The women whispered the names of prisons among themselves. Kresty, the Crosses; Peter and Paul; camps in the north, about which we’d heard rumors since the war. Or there was that much shorter trip, which I could not stop thinking about—out to the courtyard. There were no firing squads anymore. It would be only a single bullet to the head. “Saving ammunition,” the woman with the jug-ears joked grimly. We listened for that single shot, even in our sleep.
Still no one came for me. Not for Morskaya, or for Marusya, or Makarova. I suspected the commissar had not bothered to solve the puzzle—too many bodies to process, too many fates to decide. To judge from this cell, the Cheka had its bloody hands full. They seemed to have arrested every third person in Petrograd. And what was I but just a loose piece of dirt that happened to be lying on the floor when the big broom came through?
56 Up or Down
THE AUTUMN RAINS GREW heavy, and many of the women declined the opportunity to march around the small courtyard for exercise, but I always went. I would take any opportunity to leave that cell. Outside, I lifted my face to the weeping sky. Please, God, reach down and pluck me from this life. Upon my return, the cell always seemed smaller, as if they’d moved the walls in just a foot or two while I was away. The presence of Karlinskaya sent up a stink I could sense even in sleep. I’d been here two weeks now. Perhaps they’d lost my paperwork, sent the files to Moscow.
I’d been trying to remember Genya’s poem about Abraham and Isaac when finally the fat guard called out through the bars, “Morskaya, V367.”
He led me to a different door from the one we came and left by to go to the prison yard. This one was solid metal, and we passed through it into an unfamiliar part of the building. Yellow walls, low ceilings, shouts, the brutal clang of doors. He brought me to a stairway and I studied the broken tile while he jawed with another guard. Which way would I go? Up could mean interrogation, but it could also mean freedom. Down could only mean one thing.
Like a soul on the scales of heaven, I waited.
Another man arrived. A vigorous, short, athletic blond in black leather. “Morskaya?” The fat guard stepped back and the blond shoved me ahead of him.
Down.
The smell of wet walls and mold, and a dirty animal odor, increased as we descended. A slaughterhouse stench. He walked me down the dim hall. Muffled voices came from behind thick doors. A rising shriek snaked from the base of my spine and coiled around my heart, squeezing my throat in its knot. We passed yellow walls the color of old teeth. Black sticky floors sucked at our shoes. Bare bulbs buzzed overhead. The rest of the country was plunged in darkness, but the Cheka would have its electricity.
From behind a metal door, a gunshot reverberated like a crack of lightning in the closed-off space. Panic was a bird crashing into walls, my heart within my rib cage. The smell, the tile, the promise of pain. I felt as though someone was pressing a wet pillow to my face. I stumbled. The Chekist hauled me along. “Don’t pass out yet. Plenty of time for that.”
A heavy door swung outward, and two Chekists dragged a man’s body out in front of us. He’d gone into that room alive. To think I had scorned the schoolteacher’s terror. I melted into a hysteria all my own when I saw the dead man’s bare feet. And there were his boots, tucked under the arm of the taller man. It was hard to both drag the body and keep the boots from falling.
The Chekist shoved me inside.
The room was windowless, tiny. Black oilcloth lined the walls. A drain in the middle of the floor pooled with blood. A sound—a howl, a moan, a wail all in one—emerged from me like an animal’s from a cage. Now I, who’d been silent for so long, was suddenly chattery as a mockingbird. “This is all a mistake. You have the wrong person. I need to see Varvara Razrushenskaya. She’s Cheka, she worked for Uritsky. She knows me. She can vouch for me. Please call her!” I started to beg but then I remembered what Arkady once told me about men like him, that tears make them cruel. We hate weakness. It inspires us to violence, he’d said. I certainly didn’t need to inspire this man. I had to get a grip on myself.
“Save your breath.” He shoved me against the oilcloth. I sank to my knees in the still-warm blood. Again that wail. Was this to be my end—this? Unknown, unsung, my only crime to have been alive at the same time Lenin was shot. I pictured the Left SR women up in the cell. They’d started a hunger strike before they disappeared, one by one. How weak I was compared to them. Because I was alone. I had no comrades, no friends. This man wouldn’t even have to pull my hair.
