“I’m going to Vologda. There’s a train they don’t know how to fix. The English left it behind, a little gift to the Soviet people. Only they wrecked it first.”
“Why do you have”—he looked at my labor book again—“Mikhailov’s documents?”
“He’s my brother. Half brother. He was going off with a whore earlier. I didn’t want him to lose anything while he was out getting the clap.”
“Prostitution is a filthy remnant of bourgeois culture,” the Cheka man warned Misha gravely. “There is no place for prostitution in our soviet society.”
I nodded. I didn’t have to fake the terror I felt. “She’s just a regular girl,” Misha protested. “My brother envies my luck with women.”
“Are we done?” said Olinsky. “I have a train to run.”
But Knobbly Nose was still eyeing our labor books. “You will move at the convenience of the Petrograd Railway Cheka, Engineer Olinsky.”
He handed us back our documents but gave Kolya an icy, close-range examination before letting him take his book back.
Then he clambered down from the cab and the engineer slammed the door shut.
The visit took the steam out of our boilers. No one said anything after that, or even exchanged a glance. We all knew what was happening back there on the train as the Cheka searched among the terrified passengers. Finally Olinsky produced a deck of tattered cards, and we played a few quiet rounds of durak as we waited for the all clear. The Cheka operatives removed half a dozen people from the train, marching them through the now empty station toward their own painful future. Each one of us imagined the day when this might be our fate.
66 A Peasant Wife
OVERHEAD, CLOUDS FANNED OUT into a giant winged angel, while around us stubbly fields still showed patches of brown through an expanse of snow. Thank God the road had frozen over or the wagon would have bogged down ten miles outside the railway town of Cherepovets. I swayed on the seat next to Kolya, feeling queasy as we alternated between dense pine forest and open land under the mesmerizing sky. This land had a dream life of its own—the drama of the sky, the forlorn, harvested fields, the distant lines of trees. Bare birches rattled their knucklebones as we passed by. Every once in a while a single man on horseback or in a wagon waved a short salute. Sometimes we overtook a group of recruits or a man driving cattle with a willow switch. I thought of Annoushka as we silently passed ruined manor houses two stories high, the roofs caved in, surrounded by a few blighted fruit trees. I couldn’t help wondering how Maryino had fared.
Kolya clucked and snapped the reins of the dappled gray as the road unspooled from between its ears. I hadn’t felt well for a week, spending most of my time with my head resting on his lap, looking up at his curly beard and the puffs of steam coming out of his nostrils or at birds crossing the big churning sky—ducks, cranes—flying south. The travel had proved harder than anything I’d imagined. Well, what had I pictured, that we’d be sipping sherry and appraising jewels and precious art? The reality was, we were making a map of remote villages, woods and fields, fording gelid streams not quite frozen over, sleeping in peasant izbas if we were lucky and in the straw with their animals if we weren’t.
In the beginning, our greed for one another drove us like a fire. How miraculous just to kiss openly! I was a woman again, dressed in sarafan, blouse, and woolen kerchief bought in Cherepovets along with a jacket and a sheepskin, complete down to felt boots and red beads around my neck—Kolya’s peasant wife. How luxurious it had been to lie naked next to him in an inn and have him slip a ring on my finger. “With this ring, I thee wed.” It was a joke and not a joke. I had waited so long to be with this man, to really know him for the very first time. All his mysteries about to be revealed.
We boarded the Volga ferry in Cherepovets with a big gray horse and a large wagon and arm in arm, rapturously watched the shore fall away. I’d never had such a sense of high adventure, Kolya and me, husband and wife, the red cord of our fates braided like our laced fingers on the railing as we stood on that deck, gazing out at a river so wide it could have been an ocean.
We traveled south as far as Rybinsk, awash with sailors and flats of lumber, Volga boatmen, fishermen and their wives. This was a world I’d only read about—a world Genya knew, full of barrel makers and the smell of planed wood. Riding along in our wagon, we sang and played tricks on each other, sometimes we made love in the back because we were unable to wait for nightfall.
