I climbed into the back, taking the extra sheepskin, and burrowed into the straw. I couldn’t go back to Petrograd—I’d burned every bridge there. For Kolya. The bitter irony did not escape me. No, I would only go as far as Tikhvin, get off the train and make my way to Maryino, if it still stood. I would see if it was possible to make a life there. It was my last refuge, a place I belonged.
In truth, I didn’t believe I’d make it as far as Cherepovets, I felt so wretched. But I had to get to that train. I had to be rid of him. After three days of hard travel, we finally entered the yards of the good-size town with our horse and laden wagon. I was once again presenting myself in the guise of Misha, my women’s clothing back in my bag. And so it had come to this. I was learning that if a person did nothing at all, the world continued to turn, and eventually time passed and the day arrived when you found yourself in an impossible moment of separation.
Up to then I didn’t quite believe that I would go through with it, that I would split with my one and false love, but I could already feel myself moving away from him, like being on a ship, pulling from the dock, watching him standing on the shore. I would never again love anyone the way I loved this man, the twist of his mobile mouth, the slant of his eyes, the curls in his reddish-brown hair. My magician.
“I’ll go with you as far as Tikhvin, and then I’m getting off,” I told him, looking forward as we sat side by side on the wagon seat. “I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
“One more chance,” he said. “I beg you. I’ll be a saint, a blind eunuch. Don’t do this to me. To us! God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Listen to me, Marina.”
It was the admission I’d been waiting for, but it didn’t feel the way I thought it would. It was too late. I felt cold in my bones, cold and clear in a way I didn’t think I was capable of. If one must cut off one’s own right hand, it was better to do it quickly, then sear it with an iron and plunge it into icy water. My bones were cracking like the ice when it was only just thick enough to walk upon. My heart, cracking.
He leaned on his knees and wept, while all around us in the train yard, men continued to work, ignoring this sobbing man as if it were an everyday occurrence in Cherepovets, and maybe it was. The horse switched his tail.
A man neared us with the studied nonchalance of conspiracy. He took the horse’s bridle. “You Rubashkov?”
“You’ve got work to do,” I said.
I stayed with the load while they went off and returned with two grim men pushing handcarts. They unloaded the grain quickly—our precious, tainted cargo—and took it to a passenger car marked PETROGRAD. Then they opened a panel at one end and quickly filled it with our bags. Kolya closed it up, and I could see him passing something into the hands of the men, who faded back into the station. I returned the wagon to the livery stable and collected a third of what we’d paid for the horse and wagon, then returned to find Kolya squatting on his heels, watching the car from the scrubby woods. We watched and waited, and said nothing.
The Vologda train arrived in the afternoon. It picked up our car from the siding, and we followed it into the station. The platform swarmed with desperate people heading into starving Petrograd—bag people like us, workers returning from self-provisioning, hungry locals. When people are desperate, they seek motion, even if it is in the wrong direction. I was keenly aware that we were endangering everyone on the train crew with our contraband. If the Railway Cheka found that compartment, that load of grain, they would know it hadn’t been smuggled by just one person. They searched the trains constantly, as did the local authorities.
We didn’t speak. The engineer and fireman kidded us, making their crude jokes, thinking it was a men’s-only locomotive. Kolya had his gloves off—he was biting his nails. It was like being in a funeral car. We watched dark fields passing. It stopped snowing, and the moon reappeared, revealing sleeping villages. “Come back to Petrograd, then do what you want. I won’t stop you,” he said low, in my ear.
“I am doing what I want.” I wasn’t going to point out that he had already done what he wanted and would continue doing it, no matter what he said, no matter how many tears he shed. The muscular music of the wheels, the roar of the engine, sang us their sad lullaby.
Babayevo. Podborovye. We bought tea and buns from babas on the platform. The tea tasted like dishwater, the bun was dust in my mouth. Every breath was a heartache.
