“I’d rather shoot myself in the head,” Anton said, his elbow on Arseny’s shoulder. “The Bolsheviks couldn’t organize their way out of an intersection. If it gets down to a fight, I’ll take my chances with the anarchists or the SRs.”
Gigo, on the floor, brushed back his shining black hair from his eyes. “Death and I are bound to meet, its dark wing cooling my fevered brow,” he said, quoting his own poetry. “And who will weep for me?” Gigo’s last woman had ditched him for a Red Guard, whose rations were better than a Georgian translator’s. “I’ll go, and you women will curse the day you missed loving me.”
“I’m in,” Sasha said.
This was too awful, the poets and artists of Petrograd ready to trot themselves out into the fields to be killed. “You’re all crazy. We need you here. The district is organizing something,” I said.
“You go to the district,” Zina said. “I’m going to defend the revolution. Count me in, too.”
“Anton’s got a point,” Nikita Nikulin said. “Look how the Bolsheviks have bollixed it up so far. ‘No war, no peace?’ That was a good idea.”
“Well, they got it half right,” Oksana said, low in my ear.
“Listen.” Genya stood and opened his great arms in the small room as if he were spreading revolution single-handedly, as if it were grain he was casting to the whole world.
When the enemy comes
Will you watch him
crush the skull of your newborn
against History’s cold wall?
Will you cower beneath blankets with
your spines unstrung?
There’s not time for lint-pickers,
boot-lickers, liquor-misters.
Let’s go!
before History
flicks you away like clots of snot.
Step out, lace those boots,
Pull up your tattered underwear.
The train, Red Dawn,
is waiting at the station.
Sasha removed a bottle that looked like some kind of artist’s cleaning fluid from his trunk, mixed it with water from a pan on the stove, and poured the concoction into another jar that he passed around. Each of us proposed our own toast.
“To history,” Gigo offered.
“To a little less history,” Oksana replied.
My brothers and sisters, the Transrationalists—would we ever be together like this again? Everything was ending, just as we came to know it and count on it. The alcohol proved oily and chemical. I could feel it chewing the lining of my stomach. I did my best to match their gaiety, but couldn’t stop thinking that Genya might be dead soon. Gigo, Sasha…I was drinking with ghosts.
“Marina, I thought you were the brave one,” Zina taunted me. “Are you really going to stay behind, like an old housewife?”
“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your Joan of Arc moment,” I said. I couldn’t very well explain what was really going on—that Genya didn’t want me there to be his comrade, his brother-in-arms. He was desperate for a woman who would wait for him, worry about him, imagine his suffering, as he had waited for me during those nights and days I’d been away with Kolya. He needed his dignity back and this was to be my penance. And I would do it. Damn what Zina thought of me.
On a paint-smeared guitar Sasha often used in his cubistic still lifes, Petya played an old song about a peasant girl longing for her soldier boy. We sang along and we all felt something irreparable taking place, that it might be our last time together before history shook us, took us, killed us, changed us. Now I understood why Genya had wanted to come here after our talk on the bridge—not just to recruit comrades for the fight but to all be together like this, to complete the circle.
Now he whispered in my ear, “Let’s go.”
In the Artel, at last alone, we lit the stove and fed everything flammable we could into its hungry small body so that for once we could remove our clothes, producing our precious bodies—bitten, God knows, but beautiful. His heavy arms and legs, his neck like the branch of an oak, his eyes, wounded, searching, clouded green like swamp water. I could see the hurt child inside, looking out through the man’s eyes—Do you love me? Do you care if I die?
I couldn’t help thinking about the men in the hospital beds, their mangled and mutilated forms under the dirty sheets. If he were wounded, I would care for him. I would spend the rest of my life tending that body, wiping his chest, his legs. I let my fingers follow the lines of his bones, the wide collarbones, the knobby forehead, the strong, crooked nose, the lids of his yearning eyes. Was he thinking of the reality facing him tomorrow? Grenades, German guns, the points of bayonets, the hardness and indifference of war?