The stocky Chekist stood over me. He smelled like pork fat. “All a mistake, da? Let’s start with your name.”
The letters were like doorknobs in my mouth. My mouth so parched. My throat. A paper mouth. A paper tongue. “Makarova. Marina.”
“What?” He bent over and yelled into my ear.
I was afraid to look. His boots were very good.
“Makarova,” I said again. “Marina Dmitrievna.” I fought the luxury of weeping. I had to think, to hear.
“Address?”
“Pulkovo Observatory.” Name, province, district, village. Name province district…
He kicked me in the side of the head. I saw constellations. Cygnus, flying across the Milky Way, Deneb in its tail, a comet of bright red. “Last registered? And don’t waste my time.”
I gave him Grivtsova Alley.
“Why were you arrested?”
Didn’t he know? My tears and my snot and the blood all ran together. Yet my big ears were twitching. I hid the perception like stolen cash into a loose sleeve, the possibility that he knew less than I’d imagined. “There was a raid. On the observatory,” I whispered. “I hadn’t any papers.”
“Where were they? Did you destroy them? To hide your class origins?” His waxy jaw seemed so firm, seen from below. If he were a fish, how easy he would be to land. He towered over me. The thought came: How he must hate being small.
“I was attacked. They were stolen.” On my knees, a holy petitioner, in the blood of the Lamb. Paint the doorposts so the Angel of Death will pass over. The Angel of Death—I thought I’d already met him, but perhaps not.
My blond captor shuffled through papers in a file he’d tucked under his arm. “You are from Petrograd. What were you doing in Pulkovo?” He stood so close I could smell his boot blacking.
“A place to hide, Comrade,” I said to his footwear.
“From whom?”
How could I explain in such a way that my story wouldn’t trip over itself? “I’d been kidnapped. I escaped.”
“Why? Are you wealthy?”
“No. It was…of a sexual nature.”
His long nostrils flared. I imagined the pupils of his pale green eyes widening and narrowing like a lizard’s as he scented the air. “Did the observatory personnel knowingly hide you?”
The Five, oh God. “No. They took pity on me. They didn’t know. To them, I was just a misplaced person. I wasn’t quite right in the head.”
“They recognized a fellow bourgeois…”
That word, that word again! What did it mean? Words like bits of cheap currency. It meant everything, it meant nothing. Like saying “yellow.” Yellow yellow yellow yellow.
But the drain awaited.
“I’m a worker. I do factory work.”
“Which factory?” He squinted a pale eye.
“A knitting workshop. In the Moskovsky district. Bobrov’s,” I said. Would it help? There was no Bobrov’s anymore.
“You have no labor book.” He forced me to look up. This same horrible sensation, on my knees, a man yanking me by my hair. If I lived, I would never allow a man to touch me this way. I would shave my head for the rest of my life. “You are a bourgeois parasite!” he shouted into my face. “Selling yourself! Debasing our socialist revolution!”
“I was raised bourgeois but I’m a worker now. Look at my hands.” I spread them out, bloody but coarse from boiling laundry and scrubbing floors, calloused from digging and hoeing. Was it illegal now even to live
?
“You can put a deer into harness but it doesn’t make it a horse. What are they really doing up there at the observatory? Were they sending signals to the British? Answer me!” He released my hair and unholstered his gun. I could smell the oiled leather, the metal.
I couldn’t stop my useless tears. The bitterness of my situation was a poison in my throat, the hopelessness of it all. I would end here, in this filthy basement. “Please—I’m telling you the truth. I swear on my mother’s head.” Though my mother had probably already been here, perhaps in this very cell, kneeling in someone else’s death.
“How well do you know Razrushenskaya?” he asked.
The question caught me up short. He was like a horse that had suddenly turned, trying to unseat me. In that one question, he gave me more than he’d intended. Was Varvara in trouble? What if she was on the outs, under investigation herself? The authors of Kommunist opposed the main body of power. Uritsky had been one of them. Could it have been they who shot him, and not Lyonya Kannegisser? I felt sick—it had never occurred to me that Varvara might be vulnerable. “We were in school together, that’s all.” Furiously backpedaling.
