Avdokia woke me in the afternoon, coming in with soup and a cucumber salad, cold chicken on a tray. “It’s the big worker boy who hangs around, isn’t it?” she whispered. “I’ve never seen Dmitry Ivanovich in such a state. He went off to the foreign office on an hour of sleep, poor man. I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”
“And what lesson is that?” I said, clearing off the desk so she could lower the tray. “We tried to save a boy’s life, a pickpocket being beaten by a mob. Papa’s jumping to conclusions.”
“A pickpocket.” She shook her head, sighed, sighed again, as if there were no more oxygen in Petrograd, as if it had been raised to Himalayan heights and she had to labor to fill her lungs. “May the Holy Theotokos have mercy.”
“We sat with him all night. He was young. It was terrible. His head was as big as a watermelon.”
“Eat some soup, sweetheart.” I took a hot mouthful to placate her, but eating was the last thing on my mind. I could still see the crowd’s savage glee, the boy’s battered head, the way he hung limp in Genya’s arms. My father’s face. I might never eat again.
“Dmitry Ivanovich is a changed man since joining the government,” my nanny said, hanging up my clothes. “You can’t waltz around like it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s been working so hard, he’s got so much on his mind. Oh, why did you have to go off last night? They were having a nice party here. That boy—it’s not going to go well.”
When I tried to go out to the toilet, I found the door of my room had been locked. So it had come to this. He didn’t know what to do with me, so he’d locked me up until he could formulate his plans. I couldn’t bring myself to pound on the walls. It was hardly the Crosses. I used the chamber pot, sat down to write. After a while, I heard knocking on the wall from the nursery next door. Seryozha. Fais dodo…trying to apologize. I didn’t knock back.
That evening I heard my father and mother quarreling: Reputation. Your daughter. That hooligan. Part of me wanted to announce that I’d sacrificed my precious virginity not to that hooligan but to Kolya Shurov, trusted family friend. Would he like that better? What was worse, my class treachery? Or that I’d ruined his perception of me as a pure vessel, inert and worthy to be passed along to an approved husband? Either way, I’d proved to be a stony field, an intractable horse, useless for the task assigned it.
Avdokia came and went with food and the chamber pot, her eyes red from weeping. “Pray, Marinoushka. Pray for forgiveness.”
On the fourth day of my comfortable imprisonment, Miss Haddon-Finch let herself in. “I’m here to help you pack,” she said briskly, no nonsense. “We’re leaving. For Maryino.”
The country? We never went this early. “It’s only June.”
“It’s been decided.” She opened my wardrobe, began taking out summer clothes, piling them on the bed. “This has all been very hard on your mother, not to mention Dmitry Ivanovich. They’ve decided it will be better if we got away for a while. We could all use a little peace and quiet.”
But she forgot to lock the door. I shoved past her and marched down to the dining room, where they were eating breakfast. Mother was still in her dressing gown, Father ready for work at the foreign office. Seryozha, also up and dressed, tried not to look at me.
“What if I won’t go?” I said.
“Are you moving in with your hooligan?” Father asked, sipping his coffee. “Is he ready to support you?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Did he have to be so extreme? Move in with Genya in that squalid room of his or break it off with him? Out of sheer defiance, I wanted to say yes, I’ll move in with him. But that was going too far, even for me. I had to think. Did I really want to move in with Genya? Even if I tried it for the summer, what would I do about university? I possessed no money of my own. Father had me in a corner. He wanted me to see that I had no choice but do what he said. To recognize my position. In other words, surrender.
“I’d prefer to stay here,” I said.
“But you love Maryino,” Mother said in her filmy morning coat. “We all could use some time to reflect—”
“The answer is no, you cannot stay here,” Father interrupted her. “You’ll go with the household or you’ll find some other accommodation. You can’t come and go, doing what you like with whomever you like, and come back here. It’s not a bordello.”
