September 1917. A crispness in the air, frost at night. In Mother’s era, this would have been my season. I would be preparing for balls, having gowns made, fitting my dancing shoes. Instead, with no classes to attend, I wandered the city streets with my poet’s notebook, my poet’s ears and eyes, breathing the living city. I watched the fishmongers of Haymarket Square, the freight haulers, the cabmen and the shopgirls, and wrote about them, wrote about the city, imagining my way into its secrets. My time with Genya only inspired me to dig deeper into the life around me.
One afternoon I turned a corner to find Varvara standing on a crate opposite a bread shop, making a speech to the women in the queue. “Far from improving the situation of the common people, the revolution in February has only increased your suffering,” she said from atop her rickety crate, which probably had held bottles of beer. So she had finally made it, a crate of her own. I hung back so as not to interrupt her. “The situation is worse than ever. The government is powerless to do anything but argue and pass resolutions in favor of the captains of industry.” She saw me, and the hint of a smile crossed her impassioned mouth, before she plunged back into her fierce harangue. “And still the war keeps grinding on! They say we have to stay in to seem strong to the imperialist allies! We, the Bolshevik Party, say down with the imperialists! Winter is coming, and it’s time to end the war! It’s time to bring the food and the soldiers home!”
“About time,” the women murmured.
“What did we have this revolution for?” she shouted. “To keep dying? To keep starving? We asked for bread and peace, and what did we get?”
“Just a bunch of yak,” a woman who had almost made it to the doors called out. In a bread queue, the closer to the head of the line, the more irritable and aggressive people became.
“It’s always the same,” grumbled a stout woman with a big mole on her cheek. “Whoever gets in, they pad their own nests and the hell with you.”
“Who wants this war?” Varvara called out. “You?” she pointed to the woman with the mole. “You?” She pointed to an old man.
“It’ll bury us all,” the old man said.
“Not if the Soviet has any say in it. All power to the Soviets!” She finished, got off her beer crate, and hurried over to hug me. “I thought we were going to have to go out to the hinterlands and drag you home.” She began handing out pamphlets down the line. It was wonderful to see her again, her messy black hair, her long stride.
“So you’re a Bolshevik now.”
She handed me a stack of pamphlets. “All the revolution has done is allow people to complain without being arrested,” she said. “The Provisional Government’s a joke. Look at this.” She tilted her chin at the queue. “They’re actually sleeping in line now.” What that woman joked about last year had come true. “You are the source of all power,” she told the women. “The Soviet represents you.” The pamphlet’s damp ink stained my gloves: All Power to the Soviets. “The Soviet is the future of Russia. Stand with the Bolsheviks. Get out of this war.”
I admired her, so energetic and modern compared to the tired women in their scarves. I noticed since I’d been back that women in the city were cropping their hair the same way Varvara did. Changes and more changes. Helping her hand out her crude pamphlets, I felt part of the electricity of the city. Since I’d been home, I had noticed a flood of new newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets, kiosks were plastered with news, pavements thick with opinions. No one clicked their tongues at us now for handing them our leaflets. They read them boldly.
We walked across to Vasilievsky Island over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, with its shell-and-seahorse railings, the fresh wind on the Neva whipping up whitecaps. “So you’re back at your mother’s?” I asked.
“No. I’ve got another place.” How quickly she walked, hands in her pockets—I’d forgotten about that. “You going to move in with the poet?” she asked.
“Not just yet. But I might. To be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing yet.”
“Hold on, I need to do a little business.” We stood before a modest apartment block on the Seventh Line that had a boarded-up shop on the bottom floor. As we climbed to the second story, the noise of machinery, rhythmic and heavy, rattled the building. She knocked at a drab, peeling door. Our entrance silenced a group of serious-looking young workers talking around an oilcloth-covered table. I recognized one of them. Marmelzadt, from the previous summer in the hospital ward. His lips twisted into the imitation of a smile when he recognized me. His hands were black with ink.
“Well, it’s the little barynya,” he said over the clatter of the press.
