I wandered for half the day, trundling around in my hagdom, drinking in the sights, this beloved and heartbreaking city. At the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky, the doors of the building swung in easily. A good or bad omen? The old sign for Katzev Studio, gold lettering on black glass, still hung on the elevator cage, though the machine itself crouched uselessly like a miserable, toothless lion in a small-town zoo. I was happy to note that the iron balusters were still intact—cleverly eluding the fate of the wooden ones.
I climbed to the fifth floor slowly, clinging to that solid railing. At the top stood the shiny black door, a bit pocked and peeling now, with its familiar brass plaque under the bell. Did they still have electricity? I pushed the bell and miraculously, deep inside, heard the familiar buzz.
I felt myself inspected via peephole, then heard the clicks as several locks were released. The door opened. Sofia Yakovlevna, thin, wrapped in a gray shawl, blinked at me. We could have been sisters. Her face listed to one side, as if she had had a stroke. “Yes?” She didn’t have her glasses on, thank God, but her appearance troubled me.
“Good day,” I rasped. “Is Mina Solomonovna in?”
“She’s in the darkroom.” Her voice was uncertain, her brow a puzzle of wrinkles. My face was familiar to her, I could tell, but she couldn’t place me. “Are you expecting photographs?”
“Yes. Yes I am.” This woman had known me since childhood. How could she be so easily fooled by a bit of paper and stove grime, a hoarse tone? Being dead would feel just like this, walking about as people you’ve known look through you. I could tell she was wondering why I wasn’t taking my scarf off.
“Don’t trouble yourself, dear. I think I know the way,” I said as Shusha walked in from the back of the house, wearing her school uniform. Her eyes flew open, then her mouth. I touched the side of my nose—careful—and she clamped her mouth shut again. “Maybe this girl will escort me.” I took Shusha’s arm.
We bundled ourselves back to the studio, which was cold but clearly still in use—the green velvet backdrop, the chair for the sitter, the big camera on its tripod. Shusha’s grimy school uniform was too short for her. She’d defied all odds by growing. “Marina, what’s going on? Are you in trouble?” She seemed excited by the possibility, as if it were all one romantic adventure.
I wagged my head noncommittally.
“Papa died this summer.” Her brown eyes glistened. “He was sick all spring.”
I had been so caught up in my own bad news…that wonderful man. I had to catch my breath. “I’m so sorry. How are you getting along?”
“Bad. Mama’s had it the worst. And Mina, she had to leave school to take over the business.”
Poor Mina! I could imagine how devastated she must have been. She loved the university, her chemistry courses. She was no artist. If only Seryozha were still here…“Was it cholera?”
“No, it was his stomach.”
“Vechnaya pamyat’,” I said, even though they were Jewish. Eternal memory. How warm he’d been, sweeping us all up in his familial embrace. I could see him sitting on the divan in his caftan and cap, one leg propped up from the gout. How kind he’d been to Seryozha—only a year ago. The Katzev apartment had always been our sanctuary, but without their father, it felt cut adrift, a raft instead of a mountain. Now he and Seryozha could walk together, could take photographs for eternity.
The red light over the darkroom door was on. “It’s crazy. The studio’s busier than ever now,” Shusha told me. “Even Lunacharsky came for a portrait.” The head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, in charge of all Russia’s educational and cultural affairs. It was a coup for any enterprise, but especially theirs. We entered the light-baffling turnstile into the darkroom, warm and reeking. Mina stood over the sinks, washing prints. Red flashed on her glasses. Her hair was tucked up into a scarf. “Mina, this lady asked to see you,” Shusha said.
My old friend glanced up, frowned at this strange creature her sister had brought in. “Can I help you?”
I peeled back my shawl, spit out the paper from my mouth into my palm. The expression on her red-washed face echoed that of her sister the moment before. “Marina.” No smile, no arms flung around my neck. “You’re alive.”
“Don’t go spreading it around.” I smiled, trying to make a joke of it.
