I held up the flowers. “We got married.”
Varvara nearly collided with a man carrying a filing cabinet on his back. “Whose idea was that? Yours?”
“His.”
She sighed, rounding her eyes as if to say, Well, what can you do about it now? “At least it’s not Shurov.” That put me on my guard. I felt the hardness of the pin through my dress where I always wore it and feared her keenness. She always said she could see right through me. “They almost caught him, you know. A few weeks ago, right here in Petrograd. Speculating. He’s part of a major ring. You don’t still see him, do you?” Narrowing her eyes at me.
“Not since Furshtatskaya Street.”
We entered the broad stairway and joined the steady movement of people rising and descending like some biblical curse, in our case heading hellward. As we went down, I asked the question I’d come here to resolve. “What do you hear about the internment of the bourgeoisie?” The farther down the tight spiral of stairway we moved, the more I smelled food. I could tell her silence was intentional as her black head bobbed in front of me. “Are they going to do it?”
She pulled me toward the wall. “If the bourgeoisie would stop trying to undermine the Soviet, readying bouquets for the arrival of the Germans, they wouldn’t have to worry so much. But with people like your papa stepping up operations…” She glanced at the people passing us to make sure nobody was listening. “Your old man’s been quite the busy boy.”
Well, he wasn’t preparing any bouquets. I could bet on that.
Others pressed into us to let yet another filing cabinet pass by. Varvara waited until they moved on before continuing. “Yes, he’s been collecting funds for the Volunteer Army. Working against us any way he can. Still in the pocket of the English. If they start rounding up hostages, you can bet Vera Borisovna will be first on the list.”
Hostages? “Would they really do that?”
“Of course.” She nodded at some men coming up out of the basement. “We think he’s still using your apartment, though it’s been searched again and again.”
How did she know so much about my parents? “Who? The Petrograd Committee?”
She shrugged in a way that didn’t deny my worst suspicions. “For now.”
Why would they care? But it wasn’t the time to worry about what Varvara was doing. I had to concentrate. “Help me get her out of Petrograd.”
She glared at me. People were shoving us, trying to get by. She pulled me into a corner at the next landing. “Listen,” she hissed. “One: like I told those buggers upstairs, I’m not a magician. And two: she’s our tie to your old man. No way we’re going to send her out of town.”
Then I knew. We. “You’re not with the committee at all. You’re working for the Cheka.”
She gave me a black-eyed under-the-brow gaze that told me I was the biggest fool who ever put on a coat. Searches in the middle of the night. Blood in the snow. Was this where her faith in the revolution had led her? But I had my mother to worry about.
“Don’t let them arrest her, Varvara.”
She began to descend again. More workers carrying boxes rose from the basement and everyone had to press themselves to the walls. Suddenly, a picture resolved in the developing tank. I’d been so intent on Mother’s circumstances that I hadn’t been paying attention. All this furniture, these files…the rumors were true: the Soviet was abandoning us. All their reassurances at the Alexandrinsky Theater had been a fraud. “You’re leaving, aren’t you? All those promises, they were just lies. Oh my God, it’s all lies! You’re moving to Moscow!”
Varvara shoved me into the wall, staring holes into me. “Don’t make a scene or it’ll be the worse for you,” she said under her breath. If she hadn’t been holding on to me so tightly, I might have fallen. The government was saving itself, leaving the rest of us alone and exposed to the German army. “All those speeches,” I whispered. “You accused the Provisional Government of exactly this and now you’re doing it—”
Varvara jerked me again. “Stop it. Do you think this is some kind of game? The game of Revolution?” Her fingers dug into my arm as she pressed her bony face right up to mine. “If the Germans take Petrograd—well, too bad for us. It’s a disaster for you and me and the rest. But if the Soviet is taken, we lose the revolution. This isn’t about Petrograd. We’re preparing for the years to come. In the end, what happens to you and me doesn’t matter one tiny bit. If they have to move to Moscow or Omsk or Novosibirsk to keep the revolution safe, then so be it. The important thing is that the Soviet survives.” Her eyes glittered, inhuman. “Don’t cry. Don’t even breathe.”
