I was still standing in the hall when my governess returned to the door. “Don’t go, Marina. Come talk to your mother.” She faced the figure now sitting on the edge of the bed, the quilt around her shoulders. “Vera Borisovna! Look who’s here. Look who’s come to see you.” She waved me closer. I saw that the last months had turned my mother into an old woman. Her beauty hadn’t disappeared, but her flesh was thinned, her bones sharpened, her lips chapped and pale. Her eyes, so much like Seryozha’s, consumed her face. Ginevra tucked her back into bed, drawing the bedclothes up around her, plumping her pillows.
My family had disappeared—brother, mother, father. Here I thought their lives had continued without me, but there was no home anymore. Not for any of us.
“Are you able to get some food for her?” I asked.
“Avdokia trades things. And Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help.”
Kolya was here? Kolya, taking care of her? “He’s been here?”
“He’s saved our lives—you don’t know,” she went on, tucking the lace-edged sheet over the edge of the blanket. She was back to her resolute, tranquil demeanor. How could she have calmed down so fast? But her tears had been for me. Seryozha had been dead for months. She’d had time to get used to his death. His death! She went on talking. “We can’t get a thing out of the banks, what with the teller strike. Nikolai sold some of the paintings, and told us to hide the money in the stove, her jewelry. Thank God he got to us before the last sweep. They took everything.” We watched my mother, her hands fiddling again. I could see now that she was working a tangle of thin necklaces, trying to get them apart. “We’ve heard from Volodya. He’s joined the Volunteer Army in the Don.”
Seryozha was in the ground in Moscow. Volodya was fighting against the revolution. My lungs couldn’t expand. They’d been frozen solid.
My mother looked up from the tangle of chains. “Where’s Tulku?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She still hadn’t noticed I was here, but she wanted her little greyhound.
“Avdokia’s taking him for a walk, dear,” said the Englishwoman. She turned to me, whispered, “They shot Tulku during the first search, poor thing. He growled at one of the Red Guards and the man shot him the way you’d swat a fly. Frankly, it was just as well. We couldn’t have kept feeding him.”
Why was she talking to me about a dog? I had to get out of there while I could, while I still had the strength.
My mother turned to me, her eyes big and uncomprehending as a squid’s. The heat was unbearable in here, the closeness, the lavender, their helplessness. My brother was gone. My sensitive, anxious brother who had never wanted to climb beyond the first branch of the maple that grew in the Tauride Gardens. Even then you’d have to hold him on. Killed defending the Kremlin. I pictured the dead in Znamenskaya Square, a blond head, the cap fallen off. I put the letter in the bag with Seryozha’s pictures and my papers and left the flat before I turned to stone.
31 The Twenty Towers of the Kremlin
BIG FLAKES SIFTED ACROSS the windows. Down in the courtyard, a woman pumped water, and a crow picked disconsolately at some kind of rag. The same snow was falling in Moscow, deep, deep over his grave. Falling as it had in the snow globe music box Avdokia would wind for us, gnarled hands turning the key and shaking the encased wintry scene—St. Basil’s, a troika rushing. Seryozha in his nightshirt, I in my flannel gown, Volodya pretending he was too old for such things but watching all the same. “That’s you three,” she would say, pointing to the horses pulling the troika. It had played “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” little tinkling bells, over and over. Warm from our Sunday night baths, we would watch the snow fall together. Moscow seemed a magical place then, not a backdrop to murder.
Moscow.
Crow among cities
I curse your churches
40 times 40
their funeral bells
I curse your Kremlin towers
Spasskaya,
Blagoveshchenskaya
Borovitskaya…
Blackhearted Rus
You barrow,
You sow.
Devouring your piglets one by one.
How would I live in a world without Seryozha? A world surrounded by strangers, a world that could kill a little boy in his nightshirt? The sky grew dark. I prayed he hadn’t been lying about being happy at the military academy. The snow swirled, a silent answer. You are all erased. You live to be erased. No one will be remembered by anyone. They hadn’t bothered to tell me—I wasn’t that hard to find!—but let me go on thinking he was alive. I’d laughed and run around town, spouting verses on bridges and singing on street corners, when he lay—where? I hadn’t even asked. All I could picture was a sad mound of snow by the Kremlin wall, one of its twenty towers looming above.
