Dunya answered my knock. I hardly recognized her—she’d cut her braids. “Marina! Are you alone?” She immediately peered into the hall behind me, hoping for a certain tall blond painter. How grown up she’d become. The hands of our clocks whirled like pinwheels these days. Soon she would be seventeen, eighteen, she would have lovers, children. Whereas my brother hadn’t lived long enough for a first kiss.
I followed her into the parlor. In heaven, it would be just like this: Sofia Yakovlevna sewing at the table, Solomon Moiseivich on the divan in Bukhara cap and dressing gown, Aunt Fanya laying out a hand of solitaire, Shusha banging out Rachmaninoff on their old upright. Sofia Yakovlevna paused over her work when she saw me and half rose. “Marina!” Her smile was bright, then overcast with concern. “You didn’t come alone, did you? On a night like this?”
I wanted to throw myself into their arms, but for my own selfish reasons I also wanted to savor the beautiful peace of their lives, the warmth they wove about them, before I brought my tragedy into their midst. “Mina’s in her room,” Dunya said. “I’ll go get her.” She disappeared down the hall.
“Where’s your young man?” Papa Katzev asked, his eyes kind. “Your peppery comrades?”
“Up on Sergievskaya, thrashing Blok.” I couldn’t just blurt out Seryozha’s dead.
“Give her a minute to catch her breath, Papa,” his wife said. She knew something was wrong.
Dunya reappeared with Mina in tow. Now it was my turn to be shocked. Who was this vision before me in a dress of soft blue wool? Red lipstick emphasized her mouth, and someone had fashioned her stubbornly thick ash-blond hair into a pretty upsweep. The food shortages that had turned most of us scrawny had distilled her toward a new beauty. She wore dangling earrings and looked…horrified.
“Have I come at a bad time?”
“As a matter of fact, I was just going out. To a party.” Her lovely skin bore a bit of rouge. Where were her spectacles?
“You look…beautiful.”
She gave me a nervous, gelid grimace.
“Who is it? Someone I know?”
She paled, and her gray eyes slid from mine like butter on a hot pan. As clearly as if I were at one of my mother’s séances—I knew. Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help.…Who else could have worked such magic on dull, stodgy Mina Katzeva? She had probably been singing before the mirror, getting ready for her rendezvous with my lover. My lover. “You’re seeing Kolya?”
Terrified, she mimed buttoning her lips, glancing at her mother sewing at the table, her father, her sisters. Although we were pretty safe with Shusha banging away at Rachmaninoff, she yelled, “Let me show you a new dress Mama made me,” then gestured with her head down the hall.
I followed her to her room, past pictures of grandparents, great-grandparents, men with sidelocks and beards, women with suspicious faces, stern with disapproval at their dependable workhorse turned siren. I could hear Uncle Aaron singing behind the bathroom door. In Mina’s bedroom, where I’d slept with her and her sisters during the first revolution, she pulled the door shut. The room smelled of some light perfume. She never wore perfume. There was the bottle, by her bed. Something he’d brought her, no doubt.
I didn’t want her to lie to me now. She had to understand the situation. “Mina, listen to me. Seryozha’s dead.”
On her face—shock. But something else…her gaze dropped to her feet, then met mine again. Her tear-filled eyes drifted off to the right. She knew! He had told her. Her lids dropped again. She couldn’t bear the anguish on my face. She shielded her guilt with a cupped hand.
I grabbed her, shook her. “How long have you known?”
“I was going to tell you, I swear, it’s just that we haven’t seen you…” Sniveling, she tried to wrench herself from my grip.
“I’ve been right here. Ten blocks away.” Mina, my best, my oldest friend in the world, had kept Seryozha’s death from me. No wonder she couldn’t meet my eyes. I shoved her away.
Her face was a kaleidoscope, emotion replacing emotion—shame, fury, pity—like impatient people all trying to get through a door at the same time. “I would have told you when I saw you again. I thought I’d see you. But the longer I waited, the harder it got.” Her little earrings flickered in the electric light.
“And you got to see Kolya.” I saw it so clearly. She would have done anything to have him. Even this.
