37 Germans
IGNORING VARVARA’S ADVICE TO stick to the banks and the telephone exchange, I landed a job at a small knitting factory a few minutes’ walk from Grivtsova Alley. It paid barely enough to buy a shoelace, but the important thing was to be working now, to have a labor card entitling me to precious ration tickets for bread and soap and even new galoshes when it came around to my turn, if that day ever arrived. He who does not work, does not eat, the tickets said.
The factory was owned by a tubby man named Bobrov, whom the girls called Count Bobo. His wife, Tatiana Rodionovna, made us a hot lunch every day. I liked to think of it as a factory, because factory work carried a proletarian dignity with it, but the place was really just a poorly lit, poorly heated workroom with tables and benches where eleven girls knitted socks on tiny machines. Their leader, fifteen-year-old Olga, showed me how to wind the yarn around metal pins, then trip them one by one. Click, click, click, all day long. After a week, I’d picked up the cough they all had from breathing the woolen threads. At eighteen, I was by far the oldest. It was like having eleven little sisters. They buzzed with stories, mostly about the German advance.
Contrary to Trotsky’s assumption that the Germans would give up on us, not daring to foment revolution at home, they came east at terrifying speed. In the girls’ tales, the Huns hacked off Red soldiers’ limbs and fed them to pigs before the very eyes of the mutilated men, and any workers they caught in the invaded towns were stripped and tied to fences, splashed with water, and left to freeze or gutted and left for the wolves. I didn’t dare ask them to shut up. A protest would just increase their gruesomeness. They loved it when they got to you and would attack like a school of small vicious fish.
Silently I spun the wool, winding it around the pins of the little machine, composing verses against the click and spin as the tube of socks or gloves emerged. Poems kept my mind off the blisters, the ache, and the cold. I thought of Avdokia’s gnarled fingers and for the first time really understood how it was to live off the work of one’s hands. It took hours to straighten my fingers at night. Genya rubbed them, warming them between his own, until the blood came back to them.
These days he and I had the divan to ourselves. Sasha and Gigo had moved into a place of their own, now that Sasha was working at the Zubov Art Institute. And Zina had begun sleeping elsewhere out of sheer disgust at Genya’s taking me back. I slept each night in the crook of Genya’s arm and dreamed of red wool snaking through my hands.
In a second courtyard
A dark workshop
Three sisters cast their shadows
The one who spins, the one who measures,
And—don’t ask.
The one who cuts the bloodred wool.
Our hands are raw
Our backs grow bent
Do we know whose fate we thread?
The pulse of blood runs thick and thin
As the heavy tread advances.
In the bread queue after work, I stood with the others, holding my thirty-day ration card, stamping my feet, and listening to the latest. All the standers agreed that the government had signed the peace too late. Against a broken Russian army, the Germans advanced like the tide. What reason did they have to stop when town after town rolled onto its back? They would teach Red Petrograd a lesson, a parable for their own workers to read.
“The Petrogradsky Echo says the embassies are pulling out,” said a girl wearing a homemade fur hat.
“Which embassies?” I asked her.
“All of them,” said an intelligent-looking woman with a soft, lined face.
The SR paper, Delo Naroda—the People’s Cause—reported that the Bolsheviks were shipping the treasury to Moscow, preparing to abandon the capital. How upset Father had been when Kerensky had suggested it! Now it was Pravda and Izvestia denying the rumors.
No one knew anything for sure, but everyone had a bit of information to share. The woman standing behind me, broad-hipped and gold-toothed, holding a heavily swaddled infant, spat and said, “Ericsson’s being evacuated. They’re sending them out to the Urals.” The giant electronics plant. I well remembered marching with their workers in February. “My old man works there. But they won’t let him bring us. Ain’t that something?” She joggled the baby. Only the slits of its eyes showed. “Safe in the Urals while we’re here in Petrograd about get run over by Willie’s boys. What kind of a government is this, turning women and children into sitting ducks? He says the Ericssons are going to strike.”
“How close you think they’ll come?” asked the girl in the hat. “The Germans?”
