The Revolution of Marina M.

27 The Dawn

I STOOD IN THE cold hallway of the Poverty Artel at the return of daylight, shivering in the silence. It was too early, but what choice did I have? I tapped on the door, waited, tapped again. I knocked. In a moment, Zina’s round face appeared, her hair rumpled, a blanket wrapped around her. Her sleep-soaked glance sourly took in my suitcase, my woolen scarf, and she turned away without even a “hello,” leaving me standing in the hall. I followed her in, closed the door.

It wasn’t much warmer inside. The stale air smelled like feet, like ashtrays and people. In the dimness, I could only recognize rough shapes. Dawn hadn’t yet managed to penetrate the courtyard. “Genya?”

I heard someone turn over, call my name. “Over here.” I followed the voice, bumping into chairs in the close, stinking air, inching along stepping on things—a mumbled curse—to find my lover propping himself up on a pallet on the floor. He opened the covers, and I crawled in, boots and all, as if I could bury myself in his side, as if I could return to his body like Adam’s rib. “What happened?” he whispered. “Come on, don’t cry.” But I couldn’t answer or stop my tears. I just wanted to hold him. I was here, I was safe. He rocked me, stroking my hair. Eventually I fell asleep in his arms.

Sometime later, something woke me, a cough, a slammed door—and the first thing I saw in the dim room was Genya on one elbow, watching me. I smiled and touched his mouth. He kissed my hand. Then the shame of my exposure, the grief returned to me in a wave. “Varvara told him everything.” I shielded my eyes—I didn’t want him to see me crumble.

“I’m glad,” he whispered fiercely. “Now you’re here.”

I pressed my head to his chest, just listened to the steady hammer of his heartbeat.

“How touching,” a voice grumbled.

“Don’t be an ass,” someone else hissed.

The skritch and flare of a match. Cigarette smoke. Someone yawned. People began to move. A blanket-wrapped figure on lined-up chairs became Sasha, heavy arms stretching. Across the room, on the cot, someone groaned, sat up. Legs appeared in their white winter underwear, feet shoved into boots. Anton. From the divan above our heads, Gigo’s black eyes studied me. “Thought so.” Another floor sleeper stirred nearby, under the table—a feminine voice cursed. Zina.

One by one, they sat up, lit cigarettes, smoked, coughed, struggled into clothes. Sasha went outside, presumably to use the convenience. But Genya didn’t move. He lay next to me, gazing at me as if he had wished for a pony and had opened his eyes to a soft nose and long whisking tail. He was all I had now. I had never expected to be so fully in someone’s hands. I only hoped he was ready for this.

Anton poked the fire, letting a trickle of smoke escape into the room. He looked the perfect cartoon of an avant-garde poet—unshaved, scowling, his black hair sticking straight up as he clomped around in unlaced boots. “She’s not staying,” he said, shaving off pieces of kindling with a hatchet. “No women.”

“What does that make me?” Zina sat up in her quilt, her dark hair matted from sleep.

“No sweethearts. No innamorate, consorts, or girlfriends,” said the editor, letting his smoke express his feelings.

“Anton doesn’t like people to have girlfriends,” explained Sasha, closing the door, taking a chair, stretching his bony wrists out from his raveling sleeves. “He thinks it distracts us from our misery.”

“And misery is to poets as milk is to babes,” pronounced Gigo, his face above mine, sticking over the side of the divan. “Why keep it all to ourselves?”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Genya, kissing my temple, pulling me close. “You’re staying and that’s it. She’s got nowhere to go, Anton. Her parents threw her out.”

“That’s why they invented bridges.” Anton lit a spirit lamp with a match, set a kettle on it. “For bourgeois girls… to jump. Off. Of. It’s my flat, and I say no.”

“Vote.” Genya sat up, raised his arm. “Show of hands. All in favor.”

Hands went up. Genya. Sasha. Gigo. Zina’s black eyes flashed from me to Genya, calculating. She loathed me but pursued Genya’s favor like a starving dog. “Why can’t she go to a hotel? She’s got money. It’s already too crowded.”

“She’s one of us,” Genya said. “She was working for the Bolsheviks. That’s why they gave her the boot.”

Reluctantly, Zina raised her hand—halfway.

Anton slammed the screechy stove door. “What’s next—elephants? Giraffes? High-wire walkers?”

Genya grinned triumphantly, kissed my brow. “You see?” With a mixture of relief and apprehension, I surveyed my new home. No more napkins and polite handshakes and marcelled hair. A new life. A life of poetry—wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? With Genya? And I would show Anton just who was a poet.

A rare autumn sun bestowed benedictions upon a huge armored car blocking the entrance to the telephone exchange building and the soldiers surrounding it. They eyed passersby mistrustfully. But where were their loyalties? To the government or to the revolution? “All Power to the Soviets!” Zina shouted, and a young soldier nodded. Revolution. Just as they’d done in February, the soldiers were taking the communications points. Only this time they weren’t going to beg any bourgeois politicians to lead them. Oh please, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Banker, Prince Lvov, Paul Miliukov, show us the way. This was the real revolution, the one we’d been waiting for.

Theater Square gleamed under a tender frost. Sun glanced off the bayonets of Red Guards, burnished the gold dome of St. Isaac’s in the distance. We watched members of the Pre-parliament arrive at the Mariinsky Palace for the noon session. But I thought the government had fallen. Had Varvara’s imagination gotten the better of her? Gigo stepped in front of one of the delegates, who wore a high white collar and regarded the pale, excitable poet with alarm. “What’s the order of the day, sir?” the mad Georgian asked. The man glanced at the rest of us and his face composed itself into a weary amusement, but he regarded the Red Guards more soberly. “I believe we’ll be discussing procedural issues,” he said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “We may be adjourning early.”

We moved up into St. Isaac’s Square, bristling with Red Guards. They seemed to be coming from the Nikolaevsky Bridge. The cathedral drew up its gold cap like a dowager pulling away from a pack of clamoring beggars.

But the most astonishing sight by far awaited us on the Neva shore. The embankment teemed with people in the sea wind—soldiers and sailors, workers and students. And opposite the Winter Palace—a warship. The Aurora, she was called. The Dawn. Huge, with her three smokestacks and two masts, rows of portholes, her seven big guns leveled at the Winter Palace. I couldn’t get my mind around her presence. A battleship in the Neva. Poised to fire. Would they really do it? Blow holes in the palace’s half mile of Italianate flank? Nothing much seemed to be happening on deck, yet the mere fact of her meant that our naval base at Kronstadt was already in the hands of the Soviet. Kerensky had thrown down the gauntlet and the Kronstadt sailors had picked it up.

On impulse, Genya clambered onto the narrow embankment railing and balancing there, shouted at the steel bulk, his hand outstretched.

He teetered and almost fell, jumped down to finish his poem on solid ground. His seaward lines rolled like waves hitting granite cliffs on a northern shore. Gigo and Zina each took a turn reciting, then Genya pulled me forward. The crowd watched me expectantly, happy to be entertained while they waited for the revolution to begin. I gave them my poem about the massacre at Znamenskaya Square, but I had nothing to follow it with. I had to put something more up into the air. So I began to sing the first song that came into my mind, “Dubinushka.” Little Hammer. “Strike harder, strike harder, da ukhnem!” My singing teacher, Herr Dietrich, would have had a heart attack if he heard what I was doing with all that training, but some listeners tossed coins, which my friends picked up from between the cobbles.

A strange moment, entertaining the revolutionary crowd with their own work songs, receiving their hard-earned kopeks in return. For the sailors in the crowd in their flat white caps and striped jerseys, I began another—“The Boundless Expanse of the Sea.” My friend, we’re on a long journey, far from our dear land we go… A blond sailor came forward and pressed a silver ruble into the palm of my hand. His hatband read AURORA.

I wish I could say I still had that ruble, but we spent it on dinner.

In the afternoon, we tramped out to Smolny, a good three miles away, to see what the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was doing about the insurrection. Delegates had converged from soviets all over the country, but the start had been delayed and delayed again and the delegates were getting restless. Gunners stood poised at their machine-gun stations flanking the entrance to the building, exactly where tenderly brought-up young noblewomen once walked when it was a convent school. The gardens teemed with armed workers and rough men in red armbands—Red Guards—who had come on their own to help with the insurrection. Thousands of them were camping out, waiting for instructions. There were too many—we heard revolutionary soldiers trying to send them home, but few left. The tension was thick. Evidently the Bolsheviks had announced they were pushing back the starting time for the congress yet again. We tried to talk our way in, to no avail, and now the sun was going down. I was tired and hungry but I had no home to go to besides the Poverty Artel, and the poets were in no mood to abandon the streets. Genya certainly showed no signs of flagging. We ate in a nearby café, lingered over our tea, then set out again. I drifted along in a fog of exhaustion, Genya’s arm around me the only thing between me and collapse.

The first cannon shot came around ten. We converged on the English Embankment with the excited, slightly menacing revolutionary crowd to watch the firefight. It wasn’t the Aurora after all. Stranger than that—it was the Peter and Paul Fortress firing across the wide Neva, pummeling the Winter Palace. To a native of this mirrored city, it was a sight unthinkable even twenty-four hours earlier. Like the fork running away with the spoon. This is really happening, I had to keep reminding myself.

“The Bolsheviks have to take the Winter Palace tonight,” said Zina, leaning on the parapet, vapor escaping her lips. “They’ll want to report a victory to the Congress of Soviets. That’s probably why they’re holding off the start. But they can’t keep the delegates waiting another day—there’ll be a riot.”

Gigo stamped his feet, put his collar up.

The rapid fire of machine guns added to the great boom of the cannons, a symphony. I shivered and pressed into Genya for warmth. If only we could just go home. I didn’t know if my trembling was from fear or exhaustion, but I couldn’t make it stop. Sweet Sasha asked if I was all right, if I needed to go home, but I shook my head.

Another burst of machine-gun fire—too loud, too fast, too close—made me jump. Above me, my lover’s nostrils flared, drinking in the smell of gun smoke. I could tell he wanted to get closer, to go right up to the cordon. I couldn’t stop seeing Znamenskaya Square, the bodies, and the men with the Red Cross armbands carrying away the wounded. I was in over my head, thinking I could keep up with Genya Kuriakin. I wanted to be like him—brave. I wanted him to think of me as worthy of his love.

Anton had had enough. They weren’t taking the Winter Palace fast enough for his liking. “I’m going back,” he said. “Let me know in the morning how it turned out.”

I could go with him. But I would not leave Genya. I wanted to see what he saw, go where he went, to prove I could, to myself as much as to anyone.

We didn’t return until early next morning. We stumbled in, laughing, bumping into the furniture as we tried to shed our coats and boots, stoke the fire. “Anton, wake up.” Genya kicked his bed. “They did it! While you were here keeping your fleas warm.”

I laughed. I was drunk—on wine and on our insane bravery. If I hadn’t been so tired, I never would have done it. Never would have had the nerve. But I was standing strangely outside myself. We had gone into the Winter Palace, had drunk its wine, had plumbed hell itself and returned.

“We got inside,” said Zina, bouncing on her heels. “All of us. Genya first.”

The soldiers were first, breaching the firewood barricades, hundreds of soldiers pouring in, and then Genya was up ahead, waving for us to follow him. Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Yes, but it had been wonderful, strange beyond imagining, to enter the violated palace.

“It was fantastic. Pure madness,” Gigo said, turning a chair the wrong way around and lowering his slight frame into it.

“You should have been there,” Genya said, wrapping his arm around Anton’s neck where he sat up in his cot. The editor reached for the clock. It was around five. He groaned and let it fall to the floor.

I sank onto the divan, remembering all those corridors. The fine paintings, the Malachite Hall. Ballrooms used for barracks, dining rooms for offices. Everyone was lost—the soldiers, the cadets; people shot at each other out of sheer nerves and confusion. A revolutionary soldier dropped a grenade down a staircase—why? My ears still hadn’t stopped ringing.

Anton shoved his friend’s heavy arm from his shoulders. “Then you got drunk to celebrate?”

Sasha pulled up a chair to the messy table. “The soldiers broke into the tsar’s wine cellars. We heard they lost a whole battalion down there. They sent another in after them and they disappeared, too. They won’t be coming out anytime soon, either.”

Genya reached under his jacket and pulled out three bottles. Sasha produced four more.

Zina goggled. “So that’s where you were.”

We’d gone down just to see it. Now I would never get the picture out of my head, that Blakean hell: drunken soldiers bashing the necks off vintage bottles, lying on the floor as their mates poured wine into their open mouths. The cellars went on and on, a labyrinth under the palace, and the soldiers turned into animals before our eyes, like Odysseus’s men on Circe’s isle. The drunken men were more frightening than cannon fire. I slipped in the spilled wine and fell, cutting my knee. Genya and Sasha grabbed bottles and we departed, fighting our way back upstairs against a tide of descending celebrants. I looked at the tear in my stocking, the jagged sore, but it seemed like someone else’s leg. I still couldn’t feel it.

“Wine?” Genya held an old bottle against his forearm like a sommelier. It was a Madeira, 1848.

“A good year,” I said.

He handed it to Sasha, who began working its cork with his penknife, as Genya continued his story about our adventures conquering the Winter Palace. “We found the meeting room where the ministers were holed up. The Red Guards were just marching them out when we got there.”

Actually we hadn’t seen them. Genya was painting a picture now. We came upon the room by accident, wandering among soldiers and looters grabbing plumes and statuettes, clocks and miniatures, the Red Guards trying to stop them. These things belong to the people! Shots firing, people running, smoke. We passed through ruined chambers that had been used as barracks. Suddenly we found ourselves in a dining room, rather plain compared with the outer galleries, its long table scattered with pens and pads bearing the scribblings and drafts of proclamations. The ministers had been trying to find a course for themselves and the country up to the last moment, when the Red Guards had arrived to arrest them. Waiting for the inevitable. What a fitting finale it was for the Provisional Government. True to form, they’d conferred to the very end. Talk, that was their forte, while they waited for someone else to act. But I wondered what had happened to one dignified gentleman in particular, a man with a reddish-brown beard and eyes like my own. I prayed he’d listened to Varvara, but I doubted he did. Perhaps going down with the ship seemed more noble than what had occurred that night on Furshtatskaya Street.

Finally Sasha got the stopper out of the bottle. Zina found glasses of varying sizes and degrees of cleanliness. We poured and toasted the revolution, the sailors, and, finally, poetry. I thought of those hundreds of soldiers swilling priceless wine as if it were kvas. Some bottles probably dated from the reign of Peter the Great. Then I shook myself. Who had tears for vintage wine when men were still dying in a war nobody wanted? Let them drink. I raised my glass, the oval of Madeira like a fine red fire.

Genya held his hand behind his back. “Guess what I found,” he said, his eyes shining but a bit blurred by drink.

“The Orlov diamond?” Anton ventured, squinting against the smoke spewing from the stove.

“The tsar’s truss,” suggested Sasha, sniffing the wine.

Genya brought his big hand around and displayed on his palm… an ordinary fountain pen. He grinned, triumphant. “Kerensky’s pen.”

“How do you know?” Anton asked. Despite his blasé air, he was intrigued. He grabbed it, tried it out on a scrap of paper. There was still ink in it.

Genya snatched it back. “It was at the head of the table, wasn’t it?” He held the pen before my eyes. “With this pen, I swear I’m going to write the most revolutionary poems the world has ever seen.”

Sasha divvied up the rest of the Madeira, which had been waiting for us in that bottle since before Alexander II freed the serfs. “To Kerensky’s pen.”

Then it really struck me, the gravity of what we had seen, where we had been, what we had done. The Soviet had taken the Winter Palace. Dual power was over. My father and the government, our class, the liberals, had had their moment and had bungled it sorely. Now the Bolsheviks and the workers would have their chance to drink that wine.

“You think the ministers will be all right?” I asked. “They won’t shoot them, will they?”

“They’re probably becoming poets and moving in here,” Anton sighed. “Along with the Kronstadt sailors and Lenin’s mother.”

Genya sat down heavily next to me on the divan. “Someone said they took them to the Peter and Paul Fortress. But there was an explosion, maybe a grenade, and a bunch of them scampered off.”

“And the cadets?” I whispered. Those boys, guarding the palace.

“I see them more as essayists,” Gigo said. “I don’t think they’re much for poetry.”

“A whole group of them left when we went in,” Genya said, nuzzling me. He knew what I was worried about. “I heard the rest came out after the ministers. They’re fine. No one’s going to shoot a bunch of kids.”

They opened another bottle. I’d never drunk wine so fine. It sent its dizzying thickness all through my tired body. After that, all I remember was Gigo singing the Georgian national anthem and Zina demonstrating the cancan. Genya offered up a toast. “To the revolution! May the last be first and the first be damned.”

28 Grivtsova Alley

THE WHEEL OF REVOLUTION whirled on with a speed that made our heads spin. Within hours of the fall of the Winter Palace, the Congress of Soviets had already named the new ministers, to be called commissars. And what a list! Lenin, chairman; Trotsky, foreign affairs; Rykov, internal affairs; Kollontai, public welfare; Lunacharsky, education; Stalin, nationalities; and so on. I laughed as I read the names in the afternoon papers. Many were familiar to me from the Cirque Moderne, people I’d never have imagined would one day be running a nation that encompassed one-sixth of the globe. A woman minister—Varvara’s beloved Kollontai! And Trotsky as foreign minister. Changes were coming that would make the February Revolution look like a snoozy afternoon in a gentlemen’s club.

Not everybody was pleased with the success of the Bolshevik insurrection. As we staggered out into the daylight, blinking and hungover, we saw walls bearing pleas to RESIST THE BOLSHEVIK TAKEOVER! “A bit late for that,” Genya said. We bought all the newspapers. Gorky’s Novaya Zhizn called for a new government that would unite all socialist parties and criticized the SRs and the Mensheviks for walking out of the Congress of Soviets, letting the Bolsheviks have the field. I thought of Father’s letter, criticizing the Kadets for walking out this summer: Boycotts and walkouts make a splash, but then where are you?

But Pravda—the paper of the Petrograd Soviet, remade from Rabochy Put’—shot back, saying that the people had struck down the tyranny of the nobles in February and now the tyranny of the bourgeoisie was at an end. The Kadet paper predicted that the Bolshevik coup would last a mere day or two before it crumbled under its own ineptitude. “They would know all about that,” Zina said.

Within twenty-four hours, the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land were adopted by the Congress of Soviets, proving that the Bolsheviks had the will to do what the government had endlessly debated but had not been able to accomplish. In a single day, the assembled delegates legislated three basic popular demands: they called for immediate negotiation for peace, without annexations or indemnities; they ordered confiscation of all land from nobility, landlords, and clergy for distribution to the peasants; and they set a date for elections to the Constituent Assembly—November 12, three weeks away. It felt like a dam bursting.

For my part, I was having another revolution. For the first time I lived as others did, standing with my bucket in the courtyard pumping water, using a shared toilet on the landing of the stairway. I stood in line for bread. I often literally sang for my supper, varying my repertoire as seemed appropriate—work songs, sea chanteys, love songs. And I never complained, tried never to show myself as the bourgeois miss. I had finally gotten off Nevsky Prospect, Comrade Kraskin.

But there was one aspect of life on Grivtsova Alley that nobody seemed to notice but me: roaches, fleas, bedbugs. Genya never said a word about the infestation. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend focusing on such trivialities when we had the Future to forge on the anvil of our verse—or vice versa—but it was hard to think about anything else for more than a few minutes at a time when you were being eaten alive by small voracious creatures.

I studied the other women in the queue for water as I moved forward on the plank that crossed the icy puddle in the courtyard. There must be something they did about it that eluded the poets of the Artel. Some secret. But whom to ask? The rangy woman in front of me worked the handle of the pump, briskly filling her bucket. I asked if she had bugs in her flat and what we could do about them.

“Why not read them some poetry?” she said, and the women behind me snickered. She switched out her full pail for an empty one and glanced up into my face. Her demeanor softened. “You don’t know anything, do you, devushka? Not a thing.” She snorted. “Tell those boys to drag the bedding down here and beat the devil out of it. With shoes if you have to. Scrub the place down and put the legs of the beds in kerosene. That’ll fix you right up.” I watched her pick up her pails and straighten slowly under the weight.

Bozhe moi, was that what they were doing? I hoped the neighbors didn’t smoke in bed. Now I was glad we slept in our clothes. It would make for an easier getaway.

Not only were we infested, but everyone smoked makhorka, and Anton spat his sunflower-seed shells right onto the floor, daring me to say something. One cold November day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “All right!” I yelled. “All right! Fine! Beautiful!” And I grabbed everything from the floor, piled it onto the table—papers, shoes, socks, books, shirts, slippers—and swept the room with a savage broom I borrowed from the woman next door. Boiled water on the stove, threw it on the floorboards and into the corners, and scrubbed it with a brush and a scrap of lye soap I had managed to buy. I didn’t care how much the others teased me, calling me “housewife” and “Mama.” It was worth it. All of us were covered with bites and boils. I berated myself for my naïveté. I’d brought books and a silver-handled hairbrush from home but hadn’t thought to bring a towel or soap or, God help me, a set of sheets. Any working-class housewife would have known better.

Genya and Sasha dragged the mattresses, bedding, and divan cushions down to the yard for me and we beat them with slats of wood. Feathers flew. When we brought the clean bedding back to the clean flat, no one said a word. Although I was sure everyone appreciated the lessening of the infestation, they had to feign indifference so they wouldn’t jeopardize their bohemian cachet. Anton pointedly restored the gritty underlayer as soon as he could.

I developed new respect for housewives—what a lot of work even the tiniest bit of cleanliness entailed. To wash, you pumped water, brought heavy pails up the flights of stairs. If you wanted it hot, you boiled it on the small stove, and sometimes it tipped over—what a mess. To wash clothes was a monumental task. Anton loathed seeing female laundry strung across the room. The domestic aspects of life must have recalled some childhood indignities for him. He believed somehow he’d emerged full grown from literature via some sort of immaculate mental conception. He held up my newly washed panties for general inspection. “Are these the drawers that launched a thousand ships?”

And yet despite the dirt and the cold, the battle with bugs and the spartan diet, life in our small room was ferociously interesting. We read and talked and argued and read some more. On the shelves, Apollinaire and Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky pressed up against The Lay of Igor’s Campaign and Balmont’s translations of Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dostoyevsky faced off with Rimbaud. They even had my little book, This Transparent Twilight.

“I wouldn’t fall in love with just anyone,” Genya said when I’d first noticed, putting his arm around my waist, burying his nose in my hair.

“Baaah,” said Gigo. They snorted and whinnied and oinked. Any sign of tenderness or lust brought mockery from our fellows. Only Sasha tolerated us—like Genya, he hid a romantic heart inside his futurist breast.

The difficulty of maintaining a love affair in a room occupied by anywhere from four to eight talkative poets couldn’t be overestimated. Genya and I slept most nights as chastely as Tristan and Isolde. The frustration! His chest against my back, we furtively made love while the others slept—and God knew whether they really did. If the divan creaked the smallest bit, Anton would call out, “Lo, the turtledove shits on my head!” And I was not by nature a quiet girl in bed. How ironic—in the gold and green room on the Catherine Canal, I could keen and moan, but in this liberated milieu, I had to stifle my cries in a pillow. A wonder that the poor got children at all. Though we knew that coitus interruptus was not the most efficient method of contraception, we didn’t always have the money for preservativy. And if I became pregnant? It would be Genya’s child—the ultimate futuristic improvisation.

But these difficulties and irritations were small sacrifice compared to the camaraderie and improvisation of our artistic life. I felt liberated. I’d made the leap, left my family and that old world behind. No more straddling stools. Such a relief to be wholly myself, to live without lying, to reach out, to try new things, to let curiosity unfold. Every day was an adventure, and I rested my head on Genya’s broad chest every night. He always smelled good to me, of grass and wood.

But still I itched—my hair, my groin, my armpits. I smelled so bad that I sometimes woke myself up at night. I’d never been so dirty in my life. And what would I do when my period came? Everyone in the room would know. I could ask Zina, but she hated me so much.

“Can you smell me?” I whispered to Genya.

“The banya’s right around the corner.” He shifted behind me, pulled me against him, his breath in my ear. I was mortified at his evasion.

The banya… akh, I knew where it was. I went by it every day, a windowless storefront on Kazanskaya Street. I didn’t want to tell him that the idea terrified me. I’d never been to a public banya. I knew they would laugh at me if they knew. What kind of Russian are you? But Father was strictly opposed to them, felt they were unsanitary, breeding grounds for disease. The toilet on the landing was bad enough, but at least you were alone in there.

“It’s not so bad,” Genya said. “Zina can show you.”

“Zina can show you what?” she asked from the table. No such thing as privacy in a Poverty Artel.

Somehow Genya assumed that Zina and I would become friends. What he didn’t know about women. He never realized that Zina had considered him hers, that in her overheated imagination, I had broken up their love affair with my false bourgeois charms and sexual tricks—though Genya swore there’d never been anything between them. She dogged me, trying to diminish me in his eyes, like a little terrier, more aggressive to compensate for her small size. Sometimes I’d catch her studying me, as if trying to figure out where to slip in the dagger. I’d be damned if I would admit my squeamishness to her.

That dull gray November day, people shouldered past me—a man hurrying by with a shabby briefcase, a woman fighting the raw wind with what looked like a huge sack of doorknobs. I couldn’t stand there forever in the cold. I steeled myself and pushed open the battered green door marked ZHENSHCHINY. Women.

Small and windowless, the anteroom was clad in peeling wallpaper the color of bread mold. No one sat at the counter. I didn’t know what to do next. “Hello?” I called out. An attendant, a female dwarf, stormed in from the other room. Then, taking a second look at me, she smiled. I supposed my coat and hat were of better quality than what was usually seen here. She instructed me on payment—fifty kopeks for the banya, fifty for soap and a towel—calling me milaya, pointing out the reasonable fee, “not like those fancy places on Sadovaya.” She led me into a dressing room, indicated the hook where I was to put my clothing, and waited—for a tip. But I could only give her a few small coins. She scowled when she looked at them, shoved me toward a wooden door.

On the other side it was—Goya. Twenty, twenty-five naked women crowded together in a large wet wooden washroom. A hideously fat woman scrubbed her neighbor’s bony back. A toothless granny held up the flab of her stomach to get at her hairless zhenshchinost’. Wrinkled, contorted feminine forms of every variety—hair, no hair… I wanted to run for the door, but I’d already paid my hard-earned ruble, and the dwarf would know what a coward I was. I would never be able to show my face here again.

The sight of them blistered my eyes. I’d seen a hundred paintings entitled In the Bath, where rosy beauties waded knee-deep in picturesque rivers and washed their long hair. Brown soap never appeared in Rubens. This was the thing itself, the squalor of human life. Age and decay. It was one thing to see bent backs under brown shawls, sagging stomachs faintly suggested by full dresses, breasts swinging low under bodices and aprons, genitals quite invisible, and another to see them revealed in their horrific variety. Bodies covered with wounds, with sores, rashes, bruises, welts, and worse. Bandages kicked into a corner. I could just imagine what Father would say, with his concern for public health. And Mother… I couldn’t stop looking at their tragic feet, their twisted toes like the claws of some horrible bird. I could see why Jesus would want to wash the feet of the poor.

Woman. How could one not pity her, with that forked stem, that tube for food and babies? This one—expanded like overyeasted bread. That one—contracted like a fallen soufflé. Emptied out, gouged like clay, clawed, bruised, imprinted with the devastation of gravity and years. I felt every inch the foreigner, visiting not from abroad but from the land of youth and beauty. They stared at me, too, at my smooth, pale flesh with its constellations of freckles, the wide-spaced breasts Genya found so stirring. The flame of my hair above and below. Conspicuous as an albino on safari. I moved to the buckets by the tap in the wall, filled one, and found a place on a bench where I could wash, concentrate on the steaming hot water and not the Rabelaisian sight all around me.

Hot water! Such luxury. I would not have imagined in my earlier life that someday it would make me weep with gratitude. I washed with the small bar of lye laundry soap the dwarf had sold me, imitating the others, squatting with the bucket between my legs, modestly scrubbing, then sudsing my neck, my short hair, rinsing again and again—what divinity, what bliss. I felt sorry for the women wrestling with their long skeins of hair. They must have to run home with it wet and dry it over the stove before they caught cold. Why didn’t they cut it?

But slowly, as I watched them patiently, proudly comb it out, I realized that lives so brutally hard might need such impractical beauty, that this little indulgence—long flowing hair—might be their sole grace note, to be savored rather than suffered.

I knew so little about life.

A cloud of billowing steam escaped from a wooden door. A woman staggered out, lay on a bench, pink as a salmon, steam rising from her skin as from a dish of noodles. It seemed there were more infernos to explore. I gathered my fortitude and my towel and pushed through into the mystery.

Searing steam, fragrant with the smell of green wood, revealed only vague smears of pink and motion, the sounds of rustling slaps as women flailed one another with bundles of birch twigs, leaves still attached. Through the mist, I found an empty place on a lower bench. My fellow bathers gradually materialized out of the blistering fog, like a photograph in a tank. An immense woman encased in fat like a walrus took center stage, flanked by an old woman who looked like a melting candle and a younger one whose shoulders and breasts revealed the shocking marks of repeated beatings—some bruises still livid, others already faded toward green and yellow like a forest floor. On the upper, hotter bench, shriveled old babas sat with backs like question marks, bent from a lifetime of standing over stoves, brooms, children.

A strapping girl with long black braids and full ripe breasts like blue-veined planets emerged from the steam to throw a ladle of water onto the stove. It spat and hissed and clouds obscured the scene. I liked it better that way, though the heat was phenomenal. I felt less glaringly out of place. Just when I’d begun to relax and enjoy the feeling of being clean and safely invisible, the fat woman hawked and spat on my foot. Had she really? I stared at the thick yellow glob of phlegm oozing down my instep. “Burzhui,” she sneered. “I could eat you for breakfast.” The others tittered, waiting to see what I would do.

I’d been to a girls’ school—I knew she would keep it up unless I stopped her. I got up and washed it off with the dipper. “So that’s how you got so fat.”

The women hooted. The fat one narrowed her piggish eyes.

I sat back down. “Watch out for her,” said the woman to my left under her breath, a rangy woman of late middle age, long breasts scarred vertically—from nursing, I imagined. I recognized her. The woman from my courtyard. Put the legs of the beds in kerosene. “She runs a booth in the Haymarket. She’s mean as a bucket of snakes.”

“She lives with all those poets on Grivtsova,” said a voice down the bench. “They’re all crazy as bedbugs.”

I was shocked. I hadn’t imagined anyone knew who we were. No one ever talked to us.

“She take them one at a time or all at once?” said a woman in a felt hat. I would have liked a hat like that—my ears were burning up.

“In that dog kennel they live in?” said our neighbor. “It would have to be all at once. No place for the queue.”

Everyone laughed—even me, although the joke was at my expense.

The girl with the globelike breasts squealed. “Ooh, the blond—that’s my idea of a man.” I wondered if Sasha knew he had an admirer in the neighborhood. I hoped for Dunya’s sake he didn’t. Those breasts could smother him outright.

I slicked my hand down my arm, the sweat pouring. Was I getting dirtier or cleaner? I couldn’t resist licking it, tasting the salt.

“Give me the big one,” said a woman twice the girl’s age. “Prince Ivan. Now that’s a man.”

Sage nods all around. Clearly they knew whom she was talking about. Prince Ivan. I imagined how Genya would laugh.

How strange, though… they knew us. They had ideas about us. Here we thought we were living in a world of our own making. It never occurred to us that it was a fishbowl, that others saw everything, drew conclusions, too. We lived in a real world where our futurist experiments meant nothing, where nobody cared about Victor Shklovsky.

