The Revolution of Marina M.

43 The Islands

HE WHO DOES NOT work, does not eat.

The knitting factory closed shortly after the Soviet accepted the German terms—an event nothing short of apocalyptic. I arrived in the morning as I always did to find the rest of the girls standing in the courtyard like so many stunned oxen, the metal door rolled down and locked tight.

“Do you think he’s been arrested?” a girl asked.

“That skunk, that fat burzhui,” said pug-nosed Olga, their ringleader, and gave the door an enormous kick. “He’s moved down to Moscow like the rest of the rats.” Though the danger of the German invasion was over, the Soviet had left anyway, sneaking out in the middle of the night like tenants behind on their rent.

The weight of what had happened hit me. “No war, no soldiers,” I explained to my little comrades. “No army, no contracts. No money, no socks.”

“Bastard,” said Olga. “There’s capitalism for you.”

“We’re leaving anyway,” said one of the younger girls. “Mama’s got sisters in Kiev. They say there’s food down there.”

We kissed each other goodbye like school chums before summer break, and left the courtyard in dejected groups of two and three.

Back at Furshtatskaya Street, I tried every trick I could think of to get into the Red Guard’s room, but no such luck. His wife, so-called, was always in there, and she distrusted me from the start. There was no trace of Father’s supposed support. I kept waiting for him to make an appearance, steeling myself for the explosion that was sure to follow, but he never surfaced. Perhaps he’d gone deeper underground. Or maybe Mother had been lying all along.

After the knitting factory closed, I haunted the labor exchange, but they were only looking for the most vital, skilled professionals—obstetrical nurses and engineers. Mostly I wandered around avoiding the apartment, stopping in at Wolf’s and reading the poetry I couldn’t afford to buy anymore. I wanted to know what poets were saying about the revolution, whether Okno had appeared and if I’d been included. And, yes, I was hoping to run into Genya. Rehearsing what I would say to him. Yet I could not bring myself to go to the Poverty Artel to beg him to rethink his actions, beg him to let us start over.

I drifted over to Znamenskaya Square, scene of so many rousing and traumatic events of the previous year. The train station was a kicked-over anthill. Half of Petrograd seemed to be trying to get on trains for the south or Moscow or back to the villages. A porter I talked to had been there for the evacuation of the Soviet. They’d had trains waiting on sidings a half mile out—that’s why no one saw them. “I carried stuff out there all night,” he said. “Desks, chairs, pictures. Bathtubs. Wives. Mistresses.”

I stood under the clock, watching people rush by me like a run of salmon around a rock. I felt becalmed, invisible. A great migration out of the city was taking place and like a lone goose on a lake, I’d been left behind. The concourse, once a showpiece, had grown impossibly grimy, the floor black as if it had been painted, the stuccowork cast in high relief, each medallion picked out by a heavy coat of soot.

Suddenly, a woman with three small children tugged at my sleeve. “Devushka, can you help us?” The woman was young, pretty—well dressed, I noticed—but harried. Her hair was coming down. “I need to find my husband. Could you stay with the children and our bags?”

I was evidently still identifiable as bourgeois, a girl who would be trustworthy and sympathetic, a strong-looking girl who was nevertheless one of us. Nasha. I sat on their luggage, holding the baby—a novel experience as I’d never so much as touched one before. It was heavy and made mewling sounds, which fortunately never broke into out-and-out bawling. I jiggled it as the oldest child, a boy, told me all about trains, especially the one they were taking to Moscow, the Nikolaevsky Express. He didn’t know that it was the very train upon which Anna Karenina met Vronsky, the train under which she’d thrown herself. “You never heard of Tolstoy?”

He shook his solemn head. “Papa works for the Commissariat.” More desertion. I dandled the baby and couldn’t help wondering what Genya’s and my child would have looked like. I’d left all my things back at the Poverty Artel—my books, my brother’s silhouettes. I imagined going back to retrieve them, seeing if there could be some reconciliation between us. But we were both so terribly stubborn. The little girl, around four, in a puff-sleeved coat and a little tam, sat next to me with her soft-bodied doll and amused herself by kissing it and shaking it ferociously by turns. How like life.

At last, the woman returned with the husband and their tickets. The man asked if I would accompany them to the platform to keep an eye on the children and the porter. I received a twenty-ruble tip for my efforts, and it gave me the idea to see if there was more work in it. I set myself up as a porter, babysitter, runner after lost items or people, and cleared nearly fifty rubles that day. And spent it all on a packet of meat on the way home. Sure that there was a new career in this for me, I returned to the station for several days running, but never made as much money again. However, I was propositioned by three pimps and threatened by a porter who thought I was taking business away from him.

I had to find work. I was grateful that I still had a few more days on my monthly ration cards, but come March, those cod-liver pancakes would seem like a feast. There were only so many things Avdokia could sell in the shadows. I felt like a drunk pitched out into the street by the tavern keeper only to be run over by a cart. My brief marriage was over, the poets’ circle closed against me. My revolutionary life had ended. There was nothing left but two old women and a flat full of furniture that nobody wanted except to chop up for firewood.

In the overstuffed boudoir, I ate a meager dinner with my mother and nanny—pancakes consisting of shredded frozen potatoes fried in a malodorous substance that was mostly cod-liver oil, all I could find on the black market. Mother was depressed, her friends the Gromitskys had had a visit from the Cheka the night before. “Everything confiscated. They only left them the clothes on their backs and the bed. Now, tell me, what does the worker need a Venetian mirror for? Dresses by Worth—can you imagine? Trotting around on some commissar’s mistress, no doubt.” I choked down the meal and thought of the future, my stomach bubbling like a cauldron. Mother pushed her plate away, unable to eat any more. She covered her mouth with the heel of her hand and looked away. All the brightness I’d seen in her at the Artel had faded. There was no reason for us to live like this when I had a diamond threaded into the seam of my slip. If this wasn’t the time to sell it, what would be? When we were peeling the paint off the walls with our fingernails and eating it? Although the idea of walking all the way up to the lawless outskirts of the city to sell such a valuable item was sobering. “Don’t cry,” I said, rinsing the oily taste of cod liver out of my teeth with tea. “I think I have a plan.”

I woke at first light to find Avdokia already up, water boiled, tea and kasha made, warm water in the washstand—as if she had read my mind. Now that I’d decided, I was impatient to get it over with. I washed my face and hands cursorily, ate standing up, bundled myself up in two wool dresses, and pulled Anton’s gun from the bureau drawer. My nanny’s birdlike little eyes caught the motion, though I kept my back to her. “Marinoushka, what are you up to?” she whispered, squinting at me, trying not to waken Mother, who’d stayed up late reading The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky.

I reached up under my clothes and unfastened the diamond stickpin from my slip. I turned it so it caught the lamplight. Canary sparks lit the room. The old woman regarded me with alarm. “Where did you get that?”

“Kolya. He told me about a market on Kamenny Island. Said if we ever needed money I should go up there.” I pinned the diamond back under my clothes, donned my coat, tucked my shawl in tight, and put the revolver in my pocket.

She crossed me and herself and pressed a piece of wood into my hand—the light wood, the torn edge. I guessed by feel what it was. “Be careful,” she said, but she didn’t say “Don’t go,” as she might have earlier. We had all changed, even the unchangeable Avdokia.

Preobrazhenskaya Square and its sad market emerged and dissolved in the milky fog. I followed the frozen Kanavka, the gold-touched rails of the Summer Garden. Inside those famous fences lay the paths where I’d walked with Genya so long ago. Now it lay in deep snow, the imperial statues shivering in their winter boxes, like vertical coffins. How we’d laughed as Diana had disapproved of our young love. The memory was a sharp pain in my side, as if I’d impaled myself on one of the railing’s spear points. The Kanavka reminded me of the Mallarmé poem about a swan trapped in the ice, that small white agony. Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui… Would that be me, left behind, alone and abandoned, trapped in these beautiful ruins?

Damp clung to my face, crystallizing into ice as I emerged onto the Neva, the southern end of the Troitsky Bridge with its style moderne tramline down the center. As I crossed, threadbare people eyed me and each other with distrust, each of us locked into our own loneliness. The bridge seemed interminably long, as if it were telescoping outward as I walked. For a moment, I panicked, wondering if I had fallen into some weird pocket of reality. My mother and her spiritualist cronies believed that there were parallel planes to this world—other lives, other levels. What if I had entered one? Or perhaps I was caught on a bridge forever suspended between the two banks. I might become a legendary ghost, seen from time to time through the fog of a tram window.

With relief I saw the outline of the Peter and Paul Fortress emerging, its golden needle shrouded in white. Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned there, and the anarchist philosopher Kropotkin, even Trotsky himself, silver-tongued and foolishly believing his own propaganda. Now it held tsarist officers and Kadet ministers and a raft of speculators, whose ranks I was about to join.

A little ways on, the great wooden wreck of the Cirque Moderne loomed. Were they so long ago, those electrifying days when SRs and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks all mounted the same stage, part of the same movement? Now all I could think was how long it would take to burn in a small bourgeoika tin stove. People were destroying the city for firewood—fences, banisters, whole houses. The Bolsheviks had banned any but official cutting parties going out to the forests above the city, making criminals of us all.

My broken boot had rubbed a good-size blister into my left foot. No one strolled idly along the wide boulevard of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect anymore. Why would they? The shops were all closed. There was a time you might have walked halfway across the city just to meet someone for hot chocolate. Now you thought of your pitiful rations, your hoarded strength, your precious boot leather, like an old maid counting kopeks in a tea shop.

A man emerged from the fog, a small man with burning dark eyes, a dirty fur collar on his coat. “Hey, chicken,” he said. “Sweetie pie.”

I felt for Anton’s gun in my pocket. I didn’t know if I could really shoot someone. The man looked so sad, so desperate, his dark eyes glittering hot. He had a fever, maybe consumption, maybe the onset of typhus, which was beginning to spread in the city. I began to walk faster but he was following me. “Thirty rubles,” he called out. “Queen of my dreams.” Thirty rubles—it was a good price, when women would lift their skirts for half a loaf of bread. I walked faster. “Forty, princess of my heart,” he said. “Please, sweetness, I’m dying.” He grabbed my arm.

I pulled out the revolver and pointed it at the bridge of his nose, his great shining eyes. “Please,” he whispered. “Shoot me. For God’s sake, I can’t live like this anymore.”

Someday soon I might be as desperate as this man, as sick and crazy. I lowered the gun. “I heard something the other day,” I told him, pocketing the gun. “Want to hear it?”

“Why not?” he said.

In the middle of the white fog, with no one else around, I began to recite a Blok poem for him, holding his sleeve as he was holding mine.

Blok understood this kind of despair, understood it very well, perhaps better than the two of us standing there. I let the man go, and he vanished into the fog.

Around midmorning, I crossed the last bridge into the park-swathed elegance of Kamenny Island, the old playground for affluent Petersburg. What absolute silence. Frost painted every contorted tree limb and traced the railings in white. Somewhere in the fog, the dachas of the upper nobility lay empty. Here the Soviet government planned a utopia of workers’ clubs, hospitals, and old-age homes. But there was no trace of the new purpose, nor remainder of the old.

In places, the snow rose to my knees and higher. It was difficult to keep to the road. My nerves were tattered, like a sweater that moths had gotten into. If this trip ended in failure, I couldn’t imagine how weary the return journey would be. Maybe I could find the man with typhus and go home with him. But no—I would find this Arkady somehow. Yet if I asked the wrong person now, I could find myself in a Cheka cell by nightfall. Who would tell Mother and Avdokia? I couldn’t put them through that.

I found it hard to believe a market thrived up here. All I could see was acre after acre of white parkland fading into the fog. There was no one to even ask the time of day. I came to a crossroads. If there was any semblance of a market, it would either have to be east, at the old Church of St. John the Baptist, or west, out near the Kamennoostrovsky Theater. Like everyone else in Petrograd, I was trying to spare my boots, and the church was closer. I bet on St. John.

I kept to the prospect as best I could, until finally the church’s rosy brick bled through the mist like a watered pastel. In the little square, the shadowy shapes of human beings appeared, a small silent Kabuki of sinister figures with sleds at their feet, ropes in their gloved hands. I let my eyes run over the men with the sledges, looking for someone to approach. But who? How to choose? One man’s solidity somehow reminded me of Kolya’s men, and on impulse I approached him.

“I’m looking for Arkady,” I said, my breath blending into the mist.

A bright pair of Kirghiz eyes stared out from under a fur hat. “The Archangel?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s the one.”

“Or the Antichrist?” He grinned, his leathery face breaking into jagged lines.

Was he playing with me? “It’s pretty much the same, Uncle, now isn’t it?”

He shifted from foot to foot, stamping to keep them warm. “Yes, it’s all the same. Yes, you’re right about that one.”

“So where is he?” I tried again.

“You should pray,” he said, and nodded with his bearded chin to the church. “God knows everything.”

Arkady was in the church. I didn’t like the idea. What happened out here would be visible at least to someone, but in that ancient darkness, I could disappear like Alice’s rabbit. Yet I had come up here for a purpose—what else could I do? I was not about to leave now. The eyes of the men burned holes in my back as I approached the entrance.

Inside, the air was even colder, if that was possible. Dutch Gothic beams and pillars arched, high and gloomy, like the trees of an ancient forest. The church smelled of centuries of incense and damp. A couple of old women stood meekly before a tall bent priest and sang prayers in surprisingly lovely voices. A votive flame burned before the icon of St. John, stripped of its frame, which had no doubt been silver or gold. The flame wasn’t from a candle but rather some sort of rancid fat in a jar. It smoked horribly. The iconostasis had also been stripped of its gold cladding but otherwise had been left miraculously intact. I crossed myself and bowed. Mother of God, please let this Arkady be here, if not for my sake, then for my mother and Avdokia. And get me home safely.

I felt I was being watched, that subtle pressure of another’s gaze, but I didn’t see anyone besides the old babas and the priest. Then I noticed that one of the side doors in the iconostasis was open, just a crack. Archangel Gabriel’s door, Gabriel the Messenger, the Angel of Death in Exodus. I could see the slightest movement of someone watching from behind it, blocking the light. The Archangel? Or the Antichrist? I was no great believer, but my neck prickled as I walked toward that opening, hugging the shadows, giving the worshippers a wide berth, my hand on the butt of the heavy revolver. Nudging the door just a crack more, I held my breath and slipped inside the great altar screen.

Dark. Movement up high. Birds. I heard a step on the stone floor.

“Who are you?” A quick voice, a man’s, low but not whispering.

“I’m looking for Arkady,” I said. I could hear only breathing in the dark, a bit of thready wheeze. On the other side of the iconostasis, the pure high voices of the old women rose. “A friend sent me.” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the silhouette of a man and smelled… cooked meat. Now I knew I was in the right place, for who but speculators would have meat in our starving city?

“What friend?” came the voice.

“Nikolai Shurov,” I said.

The scritch of a match revealed the profile of a man with a salt-and-pepper moustache and heavy black eyebrows. He lit a lantern and I could barely conceal my horror at the sight of the altar being used as a picnic table for the lamp and a greasy wad of papers that smelled like sausage. It was like watching Genya trample the Virgin of Tikhvin, my luck breaking in a thousand pieces. “Are you Arkady?”

He stuck out his lower lip, shook his head. “What do you have?”

My panic redoubled. “I’m only talking to Arkady,” I said, trying to sound tough, my voice strange against the ringing crystal tones of the babas. I wondered if the priest was in on it, too. “So who are you, anyway—St. Peter at the gates?”

He waggled his finger in front of my nose. “You’d better watch that mouth up here.” He picked up the lantern. “Come with me.”

Every instinct shouted at me to turn around and flee while I could. But it was too late for instinct. I followed him through a door into the sacristy, smelling of ancient incense and dirty hair, and out the back of the church into the snow.

44 The Archangel

I STAYED CLOSE BEHIND my surly guide and tried to walk in his footprints, sinking into the snow, struggling to keep up. I didn’t trust him. He knew I possessed something valuable. Why pay for it when he could rob me and leave me up here to freeze? Kolya, what have you gotten me into? I wanted to keen aloud like a terrified child, but instead I gripped the handle of Anton’s gun, hoping it worked, hoping there would be enough time to use it.

To my relief, we came upon a path of sorts, churned by many boots. I did my best to memorize the spot so I might find it again if I needed to flee. Now a long shedlike building coalesced in the fog. It must have been used to service one of the great dachas. A bundled man emerged from a small door. It closed behind him, and he marched off into the park. Soon my churlish Virgil pounded on its peeling gray wood, three long blows. A small bowlegged man let us in, his quick eyes taking my measure.

Servants’ quarters—for gardeners, cooks—had been converted into a kind of barracks. Men sat in the makeshift clubhouse playing cards, smoking, and eating. I could smell their cooked meat, and it made me wolfish with hunger. They glanced at me in rough disinterest. I gave up clutching the pistol in my pocket lest it draw their attention. The black-browed man led me to a door, knocked, opened it, stepped aside like a butler—or a jailer—and waved me in.

On a threadbare divan with stuffing coming out of the arms lay a handsome man of around fifty, though it could be sixty—I wasn’t much of a judge of old people. He was languid and long, with untrimmed pale hair and eyebrows, a long Swedish face with sloped nose and eyes of brightest blue, intent upon a web of string in his hands. I watched, fascinated by fingers that could move so deftly from cradle to diamonds to fish. “So?” he said, his voice dry, unimpressed.

