“Come in the back way then. That’s what Varvara does.” And then into my salmon-pink boudoir.
“I don’t go in the back way,” he said stiffly.
I was mortified. I had offended him, suggesting he use the servants’ entry. “Well, come in the front, then, and meet my mother.”
“Some other time,” he said, chastely kissing my temple.
Yet later from our windows I caught sight of him, loitering in the park strip under the shade of the burgeoning trees.
I sat at my place at dinner, imagining how this would all look to Genya: Mother in her filmy summer organza; Father relating amusing anecdotes about the foreign office; Tripov the art collector, his fat fingers bedecked with rings; the Gromitskys quarreling about their visit to Capri; Basya in a starched apron and cap, handing around asparagus. How Genya would mock all this, and rightly so. The chatter and clatter of silverware seemed almost unbearable to me now, the ludicrous epergne spilling over with roses, the chandelier whose crystals Basya had to disassemble and soak one by one. These days it was becoming dusty. She did as little as possible, and with ever greater insolence—Mother was becoming afraid of her. The revolutionary feeling was growing in the city, even in her own home. I could see my mother’s eyes stray from time to time to the chandelier, to the little strings of dust, and I noticed that she avoided looking into Basya’s face as she offered more wine. I missed what people were saying as they tried to draw me out. I was further and further away, thinking about Genya waiting for me in the parkway, in the silvery White Night. Tonight I would make love with him. Even if it was behind a statue in the Summer Garden.
Finally the dishes were cleared, and I seized the moment to flee. I threw on a light shawl and ran down to Furshtatskaya Street. It was almost ten, a warm June evening—bright enough to read a newspaper. The leaves cast shadows on the ground. For a moment I thought he hadn’t come. But there he was, standing under a tree in the eerie dappled shade of the northern summer evening. I ran to him, kissed him breathlessly, tilting my face up to him as if I were trying to kiss the sky.
We walked together slowly through the cool silvery streets toward the Summer Garden. He kept stopping to look at me, or walked backward in front of me. How different it was to be with Genya. When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me. Genya bent toward me as if I were the source of light. Strange—for once I didn’t feel the impulse to show off for him. Mother always scolded me for my blurtings, my “antics,” my tendency to tell people more than they ever wanted to know. “One attracts others with mystery,” she said, “not by turning one’s pockets inside out.” Genya treated me as if I were as mysterious as a hidden spring. I loved seeing myself through his eyes. Everything around us shimmered in this dream light. I felt drunk, though I’d only had one glass of champagne. “You’re like a ghost in that dress,” he said.
“I’m a corpse—is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not a ghost then. A sleepwalker. In a white nightgown,” he said. “Barefoot, with a candle in hand.”
I’d worn a white dress intentionally. I wanted to glow in his memory, to haunt him, yes, the way Kolya had once haunted me. I hummed the dreamy grand waltz from Sleeping Beauty, taking his hand and turning under his arm.
In the Summer Garden, the unearthly twilight shifted through the old trees, illuminating the mossy sculptures lining the gravel paths. Every lover in Petrograd was out tonight, breathing with us the green of the linden trees as birdsong tumbled liquid through the air.
“I want to do something astonishing,” Genya declared. “Something heroic. Kill myself in your honor. Swim to Antarctica. Fight a duel.” He mimed fencing an imaginary adversary on my behalf. He bit the shoulder of my thin dress, tugged at it like a dog. “I’d like to tear this off with my teeth,” he said in my ear.
“Please! Not in front of Diana.” Clutching demurely at my bodice, I pointed at the glowing bare-breasted huntress with the moon in her sculpted hair.
“She doesn’t like me,” said Genya, resting his cheek on top of my head. I wasn’t a short girl but he towered above me as we gazed at the glaring goddess, poised with bow and arrow.
“She doesn’t like men.”
“And why should she? Why would any woman?” He rubbed his stubbly cheek against mine. “Big hairy protuberant fellows. Always knocking something over or giving a speech. If I were a woman I’d have nothing to do with any of us.” His breath was sweet and smelled of fennel seeds.
As a schoolgirl, I’d imagined I’d walk here someday with a lover in summer just like this…though I always pictured characters from Pushkin: a man in a swallowtail coat, me in a summer gown and bonnet. The idea of Genya in breeches and a swallowtail coat made me laugh. A bearskin and bast boots were more like it. Or chain mail.
“Come home with me tonight,” he said, in the shadows of a lesser path, leafy and fragrant. “I wish I had some better place to take you…but I told the boys to clear off. We’ll have it to ourselves.”
So it had come at last. I passed my hand back and forth, so that the shadows of the linden leaves cast their shapes on my palm. His proposal was certainly better than the idea of bringing him into my fussy bedroom with its trinkets and albums, the vanity table with all the pictures, the crocheted bedspread. He simply would not have fit.
Sadovaya Street was thick with people strolling, taking in the magical night. Haymarket Square was bustling with its long lines of stalls—vendors of pirozhky and ice cream, old clothes and hats. A potbellied man had a bear on a leash and was making it dance. Watching the bear lumbering on its hind legs—the leather collar on its neck, the chain—Genya’s eyes filled with tears. “Poor thing,” he said. “You can see how he hates this. The revolution should take bears into account.”
