The city blocks grew spare, the houses poor and poorer, served by roads barely worth the name—unpaved, just tracks in the snow. Smoke showed from one house in ten. To think I’d been born in Petersburg, but had never been this far into the industrial outskirts of the city. Now we passed rickety houses with wooden fences all falling down, lonely and sad in the white mist, their snow-filled dooryard gardens within smokestack range of the giant factories. Red tips of willow bushes poked out from the drifts like the fingers of buried corpses. The city soviet was trying to get the workers to resettle in the big flats in the center of town, to literally bring them into the center, but the proletariat had been reluctant to move. Now I understood. If I was a worker, would I want to live in a big flat with ten strange families, miles and miles from work, just for the pleasure of the parquet and the tony address? That, too, was bourgeois thinking. It seemed the Bolsheviks weren’t as proletarian as they professed to be.
The road underfoot turned perilously icy. A stooped woman in a rusty brown shawl slipped and fell, and a girl in a quilted coat with the stuffing coming out at the seams stopped to pick her up. “You okay, Granny?”
“I’ll ‘Granny’ you,” said the woman, settling back on her feet, collecting her shovel, and rearranging her scarf. “Tell you one thing, I’ll be happy when spring comes.”
Hollow-eyed women with ragged children watched us march past. A few waved, but most just stared, mute as cattle. The branches of the willows trembled above the snow. A tall woman with steel-gray hair cut in a fringe across her face was complaining about the Bolsheviks. “They say vote for them, so you vote for ’em and what the hell do they do? Give themselves the cushy spots, best rations, all their damn committees, yak yak yak. Lording it over everyone like the new aristos. Then the first sign of trouble, they’re packing up and leaving us to go to the devil.”
“They’re not,” said the girl in the quilted coat, her breath a white cloud.
“The hell they’re not,” said a woman who looked too old to be carrying that pick she nevertheless carried with the ease of familiarity, shifting the tool to her other shoulder. “Takin’ the food with ’em, too.”
“We shoulda all gone SR,” said the woman with the bangs. “They wouldn’t pull this kinda stuff. Spiridonova for me. Those old SRs, they knew who to shoot, right, girls?”
I wondered if Varvara knew what the workers were saying about the Bolsheviks. Did they know that the bourgeoisie wasn’t their only problem? It scared me. If the workers weren’t behind the Bolsheviks, then what?
“They’re out, though,” said a girl from the Netrobsky shoe factory whose broken boots had been repaired with rags. “The SRs are done for.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said the gray-haired woman. “I heard they’re setting up at the Horse Manège.” The tsar’s old stables, on the Moika. “If it’s a fight, all hell’ll break loose.”
This was the first I’d heard that there might actually be separate SR forces, as Anton had intimated in Sasha’s room. I wondered if they’d fight the Germans or take on the Bolsheviks in their weak moment. Worker against worker? I shifted my shovel to the other shoulder and tried to still my panic. I was going to dig trenches. The SRs and Bolsheviks would fight or they wouldn’t, but the Germans were on their way, and they had to be stopped. I looked at the figures struggling through the mist along with me. We needed the Bolsheviks to keep us believing in the future. Despite Varvara’s assertions about the survival of the revolution, people didn’t understand abstractions. I saw, even more than before, the danger in the soviet exodus. Because these women wouldn’t see in it preservation of the cause at all costs. They’d see desertion. And though I could understand Varvara in theory, I was only a person myself, and I, too, felt abandoned.
We reached the southwestern edge of the city, the Narva Gate outlined in the fog. Beyond it open snowfields lay waiting—the approach to Petrograd across which, at any time, we might hear the crunch and roll of German soldiers, German cannons. I suddenly felt weak, armed only with this shovel. Citizens of every sort toiled in lines across the forehead of the snow. A comrade in an army greatcoat directed us. “Right along there, sisters. The Huns may think they’ll be checking into the Astoria tonight, but seven feet closer to the devil is where they’ll be.”
