I woke at first light to find Avdokia already up, water boiled, tea and kasha made, warm water in the washstand—as if she had read my mind. Now that I’d decided, I was impatient to get it over with. I washed my face and hands cursorily, ate standing up, bundled myself up in two wool dresses, and pulled Anton’s gun from the bureau drawer. My nanny’s birdlike little eyes caught the motion, though I kept my back to her. “Marinoushka, what are you up to?” she whispered, squinting at me, trying not to waken Mother, who’d stayed up late reading The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky.
I reached up under my clothes and unfastened the diamond stickpin from my slip. I turned it so it caught the lamplight. Canary sparks lit the room. The old woman regarded me with alarm. “Where did you get that?”
“Kolya. He told me about a market on Kamenny Island. Said if we ever needed money I should go up there.” I pinned the diamond back under my clothes, donned my coat, tucked my shawl in tight, and put the revolver in my pocket.
She crossed me and herself and pressed a piece of wood into my hand—the light wood, the torn edge. I guessed by feel what it was. “Be careful,” she said, but she didn’t say “Don’t go,” as she might have earlier. We had all changed, even the unchangeable Avdokia.
Preobrazhenskaya Square and its sad market emerged and dissolved in the milky fog. I followed the frozen Kanavka, the gold-touched rails of the Summer Garden. Inside those famous fences lay the paths where I’d walked with Genya so long ago. Now it lay in deep snow, the imperial statues shivering in their winter boxes, like vertical coffins. How we’d laughed as Diana had disapproved of our young love. The memory was a sharp pain in my side, as if I’d impaled myself on one of the railing’s spear points. The Kanavka reminded me of the Mallarmé poem about a swan trapped in the ice, that small white agony. Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui…Would that be me, left behind, alone and abandoned, trapped in these beautiful ruins?
Damp clung to my face, crystallizing into ice as I emerged onto the Neva, the southern end of the Troitsky Bridge with its style moderne tramline down the center. As I crossed, threadbare people eyed me and each other with distrust, each of us locked into our own loneliness. The bridge seemed interminably long, as if it were telescoping outward as I walked. For a moment, I panicked, wondering if I had fallen into some weird pocket of reality. My mother and her spiritualist cronies believed that there were parallel planes to this world—other lives, other levels. What if I had entered one? Or perhaps I was caught on a bridge forever suspended between the two banks. I might become a legendary ghost, seen from time to time through the fog of a tram window.
With relief I saw the outline of the Peter and Paul Fortress emerging, its golden needle shrouded in white. Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned there, and the anarchist philosopher Kropotkin, even Trotsky himself, silver-tongued and foolishly believing his own propaganda. Now it held tsarist officers and Kadet ministers and a raft of speculators, whose ranks I was about to join.
A little ways on, the great wooden wreck of the Cirque Moderne loomed. Were they so long ago, those electrifying days when SRs and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks all mounted the same stage, part of the same movement? Now all I could think was how long it would take to burn in a small bourgeoika tin stove. People were destroying the city for firewood—fences, banisters, whole houses. The Bolsheviks had banned any but official cutting parties going out to the forests above the city, making criminals of us all.
My broken boot had rubbed a good-size blister into my left foot. No one strolled idly along the wide boulevard of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect anymore. Why would they? The shops were all closed. There was a time you might have walked halfway across the city just to meet someone for hot chocolate. Now you thought of your pitiful rations, your hoarded strength, your precious boot leather, like an old maid counting kopeks in a tea shop.
A man emerged from the fog, a small man with burning dark eyes, a dirty fur collar on his coat. “Hey, chicken,” he said. “Sweetie pie.”
I felt for Anton’s gun in my pocket. I didn’t know if I could really shoot someone. The man looked so sad, so desperate, his dark eyes glittering hot. He had a fever, maybe consumption, maybe the onset of typhus, which was beginning to spread in the city. I began to walk faster but he was following me. “Thirty rubles,” he called out. “Queen of my dreams.” Thirty rubles—it was a good price, when women would lift their skirts for half a loaf of bread. I walked faster. “Forty, princess of my heart,” he said. “Please, sweetness, I’m dying.” He grabbed my arm.
I pulled out the revolver and pointed it at the bridge of his nose, his great shining eyes. “Please,” he whispered. “Shoot me. For God’s sake, I can’t live like this anymore.”
Someday soon I might be as desperate as this man, as sick and crazy. I lowered the gun. “I heard something the other day,” I told him, pocketing the gun. “Want to hear it?”
“Why not?” he said.
In the middle of the white fog, with no one else around, I began to recite a Blok poem for him, holding his sleeve as he was holding mine.
A girl was singing in the church’s choir
of all the weary souls on foreign shores,
of all the vessels sailing ever farther,
of all who’d lost the joy they’d known before…
Blok understood this kind of despair, understood it very well, perhaps better than the two of us standing there. I let the man go, and he vanished into the fog.
