia was in a holiday mood, her little eyes brightening as she pointed out familiar landmarks. “I have cousins in this village, Verushka. Remember Mishka, with the wall-eye?” She was coming home.

After we’d endured hours of heat and airlessness and being thrown about, the landscape started to look familiar to me as well. Then we were passing through our village, Novinka, with its rambling cluster of izbas, its blacksmith shop, its silvery wooden church with its birch domes. Mangy dogs barked after our coach. The peasants watched us, but no one waved. We jounced out past the fields, the long strips of the peasant allotments. The oats had been cut, now wheat grew green under a bright blue sky.

The road to the estate itself brought us up a hill, and then down through a linden allée my mother’s grandfather had planted, using dynamite to assure that the roots had room to grow. They were taller than any trees in the area. Now the house appeared, dark wood with white carved moldings around the windows. This beloved place. But dill and Queen Anne’s lace and thistles crowded the yard, and one of the shutters hung crookedly.

The old steward, Grigorii, came to his feet slowly, as if he were just stretching. A sturdy, stout peasant with a long beard, he didn’t remove his cap as the coach stopped before the porch—that was new. His smile was warm but his bow was brief and even a little ironic. But roses still rambled up the side of the house in bright red bloom, pretty but unpruned, and insects buzzed like tram wires before a rain.

“We just heard you were coming,” he said to Mother. No barynya. No Vera Borisovna. She was visibly rattled and tripped alighting from the carriage. She had never become used to revolutionary treatment and certainly hadn’t expected it here.

Avdokia steadied her while upbraiding her cousin. “Where are your manners, you stupid sot? You’re still living here, stealing everything not nailed down. Have some respect.”

He took off his cap, scratched his head, then embarrassed at having taken orders from this old woman, put it on again defiantly.

To gain time Mother removed her gloves, her hat, touched her shining silver hair with an unsteady hand. “Where are the others?” she asked.

“Oh, they’re around. Except for the young ones. Army took seven of ’em.” It was a small village, no more than fifty souls. Seven young men was a huge loss. “Yegor got killed last August.” He hocked, as if to spit, then thought twice when he caught Avdokia’s fierce eye. I remembered Yegor, a rock thrower who kicked the cows. But now he was dead.

“How awful,” Mother said. “Such terrible times. Our Volodya’s stationed on the Southwestern Front.”

“Officer, no doubt,” Grigorii said.

“Yes, he’s grown into a fine young man,” she said stiffly. “And Annoushka? How is your wife?”

“She’s fine, praise be to God,” Grigorii said. “She’ll get herself elected to the zemstvo soon enough.” Unlikely—the zemstvo was an all-male peasant organization led by landowners like us. But he was letting us know that things had changed. Putting us on notice.

“Yes, that’s good.” Mother brushed her forehead, as if trying to whisk away a fly. But the fly was the new era. The moment went on and on. What was he hoping, that she’d pick up her own bags?

Grigorii finally hoisted her trunks into the house. I’d have called it a draw.

Mother settled into Grandmère’s old boudoir. Miss Haddon-Finch was put into my childhood room, which had also been Mother’s. I took Grandfather’s old study at the head of the stairs. Avdokia went in with her half sister, Olya, and Olya’s daughter, Lyuda, behind the kitchen. Lyuda, my age or maybe a year older, unpacked my things. She handled them slowly, fingering my clothing, smoothing the cottons, the silks, as if she were shopping.

Over the following weeks, Avdokia treated me as if I were recovering from a horrible shock—which I supposed I was. She made me lie down with cold compresses of water steeped in lavender, sent me out to pick strawberries, blackberries, rowan berries, chamomile. I knew everyone thought me angry and peevish, but I didn’t care. I was helpless and useless and saw no point in being stoic about it. I plunged into my trunkful of books, played lackluster rounds of cards with Miss Haddon-Finch, who invited me to call her Ginevra, and wrote dozens of letters to Genya, which Avdokia refused to mail.

I slashed at the heads of shoulder-high weeds with a walking stick I’d found in the hall and cursed my father for his stupidity, my brother for his passivity, and the entire country for its idiocy. Ginevra trailed behind me, her skirts caught in the weeds as I made my way down to the river. The water was wide and slow, light skittering across the surface like gold coins. I took off my shoes and stockings and climbed out onto a large old birch that had fallen almost horizontally out over the water. “Be careful, Marina!” she called out to me. “I can’t swim!” When I was a child I could walk the entire length of this trunk, imagining I was a world-renowned aerialist, the Great Esmerelda. The crowd marveled at my grace and daring. Below me, water grass waved under the surface of the river, hiding pike and perch where I had once imagined tiny mermaids and orphans played. I could almost feel the warmth of the water. Blue dragonflies flitted. I stripped out of my light dress.

“What are you doing? Marina! Someone will see you!” Her voice rose as I took off my slip and my corselette. “Come down immediately!” I dropped my bloomers, and plunged into the green water.

This was what I’d forgotten—the sweet embrace of the river, the feel of it slipping over my naked flesh. Even its murky taste was wonderfully familiar. I turned over in the current, my red hair dark and streaming over my shoulders like a rusalka, the river spirit.

I could hear Ginevra, but I was lost to her. Above me floated boughs of birches and elms, dark proud spruces. Fat trout patrolled the deep hole at the riverbank’s edge. All my rage to return to the city dissolved, and I was just a fish swimming among the water weeds. Suddenly I heard giggles. Some little boys fishing on the opposite bank jeered, throwing pebbles, my nudity exciting and confusing to them. Let them look and imagine what they might have for themselves one day.

Afterward I dried my freckled skin with my dress and put it back on, lay in the soft grass under the birches as Ginevra scolded. What would happen if you’d drowned? and so on.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” I said. “I’m not suddenly going to put on a corset and play the fine lady.”

“Then I wash my hands of you. You heartless thing!” She wept as she marched off. Oh, the blessed quiet as she was gone! As if a tear in a fabric had been stitched closed. The humming of bees swelled and ebbed. I wrung out my hair and braided it. I felt Maryino recognized me as the same child who’d collected flowers and climbed these trees. I missed Seryozha. Where is the other one? the big maple asked. But he was gone, lost to the land of men. Why did everybody want a boy to hurry up and become a man, but nobody wanted a girl to become a woman? As if that were the most awful thing that could befall her.

Ignoring the harshness of the twigs and rocks underfoot, I walked barefoot to the springhouse, drank the icy water from my hand. The bathhouse lay buried in vines, which Seryozha and I used to pretend was Baba Yaga’s hut turning around and around on chicken legs. Turn and face us. Maybe Genya and I could come here someday, clear out all those vines. We could bring the Transrational Interlocutors and create our own Commune of the Future. Though Genya detested the countryside. To him it represented every backwardness. It made me laugh—he and my father shared at least that.

Back at the house, I uncovered a sickle in the garden shed—a bit rusty—and decided to mow the overgrown yard. I was tired of sitting around all day with a book and a compress on my face, the bourgeois miss. I took the little blade and began to slash at the thistle and fennel where we’d normally have set tables and chairs and eaten under the canopy of trees. The work proved harder than I’d expected.

“Marina! What do you think you’re doing?” Avdokia flew out onto the veranda. She must have seen me from the window. “You’re going to cut your foot off!”

Blisters were already forming on my palms. My arms itched, the sun was hot, and my nose ran from the pollen.

“When I was your age, I would have killed not to have to mow one more inch.” She pulled the sickle from me, examined the little crescent of steel. “Look how dull that blade is. Shame. Lyudochka! Lyudochka!” Her niece appeared in the open doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. “She’s going to cut her foot off. At least sharpen the blade for her.” The old woman sighed deeply. “That Grigorii’s got it coming.”

The girl led me back to the shed. On a shelf she found a stone, dark and heavy. She sat on a stump and drew it along the blade. “I’ve got the laundry or I’d help you. The old lady’s right—when you’re not here, Grigorii and Annoushka don’t do anything but sit on the porch on their asses drinking kvas. Your grandfather would have put the fear of God into them. He was a real baryn, that old man.”

It smelled like rain. I could hear it in the heavy metallic thrumming of the cicadas. I cut weeds for a while longer. Though the urge to do it had gone out of me, I knew Lyuda was watching. It certainly was much easier with the sharp blade. Soon I’d cleared a scrap of yard. Then I sat on the steps admiring my work and staring at my blisters with pride.

Lyuda brought me a glass of cherry water and we gazed out at the wind rustling the hazelnut bushes and the larch, fingering birch boughs like an invisible hand combing through a girl’s long hair. A long way off, I could see Ginevra and Mother coming back from a walk. They looked like a painting together, dressed in white blouses with their white parasols, and I felt a wave of intense nostalgia, as if I were already looking at a past time. How precious all this was, how soon it might be gone. It only made it more poignant and beautiful in my eyes.

One afternoon Mother received a letter—a group of her friends was planning to visit. Such joy! Suddenly she remembered that she was the mistress of Maryino and not just a pale captive. She summoned the steward, waiting for him in the salon at the little writing table exactly where her father and grandfather once sat, and I noticed that upon stepping inside the doorway, Grigorii reflexively removed his cap. She told him that guests were coming, that he must clear the yard and the path to the aspen grove, fill in the worst of the potholes on the drive, “and for God’s sake repair that shutter.” Not a quiver in her voice or the slightest apology.

Soon long tables stretched underneath the trees, and the rooms filled with guests. The house itself seemed happy, and though I still tried to portray myself as the despairing urbanite, the longer I stayed the happier I grew. I noticed the art collector Tripov among the guests who arrived from Petrograd. Perhaps it was he who had organized the excursion as an excuse to pay court to Vera Borisovna.

Now my mother had friends to walk with through the pines and the aspen grove, to show off the village church to and play cards and guessing games, to ride in the wagonette to other estates. We sat at night at the long table covered with white tablecloths under the trees, and my mother laughed as her guests shared their gossip—who was having an affair with whom, what had happened at so-and-so’s birthday party, a neglected painting that turned out to be a Rubens, a remarkable man who taught spiritual dances and had such an original point of view. Mother wore a long gown of lilac linen. She glowed in the unearthly summer twilight, which would go on until the sun briefly dipped below the horizon before returning in an hour or so—like a child who will not go to bed.

“How has Dmitry Ivanovich fared in this auto-da-fé?” Ilona Dahlberg asked, her crimped gray hair in its elegant chignon.

“He’s managed to keep a toehold,” Mother replied. “You know he’s the most stubborn man. He says Tereshchenko’s an excellent minister, though he’s no Pavel Nikolaevich.” Paul Miliukov, a true intelligent, still led the Kadet party, but he’d become increasingly counterrevolutionary in his views.

“Dmitry Ivanovich had better hang on tight,” said the art dealer Ryazanovsky. “It’s not over yet.”

“It seems my husband’s excellent on the high wire. Who knew? Maybe he has a new career,” said Mother, making them all laugh. She tinkled her fork against her wine glass, lifted it. “I’d like to propose a toast. To long summer nights with good friends. And no more politics. Toujours gais, mes amis.”

Avdokia got wind from somewhere that the barynya had been swimming au naturel and deputized her niece as my watchdog. “And if anything happens to her, you’ll wish you’d never been born,” she’d warned her. I could imagine Lyuda’s mockery as soon as my nanny’s back was turned. A strong, spirited girl, she was delighted to be freed from making beds, doing laundry, and clumsily serving meals. Now her only responsibility was to tramp the countryside with me and make sure I didn’t run off with a deserter or drown in the Kapsha. She was not afraid of swimming, though she paddled with her head above the water like a dog.

And at last I found a postman for my letters. Because I still didn’t know the address of the Poverty Artel and couldn’t address them to “a murky courtyard off Grivtsova Alley,” I addressed them all to Mina, with instructions on how to deliver them.

“What is it?” Lyuda asked, weighing the package in her hand.

“Letters. For my boyfriend in Petrograd,” I said.

She touched the address written on the brown paper. “And this says where it goes?”

I showed her the word, Petrograd. Held out the silver ruble. “This is for the postage, and you keep what’s left. Will you do it?”

“Sure, why wouldn’t I?” She tossed the coin in the air and snatched it as it fell, fast as a snake on a rat. Could I trust her? She could easily throw the letters away and keep the ruble for herself. But who else did I have? She was more trustworthy than Grigorii. She took the package and put it in the basket with our lunch.

We stopped in the shade of a small copse of birches, where the grass was high. She spread out a tablecloth and we sat. I emptied my skirtful of daisies and began to weave them into a chain for my hair. “What’s Petrograd really like?” She spoke of it as if it were the sunken city of Kitezh, not a place one could travel to in two short days. “Bet you people wear different clothes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, eh?” We could hear the bells of the village cows grazing close at hand. “They say even the workers eat roast beef.”