There was no point in arguing that a bordello was the very opposite of the freedom he described. “I could live with the Katzevs,” I said. “Surely Sofia Yakovlevna would let me.”
“Forcing them to house and feed you for months at a time? They’re not wealthy people, Marina. For someone who claims to be so sensitive to the plight of the common man, you’re embarrassingly self-involved. The Katzevs have children of their own to think about. Consider the example you’re setting for the younger ones. No, you pride yourself on being an adult, but you’re still thinking like a child. Now, you’ll pack, and tomorrow you’ll accompany your mother to the countryside.”
Yes. I saw there was no other way. “At least let me say goodbye.” I had to tell Genya how it stood with us, that I wanted him, but I had to go.
“There’s the telephone. Be my guest,” Father said, gesturing to the hall.
Mother sighed, stirred her tea. Seryozha twisted in his seat, his face red and blotchy, guilty as a dog who’d eaten your shoes.
“You know he doesn’t have one,” I said. “Let me see him once more, and I’ll go.”
“Write him a note and I will mail it for you.” Buttering his toast.
I couldn’t very well say I didn’t know Genya’s address. So I wrote a hurried note, telling him that my father was sending me into exile in the country for the summer but I would be home by fall. I’ll wear Saturn’s ring, and I’ll think of you. I addressed it to Gennady Kuriakin, Grivtsova Alley, east-side courtyard, second floor, room 8. I’d have to pay Basya to deliver it. The idea of Father intercepting it was too grim to imagine. And what if he decided to confront Genya face-to-face? Hideous. I hated to let Basya know such intimate details of my life, but it was better than Genya’s never knowing.
While I packed, Seryozha slipped into my room. He was crying. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what to say. They were so worried—”
“You could have said I was at Mina’s.”
“They called Mina’s.”
I sighed, folded nightgowns. “Well, I guess we’ve got a long summer ahead of us.”
“You maybe. Not me.” He ran his hand over the eyelet lace of my summer bedspread. “I’m going to Moscow. I’m leaving in five days.”
I stopped folding.
“For Bagration Military School.”
I clutched the ruched cotton of my nightgown. “He can’t do that.” My brother pretended to count the bands on my bedpost with his thumbnail. I grabbed him, turned him around, tried to force him to look me in the eye, but he wouldn’t. “You can’t. You’ve got to tell him right now you won’t go.”
“But I want to go.” He twisted away from me. “I need to. I need to start my own life.”
I held my hands to my mouth, as if something were about to fall out. My heart maybe. “Seryozha, you’ve heard them talking at the Cirque Moderne. You know what’s happening out there. Don’t get on the wrong side of this!”
“It’s already been decided,” he said. My little brother. It was just what Miss Haddon-Finch had said. But somebody had decided—it wasn’t Fate. It could still be undone.
“No.” I batted the neat piles of clothes off the bed onto the floor. “Let’s run for it. We can go, right now.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, sitting down at my vanity. “What are we going to do, sell newspapers?”
“Maybe Solomon Moiseivich would give you a job. Apprentice you. You can’t let him do this. You’re not cut out to be a soldier.” The idea made me dizzy with terror.
He bristled. “How do you know? People survive it. Look at Volodya. Papa’s right. I have to stop dodging these things.”
br /> I knelt by his side, took his hands in mine. “Please, I’m begging you…this is not a fight you want to join.”
He was about to cry, this would-be officer. “Don’t say any more.” We stayed like that for a long time. I wept, I think he did, too. After a while, he stood, then I did. We kissed three times, formally, and I had to let him go.
It rained the morning we left, a real soaker. In the first-class compartment, I sat with Avdokia, her arm around me, her smell of yeast, my head on her shoulder. Out the fogged-up window, the slums of the Vyborg side rolled past, the very seedbed of the revolution. Mother, with her hands folded in her lap, occupied the forward-facing seat alongside Miss Haddon-Finch and her little Italian greyhound Tulku. He stood on her lap to look out the window, leaving his nose print on the glass. But Mother’s eyes were closed, shutting out the sorry scene rumbling by, factories and tenements, as well as the squalid one inside the compartment—namely, me.