“One more bastard in the courtyard by summer—you heard it here first,” said the rangy woman, elbowing me goodheartedly. “Take my word for it and kiss those pretty girls goodbye.” My breasts.

Unlikely. It wasn’t easy to make love in the Poverty Artel, four or five people listening to your every breath. “In the future,” I said, “there won’t be bastards. People won’t even know what that means.”

The way the women stared, I wished I hadn’t spoken, that I’d just enjoyed the sweating and let them think what they liked. Now I had to explain myself. “Children won’t be the property of fathers. All children will be the same. The whole property basis of marriage is obsolete.”

“Intelligentka,” one said with a laugh. “Vote list number three!” another called out from the steam. List number 3 was the Bolshevik slate in the upcoming election.

Their disdain was a challenge. Who was a burzhui now? “Kollontai said that for a woman, love should be no more important than drinking a glass of water.” Something I remembered Varvara quoting.

“What, are we men now?” the spitting walrus demanded.

“Who drinks water anyway?” said a woman in the steam, her words punctuated by the slap of birch twigs. “Too much trouble. Pump and boil…”

A tiny babushka on the bench above me patted my shoulder. “I’ve been married three times. I’d rather have a glass of water.”

“I’d rather have a drink of vodka than a man,” said a blond woman combing her hair. “Though I hardly remember either one.”

“I’ll take Ivan,” said the woman in the felt hat. “And he can bring the vodka.”

“Actually, he’s mine,” I said. “But you can have one of the others. How about the tall skinny one? He could use a girlfriend.”

They howled. They all knew which one I was talking about. “He’s the craziest one of all,” said my neighbor. “I have to keep the milk covered when he goes by.”

I wondered if Anton knew that he’d been passed over by the wives of Grivtsova Alley.

“He goes with whores,” said a woman sitting on the bench across from me. Her thighs looked like they’d been eaten by mice. “I’ve seen him up the street.”

My big ears knew a piece of ripe intelligence when they heard one.

“Who else would take him?” said the woman from my courtyard. “He’s so sour, he scares the vinegar.”

“He’s got that limp,” said a woman savagely slashing at herself with a birch flail. “Must be why he’s not in the army. But the others—what’s their excuse?”

The birch twigs thwacked disapprovingly, making it hotter. The green scent permeated every inch of the room, whose walls I hadn’t yet seen.

The girl with the braids threw another ladle on the stove. Instantly the heat redoubled. The women disappeared. Suddenly the girl was right in front of me. “You don’t believe in love?”

I was grateful for the change of subject. “When women have to trade on love, it’s an offense to love. Worrying about who will take care of us—that’s not love, is it? In socialism, marriage will be untainted by commerce.”

“Zhili-buili,” said the blond woman above us. “You’ll see what’s what when you get a couple of kids.”

Thwack…

“Without a man, who’s going to take care of you?”

“Lenin,” said the fat woman, and everyone laughed. She folded her giant arms across her breasts. “You’ll see. Couple of kids, your man’s out of work, you’re coughing up cotton like half these sad sisters. Stand in the queues after a day on the factory line, then let’s see about your lya lya fa fa. You’ll be the one sobbin’, ‘Where’s that Lenin now to take care of me and my brats?’” My interlocutor nodded sagely with her three chins. “Wait and see—a man’s never there when you need him.”

Laughter rose around me. Yes, they were right to laugh at me. Seventeen years old—who was I to lecture women about anything? No husband, no children. An intelligentka, I’d never worked a day in my life. The room started to spin. My neighbor and the girl with the braids caught me before I fainted, helped me stumble out the wooden door, laid me down on the bench, and threw a pail of cold water on me. “She’ll be all right,” the older one said.

I lay staring up at the wooden beams in the ceiling, thinking about the women in the steam and those washing at the taps. In ten years, fifteen, this would be me, no longer carefully tended and fed and ministered to by dentists and doctors, hairdressers and dancing masters. This woman washing herself had lived on bad bread, horsemeat, and fish soup. She lifted children with that back, walked miles on those arthritic feet. Women like her were invisible to men like my father, who never noticed who did his laundry and cooked his dinner. He never thought twice about who painstakingly stitched his suits, wove his scarves, fashioned his shoes, though he’d been so sure he knew what was best for them.

Soon enough my beauty would vanish. On Grivtsova Alley or someplace just like it, I would lose my looks, my health, everything I’d ever taken for granted. The realization shook me. How stupid I was. I was not from another planet, I was not a visitor here. This was also my fate, my future. My own curved back, my bruises and sores that would not heal, my sagging breasts, missing teeth, poverty. My suffering, unless the Bolsheviks were able to construct a just society—and how fast could they do it?

Oh, to give these women their beauty back. Or if not that, then something—nobility, some recognition of their struggle. I was a poet, that was something I could do. This woman had once been young, maybe even beautiful. Her disproportionately large hands spoke of years of hard labor. Were they not as dignified as my smooth ones? More. I loved the pleasure she took in soaping her gray hair in hot water, her eyes closed, savoring. What were all my opinions and ideals worth compared to this one woman, no longer young, washing her hair in a public banya, humming under her breath?

29 Fait Accompli

HOW STRANGE TO FIND myself in such a politically thrilling moment without any inside information or pressure from either Varvara or my father. I was free to decide for myself. The Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now leaned Bolshevik, though Anton and Gigo declared themselves Anarcho-Khlebnikovist. In the upcoming elections, the SRs were the frontrunners, representing the interests of the peasants and the less programmatic socialists. But there were lists for everything and everyone. Mohammedans, the Jewish Bund, Old Believers, rural proprietors and landowners, a feminist League for Women’s Equal Rights. There were cooperativists, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Germans, Bashkirs. Everyone had a list but the Theosophists. There was even a Kadet list, led by Paul Miliukov, back for another try at leading the country, along with Terekhov and a few others I recognized, but I saw no mention of Dmitry Makarov, either as a Kadet delegate or as one of the arrestees.

“And what is your platform?” Zina demanded of the Anarcho-Khlebnikovists as she singed her split ends with the burning coal of her cigarette, adding the stench of human hair to the already smoky miasma. A blizzard had threatened all day, and this evening, its first tentative flakes fell past our window.

Gigo, seated cross-legged on the coveted divan, leafed through the pages of his tattered, three-hundred-page futurist novel in verse. “We of the Anarcho-Khlebnikovist Party oppose governments and zoos of any kind.”

Anton steadied a walnut on the table and placed a chisel he’d taken from Sasha’s bag into the crevice, as if he were performing surgery. “Down with all parliaments.” He brought the hammer down on the chisel and neatly split the shell in two. Half went skittering off the table. “No congresses, zemstvos, or queues. No more choirs. No sing-alongs.” Sasha picked the half walnut up off the floor and tossed it back to the editor. “Free the periodic table!” Anton said. “We demand free air. Free poverty for all.” He extracted the meat with his pencil. “Vote list minus two.”

“Free the feet of the women of the banya,” I said from the stool where I sat posing for Sasha as he painted a cubist portrait of me onto the door. “Free their bunions, their fallen arches.”

“Free the women of the Terrestrial Now,” Sasha said, painting my nose in. “Free their lips and their adorable backsides. Free their freckles. Free the blondes, brunettes, and redheads. Free Vera Kholodnaya!”

Sitting at the table, Genya screwed an empty half shell into his eye socket like a monocle. Gigo’s mother had sent the sack from Georgia, and walnuts had become our main source of nutrition. He screwed in a second shell. “In the land of the blind, a blind man shall rule.”

“Free the alphabet from its unspeakable bondage,” said Gigo from the divan. “Free the ya. Ya before A. The last shall be first.”

At Genya’s side, Zina burped and sighed, fist under ribs. “These walnuts give me gas. I hope to God whoever wins gets some food into the city. I’m inflating like a dirigible. One night I’m going to explode.”

Only the Bolsheviks were surprised when the SRs won the election. No one else could have imagined it would turn out differently. Although we in Petrograd could fool ourselves into thinking we were an industrialized nation, the factory proletariat was a sprinkle of salt in the vast bowl of kasha that was Russia, a dollop of sour cream in that great vat of borscht. “The vanguard of the working class” could not carry the day in a country where most people still plowed behind a horse and wove their own clothes and bast shoes. In that Russia, revolution still meant “Land and Freedom,” the SR slogan.

Though I could not vote, being only seventeen, I had my favorites. I liked the wide embrace of the SRs, their historical roots, but it was also true that they didn’t have their eyes on the future. The bulk of the SRs were Defensists, wanting to fight the war to the end. They were old-fashioned populists of the last century, fighting old battles, while the Marxists were coolly working their program like mathematicians, organizing the proletariat and, even more important, the soldiers. They were the future.

Though they lost, the Bolsheviks made a good showing—they won a quarter of the vote throughout the country, and they proved overwhelmingly popular in the big cities, among the industrial workers, in the army, and in the fleet. What would happen now? Only the Bolsheviks would get us out of this war.

At dinnertime we descended on the Katzevs en masse. Dunya swooned at the sight of Sasha in the doorway with an armful of flowers shaped and painted from squares of Izvestia and Pravda, an adorable hint of blue paint clinging to his shaggy forelock. As for me, a different girl entered that apartment from the one who’d cringed with them under the tabletop the day the soldiers burst in. Different even from the girl I’d been when I’d returned from Maryino. Now I was a free woman, on my own, with my lover, coins from a street performance jingling in my pocket. My hair was rough, my clothes becoming worn from heavy use. I’d gone from windowsill pussycat to something of an alley cat.

Solomon Moiseivich greeted us from the divan, folding his Novaya Zhizn—and holding out his arms for an embrace. “So you’ve become a bohemian,” he said, kissing me three times. He wore his Bukhara cap and a caftan. Now Sofia Yakovlevna came in from the kitchen, and I reveled in the unfeigned pleasure on her face. “I wondered where you’d been hiding yourself.”

But Mina seemed less thrilled as she glanced up at us from her pile of homework. “Right on time,” she said sardonically. “Could you smell dinner?”

“All the way from Grivtsova Alley,” I said and pinched her upper arm. Don’t be like that.

Meanwhile, Gigo bestowed a bag of walnuts on Sofia Yakovlevna. “With my compliments,” he said. Genya handed her a loaf of bread we’d all pitched in to buy and followed her into the kitchen. She was like catnip to all the boys, with her soft bosom and kind round face. I helped Mina clear off the table—chemistry volumes, journals, notes in her small, neat hand—and felt a tiny pang of envy. Was I still jealous of her being at the university? I played with the feeling as you would toy with a slice of lemon, deciding whether it was too sour to eat. A little, I decided, but I wouldn’t have traded places with her. I was a poet among poets now, living the revolution. I couldn’t have stuffed myself back into that book bag, that lecture-hall seat.

I went back to the kitchen to see if I could help. Sofia Yakovlevna had Genya stirring the soup while she cut up more vegetables, doubling the recipe to accommodate the unexpected guests. Seeing me there, she caught me by the sleeve and pulled me to the sink, where she could talk under the cover of running water. They still had running water—imagine. “So are you happy, Marina?” she asked.

I turned to watch Genya solemnly stirring the soup as if the future of mankind depended upon it. “Very happy,” I said.

Worry argued with hope across her face as she washed a dish, a knife. “Will you marry?”

“Marriage isn’t revolutionary,” I said.

She sighed and wiped her hands on a towel. I could tell she was about to say something, but she just shook her head and smiled.

Six Transrationalists and seven Katzevs gathered around the big table, passing bread and garlicky pickles as Sofia Yakovlevna ladled up the borscht. All here, all together, everyone I loved. Except for Seryozha. I’d been writing to him faithfully, telling him what was going on here, but all I had to go on was the name of the institution, the Bagration Military School, and the address in Moscow. Maybe they’d censored my letters. Maybe the postal system had broken down, but I never received a response. The papers said there’d been fighting in Moscow, where the anti-Bolshevik forces were more organized, but after a week, their cadets, too, surrendered, and now the city was coming around to the new way of life.

Looking around the table, I was amazed at how we’d all grown up this year—Shusha, Dunya… Mina was wearing lipstick, her hair in a soignée chignon. Genya sat beside me, and Solomon Moiseivich beside him. They’d fallen into conversation about the elections. Genya was furious about the Bolshevik loss. He attributed it to the fact that the lists, drawn up months earlier by the Provisional Government, didn’t properly represent the new coalition between leftist SRs and the Bolsheviks, which he was convinced would have won. But the Bolsheviks still didn’t have the numbers. “They’ll have to restage the election,” he insisted. “We didn’t get rid of landlords to be ruled by ignoramuses in bast shoes genuflecting to painted boards.”

“The SRs got the majority,” Mina’s father said. “It’s the will of the nation.”

“The Bolsheviks have to reach the villages if they want to win in Russia,” said Aunt Fanya.

“The hell with the villages. I’m sick of the villages. I’m so sick of them I could scream.” Genya’s deep-seated hatred of peasants, stemming from his childhood on the Volga, always caught me off guard. He was otherwise such a loving, enthusiastic man, so his hatreds seemed all the more shocking.

Zina, seated across the table, was quick to jump into the fray, pointing her spoon at Solomon Moiseivich. “The advanced proletariat is the revolutionary class,” she said. I hated the way she spouted stock phrases, like a child reciting her lesson. I could take that behavior from Varvara—she’d actually read Lenin and Plekhanov and Kropotkin, Das Kapital in German. Zina just memorized slogans.

“If it wasn’t for the Petrograd worker, there wouldn’t have been a revolution at all.” Genya swept his arm in a gesture that barely missed his water glass. “The worker made this happen. Without the proletariat, the peasant would still be asleep in the haystack scratching at his lice.”

Just the mention of lice made me itch. Gigo ignored all the fulminations. He was doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his napkin for Shusha.

“It’s a peasant country,” said Solomon Moiseivich thoughtfully. “You can’t make a revolution without them.”

“But who should lead?” Genya said, letting his heavy hand fall to the table, making our dishes jump. “It’s got to be the most advanced. The head has to lead.” He poked himself in the forehead, hard enough to drive a nail. “The revolution’s the future, and there aren’t any plows in it.” He rested his arm across the back of my chair, and I saw how Mina blanched to see this familiar gesture. So each of us had something the other had missed.

Mina’s father sipped his tea with an indulgent smile. “There will always be plows, sinok.” Little son. “Someone has to bring in a crop. Unless you’re going to eat Bolshevik handbills.”

“Now there’s a field of plenty,” Mina said.

“I’ve lived out there.” Genya’s voice rising, his former good-fellow expression gone. “None of you have lived like that. The peasant doesn’t care about socialism. Land and Freedom? Once the peasant gets his land, he’ll consider himself free, and the hell with you. Just you watch.”

I waited for the echo of his voice to die down before I said, “You have to agree that the peasants should have the land. Without the soldiers, there would have been no revolution, and they’re all peasants. God knows they’ve waited long enough.”

He turned to me, hurt and surprised. “They only want to be the next landlord, don’t you see?” He backed away from the table to give his gestures more room. “They all have capitalist aspirations. The workers are the only ones who will protect the revolution.”

Sofia Yakovlevna watched me, and the expression on her face had nothing to do with the revolution and everything to do with my new life—to wit, Genya. Is he always like this?

“Whoever gets power will find a way to keep it,” Anton said from the foot of the table, where he perched on a footstool between Dunya and Shusha, enveloping them in a haze of cigarette smoke. “Bolshevik, Menshevik, the Committee for the Preservation of Wigs—they’ll set up a nice system of privilege for themselves and their friends.”

“Finally, a man to make some sense,” said Uncle Aaron, the old-time anarchist. “I’m with Mephistopheles over there.”

“The workers are no geniuses,” Anton continued, dropping ashes into his soup. The younger Katzev girls watched, horrified and fascinated.

Dunya stole shy glances down the table at Sasha. He smiled at her, wiping his moustache on the back of his hand. Gigo pulled a walnut out of Shusha’s ear, then a spoon out of his nose, making her laugh.

Now Genya couldn’t sit still anymore, he was up and pacing behind Anton, who turned around to speak to him. “You’re all mistaken if you think the worker is going to create a utopia,” Anton said. “Once you have a concentration of power, you’re screwed no matter who’s in charge.”

Uncle Aaron picked up the black flag of anarchism where he sat at the corner of the table. “The state’s a flawed tool. But I have more confidence in the people than you do, my smoky friend.”

“The people are a monster,” said Anton. “Individually bad enough, but once there’s a committee, you’re sunk.”

“I for one will take whoever clears the garbage.” Sofia Yakovlevna surprised us by the sharpness of her tone. She ladled a bit more soup into her husband’s bowl. “The SRs knew how to keep the streets clean.” It was true. Municipal services had almost ceased since the Bolshevik takeover, and the city was rapidly becoming a rotting trash heap. Everyone prayed for a good heavy snow. “And we could use some police protection while they’re at it. It’s one thing to take the Palais de Justice, but to fire the police? These Red Guards are hopeless. I’m afraid to leave the apartment.”

The common sense of this was undebatable. It’s what they talked about in the bathhouse as well—not the future but the present, the one outside the door. Where was that in the Bolshevik schema? Yet it was almost counterrevolutionary to mention it.

“They can only do so much,” Zina explained. “If we wanted just clean streets and police, we could have kept the tsar.”

Luckily for us, we lived in revolutionary times, which meant that the trash and the police would have to wait for bigger things. Jam tomorrow, as Alice would have said.

The Constituent Assembly walked into the Tauride Palace for the first time on an ice-covered January day. The snow glittered pink and lilac. We had turned out with thousands of others to watch the delegates arrive. I wondered if Father was here. I bet he was, hiding somewhere in the crowd. He wouldn’t want to miss this historic moment, a freely elected democratic body to rule Russia. Genya was still angry about the Bolshevik loss. Like many of the spectators, he and Zina shouted, “Soviet power!” and “We demand new elections!” but I felt tears welling up, seeing the solemn representatives of the Constituent Assembly move into the palace, preparing to sit for the first time in history.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the presence of the Red Guards that day. I assumed they were part of the grand occasion. But the next morning, I read on a wall poster that the Red Guards had taken over the first session of the Constituent Assembly and that it would remain closed thereafter. The workers’ militia hadn’t been there to protect the assembly but to close it down, lock it out. The Bolsheviks had never intended to give up power, whether the transition was legitimate or not.

Genya was ecstatic. “It would have just been the Provisional Government all over again—don’t you see?” he argued. “Talk, talk, talk. The war’s grinding us to dust, and the industrialists back running the country. It would only have been a matter of time until we had to get rid of them. No more kowtowing to retrograde classes. That’s over.”

I understood his argument but I couldn’t share it, not deep down in my bourgeois heart. This was a fairly elected body. Genya and I weren’t speaking by the time we drifted up to Znamenskaya Square, where speakers of all political stripes pleaded their causes, every lamppost resonating with hot oratory. Genya was the one who spotted Varvara exhorting a crowd from the base of the Alexander III statue. “Look. Your friend’s moving up in the world.”

I didn’t want to talk to Varvara. I didn’t even want to look at her, not after what she had done to me. It would have been one thing if my departure had been voluntary, but it was another to have my best friend rip my skin off for me and hand it back to me as if it were a cape.

“Only the workers can lead the workers!” she shouted. “We, the laboring classes, told the Constituent Assembly we demand it recognize the October Revolution, our revolution! And they refused!”

“Soviet power!” Genya shouted. “Down with the lackeys of the imperialists!”

Varvara saw me now, stumbled, but quickly recovered. “The majority of the Constituent Assembly rejected our demand for Soviet power, the highest democracy in the world. They refused to recognize our achievement—your achievement!”

“Down with the Bolshevik grab for power!” a solidly built man belted out. “The Constituent Assembly represents all of us!”

“Parliamentary democracy is a bourgeois throwback,” she shot back. “It ignores the leadership role of the revolutionary working class!” She held her hand high. “The Bolshevik revolution represents the triumph of the working class.”

“Urah!” shouted Genya along with other pro-Bolshevik elements of the crowd against the booing and furious heckling by Constituent Assembly advocates. Rhetoric flew back and forth. Varvara gave as good as she got, never folding, never tiring. I wondered where I would be now if she hadn’t pushed me into my new life. She’d been the violent midwife of my personal revolution, forcing me to do the very thing I’d been afraid of, to stand up for what I believed in, out in the open. I’d been happy to go behind people’s backs, but she forced me to take a side—exactly as the Bolsheviks had just done to the country.

They had flushed us out of our old cherished notions, our beloved dreams in sepia frames. Under the nose of the tsar and his bronze horse, Varvara argued that the Bolsheviks couldn’t take the chance that the other parties would chip away what the worker had wrought. Yet I couldn’t quite shake my regret that we never got the chance to see this thing, an elected assembly. To turn it over in our hands, marvel at it, and decide for ourselves what it was. To have February again, just for a little while—that’s all I wanted. Maybe I would have come around to her point of view eventually. But everything had happened so fast. The assembly had sat for just one night, and now it was gone, and we would never know it for itself. Just as Varvara had done that October night in my parents’ salon, the Bolsheviks had swept in and made up our minds for us. Fait accompli.

30 Former People

IT WAS A HARD WINTER. The only thing heating the flat was our own fevered talk. Our little tin stove was voracious, an idol, a Baal, a starving beast:

We tore down fences to slake its hunger, stole siding from abandoned houses, broke off slats from stairway banisters. We burned whatever we could pry loose, though it was considered a serious crime now. The Bolsheviks were rightly afraid that the freezing citizens would consume the city like termites. But stoves must eat. Petrograd became ever more dilapidated—windows broken, boarded up, traces of bullets on the walls. Rent became a thing of the past—only the bourgeoisie had to pay it—and that was a blessing, as we had few sources of income. Anton was our main provider of cash, through a stipend from Okno’s patroness, Galina Krestovskaya, an actress with poetic aspirations. Genya and Sasha made money hauling junk, unloading carts, plastering walls with newspaper broadsides. Gigo disappeared from time to time, returning with packets of cash, evasive about their source. I continued to sing for loose change—not only the revolutionary songs, although my repertoire was expanding. Often people just wanted to hear something beautiful or nostalgic. Do not awaken my memories… you’ll not return… my soul does cry…

But it wasn’t enough. I had to find some real work. Factory work would be best, something with dignity that would confer proletarian credentials. But one needed a labor book to work, get housing, do anything now.

“Ask Varvara to help you,” Genya said. “She knows people.”

“I’m not talking to her.” How she would love that, for me to come a-begging.

That morning, I walked up the icy, unshoveled street to our local district soviet on Kazanskaya Street, my scarf tight around my neck, my hat drawn down, taking small mincing steps and trying not to fall. My route sent me past the familiar sad array of “Former People”—the previously well to do, now outmoded, terrorized, standing against buildings, silently offering bits and pieces of their former lives—silver spoons, a lace-edged towel. A new organ of the government had recently been formed to fight the hydra of counterrevolution, sabotage, and speculation. The Extraordinary Commission, Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, it was called. And it considered all private trade, even the necessary sale of petty personal goods, to be speculation, punishable with confiscation and arrest. In the spirit of the time, impatient and modern, it was known by its initials—Che-Ka. Cheka.

Despite the danger, a woman in a thin black coat held out something discreetly wrapped in paper. Her deadened face came to life as I passed. I supposed she smelled my own Formerness. Her voice was low and plaintive. “For God’s sake, child. It’s a brass clock. From Hamburg. A hundred rubles. Fifty.”

I didn’t have ten rubles, much less need of a clock. But that coat was too thin for the weather—she was blue as a Picasso. I tried to imagine my mother standing by a building in the shadows, trying to sell a clock, but I knew it was impossible, even if she were starving. I gave the woman the money from my pocket, around eighty kopeks. Most of the Formers had left by then, heading for the south, where there was more food and fewer Bolsheviks, or striking out for the West.

The Kazansky District Soviet, housed in an ugly building that was once a police station, gave the lie to the notion that the city had emptied out, however. There must have been a thousand souls packed inside, standing in queues that snaked down steamy, murky halls, then folded over and doubled back. Half of ambulatory Petrograd must have been there. It smelled of wet wood and wet coats and the ozone of terror.

“Labor books?” I asked a small woman wearing a man’s greatcoat.

She pointed to the next floor up.

The Bolsheviks turned out to be as fond of bureaucracy as the tsarists had been. If only one could eat red tape. I struggled through the closely packed bodies and found the right queue on a back stairway. People stood with their hands in their pockets, silent, each wrapped in his or her own private worries. No one felt like commiserating. The man in front of me had a cold. He sneezed in threes. I grew sleepy from the heat, my feet and ankles swelling as we moved forward by centimeters. I dozed and thought of the spacious Krestovsky flat where we held our poetry evenings—specifically, of the butter cookies Galina Krestovskaya served. Her husband owned seven snack bars in Petrograd theaters. Their flat had heat and hot water and a working telephone. I could taste those cookies melting in my mouth, good as anything Vaula ever made. Where did they get the sugar, the flour? Money could buy almost anything, even now. Except Anton’s respect. He was no more civil toward his patroness than he was toward anyone else, though she was supporting us all. His scorn only intrigued her. He didn’t even publish her poems in the journal she bankrolled.

Passing open office doors, I listened as bourgeois petitioners pleaded with rough, barely literate soldier “clerks” and worker “secretaries” to solve this or that problem, or let them off the rent. “The water isn’t even working!” The secretaries could barely write their own names. However, public service employees were still on strike, ever since the Bolshevik coup, so the local soviets had to find staff wherever they could. I considered joining the Bolsheviks—I could be working here instead of queuing like a penitent—but I wasn’t nearly fanatical enough. The Bolsheviks were more than a political party, they were a religious order.

I’d made it up the stairs now, close enough to see the front of the line, where a woman pleaded with the soldier-clerk, a weary-looking man with a big untrimmed moustache. “I am a proletarian,” she insisted, though she wore some stuffed bird atop her ancient hat that clearly identified her as a Former.

“Birth certificate,” the soldier said.

They needed a birth certificate?

“It’s been lost,” said the woman with a tremulous voice. “There was a house fire. My father was a carpenter. Mother—laundress.”

“Next,” the soldier said, indicating a woman two places in front of me.

I had to think of another story. I, too, had been planning on claiming proletarian origins, changing my name to Marina Moryeva. I’d practiced my story. Born Harbin, China. Father, printer. Mother, seamstress. Let them try to track that down.

“Please, Comrade.” The woman with the bird hat would not move on. Now she started crying in earnest. “I have to work. No one’s hiring us.”

“Lady, look at all these people. Most of ’em worked all their lives. They’ve got skills. They haven’t been lying around, living off our sweat. Now move along.”

It was my turn. “Papers?” he asked, extending his hand, not looking at me.

I gave him my form but I didn’t have any personal papers. They were all back on Furshtatskaya Street. My birth certificate, baptismal records, school transcripts. I didn’t have a single one.

“My bag was stolen,” I said. “On the tram. Please, what should I do?”

The soldier appeared to have some sort of indigestion, belching and thumping his chest with his fist. It was the bad bread we all ate. “Guess you’ll have to write to China,” he said with a smirk. “We’re not handing out labor books like they’re posies.” Those small books, our very lifeline.

“But it’s China.”

“China,” the comrade sighed. “That’s a new one.” He indicated the door with a disgusted thumb. “Next.”

So it came to pass that on a bitter snowy January evening I swallowed my pride with a cup of barley soup and, together with Genya, crossed the Nikolaevsky Bridge over the frozen Neva to enter the broad, dark Lines of Vasilievsky Island—specifically, the Seventh Line, where Varvara had brought me to the illegal print shop that day. I knocked, and a pale suspicious face appeared in the doorway. Steel-rimmed glasses, pallid blue eyes. I asked for Varvara. “I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said.

Another man took the place of the first. “I’m looking for Varvara Razrushenskaya,” I tried again. “I’m a friend of hers. We were distributing leaflets before the insurrection.”

The second man squinted at me. “She’s back in her mother’s old flat,” he said. “If you’re her friend—you must know where it is.”

“On the Sixteenth Line,” I said.

The comrade nodded and closed the door.

Varvara’s old building was more than a mile farther west. Half the streetlights were out on Bolshoy Prospect as we trudged and slipped along, trying not to break our necks. I was glad to have Genya by my side. I recognized the dark hulk of the brothel opposite Varvara’s apartment house, but there were no women outside or in the windows. Was it the revolution or just the cold? Inside her building, the stairs had grown gap-toothed just like ours. It seemed strangely quiet after our noisy tenement. People here were hunched behind their doors over their scraps of food, listening for criminals or for the step of the Cheka making a raid. Our building was too poor for raids, so we’d escaped the worst of it. I stopped at her flat. I could hear voices inside. As soon as I knocked, they stopped talking. I knocked again. A familiar lean, sneering mug answered the door—the printer Kraskin—formerly Marmelzadt—smoking a crooked little cigar.

Varvara sat at the table, wearing a black sweater with a ragged collar, among six or seven comrades perched on stools and hunched on old tattered chairs, young men and women startled at the interruption. When I approached her, she stuck out her hand like a man. Her palm felt very dry. She nodded at Genya, and they, too, shook hands.

“Where’s the countess?” I said, lowering the shawl from my head but not taking off my coat—it was almost as cold in the flat as it was in the hall.

“Dead,” Varvara said. She examined the ember on her hand-rolled cigarette. I couldn’t tell whether her bluntness was to impress me or Kraskin, leaning against her chair back, or the cluster of comrades. “Vot tak.” Like that. “She got into bed one day and turned her face to the wall. Said, ‘I don’t care to see any more of this.’” My infuriating friend considered me with a slightly amused, cruel expression, the same one that Kraskin wore. “So what brings you to this side of the river?”

“I’ve been looking for work,” I said.

Kraskin’s smirk toyed with his thin lips like a scrap of paper circling in dirty water. “Does this look like an employment agency?” he said.

“Excuse me, but I was talking to… her.” Friend was out of the question.

Varvara leaned her chair back on its hind legs and planted her boots on the table. They were in terrible shape. “Try the telephone company. That’s the place for nice bourgeois girls like you.”

“As if you’re not one,” I snapped back. I didn’t need her supercilious attitude. If I was going to claim proletarian status, change my biography, I needed industrial labor, not association with the anti-Bolshevik class. She owed me this. I wouldn’t let her play with me to show off for Kraskin. I wondered what their relationship was. Though I couldn’t really imagine her with a lover, he did seem to show up in too many places for them to be just comrades.

“Try the banks. The bourgeois workers are still on strike,” she said.

“They’ll show us, eh?” Genya laughed. “As if the Soviet’s going to disappear without bank clerks and telephone operators.”

“I don’t want to be a bank clerk.” I plucked the cigarette from Varvara’s fingers and took a deep puff of the cheap makhorka. Remember me? I wanted to scream. “Find me a metal factory. A printworks. I’ll make shoes, work in a tannery, weave.”

“Bourgeois baby wants to play the proletarian,” Kraskin mocked. “Oh what would Papa say?”

Genya clapped his hand on Kraskin’s little bony shoulder. The top of the printer’s head barely reached my lover’s chin. “Hey, brother, who are you again? And why is this any of your business?”

“This isn’t a game,” Varvara stated flatly. “We can’t fill these clerical jobs. And we can’t take factory jobs from workers to flatter your revolutionary romanticism.”

“Maybe I can be a robber,” I said. “How’s that for romantic?”

She let loose a great cloud of smoke above her head. “Better start soon, the field’s getting crowded.” It was true, more and more audacious criminal gangs were robbing apartment houses, bakeries, theaters—even in daylight. Krestovskaya’s husband’s snack bars were regular targets. Just the other day there had been an out-and-out gunfight in a theater between a gang and the Red Guards.

“I already went to the district soviet, but they wanted to see my papers.”

“So?”

