That night I worked on three new poems—one about maroon women, one about socks, and a third about the boxed statues in the Summer Garden emerging in spring, not knowing all that had taken place while they’d slept. As I wrote, Anton explained to Mother why the futurist Khlebnikov was the only poet in Russia worth reading now, better than even Mayakovsky. He was just launching into a recitation of “Bo-Beh-O-Bi Sang the Lips” when we heard scrabbling in the lock. Oh, Lord. I threw my pen down and ran to the door. There stood my dear husband, filling the doorway, dirty, exhausted, and grinning, his thick overcoat snow-dusted and smelling of wood smoke. I couldn’t stop kissing him, touching him, his whiskery cheeks, drinking in his smell of hay. In one piece. Thank God he was here.
Zina and Gigo crowded in behind him. “Don’t mind us,” she said, pushing past me.
Anton stood and embraced him, pounded him on the back. “About time, young son. I was about to rent out your corner.”
He kissed me, hugged me in the crook of his arm, laughing, so happy, before noticing Mother at the table, and Avdokia with her mending on the divan. He took in the neatly folded bedding, the washed floor, the emptied ashtray, and stiffened in my arms. He’d never met my mother, nor had she laid eyes on him except from a second-floor window. I should not have let this happen. Not like this, not now. I took a deep breath, but the air in the room seemed to vanish. “Genya, this is my mother, Vera Borisovna. Mother, my husband. Gennady Yurievich Kuriakin.”
She gave a nod—courteous, formal. But the light had gone out in his face, as if he’d stepped into a shadow. He pushed his cap to the back of his head, stalked to the table, and slumped into my vacated chair. Slow rage built in his face. He reached out and drank from the cup of roasted-oat tea sitting before her, finishing it off in a single draught. She pulled away, valiantly trying not to show her disgust.
“She’s been helping Anton. With the Apollinaire,” I added quickly. “She came during the offensive. Just for a few days. Varvara said they might take her hostage.”
Gigo flopped onto the divan next to Avdokia and began to inspect her, clowning, fooling with her mending, touching her scarf, examining her like a chimpanzee would, as if he’d never seen an old woman before.
Genya took off his snow-brushed cap and tossed it onto the table, ran his fingers through his hair. It was cut short now, like a soldier’s. “Enjoying our hospitality, Vera Borisovna?”
Her eyes flashed in panic. “We have been comfortable, thank you.”
“How nice,” he said. He wasn’t a sarcastic man, it didn’t suit him.
I wished Anton would speak up. “Anton invited her to stay on.” But our Mephistopheles just leaned back in his chair watching the scene unfold, head to one side, thin fingers on the tabletop. He would never side with anyone against Genya. Genya glowered at him, then back at my mother. Zina picked up Mother’s karakul hat from a hook by the door, put it on her dirty hair, and posed. “What do you think?” I hadn’t missed her little sharp-chinned face, her spiteful black eyes with their dark circles. As I was sure she hadn’t missed mine. It had given her a chance to work her influence over Genya, in case he might be persuaded to change his mind about me. She glittered with malice as she modeled, holding her hands at fashionable right angles. “Will it do?”
I snatched it off her head, hung it back on the hook. “Don’t do that.”
“Ooh, sensitive,” she snickered.
Mother, still as an ice-encrusted statue atop the Winter Palace, watched Genya, now pacing, anger darkening his pale face as all the chill in her personality returned, freezing the warmth and charm. He opened the stove door, letting smoke into the room, poking it with the stair rod we’d stolen from the front building. His brows pressed on his deep-set eyes, and his wide mouth pinched at the corners. He was about to explode.
“Anton,” I whispered, cutting my eyes toward Genya. Say something.
But Anton rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, breaking the tobacco off each end. Genya reached over and plucked it from his lips, stuck it between his own, lit a straw, and ignited the cigarette with its burning edge. The smell of smoke hung in the air like a warning. He slammed the stove door.
“Genya, can we talk? In the hall?” I asked him. If only I could get him away from his audience, take him in my arms, I knew I could explain. Surely he could understand the danger. His fury was being fed by the presence of spectators. This new swagger and sarcasm must be the spoils of war. Where was my tender Genya?
