I clambered out of the sleigh and Gurin tossed me a small package wrapped in newspaper. “Pryazhka Embankment, number fourteen,” he said, then cracked the reins over the horse’s furry back. The monster startled, backed up on its huge round haunches, then took off again at a thundering trot. I watched them leave with an increasingly hopeless feeling. I’d assumed that if anything went wrong, I could run back out to the sleigh or that little Gurin would come in, guns blazing. I hefted the bundle, squeezed it, wondering what it contained. A package the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped in Petrogradskaya Pravda, tied with string.
The front house on the Pryazhka was 16–18, and the next 8–10, so number 14 had to be in the courtyard. I steeled myself and walked through the passage into the large courtyard, where a man was defecating in the snow, his bare buttocks sad and vulnerable over the dirty hummocks. Not a reassuring sight. A sturdy wooden house painted a pale green, older than any building on the street, sat back in the yard. Perhaps it had once belonged to a sea captain or had been used as a tavern—it would be the right size, and close to the docks. This had to be number 14. It was cold this far back from the street, slushy and forgotten, the pale sunlight muted, the air smelling of the gulf and the wet wood of the wharves. All I could hear was ice cracking—like boys breaking walnuts—from the house’s eaves, where the icicles reached almost to the ground.
I knocked on the old door.
A man opened it. He held a revolver trained at my heart. I would have dropped the package and run, but I couldn’t move. He was sweating—he looked as nervous as I did. He nodded me inside and patted my coat pockets. The room was bare but for a small wooden table and a couple of mismatched chairs. It probably had once been a cozy room—low beamed ceilings, a broad tile stove. Home for a sea captain, yes, but now, like half the city, it was being used for other purposes. On second glance, the man—thin, balding, blue-eyed and bespectacled, with a prominent Adam’s apple—wasn’t so threatening, only pugliviy. A teacher of philology, maybe, or mathematics.
He shut the door and locked it. “Open the package,” he told me, and his Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy. I tore off the wrappings. Passports. Ten of them at least. I spread them out on the table. New Soviet passports. And permissions for train passage, covered with stamps and signatures. What a treasure. They looked real, there in the dimness of the room, the light from the courtyard filtering through the dirty windows. Were they forgeries? Stolen? Had Arkady bribed someone inside the government?
The terror slid away from the man’s intellectual face. He actually laughed, his sharp Adam’s apple rising and falling. Tucking the gun into his belt, he started opening them up. Photographs were already affixed: mostly men, beardless, with workers’ caps. A couple of women. The documents were made out in black ink and stamped in a rainbow of colors, with different handwriting and printing in three languages—Russian, French, and German. Laughter gave way to a more solemn emotion as the man looked at one, then another. “Forgive me,” he said. “You don’t know how long we’ve been waiting. It was essential…” He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket under his heavy coat and dabbed his eyes. “Thank God.”
I heard a sound from upstairs, the scrape of a chair. I missed the weight of Anton’s gun in my pocket. The ticking of a clock was loud as a hammer, but there was no second sound. Now that I’d delivered the goods, I was eager to be on my way. The man put the documents under his coat. Now would be the time to shoot me. Who would ever find me here? My legs shook. But he went to the cold stove and reached inside, into the ashes, and brought out a sooty package about the size of a cigar case, also wrapped in newspaper, this showing the masthead Znamya Truda—the Banner of Labor, the SR paper. “Give your mysterious employer our profoundest appreciation. You’re doing a tremendous service,” the teacher said, vigorously shaking my hand. “You don’t even know…for Mother Russia. For us all.”
Who could he be? What was Arkady abetting here? People leaving the country who might still have the wherewithal to buy ten passports on the black market? Not SRs, but aristocrats who had waited too long to fly. Perhaps they had held out for the Germans, and now realized their mistake. The combination of crime and political intrigue was dangerous indeed.