Our first successes astonished me. In village after wretched village, peasants opened their cellars to us, led us to springhouses, dug up pits in which their hoarded grain had been stashed. Grain, potatoes, even butter and cheese. I was shocked. It was just as the Bolsheviks had said—peasants were holding back, hiding their surpluses in the woods and under the floors of their wooden cabins. Genya used to say that the Russian peasant, once he had his land, was done with his revolution. But our peasant hosts complained that the fixed price the Soviet provisioning brigades offered was impossibly low. They knew the cities were starving, and they cared to a point. They all had relatives in the cities, in the factories. But they didn’t know what would happen come spring. They had to think of the future.
“What do the Bolsheviks know about our lives?” our first host had said. “Why should we sacrifice when they offer us nothing in return?” The peasants needed scythes and plows, machine parts, nails, but the factories were dead. Half the workers were out self-provisioning, being pressed into the food brigades terrorizing the countryside, seizing the grain of the so-called kulaks, the better-off peasants who hired others, who often made money in trade as well as by farming.
“What’s a kulak?” our host had railed. “I hire someone to replace my boys in the army, and suddenly I’m a kulak and my grain’s good for seizure? I supported the revolution! I gave up grain when the workers first came along—I don’t want anybody to starve. But when these so-called Kombedy come along”—the Committees of the Village Poor—“telling us how much we can keep? When they’ve done nothing, these village termites? What does Lenin know about crops? And how much seed you need come spring? The devil with them, that’s what we say, and their nine poods per person.” A pood, about thirty pounds, was the allowable holdback per person for the year.
But soon we’d seen what happened to villages that were discovered to be holding back more. We drove through one that had been burned to the ground. It was a new kind of civil war—not Red versus White but town versus country, peasant versus worker, the poor versus the poor. Waged over not politics but grain. I remember when I’d begged Varvara to send me to Maryino during Red Terror. It’s going to be worse in the countryside than here. With us it’s almost over.
She thought it was all the fault of the speculator, people like Kolya and the peasants who sold to him. If only the peasant would sense his historic role as the ally of the proletarian, she used to fulminate. If only the Cheka could eliminate the speculators, then the Petrocommune stores would have food, the workers could get back to work, the peasants could get the factory items they wanted, and Russia would move ahead into the future.
I used to think I knew what people should do, that I had a good sense of right and wrong. But since I’d been out here with Kolya, I saw the true tragedy—that everyone was right from his own point of view, everyone was suffering and needy. The workers didn’t want to be in those brigades, but once they’d grimly accepted their duty, they transformed themselves into men who could perform those tasks—in exactly the way armies turned peasant boys into killers. All I knew now was that what we were doing was dangerous indeed, that I was not well, and that I was homesick for Petrograd.
I leaned against Kolya as we rode through a pine forest, mile after mile, the wall of trees and a strip of sky. It made me nauseated, the regularity of the trunks, the way they passed. I couldn’t even look at them. I worried about returning to the city. It would be so easy for Arkady to find us, especially if Kolya had all this grain to sell—surely we’d be traced. B
ut Kolya insisted it had to be Petrograd, to bring the most money. “Then we can get on a ship and go anywhere,” he said. “Where shall we go?”
“Argentina,” I said. “Spain.”
“Not Paris?”
“Too wet. Take me somewhere hot and dry. With mosaics and a little fountain in the courtyard. And guitars. I’ll dance with a black mantilla, and I’ll break men’s hearts.”
“They’ll die in droves for this redheaded Carmen.” He leaned over and kissed me. A few weeks ago, our kisses would have caught fire, and we would have made love right here. But now I was so tired that it was hard to believe there was even a place called Spain, somewhere the sun was hot and the little burros climbed the rocky hills, and great cathedrals rose like pastry, with pigeons bursting into the sky. My body ached, and an unnamed foreboding, heavy and thick, sat on my stomach, the sense of something coming. I remembered my mother’s nervousness just before the revolution broke. She’d been like a cat sensing a storm. I lay down again with my head on Kolya’s thigh, curled up on the wagon’s seat, the hard wood biting into my bones. How much longer could we go on? I slept and dreamed of grain, bags of grain heaped on a wagon over our heads, coming loose and crushing us.