“Shurov sent her,” said the man with the black eyebrows.

“Interesting.” His eyes flicked from my brown proletarian shawl to my wet and broken boots. “Leave her.”

My guide closed the door behind him. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit in one of the hard chairs dotting the room. I pushed the shawl off my head, let it lie on my shoulders. It was so warm here, bliss. I removed my dirty gloves, too, and rubbed my hands, wishing I could take my boots off and let them dry by the stove. My feet ached, and I wondered if they were frostbitten.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“Arkady, I guess.” I hoped I sounded nonchalant.

“I am Baron Arkady von Princip,” he said, looking only at the shifting figures between his hands.

Von Princip. I had read all about him in the nonparty papers, him and his gang. Responsible for outrageous daylight robberies and armed assaults, gun battles with Red Guards, the lurid stuff of our knitting-factory fantasies. The girls followed the stories of his bold attacks as if they were the exploits of some folktale hero.

Arkady’s clever hands turned the fox into a purse and then into a throne. “You have something for me?”

I turned my back, then unbuttoned my coat and the bodice beneath it to unpin the canary diamond. Warm from the heat of my body, it flashed in my hand. Well, Kolya, farewell… sentiment was history. I closed my dress and turned back to him, holding out the jewel in the palm of my hand the way you feed sugar to a horse so it doesn’t bite your fingers. But he didn’t reach for it, just transformed the string throne into a broom. “Very nice,” he said, not even looking. “I won’t ask how you came to receive such a fine offering from our young Shurov. I’m sure whatever you did for it, it was quite impressive.”

I didn’t think I could blush anymore. But there was no mistaking the hot tingle in my cheeks. I could see Arkady, lying there on the divan like a lizard that lived in the dark, was a man who enjoyed making people uncomfortable. He wore a tweed jacket and a knitted scarf and had a hole in his sock. Couldn’t the prince of thieves afford a new one? I dropped my hand with the offered pin.

“It’s odd, don’t you agree? That you take this from Shurov and sell it to me?” he said. “Why didn’t he just give you the money? Or is that too indecorous? Oh, youth. Tell me your name, girl.”

I knew I should lie, but something perverse in me—pride?—refused to be cowed, even for my own sake. “Makarova,” I said. “Marina Dmitrievna.”

“Dmitry Makarov.” He looked up at me now, arched one pale eyebrow.

“It’s a common name,” I said.

He regarded me wearily, as if he could see everything about me, who I was and where I came from and even what would happen to me after I left. The men in the hall were arguing, and Arkady cocked his head to listen. Evidently it was nothing that bothered him, for he went back to his string. “I know you didn’t come here just to sell me that little trinket.”

I tried to imagine what he was getting at. “Kolya said to ask for you. He said it was worth ten thousand.”

The old man shook his head, a faint smile creasing his thin, bloodless lips. “You were curious. Who is this Arkady fellow? Perhaps you wanted to hear a bit more about the fate of your elusive friend Shurov.” His strange gaze—you couldn’t feel a human being behind it. It was more like a blue-eyed tiger’s. “Perhaps your friend wanted us to meet. And this is your letter of introduction.”

I shuddered. I swore to myself I’d tell Varvara about this whole headquarters of thieves as soon as I made it back to the Petersburg side of the Neva.

“Would you like to know where our friend is at this very moment?” he asked.

“He’s in the south,” I said, and my lips were as dry as a Crimean wind. “He had a load of art. Three sledges’ worth.”

Arkady reached with his teeth to pull a length of string and loop it over his curled thumbs. “What would you say if I told you he was here in Petrograd?”

My heart dropped like a statue from a palace rooftop. Breaking like shattered plaster on the stones of a public square.

The old man nodded. “You care for him a great deal. No, actually, I put him and his goods on a train to Finland six weeks ago. He was headed to Stockholm. And from there, Paris—if he can make it through the lines.”

Was this also a lie? Some sort of test? I sensed he was telling the truth now. Kolya had gone six weeks ago. But he’d promised he would never leave the country without me. I didn’t want the languid von Princip to see me cry. I could feel him watching me, enjoying his little game. I bent down to brush an imaginary lump of snow from my broken boot, examined the sole, the awful crack. I pressed the bridge of my nose, pulled hard on my forelock.

Von Princip wove a string crown, held it at arm’s length, and squinted one eye, crowning me with it. Then he pulled it off his fingers and swung his legs over the edge of the divan, sitting up. “What do you do for a living, Makarova? Teach dancing? Give French lessons to pharmacists?”

“I work in a factory,” I said defiantly.

A smile broke slowly across his face, like a crack moving through glass. “Ah, the little proletarian. No need to get defensive. I’m quite fond of the Bolsheviks, you know. After all, they’ve made all this possible.” He rose from the divan and went to his desk, started rooting in the drawer. “Before the revolution I was only a criminal. Now I’m a regular tycoon.”

I imagined the possibilities of panic and scarcity. I knew why Kolya did it—for the excitement, the gambler’s thrill. Some spectacular bit of cleverness, perhaps gulling the uninformed but also helping when he could, that’s what he loved. More than the money. And what did this man love? “There’s nothing shameful in working for a living,” I said.

“Oh, Makarova,” said Arkady. “You’re no proletarian.” He put his bony hand on my shoulder. I was surprised that it didn’t repulse me. “You’re an adventurer. Just like your little friend Shurov.” His voice was dry, precise, raspy, insistent. “Politically. Personally. Probably sexually, too.” He was watching me with a half smile. What was he looking for? Shame? Agreement? I hadn’t lived with Anton all these months to be baited so easily. There was a knock on the door. Arkady didn’t answer it. “You weren’t born to run a lathe or whatever you do at your factory.”

Adventurers. Was that what we were, Kolya and I? Perhaps. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of labeling me. “Maybe I’m a good lathe operator. Maybe it’s my ultimate dream. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

Arkady held up the diamond.

I opened my hand, not quite believing it wasn’t still in my palm. He turned the pin in his fingers, letting the lamp shatter its spectrum into yellow shards. He closed his other fist over it, opened his hands, and the pin was gone. “Another girl would have brought someone. But not you. You’re frightened, but your curiosity is stronger.” Watching my face the way a boatman scans a shore. He was standing right next to me, and I could smell wormwood, dark and a bit antiseptic, and camphor, like the church. “Hiding this all those weeks.” The pin was back in his fingers and he held it before my face. “It must have burned quite a hole in your slip, knowing you could have ten thousand rubles any time you liked. Biding your time. Consider this before you tell me you don’t play games. You have a bit of the criminal in you, Makarova. More than a little, I would say. You like secrets. You like knowing more than most people.”

“But I don’t rob them.”

“Ostorozhno,” he said, waving a finger in the air between us. Careful. “Remember, if you’re alive, it’s only by my pleasure. I could strangle you right now, throw you out in the snow, and no one would lift an eyebrow.”

I nodded, a very tiny nod. Felt the weight of the gun in my pocket.

“Though at this moment, I prefer you alive.” He pursed his lips in a coquette’s moue, which on his gaunt face was laughably incongruous. “But I won’t have my profession maligned. Without the criminal, how would people live? How much meat do you think would be sold in Petrograd? Or oil or grain? The Soviet can’t keep it on the trains long enough.” He stood next to the window in his socks, gazing out at the milky sky, the gaunt trees. “Every region takes its share, and poor Petrograd’s the end of the line. As simple as that. Without us, the city would starve.” He threaded the diamond stickpin through the lapel of his jacket and poured himself a glass of vodka from a tray on the table, poured another and held it out to me. Standing, he was tall and rather elegant in an untidy way. “Never underestimate the genius of crime. We find a way when there is no way.”

I knew I shouldn’t drink with him. It implied some kind of agreement. But to what was I agreeing? Hesitating a moment, I drank. The vodka burned my empty stomach.

“I’ll give you five thousand plus a can of cooking oil, ten pounds of good wheat flour, four of meat. And some sugar.”

My stomach rumbled. Not vobla, that bony fish, our “Soviet ham,” but something that once walked on four legs… and wheat flour… sugar, when had anyone last seen that? And cooking oil. No more of those bizarre substitutes—cod-liver or castor oil or liquids that didn’t seem to be oil at all. I wouldn’t be able to find such an offer of real food again, even with ten thousand rubles in my pocket. By comparison, money was nothing, birdseed, a shake of salt, though that, too, was hard to find.

Arkady put on a pair of leather slippers and went out into the hall, leaving me in his makeshift salon. On a wide, ugly desk dating from the era of Nikolas I lay piles of ragged papers, lists of abbreviations, and numbers scribbled on the scraps. I held one up. The baron had very small handwriting, spiked, Gothic. All in a sort of code. I considered taking a sheet and folding it into my pocket as insurance against a rainy day, but I put it down again. I suspected this, too, might be some kind of test. I turned to the stove to warm my feet and hands.

The baron returned. He pressed a thick wad of banknotes into my hand, like a paper brick. “Here’s the five.” I didn’t count it, only turned away and tucked the bills into my bodice, packing them around my ribs. When I turned back, he was studying me, unblinking, long fingers pressed to his lips. “I start to see what our friend saw in you, Makarova.” He made that terrifying moue again, contorting his bony face in a whore’s pout. “But don’t mistake my affability for idiocy. I might have something for you in a day or two. I’ll be in touch.”

45 The Errand

NO WAY TO HAVE something in these hungry days without the world knowing about it and hating you for it. When Avdokia let me in, I smelled incense—Master Vsevolod must have been there. Even though Mother no longer had tea and mille-feuilles to offer him, I was pleased to discover that it was actually a friendship. I had assumed the worst about him—unfairly, as it turned out.

Avdokia crowed as I dropped my heavy prizes on the table, the meat, the oil, the flour, which I’d carried home most of the way on my back, fully prepared to shoot anyone who got near me. She sifted the silky flour between thumb and forefinger. “Wheat flour! Theotokos be praised.”

Mother said nothing. She’d turned inward again since our ejection from Grivtsova Alley. The fight with Genya, the attack on the Virgin, the terrifying walk back to the flat through the storm had snuffed out her time with Anton like a lamp at bedtime. Avdokia volunteered to brave the kitchen to cook the meat. She would be better able to withstand the catty remarks of women trying to guess where that delicacy had come from than I would. Envy ran thick as cold oil in the collectivized flat. Mother buried herself in her Blavatsky, and I thought about Kolya and what he was doing with the frightening, intriguing man whose company I’d just left.

Later, as we ate our heavenly dinner, real wheat pancakes and fresh meat, my nanny and I plotted what to do with the money and the rest of the food. We decided we would first buy a small load of firewood. Avdokia knew a woman who knew a man in the Haymarket who had a source. “We’ll trade for a bit of the flour.” But how to get the wood back here? If only I had a little sled… just a board with wooden runners and a rope to pull it with.

Mother cried out when I broke apart a drawer of the chifforobe using my hands and feet. “That was a wedding gift from my grandmother,” she sighed.

I didn’t bother looking for tools. Even in the old days, we never had any. We’d used other people as our tools—plumbers and shoemakers and tinkers and tailors, the dvornik. And now we were paying for it. No awl, no hammer, no ax—we were little better than cavemen. These days tools were rarer than radium. Though nails were easy. Every bit of wood came with some—all you had to do was burn it. Everyone’s bourgeoika stove was full of them. Maybe I should look for a hatchet while we still had the money.

I emptied the bullets from Anton’s gun and used the butt to hammer the runners to the bottom of the drawer’s face using nails from the stove. Soon I’d fashioned a crude sled, no worse than many I’d seen in town. I punched two holes in the walnut slab and threaded a drapery cord through for a strap.

“Barbarians.” Mother turned away, unable to watch the destruction of the beautiful armoire.

“Rich barbarians,” I said. “And soon to be warm ones.”

In the morning, we measured flour into a sack that Avdokia had sewed from a pair of Mother’s underwear and hung from my belt inside my coat, pulling on it to make sure it wouldn’t break loose under a pickpocket’s hands. “Make sure the wood’s not wet,” Avdokia said. “And don’t settle for less than a pood. You should hardly be able to lift it.”

“Marina, don’t go.” Mother was anxious again. She’d started rubbing her knuckles, knitting her hands, as she’d been doing after Seryozha’s death. “Stay home today. There are dark entities around you.”

That was all I needed to hear before going out on this little mission. I exchanged glances with Avdokia. She walked me to the door, made the sign of the cross over me. “God have mercy… maybe I should come with you. I’d make a better bargain.”

“You stay with her.”

With the gun snug in my pocket, I descended the stairs to Furshtatskaya Street. I felt like a character from Dumas in seven-league boots. So glad to be out of the flat and Mother’s aura of doom. The air seemed suddenly warmer, the fog less icy. Perhaps it was just the good dinner last night and a breakfast of fresh eggs. I had oil, meat, and soap, flour to trade, money hidden behind the baseboards. No Genya, no Kolya, but I’d survived, and spring was coming soon. A sudden feeling of well-being seized me. I strode down the street like a bogatyr. Life would return. Maybe for me, too.

Now that I was eating regularly, I felt better than I had in a long time and the city seemed more beautiful to me. Occasionally sunshine broke out and glinted on the icicles, which loosened from the rooftops and dropped like spear points from the sky to burst on the pavement. You could be killed if you weren’t careful. Yes, spring arrived with the retorts like gunfire from the Neva as the ice began to break. I was writing again, three, four poems a day, the straitjacket of my soul broken loose.

Strolling along Sergievskaya, not far from the Krestovskys’, I was startled by an enormous form at the periphery of my vision. A huge horse—black, and shaggy. My first thought—Kolya! But no. In the high driver’s seat was the wizened little man who’d kept the door at Arkady’s barracks. Yet the horse was the same as those in the courtyard that day on the English Embankment, a giant black feather-footed beast, powerful, beautiful, and well-fed when all Petrograd horses were either bags of living bones or already wrapped in paper, being sold in dark stairwells. Who but criminals could feed horses like these now?

“He wants to see you,” the little man said. He didn’t open his mouth much when he talked, like people from the far north.

“What for?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

There are points in one’s life where it’s possible to turn back, and we know them when they come, even when we don’t choose to take that option. Man is a curious and stubborn creature, and I was possessed of both qualities in full. So instead of running for my life, I took a seat behind the little man, who whipped up the giant horse. It surged off—my God! It had the energy to trot when most of the humans around us barely had the strength to stand. We raced to the river, crossing at the Liteiny Bridge, clods of softening snow thumping against the front of the sled, the freshening wind splashing my face. Gaunt pedestrians watched us hungrily, wishing they could ride, wishing they were as fat as the horse, wishing they could carve the horse up with their little knives right there and then. We moved across like royalty. It had been so long since I’d ridden anything other than an overcrowded tram.

On the Vyborg side, we passed the great factories, empty now after the evacuations. Broken windows, sagging gates. Ericsson, Nobel, Arsenal—stinking belching brawny plants now silent as dead mammoths. The workers’ tenements looked colder and shabbier than ever, the streets full of debris. Workers with no work had gone back to their villages. If one needed more proof that Petrograd was dying, the fact was laid bare up here. How would the Bolsheviks ever breathe life back into this devastation?

We sped on through the industrial belt and emerged in the countryside. The sky had brightened, the sun threatening to break through. I had never been so far out on the Vyborg side, had only seen it from train windows, and never in winter. The horse thundered through little-used lanes between open fields, and I remembered another sleigh ride, lilac light on the snow… it seemed like a dream now. Or maybe this was the dream. The sweet cast of the warming air on the weary, sodden drifts.

We pulled up before a greenhouse, the glass obscured by steam, green things growing inside. The little man got down from his high seat. Funny to see such a shrimp driving a sleigh—Petersburg coachmen were always large and well padded. I stroked the giant horse’s beautiful haunch, warm and shaggy, savoring the sweaty, earthy smell, and followed the little bowlegged tough to the greenhouse. Its entry still boasted fancy woodwork from the age of Alexander III. We passed inside the double doors, outer and inner, entering the warmth of the hothouse and its staggering fragrance, lilacs and lilies. They still existed, the greenhouses of Petrograd. Down one long aisle, Arkady von Princip leaned over a flat of hyacinths, closing his eyes over the deep blue of the blooms and inhaling, just like a man preparing to sip a glass of cognac.

He didn’t look up. “What do you know about hyacinths, Makarova?”

“Only the myth.”

“Tell it to me,” he said, moving on to other flats.

I searched my memory. “Hyacinth, a handsome boy who became an object of rivalry between two gods: Apollo, god of the sun, and Zephyr, the west wind. So the gods decided that they would throw the discus to determine who should win the boy. Hyacinth thought to impress Apollo by catching it, and Zephyr, in his jealousy, blew the discus so hard it killed the boy. In mourning, Apollo turned him into a flower.”

“Apollo couldn’t bear for the boy’s soul to end in sad Hades,” Arkady said, breaking off a hyacinth and sniffing it. “So he turned him into a flower that rises from a bulb buried most of the year, to live again in the spring, full of this unearthly scent. Quite a tribute. Ovid says that Apollo’s tears are written upon the petals. Ai. See?” Ai, alas.

