“Next,” the soldier said, indicating a woman two places in front of me.
I had to think of another story. I, too, had been planning on claiming proletarian origins, changing my name to Marina Moryeva. I’d practiced my story. Born Harbin, China. Father, printer. Mother, seamstress. Let them try to track that down.
“Please, Comrade.” The woman with the bird hat would not move on. Now she started crying in earnest. “I have to work. No one’s hiring us.”
“Lady, look at all these people. Most of ’em worked all their lives. They’ve got skills. They haven’t been lying around, living off our sweat. Now move along.”
It was my turn. “Papers?” he asked, extending his hand, not looking at me.
I gave him my form but I didn’t have any personal papers. They were all back on Furshtatskaya Street. My birth certificate, baptismal records, school transcripts. I didn’t have a single one.
“My bag was stolen,” I said. “On the tram. Please, what should I do?”
The soldier appeared to have some sort of indigestion, belching and thumping his chest with his fist. It was the bad bread we all ate. “Guess you’ll have to write to China,” he said with a smirk. “We’re not handing out labor books like they’re posies.” Those small books, our very lifeline.
“But it’s China.”
“China,” the comrade sighed. “That’s a new one.” He indicated the door with a disgusted thumb. “Next.”
So it came to pass that on a bitter snowy January evening I swallowed my pride with a cup of barley soup and, together with Genya, crossed the Nikolaevsky Bridge over the frozen Neva to enter the broad, dark Lines of Vasilievsky Island—specifically, the Seventh Line, where Varvara had brought me to the illegal print shop that day. I knocked, and a pale suspicious face appeared in the doorway. Steel-rimmed glasses, pallid blue eyes. I asked for Varvara. “I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said.
Another man took the place of the first. “I’m looking for Varvara Razrushenskaya,” I tried again. “I’m a friend of hers. We were distributing leaflets before the insurrection.”
The second man squinted at me. “She’s back in her mother’s old flat,” he said. “If you’re her friend—you must know where it is.”
“On the Sixteenth Line,” I said.
The comrade nodded and closed the door.
Varvara’s old building was more than a mile farther west. Half the streetlights were out on Bolshoy Prospect as we trudged and slipped along, trying not to break our necks. I was glad to have Genya by my side. I recognized the dark hulk of the brothel opposite Varvara’s apartment house, but there were no women outside or in the windows. Was it the revolution or just the cold? Inside her building, the stairs had grown gap-toothed just like ours. It seemed strangely quiet after our noisy tenement. People here were hunched behind their doors over their scraps of food, listening for criminals or for the step of the Cheka making a raid. Our building was too poor for raids, so we’d escaped the worst of it. I stopped at her flat. I could hear voices inside. As soon as I knocked, they stopped talking. I knocked again. A familiar lean, sneering mug answered the door—the printer Kraskin—formerly Marmelzadt—smoking a crooked little cigar.
Varvara sat at the table, wearing a black sweater with a ragged collar, among six or seven comrades perched on stools and hunched on old tattered chairs, young men and women startled at the interruption. When I approached her, she stuck out her hand like a man. Her palm felt very dry. She nodded at Genya, and they, too, shook hands.
“Where’s the countess?” I said, lowering the shawl from my head but not taking off my coat—it was almost as cold in the flat as it was in the hall.
“Dead,” Varvara said. She examined the ember on her hand-rolled cigarette. I couldn’t tell whether her bluntness was to impress me or Kraskin, leaning against her chair back, or the cluster of comrades. “Vot tak.” Like that. “She got into bed one day and turned her face to the wall. Said, ‘I don’t care to see any more of this.’” My infuriating friend considered me with a slightly amused, cruel expression, the same one that Kraskin wore. “So what brings you to this side of the river?”
“I’ve been looking for work,” I said.
Kraskin’s smirk toyed with his thin lips like a scrap of paper circling in dirty water. “Does this look like an employment agency?” he said.
“Excuse me, but I was talking to…her.” Friend was out of the question.
Varvara leaned her chair back on its hind legs and planted her boots on the table. They were in terrible shape. “Try the telephone company. That’s the place for nice bourgeois girls like you.”