He crossed his arms, his jutting jaw telling me all as I moved close, speaking low in his ear. His green, fresh smell was the same as always. “So talk.”
“They’ll be gone tomorrow,” I began. “Please. It’s not a big deal.”
He didn’t meet my eyes. His face darkened even more. “I’ve been sleeping in ditches on the snow. I get back to my loving wife and it’s Vera Borisovna. Not to mention the old nanny. You say it’s not a big deal? Anton, what the hell were you thinking?”
Anton raised his hand. “Don’t involve me in your domestic fiascos,” he said, moving onto the cot, where he rolled himself another cigarette to replace the one in Genya’s hand. Mother gazed down at the book of Khlebnikov poems she’d been discussing with Anton, knowing she’d been thrown to the wolves.
I still stood in front of him. “Genya, look at me.”
But his attention was seized by something over my shoulder. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” In one step, he swooped over and scooped up the Virgin of Tikhvin in his huge hand. He gazed down at it with such loathing I thought he might spit on it. He hated religion more than anything. It meant authority, superstition, tradition, ignorance, reaction, and irrationality all rolled into one.
I reached for it, but his smile chilled me as he pulled it away. Eyes narrowed at me, his brow like a ridge, he dropped it to the floor. Its silver frame made a tinny clatter. Gigo and Zina were watching him, fascinated. Then he lifted his enormous boot and crushed the small painted panel. I heard Avdokia’s gasp. I felt as if he’d just crushed my own chest. He kicked the shattered thing against the wall, and the pieces came tumbling out of the frame. “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Bringing something like that in here. You think this is a joke?”
Avdokia rushed in to salvage it, heedless of danger, gathering up the smashed remains, weeping and hissing curses at him. “Enemy Satan! Depart from us a hundred, a thousand versts…” And he did look, if not satanic, then like some elemental chthonic power coming up from the dark halls of the earth. “May he know every grief and woe…”
“Don’t you curse me, old witch,” he said and took a step toward her.
I picked up the stair rod and slashed through the air with it as if it were a saber. How I wanted to hit him with it, to beat it over his back until it broke. “Don’t you go near her!” I shouted at him. “Who are you? Where’s Genya? What did you do with him?”
I helped my weeping nanny stand, the broken pieces of the icon in her apron’s skirt. Zina held her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. I brandished the rod in her direction and she stopped. My mother stood, picked up her carpetbag, and began numbly collecting her things. “We’re leaving,” she said. Outside the windows, the wind howled, the snow in the courtyard whirled but Mother and Avdokia put on their coats. Avdokia snatched her sewing basket away from Gigo. “I would not wish to spend a night under the same roof as you, monsieur,” Mother said.
“You can’t leave,” I said. “Not in that storm. And it’s late—the trams have stopped running.”
“Did they think of that when they kicked you out?” Genya said to me, throwing himself into the chair. “Pitched you right to the curb in the middle of the night? Soldiers were shooting. Did they care? No. The question is, who are you, Marina? Revolutionary poet or…” He tipped his chin at my terrified mother.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Zina piped up. “Right from the beginning, she came waltzing in with that fancy coat she used to wear—”
“Want me to
part your hair for you?” I asked her. My mother was stuffing her things into her carpetbag. Gigo was pulling things out as she put them in, clowning around.
“She killed your brother. You forgive her for that?” Genya said. “Threw Seryozha to the dogs.”
Mother stood up straight, her face so pale I thought she would faint.
“And now you’re hiding her from proletarian justice, in my house!” He jumped up and crossed to the door in two long strides, opened it wide. Immediately the air from the icy hall emptied the warmth from the room. “Allow me!” He was playing it for theater, for Gigo and Zina. “Too cold for you, Vera Borisovna? I’m sorry. But really, it’s time to go.”
Was I going mad? She and Avdokia were all the family I had left—couldn’t he understand that? Couldn’t he find one shred of pity? I grabbed Mother’s hairbrush out of Gigo’s hand and put it into her bag. “I’m leaving, too. I can’t stay here with this impersonator. Let me know when Genya comes back.”
He laughed, so painfully. “Oh, so it’s my fault! How quickly we forget.”
Mother and Avdokia stood with their coats on, waiting for me to get out of the way so they could make a run for it.
He turned away from us all, sat in his chair again, his arms folded. “Go on then.” Daring me.