Miss Haddon-Finch wept quietly, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, her spectacles fogging up. I couldn’t tell whether they’d held her responsible for my supposed “disgrace.” Was she afraid she was going to be dismissed? I hardly needed a governess anymore—but there wasn’t time for arrangements to be made, and Mother would need some adult companionship. She couldn’t exactly dine with Avdokia and her half sister, Olya, every night. Or was the Englishwoman frightened at the prospect of a long summer alone with Mother in the depths of Russia, without her Dmitry Ivanovich?
It was the one positive note—I wouldn’t have to see Father all summer. His arrogance had grown worse now that he was in the Provisional Government. I couldn’t stop thinking of Seryozha at the Bagration Military School and all that it meant. I knew what kind of boys these officer cadets would be, sharpening their cruelty on the softest in their midst. After a few months of torment, he would prefer the enemy at the front! Or the unthinkable could happen—he could become one of them and call it growing up.
And my sweet Genya—how long would he wait for me? Would he write poetry for some other girl, someone he saw on a bridge, drawn to her shape reflected in the water? I tried to remember the feel of his arms, his body, the taste of his lips, his smell of hay and fresh wood. We had never even made love. It made me cry all over again. Avdokia petted me, murmuring, “We’re in God’s hands, Marinoushka. Tishe…” Quiet now.
21 Maryino
WE SPENT THE NIGHT in the market town of Tikhvin, in a small hotel near the station, and the next day, we rode up to Maryino. The weather was dusty and hot. I was sullen, and Mother had a headache. We drank tepid water from a flask, and Miss Haddon-Finch tried to teach us a game, spying something beginning with a certain letter, but no one wanted to play. Only Avdokia was in a holiday mood, her little eyes brightening as she pointed out familiar landmarks. “I have cousins in this village, Verushka. Remember Mishka, with the wall-eye?” She was coming home.
After we’d endured hours of heat and airlessness and being thrown about, the landscape started to look familiar to me as well. Then we were passing through our village, Novinka, with its rambling cluster of izbas, its blacksmith shop, its silvery wooden church with its birch domes. Mangy dogs barked after our coach. The peasants watched us, but no one waved. We jounced out past the fields, the long strips of the peasant allotments. The oats had been cut, now wheat grew green under a bright blue sky.
The road to the estate itself brought us up a hill, and then down through a linden allée my mother’s grandfather had planted, using dynamite to assure that the roots had room to grow. They were taller than any trees in the area. Now the house appeared, dark wood with white carved moldings around the windows. This beloved place. But dill and Queen Anne’s lace and thistles crowded the yard, and one of the shutters hung crookedly.
The old steward, Grigorii, came to his feet slowly, as if he were just stretching. A sturdy, stout peasant with a long beard, he didn’t remove his cap as the coach stopped before the porch—that was new. His smile was warm but his bow was brief and even a little ironic. But roses still rambled up the side of the house in bright red bloom, pretty but unpruned, and insects buzzed like tram wires before a rain.
“We just heard you were coming,” he said to Mother. No barynya. No Vera Borisovna. She was visibly rattled and tripped alighting from the carriage. She had never become used to revolutionary treatment and certainly hadn’t expected it here.
Avdokia steadied her while upbraiding her cousin. “Where are your manners, you stupid sot? You’re still living here, stealing everything not nailed down. Have some respect.”
He took off his cap, scratched his head, then embarrassed at having taken orders from this old woman, put it on again defiantly.
To gain time Mother removed her gloves, her hat, touched her shining silver hair with an unsteady hand. “Where are the others?” she asked.
“Oh, they’re around. Except for the young ones. Army took seven of ’em.” It was a small village, no more than fifty souls. Seven young men was a huge loss. “Yegor got killed last August.” He hocked, as if to spit, then thought twice when he caught Avdokia’s fierce eye. I remembered Yegor, a rock thrower who kicked the cows. But now he was dead.
