Create, O Lord, create for me,
For me a pretty young beauty…
Our splintered door had lost its number. I steeled myself and used my key, said a prayer, and opened it quickly. Only Anton was there, editing in the light from the window. I quietly closed the door and headed for the divan, crunching across the detritus of sunflower seeds that had built up in my absence.
“Decided to creep home, did you?” he said.
I sat on the edge of the divan. Much as I’d dreaded facing Genya, now I wished to God he was here and not Anton so I could get on with my execution. What was I going to tell him? I thought I’d never see him again. It had never occurred to me that I would have to face the damage I’d done to his good, sweet heart. I had expected to disappear into the magical rabbit hole with Kolya Shurov and end up in some crazy folk song. But now I’d come back here like a shipwrecked sailor, half drowned in my wet clothes, wave-battered on the very same beach from which I’d departed four days ago.
“We were just getting used to your absence. It was wonderful. Like getting rid of a cold sore. And suddenly it’s back.”
I lay down, wishing I could be as drunk as the man on the staircase, singing and pissing in my pants. I kicked off my boots and pulled the quilt up over me, coat, scarf, and all. “I missed you, too, Anton.”
He leaned over from his cot and opened the door of the little stove, poking at its sad contents, letting the room fill with smoke until my eyes stung. I knew he wanted me to shout at him so he could abuse me more, but I had no strength for it. I turned to the wall. I could hear him rattling around, slamming the stove door, pulling back a chair. “The trouble with you is that you think his genius is going to rub off on you like paint. But poetry doesn’t transfer that way.”
A portly old gent with a grand set of moustaches gazed out from a tattered advertisement, appraising me with utter condescension. I would tell Genya everything, and throw myself on his mercy. I could sleep on the chairs. Move in with one of the girls from the Okno group. He could beat me. There was no point in trying to anticipate it.
“He doesn’t love you.” The creak of the chair, the crunch of shells. “He just thinks he does. If you cleared out, he’d get over you in a week.” He was back on his feet, prowling.
I ran my fingertips over the newspapers and announcements that served as our wallpaper: society fashion circa 1904 and portraits of captains of industry peered out from between the Bolshevik proclamations that Genya and the boys stuck there. To the Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants: The Provisional Government Is Deposed…how excited we’d been that day, almost a year ago now. Soldiers, Workers, Clerical Employees! The Destiny of the Revolution and Democratic Peace Is in Your Hands! That “clerical employees” had made us howl. For weeks afterward, every time soldiers, peasants, and workers were mentioned, we had to add: and clerical employees. I touched the paper, trying to hold on to the echo of Genya’s laughter.
The soviets must remain a revolver pointed at the head of the government to force the calling of the Constituent Assembly…gone, gone. All the missed opportunities. While on the other side of the wall, Marfa Petrovna scolded one of her children: “Give it to Anya. See how you like that!” followed by high-pitched shrieks.
I could hear the tapping rain of sunflower-seed shells. “You think you’re some kind of new woman,” Anton informed me. “But you’re just a cheap trinket with your romantic nights, your sentimental notions of the ‘suffering Russian people.’” He finally settled back in his chair, propped himself against the table with a corduroy knee. “Why do you have to torture him? Like a fly laying her eggs in a raw wound. How women love to see a man suffer. It makes him sing so beautifully. Sing, Genya, sing!”
I saw myself as Anton must see me—as La Belle Dame sans Merci, the villainess of a kinofilm melodrama, a figure from Poe. “And here I thought you were a futurist,” I retorted. “All you’re missing is the amontillado.”
“There won’t be people like you in the future.” I heard the skritch of a match, smelled the stink of his makhorka. “I know where you’ve been. I can smell you from here.”
Guiltily, I drew the quilt tighter around me. How could he smell anything through that tobacco? He was just trying to unnerve me. I could go to the banya, but my going would confirm his suspicions.
“Mina told him everything,” he said.
Of course she did. Maybe she’d tried to make love to him herself. She was good with my old lovers.
“You could leave right now. I wouldn’t say anything. He’d never know you’d been here. And we could all get on with our lives.”