“We haven’t seen beef since the war began,” I said. “You probably have more here than we do.” I wove the green daisy stems together, breathing their bright, bitter smell, staining my fingers. “In Petrograd the bread queues stretch around the block.”

The dappled sun caressed her broad face and her blond plait. “Is that why you’re here? For the food?”

I wiggled my bare toes dark from dirt, noting with satisfaction the calluses forming on the bottoms. “My father doesn’t like my boyfriend. He’s trying to break us up.” When I said it that way, it seemed so simple. The world’s oldest story. “That’s why I need you to mail the letters. I don’t want him to forget me. My father hates him. He’s so sure he knows what’s best for everyone.”

“You know what I remember?” she said. “Him bawling out Annoushka because she overcooked his eggs. Three minutes. I gave you a timer. What have you done with it?” What a perfect imitation! “And it had to be served in a little cup, or it went right back to the kitchen. The Englishman—that’s what your grandpa called him.” She dropped her voice, brushed her jowls to suggest Dyedushka’s bushy whiskers, and pounded her fist into her hand, the way Grandfather used to punctuate his pronouncements. “Why can’t the Englishman eat kasha like everyone else?”

“He’s still like that,” I said. “Teaching the world how to live.”

“So tell me about the boy.” Her wide-set blue eyes were eager for gossip.

“He’s a poet. A worker and a poet. He calls himself a bargeman-Keats.”

“What’s a Keats?” she asked.

I recited Keats’s love poem to Fanny Brawne, one of my favorites, and translated it roughly for her.

She fell back on the tablecloth, pretending to swoon. “He really talks like that? The blacksmith can barely open his mouth. But why a bargeman-Keats?”

I pulled out the sandwiches Olya had made, black bread with smoked fish, handed her one. “Bargeman-Keats means that when people look at him, they see the bargeman, but not the Keats. He’s a giant. He could pull a plow without a horse. My father wants a son-in-law who will fit in his egg cup.”

Lyuda laughed open-mouthed, her head thrown back. What a fine-looking girl she was, wide hips and heavy breasts. More a match for Genya than I was. “All our boys are gone,” she said. “There’s only a bunch of ugly old men, halfwits and peewees. Why isn’t your bargeman-Keats in the war?”

There were several answers to that. Draft dodger, only son, Bolshevik. “He doesn’t believe in the war,” I said.

“Who does? It’s just that our lot can’t get away with it.” She licked her lip, a bit of sour cream from her sandwich escaping her mouth. “My mother thinks I should marry the blacksmith. What do you think? He makes a good living, but he’s old, thirty at least, and stupid as a sheep. Maybe I should run off to Petrograd,” she said. “Get a job in a factory, go dancing all night.”

I imagined those women at the pumps on the Vyborg side and the Belhausen women. Many had started out as peasant girls themselves. “You might not want to go dancing after standing in a dark barn all day, working at a loom until your legs swell and you can’t breathe for the dust in your lungs.”

“You think this is any better? Stuck with kids and old geezers, trying to bring in a harvest? Sending our money to you lot so you can drink champagne and eat roast beef?”

My face went fiery red. Before the revolution she wouldn’t have dared. But she was right. It was unfair, unjust, and yet it was how we lived. I never really explained that part to Genya. I lay back and watched the spruce boughs in their circles soughing in the wind. Maryino wasn’t just a beautiful retreat. It was a means of production, as Varvara would say. How Lyuda must hate me.

“Akh, don’t look like that.” She brushed crumbs off her lap, threw a bite of bread to the birds. “I’m just saying it’s pretty but no paradise. You’ll see me in Petrograd soon enough.”

I chewed on that as I ate my sandwich, then shimmied up the tilted trunk of one of the old birch trees, where I could sit in the fork about eight feet above ground over Lyuda and drop catkins down on her. The breeze sent the bright green of the boughs into motion.

She pulled the letters out of the basket and was looking at the words again. Running her fingers over the address. “Look, here’s something you can do for me,” she called up into the trees. “Teach me to read. Do that and I’ll send your letters for free.”

I’d brought a trunkful of poetry, but even I could see that none of it would be suitable for the purpose. Mother’s cache of Blavatsky and Steiner, doubly useless. If only Ginevra’s Austen and Dickens were in Russian, that would have been ideal. In the end I wrote a ballad for her myself, the story of a cow from Novinka who came to Petrograd to make her fortune. I had the cow fall in love with one of the horses on the Anichkov Bridge and become a singer at the Stray Dog Café. I was proud of how fast she caught on. Soon she was reading everything—labels on tooth powder, tins of sardines. It wouldn’t be long before she was reading my letters, if she hadn’t started already.

Replies began to arrive from Petrograd, from a “Nadezhda Lyubova”—Hope of Love.

The house seemed so empty once Mother’s guests departed, leaving behind a slight air of mourning, though summer was still high. After dinner, we sat on the porch listening to the nightingales, Mother curled in Grandmère’s rocking chair, Avdokia with her pipe, Olya on the old bench by the door. Ginevra wrote a letter by lamplight, waving the moths away, while Mother rocked, her eyes half-closed, humming, then began to sing in her pure, lovely voice, “Au clair de la lune / Mon ami Pierrot, / Prête-moi ta plume / Pour écrire un mot…”

The tune enveloped me. She used to sing when I was young, but rarely did anymore. I listened, then quietly, hoping she wouldn’t stop, started to accompany her. My voice was lower than hers now, and she began to improvise harmony above, her voice embroidering itself through my melody like silk thread through plain cotton. I could recall how fiercely I had once loved her, the most beautiful of all the mothers, the most talented, the most sophisticated. The other girls envied me. She invented games for us, fashioned puppets and creations in paper—it was how Seryozha got his taste for constructions. She read to us, and sang. If she had not settled for becoming an ornament, a fashionable wife, she might have been an artist herself. Tonight she let down her talent, like the hair of Rapunzel. We sang “Gentil Coquelicot” and “Fais Dodo, Colin,” as the crickets chirped and fireflies winked in the long grass.

Lyuda joined us on the porch after the washing up, and she and Olya sang an old song about sweethearts parted by war, how youth would be wasted and lovers would die, the world would ever come between them. When Avdokia sang with them, their harmonies blended with hair-raising beauty, like one woman at three stages of life. Their song shook tears from me. Then Annoushka started one, even sadder—“I Walk Alone upon the Road”—and each woman, joining, added her own unique timbre and temperament. In the glowing half-light, we drank from the ancient spring that ran, deep and sweet and cold, beneath us all.

22 The Harvest

SUMMER EDGED TOWARD FALL, filled with checkered lilies and cornflowers, and still we remained at Maryino. I’d lost Lyuda to the hard labor of the wheat harvest and began to wonder if Father was ever going to bring us home. Letters arrived for Mother from her friends in Petrograd, and for me from Nadezhda Lyubova. I can’t think about anything but your hair. But bad news came from Father. His letters complained about Kerensky and the difficulties faced by the new government: coup attempts first by Lenin’s gang, then by the rightists led by General Kornilov. Kerensky’s appointed himself commander in chief, he wrote. It’s Alice down the rabbit hole. The Kadets resigned en masse, but I continue in harness. I’ll stay until I’m fired. Boycotts and walkouts make a splash, but then where are you? Tereshchenko manages to navigate the zigs and zags, but the situation’s volatile. A Bolshevik demonstration was recently fired upon, and of course they’re making political hay of it. I recommend that you stay in Maryino until things settle down.

Mother and I strolled along a path that had already begun to close in now that the harvest was taking priority. The wind set the aspen leaves to rustling on their white branches. “You don’t put your hair up anymore,” Mother said, touching the long braids I wore. “You look like a little girl again. Sweet years…”

I laced my arm through hers. Her perfume was still the same. But now we were two women, the same height, though she was the slimmer, the more ethereal. “A little change is a good thing, Marina,” she said. “But one needs tranquillity to absorb it. Too much change and it’s just a hurricane. We don’t have time to make sense of it as we’re tumbling down the street.” She peered into a thicket. “Those blackberries are ripe. Pick some.”

I went into the deep grass and picked the black ones into my old straw hat, trying not to let the wicked thorns tear at me and avoiding the wasps growing drunk around the burst fruit. “Mama, what is it you think Papa is so mad about? Is it Genya? Or is it me? He’s not really a worker, you know. He’s a priest’s son and a poet.”

The wind in the trees was an ocean’s rumble, that wide, many-voiced murmur—like a rumor moving through a crowd. She sighed, pushing her hair back under her hat. “Can’t you see how impossible it is? Although I’m sure it’s exciting… the lure of the forbidden. You’re curious. You were always sensitive about the lower classes. Worrying about the coachmen out in the snow, remember? And there’s the revolutionary cachet…”

She thought I was in love with Genya because it was fashionable. But he was hardly representative of “the lower classes” as she so horrifyingly put it. I popped a blackberry in my mouth, sweet and sour, and brought the rest to her. She ate them as we continued our walk.

“Was there no one before you and Papa married?” It was something I’d always wanted to know but never dared ask.

The trees shimmered in a sudden burst of wind. She had to hold her hat to keep it from taking off like a gull. How could she still be so beautiful, that elegant profile with the straight, sculpted nose, the finely turned mouth? “A boy came to visit one summer. He was staying on the Zarkovskys’ estate. Grisha, his name was. He played tennis very beautifully. He moved like it was music.” She frowned. “But relations between men and women are overemphasized, in my opinion. It’s not as important as you think it is right now.”

I’d never heard her speak about anything so personal. Though I couldn’t have disagreed with her more, I wanted to hear what she actually thought about love. “What is important then?”

“Harmony,” she said. She stroked her fingertips along a white aspen trunk. “Nature. One’s feeling for deeper things.” Tulku disappeared into the bushes—after a rabbit most likely. “Your father never cared for the country. I wouldn’t mind staying on here.” She reached down and plucked a dandelion, held the head without blowing the floss, twirling it in her hand. “Actually, I’m dreading going back into that hurricane. It’s so peaceful here. Don’t you feel it? It reminds me of so many things.”

I felt it myself, this nostalgia, but I waved it away. “You’d miss your friends if you didn’t go back.”

“They can take care of themselves,” she said.

I ate a blackberry, but it was too sour. I spit it out. “I start university in a few weeks, remember?”

“If there’s a university left,” she said.

Whether or not there was a university, there was Gennady Kuriakin. My university. My Petrograd. Nadezhda Lyubova, my hope, my love.

I sat in the kitchen watching Annoushka make bread, the room dim compared to the brightness outside. She was a fount of information, had opinions about everything. “What if we just stopped paying taxes? What’s Russia to us? What’s this war to us? Nobody asked us what we thought.” She turned the loaf over, kneading it, pummeling it. “When is this repartition going to happen? That’s what I want to know. The tsar’s gone. What are they waiting for?” It was on everybody’s mind, the division of the land. She stopped to wipe sweat from her brow with the back of a floury hand. “What does Dmitry Ivanovich say?”

I knew exactly what he would say because I’d asked him that myself. These things take time. The landowner has to be compensated. If she and the others were looking for the land to be seized and distributed into peasant hands, they shouldn’t be looking to the Provisional Government. Even the SRs in power now didn’t have the nerve. “I don’t think they’re any closer,” I admitted. “Only the Soviet is talking about it seriously.”

“Well, bless you for telling the truth,” she said, turning the loaf over and punching it down. “We’ve heard the peasants in Ryazan are taking the land and the hell with the landowner. They’re burning them out down there. Killing them in their beds, so they say.” Annoushka cut her wicked eyes at me, just to make sure I got the message, then fell dutifully to her task.

Ever since the tsar’s fall, the peasants had been waiting for the redistribution of the land. Soldiers were deserting so they could come home and be part of it. They believed that if they weren’t physically present when the land was parceled out, they wouldn’t get their share. They were deserting by the tens of thousands. I watched Annoushka finish the bread and slide it into the oven with a paddle. Although I didn’t believe she and Grigorii were going to slit our throats as we slept, change was in the wind. Sooner or later, I saw, we were going to lose Maryino. We were living on borrowed time.

I asked if she’d heard anything about the food situation in the capital. Were provisions from here getting into the city? Something had to relieve those bread queues. Father said the Provisional Government could do nothing because the railways were so poor and the army was eating most of the bread. Anything that got on the trains came off before it got to us in the city.

“It’s all going to the army, isn’t it?” Annoushka said, wiping the table down. “The pirates. They come and take what they want, pay us a few kopeks. Over in Alekhovshchina, they refused to go along with one bunch. Cut off their heads with scythes, they say.” The musky scent of yeast and the wood burning in the big oven smelled like home—yet the terrible things she was saying took away all familiarity.

I thought of Kolya and his provisioning unit. Was that what he was doing all this time—robbing the peasants for the army? Yes, I imagined that was exactly what he was doing. He was completely capable of seizing a village’s grain if they refused to accept the price he offered. I had seen the toughness behind the charm.