The tiny music box played over and over in my mind as I remembered Seryozha manipulating his Pierrot and Columbine paper puppets, making them jump with a tug of the string. Come with me; we’ll live on the moon. His little voice, playing both parts. Yes, I’ve always wanted to live on the moon.
Me, too, Seryozhenka. I’d like to live on the moon, somewhere cold and shining, with no humans at all—just us.
I could hear them, the racket in the hall, and in they came, talking all at once, shaking snow from hats and coats. Someone lit the lamp, dispelling the calming shadows, the gentle dark. Shouting, laughing. Something had outraged Genya, something about Red Guards. Now they saw me.
“Why were you sitting in the dark?” he asked me. He pretended to fall on me, a joke, caught himself at the last minute, one hand braced against the wall over my head. He leaned down to kiss me. I turned my face away. “Are you on strike like the Red Guards?” He tried the other side. “Fishing for more rations? Higher wages?” He righted himself. “What’s with you? How’d the job search go?”
I stared out to the windows facing ours in the courtyard. People making dinner for their children with what little they had. Families. How fragile it all was.
“What’s with her?” Zina asked.
Not looking at him, I handed Genya the letter, the paper that felt so much like skin. I could not say it. Seryozha’s dead. A girl on the far side of the courtyard lounged in a window, looking back at me. Maybe it was me in a different life. I held my hand over my mouth to stop sobs if they started.
“It’s her brother,” Genya told the others.
“What happened?” Zina asked again.
“Killed. At the Kremlin. Back in November. Remember him, at the Cirque Moderne?”
“The blond one with the curls?” Zina asked.
“The father sent him to junker school. Bastard. Bastard!” Junkers—it’s what they called the cadets.
Junker school. My father hadn’t presented it that way, but that was exactly what it was. Officers in training. I held out my hand for the letter without turning to look at him. He pressed it into my palm. I folded it and put it back in my pocket. It was all I had of him now, that and a landscape or two, some silhouettes. Genya took my hands in his, rested his face against them. “Marina. I’ll kill him. I’ll go up there and rip his head off. To send that kid down there for nothing? What can I do, Marina? Just say the word.”
“It happened three months ago.” I didn’t want his histrionics or his tears. I just wanted to be cold, to freeze solid here by the window. I wanted to disappear.
But now he was pacing, swatting at the air. “I wonder what your old man has to say about it now. ‘Your son died heroically.’ Boys against soldiers—what did they think would happen?”
“Sorry, Marina,” Sasha said, touching me on the shoulder. “He was a sweet guy, an artist. I remember him. He was good, too.”
“Like meat to dogs,” Genya said.
Stop, for the love of God.
Anton stretched out on his cot. Supine, he began to roll a cigarette on a book on his chest. “This is exactly why governments should be abolished.”
“Sorry, Marina,” Gigo said, awkward as a hayseed at a
costume ball. He held out a half-eaten bar of chocolate to me, linty from his pocket, as if I were a child to be appeased with sweets.
Sasha blew the stove to life. The smell of sulfur, newsprint, varnish.
“I hope he’s satisfied,” Genya said, still pacing. He was too noisy. Could he not just sit down? “I’d like to ask him that to his face. ‘Are you satisfied now, Dmitry Ivanovich? Are you proud of your son at last?’”
I finally let out a shriek. “For God’s sake!”
“I’m sorry!” Genya flung himself to his knees at my feet, clutching at my skirt, his head in my lap. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m such an oaf. Just an organ-grinder’s monkey. Please tell me what to do. Please…anything, Marina. It’s just too hideous. I can’t stand it.” He wept into my lap.
I ran my hands through his hair just to quiet him. It was absurd—I wanted him to hold me, say nothing, and just be very still. Oh, none of these poets knew the first thing about life.
The conversation went on around me. I counted towers.
