His fury made her laugh and dance around him. She truly looked demonic. “Yes, think of it. Right from your dinner table to Smolny.” I thought he would have a heart attack, a stroke. Avdokia attempted to grab her by her coat but Varvara backed away. “I’m just returning the favor, giving you a running start before the Red Guards get you. It’s your lucky night!”
His face looked so white it could have been powdered. I’d betrayed him, his love, his confidence. And now I in turn had been betrayed.
“Out!” His voice was grated, almost gone.
“I’m going, I’m going. Hey, see you around, Marina.” She saluted with the chrysanthemum—“Thanks for the help!”—and tossed it at him. It bounced onto the floor.
In her wake, the smell of ozone stained the air. The big clock ticked out our silence. In the distance, rifle fire. My father stood in the middle of the parquet floor, adrift as a man fallen overboard in a stormy sea. I could feel him staring at me as if I were a stranger. How could I, a girl who wouldn’t have stolen so much as an egg or a kopek, have done such a thing? I had stolen his secrets and passed them to his enemies. I dared myself to look in his eyes. All the weariness in the world was there.
“Why? To punish me?” he rasped, staggering a bit, steadying himself with a manicured hand on the back of a chair. “For breaking up your love affair?”
“It had nothing to do with that,” I said.
“You hate me so much?”
And he’d thought this the worst night of his life when he came home. Now he knew it was. “It was never about us,” I said, managing to get the words around the clutch of razors in my throat. “You were selling our future, night after night, while the country begged for peace. I wanted Russia to have a chance.”
“Good Christ!” He threw one of the little wooden chairs across the room. It skidded across the parquet and hit one of the silvery blue walls. “Don’t you have a brain in your head? You expect the Bolsheviks to give Russia a chance?”
The urge to beg forgiveness passed, and outrage rose up in its place. “If we left it to you it would be like the revolution never happened. You had the chance, and look what you did with it. You and your Kadets. The government, Kerensky. All of them.”
Mother was silent. Ginevra held her hand over her mouth. Avdokia, palm to her forehead. No one would defend me.
“I’ll give you half an hour to pack and leave,” he choked out. “I never want to see you again.”
I could smell the smoke in the room. As if a bolt of lightning had come through the roof and struck us all down.
It was after two. A dark, rain-filled night peppered with gunfire. The Englishwoman bravely stepped forward. “You can’t send her out there. Surely she can wait until morning.” I could have kissed her. It would have been brave enough if I’d been innocent, but the bravery to stand up for the guilty demanded a special depth of character. I couldn’t look at either one of them.
And my father had turned his back on me. “I cannot have her under my roof. Not one more second.”
The world was cracking—I could hear it—like ice that had grown too thin to hold us, and we were falling in: this apartment, the Bösendorfer, the clock. I’d never dreamed it would end this way. I wanted to help the revolution, but at what price? “Papa…don’t hate me.”
“Dmitry Ivanovich,” Ginevra tried again. “I beg you to reconsider. You can’t send a young girl out onto the street—”
“Let her go to her Bolshevik friends. Or to the devil for all I care.” He was crying. He wiped his face on the back of his hand.
I thought my deeds would be forever hidden, that only good would come of them. As I walked past, he turned away. Mother whispered to him, her arm around his shoulder.
I didn’t remember walking down the hall. I just found myself in my room. I put a suitcase on the bed and stared into its lining of mauve watered silk. What did one pack on a trip to the devil? A warm coat, fur on the inside. Hat, sturdy shoes. A warm dress or two, heavy stockings. I wavered over my jewelry: pearl earrings, a ring with a small emerald from Grandmère, a gold bracelet with my name engraved on it, carved amber beads. Only the enameled bangle was really mine. I left the rest piled on the vanity table. I would start from nothing, like other people. I took Seryozha’s silhouette of Akhmatova and my book of poetry. A brush, my clock. I left the photographs of Volodya and Kolya. What would Volodya say when he heard? If he heard?
No one came to watch me go, not even Avdokia.
