26 October
EVERY DAY I WENT out to update the Republic and Great Russian Discoveries and to test the mood of the city. A certain pressure was building in my sinuses, a tingling in my hands and the soles of my feet. Tides of people, restless, flowed from corner to corner, looking for news, reading the proclamations and appeals plastered on every wall. They asked the workers and soldiers to stay home and support the government. I bought a pamphlet with stamps we used for small change—WILL THE BOLSHEVIKS BE ABLE TO HOLD THE POWER?—written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He was of the opinion they’d be able to. Throngs filled every corner, soldiers arguing with students, workers with carters. I bought all the socialist papers and read them one by one under my dripping umbrella. They all said the same thing, that the soldiers’ section of the Soviet demanded that if the government couldn’t or wouldn’t defend Petrograd, it should either make peace or make way for a soviet government. Rabochy Put’ said the northern soviets had sworn to defend Petrograd’s soviet against the government if that were to become necessary.
The time was coming. I could smell it in the air.
Eleven o’clock on a foggy, drizzly morning, the 24th of October. I stood on the street corner waiting for a tram. I’d been suffering from a toothache and had made an appointment with the dentist. Ginevra volunteered to accompany me, but Mother had persuaded her to stay home. I felt sorry for my governess, stuck waiting for our departure for London. I wished I could warn her: Make your own plans, and quickly, but that was impossible.
The mood on the damp street that day was surly and a peculiar nervous intensity clung to the crowds. Only the bourgeois newspapers were on sale. No Rabochy Put’, no Soldat. So Kerensky had done it, had closed the socialist presses. An opening salvo. A wall poster warned THE SOVIET IS IN DANGER! I read as I waited. GENERAL KORNILOV IS MOUNTING COUNTERREVOLUTION! THE PEOPLE SHOULD PREPARE TO DEFEND THE SOVIET. It was signed, THE MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE. The big Bolsheviks, in other words.
The dentist, a small fussy man in a second-floor office overlooking the Kazan Cathedral, had his own opinions. In fact I wished he wouldn’t have been quite so excitable as he plied his sharp tools and drill. “I think Kerensky’s trying to goad the Bolsheviks into violence.” His thick glasses magnified his eyes, which looked huge and slightly deranged. “They can’t possibly hold power, so it’s an invitation for the generals to come in and take over. But my wife thinks it’s just incompetence. The result’s the same either way. Black Hundreds. Pogrom.”
But why couldn’t the Bolsheviks hold power? The Soviet had the troops, and the workers…anything was possible.
With the metallic taste of cocaine running down my throat, and my jaw swollen and numb, I returned to Nevsky Prospect an hour later to notice a change, people swarming the newsboys, grabbing up their wares. As I got closer, I saw why. They were selling the Bolshevik papers again. While I’d been reclining in the dentist’s chair, the presses had been liberated. Kerensky had just lost a critical fight. I pushed into the crowd, not worrying about my jaw. I wanted to get one of those papers before they sold out.
I scanned Rabochy Put’ under my umbrella, but was disappointed to find nothing about insurrection, just a big dull article by Lenin about the peasant question and an editorial by Kamenev making the usual threats, which could have been published two months earlier. Although I did note that Kamenev, author of that letter in Novaya Zhizn, was back in the fold. I was learning how to read between the lines. So the MRC senior leadership had buried their squabbles. That had to mean something.
Just then, a group of mounted cadets rode past, heading toward the Winter Palace. A bourgeois woman clapped with her gloved hands. “Bravo. Bravo! Those brave boys.” I saw nothing to cheer about. We had used up all our men, and now we were starting on boys. I thought of Seryozha’s learning to ride. He was only sixteen. Would they use him for guard duty in place of troops the government considered unreliable? But by their blue uniforms, I knew these boys were from the artillery school, training to be gunners and marksmen. Surely they wouldn’t use a bunch of drafting students to guard the government. While I clambered onto the streetcar, I couldn’t stop thinking of the lunacy of Father’s enrolling Seryozha in military school during these revolutionary times.
