A new page hit the developer. Upon the familiar stone steps of the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma, a man harangued a large crowd. I recognized the long, equine face and squarish head of cropped hair—Kerensky, the radical lawyer and Duma member. Father considered him a rabble-rouser, vain and emotionally unstable. But he got results. He wore a military tunic instead of the usual frock coat and tie, and the photo caught him midbreath, giving an impassioned speech. “What did he say?”
Solomon Moiseivich indicated with lifted palms for Seryozha to keep agitating the print. “He called for seizure of the telegraph, the railway, all the government offices. He demanded the ministers be arrested.”
Other elements in the Duma were moving ahead of Father. The telephone was already out, they must have taken it. Again, I felt the thrill of the burning police files. This was really happening. And we were all part of it, together, the whole country moving into the unknown.
My brother pulled the photo into the stop bath as the big man continued his story. “Kerensky’s playing liaison between the Duma and the Workers’ Group. It’s now called the Workers’ Soviet. He shuttles between them like a tennis ball. The Duma’d better do something, or the Soviet will.” We demand a Workers’ Soviet. We demand ice cream on Tuesdays and an automobile for every scrubwoman. So they had their Soviet now. What else might have happened while we dozed in the Katzevs’ parlor? I could not believe how fast the world could change once it started to move.
In the tank, a hall with pillars and red flags appeared on the sheet, hundreds of pale faces. “This is the Soviet. Think, Mama, this morning these people were prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Now they’re meeting with delegates and writing proclamations.”
Sofia Yakovlevna covered her mouth, her eyes glittering but unsure.
“But which one is the government?” Shusha asked. “The Soviet or the Duma?”
“It remains to be seen, my dove,” her father replied.
As we settled down to sleep that night, all of us stinking of the darkroom chemicals, there was one image I could not get out of my head. A rough band of common soldiers, eighty men or more, posing for Solomon Moiseivich around a commandeered automobile, grimly defiant, each face fiercely focused. Men who just yesterday had been about to be shipped to the front to fight in this hopeless war were suddenly masters of their own fate, history thrust into their hands. What would they do with such unexpected power? You could see it in their eyes, behind their defiance—a terrified confusion. Today they were for the revolution, but what about tomorrow? They themselves did not know.
15 Visitors
GUNFIRE SOUNDED THROUGHOUT THE following day. Whoever was shooting—police, officers who’d escaped the mutineers, workers—it was clear that the regime wasn’t handing over the keys to the tsar’s washroom quite so easily. Varvara never returned, and gunfire or not, Seryozha had left with Solomon Moiseivich, propping a note on the divan where he’d slept, a drawing of him bearing the film case behind the bearded photographer, followed by a parade of armed mice.
I did my best to be cooperative, to make it easier and more fun for everybody to be locked up in the apartment. I played poker with the girls and Aunt Fanya, rounds of chess with Mina. I even let her win. She was a sulky loser and hadn’t had Dmitry Makarov to teach her the moves of the masters. I taught Dunya to waltz as her little sister banged out Tales from the Vienna Woods on the piano. I won a bet with young Shusha by walking on my hands all the way down the hall. All this was to make it up to Sofia Yakovlevna for defying her the day before. She was always so kind, so tolerant. But she was accustomed to her own girls, who did exactly what she said.
I even offered to help with lunch. I stood in the small kitchen, chopping cabbage inelegantly before a tall window filled with plants in pots. I’d never cooked anything in my life. Sofia Yakovlevna chopped onions the way a gambler shuffles cards, not even looking at her hands and the flashing knife. “You let that girl influence you too much,” she scolded me as we worked. “We love Varvara, but such an angry girl I’ve never seen. You be careful. She’s going to bring such trouble down around her. I can see it as if it were written on her face.”
“She’s more bark than bite,” I said, sucking my finger where I’d nicked it with my knife—it was scalpel-sharp.
The older woman wagged her head, neither yes nor no. Lifting the cutting board over a pan smoking with oil, she scraped the onions in with a whoosh and a sizzle, the delicious smell blooming. Steam coated the window. Broth boiled in another kettle. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Listen to me. I know she’s your friend, but she’s going to bring misery to everyone around her. You keep doing what you’re doing. Go to school, write your poems. You’re not a revolutionary—you’re a girl from a good family who has such wonderful prospects if she doesn’t get swept away by all this.”