I grabbed my coat, my thick scarf, wriggled my feet into my boots, sobbing, hoping he would see what he was doing, beg me to stay as he had begged me to marry him only eight days ago. But as he sat at the table with his back to us, his shoulders like the fortification of a city, I knew he could not relent. “Anton?”
Anton lay on his cot, spinning the cylinder of his revolver, mortified at such naked displays of personal drama, looking like he was going to shoot someone—or himself. Gigo lay on the divan like an odalisque, while Zina had slipped into my vacated chair—ready to replace me. My home, my life. Why was this happening?
Yet I buttoned my coat, the wind roaring outside, and inside my head. “Neither of us wants this,” I said to him but he didn’t turn around. It had all gone too far. “Anton, give me your gun.” That made Genya glance over at me.
“What for?” Anton asked.
It would be a long trip across the city in the storm. Nobody was offering to walk us, and I wasn’t about to ask. “For me,” I said.
Mother waited by the door, tense as a cat, while Avdokia glared at Genya as if he were Beelzebub in a tattered coat.
Anton glanced questioningly at his brooding pal. “You really going to let her go? After all this crap I’ve been forced to listen to all this time?”
He actually understood how ridiculous Genya was being, but Genya wouldn’t even return his gaze, just stared moodily into the stove.
“Oh, hell.” Anton brought me the weapon. “If you need to fire it, you pull this back”—he showed me a catch at the butt end of the gun—“then fire. And if you do have to use it, keep firing, and don’t stop until it’s empty.” He reluctantly handed it over, the metal warm from his playing with it, and the weight of it, the ugly greasiness, surprised and revolted me.
Anton was actually being nicer than Genya—the world had gone crazy! I stuffed the gun into my coat pocket. Genya still hadn’t turned around. Mother looked frail and exhausted by my unseemly life in all its squalor. I wondered whether she would even stand the walk home. Home? Had I actually thought that? This was home, the Poverty Artel, the poets, Genya. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. The cards had turned again. Do you have to have everything? I heard Mina saying. But I was leaving my husband with only the rustle of the clothes on my back and the howl of the storm for a farewell. We walked down the slick stairs of the Grivtsova tenement, and out into the night.
Part IV
Hyacinths
(Spring 1918)
43 The Islands
HE WHO DOES NOT work, does not eat.
The knitting factory closed shortly after the Soviet accepted the German terms—an event nothing short of apocalyptic. I arrived in the morning as I always did to find the rest of the girls standing in the courtyard like so many stunned oxen, the metal door rolled down and locked tight.
“Do you think he’s been arrested?” a girl asked.
“That skunk, that fat burzhui,” said pug-nosed Olga, their ringleader, and gave the door an enormous kick. “He’s moved down to Moscow like the rest of the rats.” Though the danger of the German invasion was over, the Soviet had left anyway, sneaking out in the middle of the night like tenants behind on their rent.
The weight of what had happened hit me. “No war, no soldiers,” I explained to my little comrades. “No army, no contracts. No money, no socks.”
“Bastard,” said Olga. “There’s capitalism for you.”
“We’re leaving anyway,” said one of the younger girls. “Mama’s got sisters in Kiev. They say there’s food down there.”
We kissed each other goodbye like school chums before summer break, and left the courtyard in dejected groups of two and three.
Back at Furshtatskaya Street, I tried every trick I could think of to get into the Red Guard’s room, but no such luck. His wife, so-called, was always in there, and she distrusted me from the start. There was no trace of Father’s supposed support. I kept waiting for him to make an appearance, steeling myself for the explosion that was sure to follow, but he never surfaced. Perhaps he’d gone deeper underground. Or maybe Mother had been lying all along.
After the knitting factory closed, I haunted the labor exchange, but they were only looking for the most vital, skilled professionals—obstetrical nurses and engineers. Mostly I wandered around avoiding the apartment, stopping in at Wolf’s and reading the poetry I couldn’t afford to buy anymore. I wanted to know what poets were saying about the revolution, whether Okno had appeared and if I’d been included. And, yes, I was hoping to run into Genya. Rehearsing what I would say to him. Yet I could not bring myself to go to the Poverty Artel to beg him to rethink his actions, beg him to let us start over.