Spasskaya,
Blagoveshchenskaya
Borovitskaya…
“Power will defend itself to the end,” Anton was saying from his cot, where he was examining the hole in his sock.
Beklemishevskaya
First Unnamed
Second Unnamed
Secret Tower,
Tsar’s Tower
Trinity…
That night, I dreamed of Moscow. Seryozha was a bell ringer, up in one of the towers of the Kremlin Wall, and they’d tied him into the belfry, hand, foot, and neck, stretched between them. I knew that when they rang the bells it would tear him to pieces.
Life went on. Arguments, fires made, meals eaten, visits to the toilet, hours in queues and trips to the district soviet. I managed to secure a labor book. Origin: bourgeois. I saw no point fighting it now. The air felt thick in my lungs, unbreathable, like the atmosphere on Venus. I went through my days, living as if within a matrioshka nesting doll. One Marina functioned, while deep inside, another Marina knelt in the snow by the Kremlin Wall, weeping atop a small grave. No one could join her there. They didn’t know that Seryozha didn’t like people touching him on the head. That his favorite color was cadmium yellow with a dash of red at its heart. That he was bitten by a spider at the age of five and became so sick and swollen that he almost died. He’d read that the Chinese kept crickets as pets and insisted on having one of his own. Avdokia got him a little basket with a lid, and Volodya hunted for three nights to catch one for him. My loneliness possessed a gravity I thought would crush me.
That Wednesday evening, we all trooped up to our poetry circle, held at the Krestovsky apartment on Sergievskaya Street, near the English embassy. Genya had something special to present. He was dying to show me, dropped numerous hints. He’d been working on it all week. Thank God it kept him busy. Mechanically, I combed my hair and got into my boots, my coat.
The bracing walk did me good. Everyone was bundled up, our breath freezing in midair. Galina Krestovskaya, so beautiful with her golden curls, met us at the door, kissed us in greeting. I always loved coming to this big overwarm apartment with its faux peasant furniture, the flowers and birds painted on the walls, the young poets gathered from all over the city to share their work and listen to the critique, especially from Anton. Seryozha would have loved this place. He would have approved of Galina—he was always attracted to beauty. She wore an embroidered Russian blouse that my brother might have designed himself.
Everybody was talking about a brand-new poem from Blok, “The Twelve,” a poem about the revolution. No one had seen it yet, but a friend of the Krestovskys had acquired a copy, and we eagerly anticipated hearing it. Galina, the star of the Kommedia theater, read aloud proudly and with great revolutionary enthusiasm, checking periodically to see what Anton thought of her performance. Her husband, Krestovsky, rattled his newspaper from time to time in his leather armchair in the alcove, occasionally surveying the gathering with a doleful, proprietary squint. It was he who footed the bill for our journal, for the snacks and the fuel to heat this room for our meeting, and for Anton’s editorial salary, which in turn paid for the Poverty Artel.
“The Twelve” took around fifteen minutes to read. Intricate and modern, it captured the music of the revolution, a Blok no one had ever heard before. In the poem, twelve Red Guards patrolled the streets of Petrograd in a snowstorm, streets familiar to us all, haunted and laced with deadly dramas. We recognized the rough men, the haggard bourgeoisie, the prostitutes, the hunger and cold. A prostitute, Katya, seduced by a tough, is shot by her Red Guard lover. The action was brutal and callous, yet Blok could not stop the music inside himself. What a singular moment, to hear the first recitations of a master’s work, to stand aside from the dullness of my grief—no, not stand aside from it, because grief was in the poem, along with coarseness and beauty. A contradictory piece, it was on the side of the revolution and yet accepted it for the wild, violent, uncontainable thing it was, a time when people were going to suffer.
The dangerous, ragged quality of the poem took impulse, rage, murder, and remorse and drove onward, onward into the snowstorm that blinded us all. It ended, most astonishingly, with Christ marching unseen at the head of the column of the twelve, struggling through the blizzard, into the unknown. And in front of the flag / invisible in the snow / walks one more man…
I would have liked to just sit and absorb what we had just heard, but the discussion began immediately. What was Christ doing at the end of the poem? Was Blok a modernist or still a symbolist? I accepted a pastry from a tray being passed by the Krestovskys’ maid and chewed it without savor. Though pastry was usually a treat, tonight it tasted like paper.
