She entered the world like a spy.
She entered the world the queen of hearts.
Her hair a flame.
Her bones bleaching white
While he gambled her away.
Part II
My Revolution
(February 1917–October 1917)
10 International Women’s Day
IN THE MIDST OF that terrible winter of 1917, after weeks of twenty, thirty below zero, the weather suddenly turned fair. Overnight, thermometers soared from four below to forty degrees, just in time for the International Women’s Day march. Had the weather not cooperated, who knows whether events would have unfolded as they did? That short warm spell changed the world.
What is history? Is it the trace of a footstep in wet cement? Is it the story of important men in smoky rooms and on battlefields? The inevitable outcome of great impersonal forces? Or is it a collision of chance events—like the sudden rise of the mercury on February 23, 1917, in the midst of a hungry midwinter and a ruinous war? The day before, Putilov locked out its thousands of workers—the owners claiming there wasn’t enough materiel to keep the factory running, though it was more likely in retaliation for striking. So the essential ingredients happened to come together on that one day—thousands of unemployed and striking workers, warm weather, and the Women’s Day march.
I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.
But up on Furshtatskaya Street, it could have been any Thursday morning. An old woman walked her dog, which trotted ahead, visiting huge piles of snow. A wagon clattered by. Dvorniks’ brooms swept passages and pavements in front of chic apartment buildings. Father, leaving for the Duma that springlike morning, briefcase in hand, had a swing in his step. He wore his fedora instead of a fur shapka. When he was gone, I shook Seryozha awake. They’d closed school in anticipation of huge crowds turning out for the march, hoping to keep the children off the streets—though of course the opposite was likely. My sleepyheaded brother slunk further under the covers, his tangled blond hair on the pillow. I shook him again. He rubbed his eyes, stretched, peered at the clock, groaned. “You go. I hate crowds. Anyway Papa said to stay in.”
“We’re not staying in. Get dressed.” I threw his clothes at him. Father had warned us last night, “There’s likely to be trouble,” but what were the chances I’d stay home with eighty thousand women, strikers, and soldiers’ wives coming out to demonstrate? I fetched the water pitcher from my brother’s dresser and prepared to anoint him with it. A half hour later, we emerged onto Liteiny Prospect, already teeming with people marveling at the mild weather—shopkeepers chatting with customers, the florist with the greengrocer. The air vibrated with life. Of course Seryozha dawdled, having to admire every window display—the antiques shop, the stationer’s. Like a cop, I took his arm and marched him forward to Mina’s flat on Nevsky Prospect.
The Katzevs’ apartment at the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky smelled of kasha. Mina was still finishing breakfast, but Varvara already had her coat on and she paced like a caged leopard. Mina’s mother, Sofia Yakovlevna, poured us glasses of tea and insisted Seryozha sit down and try a savory cheburek. Everyone there petted Seryozha. It was a boyless family, and how they spoiled him—Mina’s two younger sisters vied for his attention, her mother plied him with snacks and praise. Then Mina’s father, Solomon Moiseivich, a bearish, jovial man, appeared from the photography studio off the sitting room carrying a big box camera, tripod, and case. He squeezed my brother’s skinny shoulder. “Ah, my young assistant’s arrived. I can use the help today, believe me.”
A rapturous look replaced Seryozha’s former sulkiness. He loved this old man—a real artist who praised my brother’s sketches and silhouettes and brought him into the darkroom whenever he could. Seryozha picked up the heavy camera case in which Papa Katzev kept his film, though I’m sure it weighed thirty pounds. But he would walk through hell to protect Katzev’s film, even if his arms fell off.
“You children stay with Papa,” Sofia Yakovlevna called after us. “If anything happens, come right back up.”
Solomon Moiseivich kissed his wife on her plump cheek. “They’ll be fine, Mama. I’ll keep an eye on them.”
A skeptical smile edged along her maternal face. It was highly unlikely that the photographer, under a black cloth, could keep an eye on anyone, let alone four young people. The younger girls clamored to be brought along, wheedled and protested at being kept inside, but she would not be budged.