“Did you know she was dvoryanstvo?” Nobility.
Oh God, help me get out of here without incriminating her. “When I knew her, she lived in a tenement on Vasilievsky Island. She was a party member, even in school. Organizing among the women in the textile factories. Working an underground press.”
“Did you ever see her with members of the nobility?”
“She was a Bolshevik!” Was my friend in a cell somewhere in this building herself? Waiting for the tap on the shoulder, the shout from the guards?
“Did she ever take money from members of the nobility?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Is she a member of any counterrevolutionary groups?”
The devil tickled me and despite myself I laughed. He grabbed the back of my head and smashed my forehead into the floor. Into the blood. Blood everywhere. My hands, my face covered with it. Fresh. Warm. Rivers of blood. Oceans of blood. I saw it, like a vision. Russia. Washing into the drain. I could not stop screaming. He kicked me to shut me up but the screams kept coming out. The blood, which had once been inside another person, coated me, drenched me in its viscous red.
The door opened. Even the dank smell from the hall was fresher than the iron smell of the blood and the rot of the drain.
A woman’s boots. Long and narrow. “I’ll take this, Comrade.” He left without saying another word.
Weeping, I crawled to the boots, clung to them.
A bony hand pulled me to my feet.
I threw myself around her neck, forgetting that I was covered in blood, forgetting everything but love for this tall, leather-clad girl, my savior. Bloodying her neck, her cheeks, kissing her, clutching her as a drowning man clutches a plank of wood.
She shoved me away roughly, embarrassed.
“He asked about you,” I whispered, the words tumbling over each other. “Your family. Your social origins. Asked if I knew you were dvoryanstvo, how we met. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Berzhins, that treacherous scum. He knew you were my prisoner. Thought he’d get a head start on you, see if he could find something. He’ll get his soon enough.”
My prisoner. She had known I was here all along. “He could have killed me. Why didn’t you come for me, if you knew I was here?”
“Don’t you interrogate me,” she shouted. “You can’t imagine what’s going on now, so just shut up and do what I tell you.” Like a cop, she hauled me out of the room and toward the stairs by my bruised upper arm.
Eighteen years old, and my school chum held my life in the palm of her hand. And the lives of how many others? Yes—who was I to interrogate her? I didn’t even own a pair of drawers.
As we ascended the tile stairs, she kept a close grip on me under the armpit, the practiced hold of a prison guard. I couldn’t help asking myself how many times she’d been down to that cellar. Had she held a gun to somebody’s head there? Pulled the skin from his flesh? I felt the blood drying on my face. My hands were sticky with it, and the cold whistled up my skirt as we climbed to the third story, then down a long hall painted the dingy yellow that was the palette of Russian officialdom. Prisoners waited along the walls, pale-faced, like patients outside a hospital ward. Would the news be bad, or worse? They blanched when they saw me drenched in blood and looked the other way. Varvara opened a door and shoved me inside.
It was an office like any other—small, high-ceilinged, painted a dirty green, with a chair rail that ran around the room. A portrait of Lenin hung on the wall along with one of a gaunt man with a pointed beard. Heavy mesh on the windows, in case one thought to jump. Outside, charcoal clouds boiled in the early October sky. “Sadis’,” Varvara ordered. Sit.
I took the straight-backed chair before a small, scarred table. No calendar in here, no clock. The smell of graphite and wet wood tinged the cold air with a special despair. My body felt not quite my own, my head semidetached, as the English would say.
How much she had changed since spring. She was every inch the Chekist now, in creaking leather, the square body of her machine pistol menacing at her belt. Her expression perfectly echoed that of the grim, pointy-bearded man on the wall. Yet somewhere in there was still the girl who loved puns and puzzles, who stole sugar from the bowl with a grin. She disliked tenors and squeaky chairs and had not been pleased with the broom she got on St. Basil’s Eve.