As soon as I entered the vestibule, Mother rushed in. “Marina, the servants are gone.” Her voice was high and tremulous. “Basya, Vaula too. They’re not in their rooms. They’re nowhere!”
I did my best to soothe her. “They’re just frightened. They want to be with their families.”
It was getting close. The radical press was working again, and the servants had disappeared. Mother was wound tight as a tin soldier, pacing, her dog at her heels, peering out the windows of the salon, which overlooked Furshtatskaya, holding her arms as if it were freezing, gazing down as if troops of maids and cooks were going to come marching down the parkway to overthrow bourgeois apartment buildings. “After all we’ve done for them. I never want to see them again. Traitors.”
My lungs hurt at the mention of the word traitor.
For dinner, Avdokia brought us some snacks and soup, which we ate in silence at the card table in the salon. Ginevra played patience, while Mother directed her fears into the intricate patterns of Scarlatti on the ivory keyboard of the big Bösendorfer. Scarlatti wrote more than five hundred sonatas for a Spanish queen, and it seemed that my mother intended to play every last one. Avdokia knitted a scarf of soft gray wool for me. I thought of the cadets on their horses, the poster put up by the MRC. Large shapes moving in the night. I prayed that Seryozha was safely out of this. I could picture him on the floor by the divan, throwing small balls of wadded paper for the dog. He had been gone so long—five months. I wondered what he looked like now. Short-haired, harder, warier? Would I even recognize him?
Around ten, we heard the crack of gunfire, instantly recognizable, and not so very far away. Mother took her hands from the keyboard and sat silently with them folded in her lap. It was here. The moment we had all expected, or dreaded, or hoped for, was beginning. But what would it mean? We waited to hear if it would quiet or grow worse. Avdokia crossed herself and prayed. I felt the creak of the wheel, the heavy strain of the timbers, the first faint ringing of gongs.
By midnight it was clear that Father wasn’t coming home, even though he had promised Mother he would. “We should go to bed,” I said.
“Go if you like,” Mother said, meaning the opposite.
“Verushka, you’re tired,” Avdokia said in the voice she used for children, cajoling, humoring. “He’ll work all night. Just lie down a little, Marina can sleep in your room. You won’t be alone.”
“I’ll wait. I’m too worried. I just couldn’t…”
In the end, we all stayed where we were, I on the divan, Ginevra at the card table in the wing chair, Avdokia leaning against the wall on her bench, snoring, Mother pacing and then playing at the Bösendorfer, taking small glasses of vodka for her nerves. Scarlatti and scattered gunfire filled my dreams. I don’t know what it was that woke me—the sound of the piano bench pushing back? My mouth tasted of dust and my jaw hurt. Mother stood in the dimly lit room. “Mitya?” she called out. The grandfather clock in the hall said half past one.
My father entered wearily from the hallway, hair wet with rain, and sagged into an armchair by the door, too tired to make it all the way in. He leaned forward, his face in his hands, elbows propped on his knees.
Mother raced to his side, knelt by him, touched his face. “Mitya. What’s happened?”
He made a disgusted “Tcha.”
She pressed her cheek to his thigh. “I’m so glad you’re home. I was afraid something awful might have happened. We waited up for you.”
He sat back and rested his hand in her silver hair. “You didn’t have to.” I wasn’t used to seeing them so intimate with each other. It was almost embarrassing.
“There’s such a bad feeling in the air.”
“Indeed.”
&
nbsp; “Is it insurrection?” I asked.
A glance at the windows. Another sigh.
Mother rose, wiped her eyes, tried to compose herself. “You must be hungry. Let Avdokia get you some dinner.”
“I had a sandwich at the Winter Palace. I could use a whisky, though.” He was hoarse. He sounded like he’d caught a cold. “Or three. Or just hit me over the head with the bottle.”
Mother rose and poured him a drink, indicating to Avdokia with a tip of her head that she should get him something to eat anyway. I could smell the peaty, scorched scent of Scotch. She pressed the glass into his hand. “The servants are gone.”