“How awful,” Mother said. “Such terrible times. Our Volodya’s stationed on the Southwestern Front.”
“Officer, no doubt,” Grigorii said.
“Yes, he’s grown into a fine young man,” she said stiffly. “And Annoushka? How is your wife?”
“She’s fine, praise be to God,” Grigorii said. “She’ll get herself elected to the zemstvo soon enough.” Unlikely—the zemstvo was an all-male peasant organization led by landowners like us. But he was letting us know that things had changed. Putting us on notice.
“Yes, that’s good.” Mother brushed her forehead, as if trying to whisk away a fly. But the fly was the new era. The moment went on and on. What was he hoping, that she’d pick up her own bags?
Grigorii finally hoisted her trunks into the house. I’d have called it a draw.
Mother settled into Grandmère’s old boudoir. Miss Haddon-Finch was put into my childhood room, which had also been Mother’s. I took Grandfather’s old study at the head of the stairs. Avdokia went in with her half sister, Olya, and Olya’s daughter, Lyuda, behind the kitchen. Lyuda, my age or maybe a year older, unpacked my things. She handled them slowly, fingering my clothing, smoothing the cottons, the silks, as if she were shopping.
Over the following weeks, Avdokia treated me as if I were recovering from a horrible shock—which I supposed I was. She made me lie down with cold compresses of water steeped in lavender, sent me out to pick strawberries, blackberries, rowan berries, chamomile. I knew everyone thought me angry and peevish, but I didn’t care. I was helpless and useless and saw no point in being stoic about it. I plunged into my trunkful of books, played lackluster rounds of cards with Miss Haddon-Finch, who invited me to call her Ginevra, and wrote dozens of letters to Genya, which Avdokia refused to mail.
Dearest
I write these letters
Send them into the abyss.
How long can I endure
Mother, nanny, peasant cousins, village gossip.
Too many women in the soup.
Death by fire would be quicker.
The river mocks me, flowing on.
The birds fly west.
I try to join them but
My waxen wings won’t hold.
In the kitchen, the Revolution’s arrived.
The peasants set their place at the table.
But where is the Revolution
To spring me from this green prison?
I slashed at the heads of shoulder-high weeds with a walking stick I’d found in the hall and cursed my father for his stupidity, my brother for his passivity, and the entire country for its idiocy. Ginevra trailed behind me, her skirts caught in the weeds as I made my way down to the river. The water was wide and slow, light skittering across the surface like gold coins. I took off my shoes and stockin
gs and climbed out onto a large old birch that had fallen almost horizontally out over the water. “Be careful, Marina!” she called out to me. “I can’t swim!” When I was a child I could walk the entire length of this trunk, imagining I was a world-renowned aerialist, the Great Esmerelda. The crowd marveled at my grace and daring. Below me, water grass waved under the surface of the river, hiding pike and perch where I had once imagined tiny mermaids and orphans played. I could almost feel the warmth of the water. Blue dragonflies flitted. I stripped out of my light dress.
“What are you doing? Marina! Someone will see you!” Her voice rose as I took off my slip and my corselette. “Come down immediately!” I dropped my bloomers, and plunged into the green water.
This was what I’d forgotten—the sweet embrace of the river, the feel of it slipping over my naked flesh. Even its murky taste was wonderfully familiar. I turned over in the current, my red hair dark and streaming over my shoulders like a rusalka, the river spirit.
I could hear Ginevra, but I was lost to her. Above me floated boughs of birches and elms, dark proud spruces. Fat trout patrolled the deep hole at the riverbank’s edge. All my rage to return to the city dissolved, and I was just a fish swimming among the water weeds. Suddenly I heard giggles. Some little boys fishing on the opposite bank jeered, throwing pebbles, my nudity exciting and confusing to them. Let them look and imagine what they might have for themselves one day.