“I don’t have any.” I glared at her, not wanting to say, You remember why, don’t you? “In any case, I need better ones.” Ones that wouldn’t scream Class: bourgeois. “You’ve got to help me.”

Kraskin shook his head over his cigar. “Smolny’ll love that.”

Varvara turned on the sour-faced printer. “Why don’t you show Genya what we’re working on? He’s a poet. Maybe he can make it sound better.”

He took his arms off the back of her chair and touched his cap, ironically, and he and Genya drifted over to the group huddling by the stove and making notes on some pages. I sat down next to Varvara, shoulder to shoulder. She sighed, swung her booted feet to the floor, let her chair fall back to all four of its rickety legs. “All right. Get me your birth certificate, et cetera. I’ll see what I can do. But it’s going to be the telephone company, something like that. We need people on our side who can read and write, do sums. Unemployment’s over the moon in the industrial sector. No materiel, no fuel. We need those jobs for the workers.”

I could smell her scent, slightly sour, dirty hair plus graphite and paper, apple cores. “I’m never going to forgive you, you know.”

Her mouth twisted, trying to suppress a smile. “You can’t play both sides. I just gave you a push. Don’t be so sore. Look, if you’re interested, he’s still out there, making trouble, as you can imagine. He’s on the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution as well as the Committee for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. Tenacious, you have to give him that. But go back and get your papers. I’ll see what I can do.”

I had little choice but to return to Furshtatskaya Street and hope my papers were still there. They were like soap—essential, yet a part of life I’d never considered while I packed my pictures and poetry that night three months earlier. A whole world had passed away since I’d last walked down this broad avenue. The sidewalk had barely been cleared, the snow piled into high tunnels of icy white. So many things I hadn’t known back then. What it was to be hungry, and tired, and bug-bitten, and restless for a moment of privacy. Looking down the block, I could easily see which apartments were still occupied and which had been abandoned—the exterior walls of the living flats showed dark, while the “dead” ones gleamed with silvery frost. So many dead buildings. Here was ours, still blue with white plasterwork, elegant even now, though I noticed the pipes of the little bourgeoika tin stoves dribbling smoke through some of the windows. Not enough coal or wood to stoke the big porcelain stoves anymore, not even up in this part of town.

I felt my way up the back stairs from the courtyard, tried the kitchen door. It swung open. The very path Varvara had taken that night in October. With all the robberies, I was amazed it was left unlocked. Frost grew thick on the windows of the large tiled kitchen. The stove, ice cold. All down the back hall, the doors to the servants’ rooms stood open, revealing beds without mattresses, empty wardrobes. We’d read that the Red Guards had been carrying out a general confiscation of furniture and clothing from the bourgeoisie, to be redistributed to the poor. So it had happened here, too. Feelings warred inside me. I was all for redistribution, yet I couldn’t help feeling robbed.

My footsteps rang out in the empty rooms. I felt as though I’d entered my house in a dream. The cloakroom, where I had first kissed Kolya, looked so much larger with nothing in it—the Transrationalists could have lived there quite comfortably. In the main wing, the desolation was even more obvious. The foyer rug was missing, the marble-topped table lay on its side, too heavy to cart away. In the parlor, pieces of wood littered the parquet, and empty frames of the art that normally hung on the walls. The Repin portrait of Seryozha and the Vrubel were gone. A flush of anger returned.

I crept down to Father’s office. Would my papers still be there? The door gaped open revealing the oak file cabinet turned over, its drawers gone. The desk drawers, too, had been breached, broken open with some crude instrument, a hatchet or a crowbar. Yet the green-striped wallpaper was still the same, and, incredibly, photographs still hung on it. My brothers and I. Our Makarov grandparents. All of us at a picnic on the coast of Finland. Only one was missing—Volodya the cavalry officer on his sleek bay horse. Had Father removed it? Or had the Red Guards taken it as evidence of our family’s allegiances? I took a photo of the three of us as children on the porch at Maryino, our legs hanging down, Volodya dark-skinned in a bathing costume, I in my braids and freckles, Seryozha with his floss-blond hair and enormous eyes.

The telephone still sat on the desk. I tried the receiver, depressed the cradle, and—mirabile dictu!—an operator came on the line. “Number, please.”

“Sorry,” I said, then hung up. Would that soon be me, my new Soviet life?

I turned to the big Russian stove in the corner of the room, and slid open a panel in the tile, revealing a metal-lined safe where we hid valuables and important documents, not so much out of fear of theft as fear of fire. I breathed a short prayer of gratitude—they were still there. Birth certificates, passports. My parents’ elaborate wedding papers. My high school diploma and the letter of acceptance into the department of philology at Petrograd University. Only Father’s documents were gone—passport, law degree, his first from Oxford, his MLitt, even his certificate from the Tenishev Gymnasium.

Surprisingly, stacks of ruble notes, gold coins, and Mother’s jewelry—luminescent opals, Indian sapphires with their mysterious stars—were still intact. I took my own documents and a few rubles, stuffed them in my bag, slid the tile closed.

I knew I should go, but it had been three months since I’d seen these rooms. Who could have blamed me for nostalgia? The nursery was as it always had been, but dustier and ice cold. Here we had learned our letters, shared secrets, played endless games of durak. Here I had cast the wax that long-ago New Year’s Eve. I knelt by the old rocking horse, pressed my nose to his, wrapped my arms around his wooden neck and horsehair mane. “I wish I could take you.” The horse forgave me, he was filled with such love. Why hadn’t some Red Guardsman taken him for his own children? “Be brave,” I whispered to him.

My bedroom, by contrast, was a scene of devastation. Pictures askew, anything made of fabric gone: clothing, rugs, the bed just a skeleton of springs. But Seryozha’s watercolor of the Finland shore still hung on the deep pink wall along with the poets’ silhouettes he had so painstakingly cut with his fine-pointed scissors. I took them down and piled them on the bare bedsprings. My jewelry, long gone. The little drawer of the vanity table empty. But the photographs under the glass remained untouched. I pulled them out and stacked them on top of Seryozha’s pieces.

Father’s English bedroom had been even more thoroughly ransacked—clothing gone, wardrobe gaping. The dresser top lay bare of the beautiful toilet set that always rested there, the bone-handled brushes and combs for head and beard, tiny nail scissors, powders and pomades to tame his crinkly hair. Did I dare look into Mother’s room?

I turned the door handle but found it locked. I knocked. “Hello?” Could she have lain down and turned her face to the wall? I began to beat the door with the heel of my hand. “Mama? It’s Marina. Avdokia? Open up.”

I heard the tiny click, the latch turning, like a sound from a grave. In the gap, Ginevra’s frightened face. She pulled me inside, locked the door, and embraced me, patting me, touching my hair, my cheeks. “You’re here… I can’t believe it.”

What a sight! Furniture had been squeezed into every last inch of space—a tumble of chests, chairs, and trunks like in an antiques shop. The nursery piano! They probably couldn’t move the Bösendorfer. Three mismatched beds were lined up against the far wall. Mother, Avdokia, and the English had probably retreated to this bedroom so they could devote all the wood to one stove. In her ornate canopied bed, Mother sat propped up on pillows, her white hair a disordered nest. She was fumbling with something in her hands. At first I thought she was knitting, but there was nothing there. “Mama, where’s Avdokia?” I was afraid to approach her.

“She’ll be back. She’s off selling a few things,” Ginevra said. She hugged me suddenly, awkwardly. She was never very physical. “Oh, child.” Her hand flew to her mouth, and her face withered like a cut bloom. She motioned for me to come out into the hallway. She was only twenty-eight, but she looked forty. Her lips trembled as she tried to speak.

“Is it Papa?”

She shook her head.

A great hand wrapped itself about my throat. Volodya?

She shook her head again and started to cry.

Seryozha. Oh God.

She told me that it had been in the battle for the Kremlin, the first week of the Bolshevik insurrection. Moscow had been more prepared to fight the takeover than we had been and the Provisional Government had pitted the cadets against the Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers. Thousands of them. Boys, defending the city against seasoned men.

“We had a letter.” Her voice was as empty as the hallway, with all its staring doors. “Please, Marina, you’re hurting me.” I hadn’t noticed that I was gripping her arm, digging my fingers in. I let her go. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” She scurried back into Mother’s room, shutting the door behind her. I stood in the hallway, my mind a howling waste.

After a time, she emerged and held out an envelope to me, her back against the door, as if I might rush at her. Bagration Military Academy. Beautiful stationery, bearing the Romanov eagle. I pulled out one big, creamy sheet. I had never hated anything so much in this world.

He’d been dead since October. I stared down at the page as if I expected the letters to rearrange themselves and spell something else. “Does Father know about this?”

She answered quietly, holding my hands. “Dmitry Ivanovich was going to give himself up for arrest, to go in with the ministers, but this changed his mind. He said he still had work to do.”

This was how you saved Russia, Papa? “You could have at least sent word.”

My governess sighed as if she could expel all the sorrow and guilt in one single breath. “No one was allowed to speak to you.” Tears dripped from those watery English eyes. Her nose was red and runny. She blotted at herself with a wadded handkerchief.

My mouth felt full of the metallic bitterness of dirty kopeks.

I was alone now. Absolutely alone. What good was all our knowing, all our love, our secrets and shared memories? A fanged animal lodged in my throat. I tore at my neck, trying to let it out.

Ginevra caught at my hands. “Marina, don’t… for pity’s sake…”

I would find Father in whatever high-ceilinged drawing room he was in, talking so importantly about Russia’s future, and I would kill him.

“Ginevra?” Mother appeared at the door, barefoot in a white nightgown—a frightened ghost. She saw me but gave no sign of recognition, only fear and stupefaction. The Englishwoman pushed between us.

“Come, Vera Borisovna. Let’s go back to bed.” She ushered my mother back into her room.

I was still standing in the hall when my governess returned to the door. “Don’t go, Marina. Come talk to your mother.” She faced the figure now sitting on the edge of the bed, the quilt around her shoulders. “Vera Borisovna! Look who’s here. Look who’s come to see you.” She waved me closer. I saw that the last months had turned my mother into an old woman. Her beauty hadn’t disappeared, but her flesh was thinned, her bones sharpened, her lips chapped and pale. Her eyes, so much like Seryozha’s, consumed her face. Ginevra tucked her back into bed, drawing the bedclothes up around her, plumping her pillows.

My family had disappeared—brother, mother, father. Here I thought their lives had continued without me, but there was no home anymore. Not for any of us.

“Are you able to get some food for her?” I asked.

“Avdokia trades things. And Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help.”

Kolya was here? Kolya, taking care of her? “He’s been here?”

“He’s saved our lives—you don’t know,” she went on, tucking the lace-edged sheet over the edge of the blanket. She was back to her resolute, tranquil demeanor. How could she have calmed down so fast? But her tears had been for me. Seryozha had been dead for months. She’d had time to get used to his death. His death! She went on talking. “We can’t get a thing out of the banks, what with the teller strike. Nikolai sold some of the paintings, and told us to hide the money in the stove, her jewelry. Thank God he got to us before the last sweep. They took everything.” We watched my mother, her hands fiddling again. I could see now that she was working a tangle of thin necklaces, trying to get them apart. “We’ve heard from Volodya. He’s joined the Volunteer Army in the Don.”

Seryozha was in the ground in Moscow. Volodya was fighting against the revolution. My lungs couldn’t expand. They’d been frozen solid.

My mother looked up from the tangle of chains. “Where’s Tulku?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She still hadn’t noticed I was here, but she wanted her little greyhound.

“Avdokia’s taking him for a walk, dear,” said the Englishwoman. She turned to me, whispered, “They shot Tulku during the first search, poor thing. He growled at one of the Red Guards and the man shot him the way you’d swat a fly. Frankly, it was just as well. We couldn’t have kept feeding him.”

Why was she talking to me about a dog? I had to get out of there while I could, while I still had the strength.

My mother turned to me, her eyes big and uncomprehending as a squid’s. The heat was unbearable in here, the closeness, the lavender, their helplessness. My brother was gone. My sensitive, anxious brother who had never wanted to climb beyond the first branch of the maple that grew in the Tauride Gardens. Even then you’d have to hold him on. Killed defending the Kremlin. I pictured the dead in Znamenskaya Square, a blond head, the cap fallen off. I put the letter in the bag with Seryozha’s pictures and my papers and left the flat before I turned to stone.

31 The Twenty Towers of the Kremlin

BIG FLAKES SIFTED ACROSS the windows. Down in the courtyard, a woman pumped water, and a crow picked disconsolately at some kind of rag. The same snow was falling in Moscow, deep, deep over his grave. Falling as it had in the snow globe music box Avdokia would wind for us, gnarled hands turning the key and shaking the encased wintry scene—St. Basil’s, a troika rushing. Seryozha in his nightshirt, I in my flannel gown, Volodya pretending he was too old for such things but watching all the same. “That’s you three,” she would say, pointing to the horses pulling the troika. It had played “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” little tinkling bells, over and over. Warm from our Sunday night baths, we would watch the snow fall together. Moscow seemed a magical place then, not a backdrop to murder.

How would I live in a world without Seryozha? A world surrounded by strangers, a world that could kill a little boy in his nightshirt? The sky grew dark. I prayed he hadn’t been lying about being happy at the military academy. The snow swirled, a silent answer. You are all erased. You live to be erased. No one will be remembered by anyone. They hadn’t bothered to tell me—I wasn’t that hard to find!—but let me go on thinking he was alive. I’d laughed and run around town, spouting verses on bridges and singing on street corners, when he lay—where? I hadn’t even asked. All I could picture was a sad mound of snow by the Kremlin wall, one of its twenty towers looming above.

The tiny music box played over and over in my mind as I remembered Seryozha manipulating his Pierrot and Columbine paper puppets, making them jump with a tug of the string. Come with me; we’ll live on the moon. His little voice, playing both parts. Yes, I’ve always wanted to live on the moon.

Me, too, Seryozhenka. I’d like to live on the moon, somewhere cold and shining, with no humans at all—just us.

I could hear them, the racket in the hall, and in they came, talking all at once, shaking snow from hats and coats. Someone lit the lamp, dispelling the calming shadows, the gentle dark. Shouting, laughing. Something had outraged Genya, something about Red Guards. Now they saw me.

“Why were you sitting in the dark?” he asked me. He pretended to fall on me, a joke, caught himself at the last minute, one hand braced against the wall over my head. He leaned down to kiss me. I turned my face away. “Are you on strike like the Red Guards?” He tried the other side. “Fishing for more rations? Higher wages?” He righted himself. “What’s with you? How’d the job search go?”

I stared out to the windows facing ours in the courtyard. People making dinner for their children with what little they had. Families. How fragile it all was.

“What’s with her?” Zina asked.

Not looking at him, I handed Genya the letter, the paper that felt so much like skin. I could not say it. Seryozha’s dead. A girl on the far side of the courtyard lounged in a window, looking back at me. Maybe it was me in a different life. I held my hand over my mouth to stop sobs if they started.

“It’s her brother,” Genya told the others.

“What happened?” Zina asked again.

“Killed. At the Kremlin. Back in November. Remember him, at the Cirque Moderne?”

“The blond one with the curls?” Zina asked.

“The father sent him to junker school. Bastard. Bastard!” Junkers—it’s what they called the cadets.

Junker school. My father hadn’t presented it that way, but that was exactly what it was. Officers in training. I held out my hand for the letter without turning to look at him. He pressed it into my palm. I folded it and put it back in my pocket. It was all I had of him now, that and a landscape or two, some silhouettes. Genya took my hands in his, rested his face against them. “Marina. I’ll kill him. I’ll go up there and rip his head off. To send that kid down there for nothing? What can I do, Marina? Just say the word.”

“It happened three months ago.” I didn’t want his histrionics or his tears. I just wanted to be cold, to freeze solid here by the window. I wanted to disappear.

But now he was pacing, swatting at the air. “I wonder what your old man has to say about it now. ‘Your son died heroically.’ Boys against soldiers—what did they think would happen?”

“Sorry, Marina,” Sasha said, touching me on the shoulder. “He was a sweet guy, an artist. I remember him. He was good, too.”

“Like meat to dogs,” Genya said.

Stop, for the love of God.

Anton stretched out on his cot. Supine, he began to roll a cigarette on a book on his chest. “This is exactly why governments should be abolished.”

“Sorry, Marina,” Gigo said, awkward as a hayseed at a costume ball. He held out a half-eaten bar of chocolate to me, linty from his pocket, as if I were a child to be appeased with sweets.

Sasha blew the stove to life. The smell of sulfur, newsprint, varnish.

“I hope he’s satisfied,” Genya said, still pacing. He was too noisy. Could he not just sit down? “I’d like to ask him that to his face. ‘Are you satisfied now, Dmitry Ivanovich? Are you proud of your son at last?’”

I finally let out a shriek. “For God’s sake!”

“I’m sorry!” Genya flung himself to his knees at my feet, clutching at my skirt, his head in my lap. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m such an oaf. Just an organ-grinder’s monkey. Please tell me what to do. Please… anything, Marina. It’s just too hideous. I can’t stand it.” He wept into my lap.

I ran my hands through his hair just to quiet him. It was absurd—I wanted him to hold me, say nothing, and just be very still. Oh, none of these poets knew the first thing about life.

The conversation went on around me. I counted towers.

“Power will defend itself to the end,” Anton was saying from his cot, where he was examining the hole in his sock.

That night, I dreamed of Moscow. Seryozha was a bell ringer, up in one of the towers of the Kremlin Wall, and they’d tied him into the belfry, hand, foot, and neck, stretched between them. I knew that when they rang the bells it would tear him to pieces.

Life went on. Arguments, fires made, meals eaten, visits to the toilet, hours in queues and trips to the district soviet. I managed to secure a labor book. Origin: bourgeois. I saw no point fighting it now. The air felt thick in my lungs, unbreathable, like the atmosphere on Venus. I went through my days, living as if within a matrioshka nesting doll. One Marina functioned, while deep inside, another Marina knelt in the snow by the Kremlin Wall, weeping atop a small grave. No one could join her there. They didn’t know that Seryozha didn’t like people touching him on the head. That his favorite color was cadmium yellow with a dash of red at its heart. That he was bitten by a spider at the age of five and became so sick and swollen that he almost died. He’d read that the Chinese kept crickets as pets and insisted on having one of his own. Avdokia got him a little basket with a lid, and Volodya hunted for three nights to catch one for him. My loneliness possessed a gravity I thought would crush me.

That Wednesday evening, we all trooped up to our poetry circle, held at the Krestovsky apartment on Sergievskaya Street, near the English embassy. Genya had something special to present. He was dying to show me, dropped numerous hints. He’d been working on it all week. Thank God it kept him busy. Mechanically, I combed my hair and got into my boots, my coat.

The bracing walk did me good. Everyone was bundled up, our breath freezing in midair. Galina Krestovskaya, so beautiful with her golden curls, met us at the door, kissed us in greeting. I always loved coming to this big overwarm apartment with its faux peasant furniture, the flowers and birds painted on the walls, the young poets gathered from all over the city to share their work and listen to the critique, especially from Anton. Seryozha would have loved this place. He would have approved of Galina—he was always attracted to beauty. She wore an embroidered Russian blouse that my brother might have designed himself.

Everybody was talking about a brand-new poem from Blok, “The Twelve,” a poem about the revolution. No one had seen it yet, but a friend of the Krestovskys had acquired a copy, and we eagerly anticipated hearing it. Galina, the star of the Kommedia theater, read aloud proudly and with great revolutionary enthusiasm, checking periodically to see what Anton thought of her performance. Her husband, Krestovsky, rattled his newspaper from time to time in his leather armchair in the alcove, occasionally surveying the gathering with a doleful, proprietary squint. It was he who footed the bill for our journal, for the snacks and the fuel to heat this room for our meeting, and for Anton’s editorial salary, which in turn paid for the Poverty Artel.

“The Twelve” took around fifteen minutes to read. Intricate and modern, it captured the music of the revolution, a Blok no one had ever heard before. In the poem, twelve Red Guards patrolled the streets of Petrograd in a snowstorm, streets familiar to us all, haunted and laced with deadly dramas. We recognized the rough men, the haggard bourgeoisie, the prostitutes, the hunger and cold. A prostitute, Katya, seduced by a tough, is shot by her Red Guard lover. The action was brutal and callous, yet Blok could not stop the music inside himself. What a singular moment, to hear the first recitations of a master’s work, to stand aside from the dullness of my grief—no, not stand aside from it, because grief was in the poem, along with coarseness and beauty. A contradictory piece, it was on the side of the revolution and yet accepted it for the wild, violent, uncontainable thing it was, a time when people were going to suffer.

The dangerous, ragged quality of the poem took impulse, rage, murder, and remorse and drove onward, onward into the snowstorm that blinded us all. It ended, most astonishingly, with Christ marching unseen at the head of the column of the twelve, struggling through the blizzard, into the unknown. And in front of the flag / invisible in the snow / walks one more man…

I would have liked to just sit and absorb what we had just heard, but the discussion began immediately. What was Christ doing at the end of the poem? Was Blok a modernist or still a symbolist? I accepted a pastry from a tray being passed by the Krestovskys’ maid and chewed it without savor. Though pastry was usually a treat, tonight it tasted like paper.

Genya, the priest’s son, of course was outraged. “Do we really need Christ to redeem the revolutionary struggle?” he thundered. “He says without crosses—what’s the line? Freedom, freedom… oh, oh, without a cross. But then here comes Jesus. If you need a justification from the Beyond, you’re not a revolutionary, no matter how many Red Guards you stick in a poem.”

At least Anton didn’t judge the ending. He was at his best at times like this, examining each of the twelve sections on a cool technical level. In the end, he decided it wasn’t a poem at all but a play. Still, he had no respect for the self-questioning of the poem. He was interested only in its bones, not in the mystery of its flight.

Once, a night like this would have brought me to near ecstasy, but I was fed up with our opinions, our judgments. Life was too deep and full of currents that could snatch you off your raft and drag you under for such theorizing. I thought of Blok’s Christ, leading the men through the snowstorm that was inside them as well as outside. Was He here, invisible, leading all this as well? Had He been there at the Kremlin the day Seryozha had breathed his last? Perhaps so. Invisible, weeping for us all.

After chewing up Blok’s magnificent poem we turned to our own. Genya stood to recite.

So this was his answer to my brother’s death? The poem he’d been so excited to share with me? My father as Abraham, my brother as Isaac, the bourgeois father sacrificing his artist son to the corrupt God of the past, an ancient but bloodthirsty deity? How proud of it he was, how thunderous his delivery, the way he stuck out his chin, as if daring God to strike him down.

Genya kept looking over at me to see what I thought of his gift. I rocked myself, praying it would soon be over. Seryozha wasn’t a poem. He wasn’t a symbol. He was just a boy full of dreams, bursting with talent and eccentricities and fears, who’d been sent away on a fool’s errand. Father was certainly no Abraham, anointed by God and called to the ultimate sacrifice. He was just a pigheaded man steeped in vanity. Neither one of them was an abstraction.

I saw what Genya was trying to do—shape Seryozha into a martyr, a legend, a narrative that could be delivered on a street corner so people could imagine a cosmic battle between good and evil. It would play perfectly at the Haymarket. His fervor took over as he recited, and he was completely lost in his own roaring.

I had to leave. As I was slipping out, I ran into Oksana Linichuk, a student at the university, shaking snow from her scarf. I must have looked as shocked as I felt. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Isn’t that Genya reading?”

I could not bring myself to answer. “I’m not feeling well. Maybe I’m coming down with something. If he asks, tell Genya I’ll see him at home.”

Out on Sergievskaya Street, I scurried from swirling streetlamp to streetlamp, aware of the danger, staying away from the dark doorways. I had entered the poem “The Twelve.” The hunched shadow of a pedestrian entered the egg-shaped glow of the streetlight ahead, cutting a cave in the whirling snow, growing to nightmare size then disappearing. My eyelashes were freezing, I had to blink them warm again. Although the Krestovsky apartment lay in the heart of the diplomatic district, there was no such thing as a safe neighborhood now. Thieves robbed you just for your clothes and left you to freeze in the snow. I kept moving.

The shops were all dark, though it wasn’t that late. I caught the streetcar toward home—everyone inside looked hunched and miserable. Down on Nevsky, the windows of Mina’s building glowed behind curtains. Up there, on the fifth floor, lived people who actually knew Seryozha. Would understand what I had lost. Oh, to be known! On impulse, I jumped off the tram and raced to that familiar entrance, slipping and teetering on the ice.

In the cracked gilt mirror of the elevator, I saw my face—broken, smashed. My unfocused gaze was like my mother’s as she lay in bed, trying to untangle the chains. I pushed back my scarf, combed my hair with my fingers, tried to pinch some color back into my pale cheeks.

Dunya answered my knock. I hardly recognized her—she’d cut her braids. “Marina! Are you alone?” She immediately peered into the hall behind me, hoping for a certain tall blond painter. How grown up she’d become. The hands of our clocks whirled like pinwheels these days. Soon she would be seventeen, eighteen, she would have lovers, children. Whereas my brother hadn’t lived long enough for a first kiss.

I followed her into the parlor. In heaven, it would be just like this: Sofia Yakovlevna sewing at the table, Solomon Moiseivich on the divan in Bukhara cap and dressing gown, Aunt Fanya laying out a hand of solitaire, Shusha banging out Rachmaninoff on their old upright. Sofia Yakovlevna paused over her work when she saw me and half rose. “Marina!” Her smile was bright, then overcast with concern. “You didn’t come alone, did you? On a night like this?”

I wanted to throw myself into their arms, but for my own selfish reasons I also wanted to savor the beautiful peace of their lives, the warmth they wove about them, before I brought my tragedy into their midst. “Mina’s in her room,” Dunya said. “I’ll go get her.” She disappeared down the hall.

“Where’s your young man?” Papa Katzev asked, his eyes kind. “Your peppery comrades?”

“Up on Sergievskaya, thrashing Blok.” I couldn’t just blurt out Seryozha’s dead.

“Give her a minute to catch her breath, Papa,” his wife said. She knew something was wrong.

Dunya reappeared with Mina in tow. Now it was my turn to be shocked. Who was this vision before me in a dress of soft blue wool? Red lipstick emphasized her mouth, and someone had fashioned her stubbornly thick ash-blond hair into a pretty upsweep. The food shortages that had turned most of us scrawny had distilled her toward a new beauty. She wore dangling earrings and looked… horrified.

“Have I come at a bad time?”

“As a matter of fact, I was just going out. To a party.” Her lovely skin bore a bit of rouge. Where were her spectacles?

“You look… beautiful.”

She gave me a nervous, gelid grimace.

“Who is it? Someone I know?”

She paled, and her gray eyes slid from mine like butter on a hot pan. As clearly as if I were at one of my mother’s séances—I knew. Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help…. Who else could have worked such magic on dull, stodgy Mina Katzeva? She had probably been singing before the mirror, getting ready for her rendezvous with my lover. My lover. “You’re seeing Kolya?”

Terrified, she mimed buttoning her lips, glancing at her mother sewing at the table, her father, her sisters. Although we were pretty safe with Shusha banging away at Rachmaninoff, she yelled, “Let me show you a new dress Mama made me,” then gestured with her head down the hall.

I followed her to her room, past pictures of grandparents, great-grandparents, men with sidelocks and beards, women with suspicious faces, stern with disapproval at their dependable workhorse turned siren. I could hear Uncle Aaron singing behind the bathroom door. In Mina’s bedroom, where I’d slept with her and her sisters during the first revolution, she pulled the door shut. The room smelled of some light perfume. She never wore perfume. There was the bottle, by her bed. Something he’d brought her, no doubt.

I didn’t want her to lie to me now. She had to understand the situation. “Mina, listen to me. Seryozha’s dead.”

On her face—shock. But something else… her gaze dropped to her feet, then met mine again. Her tear-filled eyes drifted off to the right. She knew! He had told her. Her lids dropped again. She couldn’t bear the anguish on my face. She shielded her guilt with a cupped hand.

I grabbed her, shook her. “How long have you known?”

“I was going to tell you, I swear, it’s just that we haven’t seen you…” Sniveling, she tried to wrench herself from my grip.

“I’ve been right here. Ten blocks away.” Mina, my best, my oldest friend in the world, had kept Seryozha’s death from me. No wonder she couldn’t meet my eyes. I shoved her away.

Her face was a kaleidoscope, emotion replacing emotion—shame, fury, pity—like impatient people all trying to get through a door at the same time. “I would have told you when I saw you again. I thought I’d see you. But the longer I waited, the harder it got.” Her little earrings flickered in the electric light.

“And you got to see Kolya.” I saw it so clearly. She would have done anything to have him. Even this.

Her chin stuck out a little farther. “Yes. Yes, all right?” She rubbed her arms where I’d hurt her. “Do you have to have everything? Everything, everything! What about me? Good old Mina. Here, hold my coat, Mina…” Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “But maybe I’m not so good. Maybe I deserve a life, too.” The smile hovered, crumpled. She held her hand to her forehead and began sobbing in earnest, the ragged sobs of a child.

“Mina, I need to see Kolya.” I tried to keep my voice low and soft. “Let me come with you tonight.”

“No!” Startled, she wheeled away from me. “What will you tell Genya? Remember him? Your boyfriend?”

I thought of Genya, so sincere, so caring. But it was Kolya I needed. Only he would know how I felt. Only he could know what it was to lose Seryozha, only he could console me. To think that a few minutes ago, I was heading home to sit alone and watch snow fall. I’d been thrown a lifeline and I wasn’t going to let it go. Not for her or Genya or God Almighty. “Tell me where you meet him.”

Her crying had left blotchy patches on her lovely skin. Her hair was coming down. She sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, took off her earrings, and threw them at the pillow. One bounced onto the floor, skittered under Dunya’s bed. “I’m sorry about Seryozha. Oh God, what a mess…” She keeled over sideways on the bed and wedged her hands between her knees, her tears dripping on the chenille bedspread.

“Where is he? I need to see him.”

“In a mansion. On the English Embankment.”

Poor Mina. My tearstained, disloyal old friend. I had never guessed her envy was so great that she would go as far as to withhold news of my brother’s death so that she could keep her rendezvous with Kolya. “How do you go?” I pressed her. “Will he come here?”

She shook her head. “He sends a cab. You go. It’s you he wants anyway.”

Was it wrong that this lifted my spirits? I needed him. There would be no explanations, no awkward embraces, no ridiculous metaphors or poetic histrionics. It was a time for raw feeling, something there was no room for in the crowded Poverty Artel. Mina might love him, but I would burn down everything to be with him again.

32 The English Embankment

THE COACHMAN WORE A frozen lily like a starfish in his buttonhole. Frost whitened the poor horse, its ribs a clattering xylophone. Crouching in his great cloak against the whirling snow, the coachman clapped the reins and we moved into the storm as into a poem, a legend. Frost soon coated my shawl in a glassy shroud, making it crack. My eyes narrowed to slits as we slid through the deserted streets down Horse Guards Boulevard and up past St. Isaac’s, across the vast white whirling plain of Senate Square.

On the English Embankment, the cold grew even worse. The wind sweeping across the frozen river drove sharp needlelike grains of snow into my eyes, my lashes crusted with frost. How different from that first joyous sleigh ride with Kolya. On one side, the great houses of the English Embankment braced like aristocrats before a firing squad, while on the other, wind and darkness, the howling expanse of the frozen Neva. The sleigh came to rest right in the middle of the road—there was so little traffic these days that it made no difference where we stopped. The coachman, hunched in his seat, made no attempt to help me scramble out. As soon as I had my feet on the ground, the bearskin piled back in the sled, he whipped up the horse, leaving me alone in this white blowing world.