I took the smaller package and put it in my pocket, and nodding once more, flew out the door. Ah, blessed sunshine! But when I peered out the Pryazhka passageway into the street, I saw a man in a leather coat smoking under one of the bare poplars, watching the building. Cheka! Or maybe not, but I wouldn’t be around to discover the truth. I retreated through the archway and lost myself in the maze of slushy courtyards. There must be a second exit somewhere. I could have thrown the sooty little package into the snow—I couldn’t imagine the penalty if the Cheka caught me with something like this, linked me to speculation and counterrevolution and Arkady. But I didn’t dare throw it away. Arkady was the threat I believed more certain.
I found an opening onto Angliisky Prospect and walked away as quickly as I could, thinking that if Gurin had circled around to the Pryazhka, he would have seen our friend in black leather and would know enough to look for me elsewhere. I hurried east toward Senate Square and tried not to look back, not to look around at all, just to move forward. I wasn’t that girl delivering packages for the Archangel. I was a girl late to an exam, late to work at the telephone exchange, muttering under my breath, with the crabby face and irritated march of the tardy.
I made it all the way to Gorokhovaya Street, walking at that fast clip among the ghostly, dejected Petrograders and waiting for the sleigh to find me the way I used to wait for Kolya’s messengers. But that was in the high expectation of love, not this dread, jumping when a man started out of a doorway, flinching when people crowded too close behind me. Holy Theotokos, please let this end! Finally the black horse came abreast of me, passed me, and the sleigh turned in at a courtyard. I followed them in. The enormous beast nickered and blew hot air from its nostrils, its feathery fetlocks wet to the knee.
“Couldn’t you have picked me up back there?” I said, leaning on its shaggy neck. “I just crossed half the city on foot.”
The little thief shrugged. “You were followed.”
A different note of fear sounded inside me, dropping half an octave, deeper and more certain. That was why Arkady sent me, of course. I was more expendable than his men. More expendable to anyone except Mother and Avdokia waiting back at the flat. The little man handed me the sweat-stiffened reins and went out to stand by the arch, smoking, watching the street. The beast, so warm, smelling of that good tangy horse smell, nudged my shoulder, getting snot on my scarf. I buried my face in the fur of his neck, big as a felled tree trunk, salty and solid. I hoped nobody would eat him. He made me think of Volodya, and Carlyle, his bad-tempered pony, and Swallow, his cavalry steed. To think that Seryozha had finally learned to ride—or said he had. I stroked the velvety black nose, thinking of Volodya practicing Cossack mounts and picking up handkerchiefs from the wet grass at a gallop. What would he do now that the war was over? I tried to imagine him here, in the midst of this hunger, this poverty. Volodya with a Soviet future? Could he reconcile himself to a room in the servants’ hall by the kitchen while a Red Guardsman lived in Father’s study with his woman? It would be best if Volodya stayed in the Don or left the country and never returned. And what would he think of me now, this mess I’d made of my own life? At least this particular mess would be at an end as soon as I got this package back to its owner. Then I’d be done with Arkady von Princip. It was a bit too much adventure, even for an adventuress like me.
After a while, the little man got the horse and sleigh turned around. “Get in.” We set off again. The fun of the ride out to the greenhouses on the Vyborg side was a distant memory. Now I felt more like a prisoner on the way to the gallows. We sped along, not up toward the river but along Nevsky to Znamenskaya Square, turning in at the train station. Oh God, was I leaving?
46 The Station
CABS AND HANDCARTS,
HORSES and automobiles jostled at the entrance to the Nikolaevsky station. Gurin urged the shying, snorting horse forward into the fray. Wasn’t Arkady afraid the horse would be noticed, recognized? It was flashy—people gave us fast looks as they hurried into the arrivals hall. But either he didn’t care or he enjoyed letting people understand his reach, his power. That he was not afraid. The driver turned around in the coachman’s seat. “Take the package and go for a walk. In the main hall. Not too fast.”
“Who am I meeting?” I asked, watching passersby, aware that any of these people could be Cheka.
“Just take a walk. A nice little stroll.” His mouth hardly moved. Perhaps he’d been a ventriloquist in another life.
