“A small bag if you have to. As though you’re going on an errand. You’re just going out for an hour. Visiting a friend.” I went to the armoire, pulled out her sable hat and warmest coat, mink-lined. I sighed, stroking the fur. They were too beautiful. They would arouse attention on Grivtsova Alley. A black sealskin coat was better, though not so warm, and a hat of karakul lamb.
I stuffed a few things in a small carpetbag—underwear, a towel, her brush…just as though she were going out to sell some of her dish towels. “Do you know where Avdokia’s gone?”
My mother shook her head. “She just goes.”
My mother did not know where her bread came from. Even now. I scanned the map of the neighborhood in my mind, trying to imagine where an illegal market would be in this, the most bourgeois area in the city. There had to be one somewhere, because the Former People who couldn’t get work couldn’t get ration cards. They all depended on the black market. I guessed that the “market” was in Preobrazhenskaya Square. Large enough, not on the water, with several side streets down which people could scramble in case of trouble. “Look, put on a few pairs of underwear under your skirt. Put these dresses on.” I tossed her two, both wool, the heaviest ones. “Take a few things in your pockets and the rest in the carpetbag. I’ll wait for you at the Church of the Transfiguration. Fifteen minutes. I mean it.”
“I hate this life,” she said. “Why can’t they just kill us and get it over with?”
I headed over to Preobrazhenskaya Square. Yes, I was right. The starving figures of our neighbors stood like shadows against the walls holding out wrapped bundles of their prized possessions while buyers, mostly peasants, bartered with frozen potatoes and other questionable foodstuffs—eggs, most likely rotten, bottles of oil that could be anything. And there was Avdokia, right under the great chains of the church enclosure, in heated negotiation with another peasant woman close to her own size and vintage. They made the deal, then Avdokia deposited a wrapped item the size of a plate into the other woman’s arms, hefted a bag of potatoes off a sledge.
When she saw me her hard-mouthed, determined bargaining expression melted away. She would have crossed herself had she not had her arms full of potatoes. “Marinoushka, what are you doing here? This is no place for you. God in heaven!” She looked around for the Cheka, Red Guards. “Is everything all right?”
I embraced her and took the potatoes from her, explaining the situation. “God save us.” She crossed herself as we walked.
“I need to get her out of there, but she’s worried that if she leaves they’ll take the flat. I don’t think I can handle her by myself.”
She came closer, so that I could see every crosshatch of wrinkle, every hair in the mole on her bulbous nose. “If Basya tries anything with that flat, I’ll pull her legs off and bury them under a birch tree. Whose flat does she think it is, Lenin’s? She’d better not pull anything or when the Germans get here, she’ll be the one paying the piper.”
The expression on Anton’s face when the three of us entered the room on Grivtsova Alley could not have been more horrified than if the entire German army had burst in. He stared at Avdokia and Mother as if they had one eye between them, as if we were Macbeth’s crones and had come to rip off his dirty woolens and tear his flesh from his bones. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no.”
I just continued with the introductions. It didn’t matter what Anton thought, not now. “Anton, this is my mother, Vera Borisovna Makarova. And this is Avdokia…Fomanovna.” I realized I’d never formally introduced Avdokia before. “This is Anton Mikhailovich Chernikov. Your host.”
My mother’s expression exactly mirrored Anton’s. But unlike our editor and universal critic, her horror lay in the scene around her, of which his unkempt surliness was only a part. To see the Poverty Artel through her eyes was to remember it the first time I saw it. The teetering stacks of books, Anton with his feet on the table, the overflowing ashtrays, the sunflower-seed shells all over the floor, the dirty clothes and crumpled pages. The pathetic little stove. The smell. I was thankful at least that the chamber pot under the divan was empty. I hoped she would take comfort in Seryozha’s watercolor painting and silhouettes, even if they were pinned to the old newspapers and handbills that served as our wallpaper.
When I was busy persuading Mother to come, I’d somehow failed to mention Anton.
