“I can’t go anywhere. There is nowhere else. Please.” I pressed my face into his tunic, my tears streaming into the wool of his jacket. “You have to take me.”
He held me at arm’s length. “It’s too dangerous. But I swear to you I’ll be back, no matter what.” He wanted me to agree, but I wouldn’t. “I adore you, Marina.” Kissing my hands, my neck. “Ever since you were a bratty little girl—you threw a snowball at me at a sledding party. In the Tauride Gardens, remember?”
He’d been talking to Klavdia Rozanova, with her perfect blond braids and her ermine muff. I’d been trying to knock that snotty look off her stupid face. My aim was just bad.
He crushed me against him, my face buried into the fragrance of his chest, his clothing. “I’ll be back. I swear I will be. Look.” He fished something out of his pocket. A box, its velvet an ancient, rusty black. I wouldn’t touch it, so he set it between us on the bed. Pushed it toward me. Against a dark blue satin lining—a bit pilled—lay a jeweled stickpin, a yellow stone surrounded by diamonds, the kind of thing a wealthy dandy might have worn in a silk lapel in the 1830s.
“If you ever need money, take this to the market on Kamenny Island. Ask for Arkady.” He pinned it onto my camisole. “Don’t take less then ten thousand. It’s a canary diamond. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s topaz.”
I hit him. In the chest, on the arms. “You liar! You were lying all the time. You knew you were going to do this!” Even when he was saying I love you last night he’d been intending to leave. “You bastard!”
He gathered me in and held me tight, too tight to hit him, and into my ear, he whispered, “Don’t…we’re in a hurry.” He let me go and I rolled away from him.
Standing, straightening his uniform, he put a wad of notes on the table. “Hide that and get dressed.”
I wasn’t going to do anything he said ever again. “No.” How could he just scrape me off like mud on his boots?
“Do it. We’re about to have visitors—in black leather jackets.” He picked up my dress and shoes and handed them to me. His tone told me he was very serious. Weeping, I struggled into my things. I wasn’t going to be arrested for his speculation. I downed the last of the wine in a gulp—I wasn’t going to leave that for the Chekists—and bundled the rest of the food into my bag, the precious sugar, the ham.
He led me down the hall, down an icy back stairway, through service rooms, and out into the courtyard where men were covering three sledges with tarps. Seven big furry black horses stamped in their traces, two pairs and a troika. It was a shock to be out in daylight in the yard of a house where I’d just spent three days without ever seeing its exterior. The men worked quickly, grimly, without comment, rifles strapped on their backs, beards coated with frost. Kolya kissed me one last time, my darling traitor. I would not let go—he had to pry me away. I watched helplessly as he climbed onto the last cart, the collar of his heavy coat turned up, and signaled the men to drive out. He waved back at me once, an ironic salute, his kiss still bruising my lips as the small convoy disappeared onto Galernaya Street, the ghost of his embrace still around me.
34 Mother
SOME INSECTS LIVE OUT their lifetimes in just a few hours. Once, I thought that was terribly sad. But now I could see how brilliant those hours might be, how radiant, how intense, flashing and beautiful. Each precious second might contain the riches of months, compressed within tiny hearts and wings, before time tore them to pieces. I felt as though I had just lived out my few hours, that the rest of my life would contain just the papery remnants of those three days in the winter of 1918.
I leaned on the embankment on the Neva side in the gray morning, feeling brave one minute, sobbing the next, trying to figure out which window had been ours. Two old women emerged from the house next door. A princess, perhaps, and her lady companion or her sister, leaning on each other in their dark coats and decrepitude. They gave me a hard stare as they passed by. A worker girl, I could see them thinking. Or a lookout, preparing to signal some gang to come and rob their house in their absence. Perhaps they could smell my wildness. Had these women experienced three such days in their lives? Or even an hour?