Her chin stuck out a little farther. “Yes. Yes, all right?” She rubbed her arms where I’d hurt her. “Do you have to have everything? Everything, everything! What about me? Good old Mina. Here, hold my coat, Mina…” Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “But maybe I’m not so good. Maybe I deserve a life, too.” The smile hovered, crumpled. She held her hand to her forehead and began sobbing in earnest, the ragged sobs of a child.
“Mina, I need to see Kolya.” I tried to keep my voice low and soft. “Let me come with you tonight.”
“No!” Startled, she wheeled away from me. “What will you tell Genya? Remember him? Your boyfriend?”
I thought of Genya, so sincere, so caring. But it was Kolya I needed. Only he would know how I felt. Only he could know what it was to lose Seryozha, only he could console me. To think that a few minutes ago, I was heading home to sit alone and watch snow fall. I’d been thrown a lifeline and I wasn’t going to let it go. Not for her or Genya or God Almighty. “Tell me where you meet him.”
Her crying had left blotchy patches on her lovely skin. Her hair was coming down. She sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, took off her earrings, and threw them at the pillow. One bounced onto the floor, skittered under Dunya’s bed. “I’m sorry about Seryozha. Oh God, what a mess…” She keeled over sideways on the bed and wedged her hands between her knees, her tears dripping on the chenille bedspread.
“Where is he? I need to see him.”
“In a mansion. On the English Embankment.”
Poor Mina. My tearstained, disloyal old friend. I had never guessed her envy was so great that she would go as far as to withhold news of my brother’s death so that she could keep her rendezvous with Kolya. “How do you go?” I pressed her. “Will he come here?”
She shook her head. “He sends a cab. You go. It’s you he wants anyway.”
Was it wrong that this lifted my spirits? I needed him. There would be no explanations, no awkward embraces, no ridiculous metaphors or poetic histrionics. It was a time for raw feeling, something there was no room for in the crowded Poverty Artel. Mina might love him, but I would burn down everything to be with him again.
32 The English Embankment
THE COACHMAN WORE A frozen lily like a starfish in his buttonhole. Frost whitened the poor horse, its ribs a clattering xylophone. Crouching in his great cloak against the whirling snow, the coachman clapped the reins and we moved into the storm as into a poem, a legend. Frost soon coated my shawl in a glassy shroud, making it crack. My eyes narrowed to slits as we slid through the deserted streets down Horse Guards Boulevard and up past St. Isaac’s, across the vast white whirling plain of Senate Square.
On the English Embankment, the cold grew even worse. The wind sweeping across the frozen river drove sharp needlelike grains of snow into my eyes, my lashes crusted with frost. How different from that first joyous sleigh ride with Kolya. On one side, the great houses of the English Embankment braced like aristocrats before a firing squad, while on the other, wind and darkness, the howling expanse of the frozen Neva. The sleigh came to rest right in the middle of the road—there was so little traffic these days that it made no difference where we stopped. The coachman, hunched in his seat, made no attempt to help me scramble out. As soon as I had my feet on the ground, the bearskin piled back in the sled, he whipped up the horse, leaving me alone in this white blowing world.
I stood alone before a two-story mansion that had lorded it over the snow-crusted Neva for a hundred years, a looming blur of darkness one shade lighter than the sky. I stumbled my way through the drifts to the enormous door. Padloc
ked. I pulled on the chain, but it was fastened tight. No light appeared in any of the windows. I pounded with the side of my fist, barely making a sound. The cold sucked the last strength from my body, the benefits of the fish-soup dinner and the pastry I’d eaten at the Krestovskys’ gone by now. “Kolya!” I shouted up at the windows, my voice lost in the roar of the storm. “Kolya, let me in!”
Down the embankment, a door opened, a flickering light. A figure waved. I didn’t have to see the face. I ran to him. I flew.
He caught me by the waist. “Hey, hey, easy there!” He held the lamp high so it wouldn’t be knocked out of his hands and laughed as I stepped through the door. He bolted it behind me. We were in the frozen pantry of a great house. I pushed the shawl from my hair as he walked ahead holding his lamp. “Kolya.”
He turned back. The look on his face when he realized it wasn’t Mina, the smile of mild anticipation vanishing, then he knew me. He bundled me into his arms, repeating my name like a prayer. So solid, so real, his smell of cigar and Floris Limes and that powerful indescribable honey. I began to cry. He kissed my hands, smoothed my hair, held me tightly enough to make me believe this was real.