She lingered at the door, clutching the handle of her little carpetbag. Avdokia stood by Mother’s elbow, her wrinkled mouth drawn so tightly that it almost disappeared below her pulpy nose. How sordid it all must appear to them, as if I’d brought them to a tavern. I dropped the bag of potatoes on the table next to Anton’s feet, hopefully sweetening the deal.
“Really, Makarova?” Anton drawled. “He’s gone for four hours and you’re already moving the family in? Even Granny over there?”
“It’s just for a few days. Until things shake out.”
He carefully, ostentatiously, removed his feet from the table and put them down on the dirty floor. “Am I suddenly running a boardinghouse for itinerant society women and their servants? Renting out corners for fifteen rubles a pop? Maybe there’s some room under the stove. Why don’t you look?”
“For God’s sake, Anton. Varvara said they’d use her as a hostage.”
He crushed out his butt on the floor under the leg of his chair. “Look, it was one thing for Kuriakin to flop here. Then one day you appear, like something the cat dragged in and forgot to eat. Did I throw you out? No. I lived with it, like the sympatichniy chelovek I am.” That was a laugh. No one in the world would accuse him of being an agreeable chap. “But this? What’s next, a priest? Maybe you want to start a cotillion. Or a charitable society.”
It had been hard enough to get her here. I wasn’t going to let Anton chase her off now. I came closer so I could keep my voice down. “Have a heart, Anton. If she ends up a hostage, or interned in some camp in the Arctic, would you feel comfortable in your soul that you chased her away?”
“Are you accusing me of having both a heart and a soul? Mercy!”
“I’ve heard quite enough,” said Mother from the doorway. “Not another moment will I remain under this roof, I assure you, monsieur. Come, Avdokia, we’ll put our counters on noir and see what becomes of us.” My mother took the old lady’s arm and turned back to the door.
But the bets would be on rouge, Mother. “Happy now?”
“Yes, I am completely comfortable, thank you.” He was the one in charge—no Genya to mitigate his pettiness. He knew he was wrong, and it made him all the nastier.
My mother put her gloved hand on my wrist. “Tu t’es trompé en tes amis.” You have miscalculated your friends. “Let’s be on our way, Avdokia.” She tried to grasp the knob but I wouldn’t move away from the door.
“Anton, I’m talking to you. Just tell me this, how do you live with yourself every day?”
“You should know—you’re always here, aren’t you?” He wiped his gaze away to the window, as if the most interesting sight in the world were outside the dirty panes, gilded elephants loping by in midair, bearing howdahs of Turkish clowns. He was waiting for them to leave, for us all to go, so that he would not have to recognize what a beast he was being. But this was no joke, no matter of preference. Even now the Cheka might be searching from flat to flat in the Liteiny district for the possible—the likely—fifth column. Makarov would be a name high on the list.
Anton had been spoiling for this fight for a long time, and with Genya gone, he wasn’t the only one who could speak plainly. “Listen, Anton. I fell in love with your friend. Is that a sin? Is it a capital offense? Someone loves him. And now you’re going to punish me? Is that what this is all about?”
My mother was whiter than her own white hair. She took my mittened hand in her gloved ones. “For the love of God,” she whispered hoarsely. “Not one more word. Death itself would be better.”
“No, it wouldn’t, Mother. Death would not be better than this.” I snatched my h
and from hers. I knew she didn’t like it but this was my life now, this life that people were living, on top of each other, arguing, saying the cruelest things right out loud. You had to have the hide of a buffalo. I was trying to do the right thing. Why did everyone have to be so difficult? “Anton, could you please just let them stay? I thought you were a mutualist. I thought you believed in spontaneous organization.”
Anton heaved himself up and skulked to his side of the room, pacing between his cot and the table, his arms folded tight across his chest. His black brow thundered over his long nose, his jaw set. Mother tried the door again, but I wouldn’t let her open it. What would he say? “Anton?”
Finally, he flung himself back into his chair. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Just keep them quiet and out of my hair.”
My mother drew herself up in her glossy black coat. “I don’t intend to host a party, monsieur.”