Around midmorning, I crossed the last bridge into the park-swathed elegance of Kamenny Island, the old playground for affluent Petersburg. What absolute silence. Frost painted every contorted tree limb and traced the railings in white. Somewhere in the fog, the dachas of the upper nobility lay empty. Here the Soviet government planned a utopia of workers’ clubs, hospitals, and old-age homes. But there was no trace of the new purpose, nor remainder of the old.
In places, the snow rose to my knees and higher. It was difficult to keep to the road. My nerves were tattered, like a sweater that moths had gotten into. If this trip ended in failure, I couldn’t imagine how weary the return journey would be. Maybe I could find the man with typhus and go home with him. But no—I would find this Arkady somehow. Yet if I asked the wrong person now, I could find myself in a Cheka cell by nightfall. Who would tell Mother and Avdokia? I couldn’t put them through that.
I found it hard to believe a market thrived up here. All I could see was acre after acre of white parkland fading into the fog. There was no one to even ask the time of day. I came to a crossroads. If there was any semblance of a market, it would either have to be east, at the old Church of St. John the Baptist, or west, out near the Kamennoostrovsky Theater. Like everyone else in Petrograd, I was trying to spare my boots, and the church was closer. I bet on St. John.
I kept to the prospect as best I could, until finally the church’s rosy brick bled through the mist like a watered pastel. In the little square, the shadowy shapes of human beings appeared, a small silent Kabuki of sinister figures with sleds at their feet, ropes in their gloved hands. I let my eyes run over the men with the sledges, looking for someone to approach. But who? How to choose? One man’s solidity somehow reminded me of Kolya’s men, and on impulse I approached him.
“I’m looking for Arkady,” I said, my breath blending into the mist.
A bright pair of Kirghiz eyes stared out from under a fur hat. “The Archangel?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s the one.”
“Or the Antichrist?” He grinned, his leathery face breaking into jagged lines.
Was he playing with me? “It’s pretty much the same, Uncle, now isn’t it?”
He shifted from foot to foot, stamping to keep them warm. “Yes, it’s all the same. Yes, you’re right about that one.”
“So where is he?” I tried again.
“You should pray,” he said, and nodded with his bearded chin to the church. “God knows everything.”
Arkady was in the church. I didn’t
like the idea. What happened out here would be visible at least to someone, but in that ancient darkness, I could disappear like Alice’s rabbit. Yet I had come up here for a purpose—what else could I do? I was not about to leave now. The eyes of the men burned holes in my back as I approached the entrance.
Inside, the air was even colder, if that was possible. Dutch Gothic beams and pillars arched, high and gloomy, like the trees of an ancient forest. The church smelled of centuries of incense and damp. A couple of old women stood meekly before a tall bent priest and sang prayers in surprisingly lovely voices. A votive flame burned before the icon of St. John, stripped of its frame, which had no doubt been silver or gold. The flame wasn’t from a candle but rather some sort of rancid fat in a jar. It smoked horribly. The iconostasis had also been stripped of its gold cladding but otherwise had been left miraculously intact. I crossed myself and bowed. Mother of God, please let this Arkady be here, if not for my sake, then for my mother and Avdokia. And get me home safely.
I felt I was being watched, that subtle pressure of another’s gaze, but I didn’t see anyone besides the old babas and the priest. Then I noticed that one of the side doors in the iconostasis was open, just a crack. Archangel Gabriel’s door, Gabriel the Messenger, the Angel of Death in Exodus. I could see the slightest movement of someone watching from behind it, blocking the light. The Archangel? Or the Antichrist? I was no great believer, but my neck prickled as I walked toward that opening, hugging the shadows, giving the worshippers a wide berth, my hand on the butt of the heavy revolver. Nudging the door just a crack more, I held my breath and slipped inside the great altar screen.
Dark. Movement up high. Birds. I heard a step on the stone floor.
“Who are you?” A quick voice, a man’s, low but not whispering.
“I’m looking for Arkady,” I said. I could hear only breathing in the dark, a bit of thready wheeze. On the other side of the iconostasis, the pure high voices of the old women rose. “A friend sent me.” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the silhouette of a man and smelled…cooked meat. Now I knew I was in the right place, for who but speculators would have meat in our starving city?
“What friend?” came the voice.
“Nikolai Shurov,” I said.
The scritch of a match revealed the profile of a man with a salt-and-pepper moustache and heavy black eyebrows. He lit a lantern and I could barely conceal my horror at the sight of the altar being used as a picnic table for the lamp and a greasy wad of papers that smelled like sausage. It was like watching Genya trample the Virgin of Tikhvin, my luck breaking in a thousand pieces. “Are you Arkady?”
He stuck out his lower lip, shook his head. “What do you have?”
My panic redoubled. “I’m only talking to Arkady,” I said, trying to sound tough, my voice strange against the ringing crystal tones of the babas. I wondered if the priest was in on it, too. “So who are you, anyway—St. Peter at the gates?”
He waggled his finger in front of my nose. “You’d better watch that mouth up here.” He picked up the lantern. “Come with me.”
Every instinct shouted at me to turn around and flee while I could. But it was too late for instinct. I followed him through a door into the sacristy, smelling of ancient incense and dirty hair, and out the back of the church into the snow.