“Can’t I just leave it with you?” I couldn’t afford to be arrested. This wasn’t my business—speculation, passports, buying and selling. I took the package and held it out to him.
“Don’t get ideas,” he recommended.
I crammed the bloody thing back in my pocket and straggled into the station.
If it had been crowded the week of my adventure as a girl porter, the station had since become a giant squatters’ camp as people waited for trains—any trains, going anywhere, especially south to the Ukraine, where there was food. Tattered but elegant people shepherded leather trunks. Workers sat on broken cases tied with ropes. Peasants lugged their bundles while veterans and pickpockets and vagrants loitered—one great simmering stew of humanity under the vaulted ceilings and electroliers. The metallic scent of panic, soot, and trains stained the air.
My eye caught opportunities for work—people with children struggling with bags. A man accompanying a heavily made-up woman carted all their luggage while the woman carried a single hatbox and a little dog under her arm. That gave me a moment’s laugh. I picked my way through the anxious crowd in the grand concourse, watching for—what? I had to stop myself from continually checking the little package in my pocket. The corners were starting to fray.
On a bench, a man reading Krasnaya Gazeta glanced up. Was he watching me? Or against that pillar, that soldier? Which would be my contact? Or were those men watchers from the other side, searching out speculation and counterrevolution? I wished my mother hadn’t made that pronouncement about evil entities. I didn’t believe in entities, but it was hard to brush her words off with a laugh right then.
Then a figure halfway across the hall caught my eye, a head taller than anybody else. The patched greatcoat, the wide shoulders, the cap. I began to run, pushing past the gangs of hopeful travelers. He was heading for the platforms. “Genya!” I called, though how could he hear me over this din? I shoved and squeezed, pressing my hands together before me like an icebreaker. “Genya!”
He turned, searching the crowd. He couldn’t have heard me, but something in him did hear, and he turned and saw me. Emotion passed over his face like clouds racing across the sun—shock, joy, hurt, longing. I struggled like a salmon to reach him, climbing over people’s boxes and forcing my way through until I could touch him, cling to that smoky, wonderful coat, and he held me tight tight tight. I hadn’t known how much I still loved him, how I’d missed him, the sheer relief of having his body back in my arms. “Genya, I’ve been crazy. I’m doing the maddest things.”
He was wearing the scarf I’d knitted for him, gray and red. The taste of his mouth, the sweetness of his kiss, the smell of him. How had I let my infatuation with Kolya destroy us? How had we let that little religious trinket split us apart? “You’ve always been crazy,” he whispered, kissing my eyes. “But I’m such a moron. I don’t even remember what happened, do you?”
Zina emerged from the crowd, all dressed for traveling in her tam, holding her gloves officiously. I saw on her face her dismay at finding me resurrected. “Genya, we need to get on that train.” Someone jostled her and she elbowed and cursed. Now I understood the first look on his face, that guilty surprise. They were leaving Petrograd. Together. He pulled away from me, abashed and ill equipped to deal with this two-woman problem.
“I’ll meet you on the platform,” he told her. “Go on ahead.”
Zina’s face condensed with irritation. It shrank like wool in water. “We have to grab seats when they open the doors or we’ll be riding in the corridor all the way to Moscow.”
“In a minute,” he said firmly.
Clearly there was more she wanted to say, but the tone of his voice put an end to the argument, and she walked off reluctantly, looking back over her shoulder every few steps before the crowd swallowed her angry little face.
Moscow. I laughed. A sob really. He couldn’t go to Moscow. People died in Moscow. They became someone else. I stroked his face, handsome and forlorn, the wide mouth, the crooked nose, the bony brow over those dear eyes. “You don’t belong there. Don’t go. I have no right to ask, but please stay. Let’s try again.”
His expression begged me to understand. He was being pulled in all directions. “Petrograd’s done for—you can see it as well as I can.”
“No.” I burrowed into his coat. I wouldn’t see.