He held a bloom between his fingers, bending the petals back. I was aware of how he studied me, the intellect behind those reflective blue eyes. Like most women, I knew when a man found me attractive. He would pay a certain kind of attention that wasn’t so much listening as taking in the sound of my voice, the shape of my profile, the turn of my lips. I was no great beauty. I had my red hair, my round dark eyes, my fat lips, but they were rough and cracked now, the skin peeling from winter’s harshness. I’d once had a good figure but now was all bones—and who could tell anyway under all these clothes? I was no regal Lisa Podharzhevskaya, no Akhmatova. I hadn’t the dignity, the mournful gravity. And yet, who was he looking at like that? He put his hand on my scarf and pushed it down, left his hand on my neck. I thought it would be rough, scaly, like lizard skin, but it was very smooth.

What was it I found so alluring about him? He smelled peculiar—like cold cellars, like decaying pines—yet I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be with him. How would such a man—whose gangs were the terror of Petrograd—make love? He stroked my hair just once, then turned and perched against the row of seedling tables like some giant messy hawk, his white hair long as an English poet’s.

“I have a job for you, Makarova. Think you can do something simple for me?”

What in the world did he need me for, with an army of criminals at his command? “How simple?” I asked.

“I want you to deliver a package for me,” he said. “You’ll need to be unarmed, I’m afraid. The customer is a bit pugliviy.” Skittish. He held out his hand. I stared at it. “Your weapon, Makarova.” How did he know? I didn’t want to be disarmed by him, but like Russia, I was unable to reject his terms. I took out Anton’s revolver and handed it over. “Will I get it back?”

“You’re likely to blow your hand off with it,” he said. “That would be most unfortunate.” He put it into his own pocket. “Although you might want it to wave around in unsavory company someday. Gurin will drop you.”

I was annoyed to have lost the gun and surprisingly disappointed to find myself summoned merely as a delivery girl suitable for reassuring a skittish customer. I’d thought for a moment his interest was personal. Humiliating, to have thought that a man desired you only to find he just wanted his laundry done. “What’s in the package?”

“Don’t think too much,” he said, and put the hyacinth behind my ear.

The address was in Kolomna, at the western edge of the city, an area of dockworkers, foreigners, and drifters, where Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman once chased the little clerk to his death and where the great poet Blok lived, in a gray six-story building on Ofitserskaya—now Decembrist—Street. As a girl, I had often lingered across from that building, on the embankment of the Pryazhka, imagining that Alexander Alexandrovich would look out from his desk and, seeing a young auburn-haired girl, might stop and wonder, might write a poem about her. I wrote dozens of poems for him that I left on posts and in the knotholes of trees and around the doorway of his building, in hopes he might find them. Such a thing of the past, when girls dreamed of poets instead of meat pies.

I clambered out of the sleigh and Gurin tossed me a small package wrapped in newspaper. “Pryazhka Embankment, number fourteen,” he said, then cracked the reins over the horse’s furry back. The monster startled, backed up on its huge round haunches, then took off again at a thundering trot. I watched them leave with an increasingly hopeless feeling. I’d assumed that if anything went wrong, I could run back out to the sleigh or that little Gurin would come in, guns blazing. I hefted the bundle, squeezed it, wondering what it contained. A package the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped in Petrogradskaya Pravda, tied with string.

The front house on the Pryazhka was 16–18, and the next 8–10, so number 14 had to be in the courtyard. I steeled myself and walked through the passage into the large courtyard, where a man was defecating in the snow, his bare buttocks sad and vulnerable over the dirty hummocks. Not a reassuring sight. A sturdy wooden house painted a pale green, older than any building on the street, sat back in the yard. Perhaps it had once belonged to a sea captain or had been used as a tavern—it would be the right size, and close to the docks. This had to be number 14. It was cold this far back from the street, slushy and forgotten, the pale sunlight muted, the air smelling of the gulf and the wet wood of the wharves. All I could hear was ice cracking—like boys breaking walnuts—from the house’s eaves, where the icicles reached almost to the ground.

I knocked on the old door.

A man opened it. He held a revolver trained at my heart. I would have dropped the package and run, but I couldn’t move. He was sweating—he looked as nervous as I did. He nodded me inside and patted my coat pockets. The room was bare but for a small wooden table and a couple of mismatched chairs. It probably had once been a cozy room—low beamed ceilings, a broad tile stove. Home for a sea captain, yes, but now, like half the city, it was being used for other purposes. On second glance, the man—thin, balding, blue-eyed and bespectacled, with a prominent Adam’s apple—wasn’t so threatening, only pugliviy. A teacher of philology, maybe, or mathematics.

He shut the door and locked it. “Open the package,” he told me, and his Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy. I tore off the wrappings. Passports. Ten of them at least. I spread them out on the table. New Soviet passports. And permissions for train passage, covered with stamps and signatures. What a treasure. They looked real, there in the dimness of the room, the light from the courtyard filtering through the dirty windows. Were they forgeries? Stolen? Had Arkady bribed someone inside the government?

The terror slid away from the man’s intellectual face. He actually laughed, his sharp Adam’s apple rising and falling. Tucking the gun into his belt, he started opening them up. Photographs were already affixed: mostly men, beardless, with workers’ caps. A couple of women. The documents were made out in black ink and stamped in a rainbow of colors, with different handwriting and printing in three languages—Russian, French, and German. Laughter gave way to a more solemn emotion as the man looked at one, then another. “Forgive me,” he said. “You don’t know how long we’ve been waiting. It was essential…” He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket under his heavy coat and dabbed his eyes. “Thank God.”

I heard a sound from upstairs, the scrape of a chair. I missed the weight of Anton’s gun in my pocket. The ticking of a clock was loud as a hammer, but there was no second sound. Now that I’d delivered the goods, I was eager to be on my way. The man put the documents under his coat. Now would be the time to shoot me. Who would ever find me here? My legs shook. But he went to the cold stove and reached inside, into the ashes, and brought out a sooty package about the size of a cigar case, also wrapped in newspaper, this showing the masthead Znamya Truda—the Banner of Labor, the SR paper. “Give your mysterious employer our profoundest appreciation. You’re doing a tremendous service,” the teacher said, vigorously shaking my hand. “You don’t even know… for Mother Russia. For us all.”

Who could he be? What was Arkady abetting here? People leaving the country who might still have the wherewithal to buy ten passports on the black market? Not SRs, but aristocrats who had waited too long to fly. Perhaps they had held out for the Germans, and now realized their mistake. The combination of crime and political intrigue was dangerous indeed.

I took the smaller package and put it in my pocket, and nodding once more, flew out the door. Ah, blessed sunshine! But when I peered out the Pryazhka passageway into the street, I saw a man in a leather coat smoking under one of the bare poplars, watching the building. Cheka! Or maybe not, but I wouldn’t be around to discover the truth. I retreated through the archway and lost myself in the maze of slushy courtyards. There must be a second exit somewhere. I could have thrown the sooty little package into the snow—I couldn’t imagine the penalty if the Cheka caught me with something like this, linked me to speculation and counterrevolution and Arkady. But I didn’t dare throw it away. Arkady was the threat I believed more certain.

I found an opening onto Angliisky Prospect and walked away as quickly as I could, thinking that if Gurin had circled around to the Pryazhka, he would have seen our friend in black leather and would know enough to look for me elsewhere. I hurried east toward Senate Square and tried not to look back, not to look around at all, just to move forward. I wasn’t that girl delivering packages for the Archangel. I was a girl late to an exam, late to work at the telephone exchange, muttering under my breath, with the crabby face and irritated march of the tardy.

I made it all the way to Gorokhovaya Street, walking at that fast clip among the ghostly, dejected Petrograders and waiting for the sleigh to find me the way I used to wait for Kolya’s messengers. But that was in the high expectation of love, not this dread, jumping when a man started out of a doorway, flinching when people crowded too close behind me. Holy Theotokos, please let this end! Finally the black horse came abreast of me, passed me, and the sleigh turned in at a courtyard. I followed them in. The enormous beast nickered and blew hot air from its nostrils, its feathery fetlocks wet to the knee.

“Couldn’t you have picked me up back there?” I said, leaning on its shaggy neck. “I just crossed half the city on foot.”

The little thief shrugged. “You were followed.”

A different note of fear sounded inside me, dropping half an octave, deeper and more certain. That was why Arkady sent me, of course. I was more expendable than his men. More expendable to anyone except Mother and Avdokia waiting back at the flat. The little man handed me the sweat-stiffened reins and went out to stand by the arch, smoking, watching the street. The beast, so warm, smelling of that good tangy horse smell, nudged my shoulder, getting snot on my scarf. I buried my face in the fur of his neck, big as a felled tree trunk, salty and solid. I hoped nobody would eat him. He made me think of Volodya, and Carlyle, his bad-tempered pony, and Swallow, his cavalry steed. To think that Seryozha had finally learned to ride—or said he had. I stroked the velvety black nose, thinking of Volodya practicing Cossack mounts and picking up handkerchiefs from the wet grass at a gallop. What would he do now that the war was over? I tried to imagine him here, in the midst of this hunger, this poverty. Volodya with a Soviet future? Could he reconcile himself to a room in the servants’ hall by the kitchen while a Red Guardsman lived in Father’s study with his woman? It would be best if Volodya stayed in the Don or left the country and never returned. And what would he think of me now, this mess I’d made of my own life? At least this particular mess would be at an end as soon as I got this package back to its owner. Then I’d be done with Arkady von Princip. It was a bit too much adventure, even for an adventuress like me.

After a while, the little man got the horse and sleigh turned around. “Get in.” We set off again. The fun of the ride out to the greenhouses on the Vyborg side was a distant memory. Now I felt more like a prisoner on the way to the gallows. We sped along, not up toward the river but along Nevsky to Znamenskaya Square, turning in at the train station. Oh God, was I leaving?

46 The Station

CABS AND HANDCARTS, HORSES and automobiles jostled at the entrance to the Nikolaevsky station. Gurin urged the shying, snorting horse forward into the fray. Wasn’t Arkady afraid the horse would be noticed, recognized? It was flashy—people gave us fast looks as they hurried into the arrivals hall. But either he didn’t care or he enjoyed letting people understand his reach, his power. That he was not afraid. The driver turned around in the coachman’s seat. “Take the package and go for a walk. In the main hall. Not too fast.”

“Who am I meeting?” I asked, watching passersby, aware that any of these people could be Cheka.

“Just take a walk. A nice little stroll.” His mouth hardly moved. Perhaps he’d been a ventriloquist in another life.

“Can’t I just leave it with you?” I couldn’t afford to be arrested. This wasn’t my business—speculation, passports, buying and selling. I took the package and held it out to him.

“Don’t get ideas,” he recommended.

I crammed the bloody thing back in my pocket and straggled into the station.

If it had been crowded the week of my adventure as a girl porter, the station had since become a giant squatters’ camp as people waited for trains—any trains, going anywhere, especially south to the Ukraine, where there was food. Tattered but elegant people shepherded leather trunks. Workers sat on broken cases tied with ropes. Peasants lugged their bundles while veterans and pickpockets and vagrants loitered—one great simmering stew of humanity under the vaulted ceilings and electroliers. The metallic scent of panic, soot, and trains stained the air.

My eye caught opportunities for work—people with children struggling with bags. A man accompanying a heavily made-up woman carted all their luggage while the woman carried a single hatbox and a little dog under her arm. That gave me a moment’s laugh. I picked my way through the anxious crowd in the grand concourse, watching for—what? I had to stop myself from continually checking the little package in my pocket. The corners were starting to fray.

On a bench, a man reading Krasnaya Gazeta glanced up. Was he watching me? Or against that pillar, that soldier? Which would be my contact? Or were those men watchers from the other side, searching out speculation and counterrevolution? I wished my mother hadn’t made that pronouncement about evil entities. I didn’t believe in entities, but it was hard to brush her words off with a laugh right then.

Then a figure halfway across the hall caught my eye, a head taller than anybody else. The patched greatcoat, the wide shoulders, the cap. I began to run, pushing past the gangs of hopeful travelers. He was heading for the platforms. “Genya!” I called, though how could he hear me over this din? I shoved and squeezed, pressing my hands together before me like an icebreaker. “Genya!”

He turned, searching the crowd. He couldn’t have heard me, but something in him did hear, and he turned and saw me. Emotion passed over his face like clouds racing across the sun—shock, joy, hurt, longing. I struggled like a salmon to reach him, climbing over people’s boxes and forcing my way through until I could touch him, cling to that smoky, wonderful coat, and he held me tight tight tight. I hadn’t known how much I still loved him, how I’d missed him, the sheer relief of having his body back in my arms. “Genya, I’ve been crazy. I’m doing the maddest things.”

He was wearing the scarf I’d knitted for him, gray and red. The taste of his mouth, the sweetness of his kiss, the smell of him. How had I let my infatuation with Kolya destroy us? How had we let that little religious trinket split us apart? “You’ve always been crazy,” he whispered, kissing my eyes. “But I’m such a moron. I don’t even remember what happened, do you?”

Zina emerged from the crowd, all dressed for traveling in her tam, holding her gloves officiously. I saw on her face her dismay at finding me resurrected. “Genya, we need to get on that train.” Someone jostled her and she elbowed and cursed. Now I understood the first look on his face, that guilty surprise. They were leaving Petrograd. Together. He pulled away from me, abashed and ill equipped to deal with this two-woman problem.

“I’ll meet you on the platform,” he told her. “Go on ahead.”

Zina’s face condensed with irritation. It shrank like wool in water. “We have to grab seats when they open the doors or we’ll be riding in the corridor all the way to Moscow.”

“In a minute,” he said firmly.

Clearly there was more she wanted to say, but the tone of his voice put an end to the argument, and she walked off reluctantly, looking back over her shoulder every few steps before the crowd swallowed her angry little face.

Moscow. I laughed. A sob really. He couldn’t go to Moscow. People died in Moscow. They became someone else. I stroked his face, handsome and forlorn, the wide mouth, the crooked nose, the bony brow over those dear eyes. “You don’t belong there. Don’t go. I have no right to ask, but please stay. Let’s try again.”

His expression begged me to understand. He was being pulled in all directions. “Petrograd’s done for—you can see it as well as I can.”

“No.” I burrowed into his coat. I wouldn’t see.

“She’s got friends down there, a film company. They want us to write a kinofilm. We’ve got tickets, permits.” He pressed his cheek to my head, pulled my shawl down, ran his fingers through my hair. “I’ve thought of you so much. I do nothing but write and think of you. I’m going mad.”

“I should never have left that night. I should have fought you, claw and knucklebone.” I held on to him, speaking fast and low. “It’s horrible without you. You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you.”

“Come to Moscow,” he said. “The poetry cafés are filled to bursting. Everything’s alive down there. Petrograd’s had it.”

“And live with you and Zina?” I laughed but it was more of a cry, a choke of despair.

His face closed up, like one of those trees whose leaves shrink at the slightest touch. “Look, I have to go.”

“Genya, I love you,” I said, still clutching his coat.

He grasped my gloved hand, tore off the glove and kissed my palm. I could feel the tears on his face, his scratchy beard. But then he gave it back to me, my hand, my useless hand, and he was pushing through the crowd toward the platforms. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air. I staggered back through the hall toward the doors of the station and stood in the cold colonnade, sobbing like a child.

It was several minutes before I remembered Arkady von Princip. I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief and braced myself to go back in and finish the job, checking the package in my pocket. My fingers touched nothing but cloth.

Impossible.

I checked the other pocket. I had put it in deep, hadn’t I? I checked myself all over. My mind flew to the possibilities. Don’t think. Pickpockets worked these halls like peasants picking cherries. Don’t. I could not imagine the value of ten passports, visas, and railway permits. In these times? A million rubles? People died for a loaf of bread now. A hat, a pair of boots. Maybe I dropped it when I saw Genya, when I ran.

I shoved my way back into the hall. Oh God, Theotokos preserve us. It hadn’t been that long. Who would notice a little package wrapped in newspaper? Who would stop in their hurrying to trains and pushing through the crowd to study the floor?

Anyone.

For an hour I searched, my tears blurring the view of the dirty floor littered with sunflower-seed hulls and cigarette butts, hairpins and sputum, a glove, a page fallen from a book, a baby’s shoe, scraps of paper, but no package wrapped in Znamya Truda. I scanned the crowd, looking for suspicious people, people too interested in others, especially those without baggage, and—yes, a girl in a black coat, my own age. I saw her reaching into a man’s coat. “Hey, you!” She looked up, startled, and the man clapped his hand over his pocket. She hurried away into the crowd. “Wait! Stop that girl!” I fought my way through the throng, following her hat, her pigtails, but I couldn’t catch her. It was like a terrible dream where you run through mud or a flood. That figure, always moving away, always vanishing.

Light lingered on broad, quiet Furshtatskaya Street and the slushy melting snow as I returned to the flat. What was I going to do? I should go up to Kamenny Island and tell him, I lost the package. Why did you ever send me? You who know so much, you should have known better. But what was the point of trudging up all that way to deliver bad news? He would find me eventually. He would find me and kill me. I hated to go home, but what choice did I have? I vowed I would never leave the apartment ever again.

Everything looked worse—the dirty courtyard, the warming staircase that now stank of rotting fish and mold, the women in the kitchen drinking tea from Mother’s Limoges coffee service at the table on which Vaula had once rolled out her huge sheets of pastry dough. They stared at me as if I had a goat balanced on my head. I was used to having to walk the gauntlet of barbed remarks, especially once we began cooking meat. But blessedly, nobody said a thing. Not even the hard-faced blonde spoke, or the tall gaunt one, nursing her baby at a flat pap. Even the Red Guardsman’s woman, chopping a carrot, said nothing.