So this was what it meant. A broom indeed. Still standing, she spread my dossier before her like a choir book and leafed through the hymns, her mouth sliced into a deeper-than-customary scowl. Patches of red broke out on her bony cheeks. “I can’t believe you used my name. What the devil did you think would happen?” She read aloud: “One unidentified person, aka Maria Mardukovna Morskaya, arrested Pulkovo Observatory, twenty-third September. Without papers. Confessed to passing secrets to the English. Named Cheka commissar Varvara Razrushenskaya in confession.”
I hadn’t realized it would sound like that. “You’re a commissar?”
“No—I’m the Little Humpbacked Horse. You were passing secrets to the English?”
“No! I never confessed to anything. It’s all made up! A commissar with a little moustache interrogated me and threw me onto a truck for Petrograd. I only used your name…” I didn’t know it would get her in trouble. “It was all I could think of. But I swear I never named you as part of a confession. I swear to God, Varvara.”
“And you were in Pulkovo doing exactly what?” The squeak of her leather jacket, that smell would forever after remind me of this day. She had an extra skin now, and I had none. “Everybody said you were dead. No news, nothing. And then, when they arrest you, you think of me? Not a word for months, and suddenly, you drag me into it?” She leaned forward, and I couldn’t believe the hatred in her eyes. She had looked upon me in many ways—grudging admiration, sneering superiority, even sisterly scorn—but never with loathing. Pure disgust. “Thought I’d come to the rescue? ‘Oh, Varvara will clean it up. Varvara will make it all go away.’ That’s not going to happen this time. Everything’s different now.” She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled, like a swimmer emerging from under water.
And I felt myself sinking, my head going under the waves.
“What were you doing at Pulkovo?”
How could I tell her the way I’d careened through the winter like a drunk on a frozen pond? I didn’t want to lie to her. She always knew, and she was my one chance. But I didn’t know how to tell her the truth—how much of it to tell, how not to sound like the adventurer Arkady had labeled me.
At last she sat, threw her cap on the table, and scooted her chair in, her black frizzy hair standing up like a madman’s. She took out some paper, dipped her pen in the ink pot. How far we’d come from those days leafleting outside factories together, talking to women in tenement courtyards. I would have mentioned it, but the rage in her eyes to
ld me we’d gone beyond friendship. From her point of view I was simply a liability now, a hot coal of which she was only too eager to rid herself. “Start at the beginning.”
The beginning? I sorted through my life since then, the way you sort photographs before placing them in an album, deciding which pieces fit and which don’t and in what order. In the next room, an interrogator was badgering someone. I was distracted by the incessant stream of his hectoring accusations. Outside, the hoofbeats of a cabman’s nag clattered down Gorokhovaya Street. “I’m losing patience, Marina.” Her pen was about to drip on her papers. She tapped it on the ink pot.
I suddenly saw myself—I was exactly like this city, with its classical facades and labyrinths of dirty courtyards behind them as I unfolded my story, beginning with Seryozha’s death and Kolya’s return, the house on the English Embankment. I held nothing back, watching her face, her jealousy at my passion for Kolya—how she hated him. Well, she’d wanted to hear the whole thing. I had no other cards to play.
“You know what he was doing here, don’t you?” she asked. “Speculating under cover of army provisioning. The man’s complete scum. I can’t believe you’d go to him when you had a man like Genya. You’re really a piece of work.”
Something heavy dropped in the next room, startling me—but not her. What was she accustomed to that that sound was just an ordinary workday?
She liked it better when I told her how Kolya left me. My return to Genya. Our marriage and its implosion. The move back to Furshtatskaya. I noticed she’d stopped taking notes.
I got to the part about Arkady. The islands, St. John the Baptist, the barracks. Then her pen flew, blotting the cheap paper. The hothouse on the Vyborg side. The trip to Kolomna, the passports and the station.
She rubbed her temples with thumbs and forefingers. “And you never thought to tell anyone? You never thought how this was harming the revolution?”
“I tried to tell you, remember? When I came to your place? You’d just been roughed up by the strikers…” I trailed off. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of that. “I wanted to tell you, but Manya was there. I couldn’t. Compared with what you were doing, it sounded so unbelievably squalid.”