The man exhaled the sweet Turkish tobacco. “With the German surrender? It’s going to be a free-for-all. Why don’t you go wallow in the mud before the Reds arrive?” He leaned back in his seat, making the chair creak.
“What about the Don?” Misha blurted out. It was a marvel to talk to someone with access to real news. We civilians got all our news filtered through the pages of Pravda, but Vikzhel had the telegraph. Vikzhel took the nation’s pulse, had its nervous system right under its fingertips.
“Pretty heavy down there,” said Vorchenko. “Krasnov’s a puffed-up idiot, but Denikin’s no fool.” General Denikin—Volodya’s general. “They’re already at each other’s throats. My bet’s on Denikin coming out on top. If I was a betting man.”
“If?” Kolya snorted. He rose from his stool, stretched. Evidently we were done here. He betrayed no indication of our plans. “Hungry, Misha?” He punched me playfully in the shoulder. He made no attempt to shake the stationmaster’s hand, just unlocked the door. “See you around, Vorchik.”
“Don’t fall off any trains, Shurov.”
We didn’t return to the terminal. Instead we crossed over the tracks and tramped east through little wayside woods and stubbly fields. The crows gleaned the leftover rye and the boggy lowlands bristled with reeds. I was feeling melancholy despite myself. I couldn’t shake the way Kolya looked when he was threatening—yes, threatening—the Vikzhel man.
He bumped my shoulder with his. “Was it so bad? You shouldn’t have come. What I do—it’s not pretty. If you want a shining example of revolutionary idealism, stick with Varvara. This is the real world.”
“That’s the real world, too. I’ve been in that cellar, thank you.”
He slung his arm around my shoulder. “We’ll be together, I promise you that. The way you always wanted it to be. But I’m not a prince with a golden feather.”
I wanted him to hold me tenderly, but that was out of the question. Instead I threw a comradely arm over his, and we bumped along under the blue flag of the sky. He started whistling “Mephistopheles’s Song of the Flea,” making me laugh. He always did know how to cheer me up.
“So tell me, Mephistopheles,” I said, trying to hook my foot around his ankle as we walked to see if I could trip him. “What’s your plan? And stop trying to be mysterious.”
“All in good time, brother Misha,” he said. “You shall know all.” He gave a magician’s fan of the fingers, pulled a coin from the air, made it disappear. “That is, unless you want to go home to your Cheka girlfriend.” He succeeded in hooking his foot around mine while I wasn’t paying attention, and suddenly I found myself sitting on my ass in the dirt. “Goodness, watch your step!” Laughing, he offered me his hand and pulled me back to my feet. “We’ll just have to see how the winds blow.”
I dusted off the seat of my pants. “Just like that? Flip a coin?”
“The great world’s spinning, and we’re about to jump on,” he said. “Make up your mind. Want this or not?” How I loved that clever face, smiling slyly, the thin top lip, the full bottom one. Suddenly I didn’t care who saw me or what they thought. I threw my arms around him—this maddening man, this infuriating beast.
65 Apprentice Mikhailov
IT WAS LATE AT night when we returned to the station, though what a difference! As we entered, we could hear the scream of a train coming in. The sagging forms of the dispossessed, dispirited, and depressed rose fully animated, grabbed their earthly possessions and loved ones, and pressed to the edge of the platform as the old train came staggering into its berth like a dowager queen, black and stately, grimy as a kettle. The tension of the crowd stretched to the breaking point. A terrible sight—citizens straining toward the train, preparing to fight their way to Moscow or heaven itself. I shrank back, hoping I would not have to join them. I had been through a lot but didn’t think I had what it took to claw my way onto a train like an animal, assuring my own place at the expense of God knows who. That old gentleman with the square-cut beard? This young couple with their brood of sick-looking children?
Soldiers beat back the crowd with the sides of their rifles so that arriving passengers could alight, pushing their way out. Who in the world would be arriving in starving Petrograd now, when everyone in the city was trying to leave? Kolya stood with me against a pillar off to one side of the hall, smoking, his arm loose around my shoulder, so I could feel that solidity and warmth as we took in the monstrous scene.