A strange smell permeated the hall as I walked back toward Mother’s room, a floral scent unlikely but familiar. One of Mother’s spiritualist friends? I knocked wearily on the door. Avdokia opened up quickly, glanced down the hall, and waved me in with great urgency. “Thank God,” she said. Slava Bogu.

The wall of scent hit me. Mother stood near the table by the window, her hand over her mouth. She looked as if she’d seen her own death. A great heap of blue hyacinths buried the tabletop, their scent replacing all the air in the room. Hyacinths, each petal sighing its secret Greek sigh—alas.

47 Kommunist

THE SPRING RAINS BEGAN. I jumped at the slightest sound. A week went by, and still I didn’t know how things stood with the Archangel. The flowers breathed their terrible message. I know where you live, they said. And, You’re alive only by my pleasure. “Don’t ask me anything,” I said when Mother questioned me. I developed a throb in my temple, a flutter in my eyelid. My knitting-factory cough returned. We got rid of the sheaves of blooms, but there was no way to get rid of the scent. I smelled it in my hair, on my clothes, as if it were searching me out. Oh, how I would have loved to ask Kolya what he was thinking when told me to go to Kamenny Island and find that man. I felt like he’d slammed my fingers in a door. If he ever came back, I would ask him: This is how you take care of a girl you love?

I wrote a poem about the dreariness of spring, that which had been buried brought to light again. I wrote about lovers in a train station. I wrote about Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos by her lover Theseus. I wrote about a photo album with silver hasps sold on the streets of Petrograd. And I wrote about the tragedy of Hyacinth, the plaything of the gods.

I kept thinking of Arkady’s fingers, so quick, so deft, touching the hyacinth petals, taking the diamond from my hand without my knowing it. If only I hadn’t lost his merchandise… I was sure there had been something, some interest. I would have enjoyed getting to know a man like that, but now… there was only dread.

Every day I peered out to see if anyone was watching the house, and every day I saw someone who might or might not be one of Arkady’s people. A woman walking a dog outside in the parkway kept glancing at our building. A man, his hat dripping with rain, stood in the lee of a still-leafless tree, smoking. But ultimately I saw no one who set my nerves on edge, and I simply had to get away from the apartment or go insane. I quickly left the courtyard passage and walked away under the umbrella I had borrowed from Mother. Oh, it had been so long! The air smelled like spring, like softened snow, and dirty puddles, and water dripping from the icicles.

As I walked out toward the Fontanka, I peered at passersby and listened for footsteps behind me, but all I saw were slow, hunched, miserable citizens, their faces turned to their damp, brooding thoughts. That’s when I noticed a figure crossing Liteiny. What was it that caught my eye? The gait, the pace. At a time when everyone had slowed to a wheezy shuffle, the brisk movement stood out—someone with somewhere to go. A tall girl in a black coat, moving like a hare through a forest, her umbrella rising to avoid those of other people. “Varvara!” I ran into the street, the hem of my wet coat slapping against my legs. A tram screeched as I raced in front of it. “Varvara!”

She turned. Her expression was grim, and her face looked puffy and swollen. She had a cut under one eye. But when she saw it was me, she broke into a grin. I embraced her with my free hand. We kissed cheeks three times. “Thank God, someone who doesn’t want to beat my head in.”

“Assuming a lot, aren’t you?” I laughed.

She kept her arm around my shoulder and we resumed walking under overlapping umbrellas out to the Fontanka Embankment, then down, past the shabby facade of the Sheremetev Palace, where they said Akhmatova lived now.

“What happened to your face?”

“Strike at the Rechkin coach plant,” she said, twisting her mouth into a bitter knot. “They have a country now, and all they do is scream about rations and galoshes.” As if rations and galoshes were nothing. “They have to remember why we’re doing this, what it’s all for.”

Still fighting for the revolution. “How’d it go?”

“Rough.”

She’d gone in to face a factory full of striking workers to present the Bolshevik side. She was absolutely sure this was all going to be worth it—her certainty was bound to have inspired people. It was a kind of courage you had to admire. She had one goal, the establishment of the workers’ state, and she would fight the workers themselves to give it to them. “Does it hurt?”

Varvara brushed the words away with an impatient swipe of the hand. “Think that’s bad? Have you seen this?” She stopped and removed a newspaper from her pocket and unfolded it under cover of our umbrellas. Kommunist, it was called. A manifesto of some kind. The dense print was already smudged.

THE REVOLUTION IS AT A CROSSROADS… “What is it?”

She folded it and put it back in her pocket. “The Left Communists have resigned from the party. Bukharin, Kollontai, Radek, and Uritsky.”

The fiery speakers of October. I recognized the name Uritsky, Varvara’s boss.

The party was coming apart. Now what? They’d won the revolution, but the Titans were fighting in the heavens. I had been so busy thinking about my Arkady problem that I’d forgotten the wheel of revolution continued to spin, that the fate of Russia was still unfolding. “Resigned from the party? But why?”

“What else can they do? They can’t agree to these peace terms—they end the revolution! German extortions, threats of Japanese occupation in the Far East, annexations… we’re forbidden to propagandize in the West, forbidden to work against the Germans, right when we were on the brink of World Revolution. Lenin thinks it’s buying us time, but it’s not. It’s selling out the world proletariat to save our skins! ‘Saved the territory but killed the revolution,’ as Bukharin put it.” She still hoped that revolution would catch fire in the West and save us at any moment.

Reflexively, I glanced around to see if anyone was following us. A workingman smoking, cigarette in his cupped hand, looked out at the buildings across the Fontanka. A pair of men passed by, heads close together under umbrellas. I wanted to tell her about Arkady, but I wasn’t sure how sympathetic she’d be. What was a gang of criminals compared with the fate of Russia?

“So who’s behind Kommunist?” I said, lowering my umbrella to hide my face.

“The Petrograd Committee,” she said. Then she, too, glanced around, as if she’d caught my suspicion. “Bukharin, Radek, and Uritsky. We needed a voice apart from Lenin. He used to be a revolutionary, but now he’s just plugging the dikes like the little Dutch boy. Just another politician.”

We. So she’d placed her bets on the schismatics, the true believers.

Out on the Fontanka, the ice was breaking, like a puzzle once solved, now coming apart.

I didn’t like the way that worker was loitering. Who would be standing in the rain without an umbrella just watching the ice floes drift? I had that strange prickling sensation. “Is there anywhere we can get off the street?”

She cut her eyes to the man, having seen him as well. “Da, koneshno.” Yes, of course. “I’ve got a new place. It’s not far.”

The rain intensified, blowing first from the east, then from the west across the thawing Fontanka. She grabbed my arm and we began to run, splashing through the puddles, laughing, feeling like girls again as our umbrellas tugged against the wind and our skirts grew heavy with water. We crossed Nevsky where the bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge fought their eternal tamers.

Her new place was just as she said, not far—on the Fontanka below Nevsky, a flat in a building designed in the heavy Russian style of the 1880s. We stopped to wring out our skirts, then ran up three cold flights to a subdivided flat whose inner hall was lined with numbered doors. I followed her into number 3/8, a room of two windows overlooking the river, with old flowered wallpaper in stripes, a bed in an alcove, papers everywhere, books, a typewriter. “My villa by the sea,” she said, opening and closing her umbrella to shake off the water, then propping it by the door. I did the same.

I took a seat on a splintery chair, undid my wet scarf and fluffed my hair. The place stank of cold tobacco, mold, and soot from a leaky stove. She tossed Kommunist on the table, cleared off some of the papers and the typewriter, and went to start the little stove. I took off my gloves and rubbed my hands together, blew into them, opened her paper and read aloud from Kommunist about the “vertiginous decline of the Petersburg region,” dangerous unemployment, the disruption of production, and the “declassing of the proletariat.” “Peace has saved the territory, but the spirit of the Red capital has been sold away.”

“Petrograd’s a disaster.” Varvara squatted and placed kindling in the stove from her modest woodpile. “You’ve got the seasoned Bolsheviks out in the villages trying to recruit illiterate bumpkins, leaving our factories full of whiners and snivelers, the most nonmilitant elements.” The declassing of the proletariat. “So who jumps into the breach? Of course—petit bourgeois SRs. And anarchists, always happy to make a muddle of things.” She blew on the fire, sending smoke and bits of ash into the room. “Sometimes I’d just like to shoot everyone. It’s like driving a stupid ox that would rather freeze in the snow.” Her eye drooped where she’d been hit.

It was probably a bad time to ask about Arkady.

“You’re pacing like a nervous cat. What’s going on?”

She could always see through me. I shrugged. She was being beaten up by striking workers for arguing on behalf of World Revolution while I was dabbling in petty crime, speculation, and possible counterrevolutionary activities. How could I begin to tell her about my problems involving Kolya, illegal flour and oil and meat, passports, and rendezvous up in the islands with Arkady von Princip? “It’s un-Soviet…”

“Then don’t tell me about it,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do anyway. My guy is on the outs, and I’ve got as much on my hands as I can possibly handle. Did Vera Borisovna survive the offensive all right?”

“Yes, but Genya came back and we broke up. I’m back on Furshtatskaya now.”

At last she got the fire lit, stood and brushed her hands off. “You never learn.” The fire was going but the stove leaked, made my eyes smart. She opened the fortochka, peered down. “Does it have something to do with the man by the embankment, with the cap?”

“Is he still there?” I shrank away from her.

“He followed us all the way down,” she said.

Surely she would have some ideas if I could figure out how to couch it so it wouldn’t look so bad. I wondered what her position was now that her boss had resigned. “Are you even at Smolny anymore?”

She shrugged, set out glasses for tea, lit the primus, set a pan of water to boil, then peeled an old carrot into the teapot. No actual tea anymore—you either got roasted barley or carrot peel. But any food preparation was uncharacteristically domestic for her. She seemed… hesitant. As if there was something more she wanted—but also didn’t want— to tell me. That made two of us.

“Look again.”

She took a peek out the window. “He’s gone. Now there’s a woman, walking a little dog. It’s not us, I don’t think.”

We eyed one another, sizing each other up like wrestlers. I realized that between my dubious commercial and romantic entanglements and her political engagement, we probably could never again be as completely open with each other as we’d once been. Our girlhood friendship had been transformed into a new thing, a sort of hungry, wary circling, a friendship not between girls but between women. Each would hold back a piece of herself that could not be shared.

As Varvara was in the middle of pouring boiling water into the teapot, we heard a key turn in the lock. She stopped, listening, and a slim woman entered. Shorter than either of us, she shook her umbrella and stuck it in the stand in the corner. Her little glasses were steamed from the rain. “Hello,” she said, and smiled.

All the color had drained out of Varvara’s face. “I didn’t expect you back.”

“We’ve been meeting all night,” the woman said. “I’m about to drop.” She regarded me with unabashed curiosity.

“Manya, this is Marina. I told you about her. We ran into each other on Liteiny.” Now my friend noticed she was still holding the pan and poured the rest of the water into the teapot.

“Oh, yes! Marina the poet. Good to meet you.” The woman offered her hand, and I shook it. Small, firm, still icy cold from the street.

“Good to meet you, too,” I said. A roommate? A lover? The double bed. Varvara wouldn’t look at me.

“I was just making tea. Want some?” she asked Manya. Pretending casualness, but I could see her nerves in her twitchy gestures.

Although Manya was the smaller of the two, she seemed the more self-possessed. She took off her hat and hung it on a hook, touched her dark, wavy coif, threaded with gray. “I think I’m just going to—” Then she noticed Varvara’s beaten face. “What happened?”

“Rechkin,” Varvara said, embarrassed at her attention. “It was a mess.”

“You’ve got to take care of that. Oh, you’re going to have a shiner in the morning. Sit down.” The older woman moved about the flat efficiently, brisk and precise as a field nurse, getting iodine, wringing out a cloth in the washstand. She cleaned the cut on Varvara’s face, then pressed the cloth to her eye and cheekbone and had her hold it there.

“She pretends to be so tough,” Manya said. “Well, you’re going to look like a brawler now.” But she left her hand on Varvara’s shoulder.

Not a roommate. Not a comrade. This woman with the white threads in her black hair was—Varvara’s lover.

My friend watched me as she pressed the white cloth to her swollen face. She loved to shock people, but only when she’d done it on purpose. I didn’t know who was more shocked now. Any response would seem hopelessly stupid, ridiculously backward. Other people had their locked rooms, their secret corridors, and Varvara had planned to keep this one to herself. The flash of her black eyes, of being so revealed, dared me to judge her.

Now Manya bustled about pleasantly, finishing the tea, setting our glasses in front of us, taking one for herself and moving to the bed, where she set the glass down and took her shoes off. “I wish I could join you. There’s so much I’d like to hear, but I can’t keep my eyes open.” She took off her wet dress and hung it on a peg. Her slip clung to her body. She had a nice figure for an older woman. How old was she? Thirty? Younger than Mother, certainly. I wondered how two women made love. But passion makes use of all equipment—I knew that better than anyone.

We drank the carrot peel tea, which tasted primarily of dirt. Varvara’s eyes searched mine—for judgment? Signs of disapproval? She looked so comical with that cloth pressed to her face. I would not have thought to take care of her as Manya had done. To me she always seemed indestructible. I thought back on our friendship—her kisses, her possessiveness. Her loyalty and disloyalty. Unexpected emotions tumbled over me: hurt, abandonment, jealousy. Jealousy? Really? Was I was jealous of Manya, this woman who had taken possession of my friend? I’d come to expect the intensity of Varvara’s feelings. Now someone else would be the recipient of her enthusiasms and her rages, her crises and triumphs.

I wondered if this was how she felt when I fell in love with Kolya. I heard Mina’s voice in my head. Do you have to have everything? Did I? I wasn’t sure. I felt her rocketing away from me as we sat there on either side of the small wobbly table.

Varvara and I spoke of this and that, but like actors in a new play, we were unable to settle into a rhythm. Cloth still pressed to her face, she talked about Manya’s party work and how they’d met at the Smolny canteen. The travails of the Left Communists, the pressure the trade unions were putting on the party. Neither of us able to say what was really on our minds. After a polite interval, I said I had to leave and got back into my coat.

She walked me to the flat’s outer door, took my hand. Hers was trembling, but she still couldn’t say what she wanted to say.

“I know,” I said.

She hugged me hard, kissed me three times, as if we were saying our last goodbyes. “There’s an exit on Rubinshteyna. Be careful,” she said. And I returned to the street, the rain.

48 Never Say No

AVDOKIA STOOD ROASTING OATS in a little iron pan while Mother sat deep in study of some occult tome. She pressed her slender fingertips to her lips in concentration, her fur-lined coat draped about her shoulders. I felt sad she’d returned to her Blavatsky and Ouspensky after she’d had such success helping Anton with Apollinaire. I supposed I’d imagined she might take up translation on her own, but instead she’d returned to unfurl her mania at full length, an iridescent banner of otherworldly faith.

“How were the Gromitskys?” I asked. She’d visited her friends today, also followers of Master Vsevolod.

“Packing,” Mother said, turning the page. “They’re going to China. Master has friends there.”

Maybe she could go with them. I wondered about getting railway permissions. Maybe I should go, too. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear this, listening for footsteps, bracing for a bullet. I drew up a chair before the bourgeoika, held my hands out to warm them. At least we had wood now, so I could take my wet coat off.

Rain pelted the windows, then subsided. I leafed through the new verses I’d written since leaving Grivtsova Alley. Ours was a time for short poems that could be finished in a single sitting before the political situation changed again. I imagined it would be years before a new great novel would come out of Russia. Life changed too quickly. I liked one about digging fortifications:

Perhaps with Genya and Zina gone, I could safely return to the Transrational Interlocutors. How I missed them, those lively Wednesday nights at the Krestovskys’ in the company of the poets and painters. I had to do something. This waiting was driving me mad. Although I wasn’t looking forward to admitting to Anton that I’d lost his revolver, perhaps he could use Mother’s help. That would distract her from this obsessive research into the kabbalah and the Golden Dawn and give me somewhere to go besides this room.

Promptly at nine, the electric lights went out, and Avdokia lit the lamps. At ten, Mother uncoiled her silver coif before the dressing table, appraising herself in the mirror as Avdokia brushed her hair smooth. At ten after by the old travel clock on the dresser, there was a knock on the door—light, rattling, intimate—but it was far too late to be anyone we knew.

“Don’t answer,” Avdokia whispered. “For the love of God.” She blew out the lamp nearest her, and Mother blew out the other one on the table.

“Makarova.” Spoken with a teasing menace. A man’s voice with its dry rasp. We waited in the dark, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. The Antichrist had come himself, right into the heart of the city, where every Cheka officer in town was looking for him. Though if Varvara was right, there weren’t many Chekists left—they’d all gone to Moscow. “Don’t hide under the covers,” the voice came again. “You insult my intelligence.”

I lit the lamp. It was ridiculous to try to hide from him. I had set this in motion. It was up to me to finish it. Avdokia grabbed my sleeve as I went to unlock the door, shaking her head, begging me with her eyes, but I pried her loose.

The Archangel looked as unkempt as he had the last times I’d seen him, shabby in an ancient overcoat and crushed broad-brimmed hat, like a horse trader’s, even as the wealth of starving Petrograd flowed into his hands. He glanced about, seemingly casually, but I knew he could read our lives in every chair and table—the mismatched beds, the superior quality of the armoire, the dresser missing one drawer, the chandelier, the smell of our dinner. “Good evening, ladies.”