The trench in the snow was five feet deep, almost over the heads of the women already down there, and about seven feet across. I could see how it could slow down an army that might not see it in the fog, or give our men shelter if they fell back before the Germans. The comrade lowered us into the trench. Inside, flanked by the snow walls, I was flooded by memories of the countless snow tunnels and caves I’d dug in the Tauride Gardens as a child. So strong was the sensation I had to put my shovel down, my foot on the blade, and gasp for air, eyes stinging in the cold. That ice world, furious snowball battles, fought like wars. Now this silent reality.
“You okay?” asked the girl in the quilted coat, noticing I hadn’t filled a single shovelful.
“Sure,” I said, and started to dig. The snow was heavy and compacted, thawed and refrozen. I scraped at it to no avail while women all around me managed shovelfuls, throwing the hard clumps up and over the lip of the trench. A young blond woman marched up to me. “Not like that. Put your boot in it!”
I tried again, but she snatched the shovel away from me in disgust, catching me a blow on the cheek with the handle in the process. “Like this.” Boot heavy on the blade, she thrust the shovel into the snow at an angle. It sliced off a hard white alp that she flung high over the crest of the trench. She shoved the spade back into my hands.
I flushed, my eyes watering, the skin of my face prickling in the frost as the girl with the broken boots watched from the corner of her eye and snickered. I burned with shame to have my uselessness so publicly exposed. But I told myself that humiliation was personal and the task at hand was anything but. Who cared if the girl from the shoe factory was amused by my dressing-down? I tried again, cutting downward through the snow with my foot rather than my body. The first strike broke through and filled the blade with a neat slice of frozen white. But when I flung it, most of it fell back into the trench. The girl laughed. “Oh, that’s good. You’ll have it all filled in by the time the Germans get here.”
“Why don’t you stand there yakking?” I said.
“Eat my dust, devushka,” the girl said.
“Davai,” I said. Let’s go.
We fell into a rhythm, shoveling, breaking the snow, heaving it out of the trench, which began to deepen. Between shovel loads, we exchanged clipped conversation, part of the rhythm of the labor: “What’s your name?” “Where do you work?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” The work made me feel strong and clean. Some women started a song—a haying song, of all things—and we all caught it up, men farther down the line responding, just as they would in the fields. I had never worked alongside others like this. It felt good to be just one of the many, our heartbeats in time, our arms, our lungs. You didn’t have to be the best, it would have ruined the whole thing—not the best, not the worst, just a part of. The important thing was that the revolution survived.
As we moved along the trench in the blue-white fog, our breath forming ice on our scarves, I heard the women call out, “Here they come, those bastards!” “Hey, look lively!” “Watch out, honey, your slip is showing!” Having reached a shallower portion of the trench, I could now see over the lip. A party of people straggled along, prodded by Red Guards. Bourgeois, pitiful in their thin shoes. Had they had their boots confiscated? Had they sold them? Old men and slender-waisted women, their formerly fine coats and hats showing the wear of the revolutionary year. Rounded up for labor duty. They certainly hadn’t volunteered. “That’ll show ’em.” “Burzhui!” My teammate, Alya, called out at top volume, “See how ya like wiping your own asses, and you can wipe mine as well!”
The woman with the steel-gray bangs yelled, “Pretend it’s a road for the Germans!”
I could hardly
bear to watch them struggle. Old men and fragile women who had never so much as handled a dishrag let alone a pick or a shovel were handed heavy tools and shoved toward the line. Just the weight of the implements was more than they could manage. I could well imagine their hunger, their weakness.
Then I recognized one of them—Lisa Podharzhevskaya, from the Tagantsev Academy. And her parents. Lisa wore a draggled fur hat that looked as though it had been dropped into a puddle and frozen. She was the class beauty, the haughty type. How ill they all looked, especially the father—miserable, struggling in the icy fog, their gloves too thin. I was selfishly grateful I had Mother stashed away on Grivtsova Alley.
Now the work seemed colder, sadder, the women not so nice.
“You’re not feeling sorry for ’em, are you?” Alya asked.
“A little.”
“Well, they weren’t feeling so sorry for us, now were they? Like who was paying for those big flats and Sunday hats? You and me, girlie. So now they get a taste of their own medicine. It’s good for ’em. Like a big dose of castor oil.”
