The Revolution of Marina M.

63 Golovins and Naryshkins

OF ALL THE PLACES in Petrograd he could have taken me, my love led me straight into the brutal environs of my Arkady captivity—a building right across from the Tauride Palace. Even being in this neighborhood terrified me. We entered a dignified house that nevertheless sported a number of broken windows, then raced up the ravaged stairs to the second floor. He knocked a pattern on a door: one, two, three—pause—fourfive. Ochi chor-nye—the song’s first syllables. Two taps back. Three taps from Kolya and we heard the scrabbling at the lock. The door opened to the length of a chain. A blue eye surveyed us from elbow height. Quickly, the chain fell, and a tiny old woman resembling a white mouse stood before us, holding her shawl close around her throat. She checked over our shoulders for loiterers, and satisfied, bundled us in.

She scolded Kolya as he propped the tripod and camera against the wall of the vestibule, stacked with firewood. “Oh Nikolai Stepanovich! You gave us such a start! Who in the world could be knocking at this hour? I asked myself. God save us, it’s never good news anymore. And this ruse, this joke…” She cocked her head, presumably to indicate the world outside. “Patting themselves on the back with their bloody hands. The first year of hell—I can’t wait to celebrate the second! And who is this?” She eyed me suspiciously.

“Elizaveta Vladimirovna, may I present my friend Mikhail Bogdanovich… Orlov.”

Oh, was I to be an Orlov now? From hooligan to high nobility in a single night? Misha was to be the great-grandson of the adventurer who’d risen to favor as a lover of the future Catherine the Great. Orlov had served Russia by eliminating her feeble husband so she could rise to power. Later, she’d cast him aside for Potemkin but named the jewel he’d given her the Orlov diamond, which until recently had rested in the imperial scepter. I assumed now it lay in the hands of the people, or perhaps it had been put to work funding the forces of reaction.

The old lady noticeably warmed, satisfied I was nash, one of ours. She received her formal three kisses from Kolya, pressed my hand, and led us into a parlor that must have once held many fusty objects but now was sadly denuded, probably for the better, though there were still chairs and a proud, ugly tufted divan with carved mahogany legs. At a table sat three old people of decidedly aristocratic demeanor: playing cards, gambling—but for what?

“Well, come and kiss me,” commanded another old woman, this one flabby and overdressed, reaching out her hand to Kolya. I guessed she had once been round as a Volga apple but in the food shortage had melted like beeswax. Her gray hair was coiffed as elaborately as it had been in the 1880s.

“Dear Emilia Ivanovna.” Kolya kissed her and shook the men’s hands—everyone wanted to touch him. His young man’s touch was more precious than gold. “Viktor Sergeevich. Pavel Alexandrovich. You’re looking hale.” Were they his relatives? He’d certainly spent enough time with us, and we never thought he had any family to speak of other than his profligate father.

Nervous glances were sent in my direction. Our hostess reassured them by introducing me. The others visibly relaxed when they heard my famous name. “Welcome to our ‘commune,’ dear boy.”

Kolya explained, “Elizaveta Vladimirovna was very clever. When she heard the Bolsheviks were going to collectivize the apartment—”

The old woman interrupted with an impatient hand on his arm. “I said, well, I’m certainly not going to share my flat with a bunch of thieves and Bolsheviks, so-called workers who never worked a day in their lives! So I called our dearest friends, the Naryshkins and the Golovins, and suggested we throw in our lot together.”

“Best idea anybody’s had in a long time,” said the man with a terrifying sweep of whiskers, Viktor Sergeevich. A Naryshkin! Or a Golovin… both families known for their ultraconservative politics. I was a Golovin, too, on Mother’s side, though I didn’t recognize him. I thought better of mentioning it. I remembered visiting my Golovin relatives in luxurious old flats just like this one. So this was how the aristocrats were celebrating the Year One—sitting behind their locked doors, slandering the workers, and hoping for the restoration of the tsar. A lamp flickered before the icon in the far corner of the room. I could only imagine what Genya would say if he could see this.

“Aglaya!” the mouselike old lady called out.

A servant with a nervous demeanor and eyebrows like an untrimmed hedge appeared through a second doorway. A back hall. Ever since my imprisonment with the Archangel, I’d become conscious of exits. “Aglaya, pour Nikolai Stepanovich and Mikhail Bogdanovich some tea!” The old lady sat down heavily in an armchair.

“What tea?” said the poor servant.

“This tea.” Kolya produced a brown-wrapped package from his pocket, which stopped all conversation. I wondered how many packets he carried for just such occasions. I’d like to see what else he had in that magician’s coat.

Aglaya curtsied and bustled to make the tea.

The oldsters insisted we sit with them and partake of the tea and some stale biscuits, though it was the last thing I wanted to do—sit politely and chat to a commune of rheumy-eyed baryny with Kolya tantalizingly within reach. But he seemed to enjoy tormenting me. He launched into a long explanation of how he’d gone to school with Misha’s older brother, and had run into me in the audience of an advanced revolutionary play. “You know the type,” he said. “Poetry that doesn’t rhyme. Sets so modern you can’t tell them from the scaffolding.”

“It’s the same all over the city,” said the melted grande dame. “You should see the Palace Square.” Uritsky, I itched to say.

“We keep trying to get our permissions to travel,” said the white mouse, adjusting her shawl. “But it’s fifty thousand rubles. Each. Which is worth about five hundred in real money, but when you don’t have it, it might as well be a million.”

“I assume you’ve been to the station,” said the other old man, Pavel Alexandrovich, bald with a few streaks of white hair combed over the dome. “Like the entrance to an abattoir. I think I’d prefer the Roman solution. If only they’d left me my sword.”

White Whiskers sipped his tea and closed his eyes in ecstasy. “Oh, real tea. And sugar, too. Thank you, boy. What a wonder.”

Kolya faked a big yawn and stood. “I hate troubling you for a bed, Elizaveta Vladimirovna, but I’ve been traveling since Kharkov, day before yesterday. I just got in when I ran into this one. He’s in from Tsarskoe Selo—”

“Detskoe Selo,” I corrected him.

Harrumphs all around.

“He wanted to see what the proletariat was doing with its dictatorship. We’re all in.”

The bald man shuffled the cards. “And what is your impression of Piter now, boy?” Our name for Petersburg. “Unrecognizable, isn’t it?”

“Hard to say,” said Misha. “But really, people must do something here besides parade in the streets.”

The aristos thought that was quite funny. “No, they don’t,” said Elizaveta Vladimirovna. “Not one blessed thing. Protest, parade, and send in the Cheka to torment law-abiding people.”

Kolya yawned again.

“Oh, don’t let me keep you young people up,” said our hostess, clapping her little bony paws together. Then, maddeningly, she continued talking. “But Nikolai Stepanovich, in the morning you promise you will tell us about your travels. Ever since they stopped publishing the Petrogradsky Echo, we know nothing about what’s going on except the self-congratulatory columns in Pravda. How are our brave boys in the south? Will this be over soon?”

Over soon, meaning a White victory. “I wouldn’t start hanging out double eagles quite yet,” Kolya said.

Elizaveta Vladimirovna lit a kerosene lamp and led us through the huge flat to a room by the kitchen, apologizing profusely for the meager accommodations but explaining that all the good rooms were occupied now. The one she showed us, a maid’s room, was packed with odds and ends waiting to be sold off. Sleds and skis, tables and lamps. But we unburied the narrow bed and found its thin mattress rolled on top of the springs. “One of you could use that, and the other could perhaps—”

“We’ll figure something out,” Kolya interrupted her, trying to push her out of the room. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Aglaya will bring you blankets and sheets.” The old lady kept talking, craning her neck back into the room. “She’s just next door if you need her. Here’s a candle.” She dug in her pocket and produced a short stub. “I wish we had something else, but the world—”

“After a week on the road, traveling on top of trains, believe me this is paradise,” said Kolya, lighting the candle off the lantern wick. “Good night, dear. May God bless you a thousand times.” He finally got her out and closed the door behind her, stuck the candle into a chipped china candleholder on the windowsill, and surveyed our love nest. Certainly we had made love in better surroundings, but we unrolled the mattress eagerly, and were just sitting down when a knock broke us apart—the maid, bearing sheets and two quilts they had given up for our comfort. I was touched, as the old would suffer so much more from the cold than we would tonight.

Finally we were alone.

The scuffle of flying clothes I’d presumed would ensue turned into a sudden awkwardness, an uncertainty. I think Kolya was ashamed of what a mess this had all turned out to be, and for my part, I couldn’t avoid a moment of remembered pain from the last time I’d seen him, when he’d left me to fend for myself, sent me back to Genya. If it hadn’t been for Arkady, he probably wouldn’t have come back at all. In the dark entranceway I hadn’t been able to get enough of him, now I couldn’t look at him. Instead, I pressed my forehead to his, like a good horse. I remembered this.

He knew enough not to speak, not to move. He put his arm around me and we sat for a lifetime. Continents drifted and collided as we just drank in the presence of the other. How lucky we were to have found each other again, in this world like a river in a spring flood that was carrying away horses, trees, villages, whole cities.

“Marina, dearest, I’m so sorry—” he said, but I stopped his words, planting my fingers against his mobile mouth. He didn’t have to say anything, I was already his. I just needed time to remember him again.

My fingers moved through the curly beard, marveling at the texture, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and turned my hand over to kiss the palm. And the hand came to life, as in a magic act where a piece of paper suddenly becomes a dove and flies away when the magician softly blows on it. Tenderly, he removed my cap, my coat. I trembled uncontrollably. “Are you cold?” he whispered.

I shook my head.

He gently arranged my short black hair with his fingertips, ruffling it, then smoothing it, tickling the sideburns. He stroked my brows, my eyelids, my lips. His fingers when I kissed them tasted of smoke and leather. He slowly unbuttoned my student’s tunic, beginning at the high neck, coming across the chest, down to the waist, and slid the brown fabric off my shoulders, then the undershirt, to reveal the tight bindings around my breasts and torso, my maiden’s armor.

He unpinned the fastenings and began the unwinding. I held my arms over my head until he had finished. He ran his warm hands gently over my breasts, which always surprised me a bit as they sprung loose—so accustomed was I to being Misha. The other hand stroked my back, then stopped. His expression turned to puzzlement. He turned my shoulders so he could see what his hands had sensed.

Yes, my love. I’m afraid this isn’t going to be as simple as you’d hoped.

“He did this to you?”

I turned so he couldn’t stare at it, or perhaps I wanted to witness his reaction. His face painted with pity and shame, his hand across his mouth. In the silence, I could hear the old people chattering in the distant parlor. This was the moment Arkady had planned, ensuring that Kolya could never again look at me or touch me without knowledge that he had been there, had left his mark. The devil Kolya himself had summoned. Would it diminish me for him? “He could have shot me, Kolya.”

“I’m not grateful,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t graduated to sainthood yet.”

The lines across his forehead—one, two three—like waves coming in low and even on the Finland shore. Plus the strong double line between his brows. I took his hands. “It was another lifetime. I don’t care about that now.”

He knit our fingers together like we were praying, pressing our knuckles to his lips. “Forgive me. I should never have started all this. I should have left you alone.” And he began to weep. “I’m a bad man, Marina—you don’t even know. If you stay with me, you’ll only have grief. If I had half a heart, I should leave you right now and let you have your life back.”

Of all the things I expected when we’d gotten away from the waxworks in the living room, I never expected this. I stroked his cropped hair, pressed my temple to his. “You can’t, though, any more than I can. So stop thinking like that. I’m responsible, too. I sold the diamond—and it kept us going for a good long time. Getting involved with Arkady—that was my mistake, and I paid for it, and it’s done.” Though it was hardly done, I had stopped blaming Kolya for it.

“I should have seen it coming. I should have been there. I thought I was keeping you safe. My God, what a fool!” He struck himself in the forehead with our clenched hands.

“Stop it.” I jerked my hands away.

“Forgive me, I was such an idiot, such a fool.” He slid to his knees by the bed, where some maid had worn a bare patch through the oilcloth with her praying, pressing his cheek to my knees in Misha’s rough trousers. “Can you ever forgive me, Marina?”

“Two idiots. Who’s here to do the forgiving?” Kolya with a conscience? I kissed his sweet, agonized face. My God, what now? Would Kitezh rise from the lake?

“I’ll make it up to you. I swear I will,” he whispered.

I held out my foot, still clad in a boot. “Pull,” I said.

My smile reached him at last. The sorrow and shame on his elfin face retreated, the way a wet pavement dried in the sunshine. He just wasn’t made for regret.

Suddenly my boots were off, then my trousers, replaced by magical hands and gifted mouth. This is why I’d survived. I wrapped my thighs around him, knowing again that this was my church, my redemption. It wasn’t the same act as I’d been enduring with Varvara, not even like Genya’s loving efforts. As we rolled on that narrow bed, I knew this was why one needed a body, why it was worth all the pain, the hunger and harm it was prey to, why the angels envied us.

I felt sorry for the maid, Aglaya, in the room next door, to have to listen to such pleasure. I did my best to stifle my cries, and made Kolya stuff my coat behind the iron bed frame so it wouldn’t crash into the wall like a bull kicking its pen to pieces. Luckily the other inhabitants were elderly and hard of hearing. If they could have heard us at all, what a scandal! I imagined Aglaya mortified in her straight little bed, praying under her breath. But at least she’d never have the nerve to relate to her mistress the horrors she’d endured—that those boys had fucked like lions in the desert, all night long.

64 Vikzhel

I WOKE TO THE sight of Kolya dressing in the tender morning light. It fell on his shoulders, caressing the light hairs, the freckles. Even that milky scrap of sun wanted him, wanted to run its tongue along his arms, his squared-off chest with its fan of hair, that narrowed waist, leaner than it had ever been. He bent down to kiss me. “Go back to sleep. I’ve got a few things to do.”

I pulled him to me, rubbing the crown of my head against him, like a cat in a patch of grass. “No, stay here.”

“I can’t. I’ve got some business.” He pressed his lips to my brow. “I’ll be back, don’t worry.”

I groped for the binding cloth that had fallen to the floor, sat up, and began wrapping myself into it—second nature, compressing myself into my armor. “No. I’m coming with you.”

He grabbed my wrists, shoved me back on the pillows, and lay on me, holding me there, a delicious captivity. “Nyet,” he whispered and kissed my nose.

Hurt feelings were a pain Misha wasn’t used to experiencing. I was so unused to being a girl. Compared to all the other pain, this one, Marina’s, was almost nostalgic. Only Kolya could hurt me this way. I tried to buck him off. “I didn’t come here for you to tie me to a post whenever you want. Leave if you don’t want me. You’ll never see me again.”

He kissed my eyes, my mouth. “Don’t be melodramatic. I’ll be back by noon. We’ll go celebrate the workers’ state.” He let me go, then worked his head through the neck of his sweater.

I went back to binding my breasts, pulling the cloth tight, as if it were my resolve. After last night, Misha’s rigid masculine form seemed intolerable. My body had returned to the feminine and resisted confinement.

“You’re not listening,” he said.

“No, I’m not.” I slipped on my trousers and shoved my feet into my poor socks, my broken boots. What I would give for a pair of socks like the ones we used to make at Count Bobo’s.

The exasperation painting his quick, restless face settled into resignation. He helped me on with my shirt, delicately, as if it were an evening cape. I buttoned my tunic as he dug my coat out from where we’d wadded it behind the headboard. “You’re being ridiculous, you know.”

