“Will the government finally move house?” asked Captain Cromie. “Somewhere safer?”
“Like Japan?” Mother quipped, making the others laugh.
“Kerensky and his Moscow bankers,” Father sighed. “They’re pressuring him to move down, but we’re doing our best. It would give Germany altogether the wrong signal. Put out the welcome mat. Whatever you’ve heard about our Petrograd garrison, Cromie, I can promise you they are solidly anti-German. They’d never give up Petrograd. The only problem is that they’ll defend it in the name of the Soviet instead of the government.”
All Power to the Soviet. It was getting closer every day.
“I don’t know which is worse,” said Terekhov.
Cromie was full of questions. “Is the Soviet really calling the shots?” An attractive man with chiseled face, military bearing, and excellent Russian, Cromie had won over the others, but I didn’t trust him. There was something more to him…the way he weighed the others’ statements before he spoke. What was he really doing here?
“My dear Cromie,” said Sibley. “I’m sure the government’s got them well in hand.”
“We’ve heard that Kerensky’s going to send the garrison to the front and replace them with reliable troops,” said the attaché. “In case there’s anything to this insurrection talk.”
“Which would be fine, if only he wouldn’t broadcast his every whim,” Father said grimly. “Every time Kerensky manages to make a decision, he makes a splashy speech about it, and then he’s countermanding it before the ink is dry. It’s undermining the little confidence anyone has in us.”
“What do you think of Lenin?” asked Cromie. “Does he have the sway people say he does?”
Father stoked his pipe, spoke carefully. “He’s not the great speaker of the movement—he leaves that to Trotsky and Zinoviev, that Cirque Moderne crowd. But he’s absolutely relentless. Without him the Bolsheviks would have compromised long ago.”
“He’s doing a fine job of keeping the agitation going,” said Mr. Sibley, lighting up an after-dinner cigarette. “Even from hiding. Whenever the fires seem to die out, he gets the bellows out and fans them up again. I’d say the Germans are getting their money’s worth.” He chuckled drily.
I’d always been sure it was a lie that the Bolsheviks were being funded by Germany, but Sibley was in a position to know. Was that something Varvara would want to learn? English believe Lenin’s in Germany’s pay.
“That’s the thing you have to remember about the Bolsheviks,” said Terekhov. “These are the dregs of society. Look at their leaders: Jews. The dregs of the Jews at that. Their own people won’t even have them. Trotsky, Martov, Zinoviev? These aren’t Robespierres. They’re little Jewish businessmen. All this talk about taking power. I don’t see it.” Anti-Semites weren’t all monarchists; the Kadets were crawling with them. Terekhov was exhibit A.
“Peace without annexation or indemnities—that’s the German formula,” said Sibley.
Peace without annexation hardly meant winning to these people. They wanted a hunk of the Ottoman Empire as a prize and to bill the loser for the whole mess.
“But there won’t be a separate peace?” Cromie said.
“No separate peace, no negotiated end,” Father said. “We won’t bend on that.”
Nods all around the table. But the people wanted us out of the war, and the Bolsheviks would do it without dithering for a second.
“If you could only get your hands on this Lenin,” said McDonegal. Basya came in to clear the table. He let her clear his plate but hung on to his wine glass. “He seems to be the one stirring the pot. I’d do a house-to-house search if I were you.”
Father watched Basya piling plates on a tray, and Mother frowned at her cap, sliding off her head. Basya kept clearing, her face impassive, as if she had no idea what Mother’s frown was about. She did it on purpose, the provocateur. She loathed that cap. I winked as I handed her my plate.
“Why don’t you people just pick him up?” said the British steel man. “It can’t be that hard. Surely hundreds of people know where he is. Pick up some other Bolshie and sweat it out of him.”
“You might find having Lenin is as bad as not having Lenin,” Sibley said thoughtfully. “Tiger by the tail. Arresting him could be the spark that sends the whole thing up.”
Father watched Basya depart, the door swinging closed behind the starched white bow of her apron. “We’re monitoring the situation quite closely. As we speak.”
