Woman. How could one not pity her, with that forked stem, that tube for food and babies? This one—expanded like overyeasted bread. That one—contracted like a fallen soufflé. Emptied out, gouged like clay, clawed, bruised, imprinted with the devastation of gravity and years. I felt every inch the foreigner, visiting not from abroad but from the land of youth and beauty. They stared at me, too, at my smooth, pale flesh with its constellations of freckles, the wide-spaced breasts Genya found so stirring. The flame of my hair above and below. Conspicuous as an albino on safari. I moved to the buckets by the tap in the wall, filled one, and found a place on a bench where I could wash, concentrate on the steaming hot water and not the Rabelaisian sight all around me.
Hot water! Such luxury. I would not have imagined in my earlier life that someday it would make me weep with gratitude. I washed with the small bar of lye laundry soap the dwarf had sold me, imitating the others, squatting with the bucket between my legs, modestly scrubbing, then sudsing my neck, my short hair, rinsing again and again—what divinity, what bliss. I felt sorry for the women wrestling with their long skeins of hair. They must have to run home with it wet and dry it over the stove before they caught cold. Why didn’t they cut it?
But slowly, as I watched them patiently, proudly comb it out, I realized that lives so brutally hard might need such impractical beauty, that this little indulgence—long flowing hair—might be their sole grace note, to be savored rather than suffered.
I knew so little about life.
A cloud of billowing steam escaped from a wooden door. A woman staggered out, lay on a bench, pink as a salmon, steam rising from her skin as from a dish of noodles. It seemed there were more infernos to explore. I gathered my fortitude and my towel and pushed through into the mystery.
Searing steam, fragrant with the smell of green wood, revealed only vague smears of pink and motion, the sounds of rustling slaps as women flailed one another with bundles of birch twigs, leaves still attached. Through the mist, I found an empty place on a lower bench. My fellow bathers gradually materialized out of the blistering fog, like a photograph in a tank. An immense woman encased in fat like a walrus took center stage, flanked by an old woman who looked like a melting candle and a younger one whose shoulders and breasts revealed the shocking marks of repeated beatings—some bruises still livid, others already faded toward green and yellow like a forest floor. On the upper, hotter bench, shriveled old babas sat with backs like question marks, bent from a lifetime of standing over stoves, brooms, children.
A strapping girl with long black braids and full ripe breasts like blue-veined planets emerged from the steam to throw a ladle of water onto the stove. It spat and hissed and clouds obscured the scene. I liked it better that way, though the heat was phenomenal. I felt less glaringly out of place. Just when I’d begun to relax and enjoy the feeling of being clean and safely invisible, the fat woman hawked and spat on my foot. Had she really? I stared at the thick yellow glob of phlegm oozing down my instep. “Burzhui,” she sneered. “I could eat you for breakfast.” The others tittered, waiting to see what I would do.
I’d been to a girls’ school—I knew she would keep it up unless I stopped her. I got up and washed it off with the dipper. “So that’s how you got so fat.”
The women hooted. The fat one narrowed her piggish eyes.
I sat back down. “Watch out for her,” said the woman to my left under her breath, a rangy woman of late middle age, long breasts scarred vertically—from nursing, I imagined. I recognized her. The woman from my courtyard. Put the legs of the beds in kerosene. “She runs a booth in the Haymarket. She’s mean as a bucket of snakes.”
“She lives with all those poets on Grivtsova,” said a voice down the bench. “They’re all crazy as bedbugs.”
I was shocked. I hadn’t imagined anyone knew who we were. No one ever talked to us.
“She take them one at a time or all at once?” said a woman in a felt hat. I would have liked a hat like that—my ears were burning up.
“In that dog kennel they live in?” said our neighbor. “It would have to be all at once. No place for the queue.”
Everyone laughed—even me, although the joke was at my expense.
The girl with the globelike breasts squealed. “Ooh, the blond—that’s my idea of a man.” I wondered if Sasha knew he had an admirer in the neighborhood. I hoped for Dunya’s sake he didn’t. Those breasts could smother him outright.