“We’re going to do some beezneez.” I crammed my cap on my head. “So? Let’s go.”

We slipped from the flat, snores arising from every room. I grabbed Mina’s tripod on the way. Even last night with the hooligans seemed weeks ago.

Outside, we could hear distant noise, though Shpalernaya Street was quiet. The Tauride Palace with its columns and its dome—the seat of the Duma, the home of the Constituent Assembly—lay silent. Whatever happened now, a new chapter was beginning in my life. We crossed through the garden—the open parkways where as a child I’d thrown that snowball at Kolya in a fit of precocious jealousy, and which I watched with such yearning through the window of my prison. The sky stretched fresh, a pale blue, scrubbed and starched as Vaula’s aprons.

Proletarian families on holiday were filling Znamenskaya Square, now called Insurrection, their normally drooping heads held high, and why not? The World Revolution was at hand. At last it might be safe to look beyond cold and hunger to a new day. I felt a twinge of guilt for abandoning Mina to all those speeches. But I was with Kolya now, and we had business to attend to. At my side, he stretched and sighed, speaking to me as men do, facing front. “So wonderful to be back. I never thought I’d see it again. What a day. And you!”

I felt it, too, but I didn’t like being down here at the station, out in the open with Kolya, even disguised. This was prime territory for the Archangel and his men. “Shouldn’t we walk farther apart?”

“You were the one who wanted to come along,” he said. “Getting nervous?”

He bought pirozhky from a street vendor, and we walked through the crowd, watching the revolutionary circus of holidaymakers, modernist constructions, agitprop players. “What a farce. I hope they like what they’re getting.” He finished his pie, brushed his coat off, and tipped his head toward the pillared entrance to the station. “Follow me.”

Happy as I was, the sudden realization that my life was completely in Kolya’s unpredictable hands whistled through me like a wind through a too-light jacket. I did not want to go back into that station.

“Cold feet?”

“Davai,” I said.

The darkness of the terminal after the morning light left me temporarily blinded. Suddenly I felt the sly inquiry of a pickpocket’s fingers. I twisted to catch sight of my assailant, a girl of around twelve, and made a half second’s contact with her blue eyes gazing back at me, round and hard as quartz. Then she stuck out her tongue, a little girl again, and laughed before diving back into the crowd. The orphans of the revolution, left behind by starving families or by cholera or typhus or just lost in the madness, wandered the streets in gangs. Sometimes the girls worked as prostitutes. The boys scraped together a living as thieves, lookouts, or second-story men, like my hooligan friends from the Rostral Column. The station was lousy with them—the very reason people had been so happy to employ me as a porter and watcher of luggage.

“Still have your bankroll, Misha?” Kolya asked.

“Call me Count Orlov.” But I did still have Mina’s Kodak tucked under my arm.

All around us was the unmistakable station smell of stale coal, discouragement, fear, electricity, and unwashed bodies. People sat on their bundles, watched for thieves, or else stared off longingly toward the end of the tracks from which they hoped help would come. Trains ran seldom now, and the soldiers took priority—the new Red Army, a million men under arms preparing to escort the World Revolution to the ball. What was in their heads, these anxious escapees—images of the south? Of food? The lands east of the Urals, where the Whites ruled? Some were heading to villages, others just hoping for a corner of a room in Moscow and a job sweeping a government office. I took out Mina’s camera and snapped a picture, then followed Kolya through the human reef, at once thanking God for the unbelievable good fortune of having found him again, and praying for the wits with which to withstand it.

We inched our way through the bundles and the unhappy pacers, and back into the light and air at the end of the platform. Kolya jumped down onto the tracks. Instinctively he held up his hand to steady my descent, but that wouldn’t do for Misha. I leaped down and followed his jaunty saunter out onto the cinders and into the vast train yards behind the station.

I had often seen these yards, of course, these rusted cars, but only from a train window. I’d always dismissed them as a mere unsightly jumble to be endured before the onset of green countryside. But as we crunched on foot through a wilderness of snaking iron, cross ties and coal stations, signals and ruined trains, the tracks separating and coming together like a frozen quadrille, I realized it was a world unto itself. Huts for the signalmen, water towers. Kolya raised his hand to the workingmen. He was known here, or else he made it seem so. “All right, you’re my brother,” Kolya said. “Mikhail Bogdanovich Mikhailov. My mother’s second husband’s brat.”

“Brother.” I threw an arm around his broad shoulder in what I hoped was a comradely way. “I could eat you up,” I whispered in his ear.

“Eyes are everywhere,” he said.

I dropped my arm. “So, Brother Kolya, you have a plan?”

He picked up a rock and threw it, hitting the side of a train car with a satisfying clang. “Stick with me, Misha, we’ll go to the top of the Himalayas and have conferences with the Buddha himself.”

That I doubted. But for the first time, we would truly be together. Not just meetings after school, brief, passionate rendezvous. I would be with him when we awoke and when we went to sleep. I would know where he went, what he did, who he saw. He was mine now, this clever, impossible man, all of him, delight and danger and even mundanity, if there was any. We marched a mile or more down the sidings, and there, lurching and swaying like a lumbering pachyderm, a train grumbled toward us, heading for the station at such a rate that you could have jumped off and jumped back on again without having to catch your breath.

And people were jumping, hundreds of people with sacks on their backs, struggling under the weight of bulging loads. Bagmen, the villains of Soviet propaganda, the rats in the food distribution system. Opportunists, profiteers taking advantage of the brutal hunger of Petrograd. It was they who were breaking the backs of the soviets, siphoning off much of the food that should have been coming into the Petrocommune warehouses for direct free distribution to the people. But it wasn’t so easy to judge them—there were regular people here, too, workers who’d had to leave their factories to go out into the countryside to forage. I even saw office workers with their suitcases. It didn’t matter if you had ration cards; there wasn’t always food to fulfill them. And this was why. The flip side of the Revolutionary Carnival was scarcity and the means, any means, to alleviate it. Everywhere you saw the signs, even printed on our ration cards: HE WHO STANDS FOR THE FREE MARKET OPPOSES THE FREEDOM OF THE PEOPLE.

Watching the bagmen disappearing into the wayside trees, I heard Arkady in my mind: Never underestimate the genius of crime. We find a way when there is no way.

And this was the world I was joining. This shadow world.

I knew this had been going on all along, but I’d never seen it so starkly—the sheer numbers. No one met anyone else’s eyes. Now I could understand what a flood this traffic represented—the Cheka could only stop the smallest part of it. The rest got through. But surely Kolya must have something better in mind—he hadn’t come all this way to introduce me to this hideous hand-to-mouth trade.

I waited for him to say something, but he just kept walking, his hands in his pockets. I could see why he hadn’t wanted me to come. If I hadn’t seen this, this murky world of speculation and profiteering he lived in, I’d have gone on thinking of him as the clever fellow, gone on delighting in his trickery. Was I ready for this?

Now smaller stationlets appeared, other platforms, other sights, signal posts and coaling stations. We arrived at a small wooden shack, some sort of train official’s. Kolya knocked on the Dutch door. A slight man in his forties opened the upper half. He sported a patchy beard and hair cut straight across his forehead, as though he’d done it in the mirror that morning. He saw us and paled.

“Comrade Vorchenko.” Kolya grinned. The man stepped back, clearly less than excited to see my fox, who nevertheless took the liberty of opening the lower door and walking in. I followed him. Kolya shut both doors and locked them.

“I knew it was going to be a bad day,” said the little man. “The moment I woke up. Who’s the puppy?”

“My kid brother.” Kolya pulled up a stool that sat under a counter by the closed door. “We find ourselves in need of a bit of Vikzhel help, Vorchik.”

Vikzhel, the railwaymen’s union. They were the masters of Russian transport and, since last October, the sole arbiter of the Russian rails. They’d been essential to the victories of February and October by keeping troops from entering the city and putting down the nascent revolutions. So this was Kolya’s secret: he was hooked into the railway network. My lover, my devil, lounged, easy, one leg on the ground, the other displaying the sole of a worn boot. Leave it to Kolya to know the secret doors of possibility in a world where nothing seemed possible. Vikzhel. Every other union was in trouble, the Bolsheviks draining them of their independent power. What did workers need unions for, Varvara said, if the whole country belonged to them already? Whenever there was a strike, the workers were accused of being declassed, their unions vilified. But the Bolsheviks could do nothing against Vikzhel. Nothing moved in the country without the railway union’s consent.

Of course. How else would Kolya have been able to move about the country so freely? Yet it obviously wasn’t out of friendship. The small man kept his distance and the lines on his face seemed deeper than when he’d first seen us. I hated that we represented trouble to someone. “It’s not so easy now,” he said. “As I’m sure you must have heard, this new Railway Cheka is applying a lot of pressure.”

Kolya’s smile disappeared. It was shocking, the speed at which his affable demeanor changed and the laughing blue eyes turned steely. This was a face I didn’t know, a hard man’s face. Then, as fast as it had left, the smile returned, and with it the likable, winning, persuasive Kolya. “Vorchenko, clearly your memory’s better than that. Haven’t I done Vikzhel a favor or two? A certain stationmaster specifically?”

The man blanched white as a mushroom. “Aren’t you tired of sucking the scum off the bottom of the world, Shurov? And now you’re dragging your kid brother into it? Very nice. Nice family business.” But all his fight seemed to have gone out of him and he sank into a chair behind a squat, ugly desk.

Dust motes floated in the light from the dirty window. I yearned to be out of this hut and in the freshness of the morning, but clearly Kolya was not leaving until he had extracted whatever concession he was pressing for. He brought his steepled fingers to his lips. “The thing about scum is that there’s always plenty of it.”

The man sighed.

“How soon can we get out of here?” Kolya asked.

The man listlessly flicked through a tattered log on the desk. “This one’s heading for Vilna. It’ll be out of here in about four hours. Say, fifteen hundred hours.”

“How about the Moscow train?”

“Half midnight. But security will be tight, a lot of bigwigs on it, going back to their big fat Bolshevik tit in the Kremlin after the parades. It’s up to you.”

“What else?” Kolya asked, looking at the raveling cuff of his corduroy jacket.

“Tomorrow morning there’s a milk run to Vologda. Four a.m.”

Vologda. Tikhvin was on that line.

“Track?” he asked casually.

“Eight. Nobody gives a damn about Vologda. Or take Vilna and be damned with you.”

I tried to look indifferent, picking at the raw wood that sided the stationmaster’s hut. But inside, my heart was thrashing about like a big fish in a small net. We were leaving Petrograd. And tonight—or in the small hours of the morning. I hardly heard the rest of their conversation. Kolya and I, leaving the rest of the world behind. Was the fish leaping with joy or terror—or something more primitive, an indistinguishable emotion that just thrashed with the electricity of change? I’d been waiting for this moment my whole life. What if I hadn’t accompanied him this morning, if I’d been a good girl and done what he asked? Would he have even told me he was leaving? Would he have feigned some excuse and jumped on the train by himself, not wanting me to see the true nature of his business?

I was ready to come with him. What was left for me here? Mina, Varvara… Arkady. Yet I felt like a traitor. This was my Petersburg, my home. Vilna meant Poland and a run for the West. If we went west, we might never return. Vologda? Maybe he was trying to get to the Urals, to the White-controlled territories of Siberia. It terrified me that with Kolya I could well end up on the wrong side of this war. Why could no choice ever be clear and simple in life, just one single good thing without a shadow?

I watched him pull a packet from his magician’s coat and throw it onto the desk. “Here. Thought you’d like something better to smoke than back issues of Delo Naroda.”

Vorchenko didn’t find that particularly funny. The People’s Cause, the SR paper, had long been banned by the Bolsheviks. Vikzhel had supported the SRs. The stationmaster pulled out from the shag tobacco a fat roll of bills, pocketed the money, and stuck the tobacco into his pipe. Kolya reached out to light it, and I noticed how Vorchenko flinched, then flushed when he saw what it was—just a lighter made out of stolen pipe fittings, which were the biggest industry in Petrograd at the moment. Sheepish, he let Kolya light his pipe. We sat for a moment as the Vikzhel man puffed away, his former irritation giving way to a more resigned posture now that our business had been conducted.

“Fighting’s died down around Samara,” the man said.

“Komuch didn’t put up much of a fight.” My father’s friends, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly. Suddenly my big ears were open.

The man leaned back in his seat. “Now they’ve thrown their lot in with Kolchak. To hell with them.” Admiral Kolchak, with his tall fur hat and his Cossack coat, was the charismatic dictator of the Siberian Whites. So the moderate government at Samara, the last hope of the liberals, had come under the wing of the reactionary Siberian dictatorship. Varvara had said all along it would happen.

“What do they say about the Ukraine?” Kolya asked. Yes, the south, where so many of my classmates’ families had gone, and Kolya’s aristocrats were attempting to go, where there was food. The Germans were done—we’d heard that yesterday—so what would happen with their occupation of the Ukraine?

The man exhaled the sweet Turkish tobacco. “With the German surrender? It’s going to be a free-for-all. Why don’t you go wallow in the mud before the Reds arrive?” He leaned back in his seat, making the chair creak.

“What about the Don?” Misha blurted out. It was a marvel to talk to someone with access to real news. We civilians got all our news filtered through the pages of Pravda, but Vikzhel had the telegraph. Vikzhel took the nation’s pulse, had its nervous system right under its fingertips.

“Pretty heavy down there,” said Vorchenko. “Krasnov’s a puffed-up idiot, but Denikin’s no fool.” General Denikin—Volodya’s general. “They’re already at each other’s throats. My bet’s on Denikin coming out on top. If I was a betting man.”

“If?” Kolya snorted. He rose from his stool, stretched. Evidently we were done here. He betrayed no indication of our plans. “Hungry, Misha?” He punched me playfully in the shoulder. He made no attempt to shake the stationmaster’s hand, just unlocked the door. “See you around, Vorchik.”

“Don’t fall off any trains, Shurov.”

We didn’t return to the terminal. Instead we crossed over the tracks and tramped east through little wayside woods and stubbly fields. The crows gleaned the leftover rye and the boggy lowlands bristled with reeds. I was feeling melancholy despite myself. I couldn’t shake the way Kolya looked when he was threatening—yes, threatening—the Vikzhel man.

He bumped my shoulder with his. “Was it so bad? You shouldn’t have come. What I do—it’s not pretty. If you want a shining example of revolutionary idealism, stick with Varvara. This is the real world.”

“That’s the real world, too. I’ve been in that cellar, thank you.”

He slung his arm around my shoulder. “We’ll be together, I promise you that. The way you always wanted it to be. But I’m not a prince with a golden feather.”

I wanted him to hold me tenderly, but that was out of the question. Instead I threw a comradely arm over his, and we bumped along under the blue flag of the sky. He started whistling “Mephistopheles’s Song of the Flea,” making me laugh. He always did know how to cheer me up.

“So tell me, Mephistopheles,” I said, trying to hook my foot around his ankle as we walked to see if I could trip him. “What’s your plan? And stop trying to be mysterious.”

“All in good time, brother Misha,” he said. “You shall know all.” He gave a magician’s fan of the fingers, pulled a coin from the air, made it disappear. “That is, unless you want to go home to your Cheka girlfriend.” He succeeded in hooking his foot around mine while I wasn’t paying attention, and suddenly I found myself sitting on my ass in the dirt. “Goodness, watch your step!” Laughing, he offered me his hand and pulled me back to my feet. “We’ll just have to see how the winds blow.”

