The Revolution of Marina M.

52 The Observatory

ZHILI-BUILI, ONCE UPON a time, five old people lived on a hill not so very far from the capital of Once-Had-Been. Their minds stalked through the corridors of the universe, galaxies without end. Every night the domes filled with the vast cotillion of the stars, the swirling waltz of the infinite. Comets streaked frozen tails past their five wrinkled foreheads, painting them with light. Constellations dotted their white hair and glazed their spectacles. Nebulae nested in their eyebrows. They knew where stars were born, and where they died, and why, and how. White giants studded their frail arms, yellow dwarfs gleamed in their lapels like diamond stickpins. They were the Five—pyat’.

The First studied the fingerprints of the stars, caught them coming and going.

The Second photographed their passports.

The Third pondered the possibilities of their planets.

The Fourth measured the distance to the end of the night.

And the Fifth, the starushka, she catalogued them, soup to nuts.

Like Chinese celestials, they lived above the wreckage of the world and quietly kept the heavens in their place. As with the city in the lake, the air around them chimed with the subtle music of contemplation, though here it was the music of genius, of Great Time and the secrets of creation, without boundaries or edicts.

Snow melted. Mud came and went. Leaves budded tender on the birches. The rains came, then the sun. The grass grew tall in a yard that must once have been a lawn of some majesty. The days lengthened, shortening their working hours, for they, like owls, saw better at night.

And what became of that other place? The capital of Once-Had-Been? They could see it when the day was clear. Twenty miles away, no more. But to them it was of less consequence than dust on the telescope’s lens. Mausers and collectivized flats, the fate of the bourgeoisie, the crush in the train stations, Kommunist and holdups in snack bars, madmen with their strings. How much better to keep one’s eyes on the sky.

The domes shone in the moonlight like the breasts of women. I had followed that gleam to the only unlocked doors in all of Russia, the doors to the house of the stars. I had to find a hole and jump down it. But this was no hole. It was the portal of heaven.

An Ancient stood at the top of the steel stairs under the vast central dome, gazing down through the eyepiece of a mighty telescope into the night sky, when the girl, the girl without a tongue, found her way in. Voiceless at the bottom of the stairs, she waited, still steaming from her run, a girl with great sad-clown eyes. Her ears rang from gunshot blasts. Finally he heard her heavy breathing, noticed her down there in the gloaming. He closed his notebook and descended, slow, majestic in velvet skullcap, unkempt white beard, coat and gloves. Time finally slowed. She could feel her heart, steadying. All around her, busts of famous astronomers gazed down from their circle in the dim hall.

The Ancient gestured for her to follow him down a cold marble corridor to a door. Inside a warm room nestled among rugs and furniture, even a straggly plant, glowed four more ancient faces, their spectacles flashing under the glaciers of furrowed brows.

“We have a guest,” said the First.

The Second turned on his wheeled chair. He had a beard like a double ax and was holding a photographic slide and a magnifying glass between his fingers. “Oh Lord, what next?”

“Are you from the village?” asked the Third, the only clean-shaven one, wearing a knitted hat. He had a sprig of green in his hand, though it was too early for green. “Has something happened?”

The girl eyed the pattern in the rug, pomegranates and deer. Bukhara. So many lives she could have had.

“What do you want then?” asked the Fourth, frail and cantankerous, hunched in on himself, pencil in hand, a slide rule. “Speak up, girl!”

But the girl discovered that her voice had been taken from her. She saw herself as if from a distance, very small. Small and insignificant, and what could she have to say that would make any difference? She had lost her tongue and felt no urge to find it. Better to be a stray cat, a donkey, nobody at all.

“You’re frightening her,” said the Fifth, the woman, who rose from her thick ledgers and approached her as one would a lost dog, slowly, speaking softly. She put her arm around the silent visitor. “Are you all right, milaya? What’s happened? Can you tell us?”

The girl, the lost dog. She pulled off the bandage on her right hand and showed the Fifth the wide swath of cut and seared flesh. Her passport.

“Nikolai Gerasimovich?” the old woman called in a trembling voice.

The Third came close and studied the hand. “I can get some iodine on it, but it seems to be healing.”

“What happened to you, dorogaya moya?” the starushka asked her, so kindly that the girl began to cry.

“She can’t stay here, if that’s what she’s thinking,” said the Fourth. “It’s not a home for mental defectives.”

“Speak for yourself, Valentin Vladimirovich,” said the First, the starman with the velvet skullcap, stroking his long moustache contemplatively.

The girl, the mental defective, pulled the starushka out into the hall, struggled out of her coat. Her hands flew to the buttons of her dress. She had to show her, the woman had to see. The old one tried to move away, so the girl hurried, pulled the woolen fabric from her shoulder, tearing at the dressings.

When the old woman saw the bandages, the terrible poetry, she understood that whatever had happened to the girl, whatever had chased her to the observatory’s heights, she could not be sent back down. The girl fell to her knees and kissed the starushka’s hand, kissed the hem of her rusty black dress, her laced boots. The girl wept wordlessly. Words had flown from her like birds fleeing a fire, an explosion. The old woman pulled the girl to her feet. “Don’t worry, devushka. Nobody will send you away.” The visitor, the mute, clung to her. With much patting and clucking, the old woman sat her down on a bench in the cold hall, lined with portraits of men with telescopes and astrolabes and compasses, then went back into the room, and closed the door. She heard their voices, discussing, arguing. Who was she? How could they feed her? Rations were bad enough as they were. But sitting there on the hard bench as before the headmistress’s door, the girl vowed she would not be sent away. There was nowhere else in the world for her, not a square inch in the world of Once-Had-Been that would permit her feet to rest. Only in the stars, among these Ancients, this precious, silent island drifting above the world could she find safety.

The old woman returned, gestured for the girl to follow. Back in their warm study, the Second had prepared a small slate, as one would use for schoolchildren, upon which he’d written the alphabet. “Can you read?” he asked. He pointed to his eyes, then the slate. The girl didn’t want to be dismissed as an idiot. She needed them. She had to be seen as useful. She was young, she was strong, she could read. She nodded.

“What’s your name?”

She began to point to letters. M. The starushka smiled triumphantly. A. R. “Mar,” said the old woman.

Impatient, the Fourth began to guess. “Maria.” She shook her head. “Marta. Martina.”

The Second chimed in over the slate. “Marina?”

God, no. Anyone but her.

“Marusya?” said the Fifth.

Marusya. It meant bitter. Yes, that was her name. She allowed them to baptize her like Achilles in the black waters of the Styx. Leaving only the heel. She wondered what that would prove to be. But for the rest, sealed in darkness, Marusya be her name.

Thus the girl, the visitor, the vagabond, scarred and renounced, stepped away from all that she had been. Left herself behind like a glove dropped in a train station. What she found was—silence. She wrapped it around herself like an Orenburg wedding-ring shawl. So light, so soft, so warm. Her life now could pass through a wedding ring.

Marusya woke early. Collected their firewood, breaking it from branches before she found a few precious tools still left in the shed—the empty pegs evidence of a larger store, vanished now. To the credit of the thieves, or someone else’s foresight, the departing gardeners or Red Guards hadn’t stolen everything. A couple of spades and hoes hung scattered, a rusty saw, a hatchet, an ax, a large hammer, and a wedge. Most important, the observatory’s well was good and deep, the water blessedly clean—it didn’t have to be boiled to drink! She could not imagine such luxury. She washed their clothes, took their ration cards down to the village, and walked the mile back up, their food on her back, bread and potatoes and herring, deflecting the prying of the housewives with shrugs. She did everything she could to justify her presence there, ate as little as possible.

The place had been terribly neglected. The servants and most of their colleagues had left after October’s battle on the Pulkovo Heights. The rest left when Bolshevik miracles failed to manifest themselves. The girl swept and scrubbed, sewed underwear, darned socks, boiled sheets, dragged bedding out to the yard, hung the quilts and beat and beat them. The dust could have spawned a new galaxy.

The days warmed, and one by one she seated the Ancients outside in the new wildflowers and washed and trimmed their hair and their beards to their specifications—the First liked his in the style of the tsar, of medium length and gently rounded at the bottom. The Second favored his double ax heads. The Third liked his hair trimmed short, but shaved himself. The Fourth was so ancient that his beard was spare and wiry, like a goat’s, but he would permit only half an inch of trimming. Soft old hair, light as dandelion floss in her fingers. The starushka, Ludmila Vasilievna, practically wept with pleasure as the girl washed her hair in the yard and combed it and let it dry in the sun, then brushed and braided it for her. Their mute servant cut their hornlike toenails with a pair of scissors the First Ancient kept in a leather case only slightly older than the moon. The girl saw many things they could have sold to make their lives more bearable, but it never occurred to them. In many ways, she felt these Ancients were her children, and she their young mother.

They gathered at moonrise like moths. The Third had made yellow dandelion wine they enjoyed before the evening meal. Marusya served them sorrel soup and spring onions and rationed bread and fed upon their learned conversations as they ate in measured bites, drank their thin soup. They spoke of colleagues in far-flung universities, at Freiburg and Berlin, at Greenwich and Cambridge, of discoveries in mathematics and physics and chemistry. They bemoaned the lack of contemporary publications. “When this is over,” said the First, “we’re going to be as antique as knee britches.” They made jokes about former students. Marusya remained quiet, alert, unobtrusive, and as adoring as a good German shepherd. She would have killed for them, she would have laid down her life.

They explained to her over their yellow wine that there had been scores of astronomers and other staff members living here before the revolution, but alas—sighs all around—the younger people preferred life “down below,” where they could continue their careers at the university. “Their wives and children hated the isolation,” said the Second, Boris Osipovich, “when travel became difficult—”

“Impossible,” said the Fourth, Valentin Vladimirovich, in his high, cracked, crabby voice. “Who could go back and forth five times a week? We used to have an automobile—remember that?”

“We had to choose,” said the First, Aristarkh Apollonovich, the director of the observatory. “The university or this.” He sipped his yellow wine, stroked his moustache. “Most chose to stay in Petrograd with their students and continue teaching. Only we stariki preferred our researches, though it wasn’t the easiest choice.”

“It was for me,” said Ludmila Vasilievna. “It’s too awful down there now.”

Marusya nodded her agreement.

The girl fell into the rhythm of the observatory. She liked it best when Aristarkh Apollonovich permitted her to climb the metal stairs with him and gaze upon some spectacle of the cosmos. The double star in the constellation Ursa Major, which the great Arab astronomers called the Horse and Rider. The Moving Group of stars in the Big Dipper—her silent tongue ran over the shapes of their names: Alioth, Mizar, Merak, Phad, Megrez, Alcor—like a stable of Arabian stallions… all moving together toward Sagittarius. Which showed that this constellation was not, like most, a mere appearance—stars superimposed in the same sector of the sky—they were in fact related. A family, born together around three hundred million years ago. The girl so loved to hear numbers like that, to contemplate the vast age of the universe. It somehow made life on earth seem less desperate.

This old man had been at Pulkovo Observatory for years. His specialty, the fingerprints of the stars: spectra and motion. He trained the telescope on great Jupiter and the glowing rings of Saturn. “See those rings? They don’t turn like a phonograph recording,” he said, spreading his fingers and rotating his hand. “Each ring moves at a different rate. This indicates they’re made of a flow of small objects. We discovered that here.” He stroked the wing of his moustache in a way that made her realize it was he who had made the discovery. This very man, the First, who gave her a guided tour of the seas and mountains of the moon, who showed her rising Venus and red Mars.

Sometimes he told her of his wife, who had died, and his son and grandchildren, who lived in Brazil—a distance more than light-years away now.

Ludmila Vasilievna continued to be her favorite. She brushed the old woman’s hair out every day and helped her into her bed after a long night’s cataloguing of the stars. She massaged her old feet and hands, which tended to arthritis, and brought her a cup of chamomile tea so that she would sleep soundly through the morning.

But soon Marusya discovered that the Third Ancient, Nikolai Gerasimovich, was to be her main charge. He was the one who actually needed an assistant in his work. A physicist and chemist who specialized in the composition of atmospheres, he was a passionate astrobotanist. She had never heard of such a thing. What plants could there possibly be in space? “When we travel, it’s not going to be a day trip to Novgorod, Marusya,” he explained, interpreting her quizzical expression. “We’ll have to take them with us. They’ll help us breathe, and feed us, and filter the air. And when we land, we’ll have to have something to start with, won’t we?”

She almost wept. This learned man really thought they were going to the stars. It had never occurred to her how optimistic scientists were. He spoke as if he would be on those ships himself, heading out into the cosmos, though he must have known that he would likely not live to see even the return of hot water. She followed him around like a little dog as he gave elaborate instructions on how to tend his plants—if you could call them that. Most weren’t even plants, just lichens and mosses and foul-smelling algae growing in washtubs.

Marusya could only imagine what a certain Petrograd speculator would say about this childlike fascination with mucky goo. “The Aztecs grew this very same algae centuries before Columbus,” said Nikolai Gerasimovich. “It’s the fastest-growing protein source on earth. They grew it on vast lakes, dried it in blocks, and ate it when food was scarce.” He gave her a chip off a cake. “Try it.” Without hesitating, she bit into it. It tasted like dirt and pond scum, but no worse than the dried deer pellets she’d eaten as a child, thinking them candies. She chewed and swallowed it nevertheless, not wanting to spit it out, since he was so proud of it. “Good?” She nodded. He laughed and ate some as well, chewing it up. “You’d do well to get used to it. We might have to eat this next winter if rations continue to erode and the garden proves insufficient. If only we had better laboratories… I’m working with simulations of various atmospheres—ammonia, sulfur. So much knowledge has been lost about the medicinal and nutritional value of substances we would never consider as food sources. Insects, for example.”

She glanced over at his screen-covered terrariums hopping with beetles, and realized in horror that he was growing them as food. He laughed when he saw her face. “They’re not bad, really. I learned to eat them in Java. They multiply at a wonderful rate in warmth and damp. The latter we already have, but the former…” He seemed positively nostalgic about entomological cuisine. Professor Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomogayush… Marusya wondered, if she had met him at a party in the capital of Once-Had-Been instead of at the Pulkovo Observatory, would she have thought him venerable or mad? “These insects, this algae, lichen, and fungus—this is most likely the fodder that will take us to the stars, my dear. Not asparagus and beefsteak.”

To the stars, that was the important thing here. This was what they thought about day and night: what lay beyond. They wanted to catch the stars in their beds, know how they danced, what held them and what forced them to blow apart. Stars in their matrix—how hot, how cold, how far, how old. They wondered about the sense of it all, the physical laws that weren’t opinion, that weren’t voted upon. There were no commissars here.

Every so often, the Third asked about Marusya’s past, what had brought her here that night in early spring. Whether she had ever spoken, if she had always been mute. But she simply ignored the questions. “You’ve had an education, though, haven’t you? You understand what we say. Every word, I’d wager. What happened to you?” But a shrug was the only reply he would get for his trouble.

They were lucky to have Nikolai Gerasimovich. Unlike the more theoretical physicists and mathematicians, he understood the needs of poor earth-bound bodies. He showed her the seeds he’d saved—cucumber and carrot, dill, onion sets and beets and even some seed potatoes in sand. He proudly showed her where his currant bushes and raspberries grew—their green buds had already begun to swell. He was the one who’d given Ludmila Vasilievna an herbal ointment for Marusya’s wounds. He showed her how to plant seeds in flats indoors and keep them watered under glass.

Now her silence had become a shimmering sari. It was both beautiful and comforting not to have to reply to people when they spoke to her. It energized her, left her with hands and actions alone. She would not have to lie if she didn’t speak, she would not have to explain or confess. How simple life was that way. Everything that was inside her stayed inside. Nothing spilled out. She realized how much of herself she normally leaked away, gave away to anyone and everyone. Now she listened, companionably, and worked. There was a poetry in it.

When it grew warm enough, she took their seedlings outside to bask in the lengthening days. Under the demanding eye of the Third, she dug the garden. It would be a big one. She didn’t like it when he tried to work alongside her. What if he had a heart attack? A stroke? She preferred it when he sat in the shade and explained about the varying atmospheres on other planets while she did the bulk of the digging.

Silence rinsed her bitter soul as clear as their well water, silence and starlight. The garden began to grow. The observatory stood above the plain, untouched as a holy city in a lake, and she lived safely at the secret heart of her own Svetloyar, and cared for her five beloveds.

53 The Clinic in the Trees

IN ANY EARTHLY IDYLL, time and events will inevitably intrude, and so they did, in the form of a young astronomer and his family: a wife, a pretty but ill-looking blonde, and two children, a girl of seven, a boy, maybe five, his round head shaved against lice. The astronomer carried the boy to the house of the stars. Marusya met them at the door. “I’m Mistropovich. Rodion Karlovich,” he said, hoisting his son higher on his shoulder, that round head lolling. “I used to work here. Are they still here—Aristarkh Apollonovich? Nikolai Gerasimovich?”

The way the woman looked—dull-eyed—frightened Marusya. She thought of the Five, the Ancients, how frail they were. She was afraid of these new people. Not for herself but for her charges. Nothing must harm them. Not these visitors. She felt as protective as any peasant nanny as she stood in the doorway, barring their path.

“Please,” he said. “Just tell Aristarkh Apollonovich I’m here.”

Reluctantly, Marusya stepped back and allowed them to enter the great hall, showing them to a bench, indicating with her hand for them to wait there. “Water,” the woman said, “for the love of God.”

It was late in the day. The Five were already gathering in the salon for the evening’s cordials. How could she tell them, Beware, beware! She went to Pomogayush, caught his sleeve. “What is it, Marusya? What’s happened?”

She mimed the knock on the door. Showed the number four on her fingers. Their heights, small, medium and tall. And that two of them were ill—lines under their eyes for the dark circles. He rose with alacrity. “Somebody’s here. Something’s wrong.” And the others followed him into the hall. She tried to slow the others, waving them off, tugging at Ludmila Vasilievna’s sleeve, but they wouldn’t heed her.

“Mistropovich!” the Third shouted. And then they were out of Marusya’s hands, running to the strangers, embracing them, O Holy Theotokos! Bringing them into their parlor! The woman collapsed onto the sofa, the boy by her side. The gray-eyed daughter looked at Marusya curiously.

“I’m so sorry.” The man was weeping. “I just didn’t know where else to go.” They patted him and made conciliatory sounds, even Marusya could see how they loved him. He took the elders to one side and explained something to them very quietly but she could see his panic, their solicitous concern.

“Of course you should have come, of course,” said the First.

“We would have expected nothing less,” said the Second.

“Marusya, bring them some water,” said Ludmila Vasilievna.

The sick woman and her sick son terrified her. She wanted to throw them into the yard and bar the door, but she did what she was told and dashed to the kitchen to bring them their water.

The Third met her in the hall, as she was returning with a pitcher and glasses. “Marusya, listen to me. It’s cholera. Do you understand what that is?”

Cholera! Why in God’s name had they come here with it?

“There’s an epidemic in Petrograd. They were lucky to get here.”

The water. Cholera was transmitted in water. Sanitation in Petrograd had all but vanished. The plumbing was broken, people had been using the courtyards as latrines all winter, and then with the spring melt… oh God. The drinking water came right out of the canals, and water ran just inches below street level. Dead horses, garbage, no soap, people shitting everywhere, then pumping the same water. Everyone was in danger. The whole city could be infected by now. How many people—a thousand? Ten thousand? She did not want to think of the horror unfolding in the capital of Once-Had-Been. But what about the Five?

“They’re all right for now. It’s only contagious through contact with bodily fluids,” said the Third. “Not breathing or touching them. Understand? It’s the dehydration that kills them. They need water, and we will have to keep everything perfectly clean, especially our hands. Their wastes need to be sequestered—away from the water and the vegetable garden. God knows what must be going on down in the city. Are you ready for this?”

She nodded vigorously. She wanted them out of the observatory, silently begged with tugs and gestures for the Third to let her bring them out of doors. She led him to the spot where she often slept, in a pleasant grove of trees, away from the well, away from the garden. He concurred, and the rest agreed. They brought cots into the clearing. The husband washed and gave the boy water with salt, while Marusya helped the wife hold her cup, dipped the precious liquid between her chapped lips. “I’m so sorry,” the father kept saying. “People are dying in the streets—you can’t imagine. The hospitals are no better than giant latrines.”