I watched them, wiping my tears and wishing I had a handkerchief, when the roar of automobiles reverberated in the silence. It was either soldiers or the Cheka—no one else had gasoline. Here they came, two big cars sliding around the corner. I began to walk, the noise and danger pushing me away. I could hear their commotion as they ground to a stop before the yellow mansion I’d left not ten minutes ago. Our bed would still be warm. Part of me was relieved. He hadn’t been lying, not about that. I tried not to watch over my shoulder as leather-clad figures piled out, unholstering their Mauser machine pistols, breaking into the house.
I concentrated on my footfalls in the snow, the frost on the elms, the grand panorama on both sides of the river. The Dutch modesty of the Menshikov Palace, the pompous Academy of Arts. And, farther away, the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, with its steeple stabbing the breast of the sky. The needle of the Admiralty lifted in response, like a swordsman’s salute.
I wandered on, not knowing where to go, what to do with myself. I couldn’t go back to Genya…I kept seeing him at that party, half out of his mind with grief and rage, walking on the sofas, howling my name. Cursing it. I couldn’t go to Mina’s, either. My loneliness was absolute. From the golden dome of St. Isaac’s, the saints stared down at me, the angels at the corners over the colonnade looking like rooftop snipers.
So it was Mother.
I pushed my way onto a crowded streetcar, squealing and groaning along like a giant unoiled hinge. The ill-tempered young woman driver stopped and started with an impatient roughness, hurling us all against one another. A young Red Guardsman climbing in the window began to shout and curse. “Kick ’em in the face!” a man next to the window advised, trying to help haul him in. Evidently someone outside was taking advantage of the guardsman’s vulnerability to steal his boots. Once inside, in his stocking feet, the militiaman drew his pistol and began shooting out of the tram. He didn’t seem to care whom he shot—he was just angry that his boots were gone. My ears rang with the percussion for the rest of the trip.
In the little park down the center of Furshtatskaya Street, drifts lay in formless humps, horse high. The front door of the building was now boarded up. I passed through the courtyard entrance. But this time I climbed the main staircase, making no attempt to conceal my presence. The stairwell was lit only by the skylight. The brass riser bars, once meticulously polished, were black as iron and empty of the carpet they used to hold down, probably stolen for shoes. Soon people would steal the rods as well, make them into pipes and lighters.
The flat was unlocked. I walked in only to be met in the vestibule by a hard-faced woman with a blond braid who was carrying a long, skinny infant. She stopped and stared at me. “Who the devil are you?”
A ferret-faced woman in a green coat and kerchief joined her. “What you want, devushka? Rooms? Ask the domkom. Third floor.”
Domkom. The house committee. The Poverty Artel’s building had one, but it seemed that the new era had finally arrived on Furshtatskaya Street.
Looking in, I saw that the expanse of our salon had been partitioned with furniture, the visible side crammed with beds and a few of the antiques Mother had not been able to sequester into her room. The flat had been collectivized. The Bolsheviks had decreed that workers should be allowed to move into the big bourgeois flats in the center of Petrograd. Every citizen was entitled to nine square meters of living space. We at the Poverty Artel hadn’t had to worry about it, since we were well over capacity by anyone’s estimation, but the bourgeois Makarov flat of twelve rooms could have housed two score. So it seemed that the surplus space had finally been claimed. Clothes drip-dried on a line stretched across the width of the room. The once-shining parquet, across which I’d danced a tango with Kolya, was now black as tile in a train station.
I wanted to run shrieking throu
gh the room, tearing down laundry, tossing their sad belongings out the window. But they had a right to be here. They knew nothing of us and our tragedy. “Old lady Makarova still here?” I said with proletarian rudeness.
“Oh, the tsaritsa? She’s still here.” The ferret-faced woman nodded down the hall with a sharp chin and took the baby from the other woman.
I ducked past them to avoid any inquiries and strode down the broad hall, noting the padlock now on Father’s study as I passed, a new American lock. Another had been bolted into the woodwork on Mother’s door. The Americans seemed to be the only ones getting rich in revolutionary Petrograd.