“She’s got friends down there, a film company. They want us to write a kinofilm. We’ve got tickets, permits.” He pressed his cheek to my head, pulled my shawl down, ran his fingers through my hair. “I’ve thought of you so much. I do nothing but write and think of you. I’m going mad.”
“I should never have left that night. I should have fought you, claw and knucklebone.” I held on to him, speaking fast and low. “It’s horrible without you. You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you.”
“Come to Moscow,” he said. “The poetry cafés are filled to bursting. Everything’s alive down there. Petrograd’s had it.”
“And live with you and Zina?” I laughed but it was more of a cry, a choke of despair.
His face closed up, like one of those trees whose leaves shrink at the slightest touch. “Look, I have to go.”
“Genya, I love you,” I said, still clutching his coat.
He grasped my gloved hand, tore off the glove and kissed my palm. I could feel the tears on his face, his scratchy beard. But then he gave it back to me, my hand, my useless hand, and he was pushing through the crowd toward the platforms. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air. I staggered back through the hall toward the doors of the station and stood in the cold colonnade, sobbing like a child.
It was several minutes before I remembered Arkady von Princip. I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief and braced myself to go back in and finish the job, checking the package in my pocket. My fingers touched nothing but cloth.
Impossible.
I checked the other pocket. I had put it in deep, hadn’t I? I checked myself all over. My mind flew to the possibilities. Don’t think. Pickpockets worked these halls like peasants picking cherries. Don’t. I could not imagine the value of ten passports, visas, and railway permits. In these times? A million rubles? People died for a loaf of bread now. A hat, a pair of boots. Maybe I dropped it when I saw Genya, when I ran.
I shoved my way back into the hall. Oh God, Theotokos preserve us. It hadn’t been that long. Who would notice a little package wrapped in newspaper? Who would stop in their hurrying to trains and pushing through the crowd to study the floor?
Anyone.
For an hour I searched, my tears blurring the view of the dirty floor littered with sunflower-seed hulls and cigarette butts, hairpins and sputum, a glove, a page fallen from a book, a baby’s shoe, scraps of paper, but no package wrapped in Znamya Truda. I scanned the crowd, looking for suspicious people, people too interested in others, especially those without baggage, and—yes, a girl in a black coat, my own age. I saw her reaching into a man’s coat. “Hey, you!” She looked up, startled, and the man clapped his hand over his pocket. She hurried away into the crowd. “Wait! Stop that girl!” I fought my way through the throng, following her hat, her pigtails, but I couldn’t catch her. It was like a terrible dream where you run through mud or a flood. That figure, always moving away, always vanishing.
Li
ght lingered on broad, quiet Furshtatskaya Street and the slushy melting snow as I returned to the flat. What was I going to do? I should go up to Kamenny Island and tell him, I lost the package. Why did you ever send me? You who know so much, you should have known better. But what was the point of trudging up all that way to deliver bad news? He would find me eventually. He would find me and kill me. I hated to go home, but what choice did I have? I vowed I would never leave the apartment ever again.
Everything looked worse—the dirty courtyard, the warming staircase that now stank of rotting fish and mold, the women in the kitchen drinking tea from Mother’s Limoges coffee service at the table on which Vaula had once rolled out her huge sheets of pastry dough. They stared at me as if I had a goat balanced on my head. I was used to having to walk the gauntlet of barbed remarks, especially once we began cooking meat. But blessedly, nobody said a thing. Not even the hard-faced blonde spoke, or the tall gaunt one, nursing her baby at a flat pap. Even the Red Guardsman’s woman, chopping a carrot, said nothing.
A strange smell permeated the hall as I walked back toward Mother’s room, a floral scent unlikely but familiar. One of Mother’s spiritualist friends? I knocked wearily on the door. Avdokia opened up quickly, glanced down the hall, and waved me in with great urgency. “Thank God,” she said. Slava Bogu.
The wall of scent hit me. Mother stood near the table by the window, her hand over her mouth. She looked as if she’d seen her own death. A great heap of blue hyacinths buried the tabletop, their scent replacing all the air in the room. Hyacinths, each petal sighing its secret Greek sigh—alas.