“Is this our train?” What would happen when they let the departing passengers loose? How could he be so calm? “There’s going to be a riot. They’ll never get half of them on. How can they stand it?”
He checked his watch. He must have been the last man in Petrograd who still owned one. “They’ll get on. They’ve had three days to get ready for this,” he said, watching as if it were proof of something. “Sit on your bags for three days, you’ll do what you have to.”
Then the crowd surged forward to strain itself into the doors of the cars. It was hideous. A man shoved ahead of a woman, causing her to drop her bundle and almost lose her grip on her infant. Others behind her stepped on her things as they pushed past her. She wept, begging for help, but there was no way anyone could lean over in that stampede. People grabbed at each other, trying to get in front, passing children and bags overhead, hand to hand. Men separated from their families fought to rejoin them. I struggled not to cry—Misha wiped angrily at his tears with the back of his sleeve. I saw a boy of ten dash off with a bundle, someone’s precious things that could never be replaced, but no one gave chase, no one had a choice but to keep on struggling, trying for a few feet of standing room on this horrible train. Suddenly my tunic, coat, and hat were unbearably warm, and my unwashed skin prickled. I swore I could smell my own fear above the reek of the hall.
After a time, the train swallowed its load of human urgency, the doors closed, and now the passengers themselves forced people away who tried to climb in through the windows.
“Davai.” He led me past the despairing would-be travelers, sleepy orphans returning to their rags, their refuge for the night, and led me once more down off the end of the platform and out into the yards. Why had he wanted me to see this if we weren’t getting on? To show me, Here is your Soviet utopia. So much for all your ideals?
Dotted along the tracks, fires burned in barrels around which the railway men gathered, hands extended, bundled in their quilted jackets. By their flickering light, we found a group chucking wood up into the locomotive being fueled for the trip. My God, we were running our trains on wood now? Had we run out of coal along with food? Poor Russia! The reality of the war writ large—coal was supplied by the mines of the Don and Siberia, and both were behind White lines now.
Indicating for me to wait behind in the darkness, Kolya approached a group in the phantasmagorical firelight. He spoke to a short, barrel-shaped greatcoated man standing with the loaders. They shook hands. Overhead, the darkness was both cold and bright, the stars shimmering high and untouchable in the vast smear of the Milky Way. I wondered if my Ancients were still alive, peacefully conducting their work down at Pulkovo. Right now, Aristarkh Apollonovich would be gazing up at his nebulae while we were going to get on a rust-bucket train headed for the ass end of nowhere.
A bottle passed from Kolya to the man by the fire barrel. Where did he stash all these things? His tea, his tobacco, and now, magically, a bottle of vodka? I swore he hadn’t had it on him this afternoon, and I’d brushed up against him all day. It had been a sweet day, too, I thought as I stepped from foot to foot in the cold, waiting for a sign to approach. It had been the closest we’d ever come to just being a normal pair of lovers strolling along together—though we could of course not hold hands or kiss. We’d walked along the Neva, admiring the decorations on the Admiralty, the bold new constructivist flags, and watched the performances. At a Punch-and-Judy booth, I spotted Mina’s sister Shusha standing with some other girls, laughing at the old stories. I left Kolya behind an
d approached, plucked at her sleeve.
Her friends giggled when they saw this older boy approaching their school friend. “Misha!” Shusha grinned, then her smile faded into alarm. “Where’ve you been? Mina was cursing you to the seventh generation this morning—”
“Something came up.” I pulled her to one side, out of earshot of her comrades. “I had to lie low.”
“She’s going to kill you. She made Dunya do it, so now Dunya’s mad—she had a date with Sasha. Mina said she’s never going to lift a finger for you even if you were dying.” Her bright brown eyes flashing with the drama of it all.
I took the Kodak camera from around my neck and strapped it over hers, handed her the tripod. “Give these to her, tell her sorry. There are some amazing shots on that roll, if they come out.” I hoped it would redeem me, but I doubted it.