I pressed my head against the wooden door panel and fought a sickening reeling feeling. Listening for noises within, I knocked. Was everybody gone? I knocked again—Fais dodo—and heard the lock release. The door opened. Avdokia! In her blue kerchief. When she saw me, she stuffed her hand against her mouth to stop herself from crying out, drew me into the warm room, closed the door and locked it. She held me, weeping. She still smelled like yeast, though there was hardly any to be found in the city. “Oh, my lovey. Oh, my girl,” she said, patting my back. “My Marinoushka, they said you’d been here. That they told you.”
My mother stood in a daze at the window wearing my father’s old dressing gown, her hair in a waist-length braid over her shoulder.
“Where’s Ginevra?” I asked.
I could feel the thinness of Avdokia’s shoulders. “Gone,” she said.
“Back to England?”
Avdokia nodded. “The English were leaving. They said she had to go.”
“Couldn’t you have gone with her?”
Her eyes flicked to Mother. “We weren’t ready for traveling.”
“Son français était exécrable.” Mother gathered the thick robe closer around her.
As if the quality of the woman’s French summed up her entire usefulness in the world.
“I’m glad you didn’t leave,” I said, pressing Avdokia’s withered old hands to my cheek. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
We heard women quarreling in the hall. “You took that egg. You know you did, you stupid bitch. My kid saw you!”
“It’s like that all the time now,” Avdokia said, low. “Who took whose egg. Whose piece of meat from the soup pot. We have to hide everything. People wear all their clothes at once so they don’t come home to an empty wardrobe.”
“Il est indigne de nous d’en parler,” Mother said. It’s beneath us to talk of such things.
“Come, sit down.” Avdokia took me by the hand and led me to the table they’d dragged to the window, cleared a box off a chair. “It’s wonderful to see you. It’s a miracle.” Avdokia’s tears leaked out of her hooded eyes into the wrinkles of her face like irrigation channels in a field. “Are you hungry, sweetness? Have you eaten?”
I remembered the food, my bag from Kolya. I’d been carrying it all morning. “These are for you.” I set the sack on the table.
She began to unpack it. “Oh, lovey, you shouldn’t have…where did you get this? Potted liver! And sour cream! Verushka, look what Marina’s brought!” Then she frowned. “You didn’t…commit a sin?”
I had to laugh. Of course I had—many. But prostitution was not one of them. “I robbed a commissar coming out of Eliseev’s. Is it all right? Have some.” I opened the jar with the potted meat.
“No, no, no,” she said, grabbing it from me, putting the lid back on. “We’ll eat it later, for supper.” She took the sack and slid it under her small bed. “You were always such a good child.”
Mother gazed out at the yellow-white sky, heavy with the promise of more snow, the light glazing her eyes. She looked like a blind seer, glowing in an unearthly way in the light from the window. Even in that man’s robe, with her hair dressed like some peasant’s, she was strikingly beautiful. “An awful child. Disobedient, noisy.”
“You were a darling,” my nanny said.
“Craved attention. She’d do almost anything to get it. Once Balmont was visiting, and she burst in wearing dancing shoes and a tutu. Proceeded to make an absolute spectacle of herself.”
Who was she talking to?
“Walking on her hands, her bottom in the air. I’ll never forget it. I’m sure he never did, either.”
I remembered Balmont applauding. He even quoted his poem, “I asked of the scattering wind: How can I be young always?”
“You shouldn’t have given me dancing lessons if you didn’t want me to dance,” I said.
The weak sunlight cast a white halo around her. This woman Kolya had loved so intensely. Though her skin had softened and creased, her bone structure was still beautiful. Her hand, holding back the lace curtain, so fine, so vulnerable. “Her father’s daughter,” she said, examining the street from behind the lace curtain. “Always. I had nothing to do with it.”
Avdokia snorted. “I was holding your hand the day she was born, Verushka, and I promise you, you were there.”
I went to Mother’s side at the window, rubbed frost from the glass. Outside, the leafless tree in the courtyard etched the sky. Children played in the heaps of uncleared drifts like processions of ants. “I’m moving back, Mama.”
She spoke without looking at me, as if recalling a dream. “He still comes, sometimes, in disguise—a beard, a workman’s coat. Stealing into his own house like a criminal.” She pressed the thick collar of Father’s robe against her neck. “No, you can’t come here.”