Something about the look on his face, the way he tucked his chin toward his collar, caught my attention. They knew where Lenin was.
“How closely?” Cromie asked.
“We know he’s moved back into Petrograd,” Father said.
“Are you confident?” Cromie asked.
“We have a good idea,” Father said. “Let’s just say we’ll know where to find him.”
The government knew where Lenin was. Or at least the foreign office did. My breath stilled. I wanted to ask more, but I was afraid my questions would be too pointed. This was why I had spent all these evenings listening to dull, self-important men at this gleaming table.
“Well, that is good news. Nab him in his sleep—if a scoundrel like that ever does sleep,” said McDonegal.
“But why…” began Cromie, raising my hopes, only to fall silent again when Basya returned to collect the remains of the meal. She must have been aware of the tinkling of glasses, the pointed glances, but she took her time at it.
Finally, when she had gone, Father explained. “While there’s still a schism among the senior Bolsheviks, we need to wait. Lenin’s continuing to battle resistance. It’s still possible that Kamenev and his more sensible colleagues might prevail in the Soviet.”
“But how long are you going to wait?” Cromie asked. “My God, the man’s advocating overthrow.”
“Not much longer, I imagine,” Father said. “But as soon as we arrest Lenin, we’ll lose our source as well.”
They had someone inside the Bolshevik organization itself. My mouth ran dry. I stared into my empty water glass but was afraid to pour myself more and betray my shaking hands. When I looked up I noticed Cromie examining me. I smiled back, as if I thought he was just admiring the shape of my eyes, my brow, the style of my hair, instead of asking himself the same questions I was asking. Who are you? Why are you listening so closely? Father sat back in his chair, and I well knew the look on his face: the bland gravity he got just before he moved a piece for a checkmate.
I lay in bed in the dark, listening to my heart pound. I imagined them closing in on Lenin as he slept. How could I wait until morning? But Varvara had warned me against ever coming near her apartment on Vasilievsky—it would mean the arrest of them all. I wondered about that shadowy figure working his way into the Bolshevik camp, willing to risk all to report to the Provisional Government. What on earth could be his motivation—or hers—to risk Bolshevik reprisal in order to support this strange agglomeration of liberalism and cravenness, wild disorganization and indecision, ego and oratory?
I rolled over on the hot sheets and thought of Father. I couldn’t help remembering how he’d looked at dinner, smug, so sure he knew what was right for Russia. Yet what I was about to do left me queasy. I had more in common with that shadowy figure on the other side of the political fence than I had with him, so confident that his actions reflected his ideals, unable to see the chasm between them. Excited and angry and defiant, eluded by sleep, I read until daybreak.
In the morning, I stood outside Wolf’s bookshop, reading the handbills pasted onto a kiosk, anxiously checking for anyone watching me. What if the Bolsheviks were watching me? Maybe they’d been watching me all along. I hadn’t thought much about that. Or maybe the government, though I doubted that. Who would spy on us?
And it occurred to me: what if it wasn’t Varvara who was collecting my notes? Maybe she had handed me on to some other Bolshevik who wouldn’t understand why I was doing this. The idea made my sto
mach churn. I realized as soon as I thought it that it was probably true. She’d never promised it would stay just between us, I had simply assumed it. But I couldn’t walk away now. I had the note in my pocket, something essential for the revolution. It wasn’t personal. It was bigger than I was.
I waited a bit longer, saw nothing suspicious, so I stuck a pushpin into the door jamb of the bookstore, low down—my signal that there was a message—and entered the shop. At the sound of the little ringing bell, the clerk glanced up. I nodded and wound my way back through the rooms to a dusty alcove where the complete works of Plato in Greek awaited. Varvara and I had picked them as the books least likely to be purchased. I pulled out book 10 of the Republic—her sense of humor—and opened it to the section where Plato inveighs against poets, claiming that poetry disorients men and that the only poetry he’d allow in his ideal state would be hymns to the gods and the praise of famous men. I parted the book and inserted my note—
You have a spy. Either at Smolny or among the Bolsheviks. Govt knows Lenin’s in Petrograd, knows where.