She looked at my pile of mangled cabbage and sighed. “Like this.” She took the knife from me, cut an even wedge from a second cabbage, and began slicing it so thinly you’d think she was shaving its face. She watched me as I tried again, using the blade as she’d showed me. Uniform shreds of cabbage peeled off the wedge. Her smile worked its way from behind her sternness like sun from behind a cloud. “See? You’re not so hopeless. You should get that cook of your parents’ to show you a few things—someday you might have to live in this world.”
Just the words I’d thrown at my great-aunt.
We sat down to lunch, jumpy from the sound of gunfire in the street. Suddenly shots rang out above our heads. Were they shooting from the roof? Now it was returned, and bullets shattered the masonry around our windows. One broke an upper pane. Dunya screamed. “Get down!” Uncle Aaron shouted, and we all dived under the table, grabbing for each other’s hands. Dunya was crying. Her aunt held her. “Tishe, tishe…” Sofia Yakovlevna prayed a Jewish prayer. I had never heard her speak in the language I assumed was Hebrew. We waited to see if there would be more gunfire, but it seemed to be over. We had just begun crawling out from under the table when we heard the thunder of booted feet in the hall. Fists pounded on the door, then something harder—a rifle butt.
“Oh God, here they come,” Mina whispered and we crawled back under. “Shh,” her mother whispered. “Maybe they’ll go away.”
“Search party,” a man called out. “By the power of the Military Revolutionary Committee, open this door!”
“I’ll get it,” Uncle Aaron said, crawling out backward. I could see his feet in their worn slippers, the heels he never pulled up when he donned them. “Coming, Comrades!” Cold air wafted in from the hall, and heavy boots stamped into the flat, all we could see from under the tablecloth.
“Are you here alone, Grandpa?”
“The family’s under the table.”
“Tell them to come out.”
Dunya and Shusha were crying. Mina held my hand tightly as we came out to face five unshaved, grim soldiers, three with rifles, bayonets fixed, two with pistols, drawn and ready. Crude red armbands decorated the sleeves of their patched greatcoats. It was one thing to see mutineers on the street busy breaking into a police station or throwing rifles to a crowd, but quite another to have them just a few feet away pointing their guns at you. Mina was crushing my hand.
“Someone’s firing from these windows,” shouted the eldest, with a squared-off beard and close-set eyes, his cap cocked back on his head. “Hands where I can see them.”
We held our hands in the air. “Please…there’s no one but us, Officer,” begged Sofia Yakovlevna. “I swear to God.”
The man laughed harshly. “No more officers now, Mama. Only men. Spread out, boys. Rykov—you watch them.”
A red-eyed boy who looked like he hadn’t slept in days pointed his pistol at each of us in turn as we all listened, following the crashing progress of the searchers through the flat. I silently prayed we would live through this. The gun jerked from me to Sofia Yakovlevna to Shusha in her red ribbons—as if any one of us might attack him if he blinked. He was g
oing to kill us by accident. “We’re not going to hurt you, son,” said little, hunchbacked Aunt Fanya. “You don’t have to keep pointing that thing at us.”
“You shut up, Grandma, unless you want to eat a lead sandwich,” he said.
Then we heard it. Gunfire, directly above us. Whoever was shooting had made it to the roof. The mutineers emerged from the rooms at a run and thundered back through the front door. “Sorry, citizens!” shouted the square-bearded one as they flew from the flat.
It took a moment for the blood to return to my head. I felt dizzy. My hands shook. They’d only been in the flat a minute, two at most, like a vicious thunderstorm. We could hear their boots on the roof. Shots. Scuffling, screams. It went on and on—what were they doing to him? Finally, we saw the body, flung off the roof and down into the street. Now the sound of their boots, clattering back down the staircase, and the slam of the door as they left the building.