“There’s no sense to this,” he whispered, gazing out at the dark arches of a station. We stood shoulder to shoulder but didn’t touch. “We can just go on. People do. People forgive, they change.”
He was so serious. I’d never heard him like this. My anger had evaporated, leaving behind only sorrow, pure and deep. “No, they don’t.”
The journey was agonizing, the train rusty. At times we moved at a walking pace. We were searched three times, once by Cheka, twice by others. Kolya watched the car with the grain, but so far so good. Before dawn we pulled into the station at Tikhvin. I climbed down from the locomotive, using the coupling rods as steps. He followed me, held me fast by my upper arms. Even now, my lips hungered for his. I could feel them trembling. They didn’t understand why they couldn’t have him.
“Wait for me,” he pleaded. “I’ll make it up to you. You’re all I have, Marina. If I thought I was losing you forever, I’d kill myself, I swear.” His blue eyes for once held no teasing, only a desperation that distilled that of the world around us. We couldn’t embrace, so we stood awkwardly like abashed brothers.
“Good luck, Kolya,” I said, and picked up my bundle: cheese and bread, a sausage, the jar of jam, tobacco and six matches, the money he’d pressed on me that I knew enough to accept. I had kept my sheepskin and my women’s clothes. Kolya slid his pistol out from his pocket and put it in mine.
“You’ll need it.” Although I was leaving him, I didn’t want to see him killed in his dirty dealings with the Petrograd underworld.
He attempted a smile. “In a few days I can buy myself a howitzer.”
I left him there in the hazy darkness and the hissing steam. He would have followed me, but he couldn’t leave the grain.
69 The North
I WALKED THROUGH TIKHVIN station, flanked by the arches my child self once imagined belonged to a palace. I could see her there through the thin veil of time—my mother in a huge hat, a mountain of luggage, her dog on a lead. Seryozha clutching his easel, Volodya bursting with joy to be heading to the country, Avdokia haggling with the porter. Now there was only the urgency of getting away. I emerged in the town square, dark and quiet in the early morning, and the gravity of what I had done hit me like a train. I felt my heart ripping like a piece of cloth.
And how exactly was I to make this journey to Maryino? On foot, with winter heavy in the sky? Kolya had warned me that it was beyond my capabilities, had outlined a tale of disaster, but all I could think of was getting away from the sight of his foxy, treacherous face.
I hadn’t considered how this moment would feel. I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life, without companion or guide, lover or friend. My lungs hurt in the frost. I reminded myself that I was also free. No tormentor, no locked doors, no enemies, no traps. And I knew this place. I’d been here many times before. But now that I saw the town again, I realized it was like a person you thought you knew—a baker or doorman you saw every day, but who, meeting him in the street, you realized you never knew at all. This Tikhvin square gave me back that same kind of blank stare.
I couldn’t just stand in one place. I was Misha again, Misha the hooligan, and what self-respecting Russian boy would exhibit such sniveling, such cowardice? Buck up, Misha said to Marina. Stick with me and the devil take him, that lying son of a bitch. We don’t need him. We’ll do fine, you’ll see. Nothing for it but to go on and see if I could follow my own harebrained plan.
Walking through the town, I could see how much it had changed. Everything seemed sadder. The boarded-up shops, broken windows, fallen roof slates, like an old man cur
led in on himself, waiting to be beaten. I passed the ancient inn where we used to spend the night. The front door was boarded and nailed. Although it could simply be that nobody used the front doors anymore. Puddles had iced over during the night. The town was pulling in its chin for the winter, stiffening up, collar raised.
Ahead rose the towers of the ancient monastery, showing the same impervious face it had displayed for five centuries, the high white walls gray in the dull dawn, and behind them rose the domes and the famous bell tower with its unmistakable steeples like a comb with five tines. The monastery was a fortress, protecting its miracle-working icon that I knew so well, having slept under its tender image in every place we’d lived, the same icon Genya had crushed in a fit of proletarian rage. I was glad the original lay safe within those forbidding walls. I only wished they would ring the carillon and break the crow-filled silence, but it was the wrong time, and I had to get going.