“Let’s go upstairs. I’ve got a fire.” We fell into step as we always did, as we traced our frozen path through the dead kitchens and ghostly pantries, the service rooms of the mansion, and climbed the stairs into the frosty grandeur of its foyer. I was too overcome to speak. He kissed my hair, rested his temple against mine. I had forgotten the waves of pleasure in that simple touch. My grief had found its home. This was why I had come—the world be damned. I didn’t care if it disappeared forever.
The flickering light created and erased reception rooms as we moved through the public areas of the abandoned villa—flashes of red silk wall covering stained and denuded of paintings. White pillars, a broken sofa, abused-looking chairs. He opened a small door I might not have noticed, flush as it was with the wall. Before us, the lantern revealed a small, high-ceilinged room papered in yellow and warmed by an open fire. Paintings and beveled mirrors still hung on chains from its picture rails, portraits in oval insets peered out like passengers from the portholes of a passing liner. The firelight licked at his face, the high cheekbones, the smiling eyes, but they weren’t smiling now. He knew. He understood. Objects gleamed on a small gilded table—wine, biscuits on a painted plate. For Mina Katzeva. I couldn’t bring myself to feel jealous. What I needed from Kolya went deeper than sex, deeper than passion.
He poured some wine into a glass of cut crystal and handed it to me.
I drank. Port, sweet, clinging to the glass. I hadn’t had alcohol since the Winter Palace was taken. It went to my head, along with the heat of the open fire and Kolya’s scent.
We settled on the settee, his arm around me. “I thought I’d never see you again. Poor Sir Garry.” That was Seryozha’s name in our circus, Sir Garry Pekingese. Sir Garry was a dog who would jump through a hoop covered with paper.
“Nobody told me. I went by the flat on Furshtatskaya to get my papers and Ginevra told me.”
“Mina didn’t tell you?” I shook my head slowly, threaded my fingers through his. He tipped his head back. “Christ.”
“You could have told me yourself.”
“I didn’t want to disrupt your new life.” Tears welled in his blue eyes. “I’m not the scum you believe me to be. She said you were in love with a poet, that you were beautiful together, to leave you alone. Do you love him?”
Did I love Genya? Of course I did. But here I was. When all was said and done, I’d run to this man without a backward glance. I would have to think about that—later.
“What a mess.” His arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist, we leaned into one another like people sheltering in a blizzard. But the hard black just under my ribs that I’d been carrying since that day eased over an inch or two. Seryozha, my beautiful brother. Sir Garry Pekingese. He remembered us. That was why I had come. We sat like that for a long time as the fire hissed and snapped. He poured me another glass of wine.
Not the Madeira from the Winter Palace, but sweet and warm.
He sighed, leaned back against the rose velvet. “I saw your father,” he said. “I think he’s trying to get himself arrested.”
“Good.” I began to pace. There was a packet of Turkish cigarettes. Did Mina smoke now, too? I took one and smelled the sweet, fresh tobacco. Kolya lit it for me, steadying my hand in his. “Does he regret what he did?”
“I didn’t ask him. Would you have expected me to?”
Funny, I had waited so long to be able just to talk to someone who knew everything, and now that I was here, I found I didn’t have anything to say. Just sitting with him where I could smell him and count his eyelashes was enough. Mina had been lucky to have him even once in her life. And I realized it would always be this way with us. Time, distance, politics couldn’t touch what we had together. Life and death would be our meat, our bread, part of what we were, not separate from us. To ever express what crackled between us would need all the poetry in my possession.
Out of the depths of my grief, desire sent up its bloom of fire, like kindling sheltered from the wind. It found my lips, my breasts—and now my mouth sought his, his hands found my thighs, our clothing falling away, buttons surrendering as we clutched each other on the small sofa. “There’s a bed,” he whispered. Yes, there would always be a bed.