I stood alone before a two-story mansion that had lorded it over the snow-crusted Neva for a hundred years, a looming blur of darkness one shade lighter than the sky. I stumbled my way through the drifts to the enormous door. Padlocked. I pulled on the chain, but it was fastened tight. No light appeared in any of the windows. I pounded with the side of my fist, barely making a sound. The cold sucked the last strength from my body, the benefits of the fish-soup dinner and the pastry I’d eaten at the Krestovskys’ gone by now. “Kolya!” I shouted up at the windows, my voice lost in the roar of the storm. “Kolya, let me in!”

Down the embankment, a door opened, a flickering light. A figure waved. I didn’t have to see the face. I ran to him. I flew.

He caught me by the waist. “Hey, hey, easy there!” He held the lamp high so it wouldn’t be knocked out of his hands and laughed as I stepped through the door. He bolted it behind me. We were in the frozen pantry of a great house. I pushed the shawl from my hair as he walked ahead holding his lamp. “Kolya.”

He turned back. The look on his face when he realized it wasn’t Mina, the smile of mild anticipation vanishing, then he knew me. He bundled me into his arms, repeating my name like a prayer. So solid, so real, his smell of cigar and Floris Limes and that powerful indescribable honey. I began to cry. He kissed my hands, smoothed my hair, held me tightly enough to make me believe this was real.

“Let’s go upstairs. I’ve got a fire.” We fell into step as we always did, as we traced our frozen path through the dead kitchens and ghostly pantries, the service rooms of the mansion, and climbed the stairs into the frosty grandeur of its foyer. I was too overcome to speak. He kissed my hair, rested his temple against mine. I had forgotten the waves of pleasure in that simple touch. My grief had found its home. This was why I had come—the world be damned. I didn’t care if it disappeared forever.

The flickering light created and erased reception rooms as we moved through the public areas of the abandoned villa—flashes of red silk wall covering stained and denuded of paintings. White pillars, a broken sofa, abused-looking chairs. He opened a small door I might not have noticed, flush as it was with the wall. Before us, the lantern revealed a small, high-ceilinged room papered in yellow and warmed by an open fire. Paintings and beveled mirrors still hung on chains from its picture rails, portraits in oval insets peered out like passengers from the portholes of a passing liner. The firelight licked at his face, the high cheekbones, the smiling eyes, but they weren’t smiling now. He knew. He understood. Objects gleamed on a small gilded table—wine, biscuits on a painted plate. For Mina Katzeva. I couldn’t bring myself to feel jealous. What I needed from Kolya went deeper than sex, deeper than passion.

He poured some wine into a glass of cut crystal and handed it to me.

I drank. Port, sweet, clinging to the glass. I hadn’t had alcohol since the Winter Palace was taken. It went to my head, along with the heat of the open fire and Kolya’s scent.

We settled on the settee, his arm around me. “I thought I’d never see you again. Poor Sir Garry.” That was Seryozha’s name in our circus, Sir Garry Pekingese. Sir Garry was a dog who would jump through a hoop covered with paper.

“Nobody told me. I went by the flat on Furshtatskaya to get my papers and Ginevra told me.”

“Mina didn’t tell you?” I shook my head slowly, threaded my fingers through his. He tipped his head back. “Christ.”

“You could have told me yourself.”

“I didn’t want to disrupt your new life.” Tears welled in his blue eyes. “I’m not the scum you believe me to be. She said you were in love with a poet, that you were beautiful together, to leave you alone. Do you love him?”

Did I love Genya? Of course I did. But here I was. When all was said and done, I’d run to this man without a backward glance. I would have to think about that—later.

“What a mess.” His arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist, we leaned into one another like people sheltering in a blizzard. But the hard black just under my ribs that I’d been carrying since that day eased over an inch or two. Seryozha, my beautiful brother. Sir Garry Pekingese. He remembered us. That was why I had come. We sat like that for a long time as the fire hissed and snapped. He poured me another glass of wine.

Not the Madeira from the Winter Palace, but sweet and warm.

He sighed, leaned back against the rose velvet. “I saw your father,” he said. “I think he’s trying to get himself arrested.”

“Good.” I began to pace. There was a packet of Turkish cigarettes. Did Mina smoke now, too? I took one and smelled the sweet, fresh tobacco. Kolya lit it for me, steadying my hand in his. “Does he regret what he did?”

“I didn’t ask him. Would you have expected me to?”

Funny, I had waited so long to be able just to talk to someone who knew everything, and now that I was here, I found I didn’t have anything to say. Just sitting with him where I could smell him and count his eyelashes was enough. Mina had been lucky to have him even once in her life. And I realized it would always be this way with us. Time, distance, politics couldn’t touch what we had together. Life and death would be our meat, our bread, part of what we were, not separate from us. To ever express what crackled between us would need all the poetry in my possession.

Out of the depths of my grief, desire sent up its bloom of fire, like kindling sheltered from the wind. It found my lips, my breasts—and now my mouth sought his, his hands found my thighs, our clothing falling away, buttons surrendering as we clutched each other on the small sofa. “There’s a bed,” he whispered. Yes, there would always be a bed.

He led me into a room with a high bed. I could well imagine a duchess in her nightdress there—the canopy, the satin pull cord, a view of the Neva behind the yellow drapes. There would always be a bed, and we would be in it, even if it was just a pile of hay. We hadn’t made love since that last day on the Catherine Canal, when I’d still been a schoolgirl and the first revolution was only a rumble on the outskirts of Petrograd. Although the world had changed, we had not. We grappled, clutched, bit, groaned. Our bodies strained to become closer than physical bodies possibly could. How chaste Genya’s and my lovemaking was compared to this. Only with Kolya did I hear the true bass notes of ardor, the soar of its melodies. I couldn’t even say what these last months with Genya had been. Ah Kolya, Kolya, my heaven and my hell. My match, my curse. My eternal love. There was nothing to stop us now.

We lay together, resting, his head on my breast, his smell all over me, his chestnut body hair in the firelight. He toyed with the bangle I never took off. Of course I hadn’t. “You’ve lost weight,” he said, tracing my ribs, my waist, my hips with their bones cradling my flat stomach.

“No food. We don’t have money for the black market.” I inhaled the gorgeous smoke from Turkey, wrapping it around my tongue.

He got up, sturdy, naked, and brought the plate of sweets in from the other room, treats he was going to feed to Mina, to stuff her with like a pigeon and then eat her up. I let him feed me crumbly, buttery white shortbread and cherry-filled chocolates. But the cherry reminded me of Father. “Poor Mina, having to miss this. Did you enjoy making love with her?”

“You can’t always have caviar. Sometimes you settle for eggplant.”

I pinched his nose, shook his face from side to side. “Look at you—you’re not even sorry.”

“I’m sorry for many things, krasavitsa moya.” My beauty. “That it’s been a year since I’ve seen you, that’s very high on my list of regrets.” He kissed my breast. “That Seryozha ended up where he had no business going—that I regret. Your father’s stubbornness. He’s a good man but he’s a man of principle.” He relit his half-smoked cigar, propping himself higher on the pillows. “Always dangerous. Your whole family’s like that—principled. You believe in things, you Makarovs. It’s dangerous business. Give me a Cossack bandit, a whore, a soldier with blood on his hands, but God save us from people who believe in things. You’re the ones who will get us all killed.” He toyed with my hair. “Look at you, look at those big brown eyes. You’re more like him than you would believe.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

He turned his head to avoid blowing smoke in my face. I never liked cigars before, but the smell was his, it completed him. I ran my hands through the curly hair of his chest, down to his soft resting sex, his sturdy legs. “Seryozha didn’t believe in things. He just wanted to make art. And please Father.”

“He believed in beauty. It’s not the worst thing. You’ve got some of that yourself.” He fed me more shortbread. “But God you’re strong.” He tipped my chin up to look into my eyes, and his blue ones darkened in the lamplight. “Luckily. Because there’s no easy road for people like you, the believers in beauty. Seryozha tried to make it out there—you’ve got to hand it to him. I admire that.”

“Are you proud of his heroism?” I thought of that hideous letter.

“Sometimes just living is heroism,” he said.

I studied the small mole under his right eye, the peaked eyebrows that faded out into nothingness, his diamond-shaped face with its high oriental cheekbones, the upturned laughing eyes. So rare to see them serious like this.

“You still remember Sir Garry.” I pressed my finger in the dip of his upper lip.

Seryozha couldn’t have been more than four. We’d tried to get Mother’s dog, Tulku the First, to do the hoop trick but he proved untrainable. Sir Garry was also assistant to the mysterious Esmerelda in her “feats of daring.” He’d walk along very seriously, as beautiful as ever a child could be with his big gray eyes and blond curls, and hold a stick aloft for me to hang on to as I wobbled along a tightrope strung between pines two feet off the ground. How solemnly he took his responsibilities. I felt the tears swell. I held out my glass and Kolya filled it again. “Mesdames et messieurs, Damen und Herren… you do it.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, meine Damen und Herren, mesdames et messieurs, coming to you direct from performances for the sultans of India and Azakazan, for your amazement and edification…” For half a second, he flashed that smile, which had gotten him out of a million scrapes and probably a million more to come. Kolya had been our ringmaster, wearing gum boots and Father’s old crumpled top hat, brandishing a whip of woven ribbons from our child’s pony cart. “The lovely Esmerelda, from the emerald caves of Capri, performing for you feats of gravity-defying amazement.”

“Vladimir the Cossack and his Horse of Marvels!” I imitated his ringmaster tone.

“That fat pony. It was always trying to bite me,” Kolya said, toying with his cigar. “What was its name?”

“Carlyle.”

“Dmitry Ivanovich’s choice, no doubt. I was terrified of your father in those days. I was sure he’d catch on that I was in love with Vera Borisovna and challenge me to a duel.” He traced the top curve of my breast, then the U of it. “I had my first orgasm thinking about her.”

Only Kolya would admit to such a thing. I wondered how he liked her now—crazy, in her nightdress, trying to untangle that nest of fine chains.

“I lived for those summers,” he said, his fingers in my cropped hair, my head tucked under his chin. I could hear his voice rumbling through his chest. “Listening to Vera Borisovna sing on the porch after dinner—do you remember?” He brushed his fingers against my abraded lips. “She would come and kiss Volodya good night. The windows all open, a gentle breeze, and her in her evening gown, her perfume…”

“Après l’Ondée.”

“She’d kiss him, then she’d come over and kiss me, too. On the forehead. I think it was the zenith of my young life.”

I nuzzled his well-shaved cheek. His lime cologne. Who else would remember her as she had been, in her lilac dress, her bare shoulders, the laughter in the twilight? “Thanks for taking care of her. It was good of you.”

Outside the wind whistled, shaking the outer windows, where in here, only the springs spoke, the crackle of the fire.

“I wish I could do more.” He plumped the fat pillows, sat up higher. “I think the English girl might have better luck getting them out. They take care of their own, the English.”

“I hope so. But Mother doesn’t seem to care anymore. Seryozha’s death was the last blow.”

He stubbed out his cigar, drank off the port, and placed the empty glass on the bedside table. “Just as well,” he said. “What’s left, even if she does get out? No money, no skills. Maybe she could remarry… but if not, can you imagine Vera Borisovna in a bedsit in London, living off charity?”

“Father has friends in London. Surely they’d be of some help.”

He kicked off the sheets, wiping the sweat from his face and revealing the red-gold glow of his body in the lamplight. “Oh, it would be fine at first. The distinguished guest, risking all to flee to the West. Embraces all around. But one week turns into six, then to ten, and they’re wondering if she’s ever going to leave. Hints about the family closing up house and traveling for a while. She gets the message, and so comes the ghostly drift from home to home, begging for a little space. ‘No, don’t trouble yourself, dear.’ I think she knows that. If it were me, I’d rather starve to death in my own bed.”

“I think that’s what she’s doing.”

How callous we’d become, to talk calmly about Mother with such fatalism. If I left Russia with her, I could support her, save her from the fate Kolya had so vividly outlined. But I had turned down Father’s offer of England. I had chosen to align my fate with Russia’s.

Kolya pulled me to him, draping my leg over his hip. I tasted his port wine cigar breath as his lips brushed mine. “I’ve told Dmitry Ivanovich he ought to leave, for her sake.”

“Let’s not talk about him.”

“But he’s decided to defend Russia instead. Citizen Quixote.” He pressed his hand to mine, palm to palm, and slowly our curled fingers interlocked like swans bowing their heads in the corps de ballet. “Poor devil.”

“Don’t you dare feel sorry for him.”

“I feel sorry for every living soul right now.”

We lay there for a while, mournfully, understanding our mutual weaknesses, not needing to speak. Seryozha was dead, the world was exploding, and what we had was our passion for each other, our mingled souls and histories. The fire cracked and popped.

Finally he brightened. “Wait!” He got up out of bed, padded out to the sitting room, his strong muscled buttocks and thighs bare in the firelight. “Remember this?” The gramophone by the settee, all set up for a night of love—with Mina. My anger flared like a sudden rash and died away just as quickly when the guitar, the voice of Carlos Gardel filled the lantern-flickering room. Mina didn’t tango. He held out his arms for me to come join him. The song spoke to what was true about us—passion and danger, longing, rebellion, tenderness. I didn’t have to know Spanish to understand what it was about.

Naked, we danced, slowly, separated only by the thickness of our bodies, our essential selves once again foiled from perfect fusion by bones and flesh, and yet still yearning.

Kolya opened the drapes. Outside, the dark winter dawn crawled toward us along the white brow of the Neva. He’d already dressed, was in his old army uniform—epaulets removed for safety’s sake, officers being uninvited guests at the party of the revolution—and set a tray on the bed. Real coffee and good black bread, herring and sour cream. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got business,” he said. Beezneez—he used the English word. “I’ll be back. Keep warm. Eat something.”

“What business?” I sat up in bed. Out on the Neva, one sledge toiled along, like an ant in a sugar bowl. “There’s no business in Petrograd.”

The corners of his eyes turned up like his nose. “That’s when there’s the most business.” He kissed my lips, bruised from the nighttime of unaccustomed passion. Smoothed my hair. “Silly.”

“Don’t go.” I clung to him.

He grabbed my haunch. For some reason my flesh always conformed to the shape of his hand. “You think I’m not coming back? With that waiting for me?”

I pulled him toward me. I was raw as a grated radish, but I still wanted more. My greed was unslakable. “Forget business.”

“I’m not a girl,” he said, kissing me again. “I can’t loll around in bed all day dreaming and writing love poems. I’ve got things to do. But I’ll be back. There’s a pail of water by the washstand. Stay warm and think about me.” He pushed me away gently, stood, buttoned his coat, sticking his fur hat on his head.

And he was gone.

I ate fatty herring, sour cream, and black bread. After the previous night, I felt drugged, so safe in this hidden place, the smell of my love all over me, the tattered splendor. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. Tired of queues and district soviets and frozen potatoes, tired of the communal squalor of the Poverty Artel, tired of the daily terrors and having to be a grown-up every day, tired of thinking and fighting and waiting my turn, while the real me was left unknown. I sat on the fragrant bed and watched the snow fall outside the windows. I should go and tell Genya what had happened. The knowledge tugged at me, but it seemed too far away. As any child can tell you, you must not leave an enchanted place or it will be lost to you forever. All that will remain will be a ribbon or a slipper, an enameled bracelet on your arm, the smell of honey and Floris Limes in your hair.

33 Speculation

I KNEW WHAT BEEZNEEZ Kolya was conducting out there. Every morning the citizens of Petrograd woke to see blood in the snow where some speculator had been shot by the Cheka overnight, caught hoarding or dealing in contraband. Dressed in black leather, with Mausers at their hips, bands of Chekists raided buildings all night long. Not the Poverty Artel—we were too poor for hoarding—but in the front building, when the electric lights came on after midnight, everyone knew a raid was about to occur. And I’d found a hidden space off the mansion’s laundry room piled high with barrels and boxes, rugs, art in frames. It was strictly illegal—all art belonged to the people now, their national heritage. Perhaps some of my parents’ things, too.

Before the last of the sun’s frosty light dropped into the gulf, footsteps sounded on the bare parquet. I hid behind the door, but it was Kolya, balancing two full bags, one on each arm. He unpacked them gleefully, like a child, showing me cheese, butter, potted meats, a dusty bottle of Napoleon cognac under a red wax seal.

“Manna, my dear. Hallelujah.” He made the sign of the cross, priestlike, over a can of deviled ham.

“The Cheka has permission to shoot speculators on sight,” I said.

He pinched my cheeks as one would a fussy child. “Lucky for me, their eyesight isn’t too good.” He pulled at a lock of my hair, let it fall. “I wish you hadn’t cut it. I miss it long. Was it always this red?”

“Mother hated the red.” I watched him open the brandy, breaking the seal, tucking it under his arm, pulling the cork. “She thought it was vulgar. When I was little, she used to have Avdokia rinse it with rosemary and walnut shells to try to darken it.”

“Didn’t want to be upstaged,” he said. The cognac unstoppered, he went looking for the glasses. They were still by the bed where we’d left them the night before.

He sliced a fat piece of ham and held it out to me. I opened my mouth for him to feed it to me instead. I would have liked to be one of those dogs who can’t eat if not fed by the master’s hand. As I ate, I wondered what it would be like to live with him, to follow him out into his mysterious world. It would be like walking through the looking glass. What lay on the other side of his life? Abandoned houses, villages, woods, gypsy camps? Was it true that there were men who could not love the way a woman loved, completely, devotedly? Akhmatova wrote,

I dreamed about fish swimming in dark currents under the frozen Neva. I was visited by the ghosts of the dead mansion, dressed in the fashion of the 1830s, watching us, watching me. I dreamed of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine, and they became mixed together with Katya and the tough and the Red Guardsman from Blok’s poem, all at a masked ball in an open square like the Field of Mars, in the swirling snow.

The next night Kolya didn’t return though the hour grew late. I had no way to gauge the time once darkness came, but I imagined it was at least midnight and still no sign. I lit the lamps, waited. Paced. Imagined him dead. Shot, robbed, arrested. But no, surely he’d been delayed with one of his customers, some old gent who had opened a bottle of wine hidden for months in a dusty cellar, accompanied by treasured cigars. A school chum, someone from the university he stumbled across on Nevsky Prospect. In a city like this, it could be anything. Arrest, interrogation.

Or a woman. The thing I should not have imagined was impossible not to. The female body sang for him, and, as they say, a great violinist can play any violin. If I can’t have caviar… but he did have it. Absurd to think he could go from our bed, so thoroughly torn and abused that I had to completely remake it each morning, to someone else’s. We already made love four times a day. But what of his need for admiration, for desire? It drove him before it like the wind. Yes, he could be with some poor lovely Former he was “helping.” Just beezneez.

“Are you even a soldier anymore?” I’d asked the night before. His unit was down in the Ukraine—or were they? The Ukraine’s Rada, its parliament, had just signed a separate peace with the Germans while the Bolsheviks were still negotiating to end the war.

“It’s uncertain,” he said. “I’m still in touch with my superiors.” He arced his head from side to side, neither yes nor no. “Let’s say I’m a useful fellow.”

Yes, I imagined he was. Sitting in someone’s parlor—desperate Former People struggling to maintain their dignity—examining their objets d’art, a Fabergé egg, a jeweled dragonfly. They would speak of old times, friends in common, parties they’d attended—Oh, you were there?—pretending that nothing so low as commerce was taking place. While he eyed the dark-haired daughter, or the mistress of the house… the oval portrait on the yellow wall followed me with her eyes. You, too?

Well, they couldn’t eat their silver, their art. Wasn’t I grateful for the money he had left hidden behind the tiles in my father’s stove? What good were our Repin, our Bakst, Vrubel’s portrait of my mother in such times? You could not stoke the tin stoves with them. You could not get passage to Finland with their beauty.

I drank wine and out of sheer perversity imagined every violent fate that might have met him, then became terrified that it had really happened, that my ugly thoughts might actually become reality. Please bring him back, I prayed. But he’d always flown back before, eager for me, shortly after dark. Was he tiring of me, my neediness, my unquenchable passion? My body ached for him.

He returned in the early hours of the morning, stinking of vodka, reeling like a circus clown. Sank down upon the settee and attempted to take his boots off, failed. He held one foot up for me to help him pull it off, but I ignored it. He let it fall with a thud. “The city’s a ruin,” he said, removing a cigar from inside his jacket and cutting off the tip, lighting it. He puffed blue smoke into the air. “I fell over a dead horse tonight. Almost broke my damned neck. A dead goddamn horse, right in the middle of Bolshaya Morskaya.”

“Write to the mayor. Tell him dead horses are bad for beezneez.”

He stuck his cigar between his teeth and tried pulling his boot off again. “Marina,” he said cajolingly. “Marinoushka.” Drunkenly, he held his leg up with both hands, wagged it at me. I pulled off the offending footwear and tossed it into the fireplace, watched him scramble on hands and knees for his burning sole. His soul. Who did he think I was? “What the devil’s gotten into you?” he asked, retrieving the smoldering object, brushing off the ash and embers.

“I thought you’d been shot. Anything could have happened. I hate just sitting, wondering whether you’re dead or alive.”

“Then you should be happy.” He grinned, teasing me, and touched my nose with a sooty forefinger. “So what’s the temper? I’ve been out seeing which way the wind’s blowing. Making my daily bread.” One boot on, one boot off, he poured himself a small glass of vodka, lifted it to me, and drank.

I sniffed him, his face, his collar. His hands. No trace of perfume. Nothing but cigar and vodka, maybe herring. “And you were mugged by a distillery.”

“An old friend of mine gave a little party.” He fumbled with the other boot and finally got it off. “Seems that she’d invited a poet. A great big boor spouting Bolshevik nonsense. Drunk as a cobbler.” He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his tunic as if it were choking him. “God I hate poets. They should all be long dead, leaving us their words but not their stink.” He grinned. “Especially this one, this ox, walking on her couch with his dirty boots, bellowing some dreadful love poems about some girl or other, some tramp who didn’t come home.”

Oh God, wasn’t there enough torment in this world? Genya, drunk, suffering… because of me. Kolya disgusted me, my own desire for him disgusted me, and yet—God!—this was me, not that brave, plucky girl so proud of heating water on a little stove.

“Stupid sap,” he said, staring at his cigar. “In a state like that over some little whore.”

“You bastard.” I snatched the Havana out of his mouth and tried to throw it, but he grabbed my wrist and slapped me across the face so fast I barely knew he had done it.

I held my hand to my cheek. The burn of it. The surprise.

“Oh God,” he said, realizing what he had done. “Marina.”

I began to scramble for my clothes, my woolen hose, my boots. I could hardly see through my tears.

“Stop, stop,” he took my boots from my hands, put them back on the floor. “Marina, oh God.” He sank to his knees, lay his head on my thighs, his tears soaking me. “I’m jealous, I admit it. I loved seeing him suffer. A big handsome devil like that. A Bolshevik! Oh, he’s going to go far in this new world of ours.”

How drunk was he? He was crazy! “I’m here with you, Kolya! Can’t you see that?”

“Yes, that’s just what I thought. I wanted to tell him, ‘I know where she is. She’s with me.’ Really work him up. Maybe he’d jump out the window.”

I could hardly take a breath. “But you didn’t.”

“No. Of course not. A man like that could kill you with his bare hands.” He walked to the table on his knees and poured more vodka into his glass, sat heavily on the floor. “But you’d been his. This admirable fellow, this poet… and who am I? What am I? So I went out and got drunk.”

I sat down with him and rested my forehead against his. We two impossible people, in this impossible life.

“I do love you so, Marina,” he said. He had never said that word before. It worked its way under my skin, through the cage of my ribs, under my breastplate. It buried itself inside me like a jewel sewn inside a smuggler.

The next morning, I woke to noise somewhere in the house. I had been here long enough to sense the change. Rattling, men’s voices. Kolya came in, dressed and composed, a far different man from the one he’d shown me the night before. Nowhere could I see the vulnerability, the madness. This man was sober, efficient, all business. “We’re clearing out,” he said. “You’ve got to get dressed.”

I rose, looking for my clothes. “Where are we going?”

“Not you. Me. My men.”

“What men?” What was he talking about? I was with him now. There was no way back, no second plan. “Your regiment’s gone. They’re in the Don, with the Volunteers.”

He spoke softly, apologetically. “These are my own men, Marina.”

“Why can’t you take me, then? You have to. I don’t care where we’re going. You can’t leave me again.”

He knelt on the bed, pushed me back flat onto the quilt. “Go back to your poet,” he whispered in my ear. “You’re safe with him—though God knows I hope he doesn’t drink often. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Or go back to Vera Borisovna’s. But you can’t stay here and you can’t come with me.” Making me look into his eyes, see the seriousness there.

“I can’t go anywhere. There is nowhere else. Please.” I pressed my face into his tunic, my tears streaming into the wool of his jacket. “You have to take me.”

He held me at arm’s length. “It’s too dangerous. But I swear to you I’ll be back, no matter what.” He wanted me to agree, but I wouldn’t. “I adore you, Marina.” Kissing my hands, my neck. “Ever since you were a bratty little girl—you threw a snowball at me at a sledding party. In the Tauride Gardens, remember?”

He’d been talking to Klavdia Rozanova, with her perfect blond braids and her ermine muff. I’d been trying to knock that snotty look off her stupid face. My aim was just bad.

He crushed me against him, my face buried into the fragrance of his chest, his clothing. “I’ll be back. I swear I will be. Look.” He fished something out of his pocket. A box, its velvet an ancient, rusty black. I wouldn’t touch it, so he set it between us on the bed. Pushed it toward me. Against a dark blue satin lining—a bit pilled—lay a jeweled stickpin, a yellow stone surrounded by diamonds, the kind of thing a wealthy dandy might have worn in a silk lapel in the 1830s.

“If you ever need money, take this to the market on Kamenny Island. Ask for Arkady.” He pinned it onto my camisole. “Don’t take less then ten thousand. It’s a canary diamond. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s topaz.”

I hit him. In the chest, on the arms. “You liar! You were lying all the time. You knew you were going to do this!” Even when he was saying I love you last night he’d been intending to leave. “You bastard!”

He gathered me in and held me tight, too tight to hit him, and into my ear, he whispered, “Don’t… we’re in a hurry.” He let me go and I rolled away from him.

Standing, straightening his uniform, he put a wad of notes on the table. “Hide that and get dressed.”

I wasn’t going to do anything he said ever again. “No.” How could he just scrape me off like mud on his boots?

“Do it. We’re about to have visitors—in black leather jackets.” He picked up my dress and shoes and handed them to me. His tone told me he was very serious. Weeping, I struggled into my things. I wasn’t going to be arrested for his speculation. I downed the last of the wine in a gulp—I wasn’t going to leave that for the Chekists—and bundled the rest of the food into my bag, the precious sugar, the ham.

He led me down the hall, down an icy back stairway, through service rooms, and out into the courtyard where men were covering three sledges with tarps. Seven big furry black horses stamped in their traces, two pairs and a troika. It was a shock to be out in daylight in the yard of a house where I’d just spent three days without ever seeing its exterior. The men worked quickly, grimly, without comment, rifles strapped on their backs, beards coated with frost. Kolya kissed me one last time, my darling traitor. I would not let go—he had to pry me away. I watched helplessly as he climbed onto the last cart, the collar of his heavy coat turned up, and signaled the men to drive out. He waved back at me once, an ironic salute, his kiss still bruising my lips as the small convoy disappeared onto Galernaya Street, the ghost of his embrace still around me.

34 Mother

SOME INSECTS LIVE OUT their lifetimes in just a few hours. Once, I thought that was terribly sad. But now I could see how brilliant those hours might be, how radiant, how intense, flashing and beautiful. Each precious second might contain the riches of months, compressed within tiny hearts and wings, before time tore them to pieces. I felt as though I had just lived out my few hours, that the rest of my life would contain just the papery remnants of those three days in the winter of 1918.

I leaned on the embankment on the Neva side in the gray morning, feeling brave one minute, sobbing the next, trying to figure out which window had been ours. Two old women emerged from the house next door. A princess, perhaps, and her lady companion or her sister, leaning on each other in their dark coats and decrepitude. They gave me a hard stare as they passed by. A worker girl, I could see them thinking. Or a lookout, preparing to signal some gang to come and rob their house in their absence. Perhaps they could smell my wildness. Had these women experienced three such days in their lives? Or even an hour?

I watched them, wiping my tears and wishing I had a handkerchief, when the roar of automobiles reverberated in the silence. It was either soldiers or the Cheka—no one else had gasoline. Here they came, two big cars sliding around the corner. I began to walk, the noise and danger pushing me away. I could hear their commotion as they ground to a stop before the yellow mansion I’d left not ten minutes ago. Our bed would still be warm. Part of me was relieved. He hadn’t been lying, not about that. I tried not to watch over my shoulder as leather-clad figures piled out, unholstering their Mauser machine pistols, breaking into the house.

I concentrated on my footfalls in the snow, the frost on the elms, the grand panorama on both sides of the river. The Dutch modesty of the Menshikov Palace, the pompous Academy of Arts. And, farther away, the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, with its steeple stabbing the breast of the sky. The needle of the Admiralty lifted in response, like a swordsman’s salute.

I wandered on, not knowing where to go, what to do with myself. I couldn’t go back to Genya… I kept seeing him at that party, half out of his mind with grief and rage, walking on the sofas, howling my name. Cursing it. I couldn’t go to Mina’s, either. My loneliness was absolute. From the golden dome of St. Isaac’s, the saints stared down at me, the angels at the corners over the colonnade looking like rooftop snipers.

So it was Mother.

I pushed my way onto a crowded streetcar, squealing and groaning along like a giant unoiled hinge. The ill-tempered young woman driver stopped and started with an impatient roughness, hurling us all against one another. A young Red Guardsman climbing in the window began to shout and curse. “Kick ’em in the face!” a man next to the window advised, trying to help haul him in. Evidently someone outside was taking advantage of the guardsman’s vulnerability to steal his boots. Once inside, in his stocking feet, the militiaman drew his pistol and began shooting out of the tram. He didn’t seem to care whom he shot—he was just angry that his boots were gone. My ears rang with the percussion for the rest of the trip.

In the little park down the center of Furshtatskaya Street, drifts lay in formless humps, horse high. The front door of the building was now boarded up. I passed through the courtyard entrance. But this time I climbed the main staircase, making no attempt to conceal my presence. The stairwell was lit only by the skylight. The brass riser bars, once meticulously polished, were black as iron and empty of the carpet they used to hold down, probably stolen for shoes. Soon people would steal the rods as well, make them into pipes and lighters.

The flat was unlocked. I walked in only to be met in the vestibule by a hard-faced woman with a blond braid who was carrying a long, skinny infant. She stopped and stared at me. “Who the devil are you?”

A ferret-faced woman in a green coat and kerchief joined her. “What you want, devushka? Rooms? Ask the domkom. Third floor.”

Domkom. The house committee. The Poverty Artel’s building had one, but it seemed that the new era had finally arrived on Furshtatskaya Street.

Looking in, I saw that the expanse of our salon had been partitioned with furniture, the visible side crammed with beds and a few of the antiques Mother had not been able to sequester into her room. The flat had been collectivized. The Bolsheviks had decreed that workers should be allowed to move into the big bourgeois flats in the center of Petrograd. Every citizen was entitled to nine square meters of living space. We at the Poverty Artel hadn’t had to worry about it, since we were well over capacity by anyone’s estimation, but the bourgeois Makarov flat of twelve rooms could have housed two score. So it seemed that the surplus space had finally been claimed. Clothes drip-dried on a line stretched across the width of the room. The once-shining parquet, across which I’d danced a tango with Kolya, was now black as tile in a train station.

I wanted to run shrieking through the room, tearing down laundry, tossing their sad belongings out the window. But they had a right to be here. They knew nothing of us and our tragedy. “Old lady Makarova still here?” I said with proletarian rudeness.