I slicked my hand down my arm, the sweat pouring. Was I getting dirtier or cleaner? I couldn’t resist licking it, tasting the salt.
“Give me the big one,” said a woman twice the girl’s age. “Prince Ivan. Now that’s a man.”
Sage nods all around. Clearly they knew whom she was talking about. Prince Ivan. I imagined how Genya would laugh.
How strange, though…they knew us. They had ideas about us. Here we thought we were living in a world of our own making. It never occurred to us that it was a fishbowl, that others saw everything, drew conclusions, too. We lived in a real world where our futurist experiments meant nothing, where nobody cared about Victor Shklovsky.
“One more bastard in the courtyard by summer—you heard it here first,” said the rangy woman, elbowing me goodheartedly. “Take my word for it and kiss those pretty girls goodbye.” My breasts.
Unlikely. It wasn’t easy to make love in the Poverty Artel, four or five people listening to your every breath. “In the future,” I said, “there won’t be bastards. People won’t even know what that means.”
The way the women stared, I wished I hadn’t spoken, that I’d just enjoyed the sweating and let them think what they liked. Now I had to explain myself. “Children won’t be the property of fathers. All children will be the same. The whole property basis of marriage is obsolete.”
“Intelligentka,” one said with a laugh. “Vote list number three!” another called out from the steam. List number 3 was the Bolshevik slate in the upcoming election.
Their disdain was a challenge. Who was a burzhui now? “Kollontai said that for a woman, love should be no more important than drinking a glass of water.” Something I remembered Varvara quoting.
“What, are we men now?” the spitting walrus demanded.
“Who drinks water anyway?” said a woman in the steam, her words punctuated by the slap of birch twigs. “Too much trouble. Pump and boil…”
A tiny babushka on the bench above me patted my shoulder. “I’ve been married three times. I’d rather have a glass of water.”
“I’d rather have a drink of vodka than a man,” said a blond woman combing her hair. “Though I hardly remember either one.”
“I’ll take Ivan,” said the woman in the felt hat. “And he can bring the vodka.”
“Actually, he’s mine,” I said. “But you can have one of the others. How about the tall skinny one? He could use a girlfriend.”
They howled. They all knew which one I was talking about. “He’s the craziest one of all,” said my neighbor. “I have to keep the milk covered when he goes by.”
I wondered if Anton knew that he’d been passed over by the wives of Grivtsova Alley.
“He goes with whores,” said a woman sitting on the bench across from me. Her thighs looked like they’d been eaten by mice. “I’ve seen him up the street.”
My big ears knew a piece of ripe intelligence when they heard one.
“Who else would take him?” said the woman from my courtyard. “He’s so sour, he scares the vinegar.”
“He’s got that limp,” said a woman savagely slashing at herself with a birch flail. “Must be why he’s not in the army. But the others—what’s their excuse?”
The birch twigs thwacked disapprovingly, making it hotter. The green scent permeated every inch of the room, whose walls I hadn’t yet seen.
The girl with the braids threw another ladle on the stove. Instantly the heat redoubled. The women disappeared. Suddenly the girl was right in front of me. “You don’t believe in love??
??
I was grateful for the change of subject. “When women have to trade on love, it’s an offense to love. Worrying about who will take care of us—that’s not love, is it? In socialism, marriage will be untainted by commerce.”
“Zhili-buili,” said the blond woman above us. “You’ll see what’s what when you get a couple of kids.”
Thwack…
“Without a man, who’s going to take care of you?”
“Lenin,” said the fat woman, and everyone laughed. She folded her giant arms across her breasts. “You’ll see. Couple of kids, your man’s out of work, you’re coughing up cotton like half these sad sisters. Stand in the queues after a day on the factory line, then let’s see about your lya lya fa fa. You’ll be the one sobbin’, ‘Where’s that Lenin now to take care of me and my brats?’” My interlocutor nodded sagely with her three chins. “Wait and see—a man’s never there when you need him.”