I had to get back to Petrograd. Somehow I had to tear Mother away from her nostalgic dream—though first I had to put it away myself.

As the light changed and the days shortened, we still heard nothing from Father, and my urgency grew sharper. Mother began to talk about having our winter clothes shipped to us. I had to do something or all would be lost. One afternoon I found her on the porch, where she sat in Grandmère’s rocker, listening to the harvest songs coming from the fields with a pleasure deeper than joy. How could I rob her of this? Yet it had to come. It would have been so much easier if we’d been quarreling, but I felt closer to her than I had in years. “I hope Father calls us home soon,” I said. “Annoushka says the peasants are speaking out against the estates.”

She said nothing, just kept rocking.

“The deserters are coming back. They’re tired of waiting for the repartition. They’re taking the land on their own. Annoushka says they’re burning the manor houses.”

“Annoushka’s imagination is running away with her,” Mother said.

“It’s already happening in Babayevo.” Babayevo was a hundred versts away—hours on horseback, yet close enough for ideas to spread.

Her eyes slowly opened, the long lashes just like Seryozha’s. “Our peasants won’t do that. We’ve known them for four generations. They can barely sharpen a scythe let alone take over Maryino.”

I shrugged. “The revolution’s not just in the city. It’s in the izbas, in the fields. They’re talking about it. They’ve been waiting since Emancipation.”

Mother shaded her eyes against the glare. The pines rustled behind me, throwing their patterns of sun and shade on the side of the house. “You’re on their side, aren’t you?”

“You can’t support the peasant in the abstract and deny him in fact,” I said. “This is the reality—the soldiers are coming back and they’re armed. They want the land.”

I saw how she clutched at the pendant around her neck. “Even Kerensky said that there would be no expropriations.”

She’d become too attached to the illusion of safety, as if Maryino could sink beneath the waters and life could continue as it always had been. Illusion and nostalgia surrounded her like a fog. I felt it myself, but I had to shake it off. “The peasants are tired of waiting. The deserters are taking matters into their own hands. Annoushka said they’re nailing the landlords into their manor houses and setting them on fire.”

“Wishful thinking,” she said. But she was sitting up straight now, brushing off her skirt in irritated little gestures. Probably remembering all the insolences of Grigorii and the coachman and the way the peasants didn’t bow when she rode through the fields.

“We don’t want to be here when the division comes, Mama. We can’t stop them, but we don’t have be here when it happens.”

We heard the dog barking at something in the woods. She clapped her hands and called until he broke from the trees and raced onto the porch. She petted his narrow head. “Your father would never expose us to any danger,” she said, but she was only reassuring herself. “He would have sent for us.”

I was about to mention that he’d sent Seryozha to Moscow, too, recklessly, but Mother looked so pained every time I brought that up. “He’s distracted. He’s got the whole country to think about. But you see how they look at us—Grigorii, Annoushka. They’re already thinking it’s theirs.”

“Stop it.” She lifted Tulku onto her lap and kissed his hard little head. “They’ve got their revolution. What more do they want?”

A woodsman was felling a tree somewhere. She flinched at the resonating blows of the ax.

“If we were murdered, Papa might not know for weeks,” I added.

“Don’t exaggerate,” she snapped. But the skin had drawn tighter over her cheekbones. Her nose seemed suddenly sharp.

That night she penned a letter. I watched her at Grandfather’s desk, stopping to wipe her eyes with a handkerchief, blow her nose. It had finally sunk in that she might well be losing Maryino. She scratched out a passage, rewrote something on the back, took out a new sheet, recopied. I think she was trying for a reasonable tone to plead our case, one that would convey the seriousness of our situation here without opening her up to ridicule. Then she started crying again, her forehead against her balled-up fist. I wanted to run to her, embrace her, and tell her I’d made it all up. But everything was true, except for the bit about Babayevo. And who knew? That, too, could be true by now. There was no helping it. All the signs said it was time to go.

In the morning, she called Grigorii and gave him the letter, even said “please” when she sent him off, coins jingling in his pocket, to catch the first post.

23 Return to Petrograd

I WAS NEVER SO happy to see the slums of the Vyborg side as I was that September day. The autumn sun shone on the gold spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the panorama as we crossed over the Neva at the Liteiny Bridge was more breathtaking than ever. A tram rattled by—trams! This wonderful noise—traffic, crowds, shops. How I loved this city, the smell of its smoke, the throngs milling on the wide sidewalks, the shimmering canals. My city, my Petrograd.

But on Furshtatskaya Street all that awaited us in greeting were twelve slightly dirty rooms and Basya. “Where is Dmitry Ivanovich?” Mother asked as our bags were carried in.

“At work, missus,” Basya said. “Where else would he be?”

Missus. Mother took her hat off very, very slowly, put it on the hall table, removed her gloves finger by finger. Surrendering to this new rudeness by quarter inches.

“It’s only a cold dinner I can get you,” the maid continued, as if she hadn’t noticed a thing. “He doesn’t eat at home now, and we weren’t expecting you till tomorrow.”

“Yes, all right,” Mother said. “I’ll take it in my room.” She retreated to her bedroom, closely followed by Avdokia, muttering curses under her breath. Ginevra, however, sighed with pleasure at the end of our journey. I supposed she had found the separation from the city harder than even I had. The dvornik and his son carted our trunks in. I slipped out to the kitchen, where Basya was resting, watching Vaula chop cucumbers for a salad, and eased past them, heading for the back stairs.

“Look at the little chit,” Basya said. “Going out already. Go then. Don’t mind me.”

“Murders on this very block,” Vaula said, looking up from her cutting board, her round blue eyes drooping a warning. “Things have changed since you left. You might not want to go out there by yourself.”

“Maybe I’ve changed a little, too.” I stole a slice of cucumber from the board. “Anybody come looking for me?”

“Who could the girl be talking about?” Basya said to the cook.

Vaula laughed, salting the sliced rounds.

“You know very well who.” I would have twisted her scrawny arm if I thought it would help.

A bell rang on the bell board: my mother’s room. Basya snickered as she passed me, her breath smelling of cinnamon and tobacco. “Ivan Tsarevich, you mean? That big hooligan shouting poems at the windows? Sure, he stood out there caterwauling until your father threatened to call the police on him if he ever saw him again. The idiot came back a few more times just to be sure. Foma saw him out there after midnight, at two, maybe three in the morning, watching your windows.”

I kissed her on both cheeks and ran out the back door, down the stairs, into the courtyard, and out to the street.

The city was even shabbier than I remembered it—perhaps I’d sprinkled it with a bit of Lyuda’s imagined glamour in my mind. But it was still Petrograd and I loved every dirty beggar as I ran toward Sadovaya and Haymarket Square. The noise, the shops, the miraculous automobiles rushing through the streets. It was September, and the cool river air had swept summer from the pavement. I ran all the way to Grivtsova Alley, racing up the stinking stairs to the Poverty Artel. I knocked, called out. “Genya! Open up!” I could not wait for him to touch me, to feel his arms again, his kiss. I knocked again. Nothing. This was it, wasn’t it? The worn door—number 8.

But there was no one home. They’d probably gone to shout their poetry from the rooftops, I told myself, but anything could have happened. They might have been drafted or evicted. The mail took forever to arrive. Yet why should they be home this time of the evening? Genya had no idea I was returning today. Still, I could not keep tears from rising. The mountains I’d had to climb to get here, the plots I’d had to orchestrate! I descended the stairs at half the pace I’d flown up them. Out in the courtyard, women waiting to pump water followed me with their eyes. I called to them, “Do the boys on the second floor still live here? The poets?”

“Who else would have them?” one of the women called out and the others laughed.

I couldn’t run around Petrograd looking for them. Instead I stopped in at the one place where I was certain someone would be home. From the hall, I could hear lively hands playing ragtime on the piano. Shusha’s skills had certainly progressed since spring. I knocked hard and Dunya answered the door. She was wearing a rust-colored dress with an embroidered sunflower on the pocket—Seryozha’s handwork. I burst into tears.

She threw her arms around me, pulled me inside. The smell of soup, of kasha embraced me as ever. Shusha jumped up from the piano—“Mariiiina!”—and hugged me hard. “Did you hear me? It’s the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’! Mama just got it for me.” She sat back down and began again.

Now I saw Mina—she’d been hidden behind a heap of books like a barricade. She rose and kissed me. “She can’t stop playing it. I could kill her. Look at you—you’re a peasant now.” She tugged at my braid, which I hadn’t bothered to put up before I ran out of the house.

My friend looked older, prettier, in a crisp white blouse and necktie, her hair worn in a fashionable coil instead of its old-fashioned crown. A studentka. I realized with a surge of panic that she’d begun university. I’d come home too late. But I refused to mourn. I was back, that was the thing. If Genya was still in Petrograd, if he still wanted me, that would be enough.

“Marina!” Now I saw Solomon Moiseivich on the divan with his foot up on a stool. “I’d get up but gout’s got me. I thought it was the province of kings, but Fate says, ‘For you, Solomon, we’ll make an exception.’”

Sofia Yakovlevna bustled out from the kitchen. “Marina! Welcome home, welcome back.” She wiped her hands on her apron, and then gave me a squeeze and a kiss. “We were wondering whether you’d come home. Your letters didn’t say. Look how healthy you are! Brown as a nut. Where’s your brother?”

“Yes—how’s my favorite assistant?” the photographer inquired.

They didn’t know. I looked again at Dunya’s dress, thinking of how he’d sewn those flowers. “They sent him to Moscow, to a military school. To become an engineer.”

“You’re joking,” Mina said. She pushed her glasses up on her nose, the better to study me. I shook my head.

Solomon Moiseivich rounded his eyes at his wife, speaking whole treatises in that single glance. “Well. Engineering’s a good trade.”

“I’m sure Dmitry Ivanovich has his reasons,” Sofia Yakovlevna said quickly, then patted my shoulder. “Sit down, Marina. I’ll get you a glass of tea.” But a note of worry hung in the air.

I took a chair next to Mina. “So you’ve started without me.” I picked up one of her heavy books—chemistry. I would not cry. I was home, that was the important thing. “How is it?”

“Lots of work.” She shrugged, pretending it was all such a burden, but I could tell how proud she was. “Rumor has it they might cancel the term because of the food shortages. I’m trying to get as much done as I can.”

I laid the book back down on the pile. “It’s that bad?”

She nodded. “People are leaving every day. Going south. Going abroad. We were wondering if you’d even be back.”

“Did you deliver my letters?” I asked under my breath.

Mina smiled, showing her pretty small teeth. “What do you think, that I’d stand in the way of true love?” She tugged at my long braid again. “Actually I didn’t even need to deliver them. He comes by with his friends—at dinnertime, naturally. Dunya’s got a crazy crush on the painter.”

“Oh, so I’ve got the crush.” Dunya threw a wadded-up paper at her. “Tell her about Nikolai Shurov.”

Mina’s cheeks blazed.

I could feel myself go pale in equal measure. “What about him?”

“He came to town is all,” Mina answered, studying her smooth hands, the little sapphire ring she wore. “I ran into him at the pharmacy.” She shrugged again. “He’d gone to your parents’ looking for you.”

A sudden tightness in my throat, down to my solar plexus. Why should I care, when I had Genya? But on some level I still did. Look at her face. Had he made love to her? No, he wouldn’t have. Though he couldn’t resist an admiring female, even if she was chubby and wore glasses and talked about integers and valences. And she had beautiful skin, and her gray eyes were shaded by long, white-tipped lashes. In fact, she wasn’t even fat anymore. She looked… pretty.

She gazed toward the hall that led to the kitchen, where her mother had returned to her cooking; to her father, reading on the divan; to her sisters; then back to me, pleading with me not to say anything more.

I lowered my voice. “Is he here in Petrograd?”

“No,” she whispered. “He went back to the front. That was months ago—in July, before the offensive.”

I could feel my eyes stinging. He’d been here, while I was out in the country mowing weeds.

“Do you mind?” she whispered, touching my sleeve. Her bottom lip trembled.

“No,” I said and tried to smile. What was done was done, and anyway I had Genya. In just a few minutes, I would see him. The hell with Kolya.

“I told him about Genya. Was that right?”

“Of course.” A soothing thought. He deserved that, for leaving me alone for all those months. Did he think I would wait forever?

Sofia Yakovlevna asked us to clear the table for dinner. I knew I should leave—not impose myself on their hospitality—but Genya might be coming, so when she asked me to dinner, I agreed with alacrity. I was going to see Genya. And Kolya? Kolya was the past. Ancient history. I telephoned home, told Ginevra where I was, that I’d be home later. I was in no hurry to see Father, and had seen enough of Mother and my governess to last a decade.