Outside, it was completely dark, the streetlights all extinguished. Gunshots echoed off the buildings. I’d been determined to go to Genya’s, but my nerves failed me. I was no revolutionary, no Varvara with a gun in my waistband. I was only a thin, tired girl with a small suitcase and my father’s curse in my heart to keep me company.
Like an abandoned cat, I slinked back into the archway. The lights in our flat had gone out. In a bit of hardscrabble luck, the door to the dvornik’s cubby wasn’t locked. I crept in and curled up under the counter on the dirty floor among newspapers and old tools, out of sight. I leaned against my suitcase and let my tears catch up with me. What had I done? I wrapped my coat tighter around myself and waited through that long cold night, the most miserable girl in Petrograd.
Part III
The Terrestrial Now
(October 1917–Early Spring 1918)
27 The Dawn
I STOOD IN THE cold hallway of the Poverty Artel at the return of daylight, shivering in the silence. It was too early, but what choice did I have? I tapped on the door, waited, tapped again. I knocked. In a moment, Zina’s round face appeared, her hair rumpled, a blanket wrapped around her. Her sleep-soaked glance sourly took in my suitcase, my woolen scarf, and she turned away without even a “hello,” leaving me standing in the hall. I followed her in, closed the door.
It wasn’t much warmer inside. The stale air smelled like feet, like ashtrays and people. In the dimness, I could only recognize rough shapes. Dawn hadn’t yet managed to penetrate the courtyard. “Genya?”
I heard someone turn over, call my name. “Over here.” I followed the voice, bumping into chairs in the close, stinking air, inching along stepping on things—a mumbled curse—to find my lover propping himself up on a pallet on the floor. He opened the covers, and I crawled in, boots and all, as if I could bury myself in his side, as if I could return to his body like Adam’s rib. “What happened?” he whispered. “Come on, don’t cry.” But I couldn’t answer or stop my tears. I just wanted to hold him. I was here, I was safe. He rocked me, stroking my hair. Eventually I fell asleep in his arms.
Sometime later, something woke me, a cough, a slammed door—and the first thing I saw in the dim room was Genya on one elbow, watching me. I smiled and touched his mouth. He kissed my hand. Then the shame of my exposure, the grief returned to me in a wave. “Varvara told him everything.” I shielded my eyes—I didn’t want him to see me crumble.
“I’m glad,” he whispered fiercely. “Now you’re here.”
I pressed my head to his chest, just listened to the steady hammer of his heartbeat.
“How touching,” a voice grumbled.
“Don’t be an ass,” someone else hissed.
The skritch and flare of a match. Cigarette smoke. Someone yawned. People began to move. A blanket-wrapped figure on lined-up chairs became Sasha, heavy arms stretching. Across the room, on the cot, someone groaned, sat up. Legs appeared in their white winter underwear, feet shoved into boots. Anton. From the divan above our heads, Gigo’s black eyes studied me. “Thought so.” Another floor sleeper stirred nearby, under the table—a feminine voice cursed. Zina.
One by one, they sat up, lit cigarettes, smoked, coughed, struggled into clothes. Sasha went outside, presumably to use the convenience. But Genya didn’t move. He lay next to me, gazing at me as if he had wished for a pony and had opened his eyes to a soft nose and long whisking tail. He was all I had now. I had never expected to be so fully in someone’s hands. I only hoped he was ready
for this.
Anton poked the fire, letting a trickle of smoke escape into the room. He looked the perfect cartoon of an avant-garde poet—unshaved, scowling, his black hair sticking straight up as he clomped around in unlaced boots. “She’s not staying,” he said, shaving off pieces of kindling with a hatchet. “No women.”
“What does that make me?” Zina sat up in her quilt, her dark hair matted from sleep.
“No sweethearts. No innamorate, consorts, or girlfriends,” said the editor, letting his smoke express his feelings.
“Anton doesn’t like people to have girlfriends,” explained Sasha, closing the door, taking a chair, stretching his bony wrists out from his raveling sleeves. “He thinks it distracts us from our misery.”
“And misery is to poets as milk is to babes,” pronounced Gigo, his face above mine, sticking over the side of the divan. “Why keep it all to ourselves?”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Genya, kissing my temple, pulling me close. “You’re staying and that’s it. She’s got nowhere to go, Anton. Her parents threw her out.”