From outside, in the hall, we could hear the drunk singing, “A fig tree stands on top of the hill / Right at the very top. / Create, O Lord, create for me, / For me a pretty young beauty…”
More smoke. The clang of the stove. “You should have heard Genya talk when you first met. ‘This girl Marina, wait till you meet her. She’s a genius, an angel.’” He took a drag. “Well, I never met a woman who was either. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Only that you’d have the nerve to come back.”
A genius, an angel. It was a knife in my breast, right under the diamond stickpin.
I sat up and opened my notebook, began to write, intending to let a decent period go by before I ran off to the banya for a wash. But before I could go, we both heard Genya’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, heavier than usual. I waited the way a horse waits with its broken leg. Anton watched the door. It banged back, bringing a fresh burst of icy air, and he staggered in. Green eyes fogged over, skin pale, unshaved, the wide mouth that loved to laugh stripped of its mirth. This was what I dreaded more than a beating, more than anything.
He was halfway to the table when he saw me. I watched him grapple with the fact of my return as a man grapples to catch a falling bowl. His eyes focused, his Adam’s apple rose and fell in his strong neck, then he lowered his head like a bull in the last minutes of the corrida—exhausted, its thick neck impaled with picks.
I had done this to a man I loved. He stood, swaying, staring at me with such sadness I thought I would break from the weight of it. How naked he was, his pain, his love, his fear. This beautiful man, whom I had betrayed. He deserved better. Better than me. I hadn’t known this about myself, just how selfish I was, how untrustworthy. Anything he could say about me would be true.
“Tell her to bugger off,” Anton directed. “You can’t let her come back.”
“Go take a walk,” Genya said, not turning his gaze from me.
“I’m busy,” said Anton, pretending to read a manuscript.
“Am I asking you?” Genya took a step toward his friend, more menacingly than I could have imagined.
Anton sighed and threw the pages down. “Look. I’ve put up with this melodrama long enough, and so have you, brother, if you’d get your head out of your pants long enough to see it.”
In one swift movement, Genya seized him in a headlock, marched him to the still-open door, and threw him into the hallway. Then he slammed the door and turned the lock. He turned back to me with those wounded green eyes.
The whole house could hear Anton pounding on the door. “Let me in! I’m freezing my nuts off!”
Genya grabbed Anton’s coat and gloves and hat and threw them out into the hall, then slammed and rebolted the door.
My relief at Anton’s absence was followed by the stark realization that Genya and I were alone together. Bearlike, he swayed, just staring at me. Would he fall? Would he rush at me, strike me with those huge hands he was unconsciously flexing and opening? He was not a violent man, but I had driven him to the wall. I deserved it. I wrapped my coat closer hoping he wouldn’t smell Kolya on me. I couldn’t stand seeing in his face the harm I had done him. I wanted to reach out, to comfort him, even now. Though he stank of vodka, he didn’t seem drunk so much as heavy with suffering.
“Where did you go?” he asked. Mina told him everything.
I tried to think of something I could tell him, b
ut all I could see was Kolya’s greedy face and naked body in the bed on the English Embankment. “Genya, I’m not who you think I am. I’m…” and my throat closed up on me. I always saw myself as a good person who occasionally did bad things, but I saw now, that was a misconception. “I’m not careful. I make a mess of everything. You should throw me out. I wouldn’t blame you.”
“Where did you go?” he roared. Bull nostrils flaring. “Who were you with? Tell me!”
I looked down at my hands. They didn’t even look like mine. “I have a lover. I haven’t seen him since I met you.” I felt like my face was on fire. I wished I could just tear it off. “He came back. I was so wild after I left Sergievskaya, so low. And I heard he’d come back. He knew Seryozha. I wanted to see him. Not to make love to him, just to see him. Just to feel known, do you understand?”
“No, I don’t,” he choked with a sob. “You don’t think I know you?”
I shook my head. “Forgive me. I’ve lost everything. My whole life. I thought it would make me feel better to see this man from the old days.”
“And did it?”