We sat down to eat, dragging Solomon Moiseivich’s footstool into place so that he could keep his foot up. It was so good to see the whole family again. Mina told me about all the people who had come to pose for photographs since I’d been gone—Tereshchenko and the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet both! Kerensky himself had come the day before yesterday. “Talked without stopping,” said Solomon Moiseivich. “He’s due for a nervous collapse, if you ask me. But the picture turned out well.”

A pounding interrupted us in mid-meal. I jumped, recalling the day that revolutionary soldiers burst in to search the flat. But this time Dunya raced to answer the door. In a moment, she returned with Sasha Orlovsky, and behind him, my own sweet Genya. Did I fly? Or had he crossed the room in one step? I leaped into his arms, and we kissed in front of God and all the Katzevs.

Anton Chernikov squeezed past us. “Oh, look. The rusticated cousin returns.”

I breathed in Genya’s scent, like fresh mown grass and the harsh makhorka tobacco he smoked. Everyone was watching, but this was more important than finishing dinner. I breathlessly thanked the Katzevs, and together we ran down the stairs as if the building were burning.

Out in the street, we floated above the city, cartwheeled over people in shoes and coats. We walked sideways along pastel buildings glowing in the twilight. We used the trees for toothpicks. “I heard Father threatened you with the police.”

His laughter, rich, huge. “And let me tell you, the Red Guards came right away. How dare I shout love poems at such an important man?” He tugged on my braid, pulling me closer. “This was what you looked like at nine, isn’t it? God, I wish I had been there.” He cupped my face in his palm and kissed me. I didn’t know if people walked around us or if they simply had vanished. “How was it out in the boonies without me?” he whispered. “Horrible and dusty and ridiculous? Were you ready to die of boredom?”

“Every day. Twice sometimes.” I rubbed my cheek against his hand. “They had to keep the knives out of reach. Take me home, Genya. While they’re all still at Mina’s.”

Haymarket Square seemed strangely empty this evening, the stalls closing up early, though the weather was fair. Was there some new curfew? We crossed the luminous Catherine Canal at the Demidov Bridge and raced up narrow Grivtsova Alley, the tops of the buildings still in light, up the dark stairs two at a time. Today we would make right what had gone wrong then.

Inside, the Poverty Artel smelled of turpentine and smoke. A section of wall was in the process of being painted, cubo-futuristically, over the tiling of newspapers. I took off my coat. So this was what it usually looked like—unmade divan, unmade cot, chairs piled with papers and paint, ashtray overflowing, sunflower-seed shells crunching underfoot. He bustled about, pulling the sheets up on the divan, picking up clothes from the floor. “Forget about that,” I said. I pulled him down next to me, took the clothes from his arms, and tossed them back onto the floor. So much time had passed between us. I didn’t care how dirty the room was.

I could feel a hesitation on his part, a new shyness. “What is it?”

He gazed at me, worry in his hazel eyes under the shock of tawny hair. “There wasn’t anybody else, was there? Out there?”

Oh, was that it? I tried not to laugh. “Who? The twelve-year-olds? Or the old uncle with the beard halfway to his knees?”

He laughed, but the uncertainty remained. It had to be slain, this dragon of time and distance. I took his hand and kissed it, slowly, biting the knuckles each in turn, then kissing the palm until he groaned. I planted my fat lips on his, and our kisses began in earnest, his big fingers fumbling at my buttons, his floppy hair longer than ever, falling into his eyes. I pushed it from his face.

“I swore I wouldn’t cut it until I had you back,” he whispered into my neck. “I would have grown it as long as a Sikh’s.”

I raked my own hair free of its braid, pulled it apart so that it flowed over my back and shoulders, and he buried his face in it as if it were a wonderland. The room was cold but I took off my dress and tossed it aside, helped him out of his old jacket, his shirt. He looked at me so uncertainly. Why? The beauty of his body was Atlantean, his smooth wide chest hairless, so large, so different from Kolya’s pelt of chestnut fur. How warm he was. I pressed my cheek to the muscle right over his heart to listen to the blood surge inside him. It was like a Niagara. With my finger, I traced the dip above his rib cage. He was big and bulky and warm, his heavy arms laced with sinews like a ship’s rope. He tried opening my corselette, fumbling to work the buttons far too tiny for him—or was it that his hands were trembling? I pushed him away so I could unfasten it myself and let him see me, my breasts and shoulders dotted with summer freckles, his expression better than any mirror. I opened his worn trousers and slid my hand in. He groaned. He was huge, and ready—so that wasn’t what was making him shy.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“You won’t,” I said. I didn’t care if he did. I produced a condom, hoping it wasn’t too small, but he managed to roll it down over himself. Would he think I was a trollop, a jade? Would it break? I’d take that chance. I wanted him. I pushed him back onto the gritty sheets and lay over him, my hair a crimson tent.

Oh, the bliss of that hour. It had been months since I’d slept with Kolya. Before the revolution. We made love and it was far more serious business than it was with Kolya. We were naked in our feelings, stopped and started again, then lay wearily in each other’s arms as the last light faded from the room. I felt as though I were rocking on a barge, on the Volga with my bargeman-Keats, the river so wide you couldn’t see both banks.

Finally the Interlocutors returned, banging on the door. “Open up!”

“Go away!” Genya shouted back.

More kicks from the other side. “Pigs,” we heard someone shout. We grunted like swine, making ourselves laugh.

Genya insisted on escorting me home, arm in arm in the dark. I could feel the uneasiness of passersby now, a tangible wildness in the air. I thought of Vaula’s warning, how things might have changed since I’d been gone. Yet seeing Genya, who would have the nerve to disturb us? The lights reflected in the canal for us alone. We crossed at the Bank Bridge, with its gold-winged griffins glinting, so close to the flat where Kolya and I… I pressed into Genya’s side. All that seemed like another century.

When we turned onto Furshtatskaya, our flat was lit up like an ocean liner. I knew they were waiting up for me. We kissed a long time, my lips swollen and raw, my body still tender, my hair a cloud of tangles. After that, I felt I could face anything.

The younger dvornik stepped out of the shadows with a lantern, but seeing it was me with Genya, he waved genially and went back to his cubby, where he was playing cards with a friend.

“I really should go.”

Genya released me but as I moved away, he snatched me up again. “Don’t. Don’t ever go.” His arms tightened around me. “Don’t go to them. I can’t stand it. I hate them. I want to fight a duel with your father. I want to have him on the ground under my boot. I’ll show him no mercy.”

I searched for his mouth again.

“Marry me,” he said. “Come live with me. You don’t have to go back.”

I thought of that room, the divan with the dirty sheets, Anton pounding on the door. “But how shall we all sleep? Standing up like horses in a stall?”

“We’ll levitate. Sleep in midair. The night will be our eiderdown.”

I had to kiss a mouth like that. I rested my fingers on his lips, memorizing them like a blind girl. And then I left him there, watching me, the dry leaves whirling about his feet.

24 The Coming Storm

PIPE TOBACCO GREETED me when I returned. I walked past the doors of my father’s study, straight to my room, wondering if it was too late to take a bath. I began to peel off my hastily assembled clothing—I’d misbuttoned my dress. It made me laugh. How I would have loved to spend the night in Genya’s arms, in that little flat, even with its fleas and Anton writing his articles. But I couldn’t be greedy. It would have been too strange if the Interlocutors had returned while we were lying together in the wash of fragrance and sweat, talking about childhood, about rivers and birds.

Sitting before my round vanity mirror, I began to brush out my hair. What a crop of snarls. I still remembered it flowing down, framing Genya’s face in a red waterfall. The enamel bangle fell back from my wrist. Why did I still wear it? It seemed a sign of something, a delectable complication. I was not too young to have had a past, I thought with a certain pride. That’s how young I was.

In the hall, a shuffle. A quiet knock. The door cracked open. Ginevra, still fully dressed. I returned to my toilette. My face was smooth with satisfaction. Hers, on the other hand, was worried and drawn. “Your father’s been waiting. He wants to speak to you.”

“He told me he never wanted to speak to me again. I’m taking him at his word.”

“Marina, don’t be a child.”

If I were Mother, I would pretend I had a headache. But I was not her. I would rather face the firing squad and get it over with. I threw a shawl over my nightgown, hoping I didn’t stink too badly of lovemaking, and followed the English down the corridor, preparing for a brawl.

I found Father at his desk, in the room I’d always loved, with its soft green striped wallpaper covered with photographs, its masculine smell of tobacco and leather and wood smoke. The big leather-topped desk with its spindle corral kept his papers from running away. The light from the green-shaded lamp washed over the bookcases on the walls, making Tolstoy and John Stuart Mill my witnesses. My father looked the same as always, only with a harder edge, his crisp, wavy hair even crisper, his neat beard more sharply trimmed. He stared me down. “You couldn’t wait twelve hours to go running off to your… factory boy?” he said.

I should have expected this. No one grants freedom—it has to be won. Our revolution had taught us that much. “That’s right. I went to see him. He’s not going to disappear. I’ll leave if you want me to, but I won’t be a prisoner.”

He fiddled with his tobacco pouch, packed the bowl of his pipe. His delicate fingers scrabbled, uncertain, in the curly threads. “Don’t I have enough to do without you running around the city like a bitch in heat? It’s disgusting. I should have left you at Maryino.”

Although I told myself I cared not at all what he thought, this characterization struck me with force, and my tears came. As if it was his right, as if he owned me. “Is that your answer? Move the women to the country, your son to military school?”

I noticed a subtle shift in his expression, a slight smile. He could see he had landed his blow. But there was something more. “Sorry to disappoint you, but in fact your brother is adjusting quite well.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“He’s made friends. He even won a prize in mathematics.” He opened the right-hand drawer of his heavy desk and took out a small packet of letters, set them on the leather desktop. He tipped his chair back, clasped his hands behind his head.

The letters were addressed in Seryozha’s handwriting, although I did notice the flourishes had been subdued. Already changing. The postmark was Moscow. I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand, and opened one of them.

Another letter. I let my eyes drift down the page. He was playing poker and had not lost his spending money yet, had even won a few rubles.

He was learning to ride. They had given him a horse named Flea with three white stockings, “a most intelligent fellow.” I couldn’t put any of this together with the boy I knew as well as I knew any human being on earth. A horse? He’d always been terrified of anything bigger than our mother’s dog. And here were drawings: a quizzical bay, presumably Flea. Moscow, the church domes of every shape and size. A little crooked lane, a marketplace. Boys at meals, sitting very straight, their backs not touching the chairs.

I folded the letters into their envelopes, trying not to show any emotion. It couldn’t be real. “He’s faking. He’s just trying to please you.”

“Why don’t you want to believe that your brother is doing fine without you? That while you’re making a mess of your life he’s actually straightening himself out?”

Doing all right. Making friends. Doing all the things boys do. Trying to be the boy our father wanted him to be. Doubt shook me by the neck, like a terrier with a rat. If Father was right about Seryozha, what else was he right about? He thoughtfully cradled his pipe in his palm. “I called you here because I’ve made a decision. About your future.” He made me wait while he lit up again—his lawyer’s trick. “I will send you to England to complete your education.”

He caught me so off guard that I couldn’t formulate a response. I had just gotten home a few hours ago.

“Miss Haddon-Finch will accompany you,” he continued in a puff of fragrant smoke. “Some of my contacts have already made the arrangements.” Just like when he sent Seryozha to Moscow. It’s all been arranged. “You’ll stay with Mrs. Sibley’s sister in London this fall, take some time to get to know the city. Then in the spring you’ll apply to St. Hilda’s.”

Oxford. I’d dreamed about it ever since the year we spent in England, when he was lecturing at Christ Church. Clever, clever Father. He was offering me Oxford in exchange for the revolution, in exchange for Genya. My father hadn’t forgotten about university at all. He’d just made it impossible for me to attend here while offering an attractive alternative.

How different life would be if I took him up on this offer. I pictured myself moving through the cloisters of Oxford, talking about Shakespeare and Keats. Tea with the dons, rowing on the Thames with those shining girls. It all seemed so retrograde to me now. Could I really see myself going off to Oxford to study dead English poets when there were living poets here in Russia I called by their first names? My country was transforming itself beyond anything England ever hoped for. St. Hilda’s had been the dream of a ten-year-old girl. I was a Russian poet, a woman. I would make my own life, to suit myself, and my future was here. “You still don’t see—I’m not your pawn, to be moved here and there to your liking. I believe in the revolution, and I intend to be part of it.”

My father’s face flushed dark against his curly reddish-brown beard. “Just because you’re here doesn’t mean you’re part of it, and just because you’re running around with a loudmouthed hooligan doesn’t make you a revolutionary. Only a trollop. And an idiot to boot.”

I was surprised how little it stung. “Go ahead, call me names. But I’ll continue to see that so-called hooligan. He’s an artist and a revolutionary and we’re very much in love.”