“Oh, the tsaritsa? She’s still here.” The ferret-faced woman nodded down the hall with a sharp chin and took the baby from the other woman.

I ducked past them to avoid any inquiries and strode down the broad hall, noting the padlock now on Father’s study as I passed, a new American lock. Another had been bolted into the woodwork on Mother’s door. The Americans seemed to be the only ones getting rich in revolutionary Petrograd.

I pressed my head against the wooden door panel and fought a sickening reeling feeling. Listening for noises within, I knocked. Was everybody gone? I knocked again—Fais dodo—and heard the lock release. The door opened. Avdokia! In her blue kerchief. When she saw me, she stuffed her hand against her mouth to stop herself from crying out, drew me into the warm room, closed the door and locked it. She held me, weeping. She still smelled like yeast, though there was hardly any to be found in the city. “Oh, my lovey. Oh, my girl,” she said, patting my back. “My Marinoushka, they said you’d been here. That they told you.”

My mother stood in a daze at the window wearing my father’s old dressing gown, her hair in a waist-length braid over her shoulder.

“Where’s Ginevra?” I asked.

I could feel the thinness of Avdokia’s shoulders. “Gone,” she said.

“Back to England?”

Avdokia nodded. “The English were leaving. They said she had to go.”

“Couldn’t you have gone with her?”

Her eyes flicked to Mother. “We weren’t ready for traveling.”

“Son français était exécrable.” Mother gathered the thick robe closer around her.

As if the quality of the woman’s French summed up her entire usefulness in the world.

“I’m glad you didn’t leave,” I said, pressing Avdokia’s withered old hands to my cheek. “I’m glad you’re still here.”

We heard women quarreling in the hall. “You took that egg. You know you did, you stupid bitch. My kid saw you!”

“It’s like that all the time now,” Avdokia said, low. “Who took whose egg. Whose piece of meat from the soup pot. We have to hide everything. People wear all their clothes at once so they don’t come home to an empty wardrobe.”

“Il est indigne de nous d’en parler,” Mother said. It’s beneath us to talk of such things.

“Come, sit down.” Avdokia took me by the hand and led me to the table they’d dragged to the window, cleared a box off a chair. “It’s wonderful to see you. It’s a miracle.” Avdokia’s tears leaked out of her hooded eyes into the wrinkles of her face like irrigation channels in a field. “Are you hungry, sweetness? Have you eaten?”

I remembered the food, my bag from Kolya. I’d been carrying it all morning. “These are for you.” I set the sack on the table.

She began to unpack it. “Oh, lovey, you shouldn’t have… where did you get this? Potted liver! And sour cream! Verushka, look what Marina’s brought!” Then she frowned. “You didn’t… commit a sin?”

I had to laugh. Of course I had—many. But prostitution was not one of them. “I robbed a commissar coming out of Eliseev’s. Is it all right? Have some.” I opened the jar with the potted meat.

“No, no, no,” she said, grabbing it from me, putting the lid back on. “We’ll eat it later, for supper.” She took the sack and slid it under her small bed. “You were always such a good child.”

Mother gazed out at the yellow-white sky, heavy with the promise of more snow, the light glazing her eyes. She looked like a blind seer, glowing in an unearthly way in the light from the window. Even in that man’s robe, with her hair dressed like some peasant’s, she was strikingly beautiful. “An awful child. Disobedient, noisy.”

“You were a darling,” my nanny said.

“Craved attention. She’d do almost anything to get it. Once Balmont was visiting, and she burst in wearing dancing shoes and a tutu. Proceeded to make an absolute spectacle of herself.”

Who was she talking to?

“Walking on her hands, her bottom in the air. I’ll never forget it. I’m sure he never did, either.”

I remembered Balmont applauding. He even quoted his poem, “I asked of the scattering wind: How can I be young always?”

“You shouldn’t have given me dancing lessons if you didn’t want me to dance,” I said.

The weak sunlight cast a white halo around her. This woman Kolya had loved so intensely. Though her skin had softened and creased, her bone structure was still beautiful. Her hand, holding back the lace curtain, so fine, so vulnerable. “Her father’s daughter,” she said, examining the street from behind the lace curtain. “Always. I had nothing to do with it.”

Avdokia snorted. “I was holding your hand the day she was born, Verushka, and I promise you, you were there.”

I went to Mother’s side at the window, rubbed frost from the glass. Outside, the leafless tree in the courtyard etched the sky. Children played in the heaps of uncleared drifts like processions of ants. “I’m moving back, Mama.”

She spoke without looking at me, as if recalling a dream. “He still comes, sometimes, in disguise—a beard, a workman’s coat. Stealing into his own house like a criminal.” She pressed the thick collar of Father’s robe against her neck. “No, you can’t come here.”

I leaned against the frozen windowpane, the wind knocked out of me. I had felt sure I’d be welcomed. “Mama, it’s my home.”

She massaged her temples. “Stop plaguing me! Go away!”

Avdokia had tears in her eyes. I took her arm. “Who padlocked Papa’s office?” I asked her.

“It’s a Red Guardsman and his wife,” she said.

“So-called wife,” Mother interjected.

“And a good thing, Verushka,” countered the old lady. “In times like these, to have a Red Guardsman here. They’re robbing whole houses, pillar to post.”

“Who do you think does the robbing?” my mother asked.

“Did she get the money out of the stove?” I asked my old nanny quietly.

Avdokia said. “No, we didn’t get it.”

I turned away and extracted the wad of Kolya’s rubles from my underwear. “Here.” I held it out to my mother. “Something to tide you over until I can get into the study.” A fat sheaf. There must have been a thousand rubles there.

“We don’t need your filthy money,” she said. “We’ll do fine. Dmitry Ivanovich takes care of us. Now please leave. I’m not well. I have to lie down. Avdokia?”

I freed a narrow slice from the sheaf of bills and slipped the rest to Avdokia, who tucked it in her apron. What would we do without her sweet presence running through our lives, grounding our unrealistic family? Romantics, idealists, dangerous fools. At least Avdokia was there to tincture us with a measure of common sense.

“Come, Marinoushka,” she said, pulling me away by the sleeve. “Leave now. Come back another day.” At the door, she whispered, “You don’t know what she’s been through. First you, then Seryozhenka, God rest his soul. And your father, wanted by the Cheka. The searches! And Basya, that devil. They came from the Soviet and dragged my poor Verushka off to clean the cesspit at the lower school—and who do you think reported her? That chicken-legged witch! She’s on the domkom now, fluffing herself up like a peacock. She has it out for us. Be careful.”

The last shall be first. Basya, our put-upon maid, now on the all-powerful house committee, had evidently ratted Mother out to the district soviet as a nonworking bourgeois, subject to the new labor conscription levied on the Formers. I’d seen them under the supervision of the Red Guards ineffectually shoveling snow in their once-elegant shoes.

“I tried to get them to take me instead, but they wouldn’t, the beasts. She didn’t come back until eight that night.” Tears welled in the droop of her eyelid. “After that she wouldn’t speak for days. A son just in the grave, and now this!” She waved her hand in the direction of the salon and the sound of people arguing. “It’s enough to drive anyone to murder.”

“Stop talking to her,” my mother called out. “She’s with them now.”

“She doesn’t mean it,” Avdokia murmured in my ear, helping me put my shawl over my cropped hair. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” She turned back into the room. “You know it’s not her fault, Verushka. It’s the revolution.”

“They’ve stolen her soul. Look at her.” Her eyes filled with dread, as if the experience of cleaning the cesspit had branded them forever with a vision of hell. “They’ve all lost their souls, can’t you see? There are no people, only things. Nothing inside but dust.”

Perhaps I had indeed lost my soul. But I could only wish there was nothing inside me but dust as I gathered myself for the trudge back to the Poverty Artel and the reception I was likely to meet there.

35 My Disgrace

I HAD NO CHOICE but to return to Grivtsova Alley, through the uncleared snowy streets and the frosty fog. Home to unbearable pain and disgrace. I felt more alone than I had on that night in October when Father sent me packing. On the tram, I rehearsed in my mind things I could say, but I only got as far as Genya, forgive me. When I got off at the bridge over the Catherine Canal, I slipped on a patch of ice and fell hard onto my knees. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me.

Wet and bruised, I mounted the stairs to the Poverty Artel. Groping my way in the dimness, I came upon a man lying on the stairs, the stench of alcohol and urine rising from him. “Girl, girlie.” He grabbed for my leg. “How’s about a kiss?”

“Get off, you stinking drunk.” I kicked myself free of him.

He laughed and began to sing as I continued my climb:

Our splintered door had lost its number. I steeled myself and used my key, said a prayer, and opened it quickly. Only Anton was there, editing in the light from the window. I quietly closed the door and headed for the divan, crunching across the detritus of sunflower seeds that had built up in my absence.

“Decided to creep home, did you?” he said.

I sat on the edge of the divan. Much as I’d dreaded facing Genya, now I wished to God he was here and not Anton so I could get on with my execution. What was I going to tell him? I thought I’d never see him again. It had never occurred to me that I would have to face the damage I’d done to his good, sweet heart. I had expected to disappear into the magical rabbit hole with Kolya Shurov and end up in some crazy folk song. But now I’d come back here like a shipwrecked sailor, half drowned in my wet clothes, wave-battered on the very same beach from which I’d departed four days ago.

“We were just getting used to your absence. It was wonderful. Like getting rid of a cold sore. And suddenly it’s back.”

I lay down, wishing I could be as drunk as the man on the staircase, singing and pissing in my pants. I kicked off my boots and pulled the quilt up over me, coat, scarf, and all. “I missed you, too, Anton.”

He leaned over from his cot and opened the door of the little stove, poking at its sad contents, letting the room fill with smoke until my eyes stung. I knew he wanted me to shout at him so he could abuse me more, but I had no strength for it. I turned to the wall. I could hear him rattling around, slamming the stove door, pulling back a chair. “The trouble with you is that you think his genius is going to rub off on you like paint. But poetry doesn’t transfer that way.”

A portly old gent with a grand set of moustaches gazed out from a tattered advertisement, appraising me with utter condescension. I would tell Genya everything, and throw myself on his mercy. I could sleep on the chairs. Move in with one of the girls from the Okno group. He could beat me. There was no point in trying to anticipate it.

“He doesn’t love you.” The creak of the chair, the crunch of shells. “He just thinks he does. If you cleared out, he’d get over you in a week.” He was back on his feet, prowling.

I ran my fingertips over the newspapers and announcements that served as our wallpaper: society fashion circa 1904 and portraits of captains of industry peered out from between the Bolshevik proclamations that Genya and the boys stuck there. To the Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants: The Provisional Government Is Deposed… how excited we’d been that day, almost a year ago now. Soldiers, Workers, Clerical Employees! The Destiny of the Revolution and Democratic Peace Is in Your Hands! That “clerical employees” had made us howl. For weeks afterward, every time soldiers, peasants, and workers were mentioned, we had to add: and clerical employees. I touched the paper, trying to hold on to the echo of Genya’s laughter.

The soviets must remain a revolver pointed at the head of the government to force the calling of the Constituent Assembly… gone, gone. All the missed opportunities. While on the other side of the wall, Marfa Petrovna scolded one of her children: “Give it to Anya. See how you like that!” followed by high-pitched shrieks.

I could hear the tapping rain of sunflower-seed shells. “You think you’re some kind of new woman,” Anton informed me. “But you’re just a cheap trinket with your romantic nights, your sentimental notions of the ‘suffering Russian people.’” He finally settled back in his chair, propped himself against the table with a corduroy knee. “Why do you have to torture him? Like a fly laying her eggs in a raw wound. How women love to see a man suffer. It makes him sing so beautifully. Sing, Genya, sing!”

I saw myself as Anton must see me—as La Belle Dame sans Merci, the villainess of a kinofilm melodrama, a figure from Poe. “And here I thought you were a futurist,” I retorted. “All you’re missing is the amontillado.”

“There won’t be people like you in the future.” I heard the skritch of a match, smelled the stink of his makhorka. “I know where you’ve been. I can smell you from here.”

Guiltily, I drew the quilt tighter around me. How could he smell anything through that tobacco? He was just trying to unnerve me. I could go to the banya, but my going would confirm his suspicions.

“Mina told him everything,” he said.

Of course she did. Maybe she’d tried to make love to him herself. She was good with my old lovers.

“You could leave right now. I wouldn’t say anything. He’d never know you’d been here. And we could all get on with our lives.”

From outside, in the hall, we could hear the drunk singing, “A fig tree stands on top of the hill / Right at the very top. / Create, O Lord, create for me, / For me a pretty young beauty…”

More smoke. The clang of the stove. “You should have heard Genya talk when you first met. ‘This girl Marina, wait till you meet her. She’s a genius, an angel.’” He took a drag. “Well, I never met a woman who was either. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Only that you’d have the nerve to come back.”

A genius, an angel. It was a knife in my breast, right under the diamond stickpin.

I sat up and opened my notebook, began to write, intending to let a decent period go by before I ran off to the banya for a wash. But before I could go, we both heard Genya’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, heavier than usual. I waited the way a horse waits with its broken leg. Anton watched the door. It banged back, bringing a fresh burst of icy air, and he staggered in. Green eyes fogged over, skin pale, unshaved, the wide mouth that loved to laugh stripped of its mirth. This was what I dreaded more than a beating, more than anything.

He was halfway to the table when he saw me. I watched him grapple with the fact of my return as a man grapples to catch a falling bowl. His eyes focused, his Adam’s apple rose and fell in his strong neck, then he lowered his head like a bull in the last minutes of the corrida—exhausted, its thick neck impaled with picks.

I had done this to a man I loved. He stood, swaying, staring at me with such sadness I thought I would break from the weight of it. How naked he was, his pain, his love, his fear. This beautiful man, whom I had betrayed. He deserved better. Better than me. I hadn’t known this about myself, just how selfish I was, how untrustworthy. Anything he could say about me would be true.

“Tell her to bugger off,” Anton directed. “You can’t let her come back.”

“Go take a walk,” Genya said, not turning his gaze from me.

“I’m busy,” said Anton, pretending to read a manuscript.

“Am I asking you?” Genya took a step toward his friend, more menacingly than I could have imagined.

Anton sighed and threw the pages down. “Look. I’ve put up with this melodrama long enough, and so have you, brother, if you’d get your head out of your pants long enough to see it.”

In one swift movement, Genya seized him in a headlock, marched him to the still-open door, and threw him into the hallway. Then he slammed the door and turned the lock. He turned back to me with those wounded green eyes.

The whole house could hear Anton pounding on the door. “Let me in! I’m freezing my nuts off!”

Genya grabbed Anton’s coat and gloves and hat and threw them out into the hall, then slammed and rebolted the door.

My relief at Anton’s absence was followed by the stark realization that Genya and I were alone together. Bearlike, he swayed, just staring at me. Would he fall? Would he rush at me, strike me with those huge hands he was unconsciously flexing and opening? He was not a violent man, but I had driven him to the wall. I deserved it. I wrapped my coat closer hoping he wouldn’t smell Kolya on me. I couldn’t stand seeing in his face the harm I had done him. I wanted to reach out, to comfort him, even now. Though he stank of vodka, he didn’t seem drunk so much as heavy with suffering.

“Where did you go?” he asked. Mina told him everything.

I tried to think of something I could tell him, but all I could see was Kolya’s greedy face and naked body in the bed on the English Embankment. “Genya, I’m not who you think I am. I’m…” and my throat closed up on me. I always saw myself as a good person who occasionally did bad things, but I saw now, that was a misconception. “I’m not careful. I make a mess of everything. You should throw me out. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Where did you go?” he roared. Bull nostrils flaring. “Who were you with? Tell me!”

I looked down at my hands. They didn’t even look like mine. “I have a lover. I haven’t seen him since I met you.” I felt like my face was on fire. I wished I could just tear it off. “He came back. I was so wild after I left Sergievskaya, so low. And I heard he’d come back. He knew Seryozha. I wanted to see him. Not to make love to him, just to see him. Just to feel known, do you understand?”

“No, I don’t,” he choked with a sob. “You don’t think I know you?”

I shook my head. “Forgive me. I’ve lost everything. My whole life. I thought it would make me feel better to see this man from the old days.”

“And did it?”

Did it? “For a while.” But now I’d ruined my life for it, for three days. Go back to your poet. Would a man who loves you send you back to your lover?

“You should have stayed with him.”

“He left.” The air felt like glass. Broken, sharp, unbearably bright. “He’s a criminal. A speculator.”

“And you went to him.”

“Yes.” I couldn’t stand to look at him. It was like looking into the sun.

“Don’t you care about me at all? What am I to you? Just this big buffoon you can lead around by the nose?” He had started to cry. “Was it that poem I wrote? I thought you’d like it.”

Oh, if only lightning would strike me right now, so that I would not have to live through this moment.

He shuffled to the window, rolling his forehead on the cold glass. “Did you ever love me?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” I said, letting the quilt fall from my shoulders, glad there was something I could answer with absolute confidence.

“Do you love me now?”

“Yes.” From the pain I was feeling, I knew I did love him, not incandescently, not feverishly, craving his skin, unable to think about anything else. Why must there be only one kind of love? There had to be better words, ten or fifteen, a hundred. Love was such a mixture of things, each love with its own flavor and spice. I wanted to both reassure him and warn him. For him I had love, tenderness, pity. Attraction and admiration, friendship and trust. As opposed to what I felt for Kolya—animal passion, ecstasy, history—and a spoonful of black hatred as well.

“Do you love this other man?”

I nodded, barely moving my head, just tucking my chin. I would not lie to him now.

He roared and turned over the table, lamp and papers crashing to the floor. He wanted to hit me, I knew it, but he couldn’t do it, so he threw chairs and broke things instead. “No. You can’t. It’s not possible!” He picked up a chair and brought it down onto the table. It flew apart, leaving him with just the chair leg, with which he battered the overturned table until he fell to his knees, sobbing.

Was I just as Anton had described, some sort of succubus draining the life from this strong, beautiful man? “I went home to my mother’s, but she won’t forgive me. I had no choice. I’m sorry.”

“You could find a brothel,” he snapped. “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.”

Would that be my next stop?

“Am I not enough for you?” he said softly. “You think I’m a bad lover?”

Of all things. Pity brought me to him, put my hand on his shoulder. He knocked it away. I leaned my face against his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t hit me. Under my cheek, a great sob. He grabbed me and held me, kissing me, pushing me down on the floor, hands in my coat, needing to make love urgently, his desperate fingers. This body, this borderline, this rocky shore. He needed to erase Kolya from this body that had been his. He tore at my dress, planting his mouth on mine as if he needed the very air from my lungs. Ripped at my bloomers. Was this love? Was it hate? Was he weeping or was it I? We made violent love on the dirty wooden floor among the debris of chairs and sunflower-seed shells, clutching, weeping, until we were drained. “Don’t leave me, Marina,” he whispered.

I lay on the floor, half under him, shells embedded in my back, his smell of green and wood, my hair a tangle, his like ruffled shocks of wheat. What was the body, this bloody field of stones? So many battles fought here, so many good men lost.

36 No Peace, No War

ONCE AGAIN WE WALKED together, breathing our breaths into the frozen days, my head in its thick scarf coming up to his rough wool shoulder. In an unexpected way, we had become more of a couple than we had ever been—considerate, protective. We spoke in low, intimate tones. But we had lost the joy, the spontaneity. What was between us felt fragile, clear, and breakable as a ship in blown glass. We had entered the formality that leads husbands and wives to call each other by name and patronymic. Yet I learned that a strange kind of trust arises after betrayal that no one ever talks about, that comes with the knowledge that one’s lover is willing to be hurt—to absorb pain, to carry it—for the sake of love. And that one was capable of hurting someone—deeply. And that it was not the end. You can live that way, you can go on.

In Galina Krestovskaya’s apartment, we pale young poets of Petrograd warmed our cracked, chilblained hands by the stove and prepared to invoke the Muse—while ignoring the lingering smells of a decent meal recently consumed. Where Seryozha’s death had placed cotton in my ears and a fog before my eyes, my disgrace had stripped my senses bare, and again I heard, I saw.

Anton began. His poem investigated the possibility of the ya, the I, the ego. It was woven with clever half rhymes and strings of sound, unintelligible at first hearing. And yet its meaning bobbed along like a buoy in rough weather, sometimes above the line of waves, sometimes below. He’d said no more to me after his outburst, but his disdain for me and concern for Genya were always simmering under the surface.

Genya’s new poems thundered more emphatically than ever, in inverse proportion to our careful silences with each other. The poem he recited urged the people to be men and not children, not to examine their leaders for feet of clay, for all feet were of clay. The revolution could not live in the sky, the poem said, only in the mess of blood and fire and earth. He challenged the reader to embrace the heat and the darkness and the smoke and let it transform him, let it temper him hard. It was his wish for himself.

For my part, I found a place to stand in the details of daily life. I returned to the precision of rhyme and meter. I found it soothing to sit on the divan, day after day, working out rhyme schemes, counting loping iambs and foot-dragging dactyls. I had never been so technically accurate. The two university students, Oksana and Petya, liked the repetition, the clarity, but Anton of course hated them. “All its energy is in chains,” he complained. “Where’s the sound?” But Seryozha’s death was silent as an owl flying through snow. Kolya’s departure was the nicker of horses, a swish of runners. And Genya and I—the sound of breath being held, the tinkling of icicles.

Sitting in the tobacco fug, discussing each poem in turn, I watched lovely Galina Krestovskaya drink in our words like claret, sometimes gasping or applauding a good line, at other times nodding as Anton analyzed us. We were her little geniuses, her personal nest of golden cockerels.

Krestovsky, in his usual leather-backed chair, a balding man in a coat and tie, big-nosed and bespectacled, read a Nat Pinkerton novel, a cigarette burning in his fingers. He was resigned to our presence as he had been to his wife’s redecorating the flat in the fashionable primitive style of the Diaghilev set designers.

My poem centered on women pumping water in the courtyard of a Grivtsova Alley apartment building. Exhausted, complaining, they shared gossip as they stood in the frozen puddles, then carried their water upstairs, two, three stories, slipping on the icy steps. It was called “The New Ice Age,” told in tightly patterned stanzas as intricate as a watch.

Oksana began the critique. She enjoyed the repetitions and tight metrical schemes, the rhymes. Zina burst in, her button eyes afire. “But it’s counterrevolutionary. You’re saying the Bolsheviks are incapable of keeping water going in the buildings, when you know it’s the landlords who won’t make repairs.”

“Are we critiquing content?” Petya asked Anton.

“Of course the landlords won’t make repairs,” Krestovsky called out from his lair. “Nobody’s paying rent. So who’s going to fix your water? Jesus Christ?”

Galina cast her luminous eyes to the figured ceiling, embarrassed at her husband’s unfashionable views.

“Well that’s the bourgeoisie for you. Money for wars but not for water.” Genya sat on the windowsill, his dirty boots defiantly resting on the satin of the seat below. He’d become more Bolshevik in the last weeks, more intentionally rude, as if he had to prove to himself he wasn’t going to be pushed around by bourgeois morality, least of all his own.

“I’m depicting actual life,” I argued. “As we’re living it. Should I pretend it’s already paradise?”

Zina flushed even darker. “But you’re saying life is worse under the Bolsheviks.” She looked pleadingly to Genya to back her up. Before, Genya would have been the first to chastise me, but now he let me be.

“I’m not ‘saying’ anything,” I said, defending myself. “Are you suddenly a symbolist?” Hers was the kind of criticism that often split our group into factions, whether content should be criticized or not.

“Those women should be glad to be pumping water in a Soviet Petrograd,” said sixteen-year-old Arseny to my left. “It’s their water now.”

Krestovsky burst out laughing from his chair in the alcove, and I had to slap my hand over my mouth not to join him. Did Arseny’s mother fetch his water?

“But they’re not glad,” I said simply. “I want those women to be able to look into the mirror of this poem and recognize themselves.” I rubbed at a blister on my right hand, where I’d burned myself boiling water on the primus stove. “Not some sentimentalized notion of ‘the people.’”

“You could write about the landlords not fixing the water,” Zina said. “They’d still see themselves, but it would also make a statement.” Her eyes flicked to Genya, but he just leaned back against the window frame and gazed over his shoulder at Sergievskaya Street.

Oksana came to my rescue, her gray eyes huge and dark-circled under her fringe of frizzy blond hair. “Not every poem has to be instructive to be revolutionary. To depict the life of common people in the contemporary context is itself revolutionary. This is poetry, not advertising.”

Zina stamped her small black boot on the Krestovskys’ parquet. “There are no sidelines. Poetry is part of the fight.”

“You’re all missing the point. The babas and their water aren’t the issue.” From the piano bench, Anton broke in, wearing that supercilious expression. “It’s the form that’s the problem. You’re trying to make a Red Guardsman waltz in hobnailed boots. Da dum da dum da dum da dum. The revolution is in the lines, or it isn’t a revolution. The poem is timid. It’s strangling in its corset.”

I resented what he was saying, but he was right. I was seeking solace in iambs and anapests, clever rhymes. I had become reactionary, not in my politics, but in my poetics. The trouble was that I could not write energetic modern lines, because I had no energy. These controlled intricacies reflected exactly my spirit’s limitations.

After the discussion, Sasha and other artists began to drift in—actors, students, dancers—knowing there would be snacks and perhaps liquor. Our hostess, graceful, blond, and green-eyed in a gypsy scarf, flitted from group to group, her bracelets jingling, happy to be at the center of such an advanced artistic coterie, while Krestovsky played chess with Anton.

I was speaking quietly with Oksana when two familiar faces entered the archway of the salon—Dunya Katzeva and her newly glamorous sister. What was Mina doing here? Dunya smiled at me, but she was searching for someone else, and her smile broadened when she saw him. I stepped behind Oksana and searched for Genya. Had he seen Mina come in? No, he was safely across the room, explaining something to Petya and little Arseny. I excused myself and threaded through the clusters of guests into the hall, but Anton’s quick eye had caught my exit. Mina’s arrival had not escaped him, either.

I ducked into a little sitting room, where Galina’s maid sat mending clothes. Surveying myself in the etched mirror, I pushed back my untidy hair, wished I had some lipstick. Compared to Mina, I looked like a washerwoman.

“Nothing to steal, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the maid said.

“I’m hiding from someone,” I said.

She assessed me like a woman appraising a sack of frozen potatoes that would cost a week’s wages, wondering how many were rotten. But finally she returned to her sewing.

We were in a pretty room—like the rest of the apartment, flavored with a folktale motif à la Nikolai Roerich. On the bookshelf stood photographs of Galina in various roles: a peasant girl in braids to her knees and an arched kokoshnik; a gypsy with golden curls; a moody portrait, her black velvet tam barely discernible from the dark background, the light questioning her heart-shaped face. Not as theatrical as the other photographs, showing her as lovely but allowing the flaws to remain, it had to be the work of Solomon Katzev.

What was Mina doing out there? Talking to Genya, stirring things up again? I paced back and forth, hoping she would leave, or—a soft knock on the door. The maid looked up, cursed under her breath. It opened slowly, and my old friend stood in the doorway. Like a hound, she’d chased me to ground. Would she tear me to pieces, or would I be able to get away?

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

“Isn’t it evident? I don’t want to talk to you.” I’d backed myself into a corner.

The maid smirked over her mending.

“Do you mind giving us a moment?” my friend, my enemy, asked her.

“The street’s right there,” said the maid, stubborn as a rock. I wondered if I’d found Anton a wife.

I tried to push past Mina, make a break for the hall, but she grabbed my arm, her gaze a purpled gray like a river in storm. “Marina—listen to me.”

I wrenched myself away. Out the window, wind swept the snow up into the blackness, where it peppered the glass like insects on a summer night. A whoop of laughter rang out from the party. Someone had started up the gramophone. A little bell rang. Sighing heavily, the maid folded her mending into the sewing basket and, with a stern cast of eye, left us.

Mina stood with her back against the door. I didn’t recognize her, only those small hands, the little ring on her pinkie that her father had given her on her thirteenth birthday. “Are you going to avoid me for the rest of your life?”

I didn’t want to talk about this, but she was giving me no choice. “You didn’t have to tell him. Did you enjoy that?”

“What was I supposed to do? He came over looking for you. You didn’t tell me what you wanted me to say.” Her lips trembling, she started to cry. As her nose reddened, she started looking like her old self. “I said you were beside yourself with Seryozha’s death, that you’d be back, to just be patient…”

She’d been sure I’d be back. Funny. She hadn’t dreamed that I’d been ready to follow Kolya to the ends of the earth, that I’d already imagined myself traveling with him to the south, living among bandits behind the Denikin lines.

“Was that all you said?”

Her cheeks flamed in her white skin—that beautiful skin—her eyes looked bruised. “I didn’t mean to tell him. I swear. He was just so torn up, and it was a terrible thing to do—you could have at least done your own lying.”

“So you told him about Kolya. You thought that would make him feel better?”

“I was angry. You just do whatever you want and get away with it. It’s always been that way.” She was shouting now. “Take what you want, leave everything else a smoking wreck. Why should I lie for you? Don’t do things you’re ashamed of doing if you don’t want to be found out.”

I drifted over to the tiled stove, smoothed the warm tiles under my fingers as if I were smoothing out a sheet. How clean it was here, the neat household of Galina and Krestovsky. How messy I was by comparison, how incapable of conducting my life. “Is that what you came to tell me? Or to find out what happened with Kolya? How it all turned out?”

She flushed crimson again, suddenly very interested in the state of her shoes.

“He’s gone back south, if you must know.” I could feel my own tears starting, welling up from where they’d been hidden since that day on the English Embankment. “Told me to go back to my poet.”

She sank onto one of the upholstered benches, let her coiffed head fall against the painted wall, closed her eyes, and wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t tell him where you were, did I?” She put her hand on my sleeve. “We’re not who we used to be, fine, but can’t we be friends anyway?”

Outside, a bout of gunfire. What could be happening—a confrontation between robbers and Chekists? Life was so precarious now. Mina had betrayed me twice, withholding the news of Seryozha’s death and of my lover’s arrival.

Her gray eyes pleaded. “I didn’t go out of my way to hurt you, Marina. Or maybe I did, I don’t know…”

Yet who did I have who knew me as Mina did? Genya and I were still together, despite my betrayal. Should I hold my friend to a higher standard than I had been held to? In any case, I needed a friend now, clay feet or not. As Genya said in his poem, nobody lived in the air.

Anton spotted us as we came back out to the party together and sauntered up, trickling smoke from his long nose. “Gotten your stories straight?”

“You’re the poets,” Mina said. “I’m only a humble scientist. It’s not my job to make things up.” She took my arm and led me past him. It made me laugh. She really was growing up. But then I saw that she was leading me straight over to the group around Genya. God, did we have to do this, too? They kissed cheeks in greeting and he reached out for my hand.

More gunfire. “What the hell is going on out there?” I asked. “Another revolution?”

Petya, his pilled sweater covered in pastry crumbs, ignored the blasts. They were obviously talking about the war negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, already a month old. “Lenin’s right. We’re going to have to give in sooner or later. Your man Trotsky can’t stall forever.”

“Oh, this again,” Mina said.

The negotiations had bogged down into a stalemate. Trotsky, as commissar for foreign affairs, refused to agree to the German conditions. He insisted that Germany must not be allowed to annex Poland or Lithuania and that Russia would not pay it any reparations. Lenin wanted to accept German terms and get it over with.

“Lenin’s a defeatist,” Genya said in his big bass voice. “Trotsky’s playing them like a fisherman. Wearing them out.” He kissed me on the top of my head, wrapped his arm around me.

Mina sought my eyes. See? You have Genya.

“You watch, a few more weeks, the kaiser’s going the same way as Nicky—right to the autocrats’ zoo. We’ll go visit and feed them peanuts through the bars.”