Laughter rose around me. Yes, they were right to laugh at me. Seventeen years old—who was I to lecture women about anything? No husband, no children. An intelligentka, I’d never worked a day in my life. The room started to spin. My neighbor and the girl with the braids caught me before I fainted, helped me stumble out the wooden door, laid me down on the bench, and threw a pail of cold water on me. “She’ll be all right,” the older one said.
I lay staring up at the wooden beams in the ceiling, thinking about the women in the steam and those washing at the taps. In ten years, fifteen, this would be me, no longer carefully tended and fed and ministered to by dentists and doctors, hairdressers and dancing masters. This woman washing herself had lived on bad bread, horsemeat, and fish soup. She lifted children with that back, walked miles on those arthritic feet. Women like her were invisible to men like my father, who never noticed who did his laundry and cooked his dinner. He never thought twice about who painstakingly stitched his suits, wove his scarves, fashioned his shoes, though he’d been so sure he knew what was best for them.
Soon enough my beauty would vanish. On Grivtsova Alley or someplace just like it, I would lose my looks, my health, everything I’d ever taken for granted. The realization shook me. How stupid I was. I was not from another planet, I was not a visitor here. This was also my fate, my future. My own curved back, my bruises and sores that would not heal, my sagging breasts, missing teeth, poverty. My suffering, unless the Bolsheviks were able to construct a just society—and how fast could they do it?
Oh, to give these women their beauty back. Or if not that, then something—nobility, some recognition of their struggle. I was a poet, that was something I could do. This woman had once been young, maybe even beautiful. Her disproportionately large hands spoke of years of hard labor. Were they not as dignified as my smooth ones? More. I loved the pleasure she took in soaping her gray hair in hot water, her eyes closed, savoring. What were all my opinions and ideals worth compared to this one woman, no longer young, washing her hair in a public banya, humming under her breath?
29 Fait Accompli
HOW STRANGE TO FIND myself in such a politically thrilling moment without any inside information or pressure from either Varvara or my father. I was free to decide for myself. The Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now leaned Bolshevik, though Anton and Gigo declared themselves Anarcho-Khlebnikovist. In the upcoming elections, the SRs were the frontrunners, representing the interests of the peasants and the less programmatic socialists. But there were lists for everything and everyone. Mohammedans, the Jewish Bund, Old Believers, rural proprietors and landowners, a feminist League for Women’s Equal Rights. There were cooperativists, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Germans, Bashkirs. Everyone had a list but the Theosophists. There was even a Kadet list, led by Paul Miliukov, back for another try at leading the country, along with Terekhov and a few others I recognized, but I saw no mention of Dmitry Makarov, either as a Kadet delegate or as one of the arrestees.
“And what is your platform?” Zina demanded of the Anarcho-Khlebnikovists as she singed her split ends with the burning coal of her cigarette, adding the stench of human hair to the already smoky miasma. A blizzard had threatened all day, and this evening, its first tentative flakes fell past our window.
Gigo, seated cross-legged on the coveted divan, leafed through the pages of his tattered, three-hundred-page futurist novel in verse. “We of the Anarcho-Khlebnikovist Party oppose governments and zoos of any kind.”
Anton steadied a walnut on the table and placed a chisel he’d taken from Sasha’s bag into the crevice, as if he were performing surgery. “Down with all parliaments.” He brought the hammer down on the chisel and neatly split the shell in two. Half went skittering off the table. “No congresses, zemstvos, or queues. No more choirs. No sing-alongs.” Sasha picked the half walnut up off the floor and tossed it back to the editor. “Free the periodic table!” Anton said. “We demand free air. Free poverty for all.” He extracted the meat with his pencil. “Vote list minus two.”
“Free the feet of the women of the banya,” I said from the stool where I sat posing for Sasha as he painted a cubist portrait of me onto the door. “Free their bunions, their fallen arches.”
“Free the women of the Terrestrial Now,” Sasha said, painting my nose in. “Free their lips and their adorable backsides. Free their freckles. Free the blondes, brunettes, and redheads. Free Vera Kholodnaya!”