My lungs hurt. I clung to my flowers drizzling petals onto my boots. Listening to Varvara was like going up in a rocket ship. I felt dizzy, sick. It didn’t matter to her what happened to us—to me or Genya or Vera Borisovna, any of us. From space, even Russia would look small. You couldn’t distinguish one human from another from that height, hear their cries.
Finally, when she saw I wasn’t going to scream, she let me go, then took me by the nape of the neck and shook me, but more gently, tenderly this time. “The Petrograd Committee isn’t evacuating. Look, I’m sorry. But I can’t have you falling apart in front of…” She nodded toward the busy comrades, rising and descending. “What do you say? Let’s eat.” As if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t understood something fundamental about our new rulers—that lying would become a way of life now. I thought of Genya’s poem about the feet of clay. Don’t be such a child, I could imagine him saying. We all have to grow up now.
In the basement, we entered an enormous, windowless dining hall, steaming, smoke-filled, lined with long tables and benches, vibrating with talk that was subdued but keyed up, underscored with anxiety. “Any party member can come and eat at any time,” Varvara told me proudly. “Smolny works around the clock.” A red-faced woman dripping sweat ladled me some fish soup. From a giant tureen, a young girl poured us tea into which Varvara dropped tiny saccharine tablets. Then she led us to the corner of a long table full of intense young people poring over some posters.
Once we were seated, Varvara at the end, she bowed her head toward me, speaking low. “You have to stop thinking in individualistic terms. No one matters now, except what we’re doing for the revolution. It’s not me, it’s my ability to make decisions. It’s not Genya, it’s that he’s fighting the Germans, that he writes with a revolutionary consciousness. The question is, what are you doing? You’re an educated girl. You can write. You can speak to a crowd. What are you doing knitting socks? Join the party. You can’t straddle the fence forever,” she said. “You might even be of some help to your worthless mother.”
The party, the party. She sounded like Zina, with that same zeal. The poets were on their way to defend a government that was fleeing for its life on a carpet of lies. But I could also see it through Varvara’s eyes—they were saving the revolution. Oh, it was all so confusing. I couldn’t sort out the politics. All I knew was that my mother couldn’t be a hostage, couldn’t be caught in the cogs as history played itself out.
“What’s that going to do for my mother? I won’t throw her to the dogs.”
“You’ve been doing a pretty good job of it so far,” she said, sopping a piece of claylike bread in the soup.
I leaned over my bowl, very close. “You owe me, Varvara.” Yes, I still held it against her. I was no more over it than Genya was over what I’d done to him.
“I owe you nothing,” Varvara said.
“I see.” Fighting tears, I drank down the rest of my soup and stood, buttoning my coat, stuffing the bread into my pocket, picking up my threadbare flowers.
She grabbed my arm, pulled me back down to the bench. “Shut up and let me think.” The two long wrinkles between her dark brows deepened. It was what she was best at. Tactics, strategy. “You’re only looking at the next few days. Either the Germans arrive and she’ll have it made, or they’ll be turned back and we’ll move on to other problems. But s
he really needs to get off her ass. Nonworking bourgeois are going the way of the dinosaurs. Give her your sock-knitting job when you join the party.”
“You’ll never give up, will you?”
She grinned her crooked grin. “Surely there’s something she can do besides talk to spirits.”
“She sings. Plays the piano.”
“Maybe she could help organize a workers’ chorus.”
An idea about as likely as warm snow.
She snorted at her own optimism. “Well, for now just get her out of there. As long as she’s gone when the domkom comes calling, you’ll be all right.”
“It’s Basya. The domkom. Remember her?” I said.
“Sure. I told you, you needed to watch her, didn’t I?” Varvara stretched her long, lanky form. “Anyway, either this’ll all blow over in a week, or else we’ll be speaking German by Friday.”
How could she be so calm when the Bolsheviks would take the bulk of the retribution—Varvara and her comrades, all these people around us? I drank the too-sweet tea, wrapping my hands around the warm tin cup. “You’re not worried?”