It was what everyone was hoping for—a revolution in Germany. They were so close. Five hundred thousand metalworkers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January. A million German workers were demanding peace without annexations abroad and democracy at home. Surely it was only a matter of time before the kaiser toppled.

“We’ve shown the world just what this war is about,” Zina said. “Reparations and annexations, for the Triple Entente as much as the Central Powers.” Upon the ascension of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky had outraged our allies by publishing the tsar’s secret treaties with France and England, revealing their plans to divide up the spoils of Europe when we won the war. “The German workers won’t take much more of it. They’re the ones paying with their blood and their labor.”

Petya took Lenin’s view. “You can’t underestimate the Germans. They’re not going to give in, workers or not. We’re a wreck and everybody knows it. They can roll right in anytime they want to.”

I noticed Dunya with Sasha over on the far side of the room, holding hands, laughing. She was wearing that soft, rust-colored woolen dress decorated with Seryozha’s sunflowers. She saw me watching her, and her smile saddened. She touched the patch. I wondered if her parents knew she was here.

“You’d better pray we don’t give in,” Krestovsky called out from his leather chair, his fringed lamp. “If you thought the tsar was bad, just try the kaiser. Trotsky should never have published those treaties. We might have gotten the English back as allies, finished the war, come out ahead. Now look what a mess we’re in.”

“Those treaties proved that both sides are the same,” Genya shouted over the heads of the others.

Across the drawing room, very straight and tall, wearing a black leather jacket with snow still clinging to her shoulders, stood a familiar form looking about—Varvara. After the way she had dismissed me that day on Vasilievsky Island, I had assumed I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I couldn’t imagine what Varvara would want, that she would willingly enter such a lavish establishment as the Krestovskys’. And where did she get that jacket? She looked just like a Cheka officer.

She saw me with Genya and Mina, grinned and hurried over to us, then took my hands in her cold, bony ones and kissed my cheeks. She glowed at Genya, grabbing him by the upper arms. Beamed at Mina. “You’re all here. My God, I’ve been looking for you all over town.” Her hair was wet. She was breathing hard. “I had to tell you. At four o’clock… there was a call to Smolny. From Brest.” The poets drew closer—Krestovskaya, Anton, Sasha, and his friends. “The war is officially over!” She embraced me vigorously and kissed me three times.

“They accepted Trotsky’s terms?” Oksana asked.

Krestovsky rose, threw his book onto his chair. “You’re sure?”

“I was out at Smolny. We got the news this afternoon. By tomorrow it’ll be in the papers. But I just had to let you know first.” She took my hands again. “You’ve given up everything for this. I wanted you to know.”

“Peace,” said Galina Krestovskaya. “I can’t even remember it.”

Mir. Even the word sounded strange to my ears. Four long years of war. I thought of those hospitals, the soldiers’ fetid dressings, the windows that wouldn’t open, the wounds that wouldn’t close. They would all go home and take up their plows. We might even have decent bread again. And Kolya would come home.

I shoved that thought away.

“What were the terms?” Krestovsky asked.

Varvara looked into the faces of the crowd that had assembled around her. Her voice changed when she spoke again. “Comrade Trotsky’s decided that nothing would put an end to the German demands. Who did they think they were negotiating with, another imperialist state? ‘No annexations,’ he said. ‘No indemnifications.’ The German people want to end it, too. It’s just the German General Staff—they can’t accept that their world is finished. So Comrade Trotsky ended it. This afternoon, he walked out of the negotiations. No war, no peace.”

“What the devil does that mean?” Anton said.

“It means we’re out of the war, but we agree to nothing,” she said. “If the Germans dare to attack us, a peaceful Soviet Russia, their workers will rise up and they’ll lose from the rear. They can’t risk it—don’t you see? Either way, they lose.”

“Genius,” Zina pronounced.

Krestovsky mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. “The Germans will never let it go at that.”

“You can stop worrying about the Germans,” Varvara said. I could smell her leather jacket as the room warmed it. “Nicky started it, but Leon Trotsky just put it to bed.”

Genya moved to the center of the room. I could feel his excitement. “Here’s to Comrade Trotsky! Urah!” This is how I liked to see him, that huge energy, freed of wounds, my sins forgotten. Perhaps more had ended than just the stalemate at Brest—perhaps ours had as well.

Gunfire splattered the night. So that’s what we were hearing—celebration! The war had ended! We began to sing “La Marseillaise”—not the worker’s version but the original. In a minute, Galina bustled in with her maid, the actress holding up two bottles of champagne, the maid bearing a tray with wine glasses. “After four long years, let’s have a proper toast.” She gave a bottle to her husband to open. He at first returned her enthusiasm with an expression of dismay when he saw the label, then resigned himself to her gesture of largesse. Opening the foil, becoming caught up in the fun as he popped the cork and filled the glasses. She began passing them around. “Does everyone have a glass?”

We all did.

Genya raised his. “To Comrade Trotsky. And the end of the war.”

“Your lips to God’s ear,” Krestovsky added under his breath.

We drained our cups—heads back, necks bared. Genya snatched me up, hoisting me to his shoulder and marching me around as he led us in singing “The Internationale.” I ducked the chandelier as we sang. Even Krestovsky sang: So comrades come rally / And the last fight let us face: / The Internationale unites the human race.

The festive mood strengthened with the second bottle of champagne. Krestovsky put a record on the gramophone and began a wobbly-kneed sailor’s dance to “The Boundless Expanse of the Sea.” Not bad considering his age and level of fitness. Genya and Sasha and Arseny joined him, arms linked across each other’s shoulders, their vigorous steps endangering the fine furniture. Varvara put her arm around my waist and hugged me again. “I just had to come tell you. I read about Seryozha…”

Oh, please, God, let her not say anything more.

“I know you’re still mad at me… please don’t hate me anymore. I can’t bear it. I’m sorry about that night, your papers. I was being a shit.”

“I got them anyway. Bourgeois.”

She brushed a lock of my hair back that had come forward during my triumphal march on Genya’s shoulder. “Let’s start over. Can’t we? No war, no peace?”

Could we ever start over? Did I want to? The sailor’s dance ended and Petya took to the piano, launching into an American ragtime piece I didn’t recognize. Genya was enthusiastic but not much of a foxtrotter, stepping on my toes. After a while Gigo cut in, and he was a beautiful dancer, a surprise. Anton and Varvara sat out the dancing, exchanging cynical quips no doubt, but Dunya and Sasha, Galina and Arseny took the floor. Oksana danced with Nikita Nikulin, a poet.

At one point, Petya began “Two Guitars,” and Galina, draping herself with the piano shawl, her blond hair falling loose over her shoulders, began a gypsy dance. Faster, faster she twirled, her little heels stamping, the fringe flying as we clapped for her. “You dance ten times better than that,” Varvara murmured under her breath.

“Hardly,” I said.

We applauded madly when she was done, and she bowed her graceful thanks.

Then Krestovsky, flush with champagne, broke out the vodka, and Petya began “Dark Eyes,” with all the flourishes. The sound of it hit me with nostalgic force.

“Marina, you dance.” Varvara shoved me forward.

“Marina!” my fellow poets chorused encouragingly. “Marina!”

Genya watched me, that dear face finally without the cloud that had darkened it these last days. Oh, but not this song. Ochi chornye / Ochi strastnye… Dark eyes, passionate eyes, / How I love you, how I fear you… / An unlucky hour, the hour I caught sight of you. “Go on,” he urged me.

I moved out onto the floor, leading with my shoulders, gypsy style, and danced it for Genya—our love, our grief, our beauty. Slowly at first, filling it with my passion as you fill a glove with your hand, then faster and faster, while down below in the street, people fired off guns for the wild music alone.

37 Germans

IGNORING VARVARA’S ADVICE TO stick to the banks and the telephone exchange, I landed a job at a small knitting factory a few minutes’ walk from Grivtsova Alley. It paid barely enough to buy a shoelace, but the important thing was to be working now, to have a labor card entitling me to precious ration tickets for bread and soap and even new galoshes when it came around to my turn, if that day ever arrived. He who does not work, does not eat, the tickets said.

The factory was owned by a tubby man named Bobrov, whom the girls called Count Bobo. His wife, Tatiana Rodionovna, made us a hot lunch every day. I liked to think of it as a factory, because factory work carried a proletarian dignity with it, but the place was really just a poorly lit, poorly heated workroom with tables and benches where eleven girls knitted socks on tiny machines. Their leader, fifteen-year-old Olga, showed me how to wind the yarn around metal pins, then trip them one by one. Click, click, click, all day long. After a week, I’d picked up the cough they all had from breathing the woolen threads. At eighteen, I was by far the oldest. It was like having eleven little sisters. They buzzed with stories, mostly about the German advance.

Contrary to Trotsky’s assumption that the Germans would give up on us, not daring to foment revolution at home, they came east at terrifying speed. In the girls’ tales, the Huns hacked off Red soldiers’ limbs and fed them to pigs before the very eyes of the mutilated men, and any workers they caught in the invaded towns were stripped and tied to fences, splashed with water, and left to freeze or gutted and left for the wolves. I didn’t dare ask them to shut up. A protest would just increase their gruesomeness. They loved it when they got to you and would attack like a school of small vicious fish.

Silently I spun the wool, winding it around the pins of the little machine, composing verses against the click and spin as the tube of socks or gloves emerged. Poems kept my mind off the blisters, the ache, and the cold. I thought of Avdokia’s gnarled fingers and for the first time really understood how it was to live off the work of one’s hands. It took hours to straighten my fingers at night. Genya rubbed them, warming them between his own, until the blood came back to them.

These days he and I had the divan to ourselves. Sasha and Gigo had moved into a place of their own, now that Sasha was working at the Zubov Art Institute. And Zina had begun sleeping elsewhere out of sheer disgust at Genya’s taking me back. I slept each night in the crook of Genya’s arm and dreamed of red wool snaking through my hands.

In the bread queue after work, I stood with the others, holding my thirty-day ration card, stamping my feet, and listening to the latest. All the standers agreed that the government had signed the peace too late. Against a broken Russian army, the Germans advanced like the tide. What reason did they have to stop when town after town rolled onto its back? They would teach Red Petrograd a lesson, a parable for their own workers to read.

“The Petrogradsky Echo says the embassies are pulling out,” said a girl wearing a homemade fur hat.

“Which embassies?” I asked her.

“All of them,” said an intelligent-looking woman with a soft, lined face.

The SR paper, Delo Naroda—the People’s Cause—reported that the Bolsheviks were shipping the treasury to Moscow, preparing to abandon the capital. How upset Father had been when Kerensky had suggested it! Now it was Pravda and Izvestia denying the rumors.

No one knew anything for sure, but everyone had a bit of information to share. The woman standing behind me, broad-hipped and gold-toothed, holding a heavily swaddled infant, spat and said, “Ericsson’s being evacuated. They’re sending them out to the Urals.” The giant electronics plant. I well remembered marching with their workers in February. “My old man works there. But they won’t let him bring us. Ain’t that something?” She joggled the baby. Only the slits of its eyes showed. “Safe in the Urals while we’re here in Petrograd about get run over by Willie’s boys. What kind of a government is this, turning women and children into sitting ducks? He says the Ericssons are going to strike.”

“How close you think they’ll come?” asked the girl in the hat. “The Germans?”

“All my neighbors are leaving,” said an old woman with a fierce Turkish nose and a coat patched like a quilt. “And if I had a place to go, you bet I’d be on my way.”

“It’s one way to solve the housing crisis,” said the soft-faced intelligentka.

Everyone was talking about whether they should leave, whom they could stay with in the country, when the revolution in Europe would start, and whether it would be soon enough to save us.

A well-dressed man strode along the street past us—whistling.

“Look at that,” said a woman with an acorn-size mole on her cheek, wearing tattered gloves. “Disgusting.”

We glowered at him. The new cheerfulness of the bourgeoisie was a slap in the face of every working person. Far from fearing the German advance, they whistled in the streets as if it were a holiday, their shoes shined, hair combed, faces newly shaved. They were looking forward to liberation by the enemy and the end of the revolution. The irony: these were the people who had kept us in the war to begin with, and who had called the Bolsheviks traitors for wanting to negotiate peace.

The government had granted greater powers to the Cheka to suppress this new bourgeois threat. The woman with the mole on her cheek said they were going to start rounding up the bourgeoisie soon and sending them to camps in the north. “And good riddance, that’s what I say. They’re ready to stab us all in the back.”

The Germans were on the move. The district soviets held mandatory classes in sanitation and first aid, checking your name against your housing registration and your labor book. You could lose your labor book if you failed to show up. So after a day’s work, we all spent two hours in the evening learning how to staunch an arterial wound, and what to do in case of a gas attack.

Newspaper headlines screamed, THE SOCIALIST FATHERLAND IS IN DANGER! We went to hear the Bolsheviks address the crisis at the Alexandrinsky Theater, worked our way through the crowd pressing in and found a bit of standing room in the aisle under the loge. I climbed onto the base of a pilaster, balancing myself against Genya, so I could see the stage. Behind us, holes remained unpatched on the imperial box where the Romanov eagles had been torn off. In a single year, two governments had been washed away, and now the workers’ state itself was in jeopardy.

Someone from the city soviet, bearded and grim, spoke from the stage lit by cheap smoky oil lamps. You could see his breath in the cold theater despite the density of the crowd. “They’ve taken Dvinsk and Reval.” Reval, the capital of Estonia, a little more than two hundred miles away. “They’re executing everyone with rough hands, a union card,” he continued, his face like a funeral. “If we can’t stop them, they’re going to be at the Narva Gate”—the entrance to Petrograd—“in a week, tops. It’s up to us, Comrades.”

No false cheer. I balanced on my perch against Genya, my arms around his neck, which was swathed in the scarf that I’d knitted for him on the sly at my bench. I felt a sudden love for us all, all of these people wedged in and on the brink together—pale, dirty faces with red, sleepless eyes—the starved, gaunt citizenry of Petrograd. Anton bit his nails. A sailor ground his cigarette out on the floor.

I thought about the revolutionary uprisings we’d studied those last months at school—Spartacus, Pugachev, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune. The sad truth—they’d all failed in one way or another. Would October go down in history as another failed experiment, just before entries about how Russia became part of a glorious German empire? I imagined grim Prussian troops crossing the Russian countryside right this minute, their carts and great gray horses, their cannons. Their presence darkened the snow, turned the sky to lead.

The comrade from the city soviet yielded the podium to Karl Radek, a frail, animated commissar with a high forehead, wild curly hair, and round glasses. Radek’s gestures were quick and confident, and he called out in oddly Western-accented Russian, “Comrades, they’re coming to crush your revolution!”

A roar from the crowd, like the roar of the ocean striking a wild shore.

He continued. “Even as Trotsky was negotiating, the snake Hoffmann was already giving orders to advance!”

“Bastards!” the soldiers shouted. “Swine!”

“What did we expect?” Anton said, rolling a cigarette, sticking it in his mouth. “Badminton?” He lit the match with his blackened thumbnail.

Radek raised his hand for silence. “But Comrades, even now, your German brothers are organizing!” Fiery faith burned in Radek’s small intellectual body, his hand outstretched, his round glasses catching the light from the smoky lamps. “They’re striking in factories from Hamburg to Munich! They want the war to end! Now it’s up to us to show them how socialists fight. Shoulder to shoulder, for the workingman. For the future!”

Cheers from the soldiers and sailors, the workers, the women in head scarves, the children and old men. I could feel my energy returning, my hope.

I imagined myself with a rifle, marching with these comrades. I’d hunted at Maryino. I was a pretty good shot—though, truth be told, I’d always felt ashamed to see a pheasant’s or duck’s bright eye cloud over, the way its beauty vanished in an instant. But these Germans had to be stopped.

“We must defend our revolution!” Radek said. “Not just in Russia but in Poland, in Latvia, in Germany and France and America! Down with every capitalist master! To arms, Comrades!”

Shouts and cheers echoed the diminutive speaker. People pounded Radek on the back as he left the stage, probably on his way to another such meeting.

A haggard-looking Bolshevik, tall and bony, took the stage. “The German soldier—what is he? A conscript. He’s tired, he’s hungry. His brothers are rebelling at home. With our example, he may just lay down his arms and join us! That’s what made our revolution here. You cannot pit a conscript army against free men and women, fighting their own cause!”

“Long live the revolution!” Genya shouted.

An old, white-bearded worker leaned out from the second balcony and in a surprisingly loud, clear voice shouted, “Is it true the Soviet’s packing up and heading to Moscow?”

The hall erupted into furor. The perfect acoustics of the Alexandrinsky Theater—which would let an actress’s sigh be heard in the third balcony—filled with cries of “Yes, what do you say to that?” “Bourgeois lies!” “It’s the truth!” “Shut up!” “You shut up!”

The gaunt comrade onstage held out his hands to quiet the crowd. “I assure you, citizens of Petrograd, the Soviet has no intention of abandoning you! We will fight to the last man! Some vital portions of industry are being evacuated to keep them from the invaders, but the Soviet isn’t going anywhere.” He stopped, leaning forward and pressing his hands on the lectern. “Ask yourselves, where are these rumors coming from? The bourgeois press! To whose benefit is it to promote chaos and counterrevolutionary hopes? The bourgeoisie! Therefore, the Soviet has declared the bourgeois press suspended until further notice. The Cheka will be especially vigilant about resurgent counterrevolutionary activity at this crucial moment. This is a warning to the bourgeoisie!” He slammed his fist into his hand to punctuate each syllable. “Do not give aid to the enemy of socialism!”

“Round ’em up!” I heard here and there around the auditorium. “Up against the wall!” “Shoot ’em!”

This warning to the Former People worried me. I pictured Mother, mustered out of her cluttered room in the middle of the night, marched through the city streets in the snow, shoved onto a train, and taken away to a camp in the forest, or in the far north. But what could I do? It was true—some of the bourgeoisie were plotting for the arrival of the Germans. They couldn’t wait to take back what had been wrested from them and recover their former privileges, their former arrogance. My mother was probably polishing the silver. But a camp?

The full moon had risen, and deep drifts of snow threw back a light so bright, it felt like a setting in a play. I tucked my arm tightly under Genya’s. Anton walked on his other side, hands shoved deep in his pockets, his face like a thundercloud. We found the rest of the Transrational Interlocutors huddled around the Catherine statue, smoking and debating in the bitter cold. We all decided to retreat to Sasha’s new room close by, just off the Fontanka.

Genya and I allowed ourselves to fall behind, not speaking, just contemplating the size and gravity of what was about to happen. The war was coming to our door. In a matter of days, tanks and troops would be marching right up this embankment. Our shadows traced a complex calligraphy on the snow as we walked.

“Come on, you two!” Zina called back at us. “It’s no time for lovemaking!”

“We’ll catch up,” Genya shouted ahead.

Instead of following them, we walked out onto the Chernyshevsky Bridge to watch the moon, huge and coldly white, rising over an empty city, the frosted walls, the sky unsmudged by chimney smoke. Ice glistened on the chains of the bridge’s towers as we leaned on the parapet, his familiar solidity in his thick, patched overcoat which we slept under at night. Our friends walked ahead of long shadows poured black against the white snow.

I studied the big handsome face rising above me, the crooked nose, the pugnacious chin. Everything good about Russia was in that face—which I had betrayed, which I had stamped into the mud. I leaned into him and turned to watch the moonbathed west. From somewhere out there, they were coming, with their tanks and bloodied bayonets.

“I’m going,” he said. “I’ve decided. I’m going to sign on in the morning.”

I could see the determination on his face, the defiance in his jaw, but there was something else there as well. Unhappiness. Did he think this was a way out? Getting himself killed by the Germans? “You don’t have to. You heard… they’ll be here soon enough,” said I, who had just been imagining taking up arms and marching to the front myself. How ridiculous! “We’ll take those defense classes at the district soviet. Two hours of compulsory firearms practice.”

“No.” His eyes looked dark in the moonlight. “We have to stop them before they get here. There’s no time for practice. I’m going.”

I stroked his cheek, my gloves catching on his whiskers. Genya, a soldier? He was so tenderhearted that if he found a spider in the Artel he would take it out into the hall, cradling it inside a cup. “You couldn’t kill a chicken if you were starving.”

He grabbed my hand. “I’ll do what I have to do. You think I’m afraid? I’m not afraid.”

“I know you’re not. But I think you’re trying to get yourself killed.” I pulled my scarf up around my mouth and nose, my eyes tearing in the cold, the tears freezing onto my eyelashes. “I thought we were all right. That we were past all this.”

His eyes blazed, I could see the whites in the moonlight. “This isn’t about us. Does everything with you have to be about love? There are Germans out there, real Germans. They’re not thinking about love. They’re thinking about crushing the revolution. You heard Radek. They have to be stopped.”

But I knew, deep inside, this was not only about what Radek said.

He put his arm around me, heavy, warm even through all the layers of our coats. He peeled the scarf from my face and kissed my cold lips, rubbed his stubble against my cheeks. His smell of sweet straw. “Would you really want me not to go?” he whispered in my ear. “To let old men fight for me? Would you respect me more?” He searched my face, begging me to understand. Begging me not to.

I pushed him away. “Seryozha went down to Moscow to prove he was a man.”

“I’m not Seryozha,” he said, his face suddenly steely. “He was a wonderful boy, but I am a man. Can’t you see? It’s war. And I need to get out there before they’re at the door. Our door, Marina.”

My eyes stung, my cheeks burned, the hair in my nostrils froze. I gazed at his heroic face over the striped scarf—my beautiful boy, my sufferer. I embraced him, I buried my face in his coat collar, that poor ragged coat that was going to the front. I should have sold Kolya’s diamond and bought a sheepskin for him. What was I keeping it for? Memories of that betrayer? But it was too late to repent, to act. There was no more time.

38 A Wedding

I THOUGHT WE WOULD go back to the Poverty Artel, but now that he had made his decision, Genya wanted to go on to Sasha’s. On a backstreet near the train station, the place was already blue with smoke and ripe with unwashed bodies when we got there. It was a room of two windows, and an easel took up half the space. Someone had found some spirits, made with God knows what—in compliance with Bolshevik asceticism, all the vodka shops had closed long ago.

“You’re looking rather sober, young sir,” Anton said to Genya as we came in.

“We thought you’d never make it,” said Zina, sharing the one chair with Oksana Linichuk.

“I’m going,” Genya said, shoving himself between Anton and Petya on the bed, forcing them to make room for him. I stood by the door. Why did Genya want to distance himself from me like this? Was he ashamed of me now?

“Going where?” Petya asked.

“The defense of Petrograd.” Genya took the jar from Sasha, who sat on a box with a girl from the art school, and drank deep. “You heard them tonight. They need us out there. I’m signing up in the morning. Who’s coming with me?”

The poets on the bed and around the low-ceilinged room exchanged glances like children caught in a prank after the schoolmaster asks the guilty one to come forward.

“I’d rather shoot myself in the head,” Anton said, his elbow on Arseny’s shoulder. “The Bolsheviks couldn’t organize their way out of an intersection. If it gets down to a fight, I’ll take my chances with the anarchists or the SRs.”

Gigo, on the floor, brushed back his shining black hair from his eyes. “Death and I are bound to meet, its dark wing cooling my fevered brow,” he said, quoting his own poetry. “And who will weep for me?” Gigo’s last woman had ditched him for a Red Guard, whose rations were better than a Georgian translator’s. “I’ll go, and you women will curse the day you missed loving me.”

“I’m in,” Sasha said.

This was too awful, the poets and artists of Petrograd ready to trot themselves out into the fields to be killed. “You’re all crazy. We need you here. The district is organizing something,” I said.

“You go to the district,” Zina said. “I’m going to defend the revolution. Count me in, too.”

“Anton’s got a point,” Nikita Nikulin said. “Look how the Bolsheviks have bollixed it up so far. ‘No war, no peace?’ That was a good idea.”

“Well, they got it half right,” Oksana said, low in my ear.

“Listen.” Genya stood and opened his great arms in the small room as if he were spreading revolution single-handedly, as if it were grain he was casting to the whole world.

Sasha removed a bottle that looked like some kind of artist’s cleaning fluid from his trunk, mixed it with water from a pan on the stove, and poured the concoction into another jar that he passed around. Each of us proposed our own toast.

“To history,” Gigo offered.

“To a little less history,” Oksana replied.

My brothers and sisters, the Transrationalists—would we ever be together like this again? Everything was ending, just as we came to know it and count on it. The alcohol proved oily and chemical. I could feel it chewing the lining of my stomach. I did my best to match their gaiety, but couldn’t stop thinking that Genya might be dead soon. Gigo, Sasha… I was drinking with ghosts.

“Marina, I thought you were the brave one,” Zina taunted me. “Are you really going to stay behind, like an old housewife?”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your Joan of Arc moment,” I said. I couldn’t very well explain what was really going on—that Genya didn’t want me there to be his comrade, his brother-in-arms. He was desperate for a woman who would wait for him, worry about him, imagine his suffering, as he had waited for me during those nights and days I’d been away with Kolya. He needed his dignity back and this was to be my penance. And I would do it. Damn what Zina thought of me.

On a paint-smeared guitar Sasha often used in his cubistic still lifes, Petya played an old song about a peasant girl longing for her soldier boy. We sang along and we all felt something irreparable taking place, that it might be our last time together before history shook us, took us, killed us, changed us. Now I understood why Genya had wanted to come here after our talk on the bridge—not just to recruit comrades for the fight but to all be together like this, to complete the circle.

Now he whispered in my ear, “Let’s go.”

In the Artel, at last alone, we lit the stove and fed everything flammable we could into its hungry small body so that for once we could remove our clothes, producing our precious bodies—bitten, God knows, but beautiful. His heavy arms and legs, his neck like the branch of an oak, his eyes, wounded, searching, clouded green like swamp water. I could see the hurt child inside, looking out through the man’s eyes—Do you love me? Do you care if I die?

I couldn’t help thinking about the men in the hospital beds, their mangled and mutilated forms under the dirty sheets. If he were wounded, I would care for him. I would spend the rest of my life tending that body, wiping his chest, his legs. I let my fingers follow the lines of his bones, the wide collarbones, the knobby forehead, the strong, crooked nose, the lids of his yearning eyes. Was he thinking of the reality facing him tomorrow? Grenades, German guns, the points of bayonets, the hardness and indifference of war?

“Just don’t die,” I whispered, tracing his lips.

He pressed his own hand over my mouth. I tried the edge of my teeth against the knuckles. He pulled me into him. “I’m not the kind that dies,” he said into my hair. “Bullets can’t penetrate my genius.”

We held each other before the stove, my cheek nested against his chest, his noble, vulnerable heart beating in my ear, the meeting place of will and destiny. We walked together to the divan, where I sat and he pretended to fall on me, then caught himself at the last minute, our old game. That night we made love freely, not silencing ourselves, not sparing each another, groaning, shouting out. He came inside me rather than pulling out. There was no going back for us, for any of us.

Later, we lay resting, sweating, his semen seeping out onto the blanket under me, his hand caressing my neck, which always felt too thin in his hands, like the stem of a flower about to be snapped, worry closing in again. I could see its shadows creeping along his jaw and into his eyes, along his nose, which some boy back in Puchezh had smashed in a fight over a chestnut when he was ten. I felt it rise in myself as well.

“Marry me,” he said.

Had I heard him right? “You’re kidding.” Genya had always loathed that bourgeois institution. He called it as outworn as whalebone.

But I could tell by his expression that mine had been the wrong answer.

“We’re already married, remember? That night on the Petrovskaya Embankment?” I showed him the ring finger on my wedding hand. “You gave me Saturn.”

He pushed his hair from his eyes. “Seriously. Will you?” He wanted something he could hang on to in the snow outside Narva or Glyadino. How could I say no to him now? Was it right? Was it wrong? There was nobody to ask.

In the morning, I packed Genya’s few things—pencils, a notebook, a pair of Anton’s socks. He had blessedly stayed over at Sasha’s. I could always make Anton another pair of socks. I gave him all our food. I cut him a lock of my hair and tied it with thread, put it in the Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers. We sat holding hands on the divan a good long while, breathing together. Our lives would never be the same after this hour. We would leave through that door and everything would change. Even I, a girl of eighteen, looked around that room, memorizing it, knowing I would forever remember it as our youth’s paradise—this spindly table where we wrote our poems, the torn newspapers on the wall, the little sulky stove, this moldy divan where we slept, and how we held each other very tightly to keep from falling out.

As we sat, knee to knee, on quilts smelling of sex, I thought of all the men in history who had gone off to fight for homelands and cities, for fields and villages, and all the women who had seen them off, just like this. I had the strange feeling of not being myself but rather some woman who had existed for centuries and whom it was now my turn to embody. I dared not cry. I dared not say a word that might burden him in any way. I just prayed, sealing my will around his body. Please, Holy Mother, let him return exactly as he leaves.

Time to go. We stumbled down the icy stairs and out across the dark courtyard along a narrow trampled path through great hummocks of uncleared snow, and out toward the district soviet.

This early in the morning, its windows were the only lit ones on the street. Inside, it was already busy, the halls smelling of wet wood, with people lining up, wanting to know where to go, what to do. And here were our friends waiting—pale, bleary, and disheveled from the party the night before, Sasha and Petya and Gigo. Zina with her cigarette dangling like a street tough. Nikita, Oksana—with flowers! Red geraniums. Where in the world had she gotten them?

“Have a nice sleep?” Scowling Anton looked like he’d slept upright. “Glad someone did.”

“We need you all next door at the registry,” Genya said. “We’re getting married.”

Zina dropped her lit cigarette. Anton turned away, bent double in a coughing fit.

Our Red wedding took less than two minutes. It was nothing like the wedding I’d imagined as a girl, in the little wooden church in Novinka, full of fragrant roses. My dress would be old ivory, my kokoshnik a crown of pearls. Bees would buzz around a long table set up for the feast in Maryino’s yard, under the larch tree. A sapphire on my ring. A honeymoon in the South Pacific.

At my revolutionary wedding, there was no incense, no rings, no priest. No candles, no crowns, no feast. No Mama and Papa, teary-eyed and proud, no Seryozha, lonely and possessive. No Volodya, joking, making the toast. No Kolya, drinking himself stupid, realizing he should have considered the possibility of losing me. No music, no games. No bread and salt, no bride’s bath. No rebraiding of my hair—no hair to braid! No Mina or Varvara. A war instead of a honeymoon. A group of hungover poets as our guests and our two signatures on a form, with Anton as witness.

But Genya never let go of my hand. That part of the ceremony was not forgotten. Nor was the wedding bouquet—Oksana handed me her geraniums. Their petals scattered over the wood floor like confetti, dotting the grime with crimson.

Outside in the hall, a somber crowd waited to sign on for defense of the city. A woman with a sharp, hawkish face behind the counter hung up the telephone. “They’ve taken Pskov,” she said. Less than two hundred miles southwest of Petrograd. How fast could an army travel?

His insecurities of the night before left behind, Genya was now all energy and manly enthusiasm. He held up his hand to get the attention of the room, and in his great, rolling voice began to recite his rousing new poem. People at first recoiled from the sheer force of him. But as they listened, a change came over them. They stood up straighter, with pride and vitality where before there had just been terror. I could see the Soviet registrars taking note. Yes, they would certainly find a use for him—if he survived.

When he was done reciting, he told the man at the counter that he and his friends were ready to defend Petrograd—Genya, Gigo, Sasha, Nikita. And Zina right alongside the boys. He glanced back at me with a sly smile. After they’d put their names down, Genya came to the place where I stood by the wall with Oksana and Anton, and swept me up in a grand embrace, kissing me—but it was all wrong, like a show, playing to the crowd. I had to fight myself not to push him away. He really was leaving. But why did he feel it was necessary to erase our farewell back in the Poverty Artel—something vulnerable and tender, just between us—with this public display? We’d learned in school that a wedding always signaled the end of a comedy, but this suddenly felt like the first act of a tragedy.

