Varvara placed her palms on the edge of the table as if she were bracing herself, her head lowered. The interrogator in the next room started up his questioning again. My head ached where I’d been kicked.
I had to steel myself to tell her the rest. My visit from Arkady, the private dining room, the Order of Saint George. My residence in the room with the striped wallpaper. I spared her nothing. After a time she stopped writing again. She looked like she was going to be sick. She got up and paced the room, pausing often to look out through the mesh as if she’d like to fly into the sky. I got to the poem he’d cut into my back. I stood and unbuttoned my dress, slipped the fabric from my shoulders so she could see for herself the truth of my words. His poem had healed into perfect lines, pink but less three-dimensional.
She stood behind me. Suddenly her arms were around me, her lips kissing my shoulder. “I’ll kill him,” she whispered into my ear. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’ll find him. I’ll fill him so full of lead it would take twelve men to carry his coffin.”
I embraced those leather-clad arms around my waist, leaned my head back against her. We had each had our own revolution. I thought that any given moment in time was not a point but a city tunneled through with parallel passageways. People could be marching overhead and underfoot, all around you, sharing exactly the same real estate, and you could miss each other entirely.
Finally I bent down and pulled my dress up.
Pale and shaken, she sat opposite me, her eyes now shining and bright with pity. Then we recognized each other, no longer interrogator and prisoner, but two friends in a terrible position. “How’d you get away?”
I was nearly done. One last bomb. I described leaving the flat. The road to Pulkovo, the observatory in the distance. “I watched it up there, glowing in the moonlight, and thought that the only happy people in the world were the ones up there on those heights.”
She took my hand, the scarred one. “The people who come after us, they’re the ones who will be happy. It’s not for us.”
“But I want to be happy myself,” I said. “Is that bourgeois of me?”
“Painfully individualistic.” She laughed mournfully.
I described the final chapter, the dacha in the woods. But I was no longer the innocent, the idealist I’d been last October, when I’d played at spying, running off to place my notes in Plato’s Republic. Now I knew the harm that could be done. But how to do the least and still get out of here? I carefully laid out the scene: Karlinsky and his wife, the small dark man, the Englishman in army uniform. And Father—how could I tell the tale without him?
She let go of my hand and began taking furious notes. To the pen’s dry music, I related as much as I could remember. That they were waiting for money—three hundred fifty thousand gold francs—and it had been delayed. But I left out the name of the person bringing the gold. Even now, after all that had happened, I would not give him up.
It began to rain outside. She was still writing as I got to the tale’s end—my father’s betrayal, my run to the observatory, my service as Marusya. My arrest along with the three celestials. “You’ve got to help them. They’re just scientists. They didn’t even know Lenin’d been shot.”
She bristled again. “Don’t tell me what to do. I don’t care about your damn scientists. I need something better than this if I’m going to save your sorry ass.” She batted at the page. “Not to mention my own. Give me something I can use, Marina.”
She took me back through my story, asking questions, demanding specifics, every inch the professional. “The meeting. Who was calling the shots, would you say? Von Princip?”
I saw I’d been focused on the wrong things. I’d been able to think about nothing but Father, how he was involved, and his horrible mistress, how he saw me, and whether I would ever escape. But it was the Englishman and the Odessan who had been at the center of things that night.
“The Englishman. Describe him.”
“Well built, sharp nose, dimpled chin. Blond. Six feet tall.” I could see him in his insignialess uniform, hear his clipped manner of speech.
Her eyebrows were like two dark goats colliding. “No one you’d seen with your old man? From the consulate, maybe?”
“I hadn’t seen him before, but he spoke like a military man. He didn’t trust Arkady.”
She snorted. “And what about the other one?”
“Short, slender, black-haired. Well dressed, clean-shaven. Smoked continuously. Maybe a Jew or a Greek, Turk, Armenian—who knows? I thought of him as the Odessan. He spoke fast, but not clearly—like he had marbles in his mouth.” It should have been here already, Baron. That was our understanding. “He and the Englishman were the link to the Czechs.”