They don’t feel the cold as you and I might, my mother would say when she’d send Basya off on some frivolous errand. I’d once heard Lisa’s father opining about workers’ demands for the eight-hour day. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. They’d just drink and beat their wives.
But I couldn’t stop thinking of the Podharzhevskys’ misery, rounded up and marched across the city, rained upon with abuse. Not like me and my crew, who worked to save our own city, our own future. We were hungry, but our rations were lavish compared to those of the nonworking Formers. And tomorrow they might all be gone, put on a train, taken out of the city. Vanished into the mist.
I ducked down, hoping Lisa wouldn’t see me, wouldn’t recognize me among the other workers. I reserved my loathing for the Red Guards, sitting on boxes by little fires, taunting the conscripts instead of putting their own shoulders to the work. What were they doing here anyway? Why weren’t they out there, trying to stop the Germans? Easier to torment scarecrows.
Now the father stopped to lean on his spade, clinging to it as if he might otherwise fall over. He had already been an old man when I first met Lisa. From behind him, a guard rose from his box and shoved him with the butt of his rifle between the shoulder blades. The old man lurched forward, throwing his arms wide, and fell. Our women laughed. “Hey, watch your step over there, baryn.” “How do you like being on the other end of the foreman’s stick now, boss?”
“It’s just an old man,” I said.
The woman with the steel-gray fringe called back to me. “Believe me, when we was on the bottom, they pissed on us good and proper.”
Ice weighted the tips of my eyelashes. I brushed it away angrily. “What’s the good in making people suffer? What difference do they make now?”
“You don’t keep feedin’ a bad dog,” said a woman in a brown shawl over her brown coat. “You take it out and shoot it.”
I was losing ground with every word, and soon I would reveal myself to be as Former as the Podharzhevskys. The girl Alya already suspected it. “So that’s what happened to Fluffy,” I said. “Come to think of it, didn’t they have meat at Dining Room 12 yesterday?”
The women laughed and went back to their work, but all the spirit and energy had gone out of me. I imagined Varvara’s scorn. And Zina’s, fighting at the front with Genya. I knew what they would say—that I was too soft to be a revolutionary, too muddleheaded, too individualistic. I hadn’t read enough Marx, didn’t understand the anonymous forces of economics and history. But I hoped pity would not prove a Former virtue, outmoded as parasols. Who would do battle against this inhumanity? I supposed that was why Blok put Christ at the head of the Twelve.
I hacked at the snow alongside Alya. I’d lost the flush of solidarity that had kept me warm. Now the work was just hard and my hands, arms, and back ached. Snow leaked in through my own broken boot. After some time, they fed us bread and tea, and we went back to it, the cold growing denser, clawing at our faces. They couldn’t keep us out here much longer. I had really thought that the revolution would change people, change their very souls. Romantic, I could hear Varvara say.
Maybe they would change, when they had the time and security—this woman with the brown scarf, the girl with the stuffing coming out of her coat. Maybe when they could stop worrying about the Germans, when they had eaten their fill and really understood they were their own masters, they would have time for mercy as well as justice.
42 The Lost Eden
I RETURNED TO THE Poverty Artel after dark, to the incongruity of Mother and Anton sitting together at the table, their heads bowed as if over a missal. Mother coolly corrected his French, while Anton clutched his head and cursed. Over the old divan, a light burned in a red glass before the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin. The place smelled of cabbage—a pot of soup kept warm for me on the little primus stove. I sank onto a chair, too tired even to take off my wet boots. Avdokia knelt to pull them off. A regular little missy again, Varvara had sneered. Yet the familiarity of Avdokia’s care was so comforting…exactly why I shouldn’t allow it. “No, please don’t. I’m eighteen. I think I can pull off my own boots. Everybody has to pull off their own boots now,” I said, louder, for Mother’s sake.
“Marinoushka,” Avdokia chided in her chu-chu-chu voice. “Give this old woman the pleasure of taking care of her baby.” She got my boot off.
I wrestled the muddy thing out of her hand. “What did we fight a revolution for? So you can wait on me on your knees?”
She sighed, sat back on her heels. “You were always such a stubborn child. What should I do—sit by the fire and grow roots like a turnip?”