“As if you’re not one,” I snapped back. I didn’t need her supercilious attitude. If I was going to claim proletarian status, change my biography, I needed industrial labor, not association with the anti-Bolshevik class. She owed me this. I wouldn’t let her play with me to show off for Kraskin. I wondered what their relationship was. Though I couldn’t really imagine her with a lover, he did seem to show up in too many places for them to be just comrades.
“Try the banks. The bourgeois workers are still on strike,” she said.
“They’ll show us, eh?” Genya laughed. “As if the Soviet’s going to disappear without bank clerks and telephone operators.”
“I don’t want to be a bank clerk.” I plucked the cigarette from Varvara’s fingers and took a deep puff of the cheap makhorka. Remember me? I wanted to scream. “Find me a metal factory. A printworks. I’ll make shoes, work in a tannery, weave.”
“Bourgeois baby wants to play the proletarian,” Kraskin mocked. “Oh what would Papa say?”
Genya clapped his hand on Kraskin’s little bony shoulder. The top of the printer’s head barely reached my lover’s chin. “Hey, brother, who are you again? And why is this any of your business?”
“This isn’t a game,” Varvara stated flatly. “We can’t fill these clerical jobs. And we can’t take factory jobs from workers to flatter your revolutionary romanticism.”
“Maybe I can be a robber,” I said. “How’s that for romantic?”
She let loose a great cloud of smoke above her head. “Better start soon, the field’s getting crowded.” It was true, more and more audacious criminal gangs were robbing apartment houses, bakeries, theaters—even in daylight. Krestovskaya’s husband’s snack bars were regular targets. Just the other day there had been an out-and-out gunfight in a theater between a gang and the Red Guards.
“I already went to the district soviet, but they wanted to see my papers.”
“So?”
“I don’t have any.” I glared at her, not wanting to say, You remember why, don’t you? “In any case, I need better ones.” Ones that wouldn’t scream Class: bourgeois. “You’ve got to help me.”
Kraskin shook his head over his cigar. “Smolny’ll love that.”
Varvara turned on the sour-faced printer. “Why don’t you show Genya what we’re working on? He’s a poet. Maybe he can make it sound better.”
He took his arms off the back of her chair and touched his cap, ironically, and he and Genya drifted over to the group huddling by the stove and making notes on some pages. I sat down next to Varvara, shoulder to shoulder. She sighed, swung her booted feet to the floor, let her chair fall back to all four of its rickety legs. “All right. Get me your birth certificate, et cetera. I’ll see what I can do. But it’s going to be the telephone company, something like that. We need people on our side who can read and write, do sums. Unemployment’s over the moon in the industrial sector. No materiel, no fuel. We need those jobs for the workers.”
I could smell her scent, slightly sour, dirty hair plus graphite and paper, apple cores. “I’m never going to forgive you, you know.”
Her mouth twisted, trying to suppress a smile. “You can’t play both sides. I just gave you a push. Don’t be so sore. Look, if you’re interested, he’s still out there, making trouble, as you can imagine. He’s on the Committee for the Salvation
of the Fatherland and the Revolution as well as the Committee for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. Tenacious, you have to give him that. But go back and get your papers. I’ll see what I can do.”
I had little choice but to return to Furshtatskaya Street and hope my papers were still there. They were like soap—essential, yet a part of life I’d never considered while I packed my pictures and poetry that night three months earlier. A whole world had passed away since I’d last walked down this broad avenue. The sidewalk had barely been cleared, the snow piled into high tunnels of icy white. So many things I hadn’t known back then. What it was to be hungry, and tired, and bug-bitten, and restless for a moment of privacy. Looking down the block, I could easily see which apartments were still occupied and which had been abandoned—the exterior walls of the living flats showed dark, while the “dead” ones gleamed with silvery frost. So many dead buildings. Here was ours, still blue with white plasterwork, elegant even now, though I noticed the pipes of the little bourgeoika tin stoves dribbling smoke through some of the windows. Not enough coal or wood to stoke the big porcelain stoves anymore, not even up in this part of town.