She looked older than the last time I’d seen her, thinner, a bit worn, a professional. Taking her father’s place had changed her—whether for good or ill it was hard to know. She glanced darkly at Shusha. “Don’t you have some homework to do?”
“I’m going.” Shusha kissed me, quickly. “I have to go to class anyway. See you, Auntie.” She started for the turnstile, but I grabbed her by the arm.
“Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”
“Who am I going to tell?”
“Anybody.”
She mimed a lock across her lips and disappeared through the revolving door.
Then Mina and I were alone, silent but for the sound of the water in the sinks. They still had water, at least. Mina’s bespectacled eyes examined me, evaluating, then turned back to her work. “So?”
Not at all the welcome I’d imagined. “I’m sorry about your father. I loved him. Seryozha worshipped him.”
“I know.” She sighed and lined up a plate in an easel, her movements deft in the glow of the red safelight. She slid in a sheet of paper behind it, exposed the print, then slid it into the first bath, poking at it with tongs. We watched the image consolidate itself. A group of patient, weary faces over open books. Workingmen, adolescents, old women. “The Liteiny District Soviet Literacy Class,” she said. “There are so many clubs and organizations now. Everyone wants a place in the new world. And they all want it recorded for posterity.” She fished the print out of the developer and plunged it into the stop bath, wiping a lock of hair back with her forearm. I tucked it into her kerchief for her. She worked quickly, efficiently, intelligence in every motion she made. “I know why you’re here. Kolya said you’d gotten yourself into some kind of rotten mess.”
He was back? And had come looking for me? With Arkady right here, waiting for him? “When was that?”
Mina poked at the print contemplatively. Extracted it and slipped it into the fixer, checked the thermometer, poured off a little water from a small tank heater into the tray, checked the thermometer again. “The last time? Back in August. Maybe July. I’m not exactly sure. I’ve got my hands full these days, as you can see.”
She put another sheet of paper behind the easel, started again, revealing a face very pale and grim, then plunging back into red.
“Shusha told me. I’m sorry about the university.”
“Nothing to be done.” Her mouth turned down even more sharply.
“Nothing more from Kolya since August?”
“Don’t I have anything better to do than keep track of your love life?” she snapped, poking irritably at the print in the bath. “You’ve been gone since April. Do you think our lives just stop when you’re away? That we freeze into place, only to reanimate when you next appear? I’ve been here all along, trying to keep a roof over everybody’s head. It’s not a thrill a minute, narrow escapes and bold adventure, but it’s the way real people live. We just keep living.”
I struggled not to show how her words appalled me. She thought I’d died, and now that I hadn’t, she wasn’t even happy about it. I tried to see myself as she saw me. The self I saw reflected in her eyes, in her fury, was not me as I was today, but as I had been as a spoiled girl. It was like looking at a star, the light it emitted a million years ago finally reaching our eyes. But you could not talk people out of their impressions of you; only time could change them. I could tell her about the room on Tauride Street, but she could say that that, too, was my fault. I could tell her about the observatory, and cholera, and Gorokhovaya 2. “We’ve all suffered, Mina.”
She slid in yet another sheet of paper. “Maybe so. But I have my own life now. It’s not my choice but it’s a good li
fe. I don’t chase after whirlwinds. I don’t have time for your dramas. I’m engaged to be married, thank you for asking. I’m trying to live my life in a rational manner.”
Engaged? Our little student? “Mina! Engaged to who?”
She finished counting and extinguished the light. “A medical student. You don’t know him. Roman Ippolit. We got engaged when Papa was sick.”
“I’m so happy for you.” I reached to embrace her.
“Don’t.” She shrugged me off with a shoulder. I thought about her coming to find me, our reconciliation. “You don’t really care, so don’t pretend.” She pulled the exposed paper and put it in the first bath. “You only came here to find Kolya.” I could see she was seething. At least this time he hadn’t given her a whirl, no great big dollop of coo to butter her up. “He showed up here back in May, looking for you. As if it were life or death. Really, you’re two of a kind, you know that? You deserve each other. I don’t know who’s more melodramatic, you or him.”
