“It was fantastic. Pure madness,” Gigo said, turning a chair the wrong way around and lowering his slight frame into it.
“You should have been there,” Genya said, wrapping his arm around Anton’s neck where he sat up in his cot. The editor reached for the clock. It was around five. He groaned and let it fall to the floor.
I sank onto the divan, remembering all those corridors. The fine paintings, the Malachite Hall. Ballrooms used for barracks, dining rooms for offices. Everyone was lost—the soldiers, the cadets; people shot at each other out of sheer nerves and confusion. A revolutionary soldier dropped a grenade down a staircase—why? My ears still hadn’t stopped ringing.
Anton shoved his friend’s heavy arm from his shoulders. “Then you got drunk to celebrate?”
Sasha pulled up a chair to the messy table. “The soldiers broke into the tsar’s wine cellars. We heard they lost a whole battalion down there. They sent another in after them and they disappeared, too. They won’t be coming out anytime soon, either.”
Genya reached under his jacket and pulled out three bottles. Sasha produced four more.
Zina goggled. “So that’s where you were.”
We’d gone down just to see it. Now I would never get the picture out of my head, that Blakean hell: drunken soldiers bashing the necks off vintage bottles, lying on the floor as their mates poured wine into their open mouths. The cellars went on and on, a labyrinth under the palace, and the soldiers turned into animals before our eyes, like Odysseus’s men on Circe’s isle. The drunken men were more frightening than cannon fire. I slipped in the spilled wine and fell, cutting my knee. Genya and Sasha grabbed bottles and we departed, fighting our way back upstairs against a tide of descending celebrants. I looked at the tear in my stocking, the jagged sore, but it seemed like someone else’s leg. I still couldn’t feel it.
“Wine?” Genya held an old bottle against his forearm like a sommelier. It was a Madeira, 1848.
“A good year,” I said.
He handed it to Sasha, who began working its cork with his penknife, as Genya continued his story about our adventures conquering the Winter Palace. “We found the meeting room where the ministers were holed up. The Red Guards were just marching them out when we got there.”
Actually we hadn’t seen them. Genya was painting a picture now. We came upon the room by accident, wandering among soldiers and looters grabbing plumes and statuettes, clocks and miniatures, the Red Guards trying to stop them. These things belong to the people! Shots firing, people running, smoke. We passed through ruined chambers that had been used as barracks. Suddenly we found ourselves in a dining room, rather plain compared with the outer galleries, its long table scattered with pens and pads bearing the scribblings and drafts of proclamations. The ministers had been trying to find a course for themselves and the country up to the last moment, when the Red Guards had arrived to arrest them. Waiting for the inevitable. What a fitting finale it was for the Provisional Government. True to form, they’d conferred to the very end. Talk, that was their forte, while they waited for someone else to act. But I wondered what had happened to one dignified gentleman in particular, a man with a reddish-brown beard and eyes like my own. I prayed he’d listened to Varvara, but I doubted he did. Perhaps going down with the ship seemed more noble than what had occurred that night on Furshtatskaya Street.
Finally Sasha got the stopper out of the bottle. Zina found glasses of varying sizes and degrees of cleanliness. We poured and toasted the revolution, the sailors, and, finally, poetry. I thought of those hundreds of soldiers swilling priceless wine as if it were kvas. Some bottles probably dated from the reign of Peter the Great. Then I shook myself. Who had tears for vintage wine when men were still dying in a war nobody wanted? Let them drink. I raised my glass, the oval of Madeira like a fine red fire.
Genya held his hand behind his back. “Guess what I found,” he said, his eyes shining but a bit blurred by drink.
“The Orlov diamond?” Anton ventured, squinting against the smoke spewing from the stove.
“The tsar’s truss,” suggested Sasha, sniffing the wine.
Genya brought his big hand around and displayed on his palm…an ordinary fountain pen. He grinned, triumphant. “Kerensky’s pen.”
“How do you know?” Anton asked. Despite his blasé air, he was intrigued. He grabbed it, tried it out on a scrap of paper. There was still ink in it.
Genya snatched it back. “It was at the head of the table, wasn’t it?” He held the pen before my eyes. “With this pen, I swear I’m going to write the most revolutionary poems the world has ever seen.”