Each patient was assigned a bucket and a pillow. The husband dug a pit for their waste and lined it with pine boughs. He held the wife’s hand, stroked the son’s shaved head. “Don’t be frightened of the girl. Her name is Marusya. She’ll be your nurse while you’re so sick.”

“I don’t like her,” the little boy said. “Don’t leave, Papa.”

“I have to. I have work to do, and someone has to look after Katinka. But Mama’s here, and Marusya will take care of you. She doesn’t speak, but she can hear.”

The boy started to cry, and the mother, who was also weak, reached across from her cot and held his hand. “Where’s my brave little boy?” And Marusya remembered another little boy, how scared he was whenever he was ill. She found it hard to be angry with these people for their illness. Now that they were in the pines and not in the observatory, she could find her pity again.

Within hours, their symptoms worsened. They trembled, they vomited. Marina would have been disgusted and helpless with pity, but Marusya stoically supported them to the pit, where they shat so loosely that it might have been urine. She wiped them on pages of a thick German astronomical journal, then washed her own hands in water she kept boiling over a fire pit the husband had dug and filled with wood. The wind was sweet in the pines, but she had never seen such sick people. She washed their hands and her own until they puckered. The Third Ancient brought a host of supplies to her clinic in the trees—a glass straw for each of them so dirty fingers wouldn’t reinfect the water as they drank. He brought her a little bottle of chlorine to add to the patients’ drinking water, just in case.

“This is food for you,” he said, giving her a packet in paper. “Don’t touch it with your hands, if you can avoid it. Just to be safe.” He tucked a fork and a knife in her pocket, wrapped in a napkin, then gave her a rag and a stack of towels. “Don’t touch anything with your hands. Wrap your hands when you use the pump.”

Marusya kept the cauldron of water boiling day and night. Carried pails of clean water back to their sad camp. Pomogayush brought salt and a clutch of desiccated sugar beets from last year’s crop to mash into the water and help fight dehydration. He’d imagined they might take the beets to the stars, not to a makeshift clinic in the trees.

When the patients could no longer make it to the latrine, and all the sheets were soiled, and the oilcloth over the cots just too hard to keep clean, she made pallets of long grass and sweet ferns and fennel on the ground, and hour after hour sat next to them and forced warm, slightly sweet, slightly salty water into their dry mouths. She was stubborn as a donkey when they waved her away. She held the buckets under their mouths for them to vomit into, then forced more water into them. Marina would have become discouraged, but Marusya would not be dissuaded by their pleas, their vomiting, their moaning, their shitting themselves, or their shivering and sweating as they lay on the ferns and pine needles, which she periodically gathered and piled up for burning. The boy told her about the dog they had to leave behind, about his friend who got sick first, about how he was going to go up in a rocket ship. He wept and asked for Mama. She moved them close together so the woman could hold his hand, though she could not lift her own head. The father came to their hideous camp several times during the day. She made him wash and wash. He had to think of his girl. He had to think of the Five. His boy and his wife were in the hands of Fate now.

They shat into the grasses, and Marusya raked them and put down new. They shook in the warm summer air and vomited into their buckets, which she rinsed with boiling water and chlorine, then threw the contents into the woods. When they were done they lay on the straw and moaned so pitifully she wished she were deaf as well as mute. Often she couldn’t decide which end to serve. Each time she gave them more salted water with mashed beet and tried not to think about the fate of the city. No medicines, no clean water, the sick dying by the thousands. And what would become of all those bodies? What of her mother, Avdokia, Anton, Mina and the Katzevs?

The nights were warm and brief. The crickets droned, mosquitoes bit. She dozed but did not sleep, watched over her patients like the moon. She didn’t drink except with her own glass straw. She ate bread and the cucumbers she and the Third had grown, all with a fork and knife. She slept with her hands in her pockets for fear she would touch her mouth in her sleep, and dreamed of the wards and sickrooms of the capital of Once-Had-Been.

Three days she worked at them, three days of terrible struggle. She had no thoughts, only images. Sunlight through the trees. The explosive birth of stars. Her own hands, cutting grass with a sickle she’d found, sharpening it on a whetstone produced by the Third. The stars of the wildflowers she sprinkled on the grass between the woman and the boy so they could look across the flowers as they gazed into each other’s faces.

On the fourth morning, the husband stood on the brink of the lawn, looking in at their stand of pines. The wife was sleeping, holding the dead boy’s hand. Marusya stood by her own cot and waited. She had nothing to say. He came closer. She mimed “sleep” and pointed to his pretty wife.

“And him?” he whispered.

He’d been convulsing, become too weak to drink. The water just seeped out from between his lips. Then it was over.

Have you heard a man sob for love of a child? Have you seen his tears? She stood aside and let him crouch between them. He’d studied the stars, but everything he loved was lying right here on this earth.

The summer passed. The visitors stayed on, waiting to return to the capital of Once-Had-Been. The wife sat on the steps of the observatory as Marusya worked in the garden. Sometimes she sang, sad songs. She had the loveliest voice. The little girl helped pull weeds and told Marusya her nursery rhymes. The wind turned fresh, the days shortened. The husband tried to persuade the Five to return with him and his diminished family. There were classes to teach, students who would share their rations with their professors. The epidemic had surely passed. Marusya walked amid the rows of fattening cabbages, the potatoes not yet dug, the onions and ferny carrots, the cucumbers too numerous to count, the melons done. It was time to start pickling and hunting for mushrooms. What would she do if the Ancients left? Where would she go? She would have to stay on, alone.

The old woman, the Fifth, walked with Marusya along the verge of the woods, told her they had no intention of going back to the university. They had their work to do here. Perhaps now others would return to the observatory. It was safer up here, though it would be a hard winter. They sent the young family on their way, watched them walking away down the hill—the man, the woman, and the child in the autumn light. Marusya felt as old as the Five. It was such a danger to love people. Nobody ever told you about that.

54 The Crows

NOW IT WAS HARVEST time, the ripest time of the year, when the wheat on the plain grew golden and the sky was the cornflower of heaven. It was then that their heaven grew dark with an invasion of dirty, glossy crows, wings studded with lice. They landed clumsily upon this island, crumpling the maps of stars, jabbing their beaks into the corners, chasing the Ancients like furies.

What were they looking for? Weapons? Hoarded food? The Grand Duke Michael?

Counterrevolution.

Blood.

They inspected the labor cards, interrogated the Five, collected their research in messy handfuls. They had no idea what they were doing. One of them struck Aristarkh Apollonovich—a man with a crater on the moon that bore his name—in the face when he tried to interfere. Of course they found the girl Marusya. No labor card. No papers. No name. It was not permitted to have no name. To those who occupied the leather jackets, having no name was not a personal matter. It indicated an attempt to circumvent the state. In this, the revolution was no better than what had come before.

“Who are you?” asked a hollow-cheeked thug.

“She doesn’t speak,” Ludmila Vasilievna said. “There’s something wrong with her.”

The astronomer knew much about the stars, but she knew little about men. It was a terrible thing to tell a tough with a pistol and Chekist arrogance that someone could not speak. That person would become a challenge, like a virgin who must be tested and tested again.

The local political police were looking to make an arrest. In the end they took three, calling them spies: Aristarkh Apollonovich, Nikolai Gerasimovich, and sad-eyed Boris Osipovich along with a couple of boxes of papers whose value they could not begin to imagine. And Marusya, who had no papers at all. They took them down the hill in a wagon, leaving fragile Valentin Vladimirovich behind, and Ludmila Vasilievna, who they thought was the housekeeper. “Water the garden,” Nikolai Gerasimovich called out over his shoulder. “Pick the cucumbers and get them into salt. And water the algae if you can.”

Aristarkh Apollonovich sat in the wagon with great dignity as Nikolai Gerasimovich rubbed his face, worrying about his plants, his work. Boris Osipovich winced at every jolting of the wagon down the hot, dusty road. Crows flew by overhead. The grain was ripening. Marusya sat very still next to Aristarkh Apollonovich. “They’ve searched before but they’ve never been so aggressive,” he said in a low voice. “I’m afraid something’s happened. We should have paid more attention. We forget about the outside world to our peril.” Such galaxies inside these three weathered heads jouncing down the road behind a mismatched pair of horses. What light would be lost if they were snuffed out.

Three of the crudest Chekists Marusya had ever seen brought them to a house in the village. They prodded the Ancients out. “Not you,” said one with a low brutish brow, and shoved Marusya back into the wagon. She watched as the astronomers disappeared through a door around which stock flowers grew, pink and white. Levkoi. Nikolai Gerasimovich turned and waved sadly, and Marusya waved back, holding her skirt down with the other hand where her guard was trying to lift it with the barrel of his pistol. He was probably the village hooligan before the Cheka recruited him.

They unloaded Marusya at what looked like it had once been a small store. Inside, the brutish tough and another rural thug set to their business. “Who are you? Where are your papers? Where are you from?” They pulled her hair. They twisted her arm. “What’s your name? Say something!” One of them waved a revolver in her face. It wasn’t a Mauser, just some old and battered thing left over from the war before last. She could smell the cleaning oil. “Say something!” Beetle-Brow slapped her while the one with hollow cheeks smoked a cigarette. “We know you can talk, so stop pretending.” Her hair, bunched in his fist, as he screamed into her throbbing face and threatened her with his fist, huge as Jupiter rising. “What’s your name?!”

Her name.

Her name.

My name.

A curse.

A name.

Bitter was my name.

He punched me in the stomach. Bastard! I doubled over, gasping for breath. His knee to my back, he forced me to the floor and lifted my head by the hair. “You’re going to tell me, aren’t you? Who’re you working for? The British?” Knocked my forehead against the wooden planks. My brains swirled. He kicked me as I curled around myself, got me in the ribs. He had just lifted my skirt over my head and ripped down my bloomers when someone came in with heavier boots—had he heard me scream? Or maybe it was just luck. “Vovka, you pig fucker. Put it away. The commissar’s here.” Beetle-Brow rose, kicked me again—in the ass, angry to be denied his final payoff, and left me with my unintentional savior.

I rolled over on my back, trying to breathe through my bleeding nose, my aching ribs. Had he broken one? Vovka, I will remember you. Someday I will return the favor. The one with the hollow cheeks returned, yanked me to my feet by one arm, my bloomers falling around my knees, opened a trapdoor in the floor revealing a steep wooden stairway, and pushed me down it. I would have fallen all the way but I caught the rail in time. The door dropped shut above me.

The place must have been the cellar of a grocery store or maybe a vodka shop—low ceiling, dirt floor. Light came through a dirty window up at street level framing the proletarian footwear and bast shoes of passersby. Three other women already sat on the benches. I recognized two of them, a plump woman who worked in the bakery where Marusya collected the Ancients’ bread and an old baba I’d seen in the village. A third, a younger woman in a summer dress, sat hunched in the corner quietly weeping, holding herself around the waist. I was grateful that Ludmila Vasilievna had been spared this.

“Got you, too, did they? Poor unlucky girl,” clucked the bakery woman, helping me over to the bench, supporting me as I sat. I wondered why she was here. Speculating? Shorting the customers, as people complained to one another in the queue? I lowered myself to the bench. Every movement was excruciating. I sat half curled, wrapping myself in what was left of my silence. I kicked off my torn bloomers, there was nothing to be done with them. The woman used the corners of her apron to wipe my face, the blood from my nose. “Those Makushkins. Pig thieves. If your pig is missing you can count on it that a Makushkin’s behind it. And now they’ve got a license.”

“Someone shot the big boss,” said the old baba from the other bench, working her toothless gums. “We’re in for it now.”

Which big boss? Some rural commissar? Lenin? Could someone have shot Lenin? I was dying to ask but I couldn’t suddenly reveal myself as capable of speech or they’d think me a spy indeed. I kept my head tilted back, trying to stop the blood from flowing. I could taste the salty thickness down my throat.

“To think, I voted for them,” said the baker, spitting on the dirt floor. Her eyes were very blue. “Lord have mercy on us.” Both women crossed themselves.

The third woman moaned and whimpered. Young and pretty, her hair coming out of its braid, she sat with her arms across her belly, rocking herself, and I suspected worse had happened to her than the kicks and blows I’d suffered. Probably the fate I had been about to receive before the commissar showed up. I’d been lucky, despite my throbbing eye and aching ribs—I’d only lost my underwear. And what of the Ancients? Would they beat Aristarkh Apollonovich, the man who’d discovered the composition of Saturn’s rings? Torture Nikolai Gerasimovich?

In the afternoon, the trapdoor opened and the other pig thief, Hollow Cheeks, called down for me. “You. Red.” I climbed the steep steps as I would the stairs to a gallows. Across the dusty road, in the village tavern, a moustached man in tinted spectacles sat at a plank table that smelled of old beer. The commissar. He wasn’t from around here. He was neat and looked intelligent and efficient. Papers lay piled before him. The pig thief shoved me forward. There was nowhere to sit.

The commissar regarded me wearily. Would he notice the city cut of my clothes, worn as they were? “How did you come to stay at the observatory, devushka? Who brought you there?”

I just stared at his lips, that moustache. I, Marina, had no trouble cringing at the sight of the Chekist and at the hollow-cheeked pig thief behind me, but Marusya had no idea what they wanted. I clung to the last shreds of her, a poor girl bewildered by such an important man, not understanding any of this.

“We can make things very unpleasant,” said the commissar. “Why do you have no papers? Where are you from?”

Marusya’s silence soured on my tongue. Her raiment was already in shreds. She was half naked. It would be every bit as easy to kill a silent girl as a verbal one. Merde. I had to end this charade. But how? People so disliked being mocked. I gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward, opened my mouth as if trying to give birth to speech. Or vomit. The commissar instinctively sat back. “I… I…”

He leaned forward to catch my revelation, as if expecting miracles. Suddenly I wanted to laugh at the way he was watching me. But he would not have taken it well.

“Pe… Pe… Pe…”

“What’s she trying to say?” he asked Hollow Cheeks.

“She’s an idiot,” Hollow Cheeks said.

“Pe… te… te…”

“Petrushka? Petrovka?” The commissar tried to help me along.

I shook my head. “Pe…” I stuttered more forcefully. “Pe Pe PePe…” My eyes were full of realistic tears. And I pointed, jabbing my finger. North.

“Petrograd! You’re from Petrograd!” The commissar slapped the poor gouged plank of a table like a man who guesses the clue in charades. “She’s from Petrograd!” he told the pig thieves. “Do you write? Can. You. Write?” he repeated, enunciating each word, miming a hand, writing.

I just let the tears stream, thinking of the Second and his slate, and my throbbing eye, and my painful ribs, and what could possibly save me. The precious Five—whatever I did, I must not be forced to implicate them. These people had to leave the stars alone. They must not be allowed to wipe their Cheka asses on the sky.

I nodded.

The commissar took a piece of paper and a pencil that looked like it had been sharpened with an ax and set it before me. I knelt to write. How wrong I was to think I could hide myself away out here in my silence, in my absolute service. I’d confused the observatory with the city in the lake. Alas… it was true, after all—I would not hear those bells again, not on this earth. Tucking my tongue into the corner of my mouth, I wrote my SOS, my message in a bottle. Hoping the handwriting would suggest that of a simply educated rural housekeeper, I wrote the words—Varvara Razrushenskaya.

“Is this your name?” he asked.

I shook my head violently, tapped on the name several times, and after it added the fatal acronym, the black crow wings.

He looked at the paper for the longest time, lost in thought. He’d been so happy to have solved the first puzzle… would he understand? Or would I be delivered into the hands of the pig thieves again? Maybe pressured into saying something about the Five? He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his handkerchief. His eyes were without any light or emotion. Outside the high window, a maple tree was losing its leaves, bright scraps floating through the afternoon air. A single leaf hovered impossibly in midair, twirling and twirling, glowing, lit from behind. A small flame of hope that my message was understood. He put the paper in his pocket and nodded at Hollow Cheeks to take me away.

55 Red Terror

I WAS SUMMONED FROM that dirt-floored cellar at dawn. A shabby Chekist I recognized from the observatory search marched me to a police van waiting in the unpaved road. A dull rain was falling and the air smelled of ozone as it hit the dusty earth. Guards opened the back doors. The van was packed tight with prisoners. I couldn’t imagine there being room for any more bodies. “The tram’s not made of rubber,” a man in the back shouted out, and a few laughed. It’s what we said when the trams were full in Petrograd. I tried to keep my skirt down as the guards shoved me in, my drawers having been turned to rags by the pig thief. Before the doors clanged shut, I could see that all the prisoners had been beaten in one way or another. A fleeting impression of black eyes, bloody noses, cuts, and contusions. But no Ancients. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.

“Where are you from?” I asked the bulk next to me, a man who smelled of coarse wool and tobacco. It felt so strange to speak after my long summer of silence. It felt dangerous, like a vow I was breaking.

“Tsarskoe Selo,” he said.

“Detskoe Selo,” someone nearby corrected him in the close, thick, fear-tinged darkness. Ah yes, the renaming of the world. The tsar’s village had become “children’s village,” in preparation no doubt for its repurposing as a site for orphanages and schools.

The prisoners smoked and talked as we rattled along. There were no guards back here and I was dying to know if the rumor was true. “They say someone shot the big boss—which one?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know?” another voice said.

“Someone tried to kill Lenin,” said the man in the wool jacket at my side. “A woman.”

“Botched it, too,” said a higher-voiced man, and there was a flash of a match, a cigarette, a narrow face, a shock of blond hair.

My head reeled. What would happen if Lenin died? What would happen to the revolution?

“They assassinated the head of the Petrograd Cheka, too,” said my neighbor. “Deader than dead. Some student shot him in Palace Square.”

Uritsky! Varvara’s boss.

“I wish the woman had been so lucky,” said the smoker over his bright coal. “Now they think there’s a giant counterrevolutionary conspiracy. They’re rounding up everyone with a pulse. It’s been going on for weeks.”

I could not imagine what was happening in the kingdom of Once-Had-Been, but I was afraid I was about to find out. The van swayed over the ruts in the road. At times the wheels spun in the mud. “Are they taking us to Petrograd?”

“They’re taking us nowhere!” A woman’s voice rang out from the back of the van, urgent, edged with hysteria. “Don’t you see? They’re going to stop somewhere and shoot us all!”

“Why would they bother putting us in a van for that?” argued the smoker. “They could have just shot us back there and saved the gasoline.”

My neighbor predicted they were taking us to Petrograd. “Most of these are hostages,” he said to me under the rumble of the engine. “Families of White officers. What use is a dead hostage?”

“White?” I had an image of men bled white, shuffling through the snow.

“White Army. Where’ve you been living, devushka, a henhouse?” My companion made a scornful sound. “The counterrevolutionaries. They’re massing in Siberia and down in the Don.” Volodya and his Volunteers. “Country’s dividing up like a red-and-white cow, with the English in the north getting ready to milk us dry.”

It was all making horrible sense now, the commissar’s questions, everything that had been said in the dacha the night of my death. Father, Karlinsky, the British. He’s in Vologda with the English. Invasion, counterrevolution, money for the Czech Legion. “What’s happened with the Czechs?”

“That’s how it started. A clash on the Trans-Siberian. Trotsky tried to disarm them and it backfired. Instead of going east, the Czechs came west and took every town on the line. The counterrevolutionaries rushed out of the woodwork to join them.” The van careened and threw my neighbor right onto me. I shrieked and pushed him off. “Sorry, sorry.” He scrambled to right himself. “Forgive me. I wasn’t taking advantage.” I immediately judged him to be ten years older than I’d first imagined. It was a relief to realize that the “victim sign” on my forehead wasn’t visible in the dark.

“Why do they toy with us?” wailed the woman. “Why can’t they just deliver the coup de grâce?”

“Akh, would you shut up?” someone called out.

“I’ll ask them to stop if you want, lady,” said the smoker. “If you want them to shoot you, I’m sure they’ll oblige.”

Despite what my neighbor said, I, too, kept waiting for the van to halt. To be rousted out into a field, told to turn our backs… a couple of times we slowed, and the woman shrieked and sobbed. It was terrible—panic was contagious. I couldn’t help thinking of having escaped Arkady von Princip only to have my short stupid life ended by a Cheka bullet, my head exploding like a watermelon fallen from a cart. Sinking in the field to my knees, then toppling over, my naked ass exposed to the wind. No poems, no children, no memories. Left to the crows.