“All my neighbors are leaving,” said an old woman with a fierce Turkish nose and a coat patched like a quilt. “And if I had a place to go, you bet I’d be on my way.”
“It’s one way to solve the housing crisis,” said the soft-faced intelligentka.
Everyone was talking about whether they should leave, whom they could stay with in the country, when the revolution in Europe would start, and whether it would be soon enough to save us.
A well-dressed man strode along the street past us—whistling.
“Look at that,” said a woman with an acorn-size mole on her cheek, wearing tattered gloves. “Disgusting.”
We glowered at him. The new cheerfulness of the bourgeoisie was a slap in the face of every working person. Far from fearing the German advance, they whistled in the streets as if it were a holiday, their shoes shined, hair combed, faces newly shaved. They were looking forward to liberation by the enemy and the end of the revolution. The irony: these were the people who had kept us in the war to begin with, and who had called the Bolsheviks traitors for wanting to negotiate peace.
The government had granted greater powers to the Cheka to suppress this new bourgeois threat. The woman with the mole on her cheek said they were going to start rounding up the bourgeoisie soon and sending them to camps in the north. “And good riddance, that’s what I say. They’re ready to stab us all in the back.”
The Germans were on the move. The district soviets held mandatory classes in sanitation and first aid, checking your name against your housing registration and your labor book. You could lose your labor book if you failed to show up. So after a day’s work, we all spent two hours in the evening learning how to staunch an arterial wound, and what to do in case of a gas attack.
Newspaper headlines screamed, THE SOCIALIST FATHERLAND IS IN DANGER! We went to hear the Bolsheviks address the crisis at the Alexandrinsky Theater, worked our way through the crowd pressing in and found a bit of standing room in the aisle under the loge. I climbed onto the base of a pilaster, balancing myself against Genya, so I could see the stage. Behind us, holes remained unpatched on the imperial box where the Romanov eagles had been torn off. In a single year, two governments had been washed away, and now the workers’ state itself was in jeopardy.
Someone from the city soviet, bearded and grim, spoke from the stage lit by cheap smoky oil lamps. You could see his breath in the cold theater despite the density of the crowd. “They’ve taken Dvinsk and Reval.” Reval, the capital of Estonia, a little more than two hundred miles away. “They’re executing everyone with rough hands, a union card,” he continued, his face like a funeral. “If we can’t stop them, they’re going to be at the Narva Gate”—the entrance to Petrograd—“in a week, tops. It’s up to us, Comrades.”
No false cheer. I balanced on my perch against Genya, my arms around his neck, which was swathed in the scarf that I’d knitted for him on the sly at my bench. I felt a sudden love for us all, all of these people wedged in and on the brink together—pale, dirty faces with red, sleepless eyes—the starved, gaunt citizenry of Petrograd. Anton bit his nails. A sailor ground his cigarette out on the floor.
I thought about the revolutionary uprisings we’d studied those last months at school—Spartacus, Pugachev, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune. The sad truth—they’d all failed in one way or another. Would October go down in history as another failed expe
riment, just before entries about how Russia became part of a glorious German empire? I imagined grim Prussian troops crossing the Russian countryside right this minute, their carts and great gray horses, their cannons. Their presence darkened the snow, turned the sky to lead.
The comrade from the city soviet yielded the podium to Karl Radek, a frail, animated commissar with a high forehead, wild curly hair, and round glasses. Radek’s gestures were quick and confident, and he called out in oddly Western-accented Russian, “Comrades, they’re coming to crush your revolution!”
A roar from the crowd, like the roar of the ocean striking a wild shore.
He continued. “Even as Trotsky was negotiating, the snake Hoffmann was already giving orders to advance!”
“Bastards!” the soldiers shouted. “Swine!”
“What did we expect?” Anton said, rolling a cigarette, sticking it in his mouth. “Badminton?” He lit the match with his blackened thumbnail.