Sasha divvied up the rest of the Madeira, which had been waiting for us in that bottle since before Alexander II freed the serfs. “To Kerensky’s pen.”
Then it really struck me, the gravity of what we had seen, where we had been, what we had done. The Soviet had taken the Winter Palace. Dual power was over. My father and the government, our class, the liberals, had had their moment and had bungled it sorely. Now the Bolsheviks and the workers would have their chance to drink that wine.
“You think the ministers will be all right?” I asked. “They won’t shoot them, will they?”
“They’re probably becoming poets and moving in here,” Anton sighed. “Along with the Kronstadt sailors and Lenin’s mother.”
Genya sat down heavily next to me on the divan. “Someone said they took them to the Peter and Paul Fortress. But there was an explosion, maybe a grenade, and a bunch of them scampered off.”
“And the cadets?” I whispered. Those boys, guarding the palace.
“I see them more as essayists,” Gigo said. “I don’t think they’re much for poetry.”
“A whole group of them left when we went in,” Genya said, nuzzling me. He knew what I was worried about. “I heard the rest came out after the ministers. They’re fine. No one’s going to shoot a bunch of kids.”
They opened another bottle. I’d never drunk wine so fine. It sent its dizzying thickness all through my tired body. After that, all I remember was Gigo singing the Georgian national anthem and Zina demonstrating the cancan. Genya offered up a toast. “To the revolution! May the last be first and the first be damned.”
28 Grivtsova Alley
THE WHEEL OF REVOLUTION whirled on with a speed that made our heads spin. Within hours of the fall of the Winter Palace, the Congress of Soviets had already named the new ministers, to be called commissars. And what a list! Lenin, chairman; Trotsky, foreign affairs; Rykov, internal affairs; Kollontai, public welfare; Lunacharsky, education; Stalin, nationalities; and so on. I laughed as I read the names in the afternoon papers. Many were familiar to me from the Cirque Moderne, people I’d never have imagined would one day be running a nation that encompassed one-sixth of the globe. A woman minister—Varvara’s beloved Kollontai! And Trotsky as foreign minister. Changes were coming that would make the February Revolution look like a snoozy afternoon in a gentlemen’s club.
Not everybody was pleased with the success of the Bolshevik insurrection. As we staggered out into the daylight, blinking and hungover, we saw walls bearing pleas to RESIST THE BOLSHEVIK TAKEOVER! “A bit late for that,” Genya said. We bought all the newspapers. Gorky’s Novaya Zhizn called for a new government that would unite all socialist parties and criticized the SRs and the Mensheviks for walking out of the Congress of Soviets, letting the Bolsheviks have the field. I thought of Father’s letter, criticizing the Kadets for walking out this summer: Boycotts and walkouts make a splash, but then where are you?
But Pravda—the paper of the Petrograd Soviet, remade from Rabochy Put’—shot back, saying that the people had struck down the tyranny of the nobles in February and now the tyranny of the bourgeoisie was at an end. The Kadet paper predicted that the Bolshevik coup would last a mere day or two before it crumbled under its own ineptitude. “They would know all about that,” Zina said.
Within twenty-four hours, the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land were adopted b
y the Congress of Soviets, proving that the Bolsheviks had the will to do what the government had endlessly debated but had not been able to accomplish. In a single day, the assembled delegates legislated three basic popular demands: they called for immediate negotiation for peace, without annexations or indemnities; they ordered confiscation of all land from nobility, landlords, and clergy for distribution to the peasants; and they set a date for elections to the Constituent Assembly—November 12, three weeks away. It felt like a dam bursting.
For my part, I was having another revolution. For the first time I lived as others did, standing with my bucket in the courtyard pumping water, using a shared toilet on the landing of the stairway. I stood in line for bread. I often literally sang for my supper, varying my repertoire as seemed appropriate—work songs, sea chanteys, love songs. And I never complained, tried never to show myself as the bourgeois miss. I had finally gotten off Nevsky Prospect, Comrade Kraskin.