New guest: with Second Secretary Sibley, Captain Cromie. British naval attaché. Seemed very interested in local affairs. His Russian suspiciously good.
Govt believes there will be no insurrection.
Then I reshelved the book out of order. The next time I returned, it would be back in its proper place.
With studied casualness, looking around again, I retreated to the history room, where I located Great Russian Discoveries in the Arctic and the Pacific 1696–1827: Accounts of Nautical Expeditions to Siberia and Russian America by F. G. Popov—another volume unlikely to find a buyer. I prayed there would be something in it for me that was not about treachery.
Inside, in Genya’s big, barely legible scrawl, a poem:
Who sentenced me
to this jail?
The vandal
the thief
she jokes with fools
over salmon and wine
Leaves me to
yowl
with the cats.
Burn
the house down
with your arson-prone hair
and fly to me, fly!
I’m drowning in air like a fish
flip-flopping on deck.
Pity my lips.
In the agonies of waiting
they froze and fell off.
If you see them,
please send them back.
Pity my lungs
That can’t even whimper
Air does them no good
Kiss me alive again.
Madness is you
Somewhere that’s not here.
Sweeping the room once more for any suspicious loiterers, I stuck the poem in my pocket. Madness was me, just about anywhere.
In the hushed, scented precinct of Madame Landis’s boutique in the Nevsky Passazh, Mother and Madame were locked in discussing the minutiae of hats: the nostalgic virtues of yesterday’s styles—broad brims, egret plumes, veils—versus the utilitarian casquettes, turbans, and tricorns of today. Tricorns! The fashion of revolution secure on bourgeois heads. I kept touching the poem in my pocket. I am drowning, too, Genya, in this endless drivel and perfume and imposture. I had to see him, feel his solid form around me, talk honestly to someone.
I glanced at my watch and feigned surprise. What an actress I was becoming. “It’s almost four? I almost forgot—my friend Veronika’s family is leaving for Odessa. I told her I’d pay a call. Mama, take the tricorn. That’s the best.”
“So many leaving,” Mother sighed. “Soon we’ll be rattling around by ourselves, like buttons in an empty drawer.”
“I’ll be back by dinner,” I said, patting Tulku’s elegant little head.
“Remember we’re going to Viktor Vladimirovich’s.” Tripov’s. In the face of Father’s increasingly long working hours and the growing unrest, the all-night debates at the Pre-parliament—the new Duma—she expected me to be her evening escort.
Freed, I dashed down the glass arcade of the Passazh and out into the rain, crossed Nevsky Prospect, and dodged a tram, the angry driver ringing her bell at me. I raced behind the Gostinny Dvor department store toward Haymarket Square. In the absence of police the number of robberies had been rising all fall, and I looked a perfect fool in my bourgeois finery. But if someone wanted to rob me they’d have to catch me first. I pounded up Grivtsova Alley in my heeled shoes, up those wretched stairs two at a time, knocked, and tried the battered door. It opened, but it was only Anton, reading on the divan, a coat thrown over him as a blanket. He pretended not to recognize me. “Is it rent day already?” he asked, turning a page. “I don’t have it. Check back on Friday.”
I finally found Genya at a corner table with Zina and his other friends in a workingman’s café on Gorokhovaya Street, the greasy windows steamed over. Loath to go in dressed as I was, especially with Zina there, I tapped on the glass with the edge of a coin. When he saw me, he rushed out into the cold without his coat, wrapping himself around me in an enormous embrace. His jacket smelled of the café, greasy pirozhky and rough tobacco, cabbage and tea. “Look at you. You’re making me jealous of all those English diplomats. I’ll kill them one by one, dump them in the canal. You won’t be able to move a boat there’ll be so many of them.”
I could feel Zina staring through the restaurant window, seeing him with the Enemy in full regalia. I linked my arm in his. “Let’s take a walk.”