“The triple disaster,” my father said. He sighed, pressing his hands to his eyes.

As we glared at each other across the broad expanse of the desk, locked in that showdown, I saw we were exactly the same—our stubbornness the same, our brown eyes, his reddish-brown hair concentrated into my flaming red. I was more his child than he knew. But my womanhood had put a permanent barrier between us. He didn’t know how to be the father of a woman, and womanhood could not be undone. The future already a fact.

I left dry-eyed and gracefully, without so much as slamming the door. I felt strangely that I had won and yet lost.

My room already felt different to me, as if it belonged to someone else, someone who treasured trinkets and keepsakes and pictures in silver frames, a girl with lace-collared dresses. I had always loved the salmon-pink walls, but now they were cloying. I knew that whatever happened to me, to us, I would not be here long. Whoever this woman was that I was becoming, she would not live in a room like this.

September 1917. A crispness in the air, frost at night. In Mother’s era, this would have been my season. I would be preparing for balls, having gowns made, fitting my dancing shoes. Instead, with no classes to attend, I wandered the city streets with my poet’s notebook, my poet’s ears and eyes, breathing the living city. I watched the fishmongers of Haymarket Square, the freight haulers, the cabmen and the shopgirls, and wrote about them, wrote about the city, imagining my way into its secrets. My time with Genya only inspired me to dig deeper into the life around me.

One afternoon I turned a corner to find Varvara standing on a crate opposite a bread shop, making a speech to the women in the queue. “Far from improving the situation of the common people, the revolution in February has only increased your suffering,” she said from atop her rickety crate, which probably had held bottles of beer. So she had finally made it, a crate of her own. I hung back so as not to interrupt her. “The situation is worse than ever. The government is powerless to do anything but argue and pass resolutions in favor of the captains of industry.” She saw me, and the hint of a smile crossed her impassioned mouth, before she plunged back into her fierce harangue. “And still the war keeps grinding on! They say we have to stay in to seem strong to the imperialist allies! We, the Bolshevik Party, say down with the imperialists! Winter is coming, and it’s time to end the war! It’s time to bring the food and the soldiers home!”

“About time,” the women murmured.

“What did we have this revolution for?” she shouted. “To keep dying? To keep starving? We asked for bread and peace, and what did we get?”

“Just a bunch of yak,” a woman who had almost made it to the doors called out. In a bread queue, the closer to the head of the line, the more irritable and aggressive people became.

“It’s always the same,” grumbled a stout woman with a big mole on her cheek. “Whoever gets in, they pad their own nests and the hell with you.”

“Who wants this war?” Varvara called out. “You?” she pointed to the woman with the mole. “You?” She pointed to an old man.

“It’ll bury us all,” the old man said.

“Not if the Soviet has any say in it. All power to the Soviets!” She finished, got off her beer crate, and hurried over to hug me. “I thought we were going to have to go out to the hinterlands and drag you home.” She began handing out pamphlets down the line. It was wonderful to see her again, her messy black hair, her long stride.

“So you’re a Bolshevik now.”

She handed me a stack of pamphlets. “All the revolution has done is allow people to complain without being arrested,” she said. “The Provisional Government’s a joke. Look at this.” She tilted her chin at the queue. “They’re actually sleeping in line now.” What that woman joked about last year had come true. “You are the source of all power,” she told the women. “The Soviet represents you.” The pamphlet’s damp ink stained my gloves: All Power to the Soviets. “The Soviet is the future of Russia. Stand with the Bolsheviks. Get out of this war.”

I admired her, so energetic and modern compared to the tired women in their scarves. I noticed since I’d been back that women in the city were cropping their hair the same way Varvara did. Changes and more changes. Helping her hand out her crude pamphlets, I felt part of the electricity of the city. Since I’d been home, I had noticed a flood of new newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, kiosks were plastered with news, pavements thick with opinions. No one clicked their tongues at us now for handing them our leaflets. They read them boldly.

We walked across to Vasilievsky Island over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, with its shell-and-seahorse railings, the fresh wind on the Neva whipping up whitecaps. “So you’re back at your mother’s?” I asked.

“No. I’ve got another place.” How quickly she walked, hands in her pockets—I’d forgotten about that. “You going to move in with the poet?” she asked.

“Not just yet. But I might. To be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing yet.”

“Hold on, I need to do a little business.” We stood before a modest apartment block on the Seventh Line that had a boarded-up shop on the bottom floor. As we climbed to the second story, the noise of machinery, rhythmic and heavy, rattled the building. She knocked at a drab, peeling door. Our entrance silenced a group of serious-looking young workers talking around an oilcloth-covered table. I recognized one of them. Marmelzadt, from the previous summer in the hospital ward. His lips twisted into the imitation of a smile when he recognized me. His hands were black with ink.

“Well, it’s the little barynya,” he said over the clatter of the press.

“Glad to see you looking well, Comrade,” I said. “Guess the army’s getting along without you.”

Deserted or discharged? I wondered. Kerensky had announced the death penalty for deserters, reneging on one of the Provisional Government’s basic promises, the abolition of capital punishment in the army. Yet soldiers were still walking away from the war by the company and battalion. “You know each other?” Varvara seemed startled. There were things she didn’t know about me, too. I liked that.

“You see, I’ve taken your advice,” I said to him.

“Kraskin?” Varvara asked. So he’d taken a revolutionary name. Ink.

He watched me, his expression a blend of superiority and suspicion. What was the baryshnya doing invading their Vasilievsky Island revolutionary cell? As before, I found him provocative: he was irritating, yet somehow I wanted his approval. He turned his back to me and gave Varvara another stack of pamphlets to hand out:

On the way back, we passed a barbershop on Bolshoy Prospect in the heart of Vasilievsky’s working-class district. I stopped to watch the barbers at their labors, pulling out my notebook. Barbershops always seemed like such dignified places, quite different from the cloying, slightly bullying ministrations of women’s hairdressers. There was something so esoteric and philosophical about these minor priests with their ointments and jars, bestowing a temporary princehood upon every man as he sat on his throne for a trim and a shave.

On impulse, I caught Varvara by the sleeve and pulled her inside. We squeezed into seats on the bench among the men, ignoring their outraged stares in response to their precinct’s violation. Today I would rid myself of the equivalent of salmon walls—this great mass of hair I was constantly at war with. A modern woman should have better things to do with her time than spend hours brushing and washing and putting up hair. What oppressive beauty.

When it was my turn in the barber’s chair, I removed my hat, took out my hairpins, let my hair fall. The blue-eyed barber, a Hungarian with a curly moustache, looked stricken, threading his fingers through my heavy red locks, which hung over the back of the chair to my hips. “Don’t ask me to cut this,” he said. “It would be a crime.”

“It weighs a ton, and it’s always in the way. It gives me headaches. Cut.”

“You’re breaking my heart, devushka.” He pressed his fist to his mouth.

“Girls today,” said a man in the next chair. “Used to be women liked being women. Now they want to be men. Cut off their hair, smoke, wear pants…”

Varvara, hovering to my right, smoked a rolled cigarette in an inky hand. “Used to be men liked being serfs, too… but somehow they came to their senses.”

The Hungarian mournfully stroked my hair.

“Just a line.” I indicated where he should cut with the edge of my hand, an unbroken cut from nape to jaw.

He sighed, twisted my long hair into a tail, and cut straight across. He could hardly bear to look. I hadn’t had more than a trim in my entire life. My hair now fell to my shoulders, uneven. It looked like a madwoman’s. The amputated length of it hung in his hand like a dead fox. “You could keep this,” he said, offering it to me over his arm.

“You keep it,” I said. “I’m not sentimental.”

Seeing that the worst was over, he got to work, shaping. When he was done, my head felt light, liberated, modern, my newly exposed neck thin and embarrassed. I gave him a smile with his ruble. The men shook their heads as we left.

Out in the parkway on Bolshoy, we sat on a bench and I asked Varvara to teach me to roll a cigarette. I managed to roll a sad twisted version, and we walked, smoking, modern, very proud of ourselves, down to the university along the Neva embankment, handing out her pamphlets to the students. Most took them with curiosity, but one crumpled it and threw it at me. It bounced off my chest. “We’re not interested in your defeatism,” he said. “Bolshevik scum.”

If I hadn’t cut my hair, I don’t think I would have stared at him as boldly as I did. “Wait until they get rid of the student deferments,” I spat back at him. “Then you’ll be singing a different tune.” I was no longer that girl from the Tagantsev Academy, straddling the worlds, Papa’s darling. I was a visitor from the future.

After our pamphlets were gone, we walked the windswept Strelka, the eastern tip of Vasilievsky Island, and sheltered in the lee of the Rostral Columns. The wind was unaccustomedly cold on my newly bare neck. Before us, the hulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress rose upriver—fortress, prison, cathedral, mint, all in one. Everything you needed to found a civilization. I considered the great beast of the Neva and the clotted clouds moving in overhead while Varvara eyed the Winter Palace across the black swells. “What’s going on at the foreign office these days?” Father’s offices had moved from the Duma to the Winter Palace since I’d been gone.

I shrugged. “I’m not exactly kept abreast anymore. I eat in the kitchen. But there’s always a steady stream of foreigners coming through, making their deals.”

“What kind of foreigners?” she asked, still watching the palace.

“English and American mostly.”

“What kind of deals?”

I wrapped my scarf higher around my neck. “Father and I go our own ways. We don’t even talk anymore.”

Varvara exhaled. The wind smelled of a coming storm. “But you could. You’re in a position to know far more than you do. Why don’t you play nice for a while?”

It took me a moment to understand what she was asking me. “You want me to spy on my father?” Surely she wasn’t serious. Did she really see me as some kind of Charlotte de Sauve?

“All you’d have to do is sit there and eat your cutlets. It’s not like you’d be breaking into the safe at the foreign office.” She’d thought of this as I’d been getting my hair cut. As I’d been handing out pamphlets for her. That mind never rested. “But it could help hurry the peace, to know what they’re up to.”

I thought of the way Father and his friends bandied the future of Russia about as they passed the fish, the butter. The memory irritated me all over again. Though it was my family she was talking about. Betraying my own father.

“Kerensky’s beating the invasion drum like mad,” she said. “‘The Germans are in Riga! The Germans are going to take Petrograd! They’re going to cut in front of you in the bread lines! They’re going to work your twelve-hour day. Oh, we can’t give you justice—the Germans won’t let us!’ They’re trying to move the garrison out of Petrograd so they can have their way with the workers. We need to know what else they’ve got up their sleeves.”

“What will you do with the information?” I asked softly.

“Get us out of the war. But we need to know what’s going on.”

I had no love for the capitalists and industrialists who frequented our table—the way my father spoke as if he and his Kadets were Russia when he was only in power because the people brought about a revolution. These foreigners made no secret of their beliefs. Why shouldn’t I help Varvara if it would help move power into the hands of those who had made the revolution? “It’s just table talk, though,” I warned her. “Nothing very startling.”

“Just keep your ears open. Listen for anything about the war, anything about industry or treaties, oil, railroads. Mostly their plans for our future.”

At the Cirque Moderne, it was never hard to spot Genya, even in that crush. As I neared, he noticed my newly cropped hair, and his smile vanished. I pressed my way to him and saw that his eyes were full of tears. He touched the shorn strands with bewildered fingertips. As if I had lost an eye. “Oh, Marina, why?”

He hated it. My sentimental revolutionary. It made me laugh. “I thought you were a futurist,” I teased him. “This is the future.” He laughed at himself then, at his own sentimentality. He gathered me up, lifting me off my feet. “No, it’s good. Out with the useless trappings of the pampered life! Out with bustles and skirts on pianos. Freedom for heads and necks of the beautiful women.”

I took some woodcut broadsides Sasha Orlovsky had printed and began to distribute them to the crowd:

I loved handing these to people in the wooden hall, watching them moving their lips, slowly reading the words, reading it aloud to others. This hall was the university of the poor. They weren’t going away; they were learning, moving into their power. I could imagine Lyuda here. They were readying themselves to steer their own destiny, and my father and his cronies be damned. And what would I do? What was right and necessary, even if it frightened me, even if I knew others might not understand. I had to bet my soul on it. The important thing was to get out of the war and rebuild the country, repair the devastation, and see what the future would hold.

25 Big Ears

WHO WAS THIS GIRL in aubergine silk, with pearls once again in her ears, chatting with such important men that October? It was my season. A season of betrayal, without parties or carriages or young men in evening dress joking behind their programs. Only late dinners with diplomats and businessmen, trade representatives, Kadet diehards, Moscow journalists, American envoys, British railroad and mining representatives, British banking interests. The talk was of the war, the collapse of the French army, the German advance on Riga, barely a hundred miles away. The talk was of the future of the government and its ability to resist the Germans. And that night, the talk was of the letter that had appeared in Novaya Zhizn, written by someone in Lenin’s own party, claiming that Vladimir Ilyich himself was planning the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. Evidently Lenin had been in hiding abroad since the summer, when he had been implicated in the failed Bolshevik coup in July. The others in his party were blaming him—many of them had been arrested, but Lenin escaped.

