I presented myself at the studio every morning at eight. Misha, the new assistant, was eager, hungry. Sofia Yakovlevna embraced him as she had once embraced another boy…a more sensitive, more beautiful boy, better in every way. “Misha, are you hungry?” “Misha, could you thread this needle? My glasses aren’t strong enough.”
Shusha and Dunya saw through me like a window. Dunya understood that I was in trouble, but to Shusha it was just a wonderful big joke. She made eyes at me, blew kisses, pinched my rump. Her mother told her not to torment me—I was there to work.
Eventually, I even met the fiancé, Roman Ippolit, the medical student. Opinionated, with a square jaw and short, straight, bristly hair, he enjoyed giving Misha the benefit of his vast manly knowledge of the world. Especially its filth and decay. “Misha, the thing you need to know about third-stage syphilis…” He liked to tell me dirty jokes when Mina left the darkroom, about Lenin and his wife, Krupskaya. He was awfully sure of Misha’s politics, yet in his own way he was as much a dialectical materialist as Varvara. No God, no poetry, no grace. Only arrogance and a sort of advanced crudity. I could not imagine the lover Roman Ippolit would be. Even Varvara the Chekist was capable of passion and tenderness. All I could think was that Mina must have made a rational decision to find a man she couldn’t possibly love. That way she would not care if she lost him, wouldn’t have to waste any time dreaming about him or replaying his touch in her mind. She was a practical girl. Her thwarted love for Kolya seemed to have soured her on the whole enterprise.
I started out, as promised, spotting negatives, scanning for the places where the emulsion’s bubbles had formed white dots and painting them out with a fine-tipped brush. Eventually I graduated to the darkroom. We would develop plates she’d shot that day, and I learned to print them, then recoat them for the next series. And as promised, my eyes grew bloodshot with the effort of scanning the hectares of negatives for those white dots and feathering in the darkness.
But soon, she required help with the photography side of things and asked me to accompany her on jobs in the city, to haul her equipment, to help her with crowd control, to organize unruly schoolchildren or factory committees.
Printing was the best part. I loved the moment when the paper went into the developing bath. When something that was apparently blank revealed its true nature. I felt like all of revolutionary Petrograd was passing under my hands. The Dinamo factory’s chess club, the workers’ committee of the Vyshinsky printing plant. Portraits of artists and journalists, bureaucrats and Soviet young ladies. How complex this world was. Was it dying, or was it being born? Both at the same time. How could I reconcile this with the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2? For every hopeful face, a name on a list. Eventually I stopped thinking about it, lost myself in shape and grade and density, the elegant process of the work. At times I felt Seryozha watching over my shoulder, and I talked to him. He didn’t always approve of Mina’s portraits. Her father had a better sense of people’s inner character. But I was only the assistant, and after swimming in that acidic murk night after night, I felt I should be developing gills. I usually came home just as Varvara was waking up and getting ready for work, which suited me fine, relieving me at least of that masquerade, but left her restless and longing.
Mina told me to be ready at ten that morning. We had an assignment. She handed me the camera and tripod and together we descended to the street, just as we’d once descended with her father, so long ago, it might as well have been another century. As we walked up Nevsky, she told me she was worried that Dunya was still spending time with Sasha Orlovsky and wanted to marry him when she got out of school. It sounded all right to me. Evidently Sasha had a job now, teaching painting at the Free Educational Workshops—the old Higher Art Academy. “She’s too young,” said Mina.
But the time belonged to the young. As we walked in the cold drizzle, I thought of Sasha, and Anton, of Okno and our Wednesday nights, Genya in Moscow, poor dead Krestovsky with his newspaper, his wife dancing with the piano shawl. It wasn’t until we were shoving our way onto the tram at Sadovaya that I asked Mina where we were headed.
“The new mothers’ home on Kamenny Island,” she said, slipping between two door-clingers.
Halfway on, halfway off, carrying the camera and the tripod, I almost fell backward. I would have, but the woman behind me was too forceful and crammed me on before I could change my mind. “Watch your step, mal’chik. Live another day.”