“Glad to see you looking well, Comrade,” I said. “Guess the army’s getting along without you.”
Deserted or discharged? I wondered. Kerensky had announced the death penalty for deserters, reneging on one of the Provisional Government’s basic promises, the abolition of capital punishment in the army. Yet soldiers were still walking away from the war by the company and battalion. “You know each other?” Varvara seemed startled. There were things she didn’t know about me, too. I liked that.
“You see, I’ve taken your advice,” I said to him.
“Kraskin?” Varvara asked. So he’d taken a revolutionary name. Ink.
He watched me, his expression a blend of superiority and suspicion. What was the baryshnya doing invading their Vasilievsky Island revolutionary cell? As before, I found him provocative: he was irritating, yet somehow I wanted his approval. He turned his back to me and gave Varvara another stack of pamphlets to hand out:
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT IS IN THE POCKET OF THE IMPERIALIST WEST. STOP THE WAR! THE REVOLUTION MUST CONTINUE! ALL POWER TO THE REVOLUTIONARY SOVIET OF WORKERS’ AND SOLDIERS’ DEPUTIES! BREAD AND PEACE!
On the way back, we passed a barbershop on Bolshoy Prospect in the heart of Vasilievsky’s working-class district. I stopped to watch the barbers at their labors, pulling out my notebook. Barbershops always seemed like such dignified places, quite different from the cloying, slightly bullying ministrations of women’s hairdressers. There was something so esoteric and philosophical about these minor priests with their ointments and jars, bestowing a temporary princehood upon every man as he sat on his throne for a trim and a shave.
On impulse, I caught Varvara by the sleeve and pulled her inside. We squeezed into seats on the bench among the men, ignoring their outraged stares in response to their precinct’s violation. Today I would rid myself of the equivalent of salmon walls—this great mass of hair I was constantly at war with. A modern woman should have better things to do with her time than spend hours brushing and washing and putting up hair. What oppressive beauty.
When it was my turn in the barber’s chair, I removed my hat, took out my hairpins, let my hair fall. The blue-eyed barber, a Hungarian with a curly moustache, looked stricken, threading his fingers through my heavy red locks, which hung over the back of the chair to my hips. “Don’t ask me to cut this,” he said. “It would be a crime.”
“It weighs a ton, and it’s always in the way. It gives me headaches. Cut.”
“You’re breaking my heart, devushka.” He pressed his fist to his mouth.
“Girls today,” said a man in the next chair. “Used to be women liked being women. Now they want to be men. Cut off their hair, smoke, wear pants…”
Varvara, hovering to my right, smoked a rolled cigarette in an inky hand. “Used to be men liked being serfs, too…but somehow they came to their senses.”
The Hungarian mournfully stroked my hair.
“Just a line.” I indicated where he should cut with the edge of my hand, an unbroken cut from nape to jaw.
He sighed, twisted my long hair into a tail, and cut straight across. He could hardly bear to look. I hadn’t had more than a trim in my entire life. My hair now fell to my shoulders, uneven. It looked like a madwoman’s. The amputated length of it hung in his hand like a dead fox. “You could keep this,” he said, offering it to me over his arm.
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br /> “You keep it,” I said. “I’m not sentimental.”
Seeing that the worst was over, he got to work, shaping. When he was done, my head felt light, liberated, modern, my newly exposed neck thin and embarrassed. I gave him a smile with his ruble. The men shook their heads as we left.
Out in the parkway on Bolshoy, we sat on a bench and I asked Varvara to teach me to roll a cigarette. I managed to roll a sad twisted version, and we walked, smoking, modern, very proud of ourselves, down to the university along the Neva embankment, handing out her pamphlets to the students. Most took them with curiosity, but one crumpled it and threw it at me. It bounced off my chest. “We’re not interested in your defeatism,” he said. “Bolshevik scum.”
If I hadn’t cut my hair, I don’t think I would have stared at him as boldly as I did. “Wait until they get rid of the student deferments,” I spat back at him. “Then you’ll be singing a different tune.” I was no longer that girl from the Tagantsev Academy, straddling the worlds, Papa’s darling. I was a visitor from the future.