Suddenly, someone in the crowd behind us screamed, “Thief! He’s got my handbag!” Other people took up the cry. “Catch him!” “Get him!”
A skinny young urchin flashed by with the woman’s purse. There were no police anymore, so the crowd went running after him, men and women, baying like hounds. They soon caught the culprit—oh the shouts and the curses! They boiled up like noxious gas as they beat him, others soon joining in. Please stop it, I prayed, tears dripping down my face, clinging to Genya. It reminded me of the day of the bread riot, and how the baker had been beaten and the woman punched. “Someone’s got to stop it,” I said. The boy disappeared in their midst like a small fish in the center of a sea anemone.
Then Genya was shoving his way through the horde, pulling them out of his way, into the ugly inner circle. Their faces were so puffy with fury and a horrible glee that they were unrecognizable as human. He grabbed people by their collars and flung them aside to reveal a boy about Seryozha’s age, broken on the stones. “Isn’t that enough?” he shouted at the crowd. “Didn’t she get her miserable purse back?”
A man with a face like a knobby potato kicked the boy one more time. “That’s what we do with thieves. He’ll remember that the next time he thinks of stealing something.”
His face streaming with tears, twisted in pity, Genya picked up the limp and bleeding body, lurched to his feet, and carried the boy on his shoulder away from the crowd. I followed him through the square and he turned down a passage into a courtyard. A woman pumping water into a pail glanced up at us with little interest, as if we were hauling coal. Genya carried the battered boy up a steep stairway, arriving in a dark, dirty hall. I had to reach into his pants pocket for his key, at which he gave me a ghost of a smile. The boy moaned. I unlocked the door.
Here it was, the Poverty Artel. Three windows overlooking a courtyard. A divan and a cot, some mismatched chairs and stools, a table covered with manuscripts. Newspapers plastered the walls. But the divan had been neatly made up with sheets and a pillow. Genya lay the thief there, the boy’s purple face already swelling, his eyes shut tight as a newborn’s. “Stay with him. I’ll get some water.?
?? My would-be lover grabbed a jug.
I sat next to the boy, praying he wasn’t terribly hurt. The thief keened and moaned. I took his hand—hard and dirty—and hummed a song my mother used to sing when I was small. Fais dodo, Colin, mon petit frère…While we were waiting for Genya to come back, the boy turned and squinted at me through terrible swollen eyes. “I don’t want to die. I’m afraid,” he whispered through his split lip, his broken teeth.
“You won’t,” I said, and tried to shape my face into a reassuring smile. “He’s getting you something to drink.” All I could do was hold his hand.
I thanked God when Genya finally returned with the pitcher of water. The urchin’s head was swelling into something unrecognizable. We switched seats. Genya took a rag—no, a nightshirt—and sponged the boy off.
“I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.”
I sang for a while, low, sad songs, until the boy’s breathing slowed. The bird nests, but I am an orphan, I have no home…
We spent the rest of the night watching him sleep, like worried parents. Was he asleep or unconscious? “Shouldn’t we get a doctor?” I asked. “What if he…” But I didn’t want to say die…dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.
“There’s no doctor,” Genya said gently.
“We could fetch him to the hospital…”
“They wouldn’t take him. Look, we’ll think of something in the morning.”
He held my hand, and recited the poem I had written about the light in the window—he remembered it. All we could do was keep this boy company. So that’s what we did. I couldn’t help but imagine how it would be to watch a child who was ill, a little boy with a fever. This was what was meant by love—not passion, not a game of pleasure.
I fell asleep on the cot, on top of the blankets—the sheets were far too grimy—but Genya stayed awake all night in the chair by the divan, putting cold compresses on the boy’s swollen head.
When I woke in the morning, Genya stood at the window. “He’s dead.” The frail lifeless body, the purple battered head, a pink stain on the pillowcase. “I’m going to take him down. Let them look at their handiwork.” He lifted the small form, the head flopping. I opened the door for him and locked it behind us, followed him down the narrow, foul-smelling stairs out into the courtyard, then the lane. As we walked, Genya began to sing “You Fell Victim,” the song they’d sung when they buried the martyrs of the revolution. People stared as he carried the fragile corpse through the workaday streets and into Haymarket Square, moving through the stalls selling hats and fruit and cucumbers, past tinkers and candle makers. His song gathered a crowd. He propped the boy up against a post and addressed them. His voice carried far into the square, reciting a poem he must have written while I slept:
Citizens, comrades, you,
the new elite!
this is the boy
you beat last night.
You were wolves
snapping
as he ran
your jaws red with justice.
This is the boy
who committed a crime
for a few kopeks
he has given his life
he needed four kopeks
no one asked—whose child are you?
No one asked
what terrors he’d seen.
White Nights
are romantic, dearies,
just right for killing
a boy with no name.
Our sweet revolution means nothing to you
You’re gorged with truth
with justice
he should have run faster.
He should have just starved
more quietly.