I stood pressed up next to Mina, the tripod shuddering between us, and lowered my cap over my eyes. The boarded-up windows of Gostinny Dvor peered at the street like a blind man behind smoked lenses. My skin crawled as the tram came onto Palace Embankment and started over the Troitsky Bridge. I could almost see myself out the window in the fog, marching up to Kamenny Island to sell that pin. Ask for Arkady. Maybe I was still there, on a parallel stream. Marina, don’t go, I tried to tell her. Turn around now. Throw that cursed pin to the goddess Neva.
As if it had heard me, the tram jerked to a stop. A collective moan went up. “It’s broken again.” “Every day.” “Enough whining!” But nobody got off.
It was a sign. “Mina,” I whispered, “I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t—” But then the car started up with a jerk that threw us into others and them into us and caused a chain reaction of elbowing and shoving, curses and grumbled relief. Soon we were over the bridge, right alongside the Peter and Paul Fortress. I held my breath as we passed, averting my eyes. Who was imprisoned in the Troubetskoy Bastion today? Anyone I knew?
It turned out that the mothers’ home was installed in a dacha that had once belonged to the Danish ambassador—a famous spot in Petersburg’s old society. The big trees, leafless in October, were still black from yesterday’s rain. I, for one, was glad for the somberness of the day. I felt less conspicuous in the flat dull light. We started by photographing the nursing sisters, whom we arranged in four rows on the dacha’s steps. Some of the nurses were as slovenly as the ones I remembered from the Anglo-Russian hospital, others somewhat more appealing.
I set the camera on the tripod for Mina, locked it down and inserted the big lens, put the cloth over my head to look at the subjects upside down on the ground glass. The grid made it more abstract. You could see the composition purely. If only life had something like that—a grid overlay to help you check your composition. You could square the edges, make sure it was straight. Perhaps that was why people were devoted to Marx or religion. But people like me always had to work freehand. It was our blessing and our curse.
Mina came to check the solidity of my handiwork, then went under the cloth to examine the shot. “Bring them in on the left,” she said, motioning with her left hand. “Third row—make sure I can see all the faces.”
Oh, the winks and pats from the maternity nurses as I tried to move them closer together.
“Hey, sweet face, got a girlfriend?” They squeezed and pinched me like a suckling pig. I hoped no one would notice my lack of male equipment.
“Squeeze in tighter, Comrades. That’s right—tighten your corsets, girls,” Misha directed.
How they laughed and flirted. Women loved little Misha. I could have had half of them. The young men were all out of town vacationing with the Red Army, and it seems they were sorely missed.
We took pictures of the mothers in the ambassador’s dining room, sitting at his long wooden table, attended by the same stoic servants who had once served state dinners to the great and powerful. I was surprised they had stayed on, but then again, where would they have gone after a lifetime of service? Now they passed plates to poor women who’d just given birth, the women grateful but a little confused. What did this splendor have to do with their travails? Soon they’d be back in their smoky rooms with their squalling babies and other kids, the old man and the cold and vobla soup for dinner, and outside, the queues. We photographed their skinny blue babies, too, bundled up like cigars on a cart, scrunching up their wizened little faces. Clearly the Bolsheviks were ser
ious about trying to keep alive what proletarian babies there were. Considering the epidemic level of malnutrition in Petrograd, each one was a miracle. I myself hadn’t had a period since last winter. But life wanted to assert itself even in the least promising places. One of these poor things could have been mine. How lucky I’d been in that regard, in my otherwise ill-fated life.
After our day’s work and a special treat—a meal of milk and kasha with a few members of the home’s staff committee—we began the long walk out of the parkland back toward the tram. I was lugging the heavy camera and tripod, and Mina was carrying the wooden case with the film, when through the icy drizzle, which had started up again, we passed a form in a belted coat with a skirt and a curly astrakhan hat. I lowered the brim of my cap practically to my nose. Luckily for me Mina noticed nothing and continued jabbering away about the director of the mothers’ home and how insulting he’d been when he realized it was us and not Solomon Katzev himself who’d come to photograph his nurses. “The nerve of that man,” she was saying. “If someone hates women, what’s he doing running a mothers’ home?”