I drifted over to Znamenskaya Square, scene of so many rousing and traumatic events of the previous year. The train station was a kicked-over anthill. Half of Petrograd seemed to be trying to get on trains for the south or Moscow or back to the villages. A porter I talked to had been there for the evacuation of the Soviet. They’d had trains waiting on sidings a half mile out—that’s why no one saw them. “I carried stuff out there all night,” he said. “Desks, chairs, pictures. Bathtubs. Wives. Mistresses.”
I stood under the clock, watching people rush by me like a run of salmon around a rock. I felt becalmed, invisible. A great migration out of the city was taking place and like a lone goose on a lake, I’d been left behind. The concourse, once a showpiece, had grown impossibly grimy, the floor black as if it had been painted, the stuccowork cast in high relief, each medallion picked out by a heavy coat of soot.
Suddenly, a woman with three small children tugged at my sleeve. “Devushka, can you help us?” The woman was young, pretty—well dressed, I noticed—but harried. Her hair was coming down. “I need to find my husband. Could you stay with the children and our bags?”
I was evidently still identifiable as bourgeois, a girl who would be trustworthy and sympathetic, a strong-looking girl who was nevertheless one of us. Nasha. I sat on their luggage, holding the baby—a novel experience as I’d never so much as touched one before. It was heavy and made mewling sounds, which fortunately never broke into out-and-out bawling. I jiggled it as the oldest child, a boy, told me all about trains, especially the one they were taking to Moscow, the Nikolaevsky Express. He didn’t know that it was the very train upon which Anna Karenina met Vronsky, the train under which she’d thrown herself. “You never heard of Tolstoy?”
He shook his solemn head. “Papa works for the Commissariat.” More desertion. I dandled the baby and couldn’t help wondering what Genya’s and my child would have looked like. I’d left all my things back at the Poverty Artel—my books, my brother’s silhouettes. I imagined going back to retrieve
them, seeing if there could be some reconciliation between us. But we were both so terribly stubborn. The little girl, around four, in a puff-sleeved coat and a little tam, sat next to me with her soft-bodied doll and amused herself by kissing it and shaking it ferociously by turns. How like life.
At last, the woman returned with the husband and their tickets. The man asked if I would accompany them to the platform to keep an eye on the children and the porter. I received a twenty-ruble tip for my efforts, and it gave me the idea to see if there was more work in it. I set myself up as a porter, babysitter, runner after lost items or people, and cleared nearly fifty rubles that day. And spent it all on a packet of meat on the way home. Sure that there was a new career in this for me, I returned to the station for several days running, but never made as much money again. However, I was propositioned by three pimps and threatened by a porter who thought I was taking business away from him.
I had to find work. I was grateful that I still had a few more days on my monthly ration cards, but come March, those cod-liver pancakes would seem like a feast. There were only so many things Avdokia could sell in the shadows. I felt like a drunk pitched out into the street by the tavern keeper only to be run over by a cart. My brief marriage was over, the poets’ circle closed against me. My revolutionary life had ended. There was nothing left but two old women and a flat full of furniture that nobody wanted except to chop up for firewood.
In the overstuffed boudoir, I ate a meager dinner with my mother and nanny—pancakes consisting of shredded frozen potatoes fried in a malodorous substance that was mostly cod-liver oil, all I could find on the black market. Mother was depressed, her friends the Gromitskys had had a visit from the Cheka the night before. “Everything confiscated. They only left them the clothes on their backs and the bed. Now, tell me, what does the worker need a Venetian mirror for? Dresses by Worth—can you imagine? Trotting around on some commissar’s mistress, no doubt.” I choked down the meal and thought of the future, my stomach bubbling like a cauldron. Mother pushed her plate away, unable to eat any more. She covered her mouth with the heel of her hand and looked away. All the brightness I’d seen in her at the Artel had faded. There was no reason for us to live like this when I had a diamond threaded into the seam of my slip. If this wasn’t the time to sell it, what would be? When we were peeling the paint off the walls with our fingernails and eating it? Although the idea of walking all the way up to the lawless outskirts of the city to sell such a valuable item was sobering. “Don’t cry,” I said, rinsing the oily taste of cod liver out of my teeth with tea. “I think I have a plan.”