I dusted off the seat of my pants. “Just like that? Flip a coin?”

“The great world’s spinning, and we’re about to jump on,” he said. “Make up your mind. Want this or not?” How I loved that clever face, smiling slyly, the thin top lip, the full bottom one. Suddenly I didn’t care who saw me or what they thought. I threw my arms around him—this maddening man, this infuriating beast.

65 Apprentice Mikhailov

IT WAS LATE AT night when we returned to the station, though what a difference! As we entered, we could hear the scream of a train coming in. The sagging forms of the dispossessed, dispirited, and depressed rose fully animated, grabbed their earthly possessions and loved ones, and pressed to the edge of the platform as the old train came staggering into its berth like a dowager queen, black and stately, grimy as a kettle. The tension of the crowd stretched to the breaking point. A terrible sight—citizens straining toward the train, preparing to fight their way to Moscow or heaven itself. I shrank back, hoping I would not have to join them. I had been through a lot but didn’t think I had what it took to claw my way onto a train like an animal, assuring my own place at the expense of God knows who. That old gentleman with the square-cut beard? This young couple with their brood of sick-looking children?

Soldiers beat back the crowd with the sides of their rifles so that arriving passengers could alight, pushing their way out. Who in the world would be arriving in starving Petrograd now, when everyone in the city was trying to leave? Kolya stood with me against a pillar off to one side of the hall, smoking, his arm loose around my shoulder, so I could feel that solidity and warmth as we took in the monstrous scene.

“Is this our train?” What would happen when they let the departing passengers loose? How could he be so calm? “There’s going to be a riot. They’ll never get half of them on. How can they stand it?”

He checked his watch. He must have been the last man in Petrograd who still owned one. “They’ll get on. They’ve had three days to get ready for this,” he said, watching as if it were proof of something. “Sit on your bags for three days, you’ll do what you have to.”

Then the crowd surged forward to strain itself into the doors of the cars. It was hideous. A man shoved ahead of a woman, causing her to drop her bundle and almost lose her grip on her infant. Others behind her stepped on her things as they pushed past her. She wept, begging for help, but there was no way anyone could lean over in that stampede. People grabbed at each other, trying to get in front, passing children and bags overhead, hand to hand. Men separated from their families fought to rejoin them. I struggled not to cry—Misha wiped angrily at his tears with the back of his sleeve. I saw a boy of ten dash off with a bundle, someone’s precious things that could never be replaced, but no one gave chase, no one had a choice but to keep on struggling, trying for a few feet of standing room on this horrible train. Suddenly my tunic, coat, and hat were unbearably warm, and my unwashed skin prickled. I swore I could smell my own fear above the reek of the hall.

After a time, the train swallowed its load of human urgency, the doors closed, and now the passengers themselves forced people away who tried to climb in through the windows.

“Davai.” He led me past the despairing would-be travelers, sleepy orphans returning to their rags, their refuge for the night, and led me once more down off the end of the platform and out into the yards. Why had he wanted me to see this if we weren’t getting on? To show me, Here is your Soviet utopia. So much for all your ideals?

Dotted along the tracks, fires burned in barrels around which the railway men gathered, hands extended, bundled in their quilted jackets. By their flickering light, we found a group chucking wood up into the locomotive being fueled for the trip. My God, we were running our trains on wood now? Had we run out of coal along with food? Poor Russia! The reality of the war writ large—coal was supplied by the mines of the Don and Siberia, and both were behind White lines now.

Indicating for me to wait behind in the darkness, Kolya approached a group in the phantasmagorical firelight. He spoke to a short, barrel-shaped greatcoated man standing with the loaders. They shook hands. Overhead, the darkness was both cold and bright, the stars shimmering high and untouchable in the vast smear of the Milky Way. I wondered if my Ancients were still alive, peacefully conducting their work down at Pulkovo. Right now, Aristarkh Apollonovich would be gazing up at his nebulae while we were going to get on a rust-bucket train headed for the ass end of nowhere.

A bottle passed from Kolya to the man by the fire barrel. Where did he stash all these things? His tea, his tobacco, and now, magically, a bottle of vodka? I swore he hadn’t had it on him this afternoon, and I’d brushed up against him all day. It had been a sweet day, too, I thought as I stepped from foot to foot in the cold, waiting for a sign to approach. It had been the closest we’d ever come to just being a normal pair of lovers strolling along together—though we could of course not hold hands or kiss. We’d walked along the Neva, admiring the decorations on the Admiralty, the bold new constructivist flags, and watched the performances. At a Punch-and-Judy booth, I spotted Mina’s sister Shusha standing with some other girls, laughing at the old stories. I left Kolya behind and approached, plucked at her sleeve.

Her friends giggled when they saw this older boy approaching their school friend. “Misha!” Shusha grinned, then her smile faded into alarm. “Where’ve you been? Mina was cursing you to the seventh generation this morning—”

“Something came up.” I pulled her to one side, out of earshot of her comrades. “I had to lie low.”

“She’s going to kill you. She made Dunya do it, so now Dunya’s mad—she had a date with Sasha. Mina said she’s never going to lift a finger for you even if you were dying.” Her bright brown eyes flashing with the drama of it all.

I took the Kodak camera from around my neck and strapped it over hers, handed her the tripod. “Give these to her, tell her sorry. There are some amazing shots on that roll, if they come out.” I hoped it would redeem me, but I doubted it.

“Give them to her yourself.” Shusha took off the camera, held it out to me. “I just saw her—she’s in Palace Square. You can catch up to her.”

“I can’t. I’m leaving,” I said.

“Leaving Petrograd?” Her attitude changed, suddenly solemn, genuinely alarmed. She loved me. And I realized this was real, what I was planning. I was leaving. Everyone I loved and everything I knew. She dropped her voice. “Why? What’s happened? Are you really on the run?”

I felt my lips quivering. I was about to break down. I gave her a hug. “Give your mama a kiss for me, and tell Mina not to hate me. You be good.” I tugged at her dark braid.

It was possible I would never see her again. The enormity of what I was doing threatened to engulf me. Not to see Mina marry that idiot, or Dunya… I would never know what happened to Mother, to Father… Mother, not Father, I corrected myself. The children burst into laughter at the puppet show, and when Shusha turned back for a moment, I took advantage of her distraction to fade into the crowd. I soon rejoined Kolya, who grinned and clapped me on the shoulder, but the flavor of that last exchange and the jerking, quarrelsome puppets had unnerved me.

In the cold train yard, I felt those tears coming again. What was I doing? The men were drinking together. A railwayman on the ground rapped the side of a tender and threw the almost-empty bottle up to another man who finished it off then threw it gaily onto the rails, where the glass broke with a merry crash.

At last, Kolya gestured for me to join him. I breathed deeply, trying to pull myself together before I approached him and the squat man in the greatcoat, with a face like a wall. The man took one look at me—“So this is our new stoker?”—threw his head back and laughed. Then surprisingly, he burst into song. “Ven zhon khenry vas a little bebby…” He squeezed my skinny bicep with a hand like an iron claw.

Kolya shook me by my neck the way you’d pick up a rabbit. “I know he doesn’t look like much, but he’s a good boy. He won’t give you any trouble.”

The man nodded to the tender. “Go on up then, kid. Give ’em a hand.”

I glanced at Kolya, who indicated with his chin the second tender of the rusty locomotive they were loading. He was sending me up there alone?

“I’ll be up in a while.” He slapped a pair of stiff, filthy leather gloves into my hands. “You’ll need these.”

“Where are you going?”

“Comrade Olinsky and I have a little beezneez.” A world of meaning lived inside his smile. “I’ll be there before the train leaves.”

Olinsky shouted up to the men in the wagon, and a giant glove lowered itself to me. I clambered onto a monster iron wheel and let the gloved hand pull me up into the car. When I landed, three sets of eyes regarded me with disgust, as a fisherman looks at a monkfish when he thought he had a halibut. Surely if the bottle hadn’t preceded me they would have thrown me back.

Their captain, a talkative dark man with a thick Georgian moustache and an accent to match, put me to work catching and stacking wood. Split wood came flying thick and fast from the ground into the car, and a man balanced on the load, catching logs and stacking them. He hauled me up on top and I tried to emulate him while attempting not to fall and break my ankle on the loose wood. I caught more wood with my chest and ribs than with my arms. In fifteen minutes, I felt as if I’d been beaten. “You’re really running this can on wood?”

“Just in case, kid. We thought you were a veteran.”

The men laughed and began to sing chastushki as we loaded—about all sorts of filthy things, whores and unquenchable lust, erections that would not cease but grew larger than the man. There were political ones, too, making fun not only of the tsar but of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky as well. They were afraid of nothing, these Vikzhel men. “Hey, little girl,” my partner called out, throwing a chunk of wood at me. “At least amuse us, you useless little cunt.”

I caught the block and placed it on the pile, then struck a poet’s pose, foot up on a log, as I scraped my thoughts together.

Har har har. Oh they loved it. They even stopped throwing wood at me so hard. Encouraged, I continued.

Admitting my uselessness, I managed to keep them entertained until we’d filled the wagon. I hadn’t known Misha was such a shirker. So unlike Marina, who would work until her fingers bled, always trying to prove herself, her value, her intelligence, her stamina, prove herself willing and capable, a real comrade. But Misha was a natural anarchist, traveling on charm, a wastrel and hooligan desiring only to seize the color and avoid the dreariness of life.

Finally Kolya returned with Olinsky, I could spot his jaunty stride painted in the light from the fire barrels at a hundred yards. The two of them climbed into the cab of the locomotive. The Georgian waved me forward, and the others left. Now it was the four of us: engineer, fireman, and two unauthorized passengers, and a tight squeeze it was indeed. Most of the space was occupied by the monstrous cast-iron cylinder of a boiler, a remnant from the reign of Catherine the Great. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had run on her ex-lovers at some point.

As the Georgian stoked—with coal, thank God—he urged me to sing some of my better chastushki to the newcomers. I was shy, but he remembered the first lines—I could not help but complete them. I could see Kolya adored the masquerade. Olinsky, who proved to be the engineer, chuckled but spoke little, his attention absorbed in checking dials, turning cranks, and pulling levers on the side of the big boiler. Slowly the pressure mounted, steam building. You could feel it, like an immense winding spring. He released the steam with an enormous rush, then let it build back up again, twice, three times, and finally we slowly backed into the station, the tenders behind us, until, with a clang and a jolt, we met the waiting train. My excitement surged ahead of all waiting fears. We were finally going to be off on our adventure. Kolya’s secret grin flashed, just for me.

Olinsky checked his own watch. “Tea, anyone? The samovar’s hot.”

“Company’s here,” said Kolya, nodding out the window.

Black leather jackets signaled the arrival of the Railway Cheka. Six of them. They boarded the train, disappearing inside the crowded cars. This would take a while, if they planned to inspect the contents and travelers on this densely packed train. Surely they would find us. But Kolya was sunny and cool as a September morning. Olinsky siphoned off some of the boiling water from the engine into a pot. Kolya added tea to the mix and I tried to hold my cup steady so I wouldn’t betray my nerves. A sudden bang made me jump—a blow to the sheet metal of the cab. The Georgian opened the door and a tall, leather-jacketed man climbed up, letting in a rush of cold air behind him. “Well, Comrades? Let’s see some papers.”

Runnels of sweat trickled down my neck. I was afraid to even blink. The engineer handed over his clipboard covered with curled, greasy papers—records of settings and inspections. The Cheka man, tall and graceless, with a knobbly nose under his leather cap, looked through them perfunctorily and thrust them back at the engineer. “Labor books.” He wiggled his fingers, as though tickling the chin of a billy goat.

Oh God. My labor book was for some girl named Marina. I watched as Olinsky and the Georgian pulled theirs out and handed them to—or, rather, tossed them with purposeful insolence at—the Cheka man. They bounced off his chest and fell to the floor of the cab. “Pick them up,” said the Chekist.

“Kiss my ass,” said the engineer.

Kolya produced two from his coat and scooped the two from the floor into the Chekist’s hands.

“What are these clowns doing here?” He pointed at me and Kolya as he inspected the labor books. Specifically, me. “You. How old are you?”

I could feel sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades, my breasts pushing at the bandage. My heart thumped as loud as the engine. “Eighteen, Comrade.” Misha tried to keep his voice deep.

He was looking at one of the books. “Fifteen,” he said. “Apprentice engineer. What a load of crap. You Vikzhel bastards. Featherbedding. How about you, Shorty? What’s your excuse?” he asked Kolya. Narrowing his eyes as if he recognized him. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”

I felt my guts rumbling, hoped my bowels wouldn’t let go. To have come so close only to have Kolya fall into Cheka hands… all for nothing. What would I do if they arrested him? Head east on this train, I supposed.

“Yeah, I was visiting your mother,” Kolya said.

The Georgian laughed.

“Shut up,” said the Cheka man. “What are you doing on this train?” He went back to examining Kolya’s labor book in the light of the kerosene lamp. “Mechanic Rubashkov.”

“I’m going to Vologda. There’s a train they don’t know how to fix. The English left it behind, a little gift to the Soviet people. Only they wrecked it first.”

“Why do you have”—he looked at my labor book again—“Mikhailov’s documents?”

“He’s my brother. Half brother. He was going off with a whore earlier. I didn’t want him to lose anything while he was out getting the clap.”

“Prostitution is a filthy remnant of bourgeois culture,” the Cheka man warned Misha gravely. “There is no place for prostitution in our soviet society.”

I nodded. I didn’t have to fake the terror I felt. “She’s just a regular girl,” Misha protested. “My brother envies my luck with women.”

“Are we done?” said Olinsky. “I have a train to run.”

But Knobbly Nose was still eyeing our labor books. “You will move at the convenience of the Petrograd Railway Cheka, Engineer Olinsky.”

He handed us back our documents but gave Kolya an icy, close-range examination before letting him take his book back.

Then he clambered down from the cab and the engineer slammed the door shut.

The visit took the steam out of our boilers. No one said anything after that, or even exchanged a glance. We all knew what was happening back there on the train as the Cheka searched among the terrified passengers. Finally Olinsky produced a deck of tattered cards, and we played a few quiet rounds of durak as we waited for the all clear. The Cheka operatives removed half a dozen people from the train, marching them through the now empty station toward their own painful future. Each one of us imagined the day when this might be our fate.

66 A Peasant Wife

OVERHEAD, CLOUDS FANNED OUT into a giant winged angel, while around us stubbly fields still showed patches of brown through an expanse of snow. Thank God the road had frozen over or the wagon would have bogged down ten miles outside the railway town of Cherepovets. I swayed on the seat next to Kolya, feeling queasy as we alternated between dense pine forest and open land under the mesmerizing sky. This land had a dream life of its own—the drama of the sky, the forlorn, harvested fields, the distant lines of trees. Bare birches rattled their knucklebones as we passed by. Every once in a while a single man on horseback or in a wagon waved a short salute. Sometimes we overtook a group of recruits or a man driving cattle with a willow switch. I thought of Annoushka as we silently passed ruined manor houses two stories high, the roofs caved in, surrounded by a few blighted fruit trees. I couldn’t help wondering how Maryino had fared.

Kolya clucked and snapped the reins of the dappled gray as the road unspooled from between its ears. I hadn’t felt well for a week, spending most of my time with my head resting on his lap, looking up at his curly beard and the puffs of steam coming out of his nostrils or at birds crossing the big churning sky—ducks, cranes—flying south. The travel had proved harder than anything I’d imagined. Well, what had I pictured, that we’d be sipping sherry and appraising jewels and precious art? The reality was, we were making a map of remote villages, woods and fields, fording gelid streams not quite frozen over, sleeping in peasant izbas if we were lucky and in the straw with their animals if we weren’t.