I quickly showed Mother and my old nanny to our corner, the divan and the bookshelf. They could have the divan, and I would sleep on the chairs. I stripped the linens off the divan, shaking them out and folding them neatly so that Vera Borisovna could sit down without soiling her spirit with the unmentionable activity the quilts and blankets embodied. I could see the unspoken words written on her forehead: Is this where you sleep with him? You and he, like beasts?
I did my best to play host, pointing to our books, to Seryozha’s art works, to the zinc water bucket by the stove, our few sticks of wood, our old iron primus, which had been outfitted to burn just about anything. It was like giving someone a tour of the inside of a drawer. And over here are the pencils, and that’s our eraser. Mother plumped the pillows and Avdokia fished Our Lady of Tikhvin out of her bag, placing it on the bookshelf and positioning an oil lamp before it. I ignored Anton’s stare. Are you joking?
After studying Seryozha’s painting and his silhouettes for a time, Mother seated herself gingerly, folding her hands in her lap, as if she could stay like that, frightened and stubborn and straight-backed, until it was safe go home. I threw some wood scraps in the primus to boil water for barley tea.
At the table, Anton importantly riffled the pages of his French dictionary, filling the air with the sound of autumn leaves blown in a strong wind. He mumbled, “Les Chabins chantent des airs à mourir / Aux Chabines marronnes.” He slammed the dictionary closed. “What the hell are Chabins? ‘The somethings sing their songs of death to their maroon something women.’ Apollinaire you whore’s son, you big fat turd.” He threw himself onto his cot. “I have a headache.” The springs groaned. He began to play with his revolver, spinning the cylinder, opening it, looking in at the bullets in the chambers. I was used to this but I knew he was trying to terrify my mother. I didn’t think the gun even worked. He liked to tell us that he’d played Russian roulette with it. He imagined himself a Verlaine.
“Mulatto,” Vera Borisovna said suddenly, her voice clear and still as a stone dropped in clear water. “Chabin. It’s when one of the great-grandparents is a black. Like Pushkin.” We all turned to stare at her. “One-eighth’s part. And marronnes means ‘chestnut.’”
Anton propped himself up on one elbow. “Really?”
“Although ‘maroon’ is picturesque. You might prefer it.” She stopped. Then a slow smile trickled across her pale face. “Also it’s ‘dying.’ Not ‘death.’ Les Chabins chantent des airs à mourir.” Her beautiful accent. “The mulattos sing songs of dying to their chestnut—maroon—women.”
Anton sat up on his bed, put his feet on the floor. “Listen, do you know anything about Apollinaire?”
“A follower of Mallarmé, I believe.”
“Not a follower. A colleague,” Anton corrected her.
Mallarmé was Mother’s sort of poet, very World of Art, decadent, symbolist. All those fauns and night-blooming flowers, absinthe. I cringed to hear her speak of him with Anton. However, the miracle was that they were speaking at all. Anton could just as well have taken that revolver and shot her in the forehead.
“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance,” she recited. At least Mallarmé was a modernist.
Anton nodded excitedly. “Have you read Apollinaire?”
“Not that I know of,” she said, brushing the knee of her coat.
Anton got up and went back to the table and began to read: “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien / Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin…” His accent was atrocious. While Mother was a graduate of the Catherine Institute—and knew Balmont and Gippius and Pierre Louÿs personally—Anton was a poor teacher’s son from Orel. He was doing the best he could with a tattered copy of Larousse. I watched her anxiously for sneers, but aside from the slightest reshaping of the lips from time to time, she betrayed nothing. All those years of dinners and teas and dances and receptions, generations of good form, kept her from sabotaging herself on Grivtsova Alley. Her cool and interested demeanor during the recital of these cubistic poems with which Anton had been torturing us for months was a monument to her upbringing. She sat with closed eyes and listened, carefully, as if it were a séance and she was trying to elicit words from the Beyond. Could she actually understand the disjunctive, futuristic spirit of Apollinaire?
“I’d like to see your translation,” said Vera Borisovna after he finished. Then she gave him the slight smile she was famous for. “That is, if you care to show it to me.”