Did it? “For a while.” But now I’d ruined my life for it, for three days. Go back to your poet. Would a man who loves you send you back to your lover?
“You should have stayed with him.”
“He left.” The air felt like glass. Broken, sharp, unbearably bright. “He’s a criminal. A speculator.”
“And you went to him.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t stand to look at him. It was like looking into the sun.
“Don’t you care about me at all? What am I to you? Just this big buffoon you can lead around by the nose?” He had started to cry. “Was it that poem I wrote? I thought you’d like it.”
Oh, if only lightning would strike me right now, so that I would not have to live through this moment.
He shuffled to the window, rolling his forehead on the cold glass. “Did you ever love me?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”
“Yes,” I said, letting the quilt fall from my shoulders, glad there was something I could answer with absolute confidence.
“Do you love me now?”
“Yes.” From the pain I was feeling, I knew I did love him, not incandescently, not feverishly, craving his skin, unable to think about anything else. Why must there be only one kind of love? There had to be better words, ten or fifteen, a hundred. Love was such a mixture of things, each love with its own flavor and spice. I wanted to both reassure him and warn him. For him I had love, tenderness, pity. Attraction and admiration, friendship and trust. As opposed to what I felt for Kolya—animal passion, ecstasy, history—and a spoonful of black hatred as well.
“Do you love this other man?”
I nodded, barely moving my head, just tucking my chin. I would not lie to him now.
He roared and turned over the table, lamp and papers crashing to the floor. He wanted to hit me, I knew it, but he couldn’t do it, so he threw chairs and broke things instead. “No. You can’t. It’s not possible!” He picked up a chair and brought it down onto the table. It flew apart, leaving him with just the chair leg, with which he battered the overturned table until he fell to his knees, sobbing.
Was I just as Anton had described, some sort of succubus draining the life from this strong, beautiful man? “I went home to my mother’s, but she won’t forgive me. I had no choice. I’m sorry.”
“You could find a brothel,” he snapped. “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.”
Would that be my next stop?
“Am I not enough for you?” he said softly. “You think I’m a bad lover?”
Of all things. Pity brought me to him, put my hand on his shoulder. He knocked it away. I leaned my face against his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t hit me. Under my cheek, a great sob. He grabbed me and held me, kissing me, pushing me down on the floor, hands in my coat, needing to make love urgently, his desperate fingers. This body, this borderline, this rocky shore. He needed to erase Kolya from this body that had been his. He tore at my dress, planting his mouth on mine as if he needed the very air from my lungs. Ripped at my bloomers. Was this love? Was it hate? Was he weeping or was it I? We made violent love on the dirty wooden floor among the debris of chairs and sunflower-seed shells, clutching, weeping, until we were drained. “Don’t leave me, Marina,” he whispered.
I lay on the floor, half under him, shells embedded in my back, his smell of green and wood, my hair a tangle, his like ruffled shocks of wheat. What was the body, this bloody field of stones? So many battles fought here, so many good men lost.
36 No Peace, No War
ONCE AGAIN WE WALKED together, breathing our breaths into the frozen days, my head in its thick scarf coming up to his rough wool shoulder. In an unexpected way, we had become more of a couple than we had ever been—considerate, protective. We spoke in low, intimate tones. But we had lost the joy, the spontaneity. What was between us felt fragile, clear, and breakable as a ship in blown glass. We had entered the formality that leads husbands and wives to call each other by name and patronymic. Yet I learned that a strange kind of trust arises after betrayal that no one ever talks about, that comes with the knowledge that one’s lover is willing to be hurt—to absorb pain, to carry it—for the sake of love. And that one was capable of hurting someone—deeply. And that it was not the end. You can live that way, you can go on.
In Galina Krestovskaya’s apartment, we pale young poets of Petrograd warmed our cracked, chilblained hands by the stove and prepared to invoke the Muse—while ignoring the lingering smells of a decent meal recently consumed. Where Seryozha’s death had placed cotton in my ears and a fog before my eyes, my disgrace had stripped my senses bare, and again I heard, I saw.