Avdokia crossed herself, her mouth silently moving in prayer. For once, her spells of protection weren’t being invoked in vain. Mother rose from the dressing table, long hair to her waist shining silver like a priestess’s. She gripped the back of the chair for support but nonetheless stood firm and straight. “Who are you, monsieur? What are you thinking, barging in on respectable people in the middle of the night?”

“Get your coat, Makarova,” he said to me.

“Pardon, monsieur.” Her voice trembled. “My daughter is most assuredly not going anywhere with you. What can you mean by this?”

“I’m taking your daughter, madame. You have nothing else I want or I’d take that too.”

I was already putting my boots on, trying to appear calm and confident. “I’ll be all right. I have a little unfinished business with this gentleman.” I reassured myself with a glance toward Arkady, praying that what I said was true. He didn’t seem angry, but I didn’t know what his anger might look like. Avdokia was crossing herself furiously as I got my coat. It took forever to button it, my fingers were so stiff with fear. In a kind of terrified daze, I wrapped my shawl around my head, took an umbrella from the stand. He opened the door. Avdokia was weeping. I kissed her three times, told her not to worry, nodded at Mother, who nodded back. A whole lifetime in that nod. I had to remember all of it. It could be the last time I ever saw them.

Then Arkady and I walked down the hall.

I knew how a man must feel walking to his execution, although this was more confusing, because I didn’t know if it was an execution or not. We came out onto dripping Furshtatskaya Street. I opened my umbrella, and we began to walk together, his hands in his pockets, rain spilling off the brim of his hat. He made no attempt to touch me or to hold on to me in any way. An odd semblance of a couple we must have made, ambling toward the Tauride Palace—the very route Father took to work in bygone days.

“Can I ask where you’re taking me?”

“To dinner, of course.”

That was a turn I’d never expected. I was intrigued, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. “What if I’ve eaten?”

He stopped. I couldn’t see his face under the broad brim of his hat. “Never say no to me.”

It was more than an order. It was an edict. A commandment. I gave no assent, but it seemed that a pronouncement from him required no agreement. We began walking again. We skirted the Tauride Gardens, fragrant in the wet darkness, the fresh earth and the rain. Where could he be taking me? His legs were very long, and he swung along soundlessly, gracefully, as if just out for a stroll, a man walking with a woman. He didn’t touch me, although I felt he wanted to. Was this some twisted courtship? “Did you like my flowers?” he asked.

I searched for an adequate response. I couldn’t be in the flat with them. We put them in the hall, all the tenants had a little bouquet. I will never be able to smell a hyacinth again without terror. I decided on the most neutral reply. “They were lovely.”

He took my arm in his, and there it was again, to my shame, my strange attraction to him. The way his arm pressed my breast under my layers of clothing excited me.

On the other side of the Tauride Gardens, he led me down the steps to the ground floor of a six-story building, once extremely elegant, now a bit battered, and knocked on a door. A woman opened it partway, saw who it was, and for just a moment, shock and fear were plainly written on her face. Then she slapped a smile over it like a poster slapped onto a wall.

It was a restaurant, a private dining room, such as I’d heard rumors about but never actually seen. I thought they were a myth, the fantasy of a hungry populace. Seven tables occupied a small room, four of them in use by groups of men voluble with drink. The smell was dizzying. The woman took our coats and my dripping umbrella and led us to a table by the fire, replete with a tablecloth and napkins, glasses, cutlery. She offered menus, but Arkady waved them away. “You know what to bring,” he told her.

He did not pull out my chair, so I sat down, smoothed the napkin across my lap. I couldn’t imagine what the prices in a place like this might be. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Who could afford it? Well, from the look of the other patrons, the restaurant catered to criminals, foreigners, and the last haut bourgeois left in Petrograd.

Dishes began to arrive. Mushrooms in sour cream. Solyanka, a meat-rich fragrant soup. Blini and salad, smoked fish and vodka. Arkady ate little, just sat watching me. I tried to eat with indifference, though the florid rumbling of my stomach betrayed me. I drank more than I should have. I was letting myself become careless, noticing my own pretty gestures, my arm falling from the sleeve, the gleaming bangle adorning it. I felt like a performer, like an actress in the smallest theater of all, with an audience of one.

“That bracelet—is that from our old friend Shurov?” He leaned forward and clasped it in his supple hand, turned it to catch the light.

I forced myself not to protect it from his view, to act as if it were nothing. He would catch any slight movement. “It’s from Bukhara.”

“Give it to me.”

I slid the bracelet from my wrist.

He turned it between his fingers, its inlay glowing in the soft light. I wanted to snatch it out of his hands. What right did he have to touch that bangle? “He has an eye, doesn’t he?” He weighed it in his palm and put it in his jacket pocket. “What do you want most in the world, Makarova? If you could have anything. Anything at all.”

The world, unshattered. Love. Books of my poems, read and reread. My brother, alive.

None of which Baron Arkady von Princip could offer. “The success of the revolution,” I said.

He laughed out loud. He removed something from his pocket and slid it under his hand across the table. “Put your hand over mine.”

A shock of electricity to touch his bare skin.

He put his other hand over mine, as in a child’s game, pulled his lower hand away, and I felt what was underneath, a wallet, about the size of a cigarette case. He released my hand, and I lifted it.

On the crumbly dark red calfskin gleamed the Romanov double eagle embossed in gold.

“Open it,” he said. “Discreetly.”

I pulled it onto my lap, opened the clasp. And there, lying against the white satin of the wallet’s lining, appeared a brooch the size of my palm. Four Romanov eagles in gold, perfect down to their beaks, talons, and the crowns between their double heads, each surmounted by a cross, interspersed by four rubies shaped like arch stones. The eagles were set in diamonds—their bodies, their individual wing feathers, the graduated stones around the rubies. And in the center, St. George on his horse trampled the dragon.

“It’s the Order of Saint George. Catherine the Great gave it to her lady-in-waiting, Countess Alexandra Branitskaya. What do you think? Worth a couple of hours’ trouble, wouldn’t you say?” He lifted one pale eyebrow, gave the hint of a smile.

This is what was in my package at the train station, wrapped in Znamya Truda. This was the price of sanctuary for some high royal family. The wealth of Russia, falling directly into the hands of Arkady von Princip, bypassing its true owners, the Russian people. Crime would find a way—to serve itself.

But what a weight off my shoulders! It had not been stolen after all, it had been duly delivered. I started to cry. My sentence had been commuted. A last-minute stay. Now I could eat the rest of this beautiful dinner in peace.

I watched his face through my tears. All these weeks he had tormented me, left me in the dark. I gazed back into his long, bony face, the sunken cheeks, the wide mouth, the Swedish nose, and saw the pleasure there.

“I thought you understood when you saw the flowers.”

I held out my hand with the wallet under it. He put his hand over it but didn’t pull the wallet away, not immediately. This strange, strange being. His eyes searched me. Would I? Would I stay with him tonight? Yes, I thought. I just might.

It was a good house. There was still power, even after midnight, and the elevator worked. On the fourth floor, a man guarded a door—the bearded man from Kamenny Island with the bushy black eyebrows over his mistrustful eyes. Arkady said something and the man opened the door. I went in first. No one forced me. There was no knife, no gun.

The flat lay empty. Some broken-up furniture, an armoire facedown, a pile of garbage. He led me down the enfilade to a narrow room, beautifully furnished, where a tall stove on the short back wall pumped out a fair amount of heat. Wood was stacked next to it, enough to heat a bourgeoika for a month. The study, it must have been, of a home belonging to some Former family recently decamped. The gold-and-blue style moderne wallpaper showed them to have been a chic family, a touch artistic. Maybe we had known them. A daybed covered in a dark gold velvet sagged against one wall, with a wide-seated Louis XV chair drawn up alongside it.

Arkady closed the door, locked it. I didn’t like the locked door, but there was no turning back now. He slumped into the Louis chair with his usual careless slouch. I was coming to recognize it by now. Keeping his blue eyes on me, casual as unfolding a napkin, he unbuttoned his fly and pulled himself out. His member was enormous, lying there against his thigh.

I didn’t know whether to sit, where to look, whether to laugh or beat on the door. “Touch it,” he said, in his rough, gravelly whisper. “Go on. You’ve been thinking about it all night.”

Had I? Well, yes. I’d been thinking about him, imagining how it might be to be with such a man, to let him touch me, make love to me, but nothing so—bluntly to the point. Well, I was beginning to get the idea. It would be like this—outrageous, unpredictable, a game of nerves. First the terror, then an exquisite dinner… then, Here’s my cock.

And it was certainly impressive—he was obviously proud of it. Even as I watched, it grew, rising like a baby’s arm, or a devil’s tail, from the worn trousers. How he savored my embarrassment. Well, what had I thought this would be about? Roses and aubades? “Come shake hands,” he said. “Make friends with my little man.”

Daring me. I reached out, but just as I brought my fingertips onto that monster, he made it jump, startling me and making me cry out. He laughed and clapped his hand over mine and began to stroke himself. “Oh, you have to be firmer with him. He’s a real Cossack. You’re not painting a pole, you know.”

I gripped it like a pipe, like a wrench or a hammer, something you’d drive nails with, or split logs. “Yes, that’s right, there. Oh, good,” he groaned. “You like how big he is? Tell me, have you ever seen one this size? Your boyfriend Kolya doesn’t even count. He has nothing—he’s practically a woman. This is what a man looks like.” He squeezed my hand around him, up and down. “Spit on it, please.”

I spit on it, making our hands slide more easily. He moaned. “Yes. You’re still a virgin as far as I’m concerned, Makarova. We’ll make you forget all about him. I’ll make you forget about all of them.”

It was true that for size, Kolya was a child by comparison, but Kolya knew how to make love to a woman. So full of delight, and he knew how to bring that to you. He made love as if he were touching the world itself, the world made flesh in your body. Every word, every touch, every joke and caress. Arkady was just stimulating himself. Even in sex, he was lonely and controlling.

“Take that off,” he said, nodding at my dress, letting my hand go. “All of it. I want to see you. I want to see what color your muff is, if your nipples are dark or light.”

I was afraid but excited, too, to see where this would all go. I unbuttoned my dress, removed it slowly, while he ran his hand up and down that tumescent organ. My slip, dingy white, my boots. Perhaps I was the slut my father said I was, but I had to admit, this game aroused me. His voice was hypnotic, it went on and on. “Do you bruise easily, Makarova? I’m not the gentlest man. No—not the stockings. Leave them on.”

Was he trying to scare me? Or was that part of the game? I didn’t know that men his age even wanted to have sex anymore, that they had cocks like that, that I might be as nervous as a virgin—or in my case, even more so. I knew a sensible girl would leave now, would have fled after dinner. But I was not a sensible girl. I was every bit the adventurer he had seen in me that first day. So I did what he asked, and stood before him in my white freckled skin. No wonder he’d heated the room so thoroughly. I let him admire me. I knew I was beautiful. What would he think of me now? Would he really want to bruise this?

“Pale. I was thinking they were dark, because of the hair, but they’re very pale, aren’t they?” he said as he worked on himself. “You’re not as small as you look. The fullness is mostly on the sides, under the arm.” I saw he had to keep talking, that it was the talking that excited him. And it was arousing in a peculiar, unwholesome way. “I knew a girl like that when I was a boy, back in Estonia, a servant on our estate. Very pale skin, but her nipples were larger than yours. And dark. She had done something, I don’t remember what. Stolen something, probably. They dragged her into the yard and stripped her to the waist and beat her. Three lashes. I’ll always remember the sight of those welts rising on that white skin. Her breasts, swaying. It was my first erotic encounter.” His voice was dark, the exciting memory lowering it to a whisper. “And your crimson hair. A shame you cut it. It should fall down your breasts—it would look like dried blood. Think you could take three lashes, Makarova?”

Did he have a whip hidden somewhere in the room? I forced myself to keep my eyes on his, not to glance about nervously. Was it just talk? If I screamed, people would hear me in the other apartments. Someone would break in. Or would they? I had heard women scream on Grivtsova Alley, had watched Genya pound on a door, threaten to kick it in. But he was a long way away.

“Come over here. Closer.”

I imagined the young baron watching the girl being beaten, jerking at himself. Though it could be a story he’d made up for my benefit. My heart beat raggedly in my chest. No one knew where I was. I was entirely on my own. Was he going to hurt me like that, beat me or cut me? Or was all this just something to scare me with? I couldn’t show him I was afraid. I felt the moment like a knife edge in my teeth. Steady…

I came over to his chair. He leaned into me and sniffed me like an animal, my belly, my plume of red hair. It was repulsive and exciting. I was appalled at how dirty I was—how much there was to smell. It had been so long since I’d taken a real lie-down bath. He ran his finger between my legs, and I trembled, repulsed and excited in equal measure. “Now open up for me.” He sprawled back on the chair, like a man in the theater. “I want to see you. Put your foot up here.” He patted the far arm of the chair.

I wanted him to see me. I was ashamed how aroused I was. Yet I didn’t have to confess this to anyone. If I made love with him, who would know? My love life was no one’s business—not Kolya’s, Genya’s, or anyone’s. I wanted to play this out, hoping he was just exciting himself with his talk of lashes and blood. Very possibly he was making it up—I wouldn’t put it past him. I lifted my foot up on the arm of the chair and spread myself so he could see me, the silky insides, the peaks and folds.

The way his eyes almost closed, like a man fighting sleep. Oh, he liked it all right. “It’s so pale. The color of your nipples. I wonder if it will change.” Still, he did not touch me, only himself. “Finger yourself for me. Yes. Just like I wasn’t here.”

I slowly drew my fingers along my folds, and his eyes narrowed. He wet his wide mouth with his tongue. It was disgusting and exciting. Trollop. Jade.

“You’re so lonely,” he began. “Your lover’s in Paris, or God knows where, out banging the help. A maid—no, a little actress he found, in some cheap revue in the Place Pigalle.” His low hypnotic voice painted the scene. “You’re in your room. Your mother and the old baba have gone to sleep. Your little boyfriend’s left you there all alone. You’re a passionate girl, and you haven’t had a man in a long time.”

God knew that was true. Though I would never have dreamed of touching myself in the room with Mother and Avdokia. Between the two of them, they could chill desire in the most confirmed libertine. Yet this was the Archangel’s fantasy, and I was prepared to go along, see where it took me.

“Your friends have all gone abroad, leaving you here, your beautiful youth fading away in that collectivized flat. Night after night, you sit with that dried-up grande dame. Who would blame you for touching yourself, trying for a little pleasure? At night you sometimes leave the shades open—yes you do. I’ve seen you.”

I could imagine it, the shades open… though no one could see—we were on the second floor. I’d have to hang myself out the window. Easier to imagine a ground-floor window…

“Just in case someone comes along, some lonely man out walking. And there is someone. You’ve seen him in the street. He waits for you when you come home at night. He’s waiting, he watches your windows. You feel him there, don’t you?”

“Is it you?” I murmured. “Are you watching me, Arkady?”

He sighed heavily. “Your mother and that old baba are snoring away, safely tucked up in their beds, and you stand at the window. You’re naked, so lovely, so yearning. You touch yourself, and he watches you, and you move together, you and this stranger.”

We moved together, there in the room, separate and yet together in this fantasy. I rubbed myself, tracing the slickness, letting his voice take me into the moment. It was an insistent, rumbling throaty whisper that I rode. I wanted him to keep talking, telling me the story of the man in the dark. My eyes were closed but I could hear him panting, slapping away at himself as I teased my body into orgasm. I buckled forward as the sweet waves of sensation moved through me.

Suddenly he was no longer sagging in the chair with a view of me. He was up on his feet, lifting me by the waist, and he shoved me, kneeling, onto the couch. I threw my arms up so I wouldn’t hit the wall with my head, but my forehead struck as he jammed himself into me from behind. I twisted to find a position where he couldn’t ram himself up painfully against my womb, but he kept moving me back so he could get it all in. “You’re so little—who would have thought?”

But I wasn’t that little. Genya and I made love and it wasn’t like this. Arkady knew exactly what he was doing. He either wanted to hurt me or didn’t care. I screamed.

“My big dick—is it too much for you?” he whispered in my ear, bent over me. He twisted my nipple, hard. “Yes, I’m hurting you?”

I gritted my teeth so I wouldn’t cry out again, he seemed to enjoy that he was hurting me. I would not add to his pleasure in it. I held my arms before my head so I wouldn’t knock myself out hitting the wall. “Get off… let me go.”

He slapped my ass, hard, like a horse. “Tell me how it hurts. Tell me, or I’ll keep it up all night. Tell me how you like my steel.”

I braced my forehead against my arms. “Why are you doing this?” I choked out.

“So your boyfriend Kolya’ll feel it when he fucks you,” he said, close by my ear, petting my hair. “He’ll know you’ve been fucked by a real man. How do you like fucking a real man?” He grabbed my hair and plowed all the way into me and a scream rose from my guts into the room and my head hit the wall again. Would he never stop? He twisted my nipple like he was trying to pull it off. “Tell me.”

But I could not say it. I could only cry as he scoured me raw as a sandpapered plank. When would he come? What would make him finally stop? It wasn’t the sound of my sobs—that was clear. Would he just keep going forever? I was dry as a piece of toast, and he kept going. I was cramping with pain. What a fool. This was what he really wanted. All that sexy talk was just one more thing he could take away from me.