“And you told him…”
“I said no one had seen you. But I’ll admit, Papa was so sick, I didn’t pay a lot of attention.”
Her father had died, and I had not been there. That’s why she was so angry.
She pulled the photo out of the developer and into the stop bath. “‘Maybe she’s dead,’ I said, half joking. And he started to cry.”
Kolya!
“‘I’d know if she was dead,’ he said. ‘And she’s not.’” Her mouth got very small, and wrenched to the left as she rubbed her nose on her shoulder. I held my hand out and let her rub it on my palm. In the red light, I couldn’t see her eyes behind her glasses.
“He looked around for you, but then he had to get out of town. He said things were ‘too hot’ for him. Needless to say I didn’t ask what he’d gotten himself into.”
She printed another plate on the glass easel. Lights on, lights off. She had a rhythm to her work. It was pleasant to watch people who were good at their work, even if they resented it. Into the trays went more faces, more clubs. Hopeful new citizens of the Soviet utopia. I plucked one out of the last bath and clipped it to the line for her. The faces on the slick sheet pleaded from their borders, Remember us. We, too, have been here. Ordinary people who probably had never before had a likeness committed to a photographic image. This, too, was the revolution. I had to remember that.
“He asked me if there was anything I needed,” she said. “I told him I needed silver to coat my papers. The Cheka took mine on a raid, even though I had an order from Lunacharsky himself. And film, if he could ever get some. I was back to using glass plates. When I have film, I can do more work in the street. Cover events and so on. The world isn’t going to come and sit in the studio and pose anymore.”
I wanted her to talk about how he looked, if he’d indicated where he was going. But her father was dead, and she was still angry at me for my past sins. “I hope he brought you the film.”
“He did. And flour and soap. Silver. Platinum salts. All kinds of things. Up to his old tricks, but I’m not complaining. That was June. I saw him once again in August, and that was it.”
I helped her hang the prints as she pulled them out of the fixative. “Tell me about Roman Ippolit.”
She laughed, hoarsely. “What do you want, Marina? I never see you unless you want something. What kind of trouble are you in? That ridiculous costume—it’s not Maslenitsa, is it?” The butter festival, our pre-Lenten carnival week.
“I got involved with some bad people. Disappearing’s harder than you think.”
With all the prints drying on the line, she washed her hands, dried them on a towel, picked up a stack of finished shots. I followed her out into the studio. It was colder but at least we could breathe. She turned on a lamp at the long table and began organizing prints into piles and sliding them into envelopes. “I can’t have you here, if that’s what you’re hoping for. Things are hard enough as it is. The Cheka comes two nights a week.”
I saw where I rated on her table of ranks—somewhere between cholera and a ricocheting bullet. She wouldn’t let me endanger her family, no matter what kind of trouble I was in. “It’s okay. I have a place,” I said. “I’m staying with Varvara.”
She wrote something on one of the pink envelopes. “Be careful with Varvara,” she said. “She’s not the person you used to know. She’s in the Cheka now.”
“She got me out of the cellar at Gorokhovaya 2. Took me in. I have to trust her.” I looked through a stack of prints and stopped at a big group—youthful faces posed in a pyramid.
“The so-called Third University,” she sniffed. “The new privileged class.” It was a recent innovation: the children of workers were allowed in without qualification. Studying while the brilliant Mina Solomonovna herself could not. “They get twice the bread ration as real students. Nice, eh?” she said bitterly. “While our professors were dropping like flies. Some teach over there for the bread.”
She took the Third University picture out of my hands, stacked it with two more and put it in its envelope. “Don’t trust anybody.” It gave me the chills, the way she said it. It was so unlike her.
“Not even you?”
She sighed, took off her glasses, wiped her face on her forearm. I took her glasses, polished them on the tail of her kerchief, then put them back on her nose, delicately threading the earpieces, first one, then the other, over her small ears. Her eyes were deep with some emotion. Was it kindness leaking out? Was it regret? In that instant, she looked very much her father’s daughter. She smiled a half smile. “What are you doing for work?”