She groaned and leaned back in her seat. “If only you’d come to me then…didn’t you have any sense of what you were sitting on? What they were about to unleash? Instead you go bury yourself at Pulkovo Observatory. Could you really have forgotten your allegiance to the revolution?”
How could she ask such a question? “If you knew Arkady, you’d know why. He’s not just going to forget about me. I bet he has Chekists on the payroll. Otherwise, how could he have operated so long?”
She got up and paced. “There’s got to be something. If you want me to save you—think!” My stomach rumbled, but she ignored it. “Tell me, did the Englishman have a name? Who would meet the Czechs? Who was their contact?”
I ran my hand over the rough table, wondering how many people had confessed to how many crimes sitting just here. Who was innocent? Most, I imagined. I could hear their whispers in the wood…You have to believe me. Who had named others, men and women forever lost. I thought about Karlinskaya in that cell on the second floor. I kept testing it, like a bad tooth. Karlinskaya would know all kinds of things—the identity of the Englishman, and perhaps the Odessan. Karlinskaya, my father’s mistress, the woman who ordered with such coldness that I be led out—she must have known it would be to my death. She might even now be conspiring with foreign powers to overthrow the revolution.
“There’s something. I can see it on your face.” Varvara grabbed my arm. “Marina, don’t even think of holding anything back from me.” Her gaze drilled into my forehead. “I see through you like a gauze curtain. What?” She pulled me across the desk so that we were nose to nose. I could smell the fish she’d had for lunch. “I could get someone to sweat it out of you,” she growled. “Don’t play with me. You’ve implicated me at a very bad time. You owe me. You can save us both. Tell me, and don’t leave anything out.”
“What are you going to do, make me drink hot wax? Like Fanya Kaplan?”
At the name, Varvara’s skin turned gray. She let go of my arm. “Marina,” she said in a slightly softer tone. “Do not mention Lenin’s assassin. Give me something I can use. Give me some reason to save you.” She ended in a whisper. Almost pleading. Her emotion wasn’t a tactic.
“It’s about someone who was there that night,” I said. “But what will you do to them if I tell you?”
“Who is it?” She was all alertness now. “If it’s a traitor to Soviet Russia, if it’s someone conspiring with the English to overthrow us, why would you want to protect them? Have your politics changed so much? It’s civil war!”
“Those Chekists at Pulkovo thought the astronomical charts were British code.”
“Everybody’s on edge. What do you expect?” She was shouting again. She sounded just like the interrogator next door. “The English are at Murmansk. Reactionaries have a dictatorship in Siberia, a separate government, supported by your father and those goddamn Czechs! And you should see some of those Siberian psychopaths if you think we’re rotten. You’ve been away a long time. So if you know something, this is not the time to keep it back. Give me a name and where I can find this person and I swear you’ll walk out of here free as a bird.”
I was exhausted. How long had I been in this room? All around me I could feel the grim machinery of Gorokhovaya 2 turning, tu
rning, a factory stamping out molds, the waiting forms stuffed with human beings. We, the prisoners, were what was being processed. But what product demanded such tons of flesh? Where was this all going? For the happiness of some future people who were somehow more valuable than the people sitting in the cell downstairs or out there in the hall?
But I had a key in my molar. It ached there. It would unlock the door.
What are you waiting for? Get rid of her!
At the observatory, the Ancients should have been gathering for their yellow wine right about now. Later, Ludmila Vasilievna would make her calculations while Aristarkh Apollonovich would mount the metal staircase to the big telescope, to observe the young stars in the Moving Group. Should be. Could be. Were not. Were in a Cheka cell. While Varvara, across the table, was caught in her own dark nebula.
They had made Fanya Kaplan drink hot wax. They had shot the man downstairs. Those were not metaphors. And yet Get rid of her! still rang in my ears.
A Bolshevik spy. Here I was again. “Promise me they’ll leave the observatory alone and let the astronomers go. They’re only thinking of Alpha Centauri up there.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Varvara said. “I’ll write the order myself. I’ll do it today. There’s to be no interference with the state work of the observatory. Now who is it?”