“Give them to her yourself.” Shusha took off the camera, held it out to me. “I just saw her—she’s in Palace Square. You can catch up to her.”
“I can’t. I’m leaving,” I said.
“Leaving Petrograd?” Her attitude changed, suddenly solemn, genuinely alarmed. She loved me. And I realized this was real, what I was planning. I was leaving. Everyone I loved and everything I knew. She dropped her voice. “Why? What’s happened? Are you really on the run?”
I felt my lips quivering. I was about to break down. I gave her a hug. “Give your mama a kiss for me, and tell Mina not to hate me. You be good.” I tugged at her dark braid.
It was possible I would never see her again. The enormity of what I was doing threatened to engulf me. Not to see Mina marry that idiot, or Dunya…I would never know what happened to Mother, to Father…Mother, not Father, I corrected myself. The children burst into laughter at the puppet show, and when Shusha turned back for a moment, I took advantage of her distraction to fade into the crowd. I soon rejoined Kolya, who grinned and clapped me on the shoulder, but the flavor of that last exchange and the jerking, quarrelsome puppets had unnerved me.
In the cold train yard, I felt those tears coming again. What was I doing? The men were drinking together. A railwayman on the ground rapped the side of a tender and threw the almost-empty bottle up to another man who finished it off then threw it gaily onto the rails, where the glass broke with a merry crash.
At last, Kolya gestured for me to join him. I breathed deeply, trying to pull myself together before I approached him and the squat man in the greatcoat, with a face like a wall. The man took one look at me—“So this is our new stoker?”—threw his head back and laughed. Then surprisingly, he burst into song. “Ven zhon khenry vas a little bebby…” He squeezed my skinny bicep with a hand like an iron claw.
Kolya shook me by my neck the way you’d pick up a rabbit. “I know he doesn’t look like much, but he’s a good boy. He won’t give you any trouble.”
The man nodded to the tender. “Go on up then, kid. Give ’em a hand.”
I glanced at Kolya, who indicated with his chin the second tender of the rusty locomotive they were loading. He was sending me up there alone?
“I’ll be up in a while.” He slapped a pair of stiff, filthy leather gloves into my hands. “You’ll need these.”
“Where are you going?”
“Comrade Olinsky and I have a little beezneez.” A world of meaning lived inside his smile. “I’ll be there before the train leaves.”
Olinsky shouted up to the men in the wagon, and a giant glove lowered itself to me. I clambered onto a monster iron wheel and let the gloved hand pull me up into the car. When I landed, three sets of eyes regarded me with disgust, as a fisherman looks at a monkfish when he thought he had a halibut. Surely if the bottle hadn’t preceded me they would have thrown me back.
Their captain, a talkative dark man with a thick Georgian moustache and an accent to match, put me to work catching and stacking wood. Split wood came flying thick and fast from the ground into the car, and a man balanced on the load, catching logs and stacking them. He hauled me up on top and I tried to emulate him while attempting not to fall and break my ankle on the loose wood. I caught more wood with my chest and ribs than with my arms. In fifteen minutes, I felt as if I’d been beaten. “You’re really running this can on wood?”
“Just in case, kid. We thought you were a veteran.”
The men laughed and began to sing chastushki as we loaded—about all sorts of filthy things, whores and unquenchable lust, erections that would not cease but grew larger than the man. There were political ones, too, making fun not only of the tsar but of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky as well. They were afraid of nothing, these Vikzhel men. “Hey, little girl,” my partner called out, throwing a chunk of wood at me. “At least amuse us, you useless little cunt.”
I caught the block and placed it on the pile, then struck a poet’s pose, foot up on a log, as I scraped my thoughts together.
They say there’s not one shred of coal
From Tula to Donbass
Instead the trains run regularly
On birchwood chunks and Vikzhel gas.
Har har har. Oh they loved it. They even stopped throwing wood at me so hard. Encouraged, I continued.
Vikzhel men they love their pipes
Warm outhouses and ugly wives
Vikzhel men jerk off at night
Their daughters have to sleep with knives.