In the beginning, our greed for one another drove us like a fire. How miraculous just to kiss openly! I was a woman again, dressed in sarafan, blouse, and woolen kerchief bought in Cherepovets along with a jacket and a sheepskin, complete down to felt boots and red beads around my neck—Kolya’s peasant wife. How luxurious it had been to lie naked next to him in an inn and have him slip a ring on my finger. “With this ring, I thee wed.” It was a joke and not a joke. I had waited so long to be with this man, to really know him for the very first time. All his mysteries about to be revealed.

We boarded the Volga ferry in Cherepovets with a big gray horse and a large wagon and arm in arm, rapturously watched the shore fall away. I’d never had such a sense of high adventure, Kolya and me, husband and wife, the red cord of our fates braided like our laced fingers on the railing as we stood on that deck, gazing out at a river so wide it could have been an ocean.

We traveled south as far as Rybinsk, awash with sailors and flats of lumber, Volga boatmen, fishermen and their wives. This was a world I’d only read about—a world Genya knew, full of barrel makers and the smell of planed wood. Riding along in our wagon, we sang and played tricks on each other, sometimes we made love in the back because we were unable to wait for nightfall.

Our first successes astonished me. In village after wretched village, peasants opened their cellars to us, led us to springhouses, dug up pits in which their hoarded grain had been stashed. Grain, potatoes, even butter and cheese. I was shocked. It was just as the Bolsheviks had said—peasants were holding back, hiding their surpluses in the woods and under the floors of their wooden cabins. Genya used to say that the Russian peasant, once he had his land, was done with his revolution. But our peasant hosts complained that the fixed price the Soviet provisioning brigades offered was impossibly low. They knew the cities were starving, and they cared to a point. They all had relatives in the cities, in the factories. But they didn’t know what would happen come spring. They had to think of the future.

“What do the Bolsheviks know about our lives?” our first host had said. “Why should we sacrifice when they offer us nothing in return?” The peasants needed scythes and plows, machine parts, nails, but the factories were dead. Half the workers were out self-provisioning, being pressed into the food brigades terrorizing the countryside, seizing the grain of the so-called kulaks, the better-off peasants who hired others, who often made money in trade as well as by farming.

“What’s a kulak?” our host had railed. “I hire someone to replace my boys in the army, and suddenly I’m a kulak and my grain’s good for seizure? I supported the revolution! I gave up grain when the workers first came along—I don’t want anybody to starve. But when these so-called Kombedy come along”—the Committees of the Village Poor—“telling us how much we can keep? When they’ve done nothing, these village termites? What does Lenin know about crops? And how much seed you need come spring? The devil with them, that’s what we say, and their nine poods per person.” A pood, about thirty pounds, was the allowable holdback per person for the year.

But soon we’d seen what happened to villages that were discovered to be holding back more. We drove through one that had been burned to the ground. It was a new kind of civil war—not Red versus White but town versus country, peasant versus worker, the poor versus the poor. Waged over not politics but grain. I remember when I’d begged Varvara to send me to Maryino during Red Terror. It’s going to be worse in the countryside than here. With us it’s almost over.

She thought it was all the fault of the speculator, people like Kolya and the peasants who sold to him. If only the peasant would sense his historic role as the ally of the proletarian, she used to fulminate. If only the Cheka could eliminate the speculators, then the Petrocommune stores would have food, the workers could get back to work, the peasants could get the factory items they wanted, and Russia would move ahead into the future.

I used to think I knew what people should do, that I had a good sense of right and wrong. But since I’d been out here with Kolya, I saw the true tragedy—that everyone was right from his own point of view, everyone was suffering and needy. The workers didn’t want to be in those brigades, but once they’d grimly accepted their duty, they transformed themselves into men who could perform those tasks—in exactly the way armies turned peasant boys into killers. All I knew now was that what we were doing was dangerous indeed, that I was not well, and that I was homesick for Petrograd.

I leaned against Kolya as we rode through a pine forest, mile after mile, the wall of trees and a strip of sky. It made me nauseated, the regularity of the trunks, the way they passed. I couldn’t even look at them. I worried about returning to the city. It would be so easy for Arkady to find us, especially if Kolya had all this grain to sell—surely we’d be traced. But Kolya insisted it had to be Petrograd, to bring the most money. “Then we can get on a ship and go anywhere,” he said. “Where shall we go?”

“Argentina,” I said. “Spain.”

“Not Paris?”

“Too wet. Take me somewhere hot and dry. With mosaics and a little fountain in the courtyard. And guitars. I’ll dance with a black mantilla, and I’ll break men’s hearts.”

“They’ll die in droves for this redheaded Carmen.” He leaned over and kissed me. A few weeks ago, our kisses would have caught fire, and we would have made love right here. But now I was so tired that it was hard to believe there was even a place called Spain, somewhere the sun was hot and the little burros climbed the rocky hills, and great cathedrals rose like pastry, with pigeons bursting into the sky. My body ached, and an unnamed foreboding, heavy and thick, sat on my stomach, the sense of something coming. I remembered my mother’s nervousness just before the revolution broke. She’d been like a cat sensing a storm. I lay down again with my head on Kolya’s thigh, curled up on the wagon’s seat, the hard wood biting into my bones. How much longer could we go on? I slept and dreamed of grain, bags of grain heaped on a wagon over our heads, coming loose and crushing us.

Kolya woke me, shaking me gently by the shoulder. I sat up to see gentle columns of white smoke rising from a copse of trees. Chimney smoke, thank God. The eerie red sun was already low on the horizon as we drove into an enclave of izbas, nicely maintained and well spaced, the gates and fences in good shape. A fairly prosperous village, it had done well without a landlord. The inhabitants we saw did not melt away into the yards, but watched us curiously. We pulled up in front of a proud house with four windows to the street—red windows, as they were called under the tsar. Krasniy, krasiviy—red meant beautiful, because they had glass in them. The peasants had once been taxed on every window and on the chimney, too, so this was an announcement to the world: we can afford light and fresh air. Many of the poorer huts we’d visited had been little better than smokehouses.

Our horse stopped, snorting plumes of vapor into the cold air. Kolya handed me the sweat-smelling reins, leaped lightly from the wagon, and walked off whistling In the meadow stands a little birch tree. The gray threw back his head, making his bridle jingle. He couldn’t wait to be unhitched. Dogs barked as Kolya knocked on the small door next to the gates protecting the yard from the street. “Privet!” he called out. He wore a patched sheepskin over his jacket, his pants in his boots. With his little cap and homemade pipe, he looked like something you’d put in a wheat field to frighten the crows.

I sighed and stretched. I couldn’t wait to get out of this cursed wagon. My back hurt, my hips ached. I felt a hundred years old and stupid as the feeble-minded boy peeking at me from around the corner of a neighboring house. To think I’d once been a poet. Had placed word next to word just for the thrill of it, the burr of zh and the arch-throated ya. But the miles had reduced me to an ache and a queasiness, a certain melancholy, an animal’s desire for warmth and a moment’s safety.

The small door opened and a woman poked her head out, a beauty with a blue kerchief over her blond hair, pink cheeks, and upturned wide-spaced eyes. A big dog came out in front of her and sniffed at Kolya, then barked at the horse. I had not seen a beautiful peasant woman on this trip. I watched her take us in, the wagon, Kolya’s deferential stance. She was suspicious but also curious, a tiny girl in a little kerchief clinging to her skirt, and a bit more belly than that short jacket could conceal.

They spoke for a while, then she leaned over and said something to the tot, who went trotting back into the yard. Kolya waved for me. He helped the woman open the big gates and I drove the horse in. “You can put the horse in the stable, devushka,” the woman called up to me. “You’ll see where.” And Kolya followed her into the izba.

“Put the horse in the stable,” I grumbled as I began to unhitch him. “You can water and feed him, too, if you like. And would you mind fetching some more water while you’re at it?” Now that I was a peasant wife, all the work was left for me. It had been a joke at first, a delicious imposture. But now I was getting tired of it.

I was still unhitching the horse when she brought out the two pails on a yoke. “To water the horse. The well’s across the road.” She wasn’t that much older than me, maybe twenty-five, but she was already the mistress of the house. She set the pails down on the porch and went back inside. “The well’s across the road,” I imitated her to the horse. He swiveled his ears intelligently. He was sweaty, he’d done his part, too.

I put him into their barn, dark and close after all the fresh air and light, heady with rich smells—urine, animals, and straw. A cow lowed, and her calf replied. Cow and calf meant milk. Goats bleated, hoping to be fed—more milk and meat. In the dim light, I made out a manger and a watering trough. Their own horse must be out with the husband. I led our big gray in. A pig grunted, and I heard the higher notes of piglets. Around my feet, chickens made their crackling, irritable racket, filling the air with down, and the rooster wandered around in the doorway crowing, trying to peck at me. Eggs, milk, bacon… a prosperous family. They would have grain as well. I wondered where they stored it.

I made myself laugh. I was starting to think like a thief.

I scooped out some oats from our wagon for the horse. I gave it to him first in handfuls, to enjoy the softness of his nose as he ate from my hand. “We’ll be out of this soon, Comrade,” I said, petting his steamy neck, listening to him chew. Then I put the feed bag on his bridle and went to fetch the water in the reddening dusk.

Two women stood chatting at the well, their pails already full. I greeted them politely and lowered the well bucket on its chain. The splash came quickly—that was good, I wouldn’t have to haul it up so far. I groaned and huffed as I cranked the handle.

“You ought to watch your man with that one,” one of the women said, a sturdy peasant of around forty. “She’s a witch, you know.”

The other one said, “She might turn him into a pig, or a duck.”

“A duck would be easier to train,” I said, and they laughed.

“She flies around at night,” the second woman said.

“She dances in the woods,” said the first one.

“May God protect us,” I said, crossing myself piously, feeling sorry for the woman for having gossips like this as neighbors. The world always envies the beautiful and the rare.

I squatted down like a strong man at the circus and lifted the buckets straight up, the yoke across my already aching shoulders. I’d filled the pails too full, and the water splashed as I tottered through the smaller door of their gate, banging one end of the yoke so water drenched my soft boots. I was so tired I didn’t even care. I filled the horse’s trough, barely visible now in the warm darkness of the barn, and left him with the other animals, eager to be inside and sitting down.

Oh the warmth and the smell of cooking! Herbs and tea and smoke and meat—and people. Kolya already occupied the place of honor—the bench in the red corner—where a boy of around five sat at his elbow and gazed up at him, fascinated, as if my lover were a seven-league prince or a hut on chicken legs. An old man with a spade-shaped beard sat on the other side, and an old woman sat by herself at the end of the bench, mumbling. A cradle hung from the ceiling and I could see a baby sitting up in it, like a man in a boat.

The mistress stood at the stove, stirring something into a big earthenware pot. How on earth could she be so lovely, even from the back, with her figure concealed under padded clothes and her hair hidden by a kerchief? I imagined the woman’s braids under the flowered kerchief, two great ropes of gold wound crownlike around her head. Her breasts and hips were full, her belly—she was bursting with life. No wonder Kolya was trying so hard to be charming. I envied the self-confidence of her face, the bold eyes, the little upturned nose, the firm chin and wide bones. I could feel her pleasure at the unexpected company.

I was more interested in the food. The smells! The place was crammed full of produce as a storehouse, the season of preserving having just passed. Fragrant herbs and ropes of dried fruit and mushrooms hung from the ceiling, and jars of pickles and sacks of vegetables were tucked everywhere, along the shelves and under the benches, their earthy breath adding to the smell of dinner and the dog and wet clothes and the tea in the samovar.

On the bare, scrubbed table sat a crock of milk and a bowl of salted cucumbers, a loaf of black bread and a bowl of smetana—sour cream. Kolya drank milk and smetana-slathered bread, telling a story about the bandits we’d encountered on the road, how he scared them off with his gun and they turned into magpies and flew away. The woman laughed, showing her even pearly teeth, and the melody of her laughter turned Kolya rosy and garrulous. How that man loved an audience, especially if it was a beautiful woman.

The tantalizing aromas issuing from the oven distracted me from my jealousy, and the sight of that bread, the milk. Since we’d been on the road, there had been so much lovely food, and I was as hungry as a bear in spring. Sometimes Kolya would buy me a chicken or some eggs or shoot a grouse and cook it out in the open for me. We’d devour it in the wagon. Now my stomach growled, while the rest of me politely pretended not to notice the savory bounty. As a good peasant wife, I could not ask for it myself.

“Please, have some bread,” the woman finally invited me. “The milk’s from the goat. I’d just finished milking when you came. Ilyosha, give her a cup.” The five-year-old got up and brought me a tin cup, then tucked himself back in next to Kolya. Big-eyed and sharp-chinned, he had long eyelashes just like Seryozha’s. He looked afraid to blink lest the visitor disappear on him. And I remembered so vividly how my brother would become obsessed by people, just like this. I poured myself warm milk, sweet and grassy. The bread was fresh and smelled of coriander. I slathered the thick sour cream on top. “God bless you and your household,” I said.

“You are most welcome,” she said.

“So you’re from Danilov,” the old man cut in on our womanly exchange. A real old-time patriarch, chewing his toothless gums in his untidy beard. “Pack of thieves, if you ask me. I bought a horse there once—this was back in the seventies. Remember that horse, Faina? Had the wheezes. Didn’t last the winter.”

“In the seventies?” our hostess snorted. “How old do you think I am?” It must be the husband’s father—clearly no love lost there.

Kolya lit his pipe. “I remember that horse,” he said. “A noble beast. The noblest.”

Faina laughed out loud. I was sure she’d never seen such charm in her life. She lowered her eyes to her pots. She had the big fork out and was moving earthenware jars inside the oven, but whenever she looked up, there was hunger and pleasure in those eyes. She barely noticed I was there. The old granny next to me played with a little doll, dancing it on the table. She smelled sharp and, I hated to say, urinous. My envy for the good wife melted away. The village wives were all against her, she had nobody but these old people for company, three children to take care of, and a husband she kept nervously watching for out the windows. How could I begrudge her the fun we’d brought, the relief from boredom and labor?

The little boy at Kolya’s elbow wanted to know more about the bandits. “How many were there?”

“Hundreds,” Kolya said. “But nothing like the ones in the Caucasus. I was stationed there during the war.” And he began to tell a twisted tale about having been kidnapped by bandits in the mountains and the time he spent at their campfires. He described their women, who were all beautiful gypsy girls, and the wild tribesmen, their high hats and curved Circassian swords, the tale working up to a bet on a horse race. The adventures were strongly reminiscent of Lermontov and Pushkin, but luckily our hostess hadn’t read these venerable authors.

She brought me a pail of potatoes and set a short knife and a pan down in front of me. And so I began to peel, making myself useful just as I’d done at every stop on this journey, while my man sat in the place of honor under the icon and held forth, amusing everyone. I didn’t really mind working, it was warm and pleasant here. But there was no hiding from the fact that a woman was worth exactly nothing but labor. This beauty and I counted the same—a pair of hands, a womb to endlessly produce, breasts to suckle the young, feet to drag and carry and plant themselves in the dirt.

As I listened to Kolya—he was really outdoing himself tonight—the pan filled with my peelings, probably slated for the pigs. To think people in Petrograd clung to life on such peelings. The Third Ancient could make a passable cake from them. One thing you could say about a revolution, we all discovered hidden talents.