Kolya woke me, shaking me gently by the shoulder. I sat up to see gentle columns of white smoke rising from a copse of trees. Chimney smoke, thank God. The eerie red sun was already low on the horizon as we drove into an enclave of izbas, nicely maintained and well spaced, the gates and fences in good shape. A fairly prosperous village, it had done well without a landlord. The inhabitants we saw did not melt away into the yards, but watched us curiously. We pulled up in front of a proud house with four windows to the street—red windows, as they were called under the tsar. Krasniy, krasiviy—red meant beautiful, because they had glass in them. The peasants had once been taxed on every window and on the chimney, too, so this was an announcement to the world: we can afford light and fresh air. Many of the poorer huts we’d visited had been little better than smokehouses.
Our horse stopped, snorting plumes of vapor into the cold air. Kolya handed me the sweat-smelling reins, leaped lightly from the wagon, and walked off whistling In the meadow stands a little birch tree. The gray threw back his head, making his bridle jingle. He couldn’t wait to be unhitched. Dogs barked as Kolya knocked on the small door next to the gates protecting the yard from the street. “Privet!” he called out. He wore a patched sheepskin over his jacket, his pants in his boots. With his little cap and homemade pipe, he looked like something you’d put in a wheat field to frighten the crows.
I sighed and stretched. I couldn’t wait to get out of this cursed wagon. My back hurt, my hips ached. I felt a hundred years old and stupid as the feeble-minded boy peeking at me from around the corner of a neighboring house. To think I’d once been a poet. Had placed word next to word just for the thrill of it, the burr of zh and the arch-throated ya. But the miles had reduced me to an ache and a queasiness, a certain melancholy, an animal’s desire for warmth and a moment’s safety.
The small door opened and a woman poked her head out, a beauty with a blue kerchief over her blond hair, pink cheeks, and upturned wide-spaced eyes. A big dog came out in front of her and sniffed at Kolya, then barked at the horse. I had not seen a beautiful peasant woman on this trip. I watched her take us in, the wagon, Kolya’s deferential stance. She was suspicious but also curious, a tiny girl in a little kerchief clinging to her skirt, and a bit more belly than that short jacket could conceal.
They spoke for a while, then she leaned over and said something to the tot, who went trotting back into the yard. Kolya waved for me. He helped the woman open the big gates and I drove the horse in. “You can put the horse in the stable, devushka,” the woman called up to me. “You’ll see where.” And Kolya followed her into the izba.
“Put the horse in the stable,” I grumbled as I began to unhitch him. “You can water and feed him, too, if you like. And would you mind fetching some more water while you’re at it?” Now that I was a peasant wife, all the work was left for me. It had been a joke at first, a delicious imposture. But now I was getting tired of it.
I was still unhitching the horse when she brought out the two pails on a yoke. “To water the horse. The well’s across the road.” She wasn’t that much older than me, maybe twenty-five, but she was already the mistress of the house. She set the pails down on the porch and went back inside. “The well’s across the road,” I imitated her to the horse. He swiveled his ears intelligently. He was sweaty, he’d done his part, too.
I put him into their barn, dark and close after all the fresh air and light, heady with rich smells—urine, animals, and straw. A cow lowed, and her calf replied. Cow and calf meant milk. Goats bleated, hoping to be fed—more milk and meat. In the dim light, I made out a manger and a watering trough. Their own horse must be out with the husband. I led our big gray in. A pig grunted, and I heard the higher notes of piglets. Around my feet, chickens made their crackling, irritable racket, filling the air with down, and the rooster wandered around in the doorway crowing, trying to peck at me. Eggs, milk, bacon…a prosperous family. They would have grain as well. I wondered where they stored it.
I made myself laugh. I was starting to think like a thief.
I scooped out some oats from our wagon for the horse. I gave it to him first in handfuls, to enjoy the softness of his nose as he ate from my hand. “We’ll be out of this soon, Comrade,” I said, petting his steamy neck, listening to him chew. Then I put the feed bag on his bridle and went to fetch the water in the reddening dusk.
