“Russia has opened a new epoch,” he called to us, “an epoch of blood and iron. A struggle no longer of nation against nation but of the suffering oppressed classes against their rulers.” The roar of applause in that barn left no confusion as to what it meant to believe in revolution. He talked about the achievement of the revolution, our impact on the world.
I’d always thought that once the tsar was gone, the wheel would stop, or at least pause, giving us a chance to get used to things, but now I could see that the revolution was just beginning. It would become a way of life as people clarified and changed their perceptions of what they thought could and must be done. Already, between February and May, my father’s superior in the foreign office, Paul Miliukov—a constitutional monarchist and one of the leading lights of the Kadet party—had been run out, replaced by Mikhail Tereshchenko, a nonparty beet-sugar magnate from the Ukraine. Now there was a new coalition of ten capitalist and six socialist ministers. The socialists, still trying to find common ground, had committed to continuing the war and calming the masses. But like Lenin, the man onstage had another idea. “Only a single power can save Russia—the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies! All power to the Soviet!”
What was the government waiting for? Here was a clear message, impossible to misunderstand: end this war, redistribute the land, feed the people, and achieve peace.
After Trotsky, another man took the stage, a pro-war Defensist, but he didn’t stand a chance—it was like having to sing after Chaliapin. “The war is Russia’s face to the world,” he argued to the enormous crowd. “If we retreat, we’ll be putting out the welcome mat! With the tsar we were subjects, but with the kaiser we’ll be slaves. The worker will be back under the lash. The only way to establish ourselves in the world as a true power is to continue the war and uphold our alliances.”
I had heard this argument before and had never been able to counter it. People booed and hissed, but others shouted, “Let him talk!”
Up in our section, something was happening behind us. “The poet!” “Go on, kid.” A big young worker stood on his bench and began to speak—no, he was reciting a poem! Lucky for him he had a deep actor’s voice and was able to create a pool of attention around himself. His poem likened a burning police station to a garbage incinerator, then to the blast furnace of a great factory, and finally to the gaping mouth of a lying old man. His shock of tawny blond hair looked familiar. Suddenly I recognized him—the boy from the Stray Dog Café! The one who wanted to show his work to Mayakovsky. Tonight he wore a carrot in the buttonhole of his jacket, the long green ends dangling, and he signaled the end of his poem by unthreading the carrot and biting off the end. Had I imagined it, or had he grinned right at me as he sat down? I felt it all the way through my coat, my layers of clothes, directly into my body. I quickly turned and faced front, my heart thumping around in my chest like a bird in a hallway, looking for an exit.
Onstage, an older woman now addressed the hall. I tried to concentrate and not to check if the poet was still looking at me, but when I managed to see past all the heads, he was gone.
The soft deep voice in my ear startled me. “Not her again.” The boy had moved down to a seat right behind us. I could hardly hear through the thunder in my ears, my freckles were on fire. “She looks like a teacher I once had. I keep thinking she’s going to give me a whipping.”
It would hardly do to let him see how thrilled I was. “Maybe you need one,” I replied, not turning.
Seryozha laughed over the drawing in his lap. Pavlik glanced back over his shoulder, annoyed with this interloper. The Tagantsev girls watched the whole thing closely, storing up gossip for the next day.
“If it was you, who knows? I might let you.”
Varvara made her black eyes bulge with exasperation. Can’t you leave off for a moment?
He held out the feathery end of his carrot, tickling my nose. “Here’s the whip.”
I laughed, brushing the leaves away.
“Kuriakin. Gennady Yurievich.” The poet held out a giant hand. My hand vanished in it, and yet we shook. It was a softer hand than I had expected, more flexible. “Call me Genya.” Genya. I shivered.
“Do you mind?” Pavlik said.
Genya stuck his big face between Seryozha and me and ignored every signal from Pavlik that he was unwelcome.
“Makarova. Marina.” Then I added, “This is my brother Seryozha.” Surely I couldn’t be accused of flirting if I introduced my brother.