“That’s why they invented bridges.” Anton lit a spirit lamp with a match, set a kettle on it. “For bourgeois girls…to jump. Off. Of. It’s my flat, and I say no.”
“Vote.” Genya sat up, raised his arm. “Show of hands. All in favor.”
Hands went up. Genya. Sasha. Gigo. Zina’s black eyes flashed from me to Genya, calculating. She loathed me but pursued Genya’s favor like a starving dog. “Why can’t she go to a hotel? She’s got money. It’s already too crowded.”
“She’s one of us,” Genya said. “She was working for the Bolsheviks. That’s why they gave her the boot.”
Reluctantly, Zina raised her hand—halfway.
Anton slammed the screechy stove door. “What’s next—elephants? Giraffes? High-wire walkers?”
Genya grinned triumphantly, kissed my brow. “You see?” With a mixture of relief and apprehension, I surveyed my new home. No more napkins and polite handshakes and marcelled hair. A new life. A life of poetry—wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? With Genya? And I would show Anton just who was a poet.
A rare autumn sun bestowed benedictions upon a huge armored car blocking the entrance to the telephone exchange building and the soldiers surrounding it. They eyed passersby mistrustfully. But where were their loyalties? To the government or to the revolution? “All Power to the Soviets!” Zina shouted, and a young soldier nodded. Revolution. Just as they’d done in February, the soldiers were taking the communications points. Only this time they weren’t going to beg any bourgeois politicians to lead them. Oh please, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Banker, Prince Lvov, Paul Miliukov, show us the way. This was the real revolution, the one we’d been waiting for.
Theater Square gleamed under a tender frost. Sun glanced off the bayonets of Red Guards, burnished the gold dome of St. Isaac’s in the distance. We watched members of the Pre-parliament arrive at the Mariinsky Palace for the noon session. But I thought the government had fallen. Had Varvara’s imagination gotten the better of her? Gigo stepped in front of one of the delegates, who wore a high white collar and regarded the pale, excitable poet with alarm. “What’s the order of the day, sir?” the mad Georgian asked. The man glanced at the rest of us and his face composed itself into a weary amusement, but he regarded the Red Guards more soberly. “I believe we’ll be discussing procedural issues,” he said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “We may be adjourning early.”
We moved up into St. Isaac’s Square, bristling with Red Guards. They seemed to be coming from the Nikolaevsky Bridge. The cathedral drew up its gold cap like a dowager pulling away from a pack of clamoring beggars.
But the most astonishing sight by far awaited us on the Neva shore. The embankment teemed with people in the sea wind—soldiers and sailors, workers and students. And opposite the Winter Palace—a warship. The Aurora, she was called. The Dawn. Huge, with her three smokestacks and two masts, rows of portholes, her seven big guns leveled at the Winter Palace. I couldn’t get my mind around her presence. A battleship in the Neva. Poised to fire. Would they really do it? Blow holes in the palace’s half mile of Italianate flank? Nothing much seemed to be happening on deck, yet the mere fact of her meant that our naval base at Kronstadt was already in the hands of the Soviet. Kerensky had thrown down the gauntlet and the Kronstadt sailors had picked it up.
On impulse, Genya clambered onto the narrow embankment railing and balancing there, shouted at the steel bulk, his hand outstretched.
Aurora!
let loose your thunder!
Awaken all these sleepwalkers
Free us
From yesterday’s nightmare and all the
little tsars.
We’re ready for your fury
Those with ears to hear
awaken!
He teetered and almost fell, jumped down to finish his poem on solid ground. His seaward lines rolled like waves hitting granite cliffs on a northern shore. Gigo and Zina each took a turn reciting, then Genya pulled me forward. The crowd watched me expectantly, happy to be entertained while they waited for the revolution to begin. I gave them my poem about the massacre at Znamenskaya Square, but I had nothing to follow it with. I had to put something more up into the air. So I began to sing the first song that came into my mind, “Dubinushka.” Little Hammer. “Strike harder, strike harder, da ukhnem!” My singing teacher, Herr Dietrich, would have had a heart attack if he heard what I was doing with all that training, but some listeners tossed coins, which my friends picked up from between the cobbles.