In the street, the sun splashed the storefronts, gilding churches and washing the faces of apartment houses all down Nevsky Prospect to the Admiralty needle. It poured over idle office workers and sleepy clerks, haulers and porters. It felt like a holiday. Carrying the big camera, Solomon Moiseivich shouldered and Excuse me’d his way to the curb, and we four filled in right behind him, Seryozha guarding the camera case as if bandits would come and rob him of it.
Around us, the crowd thickened—well-heeled ladies, gentlemen smelling of cedar chips, pale shopgirls and carters, carpenters and doormen, schoolkids on their day off, laughing and shoving. Even a few drunks came out to soak up the sun. A vendor moved among us selling sunflower seeds. “Watch your purse,” a young man told his pretty wife.
A sudden whiff of cigar smoke made me think of Kolya. “Look, here they come.” A man who looked like a poolroom sharp in his checkered coat and flat cap pointed toward the Admiralty.
At first I saw nothing. Then, way up at the end of Nevsky, a black dot appeared. A bit of red. As I watched, the dot grew into a bobbing mass, adorned with small smears of scarlet. Now a noise, faint, like the whispering of waves on a pebbly beach, a low gravelly chatter, arose and soon echoed off the buildings and rolled down the boulevard. The marchers were chanting but we weren’t close enough to hear the words.
“They said there might be a hundred thousand out today,” said the man in the checkered coat, chewing a handful of sunflower seeds and spitting the shells on the ground.
Varvara squeezed my arm. I squeezed back. We felt the shimmering possibility that things could be different. No—they were already different. This column of black coming toward us felt like history itself. Mina chewed her chapped lips and eyed the policemen shifting nervously from foot to foot, holding their truncheons behind them. If her father hadn’t been three feet away, she would have bolted. The presence of the police made my stomach hurt. What if they went wild, as they did the day the women stormed the bakery?
Closer the marchers came. So many women…my eye had only beheld such numbers on the parade ground of the Field of Mars. But these weren’t soldiers. They were simple workers, mouths open, chanting, We want bread. Bread! Was that too much to ask? Now we could read the banners: DOWN WITH HUNGER. BREAD AND JUSTICE! WE WANT BREAD AND THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY. There would be no more pretending that the city didn’t see them. Their footsteps resounded on the wooden paving blocks, their high voices begging for justice. I was too young to have witnessed the Revolution of 1905, when the poor had come to petition the tsar and were slaughtered. Their reward? Twelve more years of hunger and oppression, and a few crumbs of concession to the middle class, like the powerless Duma. I prayed this time would be different.
Now they were upon us.
Such faces! Bathed in morning light, on this miraculous day, it was as if God himself had blessed the procession, had dipped in gold their banners, their shabby coats and worn scarves. Shy women marched arm in arm, in fours and fives, tens and twenties, unused to such boldness, following behind their more determined sisters holding the banners. What desperate bravery at a time when it had been declared that any two people assembling in public could be arrested. How must this feel to them—to emerge from their dark airless slums, hidden away in the shadows of the factories on the outskirts of the city, to walk in the sunshine down the most glittering street of them all? To bear witness to all they had suffered and
demand that justice be done?
I wished Mother could be here, Father, too, so that they could see this woman. This one, with the white scarf pulled low on her forehead marching along with her friend with the large bruised eyes. They smiled, awed by their own audacity. These women stitched our boots, wove the cloth we wore, cut our coats, fashioned the buttons, knit our underwear and our hose. These women—and men, too—wouldn’t stay hidden with their suffering one more day. Meanwhile, Seryozha expertly handed frames of unexposed film to Solomon Moiseivich and stacked the exposed ones into the case, his fears forgotten. If Kolya could only see all this, surely he wouldn’t be able to maintain his cynicism about the people’s cause.
Now a group of stylish women passed by under the banner: SOCIALIST WOMEN STAND FOR NEW LIVES. I could well imagine myself among them. A young woman in a tricorn hat and bobbed hair could be me in a year or two. It was their march to begin with, but their movement had been joined not just by a phalanx but by an army.
A tram running alongside the marchers braked to a stop, its female driver getting out and leaving her tramload stranded. Her car blocked the one behind it, and soon the smell of static electricity and the screech of hot metal stained the air. How comical the passengers looked, peering out the windows, confused to be so at the mercy of the working class. Varvara laughed. “You’re not going to make that appointment,” she called to the bewildered passengers still in their seats.