I felt my way up the back stairs from the courtyard, tried the kitchen door. It swung open. The very path Varvara had taken that night in October. With all the robberies, I was amazed it was left unlocked. Frost grew thick on the windows of the large tiled kitchen. The stove, ice cold. All down the back hall, the doors to the servants’ rooms stood open, revealing beds without mattresses, empty wardrobes. We’d read that the Red Guards had been carrying out a general confiscation of furniture and clothing from the bourgeoisie, to be redistributed to the poor. So it had happened here, too. Feelings warred inside me. I was all for redistribution, yet I couldn’t help feeling robbed.
My footsteps rang out in the empty rooms. I felt as though I’d entered my house in a dream. The cloakroom, where I had first kissed Kolya, looked so much larger with nothing in it—the Transrationalists could have lived there quite comfortably. In the main wing, the desolation was even more obvious. The foyer rug was missing, the marble-topped table lay on its side, too heavy to cart away. In the parlor, pieces of wood littered the parquet, and empty frames of the art that normally hung on the walls. The Repin portrait of Seryozha and the Vrubel were gone. A flush of anger returned.
I crept down to Father’s office. Would my papers still be there? The door gaped open revealing the oak file cabinet turned over, its drawers gone. The desk drawers, too, had been breached, broken open with some crude instrument, a hatchet or a crowbar. Yet the green-striped wallpaper was still the same, and, incredibly, photographs still hung on it. My brothers and I. Our Makarov grandparents. All of us at a picnic on the coast of Finland. Only one was missing—Volodya the cavalry officer on his sleek bay horse. Had Father removed it? Or had the Red Guards taken it as evidence of our family’s allegiances? I took a photo of the three of us as children on the porch at Maryino, our legs hanging down, Volodya dark-skinned in a bathing costume, I in my braids and freckles, Seryozha with his floss-blond hair and enormous eyes.
The telephone still sat on the desk. I tried the receiver, depressed the cradle, and—mirabile dictu!—an operator came on the line. “Number, please.”
“Sorry,” I said, then hung up. Would that soon be me, my new Soviet life?
I turned to the big Russian stove in the corner of the room, and slid open a panel in the tile, revealing a metal-lined safe where we hid valuables and important documents, not so much out of fear of theft as fear of fire. I breathed a short prayer of gratitude—they were still there. Birth certificates, passports. My parents’ elaborate wedding papers. My high school diploma and the letter of acceptance into the department of philology at Petrograd University. Only Father’s documents were gone—passport, law degree, his first from Oxford, his MLitt, even his certificate from the Tenishev Gymnasium.
Surprisingly, stacks of ruble notes, gold coins, and Mother’s jewelry—luminescent opals, Indian sapphires with their mysterious stars—were still intact. I took my own documents and a few rubles, stuffed them in my bag, slid the tile closed.
I knew I should go, but it had been three months since I’d seen these rooms. Who could have blamed me for nostalgia? The nursery was as it always had been, but dustier and ice cold. Here we had learned our letters, shared secrets, played endless games of durak. Here I had cast the wax that long-ago New Year’s Eve. I knelt by the old rocking horse, pressed my nose to his, wrapped my arms around his wooden neck and horsehair mane. “I wish I could take you.” The horse forgave me, he was filled with such love. Why hadn’t some Red Guardsman taken him for his own children? “Be brave,” I whispered to him.
My bedroom, by contrast, was a scene of devastation. Pictures askew, anything made of fabric gone: clothing, rugs, the bed just a skeleton of springs. But Seryozha’s watercolor of the Finland shore still hung on the deep pink wall along with the poets’ silhouettes he had so painstakingly cut with his fine-pointed scissors. I took them down and piled them on the bare bedsprings. My jewelry, long gone. The little drawer of the vanity table empty. But the photographs under the glass remained untouched. I pulled them out and stacked them on top of Seryozha’s pieces.
Father’s English bedroom had been even more thoroughly ransacked—clothing gone, wardrobe gaping. The dresser top lay bare of the beautiful toilet set that always rested there, the bone-handled brushes and combs for head and beard, tiny nail scissors, powders and pomades to tame his crinkly hair. Did I dare look into Mother’s room?