“Just don’t die,” I whispered, tracing his lips.
He pressed his own hand over my mouth. I tried the edge of my teeth against the knuckles. He pulled me into him. “I’m not the kind that dies,” he said into my hair. “Bullets can’t penetrate my genius.”
We held each other before the stove, my cheek nested against his chest, his noble, vulnerable heart beating in my ear, the meeting place of will and destiny. We walked together to the divan, where I sat and he pretended to fall on me, then caught himself at the last minute, our old game. That night we made love freely, not silencing ourselves, not sparing each another, groaning, shouting out. He came inside me rather than pulling out. There was no going back for us, for any of us.
Later, we lay resting, sweating, his semen seeping out onto the blanket under me, his hand caressing my neck, which always felt too thin in his hands, like the stem of a flower about to be snapped, worry closing in again. I could see its shadows creeping along his jaw and into his eyes, along his nose, which some boy back in Puchezh had smashed in a fight over a chestnut when he was ten. I felt it rise in myself as well.
“Marry me,” he said.
Had I heard him right? “You’re kidding.” Genya had always loathed that bourgeois institution. He called it as outworn as whalebone.
But I could tell by his expression that mine had been the wrong answer.
“We’re already married, remember? That night on the Petrovskaya Embankment?” I showed him the ring finger on my wedding hand. “You gave me Saturn.”
He pushed his hair from his eyes. “Seriously. Will you?” He wanted something he could hang on to in the snow outside Narva or Glyadino. How could I say no to him now? Was it right? Was it wrong? There was nobody to ask.
In the morning, I packed Genya’s few things—pencils, a notebook, a pair of Anton’s socks. He had blessedly stayed over at Sasha’s. I could always make Anton another pair of socks. I gave him all our food. I cut him a lock of my hair and tied it with thread, put it in the Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers. We sat holding hands on the divan a good long while, breathing together. Our lives would never be the same after this hour. We would leave through that door and everything would change. Even I, a girl of eighteen, looked around that room, memorizing it, knowing I would forever remember it as our youth’s paradise—this spindly table where we wrote our poems, the torn newspapers on the wall, the little sulky stove, this moldy divan where we slept, and how we held each other very tightly to keep from falling out.
As we sat, knee to knee, on quilts smelling of sex, I thought of all the men in history who had gone off to fight for homelands and cities, for fields and villages, and all the women who had seen them off, just like this. I had the strange feeling of not being myself but rather some woman who had existed for centuries and whom it was now my turn to embody. I dared not cry. I dared not say a word that might burden him in any way. I just prayed, sealing my will around his body. Please, Holy Mother, let him return exactly as he leaves.
Time to go. We stumbled down the icy stairs and out across the dark courtyard along a narrow trampled path through great hummocks of uncleared snow, and out toward the district soviet.
This early in the morning, its windows were the only lit ones on the street. Inside, it was already busy, the halls smelling of wet wood, with pe
ople lining up, wanting to know where to go, what to do. And here were our friends waiting—pale, bleary, and disheveled from the party the night before, Sasha and Petya and Gigo. Zina with her cigarette dangling like a street tough. Nikita, Oksana—with flowers! Red geraniums. Where in the world had she gotten them?
“Have a nice sleep?” Scowling Anton looked like he’d slept upright. “Glad someone did.”
“We need you all next door at the registry,” Genya said. “We’re getting married.”
Zina dropped her lit cigarette. Anton turned away, bent double in a coughing fit.
Our Red wedding took less than two minutes. It was nothing like the wedding I’d imagined as a girl, in the little wooden church in Novinka, full of fragrant roses. My dress would be old ivory, my kokoshnik a crown of pearls. Bees would buzz around a long table set up for the feast in Maryino’s yard, under the larch tree. A sapphire on my ring. A honeymoon in the South Pacific.