“Not likely they’ll be able to go through with it now,” Father said, smoking his pipe, gloating. “I believe it would be missing the element of surprise.”

“Nothing would surprise me at this point,” said Vladimir Terekhov of the Russo-Asiatic Bank as he smugly sipped his claret. I tried to memorize everything that was said. I had an excellent memory, although this was a novel use for it.

“One can’t help but be reassured that the comrades are squabbling,” said Mr. Sibley, my English soon-to-be host—or so he thought. I’d told my parents I’d broken it off with Genya and was reconsidering the offer for Oxford.

Mother had long since given up trying to turn the conversation to matters other than politics. The wives no longer came at all. Many had already been sent out of Russia for their safety. She and I were often the only women at the table, and the topics resisted her. Tonight, however, a handsome British naval attaché named Captain Cromie had accompanied Mr. Sibley, and his presence brought her to life. Captain Cromie. British naval attaché. I made a mental note. Also, Terekhov had miraculously procured a standing rib roast, inspiring Vaula to prepare an entire English style dinner, down to the Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce. This while the bread of Petrograd was rationed to less than a pound a day per person.

I did my best to be agreeable, to insert an intellectual comment or two, to show that I was “taking an interest.” “How do you see our situation, Mr. Sibley?”

“It’s a game of nerves, isn’t it?” said the diplomat. “The Bolshies are weak but they’re fantastic at sounding the alarm. And the right vibrates to the least disturbance. The Provisional Government has to keep a firm hand on the tiller.”

“And you must miss your wife.”

“She sends her love to all of you, by the way. She can’t wait for you to join us in London.”

How happy Father was with my new compliance. He gazed down the table at me with proprietary pleasure, delighting to see me put away my proletarian brown dress and don a silk gown, my hair cleverly marcelled by Mother’s hairdresser into elegant waves. Mother was also glad to see me “back to my old self.” Their very happiness was maddening—that they preferred this falsehood, this thing I was portraying, to the girl they well knew me to be. Exactly as they preferred my brother’s “assimilation” into the military academy. They wanted to believe this charade.

It made for a strange cynical pleasure, to pretend I was one of them, to smile at their jokes at the expense of the people—something only Kolya, with his love of trickery, could really appreciate—while storing away the choice scraps for Varvara.

That night Terekhov and Mr. McDonegal of Sheffield Steel discussed Kerensky’s new legislation establishing martial law in the factories. It had been one of the causes of the revolution in February, and here we were again. “We’d never get away with it back home,” said McDonegal.

“Nobody likes it, but absentee rates are through the roof. Eighty percent, more,” said the banker. “If the Russian worker wasn’t so busy playing politics, he might have time to put in a day on the production line.” He blotted his lips and pushed away his greasy plate.

It took all my self-control not to pick up the water pitcher and pour it over his head. And when would that be, Mr. Terekhov? After sleeping overnight in the bread queues? In between locating a missing load of iron and tanker of fuel? The workers themselves were the only ones keeping our factories open.

“Will the government finally move house?” asked Captain Cromie. “Somewhere safer?”

“Like Japan?” Mother quipped, making the others laugh.

“Kerensky and his Moscow bankers,” Father sighed. “They’re pressuring him to move down, but we’re doing our best. It would give Germany altogether the wrong signal. Put out the welcome mat. Whatever you’ve heard about our Petrograd garrison, Cromie, I can promise you they are solidly anti-German. They’d never give up Petrograd. The only problem is that they’ll defend it in the name of the Soviet instead of the government.”

All Power to the Soviet. It was getting closer every day.

“I don’t know which is worse,” said Terekhov.

Cromie was full of questions. “Is the Soviet really calling the shots?” An attractive man with chiseled face, military bearing, and excellent Russian, Cromie had won over the others, but I didn’t trust him. There was something more to him… the way he weighed the others’ statements before he spoke. What was he really doing here?

“My dear Cromie,” said Sibley. “I’m sure the government’s got them well in hand.”

“We’ve heard that Kerensky’s going to send the garrison to the front and replace them with reliable troops,” said the attaché. “In case there’s anything to this insurrection talk.”

“Which would be fine, if only he wouldn’t broadcast his every whim,” Father said grimly. “Every time Kerensky manages to make a decision, he makes a splashy speech about it, and then he’s countermanding it before the ink is dry. It’s undermining the little confidence anyone has in us.”

“What do you think of Lenin?” asked Cromie. “Does he have the sway people say he does?”

Father stoked his pipe, spoke carefully. “He’s not the great speaker of the movement—he leaves that to Trotsky and Zinoviev, that Cirque Moderne crowd. But he’s absolutely relentless. Without him the Bolsheviks would have compromised long ago.”

“He’s doing a fine job of keeping the agitation going,” said Mr. Sibley, lighting up an after-dinner cigarette. “Even from hiding. Whenever the fires seem to die out, he gets the bellows out and fans them up again. I’d say the Germans are getting their money’s worth.” He chuckled drily.

I’d always been sure it was a lie that the Bolsheviks were being funded by Germany, but Sibley was in a position to know. Was that something Varvara would want to learn? English believe Lenin’s in Germany’s pay.

“That’s the thing you have to remember about the Bolsheviks,” said Terekhov. “These are the dregs of society. Look at their leaders: Jews. The dregs of the Jews at that. Their own people won’t even have them. Trotsky, Martov, Zinoviev? These aren’t Robespierres. They’re little Jewish businessmen. All this talk about taking power. I don’t see it.” Anti-Semites weren’t all monarchists; the Kadets were crawling with them. Terekhov was exhibit A.

“Peace without annexation or indemnities—that’s the German formula,” said Sibley.

Peace without annexation hardly meant winning to these people. They wanted a hunk of the Ottoman Empire as a prize and to bill the loser for the whole mess.

“But there won’t be a separate peace?” Cromie said.

“No separate peace, no negotiated end,” Father said. “We won’t bend on that.”

Nods all around the table. But the people wanted us out of the war, and the Bolsheviks would do it without dithering for a second.

“If you could only get your hands on this Lenin,” said McDonegal. Basya came in to clear the table. He let her clear his plate but hung on to his wine glass. “He seems to be the one stirring the pot. I’d do a house-to-house search if I were you.”

Father watched Basya piling plates on a tray, and Mother frowned at her cap, sliding off her head. Basya kept clearing, her face impassive, as if she had no idea what Mother’s frown was about. She did it on purpose, the provocateur. She loathed that cap. I winked as I handed her my plate.

“Why don’t you people just pick him up?” said the British steel man. “It can’t be that hard. Surely hundreds of people know where he is. Pick up some other Bolshie and sweat it out of him.”

“You might find having Lenin is as bad as not having Lenin,” Sibley said thoughtfully. “Tiger by the tail. Arresting him could be the spark that sends the whole thing up.”

Father watched Basya depart, the door swinging closed behind the starched white bow of her apron. “We’re monitoring the situation quite closely. As we speak.”

Something about the look on his face, the way he tucked his chin toward his collar, caught my attention. They knew where Lenin was.

“How closely?” Cromie asked.

“We know he’s moved back into Petrograd,” Father said.

“Are you confident?” Cromie asked.

“We have a good idea,” Father said. “Let’s just say we’ll know where to find him.”

The government knew where Lenin was. Or at least the foreign office did. My breath stilled. I wanted to ask more, but I was afraid my questions would be too pointed. This was why I had spent all these evenings listening to dull, self-important men at this gleaming table.

“Well, that is good news. Nab him in his sleep—if a scoundrel like that ever does sleep,” said McDonegal.

“But why…” began Cromie, raising my hopes, only to fall silent again when Basya returned to collect the remains of the meal. She must have been aware of the tinkling of glasses, the pointed glances, but she took her time at it.

Finally, when she had gone, Father explained. “While there’s still a schism among the senior Bolsheviks, we need to wait. Lenin’s continuing to battle resistance. It’s still possible that Kamenev and his more sensible colleagues might prevail in the Soviet.”

“But how long are you going to wait?” Cromie asked. “My God, the man’s advocating overthrow.”

“Not much longer, I imagine,” Father said. “But as soon as we arrest Lenin, we’ll lose our source as well.”

They had someone inside the Bolshevik organization itself. My mouth ran dry. I stared into my empty water glass but was afraid to pour myself more and betray my shaking hands. When I looked up I noticed Cromie examining me. I smiled back, as if I thought he was just admiring the shape of my eyes, my brow, the style of my hair, instead of asking himself the same questions I was asking. Who are you? Why are you listening so closely? Father sat back in his chair, and I well knew the look on his face: the bland gravity he got just before he moved a piece for a checkmate.

I lay in bed in the dark, listening to my heart pound. I imagined them closing in on Lenin as he slept. How could I wait until morning? But Varvara had warned me against ever coming near her apartment on Vasilievsky—it would mean the arrest of them all. I wondered about that shadowy figure working his way into the Bolshevik camp, willing to risk all to report to the Provisional Government. What on earth could be his motivation—or hers—to risk Bolshevik reprisal in order to support this strange agglomeration of liberalism and cravenness, wild disorganization and indecision, ego and oratory?

I rolled over on the hot sheets and thought of Father. I couldn’t help remembering how he’d looked at dinner, smug, so sure he knew what was right for Russia. Yet what I was about to do left me queasy. I had more in common with that shadowy figure on the other side of the political fence than I had with him, so confident that his actions reflected his ideals, unable to see the chasm between them. Excited and angry and defiant, eluded by sleep, I read until daybreak.

In the morning, I stood outside Wolf’s bookshop, reading the handbills pasted onto a kiosk, anxiously checking for anyone watching me. What if the Bolsheviks were watching me? Maybe they’d been watching me all along. I hadn’t thought much about that. Or maybe the government, though I doubted that. Who would spy on us?

And it occurred to me: what if it wasn’t Varvara who was collecting my notes? Maybe she had handed me on to some other Bolshevik who wouldn’t understand why I was doing this. The idea made my stomach churn. I realized as soon as I thought it that it was probably true. She’d never promised it would stay just between us, I had simply assumed it. But I couldn’t walk away now. I had the note in my pocket, something essential for the revolution. It wasn’t personal. It was bigger than I was.

I waited a bit longer, saw nothing suspicious, so I stuck a pushpin into the door jamb of the bookstore, low down—my signal that there was a message—and entered the shop. At the sound of the little ringing bell, the clerk glanced up. I nodded and wound my way back through the rooms to a dusty alcove where the complete works of Plato in Greek awaited. Varvara and I had picked them as the books least likely to be purchased. I pulled out book 10 of the Republic—her sense of humor—and opened it to the section where Plato inveighs against poets, claiming that poetry disorients men and that the only poetry he’d allow in his ideal state would be hymns to the gods and the praise of famous men. I parted the book and inserted my note—

Then I reshelved the book out of order. The next time I returned, it would be back in its proper place.

With studied casualness, looking around again, I retreated to the history room, where I located Great Russian Discoveries in the Arctic and the Pacific 1696–1827: Accounts of Nautical Expeditions to Siberia and Russian America by F. G. Popov—another volume unlikely to find a buyer. I prayed there would be something in it for me that was not about treachery.

Inside, in Genya’s big, barely legible scrawl, a poem:

Sweeping the room once more for any suspicious loiterers, I stuck the poem in my pocket. Madness was me, just about anywhere.

In the hushed, scented precinct of Madame Landis’s boutique in the Nevsky Passazh, Mother and Madame were locked in discussing the minutiae of hats: the nostalgic virtues of yesterday’s styles—broad brims, egret plumes, veils—versus the utilitarian casquettes, turbans, and tricorns of today. Tricorns! The fashion of revolution secure on bourgeois heads. I kept touching the poem in my pocket. I am drowning, too, Genya, in this endless drivel and perfume and imposture. I had to see him, feel his solid form around me, talk honestly to someone.

I glanced at my watch and feigned surprise. What an actress I was becoming. “It’s almost four? I almost forgot—my friend Veronika’s family is leaving for Odessa. I told her I’d pay a call. Mama, take the tricorn. That’s the best.”

“So many leaving,” Mother sighed. “Soon we’ll be rattling around by ourselves, like buttons in an empty drawer.”

“I’ll be back by dinner,” I said, patting Tulku’s elegant little head.

“Remember we’re going to Viktor Vladimirovich’s.” Tripov’s. In the face of Father’s increasingly long working hours and the growing unrest, the all-night debates at the Pre-parliament—the new Duma—she expected me to be her evening escort.

