Her Red star was rising, shooting upward like a rocket. At nineteen, she was already a commissar. She was ambitious, always had to be first, best in everything. I remember how angry she used to get when I beat her in chess. In many ways she was a very poor Communist. She drew the covers up to her neck, kicking her feet like a child. “Come on, it’s nice and warm under here.”
I peeled off my boots and hung my coat on a peg, climbed into bed to undress under the covers. The springs bucked and squeaked with our combined weight, sloppy as an ungirthed saddle. But it was warm. I wondered if she skimped on the heat on purpose. I took off my shirt and let her help me unbind my breasts—such a relief. Misha converted to Marina again. Varvara ran her fingers over my compressed skin, the angry red marks, kissed my neck, and turned off the light. As a lover she was so unlike her normal certain, direct, unapologetic self. She needed me and was abashed by her own passion. Her hands on my skin were rough and dry as a washerwoman’s, her breath slightly bitter. She had no sense of rhythm or humor and her gracelessness was worthy of pity. If I ever chose a woman for a lover, it would be someone like Galina Krestovskaya, flirtatious and lively and sensuous. But when someone pulled you from a Cheka cell, you said thank you. As she kissed me, I never forgot that she was also capable of shooting me in the head. The tiger purred for now. If I didn’t cross her, this would be the safest place in Petrograd.
“I wish we could be together tomorrow,” she whispered, fingering my nipples, though the flesh was sensitive after being bound all day.
“I’ll see you in all your triumph,” I said. She would accompany Comrade Ravich, the pro-Cheka commissar of the interior for the northern region, to the unveiling of Marx’s statue in front of Smolny. Ravich was another woman who—after years of underground activity—had risen to an unheard-of position of leadership. Varvara adored her. Mina and I would photograph the events, and all the bigwigs would be there—the leadership of the whole Petrograd Oblast, called the Northern Commune. “Maybe I should put Zinoviev”—the Petrograd party boss—“between Ravich and Lilina and watch him sweat,” I joked. Mina had heard that Ravich was Zinoviev’s mistress and that his wife, Zlata Lilina, head of the women’s department, would also be there.
“That’s not funny,” Varvara said, resting her sharp chin on my shoulder. “The people look to us as examples. Comrade Zinoviev of all people should be more rigorous.”
“They’re Bolsheviks. It doesn’t mean they’re saints,” I said.
“We ask people to sacrifice. We should sacrifice as well,” she replied, outlining the letters of Arkady’s love poem incised in my back. She couldn’t stop touching them, tracing them, then smoothing the skin over, as one smoothed down a new sheet of paper. Yet there they stayed. “We’ve heard von Princip’s men are abandoning him like rats,” she whispered in my ear. The Archangel… is not himself now. “When we get him, would you like to shoot him yourself?”
I burrowed into the old quilts. Yes, I think I would. I would do it just to make sure it was done. I knew he wouldn’t plead. He would look me right in the eye as I did it.
“We’re close.” Her breath was warm, her frizzy hair against my temple, arm around my waist. “I’ll save him for you. An anniversary present.”
What strange days. I turned onto my back. Though I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t want her to do it. I could never tell anyone that. Who would understand? But I felt him so strongly—his brilliance, his driving insanity, his loneliness. He’d revealed himself to me, a soul weirder and more trapped than anyone’s. I wanted his soul and his dark self to meet.
She traced the line of my brow, my eyes, my lips. “Think, one year ago we were standing in your father’s hall.”
Yes, my unholy shame, my father’s fury, and her glee at having ruined my family in a single stroke. Ah, the things we’d done for the sound of the word—Revolution. I’d been hypnotized by it. We all had. But I’d pictured change, not terror. I had imagined that the bourgeoisie would mend their ways. Not that one day they would literally be crushed—people I knew. People of goodwill who had nevertheless lived at the expense of others.