The shelf over Kolya’s head lovingly displayed the family treasures: a lacquered cup, a daguerreotype of two stiff people—maybe these two old people when they were young—two small paraffin lamps, and a black clock, stopped permanently at 2:50. And of course the icon in its silver frame, the red lamp dancing before it—the Virgin posed before a strip of water, and behind that, the shining towers of a white city. Peeling my potatoes, I wondered if this tidy izba, this warm kitchen, was a taste of faithful Kitezh, timeless and far from Marxist ideology and ration cards and modernity’s nightmares. I could feel the peasant woman studying me as well. I sat up straighter, tried to look less dejected. Was she envying me my clever man? Or perhaps curious about my relative youth and my freedom to travel the roads of Russia.

Meanwhile, the baby’s whimpering had become a wail. “Tishe, tishe, Lenochka,” she said from the stove. “Don’t I have enough to do? Pick her up for me, devushka.”

Inside the wooden tub hanging from ropes, the baby looked at me with sodden eyes, blond as the other children and flushed, her curls all sweated through. My first thought was for myself. Was she ill? I couldn’t afford to get sick now—I was already tired and achy all over—but how could I refuse? Keeping my head as far away from the infant as possible, I lifted the hot, heavy body from the boatlike contraption. The child immediately began to scream. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never picked up a baby before, and she knew it. Frankly I had about as much maternal instinct as a turtle that lays its eggs on the shore and leaves them there for the snakes and weasels. In that, Vera Borisovna and I had much in common.

The baby shrieked and arched her back and held out her arms to the woman at the stove as if I were about to eat her.

Faina swept down and picked up the pail of potatoes that I’d almost finished with, peeled the last ones with a few sure strokes, and chopped them into the pot, wiping hair from her face with the back of her hand. “The first ones were so easy, but this one, ai. You don’t have children?”

“Not yet,” Kolya said. “But we’re going to have tons of them. At least ten.”

Funny.

Holding the ailing infant on my lap, I bounced her, tried to amuse her with my fingers. I’d have her almost quiet, then she’d break out wailing again. Nervously, I thought of the boy who’d died of cholera. But children got sick all the time. It didn’t mean they were dying. “Check her diaper,” said the mother as the baby screamed. She took something away from the tiny girl holding her skirt and smacked her hand. “Not for you.” That one, too, started to cry.

“Can’t you keep them quiet?” said the patriarch in that high cracked voice of age. “Always someone crying. None of my children were allowed to cry like that.”

“Who asked you, old man?” snapped Faina. “At least these will grow up and be of some use someday, unlike you.”

I steeled myself and raised the baby’s shirt, loosened the cloth bound around its waist and peeked inside. A stench rose that made me gag. Oh, why couldn’t I be Kolya right now, happily sitting over on the bench doing magic tricks for the little boy? “It’s dirty.”

“There’s a pail for the dirty one right here, a clean one on the shelf over your head.”

I didn’t want to admit that I knew less about diapers than I knew about the birth of stars. I lay the child on the bench, but it immediately started to roll and the diaper came off and the shit flowed like lava, all over everything, the child screaming as if I were murdering it. I looked at Kolya, who was enjoying it all immensely.

“Oh the devil take it. You are useless, aren’t you? God help you when you have one of your own,” she said and moved quickly to take the infant from me. “Stir those pots.”

I held up my messy hands.

We heard the jingle of a harness, the gate scraping open. “Gospodi bozhe moi.” Panic had entered in her voice. “Here.” She had already removed the soiled diaper and held it out to me, folded in a neat packet. “Put it in that pail, wash it out, dump the water in the yard. I could use some more water, too, while you’re out there.” Of course—I had been waiting for that one.

We could hear the horse as it was led around to the stable. I could feel the temper of the house change, everyone’s urgency and unease.

Quickly I tipped some boiling water from the stove into the water in the enamel pail and dropped the dirty diaper in it. By the door, I washed the green muck off as best I could. I’d just opened the back door to throw the contents into the yard when the master of the house appeared at the bottom of the steps. He was a shrewd-looking peasant, taller than average, with matted hair cut straight across his ears and a squared-off beard. I bowed my head, a mere woman beneath the notice of the head of the household, perhaps of the whole village. He moved past me and into the house. “Whose horse is that? Who are these people?”

I was happy to take the pails and the yoke and leave Kolya to do the explaining. It was what he did best anyway.

When I returned, the husband was seated in the red corner, with Kolya next to him and another curly-headed blond child, a boy of around six, who had displaced his younger brother. Four children? Kolya and the peasant were talking easily, a bottle of vodka between them. But now the wife was suddenly dumb as a doorpost, tending to her pots like someone not wanting to be noticed, the infant propped on her hip. I couldn’t help but admire the clean, neatly folded diaper now wrapped expertly around the baby’s legs. “Can you put her back?” She held her out to me.

I was happy to put Lenochka back in her cradle and rock her gently by the ropes as the husband and Kolya talked about early oats and the rye harvest, how many acres under what crop, a lawsuit about a nearby forest of walnut and oak. I must have fallen asleep in the warmth and the pleasant scents because I was wakened by the sound of a big earthenware pot being dropped onto the table with a bang, a pot I probably couldn’t have picked up empty. Steam rose from a rich stew fragrant with mushrooms and potatoes. A second crock held shchi, a cabbage soup. Faina’s husband was served first, then my husband and the grandfather, followed by the children and finally, the women. The food was better than we’d seen in most of the villages. I ate in a dream, sitting at the table’s foot with the crazy grandmother and the toddler girl, who was fascinated by my red beads.

Ivan Ivanych, Faina’s husband, spoke with authority about the doings of the village. He was probably one of their headmen. He was older than his wife by at least ten years, and gray threads already ran in his hair and beard. I wondered if he had married her as a child or whether there had been a wife before her. But these children were certainly all hers—they were as alike as ducklings. Marx said that power lies with whoever controls the means of production. Clearly she was the means, and he was the owner. A certain stiffening of her posture when she spoke to him, the way she forced herself to look at him, told me she despised and feared him. And I noticed her effort now not to pay too close attention to the guest of honor.

Kolya was also careful to keep his regard evenly divided among his audience.

“So what’s going on in Danilov, boy?” Ivanych asked, helping himself to the stew pot with his decorated spoon.

Danilov was a district center about a four-day walk from here. Kolya always picked our “hometown” carefully, far enough from where we were staying to make it unlikely that people could question him too pointedly about acquaintances, but close enough to be plausible.

“The new draft, brother,” Kolya said, leaning toward our host, peasant man to peasant man, as if they were the only ones in the room. “Trotsky wants three million men under arms.”

The one thing I’d learned out here was that distance was time. The distance from a muddy village like this to anyplace with a newspaper and a telegraph could be a week, a month.

“We just got done with a war. Why the devil do they have to start a new one?” the old patriarch chimed in, eager to still be part of the masculine court.

“Do you support the Reds?” asked Ivanych, plucking at his beard as if searching for something. “You think they’re going to last?”

“That’s the question, brother, that’s the question,” said Kolya. He toyed with his empty glass. I could tell he would have liked to pour another, but it wasn’t done in a peasant home, to serve your own drinks. “Kolchak’s just declared himself dictator of Russia.” The White admiral with whom my father’s faction had recently joined. “All the other generals have sworn loyalty to him.”

“To the devil with them all.” At last Ivanych refilled the men’s glasses. “If they think we’re going to give up the land, they better think again.” They drank off the round in a single draught. “So what’s your trade, boy? Why aren’t you with your own people, getting ready for winter?”

Kolya began to tell our story. I had heard this act before in many an izba, but it was still magical, a tale as good as Afanasyev, in which he was the enterprising son of a poor widowed mother. With his new bride, he had left their town for the sake of his older brother, a worker in a factory in Petrograd—or Moscow—who had been crippled in an accident or in the war. He explained how badly he needed to buy enough food to see his brother’s family through the winter, as well as the old lady back in Danilov/Kostroma/Cherepovets/Rybinsk.

“There isn’t a morsel of food left in Petrograd,” Kolya concluded. So the brother was in Petrograd this time.

“The last shall be first,” said the peasant.

“They’re fighting over who’s last, then, brother.”

Our host snorted. “So tell me, why should I sell to you? Maybe someone comes along and offers me twice as much.” He fingered his beard as if he expected to find a small animal in it.

Kolya leaned on his elbow as if he were a student working out a difficult theorem. He pulled on his ear, bit his lip, looking like he was about to fail the exam. I tried not to smile, knowing that when Kolya put on the ermines of pure innocence, he would be picking your pocket clean. “Well, that’s true.” He opened his blue eyes wide. “Only, you know, it’s this million-man army they’re raising…”

“What about it?” Our host’s bushy eyebrows knitted together over his skeptical eyes.

“Well, you know, I was in the war, in a provisioning unit. The Southwestern Army. And I can tell you, when they say an army marches on its stomach, they’re not joking. They don’t bargain with you, and you won’t see any handfuls of gold.”

Now the headman was quiet. The little sons’ eyes shifted from their father to this handsome red-bearded man next to him, learning, absorbing. Faina, too, was watching.

Ivanych considered, rolling the empty glass in his hand. “We’ve already had the Yaroslavl workers. Twice.” It obviously had not been a pleasant encounter.

“And they’re the workers,” Kolya said. “Soldiers are another story.”

Now it was the peasant nodding. He poured vodka all around, even for Faina and me and the granny, so we could toast. “To Russia,” then to luck, then to the harvest. We drank, and I thought of this suffering land, bored full of mouse holes, the mice scurrying in before the storm.

67 The Bathhouse Devil

AFTER THE RICH SUPPER, the family treated us to a bath in the village banya. My stomach purring with the good meal, vodka pulsing in my veins, my clever lover at hand, my aching carcass free for the time being from that infernal wagon. And now a bath! What more could a mortal ask for?

We crossed ourselves as we descended into the log-and-earthen hut by a pond not quite iced over, glazed by sharp moonlight. Kolya, comically humble and visibly drunk now, gestured and wished us a good bath, loud enough that Bannik would be satisfied, as if he were actually afraid of the little bathhouse devil. Oh, I remembered Avdokia’s stories about Bannik, what he had done to this or that relative of hers in the village when his rules were disobeyed or when some naughty young girls tried out some magic spell that went terribly awry. We never used the Maryino bathhouse. Father didn’t believe in it. We have indoor plumbing, damn it all. We’re not savages. I thought of him as we ducked under the low entrance to the log shed—first the headman, then Kolya, then the patriarch, followed by Faina and myself. Where was Father now? In what godforsaken hut in Perm or boardinghouse in Omsk did he sit with his reason and his outrage, now hopelessly aligned with reactionary forces in Siberia?

In the anteroom, under the log beams, we stripped off our patchy clothes and modestly entered into the steam, redolent of fragrant pine. Faina teased me about my short hair, that I made a very pretty boy. I made excuses, saying that I’d had scarlet fever earlier this year. Ivanych threw water on the hot stones and disappeared in a fine mist. It was lovely here, the pine perfume satisfying something in me so primal I hadn’t known it existed. It had taken a revolution to bring me here. Compared to this close, dark, scented lodge, the banya on Kazanskaya Street was a sewer illustrated by Daumier.

I eyed Faina with her big belly painted red-gold in the stove light. I wondered if she would give birth here—I had heard that village women did, the reason why proper relations with Bannik were essential. I caught Kolya glancing at her ripe figure, her round haunches and luxurious poitrine, her blond braids. Did he want her? I was thin and ragged now, and my inky cropped hair could not have been terribly picturesque. My toenails looked like rawhide. I rubbed balls of dead skin off my feet, wondering if Kolya had tired of his boyish lover. Did he miss the women in Paris, perfumed and tantalizing? Was a woman like this more enticing?

Ivanych, drunk, held forth about the goings-on of the village, who had it in for whom, and assuring us that no one in the village council put up with the Kombedy and its finger-pointing. Then he moved on to the former landlord, Kachanovsky, who’d cut a stand of timber that belonged to him, Ivanych, and he’d taken that devil to court and won. It was the great triumph of his life. I couldn’t help but notice his body, which was very white and surprisingly well built. He was younger than he’d appeared in his clothes. I tried not to look at the grandfather, sunken chest and little potbelly, his sparse nest of pubic hair. Instead I sank into the clouds of fine steam as one would sink into a lover’s arms. Ivanych threw more water on the stones, and Faina beat him with the birch twigs she’d been soaking in a wooden pail.

The peasant was evaluating me as well. He seemed to approve of me, nodding. I actually thought he was going to say something kind. Instead he turned to Kolya and said, “You flog her good and proper, I see.”

Kolya had to tear his eyes off Faina’s breasts in order to respond. “Every Sunday,” he replied. “That way she knows what day of the week it is.”

Ivanych nodded again, wiping sweat down his wiry arms. His eyes were very pale under the dark brows. “Only one way to remind them who the man is, eh, boy?”

With a shock, I realized that this ignorant sot had seen my scars and assumed Kolya had been their source. Probably couldn’t write his own name, yet he had no trouble reading the signs of violence on a woman’s body. I waited for Kolya to stand up to him, to admit he was joking, that he’d never do such a thing, but my lover just grinned, drunk and too interested in the grain we were buying off this peasant to disagree. “She’s a tough one.” He swished the flail in the bucket, then switched his own back. “She looks sweet but she’s the very devil. Her parents didn’t tell me about that. They were just happy to get her off their hands.”

And they laughed together. Hee hee hee.

Though I knew it was a charade and he didn’t believe a single word he was saying, I wanted to kill him. I thought of those women in the bathhouse on Kazanskaya Street, of Arkady’s peasant woman. Think you could take three lashes? Whose fault was it that I bore these scars? Or had he forgotten? I knew he would say it was just part of the masquerade, but he was going too far now. He was way over the line.

“Show them a strong hand,” Ivanych continued. “Or before you know it, they’re ruling the roost and you’re sitting on the eggs.” He drained his vodka and handed it to Faina to refill, as if she were stupid as a cow and hadn’t understood what he’d been saying.

When she turned to pour, by the glow of the flames I saw her pale skin crisscrossed with the uneven scars of lashings, one over the next. Ivanych beat her with a whip, as though she were a criminal or a serf. To do such a thing to a beautiful woman. To any woman. I hoped Kolya saw it and understood that these were not just empty phrases, not things one said as admission to some men’s club in the hinterlands. His joke was her nightmare. No wonder she stiffened when her husband came home, no wonder she sat so silently. I tried to catch Kolya’s eye, but he was having too much fun playing the rural idiot. He only saw her breasts with their egg-size nipples, her white haunches, her lovely face. And at that moment, I hated him.

She wouldn’t look at me now, not at me or Kolya as she gave her husband his glass. Her eyes were cast down for shame, knowing what we’d seen.

“Yes, you have to beat the devil out of them,” her husband continued, tiresomely. “They have to learn respect.”

“A kiss might do the same,” I said bluntly, surprised at the clarity of my own voice in the shadowy bath. “Violence wins fear, not respect.”

Kolya laughed all the louder. He was really soused. I was on my own. So be it.

“You’ve been living in town too long, devushka,” Ivanych said, waving his finger at me. “Come live out here. We’ll get rid of some of those modern ideas.”