44 The Archangel
I STAYED CLOSE BEHIND my surly guide and tried to walk in his footprints, sinking into the snow, struggling to keep up. I didn’t trust him. He knew I possessed something valuable. Why pay for it when he could rob me and leave me up here to freeze? Kolya, what have you gotten me into? I wanted to keen aloud like a terrified child, but instead I gripped the handle of Anton’s gun, hoping it worked, hoping there would be enough time to use it.
To my relief, we came upon a path of sorts, churned by many boots. I did my best to memorize the spot so I might find it again if I needed to flee. Now a long shedlike building coalesced in the fog. It must have been used to service one of the great dachas. A bundled man emerged from a small door. It closed behind him, and he marched off into the park. Soon my churlish Virgil pounded on its peeling gray wood, three long blows. A small bowlegged man let us in, his quick eyes taking my measure.
Servants’ quarters—for gardeners, cooks—had been converted into a kind of barracks. Men sat in the makeshift clubhouse playing cards, smoking, and eating. I could smell their cooked meat, and it made me wolfish with hunger. They glanced at me in rough disinterest. I gave up clutching the pistol in my pocket lest it draw their attention. The black-browed man led me to a door, knocked, opened it, stepped aside like a butler—or a jailer—and waved me in.
On a threadbare divan with stuffing coming out of the arms lay a handsome man of around fifty, though it could be sixty—I wasn’t much of a judge of old people. He was languid and long, with untrimmed pale hair and eyebrows, a long Swedish face with sloped nose and eyes of brightest blue, intent upon a web of string in his hands. I watched, fascinated by fingers that could move so deftly from cradle to diamonds to fish. “So?” he said, his voice dry, unimpressed.
“Shurov sent her,” said the man with the black eyebrows.
“Interesting.” His eyes flicked from my brown proletarian shawl to my wet and broken boots. “Leave her.”
My guide closed the door behind him. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit in one of the hard chairs dotting the room. I pushed the shawl off my head, let it lie on my shoulders. It was so warm here, bliss. I removed my dirty gloves, too, and rubbed my hands, wishing I could take my boots off and let them dry by the stove. My feet ached, and I wondered if they were frostbitten.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Arkady, I guess.” I hoped I sounded nonchalant.
“I am Baron Arkady von Princip,” he said, looking only at the shifting figures between his hands.
Von Princip. I had read all about him in the nonparty papers, him and his gang. Responsible for outrageous daylight robberies and armed assaults, gun battles with Red Guards, the lurid stuff of our knitting-factory fantasies. The girls followed the stories of his bold attacks as if they were the exploits of some folktale hero.
Arkady’s clever hands turned the fox into a purse and then into a throne. “You have something for me?”
I turned my back, then unbuttoned my coat and the bodice beneath it to unpin the canary diamond. Warm from the heat of my body, it flashed in my hand. Well, Kolya, farewell…sentiment was history. I closed my dress and turned back to him, holding out the jewel in the palm of my hand the way you feed sugar to a horse so it doesn’t bite your fingers. But he didn’t reach for it, just transformed the string throne into a broom. “Very nice,” he said, not even looking. “I won’t ask how you came to receive such a fine offering from our young Shurov. I’m sure whatever you did for it, it was quite impressive.”
I didn’t think I could blush anymore. But there was no mistaking the hot tingle in my cheeks. I could see Arkady, lying there on the divan like a lizard that lived in the dark, was a man who enjoyed making people uncomfortable. He wore a tweed jacket and a knitted scarf and had a hole in his sock. Couldn’t the prince of thieves afford a new one? I dropped my hand with the offered pin.
“It’s odd, don’t you agree? That you take this from Shurov and sell it to me?” he said. “Why didn’t he just give you the money? Or is that too indecorous? Oh, youth. Tell me your name, girl.”
I knew I should lie, but something perverse in me—pride?—refused to be cowed, even for my own sake. “Makarova,” I said. “Marina Dmitrievna.”
“Dmitry Makarov.” He looked up at me now, arched one pale eyebrow.
“It’s a common name,” I said.
He regarded me wearily, as if he could see everything about me, who I was and where I came from and even what would happen to me after I left. The men in the hall were arguing, and Arkady cocked his head to listen. Evidently it was nothing that bothered him, for he went back to his string. “I know you didn’t
come here just to sell me that little trinket.”
I tried to imagine what he was getting at. “Kolya said to ask for you. He said it was worth ten thousand.”
The old man shook his head, a faint smile creasing his thin, bloodless lips. “You were curious. Who is this Arkady fellow? Perhaps you wanted to hear a bit more about the fate of your elusive friend Shurov.” His strange gaze—you couldn’t feel a human being behind it. It was more like a blue-eyed tiger’s. “Perhaps your friend wanted us to meet. And this is your letter of introduction.”
I shuddered. I swore to myself I’d tell Varvara about this whole headquarters of thieves as soon as I made it back to the Petersburg side of the Neva.
“Would you like to know where our friend is at this very moment?” he asked.
“He’s in the south,” I said, and my lips were as dry as a Crimean wind. “He had a load of art. Three sledges’ worth.”