There are some things that shouldn’t be said, words that bring states into being. “Viktoria Karlinskaya. She’s in the cell with me.”
“Karlinsky’s wife?” She sat up very straight. “We have her? We have Viktoria Karlinskaya?” She threw back her head and laughed. “Oh Marina! You just said the ‘Open sesame’!” All the worry fell from her face. She rose, tugging down the sleeves of her jacket, squaring the hem.
I couldn’t share in her excitement. I didn’t care about her embrace. My bitterness outshone my relief as she called a guard to take me back to my cell. I knew I was wrong to give Karlinskaya up. But in the end, we were all swimming in the same infected waters—Karlinskaya and I, Varvara, Berzhins, Father and his conspirators. This terrible place, this was also the revolution. The blood from that basement room still staining my hands and face, I had named her. I was not separate from this. They would not let you be separate.
57 Rubinshteyna Street
AND SO I SOLD Karlinskaya. Sold her for the good of the revolution. Sold her for vengeance. Sold her for love, for friendship, for freedom—my motivations as snarled as a mat of hair. Something to ponder in the deep hours of the night as water ate away at the roots of the sleeping city. The following afternoon, the fat guard called me from the cell. Varvara was waiting for me in the hallway. She already looked better—cleaner, rested, authoritative, as though she’d gotten a transfusion. She gripped my arm but it was only for show, the pressure light.
“I have to get away,” I said, low, as we walked to the stairs. “Help me get to Maryino.”
“There is no ‘away,’” she said, our feet clattering on the dirty stairs. “It’s civil war. It’s going to be worse in the countryside than here. With us it’s almost over. Hold on.” She stopped in the stairwell, glancing around, and surreptitiously pressed a key into my palm, closed my fingers over it. She smiled, touched my cheek with the back of her hand, the way a mother checks a child’s temperature. Her tenderness alarmed me. “You remember the way?”
I hefted the key in my hand. “What’ll Manya say?”
“Manya’s at the front with the troops.” We finished our descent, prisoner and Chekist once more. She nodded to a guard who opened a door into a sort of reception area with worn counters and dirty floors. Wary pale clerks eyed us as ordinary citizens stood in line with bundles for prisoners.
“He won’t let me go, Varvara. He’ll find me and kill me.”
“Trust me—he’s got his hands full. He doesn’t even remember your name.” She opened the door. Outside it was raining. “We’ll get him. When all this is over.”
I walked free into the cold rain with all of my worldly goods—the coat on my back, the boots on my feet. I had vowed never to return to Petrograd, but there I was at the corner of Admiralteisky and Gorokhovaya, the smell of blood still in my nostrils, knowing that I’d set wheels in motion I’d never be able to still.
Keeping my head down, I fled to Varvara’s flat, on Rubinshteyna Street just across the Chernyshevsky Bridge. The key in the lock, a drab hallway, an inner door to a joyless room. I remembered the faded striped wallpaper, the typewriter. But I could still see black oilcloth, blood, a drain. After locking the door and checking it to be sure I took off my boots and stretched out on the mushy bed like overrisen dough. Yet what luxury after two weeks on the floor of a Cheka holding cell. Blood still caked my clothes and hair from yesterday’s interrogation—I smelled like an animal. I should light the stove and wash, but I couldn’t force myself to rise.
I fell asleep as one plunges into a black lake, the water closing over my head.
I didn’t know where I was when I awoke in the cold, dark room. I turned on the bedside lamp and tried to breathe. Safe—for the time being. I got up and moved to her little bourgeoika stove in my stockinged feet, eyed her meager ration of firewood and stack of newspapers: Izvestia, Petrogradskaya Pravda. Krasnaya Gazeta, that bloodthirsty rag. I began to twist up a Pravda for kindling, then stopped and registered what I was seeing in my hands. In a box on the front page was a list of executed prisoners. I sat on the floor and read. Shock after shock as I recognized names: hostages, landlords, generals, publishers, and revolutionaries alike, all bundled together and canceled like stacks of old checks.