But the van continued sliding and bumping along the road.

Finally we all felt the change from mud to solid, potholed paved street. “The city,” my neighbor called to the smoker. “That’s ten rubles, Goncharov.”

Now the prisoners spoke in short whispers as we listened for the change in pitch and timbre of the tires, trying to guess our location. When we crossed the first bridge it was clear—the difference between the bridge pavers and the roadway. “Obvodny,” three people said at once. Yes, the smell of the tannery. So this had to be Moskovsky Prospect. If there was another bridge in a few minutes, it would be the Fontanka, and it would mean we were heading into the heart of the city. My longing for Petrograd bloomed inside me. Crazy, to feel hope—it could be far worse here than with the rural Cheka. And yet better to be at home than on some railway siding in Karelia.

After a few more minutes, there could be no doubt as to where we were headed. If I could have seen through the black, shuddering walls of the van, I knew I would behold the wide Fontanka with its wet pavements, its stately buildings on each side admiring themselves in the water. And all around us would be Petrograd—girls walking to appointments, old bony nags clattering along, Formers selling spoons, workers carrying boxes. The state dining rooms would be dispensing tea with saccharine and watery soup. There would be bread queues and poets and, somewhere, a certain madman. Yet I felt such yearning love for every unseen facade and yard, every canal and stone. Would I ever set eyes upon them again?

A turn, and we all toppled to the left. The sound of gates banged back. Close reverberation off stone walls told me that the truck rumbled through a passageway. Then we stopped with a jerk that sent us all tumbling, and the van’s back doors opened with a bang. I squinted against the comparative brightness of the day, though it was still raining. I climbed out with the others, gazing up at this building, most likely Gorokhovaya 2, once the home of the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. How easily the revolution had donned the master’s slippers, taken up his pipe. A few steps from here, St. Isaac’s Cathedral lifted its golden dome, and the Bronze Horseman scanned the Neva. I held my face to the sky, let water fall on my eyelids.

Guards immediately separated us with shouts and shoves. They marched me and the other woman, younger than I’d imagined—a schoolteacher most likely—to a communal holding cell on the second story that must have once been a refectory or classroom. Every spare inch of floor space was occupied with women and beds and bundles, prisoners weeping on cots or sitting stonily on the old boards, gazing at nothing. A group shouted over some slight. It was a waiting room in the train station to some hellish destination. The schoolteacher clung to me. We gingerly picked our way through the bodies and found a place to sit on the floor between two bunks.

A woman on the bed above us gave me a kick between the shoulder blades with her thick-soled men’s boots. I was grateful for Nikolai Gerasimovich’s ointments, my wounds had healed perfectly. My assailant’s face was a fist of rock, and her ears stuck out like honey jars. “Got any food? Any chocolate?” she asked.

My training as a mute held me in good stead. I considered biting her calf in response but didn’t relish having my teeth kicked out.

“We don’t have anything,” the teacher said.

On the other cot above us, a woman wailed, her head in her hands. “I don’t understand. I didn’t do anything! What about my children? They’re alone in the flat!”

An older woman sitting next to her patted her shoulder. “The neighbors will take them.”

“They killed my husband,” she said, weeping. “Because he wore a hat. A hat! His cousin sent it to him from Bremen. They called him bourgeois and chased him down the street!”

Things in Petrograd were worse than I could ever have imagined. I’d forgotten the difference a month could make in revolutionary times, and I’d been gone for four.

“It’s a reign of terror, that’s what it is,” said a thin, sour-looking woman propped up against the wall. “They’ve let loose the hounds of hell. The Bolsheviks are whipping them up—‘You’ve always hated them, your boss, your landlord? Here’s your chance to get even. Go in, Ivan, settle your scores!’”

The widow told us, “My neighbors turned me in! I knew them. I shared my firewood with them. How could people be so cruel?”

Every so often the door opened and one or another of our keepers called someone’s name. “Novik!” “Rostova!” Once a woman pretended she didn’t know it was her turn, and the guard came in, hit her with his stick like she was an animal to be driven, and dragged her out, her head bleeding. We winced at each ugly blow as if we ourselves were being beaten.

“Yes, a reign of terror,” the sour-faced woman continued. “What’s next, the guillotine? The oubliette?”

The widow keened. My companion was starting to cry.

I thought of Vera Borisovna. Some part of me actually hoped she’d succumbed during the cholera epidemic and did not have to endure this. I could well picture our neighbors: the blonde with the dirty braid, stirring diapers on the stove; the ferret-faced woman; Basya leading the pack of Furies… cholera would be kind in comparison.

With the English in the north and the Czechs along the Trans-Siberian, five thousand miles of Russia were in the hands of the counterrevolution. No wonder they were arresting us all. Although I was sure Father had slipped the net. Sensibly disguised, adequately funded, without address, he was a moving target, whereas Mother was stuck in full view. I could see him colluding with reactionaries, foreigners, the devil himself, anyone who would get rid of the Bolsheviks. Poor suffering Petrograd. It was supposed to be the new, just society, and now it was a bloodbath. Civil war. My country, coming apart.

In this bedlam, one group of women comported themselves very differently from the rest. They sat soberly and spoke not only among themselves but also to those listening nearby. “Who are they?” I asked an older woman who’d been here since we arrived, sitting at the foot of a cot reading a tattered book through half-glasses.

She looked up from her reading. “Politicals,” she said. “Left SRs. They’ve been outlawed.” So the Bolsheviks had turned on their own revolutionary brothers. How calm those women were. I drew strength just looking at them. Dignity calls to dignity the way pettiness and panic stir the same in the human heart. Though they had tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks and failed, they shed no tears.

I wanted to be close to them, but I was sure the cell was crawling with Cheka spies. I told my companion from Tsarskoe Selo to hold on to my patch of floor, that I’d be right back, and I inched my way along until I could hear them.

“We aren’t trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks,” an older woman with cropped gray hair calmly lectured other women nearby. “We just want a change in policy. They’ve got to stop making concessions to the Germans. Lenin is a traitor to the revolution. He’s betrayed the workers of the world for a separate peace.”

Women were purposely looking elsewhere, trying not to seem as though they were listening. My scalp prickled. Such daring, to say something like that while in a Cheka cell.

“The Bolsheviks better start listening to the workers or we’ll make them listen,” said a flat-faced girl with an upturned nose and small Tatar eyes.

A tremulous woman in black with the sagging cheeks of the formerly fat hissed, “Damn all of you. You shoot the man and you can’t even do a decent job of it.”

“I have the statement of Fanya Kaplan,” said another of the Left SRs, a very tall blond girl with deep-set green eyes. She dug a paper out of her pocket and began to read. “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven years at hard labor. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.”

The words hung in the air.

“They tortured her. Made her drink hot wax,” said the tall blonde, folding the paper back into her pocket.

A silent wail rose inside me. Would I face torture? Hot wax? I thought of what I had already suffered in the room on Tauride Street. I kept thinking of hot wax in my throat—it would burn and choke you at the very same time. The talk moved on to the recent execution of Uritsky’s assassin.

“Good riddance,” said the formerly fat woman who had criticized Fanya Kaplan’s poor marksmanship.

“Unfortunately for us, Uritsky was relatively moderate,” said the Left SR with the gray hair. “He was firmly opposed to the death penalty—the one man in Petrograd holding back the flood. And that idiot Kannegisser had to go and shoot him. Of all targets. It wasn’t even politically motivated.”

When I learned the name of his assassin, the hair stood up on my arms. I knew the Kannegissers, a publishing family. Their salon had been home ground for the entire progressive bourgeoisie. It was where my parents had met so many of their famous friends. It couldn’t have been the father. But I remembered a son, Lyonya—a slight young man, pale and excitable, a little younger than Volodya.

“Was it the son? A poet?” I asked quietly.

“Yes, the son,” she said. “Leonid. A cadet at the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy.” The woman’s old face seemed to glow, the soft creases burnished in the light from the tall, frosted windows embedded in wire. “The cadets devised an uprising at the time of the German invasion.” When I was out digging trenches. “The Bolsheviks shot a few of the boys as an example to the others. One was evidently a friend of this Kannegisser. He skulked around for a long time, thinking of how to get his revenge. He observed that Uritsky crossed Palace Square every day on his way to the General Staff Building. Shot him on his way to work.”

And what he had unleashed. Russia, the great home of unintended consequences.

We were all in the same kettle now: politicals, criminals, students, grandmothers, widows, hostages, and the accidental victims of Fate. All of us used the same slop bucket. We braved cholera and typhoid together with each cup of water. The Third Ancient would have been fascinated with our bread. It certainly wasn’t taking us to Neptune—we’d be lucky if it took us to Tuesday. I had much time to listen and think. I clung to the hope that Avdokia had gotten Mother out of the flat before the arrests began.

We’d been there five days when the teacher from Tsarskoe Selo was called. She collapsed into shrieks and tears. The guard had to come in and drag her out. She wasn’t a hostage—she was just an educated woman, and in the village where she taught, she was the closest thing they could find to a bourgeois. They’d discovered her copy of Aesop’s Fables in Greek and decided it was code, that she was a spy. I was haunted by the thought that if she could disappear for a book of Greek, what would the village Cheka make of astronomical calculations?

Lines looped and snaked in my head, images swirled. A silhouette in a doorway beckoned us into the Future. What would it be—a camp? Torture? Another prison? I was nobody special, but the liquidation of an entire class was going on, and I was no proletarian regardless of whether I’d sewed a few socks. Schoolmistress, piano tuner, proofreader, poet—it didn’t matter now. All guilty.

I lay on the dirty floor at night, wrapped in my coat, listening to the rain and the coughing and weeping and snores of eighty women, wondering if tonight would be the night the guards banged back the door and called the name I had given them—Maria Mardukovna Morskaya. If I died as Maria, Mother would never know what had become of me. Genya… I could not bear to think of dying in this place without a friend, without my name. Though I would see Seryozha again, on the other side. The dead were our Kitezh. They carried our love, our most precious moments, concealed beneath the waters. They were the city that could not be taken, like the secret roots of trees.

The woman on the cot above my patch of floor, the one who’d kicked me, leaned over and whispered, “The guard, Vanka, the fat one—he’s giving out chocolates for a fuck. Real chocolate.”

I had had enough of her. “And how much do you get if I fuck him, Grandma?”

“Half,” she said.

Amid a group of new arrivals, a familiar face appeared. A face I would never forget. The thick red-blond hair, wet with rain, the shapely build inside her shapeless coat. A wave of nausea swept over me. I bowed my head, pulled my kerchief lower on my brow. Did the politicals—the estranged left wing of her own party—recognize Karlinskaya? She certainly didn’t cross the cell to join them, embrace them as long-lost sisters. I could still see her in that room, watching Arkady drag me from the dacha. Hear her yell, “Get rid of her!” It was all I could do not to shove my way over, grab her by the collar and shout, “So, do you still think I’m a Bolshevik spy?” But she would never believe me. I imagined slapping her and slapping her.

She thought I was dead, shot back at the dacha, and I was better off leaving it at that. I could always hope a Left SR would kill her in her sleep. The SRs had begun as terrorists and some of that always remained. I watched her as she found a place on a cot and sat with her back to the room. Her graceful form, her heavy hair, created a kind of halo around her. My father had stroked that hair. She had spilled it across his face as she leaned above him when they made love. While he was supposed to be at Kadet meetings. It made me sick to contemplate my father as just another carnal man—and a liar to boot. I wondered if they’d arrested him when they got her.

Each day, rousted from sleep, we queued to use the slop bucket and receive our terrible rations. Nowhere to wash. The stench, the weeping, the bravery and despair. Were there eighty of us? One hundred now? More? We were taken out in groups to walk about in the yard in the rain. Ah, just to breathe the fresh air, though the clotted sky was only a small square wedged between the high walls. Women sidled up to speak to me—the tearful widow, the old chocolate pimp, others—but I kept to myself. They never aired the Left SRs at the same time as the rest. I waited to hear my name called: Morskaya, prisoner V367. But day after day, as others went to interrogation and returned beaten and bloody, mute, or pretending nothing had happened, or disappeared altogether like the schoolteacher, I was never taken out. The waiting was slowly crushing me. Some days I wished they’d just call me and get it over with.

The women whispered the names of prisons among themselves. Kresty, the Crosses; Peter and Paul; camps in the north, about which we’d heard rumors since the war. Or there was that much shorter trip, which I could not stop thinking about—out to the courtyard. There were no firing squads anymore. It would be only a single bullet to the head. “Saving ammunition,” the woman with the jug-ears joked grimly. We listened for that single shot, even in our sleep.

Still no one came for me. Not for Morskaya, or for Marusya, or Makarova. I suspected the commissar had not bothered to solve the puzzle—too many bodies to process, too many fates to decide. To judge from this cell, the Cheka had its bloody hands full. They seemed to have arrested every third person in Petrograd. And what was I but just a loose piece of dirt that happened to be lying on the floor when the big broom came through?

56 Up or Down

THE AUTUMN RAINS GREW heavy, and many of the women declined the opportunity to march around the small courtyard for exercise, but I always went. I would take any opportunity to leave that cell. Outside, I lifted my face to the weeping sky. Please, God, reach down and pluck me from this life. Upon my return, the cell always seemed smaller, as if they’d moved the walls in just a foot or two while I was away. The presence of Karlinskaya sent up a stink I could sense even in sleep. I’d been here two weeks now. Perhaps they’d lost my paperwork, sent the files to Moscow.

I’d been trying to remember Genya’s poem about Abraham and Isaac when finally the fat guard called out through the bars, “Morskaya, V367.”

He led me to a different door from the one we came and left by to go to the prison yard. This one was solid metal, and we passed through it into an unfamiliar part of the building. Yellow walls, low ceilings, shouts, the brutal clang of doors. He brought me to a stairway and I studied the broken tile while he jawed with another guard. Which way would I go? Up could mean interrogation, but it could also mean freedom. Down could only mean one thing.

Like a soul on the scales of heaven, I waited.

Another man arrived. A vigorous, short, athletic blond in black leather. “Morskaya?” The fat guard stepped back and the blond shoved me ahead of him.

Down.

The smell of wet walls and mold, and a dirty animal odor, increased as we descended. A slaughterhouse stench. He walked me down the dim hall. Muffled voices came from behind thick doors. A rising shriek snaked from the base of my spine and coiled around my heart, squeezing my throat in its knot. We passed yellow walls the color of old teeth. Black sticky floors sucked at our shoes. Bare bulbs buzzed overhead. The rest of the country was plunged in darkness, but the Cheka would have its electricity.

From behind a metal door, a gunshot reverberated like a crack of lightning in the closed-off space. Panic was a bird crashing into walls, my heart within my rib cage. The smell, the tile, the promise of pain. I felt as though someone was pressing a wet pillow to my face. I stumbled. The Chekist hauled me along. “Don’t pass out yet. Plenty of time for that.”

A heavy door swung outward, and two Chekists dragged a man’s body out in front of us. He’d gone into that room alive. To think I had scorned the schoolteacher’s terror. I melted into a hysteria all my own when I saw the dead man’s bare feet. And there were his boots, tucked under the arm of the taller man. It was hard to both drag the body and keep the boots from falling.

The Chekist shoved me inside.

The room was windowless, tiny. Black oilcloth lined the walls. A drain in the middle of the floor pooled with blood. A sound—a howl, a moan, a wail all in one—emerged from me like an animal’s from a cage. Now I, who’d been silent for so long, was suddenly chattery as a mockingbird. “This is all a mistake. You have the wrong person. I need to see Varvara Razrushenskaya. She’s Cheka, she worked for Uritsky. She knows me. She can vouch for me. Please call her!” I started to beg but then I remembered what Arkady once told me about men like him, that tears make them cruel. We hate weakness. It inspires us to violence, he’d said. I certainly didn’t need to inspire this man. I had to get a grip on myself.

“Save your breath.” He shoved me against the oilcloth. I sank to my knees in the still-warm blood. Again that wail. Was this to be my end—this? Unknown, unsung, my only crime to have been alive at the same time Lenin was shot. I pictured the Left SR women up in the cell. They’d started a hunger strike before they disappeared, one by one. How weak I was compared to them. Because I was alone. I had no comrades, no friends. This man wouldn’t even have to pull my hair.

The stocky Chekist stood over me. He smelled like pork fat. “All a mistake, da? Let’s start with your name.”

The letters were like doorknobs in my mouth. My mouth so parched. My throat. A paper mouth. A paper tongue. “Makarova. Marina.”

“What?” He bent over and yelled into my ear.

I was afraid to look. His boots were very good.

“Makarova,” I said again. “Marina Dmitrievna.” I fought the luxury of weeping. I had to think, to hear.

“Address?”

“Pulkovo Observatory.” Name, province, district, village. Name province district…

He kicked me in the side of the head. I saw constellations. Cygnus, flying across the Milky Way, Deneb in its tail, a comet of bright red. “Last registered? And don’t waste my time.”

I gave him Grivtsova Alley.

“Why were you arrested?”

Didn’t he know? My tears and my snot and the blood all ran together. Yet my big ears were twitching. I hid the perception like stolen cash into a loose sleeve, the possibility that he knew less than I’d imagined. “There was a raid. On the observatory,” I whispered. “I hadn’t any papers.”

“Where were they? Did you destroy them? To hide your class origins?” His waxy jaw seemed so firm, seen from below. If he were a fish, how easy he would be to land. He towered over me. The thought came: How he must hate being small.

“I was attacked. They were stolen.” On my knees, a holy petitioner, in the blood of the Lamb. Paint the doorposts so the Angel of Death will pass over. The Angel of Death—I thought I’d already met him, but perhaps not.

My blond captor shuffled through papers in a file he’d tucked under his arm. “You are from Petrograd. What were you doing in Pulkovo?” He stood so close I could smell his boot blacking.

“A place to hide, Comrade,” I said to his footwear.

“From whom?”

How could I explain in such a way that my story wouldn’t trip over itself? “I’d been kidnapped. I escaped.”

“Why? Are you wealthy?”

“No. It was… of a sexual nature.”

His long nostrils flared. I imagined the pupils of his pale green eyes widening and narrowing like a lizard’s as he scented the air. “Did the observatory personnel knowingly hide you?”

The Five, oh God. “No. They took pity on me. They didn’t know. To them, I was just a misplaced person. I wasn’t quite right in the head.”

“They recognized a fellow bourgeois…”

That word, that word again! What did it mean? Words like bits of cheap currency. It meant everything, it meant nothing. Like saying “yellow.” Yellow yellow yellow yellow.

But the drain awaited.

“I’m a worker. I do factory work.”

“Which factory?” He squinted a pale eye.

“A knitting workshop. In the Moskovsky district. Bobrov’s,” I said. Would it help? There was no Bobrov’s anymore.

“You have no labor book.” He forced me to look up. This same horrible sensation, on my knees, a man yanking me by my hair. If I lived, I would never allow a man to touch me this way. I would shave my head for the rest of my life. “You are a bourgeois parasite!” he shouted into my face. “Selling yourself! Debasing our socialist revolution!”

“I was raised bourgeois but I’m a worker now. Look at my hands.” I spread them out, bloody but coarse from boiling laundry and scrubbing floors, calloused from digging and hoeing. Was it illegal now even to live?

“You can put a deer into harness but it doesn’t make it a horse. What are they really doing up there at the observatory? Were they sending signals to the British? Answer me!” He released my hair and unholstered his gun. I could smell the oiled leather, the metal.

I couldn’t stop my useless tears. The bitterness of my situation was a poison in my throat, the hopelessness of it all. I would end here, in this filthy basement. “Please—I’m telling you the truth. I swear on my mother’s head.” Though my mother had probably already been here, perhaps in this very cell, kneeling in someone else’s death.

“How well do you know Razrushenskaya?” he asked.

The question caught me up short. He was like a horse that had suddenly turned, trying to unseat me. In that one question, he gave me more than he’d intended. Was Varvara in trouble? What if she was on the outs, under investigation herself? The authors of Kommunist opposed the main body of power. Uritsky had been one of them. Could it have been they who shot him, and not Lyonya Kannegisser? I felt sick—it had never occurred to me that Varvara might be vulnerable. “We were in school together, that’s all.” Furiously backpedaling.