“To think I almost didn’t find you again.” She buried her face in my short, chemical-smelling hair. “I still want to cry when I think of you in that cell, covered with blood.” Pressing herself to me. Her long body, her breasts, loose and surprisingly large, her wide hard hips, her knee between my legs. Kissing my breasts, my navel, wanting to taste me, wanting to bring me off. She wanted me the way I’d wanted Kolya. How cruel life was. Poor Varvara could not raise my pulse on her own. She came back up, holding me like I was some treasure from a sunken ship. Oh those wasted kisses. My deceitful self. I took over, touching her the way I touched myself, until the sighs came, the catch in the breath. I bit her, slapped her, pulled her hair. She loved it. I held her wrists together and pressed myself onto her, my thigh between hers, hers between mine and we brought ourselves off together.
I fell into a dead sleep, only to be awakened by a sharp, hard percussion. Were we under attack? Were the Germans here?
Varvara leaped out of bed and ran to the window, flung it wide. “It’s the fortress!” The guns went off, Boom! Boom! I threw on my shirt and joined her, barefoot on the cold boards. Three, four, five…her arm around my shoulder, mine at her waist. Twenty-five cannon shots from the Peter and Paul Fortress announcing that the first anniversary of the revolution had arrived.
The celebration uncoiled like the spring of an enormous clock, an endless conveyor belt of intricately meshed gears—what Enlightenment Commissar Lunacharsky called the Revolutionary Carnival. Streets bulged with crowds, battalions of workers marched past, arm in arm, singing “The Internationale,” and “Dubinushka,” and “The Worker’s Marseillaise.” Each district provided its own section of the ongoing procession, complete with banners, marching band, and orators as it wound through the city ten abreast. Every bridge had become a work of art, replacing the old railings and ironwork with the colors and forms of the Future. It was hard to hate these goings on, so long had it been since I’d detected any sign of hope anywhere.
Mina and I worked together like right and left hand to capture this moment on film. By midday, like a surgical nurse, I could anticipate where she would want the tripod erected, what the frame should hold. I could get the camera onto the subject, have it ready to go within a minute, and stand sentry to make sure nobody got in the way of the lens or jostled her while she hunched under the cloth. I kept a stern eye on the film case so that it didn’t walk off by itself.
She’d calculated her film stores, planned her shots, mapped out the day’s schedule for maximum economy of motion with a precision that would have made Brusilov himself proud. She refused to be inveigled by serendipitous tableaux—empty shop windows enlivened with posters: BRUSH YOUR TEETH DAILY! Middle-aged women under the banner of the TSIGANY TOBACCO WORKS, marching arm in arm, eight abreast, smoking! She wouldn’t waste the film she’d been allocated on such trivial moments. Sadly, she hadn’t her father’s eye. Worthy subjects were limited to speakers at assorted district soviets, artfully decorated squares, and elaborate factory banners—PUBLIC WINE DEPOT NO. 2, OKTOBRSKAYA FABRIKA METALWORKERS.
At noon we moved over to Smolny, where we photographed the momentous unveiling of a statue of Marx on his plinth. He gazed over the heads of the gathered commissars, looking toward Insurrection Square and the train station, hand resting inside his coat as though he were checking for his tickets.
Up by the inner circle of party brass in the autumn drizzle, Varvara quietly stood beside Comrade Ravich. How solemn my friend looked! It was supposed to be a celebration. Loosen up, Varvara! Ravich, tall and striking in a soft velvet hat, stood well away from Comrade Zinoviev, who was more youthful up close than he came across in pictures, with wild, thick hair that every caricaturist had drawn at some time or other. So this was the man responsible for the madness of Red Terror. He hadn’t even wanted to go forward with the October Revolution at the time. I c
ould have shot him easily if I’d been armed, though I sensed the Cheka presence was thick in the crowd, especially around the many dignitaries who’d come up from Moscow for the celebration. Nonetheless, their desertion remained a sore spot in every Petrograder’s heart.
Luckily, there was no question of arranging them for a photograph. These were the leaders of Red October—you didn’t tell them how to pose. All I had to do was make sure they stayed in the frame. Ravich, skeptical, with soft hat shading dark eyes, stood to the left, and a handsome man next to her, and a fat one, looking like he had a hot pirozhok in each pocket. My guess: the commissar for provisions. Zlata Lilina looked small and fragile compared to her rival, though none of those old comrades could be very fragile given what they’d gone through to arrive at this day. Zinoviev stood next to her, and behind them Lunacharsky stood upright and proud, his bald pate gleaming with the success of his Revolutionary Carnival. This was his day, shepherd of Russian Culture, single-handedly fighting to keep monuments intact and artists alive. He beamed like a proud Scottie bitch over her pups.