At my revolutionary wedding, there was no incense, no rings, no priest. No candles, no crowns, no feast. No Mama and Papa, teary-eyed and proud, no Seryozha, lonely and possessive. No Volodya, joking, making the toast. No Kolya, drinking himself stupid, realizing he should have considered the possibility of losing me. No music, no games. No bread and salt, no bride’s bath. No rebraiding of my hair—no hair to braid! No Mina or Varvara. A war instead of a honeymoon. A group of hungover poets as our guests and our two signatures on a form, with Anton as witness.
But Genya never let go of my hand. That part of the ceremony was not forgotten. Nor was the wedding bouquet—Oksana handed me her geraniums. Their petals scattered over the wood floor like confetti, dotting the grime with crimson.
Outside in the hall, a somber crowd waited to sign on for defense of the city. A woman with a sharp, hawkish face behind the counter hung up the telephone. “They’ve taken Pskov,” she said. Less than two hundred miles southwest of Petrograd. How fast could an army travel?
His insecurities of the night before left behind, Genya was now all energy and manly enthusiasm. He held up his hand to get the attention of the room, and in his great, rolling voice began to recite his rousing new poem. People at first recoiled from the sheer force of him. But as they listened, a change came over them. They stood up straighter, with pride and vitality where before there had just been terror. I could see the Soviet registrars taking note. Yes, they would certainly find a use for him—if he survived.
When he was done reciting, he told the man at the counter that he and his friends were ready to defend Petrograd—Genya, Gigo, Sasha, Nikita. And Zina right alongside the boys. He glanced back at me with a sly smile. After they’d put their names down, Genya came to the place where I stood by the wall with Oksana and Anton, and swept me up in a grand embrace, kissing me—but it was all wrong, like a show, playing to the crowd. I had to fight myself not to push him away. He really was leaving. But why did he feel it was necessary to erase our farewell back in the Poverty Artel—something vulnerable and tender, just between us—with this public display? We’d learned in school that a wedding always signaled the end of a comedy, but this suddenly felt like the first act of a tragedy.
39 The Smolny Institute for Young Ladies
RINGLESS, MY WEDDING GERANIUMS still in my arms, I hung from a tram strap thinking a married woman in time to the rhythm of wheels, lurching and screeching, metal on metal in time with the beating of my heart. A married woman. A married woman. The terrifying reality of what I’d done was beginning to sink in. My last sight of Genya hung before me—disappearing with his gang of friends, a backward wave, a smile. Outside the streetcar window, a grim and silent work party with shovels on their shoulders marched southwest, in the direction of the invader. Stillness hung over the riders this morning, no talking, no arguing. The whole city crouched, listening, straining to hear the approach of the German machine, metal on metal. And Genya, so foolishly brave, heading straight into the guns.
We passed a butcher shop, windows soaped over, the store abandoned. No meat in Petrograd unless it was walking in front of a cart or skulking in an alley. Even rats were in short supply. Another shop valiantly tried to sell things people no longer needed—wigs, medals from the imperial court, parasols. Had there ever been anything so useless as a parasol? I looked down at the homely geraniums in the crook of my arm, molting scarlet petals onto my broken boots as the streetcar jolted forward, throwing me against other passengers. Oksana had grown these flowers, with their bitter green scent, on her windowsill, tending them all through this sullen winter. I loved her generosity. She’d deprived herself of their beauty to send the poets off to the front and inadvertently provided my wedding bouquet.
This spring there would be lilacs—if we made it to spring. Maybe I could take Mother to Maryino, get her out of town and away from the threat of the camps. The irony—how hard I’d worked to get back to Petrograd this summer! How hard would it be to get a ticket out again? I swayed on my strap, wedged between tense people in winter coats. Perhaps Maryino was already in ashes…but if I could get them out there, Avdokia still had ties in the village. I could make it worthwhile for the peasants to keep her and Mother. One trip to Kamenny Island, Kolya had said. A man called Arkady.
More and more soldiers crowded onto the tram as we moved up Suvorovsky Prospect toward Smolny. All around me, they argued about wages and striking, the talk that had so angered Genya, who felt they were taking advantage of the emergency to extort concessions. A well-fed gang they looked, too. Shirkers and opportunists.