But there was one aspect of life on Grivtsova Alley that nobody seemed to notice but me: roaches, fleas, bedbugs. Genya never said a word about the infestation. I didn’t want to be the girlfriend focusing on such trivialities when we had the Future to forge on the anvil of our verse—or vice versa—but it was hard to think about anything else for more than a few minutes at a time when you were being eaten alive by small voracious creatures.
I studied the other women in the queue for water as I moved forward on the plank that crossed the icy puddle in the courtyard. There must be something they did about it that eluded the poets of the Artel. Some secret. But whom to ask? The rangy woman in front of me worked the handle of the pump, briskly filling her bucket. I asked if she had bugs in her flat and what we could do about them.
“Why not read them some poetry?” she said, and the women behind me snickered. She switched out her full pail for an empty one and glanced up into my face. Her demeanor softened. “You don’t know anything, do you, devushka? Not a thing.” She snorted. “Tell those boys to drag the bedding down here and beat the devil out of it. With shoes if you have to. Scrub the place down and put the legs of the beds in kerosene. That’ll fix you right up.” I watched her pick up her pails and straighten slowly under the weight.
Bozhe moi, was that what they were doing? I hoped the neighbors didn’t smoke in bed. Now I was glad we slept in our clothes. It would make for an easier getaway.
Not only were we infested, but everyone smoked makhorka, and Anton spat his sunflower-seed shells right onto the floor, daring me to say something. One cold November day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “All right!” I yelled. “All right! Fine! Beautiful!” And I grabbed everything from the floor, piled it onto the table—papers, shoes, socks, books, shirts, slippers—and swept the room with a savage broom I borrowed from the woman next door. Boiled water on the stove, threw it on the floorboards and into the corners, and scrubbed it with a brush and a scrap of lye soap I had managed to buy. I didn’t care how much the others teased me, calling me “housewife” and “Mama.” It was worth it. All of us were covered with bites and boils. I berated myself for my naïveté. I’d brought books and a silver-handled hairbrush from home but hadn’t thought to bring a towel or soap or, God help me, a set of sheets. Any working-class housewife would have known better.
Genya and Sasha dragged the mattresses, bedding, and divan cushions down to the yard for me and we beat them with slats of wood. Feathers flew. When we brought the clean bedding back to the clean flat, no one said a word. Although I was sure everyone appreciated the lessening of the infestation, they had to feign indifference so they wouldn’t jeopardize their bohemian cachet. Anton pointedly restored the gritty underlayer as soon as he could.
I developed new respect for housewives—what a lot of work even the tiniest bit of cleanliness entailed. To wash, you pumped water, brought heavy pails up the flights of stairs. If you wanted it hot, you boiled it on the small stove, and sometimes it tipped over—what a mess. To wash clothes was a monumental task. Anton loathed seeing female laundry strung across the room. The domestic aspects of life must have recalled some childhood indignities for him. He believed somehow he’d emerged full grown from literature via some sort of immaculate mental conception. He held up my newly washed panties for general inspection. “Are these the drawers that launched a thousand ships?”
And yet despite the dirt and the cold, the battle with bugs and the spartan diet, life in our small room was ferociously interesting. We read and talked and argued and read some more. On the shelves, Apollinaire and Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky pressed up against The Lay of Igor’s Campaign and Balmont’s translations of Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dostoyevsky faced off with Rimbaud. They even had my little book, This Transparent Twilight.
“I wouldn’t fall in love with just anyone,” Genya said when I’d first noticed, putting his arm around my waist, burying his nose in my hair.
“Baaah,” said Gigo. They snorted and whinnied and oinked. Any sign of tenderness or lust brought mockery from our fellows. Only Sasha tolerated us—like Genya, he hid a romantic heart inside his futurist breast.
The difficulty of maintaining a love affair in a room occupied by anywhere from four to eight talkative poets couldn’t be overestimated. Genya and I slept most nights as chastely as Tristan and Isolde. The frustration! His chest against my back, we furtively made love while the others slept—and God knew whether they really did. If the divan creaked the smallest bit, Anton would call out, “Lo, the turtledove shits on my head!” And I was not by nature a quiet girl in bed. How ironic—in the gold and green room on the Catherine Canal, I could keen and moan, but in this liberated milieu, I had to stifle my cries in a pillow. A wonder that the poor got children at all. Though we knew that coitus interruptus was not the most efficient method of contraception, we didn’t always have the money for preservativy. And if I became pregnant? It would be Genya’s child—the ultimate futuristic improvisation.