Freed, I dashed down the glass arcade of the Passazh and out into the rain, crossed Nevsky Prospect, and dodged a tram, the angry driver ringing her bell at me. I raced behind the Gostinny Dvor department store toward Haymarket Square. In the absence of police the number of robberies had been rising all fall, and I looked a perfect fool in my bourgeois finery. But if someone wanted to rob me they’d have to catch me first. I pounded up Grivtsova Alley in my heeled shoes, up those wretched stairs two at a time, knocked, and tried the battered door. It opened, but it was only Anton, reading on the divan, a coat thrown over him as a blanket. He pretended not to recognize me. “Is it rent day already?” he asked, turning a page. “I don’t have it. Check back on Friday.”

I finally found Genya at a corner table with Zina and his other friends in a workingman’s café on Gorokhovaya Street, the greasy windows steamed over. Loath to go in dressed as I was, especially with Zina there, I tapped on the glass with the edge of a coin. When he saw me, he rushed out into the cold without his coat, wrapping himself around me in an enormous embrace. His jacket smelled of the café, greasy pirozhky and rough tobacco, cabbage and tea. “Look at you. You’re making me jealous of all those English diplomats. I’ll kill them one by one, dump them in the canal. You won’t be able to move a boat there’ll be so many of them.”

I could feel Zina staring through the restaurant window, seeing him with the Enemy in full regalia. I linked my arm in his. “Let’s take a walk.”

We strolled along the Catherine Canal in the miserable October drizzle. Gone were the colors: the pinks, the golds, the blues. The scene had washed out into gray. The bare trees brooded in expectation of winter. “I missed you,” he said. “Why can’t your mother do the spying? Or the old nanny or somebody? Nobody would suspect her of passing secrets.”

“She’d be perfect, except she never tells what she knows. You’d have to dig it out of her.”

Soon this canal would start to freeze. Winter on the way. I clung to Genya. Even coatless, he exuded warmth, and I sheltered in his lee like a skiff at anchor. Three young girls passed us on the embankment with their bags and books, heading perhaps to the ballet school at the Mariinsky, their gait marked by the duckwalk of little ballerinas. They crossed over the bridge, giggling at us, two mismatched lovers, my head tucked into the hollow under Genya’s jaw.

In the shelter of our bodies, our hats, I pulled off my soft suede gloves and rolled a messy cigarette, which made him laugh. With my elegant clothes, my cropped hair, and my hand-rolled smoke, I was neither old nor new but caught in midtransformation. He rolled his cigarette far more deftly, and we leaned together with our elbows on the balustrade, smoking.

“Come back to the Artel with me,” he said. “I can’t stand being with you like this.” He spat a tobacco flake.

I rubbed my face against his sleeve. I would have loved to go back to the Artel and make love with him, but I could just imagine coming back rumpled and stinking from sex to encounter Vera Borisovna dressed and perfumed and ready for me to accompany her to Tripov’s salon. “I have to get back in a minute,” I said. “I shouldn’t even be here. Someone might have followed me from the milliner’s.”

“I hope you’re getting something worthwhile,” he said miserably, his arm heavy around me. “Sometimes I think it’s just Varvara trying to break us up.”

That made me laugh. “Why would she do that? She adores you.”

“She tolerates me,” he said, his eyes the same color as the gelid green water. “But she’d rather not share you with anybody.”

Yes, it was true, she was possessive of her friends. But she was also completely dedicated to the cause, far more than I could ever be. Memorizing the names of English coal barons and American envoys was hardly agitating in the factories and the barracks. I hoped she’d be proud of me. I’d finally proved useful, shown her I wasn’t just a romantic poseur with my lovers and poetry, irrelevant in the wider crisis.

“I need you more than the Bolsheviks do.” His big hand lay on my bare neck. His hazel-green eyes reflected every feeling—Genya Kuriakin would be the worst spy ever. “I’m going crazy. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can barely breathe. I draw pictures of you naked and kiss them—it’s pathetic. I can’t hold out much longer. Are you sure we need to do this? Is it making any difference at all?”

He wanted reassurance, revelations, disclosures. But something in me was surprisingly secretive. I wanted to keep these worlds apart, the dark life I was living on Furshtatskaya Street and the bright one Genya and I had. I didn’t need to prove my loyalty to him in any case. Only my love. I considered lying, telling him I hadn’t found out much of anything, but then what would be the point of our suffering? “I’ve heard some things that could make a difference. But don’t ask me to tell.”

“You don’t trust me?” He gave me a hurt look, like a little boy’s. “I’m the Bolshevik.” Then he realized he was yelling and tried to contain himself. “You think I’m going to write it on a placard and hang it around my neck?”

I cradled his cheek in my cold, ungloved hand, warming my palm on him the way one might put one’s socks on the radiator. “I have to do this my way.” We stood shoulder to shoulder, watched the sluggish water flow under the Stone Bridge, where once People’s Will terrorists had planned to blow up Alexander II. This long and torturous history.

“You’re right. You’re doing the right thing,” he said, his arms coming around me, his chin resting on my head.

“I’m afraid he’ll find out,” I whispered.

He held me tighter, trying to build a wall of himself around me. “He won’t. And so what if he does?”

I could only shake my head. My love, so kind, so tender, but he had no family feeling, and no divisions within himself, where I had nothing but. How I could make him understand how it felt to be caught between who I was—my history, my class, my family, the barynya I’d been raised to be—and the revolution, what I hoped for Russia and for myself? I was between two stools, as we say.

26 October

EVERY DAY I WENT out to update the Republic and Great Russian Discoveries and to test the mood of the city. A certain pressure was building in my sinuses, a tingling in my hands and the soles of my feet. Tides of people, restless, flowed from corner to corner, looking for news, reading the proclamations and appeals plastered on every wall. They asked the workers and soldiers to stay home and support the government. I bought a pamphlet with stamps we used for small change—WILL THE BOLSHEVIKS BE ABLE TO HOLD THE POWER?—written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He was of the opinion they’d be able to. Throngs filled every corner, soldiers arguing with students, workers with carters. I bought all the socialist papers and read them one by one under my dripping umbrella. They all said the same thing, that the soldiers’ section of the Soviet demanded that if the government couldn’t or wouldn’t defend Petrograd, it should either make peace or make way for a soviet government. Rabochy Put’ said the northern soviets had sworn to defend Petrograd’s soviet against the government if that were to become necessary.

The time was coming. I could smell it in the air.

Eleven o’clock on a foggy, drizzly morning, the 24th of October. I stood on the street corner waiting for a tram. I’d been suffering from a toothache and had made an appointment with the dentist. Ginevra volunteered to accompany me, but Mother had persuaded her to stay home. I felt sorry for my governess, stuck waiting for our departure for London. I wished I could warn her: Make your own plans, and quickly, but that was impossible.

The mood on the damp street that day was surly and a peculiar nervous intensity clung to the crowds. Only the bourgeois newspapers were on sale. No Rabochy Put’, no Soldat. So Kerensky had done it, had closed the socialist presses. An opening salvo. A wall poster warned THE SOVIET IS IN DANGER! I read as I waited. GENERAL KORNILOV IS MOUNTING COUNTERREVOLUTION! THE PEOPLE SHOULD PREPARE TO DEFEND THE SOVIET. It was signed, THE MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE. The big Bolsheviks, in other words.

The dentist, a small fussy man in a second-floor office overlooking the Kazan Cathedral, had his own opinions. In fact I wished he wouldn’t have been quite so excitable as he plied his sharp tools and drill. “I think Kerensky’s trying to goad the Bolsheviks into violence.” His thick glasses magnified his eyes, which looked huge and slightly deranged. “They can’t possibly hold power, so it’s an invitation for the generals to come in and take over. But my wife thinks it’s just incompetence. The result’s the same either way. Black Hundreds. Pogrom.”

But why couldn’t the Bolsheviks hold power? The Soviet had the troops, and the workers… anything was possible.

With the metallic taste of cocaine running down my throat, and my jaw swollen and numb, I returned to Nevsky Prospect an hour later to notice a change, people swarming the newsboys, grabbing up their wares. As I got closer, I saw why. They were selling the Bolshevik papers again. While I’d been reclining in the dentist’s chair, the presses had been liberated. Kerensky had just lost a critical fight. I pushed into the crowd, not worrying about my jaw. I wanted to get one of those papers before they sold out.

I scanned Rabochy Put’ under my umbrella, but was disappointed to find nothing about insurrection, just a big dull article by Lenin about the peasant question and an editorial by Kamenev making the usual threats, which could have been published two months earlier. Although I did note that Kamenev, author of that letter in Novaya Zhizn, was back in the fold. I was learning how to read between the lines. So the MRC senior leadership had buried their squabbles. That had to mean something.

Just then, a group of mounted cadets rode past, heading toward the Winter Palace. A bourgeois woman clapped with her gloved hands. “Bravo. Bravo! Those brave boys.” I saw nothing to cheer about. We had used up all our men, and now we were starting on boys. I thought of Seryozha’s learning to ride. He was only sixteen. Would they use him for guard duty in place of troops the government considered unreliable? But by their blue uniforms, I knew these boys were from the artillery school, training to be gunners and marksmen. Surely they wouldn’t use a bunch of drafting students to guard the government. While I clambered onto the streetcar, I couldn’t stop thinking of the lunacy of Father’s enrolling Seryozha in military school during these revolutionary times.

As soon as I entered the vestibule, Mother rushed in. “Marina, the servants are gone.” Her voice was high and tremulous. “Basya, Vaula too. They’re not in their rooms. They’re nowhere!”

I did my best to soothe her. “They’re just frightened. They want to be with their families.”

It was getting close. The radical press was working again, and the servants had disappeared. Mother was wound tight as a tin soldier, pacing, her dog at her heels, peering out the windows of the salon, which overlooked Furshtatskaya, holding her arms as if it were freezing, gazing down as if troops of maids and cooks were going to come marching down the parkway to overthrow bourgeois apartment buildings. “After all we’ve done for them. I never want to see them again. Traitors.”

My lungs hurt at the mention of the word traitor.

For dinner, Avdokia brought us some snacks and soup, which we ate in silence at the card table in the salon. Ginevra played patience, while Mother directed her fears into the intricate patterns of Scarlatti on the ivory keyboard of the big Bösendorfer. Scarlatti wrote more than five hundred sonatas for a Spanish queen, and it seemed that my mother intended to play every last one. Avdokia knitted a scarf of soft gray wool for me. I thought of the cadets on their horses, the poster put up by the MRC. Large shapes moving in the night. I prayed that Seryozha was safely out of this. I could picture him on the floor by the divan, throwing small balls of wadded paper for the dog. He had been gone so long—five months. I wondered what he looked like now. Short-haired, harder, warier? Would I even recognize him?

Around ten, we heard the crack of gunfire, instantly recognizable, and not so very far away. Mother took her hands from the keyboard and sat silently with them folded in her lap. It was here. The moment we had all expected, or dreaded, or hoped for, was beginning. But what would it mean? We waited to hear if it would quiet or grow worse. Avdokia crossed herself and prayed. I felt the creak of the wheel, the heavy strain of the timbers, the first faint ringing of gongs.

By midnight it was clear that Father wasn’t coming home, even though he had promised Mother he would. “We should go to bed,” I said.

“Go if you like,” Mother said, meaning the opposite.

“Verushka, you’re tired,” Avdokia said in the voice she used for children, cajoling, humoring. “He’ll work all night. Just lie down a little, Marina can sleep in your room. You won’t be alone.”

“I’ll wait. I’m too worried. I just couldn’t…”

In the end, we all stayed where we were, I on the divan, Ginevra at the card table in the wing chair, Avdokia leaning against the wall on her bench, snoring, Mother pacing and then playing at the Bösendorfer, taking small glasses of vodka for her nerves. Scarlatti and scattered gunfire filled my dreams. I don’t know what it was that woke me—the sound of the piano bench pushing back? My mouth tasted of dust and my jaw hurt. Mother stood in the dimly lit room. “Mitya?” she called out. The grandfather clock in the hall said half past one.

My father entered wearily from the hallway, hair wet with rain, and sagged into an armchair by the door, too tired to make it all the way in. He leaned forward, his face in his hands, elbows propped on his knees.

Mother raced to his side, knelt by him, touched his face. “Mitya. What’s happened?”

He made a disgusted “Tcha.”

She pressed her cheek to his thigh. “I’m so glad you’re home. I was afraid something awful might have happened. We waited up for you.”

He sat back and rested his hand in her silver hair. “You didn’t have to.” I wasn’t used to seeing them so intimate with each other. It was almost embarrassing.

“There’s such a bad feeling in the air.”

“Indeed.”

“Is it insurrection?” I asked.

A glance at the windows. Another sigh.

Mother rose, wiped her eyes, tried to compose herself. “You must be hungry. Let Avdokia get you some dinner.”

“I had a sandwich at the Winter Palace. I could use a whisky, though.” He was hoarse. He sounded like he’d caught a cold. “Or three. Or just hit me over the head with the bottle.”