After the photographs, the speeches began. Zinoviev stepped up to the dais to announce news even better than yesterday’s. “Today, we’ve learned, the kaiser has abdicated. The Germans are out of the war!” The cheers rebounded above the packed crowd. “The triumph of the German working class is inevitable,” he thundered, his dark frizz bobbing, and I remembered his other role as head of the Third International, the spear point of World Revolution. “In Vienna, in Budapest, in Prague, Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies are taking their places. A red flag flies today over Berlin! Can the same flag over Paris be far off?”
After the applause died away, a dignitary from Sovnarkom joked with the men around him. “You heard that in a year’s time, there’ll be just five kings left? The king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds, the king of spades…and the king of England.”
No kings. No empires. I needed a moment just to absorb all this, but Mina was already taking down the camera. “Hurry up,” she said. “We’re due at Uritsky Square in half an hour.” I admired how quickly she absorbed the latest nomenclature. Palace Square had been renamed for Comrade Uritsky as the place of his martyrdom. We packed up our gear and flew down to the palace to photograph the speakers at the Alexander Column.
In the square, constructivist paintings had transformed the grand autocratic buildings into a spectacular vision, a city of the Future. The Alexander Column was a geometric blossom, while all around the circumference of the plaza, murals forty feet high proclaimed the new realities. FACTORIES FOR THE WORKERS. LAND FOR THE LABORER. HE WHO WAS NOTHING WILL BE EVERYTHING. In the midst of the crowd, agitprop groups on flatbeds enacted melodramas and acrobatic feats for the throngs, slapstick comedy with a revolutionary flair. How I longed to be up there with them. This was the fun we had not seen since the days of the Provisional Government. Lunacharsky had been right. The people needed this. They loved it.
I could hear Anton in my head, the dour ass: It’s not art, it’s just advertising. But the players were wonderful and I laughed right along with the crowds to see the agile clowns juggle colored balls, demonstrating how the kaiser and the Entente had juggled our world. Mina for once agreed on the importance of capturing this scene.
By early twilight, the crowds began to turn toward the theaters for free concerts and plays. Thousands of workers streamed through the doors. Those not lucky enough to have tickets moved toward the Neva to watch the fleet preparing for the evening’s spectacular. I wanted to see it all, disappear into the crowd like a fish into the sea.
“That’s it.” Mina yawned, stretched, cracked her neck left and right. “Thank God. My head is ready to explode. Big day tomorrow.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“Let’s go see the ships.” I didn’t want to miss them. I was as eager as a child.
“I’ve seen ships. We’ve lost our light. I can’t shoot in the dark, and I need to get off my feet. Let’s go.” She picked up the film box and turned for home.
“Old lady. Who cares about your feet? This is history!”
“This”—she lifted the box with our exposures from the day—“is history. And I care about my feet. We have a big day tomorrow, remember?”
I shook her by the shoulder, trying to loosen her up. “Come on, Mina. Sailors! Fireworks! You can’t go home now.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” she snapped, shrugging me off. “Do whatever you want to do, Misha, like you always do. But get this stuff back to the studio first.”
How she enjoyed ordering me around. He Who Was Nothing Will Be Everything. I shouldered my waltzing lady and we pushed our way back to Liteiny, with the entire Red city shoving in the other direction.
Back at the Katzev flat, Sofia Yakovlevna was waiting, the samovar steamed. I could smell dinner cooking. Nostalgia gripped me as we carried the equipment back into the studio, dropped the big camera and its tripod, the wooden case. But the noise from the crowds, the pipes and whistles, called me. I had to go—it was a physical yearning. “Give me a camera,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”
“You must be joking. I’m not going to give you a camera.”