Admitting my uselessness, I managed to keep them entertained until we’d filled the wagon. I hadn’t known Misha was such a shirker. So unlike Marina, who would work until her fingers bled, always trying to prove herself, her value, her intelligence, her stamina, prove herself willing and capable, a real comrade. But Misha was a natural anarchist, traveling on charm, a wastrel and hooligan desiring only to seize the color and avoid the dreariness of life.
Finally Kolya returned with Olinsky, I could spot his jaunty stride painted in the light from the fire barrels at a hundred yards. The two of them climbed into the cab of the locomotive. The Georgian waved me forward, and the others left. Now it was the four of us: engineer, fireman, and two unauthorized passengers, and a tight squeeze it was indeed. Most of the space was occupied by the monstrous cast-iron cylinder of a boiler, a remnant from the reign of Catherine the Great. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had run on her ex-lovers at some point.
As the Georgian stoked—with coal, thank God—he urged me to sing some of my better chastushki to the newcomers. I was shy, but he remembered the first lines—I could not help but complete them. I could see Kolya adored the masquerade. Olinsky, who proved to be the engineer, chuckled but spoke little, his attention absorbed in checking dials, turning cranks, and pulling levers on the side of the big boiler. Slowly the pressure mounted, steam building. You could feel it, like an immense winding spring. He released the steam with an enormous rush, then let it build back up again, twice, three times, and finally we slowly backed into the station, the tenders behind us, until, with a clang and a jolt, we met the waiting train. My excitement surged ahead of all waiting fears. We were finally going to be off on our adventure. Kolya’s secret grin flashed, just for me.
Olinsky checked his own watch. “Tea, anyone? The samovar’s hot.”
“Company’s here,” said Kolya, nodding out the window.
Black leather jackets signaled the arrival of the Railway Cheka. Six of them. They boarded the train, disappearing inside the crowded cars. This would take a while, if they planned to inspect the contents and travelers on this densely packed train. Surely they would find us. But Kolya was sunny and cool as a September morning. Olinsky siphoned off some of the boiling water from the engine into a pot. Kolya added tea to the mix and I tried to hold my cup steady so I wouldn’t betray my nerves. A sudden bang made me jump—a blow to the sheet metal of the cab. The Georgian opened the door and a tall, leather-jacketed man climbed up, letting in a rush of cold air behind him. “Well, Comrades? Let’s see some papers.”
Runnels of sweat trickled down my neck. I was afraid to even blink. The engineer handed over his clipboard cove
red with curled, greasy papers—records of settings and inspections. The Cheka man, tall and graceless, with a knobbly nose under his leather cap, looked through them perfunctorily and thrust them back at the engineer. “Labor books.” He wiggled his fingers, as though tickling the chin of a billy goat.
Oh God. My labor book was for some girl named Marina. I watched as Olinsky and the Georgian pulled theirs out and handed them to—or, rather, tossed them with purposeful insolence at—the Cheka man. They bounced off his chest and fell to the floor of the cab. “Pick them up,” said the Chekist.
“Kiss my ass,” said the engineer.
Kolya produced two from his coat and scooped the two from the floor into the Chekist’s hands.
“What are these clowns doing here?” He pointed at me and Kolya as he inspected the labor books. Specifically, me. “You. How old are you?”
I could feel sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades, my breasts pushing at the bandage. My heart thumped as loud as the engine. “Eighteen, Comrade.” Misha tried to keep his voice deep.
He was looking at one of the books. “Fifteen,” he said. “Apprentice engineer. What a load of crap. You Vikzhel bastards. Featherbedding. How about you, Shorty? What’s your excuse?” he asked Kolya. Narrowing his eyes as if he recognized him. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”
I felt my guts rumbling, hoped my bowels wouldn’t let go. To have come so close only to have Kolya fall into Cheka hands…all for nothing. What would I do if they arrested him? Head east on this train, I supposed.
“Yeah, I was visiting your mother,” Kolya said.
The Georgian laughed.
“Shut up,” said the Cheka man. “What are you doing on this train?” He went back to examining Kolya’s labor book in the light of the kerosene lamp. “Mechanic Rubashkov.”