I leaned against the frozen windowpane, the wind knocked out of me. I had felt sure I’d be welcomed. “Mama, it’s my home.”
She massaged her temples. “Stop plaguing me! Go away!”
Avdokia had tears in her eyes. I took her arm. “Who padlocked Papa’s office?” I asked her.
“It’s a Red Guardsman and his wife,” she said.
“So-called wife,” Mother interjected.
“And a good thing, Verushka,” countered the old lady. “In times like these, to have a Red Guardsman here. They’re robbing whole houses, pillar to post.”
“Who do you think does the robbing?” my mother asked.
“Did she get the money out of the stove?” I asked my old nanny quietly.
Avdokia said. “No, we didn’t get it.”
I turned away and extracted the wad of Kolya’s rubles from my underwear. “Here.” I held it out to my mother. “Something to tide you over until I can get into the study.” A fat sheaf. There must have been a thousand rubles there.
“We don’t need your filthy money,” she said. “We’ll do fine. Dmitry Ivanovich takes care of us. Now please leave. I’m not well. I have to lie down. Avdokia?”
I freed a narrow slice from the sheaf of bills and slipped the rest to Avdokia, who tucked it in her apron. What would we do without her sweet presence running through our lives, grounding our unrealistic family? Romantics, idealists, dangerous fools. At least Avdokia was there to tincture us with a measure of common sense.
“Come, Marinoushka,” she said, pulling me away by the sleeve. “Leave now. Come back another day.” At the door, she whispered, “You don’t know what she’s been through. First you, then Seryozhenka, God rest his soul. And your father, wanted by the Cheka. The searches! And Basya, that devil. They came from the Soviet and dragged my poor Verushka off to clean the cesspit at the lower school—and who do you think reported her? That chicken-legged witch! She’s on the domkom now, fluffing herself up like a peacock. She has it out for us. Be careful.”
The last shall be first. Basya, our put-upon maid, now on the all-powerful house committee, had evidently ratted Mother out to the district soviet as a nonworking bourgeois, subject to the new labor conscription levied on the Formers. I’d seen them under the supervision of the Red Guards ineffectually shoveling snow in their once-elegant shoes.
“I tried to get them to take me instead, but they wouldn’t, the beasts. She didn’t come back until eight that night.” Tears welled in the droop of her eyelid. “After that she wouldn’t
speak for days. A son just in the grave, and now this!” She waved her hand in the direction of the salon and the sound of people arguing. “It’s enough to drive anyone to murder.”
“Stop talking to her,” my mother called out. “She’s with them now.”
“She doesn’t mean it,” Avdokia murmured in my ear, helping me put my shawl over my cropped hair. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” She turned back into the room. “You know it’s not her fault, Verushka. It’s the revolution.”
“They’ve stolen her soul. Look at her.” Her eyes filled with dread, as if the experience of cleaning the cesspit had branded them forever with a vision of hell. “They’ve all lost their souls, can’t you see? There are no people, only things. Nothing inside but dust.”
Perhaps I had indeed lost my soul. But I could only wish there was nothing inside me but dust as I gathered myself for the trudge back to the Poverty Artel and the reception I was likely to meet there.
35 My Disgrace
I HAD NO CHOICE but to return to Grivtsova Alley, through the uncleared snowy streets and the frosty fog. Home to unbearable pain and disgrace. I felt more alone than I had on that night in October when Father sent me packing. On the tram, I rehearsed in my mind things I could say, but I only got as far as Genya, forgive me. When I got off at the bridge over the Catherine Canal, I slipped on a patch of ice and fell hard onto my knees. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me.
Wet and bruised, I mounted the stairs to the Poverty Artel. Groping my way in the dimness, I came upon a man lying on the stairs, the stench of alcohol and urine rising from him. “Girl, girlie.” He grabbed for my leg. “How’s about a kiss?”
“Get off, you stinking drunk.” I kicked myself free of him.
He laughed and began to sing as I continued my climb: