“She doesn’t know?” another voice said.
“Someone tried to kill Lenin,” said the man in the wool jacket at my side. “A woman.”
“Botched it, too,” said a higher-voiced man, and there was a flash of a match, a cigarette, a narrow face, a shock of blond hair.
My head reeled. What would happen if Lenin died? What would happen to the revolution?
“They assassinated the head of the Petrograd Cheka, too,” said my neighbor. “Deader than dead. Some student shot him in Palace Square.”
Uritsky! Varvara’s boss.
“I wish the woman had been so lucky,” said the smoker over his bright coal. “Now they think there’s a giant counterrevolutionary conspiracy. They’re rounding up everyone with a pulse. It’s been going on for weeks.”
I could not imagine what was happening in the kingdom of Once-Had-Been, but I was afraid I was about to find out. The van swayed over the ruts in the road. At times the wheels spun in the mud. “Are they taking us to Petrograd?”
“They’re taking us nowhere!” A woman’s voice rang out from the back of the van, urgent, edged with hysteria. “Don’t you see? They’re going to stop somewhere and shoot us all!”
“Why would they bother putting us in a van for that?” argued the smoker. “They could have just shot us back there and saved the gasoline.”
My neighbor predicted they were taking us to Petrograd. “Most of these are hostages,” he said to me under the rumble of the engine. “Families of White officers. What use is a dead hostage?”
“White?” I had an image of men bled white, shuffling through the snow.
“White Army. Where’ve you been living, devushka, a henhouse?” My companion made a scornful sound. “The counterrevolutionaries. They’re massing in Siberia and down in the Don.” Volodya and his Volunteers. “Country’s dividing up like a red-and-white cow, with the English in the north getting ready to milk us dry.”
It was all making horrible sense now, the commissar’s questions, everything that had been said in the dacha the night of my death. Father, Karlinsky, the British. He’s in Vologda with the English. Invasion, counterrevolution, money for the Czech Legion. “What’s happened with the Czechs?”
“That’s how it started. A clash on the Trans-Siberian. Trotsky tried to disarm them and it backfired. Instead of going east, the Czechs came west and took every town on the line. The counterrevolutionaries rushed out of the woodwork to join them.” The van careened and threw my neighbor right onto me. I shrieked and pushed him off. “Sorry, sorry.” He scrambled to right himself. “Forgive me. I wasn’t taking advantage.” I immediately judged him to be ten years older than I’d first imagined. It was a relief to realize that the “victim sign” on my forehead wasn’t visible in the dark.
“Why do they toy with us?” wailed the woman. “Why can’t they just deliver the coup de grâce?”
“Akh, would you shut up?” someone called out.
“I’ll ask them to stop if you want, lady,” said the smoker. “If you want them to shoot you, I’m sure they’ll oblige.”
Despite what my neighbor said, I, too, kept waiting for the van to halt. To be rousted out into a field, told to turn our backs…a couple of times we slowed, and the woman shrieked and sobbed. It was terrible—panic was contagious. I couldn’t help thinking of having escaped Arkady von Princip only to have my short stupid life ended by a Cheka bullet, my head exploding like a watermelon fallen from a cart. Sinking in the field to my knees, then toppling over, my naked ass exposed to the wind. No poems, no children, no memories. Left to the crows.
But the van continued sliding and bumping along the road.
Finally we all felt the change from mud to solid, potholed paved street. “The city,” my neighbor called to the smoker. “That’s ten rubles, Goncharov.”
Now the prisoners spoke in short whispers as we listened for the change in pitch and timbre of the tires, trying to guess our location. When we crossed the first bridge it was clear—the difference between the bridge pavers and the roadway. “Obvodny,” three people said at once. Yes, the smell of the tannery. So this had to be Moskovsky Prospect. If there was another bridge in a few minutes, it would be the Fontanka, and it would mean we were heading into the heart of the city. My longing for Petrograd bloomed inside me. Crazy, to feel hope—it could be far worse here than with the rural Cheka. And yet better to be at home than on some railway siding in Karelia.
After a few more minutes, there could be no doubt as to where we were headed. If I could have seen through the black, shuddering walls of the van, I knew I would behold the wide Fontanka with its wet pavements, its stately buildings on each side admiring themselves in the water. And all around us would be Petrograd—girls walking to appointments, old bony nags clattering along, Formers selling spoons, workers carrying boxes. The state dining rooms would be dispensing tea with saccharine and watery soup. There would be bread queues and poets and, somewhere, a certain madman. Yet I felt such yearning love for every unseen facade and yard, every canal and stone. Would I ever set eyes upon them again?
A turn, and we all toppled to the left. The sound of gates banged back. Close reverberation off stone walls told me that the truck rumbled through a passageway. Then we stopped with a jerk that sent us all tumbling, and the van’s back doors opened with a bang. I squinted against the comparative brightness of the day, though it was still raining. I climbed out with the others, gazing up at this building, most likely Gorokhovaya 2, once the home of the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. How easily the revolution had donned the master’s slippers, taken up his pipe. A few steps from here, St. Isaac’s Cathedral lifted its golden dome, and the Bronze Horseman scanned the Neva. I held my face to the sky, let water fall on my eyelids.
Guards immediately separated us with shouts and shoves. They marched me and the other woman, younger than I’d imagined—a schoolteacher most likely—to a communal holding cell on the second story that must have once been a refectory or classroom. Every spare inch of floor space was occupied with women and beds and bundles, prisoners weeping on cots or sitting stonily on the old boards, gazing at nothing. A group shouted over some slight. It was a waiting room in the train station to some hellish destination. The schoolteacher clung to me. We gingerly picked our way through the bodies and found a place to sit on the floor between two bunks.
A woman on the bed above us gave me a kick between the shoulder blades with her thick-soled men’s boots. I was grateful for Nikolai Gerasimovich’s ointments, my wounds had healed perfectly. My assailant’s face was a fist of rock, and her ears stuck out like honey jars. “Got any food? Any chocolate?” she asked.
My training as a mute held me in good stead. I considered biting her calf in response but didn’t relish having my teeth kicked out.
“We don’t have anything,” the teacher said.
On the other cot above us, a woman wailed, her head in her hands. “I don’t understand. I didn’t do anything! What about my children? They’re alone in the flat!”
An older woman sitting next to her patted her shoulder. “The neighbors will take them.”
“They killed my husband,” she said, weeping. “Because he wore a hat. A hat! His cousin sent it to him from Bremen. They called him bourgeois and chased him down the street!”
Things in Petrograd were worse than I could ever have imagined. I’d forgotten the difference a month could make in revolutionary times, and I’d been gone for four.
“It’s a reign of terror, that’s what it is,” said a thin, sour-looking woman propped up against the wall. “They’ve let loose the hounds of hell. The Bolsheviks are whipping them up—‘You’ve always hated them, your boss, your landlord? Here’s your chance to get even. Go in, Ivan, settle your scores!’”
The widow told us, “My neighbors turned me in! I knew them. I shared my firewood with them. How could people be so cruel?”
Every so often the door opened and one or another of our keepers called som
eone’s name. “Novik!” “Rostova!” Once a woman pretended she didn’t know it was her turn, and the guard came in, hit her with his stick like she was an animal to be driven, and dragged her out, her head bleeding. We winced at each ugly blow as if we ourselves were being beaten.
“Yes, a reign of terror,” the sour-faced woman continued. “What’s next, the guillotine? The oubliette?”
The widow keened. My companion was starting to cry.
I thought of Vera Borisovna. Some part of me actually hoped she’d succumbed during the cholera epidemic and did not have to endure this. I could well picture our neighbors: the blonde with the dirty braid, stirring diapers on the stove; the ferret-faced woman; Basya leading the pack of Furies…cholera would be kind in comparison.
With the English in the north and the Czechs along the Trans-Siberian, five thousand miles of Russia were in the hands of the counterrevolution. No wonder they were arresting us all. Although I was sure Father had slipped the net. Sensibly disguised, adequately funded, without address, he was a moving target, whereas Mother was stuck in full view. I could see him colluding with reactionaries, foreigners, the devil himself, anyone who would get rid of the Bolsheviks. Poor suffering Petrograd. It was supposed to be the new, just society, and now it was a bloodbath. Civil war. My country, coming apart.
In this bedlam, one group of women comported themselves very differently from the rest. They sat soberly and spoke not only among themselves but also to those listening nearby. “Who are they?” I asked an older woman who’d been here since we arrived, sitting at the foot of a cot reading a tattered book through half-glasses.
She looked up from her reading. “Politicals,” she said. “Left SRs. They’ve been outlawed.” So the Bolsheviks had turned on their own revolutionary brothers. How calm those women were. I drew strength just looking at them. Dignity calls to dignity the way pettiness and panic stir the same in the human heart. Though they had tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks and failed, they shed no tears.
I wanted to be close to them, but I was sure the cell was crawling with Cheka spies. I told my companion from Tsarskoe Selo to hold on to my patch of floor, that I’d be right back, and I inched my way along until I could hear them.
“We aren’t trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks,” an older woman with cropped gray hair calmly lectured other women nearby. “We just want a change in policy. They’ve got to stop making concessions to the Germans. Lenin is a traitor to the revolution. He’s betrayed the workers of the world for a separate peace.”
Women were purposely looking elsewhere, trying not to seem as though they were listening. My scalp prickled. Such daring, to say something like that while in a Cheka cell.
“The Bolsheviks better start listening to the workers or we’ll make them listen,” said a flat-faced girl with an upturned nose and small Tatar eyes.
A tremulous woman in black with the sagging cheeks of the formerly fat hissed, “Damn all of you. You shoot the man and you can’t even do a decent job of it.”
“I have the statement of Fanya Kaplan,” said another of the Left SRs, a very tall blond girl with deep-set green eyes. She dug a paper out of her pocket and began to read. “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven years at hard labor. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.”
The words hung in the air.
“They tortured her. Made her drink hot wax,” said the tall blonde, folding the paper back into her pocket.
A silent wail rose inside me. Would I face torture? Hot wax? I thought of what I had already suffered in the room on Tauride Street. I kept thinking of hot wax in my throat—it would burn and choke you at the very same time. The talk moved on to the recent execution of Uritsky’s assassin.
“Good riddance,” said the formerly fat woman who had criticized Fanya Kaplan’s poor marksmanship.
“Unfortunately for us, Uritsky was relatively moderate,” said the Left SR with the gray hair. “He was firmly opposed to the death penalty—the one man in Petrograd holding back the flood. And that idiot Kannegisser had to go and shoot him. Of all targets. It wasn’t even politically motivated.”
When I learned the name of his assassin, the hair stood up on my arms. I knew the Kannegissers, a publishing family. Their salon had been home ground for the entire progressive bourgeoisie. It was where my parents had met so many of their famous friends. It couldn’t have been the father. But I remembered a son, Lyonya—a slight young man, pale and excitable, a little younger than Volodya.
“Was it the son? A poet?” I asked quietly.
“Yes, the son,” she said. “Leonid. A cadet at the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy.” The woman’s old face seemed to glow, the soft creases burnished in the light from the tall, frosted windows embedded in wire. “The cadets devised an uprising at the time of the German invasion.” When I was out digging trenches. “The Bolsheviks shot a few of the boys as an example to the others. One was evidently a friend of this Kannegisser. He skulked around for a long time, thinking of how to get his revenge. He observed that Uritsky crossed Palace Square every day on his way to the General Staff Building. Shot him on his way to work.”
And what he had unleashed. Russia, the great home of unintended consequences.
We were all in the same kettle now: politicals, criminals, students, grandmothers, widows, hostages, and the accidental victims of Fate. All of us used the same slop bucket. We braved cholera and typhoid together with each cup of water. The Third Ancient would have been fascinated with our bread. It certainly wasn’t taking us to Neptune—we’d be lucky if it took us to Tuesday. I had much time to listen and think. I clung to the hope that Avdokia had gotten Mother out of the flat before the arrests began.
We’d been there five days when the teacher from Tsarskoe Selo was called. She collapsed into shrieks and tears. The guard had to come in and drag her out. She wasn’t a hostage—she was just an educated woman, and in the village where she taught, she was the closest thing they could find to a bourgeois. They’d discovered her copy of Aesop’s Fables in Greek and decided it was code, that she was a spy. I was haunted by the thought that if she could disappear for a book of Greek, what would the village Cheka make of astronomical calculations?
Lines looped and snaked in my head, images swirled. A silhouette in a doorway beckoned us into the Future. What would it be—a camp? Torture? Another prison? I was nobody special, but the liquidation of an entire class was going on, and I was no proletarian regardless of whether I’d sewed a few socks. Schoolmistress, piano tuner, proofreader, poet—it didn’t matter now. All guilty.
I lay on the dirty floor at night, wrapped in my coat, listening to the rain and the coughing and weeping and snores of eighty women, wondering if tonight would be the night the guards banged back the door and called the name I had given them—Maria Mardukovna Morskaya. If I died as Maria, Mother would never know what had become of me. Genya…I could not bear to think of dying in this place without a friend, without my name. Though I would see Seryozha again, on the other side. The dead were our Kitezh. They carried our love, our most precious moments, concealed beneath the waters. They were the city that could not be taken, like the secret roots of trees.
The woman on the cot above my patch of floor, the one who’d kicked me, leaned over and whispered, “The guard, Vanka, the fat one—he’s giving out chocolates for a fuck. Real chocolate.”
I had had enough of her. “And how much do you get if I fuck him, Grandma?”
“Half,” she said.
Amid a group of new arrivals, a familiar face appeared. A face I would never forget. The thick red-blond hair, wet with rain, the shapely build inside her shapeless coat. A wave of nausea swept over m
e. I bowed my head, pulled my kerchief lower on my brow. Did the politicals—the estranged left wing of her own party—recognize Karlinskaya? She certainly didn’t cross the cell to join them, embrace them as long-lost sisters. I could still see her in that room, watching Arkady drag me from the dacha. Hear her yell, “Get rid of her!” It was all I could do not to shove my way over, grab her by the collar and shout, “So, do you still think I’m a Bolshevik spy?” But she would never believe me. I imagined slapping her and slapping her.
She thought I was dead, shot back at the dacha, and I was better off leaving it at that. I could always hope a Left SR would kill her in her sleep. The SRs had begun as terrorists and some of that always remained. I watched her as she found a place on a cot and sat with her back to the room. Her graceful form, her heavy hair, created a kind of halo around her. My father had stroked that hair. She had spilled it across his face as she leaned above him when they made love. While he was supposed to be at Kadet meetings. It made me sick to contemplate my father as just another carnal man—and a liar to boot. I wondered if they’d arrested him when they got her.
Each day, rousted from sleep, we queued to use the slop bucket and receive our terrible rations. Nowhere to wash. The stench, the weeping, the bravery and despair. Were there eighty of us? One hundred now? More? We were taken out in groups to walk about in the yard in the rain. Ah, just to breathe the fresh air, though the clotted sky was only a small square wedged between the high walls. Women sidled up to speak to me—the tearful widow, the old chocolate pimp, others—but I kept to myself. They never aired the Left SRs at the same time as the rest. I waited to hear my name called: Morskaya, prisoner V367. But day after day, as others went to interrogation and returned beaten and bloody, mute, or pretending nothing had happened, or disappeared altogether like the schoolteacher, I was never taken out. The waiting was slowly crushing me. Some days I wished they’d just call me and get it over with.