I glanced back. Lot’s wife. The flash of the Kirghiz’s gaze over his shoulder told me he had seen me, all right. Seen me, recognized me, knew it all. My mouth went dry. How long would it be before Arkady knew I was back in Petrograd, masquerading as a boy, working for a photographer? It would be only a matter of time before he tracked me down. It was clear we were going to the tram. Perhaps someone would join us right there as we waited, and the rain would wash my blood down Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. Or they would drag me away, and I would pass once more through the iconostasis, never to be heard from again. Back into the Archangel’s hands, to be nailed to the barn door like the skin of a fox.
What to do? I could drop everything and run. But Mina…there was Mina to think of, her mother, her sisters.
“Wait here,” I said, then tipped the tripod up, leaned the camera against her.
“What—are you crazy?” But she grabbed the camera before it fell. “Misha!”
“Akim!” I called out, his name jumping to my lips.
He stopped but did not turn. He was waiting for me. He lit his long pipe as I approached, squinting at me as if I were the wind and he was staring into my sting. I felt myself being weighed on an antique scale in his mind, but what I was being weighed against I couldn’t tell. This man had seen my abasement, but he had also nursed me. If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. Now it was too late and the woods were everywhere.
We stood before the iron gates of the old Rybashkov dacha, glistening with wet iron flowers. Was this Arkady’s new citadel? “Hello, Akim. How is it”—I nodded in the direction of the Church of St. John the Baptist—“these days?”
“He has not forgotten you,” said the Kirghiz. “The girl from Kitezh, he calls you. ‘I didn’t kill her?’ And I say, ‘No, Archangel. You let her fly away. Blessed are the merciful.’”
He’d kidnapped me, raped me, crooned to me, fed me, burned me, humiliated me…but the Kirghiz was saying that those bullets hadn’t missed me from any stroke of good luck. In the end, he had let me live. I let that knowledge sink in.
“Why are you back in this place?” he asked. “You should have flown fast and far. You should have disappeared from the face of the earth.”
“I was arrested. They brought me back. Please don’t tell him you saw me. I beg you.”
Behind us in the road, Mina stood unhappily, holding the camera. “Misha, let’s go!” The days were growing short now, the light beginning to fade, and we had another sitting back at the studio.
I put my hand on his sleeve. “I beg you, do this for me.”
“Things have changed since your time,” he said over his pipe. The dark eyes glittered. What was he trying to tell me?
My lips were bone dry. “How have they changed?”
“The Archangel…is not himself now.”
I shuddered to think. How could he be more mad? Yes, this man—not a good man, but better than many—was trying to tell me that Arkady wasn’t even partially sane anymore. He tilted his head toward Mina, shuffling her feet and looking anxiously at the tram stop. “Your friend is waiting. Take care, little hawk. There are bigger hawks than you. Their wings will darken the sky.”
He wouldn’t tell. Though it didn’t mean I wouldn’t be found. But today, this hour, I had my reprieve. I kissed his leathery cheek. “I’m gone.”
60 The October Celebrations
SUDDENLY THE ANCIENT DRY-ROT empires began to collapse like a row of sand castles: Germany, Austria, the Ottomans. In Vienna, mass strikes and meetings capped the headlines. A red flag topped Munich’s city hall. The kaiser teetered on his throne, clutching at the tattered brocade. After four long years, the war had at last ground itself to dust. It looked like the World Revolution had really begun—and thus our salvation. Rescue for isolated Russia, rescue for starving Petrograd. Although we had turned our backs on the workers of the world in signing the German peace, they had not forgotten us.
Now Petrograd rinsed the carnage of Red Terror from its streets and unrolled its futurist bunting, its agitprop carnival tent. The city’s artists labored around the clock to prepare for the October celebrations—October, though our calendar had changed over in January, finally catching up with the rest of the world, producing the amusing phenomenon of the anniversary of the 25th of October being celebrated on the 7th of November. Why not? It was all part of our looking-glass world, where girls became boys and society ladies became beggars, and the newly literate took their places in the lecture halls at the university while the learned ate library paste. The streets and bridges took new names, and every construction worker from Narva to Vyborg set to sawing, hammering, and painting new facades for our venerable buildings, transforming the peeling and exhausted remnants of the Past into the palaces and monuments of the Future, at least for a few days.