“We’ll go underground, like before,” she said. “Lenin spent years underground. Nothing’s going to stop us, Marina. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” She shook me by the shoulder, affectionately. “Cheer up. Think of it this way—Avdokia can do your queuing, cook, run your bath. You’ll be a regular little missy again.” She spotted a thin man in a black leather coat. “Excuse me. I have to talk to someone.” We picked up our dishes and took them to the service station on the far wall. “See you soon, Marina.” She went to join the thin man, leaving me to my own chaotic thoughts. Vera Borisovna at the Poverty Artel? Thank God Genya wouldn’t be home to see this.
40 Saving Vera Borisovna
IN THE KITCHEN OF the flat on Furshtatskaya, two women boiled laundry on the stove. They stared at me suspiciously as a third admitted me through the back entrance, glanced at the tattered geraniums I still carried. I couldn’t get used to seeing strangers in our flat. Their flat. The hard-faced blonde in her forties, all lower face and flat eyes, recognized me, but her expression didn’t soften at all. “Looking for the nuthouse again?”
“Who?” asked the ferret-faced woman.
“The tsaritsa.”
I wondered how crazy my mother had really gone. I would have stayed to glean a little more information, but I didn’t want to attract further attention to my visit, especially as I planned to get Mother out of here without raising any suspicions that she was leaving.
“Make yourself at home,” the blonde said sarcastically as I walked past her. “Just walk on through.”
“I’d have rung the doorbell but the butler’s on vacation,” I said. “Anyway, you got the front door all boarded up.”
“Anybody coulda come in through there,” said the big blonde. “Robbers.” She poked at the boiling mass in her pot. “Ready for dinner?” She lifted a diaper on her wooden spoon.
“I don’t think it’s done enough,” I said over my shoulder, and moved out into the service corridor.
All the doors were closed on this side of the flat—where Vaula and Basya had lived as well as Father’s driver Ivo before the war; where we stored junk, unneeded furniture and prams, sleds and skis and old clothes. I wondered if people were living in those rooms now. Each was barely big enough for a bed and a nightstand, true, but that made them much easier to heat. I’d begun to see housing differently since living in the Poverty Artel. For a second I imagined inhabiting one of those tiny rooms myself. It wouldn’t be so bad.
I passed through the cloakroom into the main hall, catching a peek through the pocket doors into our salon. An old man wearing felt slippers and a heavy coat, scarf, and cap sat smoking, studying a chess board. I slipped along the passage to Mother’s room. The odds and ends of discarded things—sacks and tins, trash—lay along the walls. I could already hear the nursery piano—no more the big round notes of the Bösendorfer. I stared at her door with its lock crudely bolted into the splintered wood. The last thing I wanted to do was knock, after she’d been so emphatic that she never wanted to see me again. But it didn’t matter what she wanted. She didn’t understand the fate that was awaiting her. I knocked. The piano stopped, but I heard no footsteps. I knocked again, our personal knock, Fais dodo. She knew exactly who it was, but the piano began again. “Come on, open up, will ya?” Rudely, in case anyone was listening.
And sure enough, across the hall, the door of my old room opened a crack. An eye, watching. A single eye.
Finally the door opened. She was alone, and I saw how bad off she was. She no longer looked like an otherworldly creature, merely a terrified, starving, exhausted woman of forty-three. She let me in and locked the door behind me, shoving a chair up against it for good measure. I took down my scarf, fluffed my hair, my ears still ringing from cold. I longed for the days of my big white fur hat, though I would have been robbed of it within an hour. You could not keep a hat like that without fighting for it.
“You didn’t see Avdokia, did you?” Mother asked. “She was supposed to be home by now.” She sat down at the parquet table, very still, staring at her hands. Her stillness was mesmerizing. “I wish you hadn’t come,” she said finally.
“I wouldn’t have,” I said, perching on the edge of one of the many hoarded tables. “But I need you to pack up and come with me. Right now.”