“Did you know she was dvoryanstvo?” Nobility.

Oh God, help me get out of here without incriminating her. “When I knew her, she lived in a tenement on Vasilievsky Island. She was a party member, even in school. Organizing among the women in the textile factories. Working an underground press.”

“Did you ever see her with members of the nobility?”

“She was a Bolshevik!” Was my friend in a cell somewhere in this building herself? Waiting for the tap on the shoulder, the shout from the guards?

“Did she ever take money from members of the nobility?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Is she a member of any counterrevolutionary groups?”

The devil tickled me and despite myself I laughed. He grabbed the back of my head and smashed my forehead into the floor. Into the blood. Blood everywhere. My hands, my face covered with it. Fresh. Warm. Rivers of blood. Oceans of blood. I saw it, like a vision. Russia. Washing into the drain. I could not stop screaming. He kicked me to shut me up but the screams kept coming out. The blood, which had once been inside another person, coated me, drenched me in its viscous red.

The door opened. Even the dank smell from the hall was fresher than the iron smell of the blood and the rot of the drain.

A woman’s boots. Long and narrow. “I’ll take this, Comrade.” He left without saying another word.

Weeping, I crawled to the boots, clung to them.

A bony hand pulled me to my feet.

I threw myself around her neck, forgetting that I was covered in blood, forgetting everything but love for this tall, leather-clad girl, my savior. Bloodying her neck, her cheeks, kissing her, clutching her as a drowning man clutches a plank of wood.

She shoved me away roughly, embarrassed.

“He asked about you,” I whispered, the words tumbling over each other. “Your family. Your social origins. Asked if I knew you were dvoryanstvo, how we met. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Berzhins, that treacherous scum. He knew you were my prisoner. Thought he’d get a head start on you, see if he could find something. He’ll get his soon enough.”

My prisoner. She had known I was here all along. “He could have killed me. Why didn’t you come for me, if you knew I was here?”

“Don’t you interrogate me,” she shouted. “You can’t imagine what’s going on now, so just shut up and do what I tell you.” Like a cop, she hauled me out of the room and toward the stairs by my bruised upper arm.

Eighteen years old, and my school chum held my life in the palm of her hand. And the lives of how many others? Yes—who was I to interrogate her? I didn’t even own a pair of drawers.

As we ascended the tile stairs, she kept a close grip on me under the armpit, the practiced hold of a prison guard. I couldn’t help asking myself how many times she’d been down to that cellar. Had she held a gun to somebody’s head there? Pulled the skin from his flesh? I felt the blood drying on my face. My hands were sticky with it, and the cold whistled up my skirt as we climbed to the third story, then down a long hall painted the dingy yellow that was the palette of Russian officialdom. Prisoners waited along the walls, pale-faced, like patients outside a hospital ward. Would the news be bad, or worse? They blanched when they saw me drenched in blood and looked the other way. Varvara opened a door and shoved me inside.

It was an office like any other—small, high-ceilinged, painted a dirty green, with a chair rail that ran around the room. A portrait of Lenin hung on the wall along with one of a gaunt man with a pointed beard. Heavy mesh on the windows, in case one thought to jump. Outside, charcoal clouds boiled in the early October sky. “Sadis’,” Varvara ordered. Sit.

I took the straight-backed chair before a small, scarred table. No calendar in here, no clock. The smell of graphite and wet wood tinged the cold air with a special despair. My body felt not quite my own, my head semidetached, as the English would say.

How much she had changed since spring. She was every inch the Chekist now, in creaking leather, the square body of her machine pistol menacing at her belt. Her expression perfectly echoed that of the grim, pointy-bearded man on the wall. Yet somewhere in there was still the girl who loved puns and puzzles, who stole sugar from the bowl with a grin. She disliked tenors and squeaky chairs and had not been pleased with the broom she got on St. Basil’s Eve.

So this was what it meant. A broom indeed. Still standing, she spread my dossier before her like a choir book and leafed through the hymns, her mouth sliced into a deeper-than-customary scowl. Patches of red broke out on her bony cheeks. “I can’t believe you used my name. What the devil did you think would happen?” She read aloud: “One unidentified person, aka Maria Mardukovna Morskaya, arrested Pulkovo Observatory, twenty-third September. Without papers. Confessed to passing secrets to the English. Named Cheka commissar Varvara Razrushenskaya in confession.”

I hadn’t realized it would sound like that. “You’re a commissar?”

“No—I’m the Little Humpbacked Horse. You were passing secrets to the English?”

“No! I never confessed to anything. It’s all made up! A commissar with a little moustache interrogated me and threw me onto a truck for Petrograd. I only used your name…” I didn’t know it would get her in trouble. “It was all I could think of. But I swear I never named you as part of a confession. I swear to God, Varvara.”

“And you were in Pulkovo doing exactly what?” The squeak of her leather jacket, that smell would forever after remind me of this day. She had an extra skin now, and I had none. “Everybody said you were dead. No news, nothing. And then, when they arrest you, you think of me? Not a word for months, and suddenly, you drag me into it?” She leaned forward, and I couldn’t believe the hatred in her eyes. She had looked upon me in many ways—grudging admiration, sneering superiority, even sisterly scorn—but never with loathing. Pure disgust. “Thought I’d come to the rescue? ‘Oh, Varvara will clean it up. Varvara will make it all go away.’ That’s not going to happen this time. Everything’s different now.” She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled, like a swimmer emerging from under water.

And I felt myself sinking, my head going under the waves.

“What were you doing at Pulkovo?”

How could I tell her the way I’d careened through the winter like a drunk on a frozen pond? I didn’t want to lie to her. She always knew, and she was my one chance. But I didn’t know how to tell her the truth—how much of it to tell, how not to sound like the adventurer Arkady had labeled me.

At last she sat, threw her cap on the table, and scooted her chair in, her black frizzy hair standing up like a madman’s. She took out some paper, dipped her pen in the ink pot. How far we’d come from those days leafleting outside factories together, talking to women in tenement courtyards. I would have mentioned it, but the rage in her eyes told me we’d gone beyond friendship. From her point of view I was simply a liability now, a hot coal of which she was only too eager to rid herself. “Start at the beginning.”

The beginning? I sorted through my life since then, the way you sort photographs before placing them in an album, deciding which pieces fit and which don’t and in what order. In the next room, an interrogator was badgering someone. I was distracted by the incessant stream of his hectoring accusations. Outside, the hoofbeats of a cabman’s nag clattered down Gorokhovaya Street. “I’m losing patience, Marina.” Her pen was about to drip on her papers. She tapped it on the ink pot.

I suddenly saw myself—I was exactly like this city, with its classical facades and labyrinths of dirty courtyards behind them as I unfolded my story, beginning with Seryozha’s death and Kolya’s return, the house on the English Embankment. I held nothing back, watching her face, her jealousy at my passion for Kolya—how she hated him. Well, she’d wanted to hear the whole thing. I had no other cards to play.

“You know what he was doing here, don’t you?” she asked. “Speculating under cover of army provisioning. The man’s complete scum. I can’t believe you’d go to him when you had a man like Genya. You’re really a piece of work.”

Something heavy dropped in the next room, startling me—but not her. What was she accustomed to that that sound was just an ordinary workday?

She liked it better when I told her how Kolya left me. My return to Genya. Our marriage and its implosion. The move back to Furshtatskaya. I noticed she’d stopped taking notes.

I got to the part about Arkady. The islands, St. John the Baptist, the barracks. Then her pen flew, blotting the cheap paper. The hothouse on the Vyborg side. The trip to Kolomna, the passports and the station.

She rubbed her temples with thumbs and forefingers. “And you never thought to tell anyone? You never thought how this was harming the revolution?”

“I tried to tell you, remember? When I came to your place? You’d just been roughed up by the strikers…” I trailed off. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of that. “I wanted to tell you, but Manya was there. I couldn’t. Compared with what you were doing, it sounded so unbelievably squalid.”

Varvara placed her palms on the edge of the table as if she were bracing herself, her head lowered. The interrogator in the next room started up his questioning again. My head ached where I’d been kicked.

I had to steel myself to tell her the rest. My visit from Arkady, the private dining room, the Order of Saint George. My residence in the room with the striped wallpaper. I spared her nothing. After a time she stopped writing again. She looked like she was going to be sick. She got up and paced the room, pausing often to look out through the mesh as if she’d like to fly into the sky. I got to the poem he’d cut into my back. I stood and unbuttoned my dress, slipped the fabric from my shoulders so she could see for herself the truth of my words. His poem had healed into perfect lines, pink but less three-dimensional.

She stood behind me. Suddenly her arms were around me, her lips kissing my shoulder. “I’ll kill him,” she whispered into my ear. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’ll find him. I’ll fill him so full of lead it would take twelve men to carry his coffin.”

I embraced those leather-clad arms around my waist, leaned my head back against her. We had each had our own revolution. I thought that any given moment in time was not a point but a city tunneled through with parallel passageways. People could be marching overhead and underfoot, all around you, sharing exactly the same real estate, and you could miss each other entirely.

Finally I bent down and pulled my dress up.

Pale and shaken, she sat opposite me, her eyes now shining and bright with pity. Then we recognized each other, no longer interrogator and prisoner, but two friends in a terrible position. “How’d you get away?”

I was nearly done. One last bomb. I described leaving the flat. The road to Pulkovo, the observatory in the distance. “I watched it up there, glowing in the moonlight, and thought that the only happy people in the world were the ones up there on those heights.”

She took my hand, the scarred one. “The people who come after us, they’re the ones who will be happy. It’s not for us.”

“But I want to be happy myself,” I said. “Is that bourgeois of me?”

“Painfully individualistic.” She laughed mournfully.

I described the final chapter, the dacha in the woods. But I was no longer the innocent, the idealist I’d been last October, when I’d played at spying, running off to place my notes in Plato’s Republic. Now I knew the harm that could be done. But how to do the least and still get out of here? I carefully laid out the scene: Karlinsky and his wife, the small dark man, the Englishman in army uniform. And Father—how could I tell the tale without him?

She let go of my hand and began taking furious notes. To the pen’s dry music, I related as much as I could remember. That they were waiting for money—three hundred fifty thousand gold francs—and it had been delayed. But I left out the name of the person bringing the gold. Even now, after all that had happened, I would not give him up.

It began to rain outside. She was still writing as I got to the tale’s end—my father’s betrayal, my run to the observatory, my service as Marusya. My arrest along with the three celestials. “You’ve got to help them. They’re just scientists. They didn’t even know Lenin’d been shot.”

She bristled again. “Don’t tell me what to do. I don’t care about your damn scientists. I need something better than this if I’m going to save your sorry ass.” She batted at the page. “Not to mention my own. Give me something I can use, Marina.”

She took me back through my story, asking questions, demanding specifics, every inch the professional. “The meeting. Who was calling the shots, would you say? Von Princip?”

I saw I’d been focused on the wrong things. I’d been able to think about nothing but Father, how he was involved, and his horrible mistress, how he saw me, and whether I would ever escape. But it was the Englishman and the Odessan who had been at the center of things that night.

“The Englishman. Describe him.”

“Well built, sharp nose, dimpled chin. Blond. Six feet tall.” I could see him in his insignialess uniform, hear his clipped manner of speech.

Her eyebrows were like two dark goats colliding. “No one you’d seen with your old man? From the consulate, maybe?”

“I hadn’t seen him before, but he spoke like a military man. He didn’t trust Arkady.”

She snorted. “And what about the other one?”

“Short, slender, black-haired. Well dressed, clean-shaven. Smoked continuously. Maybe a Jew or a Greek, Turk, Armenian—who knows? I thought of him as the Odessan. He spoke fast, but not clearly—like he had marbles in his mouth.” It should have been here already, Baron. That was our understanding. “He and the Englishman were the link to the Czechs.”

She groaned and leaned back in her seat. “If only you’d come to me then… didn’t you have any sense of what you were sitting on? What they were about to unleash? Instead you go bury yourself at Pulkovo Observatory. Could you really have forgotten your allegiance to the revolution?”

How could she ask such a question? “If you knew Arkady, you’d know why. He’s not just going to forget about me. I bet he has Chekists on the payroll. Otherwise, how could he have operated so long?”

She got up and paced. “There’s got to be something. If you want me to save you—think!” My stomach rumbled, but she ignored it. “Tell me, did the Englishman have a name? Who would meet the Czechs? Who was their contact?”

I ran my hand over the rough table, wondering how many people had confessed to how many crimes sitting just here. Who was innocent? Most, I imagined. I could hear their whispers in the wood…You have to believe me. Who had named others, men and women forever lost. I thought about Karlinskaya in that cell on the second floor. I kept testing it, like a bad tooth. Karlinskaya would know all kinds of things—the identity of the Englishman, and perhaps the Odessan. Karlinskaya, my father’s mistress, the woman who ordered with such coldness that I be led out—she must have known it would be to my death. She might even now be conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow the revolution.

“There’s something. I can see it on your face.” Varvara grabbed my arm. “Marina, don’t even think of holding anything back from me.” Her gaze drilled into my forehead. “I see through you like a gauze curtain. What?” She pulled me across the desk so that we were nose to nose. I could smell the fish she’d had for lunch. “I could get someone to sweat it out of you,” she growled. “Don’t play with me. You’ve implicated me at a very bad time. You owe me. You can save us both. Tell me, and don’t leave anything out.”

“What are you going to do, make me drink hot wax? Like Fanya Kaplan?”

At the name, Varvara’s skin turned gray. She let go of my arm. “Marina,” she said in a slightly softer tone. “Do not mention Lenin’s assassin. Give me something I can use. Give me some reason to save you.” She ended in a whisper. Almost pleading. Her emotion wasn’t a tactic.

“It’s about someone who was there that night,” I said. “But what will you do to them if I tell you?”

“Who is it?” She was all alertness now. “If it’s a traitor to Soviet Russia, if it’s someone conspiring with the English to overthrow us, why would you want to protect them? Have your politics changed so much? It’s civil war!”

“Those Chekists at Pulkovo thought the astronomical charts were British code.”

“Everybody’s on edge. What do you expect?” She was shouting again. She sounded just like the interrogator next door. “The English are at Murmansk. Reactionaries have a dictatorship in Siberia, a separate government, supported by your father and those goddamn Czechs! And you should see some of those Siberian psychopaths if you think we’re rotten. You’ve been away a long time. So if you know something, this is not the time to keep it back. Give me a name and where I can find this person and I swear you’ll walk out of here free as a bird.”

I was exhausted. How long had I been in this room? All around me I could feel the grim machinery of Gorokhovaya 2 turning, turning, a factory stamping out molds, the waiting forms stuffed with human beings. We, the prisoners, were what was being processed. But what product demanded such tons of flesh? Where was this all going? For the happiness of some future people who were somehow more valuable than the people sitting in the cell downstairs or out there in the hall?

But I had a key in my molar. It ached there. It would unlock the door.

What are you waiting for? Get rid of her!

At the observatory, the Ancients should have been gathering for their yellow wine right about now. Later, Ludmila Vasilievna would make her calculations while Aristarkh Apollonovich would mount the metal staircase to the big telescope, to observe the young stars in the Moving Group. Should be. Could be. Were not. Were in a Cheka cell. While Varvara, across the table, was caught in her own dark nebula.

They had made Fanya Kaplan drink hot wax. They had shot the man downstairs. Those were not metaphors. And yet Get rid of her! still rang in my ears.

A Bolshevik spy. Here I was again. “Promise me they’ll leave the observatory alone and let the astronomers go. They’re only thinking of Alpha Centauri up there.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Varvara said. “I’ll write the order myself. I’ll do it today. There’s to be no interference with the state work of the observatory. Now who is it?”

There are some things that shouldn’t be said, words that bring states into being. “Viktoria Karlinskaya. She’s in the cell with me.”

“Karlinsky’s wife?” She sat up very straight. “We have her? We have Viktoria Karlinskaya?” She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh Marina! You just said the ‘Open sesame’!” All the worry fell from her face. She rose, tugging down the sleeves of her jacket, squaring the hem.

I couldn’t share in her excitement. I didn’t care about her embrace. My bitterness outshone my relief as she called a guard to take me back to my cell. I knew I was wrong to give Karlinskaya up. But in the end, we were all swimming in the same infected waters—Karlinskaya and I, Varvara, Berzhins, Father and his conspirators. This terrible place, this was also the revolution. The blood from that basement room still staining my hands and face, I had named her. I was not separate from this. They would not let you be separate.

57 Rubinshteyna Street

AND SO I SOLD Karlinskaya. Sold her for the good of the revolution. Sold her for vengeance. Sold her for love, for friendship, for freedom—my motivations as snarled as a mat of hair. Something to ponder in the deep hours of the night as water ate away at the roots of the sleeping city. The following afternoon, the fat guard called me from the cell. Varvara was waiting for me in the hallway. She already looked better—cleaner, rested, authoritative, as though she’d gotten a transfusion. She gripped my arm but it was only for show, the pressure light.

“I have to get away,” I said, low, as we walked to the stairs. “Help me get to Maryino.”

“There is no ‘away,’” she said, our feet clattering on the dirty stairs. “It’s civil war. It’s going to be worse in the countryside than here. With us it’s almost over. Hold on.” She stopped in the stairwell, glancing around, and surreptitiously pressed a key into my palm, closed my fingers over it. She smiled, touched my cheek with the back of her hand, the way a mother checks a child’s temperature. Her tenderness alarmed me. “You remember the way?”

I hefted the key in my hand. “What’ll Manya say?”

“Manya’s at the front with the troops.” We finished our descent, prisoner and Chekist once more. She nodded to a guard who opened a door into a sort of reception area with worn counters and dirty floors. Wary pale clerks eyed us as ordinary citizens stood in line with bundles for prisoners.

“He won’t let me go, Varvara. He’ll find me and kill me.”

“Trust me—he’s got his hands full. He doesn’t even remember your name.” She opened the door. Outside it was raining. “We’ll get him. When all this is over.”

I walked free into the cold rain with all of my worldly goods—the coat on my back, the boots on my feet. I had vowed never to return to Petrograd, but there I was at the corner of Admiralteisky and Gorokhovaya, the smell of blood still in my nostrils, knowing that I’d set wheels in motion I’d never be able to still.

Keeping my head down, I fled to Varvara’s flat, on Rubinshteyna Street just across the Chernyshevsky Bridge. The key in the lock, a drab hallway, an inner door to a joyless room. I remembered the faded striped wallpaper, the typewriter. But I could still see black oilcloth, blood, a drain. After locking the door and checking it to be sure I took off my boots and stretched out on the mushy bed like overrisen dough. Yet what luxury after two weeks on the floor of a Cheka holding cell. Blood still caked my clothes and hair from yesterday’s interrogation—I smelled like an animal. I should light the stove and wash, but I couldn’t force myself to rise.

I fell asleep as one plunges into a black lake, the water closing over my head.

I didn’t know where I was when I awoke in the cold, dark room. I turned on the bedside lamp and tried to breathe. Safe—for the time being. I got up and moved to her little bourgeoika stove in my stockinged feet, eyed her meager ration of firewood and stack of newspapers: Izvestia, Petrogradskaya Pravda. Krasnaya Gazeta, that bloodthirsty rag. I began to twist up a Pravda for kindling, then stopped and registered what I was seeing in my hands. In a box on the front page was a list of executed prisoners. I sat on the floor and read. Shock after shock as I recognized names: hostages, landlords, generals, publishers, and revolutionaries alike, all bundled together and canceled like stacks of old checks.

Dukavoy, Ippolit Sergeevich, Counterrevolutionary. My father’s chess partner.

Gershon, Pavel Semyonovich, Counterrevolutionary. Pavlik, my old boyfriend. His beautiful green eyes. He was only eighteen, like me. I could still picture us walking together with the food for both schools in the early morning. His face when Genya stole me out of the Cirque Moderne. Dead. And here was Semyon, and Julia…my God, they got the whole family. Execution, moving through the population like cholera.

And Krestovsky, Andrei Kirillovich, Speculator. The type blurred with my tears. I searched for his wife, the beautiful Galina, but it seemed she’d been spared, at least that day. Perhaps she’d only been sent to a camp. Poor Krestovsky. I could still see him uncorking that champagne, doing the sailor’s dance. What had he done besides feed a raft of theatergoers, support a flock of poets?

