Arkady reached with his teeth to pull a length of string and loop it over his curled thumbs. “What would you say if I told you he was here in Petrograd?”
My heart dropped like a statue from a palace rooftop. Breaking like shattered plaster on the stones of a public square.
The old man nodded. “You care for him a great deal. No, actually, I put him and his goods on a train to Finland six weeks ago. He was headed to Stockholm. And from there, Paris—if he can make it through the lines.”
Was this also a lie? Some sort of test? I sensed he was telling the truth now. Kolya had gone six weeks ago. But he’d promised he would never leave the country without me. I didn’t want the languid von Princip to see me cry. I could feel him watching me, enjoying his little game. I bent down to brush an imaginary lump of snow from my broken boot, examined the sole, the awful crack. I pressed the bridge of my nose, pulled hard on my forelock.
Von Princip wove a string crown, held it at arm’s length, and squinted one eye, crowning me with it. Then he pulled it off his fingers and swung his legs over the edge of the divan, sitting up. “What do you do for a living, Makarova? Teach dancing? Give French lessons to pharmacists?”
“I work in a factory,” I said defiantly.
A smile broke slowly across his face, like a crack moving through glass. “Ah, the little proletarian. No need to get defensive. I’m quite fond of the Bolsheviks, you know. After all, they’ve made all this possible.” He rose from the divan and went to his desk, started rooting in the drawer. “Before the revolution I was only a criminal. Now I’m a regular tycoon.”
I imagined the possibilities of panic and scarcity. I knew why Kolya did it—for the excitement, the gambler’s thrill. Some spectacular bit of cleverness, perhaps gulling the uninformed but also helping when he could, that’s what he loved. More than the money. And what did this man love? “There’s nothing shameful in working for a living,” I said.
“Oh, Makarova,” said Arkady. “You’re no proletarian.” He put his bony hand on my shoulder. I was surprised that it didn’t repulse me. “You’re an adventurer. Just like your little friend Shurov.” His voice was dry, precise, raspy, insistent. “Politically. Personally. Probably sexually, too.” He was watching me with a half smile. What was he looking for? Shame? Agreement? I hadn’t lived with Anton all these months to be baited so easily. There was a knock on the door. Arkady didn’t answer it. “You weren’t born to run a lathe or whatever you do at your factory.”
Adventurers. Was that what we were, Kolya and I? Perhaps. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of labeling me. “Maybe I’m a good lathe operator. Maybe it’s my ultimate dream. You don’t know the first thing about me.”
Arkady held up the diamond.
I opened my hand, not quite believing it wasn’t still in my palm. He turned the pin in his fingers, letting the lamp shatter its spectrum into yellow shards. He closed his other fist over it, opened his hands, and the pin was gone. “Another girl would have brought someone. But not you. You’re frightened, but your curiosity is stronger.” Watching my face the way a boatman scans a shore. He was standing right next to me, and I could smell wormwood, dark and a bit antiseptic, and camphor, like the church. “Hiding this all those weeks.” The pin was back in his fingers and he held it before my face. “It must have burned quite a hole in your slip, knowing you could have ten thousand rubles any time you liked. Biding your time. Consider this before you tell me you don’t play games. You have a bit of the criminal in you, Makarova. More than a little, I would say. You like secrets. You like knowing more than most people.”
“But I don’t rob them.”
“Ostorozhno,” he said, waving a finger in the air between us. Careful. “Remember, if you’re alive, it’s only by my pleasure. I could strangle you right now, throw you out in the snow, and no one would lift an eyebrow.”
I nodded, a very tiny nod. Felt the weight of the gun in my pocket.
“Though at this moment, I prefer you alive.” He pursed his lips in a coquette’s moue, which on his gaunt face was laughably incongruous. “But I won’t have my profession maligned. Without the criminal, how would people live? How much meat do you think would be sold in Petrograd? Or oil or grain? The Soviet can’t keep it on the trains long enough.” He stood next to the window in his socks, gazing out at the milky sky, the gaunt trees. “Every region takes its share, and poor Petrograd’s the end of the line. As simple as that. Without us, the city would starve.” He threaded the diamond stickpin through the lapel of his jacket and poured himself a glass of vodka from a tray on the table, poured another and held it out to me. Standing, he was tall and rather elegant in an untidy way. “Never underestimate the genius of crime. We find a way when there is no way.”