Down on the stage, the woman argued not only for the end of the war but also for the end of state power and for worker control of the factories. Markus shouted his approval, pounding on his knee. “Yes! Exactly!”
Genya eyed the sketch my brother was working up. Now I saw that it was of the poet reciting over the heads of the crowd. He cocked his head for a better angle. “I even look halfway intelligent. Most appreciated.” How heroic he was in Seryozha’s eyes, broad-shouldered, chin tilted up, soldiers and sailors gathered around him. “Look, let’s get out of here, Makarova Marina,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk. It’s hot in here, and I’ve had enough of the sermons.”
Pavlik crossed his arms peevishly as I left with the boy from the Stray Dog Café. “I’ll be back,” I whispered to Seryozha as I climbed over him. “If not, go home with the others.” His face was still red from being caught admiring the handsome young poet.
Outside, the air was fresh and the night finally dark, splashed with stars like flour slung into the sky. In the absence of police, all sorts of sinister people scuttled in the shadows, but who would bother me with this giant, this Genya Kuriakin? He was like a figure from a folktale, an indomitable Ilya Muromets. And the way he’d chosen me, plucked me from the crowd as a boy picks a flower from a meadow—it was so easy. As simple as destiny. Genya, a name like grain on the tongue, like a gift in the hand. That hard G grabbed you, the ya declared itself again. Ya, I.
We strolled along the Petrovskaya Embankment, where the river sparkled, shattering reflections of the lights from the bridges and the Winter Palace. The whole right side of my body turned rosy with this boy’s proximity. Walking with him was like standing next to a furnace. “I’ve seen you before, you know,” he said. Had he seen me that night at the Stray Dog after all? I didn’t reply. There was time. We had all the night ahead. “At Wolf’s bookstore. You wore a green coat and a white hat, and you were looking at poetry.”
I must have been hunting for my own book, seeing if any had sold. I wanted to tell him that, but it would seem like I was trying to impress him. And he probably wouldn’t consider my stuff poetry anyway—it wasn’t very futuristic. But this was poetry, too—this, the fragrance of sex and possibility. It was a scent that surrounded me ever since I’d started up with Kolya. As if I’d passed through a mirror and found I’d become beautiful, or interesting, something other than myself. It was foolish and vain of me, but right then I felt as if I could stretch out my arm and the bridge itself would sidle closer, rub up against me like a cat.
Genya Kuriakin leaned against the balustrade and reached out toward my face. I stood very still as he carefully picked up a lock of my hair that had fallen loose and tucked it back in. “Yes, a green coat and a white fur hat, a ribbon in your buttonhole. I wrote a poem about you. Do you want to hear it?”
“If it’s any good,” I teased him.
He stepped away from me and began:
You touch my poems
as if testing my eye
with the tip of your tongue
seeing if I’m something good
to eat.
And decide—against.
No, don’t go!
Am I really so tasteless?
Too salty?
Too tough?
Really I’m tasty as can be.
Feast on my heart, my liver
Take my tongue, my brain, my limbs
What use have I for arms
unless you take them?
You think me kitsch?
The red ribbon in your buttonhole…
What valor have you shown,
what valedictions on what battlefields?
What monsters have you slain,
Tsar-Maiden?
My poem fails to stir.
I may as well jump.
Tear out my eyes.
Fall on the tracks.
Cruel beauty.
Have you already eaten
some other poet?
Are you full?
The smell of your smoke
lingers in the aisle.
Poor poet. I could well imagine his anguish as I examined his book, then put it back, unread. With that red ribbon in my buttonhole, waiting for Kolya. It was for valor in bed, Genya—that battleground. “Yes, I remember.”
He kissed my palm, as if he were drinking from it. “No, you don’t. But that’s all right. You can remember this instead.”