He took a deep draught. “That’s the least of our problems. They’ve got checkpoints set up on Millionnaya Street. I was lucky to get home at all. Fortunately my driver knows another route.”
Now Ginevra awoke in her armchair, her face creased from sleep, her coiffure lopsided. “Oh, Dmitry Ivanovich, we’re so glad you’re home!”
“And I as well, Miss Haddon-Finch. Thank you.”
“What checkpoints?” I asked.
“The Military Revolutionary Committee,” he said. “Oh Christ, where to begin? Kerensky cut their phone lines last night after we all went home. Decided to close the Bolshevik papers without telling anyone and decreed the arrest of the MRC and the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. He made a long speech at the Pre-parliament to get it all rubber-stamped. He got a standing ovation, but after four hours of caucus, the parties came back with a vote of no confidence: 126 to 103. Kadets, too. He didn’t see it coming. God, what do we do now?”
The government was crumbling under its own ineptitude, the outpouring of rhetoric leading nowhere, Kerensky whipping himself into hysteria.
“We heard shooting,” Mother said.
“The bridges are in dispute,” Father said. “The utilities, the telephone, telegraph—it’s all up in the air.” He rubbed his face, dug out his pipe from his jacket pocket. He finished his drink, put it on the floor, packed his pipe, and lit it with unsteady hands. He leaned back with his eyes closed, concentrating, as if that pipe were the sole object in the world.
“You’ll find a way,” Mother said soothingly. “You always find a way.”
Avdokia came back with a plate of food for him—some cold potatoes in sour cream, herring and onions, black bread—and set it down on the card table.
Father picked up his glass and moved to the table, lowered himself into a seat. “Maybe I’ll snatch the guns of a Red Guard and ‘go out blazing’ like a Zane Grey cowboy. Shootout at the Pre-Parliament—think it’ll be a bestseller?” Managing a mordant laugh. His face looked so haggard, the lines had become fissures.
The Provisional Government was on the brink of collapse. I thought I would feel triumphant, but what I felt was a terrific uncertainty and hope and most of all tenderness and pity for my father’s sake. All his hopes and plans, all his work, first with the Kadet party and now for the Provisional Government, ending in this.
Although he said he wasn’t hungry, he began to eat mechanically, his head hanging over his plate. I believed he was weeping. Mother poured him another glass of whisky and sat at the table with him. Tulku laid his head on her knee.
A loud knock on the half-open salon door startled us all. A familiar tall black-clad figure—wind-whipped, scarf-shrouded, wet from head to toe—stood in the doorway, eyes sparkling dangerously. How did she get in? It was as if she had materialized out of the very air. “Greetings from the Future!” She grinned, swayed. Was she drunk? My parents stared at her as if she were three-headed Cerberus himself. Her nose and cheeks shone rose-red, while the rest of her face glowed frost-white in the dimness. Her black hair hung in wet tendrils. “Why so glum, citizens? You should be celebrating!”
I jumped up and ran to her. God, of all times to appear. I tried to pull her away, down the hall. “What are you doing here?” I hissed.
“Tell her it’s two in the morning,” Father called out. “This is a private home, not a tavern.”
She broke away from my grip, whirling past me into the salon. “Am I too late? I’ve got a secret for you, Dmitry Ivanovich. It is too late! Too late for you! You and your cronies, your English thieves, your bankers and warmongers! You should have listened to the people when you had the chance.”
I had said it myself, but not tonight. Had she no pity? Had she no decency at all?
He straightened, blinking, at a rare loss for words, trying to focus on this noisy, untidy, threatening creature who stood in front of him.
She laughed as if she were in fact quite mad. “I’m going to give you a little friendly advice. I’d stay away from the Winter Palace tomorrow if I were you. Maybe even sleep away from home for the next few nights.” She took off her scarf, shook it, leaving little puddles of rain all over the parquet. “We’ve got the bridges, we’ve got the telephone, the telegraph, the Nikolaevsky station. The ministers are next.”
“I’m sure I don’t need the advice of a deranged schoolgirl,” my father said coldly. In his rising anger, he seemed less weary, coming back to himself. “In fact, I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” He wiped his mouth, and stuck his pipe back between his lips.