Sitting at the table, Genya screwed an empty half shell into his eye socket like a monocle. Gigo’s mother had sent the sack from Georgia, and walnuts had become our main source of nutrition. He screwed in a second shell. “In the land of the blind, a blind man shall rule.”
“Free the alphabet from its unspeakable bondage,” said Gigo from the divan. “Free the ya. Ya before A. The last shall be first.”
At Genya’s side, Zina burped and sighed, fist under ribs. “These walnuts give me gas. I hope to God whoever wins gets some food into the city. I’m inflating like a dirigible. One night I’m going to explode.”
Only the Bolsheviks were surprised when the SRs won the election. No one else could have imagined it would turn out differently. Although we in Petrograd could fool ourselves into thinking we were an industrialized nation, the factory proletariat was a sprinkle of salt in the vast bowl of kasha that was Russia, a dollop of sour cream in that great vat of borscht. “The vanguard of the working class” could not carry the day in a country where most people still plowed behind a horse and wove their own clothes and bast shoes. In that Russia, revolution still meant “Land and Freedom,” the SR slogan.
Though I could not vote, being only seventeen, I had my favorites. I liked the wide embrace of the SRs, their historical roots, but it was also true that they didn’t have their eyes on the future. The bulk of the SRs were Defensists, wanting to fight the war to the end. They were old-fashioned populists of the last century, fighting old battles, while the Marxists were coolly working their program like mathematicians, organizing the proletariat and, even more important, the soldiers. They were the future.
Though they lost, the Bolsheviks made a good showing—they won a quarter of the vote throughout the country, and they proved overwhelmingly popular in the big cities, among the industrial workers, in the army, and in the fleet. What would happen now? Only the Bolsheviks would get us out of this war.
At dinnertime we descended on the Katzevs en masse. Dunya swooned at the sight of Sasha in the doorway with an armful of flowers shaped and painted from squares of Izvestia and Pravda, an adorable hint of blue paint clinging to his shaggy forelock. As for me, a different girl entered that apartment from the one who’d cringed with them under the tabletop the day the soldiers burst in. Different even from the girl I’d been when I’d returned from Maryino. Now I was a free woman, on my own, with my lover, coins from a street performance jingling in my pocket. My hair was rough, my clothes becoming worn from heavy use. I’d gone from windowsill pussycat to something of an alley cat.
Solomon Moiseivich greeted us from the divan, folding his Novaya Zh
izn—and holding out his arms for an embrace. “So you’ve become a bohemian,” he said, kissing me three times. He wore his Bukhara cap and a caftan. Now Sofia Yakovlevna came in from the kitchen, and I reveled in the unfeigned pleasure on her face. “I wondered where you’d been hiding yourself.”
But Mina seemed less thrilled as she glanced up at us from her pile of homework. “Right on time,” she said sardonically. “Could you smell dinner?”
“All the way from Grivtsova Alley,” I said and pinched her upper arm. Don’t be like that.
Meanwhile, Gigo bestowed a bag of walnuts on Sofia Yakovlevna. “With my compliments,” he said. Genya handed her a loaf of bread we’d all pitched in to buy and followed her into the kitchen. She was like catnip to all the boys, with her soft bosom and kind round face. I helped Mina clear off the table—chemistry volumes, journals, notes in her small, neat hand—and felt a tiny pang of envy. Was I still jealous of her being at the university? I played with the feeling as you would toy with a slice of lemon, deciding whether it was too sour to eat. A little, I decided, but I wouldn’t have traded places with her. I was a poet among poets now, living the revolution. I couldn’t have stuffed myself back into that book bag, that lecture-hall seat.
I went back to the kitchen to see if I could help. Sofia Yakovlevna had Genya stirring the soup while she cut up more vegetables, doubling the recipe to accommodate the unexpected guests. Seeing me there, she caught me by the sleeve and pulled me to the sink, where she could talk under the cover of running water. They still had running water—imagine. “So are you happy, Marina?” she asked.