“Does your Kolya have you like this? Do you feel him in your lungs, in your throat when he fucks you?”

Was that it, to erase Kolya from my body? Who was the fool here? Only pleasure erased pleasure, Arkady. I must be bleeding now. He was never going to come.

Finally he pulled out and sagged onto the couch next to me, both of us puffing and panting, his pants around his ankles, his cock stark white like a radish. He needed a mare, a camel. He was puffing, stroking himself. I hoped he’d have a heart attack. “Put your finger up my ass, Makarova.”

I’d never heard of such a thing.

“Do it,” he said. He kicked his pants off and knelt there, pumping.

Trying not to look, I fingered the puckered orifice.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Stick that thing in before I pop.”

I pressed, just to the first knuckle. And he groaned, and I could feel him contracting around my digit, such an odd feeling. It must be the way a man felt inside me, the slick walls of muscle gripping him. Well, it was far better than what had preceded it. Finally he made a sound like he was having that infarction he richly deserved when he grabbed my head like a cabbage and forced it down onto him, spearing me in the mouth, up into my throat. I gagged as his hot, sour semen streamed into me. I couldn’t breathe, even through my nose, and I struggled to pull away—pushed against his thighs, scratched at his chest, tried to find his face, bite down but my jaws were locked open. He held me and held me as he released into my throat, then finally he let me go.

I flung myself away from him, coughing and gasping, sagged to the floor, spitting, tasting him, smelling him. I scrabbled back against the wall, as far from him as I could.

He picked up my slip from the floor, wiped himself and threw it to me. “You’ll get used to me. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?”

I wiped my finger on the Louis chair. My throat was as raw as my vagina now. I inched the slip over my head, covering the pale sore nipples that he found so exotic, the wet patches on my crumpled chemise. The sordid remains of adventure. “At least let me have my bracelet back.”

Arkady stretched and yawned on the daybed and pulled his pants back on, though he left his cock out to air. He’d had a fine time. He looked ten years younger. “No, I have something else in mind for it.” He took the enameled bangle from his pocket, twirled it on a long forefinger. “I’m going to bring your young Nikolai home for you. Your little mischief maker. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A little gift for your trouble?”

“Was that what this whole evening’s been about? Kolya?” The romantic dinner, the brutal sex, everything? It had never been about me at all. I had been so sure there’d been an undercurrent of desire. But I was only a tool.

Arkady made that horrible moue. “Oh, Makarova. It doesn’t diminish our love, does it?” He buttoned that monster back into his pants like an eel returning to its hole. “It just makes it more interesting.”

“He won’t come,” I said defiantly. I reached out warily for my dress, dragged it toward where I sat, oozing onto the floorboards. Blood? Yes. Bastard. He was counting on Kolya’s love for me, his loyalty. I have your woman. Come back if you want her. Before I flog her, cut her in tiny pieces, and feed her to the geese. And what would he do to Kolya if he returned? How perfectly I had played into Arkady’s hands. “He’ll never come back,” I spat. “He doesn’t love me like that.”

“You should hope he does,” Arkady said.

I dressed as quickly as I could, half doubled over from the cramping, imagining Kolya dashing into the trap. I prayed he would not. I could only imagine what Arkady might do to him. Yet a small part of myself, a selfish, vain part, could not help wishing he would come for me, would be willing to risk even death for me.

The tall, spectral man put on his coat and hat, and I put on my own, snatching it and moving away from him, still unwilling to get within arm’s reach. The speed with which he had turned on me was indelibly imprinted on my body. Arkady von Princip was dangerous at all times, not only when he appeared to be. He started through the door, glancing over his shoulder. “Sorry. Didn’t I mention? You’re not going anywhere.”

He closed the door and locked it behind him.

49 Captivity

I DREAMED THAT A crowd chased me through the streets of Petrograd. I turned and twisted to avoid their grasping, clutching hands, but there were too many. They got me down onto the ground in the filth of a market square and were peeling me with their knives as you’d peel summer fruit, starting with my face as I screamed and twisted and tried to get away. Finally, they got my skin off in one piece and someone ran away with it. And they left me there blinded and bloody, a hunk of living meat. How could I go around Petrograd without a skin? People were so hungry these days.

I awoke, curled in a hot room, still in my clothes, covered with sweat. Thank God, I thought. I still had my skin.

Then I remembered where I was and why. My head thundered and my throat was parched, but I grabbed my coat, stuffed my feet into my cracked boots, and flew to the door.

Locked.

I battered at it with my fists, yelled to anyone listening to let me out. I couldn’t breathe. I pleaded to be set free, but no one came. The room stank of him, our sex, a miasma, disgusting and shameful.

The windows! I opened the drapes, but the windows wouldn’t give. Locked. No, I saw the blocks hammered into the wide sill. A prison. And I’d walked in on my own. Thinking I had a new lover. What a fool. I pulled the chair from the desk to the window and climbed up onto the sill, dislodging a geranium growing there. Dirt all over the floor. The smell of my wedding. Down in the street, I could see the enviable people, walking by under battered umbrellas. Rain blackened the trees. Oh to be out there, wet, hungry but free…. I opened the fortochka, I would have cried out, but I was afraid men in the outer room might hear me, stop me. I tore a piece from my slip, waved it. No good, who would look up into the rain? “Help!” I called out. Louder. “Help!” Still no one. I listened to hear anyone coming. No.

I tried the escritoire in the bookcase, lined with drawers and cubbyholes. Nothing dangerous, no letter opener, no penknife, but here was a pen, and a bottle of ink. I found a small notepad and wrote in block letters, HELP being held prisoner fourth floor COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES March 30, 1918. GET HELP. Threw it out the window. Waved my white flag, now a wet rag. The sound of the rain erased my pleas.

The glass in the window was divided into squares, each too small for me to climb through but perhaps… I broke the first window, my coat over my hand. Listened. Nothing! I had to work quick. I broke out the second above it. Yes. The outer window opened, they had not thought to lock it. Now there just remained the matter of the crosspiece. Clinging to the wide wall of the recessed window, I lifted my foot in its boot—Put your boot in it!—and broke out the crosspiece. Waited for the sound of men running on the parquet outside the locked doors. I jumped down, dragged the Louis chair to the door and jammed it under the doorknob, then returned to my perch on the windowsill. Was I ready? I carefully brushed the glass away from the ledge. Holding on, I stuck my leg through, straddling the entire width of sill and window. Then ducked and got the rest of myself through. My head and shoulders, outside. My heart was pounding, my hands sweaty, the rain falling on my face.

But to my disappointment, there was no balcony, no ledge, no ornamentation one could balance upon. I waved my white flag. “Hey! Help!”

A child looked up. A child, across the street, tugged at his mother’s coat, pointed to the girl climbing from the window. The mother stopped, put her umbrella back, saw me. Other people stopped on the sidewalk and watched. “Help me!” I shouted, weeping, holding on to the inner window frame, praying it wouldn’t break. “They’ve got me locked in!”

But they just looked up dumbly. They thought I was a suicide.

“I NEED HELP!” I screamed.

Nobody moved. Then someone came running from this side of the building. Looked up, ran back in. “HELP ME!”

The drainspout. It ran down the building, past the next window. If I could stand, and make the big step to the next window, and then to the downspout, I just might be able to climb down. Or tie the curtains together and lower myself the four stories… I heard the falling chair, but my position was too awkward to extricate myself quickly.

Suddenly, a heavy hand reached through the broken window and grabbed me by the hair, pulled me roughly inside, knocking me onto the floor. A blow to the face. It was the bearded man. “What do you think you’re doing, huh? Trying to escape?” Another blow. Openhanded, but his hands were like blocks of wood. I curled myself into a ball around the geranium, the dirt.

“Hey, hey, take it easy.” Another man, pockmarked, shoes wet. The one down in the street, the one who’d caught me.

“You take it easy, shithead.” The bearded man. “Where were you? You were supposed to be on watch.”

“I can’t watch everything,” said the other one. “She looks bad.”

“Get some boards. Fix that.” The bearded man bent over me, his gut straining his pants. “You. Stay away from those windows or I’ll pitch you out. Head first. Whee…” He showed me with his hands, flight, and then smack!, brought his two hands together. “Shoulda helped you out the rest of the way, would have solved the woman problem right then and there.” He turned to the other man. “I told him you can’t mix women with business.”

“You told him that,” the other man said skeptically.

“In my way,” said the bearded man.

My hair hurt, my face was bleeding, scratched where it had been pulled past the window frame. My cheek throbbed where he’d hit me. “I didn’t choose to be here,” I said.

“Shut up,” said the bearded man, lifting his backhand, then thinking twice about it. “Stay out of my hair or I’ll cut your throat just to get rid of you.”

He waited for the other man to return with boards and a tool box, watched him board up the broken panes. My head still rang from the blows, I could feel the swelling coming on already.

“Could I have some water?” I asked.

“You get nothing, bitch,” said the bearded man, and slammed the door, turned the lock hard.

At least the fortochka opened. I breathed the cold freshness of the rain. I could see the trees across the way in the Tauride Gardens, their black limbs studded with new buds. I wept like a child reaching my hand out to touch the rain, licking it off my palm. So close, those gardens, the trees I’d climbed as a child. That I made Seryozha climb, though he was afraid. I should have been more afraid, and he less. Among them lay the pond we pretended was Lake Svetloyar. Avdokia would tell us the story: Zhili-buili, once upon a time, a prince built a city without walls on the banks of Lake Svetloyar… Nothing seemed as precious now as the black pond that concealed the holy city, guarded forever against the Great Khan when it sank beneath the lake. And upon the midnight, if you are pure at heart, if you are faithful, you can hear the bells of Kitezh ring out from beneath the waters.

I waited all morning for someone to arrive with water or breakfast, a knout or a gun, but no one came. I examined the room’s two dull landscapes and a portrait in a slightly cubist style. I took the latter off the wall and threw it against the door, enjoying its smash and screaming in frustration, waiting for the man to come back and hit me again, but the door remained shut.

Surely someone in the building must have heard me. But most likely Arkady had them all terrorized. He was probably paying off the house committee, too. It could even be that the residents felt safer with him around. And got electricity at night. I stood by the window, watching the rain and rehearsing my sins.

Was it raining in Moscow? I imagined Genya making his kinofilms. Genya whom I had let slip through my fingers—how had I not clung to him in the station, sworn not to let him go? If I ever got out of this room, I would go and live with him in Moscow—Zina, too. I didn’t care anymore. A city in which Arkady von Princip drew breath was cursed down to its cobblestones.

Or I could go Maryino. I was no barynya anymore—I knew how to work. I could walk cows to pasture, cut rye, saw wood, make shoes. You could vanish like that. Safe under the waters.

I sat down in the blue empire chair and searched the escritoire again to see if there was anything I could use, something I’d missed, but the little drawers and cubbies held nothing but old letters and ticket stubs. Not even a hat pin. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way that man had used me, like a cow or a horse.

It all came back to Kolya. When I thought of him, my heart didn’t jump as it had even the day before. This was his fault, in more ways than one. Not only had he given me the jewel and told me to see Arkady if I needed to sell it. No. He had introduced me to my own boundless passion, the possibilities of the flesh, had left me wide open to this kind of seduction. That’s what made me want to retch with self-loathing. I tried to think back to our good times, the sleigh ride, snow on the Catherine Canal, but that cruel parody of love with Arkady had erased it.

I used the chamber pot. The pain made me grit my teeth. No paper to wipe with, only dusty copies of the old journal Severny Vestnik from the bookcase. I ripped out a sheet—a poem by Sologub—and gently blotted my torn flesh. No blood on the paper, that was good news. My vulva would be very well read. I started to laugh. Of course, love was the poem’s subject.

Later in the day, I heard a key turn in the lock and my heart spun like a tumbler. But it was only the Kirghiz, impassive, wrinkles deeply etched, a basket in one hand, a pitcher in the other. He glanced at my battered face, the boarded-up window.

I ran to him, clutching his arm. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. “I beg you. I’ll give you four thousand rubles. You know I’m good for it.”

He shook his head, grinned. His teeth were dark from tobacco, ground to stumps. “He likes you, little bird,” he said. “Imagine what he’d do to someone he didn’t like.”

I slumped in the chair. “Will he ever let me go?”

The man shrugged, setting the basket on the desk, the pitcher alongside it. “The Archangel holds our fate in his hands.”

In the basket, an egg. A loaf of good bread, a sausage. Like a love letter from a hangman.

The room measured ten paces by four. I spent the day pacing it off, or gazing out at the Tauride Gardens, and avoiding the daybed and the Louis chair. I knew their treachery. The chair stared back at me, blank as a babe. The hypocrisy of furniture. I sat at the escritoire and read all the family’s correspondence. Old letters from Moscow and Tsarskoe Selo, a postcard of the harbor at Novorossisk, to the Dearest Mustasovs, from Elena… a stack of overdue bills. The Dearest Mustasovs were evidently behind on payments to the butcher, the florist, the stationer. Maybe they were relieved that the revolution wiped out all their debts. In fleeing they could leave those problems behind.

I closed my fist around a pen, imagining stabbing him in the neck with it. Did I have the nerve? The speed? He was quick as an adder. And would avenge an attack without mercy.

Someone was playing the violin in another apartment. How crushing it was to know how little I mattered. Even if I died in this room, people would go on making dinner, taking children to the gardens, practicing the violin. How enviable they all seemed, unaware that in this room in their own building, a girl was being held prisoner.

No. Not unaware. They’d heard me. And decided to do nothing. Even on Grivtsova Alley someone would have come by now. Even the meekest of housewives would have knocked gently once the coast was clear. But here, as long as it wasn’t their own problem, a human being’s misery was something the neighbors could close their ears to, pretend it was a cat yowling.

I hated people. Who could go on living as if nothing was happening when something hideous unfolded just overhead, or in the next flat, working its way into their dreams? “I hate you!” I screamed. “I hate all of you!” I took the children’s silhouettes and pitched them across the room, one by one—their little curls, their overbites—where they broke with a satisfying crash.

Light bled from the sky, abandoning the bare branches of the trees. Would he return? Maybe I wasn’t that important. Maybe I was merely a hostage against Kolya’s unlikely reappearance, no more. I switched on the electrolier. At least the electric lights worked. I picked up a book—Chekhov—read a page or two of “The Lady with the Lapdog,” and then “The Black Monk,” but they held no interest, these men and women, fathers and daughters, orchards and oceans.

I found some paper in the desk, ink still in the inkwell. They had departed quite recently. Maybe Arkady had threatened them. I looked down into the black soul of the ink. Maybe I should drink it. If it were the previous century, that’s what I would do. A ruined girl. The idea sparked a sudden rage. Ruined for what? That murky melodrama. Better to throw it in his face, savor his pain. Before he caught me and killed me. Or handed me over to men rougher than he was. Anything could transpire in a room like this.

On a blank sheet, I wrote my name. Marina Makarova. My father’s name. I crossed it out and wrote Kuriakina. But I’d not been Kuriakina long enough to even recognize the sight of it. Under it, I wrote the character ya. I. That was the only name that belonged to me. Ya was the city under the lake, the thing I could claim for myself. I would keep it well hidden. I, Marina. Like a pebble in the mouth in a desert.

He came on the night of the third day, waking me out of a hungry sleep. Light from the streetlamps blued the window and splashed the ceiling with rain. His hair caught some of that glow. He didn’t look quite human in that unholy radiance. I eyed him sullenly from the daybed.

He passed his hand over the boarded window. “What did you think you were doing? Would you really have jumped?” He seemed fascinated. “We’re on the fourth floor.” His eyes shone for a second, transparent as a cat’s, then disappeared into his inky silhouette. “I thought you’d want a little company,” he said. “I’ve had an interesting night.”

“Rape anyone?” I spat it out like a bad taste. I would not collaborate. I would not be seduced.

“Makarova.” He placed his long hands over his heart, right where I would have stabbed him if I’d been able to find anything besides pens in the drawer. “We’re having an affair.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all.” Silhouetted against the windows, still in fedora and coat, he was like something left over from a dream. “You wanted to know this man, this Arkady von Princip. So different from all those little schoolboys. You were intrigued—admit it. By my power. By the danger. You came up here of your own accord, took off your clothes for me. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”

Lord, I remembered. My body still reminded me. “And then what happened? I remember that, too.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “You can’t play with me like you can with your little boyfriends. You’re mine now. A man can’t rape his own wife. It isn’t possible.”

I regarded his slow, languid movements as I would a snake’s. I inched—imperceptibly I hoped—toward my boots, in case he became overconfident, in case I got the chance to bolt. “If she doesn’t want him, what else would you call it? If he forces her.”

“She’s already his. She’s already accepted him.” He gazed out at the park, the tops of the trees. “She’s already taken her clothes off and spread herself out for him. Like this city. Petrograd is mine. I own her. I’ll do what I like with her. And I’ll do the same with you.” He turned back to me and I changed position on the bed, to conceal that I’d been reaching for my boots.

He took off his coat and hat and settled himself on the Louis chair. Only his face and hair stood out in the gloom. He crossed his long legs, fished his string from his pocket. The fingers moved quickly in the nets they were weaving. He seemed incredibly pleased with himself. “Ask me a question.”

“If that’s not rape, what is?”