39 The Smolny Institute for Young Ladies

RINGLESS, MY WEDDING GERANIUMS still in my arms, I hung from a tram strap thinking a married woman in time to the rhythm of wheels, lurching and screeching, metal on metal in time with the beating of my heart. A married woman. A married woman. The terrifying reality of what I’d done was beginning to sink in. My last sight of Genya hung before me—disappearing with his gang of friends, a backward wave, a smile. Outside the streetcar window, a grim and silent work party with shovels on their shoulders marched southwest, in the direction of the invader. Stillness hung over the riders this morning, no talking, no arguing. The whole city crouched, listening, straining to hear the approach of the German machine, metal on metal. And Genya, so foolishly brave, heading straight into the guns.

We passed a butcher shop, windows soaped over, the store abandoned. No meat in Petrograd unless it was walking in front of a cart or skulking in an alley. Even rats were in short supply. Another shop valiantly tried to sell things people no longer needed—wigs, medals from the imperial court, parasols. Had there ever been anything so useless as a parasol? I looked down at the homely geraniums in the crook of my arm, molting scarlet petals onto my broken boots as the streetcar jolted forward, throwing me against other passengers. Oksana had grown these flowers, with their bitter green scent, on her windowsill, tending them all through this sullen winter. I loved her generosity. She’d deprived herself of their beauty to send the poets off to the front and inadvertently provided my wedding bouquet.

This spring there would be lilacs—if we made it to spring. Maybe I could take Mother to Maryino, get her out of town and away from the threat of the camps. The irony—how hard I’d worked to get back to Petrograd this summer! How hard would it be to get a ticket out again? I swayed on my strap, wedged between tense people in winter coats. Perhaps Maryino was already in ashes… but if I could get them out there, Avdokia still had ties in the village. I could make it worthwhile for the peasants to keep her and Mother. One trip to Kamenny Island, Kolya had said. A man called Arkady.

More and more soldiers crowded onto the tram as we moved up Suvorovsky Prospect toward Smolny. All around me, they argued about wages and striking, the talk that had so angered Genya, who felt they were taking advantage of the emergency to extort concessions. A well-fed gang they looked, too. Shirkers and opportunists.

A soldier with a broad pockmarked face came close. “Give us a kiss, sister.”

“I’m married,” I said, pulling away, or as much as I could in the crush.

“Me, too.” He grinned. He smelled of the fennel seeds he was chewing with his front teeth. “Live it up.”

Soldiers took advantage of the crowding to rub up on me. Rough hands shopping, testing me like a bin of vegetables. I held my bag tight under my arm, clung to my flowers, turned this way and that to avoid them, hoped no one would find the stickpin in the seam of my dress. There was no room to slap anybody, but I stepped on as many toes as I could on what was a very long ride.

By the time I saw the cupolas of the cathedral hovering over the complex that was once the Smolny Institute for Young Ladies, I felt as though I’d already fought a battle. The soldiers helped me out of the tram with exaggerated solicitousness, mocking burzhui manners. I briefly fantasized how they would do when the Germans arrived—then we’d see what the famed Petrograd garrison was worth. What were they doing here anyway, griping about wages when poets and painters were heading out to face the foe? Then I realized—I sounded exactly like my father.

I took a moment to gather myself before entering the seat of the Soviet. Crowds of people came and went freely from the grand old place. It was like watching the aperture of an anthill. Soldiers and workers, commissars and Chekists, the simple and the important, all converged on this one spot, the center of everything. Somewhere in the halls of these buildings, Lenin worked over a simple desk. Comrade Trotsky argued over the next move in the war negotiations he’d mishandled so terribly. There was no shortage of guards. A cannon stood before the main entrance, and machine guns were trained from second-story windows, but I climbed the steps and pushed my way inside. It was a scrimmage, new arrivals struggling against people shouldering shovels and guns on their way out. Soldiers loitered in the deafening hallways. Filing cabinets narrowed the passages, framed pictures leaned in stacks. Everything was in motion, toppling, everyone pushing, shouting. I knew that Varvara worked for the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee, but how to find my way in such a labyrinth?

Eventually on the second floor I found the committee offices, a long room filled with desks and people typing, shouting into telephones, giving orders, waiting for help. But even at the center of godless Smolny there were miracles, and there I found Varvara, standing behind a desk in a gray-blue dress and that same black leather jacket, pressing the receiver of a telephone to one ear, her palm to the other, while a tall man continued to harangue her. I swelled with pride despite myself, seeing her there, knowing we lived in such times that an eighteen-year-old girl could become a person of responsibility.

She hung up the phone and collapsed into a chair behind a mountain of papers, putting her hands over her eyes. The tall man leaned over her. Didn’t he notice she wasn’t listening? Finally, wearily, she dropped her barricade and plowed through the papers before her, finding something and giving it to him, pointing down the hall. As he departed, the people waiting moved closer, as if to begin their own entreaties.

Then she saw me. Her tired face brightened, and that one glance restored my hope that she might be willing to help me with my mother. People waiting for a scrap of Varvara’s attention grumbled as I jumped the queue. “Comrade!” “Comrade, I’ve been here since nine.” An older woman, wearing an old-fashioned shirtwaist and a skirt to her ankles, caught her by the sleeve. “What about these children’s homes?”

“Yes, Comrade Letusheva. I’ll attend to it. But I haven’t had lunch and I’m about to faint.” She hooked her arm through mine and steered me out of the office back into the teeming hall. “I’m so glad to see you, and with flowers, too,” she said. “That lot in there, they still believe in St. Nick and the golden cockerel. Do I look like a magician? What about this? What about that? Well what about it? Didn’t you hear? The Germans are coming!” We began to walk toward the stairs up which I’d just come.

I told her about my job at the knitting factory, showing off my scarred, stiff hands as my mother might have once shown off new rings. “So what are you doing here? Shirking already?” she teased.

“Genya left this morning. He’s enlisted—for the defense.”

She nodded approvingly. “We need every breathing soul. We’ll even take poets.”

I held up the flowers. “We got married.”

Varvara nearly collided with a man carrying a filing cabinet on his back. “Whose idea was that? Yours?”

“His.”

She sighed, rounding her eyes as if to say, Well, what can you do about it now? “At least it’s not Shurov.” That put me on my guard. I felt the hardness of the pin through my dress where I always wore it and feared her keenness. She always said she could see right through me. “They almost caught him, you know. A few weeks ago, right here in Petrograd. Speculating. He’s part of a major ring. You don’t still see him, do you?” Narrowing her eyes at me.

“Not since Furshtatskaya Street.”

We entered the broad stairway and joined the steady movement of people rising and descending like some biblical curse, in our case heading hellward. As we went down, I asked the question I’d come here to resolve. “What do you hear about the internment of the bourgeoisie?” The farther down the tight spiral of stairway we moved, the more I smelled food. I could tell her silence was intentional as her black head bobbed in front of me. “Are they going to do it?”

She pulled me toward the wall. “If the bourgeoisie would stop trying to undermine the Soviet, readying bouquets for the arrival of the Germans, they wouldn’t have to worry so much. But with people like your papa stepping up operations…” She glanced at the people passing us to make sure nobody was listening. “Your old man’s been quite the busy boy.”

Well, he wasn’t preparing any bouquets. I could bet on that.

Others pressed into us to let yet another filing cabinet pass by. Varvara waited until they moved on before continuing. “Yes, he’s been collecting funds for the Volunteer Army. Working against us any way he can. Still in the pocket of the English. If they start rounding up hostages, you can bet Vera Borisovna will be first on the list.”

Hostages? “Would they really do that?”

“Of course.” She nodded at some men coming up out of the basement. “We think he’s still using your apartment, though it’s been searched again and again.”

How did she know so much about my parents? “Who? The Petrograd Committee?”

She shrugged in a way that didn’t deny my worst suspicions. “For now.”

Why would they care? But it wasn’t the time to worry about what Varvara was doing. I had to concentrate. “Help me get her out of Petrograd.”

She glared at me. People were shoving us, trying to get by. She pulled me into a corner at the next landing. “Listen,” she hissed. “One: like I told those buggers upstairs, I’m not a magician. And two: she’s our tie to your old man. No way we’re going to send her out of town.”

Then I knew. We. “You’re not with the committee at all. You’re working for the Cheka.”

She gave me a black-eyed under-the-brow gaze that told me I was the biggest fool who ever put on a coat. Searches in the middle of the night. Blood in the snow. Was this where her faith in the revolution had led her? But I had my mother to worry about.

“Don’t let them arrest her, Varvara.”

She began to descend again. More workers carrying boxes rose from the basement and everyone had to press themselves to the walls. Suddenly, a picture resolved in the developing tank. I’d been so intent on Mother’s circumstances that I hadn’t been paying attention. All this furniture, these files… the rumors were true: the Soviet was abandoning us. All their reassurances at the Alexandrinsky Theater had been a fraud. “You’re leaving, aren’t you? All those promises, they were just lies. Oh my God, it’s all lies! You’re moving to Moscow!”

Varvara shoved me into the wall, staring holes into me. “Don’t make a scene or it’ll be the worse for you,” she said under her breath. If she hadn’t been holding on to me so tightly, I might have fallen. The government was saving itself, leaving the rest of us alone and exposed to the German army. “All those speeches,” I whispered. “You accused the Provisional Government of exactly this and now you’re doing it—”

Varvara jerked me again. “Stop it. Do you think this is some kind of game? The game of Revolution?” Her fingers dug into my arm as she pressed her bony face right up to mine. “If the Germans take Petrograd—well, too bad for us. It’s a disaster for you and me and the rest. But if the Soviet is taken, we lose the revolution. This isn’t about Petrograd. We’re preparing for the years to come. In the end, what happens to you and me doesn’t matter one tiny bit. If they have to move to Moscow or Omsk or Novosibirsk to keep the revolution safe, then so be it. The important thing is that the Soviet survives.” Her eyes glittered, inhuman. “Don’t cry. Don’t even breathe.”

My lungs hurt. I clung to my flowers drizzling petals onto my boots. Listening to Varvara was like going up in a rocket ship. I felt dizzy, sick. It didn’t matter to her what happened to us—to me or Genya or Vera Borisovna, any of us. From space, even Russia would look small. You couldn’t distinguish one human from another from that height, hear their cries.

Finally, when she saw I wasn’t going to scream, she let me go, then took me by the nape of the neck and shook me, but more gently, tenderly this time. “The Petrograd Committee isn’t evacuating. Look, I’m sorry. But I can’t have you falling apart in front of…” She nodded toward the busy comrades, rising and descending. “What do you say? Let’s eat.” As if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t understood something fundamental about our new rulers—that lying would become a way of life now. I thought of Genya’s poem about the feet of clay. Don’t be such a child, I could imagine him saying. We all have to grow up now.

In the basement, we entered an enormous, windowless dining hall, steaming, smoke-filled, lined with long tables and benches, vibrating with talk that was subdued but keyed up, underscored with anxiety. “Any party member can come and eat at any time,” Varvara told me proudly. “Smolny works around the clock.” A red-faced woman dripping sweat ladled me some fish soup. From a giant tureen, a young girl poured us tea into which Varvara dropped tiny saccharine tablets. Then she led us to the corner of a long table full of intense young people poring over some posters.

Once we were seated, Varvara at the end, she bowed her head toward me, speaking low. “You have to stop thinking in individualistic terms. No one matters now, except what we’re doing for the revolution. It’s not me, it’s my ability to make decisions. It’s not Genya, it’s that he’s fighting the Germans, that he writes with a revolutionary consciousness. The question is, what are you doing? You’re an educated girl. You can write. You can speak to a crowd. What are you doing knitting socks? Join the party. You can’t straddle the fence forever,” she said. “You might even be of some help to your worthless mother.”

The party, the party. She sounded like Zina, with that same zeal. The poets were on their way to defend a government that was fleeing for its life on a carpet of lies. But I could also see it through Varvara’s eyes—they were saving the revolution. Oh, it was all so confusing. I couldn’t sort out the politics. All I knew was that my mother couldn’t be a hostage, couldn’t be caught in the cogs as history played itself out.

“What’s that going to do for my mother? I won’t throw her to the dogs.”

“You’ve been doing a pretty good job of it so far,” she said, sopping a piece of claylike bread in the soup.

I leaned over my bowl, very close. “You owe me, Varvara.” Yes, I still held it against her. I was no more over it than Genya was over what I’d done to him.

“I owe you nothing,” Varvara said.

“I see.” Fighting tears, I drank down the rest of my soup and stood, buttoning my coat, stuffing the bread into my pocket, picking up my threadbare flowers.

She grabbed my arm, pulled me back down to the bench. “Shut up and let me think.” The two long wrinkles between her dark brows deepened. It was what she was best at. Tactics, strategy. “You’re only looking at the next few days. Either the Germans arrive and she’ll have it made, or they’ll be turned back and we’ll move on to other problems. But she really needs to get off her ass. Nonworking bourgeois are going the way of the dinosaurs. Give her your sock-knitting job when you join the party.”

“You’ll never give up, will you?”

She grinned her crooked grin. “Surely there’s something she can do besides talk to spirits.”

“She sings. Plays the piano.”

“Maybe she could help organize a workers’ chorus.”

An idea about as likely as warm snow.

She snorted at her own optimism. “Well, for now just get her out of there. As long as she’s gone when the domkom comes calling, you’ll be all right.”

“It’s Basya. The domkom. Remember her?” I said.

“Sure. I told you, you needed to watch her, didn’t I?” Varvara stretched her long, lanky form. “Anyway, either this’ll all blow over in a week, or else we’ll be speaking German by Friday.”

How could she be so calm when the Bolsheviks would take the bulk of the retribution—Varvara and her comrades, all these people around us? I drank the too-sweet tea, wrapping my hands around the warm tin cup. “You’re not worried?”

“We’ll go underground, like before,” she said. “Lenin spent years underground. Nothing’s going to stop us, Marina. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” She shook me by the shoulder, affectionately. “Cheer up. Think of it this way—Avdokia can do your queuing, cook, run your bath. You’ll be a regular little missy again.” She spotted a thin man in a black leather coat. “Excuse me. I have to talk to someone.” We picked up our dishes and took them to the service station on the far wall. “See you soon, Marina.” She went to join the thin man, leaving me to my own chaotic thoughts. Vera Borisovna at the Poverty Artel? Thank God Genya wouldn’t be home to see this.

40 Saving Vera Borisovna

IN THE KITCHEN OF the flat on Furshtatskaya, two women boiled laundry on the stove. They stared at me suspiciously as a third admitted me through the back entrance, glanced at the tattered geraniums I still carried. I couldn’t get used to seeing strangers in our flat. Their flat. The hard-faced blonde in her forties, all lower face and flat eyes, recognized me, but her expression didn’t soften at all. “Looking for the nuthouse again?”

“Who?” asked the ferret-faced woman.

“The tsaritsa.”

I wondered how crazy my mother had really gone. I would have stayed to glean a little more information, but I didn’t want to attract further attention to my visit, especially as I planned to get Mother out of here without raising any suspicions that she was leaving.

“Make yourself at home,” the blonde said sarcastically as I walked past her. “Just walk on through.”

“I’d have rung the doorbell but the butler’s on vacation,” I said. “Anyway, you got the front door all boarded up.”

“Anybody coulda come in through there,” said the big blonde. “Robbers.” She poked at the boiling mass in her pot. “Ready for dinner?” She lifted a diaper on her wooden spoon.

“I don’t think it’s done enough,” I said over my shoulder, and moved out into the service corridor.

All the doors were closed on this side of the flat—where Vaula and Basya had lived as well as Father’s driver Ivo before the war; where we stored junk, unneeded furniture and prams, sleds and skis and old clothes. I wondered if people were living in those rooms now. Each was barely big enough for a bed and a nightstand, true, but that made them much easier to heat. I’d begun to see housing differently since living in the Poverty Artel. For a second I imagined inhabiting one of those tiny rooms myself. It wouldn’t be so bad.

I passed through the cloakroom into the main hall, catching a peek through the pocket doors into our salon. An old man wearing felt slippers and a heavy coat, scarf, and cap sat smoking, studying a chess board. I slipped along the passage to Mother’s room. The odds and ends of discarded things—sacks and tins, trash—lay along the walls. I could already hear the nursery piano—no more the big round notes of the Bösendorfer. I stared at her door with its lock crudely bolted into the splintered wood. The last thing I wanted to do was knock, after she’d been so emphatic that she never wanted to see me again. But it didn’t matter what she wanted. She didn’t understand the fate that was awaiting her. I knocked. The piano stopped, but I heard no footsteps. I knocked again, our personal knock, Fais dodo. She knew exactly who it was, but the piano began again. “Come on, open up, will ya?” Rudely, in case anyone was listening.

And sure enough, across the hall, the door of my old room opened a crack. An eye, watching. A single eye.

Finally the door opened. She was alone, and I saw how bad off she was. She no longer looked like an otherworldly creature, merely a terrified, starving, exhausted woman of forty-three. She let me in and locked the door behind me, shoving a chair up against it for good measure. I took down my scarf, fluffed my hair, my ears still ringing from cold. I longed for the days of my big white fur hat, though I would have been robbed of it within an hour. You could not keep a hat like that without fighting for it.

“You didn’t see Avdokia, did you?” Mother asked. “She was supposed to be home by now.” She sat down at the parquet table, very still, staring at her hands. Her stillness was mesmerizing. “I wish you hadn’t come,” she said finally.

“I wouldn’t have,” I said, perching on the edge of one of the many hoarded tables. “But I need you to pack up and come with me. Right now.”

“Why? Has there been another revolution?”

“You’re not safe here anymore.”

She laughed. It was half a sob. “You’re just figuring that out?”

“There’s going to be a sweep. I don’t want you to be here when they come.”

She gazed at her hands, so thin and blue, like X-rays of themselves, the backs dry and papery. Her wedding ring with its platinum filigree was so loose that it looked like it belonged to someone else. From the courtyard, the jingle of a sleigh’s harness reached the windows. Somewhere back in the apartment, we could hear men in rough conversation, shouting, then laughing.

“They’re talking about internment. Hostages.” She would not look up. I wasn’t sure she understood me. “Because of Father. Look, I want you to come stay with me—just a few nights, until we see what happens with the Germans. There are old labor camps in the north. Rumor has it they’re going to send the bourgeoisie there.”

She examined her hands as if they were a world, as if those knotted veins could lead her out of this trap. “You’re bourgeois, too, as I recall,” she said at last.

“Yes, but I’m not married to Dmitry Makarov.”

Outside the window, the bare branches of the courtyard trees stood starkly black and white. She gazed out at them, her hands folded before her. The light flooded her weary face, her transparent blue eyes. “So I’m supposed to leave my home, just like that. Flee for my life. Que viene el Coco.” Here comes the bogeyman. “How do you like your Bolsheviks now? It was that horrible girl, I suppose. I knew she was trouble that first day. I should never have let you become friends.”

“She was the one who told me to get you out of here,” I said.

We could hear a woman at the front of the flat scolding someone, perhaps in my father’s office, maybe the Red Guard’s wife, so-called. Mother’s blue eyes filled. “I think I’ve given up enough, don’t you?” That brittle tone dissolved. “This room is all I have left. I have no one anymore, not Mitya, not Seryozha… Volodya… you. My parents gave us this flat as a wedding present.”

“It’s just for a couple of days,” I said. “You can come back when it’s blown over. You don’t want to be a Cheka hostage.” I heard my father’s reasonable tones in my own voice as I spoke.

“If I leave, some illiterate coachman and his five children will move in and chop up the piano for firewood.” She stood and stroked the keys of the banged-up nursery piano with her fingertips, the chipped yellowed ivory. She loved three things—spirituality, culture, and beauty. But her value now was as a hostage against my father’s counterrevolutionary escapades. There was no time to waste.

“You won’t lose your flat. We won’t let them know you’re going. You’ll leave just like you were going out for the day—”

“Sneak out like a criminal,” she said flatly. “I know what you’re saying. I’m a criminal now. In my own country. In my own home.”

I stood and came to her, took her hands, so cold and bony that they were hardly made of flesh. How was she going to get through the rest of this winter? “We need to go now.”

She pulled away from me. “To stay with you and your hooligan?” She found a handkerchief in her sleeve and wiped her nose.

“His name is Genya.” I didn’t know if it would help or not, but I added, “My husband.”

“You married him?” Her expression went from peevish to horrified, as if she’d learned that I ate worms for tea. “Your husband?” And then she started to laugh, even as tears streamed. She stopped long enough to wipe them, then the laughter started again.

“He won’t be there. He’s gone to the front. He’s volunteered for the defense of Petrograd.”

She would not stop laughing.

“Think of the cesspits,” I said. “You liked that? A labor camp would be ten times worse. And a Cheka prison? I don’t even want to imagine it.”

Her desperate hilarity died away. The eyes opened slowly, still wild but more focused. She was facing it.

“We’ll leave separately. It’ll attract less attention. I’ll meet you down the block in fifteen minutes.”

“But what should I bring?” She backed away from me, clutching her skirt. “What about Avdokia?”

Yes, what about Avdokia? I wondered briefly if it would be safer for her to stay here and keep the room, but I knew I would not be able to handle my mother on my own. “I’ll go get her. Don’t bring anything. Nobody can guess you’re leaving. Just wear what you need. The warmer the better.”

Her glance fluttered helplessly about the cluttered room. “I’m not a sheep! I need things…”

“A small bag if you have to. As though you’re going on an errand. You’re just going out for an hour. Visiting a friend.” I went to the armoire, pulled out her sable hat and warmest coat, mink-lined. I sighed, stroking the fur. They were too beautiful. They would arouse attention on Grivtsova Alley. A black sealskin coat was better, though not so warm, and a hat of karakul lamb.

I stuffed a few things in a small carpetbag—underwear, a towel, her brush… just as though she were going out to sell some of her dish towels. “Do you know where Avdokia’s gone?”

My mother shook her head. “She just goes.”

My mother did not know where her bread came from. Even now. I scanned the map of the neighborhood in my mind, trying to imagine where an illegal market would be in this, the most bourgeois area in the city. There had to be one somewhere, because the Former People who couldn’t get work couldn’t get ration cards. They all depended on the black market. I guessed that the “market” was in Preobrazhenskaya Square. Large enough, not on the water, with several side streets down which people could scramble in case of trouble. “Look, put on a few pairs of underwear under your skirt. Put these dresses on.” I tossed her two, both wool, the heaviest ones. “Take a few things in your pockets and the rest in the carpetbag. I’ll wait for you at the Church of the Transfiguration. Fifteen minutes. I mean it.”

“I hate this life,” she said. “Why can’t they just kill us and get it over with?”

I headed over to Preobrazhenskaya Square. Yes, I was right. The starving figures of our neighbors stood like shadows against the walls holding out wrapped bundles of their prized possessions while buyers, mostly peasants, bartered with frozen potatoes and other questionable foodstuffs—eggs, most likely rotten, bottles of oil that could be anything. And there was Avdokia, right under the great chains of the church enclosure, in heated negotiation with another peasant woman close to her own size and vintage. They made the deal, then Avdokia deposited a wrapped item the size of a plate into the other woman’s arms, hefted a bag of potatoes off a sledge.

When she saw me her hard-mouthed, determined bargaining expression melted away. She would have crossed herself had she not had her arms full of potatoes. “Marinoushka, what are you doing here? This is no place for you. God in heaven!” She looked around for the Cheka, Red Guards. “Is everything all right?”

I embraced her and took the potatoes from her, explaining the situation. “God save us.” She crossed herself as we walked.

“I need to get her out of there, but she’s worried that if she leaves they’ll take the flat. I don’t think I can handle her by myself.”

She came closer, so that I could see every crosshatch of wrinkle, every hair in the mole on her bulbous nose. “If Basya tries anything with that flat, I’ll pull her legs off and bury them under a birch tree. Whose flat does she think it is, Lenin’s? She’d better not pull anything or when the Germans get here, she’ll be the one paying the piper.”

The expression on Anton’s face when the three of us entered the room on Grivtsova Alley could not have been more horrified than if the entire German army had burst in. He stared at Avdokia and Mother as if they had one eye between them, as if we were Macbeth’s crones and had come to rip off his dirty woolens and tear his flesh from his bones. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no.”

I just continued with the introductions. It didn’t matter what Anton thought, not now. “Anton, this is my mother, Vera Borisovna Makarova. And this is Avdokia… Fomanovna.” I realized I’d never formally introduced Avdokia before. “This is Anton Mikhailovich Chernikov. Your host.”

My mother’s expression exactly mirrored Anton’s. But unlike our editor and universal critic, her horror lay in the scene around her, of which his unkempt surliness was only a part. To see the Poverty Artel through her eyes was to remember it the first time I saw it. The teetering stacks of books, Anton with his feet on the table, the overflowing ashtrays, the sunflower-seed shells all over the floor, the dirty clothes and crumpled pages. The pathetic little stove. The smell. I was thankful at least that the chamber pot under the divan was empty. I hoped she would take comfort in Seryozha’s watercolor painting and silhouettes, even if they were pinned to the old newspapers and handbills that served as our wallpaper.

When I was busy persuading Mother to come, I’d somehow failed to mention Anton.

She lingered at the door, clutching the handle of her little carpetbag. Avdokia stood by Mother’s elbow, her wrinkled mouth drawn so tightly that it almost disappeared below her pulpy nose. How sordid it all must appear to them, as if I’d brought them to a tavern. I dropped the bag of potatoes on the table next to Anton’s feet, hopefully sweetening the deal.

“Really, Makarova?” Anton drawled. “He’s gone for four hours and you’re already moving the family in? Even Granny over there?”

“It’s just for a few days. Until things shake out.”

He carefully, ostentatiously, removed his feet from the table and put them down on the dirty floor. “Am I suddenly running a boardinghouse for itinerant society women and their servants? Renting out corners for fifteen rubles a pop? Maybe there’s some room under the stove. Why don’t you look?”

“For God’s sake, Anton. Varvara said they’d use her as a hostage.”

He crushed out his butt on the floor under the leg of his chair. “Look, it was one thing for Kuriakin to flop here. Then one day you appear, like something the cat dragged in and forgot to eat. Did I throw you out? No. I lived with it, like the sympatichniy chelovek I am.” That was a laugh. No one in the world would accuse him of being an agreeable chap. “But this? What’s next, a priest? Maybe you want to start a cotillion. Or a charitable society.”

It had been hard enough to get her here. I wasn’t going to let Anton chase her off now. I came closer so I could keep my voice down. “Have a heart, Anton. If she ends up a hostage, or interned in some camp in the Arctic, would you feel comfortable in your soul that you chased her away?”

“Are you accusing me of having both a heart and a soul? Mercy!”

“I’ve heard quite enough,” said Mother from the doorway. “Not another moment will I remain under this roof, I assure you, monsieur. Come, Avdokia, we’ll put our counters on noir and see what becomes of us.” My mother took the old lady’s arm and turned back to the door.

But the bets would be on rouge, Mother. “Happy now?”

“Yes, I am completely comfortable, thank you.” He was the one in charge—no Genya to mitigate his pettiness. He knew he was wrong, and it made him all the nastier.

My mother put her gloved hand on my wrist. “Tu t’es trompé en tes amis.” You have miscalculated your friends. “Let’s be on our way, Avdokia.” She tried to grasp the knob but I wouldn’t move away from the door.

“Anton, I’m talking to you. Just tell me this, how do you live with yourself every day?”

“You should know—you’re always here, aren’t you?” He wiped his gaze away to the window, as if the most interesting sight in the world were outside the dirty panes, gilded elephants loping by in midair, bearing howdahs of Turkish clowns. He was waiting for them to leave, for us all to go, so that he would not have to recognize what a beast he was being. But this was no joke, no matter of preference. Even now the Cheka might be searching from flat to flat in the Liteiny district for the possible—the likely—fifth column. Makarov would be a name high on the list.

Anton had been spoiling for this fight for a long time, and with Genya gone, he wasn’t the only one who could speak plainly. “Listen, Anton. I fell in love with your friend. Is that a sin? Is it a capital offense? Someone loves him. And now you’re going to punish me? Is that what this is all about?”

My mother was whiter than her own white hair. She took my mittened hand in her gloved ones. “For the love of God,” she whispered hoarsely. “Not one more word. Death itself would be better.”

“No, it wouldn’t, Mother. Death would not be better than this.” I snatched my hand from hers. I knew she didn’t like it but this was my life now, this life that people were living, on top of each other, arguing, saying the cruelest things right out loud. You had to have the hide of a buffalo. I was trying to do the right thing. Why did everyone have to be so difficult? “Anton, could you please just let them stay? I thought you were a mutualist. I thought you believed in spontaneous organization.”

Anton heaved himself up and skulked to his side of the room, pacing between his cot and the table, his arms folded tight across his chest. His black brow thundered over his long nose, his jaw set. Mother tried the door again, but I wouldn’t let her open it. What would he say? “Anton?”

Finally, he flung himself back into his chair. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Just keep them quiet and out of my hair.”

My mother drew herself up in her glossy black coat. “I don’t intend to host a party, monsieur.”

I quickly showed Mother and my old nanny to our corner, the divan and the bookshelf. They could have the divan, and I would sleep on the chairs. I stripped the linens off the divan, shaking them out and folding them neatly so that Vera Borisovna could sit down without soiling her spirit with the unmentionable activity the quilts and blankets embodied. I could see the unspoken words written on her forehead: Is this where you sleep with him? You and he, like beasts?

I did my best to play host, pointing to our books, to Seryozha’s art works, to the zinc water bucket by the stove, our few sticks of wood, our old iron primus, which had been outfitted to burn just about anything. It was like giving someone a tour of the inside of a drawer. And over here are the pencils, and that’s our eraser. Mother plumped the pillows and Avdokia fished Our Lady of Tikhvin out of her bag, placing it on the bookshelf and positioning an oil lamp before it. I ignored Anton’s stare. Are you joking?

After studying Seryozha’s painting and his silhouettes for a time, Mother seated herself gingerly, folding her hands in her lap, as if she could stay like that, frightened and stubborn and straight-backed, until it was safe go home. I threw some wood scraps in the primus to boil water for barley tea.

At the table, Anton importantly riffled the pages of his French dictionary, filling the air with the sound of autumn leaves blown in a strong wind. He mumbled, “Les Chabins chantent des airs à mourir / Aux Chabines marronnes.” He slammed the dictionary closed. “What the hell are Chabins? ‘The somethings sing their songs of death to their maroon something women.’ Apollinaire you whore’s son, you big fat turd.” He threw himself onto his cot. “I have a headache.” The springs groaned. He began to play with his revolver, spinning the cylinder, opening it, looking in at the bullets in the chambers. I was used to this but I knew he was trying to terrify my mother. I didn’t think the gun even worked. He liked to tell us that he’d played Russian roulette with it. He imagined himself a Verlaine.

“Mulatto,” Vera Borisovna said suddenly, her voice clear and still as a stone dropped in clear water. “Chabin. It’s when one of the great-grandparents is a black. Like Pushkin.” We all turned to stare at her. “One-eighth’s part. And marronnes means ‘chestnut.’”

Anton propped himself up on one elbow. “Really?”

“Although ‘maroon’ is picturesque. You might prefer it.” She stopped. Then a slow smile trickled across her pale face. “Also it’s ‘dying.’ Not ‘death.’ Les Chabins chantent des airs à mourir.” Her beautiful accent. “The mulattos sing songs of dying to their chestnut—maroon—women.”

Anton sat up on his bed, put his feet on the floor. “Listen, do you know anything about Apollinaire?”

“A follower of Mallarmé, I believe.”