She wiped her face on her sleeve. “Maybe you don’t need my advice, but maybe you do.” She began wandering around the room, hands behind her back, like a museum visitor, examining things as if she’d never seen them before. She stopped before the portrait of Mother painted by Vrubel. “By morning your ministers will be in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The garrison’s already come over to our side.”
My father might have already been arrested if he hadn’t found a way around that checkpoint.
“It’s been a very long day, and I’ve had about enough of this,” he said. “I’d like you to leave now.”
“You’re not going to invite me to stay?” She laughed. “There’s gratitude.” She put her hands on her hips and tossed me a theatrical glance.
His reserves of patience were finally drained. “Gratitude? I’ll have you deposited on the sidewalk with yesterday’s garbage.”
“And who’s going to do that?” She grinned her lopsided grin. “Look around, Dmitry. Your dvornik’s gone, your maid, your cook. I’m just giving you a head start. For Marina’s sake.”
I couldn’t believe she’d just called him Dmitry, like he was a schoolboy. Couldn’t she see how devastated he was? I didn’t want to approach her, didn’t want to be seen siding with her at all, but I had to get her out of here. I stood in front of her, so she couldn’t see him and vice versa. “Varvara, you need to go.”
“But I’m trying to do your old man a favor.” She said it even louder, to make sure he heard.
“If I ever need your help, I’ll make sure to come find you.” Father returned fire, waving the stem of his pipe in her direction. “I happen to have sources of information far better than yours.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. She turned back to the Vrubel, examining it. “I’ll give you that much. You’ve been a regular font of information.”
I felt a jolt of electricity race upward from my spine to my head.
She didn’t even look in his direction. “Thanks to you, we know lots of things. Things we’d have missed otherwise.”
I was afraid to say a word. The look she gave me then frightened me more than anything I had ever seen. A dangerous glee. She took a bronze-colored chrysanthemum out of the vase Mother had arranged and stuck it behind her ear. “You’ve been ever so useful—you don’t even know.”
“I have no idea what you’re jabbering about,” Father said, downing the last of his whisky Russian-style. Standing, he took Mother’s arm, helping her up. “We’re going to bed.”
It should have been enough to put the subject to rest, but Varvara had the devil in her that night. She would not stop until the job was done. “No, you wouldn’t have any idea. Captain Cromie, the English spy? British Second Secretary Sibley? The railroads? The intentions of the British and the banking comm
unity? Thanks to you, we discovered a leak on the staff of our own Central Committee. For that alone, our humblest thanks.” She delivered a clumsy curtsy.
A slow horror spread over my father’s face as the picture began to come into focus, its shapes coalescing in his mind like an exposed photograph. He turned to look at me, his daughter, his own little girl. I burned, I twisted. Why? Why did she want to hurt me? What was in it for her? Couldn’t Varvara just have been happy with the success of the Bolsheviks? I couldn’t breathe. I was hoping I could just faint, but no such luck.
“You’ve been working for them?” he asked in that ruined voice. “For the Bolsheviks?”
If only I could have gone up in a puff of smoke, leaving nothing but a greasy smudge on the parquet. I had never thought I’d be put in a position to explain myself. Put there by Varvara—whom I had trusted! Not only trusted—the one I had betrayed him to please. The sharp, bitter object in my throat felt like a fist of rusted iron.
My father took a step away from me. “Who are you? I don’t know you.” My mother, too, was staring, as if I had risen from the grave.
How revoltingly happy Varvara looked with what she had done. She wants you all to herself. Was that it? She would even ruin my place in my family for that? “Dmitry Makarov,” she said, gloating. “The great chess master himself, moving everyone around the board like so many little pawns. The one thing you didn’t consider was that your pampered little darling would have a mind of her own.”
“You little gargoyle. You witch.” He took a threatening step toward my friend, my enemy. “Take your pestle and broom and get out.” I thought for a moment he would strike her, but instead, he pointed violently to the door. “Out!”