We strolled along the Catherine Canal in the miserable October drizzle. Gone were the colors: the pinks, the golds, the blues. The scene had washed out into gray. The bare trees brooded in expectation of winter. “I missed you,” he said. “Why can’t your mother do the spying? Or the old nanny or somebody? Nobody would suspect her of passing secrets.”
“She’d be perfect, except she never tells what she knows. You’d have to dig it out of her.”
Soon this canal would start to freeze. Winter on the way. I clung to Genya. Even coatless, he exuded warmth, and I sheltered in his lee like a skiff at anchor. Three young girls passed us on the embankment with their bags and books, heading perhaps to the ballet school at the Mariinsky, their gait marked by the duckwalk of little ballerinas. They crossed over the bridge, giggling at us, two mismatched lovers, my head tucked into the hollow under Genya’s jaw.
In the shelter of our bodies, our hats, I pulled off my soft suede gloves and rolled a messy cigarette, which made him laugh. With my elegant clothes, my cropped hair, and my hand-rolled smoke, I was neither old nor new but caught in midtransformation. He rolled his cigarette far more deftly, and we leaned together with our elbows on the balustrade, smoking.
“Come back to the Artel with me,” he said. “I can’t stand being with you like this.” He spat a tobacco flake.
I rubbed my face against his sleeve. I would have loved to go back to the Artel and make love with him, but I could just imagine coming back rumpled and stinking from sex to encounter Vera Borisovna dressed and perfumed and ready for me to accompany her to Tripov’s salon. “I have to get back in a minute,” I said. “I shouldn’t even be here. Someone might have followed me from the milliner’s.”
“I hope you’re getting something worthwhile,” he said miserably, his arm heavy around me. “Sometimes I think it’s just Varvara trying to break us up.”
That made me laugh. “Why would she do that? She adores you.”
“She tolerates me,” he said, his eyes the same color as the gelid green water. “But she’d rather not share you with anybody.”
Yes, it was true, she was possessive of her friends. But she was also completely dedicated to the cause, far more than I could ever be. Memorizing the names of English coal barons and American envoys was hardly agitating in the factories and the barracks. I hoped she’d be proud of me. I’d finally proved useful, shown her I wasn’t just a romantic poseur with my lovers and poetry, irrelevant in the wider crisis.
“I need you more than the Bolsheviks do.” His big ha
nd lay on my bare neck. His hazel-green eyes reflected every feeling—Genya Kuriakin would be the worst spy ever. “I’m going crazy. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can barely breathe. I draw pictures of you naked and kiss them—it’s pathetic. I can’t hold out much longer. Are you sure we need to do this? Is it making any difference at all?”
He wanted reassurance, revelations, disclosures. But something in me was surprisingly secretive. I wanted to keep these worlds apart, the dark life I was living on Furshtatskaya Street and the bright one Genya and I had. I didn’t need to prove my loyalty to him in any case. Only my love. I considered lying, telling him I hadn’t found out much of anything, but then what would be the point of our suffering? “I’ve heard some things that could make a difference. But don’t ask me to tell.”
“You don’t trust me?” He gave me a hurt look, like a little boy’s. “I’m the Bolshevik.” Then he realized he was yelling and tried to contain himself. “You think I’m going to write it on a placard and hang it around my neck?”
I cradled his cheek in my cold, ungloved hand, warming my palm on him the way one might put one’s socks on the radiator. “I have to do this my way.” We stood shoulder to shoulder, watched the sluggish water flow under the Stone Bridge, where once People’s Will terrorists had planned to blow up Alexander II. This long and torturous history.
“You’re right. You’re doing the right thing,” he said, his arms coming around me, his chin resting on my head.
“I’m afraid he’ll find out,” I whispered.
He held me tighter, trying to build a wall of himself around me. “He won’t. And so what if he does?”
I could only shake my head. My love, so kind, so tender, but he had no family feeling, and no divisions within himself, where I had nothing but. How I could make him understand how it felt to be caught between who I was—my history, my class, my family, the barynya I’d been raised to be—and the revolution, what I hoped for Russia and for myself? I was between two stools, as we say.