I turned the door handle but found it locked. I knocked. “Hello?” Could she have lain down and turned her face to the wall? I began to beat the door with the heel of my hand. “Mama? It’s Marina. Avdokia? Open up.”
I heard the tiny click, the latch turning, like a sound from a grave. In the gap, Ginevra’s frightened face. She pulled me inside, locked the door, and embraced me, patting me, touching my hair, my cheeks. “You’re here…I can’t believe it.”
What a sight! Furniture had been squeezed into every last inch of space—a tumble of chests, chairs, and trunks like in an antiques shop. The nursery piano! They probably couldn’t move the Bösendorfer. Three mismatched beds were lined up against the far wall. Mother, Avdokia, and the English had probably retreated to this bedroom so they could devote all the wood to one stove. In her ornate canopied bed, Mother sat propped up on pillows, her white hair a disordered nest. She was fumbling with something in her hands. At first I thought she was knitting, but there was nothing there. “Mama, where’s Avdokia?” I was afraid to approach her.
“She’ll be back. She’s off selling a few things,” Ginevra said. She hugged me suddenly, awkwardly. She was never very physical. “Oh, child.” Her hand flew to her mouth, and her face withered like a cut bloom. She motioned for me to come out into the hallway. She was only twenty-eight, but she looked forty. Her lips trembled as she tried to speak.
“Is it Papa?”
She shook her head.
A great hand wrapped itself about my throat. Volodya?
She shook her head again and started to cry.
Seryozha. Oh God.
She told me that it had been in the battle for the Kremlin, the first week of the Bolshevik insurrection. Moscow had been more prepared to fight the takeover than we had been and the Provisional Government had pitted the cadets against the Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers. Thousands of them. Boys, defending the city against seasoned men.
“We had a letter.” Her voice was as empty as the hallway, with all its staring doors. “Please, Marina, you’re hurting me.” I hadn’t noticed that I was gripping her arm, digging my fingers in. I let her go. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” She scurried back into Mother’s room, shutting the door behind her. I stood in the hallway, my mind a howling waste.
After a time, she emerged and held out an envelope to me, her back against the door, as if I might rush at her. Bagration Military Academy. Beautiful stationery, bearing t
he Romanov eagle. I pulled out one big, creamy sheet. I had never hated anything so much in this world.
Dearest Sir and Madam,
It grieves me to inform you of the death of your son, Sergei Dmitrievich Makarov, in the battle for the Kremlin, October 28, 1917. He fought hard and honorably, as befits a Russian soldier. You can be proud your son died heroically, in defense of the rightful Government. He was a fine soldier and a fine young man.
With my greatest sympathies,
Captain Yuri Borisovich Saratov
He’d been dead since October. I stared down at the page as if I expected the letters to rearrange themselves and spell something else. “Does Father know about this?”
She answered quietly, holding my hands. “Dmitry Ivanovich was going to give himself up for arrest, to go in with the ministers, but this changed his mind. He said he still had work to do.”
This was how you saved Russia, Papa? “You could have at least sent word.”
My governess sighed as if she could expel all the sorrow and guilt in one single breath. “No one was allowed to speak to you.” Tears dripped from those watery English eyes. Her nose was red and runny. She blotted at herself with a wadded handkerchief.
My mouth felt full of the metallic bitterness of dirty kopeks.
I was alone now. Absolutely alone. What good was all our knowing, all our love, our secrets and shared memories? A fanged animal lodged in my throat. I tore at my neck, trying to let it out.
Ginevra caught at my hands. “Marina, don’t…for pity’s sake…”
I would find Father in whatever high-ceilinged drawing room he was in, talking so importantly about Russia’s future, and I would kill him.
“Ginevra?” Mother appeared at the door, barefoot in a white nightgown—a frightened ghost. She saw me but gave no sign of recognition, only fear and stupefaction. The Englishwoman pushed between us.
“Come, Vera Borisovna. Let’s go back to bed.” She ushered my mother back into her room.