I couldn’t read on. I wadded the paper up and threw it in the stove. Was this the revolution we’d dreamed of? Our glistening future? If the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2 hadn’t drowned my last hope, this list had. And each issue had more. Hundreds, thousands of names, the liquidation of a class. Yet even as I wept there in the cold, I still had to light the fire, to twist their names into kindling. Forgive me. I searched each paper for Makarov, Dmitry Ivanovich. Or Makarova, Vera Borisovna, but found neither. With the names of the dead I boiled water, washed the blood off myself, and set my clothes to soak.

Dressed in someone’s robe—Manya’s most likely, I couldn’t imagine Varvara even owning such a thing—I poked around the flat. There was nothing personal. Clothes on a hook, some hose, a photograph of Marx torn from a journal, a handbill from the Military Revolutionary Committee—a souvenir from the day they took Petrograd. But the anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s cheery Father Frost face no longer presided as it had in her room on Vasilievsky Island. Neither did I see Delacroix’s Liberty. I cleared the table and moved the typewriter to the floor, adding to it a pile of manuscript pages. They were a political analysis: “A Commentary on Comrade Bukharin’s Anarchy and Scientific Communism” by Varvara Razrushenskaya.

Her stern black bookshelf tolerated no fiction or verse, only big dictionaries, and volumes on economics, politics, and history. But I recognized a small sliver of aqua blue, a title traced in gold, tucked in between two volumes of Marx. I slid it out from its hiding place. She’d kept it through everything. I traced my fingers over the cloth cover, remembering how Father and I had discussed colors. I’d been torn between the lighter blue and something more dignified. In the end the beauty had won out. I turned the soft, creamy pages—and they blurred as I thought of him, the pain I would always feel when I touched that volume, the memory of what had been.

Something fell out and fluttered to the floor. A pressed sprig of white lilac. I picked it up, sniffed. Dusty, but I could still detect the lingering scent of that long-ago night, St. Basil’s Eve, 1916, when we had cast the wax and seen our futures. Varvara had pressed one of my mother’s lilacs into the pages. So unlike her to be that sentimental.

I thought of how she’d kissed my shoulder, how she’d embraced me.

My inscription,

That kiss on my shoulder, that embrace. Manya’s at the front. Her fingertips on my incised back.

Of course I knew she had feelings for me. But I’d never expected to have to live at her mercy.

Now I was burdened with a new set of problems. I saw that I was never going to be my own woman, I simply had traded Arkady and the Cheka for Varvara. Oh, what I would give to just be free, alone, without compromises or betrayals, beholden to no one. Out in the open. A caravan, a campfire, stars in their stately progress overhead. I was tired of rooms.

Varvara returned after dark, talking, laughing, full of news. She spread her meager rations on the table—bread and a few dried herrings. I could only imagine what the Formers were eating if this was the Cheka’s fare. She ceremonially divided it up onto two chipped plates.

“I wanted you to know they let the astronomers go today.”

They were free. A weight lifted from my chest. At least I’d done something good. Then I asked the question that had been haunting me from the start. “What about Mother? Is she a hostage?”

“We never had her.” She wiped her mouth, took a sip of tea. “She disappeared when all this broke out. Maybe she’s clairvoyant after all, eh? Or else she’s learned a thing or two from last time. When we stopped by, both she and the old lady had already flown the coop. Feel better?” She chucked me under the chin as you do a sulky child.

“And Karlinskaya?” I knew I shouldn’t ask.

She sighed. “You’re worried about that bitch? She sang like a bird, if you want to know. She saw what was up the minute we called her in.”

“Did you…” I swallowed past an imaginary bolus of wax. “Torture her?”

“I never torture anyone,” she said, and held my hand in both of hers. “I simply give them choices. Karlinskaya believes in the revolution. It wasn’t hard to convince her to help us. I let her go this afternoon. She’s off to work for us now. You’ve done the revolution a service.”

Which of us would be the Bolshevik spy now? I thought bitterly. “Do you swear?”

“On Marx’s beard. Whatever else you think of me, I’m no liar.” She let that hang in the air, with its unspoken rebuke. “We knew most of it already, thanks to you. I told her I’d put her on a train to Samara if she told me what I wanted to know, and she was ready to oblige. She’s not the hard-liner you’d have thought. A practical woman, I’d say. More so than you.”

As we ate, Varvara delineated the conspiracy they’d partially uncovered at the time of Lenin’s assassination attempt, which my information further revealed. It seemed that a British diplomat had been caught bribing the Latvian Rifles—Lenin’s personal guard—to kill both Lenin and Trotsky. Dzerzhinsky, the Torquemada of the national Cheka—he of the gaunt face and the pointed beard in the portrait in Varvara’s office—had been on the hunt for others involved. Evidently Karlinsky was the conduit.

She went to her bag, pulled out a photograph, and put it by my plate. “Look familiar?”

It showed a dark-haired man with round, sad eyes and drooping moustache in an old-fashioned high white collar and soft tie. It was him, the Odessan, years ago. I nodded.

“Konstantin. Recruited by the British in 1903 in the Pacific before the Japanese war. The one in the uniform you described is a naval attaché, Commander Fielding Brown. Your meeting was preparation for the invasion of Russia by the English—and the Czech uprising on the Trans-Siberian. The plan was to meet up with the Czechs and eventually the Whites under Denikin, to attack Moscow. Karlinskaya confirmed what we knew. Added a few details.”

“And Father?”

She picked a fish bone out of her mouth and set it on the rim of her plate. “He’s in Samara, with Komuch.”

A new acronym, no doubt. “Translation, please.”

“The Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly—the old Kerensky gang mostly, plus some other assorted malcontents like your old man. For some reason, Karlinskaya stayed behind in Petrograd. She said it was because she’d “been ill,” but later admitted she’d been knocked up and needed an abortion. Quite a woman. We picked her up in a random sweep. No idea who she was. Berzhins almost wept—you should have seen his face.”

So Arkady hadn’t been lying. I could have had another sister or brother. Thank God she’d put an end to that.

She sat back in her chair, propped her knee against the oilcloth. “We did find out how they got the gold in for the Czechs. In case you were wondering.”

I forced myself to meet her gaze. She would notice if I looked away. She would notice anyway, but I had to try. “How?”

She spun her spoon around. “Surprise, surprise. Your old pal Shurov. Neck deep in it. A strange coincidence, don’t you think? Want to change your story?”

I tried to imagine how an innocent person would react. Exasperated. “I can’t imagine anyone, let alone Arkady, trusting him with a load of gold.”

She stared at me another moment, then gathered up the dishes. Nobody washed them anymore—we licked them clean. “And you didn’t know anything about it.”

I shook my head, a piece of herring bone stuck in my teeth.

“He never contacted you? Do you know where he is now?” Her black eyebrows arched to disbelieving peaks. She set the dishes on the windowsill.

“Is the interrogation still on?”

I could hear the rain gargling in the drainpipe outside. “Your father, Arkady, Shurov. Konstantin and Commander Brown? You swear you had no part in it?” Her nail-bitten hand suddenly grasped my forearm. “If you’re playing me for a fool, I’ll shoot you myself.” Her eyes glared like sun on metal. It hurt to look back into them. “Think before you answer.”

“I gave you Karlinskaya, didn’t I?” She loved me but I had no doubt she would shoot me if she thought I had turned against the revolution. She would shoot me to prove to herself that she valued the revolution over her personal feelings, even love. “I told you everything.”

She drew her face even closer. Her hair smelled of smoke. “Tell me about Shurov.” Was this politics or jealousy?

I gazed right into her black, frightening eyes. “I haven’t seen him since the last day on Galernaya. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.” The absolute almost truth.

“Too many coincidences. I don’t like it.” Varvara pursed her lips so hard, her wide mouth nearly disappeared.

“After what he did, setting me up with von Princip? You think I’d forgive him for that?” She was making me angry all over again.

She sighed and lowered herself back into her seat. “All right. We won’t speak of it again.” She lit the primus with a twist of paper, set the kettle on to boil. I tried not to cough. That bone was sticking in my throat. She prepared the tea, with something that looked like real tea. A sad celebration. The smell uncoiled in the room. We waited for it to brew and rearranged our faces.

She rolled a cigarette and put her stockinged foot up on the table. Her heel had a huge hole in it. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you. There are going to be massive celebrations for the October anniversary,” she said. “In honor of Year One. The futurists are knocking themselves out. They’re preparing theatricals, parades, puppet shows. They’re redesigning Palace Square. You should do something with them.”

“Funny, I don’t feel much like celebrating.” Just as I watched our dreams fall under the horses, they were staging a parade. There was no bread, but it seems there would be circuses. Still, hope was as real as bread and more easily constructed from papier-mâché, wire, and broadsides.

“This will be over soon,” she said, meaning Red Terror, “and then it will be Petrograd’s chance to live a little—remind people what it’s all about. The Commissariat of Enlightenment’s somehow twisted the money out of Moscow. There’s a ton of work. You should write a poem for the celebrations—it’ll reinforce your revolutionary credentials. I’m sure there’ll be readings. Some of your poets must still be around.”

But you had to have a soul to write, and I wasn’t sure I had one anymore. Maybe it was with Arkady’s now, inside an egg inside a duck inside a hare, at the bottom of the sea.

Varvara’s rations didn’t include enough firewood to warm the room past nine. We lay together under a pile of blankets. She held her manuscript on her knees, correcting pages. I had nothing to read, didn’t dare open a newspaper to hear the shrieking of the dead. Instead I was writing a poem—about the Year One—on the back of a discarded page. She smelled of smoke and pencil lead. “You know, I’ve missed you, you idiot.” She rubbed my shoulder awkwardly. “It was hell to see you in that room. That’s not how I like to see you.”

And how do you like to see me? I resisted asking the question, which would sound flirtatious. I could not shake the image of her in the interrogation room, her expert hand under my armpit leading me out of the cellar, her working in that hellish place every day. She was writing about it even now, urging people to have less heart so they could get through this insanity.

She brushed a hair from my cheek. Smiled.

I fought the impulse to push her hand away.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

To this rangy, dangerous girl I owed my life, and that of the astronomers, and probably Mother’s, too, indirectly. She and Avdokia would have waited for the Cheka like geese on a pond if not for Varvara’s lesson of last winter: when you smell trouble, make yourself scarce.

“I worried about you every day.” So close in my ear. She put her papers down, her arm across my shoulders. “I thought you were dead. I went looking for you. Anton said you were with your mother, but by then she was gone. Couldn’t you have sent me a note? Things could have turned out so differently…” She plucked at the ends of my hair, traced my nose, my lips.

I turned over the page I’d been working on. “I needed to disappear. For my own sanity.”

“All those months, I thought… then they said someone had been arrested in Pulkovo and had mentioned my name.”

She brought her face close, studied me, kissed my temple hesitantly. She shivered. Her eyes searched mine. Would I? That drain, the blood. Another room of the nightmare. Her body’s pungent smell, a higher acid smell than a man’s. Even if I’d been a lesbian I wouldn’t have been excited by her. I’d rather have made love to Manya. But I pitied her, and I owed her my life. I knew how long she had been carrying this burden. I knew what it was to love hopelessly.

“Please?” she whispered.

I couldn’t see what it mattered now, after those twisted nights with Arkady. I leaned across her to turn off the lamp.

“No,” she said. “Leave it on. I want to see you. I want to know this is real.”

Timidly, she began to make love to me. Her nervous hands explored my breasts, tentatively caressed my hips. How little experience she must have had. I was sure Manya had been her first. It was unreal having my old friend embrace me and feeling her growing excitement, the catch in her breath, the sensation of soft breasts against my own instead of a man’s hard chest. Her awkward touch, her keenness, was unbearable. There wasn’t even any vodka to make things any easier. She had no gift for lovemaking.

I showed her how. Kiss my throat, running my fingers down it. Offering her the nape of my neck. Kiss my neck, bite it. Using my hand over hers to cup my breast. Like this. My body warming now. I imagined Kolya watching us, sitting open-legged in a chair, his breath speeding up. I ran her hand up my haunch, over my hip, down my thigh. Here. Here. She kissed my mouth, my breast—not biting or twisting the nipple—my belly, and buried her face between my legs. I hoped I wouldn’t have to reciprocate. But how Kolya would adore this. It was easier, imagining him here as our third.

I moved her with my thighs and hands to a better sensation. What I would give for his clever cock now, his hands, his mouth. Thinking about his pleasure, my gleeful fox. Would I ever see him again?

She did not let me go until she felt the arch and ripple of my climax. Then, face smelling of me, she wrapped her legs around mine and rocked herself to completion. I’d never thought of doing that. “Marina, Marina… I’ve always loved you,” she whispered, nestling her chin on my shoulder, her tears dripping on my skin. “Did you know?”

I nodded. Yes, of course I knew. For that reason, the power in our friendship had always tilted a bit in my direction. What I hadn’t foreseen was the day I would lose my sense of what I’d never do, of what was impossible. Nothing was impossible and anything could happen. In the right situation, you could sleep with your best friend, you could turn over your father’s mistress to the drain.

“I’m so happy. You can’t know.” Finally, she turned off the lamp and settled under the blankets to sleep, her leg flung across me.

I tried to get some sleep myself, but her leg was heavy and I was hot and the sheets reeked of her. I pretended to stretch and turn over, out from under that leg, but she moved again to press her breasts against my back, and wrap herself firmly around me.

58 Alice in the Year One

I wrapped my head in the fringed shawl that lay on the bed and gazed in the small mirror over the washbasin. I’d been hoping to disguise myself, but my face only seemed framed and highlighted, even when I pulled the wool low over my eyes. I wadded some paper and stuffed it up against my gums, then took some soot from the bourgeoika and rubbed it around my eyes, hollowing my cheeks, darkening my eyebrows. In the wavy mirror over the sink, there I was as an old woman, as if I had gone straight from this day to the edge of the grave, missing my life entirely.

A relief to be out on the drizzly, quiet streets of the city once more, the Fontanka wide and green, still flowing below the powdered pastels of the buildings across the way. Ah, to be out from under that cracked ceiling, away from those striped walls and Varvara. Down with rooms! A man stood on the Chernyshevsky Bridge, staring down into the water, smoking pensively. I could remember standing just here with Genya the last night before he went out for the defense of the city and came back to explode my life.

Nevsky Prospect was shockingly deserted. Broken and boarded-up windows, block after block. Signs had either been torn down, or stood in sad advertisement for shops long since closed. Whole sections of the wooden street pavers were broken, missing. We were going to celebrate the Year One here in this ruin? Yet I’d missed this place as a soldier misses his leg, like a broken-off piece of my heart. Or perhaps I was a broken-off piece of the city’s heart, and it was Petrograd’s great longing for one of its children that I felt. As I rambled—or, rather, hobbled—I felt as if I were walking along the lines of my own hand, the coils of my own brain, the veins of my own body. I knew every building, every bridge, my short life inseparable from these facades and railings.

An old woman, I walked unnoticed and undisturbed along the rippling canals, the mist holding the promise of more rain, veiling the buildings’ faces. I walked all the way to Palace Square and saw that Varvara was right. The scaffolding of some great project was being built, preparations for the celebration in this next room of the dream. One blond broad-shouldered man way up on the planks at the General Staff Building arch caught my eye. Sasha! I almost called out, but then remembered who I was supposed to be, this hunched old woman—I thought of her as Marfa Petrovna—and shrank back under my shawl. Seeing him made me four times lonelier for my former life.

I wandered for half the day, trundling around in my hagdom, drinking in the sights, this beloved and heartbreaking city. At the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky, the doors of the building swung in easily. A good or bad omen? The old sign for Katzev Studio, gold lettering on black glass, still hung on the elevator cage, though the machine itself crouched uselessly like a miserable, toothless lion in a small-town zoo. I was happy to note that the iron balusters were still intact—cleverly eluding the fate of the wooden ones.

I climbed to the fifth floor slowly, clinging to that solid railing. At the top stood the shiny black door, a bit pocked and peeling now, with its familiar brass plaque under the bell. Did they still have electricity? I pushed the bell and miraculously, deep inside, heard the familiar buzz.

I felt myself inspected via peephole, then heard the clicks as several locks were released. The door opened. Sofia Yakovlevna, thin, wrapped in a gray shawl, blinked at me. We could have been sisters. Her face listed to one side, as if she had had a stroke. “Yes?” She didn’t have her glasses on, thank God, but her appearance troubled me.

“Good day,” I rasped. “Is Mina Solomonovna in?”

“She’s in the darkroom.” Her voice was uncertain, her brow a puzzle of wrinkles. My face was familiar to her, I could tell, but she couldn’t place me. “Are you expecting photographs?”

“Yes. Yes I am.” This woman had known me since childhood. How could she be so easily fooled by a bit of paper and stove grime, a hoarse tone? Being dead would feel just like this, walking about as people you’ve known look through you. I could tell she was wondering why I wasn’t taking my scarf off.

“Don’t trouble yourself, dear. I think I know the way,” I said as Shusha walked in from the back of the house, wearing her school uniform. Her eyes flew open, then her mouth. I touched the side of my nose—careful—and she clamped her mouth shut again. “Maybe this girl will escort me.” I took Shusha’s arm.

We bundled ourselves back to the studio, which was cold but clearly still in use—the green velvet backdrop, the chair for the sitter, the big camera on its tripod. Shusha’s grimy school uniform was too short for her. She’d defied all odds by growing. “Marina, what’s going on? Are you in trouble?” She seemed excited by the possibility, as if it were all one romantic adventure.

I wagged my head noncommittally.

“Papa died this summer.” Her brown eyes glistened. “He was sick all spring.”

I had been so caught up in my own bad news… that wonderful man. I had to catch my breath. “I’m so sorry. How are you getting along?”

“Bad. Mama’s had it the worst. And Mina, she had to leave school to take over the business.”

Poor Mina! I could imagine how devastated she must have been. She loved the university, her chemistry courses. She was no artist. If only Seryozha were still here… “Was it cholera?”

“No, it was his stomach.”

“Vechnaya pamyat’,” I said, even though they were Jewish. Eternal memory. How warm he’d been, sweeping us all up in his familial embrace. I could see him sitting on the divan in his caftan and cap, one leg propped up from the gout. How kind he’d been to Seryozha—only a year ago. The Katzev apartment had always been our sanctuary, but without their father, it felt cut adrift, a raft instead of a mountain. Now he and Seryozha could walk together, could take photographs for eternity.

The red light over the darkroom door was on. “It’s crazy. The studio’s busier than ever now,” Shusha told me. “Even Lunacharsky came for a portrait.” The head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, in charge of all Russia’s educational and cultural affairs. It was a coup for any enterprise, but especially theirs. We entered the light-baffling turnstile into the darkroom, warm and reeking. Mina stood over the sinks, washing prints. Red flashed on her glasses. Her hair was tucked up into a scarf. “Mina, this lady asked to see you,” Shusha said.

My old friend glanced up, frowned at this strange creature her sister had brought in. “Can I help you?”

I peeled back my shawl, spit out the paper from my mouth into my palm. The expression on her red-washed face echoed that of her sister the moment before. “Marina.” No smile, no arms flung around my neck. “You’re alive.”

“Don’t go spreading it around.” I smiled, trying to make a joke of it.

She looked older than the last time I’d seen her, thinner, a bit worn, a professional. Taking her father’s place had changed her—whether for good or ill it was hard to know. She glanced darkly at Shusha. “Don’t you have some homework to do?”

“I’m going.” Shusha kissed me, quickly. “I have to go to class anyway. See you, Auntie.” She started for the turnstile, but I grabbed her by the arm.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“Anybody.”

She mimed a lock across her lips and disappeared through the revolving door.

Then Mina and I were alone, silent but for the sound of the water in the sinks. They still had water, at least. Mina’s bespectacled eyes examined me, evaluating, then turned back to her work. “So?”

Not at all the welcome I’d imagined. “I’m sorry about your father. I loved him. Seryozha worshipped him.”