Mother rose and poured him a drink, indicating to Avdokia with a tip of her head that she should get him something to eat anyway. I could smell the peaty, scorched scent of Scotch. She pressed the glass into his hand. “The servants are gone.”

He took a deep draught. “That’s the least of our problems. They’ve got checkpoints set up on Millionnaya Street. I was lucky to get home at all. Fortunately my driver knows another route.”

Now Ginevra awoke in her armchair, her face creased from sleep, her coiffure lopsided. “Oh, Dmitry Ivanovich, we’re so glad you’re home!”

“And I as well, Miss Haddon-Finch. Thank you.”

“What checkpoints?” I asked.

“The Military Revolutionary Committee,” he said. “Oh Christ, where to begin? Kerensky cut their phone lines last night after we all went home. Decided to close the Bolshevik papers without telling anyone and decreed the arrest of the MRC and the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. He made a long speech at the Pre-parliament to get it all rubber-stamped. He got a standing ovation, but after four hours of caucus, the parties came back with a vote of no confidence: 126 to 103. Kadets, too. He didn’t see it coming. God, what do we do now?”

The government was crumbling under its own ineptitude, the outpouring of rhetoric leading nowhere, Kerensky whipping himself into hysteria.

“We heard shooting,” Mother said.

“The bridges are in dispute,” Father said. “The utilities, the telephone, telegraph—it’s all up in the air.” He rubbed his face, dug out his pipe from his jacket pocket. He finished his drink, put it on the floor, packed his pipe, and lit it with unsteady hands. He leaned back with his eyes closed, concentrating, as if that pipe were the sole object in the world.

“You’ll find a way,” Mother said soothingly. “You always find a way.”

Avdokia came back with a plate of food for him—some cold potatoes in sour cream, herring and onions, black bread—and set it down on the card table.

Father picked up his glass and moved to the table, lowered himself into a seat. “Maybe I’ll snatch the guns of a Red Guard and ‘go out blazing’ like a Zane Grey cowboy. Shootout at the Pre-Parliament—think it’ll be a bestseller?” Managing a mordant laugh. His face looked so haggard, the lines had become fissures.

The Provisional Government was on the brink of collapse. I thought I would feel triumphant, but what I felt was a terrific uncertainty and hope and most of all tenderness and pity for my father’s sake. All his hopes and plans, all his work, first with the Kadet party and now for the Provisional Government, ending in this.

Although he said he wasn’t hungry, he began to eat mechanically, his head hanging over his plate. I believed he was weeping. Mother poured him another glass of whisky and sat at the table with him. Tulku laid his head on her knee.

A loud knock on the half-open salon door startled us all. A familiar tall black-clad figure—wind-whipped, scarf-shrouded, wet from head to toe—stood in the doorway, eyes sparkling dangerously. How did she get in? It was as if she had materialized out of the very air. “Greetings from the Future!” She grinned, swayed. Was she drunk? My parents stared at her as if she were three-headed Cerberus himself. Her nose and cheeks shone rose-red, while the rest of her face glowed frost-white in the dimness. Her black hair hung in wet tendrils. “Why so glum, citizens? You should be celebrating!”

I jumped up and ran to her. God, of all times to appear. I tried to pull her away, down the hall. “What are you doing here?” I hissed.

“Tell her it’s two in the morning,” Father called out. “This is a private home, not a tavern.”

She broke away from my grip, whirling past me into the salon. “Am I too late? I’ve got a secret for you, Dmitry Ivanovich. It is too late! Too late for you! You and your cronies, your English thieves, your bankers and warmongers! You should have listened to the people when you had the chance.”

I had said it myself, but not tonight. Had she no pity? Had she no decency at all?

He straightened, blinking, at a rare loss for words, trying to focus on this noisy, untidy, threatening creature who stood in front of him.

She laughed as if she were in fact quite mad. “I’m going to give you a little friendly advice. I’d stay away from the Winter Palace tomorrow if I were you. Maybe even sleep away from home for the next few nights.” She took off her scarf, shook it, leaving little puddles of rain all over the parquet. “We’ve got the bridges, we’ve got the telephone, the telegraph, the Nikolaevsky station. The ministers are next.”

“I’m sure I don’t need the advice of a deranged schoolgirl,” my father said coldly. In his rising anger, he seemed less weary, coming back to himself. “In fact, I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” He wiped his mouth, and stuck his pipe back between his lips.

She wiped her face on her sleeve. “Maybe you don’t need my advice, but maybe you do.” She began wandering around the room, hands behind her back, like a museum visitor, examining things as if she’d never seen them before. She stopped before the portrait of Mother painted by Vrubel. “By morning your ministers will be in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The garrison’s already come over to our side.”

My father might have already been arrested if he hadn’t found a way around that checkpoint.

“It’s been a very long day, and I’ve had about enough of this,” he said. “I’d like you to leave now.”

“You’re not going to invite me to stay?” She laughed. “There’s gratitude.” She put her hands on her hips and tossed me a theatrical glance.

His reserves of patience were finally drained. “Gratitude? I’ll have you deposited on the sidewalk with yesterday’s garbage.”

“And who’s going to do that?” She grinned her lopsided grin. “Look around, Dmitry. Your dvornik’s gone, your maid, your cook. I’m just giving you a head start. For Marina’s sake.”

I couldn’t believe she’d just called him Dmitry, like he was a schoolboy. Couldn’t she see how devastated he was? I didn’t want to approach her, didn’t want to be seen siding with her at all, but I had to get her out of here. I stood in front of her, so she couldn’t see him and vice versa. “Varvara, you need to go.”

“But I’m trying to do your old man a favor.” She said it even louder, to make sure he heard.

“If I ever need your help, I’ll make sure to come find you.” Father returned fire, waving the stem of his pipe in her direction. “I happen to have sources of information far better than yours.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. She turned back to the Vrubel, examining it. “I’ll give you that much. You’ve been a regular font of information.”

I felt a jolt of electricity race upward from my spine to my head.

She didn’t even look in his direction. “Thanks to you, we know lots of things. Things we’d have missed otherwise.”

I was afraid to say a word. The look she gave me then frightened me more than anything I had ever seen. A dangerous glee. She took a bronze-colored chrysanthemum out of the vase Mother had arranged and stuck it behind her ear. “You’ve been ever so useful—you don’t even know.”

“I have no idea what you’re jabbering about,” Father said, downing the last of his whisky Russian-style. Standing, he took Mother’s arm, helping her up. “We’re going to bed.”

It should have been enough to put the subject to rest, but Varvara had the devil in her that night. She would not stop until the job was done. “No, you wouldn’t have any idea. Captain Cromie, the English spy? British Second Secretary Sibley? The railroads? The intentions of the British and the banking community? Thanks to you, we discovered a leak on the staff of our own Central Committee. For that alone, our humblest thanks.” She delivered a clumsy curtsy.

A slow horror spread over my father’s face as the picture began to come into focus, its shapes coalescing in his mind like an exposed photograph. He turned to look at me, his daughter, his own little girl. I burned, I twisted. Why? Why did she want to hurt me? What was in it for her? Couldn’t Varvara just have been happy with the success of the Bolsheviks? I couldn’t breathe. I was hoping I could just faint, but no such luck.

“You’ve been working for them?” he asked in that ruined voice. “For the Bolsheviks?”

If only I could have gone up in a puff of smoke, leaving nothing but a greasy smudge on the parquet. I had never thought I’d be put in a position to explain myself. Put there by Varvara—whom I had trusted! Not only trusted—the one I had betrayed him to please. The sharp, bitter object in my throat felt like a fist of rusted iron.

My father took a step away from me. “Who are you? I don’t know you.” My mother, too, was staring, as if I had risen from the grave.

How revoltingly happy Varvara looked with what she had done. She wants you all to herself. Was that it? She would even ruin my place in my family for that? “Dmitry Makarov,” she said, gloating. “The great chess master himself, moving everyone around the board like so many little pawns. The one thing you didn’t consider was that your pampered little darling would have a mind of her own.”

“You little gargoyle. You witch.” He took a threatening step toward my friend, my enemy. “Take your pestle and broom and get out.” I thought for a moment he would strike her, but instead, he pointed violently to the door. “Out!”

His fury made her laugh and dance around him. She truly looked demonic. “Yes, think of it. Right from your dinner table to Smolny.” I thought he would have a heart attack, a stroke. Avdokia attempted to grab her by her coat but Varvara backed away. “I’m just returning the favor, giving you a running start before the Red Guards get you. It’s your lucky night!”

His face looked so white it could have been powdered. I’d betrayed him, his love, his confidence. And now I in turn had been betrayed.

“Out!” His voice was grated, almost gone.

“I’m going, I’m going. Hey, see you around, Marina.” She saluted with the chrysanthemum—“Thanks for the help!”—and tossed it at him. It bounced onto the floor.

In her wake, the smell of ozone stained the air. The big clock ticked out our silence. In the distance, rifle fire. My father stood in the middle of the parquet floor, adrift as a man fallen overboard in a stormy sea. I could feel him staring at me as if I were a stranger. How could I, a girl who wouldn’t have stolen so much as an egg or a kopek, have done such a thing? I had stolen his secrets and passed them to his enemies. I dared myself to look in his eyes. All the weariness in the world was there.

“Why? To punish me?” he rasped, staggering a bit, steadying himself with a manicured hand on the back of a chair. “For breaking up your love affair?”

“It had nothing to do with that,” I said.

“You hate me so much?”

And he’d thought this the worst night of his life when he came home. Now he knew it was. “It was never about us,” I said, managing to get the words around the clutch of razors in my throat. “You were selling our future, night after night, while the country begged for peace. I wanted Russia to have a chance.”

“Good Christ!” He threw one of the little wooden chairs across the room. It skidded across the parquet and hit one of the silvery blue walls. “Don’t you have a brain in your head? You expect the Bolsheviks to give Russia a chance?”

The urge to beg forgiveness passed, and outrage rose up in its place. “If we left it to you it would be like the revolution never happened. You had the chance, and look what you did with it. You and your Kadets. The government, Kerensky. All of them.”

Mother was silent. Ginevra held her hand over her mouth. Avdokia, palm to her forehead. No one would defend me.

“I’ll give you half an hour to pack and leave,” he choked out. “I never want to see you again.”

I could smell the smoke in the room. As if a bolt of lightning had come through the roof and struck us all down.

It was after two. A dark, rain-filled night peppered with gunfire. The Englishwoman bravely stepped forward. “You can’t send her out there. Surely she can wait until morning.” I could have kissed her. It would have been brave enough if I’d been innocent, but the bravery to stand up for the guilty demanded a special depth of character. I couldn’t look at either one of them.

And my father had turned his back on me. “I cannot have her under my roof. Not one more second.”

The world was cracking—I could hear it—like ice that had grown too thin to hold us, and we were falling in: this apartment, the Bösendorfer, the clock. I’d never dreamed it would end this way. I wanted to help the revolution, but at what price? “Papa… don’t hate me.”

“Dmitry Ivanovich,” Ginevra tried again. “I beg you to reconsider. You can’t send a young girl out onto the street—”

“Let her go to her Bolshevik friends. Or to the devil for all I care.” He was crying. He wiped his face on the back of his hand.

I thought my deeds would be forever hidden, that only good would come of them. As I walked past, he turned away. Mother whispered to him, her arm around his shoulder.

I didn’t remember walking down the hall. I just found myself in my room. I put a suitcase on the bed and stared into its lining of mauve watered silk. What did one pack on a trip to the devil? A warm coat, fur on the inside. Hat, sturdy shoes. A warm dress or two, heavy stockings. I wavered over my jewelry: pearl earrings, a ring with a small emerald from Grandmère, a gold bracelet with my name engraved on it, carved amber beads. Only the enameled bangle was really mine. I left the rest piled on the vanity table. I would start from nothing, like other people. I took Seryozha’s silhouette of Akhmatova and my book of poetry. A brush, my clock. I left the photographs of Volodya and Kolya. What would Volodya say when he heard? If he heard?

No one came to watch me go, not even Avdokia.

Outside, it was completely dark, the streetlights all extinguished. Gunshots echoed off the buildings. I’d been determined to go to Genya’s, but my nerves failed me. I was no revolutionary, no Varvara with a gun in my waistband. I was only a thin, tired girl with a small suitcase and my father’s curse in my heart to keep me company.

Like an abandoned cat, I slinked back into the archway. The lights in our flat had gone out. In a bit of hardscrabble luck, the door to the dvornik’s cubby wasn’t locked. I crept in and curled up under the counter on the dirty floor among newspapers and old tools, out of sight. I leaned against my suitcase and let my tears catch up with me. What had I done? I wrapped my coat tighter around myself and waited through that long cold night, the most miserable girl in Petrograd.