He turned the figure in his hands. It was a woman, tangled in a web, her arms and legs outstretched. “Semantics. I own you now. I can starve you so that you’ll lick my boots. I can flog you so that, believe me, you’ll do anything I ask. If I get tired of you, I’ll kill you. Who would stop me? No one. Who cares? One girl more or less in this terrible world—it wouldn’t even make the papers.” I could smell him from here—cold and astringent, like cellar dirt. “Girls are there to be used. It’s how you’re built, and anyone who can be used will be.” His hair, a white nest. He threw his hat on the divan. “Are you looking for justice? Justice is a fiction. There’s only power.” He turned another figure—a crown. Then lowered his hands. “That’s what attracted you to me. The freedom of unapologetic power. A smart girl in your situation would think of how to make it work for her. How to cozy up to me. Flattery is good, for a start. Tell me what a wonderful lover I am, how brilliant I am.”

And he joined me on the couch.

50 The Minotaur

I BECAME ACCUSTOMED TO things one should never become accustomed to. I struggled to remember precise details about the outside world. The clean, gummy smell of fir boughs at Christmastime. The loamy richness of the forest north of town, where we collected wild mushrooms in the fall—bright foxes, chanterelles. The felted valenki boots Avdokia stitched for us, with little animals embroidered across their toes, hedgehogs and leaping stags. The details helped keep me sane. I recited poems by the hour, speeches from Shakespeare, sang songs, danced. I was sure the men guarding the flat thought me stone-cold mad.

The baron came late at night, bearing food and drink, wanting to talk, wanting sex. He was never again as cruel as he’d been the first night, but I was at no risk of forgetting what he was capable of. Occasionally he was inward, gloomy and strange, which was even worse. Who could follow the Minotaur into the depths of his labyrinth? He drank the most on those moody nights. I hoped he might grow sloppy, giving me a chance at his keys, but he liked me to drink with him, and he held it better than I did. He never stayed the night. By dawn he was always gone. I imagined him having to return to his coffin.

As my despair deepened, my mind cleared. Voices flooded in, begging to speak through my pen—Persephone, captive queen in the halls of the Dark Lord. Ariadne in the labyrinth with her half brother the Minotaur. Vasilisa the Beautiful and her knowing doll. And the faithful women of Kitezh. Arkady, too, appeared on my pages despite my efforts, the source of dark mythologies.

The electric light found me sleeping. Arkady entered, carrying a basin, a pitcher, and a towel. He rested the washbasin on his hip and closed the door behind him. I felt for the elbow of glass beneath my pillow, a shard from a broken picture frame. The time had come to treat an animal like an animal. My fingers found its bladelike edge. When he bent over me, I would slash his throat from ear to ear.

He placed the basin on the desk and poured in the water, the steam rising.

I swore I would not react, that I would wait, but the lovely sound of water… I had not had anything to drink all day. “We’re going to have a little scrub down,” he said, pulling something from his pocket. I could hear the paper tearing, could smell it from the daybed. Levkoi soap. My grandmother used to buy this soap in the Nevsky Passazh, said it reminded her of stock flowers that grew in the dooryard at Maryino. Arkady was about to drop the soap into the water.

I called out, “Wait!” And despite my vow, I stumbled to the desk and lapped hot water from the basin into my hand, drinking deep from my palm like a peasant.

“Oh, you’re thirsty. How remiss of me,” he said, like a fop at a party who had forgotten a lady’s lemonade. “Such a hectic day.”

Suddenly he seized my other hand, my right, and squeezed it, hard. I screamed as the glass sliced through my palm, a pain so intense, so unexpected. He kept squeezing, his face a mere inch from my own, enjoying the pain, delighting in it. “You waited,” he whispered into my ear as he held my hand there. “That was stupid. You should have done it right away. Only amateurs wait.” Finally he let me go. My blood spilled out of my fist into the water, over the desktop, the chair. It was running down my arm. The shard of glass fell to the floor.

I keened over my damaged hand, holding my wrist. “Bastard. Whore’s son. Motherfucker.”

He grabbed my wrist and yanked me to the stove. I fought him with all my strength, shrieking and cursing, when I saw where he was dragging me but he was strong as a bear. Forcing me to kneel, he opened the stove door.

He pressed my palm to the hot metal.

I screamed so loudly that it should have been heard on every floor of the building, echoing onto the street and up into the pitiless sky. The black trees must have recoiled, the windows shattered for miles. He grabbed my hair and bent my head back. “Quiet.”

At last he let me go. I sat on the floor, trembling with the shock, holding my hand by the wrist.

He crouched next to me, ran his bony fingers through my hair. “You’ll thank me tomorrow.” All I could do was rock back and forth. “A nasty cut. Cauterization’s best. Stitches become infected.”

He picked me up under the arms and hauled me back to the daybed. I let him. I had not one ounce of fight left. He offered me some vodka from a flask he pulled from his pocket. I shook my head. I didn’t want anything from him except his disappearance from the face of the earth. All my being was locked in the nine square inches of my right palm.

“Come on, Makarova, don’t be stupid. There’s no one here to applaud your martyrdom.” He waved it under my nose.

I took the bottle and swallowed, once, twice. It burned my empty stomach, and it was a relief to feel pain somewhere besides my hand. I drank more.

He went to the door and spoke to someone. I held my wrist, my burned hand curled to my chest, as if it were a small wounded animal. Arkady returned and began unbuttoning my dress. This, too? Would I have to endure everything?

He pulled my boots off, removed my slip, my bloomers, even my hose without really touching me. As I stood naked in the hot room, he tenderly—like a nurse—began to wash me. Lathering the sweet soap on a cloth, wiping my shoulders, my arms, my breasts. The water was warm, the soap creamy. I closed my eyes, holding my wounded hand high above my head, and let him bathe me, concentrating on the sensations rising, an uncanny mixture of intense pain and pleasure.

He sang a lullaby under his breath as he washed me, something his nanny used to sing at bath time, no doubt. I didn’t recognize it. Every so often, I’d take another sip from the flask.

As he washed me, he talked. He wanted to talk about childhood. “What were you like as a child, Makarova? Did you play when you were a little girl? Who did you play with?”

Play? What was he talking about? Everything had acquired a slight halo. My hand throbbed overhead.

“Those games in a circle. I see them sometimes. They all seem to know how to play them. Does someone teach them, or do they just know, like ants?”

Despite myself, despite everything, I laughed, dribbling vodka down my chin. “Caraway, caraway, you can go any way… they didn’t play caraway in that castle of yours?”

“No, there was no playing,” he said. He had me lean over the basin and poured water onto my head. In the presence of mine enemies… worked the soap through my hair. “I was raised a gentleman—that is, beaten regularly, my head held under water, left outside without clothes. I learned about power. Useful, but not much of a childhood.”

I could smell him, antiseptic wormwood under the sweet soap. The vodka had gone to my head, my fear ebbing like the pain in my hand. It seemed like someone else’s now. How lovingly he touched me, as if he hadn’t just crushed my hand around a blade of glass. Rinsing my hair, my shoulders, my breasts and belly, the V of my cunt, as if my body were something beautiful and rare, not a sordid object he regularly used and forgot. How could one understand a man like this?

“You played as a girl, I know you did,” he said. “Tell me what you did.”

Poor monster. His fate, like the Minotaur’s, had been cast before birth. “Was there nothing you loved as a boy? Nothing that you enjoyed?”

“I rode well. Shot, of course. I was good with horses and dogs. I raised wolfhounds.” He ran his hand along my ribs. “My hounds—that was my great pleasure. You should have seen them, Makarova. There’s nothing quite as beautiful as wolfhounds chasing a wolfpack across the moonlit snow.”

I actually felt pity for the man. In another week, I would be as insane as he was. “My mother kept Italian greyhounds. The last one was named Tulku. But Red Guards shot him. He tried to bite one when they came to take her furniture.”

“Bastards. Dogs are far superior to people. They’re incapable of betrayal, for one thing.”

The cloth moved around my neck. I bent forward to let him wash my back, losing myself in the warmth and the rough cloth on my skin. He washed between my legs, down my thighs. “Tell me,” he said. “I want to know you as a child. I want to know everything. What did you play?”

I shook my head. I would sink beneath the lake, out of reach of the invader’s hand. The bells sang under water. He could never reach me there. If you are pure at heart…

“You’ll tell me eventually,” he said. “I’m all there is now.”

Something about that struck me hard as I stood there, dumb as a horse, with my fiery hand and my heavy tongue, being washed by this evil thing that had come out of the earth.

“I had a brother,” I said. “We were like twins. We had our own world, our own language. We invented our own games. Fairy tales, secret signs. He was a terrific mimic. We wrote our own plays—”

“And where is he now, this prodigy?” Arkady asked.

“He was in Moscow. With the cadets.” And now he was nowhere. I began to cry. I pressed my good hand to my eyes. All the fight had gone out of me. I needed someone to hold me, to pity me. Even him. Even him.

“Too bad,” he sighed, patting my shoulder awkwardly. “Dying like that, for a lost cause—Holy Russia or whatever. I want to die with my eyes wide open, believing in nothing.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your wish,” I said.

He took it in good spirits. Obviously my pain had put him in a cheerful mood. “Other brothers? Sisters?”

“My older brother fought with Brusilov. He’s in the Don with the Volunteers.” As if it were a matter of pride. Even now. I pictured Volodya on his beautiful Orlov trotter, Swallow. My brother’s shining hair and dark eyes, his cap just so, the horse polished like brown satin. Though I knew after years of war they were both roughened, it was how I liked to imagine him. Safe from all this squalor. What would he think of me now, my heroic brother—his sister a corrupt, corrupted, stinking piece of whoredom?

Suddenly my captor’s hand fell away from me. “That’s the connection, isn’t it? The older brother, the school chum.” He collapsed onto the empire chair. “Of course. So simple. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Drinking bouts, shared whores. Typical Petersburg boyhood. Signed up together, I imagine. Oh, I should have guessed.” Amazed at his own genius. His mind was like an elastic band that always snapped back to the same shape.

Angry as I was at Kolya, I trembled for him, to be the object of such a relentless obsession. And I knew, at that moment, that my lover would never return to Russia. He wouldn’t dare. Once you’d escaped Arkady von Princip, you were best off staying very, very far away.

Arkady stood, came close, sniffed my neck. “Have you always been in love with him? Tell me. Were you the little girl admiring your brother’s pal from behind the curtains? Letting him fondle you in the cloakroom?”

I was his prisoner, to do with what he liked, and still he was jealous as a schoolboy. “That was a long time ago.” But Tuesday was a long time ago, too.

“How old were you? Eighteen? Fourteen? Twelve?”

I felt a rush of perversity. It was like poking a snake, I couldn’t resist. I was sick to death of him. “You want to know? You want to know about me and Kolya? Yes, I was twelve and fourteen and eighteen. Everything you’re thinking and more. I was mad for him. I loved him more than any man alive.”

He squeezed the washcloth out into the basin, rested it on the side. “You might rethink that position. He may not be alive very long. Speaking of men alive,” he said, drying his hands on a towel, “guess who I ran into the other day?”

I did not give a damn.

“Our Dmitry Ivanovich. He’s been in Vologda with the English.” He shook out the towel and wrapped it around my shoulders.

I dried my hair with my good hand. Why did Arkady know my father’s whereabouts? He’d been interested in him even that first day, on Kamenny Island. Arkady was capable of saying anything to torment me, but that bit about the English sounded true enough. My father, still not reconciled to the fact that the future belonged to others.

The Archangel picked up the bloody basin and rapped on the door. It opened, and he handed the washbowl through. Then the Kirghiz and a younger man came in, carrying a small table and baskets of food. The younger man, a big-headed blond, found it difficult to keep his eyes on the table and the foodstuffs instead of on his master’s naked woman. I didn’t bother to cover myself. I was a horse, a cow. Shame belonged only to human beings.

They set out the feast before the Louis chair and the room filled with the fragrance of cooked food, meat. My stomach welcomed it with audible gurgles, that traitor. I hated that I needed to eat, hated that I needed him, my master, this ghoul. The men left silently.

Arkady sat in the chair before the low table and peered into the basket, his forefinger lifting the checkered cloth. “Yes, the noble Dmitry Ivanovich, somewhat the worse for wear.” He filled a plate—a small chicken, potatoes, mushrooms. I hadn’t eaten since morning, just a roll and some tea. My stomach growled viciously. “His mistress was with him.”

Hungry and burned as I was, I laughed. “You must be thinking of the wrong man.” I drank from his water glass.

My captor began to eat. “Viktoria Karlinskaya. Didn’t you know? It’s been going on quite a while.” He held out a piece of chicken to me on his fork. I reached with my good hand but he pulled it away. “No, open up.”

Feeding me like a squirrel he wished to tame. But in the end my stomach was more insistent than my pride. I ate, bite by bite—chicken, warm bread, salad. “You’re still wrong.”

“She’s an attractive woman,” he continued. “Married to an SR of some prominence. You people are so civilized. No pistols at dawn.”

It was impossible. Ridiculous. Though my parents’ marriage certainly wasn’t the warmest, it went against everything I knew about Father. Arkady was playing with me. I concentrated on the sensation of his crushing my fist around the shard of glass. I wouldn’t believe anything he said—even if he said the sun rose in the morning.

He pressed a piece of bread to my lips and I chewed it. “Ask me a question,” he said.

“Why are you like this?” I asked.

“A person can’t see what I’ve seen and not be affected by it,” he said, and stroked my wet hair. “You won’t be the same, either, after this is all over.”

I was glad he thought it would be over. That was cause for hope.

A few nights later, he urged me to recite poems for him. I considered poets I thought he’d like. Pushkin? Groan. Lermontov? Better. I tried the symbolists, the acmeists. He pronounced Blok “dreary” and Akhmatova “a frigid bitch,” but he adored the mocking, incendiary Tsvetaeva, especially the poem “We shall not escape Hell, my passionate sisters…” He had me recite it three times, savoring the lines,

Yes, this was the place for Tsvetaeva. Akhmatova was too reserved, too mournful and ready to grieve. Tsvetaeva knew what it was to make mistakes out of passion, how to let the madness in, let it flare and dance. Arkady lay with his head on my bare breast. I was unfortunately getting used to all this. My captor, my enemy, my lover… the saddest man I ever met.

“Tell me one of yours,” he said. “They say you write all the time.”

I poured myself another vodka, knocked it back. “I burn them as I go.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that.” He stood up and glanced around the room, pressing his long fingers to his mouth. He began searching. He tapped briefly on the open writing surface of the escritoire but didn’t touch any of the drawers. He peered behind the ugly landscape painting, a hiding spot that wouldn’t have occurred to me, then went straight to the bookcase and methodically began shaking out the books. I knew he would find them eventually. His delight was almost comical as the loose pages fluttered out from a volume of Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches like so many gulls. He gathered them up from the floor and brought them to me, rustling them, and settled in for a show.

I sorted through them, all my characters. Persephone, tragic Pandora, Ariadne. The woman of Kitezh. Frankly, I’d never had a better audience, more intent, more focused.

I shared one I’d written in the voice of the sorcerer Koshchei the Deathless as he speaks to his soul, which lies hidden

In the poem, the soul’s so very lonely that she wants to join with him again. But he will not give up his power for his soul, no matter how lonely they both are or how much misery it causes them.

“You really believe I have a soul hidden away somewhere, like a dog’s buried bone?” He laughed, his head on my shoulder. “That I could just unlock the chest of gold, and my soul and I would be one again for all eternity? As I recall, Koshchei dies when he and his soul are reunited.” He tipped the bottle back, then held it to my lips.

The vodka had ceased to burn, ceased to taste like anything. I drank and wiped my chin on the back of my hand. “Yes, but think of the suffering of keeping them apart. All this power, this greed,” I said. “To what end?”

He was silent for a time. “What’s the point in a soul if it kills you? Would you rather have life or a soul?”

“What’s life without a soul?” I said. “It’s not even life.”

“So Russian.” He laughed. “It’s why I’m the new prince of Petrograd and you’re a naked girl in a room.”

Sometime around dawn, I must have passed out. A long, headachy sleep, with scraps of nightmares slicing this way and that.

I woke to full daylight, and flew from the couch as if it were on fire. What in the devil had he done to me while I slept? Poured candle wax between my shoulder blades? The pain was as bright as branding irons, phosphorescent. I raced to the mirror that hung between the windows and, twisting around, tried to see my back in the glass. Stretching, craning, my skin burning.

When I saw what he’d done, I clapped my hand over my mouth.

He’d incised into my back a fiery alphabet, a network of cuts, delicately inscribed, oozy red upon the white flesh. A poem. For me.

And I knew, as surely as I’d known anything in my life, that I would never walk free of this nightmare.

51 The Meeting

THE KIRGHIZ FOUND Me in a state of shock, naked, my back a mass of bloody cuts. He stopped when he saw me, holding my breakfast in a bag. I looked at him over my shoulder, gazing into the intricacy of his hard-burnished wrinkles. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t soften. What those old eyes must have seen.

“You’ve got to get me out of here,” I whispered hoarsely. “He’s not going to stop. He’s never going to stop, is he?”

I was searching for a shred of humanity. Yes, there it was—I could see the pity in his eyes. He put the bag on the desk and filled my pitcher with water from a pot. But what he said was, “If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods.”