“I know.” She sighed and lined up a plate in an easel, her movements deft in the glow of the red safelight. She slid in a sheet of paper behind it, exposed the print, then slid it into the first bath, poking at it with tongs. We watched the image consolidate itself. A group of patient, weary faces over open books. Workingmen, adolescents, old women. “The Liteiny District Soviet Literacy Class,” she said. “There are so many clubs and organizations now. Everyone wants a place in the new world. And they all want it recorded for posterity.” She fished the print out of the developer and plunged it into the stop bath, wiping a lock of hair back with her forearm. I tucked it into her kerchief for her. She worked quickly, efficiently, intelligence in every motion she made. “I know why you’re here. Kolya said you’d gotten yourself into some kind of rotten mess.”

He was back? And had come looking for me? With Arkady right here, waiting for him? “When was that?”

Mina poked at the print contemplatively. Extracted it and slipped it into the fixer, checked the thermometer, poured off a little water from a small tank heater into the tray, checked the thermometer again. “The last time? Back in August. Maybe July. I’m not exactly sure. I’ve got my hands full these days, as you can see.”

She put another sheet of paper behind the easel, started again, revealing a face very pale and grim, then plunging back into red.

“Shusha told me. I’m sorry about the university.”

“Nothing to be done.” Her mouth turned down even more sharply.

“Nothing more from Kolya since August?”

“Don’t I have anything better to do than keep track of your love life?” she snapped, poking irritably at the print in the bath. “You’ve been gone since April. Do you think our lives just stop when you’re away? That we freeze into place, only to reanimate when you next appear? I’ve been here all along, trying to keep a roof over everybody’s head. It’s not a thrill a minute, narrow escapes and bold adventure, but it’s the way real people live. We just keep living.”

I struggled not to show how her words appalled me. She thought I’d died, and now that I hadn’t, she wasn’t even happy about it. I tried to see myself as she saw me. The self I saw reflected in her eyes, in her fury, was not me as I was today, but as I had been as a spoiled girl. It was like looking at a star, the light it emitted a million years ago finally reaching our eyes. But you could not talk people out of their impressions of you; only time could change them. I could tell her about the room on Tauride Street, but she could say that that, too, was my fault. I could tell her about the observatory, and cholera, and Gorokhovaya 2. “We’ve all suffered, Mina.”

She slid in yet another sheet of paper. “Maybe so. But I have my own life now. It’s not my choice but it’s a good life. I don’t chase after whirlwinds. I don’t have time for your dramas. I’m engaged to be married, thank you for asking. I’m trying to live my life in a rational manner.”

Engaged? Our little student? “Mina! Engaged to who?”

She finished counting and extinguished the light. “A medical student. You don’t know him. Roman Ippolit. We got engaged when Papa was sick.”

“I’m so happy for you.” I reached to embrace her.

“Don’t.” She shrugged me off with a shoulder. I thought about her coming to find me, our reconciliation. “You don’t really care, so don’t pretend.” She pulled the exposed paper and put it in the first bath. “You only came here to find Kolya.” I could see she was seething. At least this time he hadn’t given her a whirl, no great big dollop of coo to butter her up. “He showed up here back in May, looking for you. As if it were life or death. Really, you’re two of a kind, you know that? You deserve each other. I don’t know who’s more melodramatic, you or him.”

“And you told him…”

“I said no one had seen you. But I’ll admit, Papa was so sick, I didn’t pay a lot of attention.”

Her father had died, and I had not been there. That’s why she was so angry.

She pulled the photo out of the developer and into the stop bath. “‘Maybe she’s dead,’ I said, half joking. And he started to cry.”

Kolya!

“‘I’d know if she was dead,’ he said. ‘And she’s not.’” Her mouth got very small, and wrenched to the left as she rubbed her nose on her shoulder. I held my hand out and let her rub it on my palm. In the red light, I couldn’t see her eyes behind her glasses.

“He looked around for you, but then he had to get out of town. He said things were ‘too hot’ for him. Needless to say I didn’t ask what he’d gotten himself into.”

She printed another plate on the glass easel. Lights on, lights off. She had a rhythm to her work. It was pleasant to watch people who were good at their work, even if they resented it. Into the trays went more faces, more clubs. Hopeful new citizens of the Soviet utopia. I plucked one out of the last bath and clipped it to the line for her. The faces on the slick sheet pleaded from their borders, Remember us. We, too, have been here. Ordinary people who probably had never before had a likeness committed to a photographic image. This, too, was the revolution. I had to remember that.

“He asked me if there was anything I needed,” she said. “I told him I needed silver to coat my papers. The Cheka took mine on a raid, even though I had an order from Lunacharsky himself. And film, if he could ever get some. I was back to using glass plates. When I have film, I can do more work in the street. Cover events and so on. The world isn’t going to come and sit in the studio and pose anymore.”

I wanted her to talk about how he looked, if he’d indicated where he was going. But her father was dead, and she was still angry at me for my past sins. “I hope he brought you the film.”

“He did. And flour and soap. Silver. Platinum salts. All kinds of things. Up to his old tricks, but I’m not complaining. That was June. I saw him once again in August, and that was it.”

I helped her hang the prints as she pulled them out of the fixative. “Tell me about Roman Ippolit.”

She laughed, hoarsely. “What do you want, Marina? I never see you unless you want something. What kind of trouble are you in? That ridiculous costume—it’s not Maslenitsa, is it?” The butter festival, our pre-Lenten carnival week.

“I got involved with some bad people. Disappearing’s harder than you think.”

With all the prints drying on the line, she washed her hands, dried them on a towel, picked up a stack of finished shots. I followed her out into the studio. It was colder but at least we could breathe. She turned on a lamp at the long table and began organizing prints into piles and sliding them into envelopes. “I can’t have you here, if that’s what you’re hoping for. Things are hard enough as it is. The Cheka comes two nights a week.”

I saw where I rated on her table of ranks—somewhere between cholera and a ricocheting bullet. She wouldn’t let me endanger her family, no matter what kind of trouble I was in. “It’s okay. I have a place,” I said. “I’m staying with Varvara.”

She wrote something on one of the pink envelopes. “Be careful with Varvara,” she said. “She’s not the person you used to know. She’s in the Cheka now.”

“She got me out of the cellar at Gorokhovaya 2. Took me in. I have to trust her.” I looked through a stack of prints and stopped at a big group—youthful faces posed in a pyramid.

“The so-called Third University,” she sniffed. “The new privileged class.” It was a recent innovation: the children of workers were allowed in without qualification. Studying while the brilliant Mina Solomonovna herself could not. “They get twice the bread ration as real students. Nice, eh?” she said bitterly. “While our professors were dropping like flies. Some teach over there for the bread.”

She took the Third University picture out of my hands, stacked it with two more and put it in its envelope. “Don’t trust anybody.” It gave me the chills, the way she said it. It was so unlike her.

“Not even you?”

She sighed, took off her glasses, wiped her face on her forearm. I took her glasses, polished them on the tail of her kerchief, then put them back on her nose, delicately threading the earpieces, first one, then the other, over her small ears. Her eyes were deep with some emotion. Was it kindness leaking out? Was it regret? In that instant, she looked very much her father’s daughter. She smiled a half smile. “What are you doing for work?”

I hadn’t thought of it but of course I would need to get some kind of work. I couldn’t go on eating half of Varvara’s rations. She was so rigorously honest that she wouldn’t take advantage of her rank to get more than she was strictly entitled to.

“Look, I’ve got more work than I can handle,” Mina said. “As you can see. Especially with the October celebrations coming up. I can’t pay you much, but you’ll get rations… and nobody’s going to come looking for you in a darkroom.” She took a scrap of notepaper and wadded it up, handed it back to me. I crammed it against my gums. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll set you to spotting negatives until your eyes bleed.”

59 The Eye

I HAD TO FIND a better disguise than Marfa Petrovna. Marfa was too cumbersome with her wadded teeth and sooty face, her limp. Varvara stood by as I chopped my hair off with a pair of blunt scissors, peering into the small mirror above the basin. I turned to examine the profile, left and right. I looked like a boy of fifteen. “Not bad, eh?” I said.

She came up behind me, ruffled my hair—proprietary, like all lovers—kissed my neck, rested her chin on my shoulder, and gazed at the two of us in the mirror. “You have to do something about that red. And these.” She weighed my breasts in her hands. “I can get you something from the infirmary, bandages or something. In the meantime…” She went to her wardrobe and pulled out a red kerchief dotted with small white flowers. Nothing I could ever imagine her wearing—it must have been Manya’s. I wrapped it around my breasts, pulled it tight, shrugged back into my dress, examined the profile. Not bad. But the hair. The red. He’d spot me at a hundred paces.

Mina, the chemist, solved that problem in the darkroom, staining my cropped hair black with something toxic she cooked up out of her bottles and jars. The smell of sulfur and ammonia lingered in my hair for days. But the inky black held fast.

For suitable attire, I went out behind Haymarket Square and speculated, trading a precious egg, a hunk of sausage, and some firewood—courtesy of Cheka rations—with a Former for a pair of woolen pants, a student’s jacket, and a boy’s cloth cap. One look into the woman’s eyes and I saw a dead son performing this last service for the family. Such sorrow, everywhere.

The clothes fit me well enough. I hoped it hadn’t been typhus. I tried not to think I might die because of my disguise. I sewed some crude drawers from a pillowcase with a needle and thread Varvara had to borrow from a neighbor, and she wound my breasts with a bandage she’d secured for me from the stores of the Cheka. It bore brown stains, which reminded me of Viktoria Karlinskaya. My soul would never be free of that invisible stain.

Now I looked for all the world like a beardless boy, bright-eyed and black-haired, too young for the army in this new civil war, which was gathering up the last youths and even middle-aged men into its sack like pickers stripping the last apples of an orchard. I practiced walking like a boy, chin up, kicking out my heels as if my male parts were in the way, elbows akimbo, thumbs tucked in my belt. Varvara shrieked with laughter. “Not so swaggery. You look like you’re going to start singing Puccini.”

I tried a more bashful boy, slouching, hands in pockets, shoulders a little hunched, rubbing my nose, my chin where I had no beard yet. I practiced walking on the balls of my feet to straighten out my feminine sway. I would have scuffed my shoes but boot leather was more precious than eggs.

“That’s better. I believe that,” she said, sitting on the bed, her knees tucked under her chin. I could see the schoolgirl in her at times like this. “What’s your name, mal’chik?”

“Misha,” I replied, but my voice came out high, too girlish. I tried again lower, less clear. “Misha.” Ending downward. My jaw flexed, a little defensive. Boys were on edge, it seemed. “Who wants to know, shitbrain?”

She jumped up, held me close. Kissed me three times.

It felt different to walk about the city as a boy. I hadn’t thought of that. When you were a boy, nobody gave you a second thought. People might shove me and shoulder me aside, but they never looked in my face. That first day I headed up to Nevsky passing scores of citizens, and not one even glanced at me. I tried staring right into their faces to see if I could make them. Their eyes slid over me as if my skin were buttered. Just a boy. Nobody worth paying attention to. How strange. How remarkable. How free.

I presented myself at the studio every morning at eight. Misha, the new assistant, was eager, hungry. Sofia Yakovlevna embraced him as she had once embraced another boy… a more sensitive, more beautiful boy, better in every way. “Misha, are you hungry?” “Misha, could you thread this needle? My glasses aren’t strong enough.”

Shusha and Dunya saw through me like a window. Dunya understood that I was in trouble, but to Shusha it was just a wonderful big joke. She made eyes at me, blew kisses, pinched my rump. Her mother told her not to torment me—I was there to work.

Eventually, I even met the fiancé, Roman Ippolit, the medical student. Opinionated, with a square jaw and short, straight, bristly hair, he enjoyed giving Misha the benefit of his vast manly knowledge of the world. Especially its filth and decay. “Misha, the thing you need to know about third-stage syphilis…” He liked to tell me dirty jokes when Mina left the darkroom, about Lenin and his wife, Krupskaya. He was awfully sure of Misha’s politics, yet in his own way he was as much a dialectical materialist as Varvara. No God, no poetry, no grace. Only arrogance and a sort of advanced crudity. I could not imagine the lover Roman Ippolit would be. Even Varvara the Chekist was capable of passion and tenderness. All I could think was that Mina must have made a rational decision to find a man she couldn’t possibly love. That way she would not care if she lost him, wouldn’t have to waste any time dreaming about him or replaying his touch in her mind. She was a practical girl. Her thwarted love for Kolya seemed to have soured her on the whole enterprise.

I started out, as promised, spotting negatives, scanning for the places where the emulsion’s bubbles had formed white dots and painting them out with a fine-tipped brush. Eventually I graduated to the darkroom. We would develop plates she’d shot that day, and I learned to print them, then recoat them for the next series. And as promised, my eyes grew bloodshot with the effort of scanning the hectares of negatives for those white dots and feathering in the darkness.

But soon, she required help with the photography side of things and asked me to accompany her on jobs in the city, to haul her equipment, to help her with crowd control, to organize unruly schoolchildren or factory committees.

Printing was the best part. I loved the moment when the paper went into the developing bath. When something that was apparently blank revealed its true nature. I felt like all of revolutionary Petrograd was passing under my hands. The Dinamo factory’s chess club, the workers’ committee of the Vyshinsky printing plant. Portraits of artists and journalists, bureaucrats and Soviet young ladies. How complex this world was. Was it dying, or was it being born? Both at the same time. How could I reconcile this with the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2? For every hopeful face, a name on a list. Eventually I stopped thinking about it, lost myself in shape and grade and density, the elegant process of the work. At times I felt Seryozha watching over my shoulder, and I talked to him. He didn’t always approve of Mina’s portraits. Her father had a better sense of people’s inner character. But I was only the assistant, and after swimming in that acidic murk night after night, I felt I should be developing gills. I usually came home just as Varvara was waking up and getting ready for work, which suited me fine, relieving me at least of that masquerade, but left her restless and longing.

Mina told me to be ready at ten that morning. We had an assignment. She handed me the camera and tripod and together we descended to the street, just as we’d once descended with her father, so long ago, it might as well have been another century. As we walked up Nevsky, she told me she was worried that Dunya was still spending time with Sasha Orlovsky and wanted to marry him when she got out of school. It sounded all right to me. Evidently Sasha had a job now, teaching painting at the Free Educational Workshops—the old Higher Art Academy. “She’s too young,” said Mina.

But the time belonged to the young. As we walked in the cold drizzle, I thought of Sasha, and Anton, of Okno and our Wednesday nights, Genya in Moscow, poor dead Krestovsky with his newspaper, his wife dancing with the piano shawl. It wasn’t until we were shoving our way onto the tram at Sadovaya that I asked Mina where we were headed.

“The new mothers’ home on Kamenny Island,” she said, slipping between two door-clingers.

Halfway on, halfway off, carrying the camera and the tripod, I almost fell backward. I would have, but the woman behind me was too forceful and crammed me on before I could change my mind. “Watch your step, mal’chik. Live another day.”

I stood pressed up next to Mina, the tripod shuddering between us, and lowered my cap over my eyes. The boarded-up windows of Gostinny Dvor peered at the street like a blind man behind smoked lenses. My skin crawled as the tram came onto Palace Embankment and started over the Troitsky Bridge. I could almost see myself out the window in the fog, marching up to Kamenny Island to sell that pin. Ask for Arkady. Maybe I was still there, on a parallel stream. Marina, don’t go, I tried to tell her. Turn around now. Throw that cursed pin to the goddess Neva.

As if it had heard me, the tram jerked to a stop. A collective moan went up. “It’s broken again.” “Every day.” “Enough whining!” But nobody got off.

It was a sign. “Mina,” I whispered, “I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t—” But then the car started up with a jerk that threw us into others and them into us and caused a chain reaction of elbowing and shoving, curses and grumbled relief. Soon we were over the bridge, right alongside the Peter and Paul Fortress. I held my breath as we passed, averting my eyes. Who was imprisoned in the Troubetskoy Bastion today? Anyone I knew?

It turned out that the mothers’ home was installed in a dacha that had once belonged to the Danish ambassador—a famous spot in Petersburg’s old society. The big trees, leafless in October, were still black from yesterday’s rain. I, for one, was glad for the somberness of the day. I felt less conspicuous in the flat dull light. We started by photographing the nursing sisters, whom we arranged in four rows on the dacha’s steps. Some of the nurses were as slovenly as the ones I remembered from the Anglo-Russian hospital, others somewhat more appealing.

I set the camera on the tripod for Mina, locked it down and inserted the big lens, put the cloth over my head to look at the subjects upside down on the ground glass. The grid made it more abstract. You could see the composition purely. If only life had something like that—a grid overlay to help you check your composition. You could square the edges, make sure it was straight. Perhaps that was why people were devoted to Marx or religion. But people like me always had to work freehand. It was our blessing and our curse.

Mina came to check the solidity of my handiwork, then went under the cloth to examine the shot. “Bring them in on the left,” she said, motioning with her left hand. “Third row—make sure I can see all the faces.”

Oh, the winks and pats from the maternity nurses as I tried to move them closer together.

“Hey, sweet face, got a girlfriend?” They squeezed and pinched me like a suckling pig. I hoped no one would notice my lack of male equipment.

“Squeeze in tighter, Comrades. That’s right—tighten your corsets, girls,” Misha directed.

How they laughed and flirted. Women loved little Misha. I could have had half of them. The young men were all out of town vacationing with the Red Army, and it seems they were sorely missed.

We took pictures of the mothers in the ambassador’s dining room, sitting at his long wooden table, attended by the same stoic servants who had once served state dinners to the great and powerful. I was surprised they had stayed on, but then again, where would they have gone after a lifetime of service? Now they passed plates to poor women who’d just given birth, the women grateful but a little confused. What did this splendor have to do with their travails? Soon they’d be back in their smoky rooms with their squalling babies and other kids, the old man and the cold and vobla soup for dinner, and outside, the queues. We photographed their skinny blue babies, too, bundled up like cigars on a cart, scrunching up their wizened little faces. Clearly the Bolsheviks were serious about trying to keep alive what proletarian babies there were. Considering the epidemic level of malnutrition in Petrograd, each one was a miracle. I myself hadn’t had a period since last winter. But life wanted to assert itself even in the least promising places. One of these poor things could have been mine. How lucky I’d been in that regard, in my otherwise ill-fated life.

After our day’s work and a special treat—a meal of milk and kasha with a few members of the home’s staff committee—we began the long walk out of the parkland back toward the tram. I was lugging the heavy camera and tripod, and Mina was carrying the wooden case with the film, when through the icy drizzle, which had started up again, we passed a form in a belted coat with a skirt and a curly astrakhan hat. I lowered the brim of my cap practically to my nose. Luckily for me Mina noticed nothing and continued jabbering away about the director of the mothers’ home and how insulting he’d been when he realized it was us and not Solomon Katzev himself who’d come to photograph his nurses. “The nerve of that man,” she was saying. “If someone hates women, what’s he doing running a mothers’ home?”

I glanced back. Lot’s wife. The flash of the Kirghiz’s gaze over his shoulder told me he had seen me, all right. Seen me, recognized me, knew it all. My mouth went dry. How long would it be before Arkady knew I was back in Petrograd, masquerading as a boy, working for a photographer? It would be only a matter of time before he tracked me down. It was clear we were going to the tram. Perhaps someone would join us right there as we waited, and the rain would wash my blood down Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. Or they would drag me away, and I would pass once more through the iconostasis, never to be heard from again. Back into the Archangel’s hands, to be nailed to the barn door like the skin of a fox.

What to do? I could drop everything and run. But Mina… there was Mina to think of, her mother, her sisters.

“Wait here,” I said, then tipped the tripod up, leaned the camera against her.

“What—are you crazy?” But she grabbed the camera before it fell. “Misha!”

“Akim!” I called out, his name jumping to my lips.

He stopped but did not turn. He was waiting for me. He lit his long pipe as I approached, squinting at me as if I were the wind and he was staring into my sting. I felt myself being weighed on an antique scale in his mind, but what I was being weighed against I couldn’t tell. This man had seen my abasement, but he had also nursed me. If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. Now it was too late and the woods were everywhere.

We stood before the iron gates of the old Rybashkov dacha, glistening with wet iron flowers. Was this Arkady’s new citadel? “Hello, Akim. How is it”—I nodded in the direction of the Church of St. John the Baptist—“these days?”

“He has not forgotten you,” said the Kirghiz. “The girl from Kitezh, he calls you. ‘I didn’t kill her?’ And I say, ‘No, Archangel. You let her fly away. Blessed are the merciful.’”