I knew I shouldn’t drink with him. It implied some kind of agreement. But to what was I agreeing? Hesitating a moment, I drank. The vodka burned my empty stomach.
“I’ll give you five thousand plus a can of cooking oil, ten pounds of good wheat flour, four of meat. And some sugar.”
My stomach rumbled. Not vobla, that bony fish, our “Soviet ham,” but something that once walked on four legs…and wheat flour…sugar, when had anyone last seen that? And cooking oil. No more of those bizarre substitutes—cod-liver or castor oil or liquids that didn’t seem to be oil at all. I wouldn’t be able to find such an offer of real food again, even with ten thousand rubles in my pocket. By comparison, money was nothing, birdseed, a shake of salt, though that, too, was hard to find.
Arkady put on a pair of leather slippers and went out into the hall, leaving me in his makeshift salon. On a wide, ugly desk dating from the era of Nikolas I lay piles of ragged papers, lists of abbreviations, and numbers scribbled on the scraps. I held one up. The baron had very small handwriting, spiked, Gothic. All in a sort of code. I considered taking a sheet and folding it into my pocket as insurance against a rainy day, but I put it down again. I suspected this, too, might be some kind of test. I turned to the stove to warm my feet and hands.
The baron returned. He pressed a thick wad of banknotes into my hand, like a paper brick. “Here’s the five.” I didn’t count it, only turned away and tucked the bills into my bodice, packing them around my ribs. When I turned back, he was studying me, unblinking, long fingers pressed to his lips. “I start to see what our friend saw in you, Makarova.” He made that terrifying moue again, contorting his bony face in a whore’s pout. “But don’t mistake my affability for idiocy. I might have something for you in a day or two. I’ll be in touch.”
45 The Errand
NO WAY TO HAVE something in these hungry days without the world knowing about it and hating you for it. When Avdokia let me in, I smelled incense—Master Vsevolod must have been there. Even though Mother no longer had tea and mille-feuilles to offer him, I was pleased to discover that it was actually a friendship. I had assumed the worst about him—unfairly, as it turned out.
Avdokia crowed as I dropped my heavy prizes on the table, the meat, the oil, the flour, which I’d carried home most of the way on my back, fully prepared to shoot anyone who got near me. She sifted the silky flour between thumb and forefinger. “Wheat flour! Theotokos be praised.”
Mother said nothing. She’d turned inward again since our ejection from Grivtsova Alley. The fight with Genya, the attack on the Virgin, the terrifying walk back to the flat through the storm had snuffed out her time with Anton like a lamp at bedtime. Avdokia volunteered to brave the kitchen to cook the meat. She would be better able to withstand the catty remarks of women trying to guess where that delicacy had come from than I would. Envy ran thick as cold oil in the collectivized flat. Mother buried herself in her Blavatsky, and I thought about Kolya and what he was doing with the frightening, intriguing man whose company I’d just left.
Later, as we ate our heavenly dinner, real wheat pancakes and fresh meat, my nanny and I plotted what to do with the money and the rest of the food. We decided we would first buy a small load of fire
wood. Avdokia knew a woman who knew a man in the Haymarket who had a source. “We’ll trade for a bit of the flour.” But how to get the wood back here? If only I had a little sled…just a board with wooden runners and a rope to pull it with.
Mother cried out when I broke apart a drawer of the chifforobe using my hands and feet. “That was a wedding gift from my grandmother,” she sighed.
I didn’t bother looking for tools. Even in the old days, we never had any. We’d used other people as our tools—plumbers and shoemakers and tinkers and tailors, the dvornik. And now we were paying for it. No awl, no hammer, no ax—we were little better than cavemen. These days tools were rarer than radium. Though nails were easy. Every bit of wood came with some—all you had to do was burn it. Everyone’s bourgeoika stove was full of them. Maybe I should look for a hatchet while we still had the money.
I emptied the bullets from Anton’s gun and used the butt to hammer the runners to the bottom of the drawer’s face using nails from the stove. Soon I’d fashioned a crude sled, no worse than many I’d seen in town. I punched two holes in the walnut slab and threaded a drapery cord through for a strap.