“Your old Kodak? I bet you still have it.” A little box camera with bellows her father had given to her on her thirteenth birthday. She’d only used it one or two times to please him—never dreaming that someday she would support her entire family with a camera.
“I don’t know if it even works. And the film’s easily four years old. You’d have to use a very long exposure in the dark. I don’t think you’d get anything.”
“Let me try,” I said. “What would you lose?”
She dropped into the studio prop chair, a plump tufted armchair from the 1890s. “A camera?”
“I’ll fight them to the death for it, as the devil is my witness. And if I’m lucky, you’ll have photos like nobody else’s.”
She sighed, but she pushed herself out of the chair and into the darkroom.
The little leather-cased Kodak sat on a high shelf next to a magazine of film, under a coating of dust. She wiped it off, slowly, then loaded it for me. She explained about the aperture and the exposure, blah blah. “The tripod’s there—no, the little one. But don’t you lose that camera. I swear, Marina, I’ll drown you in the developing tank.”
61 Hooligans
OVER THE NEVA’S CROWDED shores, a shining dark rolled out like a bolt of silk taffeta, no longer recognizable as our poor Soviet night, homely as a darned sock. This was something we’d dreamed after going to bed hungry. A dream of ships transformed into floating cities of light, strands glittering between smokestacks and masts like spiderwebs in new grass, the black water transformed to lightning. Such sound! Cheering, whistles blowing, pipes and rattles, bouncing off the tsarist facades like kopeks off a taut sheet. The ships’ searchlights wrote their angular signatures across the sky, sweeping over crowds so dense they looked like fields of dusky wheat. Mina was right—no way could I capture this with chemicals and celluloid. Yet I would try, if only to prove her wrong.
What would have been the perfect vantage point—Liteiny Bridge—was now impassable. I’d have to sprout wings and fly to it. I worked my way instead down to the Nikolaevsky Bridge and crossed it inch by inch, using my tripod like a sorcerer’s staff to part the woolly masses, those worn and hungry faces full of light. Hard to begrudge such pleasure. Everyone smiled at me, even as I shoved. When was the last time we’d seen such smiles?
An hour of determined force brought me onto the Strelka, the tip of Vasilievsky Island, wedged between the Bolshaya Neva and the Malaya Neva, with its view into the heart of the river. Before me lay the grand jewel of Petersburg cracked open like a walnut—the Winter Palace, the Admiralty with its constructivist flags and spire, the Peter and Paul Fortress, prison and palace. All lit up, no rationing tonight. But the mansions on the English Embankment turned their blind eyes to the fete, resentful, lost in the past. I tho
ught of that long-ago summer night—or was it only last year?—when I walked here with Genya in the small flame of new love, our heads full of revolution. Well, we had gotten our wish. I never suspected how it would unfold—you changed the world, but then the world came back and changed you.
I saw that people had climbed the bases of the Rostral Columns, those red granite lighthouses, each guarded by gargantuan statues representing the four great Russian rivers, and studded with the prows of bronze boats that in Viking days would have been those of captured ships, lit with signal fires. If I could get up there, I’d have a clear shot over the heads of the crowd. I wriggled and pushed my way through a mass growing denser by the moment until I’d reached the muscular statue of the Dnieper—or was it the Volga? Resting the unwieldy tripod on its giant lap the way a cripple holds his crutch on a tram, I scaled the bronze river god to the granite pedestal upon which the column stood. A sturdy man above me gave me a last hand up. Others made room. Looking down on the tripod, I saw that bringing it had been a mistake. Well, Mina had said, “Don’t you lose that camera.” She said nothing about the stand.
And it was worth the struggle. From up here I could see the breathtaking vista, fortress on the left, palace on the right, and half the Baltic fleet floating in the middle. I felt like a prince overlooking his birthright. My city had not died. I felt pride and an overwhelming nostalgia in my tightly bound breast.
Then a small shower of something fell on my head. Sunflower-seed hulls. I peered up and, in the lowest projecting prow, saw human arms twenty feet above the crowd. Another spray of sunflower hulls. Someone had climbed up to one of the symbolic bronze boats—every Petersburg child’s fantasy.