After our pamphlets were gone, we walked the windswept Strelka, the eastern tip of Vasilievsky Island, and sheltered in the lee of the Rostral Columns. The wind was unaccustomedly cold on my newly bare neck. Before us, the hulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress rose upriver—fortress, prison, cathedral, mint, all in one. Everything you needed to found a civilization. I considered the great beast of the Neva and the clotted clouds moving in overhead while Varvara eyed the Winter Palace across the black swells. “What’s going on at the foreign office these days?” Father’s offices had moved from the Duma to the Winter Palace since I’d been gone.
I shrugged. “I’m not exactly kept abreast anymore. I eat in the kitchen. But there’s always a steady stream of foreigners coming through, making their deals.”
“What kind of foreigners?” she asked, still watching the palace.
“English and American mostly.”
“What kind of deals?”
I wrapped my scarf higher around my neck. “Father and I go our own ways. We don’t even talk anymore.”
Varvara exhaled. The wind smelled of a coming storm. “But you could. You’re in a position to know far more than you do. Why don’t you play nice for a while?”
It took me a moment to understand what she was asking me. “You want me to spy on my father?” Surely she wasn’t serious. Did she really see me as some kind of Charlotte de Sauve?
“All you’d have to do is sit there and eat your cutlets. It’s not like you’d be breaking into the safe at the foreign office.” She’d thought of this as I’d been getting my hair cut. As I’d been handing out pamphlets for her. That mind never rested. “But it could help hurry the peace, to know what they’re up to.”
I thought of the way Father and his friends bandied the future of Russia about as they passed the fish, the butter. The memory irritated me all over again. Though it was my family she was talking about. Betraying my own father.
“Kerensky’s beating the invasion drum like mad,” she said. “‘The Germans are in Riga! The Germans are going to take Petrograd! They’re going to cut in front of you in the bread lines! They’re going to work your twelve-hour day. Oh, we can’t give you justice—the Germans won’t let us!’ They’re trying to move the garrison out of Petrograd so they can have their way with the workers. We need to know what else they’ve got up their sleeves.”
“What will you do with the information?” I asked softly.
“Get us out of the war. But we need to know what’s going on.”
I had no love for the capitalists and industrialists who frequented our table—the way my father spoke as if he and his Kadets were Russia when he was only in power because the people brought about a revolution. These foreigners made no secret of their beliefs. Why shouldn’t I help Varvara if it would help move power into the hands of those who had made the revolution? “It’s just table talk, though,” I warned her. “Nothing very startling.”
“Just keep your ears open. Listen for anything about the war, anything about industry or treaties, oil, railroads. Mostly their plans for our future.”
At the Cirque Moderne, it was never hard to spot Genya, even in that crush. As I neared, he noticed my newly cropped hair, and his smile vanished. I pressed my way to him and saw that his eyes were full of tears. He touched the shorn strands with bewildered fingertips. As if I had lost an eye. “Oh, Marina, why?”
He hated it. My sentimental revolutionary. It made me laugh. “I thought you were a futurist,” I teased him. “This is the future.” He laughed at himself then, at his own sentimentality. He gathered me up, lifting me off my feet. “No, it’s good. Out with the useless trappings of the pampered life! Out with bustles and skirts on pianos. Freedom for heads and necks of the beautiful women.”
I took some woodcut broadsides Sasha Orlovsky had printed and began to distribute them to the crowd:
REVOLUTION
IS IT THE THUNDER?
NO, IT’S THE WORKER
CLEARING HIS THROAT.
—KURIAKIN
I loved handing these to people in the wooden hall, watching them moving their lips, slowly reading the words, reading it aloud to others. This hall was the university of the poor. They weren’t going away; they were learning, moving into their power. I could imagine Lyuda here. They were readying themselves to steer their own destiny, and my father and his cronies be damned. And what would I do? What was right and necessary, even if it frightened me, even if I knew others might not understand. I had to bet my soul on it. The important thing was to get out of the war and rebuild the country, repair the devastation, and see what the future would hold.