The onlookers were silent. A middle-aged woman clutched a handkerchief to her mouth. A man in a leather apron took off his cap.
Genya left the boy to them and walked me back to Furshtatskaya Street.
20 Into the Countryside
THE SMELL OF PIPE tobacco lay thick in the hall that morning. I was hoping to go straight to my room—I was dead tired and smelled from sleeping in my clothes on that squalid cot—but Miss Haddon-Finch flew out from the salon and stopped me from getting any farther than the vestibule. “Marina!” Red-eyed and rumpled, she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. “Where have you been? We’re all beside ourselves…your mother…your father! We thought you’d been murdered. Seryozha told us about the boy…what were you thinking? With everything else Dmitry Ivanovich has to worry about?”
“I’d like to go wash up now,” I said. “It’s been a terrible night.”
“He wants to talk to you. He’s in his study.”
They must have wrestled it out of my brother. He’d never have shared this unless coercion was involved. Well, they knew now. All right, so what? It wasn’t as though we’d done anything, much as we’d wanted to. Ironic. But even if we had…I was a grown woman now. I’d seen four people die right in front of me. I supposed I could face my father’s disapproval. I straightened myself, took a deep breath, wiped my hands on my coat.
He was waiting in his study, his cheek on his hand, elbow propped on the green leather top of his desk. Dressed, but not carefully. His collar was askew, and his skin looked rough and bloodless. This is what he’ll look like when he’s old. “Close the door,” he said.
I did. I decided to speak before he could, so he couldn’t draw out the suspense. “A boy was beaten last night on Haymarket Square. My friends took him back to their room, and we tried to save him. He died this morning.”
He gazed at me wearily across an open book…Dickens. I recognized the volume, one of a set. His eyes the same brown as my own, though this morning his were drooping and bloodshot, yellow in the whites. “Friends, you say. Your brother told us you’ve taken up with a self-proclaimed poet, some young roughneck you met at a radical meeting. Is that why you took off so quickly last night that you could hardly push in your chair?”
“Yes. But not the way you’re thinking.” Though it was, of course.
He rubbed his eyes, pulled his palms down his face, as if he could wipe off the sight of me. But there I was again. “Well, you’re a graduate now. A young woman. I just thought you had more respect for yourself. An awareness of your position in life.” He gestured for me to sit in a spindle-backed chair.
Were we really going to have this conversation? My position in life? I would not sit down. This was going to be a very short interview. “We sat with the boy, and that’s all.”
He tapped his letter opener on the desktop, turned it, tapped, and regarded me from under his curly eyebrows. “If you don’t understand what I’m saying, I don’t know how at this late date to convey it to you.”
I felt like I was being slowly rolled in slivers of glass. My palms sweated. My neck sweated. I could smell myself—I stank. “You can’t. It’s too late.”
“You didn’t think for a minute what a turmoil your behavior would cause.” He steepled his hands, matching fingertip to fingertip.
“I’m sorry. There was no telephone—”
“All that education, the talent, the brains—our confidence in you. For what? So you could run around the streets of Petrograd like a cheap slut?”
I was too tired to defend myself. I struggled not to cry. “Everyone grows up, Papa.”
“Running around with God knows what kind of hooligan—someone you picked up at the Cirque Moderne.” He snorted as if that was the rudest irony of all. “All those years of care, and you throw yourself away with both hands.” He’d never looked at me with such despair. It was like watching a carriage toppling over. I could do nothing to stop it. “It’s my fault, I know. We’re all so very modern now. Don’t discipline the children. It’s simply not done.” His mouth hooke
d downward in its nest of brown beard like a mask of tragedy. “Do we need to go out and get you a yellow card?” The document prostitutes carried to show they’d registered with the police.
I imagined Seryozha, cowering in his room, sick with shame at having informed on me. And Mother, too, nowhere in sight. I’m sure there had been a terrible fight. Father began to call me names—old-fashioned names, trollop, jade—trying to make me cry, his voice louder and louder.
I wanted to hurt him back. “What is it that you object to most? That I’m not virginal or that he’s not one of us?”
Suddenly he was himself again, Dmitry Makarov, the lawyer. “I thought you said you hadn’t done anything with him.”
“Oh, so now you believe me.”
“There have been others?” His complexion was ashen.
I had no apologies, no argument to make. This was my life. Someone so out of touch had no right to dictate its shape or content.
“I’m not your father,” he said. “Women like you are fatherless.”
The father I knew could never say this to me, never. Waves of nausea flooded over me. I was too shocked to weep. “Is it all right if I go now?”
“Go. It disgusts me to look at you. Stay in your room until I decide what in the world’s to be done with you.”
I went. How clean it was, the freshly made bed. It smelled good and light streamed in through the lace curtains. I washed, then sat at my vanity. Slut. Jade. Trollop. Those words, coming from my own father’s lips. What did they even mean? I looked in the mirror. I looked…pugnacious. Was I a slut? I certainly liked being handled by men. Sex, the life of the senses, it was very strong in my nature. I didn’t want to hurt my father, but women like me always hurt their fathers, because we couldn’t stay little girls. Funny, when I really had been sleeping with someone, he’d never known it.