OKHTA TEXTILE ON STRIKE! WE WANT BREAD AND THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY!
Then came the families of the soldiers, solemn as a religious procession. FEED THE CHILDREN OF THE DEFENDERS OF PEACE IN THE HOMELAND begged a banner held by a woman in a blue scarf, surrounded by soldiers’ wives with their half-grown children, old people, mothers and fathers. They seemed even more unsure of themselves than the workers did, unpracticed in the art of public protest, driven by desperation. INCREASE THE FOOD RATION FOR SOLDIERS’ FAMILIES! FOR THE DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM AND THE NATIONAL PEACE!
We all felt the sea change, even Mina. “Feed the children!” we shouted. “Feed the soldiers’ families! Urah!”
“Look, Marina!” Varvara nudged me. “It’s Belhausen.”
Belhausen knitwear! I even recognized the woman who had taken the stack of flyers from Varvara that night. Their banner proclaimed: IF A WOMAN IS A SLAVE, THERE WILL BE NO FREEDOM. LONG LIVE EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN! We waved and called out, and perhaps they recognized us, but in any event, the woman raised a hand in salute.
A song began among the textile women. Varvara knew the words:
Arise, arise, working people.
Arise against the enemies, hungry brother!
Forward! Forward!
Let the cry of vengeance
Sound out from the people!
Mina took a step back. She caught my eye—vengeance?
The rich, the exploiters, deprive you of your work,
Tear your last piece of bread as the stock market rises,
As they sell conscience and honor, as they mock you.
The tsar drinks the blood of the people.
He needs soldiers, so give him your sons!
The police, so vastly outnumbered, could do nothing but bounce on the balls of their feet.
“They said it wasn’t time,” shouted a sharp-chinned woman holding a banner on a pole that seemed too large for her hands. PUTILOV WORKERS SUPPORT WOMEN’S RIGHTS! “Our brothers told us it wasn’t time. But when the women say it’s time, it’s time! A pregnancy only lasts nine months, brother—the baby comes whether you say so or not.”
The women cheered, and we joined them. Suddenly, a well-dressed couple stepped back from the curb. Then other onlookers began pressing back toward the buildings. Mina instinctively took my arm. “What’s happening?” A buzz of anxiety arose from the crowd, and then someone shouted “Cossacks!” “Seryozha!” I called, but my brother remained at Katzev’s side, handing him another frame of film. Mina pulled me toward their door as the Cossacks—the knout of the tsar—emerged from Liteiny Prospect mounted on flared-nostriled horses.
Mina stood on tiptoe. “Papa!” she shrieked.
I dug my nails into Mina’s arm. Solomon Katzev didn’t move and Seryozha remained steadfast beside him. The mounted men gathered at the edge of the march, and their officer urged his horse into the mass as you would urge it into a river. Whip raised, the bayonet of his rifle gleaming, saber at his side. I clung to Mina. We could smell the sweat of their horses as they passed, heard the creak of their saddles, their black capes flung behind them. One by one, the Cossacks waded into the frightened column. Poor women, little boys, old men, all edged backward to give these fierce men passage. But the whips stayed on their shoulders, rifles on saddles, savage sabers at their sides. Not one Cossack lifted a hand against the demonstrators. They simply rode through.
Urah! It was a miracle. Everyone—protestors, onlookers—threw their arms in the air and cheered, wept. The sound made the horses wheel, white-eyed, necks lathered from fear, but the Cossacks kept them well in hand. Sobbing, shouting, I embraced Mina, Varvara, and a woman in a sealskin coat standing behind me. One of the riders nodded at the crowd, touching his shaggy hat in the flick of a salute. Solomon Moiseivich came out from under the cloth, and I saw him squeeze the bulb of the shutter.
“You should have been there, Mama,” said Mina, slurping up the golden broth swimming with noodles as steam coated her glasses. “They didn’t fire. I couldn’t believe it.”
“We saw it all from the window,” said her sister Dunya.
“Nothing happened anyway,” said their little sister, Shusha. “You should have let us go.”
Sofia Yakovlevna shook her head. “You could all be murdered.”