“Barbarians.” Mother turned away, unable to watch the destruction of the beautiful armoire.
“Rich barbarians,” I said. “And soon to be warm ones.”
In the morning, we measured flour into a sack that Avdokia had sewed from a pair of Mother’s underwear and hung from my belt inside my coat, pulling on it to make sure it wouldn’t break loose under a pickpocket’s hands. “Make sure the wood’s not wet,” Avdokia said. “And don’t settle for less than a pood. You should hardly be able to lift it.”
“Marina, don’t go.” Mother was anxious again. She’d started rubbing her knuckles, knitting her hands, as she’d been doing after Seryozha’s death. “Stay home today. There are dark entities around you.”
That was all I needed to hear before going out on this little mission. I exchanged glances with Avdokia. She walked me to the door, made the sign of the cross over me. “God have mercy…maybe I should come with you. I’d make a better bargain.”
“You stay with her.”
With the gun snug in my pocket, I descended the stairs to Furshtatskaya Street. I felt like a character from Dumas in seven-league boots. So glad to be out of the flat and Mother’s aura of doom. The air seemed suddenly warmer, the fog less icy. Perhaps it was just the good dinner last night and a breakfast of fresh eggs. I had oil, meat, and soap, flour to trade, money hidden behind the baseboards. No Genya, no Kolya, but I’d survived, and spring was coming soon. A sudden feeling of well-being seized me. I strode down the street like a bogatyr. Life would return. Maybe for me, too.
Now that I was eating regularly, I felt better than I had in a long time and the city seemed more beautiful to me. Occasionally sunshine broke out and glinted on the icicles, which loosened from the rooftops and dropped like spear points from the sky to burst on the pavement. You could be killed if you weren’t careful. Yes, spring arrived with the retorts like gunfire from the Neva as the ice began to break. I was writing again, three, four poems a day, the straitjacket of my soul broken loose.
Strolling along Sergievskaya, not far from the Krestovskys’, I was startled by an enormous form at the periphery of my vision. A huge horse—black, and shaggy. My first thought—Kolya! But no. In the high driver’s seat was the wizened little man who’d kept the door at Arkady’s barracks. Yet the horse was the same as those in the courtyard that day on the English Embankment, a giant black feather-footed beast, powerful, beautiful, and well-fed when all Petrograd horses were either bags of living bones or already wrapped in paper, being sold in dark stairwells. Who but criminals could feed horses like these now?
“He wants to see you,” the little man said. He didn’t open his mouth much when he talked, like people from the far north.
“What for?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
There are points in one’s life where it’s possible to turn back, and we know them when they come, even when we don’t choose to take that option. Man is a curious and stubborn creature, and I was possessed of both qualities in full. So instead of running for my life, I took a seat behind the little man, who whipped up the giant horse. It surged off—my God! It had the energy to trot when most of the humans around us barely had the strength to stand. We raced to the river, crossing at the Liteiny Bridge, clods of softening snow thumping against the front of the sled, the freshening wind splashing my face. Gaunt pedestrians watched us hungrily, wishing they could ride, wishing they were as fat as the horse, wishing they could carve the horse up with their little knives right there and then. We moved across like royalty. It had been so long since I’d ridden anything other than an overcrowded tram.
On the Vyborg side, we passed the great factories, empty now after the evacuations. Broken windows, sagging gates. Ericsson, Nobel, Arsenal—stinking belching brawny plants now silent as dead mammoths. The workers’ tenements looked colder and shabbier than ever, the streets full of debris. Workers with no work had gone back to their villages. If one needed more proof that Petrograd was dying, the fact was laid bare up here. How would the Bolsheviks ever breathe life back into this devastation?
We sped on through the industrial belt and emerged in the countryside. The sky had brightened, the sun threatening to break through. I had never been so far out on the Vyborg side, had only seen it from train windows, and never in winter. The horse thundered through little-used lanes between open fields, and I remembered another sleigh ride, lilac light on the snow…it seemed like a dream now. Or maybe this was the dream. The sweet cast of the warming air on the weary, sodden drifts.