Dukavoy, Ippolit Sergeevich, Counterrevolutionary. My father’s chess partner.
Gershon, Pavel Semyonovich, Counterrevolutionary. Pavlik, my old boyfriend. His beautiful green eyes. He was only eighteen, like me. I could still picture us walking together with the food for both schools in the early morning. His face when Genya stole me out of the Cirque Moderne. Dead. And here was Semyon, and Julia…my God, they got the whole family. Execution, moving through the population like cholera.
And Krestovsky, Andrei Kirillovich, Speculator. The type blurred with my tears. I searched for his wife, the beautiful Galina, but it seemed she’d been spared, at least that day. Perhaps she’d only been sent to a camp. Poor Krestovsky. I could still see him uncorking that champagne, doing the sailor’s dance. What had he done besides feed a raft of theatergoers, support a flock of poets?
I couldn’t read on. I wadded the paper up and threw it in the stove. Was this the revolution we’d dreamed of? Our glistening future? If the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2 hadn’t drowned my last hope, this list had. And each issue had more. Hundreds, thousands of names, the liquidation of a class. Yet even as I wept there in the cold, I still had to light the fire, to twist their names into kindling. Forgive me. I searched each paper for Makarov, Dmitry Ivanovich. Or Makarova, Vera Borisovna, but found neither. With the names of the dead I boiled water, washed the blood off myself, and set my clothes to soak.
Dressed in someone’s robe—Manya’s most likely, I couldn’t imagine Varvara even owning such a thing—I poked around the flat. There was nothing personal. Clothes on a hook, some hose, a photograph of Marx torn from a journal, a handbill from the Military Revolutionary Committee—a souvenir from the day they took Petrograd. But the anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s cheery Father Frost face no longer presided as it had in her room on Vasilievsky Island. Neither did I see Delacroix’s Liberty. I cleared the table and moved the typewriter to the floor, adding to it a pile of manuscript pages. They were a political analysis: “A Commentary on Comrade Bukharin’s Anarchy and Scientific Communism” by Varvara Razrushenskaya.
Her stern black bookshelf tolerated no fiction or verse, only big dictionaries, and volumes on economics, politics, and history. But I recognized a small sliver of aqua blue, a title traced in gold, tucked in between two volumes of Marx. I slid it out from its hiding place. She’d kept it through everything. I traced my fingers over the cloth cover, remembering ho
w Father and I had discussed colors. I’d been torn between the lighter blue and something more dignified. In the end the beauty had won out. I turned the soft, creamy pages—and they blurred as I thought of him, the pain I would always feel when I touched that volume, the memory of what had been.
Something fell out and fluttered to the floor. A pressed sprig of white lilac. I picked it up, sniffed. Dusty, but I could still detect the lingering scent of that long-ago night, St. Basil’s Eve, 1916, when we had cast the wax and seen our futures. Varvara had pressed one of my mother’s lilacs into the pages. So unlike her to be that sentimental.
I thought of how she’d kissed my shoulder, how she’d embraced me.
My inscription,
For Varvara,
And you’ll say you knew me once,
All my love, Marina
That kiss on my shoulder, that embrace. Manya’s at the front. Her fingertips on my incised back.
Of course I knew she had feelings for me. But I’d never expected to have to live at her mercy.
Now I was burdened with a new set of problems. I saw that I was never going to be my own woman, I simply had traded Arkady and the Cheka for Varvara. Oh, what I would give to just be free, alone, without compromises or betrayals, beholden to no one. Out in the open. A caravan, a campfire, stars in their stately progress overhead. I was tired of rooms.
Varvara returned after dark, talking, laughing, full of news. She spread her meager rations on the table—bread and a few dried herrings. I could only imagine what the Formers were eating if this was the Cheka’s fare. She ceremonially divided it up onto two chipped plates.
“I wanted you to know they let the astronomers go today.”
They were free. A weight lifted from my chest. At least I’d done something good. Then I asked the question that had been haunting me from the start. “What about Mother? Is she a hostage?”