I sat up straighter, didn’t try to conceal the fury I felt like coals burning in my heart. He was threatening me? This illiterate bastard? And Kolya was going to let him? There was a gun in the pocket of Kolya’s coat not eight feet away. I imagined holding it to Ivanych’s forehead. Still want to beat me, Uncle?

“Let me switch you,” Faina said quickly, changing seats, and began to lash me with the birch flail, slicing through the steam and making the room even hotter. I cringed with every lash. Soon I felt faint with the heat. How far we were from civilization in this hut, as if we’d gone not only miles but years. So I was my father’s daughter after all. So much for my Princess Natasha peasant dance.

“I have to go out.” I rose from the bench, stumbled for the door.

“Yes,” Faina said, taking my arm. “Let’s go for a plunge.” We ran out into the cold night, dashed barefoot across the boards laid over the pond’s lip, then crashed into the water. The shock, the intense pleasure, made me forget for an instant everything but the body and the night and the glow of Faina’s white shoulders bobbing in the water next to me. How wonderful to be out of that hut, away from that man. I could feel the steam rising from me in the icy water. She floated beside me, a white mountain.

“My scars—that’s from something else,” I said. “He’s never raised a hand to me.”

“May you never know,” the pale form replied.

“You could leave,” I said. “Come with us.”

“You’re very young,” she said, swimming away.

I pedaled in the dark water. I knew it was cold but still didn’t feel it.

She surfaced close by me, sputtered, wiped the water from her face, steadying herself with one hand on my shoulder. “Take my advice. Don’t have children,” she said. “They stake you like a cow so the wolves can eat you alive, until there’s nothing you can do but pray for death.”

“Maybe he’ll get in an accident,” I said, imagining plausible ways such a man could lose his life.

“Then we’d all die. There’s no way out.” A splash, and I felt the touch of a snowflake fall against my face. She continued, “When I was a girl, an old woman gave me a pillow of herbs. She said, ‘Sleep on this, devushka, you won’t get a child.’ And I laughed at her. ‘Why would I want that?’ I said. ‘Every woman wants children.’ I didn’t know what she was telling me.” She caught her breath, there in the dark. “Some days I want to kill them all, myself as well, just bring it to an end.” She swam to the edge and climbed out, a huge, full-bodied white blur in the dark, wringing out her long braids.

I followed her. I wished I had a word of comfort for her, but all I could do was loop my cold wet arm around her neck and press my forehead to hers. She was weeping, silently, as she must weep at night not to wake the children. This was the benightedness the Bolsheviks were trying to end. But could they get here fast enough to save this woman? It made me sick to think how Kolya laughed when Ivanych talked about beatings. Faina was caught in a terrible net just like the one Arkady used to wind between his fingers. How could I bear to go back in and see that man and hear Kolya’s coarse jokes? I wished we could leave this second, flee this house as one would flee a massacre.

When we bedded down that night in the straw, Kolya put his drunken arms around me, but I pushed him away.

“Oh, don’t be like that. Look, you’ve got your feathers all ruffled.” He tried to kiss me, to make it up to me, but I turned over. He kissed my shoulder instead, murmuring in my ear. “What is it? The banya?”

“What do you think?”

“That was just talk, milaya. You know it’s how men talk. He’s got to think I’m just like him.”

“Why don’t you beat me and really show him? Did you see her back?” I still saw it, crisscrossed like a slave’s.

“Oh, my little poetess. You take everything too much to heart.” He rolled onto his back. “In a week, with any luck, we’ll be back in Petrograd, having a laugh. You’ll forget all about this. It’s their problem.” He shook me gently, trying to shake loose my determination not to forgive him. I only stiffened. “Come on, ma petite. Where’s your sense of humor?”

My sense of humor, where could it have possibly gone? “I think I left it in the hut there. Why don’t you go look for it?” I could smell the vodka on his breath, you could have set fire to it.

“Look at us. Who would have imagined, five years ago, we would end up like this, having a fight in some godforsaken barn?” He tickled my ear with a piece of straw. I knocked his hand away. “Marina, this is life,” he sighed. “I can’t edit it for you. We’ll be back in Cherepovets in three days. I’m doing great with this guy.” He shook me gently. “Come on. Look, some peasant beats his wife. It’s going to make headlines all over Russia? I mean, where have you been living—in a candy box?”

Yes, I knew this happened, I’d seen it on women’s flesh, but I’d never seen it written so starkly on a woman’s body besides my own. That beauty, who wanted to die. I hated what I was seeing in Kolya now: he wanted what he wanted and the plight of others left him cold. “Just leave me alone. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.”

I could feel his restlessness in the dark, the crumpling of straw as he tried to find a comfortable position, an irritable rustling against the contented clucking of the chickens, the nickering of the horses. I was tired and fell asleep easily. At some point I heard the barn door open and shut again.

A light fine snow drifted down on us as Ivanych loaded his grain into the wagon inside the barn, out of sight of the neighbors, and Kolya put the bright gold coins into his hand, French francs with their cockerels. The horse tossed his head, eager to be off. Six poods of grain, more than two hundred pounds. He’d thrown in a flat of eggs and two rounds of cheese besides. Faina wouldn’t meet my eye. Was she ashamed of her confidences? That I understood the extent of her plight?

We climbed up into the wagon, and Ivanych opened the barn door and the gates. His wife came out to watch us leave, hiding behind the manner we had seen at the beginning—abrupt, formal, indifferent. But before she shut the gates, she hurried up, thrust a jar of jam into my hands, and gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. Then she shot Kolya the strangest look. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes held such a hunger, such longing, her lips slightly parted, as if for a kiss. And his expression… the way his eyes held hers. A secret communication. What in God’s name did they have to keep secret? Kolya shook the reins and the gray headed off.

68 A Delightful Man

THE HORSE PULLED US through the sifting snow. It built up on his wide rump, traced the arch of the shaft bow over his shaggy neck. Next to me on the bench, Kolya lounged cheerfully, humming “All Along the Volga.” I felt queasy and our departure nagged at me, the glance Faina and Kolya had exchanged. I rolled the jar between my mittened hands. Something had happened between them last night. Their brief exchange was too familiar, unspoken but urgent. On either side of us, pine forest closed in. No distance to pull back, no horizon line, no relief from the pressure, only two vanishing points, one ahead and one behind. He noticed me examining him and smiled. “Stupid muzhik really thought he’d put one over on us. We could have walked away with the floor and he’d have been lying in the straw, congratulating himself.” He grinned at his own cleverness, the fox’s triumph over a folktale goose.

That look, her eyes, the barn door closing. The jam. Her smile for me—almost an apology. No, not almost. A real apology. Yes, that was right, Kolya had left Ivanych the floor. The floor would have been too hard to steal. But a ripe, sad wife was as easy as eggs in an unguarded henhouse.

“Where did you go last night, when you went out?”

“To Prince Yusupov’s,” he said. “He was hosting a ball. Why?” Such a display of innocence.

I knew a sophisticated woman would tuck it under her wing the way a swan tucks its head. Akhmatova would not make a scene. She’d say, Women have experienced such things since love began. She’d be casual, shrug off her pain with words so exact they would be like lancets. They would drain the wound, and she would go on.

But I was not that girl. My suffering wasn’t picturesque, it was hot and deep as an inflamed wound. I hadn’t thought twice when he went outside last night—but the longer I thought about the way Faina looked at him, the more sure I was. He’d met her somewhere, maybe in the bathhouse or in a shed, and they’d consummated what began in the izba, that electrical storm.

To think he’d returned across a continent for me! Through a war! Had braved Arkady von Princip for my sake. How could he have done all that, then sneaked off with a peasant woman six months along? Of course she was beautiful, but my God! And for her part, what if she’d been caught? Kolya could drive away, but Ivanych might beat her to death.

The snow drifted down, frosting our coats and scarves, the horse’s heavy clip-clop. Soon we’d need a sledge. But how could I go on? Still he prattled, his bad conscience filling the air with noise, pouring words into the gap between us, like a stream plunging into a chasm. Who cared about his stories, his daring escapes and colorful encounters in exotic places, the Russian d’Artagnan and Ali Baba rolled into one? I knew him for what he was now. An ordinary man, a bit frightened, full of bluster.

My stomach lurched as the wagon swayed and slid in the ruts. The jam sat heavy in my lap. I wanted to smash the jar into his face, to crush his head with it like an egg. I tried to hate her, her doll’s face, her red cheeks, the wide-set eyes—but I couldn’t. I didn’t blame her. A woman like that, in this hinterland, wouldn’t have many chances to enjoy a man like Kolya. No village Romeo could ever compare.

But Kolya! To bring me all the way out here, then go with her? I tried not to imagine their grappling. They did it in the bathhouse, I was sure of it. It would still have been warm. I knew how sweetly he would have spoken to her, said things no one had ever told her before. He would know just how to soothe her anxiety, get her out of her clothes, his lips to her round breasts, his clever touch. How she would groan as he brought her off, maybe for the first time in her life.

The horse stumbled on a patch of ice and we jolted together. “Steady!” He laughed. “He had a little too much to drink last night with the cows.” I wanted to wipe the little smirk from his face. So pleased with himself. He had stolen her under the very nose of the violent husband. Serves him right, he was probably thinking. And then filling my ears with talk talk talk. Would he never be quiet?

I was tired of his cleverness. I felt like the illusionist’s assistant, having rolled the strings and fastened the pulleys, seen the doves stuffed into his pockets. How many other women had he had since those days on the Catherine Canal? He might have had me in the afternoon and gone with another woman in the evening. I thought I might vomit. I thought of all the women we’d seen on this trip alone, wives and daughters, nieces and wards. I’d seen the flashing eyes of girls unused to gallantry, and Kolya was as tuned to feminine desire as a stationmaster to the ticking of the wireless.

My face burned, and bile welled up in my chest. What a child I’d been. Though I’d known what he was, I thought I was the exception, that I possessed some unique attraction. But everyone had something special, didn’t they, if only the glamour of novelty? I’d really thought that his struggle to return to me proved his love, proved that I was essential to him. What a fool.

I remembered a woman I hadn’t thought of for years, the vinegar-voiced wife of a writer in my parents’ set. Everyone loved him. That delightful man, they said. Always a smile, candy for the kiddies, compliments for everyone from grandmothers to housemaids. And I used to wonder, How could such a delightful man be married to such a sour-faced bitch?

I’d always assumed it was money. But now I understood that perhaps she hadn’t always been so tart. Perhaps she’d once been a clever, gay young thing herself, smarter, jollier than the rest, someone to whom he’d returned again and again, someone he might have pursued across a landscape like a roe deer, until she fell to his bow.

Now I imagined having such a man for a husband, having to endure the humiliation, the shame, the knowledge that he might pursue any kind of prey, though he’d seemingly already caught what he wanted—or wanted at the time. There was always more room in his game bag. And he intended to fill it, and keep filling it. Playing the delightful man wasn’t a pastime. The game was the man, the man was the game.

At last, Kolya picked up on my mood. “God I’m so tired of Russia.” He sighed, slapping the snow off his cap. “I don’t care if I never see another pine tree as long as I live. I can’t wait for Spain—Jerez, Valencia.” He exaggerated the foreign sounds. “Those perfumed nights.”

I would not listen. I had to stopper my ears to resist the sweet singing of the sirens. I would not wreck upon those rocks again. I would not become the sour wife, drinking my pint of vinegar with my morning meal.

I studied the dizzying motion of the passing trees, like a book’s pages flying past us. A book that I would never read. “I’m not going anywhere with you.” You’d kiss any girl, beneath any moon.

He stared at me as if I’d grown a second head.

“You’re disgusting. You slept with her. Don’t bother to lie.” The horse nodded rhythmically, its fuzzy ears collecting snow.

He laughed then, eyes wide with amazement that I could have such a thought, bearing his innocence aloft like a regimental flag. “Oh, little Marinochka,” he purred, dropping his chin into a pose of gentle disappointment, his voice dripping honey. “Is that what this is all about? All this pouting?” He tried to touch my chin, as one wags a child’s, to tease it, but I knocked his hand away.

“I could kill you. I’ll cut your throat while you’re sleeping.”

“You can’t be serious. You’re jealous of a barefoot peasant with four kids?” His pointed eyebrows were clownishly skeptical. As if this were an impossible interspecies mating, like a man and a giraffe. “I’m sure she signs her name with an X.”

A wave of nausea came over me. “I’m sure you didn’t ask her to sign her name.”

The idea of myself in Petrograd with him as he did his speculating, undermining the struggle of the people—for what? A better man would just admit it. If he had gotten on his knees and begged my forgiveness—She was sad. She doesn’t have much in her life. Think of that beauty going to waste. It broke my heart that that pig was the only one who would ever touch her. How could I refuse her?—I might have forgiven him. But not this. Whom did he think he was lying to?

So many years I had clung to this dream. Since childhood. If only we could be together, I’d thought. Well, now we were.

“I’m not going on with you. I can’t even look at you.”

“You want to go back to Five Huts?” He made an extravagant show of turning back to examine the misty road, the boughs of the frosty trees practically touching the wagon, the hummocks of frosty dirt. “Or are you getting out right here?” He pulled the horse to a halt in the silent forest and turned all the force of his personality onto me. “I didn’t sleep with her, Marina. I swear to you. You’re being completely unreasonable.”

I gazed into that face. Snow gathered on his cap, on that ridiculous beard. I felt like clawing my own guts out. How stupid could I be? You couldn’t expect the fox to change its ways. Either you loved it or you didn’t. And I loved it, God help me. But I didn’t have the fortitude for this. I would not become pinch-faced Alla Fyodorovna, feeling my love cut out of me with a dull knife every day. I hadn’t the depth for Akhmatovian calm, my great soul expanding like a velvet purse. I would shrivel into some sort of vicious reptile. We had to part. Nausea overtook me, and I vomited off the side of the wagon.

“You’re tired and upset. Lie down in the back,” he said. “We’ll be in Cherepovets in a few days, we’ll load the train, be back in Petrograd by Thursday. After that we’ll go anywhere you want. We never have to do this again.” He gave me a sip from the canteen of hot tea. Suddenly, I saw that he, too, was tired, the skin pressing into his cheekbones. His uptilted eyes looked lined. Funny, I always thought of him as a force of nature, as little capable of tiring as the Neva.

I climbed into the back, taking the extra sheepskin, and burrowed into the straw. I couldn’t go back to Petrograd—I’d burned every bridge there. For Kolya. The bitter irony did not escape me. No, I would only go as far as Tikhvin, get off the train and make my way to Maryino, if it still stood. I would see if it was possible to make a life there. It was my last refuge, a place I belonged.

In truth, I didn’t believe I’d make it as far as Cherepovets, I felt so wretched. But I had to get to that train. I had to be rid of him. After three days of hard travel, we finally entered the yards of the good-size town with our horse and laden wagon. I was once again presenting myself in the guise of Misha, my women’s clothing back in my bag. And so it had come to this. I was learning that if a person did nothing at all, the world continued to turn, and eventually time passed and the day arrived when you found yourself in an impossible moment of separation.

Up to then I didn’t quite believe that I would go through with it, that I would split with my one and false love, but I could already feel myself moving away from him, like being on a ship, pulling from the dock, watching him standing on the shore. I would never again love anyone the way I loved this man, the twist of his mobile mouth, the slant of his eyes, the curls in his reddish-brown hair. My magician.

“I’ll go with you as far as Tikhvin, and then I’m getting off,” I told him, looking forward as we sat side by side on the wagon seat. “I don’t want to be with you anymore.”