I hadn’t thought of it but of course I would need to get some kind of work. I couldn’t go on eating half of Varvara’s rations. She was so rigorously honest that she wouldn’t take advantage of her rank to get more than she was strictly entitled to.
“Look, I’ve got more work than I can handle,” Mina said. “As you can see. Especially with the October celebrations coming up. I can’t pay you much, but you’ll get rations…and nobody’s going to come looking for you in a darkroom.” She took a scrap of notepaper and wadded it up, handed it back to me. I crammed it against my gums. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll set you to spotting negatives until your eyes bleed.”
59 The Eye
I HAD TO FIND a better disguise than Marfa Petrovna. Marfa was too cumbersome with her wadded teeth and sooty face, her limp. Varvara stood by as I chopped my hair off with a pair of blunt scissors, peering into the small mirror above the basin. I turned to examine the profile, left and right. I looked like a boy of fifteen. “Not bad, eh?” I said.
She came up behind me, ruffled my hair—proprietary, like all lovers—kissed my neck, rested her chin on my shoulder, and gazed at the two of us in the mirror. “You have to do something about that red. And these.” She weighed my breasts in her hands. “I can get you something from the infirmary, bandages or something. In the meantime…” She went to her wardrobe and pulled out a red kerchief dotted with small white flowers. Nothing I could ever imagine her wearing—it must have been Manya’s. I wrapped it around my breasts, pulled it tight, shrugged back into my dress, examined the profile. Not bad. But the hair. The red. He’d spot me at a hundred paces.
Mina, the chemist, solved that problem in the darkroom, staining my cropped hair black with something toxic she cooked up out of her bottles and jars. The smell of sulfur and ammonia lingered in my hair for days. But the inky black held fast.
For suitable attire, I went out behind Haymarket Square and speculated, trading a precious egg, a hunk of sausage, and some firewood—courtesy of Cheka rations—with a Former for a pair of woolen pants, a student’s jacket, and a boy’s cloth cap. One look into the woman’s eyes and I saw a dead son performing this last service for the family. Such sorrow, everywhere.
The clothes fit me well enough. I hoped it hadn’t been typhus. I tried not to think I might die because of my disguise. I sewed some crude drawers from a pillowcase with a needle and thread Varvara ha
d to borrow from a neighbor, and she wound my breasts with a bandage she’d secured for me from the stores of the Cheka. It bore brown stains, which reminded me of Viktoria Karlinskaya. My soul would never be free of that invisible stain.
Now I looked for all the world like a beardless boy, bright-eyed and black-haired, too young for the army in this new civil war, which was gathering up the last youths and even middle-aged men into its sack like pickers stripping the last apples of an orchard. I practiced walking like a boy, chin up, kicking out my heels as if my male parts were in the way, elbows akimbo, thumbs tucked in my belt. Varvara shrieked with laughter. “Not so swaggery. You look like you’re going to start singing Puccini.”
I tried a more bashful boy, slouching, hands in pockets, shoulders a little hunched, rubbing my nose, my chin where I had no beard yet. I practiced walking on the balls of my feet to straighten out my feminine sway. I would have scuffed my shoes but boot leather was more precious than eggs.
“That’s better. I believe that,” she said, sitting on the bed, her knees tucked under her chin. I could see the schoolgirl in her at times like this. “What’s your name, mal’chik?”
“Misha,” I replied, but my voice came out high, too girlish. I tried again lower, less clear. “Misha.” Ending downward. My jaw flexed, a little defensive. Boys were on edge, it seemed. “Who wants to know, shitbrain?”
She jumped up, held me close. Kissed me three times.
It felt different to walk about the city as a boy. I hadn’t thought of that. When you were a boy, nobody gave you a second thought. People might shove me and shoulder me aside, but they never looked in my face. That first day I headed up to Nevsky passing scores of citizens, and not one even glanced at me. I tried staring right into their faces to see if I could make them. Their eyes slid over me as if my skin were buttered. Just a boy. Nobody worth paying attention to. How strange. How remarkable. How free.