Yet he came back later with bandages and iodine. Yes, Arkady’s men would know how to treat knife wounds. They would have had numerous occasions to perfect their art. He cleaned and dressed my flesh, quickly and efficiently, and changed the dressings each day afterward. But the marks would never fade entirely. Alas, Beloved, we shall not hear those bells again. I heard voices in other rooms, people in the street, hail on the roof, the snapping of fire logs, but under it all was silence.

The twelfth night Arkady came early, in a brisk mood. He held up my laundered slip in his bony hands. “I thought we’d go out. Let’s get you dressed, shall we? Would you like that?” His blue eyes were all concern.

He was going to take me out?

I stared at him blankly. Was there such a place as Out? Where one would be permitted to walk, dressed and booted, outside these walls? Not free, of course, but at least in the world? I hadn’t dressed since the day he’d cut me. I couldn’t bear anything pressing against my back.

He slipped the cotton lisle down past my head, pulled it gently over the bandages, tenderly even. As if cutting my flesh had been some necessary operation and he was my solicitous nurse. Yet I’d been so sure I’d never leave this room alive. I knew there was no way he was actually letting me go, that he was just expanding the walls of my prison to include the night and new air, but I’d take any scrap of it, anything, even a firing squad.

He helped me into my clothes, my coat and scarf, and turned the key in the lock. The door swung outward. It seemed impossible. Another room. Fresh air, cold compared to the hothouse I’d been living in. The shock of seeing the flat again. Men, just in the next room, playing cards amid rolls of rugs, racks of coats, objets d’art that hadn’t been here when I’d arrived. They looked up and quickly back at the worn fans of spades and diamonds. All this time, they’d heard my screams, knew exactly what I’d endured, and not one of them had so much as lifted a finger. They were just so many dogs that showed their bellies to the leader, the most vicious of them all. I felt their eyes on my back as Arkady led me on. I wished I could burn the house down with all of them sealed into it. Then I would hear their screams while I played my own game of cards.

The other rooms of the enfilade swarmed with men, eating, carrying boxes and bags, flour and cans, even a live goat, its hard hooves clicking on the parquet. I felt like a long-lashed dairy cow being led to the milking shed before a pack of wolves, though none of them dared so much as glance at me. Queen of the Underworld with her Dark Lord.

We descended the small elevator to a long car waiting at the curb in the icy night, a Benz Söhne with a surrey top. Little Gurin sat at the wheel like a monkey in a leather cap, and next to him, burly in a thick coat, sat the bearded man with the heavy eyebrows, St. Peter. He glanced at me without curiosity from under his astrakhan hat. As usual, Arkady cut a poor figure in his old coat and crushed fedora. He clearly relished the masquerade, his power concealed inside his shabbiness. I wondered what he wanted. What was his game? I knew him well enough by then to know there was a reason for all this. He looked far too pleased with himself for my liking. I slid across the seat. It occurred to me to keep on going and I grabbed the door handle on the street side, but Arkady yanked me back by my coat collar. “Oh, don’t leave us so soon, Makarova. You’ll miss the fun. Won’t she, Borya?”

The heavy-browed man turned and scratched his forehead under his hat with the thin barrel of his Mauser. Everyone had them now, it seemed—the Cheka and the criminals alike. You could tell the Mausers from the regular guns by the sound of their rapid fire, Petrograd’s nightly lullaby.

I made the mistake of sitting back against the upholstery, and my unhealed wounds sent me jolting upright again. Gurin wrenched the car from the curb and I had to clutch Arkady to keep from falling backward. But I was out, that was the thing. I wanted to stick my head out the window as Tulku used to do, drink in the Tauride Gardens, the icy night. I couldn’t imagine where it would end, but for the moment I was moving away from that prison.

“Smile.” Arkady grinned like a corpse. “Breathe.” He demonstrated deep breathing, theatrically throwing his head back, his arms wide on the seat as we careened through the pitch-dark town. “Ah, Petrograd. I love this city.” At this hour, streets that would once have been teeming with pedestrians traveling to and from the theaters and restaurants were as deserted as those of a town emptied by plague. No one walked on the ice-glazed pavement, no lights appeared in the windows. Only when we crossed Nevsky at the train station did we see any signs of life.

The Benz Söhne slid on the frozen road, Gurin neatly avoiding all the potholes and detritus. The wind tore in through the car’s open sides. I reluctantly accepted the bearskin rug over my lap and pulled it to my shoulders. I could still smell the bear. Arkady worked his hand under my skirt and warmed it between my legs as a man rests his hand on a dog’s head, as if no one else were in the car. Yes, I had submitted, utterly, I was hollow as a gourd. Arkady’s woman.

“Did you see the look on that blonde’s face?” Arkady said to the heavy-browed Borya.

“She shouldn’ta held the goods in her corset,” said the man with the Mauser. “That was her first mistake.”

In a short time we were out of the city, heading south toward the Pulkovo Heights. The moon rose in the east like a voyeur peeping through a blind. A beautiful night in any other life, the road slick and shining, the smell of the surrounding fields. In the daytime, the Benz Söhne would have been sunk in mud to the running boards, but the temperature had dropped and set a fine crust on the land. Here and there, I could detect the trench lines we had dug against the German advance. That, too, seemed like years ago, those days working alongside the women, their camaraderie. What I wouldn’t give for a friend.

The men talked about the job they’d pulled the night before, a theater robbery. I wondered if they had attacked one of Krestovsky’s snack bars. Beautiful Galina and her pretensions to poetry. Did they still gather at the apartment on Sergievskaya? Or had all the poets gone their own ways, each scrambling for a livelihood and a bit of bad bread? Maybe it had been collectivized by now. Arkady kissed my neck, sniffing me as he massaged me under the bearskin. “We made the front page of the Petrogradsky Echo—third time this week. The new Cheka head, this Uritsky, vows to clean us off the face of the earth. Ironic, wouldn’t you say, as there is officially no crime in Petrograd?” He snorted, “I’d like to see him try to get rid of me. I heard someone stole his hat right in the corridor at Smolny.” Uritsky was Varvara’s boss. He was the new chief of the Petrograd Cheka? I filed that piece of information away in a secret drawer in my head.

In the distance, the pale dome of the Pulkovo Observatory gleamed on the heights. Someone was working up there tonight, some quiet scientist for whom this madhouse on wheels would seem stranger than all nine moons of Jupiter.

We turned into a smaller lane, bumped and slid through a small forest of bare birches and thin evergreens, to a log dacha, smoke curling from its chimney. The men got out. If I ran now, how far would I get? To the observatory? I estimated I’d make it no farther than the dacha gate before I felt a bullet between my shoulder blades.

I climbed out of the back, Arkady taking my hand. My breath was full of frost. “You’re going to like this,” he said. And we all marched down the crunchy frozen path under the blistering stars to the old dacha.

A small group watched us enter, four men dressed in a variety of styles and a woman, full-lipped with thick reddish-blond hair. The room was rich with fragrant fir-smoke and tobacco. The mood was tense, as though a heated discussion had just ceased when we entered. They cast sharp glances at each other. What have we gotten ourselves into? I could almost hear them asking themselves.

Borya took up guard post near the door, Mauser at his hip, arms crossed, dashing my hopes of a quick bolt to freedom.

I squeezed myself into a corner, hoping to be ignored, wondering how I would be perceived by these people, a charcoal-eyed girl in my old coat and tattered gloves, my shawl and boots. I recognized a familiar scent married to the fir: cherry tobacco. There. By the mantelpiece, in a worker’s black blouse and a full beard, his corduroy trousers stuck in his boots, Father had already seen me. He’d been smoking a clay pipe but it now hovered halfway to his chest as he stood, frozen in horror, taking in my wasted face, my bandaged hand, the company I kept.

Shame rose up in me like water in a fountain, filled me so quickly with its hot roaring substance that I felt I might be knocked off my feet. I wished I could melt into the floor like butter. Had Arkady planned this all along? Of course he had. His blue eyes danced with fun. If I’d had a knife—even the edge of a can—I would have cut his throat.

And who might these other people be? The woman in her modest black dress wasn’t tall, but deep-breasted, her bright hair in a tight chignon. The man seated across from Arkady had soft brown hair and a drooping moustache. He nervously fingered his workman’s cap, resting on the table. Arkady tossed his own disreputable hat beside it, letting his pale rat’s nest sprawl on his cadaverous head. I saw the fun he was having at Father’s expense. Arkady reached behind him and pulled me to stand next to him, the way a man pulls a woman to the roulette table for luck as he places his chips on rouge. He was parading me before my father like a trophy of war, like the cursed captives of Troy.

A man in an indeterminate army uniform without insignia settled on the arm of a chair, eyeing my captor with distaste. The various comrades glanced anxiously at Arkady and the heavily armed Borya stationed at the door. Father struggled to maintain his composure, lighting his pipe, emotion trembling just under his eyes. Disgust? Grief? His reddish-brown hair and beard were frosted with gray now. He had become old.

A small dark man in a black jacket next to the army man assessed the situation. He had soulful, intelligent Mediterranean eyes. A Greek maybe, or a Jew, or Armenian. The twitchy man with the long moustache—he looked somehow familiar—spoke to Father over his shoulder. “You said he’d come alone.” What did Father have to do with any of these people?

“I never come alone,” interrupted Arkady, as if oblivious to the other currents in the room. “I don’t take a shit alone.” He stretched his long legs. “When I piss, someone holds my dick.”

The moustached man worked his jaw, swallowing his outrage. “So where’s the money, Princip? We’ve been waiting for weeks. I don’t think you have it.”

I knew how much Arkady would dislike this fidgety, impatient man’s purposely leaving off the honorific. The fellow could not guess how volatile the man seated across from him could be. But Arkady chose to ignore the slight—for now. “It’ll be ready when you and your people are ready for us, Karlinsky.”

If this was Karlinsky, then the voluptuous woman with the red-blond hair would be… my father’s mistress. I felt less ashamed than I did a moment before. So I was Arkady’s whore. Well, what of it? What about your whore? Were you seeing her all along? All that moralizing. She wasn’t as beautiful as my mother, but she looked like she knew her way around a bedroom. But why had we come if Arkady wasn’t prepared to do business? Surely not just to make me suffer or for a private joke. It had to have been to get the upper hand in some way.

The dark man spoke. “It should have been here already, Baron. That was our understanding. The timing is crucial.” Slim and intense, he had a quality of speech, rapid and a bit garbled, like someone who spoke many languages but none of them quite natively. I guessed him to be from Odessa, a city famous for its gangsters. The woman glanced at Father, but he was gazing down at the fire as if he’d like to throw himself into it.

The man in uniform whispered something to the Odessan, who turned away from the rest of us to reply.

“It will be here,” said Arkady. “In good time. Three hundred fifty thousand gold francs can’t be sewn into someone’s clothes.”

All at once, the picture came into focus. This money wasn’t moving on its own. Arkady must have sent Kolya to the West to sell the valuables of the Formers and return with the gold. But Kolya hadn’t fulfilled his end of the deal. Ha! Of course he hadn’t. Three hundred fifty thousand gold francs would buy a lot of women, a lot of wine, in Paris during a war. That was where I came in. Ya, hostage. And it was all for this—for some underground organization hatching a counterrevolutionary plot.

“The Czechs won’t wait,” said the small black-eyed man. “They’re already moving.”

The Czechs? I remembered reading about the Czech Legion in the papers. Tens of thousands of Allied troops stationed east of Moscow who had been trapped in Russia after the peace was signed. The government couldn’t exactly march them out through Germany—it would violate the treaty. I thought it had been decided to send them out through the Pacific, via the Trans-Siberian Railway, then sail them back to the West. But it seemed these people had something else in mind.

“It will be here in time,” Arkady said languorously, stretching his long legs.

The Odessan spoke again to the man in the army uniform.

“But how can you be sure?” the man blurted out. In English. “Really, after all, the man is a criminal.” Ah, of course. If Father was involved, the English wouldn’t be too far behind.

“The criminal,” Arkady corrected, in his own English.

The Englishman’s face flushed in ugly patches, and his nostrils flared like a hound’s scenting the wind. His accusing glance leaped at the Odessan. Why didn’t you tell me the bloody man could understand me? “The Czechs are depending on us.” His voice strained with the effort of trying not to shout. “So far as I can see, this has been just so much stalling and excuses. I think the money’s long gone and this one has no intention of providing—”

“Our experiences with the baron have been entirely satisfactory,” said the neat man with the black eyes.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Father. He’d been silent up to now, his forehead perspiring. He said it in Russian, sharply. “Due to the confidential nature of this meeting, I suggest that only essential personnel be present for the rest of this negotiation.”

“We’re all essential,” the woman spoke up, insulted, eyes flashing. “Aren’t we all at risk?”

“He means my personnel, Madame Karlinskaya,” Arkady interrupted her, lazily looking over his shoulder at me, at Borya at the door, at Gurin cleaning his fingernails by the fireplace. “These are my most trusted staff, Dmitry Ivanovich.” And to put a point on it, he kissed my hand. He might as well have put his hand up my skirt.

Father blanched white. His lips moved silently. He was fairly chewing on his beard. Finally he couldn’t contain himself any longer. “I must insist. For security’s sake.”

“What’s going on?” asked the Englishman in his native tongue.

The Odessan spoke low to the Englishman. Father wouldn’t look at me, only at Arkady.

“You aren’t accusing my people of being unreliable, are you, Dmitry Ivanovich?” Arkady said mildly. Please God, make this not be happening. “Maybe Borya here? Or Gurin? Or is it my lovely… companion?”

I could see the horror redouble in my father’s face as he realized that Arkady knew exactly who I was. “That girl…” he spluttered. Don’t say it, Father. Don’t. “Is a Bolshevik spy.”

My blood turned to metal.

The smile fell from Arkady’s face. This was not how he imagined this game would play out, and he wasn’t a man who liked being surprised. He couldn’t really think I’d sought him out for the Bolsheviks, could he? That I was a plant? Not that I was in any position to go around telling secrets, locked in that room, but the idea that I had played him for a fool… not good. “Are you sure, Dmitry Ivanovich? Are you very sure?” In one swift motion, he rose and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck like a rabbit, dragged me to the fireplace to push my face inches from my father’s. I could feel the fury in his grip. He would kill me. “This girl?”

I thought I would die. The anguish on my father’s face. I once would have done anything to bask in his love. “I’m not,” I pleaded. “I swear to you. He’s holding me hostage.” Please, Father.

Arkady pulled my hair, holding me to one side. “Is she or isn’t she, Dmitry Ivanovich? Time’s short. This is no light matter.” He twisted my hair harder, hard enough to make my eyes water.

My father’s voice was soft, thick. “God save me, yes.”

“What are you waiting for? Get rid of her!” Karlinskaya shouted.

I could have screamed out Papa! But I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I wanted him to remember me just like this. I wanted him to remember that I didn’t ruin him in front of all these people the way he had just ruined me.

The others were already packing up, grabbing their hats. “Nobody move,” Arkady said. “Keep an eye on them,” he told Borya, and hauled me out the door.

Outside, I slipped on the ice like a dog on a polished floor as he pulled me to the middle of the yard and shoved me to my knees in the frosty dirt. “I should kill you right now. Give me one reason not to.” He pulled out a revolver and pointed it at my head.

Were these to be my last minutes on earth? Was this frozen, rutted yard all of life there would ever be? I talked fast, trying to keep the tears from my voice. “How could I have imagined where you were taking me? How could I have planned this?”

“What did you tell them about me? Who did you tell?” He circled behind me. I tried to turn, but he grasped my hands and forced them behind my head.

“Nobody! If I was a spy, I’d have turned you in that first day on the islands. You’d be in the Peter and Paul Fortress by now.”

“You’re not convincing me.” Suddenly, a hot liquid hit the top of my head, seeped down my neck and into my bandages. Urine trickled into my hair, my eyes, my mouth—hot and stinking in the cold.

“Who was I supposed to tell?” I screamed. “I am not a spy!” He came back to stand before me, but all I could see were his worn boots. “I once passed on his dinnertime conversations to a Bolshevik friend, and he found out. He threw me out of the house. Now he thinks I’m trying to get back at him. It’s just an accident.”

He yanked my head back by my hair. My eyes smarted. He looked like a furious ghost, like the king in Hamlet. “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t have signed your death warrant for mere dinnertime conversation.”

“He doesn’t know you. What you might do…” But he didn’t care to ask, either. The sight of his back turned as Arkady dragged me off—I would take that to my grave.

A man came running out of the dacha, Borya on his heels. “Von Princip!” the man shouted.

Arkady turned his head, a reflex, and it was all the opening I needed. I scrambled up and broke for the woods like a rabbit heading for its burrow. I plunged into the trees, weaving blindly among the shaggy trunks of spruce and pine. A bullet zipped past me like a giant wasp. Another zinged by. I was making my way by touch alone through the dark, stumbling over frozen hummocks. Bullets continued crashing into the trees, but there was no way Arkady could see me now, a black form in the darkness. Was he following me? I didn’t stop to look.

How long did I run in those woods? Five minutes? Twenty? A year and a day? Terror stretches time—all of hell can exist in a moment. I had no idea where I was going except away from him.

The trees ended abruptly. Before me lay a field dappled with swaths of old snow, the moon like a policeman holding his searchlight aloft, raking the bare strips. The observatory glowed on the heights, its dome round among the trees. I stood, panting clouds of vapor into the icy air.

I had just this one chance. The Archangel would never grant another.