Genya, the priest’s son, of course was outraged. “Do we really need Christ to redeem the revolutionary struggle?” he thundered. “He says without crosses—what’s the line? Freedom, freedom…oh, oh, without a cross. But then here comes Jesus. If you need a justification from the Beyond, you’re not a revolutionary, no matter how many Red Guards you stick in a poem.”
At least Anton didn’t judge the ending. He was at his best at times like this, examining each of the twelve sections on a cool technical level. In the end, he decided it wasn’t a poem at all but a play. Still, he had no respect for the self-questioning of the poem. He was interested only in its bones, not in the mystery of its flight.
Once, a night like this would have brought me to near ecstasy, but I was fed up with our opinions, our judgments. Life was too deep and full of currents that could snatch you off your raft and drag you under for such theorizing. I thought of Blok’s Christ, leading the men through the snowstorm that was inside them as well as outside. Was He here, invisible, leading all this as well? Had He been there at the Kremlin the day Seryozha had breathed his last? Perhaps so. Invisible, weeping for us all.
After chewing up Blok’s magnificent poem we turned to our own. Genya stood to recite.
Abraham was shaving when he heard
a voice
in his head.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“You know,” said the Lord.
“You and me, Abe, we know the score.
“I’ve got your number, brother
“And I’m calling it in…”
So this was his answer to my brother’s death? The poem he’d been so excited to share with me? My father as Abraham, my brother as Isaac, the bourgeois father sacrificing his artist son to the corrupt God of the past, an ancient but bloodthirsty deity? How proud of it he was, how thunderous his delivery, the way he stuck out his chin, as if daring God to strike him down.
Genya kept looking over at me to see what I thought of his gift. I rocked myself, praying it would soon be over. Seryozha wasn’t a poem. He wasn’t a symbol. He was just a boy full of dreams, bursting with talent and eccentricities and fears, who’d been sent away on a fool’s errand. Father was certainly no Abraham, anointed by God and called to the ultimate sa
crifice. He was just a pigheaded man steeped in vanity. Neither one of them was an abstraction.
I saw what Genya was trying to do—shape Seryozha into a martyr, a legend, a narrative that could be delivered on a street corner so people could imagine a cosmic battle between good and evil. It would play perfectly at the Haymarket. His fervor took over as he recited, and he was completely lost in his own roaring.
I had to leave. As I was slipping out, I ran into Oksana Linichuk, a student at the university, shaking snow from her scarf. I must have looked as shocked as I felt. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Isn’t that Genya reading?”
I could not bring myself to answer. “I’m not feeling well. Maybe I’m coming down with something. If he asks, tell Genya I’ll see him at home.”
Out on Sergievskaya Street, I scurried from swirling streetlamp to streetlamp, aware of the danger, staying away from the dark doorways. I had entered the poem “The Twelve.” The hunched shadow of a pedestrian entered the egg-shaped glow of the streetlight ahead, cutting a cave in the whirling snow, growing to nightmare size then disappearing. My eyelashes were freezing, I had to blink them warm again. Although the Krestovsky apartment lay in the heart of the diplomatic district, there was no such thing as a safe neighborhood now. Thieves robbed you just for your clothes and left you to freeze in the snow. I kept moving.
The shops were all dark, though it wasn’t that late. I caught the streetcar toward home—everyone inside looked hunched and miserable. Down on Nevsky, the windows of Mina’s building glowed behind curtains. Up there, on the fifth floor, lived people who actually knew Seryozha. Would understand what I had lost. Oh, to be known! On impulse, I jumped off the tram and raced to that familiar entrance, slipping and teetering on the ice.
In the cracked gilt mirror of the elevator, I saw my face—broken, smashed. My unfocused gaze was like my mother’s as she lay in bed, trying to untangle the chains. I pushed back my scarf, combed my hair with my fingers, tried to pinch some color back into my pale cheeks.