Radek raised his hand for silence. “But Comrades, even now, your German brothers are organizing!” Fiery faith burned in Radek’s small intellectual body, his hand outstretched, his round glasses catching the light from the smoky lamps. “They’re striking in factories from Hamburg to Munich! They want the war to end! Now it’s up to us to show them how socialists fight. Shoulder to shoulder, for the workingman. For the future!”
Cheers from the soldiers and sailors, the workers, the women in head scarves, the children and old men. I could feel my energy returning, my hope.
I imagined myself with a rifle, marching with these comrades. I’d hunted at Maryino. I was a pretty good shot—though, truth be told, I’d always felt ashamed to see a pheasant’s or duck’s bright eye cloud over, the way its beauty vanished in an instant. But these Germans had to be stopped.
“We must defend our revolution!” Radek said. “Not just in Russia but in Poland, in Latvia, in Germany and France and America! Down with every capitalist master! To arms, Comrades!”
Shouts and cheers echoed the diminutive speaker. People pounded Radek on the back as he left the stage, probably on his way to another such meeting.
A haggard-looking Bolshevik, tall and bony, took the stage. “The German soldier—what is he? A conscript. He’s tired, he’s hungry. His brothers are rebelling at home. With our example, he may just lay down his arms and join us! That’s what made our revolution here. You cannot pit a conscript army against free men and women, fighting their own cause!”
“Long live the revolution!” Genya shouted.
An old, white-bearded worker leaned out from the second balcony and in a surprisingly loud, clear voice shouted, “Is it true the Soviet’s packing up and heading to Moscow?”
The hall erupted into furor. The perfect acoustics of the Alexandrinsky Theater—which would let an actress’s sigh be heard in the third balcony—filled with cries of “Yes, what do you say to that?” “Bourgeois lies!” “It’s the truth!” “Shut up!” “You shut up!”
The gaunt comrade onstage held out his hands to quiet the crowd. “I assure you, citizens of Petrograd, the Soviet has no intention of abandoning you! We will fight to the last man! Some vital portions of industry are being evacuated to keep them from the invaders, but the Soviet isn’t going anywhere.” He stopped, leaning forward and pressing his hands on the lectern. “Ask yourselves, where are these rumors coming from? The bourgeois press! To whose benefit is it to promote chaos and counterrevolutionary hopes? The bourgeoisie! Therefore, the Soviet has declared the bourgeois press suspended until further notice. The Cheka will be especially vigilant about resurgent counterrevolutionary activity at this crucial moment. This is a warning to the bourgeoisie!” He slammed his fist into his hand to punctuate each syllable. “Do not give aid to the enemy of socialism!”
“Round ’em up!” I heard here and there around the auditorium. “Up against the wall!” “Shoot ’em!”
This warning to the Former People worried me. I pictured Mother, mustered out of her cluttered room in the middle of the night, marched through the city streets in the snow, shoved onto a train, and taken away to a camp in the forest, or in the far north. But what could I do? It was true—some of the bourgeoisie were plotting for the arrival of the Germans. They couldn’t wait to take back what had been wrested from them and recover their former privileges, their former arrogance. My mother was probably polishing the silver. But a camp?
The full moon had risen, and deep drifts of snow threw back a light so bright, it felt like a setting in a play. I tucked my arm tightly under Genya’s. Anton walked on his other side, hands shoved deep in his pockets, his face like a thundercloud. We found the rest of the Transrational Interlocutors huddled around the Catherine statue, smoking and debating in the bitter cold. We all decided to retreat to Sasha’s new room close by, just off the Fontanka.
Genya and I allowed ourselves to fall behind, not speaking, just contemplating the size and gravity of what was about to happen. The war was coming to our door. In a matter of days, tanks and troops would be marching right up this embankment. Our shadows traced a complex calligraphy on the snow as we walked.
“Come on, you two!” Zina called back at us. “It’s no time for lovemaking!”
“We’ll catch up,” Genya shouted ahead.
Instead of following them, we walked out onto the Chernyshevsky Bridge to watch the moon, huge and coldly white, rising over an empty city, the frosted walls, the sky unsmudged by chimney smoke. Ice glistened on the chains of the bridge’s towers as we leaned on the parapet, his familiar solidity in his thick, patched overcoat which we slept under at night. Our friends walked ahead of long shadows poured black against the white snow.