We continued walking along the quay. The stars were winking on, and the warmth of his arm around my shoulder made my coat unnecessary. Then the moon began to rise, fast, illuminating his face, his eyes. Were they green or brown? His nose was long and bumpy, it had been broken. When we stopped again, I pulled the carrot from his buttonhole, took a bite, and threw the rest into the water. He kissed me then, suddenly, carrot still in my mouth, with all the awkwardness of unstudied desire. This was what young people did, I thought—simple and open, not a practiced seduction. Not hidden away in some stranger’s decadent flat. I felt younger than I had before, lighter, as if I’d been allowed to go back and try a new path.
He talked and talked. He’d come from a town in the Volga called Puchezh, north of Nizhny-Novgorod, where his father was a priest. Genya was a Bolshevik, he’d been to jail or so he said, he hated religion. He lived with a group of poets in a flat near Haymarket Square, and contributed to a journal called Okno—The Window. He considered himself a futurist. He loved Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and with bashful pride he admitted that his Okno friends had published a volume of his poetry called The Brief Memoir of a Clay Pigeon, the very book I’d picked up and put down again.
I didn’t volunteer any information about my own family—it was too embarrassing to say that my father was a Kadet member of the Provisional Government, that my mother was a Golovin, that we lived in a twelve-room flat on Furshtatskaya Street. Instead, I told him about the poets I loved, that I was graduating soon, on my way to university. “I write, too. Poems. That’s what I was doing at Wolf’s that day. Seeing if any of my books had sold.”
“I should have known. I felt it. More than just a beauty.” He leaned his back against the balustrade, folded his arms. “Well? Let’s hear one.”
I loved that he assumed I could just rattle one off, that he assumed it would be worth hearing. But which? The poem I’d written about the death of the student at Znamenskaya Square? That would impress him with my revolutionary fervor. But instead, I recited one written by the girl in the white fur hat, so we could be formally introduced.
Insomnia
My window gazes onto night,
alone and sleepless-starry.
Down Furshtatskaya, a single light
shines from the topmost story.
Who is this comrade untouched by sleep?
Does she rock a newborn baby?
Does he pine for love and weep?
Does she mourn for vanished beauty?
Another soul who can’t find peace.
I will not douse my light
and leave them in emptiness
to pass the wine-dark night.
As blissful souls drift blissfully
inside their peaceful homes,
dear stranger, you and I must ply
our oars till morning comes.
I couldn’t see his face in the dark. He was too quiet. I’d embarrassed him. Oh I should have done one about the insurrection. “You think it’s kitsch.”
He laughed, wrapping his heavy arm around me, resting his cheek against my hair. “No, it’s perfect. Just right. I was afraid you would be clever, all hard and brilliant. I hate cleverness. Without blood and bone, there’s no poetry—there’s nothing.”
What gods had favored me with this chance meeting? I felt I was teetering on top of a needle twenty feet in the air. The Neva flowed deep and wide before us, plashing, speaking its indecipherable truths, like Fate itself, unknown. Everything I’d thought about the future was dissolving in my hands. As Mina would say, I’d not taken variable x into account. And here he was, variable x. Genya plucked at my coat. “Why don’t you wear the green one? And the furry hat?”
“It’s spring,” I laughed. “And ermine would scarcely do for the Cirque Moderne. Trotsky would hardly approve.”
“He’d make an exception for you. Haven’t you heard of Marina Makarova, Comrade? The poet with the head of fire and the voice of flame? Surely you can’t begrudge her a hat. No? I didn’t think so. He says it’s all right.”
Who would have guessed it? A romantic. A man who wrote poems about burning police stations, a Bolshevik. He held me tight, buried his face in my neck. “I love you, Marina Makarova.”
How my body missed a man’s embrace. Kolya had never said he loved me. No one ever had. “You can’t love me. You just met me.”
“I don’t care. I love you. Just say my name.”
“Genya Kuriakin.”
“Say it again.” He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, as if I was a child, shouting, “Say it! I want to feel the syllables climbing your beautiful throat, the corners of my consonants stuck in your teeth, my vowels sticky on your tongue!” He spun me around, making me dizzy. His silky hair smelled of trees, of hay and meadows. When he slid me down his body, it was like sliding down the trunk of an oak.