25 Big Ears
WHO WAS THIS GIRL in aubergine silk, with pearls once again in her ears, chatting with such important men that October? It was my season. A season of betrayal, without parties or carriages or young men in evening dress joking behind their programs. Only late dinners with diplomats and businessmen, trade representatives, Kadet diehards, Moscow journalists, American envoys, British railroad and mining representatives, British banking interests. The talk was of the war, the collapse of the French army, the German advance on Riga, barely a hundred miles away. The talk was of the future of the government and its ability to resist the Germans. And that night, the talk was of the letter that had appeared in Novaya Zhizn, written by someone in Lenin’s own party, claiming that Vladimir Ilyich himself was planning the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. Evidently Lenin had been in hiding abroad since the summer, when he had been implicated in the failed Bolshevik coup in July. The others in his party were blaming him—many of them had been arrested, but Lenin escaped.
“Not likely they’ll be able to go through with it now,” Father said, smoking his pipe, gloating. “I believe it would be missing the element of surprise.”
“Nothing would surprise me at this point,” said Vladimir Terekhov of the Russo-Asiatic Bank as he smugly sipped his claret. I tried to memorize everything that was said. I had an excellent memory, although this was a novel use for it.
“One can’t help but be reassured that the comrades are squabbling,” said Mr. Sibley, my English soon-to-be host—or so he thought. I’d told my parents I’d broken it off with Genya and was reconsidering the offer for Oxford.
Mother had long since given up trying to turn the conversation to matters other than politics. The wives no longer came at all. Many had already been sent out of Russia for their safety. She and I were often the only women at the table, and the topics resisted her. Tonight, however, a handsome British naval attaché named Captain Cromie had accompanied Mr. Sibley, and his presence brought her to life. Captain Cromie. British naval attaché. I made a mental note. Also, Terekhov had miraculously procured a standing rib roast, inspiring Vaula to prepare an entire English style dinner, down to the Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce. This while the bread of Petrograd was rationed to less than a pound a day per person.
I did my best to b
e agreeable, to insert an intellectual comment or two, to show that I was “taking an interest.” “How do you see our situation, Mr. Sibley?”
“It’s a game of nerves, isn’t it?” said the diplomat. “The Bolshies are weak but they’re fantastic at sounding the alarm. And the right vibrates to the least disturbance. The Provisional Government has to keep a firm hand on the tiller.”
“And you must miss your wife.”
“She sends her love to all of you, by the way. She can’t wait for you to join us in London.”
How happy Father was with my new compliance. He gazed down the table at me with proprietary pleasure, delighting to see me put away my proletarian brown dress and don a silk gown, my hair cleverly marcelled by Mother’s hairdresser into elegant waves. Mother was also glad to see me “back to my old self.” Their very happiness was maddening—that they preferred this falsehood, this thing I was portraying, to the girl they well knew me to be. Exactly as they preferred my brother’s “assimilation” into the military academy. They wanted to believe this charade.
It made for a strange cynical pleasure, to pretend I was one of them, to smile at their jokes at the expense of the people—something only Kolya, with his love of trickery, could really appreciate—while storing away the choice scraps for Varvara.
That night Terekhov and Mr. McDonegal of Sheffield Steel discussed Kerensky’s new legislation establishing martial law in the factories. It had been one of the causes of the revolution in February, and here we were again. “We’d never get away with it back home,” said McDonegal.
“Nobody likes it, but absentee rates are through the roof. Eighty percent, more,” said the banker. “If the Russian worker wasn’t so busy playing politics, he might have time to put in a day on the production line.” He blotted his lips and pushed away his greasy plate.
It took all my self-control not to pick up the water pitcher and pour it over his head. And when would that be, Mr. Terekhov? After sleeping overnight in the bread queues? In between locating a missing load of iron and tanker of fuel? The workers themselves were the only ones keeping our factories open.