Two women stood chatting at the well, their pails already full. I greeted them politely and lowered the well bucket on its chain. The splash came quickly—that was good, I wouldn’t have to haul it up so far. I groaned and huffed as I cranked the handle.
“You ought to watch your man with that one,” one of the women said, a sturdy peasant of around forty. “She’s a witch, you know.”
The other one said, “She might turn him into a pig, or a duck.”
“A duck would be easier to train,” I said, and they laughed.
“She flies around at night,” the second woman said.
“She dances in the woods,” said the first one.
“May God protect us,” I said, crossing myself piously, feeling sorry for the woman for having gossips like this as neighbors. The world always envies the beautiful and the rare.
I squatted down like a strong man at the circus and lifted the buckets straight up, the yoke across my already aching shoulders. I’d filled the pails too full, and the water splashed as I tottered through the smaller door of their gate, banging one end of the yoke so water drenched my soft boots. I was so tired I didn’t even care. I filled the horse’s trough, barely visible now in the warm darkness of the barn, and left him with the other animals, eager to be inside and sitting down.
Oh the warmth and the smell of cooking! Herbs and tea and smoke and meat—and people. Kolya already occupied the place of honor—the bench in the red corner—where a boy of around five sat at his elbow and gazed up at him, fascinated, as if my lover were a seven-league prince or a hut on chicken legs. An old man with a spade-shaped beard sat on the other side, and an old woman sat by herself at the end of the bench, mumbling. A cradle hung from the ceiling and I could see a baby sitting up in it, like a man in a boat.
The mistress stood at the stove, stirring something into a big earthenware pot. How on earth could she be so lovely, even from the back, with her figure concealed under padded clothes and her hair hidden by a kerchief? I imagined the woman’s braids under the flowered kerchief, two great ropes of gold wound crownlike around her head. Her breasts and hips were full, her belly—she was bursting with life. No wonder Kolya was trying so hard to be charming. I envied the self-confidence of her face, the bold eyes, the little upturned nose, the firm chin and wide bones. I could feel her pleasure at the unexpected company.
I was more interested in the food. The smells! The place
was crammed full of produce as a storehouse, the season of preserving having just passed. Fragrant herbs and ropes of dried fruit and mushrooms hung from the ceiling, and jars of pickles and sacks of vegetables were tucked everywhere, along the shelves and under the benches, their earthy breath adding to the smell of dinner and the dog and wet clothes and the tea in the samovar.
On the bare, scrubbed table sat a crock of milk and a bowl of salted cucumbers, a loaf of black bread and a bowl of smetana—sour cream. Kolya drank milk and smetana-slathered bread, telling a story about the bandits we’d encountered on the road, how he scared them off with his gun and they turned into magpies and flew away. The woman laughed, showing her even pearly teeth, and the melody of her laughter turned Kolya rosy and garrulous. How that man loved an audience, especially if it was a beautiful woman.
The tantalizing aromas issuing from the oven distracted me from my jealousy, and the sight of that bread, the milk. Since we’d been on the road, there had been so much lovely food, and I was as hungry as a bear in spring. Sometimes Kolya would buy me a chicken or some eggs or shoot a grouse and cook it out in the open for me. We’d devour it in the wagon. Now my stomach growled, while the rest of me politely pretended not to notice the savory bounty. As a good peasant wife, I could not ask for it myself.
“Please, have some bread,” the woman finally invited me. “The milk’s from the goat. I’d just finished milking when you came. Ilyosha, give her a cup.” The five-year-old got up and brought me a tin cup, then tucked himself back in next to Kolya. Big-eyed and sharp-chinned, he had long eyelashes just like Seryozha’s. He looked afraid to blink lest the visitor disappear on him. And I remembered so vividly how my brother would become obsessed by people, just like this. I poured myself warm milk, sweet and grassy. The bread was fresh and smelled of coriander. I slathered the thick sour cream on top. “God bless you and your household,” I said.