A strange moment, entertaining the revolutionary crowd with their own work songs, receiving their hard-earned kopeks in return. For the sailors in the crowd in their flat white caps and striped jerseys, I began another—“The Boundless Expanse of the Sea.” My friend, we’re on a long journey, far from our dear land we go…A blond sailor came forward and pressed a silver ruble into the palm of my hand. His hatband read AURORA.
I wish I could say I still had that ruble, but we spent it on dinner.
In the afternoon, we tramped out to Smolny, a good three miles away, to see what the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was doing about the insurrection. Delegates had converged from soviets all over the country, but the start had been delayed and delayed again and the delegates were getting restless. Gunners stood poised at their machine-gun stations flanking the entrance to the building, exactly where tenderly brought-up young noblewomen once walked when it was a convent school. The gardens teemed with armed workers and rough men in red armbands—Red Guards—who had come on their own to help with the insurrection. Thousands of them were camping out, waiting for instructions. There were too many—we heard revolutionary soldiers trying to send them home, but few left. The tension was thick. Evidently the Bolsheviks had announced they were pushing back the starting time for the congress yet again. We tried to talk our way in, to no avail, and now the sun was going down. I was tired and hungry but I had no home to go to besides the Poverty Artel, and the poets were in no mood to abandon the streets. Genya certainly showed no signs of flagging. We ate in a nearby café, lingered over our tea, then set out again. I drifted along in a fog of exhaustion, Genya’s arm around me the only thing between me and collapse.
The first cannon shot came around ten. We converged on the English Embankment with the excited, slightly menacing revolutionary crowd to watch the firefight. It wasn’t the Aurora after all. Stranger than that—it was the Peter and Paul Fortress firing across the wide Neva, pummeling the Winter Palace. To a native of this mirrored city, it was a sight unthinkable even twenty-four hours earlier. Like the fork running away with the spoon. This is really happening, I had to keep reminding myself.
“The Bolsheviks have to take the Winter Palace tonight,” said Zina, leaning on the parapet, vapor escaping her lips. “They’ll want to report a victory to the Congress of Soviets. That’s probably why they’re holding off the start. But they can’t keep the delegates waiting another
day—there’ll be a riot.”
Gigo stamped his feet, put his collar up.
The rapid fire of machine guns added to the great boom of the cannons, a symphony. I shivered and pressed into Genya for warmth. If only we could just go home. I didn’t know if my trembling was from fear or exhaustion, but I couldn’t make it stop. Sweet Sasha asked if I was all right, if I needed to go home, but I shook my head.
Another burst of machine-gun fire—too loud, too fast, too close—made me jump. Above me, my lover’s nostrils flared, drinking in the smell of gun smoke. I could tell he wanted to get closer, to go right up to the cordon. I couldn’t stop seeing Znamenskaya Square, the bodies, and the men with the Red Cross armbands carrying away the wounded. I was in over my head, thinking I could keep up with Genya Kuriakin. I wanted to be like him—brave. I wanted him to think of me as worthy of his love.
Anton had had enough. They weren’t taking the Winter Palace fast enough for his liking. “I’m going back,” he said. “Let me know in the morning how it turned out.”
I could go with him. But I would not leave Genya. I wanted to see what he saw, go where he went, to prove I could, to myself as much as to anyone.
We didn’t return until early next morning. We stumbled in, laughing, bumping into the furniture as we tried to shed our coats and boots, stoke the fire. “Anton, wake up.” Genya kicked his bed. “They did it! While you were here keeping your fleas warm.”
I laughed. I was drunk—on wine and on our insane bravery. If I hadn’t been so tired, I never would have done it. Never would have had the nerve. But I was standing strangely outside myself. We had gone into the Winter Palace, had drunk its wine, had plumbed hell itself and returned.
“We got inside,” said Zina, bouncing on her heels. “All of us. Genya first.”
The soldiers were first, breaching the firewood barricades, hundreds of soldiers pouring in, and then Genya was up ahead, waving for us to follow him. Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Yes, but it had been wonderful, strange beyond imagining, to enter the violated palace.