He’d kidnapped me, raped me, crooned to me, fed me, burned me, humiliated me… but the Kirghiz was saying that those bullets hadn’t missed me from any stroke of good luck. In the end, he had let me live. I let that knowledge sink in.

“Why are you back in this place?” he asked. “You should have flown fast and far. You should have disappeared from the face of the earth.”

“I was arrested. They brought me back. Please don’t tell him you saw me. I beg you.”

Behind us in the road, Mina stood unhappily, holding the camera. “Misha, let’s go!” The days were growing short now, the light beginning to fade, and we had another sitting back at the studio.

I put my hand on his sleeve. “I beg you, do this for me.”

“Things have changed since your time,” he said over his pipe. The dark eyes glittered. What was he trying to tell me?

My lips were bone dry. “How have they changed?”

“The Archangel… is not himself now.”

I shuddered to think. How could he be more mad? Yes, this man—not a good man, but better than many—was trying to tell me that Arkady wasn’t even partially sane anymore. He tilted his head toward Mina, shuffling her feet and looking anxiously at the tram stop. “Your friend is waiting. Take care, little hawk. There are bigger hawks than you. Their wings will darken the sky.”

He wouldn’t tell. Though it didn’t mean I wouldn’t be found. But today, this hour, I had my reprieve. I kissed his leathery cheek. “I’m gone.”

60 The October Celebrations

SUDDENLY THE ANCIENT DRY-ROT empires began to collapse like a row of sand castles: Germany, Austria, the Ottomans. In Vienna, mass strikes and meetings capped the headlines. A red flag topped Munich’s city hall. The kaiser teetered on his throne, clutching at the tattered brocade. After four long years, the war had at last ground itself to dust. It looked like the World Revolution had really begun—and thus our salvation. Rescue for isolated Russia, rescue for starving Petrograd. Although we had turned our backs on the workers of the world in signing the German peace, they had not forgotten us.

Now Petrograd rinsed the carnage of Red Terror from its streets and unrolled its futurist bunting, its agitprop carnival tent. The city’s artists labored around the clock to prepare for the October celebrations—October, though our calendar had changed over in January, finally catching up with the rest of the world, producing the amusing phenomenon of the anniversary of the 25th of October being celebrated on the 7th of November. Why not? It was all part of our looking-glass world, where girls became boys and society ladies became beggars, and the newly literate took their places in the lecture halls at the university while the learned ate library paste. The streets and bridges took new names, and every construction worker from Narva to Vyborg set to sawing, hammering, and painting new facades for our venerable buildings, transforming the peeling and exhausted remnants of the Past into the palaces and monuments of the Future, at least for a few days.

I walked home in darkness through the metamorphosed city. Though I came and went at all hours, I was never molested. A woman on Nevsky, a furtive blonde in a ratty fur, offered her affections to Misha. “Mal’chik, come visit Paradise.” She was a Former, older than me, perhaps someone who’d once attended the Tagantsev Academy. Was that really what she thought whores said?

“Thanks, Citizen. I get it for free.” Misha was impudent. What people will accept from a boy continued to astonish and delight me. “No hard feelings—I’ll tell my dad you’re down here.”

“Brat!” she called after me. “I hope they beat you!”

I turned around and blew her a kiss.

I loved walking these dark streets. I’d never imagined the sheer freedom of the male sex. How remarkable it felt to go where I wished at any hour, ignored and unmolested. If I hadn’t been thinking of hawks far bigger than myself, and Varvara at home with her dreams of togetherness, I would have been perfectly content.

Working for Mina had whetted my appetite for my city like a knife on stone. I exulted in the cold mists, the smell of the sea, the sound of my boots resonating off the facades, the lapping of water in the canals. This wall, with its richly layered surfaces of announcements and proclamations. How beautiful! And this glorious puddle reflecting the lamplight—like an opening in the world, a tear, revealing a brighter, hidden life right beneath our feet. I was in ecstasy in the rain and the first peppering of ice, the way moisture drew halos around lamps and the few glowing windows. I wanted to eat Petrograd whole, like a boiled egg—pop it into my mouth all at once. Thank God I was finally out of rooms—Mother’s, Father’s, Arkady’s, Varvara’s, and those belonging to the state—while Mina worried only that the weather boded poorly for tomorrow’s celebrations.

Down on the Neva, the ships would already be coming in from the gulf. We’d gotten copies of their schedules: Cruisers south of the Nikolaevsky Bridge, destroyers between Nikolaevsky and Liteiny. But now I stood before the black entrance to our building on the Fontanka as a man in a worn cap and sheepskin sidled up to me from the shadows. “I have meat,” he hissed.

“How much?” I couldn’t help asking, though I hadn’t two kopeks to my name.

“Fifty per pound. I’ve got two.”

Fifty rubles for a pound of God knew what. “Was it dead before you cut it up?” said I. “Or did you ride it first?”

The man’s brutish eyes retreated into his puffy face in the hazy light from the streetlamp. “Get out of here, you little son of a whore, before it’s you.” He pulled out a folded knife, the blade flashed into place, and my impudence fell away like a suicide. I stood motionless as the man faded back into the darkness. I was wrong about being a boy. Misha was no better prepared than I.

I ran up the stairs to Varvara’s flat, two at a time. I’d hoped she was asleep, but she’d waited for me, propped up in the mushy bed reading one of her political tomes, taking notes. The room was cold and stank of damp. She’d put some bread and a bit of sausage out, which I ate, feeling ungrateful for all she did for me. I tried not to taste the mold. It grew everywhere—the blankets, the rugs, the walls, our coats, the bread. I couldn’t help longing for snow, the cleanness of winter, the crisp dry whiteness of it.

“How’d it go at the studio? You ready for tomorrow?” She set her book aside, dropped her dark head onto the pillow, yawned and stretched.

The bread was dark, sour, more sawdust than wheat. “She’s plotting our schedule like it’s a military maneuver.”

I didn’t ask about her day. Did you kill anyone? Investigate any of our old friends? I washed my face and brushed my teeth, trying not to imagine her striding into some poor family’s room—their terror, the baby crying, the crash of furniture, the wife stifling her tears as her few scraps of silver were confiscated, the husband beaten. Varvara might be miles more professional than her colleagues, but she was essentially a violent person, and the Cheka gave her absolute liberty to exercise that trait. I once asked her why she couldn’t stay a party organizer. “The party needs educated people in the Cheka,” she’d said. “It shouldn’t just be sadists and goons. They asked us to volunteer, and I did.”

Her Red star was rising, shooting upward like a rocket. At nineteen, she was already a commissar. She was ambitious, always had to be first, best in everything. I remember how angry she used to get when I beat her in chess. In many ways she was a very poor Communist. She drew the covers up to her neck, kicking her feet like a child. “Come on, it’s nice and warm under here.”

I peeled off my boots and hung my coat on a peg, climbed into bed to undress under the covers. The springs bucked and squeaked with our combined weight, sloppy as an ungirthed saddle. But it was warm. I wondered if she skimped on the heat on purpose. I took off my shirt and let her help me unbind my breasts—such a relief. Misha converted to Marina again. Varvara ran her fingers over my compressed skin, the angry red marks, kissed my neck, and turned off the light. As a lover she was so unlike her normal certain, direct, unapologetic self. She needed me and was abashed by her own passion. Her hands on my skin were rough and dry as a washerwoman’s, her breath slightly bitter. She had no sense of rhythm or humor and her gracelessness was worthy of pity. If I ever chose a woman for a lover, it would be someone like Galina Krestovskaya, flirtatious and lively and sensuous. But when someone pulled you from a Cheka cell, you said thank you. As she kissed me, I never forgot that she was also capable of shooting me in the head. The tiger purred for now. If I didn’t cross her, this would be the safest place in Petrograd.

“I wish we could be together tomorrow,” she whispered, fingering my nipples, though the flesh was sensitive after being bound all day.

“I’ll see you in all your triumph,” I said. She would accompany Comrade Ravich, the pro-Cheka commissar of the interior for the northern region, to the unveiling of Marx’s statue in front of Smolny. Ravich was another woman who—after years of underground activity—had risen to an unheard-of position of leadership. Varvara adored her. Mina and I would photograph the events, and all the bigwigs would be there—the leadership of the whole Petrograd Oblast, called the Northern Commune. “Maybe I should put Zinoviev”—the Petrograd party boss—“between Ravich and Lilina and watch him sweat,” I joked. Mina had heard that Ravich was Zinoviev’s mistress and that his wife, Zlata Lilina, head of the women’s department, would also be there.

“That’s not funny,” Varvara said, resting her sharp chin on my shoulder. “The people look to us as examples. Comrade Zinoviev of all people should be more rigorous.”

“They’re Bolsheviks. It doesn’t mean they’re saints,” I said.

“We ask people to sacrifice. We should sacrifice as well,” she replied, outlining the letters of Arkady’s love poem incised in my back. She couldn’t stop touching them, tracing them, then smoothing the skin over, as one smoothed down a new sheet of paper. Yet there they stayed. “We’ve heard von Princip’s men are abandoning him like rats,” she whispered in my ear. The Archangel… is not himself now. “When we get him, would you like to shoot him yourself?”

I burrowed into the old quilts. Yes, I think I would. I would do it just to make sure it was done. I knew he wouldn’t plead. He would look me right in the eye as I did it.

“We’re close.” Her breath was warm, her frizzy hair against my temple, arm around my waist. “I’ll save him for you. An anniversary present.”

What strange days. I turned onto my back. Though I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t want her to do it. I could never tell anyone that. Who would understand? But I felt him so strongly—his brilliance, his driving insanity, his loneliness. He’d revealed himself to me, a soul weirder and more trapped than anyone’s. I wanted his soul and his dark self to meet.

She traced the line of my brow, my eyes, my lips. “Think, one year ago we were standing in your father’s hall.”

Yes, my unholy shame, my father’s fury, and her glee at having ruined my family in a single stroke. Ah, the things we’d done for the sound of the word—Revolution. I’d been hypnotized by it. We all had. But I’d pictured change, not terror. I had imagined that the bourgeoisie would mend their ways. Not that one day they would literally be crushed—people I knew. People of goodwill who had nevertheless lived at the expense of others.

“To think I almost didn’t find you again.” She buried her face in my short, chemical-smelling hair. “I still want to cry when I think of you in that cell, covered with blood.” Pressing herself to me. Her long body, her breasts, loose and surprisingly large, her wide hard hips, her knee between my legs. Kissing my breasts, my navel, wanting to taste me, wanting to bring me off. She wanted me the way I’d wanted Kolya. How cruel life was. Poor Varvara could not raise my pulse on her own. She came back up, holding me like I was some treasure from a sunken ship. Oh those wasted kisses. My deceitful self. I took over, touching her the way I touched myself, until the sighs came, the catch in the breath. I bit her, slapped her, pulled her hair. She loved it. I held her wrists together and pressed myself onto her, my thigh between hers, hers between mine and we brought ourselves off together.

I fell into a dead sleep, only to be awakened by a sharp, hard percussion. Were we under attack? Were the Germans here?

Varvara leaped out of bed and ran to the window, flung it wide. “It’s the fortress!” The guns went off, Boom! Boom! I threw on my shirt and joined her, barefoot on the cold boards. Three, four, five… her arm around my shoulder, mine at her waist. Twenty-five cannon shots from the Peter and Paul Fortress announcing that the first anniversary of the revolution had arrived.

The celebration uncoiled like the spring of an enormous clock, an endless conveyor belt of intricately meshed gears—what Enlightenment Commissar Lunacharsky called the Revolutionary Carnival. Streets bulged with crowds, battalions of workers marched past, arm in arm, singing “The Internationale,” and “Dubinushka,” and “The Worker’s Marseillaise.” Each district provided its own section of the ongoing procession, complete with banners, marching band, and orators as it wound through the city ten abreast. Every bridge had become a work of art, replacing the old railings and ironwork with the colors and forms of the Future. It was hard to hate these goings on, so long had it been since I’d detected any sign of hope anywhere.

Mina and I worked together like right and left hand to capture this moment on film. By midday, like a surgical nurse, I could anticipate where she would want the tripod erected, what the frame should hold. I could get the camera onto the subject, have it ready to go within a minute, and stand sentry to make sure nobody got in the way of the lens or jostled her while she hunched under the cloth. I kept a stern eye on the film case so that it didn’t walk off by itself.

She’d calculated her film stores, planned her shots, mapped out the day’s schedule for maximum economy of motion with a precision that would have made Brusilov himself proud. She refused to be inveigled by serendipitous tableaux—empty shop windows enlivened with posters: BRUSH YOUR TEETH DAILY! Middle-aged women under the banner of the TSIGANY TOBACCO WORKS, marching arm in arm, eight abreast, smoking! She wouldn’t waste the film she’d been allocated on such trivial moments. Sadly, she hadn’t her father’s eye. Worthy subjects were limited to speakers at assorted district soviets, artfully decorated squares, and elaborate factory banners—PUBLIC WINE DEPOT NO. 2, OKTOBRSKAYA FABRIKA METALWORKERS.

At noon we moved over to Smolny, where we photographed the momentous unveiling of a statue of Marx on his plinth. He gazed over the heads of the gathered commissars, looking toward Insurrection Square and the train station, hand resting inside his coat as though he were checking for his tickets.

Up by the inner circle of party brass in the autumn drizzle, Varvara quietly stood beside Comrade Ravich. How solemn my friend looked! It was supposed to be a celebration. Loosen up, Varvara! Ravich, tall and striking in a soft velvet hat, stood well away from Comrade Zinoviev, who was more youthful up close than he came across in pictures, with wild, thick hair that every caricaturist had drawn at some time or other. So this was the man responsible for the madness of Red Terror. He hadn’t even wanted to go forward with the October Revolution at the time. I could have shot him easily if I’d been armed, though I sensed the Cheka presence was thick in the crowd, especially around the many dignitaries who’d come up from Moscow for the celebration. Nonetheless, their desertion remained a sore spot in every Petrograder’s heart.

Luckily, there was no question of arranging them for a photograph. These were the leaders of Red October—you didn’t tell them how to pose. All I had to do was make sure they stayed in the frame. Ravich, skeptical, with soft hat shading dark eyes, stood to the left, and a handsome man next to her, and a fat one, looking like he had a hot pirozhok in each pocket. My guess: the commissar for provisions. Zlata Lilina looked small and fragile compared to her rival, though none of those old comrades could be very fragile given what they’d gone through to arrive at this day. Zinoviev stood next to her, and behind them Lunacharsky stood upright and proud, his bald pate gleaming with the success of his Revolutionary Carnival. This was his day, shepherd of Russian Culture, single-handedly fighting to keep monuments intact and artists alive. He beamed like a proud Scottie bitch over her pups.

After the photographs, the speeches began. Zinoviev stepped up to the dais to announce news even better than yesterday’s. “Today, we’ve learned, the kaiser has abdicated. The Germans are out of the war!” The cheers rebounded above the packed crowd. “The triumph of the German working class is inevitable,” he thundered, his dark frizz bobbing, and I remembered his other role as head of the Third International, the spear point of World Revolution. “In Vienna, in Budapest, in Prague, Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies are taking their places. A red flag flies today over Berlin! Can the same flag over Paris be far off?”

After the applause died away, a dignitary from Sovnarkom joked with the men around him. “You heard that in a year’s time, there’ll be just five kings left? The king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds, the king of spades… and the king of England.”

No kings. No empires. I needed a moment just to absorb all this, but Mina was already taking down the camera. “Hurry up,” she said. “We’re due at Uritsky Square in half an hour.” I admired how quickly she absorbed the latest nomenclature. Palace Square had been renamed for Comrade Uritsky as the place of his martyrdom. We packed up our gear and flew down to the palace to photograph the speakers at the Alexander Column.

In the square, constructivist paintings had transformed the grand autocratic buildings into a spectacular vision, a city of the Future. The Alexander Column was a geometric blossom, while all around the circumference of the plaza, murals forty feet high proclaimed the new realities. FACTORIES FOR THE WORKERS. LAND FOR THE LABORER. HE WHO WAS NOTHING WILL BE EVERYTHING. In the midst of the crowd, agitprop groups on flatbeds enacted melodramas and acrobatic feats for the throngs, slapstick comedy with a revolutionary flair. How I longed to be up there with them. This was the fun we had not seen since the days of the Provisional Government. Lunacharsky had been right. The people needed this. They loved it.

I could hear Anton in my head, the dour ass: It’s not art, it’s just advertising. But the players were wonderful and I laughed right along with the crowds to see the agile clowns juggle colored balls, demonstrating how the kaiser and the Entente had juggled our world. Mina for once agreed on the importance of capturing this scene.

By early twilight, the crowds began to turn toward the theaters for free concerts and plays. Thousands of workers streamed through the doors. Those not lucky enough to have tickets moved toward the Neva to watch the fleet preparing for the evening’s spectacular. I wanted to see it all, disappear into the crowd like a fish into the sea.

“That’s it.” Mina yawned, stretched, cracked her neck left and right. “Thank God. My head is ready to explode. Big day tomorrow.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

“Let’s go see the ships.” I didn’t want to miss them. I was as eager as a child.

“I’ve seen ships. We’ve lost our light. I can’t shoot in the dark, and I need to get off my feet. Let’s go.” She picked up the film box and turned for home.

“Old lady. Who cares about your feet? This is history!”

“This”—she lifted the box with our exposures from the day—“is history. And I care about my feet. We have a big day tomorrow, remember?”

I shook her by the shoulder, trying to loosen her up. “Come on, Mina. Sailors! Fireworks! You can’t go home now.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” she snapped, shrugging me off. “Do whatever you want to do, Misha, like you always do. But get this stuff back to the studio first.”

How she enjoyed ordering me around. He Who Was Nothing Will Be Everything. I shouldered my waltzing lady and we pushed our way back to Liteiny, with the entire Red city shoving in the other direction.

Back at the Katzev flat, Sofia Yakovlevna was waiting, the samovar steamed. I could smell dinner cooking. Nostalgia gripped me as we carried the equipment back into the studio, dropped the big camera and its tripod, the wooden case. But the noise from the crowds, the pipes and whistles, called me. I had to go—it was a physical yearning. “Give me a camera,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”

“You must be joking. I’m not going to give you a camera.”

“Your old Kodak? I bet you still have it.” A little box camera with bellows her father had given to her on her thirteenth birthday. She’d only used it one or two times to please him—never dreaming that someday she would support her entire family with a camera.

“I don’t know if it even works. And the film’s easily four years old. You’d have to use a very long exposure in the dark. I don’t think you’d get anything.”

“Let me try,” I said. “What would you lose?”

She dropped into the studio prop chair, a plump tufted armchair from the 1890s. “A camera?”

“I’ll fight them to the death for it, as the devil is my witness. And if I’m lucky, you’ll have photos like nobody else’s.”

She sighed, but she pushed herself out of the chair and into the darkroom.

The little leather-cased Kodak sat on a high shelf next to a magazine of film, under a coating of dust. She wiped it off, slowly, then loaded it for me. She explained about the aperture and the exposure, blah blah. “The tripod’s there—no, the little one. But don’t you lose that camera. I swear, Marina, I’ll drown you in the developing tank.”

61 Hooligans

OVER THE NEVA’S CROWDED shores, a shining dark rolled out like a bolt of silk taffeta, no longer recognizable as our poor Soviet night, homely as a darned sock. This was something we’d dreamed after going to bed hungry. A dream of ships transformed into floating cities of light, strands glittering between smokestacks and masts like spiderwebs in new grass, the black water transformed to lightning. Such sound! Cheering, whistles blowing, pipes and rattles, bouncing off the tsarist facades like kopeks off a taut sheet. The ships’ searchlights wrote their angular signatures across the sky, sweeping over crowds so dense they looked like fields of dusky wheat. Mina was right—no way could I capture this with chemicals and celluloid. Yet I would try, if only to prove her wrong.

What would have been the perfect vantage point—Liteiny Bridge—was now impassable. I’d have to sprout wings and fly to it. I worked my way instead down to the Nikolaevsky Bridge and crossed it inch by inch, using my tripod like a sorcerer’s staff to part the woolly masses, those worn and hungry faces full of light. Hard to begrudge such pleasure. Everyone smiled at me, even as I shoved. When was the last time we’d seen such smiles?