We pulled up before a greenhouse, the glass obscured by steam, green things growing inside. The little man got down from his high seat. Funny to see such a shrimp driving a sleigh—Petersburg coachmen were always large and well padded. I stroked the giant horse’s beautiful haunch, warm and shaggy, savoring the sweaty, earthy smell, and followed the little bowlegged tough to the greenhouse. Its entry still boasted fancy woodwork from the age of Alexander III. We passed inside the double doors, outer and inner, entering the warmth of the hothouse and its staggering fragrance, lilacs and lilies. They still existed, the greenhouses of Petrograd. Down one long aisle, Arkady von Princip leaned over a flat of hyacinths, closing his eyes over the deep blue of the blooms and inhaling, just like a man preparing to sip a glass of cognac.
He didn’t look up. “What do you know about hyacinths, Makarova?”
“Only the myth.”
“Tell it to me,” he said, moving on to other flats.
I searched my memory. “Hyacinth, a handsome boy who became an object of rivalry between two gods: Apollo, god of the sun, and Zephyr, the west wind. So the gods decided that they would throw the discus to determine who should win the boy. Hyacinth thought to impress Apollo by catching it, and Zephyr, in his jealousy, blew the discus so hard it killed the boy. In mourning, Apollo turned him into a flower.”
“Apollo couldn’t bear for the boy’s soul to end in sad Hades,” Arkady said, breaking off a hyacinth and sniffing it. “So he turned him into a flower that rises from a bulb buried most of the year, to live again in the spring, full of this unearthly scent. Quite a tribute. Ovid says that Apollo’s tears are written upon the petals. Ai. See?” Ai, alas.
He held a bloom between his fingers, bending the petals back. I was aware of how he studied me, the intellect behind those reflective blue eyes. Like most women, I knew when a man found me attractive. He would pay a certain kind of attention that wasn’t so much listening as taking in the sound of my voice, the shape of my profile, the turn of my lips. I was no great beauty. I had my red hair, my round dark eyes, my fat lips, but they were rough and cracked now, the skin peeling from winter’s harshness. I’d once had a good figure but now was all bones—and who could tell anyway under all these clothes? I was no regal Lisa Podharzhevskaya, no Akhmatova. I hadn’t the dignity, the mournful gravity.
And yet, who was he looking at like that? He put his hand on my scarf and pushed it down, left his hand on my neck. I thought it would be rough, scaly, like lizard skin, but it was very smooth.
What was it I found so alluring about him? He smelled peculiar—like cold cellars, like decaying pines—yet I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be with him. How would such a man—whose gangs were the terror of Petrograd—make love? He stroked my hair just once, then turned and perched against the row of seedling tables like some giant messy hawk, his white hair long as an English poet’s.
“I have a job for you, Makarova. Think you can do something simple for me?”
What in the world did he need me for, with an army of criminals at his command? “How simple?” I asked.
“I want you to deliver a package for me,” he said. “You’ll need to be unarmed, I’m afraid. The customer is a bit pugliviy.” Skittish. He held out his hand. I stared at it. “Your weapon, Makarova.” How did he know? I didn’t want to be disarmed by him, but like Russia, I was unable to reject his terms. I took out Anton’s revolver and handed it over. “Will I get it back?”
“You’re likely to blow your hand off with it,” he said. “That would be most unfortunate.” He put it into his own pocket. “Although you might want it to wave around in unsavory company someday. Gurin will drop you.”
I was annoyed to have lost the gun and surprisingly disappointed to find myself summoned merely as a delivery girl suitable for reassuring a skittish customer. I’d thought for a moment his interest was personal. Humiliating, to have thought that a man desired you only to find he just wanted his laundry done. “What’s in the package?”
“Don’t think too much,” he said, and put the hyacinth behind my ear.
The address was in Kolomna, at the western edge of the city, an area of dockworkers, foreigners, and drifters, where Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman once chased the little clerk to his death and where the great poet Blok lived, in a gray six-story building on Ofitserskaya—now Decembrist—Street. As a girl, I had often lingered across from that building, on the embankment of the Pryazhka, imagining that Alexander Alexandrovich would look out from his desk and, seeing a young auburn-haired girl, might stop and wonder, might write a poem about her. I wrote dozens of poems for him that I left on posts and in the knotholes of trees and around the doorway of his building, in hopes he might find them. Such a thing of the past, when girls dreamed of poets instead of meat pies.