Uncle Aaron and Aunt Fanya went back to their bedroom to lie down, and Sofia Yakovlevna moved the rest of us into the photography studio with its black curtains, its windows facing away from Liteiny, where most of the gunfire was coming from. She built a fire in the studio stove to take off the chill, though our mood was damp as the Baltic. I peered through the gaps in the curtains, watching people moving along the sidewalks. One group was busy breaking into a food store. Soldiers came out of a wine shop, their arms full of bottles. I felt less like the girl who’d burned the police files and more like I had yesterday—vulnerable, overwhelmed. Uncle Aaron thought the shooter was an officer enraged at the mutineers, deciding to revenge himself on the disloyal troops.
I thought about Volodya, handsome in his fur-lined greatcoat. What would he do if his troops mutinied? Would he bend, like the little birches? Would he understand the great sea change that had come, that the masses could not suffer anymore, that they’d risen up? Or would he insist on discipline? O Holy Theotokos, I prayed, let him be wounded…not really wounded, just a graze, or a touch of fever…lying in a tent, out of the way in some field hospital. Let him not be telling his men to get back in line, to salute and march on.
Shusha curled up in an armchair and mournfully ran her red hair ribbon through her fingers, sucking her thumb as she hadn’t done for years. Mina went into the darkroom to investigate the damage. Dunya sat with her mother, staring sad-eyed at the door. I could still hear the man’s screaming. What was he thinking, shooting at the soldiers? How many of them did he think he could kill? A whole revolution? Yet I would never forget the vicious reprisal, either. One death did not salve another.
We could hear Mina sweeping up glass, the delicate clatter as she deposited it in the waste can. I knew Sofia Yakovlevna was thinking of her husband, in the thick of it with his camera. And my brother, having at last found something he would die for.
Dunya started weeping again. “They didn’t have to kill him.”
“It’s out of our hands, Dunya, dear.”
Dunya wrapped her arms around her mother and pressed their foreheads together. I envied them.
“Shushele, why don’t you get the magic lantern? We haven’t seen that in a long time.”
The girl jumped to her feet and ran to the shelf where the lantern and the slides were kept. Yes, it was exactly what we needed. The Katzevs had a marvelous collection of hand-painted glass slides from their mother’s own childhood—of Afanasyev fairy tales and Jewish stories and travelogues. As Shusha set up the old projector, Mina emerged from the darkroom, smelling of the vinegary stop bath. “Aren’t we a little old for this?” she said when she saw the projector.
“You don’t have to watch if you don’t like it,” said her little sister. “Dunya, you choose.”
It was nice of Shusha. After the afternoon’s incursion the gentle middle sister seemed the hardest hit.
“Vasilisa the Beautiful,” Dunya said softly.
It was my favorite, too. “God, the one’s sucking her thumb, the other’s talking to magic dolls,” Mina said, leaning next to me by the curtained windows.
Sofia Yakovlevna ignored her, waiting for Shusha to put in the first slide, which depicted a pretty little girl and a stout father in a long boyar’s caftan. She began telling the story of Vasilisa, whose dying mother leaves her a magic doll. “Zhili-buili, once upon a time, there lived a merchant who had a daughter named Vasilisa the Beautiful…” The slides were exquisitely painted, sharp and vivid, not like the factory-made things one saw in most people’s nurseries. “When she was nine, her mother fell deathly ill,” she continued in a voice both soft and rich. “She called Vasilisa to her side and gave her a doll. Not just any doll, mind. A magic doll. She told her daughter that whenever she needed help, she should take the doll out and give it a little to drink, a little to eat. And then the doll would tell her what she needed to do.”
Shusha was having trouble removing the slide. “Oh let me do it,” said Mina impatiently. “You’re going to break it.”
That made me smile. Even our scientist wanted the reassurance of a story, her mother’s voice, this tale of a girl who has a secret way of finding help in a wild world. I was sorry Seryozha wasn’t here. He’d never heard Sofia Yakovlevna do her slide show, and these were wonders he would appreciate. But I thought of him on the streets of Petrograd at Solomon Moiseivich’s side and knew he needed to be there. Father always accused me of not letting him grow up. Maybe it was true at that.
Halfway through the story, the flat’s doorbell rang. “Pretend we’re not here,” whispered Dunya.