“Not a follower. A colleague,” Anton corrected her.

Mallarmé was Mother’s sort of poet, very World of Art, decadent, symbolist. All those fauns and night-blooming flowers, absinthe. I cringed to hear her speak of him with Anton. However, the miracle was that they were speaking at all. Anton could just as well have taken that revolver and shot her in the forehead.

“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance,” she recited. At least Mallarmé was a modernist.

Anton nodded excitedly. “Have you read Apollinaire?”

“Not that I know of,” she said, brushing the knee of her coat.

Anton got up and went back to the table and began to read: “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien / Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin…” His accent was atrocious. While Mother was a graduate of the Catherine Institute—and knew Balmont and Gippius and Pierre Louÿs personally—Anton was a poor teacher’s son from Orel. He was doing the best he could with a tattered copy of Larousse. I watched her anxiously for sneers, but aside from the slightest reshaping of the lips from time to time, she betrayed nothing. All those years of dinners and teas and dances and receptions, generations of good form, kept her from sabotaging herself on Grivtsova Alley. Her cool and interested demeanor during the recital of these cubistic poems with which Anton had been torturing us for months was a monument to her upbringing. She sat with closed eyes and listened, carefully, as if it were a séance and she was trying to elicit words from the Beyond. Could she actually understand the disjunctive, futuristic spirit of Apollinaire?

“I’d like to see your translation,” said Vera Borisovna after he finished. Then she gave him the slight smile she was famous for. “That is, if you care to show it to me.”

41 The Defense of Petrograd

OUTSIDE THE DISTRICT SOVIET, a crowd of grim citizens gathered in the icy Petrograd morning. This was it. The head of the domkom of our building, a hound-faced old man named Popov, had come around with the notifications: Mandatory fortification work for all noncombatants. I’d quickly introduced my mother and Avdokia, “evacuated from Pskov.” He shrugged, not caring where they were from or what they were doing there, and he left without encountering Anton, who lay hiding under his cot. Now I stood in the street before the familiar worn yellow facade as lean, stubble-faced Red Guards distributed shovels, picks, sledgehammers, and axes.

A registrar signed my labor book, and I took my shovel. “Go down to the Narva Gate,” the guard said. “They’ll show you where to set up shop.”

Shouldering my spade like a rifle, I joined a brigade of other charcoal-eyed citizens—clerks, students, ordinary workers from the artels and small factories of the Kazansky district—heading southwest through the frigid morning fog. Others fell into step with us and exchanged rumors, scraps of news. “It’s all about the railways now,” a small, craggy worker said. “My brother-in-law said it’s getting hot down around Rostov.” Rostov-on-the-Don, in the Cossack-dominated southwest of the country, where Volodya and the Volunteers were fighting.

“Think the Germans’ll use gas?” said a woman with deep lines under her eyes that ran diagonally across her cheeks like scars.

Everyone had the same fear of the terrible gas the kaiser’s troops had been using on the battlefield. I well remembered the ruined men in the airless wards of the military hospital, their burned eyes, their burned lungs. A thin-faced man, a first-aid worker with his Red Cross armband, walked alongside our crew carrying a bucket full of rags in case of a gas attack. We would soak the rags in baking soda and water and breathe through them. We’d been told it was as good as a gas mask, but I sincerely doubted it. I just hoped it would be some protection, better than nothing.

“Just remember, they’re hungrier than we are,” said a woman with a falsely cheerful air, as if she were persuading herself. “They’re all workers. They could come over to our side in a heartbeat.”

We marched along the Obvodny Canal, the outer ring of the city, as packs of workers streamed out from the electrical station, the Triangle Works, and the midsize shops—tanneries, textile and shoe factories, laundries. Some clapped us on the back encouragingly, lightening our mood, but dread returned, heavier than the shovels we carried—the old world was returning to claim its own, coming to crush our new lives under its murderous heel. There was no need to draft these girls, these hard, sober men. No need to bribe them or threaten them. We intended to defend our new nation. We had won it by revolution. It would be up to us to keep it.

It felt good to be one with the revolution again. Despite the cold and the prospect of hard labor and the oncoming Germans, it was a relief to leave Mother and the whole mess of my sticky life behind. I thought about Genya as I marched along. We had a chance for a new, clean kind of life now. How loathsome all that drama had been, all that unnecessary pain. Kolya now seemed so murky and musky, foul as an unventilated room. I felt the press of the pin under my dress. I should just throw it into the road and be done with it. Yet I wasn’t that girl anymore, the little barynya of gestures and pronouncements. I would sell it and buy Genya a sheepskin. Then we could walk together and look clearly in the same direction. No more secrets, no more holding back. Genya was right. This was where my attention should have been all along—the bigger battle, the grander fight. Marching west along the canal in the gray mist with these workers felt almost holy. This must be what Varvara felt every time she said the word Revolution.

Strangely, it reminded me of the day I had my hair bobbed on Vasilievsky Island. How light my head had felt as my pounds of dark red locks fell to the tiled floor. And what emerged in the mirror was myself, but clean, modern, shorn of foolishness. I felt like that again, a new woman emerging from a chrysalis of tresses and tangles, no longer the dreamy girl of former life, the one full of secrets and divisions, but rather someone I had not yet met.

“Think they’ll get this far?” asked a girl in a rough wool scarf the color of sawdust, wiping her nose on the back of her mitten.

“Either they will or they won’t,” I said, pleased at how brave I sounded. “Think what happened to Napoleon.”

The girl’s mouth fell open. “You think we’re going to burn the city?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me that this might be a possibility—that we ourselves and not the Germans might leave the city in flames. Where would we go in deep winter? “No, but that’s why we have to stop them. We’ve got to.”

The city blocks grew spare, the houses poor and poorer, served by roads barely worth the name—unpaved, just tracks in the snow. Smoke showed from one house in ten. To think I’d been born in Petersburg, but had never been this far into the industrial outskirts of the city. Now we passed rickety houses with wooden fences all falling down, lonely and sad in the white mist, their snow-filled dooryard gardens within smokestack range of the giant factories. Red tips of willow bushes poked out from the drifts like the fingers of buried corpses. The city soviet was trying to get the workers to resettle in the big flats in the center of town, to literally bring them into the center, but the proletariat had been reluctant to move. Now I understood. If I was a worker, would I want to live in a big flat with ten strange families, miles and miles from work, just for the pleasure of the parquet and the tony address? That, too, was bourgeois thinking. It seemed the Bolsheviks weren’t as proletarian as they professed to be.

The road underfoot turned perilously icy. A stooped woman in a rusty brown shawl slipped and fell, and a girl in a quilted coat with the stuffing coming out at the seams stopped to pick her up. “You okay, Granny?”

“I’ll ‘Granny’ you,” said the woman, settling back on her feet, collecting her shovel, and rearranging her scarf. “Tell you one thing, I’ll be happy when spring comes.”

Hollow-eyed women with ragged children watched us march past. A few waved, but most just stared, mute as cattle. The branches of the willows trembled above the snow. A tall woman with steel-gray hair cut in a fringe across her face was complaining about the Bolsheviks. “They say vote for them, so you vote for ’em and what the hell do they do? Give themselves the cushy spots, best rations, all their damn committees, yak yak yak. Lording it over everyone like the new aristos. Then the first sign of trouble, they’re packing up and leaving us to go to the devil.”

“They’re not,” said the girl in the quilted coat, her breath a white cloud.

“The hell they’re not,” said a woman who looked too old to be carrying that pick she nevertheless carried with the ease of familiarity, shifting the tool to her other shoulder. “Takin’ the food with ’em, too.”

“We shoulda all gone SR,” said the woman with the bangs. “They wouldn’t pull this kinda stuff. Spiridonova for me. Those old SRs, they knew who to shoot, right, girls?”

I wondered if Varvara knew what the workers were saying about the Bolsheviks. Did they know that the bourgeoisie wasn’t their only problem? It scared me. If the workers weren’t behind the Bolsheviks, then what?

“They’re out, though,” said a girl from the Netrobsky shoe factory whose broken boots had been repaired with rags. “The SRs are done for.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said the gray-haired woman. “I heard they’re setting up at the Horse Manège.” The tsar’s old stables, on the Moika. “If it’s a fight, all hell’ll break loose.”

This was the first I’d heard that there might actually be separate SR forces, as Anton had intimated in Sasha’s room. I wondered if they’d fight the Germans or take on the Bolsheviks in their weak moment. Worker against worker? I shifted my shovel to the other shoulder and tried to still my panic. I was going to dig trenches. The SRs and Bolsheviks would fight or they wouldn’t, but the Germans were on their way, and they had to be stopped. I looked at the figures struggling through the mist along with me. We needed the Bolsheviks to keep us believing in the future. Despite Varvara’s assertions about the survival of the revolution, people didn’t understand abstractions. I saw, even more than before, the danger in the soviet exodus. Because these women wouldn’t see in it preservation of the cause at all costs. They’d see desertion. And though I could understand Varvara in theory, I was only a person myself, and I, too, felt abandoned.

We reached the southwestern edge of the city, the Narva Gate outlined in the fog. Beyond it open snowfields lay waiting—the approach to Petrograd across which, at any time, we might hear the crunch and roll of German soldiers, German cannons. I suddenly felt weak, armed only with this shovel. Citizens of every sort toiled in lines across the forehead of the snow. A comrade in an army greatcoat directed us. “Right along there, sisters. The Huns may think they’ll be checking into the Astoria tonight, but seven feet closer to the devil is where they’ll be.”

The trench in the snow was five feet deep, almost over the heads of the women already down there, and about seven feet across. I could see how it could slow down an army that might not see it in the fog, or give our men shelter if they fell back before the Germans. The comrade lowered us into the trench. Inside, flanked by the snow walls, I was flooded by memories of the countless snow tunnels and caves I’d dug in the Tauride Gardens as a child. So strong was the sensation I had to put my shovel down, my foot on the blade, and gasp for air, eyes stinging in the cold. That ice world, furious snowball battles, fought like wars. Now this silent reality.

“You okay?” asked the girl in the quilted coat, noticing I hadn’t filled a single shovelful.

“Sure,” I said, and started to dig. The snow was heavy and compacted, thawed and refrozen. I scraped at it to no avail while women all around me managed shovelfuls, throwing the hard clumps up and over the lip of the trench. A young blond woman marched up to me. “Not like that. Put your boot in it!”

I tried again, but she snatched the shovel away from me in disgust, catching me a blow on the cheek with the handle in the process. “Like this.” Boot heavy on the blade, she thrust the shovel into the snow at an angle. It sliced off a hard white alp that she flung high over the crest of the trench. She shoved the spade back into my hands.

I flushed, my eyes watering, the skin of my face prickling in the frost as the girl with the broken boots watched from the corner of her eye and snickered. I burned with shame to have my uselessness so publicly exposed. But I told myself that humiliation was personal and the task at hand was anything but. Who cared if the girl from the shoe factory was amused by my dressing-down? I tried again, cutting downward through the snow with my foot rather than my body. The first strike broke through and filled the blade with a neat slice of frozen white. But when I flung it, most of it fell back into the trench. The girl laughed. “Oh, that’s good. You’ll have it all filled in by the time the Germans get here.”

“Why don’t you stand there yakking?” I said.

“Eat my dust, devushka,” the girl said.

“Davai,” I said. Let’s go.

We fell into a rhythm, shoveling, breaking the snow, heaving it out of the trench, which began to deepen. Between shovel loads, we exchanged clipped conversation, part of the rhythm of the labor: “What’s your name?” “Where do you work?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” The work made me feel strong and clean. Some women started a song—a haying song, of all things—and we all caught it up, men farther down the line responding, just as they would in the fields. I had never worked alongside others like this. It felt good to be just one of the many, our heartbeats in time, our arms, our lungs. You didn’t have to be the best, it would have ruined the whole thing—not the best, not the worst, just a part of. The important thing was that the revolution survived.

As we moved along the trench in the blue-white fog, our breath forming ice on our scarves, I heard the women call out, “Here they come, those bastards!” “Hey, look lively!” “Watch out, honey, your slip is showing!” Having reached a shallower portion of the trench, I could now see over the lip. A party of people straggled along, prodded by Red Guards. Bourgeois, pitiful in their thin shoes. Had they had their boots confiscated? Had they sold them? Old men and slender-waisted women, their formerly fine coats and hats showing the wear of the revolutionary year. Rounded up for labor duty. They certainly hadn’t volunteered. “That’ll show ’em.” “Burzhui!” My teammate, Alya, called out at top volume, “See how ya like wiping your own asses, and you can wipe mine as well!”

The woman with the steel-gray bangs yelled, “Pretend it’s a road for the Germans!”

I could hardly bear to watch them struggle. Old men and fragile women who had never so much as handled a dishrag let alone a pick or a shovel were handed heavy tools and shoved toward the line. Just the weight of the implements was more than they could manage. I could well imagine their hunger, their weakness.

Then I recognized one of them—Lisa Podharzhevskaya, from the Tagantsev Academy. And her parents. Lisa wore a draggled fur hat that looked as though it had been dropped into a puddle and frozen. She was the class beauty, the haughty type. How ill they all looked, especially the father—miserable, struggling in the icy fog, their gloves too thin. I was selfishly grateful I had Mother stashed away on Grivtsova Alley.

Now the work seemed colder, sadder, the women not so nice.

“You’re not feeling sorry for ’em, are you?” Alya asked.

“A little.”

“Well, they weren’t feeling so sorry for us, now were they? Like who was paying for those big flats and Sunday hats? You and me, girlie. So now they get a taste of their own medicine. It’s good for ’em. Like a big dose of castor oil.”

They don’t feel the cold as you and I might, my mother would say when she’d send Basya off on some frivolous errand. I’d once heard Lisa’s father opining about workers’ demands for the eight-hour day. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. They’d just drink and beat their wives.

But I couldn’t stop thinking of the Podharzhevskys’ misery, rounded up and marched across the city, rained upon with abuse. Not like me and my crew, who worked to save our own city, our own future. We were hungry, but our rations were lavish compared to those of the nonworking Formers. And tomorrow they might all be gone, put on a train, taken out of the city. Vanished into the mist.

I ducked down, hoping Lisa wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t recognize me among the other workers. I reserved my loathing for the Red Guards, sitting on boxes by little fires, taunting the conscripts instead of putting their own shoulders to the work. What were they doing here anyway? Why weren’t they out there, trying to stop the Germans? Easier to torment scarecrows.

Now the father stopped to lean on his spade, clinging to it as if he might otherwise fall over. He had already been an old man when I first met Lisa. From behind him, a guard rose from his box and shoved him with the butt of his rifle between the shoulder blades. The old man lurched forward, throwing his arms wide, and fell. Our women laughed. “Hey, watch your step over there, baryn.” “How do you like being on the other end of the foreman’s stick now, boss?”

“It’s just an old man,” I said.

The woman with the steel-gray fringe called back to me. “Believe me, when we was on the bottom, they pissed on us good and proper.”

Ice weighted the tips of my eyelashes. I brushed it away angrily. “What’s the good in making people suffer? What difference do they make now?”

“You don’t keep feedin’ a bad dog,” said a woman in a brown shawl over her brown coat. “You take it out and shoot it.”

I was losing ground with every word, and soon I would reveal myself to be as Former as the Podharzhevskys. The girl Alya already suspected it. “So that’s what happened to Fluffy,” I said. “Come to think of it, didn’t they have meat at Dining Room 12 yesterday?”

The women laughed and went back to their work, but all the spirit and energy had gone out of me. I imagined Varvara’s scorn. And Zina’s, fighting at the front with Genya. I knew what they would say—that I was too soft to be a revolutionary, too muddleheaded, too individualistic. I hadn’t read enough Marx, didn’t understand the anonymous forces of economics and history. But I hoped pity would not prove a Former virtue, outmoded as parasols. Who would do battle against this inhumanity? I supposed that was why Blok put Christ at the head of the Twelve.

I hacked at the snow alongside Alya. I’d lost the flush of solidarity that had kept me warm. Now the work was just hard and my hands, arms, and back ached. Snow leaked in through my own broken boot. After some time, they fed us bread and tea, and we went back to it, the cold growing denser, clawing at our faces. They couldn’t keep us out here much longer. I had really thought that the revolution would change people, change their very souls. Romantic, I could hear Varvara say.

Maybe they would change, when they had the time and security—this woman with the brown scarf, the girl with the stuffing coming out of her coat. Maybe when they could stop worrying about the Germans, when they had eaten their fill and really understood they were their own masters, they would have time for mercy as well as justice.

42 The Lost Eden

I RETURNED TO THE Poverty Artel after dark, to the incongruity of Mother and Anton sitting together at the table, their heads bowed as if over a missal. Mother coolly corrected his French, while Anton clutched his head and cursed. Over the old divan, a light burned in a red glass before the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin. The place smelled of cabbage—a pot of soup kept warm for me on the little primus stove. I sank onto a chair, too tired even to take off my wet boots. Avdokia knelt to pull them off. A regular little missy again, Varvara had sneered. Yet the familiarity of Avdokia’s care was so comforting… exactly why I shouldn’t allow it. “No, please don’t. I’m eighteen. I think I can pull off my own boots. Everybody has to pull off their own boots now,” I said, louder, for Mother’s sake.

“Marinoushka,” Avdokia chided in her chu-chu-chu voice. “Give this old woman the pleasure of taking care of her baby.” She got my boot off.

I wrestled the muddy thing out of her hand. “What did we fight a revolution for? So you can wait on me on your knees?”

She sighed, sat back on her heels. “You were always such a stubborn child. What should I do—sit by the fire and grow roots like a turnip?”

“We all have to change,” I said. “This is exactly why people hate the bourgeoisie. An old woman on her knees, serving a perfectly healthy young person.”

“People hate the bourgeoisie, period,” my mother said from the table. “They’d rather see an old woman digging ditches. Or sweeping the streets.”

Avdokia sighed, watching me struggle to take my other wet boot off with clumsy, frozen hands. She set a pair of my mother’s embroidered lambskin slippers toes out in front of me, ready to be stepped into. The yeasty smell of this old woman, the velvety feel of her cheek, were as familiar as my own eyelids. She cupped my chin in her gnarled hand, rubbed her nose against mine. “The devil never tires of new ideas.”

She straightened and brought me a bowl of hot cabbage soup. The bowl felt wonderful in my cold hands. She claimed my boots and cleaned them with a page of Pravda. Such levels of irony there. Mother watched me eat as Anton grappled with Apollinaire. “I don’t like ‘with shame you overhear,’” he said, but she wasn’t listening. I saw curiosity, even respect, in her blue eyes. Who was this girl, her daughter? A married girl, a poet, capable of earning a living with her hands? I had lived her life for so long. Now she was having a taste of mine.

Avdokia set my boots by the door on a piece of newspaper and began to sweep the room. “Could you stop that?” Anton snapped. “Babushka. The place is fine.”

“Pigs shouldn’t live in a place this fine,” she muttered, moving dangerously close to Anton’s territory between table and cot, picking things off the floor, dusting them or stacking them, tucking his shoes under his bed.

“Leave those things alone!” He grabbed her armload of balled-up paper, pamphlets, dirty clothes. “Women. Can’t you ever sit still? Just leave things as they are? I’ll never find anything again.”

Mother burst out in silvery laughter, and I had to join in. Anton could never find anything anyway. He spent half his day raking through his haystacks of poems and papers for the lost scrap of an idea. Now he was outnumbered. He cursed us all roundly, then grabbed his coat, cap, and revolver and stalked out, pausing in the door like an actor leaving the stage. “I’m going to go shoot someone now. Perhaps myself. If only the Germans would come and put me out of my misery.”

Two days later, the Soviet voted to accept the German ultimatum. The deal the kaiser offered with his foot on our necks was far harsher than the one Lenin had wanted to sign in January—the one that ideologue Trotsky walked away from, proclaiming, “No war, no peace.”

With the Germans on our doorstep, we had to accept it all. So much for our old demand of “no annexations.” We would cede the Baltics and Poland to the Germans, the Transcaucasus to the Ottomans, and the Ukraine to a puppet government ruled by Berlin. Our borders shrank to the size of old Muscovy, like a heart inside the breast of a dying beast. As for “no indemnifications,” the socialist state owed six billion marks to the kaiser. Not to mention the irony of forced demobilization. We had wanted all along to take apart the machine of war and bring our men home, yet forcible disarmament by a foreign power felt quite different. And more demoralizing still, the workers’ state agreed to stop exporting revolution to the West. No propaganda, no assistance to foreign workers, a complete rout. Trotsky resigned rather than have to go to Brest to sign such an odious declaration.

Still, after four barbaric years of war—exhausted, beaten, truncated, and bankrupt—Russia was finally at peace.

Soon Genya would be home. I imagined him as I sat on my bench at the knitting factory, the pins falling in a clatter and the wool sliding through my fingers. I pictured him home alive, intact, his confidence restored. How I would rush into his arms and kiss him, never let him go. It was high time for Mother to leave the Poverty Artel now that the danger had passed. But it was Anton begging her to stay on another day, and another.

I would return to the flat after work to find her discussing the manuscript with him, cigarette in her hand—she’d started to smoke!—as Avdokia fried potatoes over the primus stove. Eight days earlier none of us would have believed any of it. She’d come to accept me as the woman I was. And I had begun to experience her anew as well, as an independent intellectual. Freed from her overcrowded room on Furshtatskaya Street, she’d been reborn. Her ability to tolerate Anton continued to astonish me. She treated him like a bad-tempered little dog whose outbursts were of no consequence.

That night I worked on three new poems—one about maroon women, one about socks, and a third about the boxed statues in the Summer Garden emerging in spring, not knowing all that had taken place while they’d slept. As I wrote, Anton explained to Mother why the futurist Khlebnikov was the only poet in Russia worth reading now, better than even Mayakovsky. He was just launching into a recitation of “Bo-Beh-O-Bi Sang the Lips” when we heard scrabbling in the lock. Oh, Lord. I threw my pen down and ran to the door. There stood my dear husband, filling the doorway, dirty, exhausted, and grinning, his thick overcoat snow-dusted and smelling of wood smoke. I couldn’t stop kissing him, touching him, his whiskery cheeks, drinking in his smell of hay. In one piece. Thank God he was here.

Zina and Gigo crowded in behind him. “Don’t mind us,” she said, pushing past me.

Anton stood and embraced him, pounded him on the back. “About time, young son. I was about to rent out your corner.”

He kissed me, hugged me in the crook of his arm, laughing, so happy, before noticing Mother at the table, and Avdokia with her mending on the divan. He took in the neatly folded bedding, the washed floor, the emptied ashtray, and stiffened in my arms. He’d never met my mother, nor had she laid eyes on him except from a second-floor window. I should not have let this happen. Not like this, not now. I took a deep breath, but the air in the room seemed to vanish. “Genya, this is my mother, Vera Borisovna. Mother, my husband. Gennady Yurievich Kuriakin.”

She gave a nod—courteous, formal. But the light had gone out in his face, as if he’d stepped into a shadow. He pushed his cap to the back of his head, stalked to the table, and slumped into my vacated chair. Slow rage built in his face. He reached out and drank from the cup of roasted-oat tea sitting before her, finishing it off in a single draught. She pulled away, valiantly trying not to show her disgust.

“She’s been helping Anton. With the Apollinaire,” I added quickly. “She came during the offensive. Just for a few days. Varvara said they might take her hostage.”

Gigo flopped onto the divan next to Avdokia and began to inspect her, clowning, fooling with her mending, touching her scarf, examining her like a chimpanzee would, as if he’d never seen an old woman before.

Genya took off his snow-brushed cap and tossed it onto the table, ran his fingers through his hair. It was cut short now, like a soldier’s. “Enjoying our hospitality, Vera Borisovna?”

Her eyes flashed in panic. “We have been comfortable, thank you.”

“How nice,” he said. He wasn’t a sarcastic man, it didn’t suit him.

I wished Anton would speak up. “Anton invited her to stay on.” But our Mephistopheles just leaned back in his chair watching the scene unfold, head to one side, thin fingers on the tabletop. He would never side with anyone against Genya. Genya glowered at him, then back at my mother. Zina picked up Mother’s karakul hat from a hook by the door, put it on her dirty hair, and posed. “What do you think?” I hadn’t missed her little sharp-chinned face, her spiteful black eyes with their dark circles. As I was sure she hadn’t missed mine. It had given her a chance to work her influence over Genya, in case he might be persuaded to change his mind about me. She glittered with malice as she modeled, holding her hands at fashionable right angles. “Will it do?”

I snatched it off her head, hung it back on the hook. “Don’t do that.”

“Ooh, sensitive,” she snickered.

Mother, still as an ice-encrusted statue atop the Winter Palace, watched Genya, now pacing, anger darkening his pale face as all the chill in her personality returned, freezing the warmth and charm. He opened the stove door, letting smoke into the room, poking it with the stair rod we’d stolen from the front building. His brows pressed on his deep-set eyes, and his wide mouth pinched at the corners. He was about to explode.

“Anton,” I whispered, cutting my eyes toward Genya. Say something.

But Anton rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, breaking the tobacco off each end. Genya reached over and plucked it from his lips, stuck it between his own, lit a straw, and ignited the cigarette with its burning edge. The smell of smoke hung in the air like a warning. He slammed the stove door.

“Genya, can we talk? In the hall?” I asked him. If only I could get him away from his audience, take him in my arms, I knew I could explain. Surely he could understand the danger. His fury was being fed by the presence of spectators. This new swagger and sarcasm must be the spoils of war. Where was my tender Genya?

He crossed his arms, his jutting jaw telling me all as I moved close, speaking low in his ear. His green, fresh smell was the same as always. “So talk.”

“They’ll be gone tomorrow,” I began. “Please. It’s not a big deal.”

He didn’t meet my eyes. His face darkened even more. “I’ve been sleeping in ditches on the snow. I get back to my loving wife and it’s Vera Borisovna. Not to mention the old nanny. You say it’s not a big deal? Anton, what the hell were you thinking?”

Anton raised his hand. “Don’t involve me in your domestic fiascos,” he said, moving onto the cot, where he rolled himself another cigarette to replace the one in Genya’s hand. Mother gazed down at the book of Khlebnikov poems she’d been discussing with Anton, knowing she’d been thrown to the wolves.

I still stood in front of him. “Genya, look at me.”

But his attention was seized by something over my shoulder. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” In one step, he swooped over and scooped up the Virgin of Tikhvin in his huge hand. He gazed down at it with such loathing I thought he might spit on it. He hated religion more than anything. It meant authority, superstition, tradition, ignorance, reaction, and irrationality all rolled into one.

I reached for it, but his smile chilled me as he pulled it away. Eyes narrowed at me, his brow like a ridge, he dropped it to the floor. Its silver frame made a tinny clatter. Gigo and Zina were watching him, fascinated. Then he lifted his enormous boot and crushed the small painted panel. I heard Avdokia’s gasp. I felt as if he’d just crushed my own chest. He kicked the shattered thing against the wall, and the pieces came tumbling out of the frame. “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Bringing something like that in here. You think this is a joke?”

Avdokia rushed in to salvage it, heedless of danger, gathering up the smashed remains, weeping and hissing curses at him. “Enemy Satan! Depart from us a hundred, a thousand versts…” And he did look, if not satanic, then like some elemental chthonic power coming up from the dark halls of the earth. “May he know every grief and woe…”

“Don’t you curse me, old witch,” he said and took a step toward her.

I picked up the stair rod and slashed through the air with it as if it were a saber. How I wanted to hit him with it, to beat it over his back until it broke. “Don’t you go near her!” I shouted at him. “Who are you? Where’s Genya? What did you do with him?”

I helped my weeping nanny stand, the broken pieces of the icon in her apron’s skirt. Zina held her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. I brandished the rod in her direction and she stopped. My mother stood, picked up her carpetbag, and began numbly collecting her things. “We’re leaving,” she said. Outside the windows, the wind howled, the snow in the courtyard whirled but Mother and Avdokia put on their coats. Avdokia snatched her sewing basket away from Gigo. “I would not wish to spend a night under the same roof as you, monsieur,” Mother said.

“You can’t leave,” I said. “Not in that storm. And it’s late—the trams have stopped running.”

“Did they think of that when they kicked you out?” Genya said to me, throwing himself into the chair. “Pitched you right to the curb in the middle of the night? Soldiers were shooting. Did they care? No. The question is, who are you, Marina? Revolutionary poet or…” He tipped his chin at my terrified mother.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Zina piped up. “Right from the beginning, she came waltzing in with that fancy coat she used to wear—”

“Want me to part your hair for you?” I asked her. My mother was stuffing her things into her carpetbag. Gigo was pulling things out as she put them in, clowning around.

“She killed your brother. You forgive her for that?” Genya said. “Threw Seryozha to the dogs.”

Mother stood up straight, her face so pale I thought she would faint.

“And now you’re hiding her from proletarian justice, in my house!” He jumped up and crossed to the door in two long strides, opened it wide. Immediately the air from the icy hall emptied the warmth from the room. “Allow me!” He was playing it for theater, for Gigo and Zina. “Too cold for you, Vera Borisovna? I’m sorry. But really, it’s time to go.”

Was I going mad? She and Avdokia were all the family I had left—couldn’t he understand that? Couldn’t he find one shred of pity? I grabbed Mother’s hairbrush out of Gigo’s hand and put it into her bag. “I’m leaving, too. I can’t stay here with this impersonator. Let me know when Genya comes back.”

He laughed, so painfully. “Oh, so it’s my fault! How quickly we forget.”

Mother and Avdokia stood with their coats on, waiting for me to get out of the way so they could make a run for it.

He turned away from us all, sat in his chair again, his arms folded. “Go on then.” Daring me.

I grabbed my coat, my thick scarf, wriggled my feet into my boots, sobbing, hoping he would see what he was doing, beg me to stay as he had begged me to marry him only eight days ago. But as he sat at the table with his back to us, his shoulders like the fortification of a city, I knew he could not relent. “Anton?”

Anton lay on his cot, spinning the cylinder of his revolver, mortified at such naked displays of personal drama, looking like he was going to shoot someone—or himself. Gigo lay on the divan like an odalisque, while Zina had slipped into my vacated chair—ready to replace me. My home, my life. Why was this happening?

Yet I buttoned my coat, the wind roaring outside, and inside my head. “Neither of us wants this,” I said to him but he didn’t turn around. It had all gone too far. “Anton, give me your gun.” That made Genya glance over at me.

“What for?” Anton asked.

It would be a long trip across the city in the storm. Nobody was offering to walk us, and I wasn’t about to ask. “For me,” I said.

Mother waited by the door, tense as a cat, while Avdokia glared at Genya as if he were Beelzebub in a tattered coat.

Anton glanced questioningly at his brooding pal. “You really going to let her go? After all this crap I’ve been forced to listen to all this time?”

He actually understood how ridiculous Genya was being, but Genya wouldn’t even return his gaze, just stared moodily into the stove.

“Oh, hell.” Anton brought me the weapon. “If you need to fire it, you pull this back”—he showed me a catch at the butt end of the gun—“then fire. And if you do have to use it, keep firing, and don’t stop until it’s empty.” He reluctantly handed it over, the metal warm from his playing with it, and the weight of it, the ugly greasiness, surprised and revolted me.

Anton was actually being nicer than Genya—the world had gone crazy! I stuffed the gun into my coat pocket. Genya still hadn’t turned around. Mother looked frail and exhausted by my unseemly life in all its squalor. I wondered whether she would even stand the walk home. Home? Had I actually thought that? This was home, the Poverty Artel, the poets, Genya. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. The cards had turned again. Do you have to have everything? I heard Mina saying. But I was leaving my husband with only the rustle of the clothes on my back and the howl of the storm for a farewell. We walked down the slick stairs of the Grivtsova tenement, and out into the night.