I studied the big handsome face rising above me, the crooked nose, the pugnacious chin. Everything good about Russia was in that face—which I had betrayed, which I had stamped into the mud. I leaned into him and turned to watch the moonbathed west. From somewhere out there, they were coming, with their tanks and bloodied bayonets.
“I’m going,” he said. “I’ve decided. I’m going to sign on in the morning.”
I could see the determination on his face, the defiance in his jaw, but there was something else there as well. Unhappiness. Did he think this was a way out? Getting himself killed by the Germans? “You don’t have to. You heard…they’ll be here soon enough,” said I, who had just been imagining taking up arms and marching to the front myself. How ridiculous! “We’ll take those defense classes at the district soviet. Two hours of compulsory firearms practice.”
“No.” His eyes looked dark in the moonlight. “We have to stop them before they get here. There’s no time for practice. I’m going.”
I stroked his cheek, my gloves catching on his whiskers. Genya, a soldier? He was so tenderhearted that if he found a spider in the Artel he would take it out into the hall, cradling it inside a cup. “You couldn’t kill a chicken if you were starving.”
He grabbed my hand. “I’ll do what I have to do. You think I’m afraid? I’m not afraid.”
“I know you’re not. But I think you’re trying to get yourself killed.” I pulled my scarf up around my mouth and nose, my eyes tearing in the cold, the tears freezing onto my eyelashes. “I thought we were all right. That we were past all this.”
His eyes blazed, I could see the whites in the moonlight. “This isn’t about us. Does everything with you have to be about love? There are Germans out there, real Germans. They’re not thinking about love. They’re thinking about crushing the revolution. You heard Radek. They have to be stopped.”
But I knew, deep inside, this was not only about what Radek said.
He put his arm around me, heavy, warm even through all the layers of our coats. He peeled the scarf from my face and kissed my cold lips, rubbed his stubble against my cheeks. His smell of sweet straw. “Would you really want me not to go?” he whispered in my ear. “To let old men fight for me? Would you respect me more?” He searched my face, begging me to understand. Begging me not to.
/> I pushed him away. “Seryozha went down to Moscow to prove he was a man.”
“I’m not Seryozha,” he said, his face suddenly steely. “He was a wonderful boy, but I am a man. Can’t you see? It’s war. And I need to get out there before they’re at the door. Our door, Marina.”
My eyes stung, my cheeks burned, the hair in my nostrils froze. I gazed at his heroic face over the striped scarf—my beautiful boy, my sufferer. I embraced him, I buried my face in his coat collar, that poor ragged coat that was going to the front. I should have sold Kolya’s diamond and bought a sheepskin for him. What was I keeping it for? Memories of that betrayer? But it was too late to repent, to act. There was no more time.
38 A Wedding
I THOUGHT WE WOULD go back to the Poverty Artel, but now that he had made his decision, Genya wanted to go on to Sasha’s. On a backstreet near the train station, the place was already blue with smoke and ripe with unwashed bodies when we got there. It was a room of two windows, and an easel took up half the space. Someone had found some spirits, made with God knows what—in compliance with Bolshevik asceticism, all the vodka shops had closed long ago.
“You’re looking rather sober, young sir,” Anton said to Genya as we came in.
“We thought you’d never make it,” said Zina, sharing the one chair with Oksana Linichuk.
“I’m going,” Genya said, shoving himself between Anton and Petya on the bed, forcing them to make room for him. I stood by the door. Why did Genya want to distance himself from me like this? Was he ashamed of me now?
“Going where?” Petya asked.
“The defense of Petrograd.” Genya took the jar from Sasha, who sat on a box with a girl from the art school, and drank deep. “You heard them tonight. They need us out there. I’m signing up in the morning. Who’s coming with me?”
The poets on the bed and around the low-ceilinged room exchanged glances like children caught in a prank after the schoolmaster asks the guilty one to come forward.