An hour of determined force brought me onto the Strelka, the tip of Vasilievsky Island, wedged between the Bolshaya Neva and the Malaya Neva, with its view into the heart of the river. Before me lay the grand jewel of Petersburg cracked open like a walnut—the Winter Palace, the Admiralty with its constructivist flags and spire, the Peter and Paul Fortress, prison and palace. All lit up, no rationing tonight. But the mansions on the English Embankment turned their blind eyes to the fete, resentful, lost in the past. I thought of that long-ago summer night—or was it only last year?—when I walked here with Genya in the small flame of new love, our heads full of revolution. Well, we had gotten our wish. I never suspected how it would unfold—you changed the world, but then the world came back and changed you.

I saw that people had climbed the bases of the Rostral Columns, those red granite lighthouses, each guarded by gargantuan statues representing the four great Russian rivers, and studded with the prows of bronze boats that in Viking days would have been those of captured ships, lit with signal fires. If I could get up there, I’d have a clear shot over the heads of the crowd. I wriggled and pushed my way through a mass growing denser by the moment until I’d reached the muscular statue of the Dnieper—or was it the Volga? Resting the unwieldy tripod on its giant lap the way a cripple holds his crutch on a tram, I scaled the bronze river god to the granite pedestal upon which the column stood. A sturdy man above me gave me a last hand up. Others made room. Looking down on the tripod, I saw that bringing it had been a mistake. Well, Mina had said, “Don’t you lose that camera.” She said nothing about the stand.

And it was worth the struggle. From up here I could see the breathtaking vista, fortress on the left, palace on the right, and half the Baltic fleet floating in the middle. I felt like a prince overlooking his birthright. My city had not died. I felt pride and an overwhelming nostalgia in my tightly bound breast.

Then a small shower of something fell on my head. Sunflower-seed hulls. I peered up and, in the lowest projecting prow, saw human arms twenty feet above the crowd. Another spray of sunflower hulls. Someone had climbed up to one of the symbolic bronze boats—every Petersburg child’s fantasy.

I had to be up there. And only now, in the chaos of Bolshevik rule and the complete absence of police, would such a thing ever be possible. I shouted up into the darkness. “Hey, Comrade! Sunflower spitter!”

A boy leaned over the side and spit some seeds into my face.

I brushed them off. “Hey, brother! I need to come up. I’m taking pictures for Pravda.” I held out the camera. I felt like the golden perch in the stories, bargaining with the old man.

His head disappeared into the darkness.

“Come on, have a heart!” I shouted up. “For Lenin!”

There was really no need—I had a perfectly decent view from here—but I yearned to be higher above all the world, as I once needed to climb all the way to the treetops.

Then the sturdy man next to me elbowed me and pointed.

A rope had descended from the ship.

I was not nearly as strong as I’d once been, but I tucked my camera into my jacket, grabbed the rope, and wound it around my leg like that circus girl I’d once imagined myself to be, and pulled myself up, a foot at a time, until unseen arms hauled me up the rest of the way, bracing the rope against the side of the hull like fishermen pulling in a full catch. Don’t let go, I thought as I slowly twirled on the rope, the pounding of my heart drowning out the din from below. Hands dragged me in over the lip, and I squeezed in between two boys, hooligans Misha’s age, flashing grins.

One thumped my shoulder, face full of freckles. “Good man, Pravda. Vanya thought you were gonna chicken out.”

“You really takin’ pichurs for Pravda?” said the other one, with a nasal voice, a smashed nose.

“Lenin’s going to give you a prize, personally,” I said.

All along the Neva, the embankments were so thick with human beings they looked like they’d grown fur. It was colder up here, the wind sharp. My nose ran, my head throbbed, but I wouldn’t have traded places with a king.

I pulled my cap down over my bruised brow, where I’d struck it on the way in.

“I’m Misha,” I said.

“Yura,” said the first one, and we shook. “We always come up here.”

“I always wanted to,” I said. “Willya look at that?”

Gazing out at our city, shining, twinned in the black water, I ached for all the exiles who would never return to this. I wiped my nose on my sleeve—it was un-Misha-like to cry. My terrible, my beautiful land.

I got to work, opening the bellows of the Kodak, resting it on the cold bronze lip of the boat, the strap secure around my neck. I sighted with one eye, although it would be pure luck if I got anything at all—the viewfinder was nearly invisible in the dark. I framed my shot as best I could. It was so different from the ground glass of the huge camera, where the image was clear and bright behind the grid and the whole thing rested on a stable tripod so you could leave the lens open for ten minutes if you needed to. All I could do now was point at the lights, open the shutter, and hold my breath.

“At first Vanya didn’t want you up here,” said Yura.

“But we figured, Pravda? Might be worth somethin’.” Vanya’s nose had been smashed almost flat—or maybe he’d been born that way. “Got any booze?”

I shook my head.

“Smokes?”

“Nah. No caviar neither.” I should have packed some kind of offering, but I’d never been a photographer before.

“Then what’re you good for?” He lit a makhorka, the foulest I’d ever smelled. He must have picked up butt ends off the street and rerolled them. He handed it to Yura, who handed it to me. My eyes watered but I would not cough and disgrace myself.

Perched there above the glittering scene, I felt like a hero, like I could eat the entire glorious night and drink the river dry. Even Marina wouldn’t have risked coming up here with two hooligans. But I was just a boy, smoking a horrific cigarette and drinking in the sights as if I were Peter the Great.

Over the river, a mechanical roar even louder than the crowd drowned out the voices, the whistles, everything—and a hydroplane flew past our nest, right at eye level. Then another. The boys stood and shouted, waving their arms. Vanya almost fell out of the boat. I balanced the Kodak on the boat rail and tried to follow their flight—their delicate gleaming wings—upriver, over the ships. They went as far as the bend toward the Okhta side, and then circled back. The crowd roared like waves on the ocean.

“Better get it if yer gonna get it,” Yura said.

I got the picture as they raced past. At least I hoped I got something.

Now searchlights from the destroyers combed the night, raking the mobs. A rocket went up from one of the ships and exploded into a fiery rose, and the noise reverberated off the river and the buildings. Fireworks responded from other light-bedecked battleships. We cheered at each glittering explosion and laughed at the percussions. My comrades’ tough-boy faces filled with equal parts fear and delight, like the children they were. I turned the Kodak onto them, and they posed for me like sailors, their caps on backward.

All this firepower reminded the boys of the civil war, and they began to talk about the Red Army, recounting its victories. Budyonny, Stalin—these were the names they mentioned with awe. “Didja see the Kronstadt sailors last week?” said Yura.

“What about ’em?” his friend asked.

“Had a rally on Nevsky is what. Think they’re gonna get rid of the Bolshies. They ain’t afraid of nothin’.”

The Kronstadt sailors were protesting against the government? Varvara had said nothing about this. Why? It was a serious thing.

“Anybody get shot?” asked thin-faced Vanya, sniffling in the wind.

“Nah. But they marched over to the Mariinsky and stole the band. It was hilarious. Took ’em down to the river to get the dockworkers to walk out.” He leaned back with his makhorka like a man in a hammock, eyes full of fireworks.

“I’d rather be in the army than the navy.” Vanya filled his mouth with sunflower seeds. “Stuck on a floating tub? Not me. I don’t even like fish.” He chewed and spat the shells down on the crowd below. “What about you, Pravda? You gonna join up?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe the cavalry.” I thought of Volodya, fighting against boys just like these. Trotsky had called for a universal draft—he wanted to build a three-million-man army. “I like horses.”

“I’d rather be in an armored division,” Yura said, wiping his nose on his hand.

The fireworks flowered like seasons and the air grew thick with smoke. I wondered whether we’d have enough gunpowder left to fight the Whites.

But eventually it ended. If getting into the boat had been a risk, a dare, a leap of faith, getting down was a moment to savor. Vanya made a sort of lasso and tied it to the prow. The two boys slid down neatly as alpinists, and though I didn’t have their strength, I followed as smartly as a fairy-tale prince down a maiden’s braid.

To my surprise, the stocky man handed me the tripod after I’d clambered down to the Volga statue. “World’s going to be different for you boys,” he said. I shook his hand. For us girls, too, Comrade.

Vanya shook the rope free and it tumbled down into his arms. “Hey, you’re pretty good,” he said, twining it into figure eights, hand and elbow, tucking it under his coat. “Ever think of makin’ some money like that?” It took me a moment to understand what he was saying. Thieves. My new pals were young second-story men. I didn’t dare ask if they knew the Archangel.

The crowds began to move off the embankments, and we wandered over to Nikolaevsky Square, where someone said there’d be an outdoor movie. They were playing Tillie’s Punctured Romance, with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand. In the shadow of the Xenia Institute, to be anointed the “Palace of Labor” in the morning, we shared a bottle with some other hooligans and picked up a group of factory girls out for a good time. A girl with a little pert nose kept touching me, clutching my arm. Yura glared. Obviously she was his choice. I leaned against the wall as my girl chattered about her friends, and who said what at their Okhta mill, and did I like her kerchief, and what did I think about Charlie Chaplin? It never occurred to me how dull girls were, how tedious our minutiae. I pretended to read a poster affixed to the wall over her head, and then suddenly began to read in earnest:

“What time do you think it is?” I asked the little girl with the pert nose.

“Who cares? No work tomorrow, lambie,” she said, kissing me.

I glanced around for someone who might have a watch, but it was a solidly proletarian crowd. I gave my new sweetheart a squeeze, saluted my comrades, and began pushing through the crush toward Liteiny.

62 The Miniature Theater

THE THEATER CROUCHED IN a cellar hard by the Muruzi House, where the art collector Tripov used to live, though surely no longer. The tattered placards gave evidence that the cabaret was ferociously clinging to life in the new revolutionary climate. Like séances, cabarets were stained with bourgeois tar—too inclined to the ribald and satirical—but not completely done with. I would have imagined that after Red Terror, they’d have boarded up the doors, but the company seemed to have fellow-traveled its way through the Year One. A group of ticketless clamorers beset the chipped black doors and stairs and I thought of the Stray Dog all those lifetimes ago. Tonight I approached importantly, shoving my way through with my tripod and Kodak. “I’m from Pravda,” I announced to the ticket man, a small intelligent in a necktie and frayed white collar. “Have they gone on yet?”

He eyed me skeptically. In honor of the anniversary, free tickets had been issued by the thousands to tobacco girls and metalworkers’ boys, to literacy classes and orphanages, and—who knows?—possibly even Soviet newborns. A boy with a small camera—who was to say he wasn’t from Pravda?

“We’re documenting the Revolutionary Carnival. Lunacharsky himself ordered it.” I waved the name before his unimpressed nose like a pass.

Other people crowded in behind me. He had to make a decision. “Nu, khorosho. Just don’t block anyone’s view.” And he parted the curtain.

I descended into the tiny nightclub, packed with unwashed bodies, muggy with cheap tobacco. I—or rather Misha—pushed to a spot by a post and set up Mina’s ridiculous camera on its spindly tripod. There I could shoot—or pretend to—past the shoulder of a woman in a hat with crushed feathers. Onstage, very young and energetic actors wound themselves into the crossbeams of an ultrastylized set, the scaffolding casting strong diagonal shadows on the wall. A few geometric shapes in bright colors, an abstract backdrop, and some ropes completed the mise-en-scène. It brought to mind a cross between a construction site, an amusement park, and a gallows—a nice metaphor for the place where we found ourselves on the anniversary of the revolution.

People coughed extravagantly, and the man next to me shoved me, almost toppling the camera. I elbowed him back. “Watch it, Pops. I’m with Pravda.” Someone jarred me from behind. A small group of workers burst into sudden laughter. I was thankful it wasn’t a real assignment. I could never get a decent shot in a crowd like this.

On the upper deck of the stage, a boy in a yarn wig and a swallowtail coat swaggered with an open umbrella like a parasol, arm in arm with a girl in a constructivist version of a satin evening gown, looking a bit like a starfish when her arms were extended. Laughter and shouts all around as the boy balanced on two chairs and recited in a pompous voice:

A roar of indignation suffused the house. Now a second boy, in a dinner jacket with a giant belly and a monocle, international currency signs scrawled on the waistcoat, exhorted in a deeper voice:

I gathered that this was a ship, or a shipwreck, and all these people were stranded on a boat or island together. I was jealous. Genya and his friends were having fun down in Moscow, clowning for the revolution, while I was binding my breasts, taking orders from Mina, and sleeping with Varvara every night, jumping at shadows. Now, the banker pulled out a guitar, and the girl in the satin evening gown delivered a song in a high clear voice pronouncing the need for order—a place for everyone and everyone in his place.

The crowd stamped and booed as the girl patted her coiffed hair. I longed to be alive again. I should have been one of these actors or writers in the Communal Theater of the Future. If I’d gone to Moscow I would have been, if I hadn’t been too proud to share Genya with Zina. And where was he? Hovering in the wings, whispering to his actors? Making last-minute changes?

No… there! In the audience, crouching so as not to be seen. Grimy-faced, in costume. Even in the dark, he glowed—the size of him, the bones of his face, the breadth of his shoulders in a worker’s coveralls. I would talk to him after the show. I would tell him, I changed my mind. I can’t live here anymore with Varvara and Mina. They’re sucking the life out of me. I’m dying. Surely I still meant something to him.

Now the Proletarians emerged from their hiding spots and stormed the stage, the Workers begrimed in greasepaint, the Sailors sporting striped jerseys. Genya, the lead worker, led the way. He planted himself onstage like an explorer planting a flag upon a rock, threw back his head, and roared:

At home in his element like a fish in the Kapsha. Now I saw Zina as one of the Sailors, her face full of pride, a member of the elect. Her eyes never left Genya—so devoted, so doggishly loyal. I’d been a poor wife by comparison. He mounted the stairs, followed by the crew, as the Aristocrats and Capitalists shrank at his approach. He absorbed the light—more arresting, more confident than ever. But I saw he’d lost his humility, his bit of clumsiness. Was that something Moscow had done for him? How we were all changing.

“Hey, mal’chik, long time no see,” came a voice in my ear. I instinctively turned but it came again, “Don’t look. Watch the play.” A voice not deep but rich like short fur, it moved down from my ear to grip my heart. Tumbling… was the floor tipping? I felt myself falling, the theater folding in like the set with its strange angles. Oh let me just be, just for a second. Let me believe that it’s true. I closed my eyes. Could I smell him under the fug of a hundred cigarettes, his honey scent in the cramp of the room? Yes, I could. I trembled, all my strength gone.

“I knew you’d be here. It was my last hope.”

I had to force myself to attend to the antics onstage—this mummery, this puppet show, Genya spouting while the professor in the swallowtail coat tried to fend him off with the umbrella. To think I’d just been beating myself up, wishing I’d left with him that day at the station. If I had, I wouldn’t have been here to be found. “How did you know?” I whispered back, counting on the noisiness of the crowd to cover our conversation.

“Tell ’em, Ivan,” the woman in front of me shouted.

“It was my last guess,” Kolya said. “I’ve been looking for months.”

I peered into the viewfinder to give myself something, anything to do besides crush him to me and kiss him so long and so hard we’d both faint from lack of air. Through the camera, Genya was just a blur standing on the stairs like a Soviet colossus, the embodiment of Proletarian Virtue. “I never thought you’d come back.”

“Get ’em, Comrades. Don’t let ’em piss on you!” “Watch the stairs, Ivan! It’s a long way down!”

“You really thought I’d leave you to that lunatic?” He was standing so close that I worried what people would think. A man and a boy. Though maybe we were brothers.

Yes, that was exactly what I’d thought. That he’d save his own skin. Now I was ashamed. “What about Shurovistan, population one?” I chanced a sideways glance. He’d grown a beard and wore a rough cap, a shabby jacket, and a turtleneck sweater. He looked like an intellectual worker, a printer or typesetter, like Kraskin. He even lit a papirosa. So much for his beloved cigars. His blue eyes were transparent in the stage-light reflection.

“I’m an ass. I could drown myself in the Fontanka,” he said.

“Why don’t you?” a man from behind us called out. “I’m trying to watch this nonsense.”

We had to get out of there. With Kolya around, it would be easy to put two and two together. “I’ve gotten my shots,” I said loudly, collapsing my tripod. “What do you say let’s get out of here, find ourselves some girls?”

He clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Lead on, brother.”

I began to shove my way toward the door to a chorus of “Watch it!” and “Hey, ’scuse you!” Glancing once more at the stage, I could have sworn Genya saw me leaving. For a moment, he paused mid-speech and looked right at me. Impossible—no way he could see in the dark with the lights in his eyes. Even if he could, how would he have recognized me? Still it gave me a shock. Too late, too late, it had already been too late even at the Cirque Moderne, even at the Stray Dog. I’d already belonged to Kolya Shurov. My heart pulsed to the syllables of his name.

Out on Liteiny, celebrants caroused in the novelty of nighttime illumination. It was as if the promised Future had finally blossomed, a weird flower that would only last a night. And by my side, my one and only love. We fell into perfect step, as we always did, but we couldn’t risk touching—it would be obvious. He’d taken quite a risk to come for me. But if I did not kiss him soon, I would explode. I needed his hands on me, his mouth.

“This getup suits you,” he said, pretending to inspect a building. “I never liked boys, but maybe I should rethink my stance.”

I didn’t even want to discuss it. “We should get off the street. Where are you staying?”

Suddenly he snaked his arm around my waist and swept me into a dark courtyard entrance, pressed me to the wall. Our lips flew together, bodies locked tight. Everything in me rose up to seal myself into the moment, into this man, his fragrant body, his strength. He searched for my breasts under my student’s tunic and found them bound, kneaded my hips, my unboyish ass. If I’d died, I would never have felt this again, this flame coursing through me, like a trench full of gasoline set on fire. It was worth having lived to this hour. It was worth everything, no matter what it had cost me or would.

He spoke quickly between kisses. “I swear I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t foresee, I swear to Almighty God.” He pressed his cheek to mine in the darkness. “My darling girl or boy or whatever you are.” My magician, my life. “I knew you were alive, I knew it in my bones.”

So many things he didn’t know: Arkady, my father, Marusya, Varvara. But their hold on me had broken, and there was only this shape in my arms now. “Don’t cry,” he said, kissing my tears. “We’re here. We’re here now.”

How long did we kiss in the shadows? When Kolya and I touched, the night held its breath. My cap fell in the mud, the camera clattered to the ground. Would I make love with him against the slimy wall of the courtyard like a desperate whore?

He unbuttoned my tunic, bit my neck. “Can’t we go to your place?” Still trying to get the bandages loose.

“I’m at Varvara’s.”

He laughed, despairingly. “Well, that’s out.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

“I’ve got an idea.” He backed away, smoothed down my tunic, hoisted his trousers, settled himself.

Shaking with undischarged passion, I scooped up my wet cap and slapped it against my leg. He picked up the camera and tripod, hoisted them onto his shoulder. We straightened ourselves and walked back into the street like friends who’d just shared a piss. I could smell his honey all over me. It was madness. We blended in with the other revelers. I thought briefly of Mina, asleep, rehearsing her plans for tomorrow. How could two friends be so impossibly different? She loved that sensible life, but at my core lived something hot and red that could not be contained and put to bed at nine. She could no more understand the forces that moved me than I could find delight in a closely planned timetable.

And Varvara… I couldn’t think of how she’d react when she realized I’d slipped her noose, when she saw my little fox footprints disappearing in the snow. Right now, only joy welled up in me, knowing I wouldn’t return to her bed tonight or any other night. It increased the danger—not only would Arkady be looking for me, but so would a deadly spurned Chekist. Scylla and Charybdis. I felt my disguise falling from me. Where was my boy’s walk? Couldn’t anybody tell we were lovers? Could they not see the steady pulse of attraction, the light in our eyes, feel the surge of current between us? He began to whistle “The Internationale.”

Common sense would have me go back to the Miniature Theater and try to burrow myself into the Communal Theater of the Future. But common sense slept in the bed with Mina, and I was myself again, a careless needlewoman among the apple trees of Paradise. How wonderful it felt not to disguise my true nature. Though I had learned many lessons since that day on the English Embankment, in the end I was not such a good student. I was still here, and night beckoned, shimmering before us with all its fragrant promise.