And so I began to walk north, to my one remaining home, with its happy memories of childhood, of summer days and my family as it was. When I reached Maryino, I could rest and sort the great trunk of my losses. Even if the peasants had taken over the big house, I was sure Grigorii and Annoushka would let me have the old maid’s room, or space in the stable. They could put me to work and enjoy their revenge.
My feet fell into a rhythm only they knew, unique to my own body, and the fresh cold air settled my nausea. Suddenly I was glad to be alone, to move to my own meter and accent, iambic tetrameter. It struck me how people either rushed you along, like Varvara and Genya or Father, or were maddeningly slow, like Mina and Mother. Only Kolya and I could ever walk together—even at the end, our steps matched stride for stride. But that was over. No point in thinking about it. Like Whitman, I would sing the song of myself—my own footsteps, the length of my stride, the strength of my back, the vapor I exhaled. I had food in my sack and somewhere to go.
I walked for three days, catching rides with peasants when I could, enjoying the changing terrain and the various opinions of my escorts. One peasant thought the next snowstorm would hold off a few more days, but the river was freezing. And the crows were thick this fall, he said, the woolly caterpillars fat—all signs of a harsh winter. I thought the opposite, out of politeness. But I also enjoyed the easy silences as a boy among men. Women liked to keep up a steady, reassuring sound of chat. One of the things women probably found so attractive about Kolya was that he could never shut up. He was compelled to conversation by some tension of his innermost nature, compelled to charm and entertain. Words forced themselves from his breast like songs from a nightingale.
It was pretty country. The lines of uncut trees plumed in windbreak crests on the hilltops, the subtle verticals of the trunks distinct in the clouds of bare branches. Below, rolling fields lay plump under a dusting of snow. And in the villages, I was the one who sat in the red corner, bringing news of the world and entertaining after dinner, weaving pictures in string and narrating the tale of Maria Morevna and Koshchei the Deathless and Prince Ivan. “Zhili-buili, once upon a time, there was a king with only one son…”
I wondered what would happen to these stories now, when there were no more princes or queens. In thirty years, I might come into an izba like this one and no one would have heard of Maria Morevna or Vasilisa the Beautiful, only the Brave Bolshevik and Ivan the Kronstadt Sailor. What happened to old stories after the world changed? Would they all just go underground, like Bannik, to be whispered about in dark bathhouses?
No one to whom I spoke knew our village, but on the morning of the second day some peasants steered me to the hut of a woodcutter who was supposed to know the whole district. “Which Novinka?” he’d asked. “Near Alekhovshchina or the one to the west?”
I hadn’t thought of the name of that village in years. “Alekhovshchina.”
“Look here.” He drew me a rough map on a bit of brown paper his wife had saved from a package, his nails like horn, striated and yellow and broken from work. On the wrinkled surface, he traced the road and the river it followed, noted where I should cross. I took his pencil and wrote the names next to the x’s on the map: Vinogora, Bol Kokovichi. He watched me with undisguised awe, as if I were swallowing a sword.
“Look at him, Alya,” he said to his wife. “Writing away like the devil himself. Good boy.” He thumped my back so hard I thought I’d break a vertebra. “The road’s not bad but this stretch in here”—he indicated the long stretch before Alekhovshchina—“that’s some forest. I should tell you you won’t see a soul from sunup to sundown. Some good hunting there. Too bad you don’t have a gun.”
I shrugged. My revolver wasn’t something I wanted to advertise. He folded the map and handed it to me. “So what’s in Novinka you’re in such a hurry to get to, hey boy?”
I put the map in the pocket of Misha’s jacket, next to my heart along with the matches. “No hurry. My sister married a man from Novinka. Just paying her a visit, that’s all.”