A soldier with a broad pockmarked face came close. “Give us a kiss, sister.”
“I’m married,” I said, pulling away, or as much as I could in the crush.
“Me, too.” He grinned. He smelled of the fennel seeds he was chewing with his front teeth. “Live it up.”
Soldiers took advantage of the crowding to rub up on me. Rough hands shopping, testing me like a bin of vegetables. I held my bag tight under my arm, clung to my flowers, turned this way and that to avoid them, hoped no one would find the stickpin in the seam of my dress. There was no room to slap anybody, but I stepped on as many toes as I could on what was a very long ride.
By the time I saw the cupolas of the cathedral hovering over the complex that was once the Smolny Institute for Young Ladies, I felt as though I’d already fought a battle. The soldiers helped me out of the tram with exaggerated solicitousness, mocking burzhui manners. I briefly fantasized how they would do when the Germans arrived—then we’d see what the famed Petrograd garrison was worth. What were they doing here anyway, griping about wages when poets and painters were heading out to face the foe? Then I realized—I sounded exactly like my father.
I took a moment to gather myself before entering the seat of the Soviet. Crowds of people came and went freely from the grand old place. It was like watching the aperture of an anthill. Soldiers and workers, commissars and Chekists, the simple and the important, all converged on this one spot, the center of everything. Somewhere in the halls of these buildings, Lenin worked over a simple desk. Comrade Trotsky argued over the next move in the war negotiations he’d mishandled so terribly. There was no shortage of guards. A cannon stood before the main entrance, and machine guns were trained from second-story windows, but I climbed the steps and pushed my way inside. It was a scrimmage, new arrivals struggling against people shouldering shovels and guns on their way out. Soldiers loitered in the deafening hallways. Filing cabinets narrowed the passages, framed pictures leaned in stacks. Everything was in motion, toppling, everyone pushing, shouting. I knew that Varvara worked for the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee, but how to find my way in such a labyrinth?
Eventually on the second floor I found the committee offices, a long room filled with desks and people typing, shouting into telephones, giving orders, waiting for help. But even at the center of godless Smolny there were miracles, and there I found Varvara, standing behind a desk in a gray-blue dress and that same black leather jacket, pressing the receiver of a telephone
to one ear, her palm to the other, while a tall man continued to harangue her. I swelled with pride despite myself, seeing her there, knowing we lived in such times that an eighteen-year-old girl could become a person of responsibility.
She hung up the phone and collapsed into a chair behind a mountain of papers, putting her hands over her eyes. The tall man leaned over her. Didn’t he notice she wasn’t listening? Finally, wearily, she dropped her barricade and plowed through the papers before her, finding something and giving it to him, pointing down the hall. As he departed, the people waiting moved closer, as if to begin their own entreaties.
Then she saw me. Her tired face brightened, and that one glance restored my hope that she might be willing to help me with my mother. People waiting for a scrap of Varvara’s attention grumbled as I jumped the queue. “Comrade!” “Comrade, I’ve been here since nine.” An older woman, wearing an old-fashioned shirtwaist and a skirt to her ankles, caught her by the sleeve. “What about these children’s homes?”
“Yes, Comrade Letusheva. I’ll attend to it. But I haven’t had lunch and I’m about to faint.” She hooked her arm through mine and steered me out of the office back into the teeming hall. “I’m so glad to see you, and with flowers, too,” she said. “That lot in there, they still believe in St. Nick and the golden cockerel. Do I look like a magician? What about this? What about that? Well what about it? Didn’t you hear? The Germans are coming!” We began to walk toward the stairs up which I’d just come.
I told her about my job at the knitting factory, showing off my scarred, stiff hands as my mother might have once shown off new rings. “So what are you doing here? Shirking already?” she teased.
“Genya left this morning. He’s enlisted—for the defense.”
She nodded approvingly. “We need every breathing soul. We’ll even take poets.”