But these difficulties and irritations were small sacrifice compared to the camaraderie and improvisation of our artistic life. I felt liberated. I’d made the leap, left my family and that old world behind. No more straddling stools. Such a relief to be wholly myself, to live without lying, to reach out, to try new things, to let curiosity unfold. Every day was an adventure, and I rested my head on Genya’s broad chest every night. He always smelled good to me, of grass and wood.
But still I itched—my hair, my groin, my armpits. I smelled so bad that I sometimes woke myself up at night. I’d never been so dirty in my life. And what would I do when my period came? Everyone in the room would know. I could ask Zina, but she hated me so much.
“Can you smell me?” I whispered to Genya.
“The banya’s right around the corner.” He shifted behind me, pulled me against him, his breath in my ear. I was mortified at his evasion.
The banya…akh, I knew where it was. I went by it every day, a windowless storefront on Kazanskaya Street. I didn’t want to tell him that the idea terrified me. I’d never been to a public banya. I knew they would laugh at me if they knew. What kind of Russian are you? But Father was strictly opposed to them, felt they were unsanitary, breeding grounds for disease. The toilet on the landing was bad enough, but at least you were alone in there.
“It’s not so bad,” Genya said. “Zina can show you.”
“Zina can show you what?” she asked from the table. No such thing as privacy in a Poverty Artel.
Somehow Genya assumed that Zina and I would become friends. What he didn’t know about women. He never realized that Zina had considered him hers, that in her overheated imagination, I had broken up their love affair with my false bourgeois charms and sexual tricks—though Genya swore there’d never been anything between them. She dogged me, trying to diminish me in his eyes, like a little terrier, more aggressive to compensate for her small size. Sometimes I’d catch her studying me, as if trying to figure out where to slip in the dagger. I’d be damned if I would admit my squeamishness to her.
That dul
l gray November day, people shouldered past me—a man hurrying by with a shabby briefcase, a woman fighting the raw wind with what looked like a huge sack of doorknobs. I couldn’t stand there forever in the cold. I steeled myself and pushed open the battered green door marked ZHENSHCHINY. Women.
Small and windowless, the anteroom was clad in peeling wallpaper the color of bread mold. No one sat at the counter. I didn’t know what to do next. “Hello?” I called out. An attendant, a female dwarf, stormed in from the other room. Then, taking a second look at me, she smiled. I supposed my coat and hat were of better quality than what was usually seen here. She instructed me on payment—fifty kopeks for the banya, fifty for soap and a towel—calling me milaya, pointing out the reasonable fee, “not like those fancy places on Sadovaya.” She led me into a dressing room, indicated the hook where I was to put my clothing, and waited—for a tip. But I could only give her a few small coins. She scowled when she looked at them, shoved me toward a wooden door.
On the other side it was—Goya. Twenty, twenty-five naked women crowded together in a large wet wooden washroom. A hideously fat woman scrubbed her neighbor’s bony back. A toothless granny held up the flab of her stomach to get at her hairless zhenshchinost’. Wrinkled, contorted feminine forms of every variety—hair, no hair…I wanted to run for the door, but I’d already paid my hard-earned ruble, and the dwarf would know what a coward I was. I would never be able to show my face here again.
The sight of them blistered my eyes. I’d seen a hundred paintings entitled In the Bath, where rosy beauties waded knee-deep in picturesque rivers and washed their long hair. Brown soap never appeared in Rubens. This was the thing itself, the squalor of human life. Age and decay. It was one thing to see bent backs under brown shawls, sagging stomachs faintly suggested by full dresses, breasts swinging low under bodices and aprons, genitals quite invisible, and another to see them revealed in their horrific variety. Bodies covered with wounds, with sores, rashes, bruises, welts, and worse. Bandages kicked into a corner. I could just imagine what Father would say, with his concern for public health. And Mother…I couldn’t stop looking at their tragic feet, their twisted toes like the claws of some horrible bird. I could see why Jesus would want to wash the feet of the poor.