“We all have to change,” I said. “This is exactly why people hate the bourgeoisie. An old woman on her knees, serving a perfectly healthy young person.”
“People hate the bourgeoisie, period,” my mother said from the table. “They’d rather see an old woman digging ditches. Or sweeping the streets.”
Avdokia sighed, watching me struggle to take my other wet boot off with clumsy, frozen hands. She set a pair of my mother’s embroidered lambskin slippers toes out in front of me, ready to be stepped into. The yeasty smell of this old woman, the velvety feel of her cheek, were as familiar as my own eyelids. She cupped my chin in her gnarled hand, rubbed her nose against mine. “The devil never tires of new ideas.”
She straightened and brought me a bowl of hot cabbage soup. The bowl felt wonderful in my cold hands. She claimed my boots and cleaned them with a page of Pravda. Such levels of irony there. Mother watched me eat as Anton grappled with Apollinaire. “I don’t like ‘with shame you overhear,’” he said, but she wasn’t listening. I saw curiosity, even respect, in her blue eyes. Who was this girl, her daughter? A married girl, a poet, capable of earning a living with her hands? I had lived her life for so long. Now she was having a taste of mine.
Avdokia set my boots by the door on a piece of newspaper and began to sweep the room. “Could you stop that?” Anton snapped. “Babushka. The place is fine.”
“Pigs shouldn’t live in a place this fine,” she muttered, moving dangerously close to Anton’s territory between table and cot, picking things off the floor, dusting them or stacking them, tucking his shoes under his bed.
“Leave those things alone!” He grabbed her armload of balled-up paper, pamphlets, dirty clothes. “Women. Can’t you ever sit still? Just leave things as they are? I’ll never find anything again.”
Mother burst out in silvery laughter, and I had to join in. Anton could never find anything anyway. He spent half his day raking through his haystacks of poems and papers for the lost scrap of an idea. Now he was outnumbered. He cursed us all roundly, then grabbed his coat, cap, and revolver and stalked out, pausing in the door like an actor leaving the stage. “I’m going to go shoot someone now. Perhaps myself. If only the Germans would come and put me out of my misery.”
Two days later, the Soviet vote
d to accept the German ultimatum. The deal the kaiser offered with his foot on our necks was far harsher than the one Lenin had wanted to sign in January—the one that ideologue Trotsky walked away from, proclaiming, “No war, no peace.”
With the Germans on our doorstep, we had to accept it all. So much for our old demand of “no annexations.” We would cede the Baltics and Poland to the Germans, the Transcaucasus to the Ottomans, and the Ukraine to a puppet government ruled by Berlin. Our borders shrank to the size of old Muscovy, like a heart inside the breast of a dying beast. As for “no indemnifications,” the socialist state owed six billion marks to the kaiser. Not to mention the irony of forced demobilization. We had wanted all along to take apart the machine of war and bring our men home, yet forcible disarmament by a foreign power felt quite different. And more demoralizing still, the workers’ state agreed to stop exporting revolution to the West. No propaganda, no assistance to foreign workers, a complete rout. Trotsky resigned rather than have to go to Brest to sign such an odious declaration.
Still, after four barbaric years of war—exhausted, beaten, truncated, and bankrupt—Russia was finally at peace.
Soon Genya would be home. I imagined him as I sat on my bench at the knitting factory, the pins falling in a clatter and the wool sliding through my fingers. I pictured him home alive, intact, his confidence restored. How I would rush into his arms and kiss him, never let him go. It was high time for Mother to leave the Poverty Artel now that the danger had passed. But it was Anton begging her to stay on another day, and another.
I would return to the flat after work to find her discussing the manuscript with him, cigarette in her hand—she’d started to smoke!—as Avdokia fried potatoes over the primus stove. Eight days earlier none of us would have believed any of it. She’d come to accept me as the woman I was. And I had begun to experience her anew as well, as an independent intellectual. Freed from her overcrowded room on Furshtatskaya Street, she’d been reborn. Her ability to tolerate Anton continued to astonish me. She treated him like a bad-tempered little dog whose outbursts were of no consequence.