Anton began. His poem investigated the possibility of the ya, the I, the ego. It was woven with clever half rhymes and strings of sound, unintelligible at first hearing. And yet its meaning bobbed along like a buoy in rough weather, sometimes above the line of waves, sometimes below. He’d said no more to me after his outburst, but his disdain for me and concern for Genya were always simmering under the surface.
Genya’s new poems thundered more emphatically than ever, in inverse proportion to our careful silences with each other. The poem he recited urged the people to be men and not children, not to examine their leaders for feet of clay, for all feet were of clay. The revolution could not live in the sky, the poem said, only in the mess of blood and fire and earth. He challenged the reader to embrace the heat and the darkness and the smoke and let it transform him, let it temper him hard. It was his wish for himself.
For my part, I found a place to stand in the details of daily life. I returned to the precision of rhyme and meter. I found it soothing to sit on the divan, day after day, working out rhyme schemes, counting loping iambs and foot-dragging dactyls. I had never been so technically accurate. The two university students, Oksana and Petya, liked the repetition, the clarity, but Anton of course hated them. “All its energy is in chains,” he complained. “Where’s the sound?” But Seryozha’s death was silent as an owl flying through snow. Kolya’s departure was the nicker of horses, a swish of runners. And Genya and I—the sound of breath being held, the tinkling of icicles.
Sitting in the tobacco fug, discussing each poem in turn, I watched lovely Galina Krestovskaya drink in our words like claret, sometimes gasping or applauding a good line, at other times nodding as Anton analyzed us. We were her little geniuses, her personal nest of golden cockerels.
Krestovsky, in his usual leather-backed chair, a balding man in a coat and tie, big-nosed and bespectacled, read a Nat Pinkerton novel, a cigarette burning in his fingers. He was resigned to our presence as he had been to his wife’s redecorating the flat in the fashionable primitive style of the Diaghilev set designers.
My poem centered on women pumping water in the courtyard of a Grivtsova Alley apartment building. Exhausted, complaining, they shared gossip as they stood in the frozen puddles, then carried their water ups
tairs, two, three stories, slipping on the icy steps. It was called “The New Ice Age,” told in tightly patterned stanzas as intricate as a watch.
Oksana began the critique. She enjoyed the repetitions and tight metrical schemes, the rhymes. Zina burst in, her button eyes afire. “But it’s counterrevolutionary. You’re saying the Bolsheviks are incapable of keeping water going in the buildings, when you know it’s the landlords who won’t make repairs.”
“Are we critiquing content?” Petya asked Anton.
“Of course the landlords won’t make repairs,” Krestovsky called out from his lair. “Nobody’s paying rent. So who’s going to fix your water? Jesus Christ?”
Galina cast her luminous eyes to the figured ceiling, embarrassed at her husband’s unfashionable views.
“Well that’s the bourgeoisie for you. Money for wars but not for water.” Genya sat on the windowsill, his dirty boots defiantly resting on the satin of the seat below. He’d become more Bolshevik in the last weeks, more intentionally rude, as if he had to prove to himself he wasn’t going to be pushed around by bourgeois morality, least of all his own.
“I’m depicting actual life,” I argued. “As we’re living it. Should I pretend it’s already paradise?”
Zina flushed even darker. “But you’re saying life is worse under the Bolsheviks.” She looked pleadingly to Genya to back her up. Before, Genya would have been the first to chastise me, but now he let me be.
“I’m not ‘saying’ anything,” I said, defending myself. “Are you suddenly a symbolist?” Hers was the kind of criticism that often split our group into factions, whether content should be criticized or not.
“Those women should be glad to be pumping water in a Soviet Petrograd,” said sixteen-year-old Arseny to my left. “It’s their water now.”
Krestovsky burst out laughing from his chair in the alcove, and I had to slap my hand over my mouth not to join him. Did Arseny’s mother fetch his water?
“But they’re not glad,” I said simply. “I want those women to be able to look into the mirror of this poem and recognize themselves.” I rubbed at a blister on my right hand, where I’d burned myself boiling water on the primus stove. “Not some sentimentalized notion of ‘the people.’”