We drank our rich, fragrant soup while Varvara imitated the woman from Putilov. “A pregnancy only lasts nine months, brother—the baby comes whether you say so or not.”
“Well, this pregnancy’s lasted twelve years,” said Mina’s old uncle Aaron. “The baby’s going to be huge.” Like everyone today, he was thinking of the failed Revolution of 1905.
“Three hundred years, if you ask me,” said Aunt Fanya, a tiny hunchbacked lady with Mina’s sharp sense of humor.
After the meal, Papa Katzev and my brother retreated to the darkroom. While we waited to see what they had captured of the day, Mina’s aunt taught us to play American poker using buttons from the sewing box as chips. I loved the names—her aunt used the American words: hold, call. Aces and eights. Of course Mina, our mathematician, won handily, but gradually the rest of us caught on. As we played, Uncle Aaron talked about his days in New York organizing garment workers before being deported. I had no idea that Mina’s family was so political.
I was raking in my first pot when Seryozha appeared in the studio doorway, his hair damp and hanging over his eyes, accompanied by a strong draught of vinegary chemicals. “We’re ready.”
We pressed into the close confines of the darkroom—like a little theater—arranging ourselves around the wooden sinks with their enamel trays. I never tired of seeing an empty sheet of paper become a scene, a portrait, that magic, although my eyes smarted from the fumes. “Everybody in?” said Solomon Moiseivich, then he turned out all the lights but one, coated in red paint. He placed a large negative onto a square of white, shut the frame, and turned on the light. “One,” he slowly counted, “two, three,” then turned it off again and slid the paper into the first tray of chemicals.
Before us bloomed an image on the white page—the first line of marchers, the empty cobbled street ahead of them, their dark figures entering from the right, as if from the past, walking onstage, their mass dividing the sheet in half. I could see history’s footprint in that moment. I had been there.
11 The Two Mariyas
TWO DAYS LATER, I sat with Mother at a table for six at the Hotel Europa, a spacious room decorated in the art nouveau fashion. All around us, soignée women lunched, well-dressed families fussed over pretty children, and business associates tucked in
to steaks and roasted chickens. At the end of the long room, a string quartet stitched a Bach concerto onto the fragrant air, while not five hundred yards away on Nevsky Prospect, strikers milled behind a cordon of soldiers. How ridiculous to be waiting here for the appearance of Great-Aunt Mariya Grigorievna and elderly Cousin Masha, visiting from Moscow.
Mother removed her gloves, slowly and beautifully, a small performance in itself, glancing about to see if she knew anyone, and of course she did. We ordered tea, which came in traditional glasses with silver holders. I studied the waiter, a somber long-faced man who resembled Pasternak. He looked like he’d been born old, as if joy had never crossed that masklike face. Did he hate us? Did he secretly hope we would all choke on our sturgeon in cherry sauce? This dumb show of privilege—the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask. But who? Not Mother. Certainly not Great-Aunt Mariya Grigorievna, whom I could see approaching, regal in an old-fashioned hat decorated with a crow’s wing, followed by dour, sharp-faced Cousin Masha in a purple velvet beret.
We exchanged obligatory kisses, for which I had to hold my breath—my great-aunt smelled of roses kept in a box with dried bones and vinegar. Masha smelled of violet eau de toilette and an illicit cigarette. The host seated my great-aunt and placed her snuffling pug in her lap. “What is happening to this place?” she spluttered. “Your local orators have been holding forth all morning. We’ve almost converted to Bolshevism and it’s not even lunchtime.”
Mother laughed. The traitor! She supported Father’s dreams of a constitutional monarchy, but when she visited her family, sometimes her politics grew hazy.
Cousin Masha, a small homely woman with the rabid self-righteousness of someone who’d taken up plainness as a cause, thrust out her sharp chin. “Don’t laugh, it’s perfectly horrid. ‘We demand a Workers’ Soviet. We demand ice cream on Tuesdays and an automobile for every scrubwoman.’ Our nerves are worn to a thread. To a thread!” Now I couldn’t help laughing, and she glared at me, as if it had been me protesting under her window. I was glad we had a seat between us. Cousin Masha was a pincher and a tattletale, eager to spot one’s sensitivities and air them in public.