It must be hard to be a woodcutter and be so outgoing. It was as if he’d saved up his breath to let it loose in a torrent this morning. “Girl trouble, am I right? A little visit out of harm’s way?” He grabbed my shoulder with the strength of a man who wielded a thirty-pound ax half his life. “I don’t blame you. Don’t wait until you’re old and ugly like me.” His wife laughed. We stood and shook hands, and he kissed me three times. “Keep your eyes open, son.” He winked. “Novinka’s no bigger than a freckle on your face. Walk too fast, you’ll miss it.”
As the woodcutter had said, the road to Bol Kokovichi followed the river, skirting mixed forest and open fields. It was definitely colder than the day before—below freezing, the trees glittering with frost—but I was well rested, and the map gave me heart. I was glad to see there would be a regularity of villages every few miles until I reached that forest. My luck was holding. If anything the sky was higher than it had been. I fell into step with myself, the aches and stiffening of yesterday’s walk at first almost ridiculously painful, but gradually my body warmed as the day went on. Pain subsided into a generalized ache that I could ignore in the rhythm of my tramp. Crows complained over the snowy, stubble-topped fields.
I grew confident about my choice and my abilities. It felt good to know that I could trust my instincts, responsible to no one but myself. The world wasn’t nearly as frightening as I’d been led to believe. And I was
not anyone’s lover,
nobody’s wife,
not boy nor girl
not daughter, nor friend.
Just myself here
mocking the crows.
Eighteen years old and full of why not.
But toward the end of the day, weariness came over me like a fog. In one village, I asked a woman where I might be able to spend the night. She said, “With your own people,” and slammed the door in my face. I had to approach five different souls before I found shelter with a sour but greedy old couple. They took my money and let me sleep in their shed. Later I discovered they’d locked me in. I went crazy—I couldn’t stand being locked up anymore. I pounded and yelled, and the old woman shrieked back through the door that they’d let me out in the morning, but they had chickens to protect. “Unless you want to sleep outdoors, you better stop that racket.” Luckily I was tired and soon slept. But my hopes of getting an early start in the morning were dashed—I felt sick and the oldsters took forever to pull themselves out of their rural torpor and open the door. The old witch thrust a crust of bread at me, and a boiled egg in the shell, which made me want to vomit. I warmed my hands with it and headed out toward Alekhovshchina.
Soon I found myself in the forest the woodcutter had described. The road deteriorated into a dismal wagon path through the lines of tall pines. The going was hard—branches and even tree trunks had fallen across the road and been left there. The ruts were deep and the darkness of the day and the closeness of the path sucked out my spirit like a chimney drawing smoke. After a few hours, my weariness deepened to pure misery. I stumb
led along, a quarter mile at a time. I felt like I’d fallen into a nightmare, shuffling along through a forest without end. A line from a Longfellow poem my father liked haunted me: This is the forest primeval…
I concentrated on hating. I hated the endless identical trees, leaving only a strip of white sky overhead. I cursed those old people for the late start. I cursed Kolya and his endless seduction. I cursed the day I kissed him in the cloakroom at my parents’ New Year’s Eve party. I cursed the peasants and the speculators and God and the devil, cursed the revolution and the year 1918. I grew sweaty, then chilled. I felt weak and stupid. After a while I stopped cursing, stopped making a sound, and just stumbled along, without thought, moving out of inertia—not walking so much as falling forward.
To make matters worse, the snow that everyone had been waiting for began to fall. Now a sick, dull panic rose. No “Song of Myself” now, just the dawning realization that I might not make it to Alekhovshchina. The snow fell faster, big flakes whirling with an updraft. It gave me vertigo. Within minutes, up and down became confused, and all that whiteness made me seasick. I dropped a pinecone, just to see it fall. The sky gave no clue as to the time—it could have been noon or two or four. I stopped to rest and drink a bit of boiled water from my bottle. I’d felt sick when I left the shed that morning, and now I just wanted to lie down on the road and curl into a ball like a hedgehog. I looked back at my own footprints, filling with snow. Was it too far to go back to those horrible old people?