“Why? Has there been another revolution?”
“You’re not safe here anymore.”
She laughed. It was half a sob. “You’re just figuring that out?”
“There’s going to be a sweep. I don’t want you to be here when they come.”
She gazed at her hands, so thin and blue, like X-rays of themselves, the backs dry and papery. Her wedding ring with its platinum filigree was so loose that it looked like it belonged to someone else. From the courtyard, the jingle of a sleigh’s harness reached the windows. Somewhere back in the apartment, we could hear men in rough conversation, shouting, then laughing.
“They’re talking about internment. Hostages.” She would not look up. I wasn’t sure she understood me. “Because of Father. Look, I want you to come stay with me—just a few nights, until we see what happens with the Germans. There are old labor camps in the north. Rumor has it they’re going to send the bourgeoisie there.”
She examined her hands as if they were a world, as if those knotted veins could lead her out of this trap. “You’re bourgeois, too, as I recall,” she said at last.
“Yes, but I’m not married to Dmitry Makarov.”
Outside the window, the bare branches of the courtyard trees stood starkly black and white. She gazed out at them, her hands folded before her. The light flooded her weary face, her transparent blue eyes. “So I’m supposed to leave my home, just like that. Flee for my life. Que viene el Coco.” Here comes the bogeyman. “How do you like your Bolsheviks now? It was that horrible girl, I suppose. I knew she was trouble that first day. I should never have let you become friends.”
“She was the one who told me to get you out of here,” I said.
We could hear a woman at the front of the flat scolding someone, perhaps in my father’s office, maybe the Red Guard’s wife, so-called. Mother’s blue eyes filled. “I think I’ve given up enough, don’t you?” That brittle tone dissolved. “This room is all I have left. I have no one anymore, not Mitya, not Seryozha…Volodya…you. My parents gave us this flat as a wedding present.”
“It’s just for a couple of days,” I said. “You can come back when it’s blown over. You don’t want to be a Cheka hostage.” I heard my father’s reasonable tones in my own voice as I spoke.
“If I leave, some illiterate coachman and his five children will move in and chop up the piano for firewood.” She stood and stroked the keys of the banged-up nursery piano with her fingertips, the chipped yellowed ivory. She loved three things—spirituality, culture, and beauty. But her value now was as a hostage against my father’s coun
terrevolutionary escapades. There was no time to waste.
“You won’t lose your flat. We won’t let them know you’re going. You’ll leave just like you were going out for the day—”
“Sneak out like a criminal,” she said flatly. “I know what you’re saying. I’m a criminal now. In my own country. In my own home.”
I stood and came to her, took her hands, so cold and bony that they were hardly made of flesh. How was she going to get through the rest of this winter? “We need to go now.”
She pulled away from me. “To stay with you and your hooligan?” She found a handkerchief in her sleeve and wiped her nose.
“His name is Genya.” I didn’t know if it would help or not, but I added, “My husband.”
“You married him?” Her expression went from peevish to horrified, as if she’d learned that I ate worms for tea. “Your husband?” And then she started to laugh, even as tears streamed. She stopped long enough to wipe them, then the laughter started again.
“He won’t be there. He’s gone to the front. He’s volunteered for the defense of Petrograd.”
She would not stop laughing.
“Think of the cesspits,” I said. “You liked that? A labor camp would be ten times worse. And a Cheka prison? I don’t even want to imagine it.”
Her desperate hilarity died away. The eyes opened slowly, still wild but more focused. She was facing it.
“We’ll leave separately. It’ll attract less attention. I’ll meet you down the block in fifteen minutes.”
“But what should I bring?” She backed away from me, clutching her skirt. “What about Avdokia?”
Yes, what about Avdokia? I wondered briefly if it would be safer for her to stay here and keep the room, but I knew I would not be able to handle my mother on my own. “I’ll go get her. Don’t bring anything. Nobody can guess you’re leaving. Just wear what you need. The warmer the better.”
Her glance fluttered helplessly about the cluttered room. “I’m not a sheep! I need things…”