“One more chance,” he said. “I beg you. I’ll be a saint, a blind eunuch. Don’t do this to me. To us! God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Listen to me, Marina.”

It was the admission I’d been waiting for, but it didn’t feel the way I thought it would. It was too late. I felt cold in my bones, cold and clear in a way I didn’t think I was capable of. If one must cut off one’s own right hand, it was better to do it quickly, then sear it with an iron and plunge it into icy water. My bones were cracking like the ice when it was only just thick enough to walk upon. My heart, cracking.

He leaned on his knees and wept, while all around us in the train yard, men continued to work, ignoring this sobbing man as if it were an everyday occurrence in Cherepovets, and maybe it was. The horse switched his tail.

A man neared us with the studied nonchalance of conspiracy. He took the horse’s bridle. “You Rubashkov?”

“You’ve got work to do,” I said.

I stayed with the load while they went off and returned with two grim men pushing handcarts. They unloaded the grain quickly—our precious, tainted cargo—and took it to a passenger car marked PETROGRAD. Then they opened a panel at one end and quickly filled it with our bags. Kolya closed it up, and I could see him passing something into the hands of the men, who faded back into the station. I returned the wagon to the livery stable and collected a third of what we’d paid for the horse and wagon, then returned to find Kolya squatting on his heels, watching the car from the scrubby woods. We watched and waited, and said nothing.

The Vologda train arrived in the afternoon. It picked up our car from the siding, and we followed it into the station. The platform swarmed with desperate people heading into starving Petrograd—bag people like us, workers returning from self-provisioning, hungry locals. When people are desperate, they seek motion, even if it is in the wrong direction. I was keenly aware that we were endangering everyone on the train crew with our contraband. If the Railway Cheka found that compartment, that load of grain, they would know it hadn’t been smuggled by just one person. They searched the trains constantly, as did the local authorities.

We didn’t speak. The engineer and fireman kidded us, making their crude jokes, thinking it was a men’s-only locomotive. Kolya had his gloves off—he was biting his nails. It was like being in a funeral car. We watched dark fields passing. It stopped snowing, and the moon reappeared, revealing sleeping villages. “Come back to Petrograd, then do what you want. I won’t stop you,” he said low, in my ear.

“I am doing what I want.” I wasn’t going to point out that he had already done what he wanted and would continue doing it, no matter what he said, no matter how many tears he shed. The muscular music of the wheels, the roar of the engine, sang us their sad lullaby.

Babayevo. Podborovye. We bought tea and buns from babas on the platform. The tea tasted like dishwater, the bun was dust in my mouth. Every breath was a heartache.

“There’s no sense to this,” he whispered, gazing out at the dark arches of a station. We stood shoulder to shoulder but didn’t touch. “We can just go on. People do. People forgive, they change.”

He was so serious. I’d never heard him like this. My anger had evaporated, leaving behind only sorrow, pure and deep. “No, they don’t.”

The journey was agonizing, the train rusty. At times we moved at a walking pace. We were searched three times, once by Cheka, twice by others. Kolya watched the car with the grain, but so far so good. Before dawn we pulled into the station at Tikhvin. I climbed down from the locomotive, using the coupling rods as steps. He followed me, held me fast by my upper arms. Even now, my lips hungered for his. I could feel them trembling. They didn’t understand why they couldn’t have him.

“Wait for me,” he pleaded. “I’ll make it up to you. You’re all I have, Marina. If I thought I was losing you forever, I’d kill myself, I swear.” His blue eyes for once held no teasing, only a desperation that distilled that of the world around us. We couldn’t embrace, so we stood awkwardly like abashed brothers.

“Good luck, Kolya,” I said, and picked up my bundle: cheese and bread, a sausage, the jar of jam, tobacco and six matches, the money he’d pressed on me that I knew enough to accept. I had kept my sheepskin and my women’s clothes. Kolya slid his pistol out from his pocket and put it in mine.

“You’ll need it.” Although I was leaving him, I didn’t want to see him killed in his dirty dealings with the Petrograd underworld.

He attempted a smile. “In a few days I can buy myself a howitzer.”

I left him there in the hazy darkness and the hissing steam. He would have followed me, but he couldn’t leave the grain.

69 The North

I WALKED THROUGH TIKHVIN station, flanked by the arches my child self once imagined belonged to a palace. I could see her there through the thin veil of time—my mother in a huge hat, a mountain of luggage, her dog on a lead. Seryozha clutching his easel, Volodya bursting with joy to be heading to the country, Avdokia haggling with the porter. Now there was only the urgency of getting away. I emerged in the town square, dark and quiet in the early morning, and the gravity of what I had done hit me like a train. I felt my heart ripping like a piece of cloth.

And how exactly was I to make this journey to Maryino? On foot, with winter heavy in the sky? Kolya had warned me that it was beyond my capabilities, had outlined a tale of disaster, but all I could think of was getting away from the sight of his foxy, treacherous face.

I hadn’t considered how this moment would feel. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life, without companion or guide, lover or friend. My lungs hurt in the frost. I reminded myself that I was also free. No tormentor, no locked doors, no enemies, no traps. And I knew this place. I’d been here many times before. But now that I saw the town again, I realized it was like a person you thought you knew—a baker or doorman you saw every day, but who, meeting him in the street, you realized you never knew at all. This Tikhvin square gave me back that same kind of blank stare.

I couldn’t just stand in one place. I was Misha again, Misha the hooligan, and what self-respecting Russian boy would exhibit such sniveling, such cowardice? Buck up, Misha said to Marina. Stick with me and the devil take him, that lying son of a bitch. We don’t need him. We’ll do fine, you’ll see. Nothing for it but to go on and see if I could follow my own harebrained plan.

Walking through the town, I could see how much it had changed. Everything seemed sadder. The boarded-up shops, broken windows, fallen roof slates, like an old man curled in on himself, waiting to be beaten. I passed the ancient inn where we used to spend the night. The front door was boarded and nailed. Although it could simply be that nobody used the front doors anymore. Puddles had iced over during the night. The town was pulling in its chin for the winter, stiffening up, collar raised.

Ahead rose the towers of the ancient monastery, showing the same impervious face it had displayed for five centuries, the high white walls gray in the dull dawn, and behind them rose the domes and the famous bell tower with its unmistakable steeples like a comb with five tines. The monastery was a fortress, protecting its miracle-working icon that I knew so well, having slept under its tender image in every place we’d lived, the same icon Genya had crushed in a fit of proletarian rage. I was glad the original lay safe within those forbidding walls. I only wished they would ring the carillon and break the crow-filled silence, but it was the wrong time, and I had to get going.

And so I began to walk north, to my one remaining home, with its happy memories of childhood, of summer days and my family as it was. When I reached Maryino, I could rest and sort the great trunk of my losses. Even if the peasants had taken over the big house, I was sure Grigorii and Annoushka would let me have the old maid’s room, or space in the stable. They could put me to work and enjoy their revenge.

My feet fell into a rhythm only they knew, unique to my own body, and the fresh cold air settled my nausea. Suddenly I was glad to be alone, to move to my own meter and accent, iambic tetrameter. It struck me how people either rushed you along, like Varvara and Genya or Father, or were maddeningly slow, like Mina and Mother. Only Kolya and I could ever walk together—even at the end, our steps matched stride for stride. But that was over. No point in thinking about it. Like Whitman, I would sing the song of myself—my own footsteps, the length of my stride, the strength of my back, the vapor I exhaled. I had food in my sack and somewhere to go.

I walked for three days, catching rides with peasants when I could, enjoying the changing terrain and the various opinions of my escorts. One peasant thought the next snowstorm would hold off a few more days, but the river was freezing. And the crows were thick this fall, he said, the woolly caterpillars fat—all signs of a harsh winter. I thought the opposite, out of politeness. But I also enjoyed the easy silences as a boy among men. Women liked to keep up a steady, reassuring sound of chat. One of the things women probably found so attractive about Kolya was that he could never shut up. He was compelled to conversation by some tension of his innermost nature, compelled to charm and entertain. Words forced themselves from his breast like songs from a nightingale.

It was pretty country. The lines of uncut trees plumed in windbreak crests on the hilltops, the subtle verticals of the trunks distinct in the clouds of bare branches. Below, rolling fields lay plump under a dusting of snow. And in the villages, I was the one who sat in the red corner, bringing news of the world and entertaining after dinner, weaving pictures in string and narrating the tale of Maria Morevna and Koshchei the Deathless and Prince Ivan. “Zhili-buili, once upon a time, there was a king with only one son…”

I wondered what would happen to these stories now, when there were no more princes or queens. In thirty years, I might come into an izba like this one and no one would have heard of Maria Morevna or Vasilisa the Beautiful, only the Brave Bolshevik and Ivan the Kronstadt Sailor. What happened to old stories after the world changed? Would they all just go underground, like Bannik, to be whispered about in dark bathhouses?

No one to whom I spoke knew our village, but on the morning of the second day some peasants steered me to the hut of a woodcutter who was supposed to know the whole district. “Which Novinka?” he’d asked. “Near Alekhovshchina or the one to the west?”

I hadn’t thought of the name of that village in years. “Alekhovshchina.”

“Look here.” He drew me a rough map on a bit of brown paper his wife had saved from a package, his nails like horn, striated and yellow and broken from work. On the wrinkled surface, he traced the road and the river it followed, noted where I should cross. I took his pencil and wrote the names next to the x’s on the map: Vinogora, Bol Kokovichi. He watched me with undisguised awe, as if I were swallowing a sword.

“Look at him, Alya,” he said to his wife. “Writing away like the devil himself. Good boy.” He thumped my back so hard I thought I’d break a vertebra. “The road’s not bad but this stretch in here”—he indicated the long stretch before Alekhovshchina—“that’s some forest. I should tell you you won’t see a soul from sunup to sundown. Some good hunting there. Too bad you don’t have a gun.”

I shrugged. My revolver wasn’t something I wanted to advertise. He folded the map and handed it to me. “So what’s in Novinka you’re in such a hurry to get to, hey boy?”

I put the map in the pocket of Misha’s jacket, next to my heart along with the matches. “No hurry. My sister married a man from Novinka. Just paying her a visit, that’s all.”

It must be hard to be a woodcutter and be so outgoing. It was as if he’d saved up his breath to let it loose in a torrent this morning. “Girl trouble, am I right? A little visit out of harm’s way?” He grabbed my shoulder with the strength of a man who wielded a thirty-pound ax half his life. “I don’t blame you. Don’t wait until you’re old and ugly like me.” His wife laughed. We stood and shook hands, and he kissed me three times. “Keep your eyes open, son.” He winked. “Novinka’s no bigger than a freckle on your face. Walk too fast, you’ll miss it.”

As the woodcutter had said, the road to Bol Kokovichi followed the river, skirting mixed forest and open fields. It was definitely colder than the day before—below freezing, the trees glittering with frost—but I was well rested, and the map gave me heart. I was glad to see there would be a regularity of villages every few miles until I reached that forest. My luck was holding. If anything the sky was higher than it had been. I fell into step with myself, the aches and stiffening of yesterday’s walk at first almost ridiculously painful, but gradually my body warmed as the day went on. Pain subsided into a generalized ache that I could ignore in the rhythm of my tramp. Crows complained over the snowy, stubble-topped fields.

I grew confident about my choice and my abilities. It felt good to know that I could trust my instincts, responsible to no one but myself. The world wasn’t nearly as frightening as I’d been led to believe. And I was

But toward the end of the day, weariness came over me like a fog. In one village, I asked a woman where I might be able to spend the night. She said, “With your own people,” and slammed the door in my face. I had to approach five different souls before I found shelter with a sour but greedy old couple. They took my money and let me sleep in their shed. Later I discovered they’d locked me in. I went crazy—I couldn’t stand being locked up anymore. I pounded and yelled, and the old woman shrieked back through the door that they’d let me out in the morning, but they had chickens to protect. “Unless you want to sleep outdoors, you better stop that racket.” Luckily I was tired and soon slept. But my hopes of getting an early start in the morning were dashed—I felt sick and the oldsters took forever to pull themselves out of their rural torpor and open the door. The old witch thrust a crust of bread at me, and a boiled egg in the shell, which made me want to vomit. I warmed my hands with it and headed out toward Alekhovshchina.

Soon I found myself in the forest the woodcutter had described. The road deteriorated into a dismal wagon path through the lines of tall pines. The going was hard—branches and even tree trunks had fallen across the road and been left there. The ruts were deep and the darkness of the day and the closeness of the path sucked out my spirit like a chimney drawing smoke. After a few hours, my weariness deepened to pure misery. I stumbled along, a quarter mile at a time. I felt like I’d fallen into a nightmare, shuffling along through a forest without end. A line from a Longfellow poem my father liked haunted me: This is the forest primeval…

I concentrated on hating. I hated the endless identical trees, leaving only a strip of white sky overhead. I cursed those old people for the late start. I cursed Kolya and his endless seduction. I cursed the day I kissed him in the cloakroom at my parents’ New Year’s Eve party. I cursed the peasants and the speculators and God and the devil, cursed the revolution and the year 1918. I grew sweaty, then chilled. I felt weak and stupid. After a while I stopped cursing, stopped making a sound, and just stumbled along, without thought, moving out of inertia—not walking so much as falling forward.

To make matters worse, the snow that everyone had been waiting for began to fall. Now a sick, dull panic rose. No “Song of Myself” now, just the dawning realization that I might not make it to Alekhovshchina. The snow fell faster, big flakes whirling with an updraft. It gave me vertigo. Within minutes, up and down became confused, and all that whiteness made me seasick. I dropped a pinecone, just to see it fall. The sky gave no clue as to the time—it could have been noon or two or four. I stopped to rest and drink a bit of boiled water from my bottle. I’d felt sick when I left the shed that morning, and now I just wanted to lie down on the road and curl into a ball like a hedgehog. I looked back at my own footprints, filling with snow. Was it too far to go back to those horrible old people?

I should have been there by now. Surely I was well past the halfway mark. I had to press on, see if I could make Alekhovshchina before nightfall. I just had to. No one in this world had any idea where I was, and no one would ever come looking. I lurched blindly from rut to rut. The snow was sticking to the ground, my cheeks were freezing, and my nose felt like a piece of metal stuck into my face. I wrapped my woman’s woolen scarf over my sheepskin and up all the way to my eyes, though breathing through the wool made it wet, and then that froze, too.

I was a fool. I should have emptied my pockets in Tikhvin, found a wagon, paid someone to take me. I was a stupid girl wearing the clothes and bravado of a boy. I stumbled along, watching the white end of the forest road for the shape of rooftops and chimneys. Just beyond those trees, I told myself. About a day’s walk, he’d said. Damn that woodcutter. And damn me for trusting him. I would never get out of this forest. I could not stop shaking, though it was unclear whether it was from the cold or my exhausted state.

Finally I could walk no more. I stood in the center of a vast white world, between two endless walls of trees, and I was done. I was going to die here. I had come to the end of my luck. Even if Alekhovshchina was just beyond that clump of trees, I could not have made it. I imagined next summer, the woodcutter coming across my half-decayed body. Guess he never made Novinka, poor donkey. Maybe he wasn’t even a real woodcutter. Maybe he was some kind of devil, sending me off on a fool’s adventure. Well, I had supplied the fool. Death was watching now, sharpening his knives. I could feel his breath on my neck. I thought of Seryozha, dead in the snow in Moscow. I’ll see you soon, little brother. I stood there like an old horse, my head down, snow building up on my sheepskin.