He pressed my palm to his lips as if his face were freezing and my hand the only warmth. “Marry me, Marina. You will, won’t you?”
I laughed out of sheer happiness, the lunacy of it all. “But what shall be our wedding ring?”
“How about Saturn? He’s got rings to spare.” He reached up and pretended to grab Saturn out of the starry sky in one enormous fist and slid the ring onto my finger. “A perfect fit.”
And so we were wed.
19 At Haymarket Square
HOW COULD I HAVE lived in the same city as Genya all these years and never seen him with his pack of fellow poets, conferring in cafés, reading on street corners? They called themselves the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now. They were everywhere, reading under the General Staff Building arch, in Haymarket Square, and on the banks of the Pryazhka River right under the windows of the great Alexander Blok, which is where I first met them. It was a clear provocation, one generation of artists trying to outrage their elders. A young man of twenty-five or so was reciting a zaum poem to the perplexity of the passersby—trans-sense language poetry invented by the avant-gardists Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, whom I already knew Genya adored.
A girl in a worn skirt and wrinkled blouse handed around a cap, but the haphazard audience, two sailors and a whore, only made fun of the poet. After he was done, Genya introduced us. The poet was Anton Chernikov, the editor of their journal and the leader of their group. I was dismayed by his look of frank horror as he took in my neat shoes, my hat, my hair, and the kiss Genya planted on my neck, his arm around me. I knew I had little hope of ever winning him over. His sneering face would never accept me, the bourgeois miss. More personable was a tall strapping paint-splattered blond, Sasha Orlovsky, an artist, and Gigo Gelashvili, an earnest, shock-haired Georgian poet. He had a gift for rhyme, and a little crowd gathered as he recited—a woman selling pirozhky, a drunk, and two dockworkers. I looked up to see if Blok would appear in his fifth-floor window, but the curtains remained drawn.
The girl with the cap was called Zina Ostrovskaya. She said nothing at all when Genya introduced us, just stared in disgust. She reminded me of a small vicious animal, like a mink or a ferret. Her poetry, when it was her turn, proved sharp a
nd political. But Genya was their star. People heard him a block away and came to investigate. Idlers stopped to listen in the warm afternoon. The whores especially admired him. He incorporated everything from zaum to the language of the street, biblical cadences and Russian mythology. As a finale, he sang a sailors’ song to the tune of the Orthodox liturgy, which brought shouts of encouragement and a clattering of coins from the loitering sailors and longshoremen.
Afterward they lounged in the sun and counted their money, ate sandwiches out of their pockets. It seemed that the Transrational Interlocutors, or at least their core group, lived together near Haymarket Square in a place they called the Poverty Artel, an artel being a small factory, which in this case produced poetry. “We pool our poverty and divide it among our members,” Genya joked. I wondered if these street-corner performances were enough to live on.
“Oh, we do all kinds of things,” he said. “Painting houses, putting up handbills. Anything people have for us.”
And how had they managed to avoid the draft? He shrugged. “Gigo and Sasha have student deferments. I’m an only son. Anton here was discharged for mental instability.”
“Unsuitability for service,” corrected the scowling avant-gardist, crushing out a cigarette.
“The apartment’s in Anton’s name.” My new love tossed a piece of his sandwich to a strutting seagull. “Nobody’s registered but him, just in case the government changes its mind. Makes us a little harder to find.”
I wanted to visit the Poverty Artel, but Genya was oddly shy about letting me come over. I couldn’t understand. I had no compunctions about being alone with him, about moving on from kisses to love. I even made Seryozha go to a drugstore and buy condoms, over his vociferous protests. I had to bribe him with a set of pastels. What was Genya waiting for? “It’s a flophouse,” he said. “You don’t want to see that.” And when he walked me home to Furshtatskaya Street that day, and we kissed in the parkway under the bright-leaved trees, I asked him to come up with me. He gazed at the fancy plasterwork and the iron balconies, at a woman coming out to walk two matched Borzois, and shook his head. “I’m not going in there.”