41 The Defense of Petrograd
OUTSIDE THE DISTRICT SOVIET, a crowd of grim citizens gathered in the icy Petrograd morning. This was it. The head of the domkom of our building, a hound-faced old man named Popov, had come around with the notifications: Mandatory fortification work for all noncombatants. I’d quickly introduced my mother and Avdokia, “evacuated from Pskov.” He shrugged, not caring where they were from or what they were doing there, and he left without encountering Anton, who lay hiding under his cot. Now I stood in the street before the familiar worn yellow facade as lean, stubble-faced Red Guards distributed shovels, picks, sledgehammers, and axes.
A registrar signed my labor book, and I took my shovel. “Go down to the Narva Gate,” the guard said. “They’ll show you where to set up shop.”
Shouldering my spade like a rifle, I joined a brigade of other charcoal-eyed citizens—clerks, students, ordinary workers from the artels and small factories of the Kazansky district—heading southwest through the frigid morning fog. Others fell into step with us and exchanged rumors, scraps of news. “It’s all about the railways now,” a small, craggy worker said. “My brother-in-law said it’s getting hot down around Rostov.” Rostov-on-the-Don, in the Cossack-dominated southwest of the country, where Volodya and the Volunteers were fighting.
“Think the Germans’ll use gas?” said a woman with deep lines under her eyes that ran diagonally across her cheeks like scars.
Everyone had the same fear of the terrible gas the kaiser’s troops had been using on the battlefield. I well remembered the ruined men in the airless wards of the military hospital, their burned eyes, their burned lungs. A thin-faced man, a first-aid worker with his Red Cross armband, walked alongside our crew carrying a bucket full of rags in case of a gas attack. We would soak the rags in baking soda and water and breathe through them. We’d been told it was as good as a gas mask, but I sincerely doubted it. I just hoped it would be some protection, better than nothing.
“Just remember, they’re hungrier than we are,” said a woman with a falsely cheerful air, as if she were persuading herself. “They’re all workers. They could come over to our side in a heartbeat.”
We marched along the Obvodny Canal, the outer ring of the city, as packs of workers streamed out from the electrical station, the Triangle Works, and the midsize shops—tanneries, textile and shoe factories, laundries. Some clapped us on the back encouragingly, lightening our mood, but dread returned, heavier than the shovels we carried—the old world was returning to claim its own, coming to crush our new lives under its murderous heel. There was no need to draft
these girls, these hard, sober men. No need to bribe them or threaten them. We intended to defend our new nation. We had won it by revolution. It would be up to us to keep it.
It felt good to be one with the revolution again. Despite the cold and the prospect of hard labor and the oncoming Germans, it was a relief to leave Mother and the whole mess of my sticky life behind. I thought about Genya as I marched along. We had a chance for a new, clean kind of life now. How loathsome all that drama had been, all that unnecessary pain. Kolya now seemed so murky and musky, foul as an unventilated room. I felt the press of the pin under my dress. I should just throw it into the road and be done with it. Yet I wasn’t that girl anymore, the little barynya of gestures and pronouncements. I would sell it and buy Genya a sheepskin. Then we could walk together and look clearly in the same direction. No more secrets, no more holding back. Genya was right. This was where my attention should have been all along—the bigger battle, the grander fight. Marching west along the canal in the gray mist with these workers felt almost holy. This must be what Varvara felt every time she said the word Revolution.
Strangely, it reminded me of the day I had my hair bobbed on Vasilievsky Island. How light my head had felt as my pounds of dark red locks fell to the tiled floor. And what emerged in the mirror was myself, but clean, modern, shorn of foolishness. I felt like that again, a new woman emerging from a chrysalis of tresses and tangles, no longer the dreamy girl of former life, the one full of secrets and divisions, but rather someone I had not yet met.
“Think they’ll get this far?” asked a girl in a rough wool scarf the color of sawdust, wiping her nose on the back of her mitten.
“Either they will or they won’t,” I said, pleased at how brave I sounded. “Think what happened to Napoleon.”
The girl’s mouth fell open. “You think we’re going to burn the city?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that this might be a possibility—that we ourselves and not the Germans might leave the city in flames. Where would we go in deep winter? “No, but that’s why we have to stop them. We’ve got to.”