For some reason, I thought of Volodya. Down in the Don with his men. Snow on the broad shoulders of his overcoat. He would understand this. Soldiers marched past exhaustion, out in all weather. Volodya always liked that sort of thing. The forts he used to build at Maryino—lean-tos, in which he imagined himself kidnapped by Indians or in Alaska with Jack London, hunting with bow and arrow, sledding with huskies. I could see that lean-to, its lichen-covered sticks, smelling of damp earth, its Volodyan mystery. Big boys and their forts.

A shelter.

I could build a shelter.

I didn’t know how, but if I wanted to live, that’s what I had to do. I needed to stop reeling with panic, and take some action before dark caught me and the cold cracked my bones. I couldn’t just stand here and cry, like an infant expecting someone’s large hands to come out of the sky and pick me up, pat my back, say, There, there.

I had to do something. Or at least try.

I mustered the energy to shuffle off the road into the trees. Before I did, I broke a branch and laid it as a crosspiece astraddle two narrow pines standing side by side at the road’s edge like children waiting for their nanny outside a sweet shop. I would look for that, and turn left when I came out. If I came out. Holy Mother, don’t let me die. I went along, marking my way at eye level every five feet or so by breaking a branch and leaving it hanging like an arm. I must not become lost. The idea was as dreadful as freezing to death. Worse than dying. I would go mad. I was already halfway there.

I crashed through the close-spaced trees, and the snowy boughs snapped back, lashing my face. I could barely see, and didn’t know quite what I was looking for until I saw a fallen pine snagged in the branches of another—the triangular shape of shelter. A frail hope kindled within me. If only I could summon the energy… I began to collect sticks and branches, fallen wood, everything I could see that I could move. My hands were clumsy with cold, my eyes watered and ice formed on the lash tips. My feet were frozen in my boots. How I wished I still had my long hair to cover my poor ears. I wrapped the scarf tighter around my head with hands that felt like bear paws. Luckily there was a good deal of fallen wood. Clumsily, I dragged lumber into a heap, resting with my hands on my knees, head down, gasping, before I began again.

I chose the straightest branches and leaned them at intervals against the fallen tree, awkwardly pressing them into the ground with my boot. The wind was quiet here in the trees, but every movement was hard. It was as if I were trying to build a hut on Jupiter. Now that I was building, though, slow and difficult as it was, I felt determination harden within me, pushing despair aside an inch or two so I could breathe.

Who are you kidding? This isn’t going to save you. Why bother?

“I’m not listening,” I said out loud. I knew it was the voice of death. Grimly I labored on. It was the hardest work I’d ever done, but every stick I pushed into the ground increased the possibility of surviving. I wrestled with a longish branch, trying to break it across my knee. I finally propped it in the snow and broke it with my boot, laying it on the growing skeleton of my hut. How I wished for a bit of cord, remembering how Volodya had lashed his shelter together, but I had not expected to become an Arctic explorer on this journey.

Now I had sticks on both sides of the center pole, low at the foot and higher at the top, the whole thing reminiscent of the spine and ribs of a fish on a plate. Not a very impressive structure, but night was the only thing on my mind. I broke boughs from limb after limb, layered them onto the skeleton until I’d got it fairly covered. I set aside boughs of springy fir for my bed—I couldn’t lie on frozen ground, it would leech out every bit of heat from my body in the night. Sticks to weigh down the boughs, boughs to fill in between the sticks. Toward the end, I was throwing anything and everything onto my construction.

I crawled inside to claw away the frozen leaves and snow, tossing the debris backward like a dog digging out a badger, then stuffed in the springy fir boughs, as many as I could cram inside, matting them down with my knees as I went. I lay on this green bed to see how it would be to spend the night there. It was dark and cold and smelled of must and sweet, aromatic evergreens.

I crawled back out and added another layer of boughs for good measure, even scooping frosty armloads of leaves and ferns and decomposing wood to seal over the whole mess like frosting on a cake. When I was done, it looked less like Volodya’s forts than like a rural brush pile waiting for a match. Did I really think this pile of twigs would keep me from freezing? I built my house of sticks, I built my house with leaves. And then the wolf he huffed, the wolf he puffed…

The sweat I’d worked up was beginning to freeze. I had to get a fire going. Wearily, I collected dead boughs from the underbranches of the pines. They seemed reasonably dry, though my frozen fingers could barely manipulate them. I was getting fuddled, my mind icing over like my gloves.

I piled up the kindling and stood, trying to remember what to do next, as snow fell onto my camp and the wind roared overhead in the pines. I dug out a spot a foot or two from the lean-to with the heel of my boot and made a little pile of kindling there, tenting it with sticks. It still didn’t look right. Rocks. I needed to circle it with rocks. At least that’s what Volodya did. Merde. I stomped around, irrationally furious that I had one more damned thing to do, kicked out some rocks, carried them to my pathetic pile of twigs, and laid them in a circle.

That was it, I could do no more.

I took out my matches from my jacket pocket, removing my gloves, and knelt to this rude altar. Saying a short prayer to the Virgin and one to Prometheus, I struck a match. It broke and flew off into the snow. Shit. Shitshitshit. How had Kolya managed to give me such lousy matches? And now I only had five. There could be no more mistakes. The second match I dropped twice just trying to hold it. It took all my effort to keep it between my blue fingers. My mind knew what it was doing, but my hands wouldn’t cooperate. My teeth were chattering hard enough to break one, and my hand was shaking so badly I had to stop, put the matches back in my pocket and stick my poor paws under my armpits to warm them. I rubbed them together and tried again, struck the match on the rock, gently, once, twice. It lit. I put it to the kindling, but it guttered out.

I started to cry. I didn’t even bother wiping my tears. I had to do this, crying or not.

I needed something I could count on to burn. I thought of the paper I carried. My Vikzhel documents, ruble notes, what good would any of them be to me if I were dead? Though if I lived… then I remembered—the map! It was as if the sun had broken through the snowstorm. I fumbled it out from my coat pocket and, trembling, shredded it and tucked it into the tiny pile of kindling, trying not to knock the whole thing over with my circus-bear hands. Gently, I lit the third match and holding one hand in the other to stabilize my grip, touched the corners of the paper, shielding it between my palms and my body. Please, God, let there be light. I barely breathed. Live or die.

The ecstasy, to see flame lacing through the tiny twigs! As though I had given birth to a fire child. I fed it tenderly, a bird feeding its nestling, an inch of dried twig at a time. Once or twice, I did so clumsily and watched in horror as it guttered, shrank, threatening to die. I breathed on it as if it were the flame of life itself. The relief as the heavenly streaks of red and orange crept back. Carefully I fed it slightly larger, finger-size twigs, trying not to topple the cone of sticks, which was starting to glow. I braced a couple of flat pieces of bark against the small tepee and—heaven!—they, too, began to smolder, and with a bit of breath, ignite.

Only then did I dare put my gloves back on, and I forced myself to use the last daylight to collect firewood, reluctant to move away from my fire child, to leave it to the wind, which was getting worse. I’d cleared just about all the easy wood already, and had to move in wider circles. I worked as quickly as I could, piling my gleanings alongside the fire, to shelter it. Finally, as the light faded, I sat down on the mat of fir boughs under my lean-to, my women’s clothes wrapped around my legs where the sheepskin wasn’t long enough to cover them. The fire fed busily before me, the stones warming and reflecting the heat. I hadn’t understood their function before. And it occurred to me that I just might survive this. An hour or two ago, I was ready to die. Who would have guessed I had it in me?

Night fell like a blanket over a birdcage. One moment it was light and the next, the darkness was complete but for the glow of the fire. The trees, growing so close together, protected me from the worst of the wind, but the pines groaned overhead like ship masts, and my fire seemed very small in a very large world. In its flickering, the trees appeared to dance, which elevated my uneasiness where I huddled in my sheepskin. Yet I was warm, I had this fire, I had food, I wasn’t dead yet.

An owl began to hoot—if it was an owl, in the middle of a snowstorm. It should have been huddled in the hollow of some tree. Every hair on my body stood out sharp as a pine needle. Owls were omens of death. I didn’t believe in omens, but out here, with nothing but forest for miles in any direction, it was hard not to read messages into the slightest event.

Suddenly a giant shape swept over me. I ducked and screamed, almost tumbling into the fire. It disappeared between the tree trunks. How could an owl that size—wings perhaps three feet across—fly between such closely spaced trunks? Was it real? Had I imagined it?

I listened with every bit of my skin and ears, I listened with my very toenails. I thought of wolves. Could they smell me even in a snowstorm? The sausage in my sack, the cheese? Wolves are afraid of people, I reassured myself. Wolves avoid men unless they’re sick or starving, and it was too early in the season for wolves to be starving. Not like us poor humans. Wolves weren’t on rations, there was no speculation in the forest, only animals living their own secret lives. Life all around me. I felt the animals just out of range of the fire, among the crazy shadows.

Thank God for this fire, the fingering flame—red and beautiful. I took off my gloves and dried them on the rocks. I stuck my boots out toward the fire, warming the leather while I gnawed tiny bites out of the sausage, frozen hard, and bits of cheese, spoonfuls of viscid jam. The snow fell like a curtain outside the small dome of light. How grateful I was that something had moved me to come into the forest and build this shelter, that something had helped me. It had to be—it wasn’t the kind of thing I could have done on my own. Maybe it was Seryozha, watching over me from the other side. Or the Virgin of Tikhvin. The fire snapped, and I watched the sparks uneasily as they rose into the dark, worried that they would drift into my brush pile and burn secretly, bursting into flame as I slept. But burning alive was not the worst fate I could imagine, not right now. Anything to feel warm.

Something was stinking. My boot was on fire. God! I jumped up and I stamped it out in the deepening snow. My boots were so poor to begin with—there was barely any sole left. I didn’t want to imagine what I had done to them in my carelessness. I huddled miserably back under the lean-to, cold again, keeping my boots a respectful distance from the fire this time and putting off the moment I would have to leave it and crawl into the brush-pile coffin.

Gazing into the firelight, I tried to think of something to look forward to. But the place where my dreams nested lay empty. The one thing I’d always dreamed of—marrying Kolya Shurov, being with him for life—had been extinguished. A dream concealed like a jewel you discovered to be a useless piece of glass. This was all I had—this hundred-something pounds of bone and gristle and poorly functioning organs sitting on twigs under a pathetic lean-to in the middle of a forest in a snowstorm. I felt as hollow and collapsed as an old sack and so weary I could have slept sitting up.

I was loath to abandon my beautiful child, but I was running out of firewood and the storm was gathering strength. I had to sleep. Carefully, I urinated on the other side of the fire—the last thing I wanted to do was let my pants down, but it would be impossible once I’d sealed myself into my burrow. Finally I crawled inside the brush pile, inching backward so my head would be at the tallest spot, carefully trying not to displace the fir boughs. I brought the food sack in after me. It was probably the wrong thing to do, but I was damned if I was going to leave it out to feed the animals. Finally, I pulled the mat of boughs in after me to stop up the small entryway.

Lying in the darkness atop the aromatic pile, I wrapped my woolen scarf all around my head, covering my eyes, and waited for sleep. The fir boughs had been a stroke of genius, thick enough to keep me off the icy ground, something I could be thankful for. I turned, ever so gently, onto my side, hands plunged in their gloves under my armpits—at least the gloves were dry and hadn’t burned. I couldn’t draw my knees up more than a few inches without touching the side of the burrow, so I lay shivering and miserable and colder than I could ever imagine being. I tried to breathe slowly, intentionally. Master Vsevolod said there were yogis who breathed through their skins alone, who could stop their heartbeats for half an hour at a time. They could be buried alive for three days, then dug up, and they would sit up smiling. My mother would listen, her blue eyes shining, rapt at such nonsense, while Seryozha imitated him behind his back. Now I wished I had learned a few of those esoteric arts, instead of making fun of them with my brother.

I fixed my mind on things that were hot. A crock of soup. A train’s boiler. The sun on the lavender fields—the very smell of sunshine. A candle burning in the nursery. I saw a line of camels crossing bleached dunes, heading to Bukhara. I imagined the city’s square blazing at midday, the wavering lines of heat, its giant tower like a rook in chess. I saw my uncle Vadim lying out on rocks in California wearing nothing but a loincloth. I walked the long allée at Maryino in the summertime, the sun pouring onto the red valerian and Queen Anne’s lace. I climbed with Seryozha into the stifling hot attic, the smell of cedar chests and old wedding dresses.

Seryozha. At least one person I hadn’t disappointed.

From my grave, I could hear the roar of the storm, but muffled. Idyosh, na menya pokhozhii… Tsvetaeva’s great poem, the poet speaking to a casual cemetery visitor from under the earth. Passerby, stop! Read—my name was Marina. But there wouldn’t be any passersby here. None who could read, anyway. Only a red fox, perhaps, with his sensitive nose, sniffing at this pile, smelling the sausage, knowing something strange was buried here. I prayed the animals would not try to dig me out. I had to hope the storm would do for them what it had done for me—send them to their burrows for shelter.

My exhaustion was absolute, but I was shivering too hard for sleep. How long would this night last under these leaves? Without even knowing it, I began to recite “Winter Evening”: Darkness spreads across the sky, / whirlwinds whip the snow around; / first the storm cries like a child, / then it bellows like a hound. I might be buried in a brush heap in the middle of a nightmare, but I still had this. I had forgotten. I had been so busy throwing Pushkin from the ship of modernity, I had forgotten that he was in my bones, my hair, my fingernails. I was made of Pushkin, as was every educated person who spoke the Russian tongue. I knew reams of his lines. Oceans of them. Now I had to beg his pardon. Alexander Sergeevich, forgive me! Help me. Keep me warm, blessed companion.

Memories came back to me of reciting these classic verses in my Makarov grandmother’s stuffy parlor, her potted palms and cutwork lace, the rustle of her black taffeta dress. She would give me a silver ruble for a recitation, but only if I didn’t make a single mistake. “Not so Wagnerian,” she would correct me. “This isn’t opera, child. You must think it, and then breathe it out, like an intelligent person, not a trained monkey.” She was the one who gave me poetry. Not my mother at all. My father’s family. Distant and conventional though they were.

This poem—once I’d learned it, I’d recite it in the nursery for Seryozha as we sat by the window, watching the snow as it fell. Those nights we’d listen to Avdokia tell her stories about growing up in Novinka with its peasant cottages, just like in the poem, as if she’d lived in Pushkin’s time.

And so I passed the night, shivering and whispering Pushkin to myself like a nun saying her rosary as the storm roiled outside my burrow. Like bells sounding out the liturgical hours were these bells of meter and rhyme. I remembered all of “The Gypsies.” Aleko, who wanted freedom for himself but not for Zemfira, his gypsy love. I always thought I would be a Zemfira, but now I saw I was Aleko, trying on a foreign life but unable to sustain it.

After “The Gypsies,” huge parts of Eugene Onegin came pouring from my lips, lips that had been born to speak them. There with me in that cold retreat came maddening Onegin, with his Byronic pose, and naive, book-mesmerized Tatiana and her dangerous love for him. I recited her famous letter, the dearest verse in the Russian language, as she admitted her passion, baring her heart to his cynical eye: Ya k vam pishu—chevo zhe bole? I write to you—what more to say? Oh, to someday create lines a hundredth, a thousandth as immortal as these! I vowed to the close darkness and to the storm and the branches and the heavens above that if I lived through this night I would dedicate myself to poetry alone and leave passion to those better able to withstand its fury.