He led me into a room with a high bed. I could well imagine a duchess in her nightdress there—the canopy, the satin pull cord, a view of the Neva behind the yellow drapes. There would always be a bed, and we would be in it, even if it was just a pile of hay. We hadn’t made love since that last day on the Catherine Canal, when I’d still been a schoolgirl and the first revolution was only a rumble on the outskirts of Petrograd. Although the world had changed, we had not. We grappled, clutched, bit, groaned. Our bodies strained to become closer than physical bodies possibly could. How chaste Genya’s and my lovemaking was compared to this. Only with Kolya did I hear the true bass notes of ardor, the soar of its melodies. I couldn’t even say what these last months with Genya had been. Ah Kolya, Kolya, my heaven and my hell. My match, my curse. My eternal love. There was nothing to stop us now.
We lay together, resting, his head on my breast, his smell all over me, his chestnut body hair in the firelight. He toyed with the bangle I never took off. Of course I hadn’t. “You’ve lost weight,” he said, tracing my ribs, my waist, my hips with their bones cradling my flat stomach.
“No food. We don’t have money for the black market.” I inhaled the gorgeous smoke from Turkey, wrapping it around my tongue.
He got up, sturdy, naked, and brought the plate of sweets in from the other room, treats he was going to feed to Mina, to stuff her with like a pigeon and then eat her up. I let him feed me crumbly, buttery white shortbread and cherry-filled chocolates. But the cherry reminded me of Father. “Poor Mina, having to miss this. Did you enjoy making love with her?”
“You can’t always have caviar. Sometimes you settle for eggplant.”
I pinched his nose, shook his face from side to side. “Look at you—you’re not even sorry.”
“I’m sorry for many things, krasavitsa moya.” My beauty. “That it’s been a year since I’ve seen you, that’s very high on my list of regrets.” He kissed my breast. “That Seryozha ended up where he had no business going—that I regret. Your father’s stubbornness. He’s a good man but he’s a man of principle.” He relit his half-smoked cigar, propping himself higher on the pillows. “Always dangerous. Your whole family’s like that—principled. You believe in things, you Makarovs. It’s dangerous business. Give me a Cossack bandit, a whore, a soldier with blood on his hands, but God save us from people who believe in things. You’re the ones who will get us all killed.” He toyed with my hair. “Look at you, look at those big brown eyes. You’re more like him than you would believe.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
He turned his head to avoid
blowing smoke in my face. I never liked cigars before, but the smell was his, it completed him. I ran my hands through the curly hair of his chest, down to his soft resting sex, his sturdy legs. “Seryozha didn’t believe in things. He just wanted to make art. And please Father.”
“He believed in beauty. It’s not the worst thing. You’ve got some of that yourself.” He fed me more shortbread. “But God you’re strong.” He tipped my chin up to look into my eyes, and his blue ones darkened in the lamplight. “Luckily. Because there’s no easy road for people like you, the believers in beauty. Seryozha tried to make it out there—you’ve got to hand it to him. I admire that.”
“Are you proud of his heroism?” I thought of that hideous letter.
“Sometimes just living is heroism,” he said.
I studied the small mole under his right eye, the peaked eyebrows that faded out into nothingness, his diamond-shaped face with its high oriental cheekbones, the upturned laughing eyes. So rare to see them serious like this.
“You still remember Sir Garry.” I pressed my finger in the dip of his upper lip.
Seryozha couldn’t have been more than four. We’d tried to get Mother’s dog, Tulku the First, to do the hoop trick but he proved untrainable. Sir Garry was also assistant to the mysterious Esmerelda in her “feats of daring.” He’d walk along very seriously, as beautiful as ever a child could be with his big gray eyes and blond curls, and hold a stick aloft for me to hang on to as I wobbled along a tightrope strung between pines two feet off the ground. How solemnly he took his responsibilities. I felt the tears swell. I held out my glass and Kolya filled it again. “Mesdames et messieurs, Damen und Herren…you do it.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, meine Damen und Herren, mesdames et messieurs, coming to you direct from performances for the sultans of India and Azakazan, for your amazement and edification…” For half a second, he flashed that smile, which had gotten him out of a million scrapes and probably a million more to come. Kolya had been our ringmaster, wearing gum boots and Father’s old crumpled top hat, brandishing a whip of woven ribbons from our child’s pony cart. “The lovely Esmerelda, from the emerald caves of Capri, performing for you feats of gravity-defying amazement.”