“I’ll go,” I offered, but Sofia Yakovlevna shook her head vehemently. “You girls stay out of sight.”
But when she opened the door to the flat, it was Varvara’s voice we heard, already in the parlor talking to Aunt Fanya. She followed the old lady in, her bobbed hair matted, her clothes wrinkled. “What are you doing back here in the dark?” she said, then saw the slide on the wall, Vasilisa feeding the doll to help her with the witch Baba Yaga’s impossible chores. “Really? Fairy stories, today of all days?”
“The soldiers broke in,” Shusha said. “Someone was shooting. They threw him off the roof. It was horrible.”
Mina’s glasses picked up the light from the magic lantern’s flame. “The one guarding us almost shot us.”
“I’m sure they weren’t looking for chubby chemistry students,” Varvara said cheerfully. Her good mood seemed tasteless, as out of place as a polka at a funeral.
“They didn’t spare him,” I said.
Our gloomy faces should have told her how bad it was, but she just shrugged. “It was a risk he took.”
“You didn’t hear him,” I said.
“You’re not asking me why I’m here.” She grinned, fairly dancing on the balls of her feet.
“You got hungry?” Mina guessed.
On Sofia Yakovlevna’s face, a mixture of fear and curiosity. “Would you like some shchi? Marina helped me make it.”
Varvara’s smirk told me what she thought of my embryonic culinary skills. “Oh she did? Very domestic. No, I’m fine. Dandy.” She used the English word. Now that she had our attention, she went to the studio costume rack, plucked a tricorn hat with a plume off the shelf, and dropped it onto my head. “Your Imperial Majesty!” She bowed. “Where are you right now?”
“Stavka,” Shusha said. “That’s what Papa said.”
“A good guess, my kitten, but in this case—wrong.” Varvara took my hand as if we were dancing a quadrille and led me to the velvet armchair where Solomon Moiseivich so often photographed clients. She seated me in it, then handed me a vase as a scepter. “His Imperial Highness is on his special train, returning to Petrograd.”
“Bozhe moi,” said Sofia Yakovlevna. Good Lord.
“Accompanied by a trainload of loyal troops.”
This was it—the tsar would crush the revolution. The mutineers would go to the firing squad or to the front, and all would be back to the way it was before.
“Yes, you’ve decided to end this revolt busin
ess once and for all.” She shook the plume, tickling my nose. “Show us who’s boss—or so you think. But here’s the thing. What you don’t know is that the telegraph workers are on our side. They report straight to the Soviet.”
“How do you know this?” Mina demanded, folding her arms across her chest.
“I’ve been spending time at the Tauride Palace. At the Soviet. And as we speak, it seems, the railway workers are shifting and shunting His Imperial Highness around like a badminton cock. ‘We’re so sorry, Gospodar, there’s snow on the tracks. We’ll have to send you to Petrograd by way of Pskov! Such a nuisance, I know! But there’s nothing for it.’”
The genius. It took my breath away.
“And listen,” Varvara said, squeezing my shoulder. “Wherever he stops, his soldiers—his most loyal troops—get wind of the revolution and melt away like cheap candles. He’ll be lucky to have a footman left by morning.”
Sofia Yakovlevna opened the dark curtain behind her, letting in the afternoon sun and dispelling the last of our dreaminess. Her face looked older in the winter light. “What about the other troops? The ones they sent when the mutiny broke out?”
“That’s the best of all,” Varvara said, perching on the arm of my chair. She smelled sharp and stale—how long had it been since she’d bathed? “Evidently some of the tsar’s advisers think a slaughter would look bad to the Allies. The troops have been told not to come into Petrograd. They’re sitting at Dno, waiting for orders—which aren’t going to come.” The crooked grin widened. She looked like a child at Christmas who actually received the pony he asked for. “Check and mate.”
And it occurred to me then that my friend had been born at just the right time. More than any of us, me or Mina or even Father, she was in exact alignment with the times. Its dangers weren’t dangers to her; its violence matched her own.
Mina’s mother paced, her hand to her mouth, trying to understand what it would all mean for her family. She and Aunt Fanya began to talk, and Mina joined them.