I walked home in darkness through the metamorphosed city. Though I came and went at all hours, I was never molested. A woman on Nevsky, a furtive blonde in a ratty fur, offered her affections to Misha. “Mal’chik, come visit Paradise.” She was a Former, older than me, perhaps someone who’d once attended the Tagantsev Academy. Was that really what she thought whores said?
“Thanks, Citizen. I get it for free.” Misha was impudent. What people will accept from a boy continued to astonish and delight me. “No hard feelings—I’ll tell my dad you’re down here.”
“Brat!” she called after me. “I hope they beat you!”
I turned around and blew her a kiss.
I loved walking these dark streets. I’d never imagined the sheer freedom of the male sex. How remarkable it felt to go where I wished at any hour, ignored and unmolested. If I hadn’t been thinking of hawks far bigger than myself, and Varvara at home with her dreams of togetherness, I would have been perfectly content.
Working for Mina had whetted my appetite for my city like a knife on stone. I exulted in the cold mists, the smell of the sea, the sound of my boots resonating off the facades, the lapping of water in the canals. This wall, with its richly layered surfaces of announcements and proclamations. How beautiful! And this glorious puddle reflecting the lamplight—like an opening in the world, a tear, revealing a brighter, hidden life right beneath our feet. I was in ecstasy in the rain and the first peppering of ice, the way moisture drew halos around lamps and the few glowing windows. I wanted to eat Petrograd whole, like a boiled egg—pop it into my mouth all at once. Thank God I was finally out of rooms—Mother’s, Father’s, Arkady’s, Varvara’s, and those belonging to the state—while Mina worried only that the weather boded poorly for tomorrow’s celebrations.
Down on the Neva, the ships would already be coming in from the gulf. We’d gotten copies of their schedules: Cruisers south of the Nikolaevsky Bridge, destroyers between Nikolaevsky and Liteiny. But now I stood before the black entrance to our building on the Fontanka as a man in a worn cap and sheepskin sidled up to me from the shadow
s. “I have meat,” he hissed.
“How much?” I couldn’t help asking, though I hadn’t two kopeks to my name.
“Fifty per pound. I’ve got two.”
Fifty rubles for a pound of God knew what. “Was it dead before you cut it up?” said I. “Or did you ride it first?”
The man’s brutish eyes retreated into his puffy face in the hazy light from the streetlamp. “Get out of here, you little son of a whore, before it’s you.” He pulled out a folded knife, the blade flashed into place, and my impudence fell away like a suicide. I stood motionless as the man faded back into the darkness. I was wrong about being a boy. Misha was no better prepared than I.
I ran up the stairs to Varvara’s flat, two at a time. I’d hoped she was asleep, but she’d waited for me, propped up in the mushy bed reading one of her political tomes, taking notes. The room was cold and stank of damp. She’d put some bread and a bit of sausage out, which I ate, feeling ungrateful for all she did for me. I tried not to taste the mold. It grew everywhere—the blankets, the rugs, the walls, our coats, the bread. I couldn’t help longing for snow, the cleanness of winter, the crisp dry whiteness of it.
“How’d it go at the studio? You ready for tomorrow?” She set her book aside, dropped her dark head onto the pillow, yawned and stretched.
The bread was dark, sour, more sawdust than wheat. “She’s plotting our schedule like it’s a military maneuver.”
I didn’t ask about her day. Did you kill anyone? Investigate any of our old friends? I washed my face and brushed my teeth, trying not to imagine her striding into some poor family’s room—their terror, the baby crying, the crash of furniture, the wife stifling her tears as her few scraps of silver were confiscated, the husband beaten. Varvara might be miles more professional than her colleagues, but she was essentially a violent person, and the Cheka gave her absolute liberty to exercise that trait. I once asked her why she couldn’t stay a party organizer. “The party needs educated people in the Cheka,” she’d said. “It shouldn’t just be sadists and goons. They asked us to volunteer, and I did.”