“I’ll make it up to you. I swear I will,” he whispered.
I held out my foot, still clad in a boot. “Pull,” I said.
My smile reached him at last. The sorrow and shame on his elfin face retreated, the way a wet pavement dried in the sunshine. He just wasn’t made for regret.
Suddenly my boots were off, then my trousers, replaced by magical hands and gifted mouth. This is why I’d survived. I wrapped my thighs around him, knowing again that this was my church, my redemption. It wasn’t the same act as I’d been enduring with Varvara, not even like Genya’s loving efforts. As we rolled on that narrow bed, I knew this was why one needed a body, why it was worth all the pain, the hunger and harm it was prey to, why the angels envied us.
I felt sorry for the maid, Aglaya, in the room next door, to have to listen to such pleasure. I did my best to stifle my cries, and made Kolya stuff my coat behind the iron bed frame so it wouldn’t crash into the wall like a bull kicking its pen to pieces. Luckily the other inhabitants were elderly and hard of hearing. If they could have heard us at all, what a scandal! I imagined Aglaya mortified in her straight little bed, praying under her breath. But at least she’d never have the nerve to relate to her mistress the horrors she’d endured—that those boys had fucked like lions in the desert, all night long.
64 Vikzhel
I WOKE TO THE sight of Kolya dressing in the tender morning light. It fell on his shoulders, caressing the light hairs, the freckles. Even that milky scrap of sun wanted him, wanted to run its tongue along his arms, his squared-off chest with its fan of hair, that narrowed waist, leaner than it had ever been. He bent down to kiss me. “Go back to sleep. I’ve got a few things to do.”
I pulled him to me, rubbing the crown of my head against him, like a cat in a patch of grass. “No, stay here.”
“I can’t. I’ve got some business.” He pressed his lips to my brow. “I’ll be back, don’t worry.”
I groped for the binding cloth that had fallen to the floor, sat up, and began wrapping myself into it—second nature, compressing myself into my armor. “No. I’m coming with you.”
He grabbed my wrists, shoved me back on the pillows, and lay on me, holding me there, a delicious captivity. “Nyet,” he whispered and kissed my nose.
Hurt feelings were a pain Misha wasn’t used to experiencing. I was so unused to being a girl. Compared to all the other pain, this one, Marina’s, was almost nostalgic. Only Kolya could hurt me this way. I tried to buck him off. “I didn’t come here for you to tie me to a post whenever you want. Leave if you don’t want me. You’ll never see me again.”
He kissed my eyes, my mouth. “Don’t be melodramatic. I’ll be back by noon. We’ll go celebrate the workers’ state.” He let me go, then worked his head through the neck of his sweater.
I went back to binding my breasts, pulling the cloth tight, as if it were my resolve. After last night, Misha’s rigid masculine form seemed intolerable. My body had returned to the feminine and resisted confinement.
“You’re not listening,” he said.
“No, I’m not.” I slipped on my trousers and shoved my feet into my poor socks, my broken boots. What I would give for a pair of socks like the ones we used to make at Count Bobo’s.
The exasperation painting his quick, restless face settled into resignation. He helped me on with my shirt, delicately, as if it were an evening cape. I buttoned my tunic as he dug my coat out from where we’d wadded it behind the headboard. “You’re being ridiculous, you know.”
“We’re going to do some beezneez.” I crammed my cap on my head. “So? Let’s go.”
We slipped from the flat, snores arising from every room. I grabbed Mina’s tripod on the way. Even last night with the hooligans seemed weeks ago.
Outside, we could hear distant noise, though Shpalernaya Street was quiet. The Tauride Palace with its columns and its dome—the seat of the Duma, the home of the Constituent Assembly—lay silent. Whatever happened now, a new chapter was beginning in my life. We crossed through the garden—the open parkways where as a child I’d thrown that snowball at Kolya in a fit of precocious jealousy, and which I watched with such yearning through the window of my prison. The sky stretched fresh, a pale blue, scrubbed and starched as Vaula’s aprons.
Proletarian families on holiday were filling Znamenskaya Square, now called Insurrection, their normally drooping heads held high, and why not? The World Revolution was at hand. At last it might be safe to look beyond cold and hunger to a new day. I felt a twinge of guilt for abandoning Mina to all those speeches. But I was with Kolya now, and we had business to attend to. At my side, he stretched and sighed, speaking to me as men do, facing front. “So wonderful to be back. I never thought I’d see it again. What a day. And you!”
I felt it, too, but I didn’t like being down here at the station, out in the open with Kolya, even disguised. This was prime territory for the Archangel and his men. “Shouldn’t we walk farther apart?”
“You were the one who wanted to come along,” he said. “Getting nervous?”
He bought pirozhky from a street vendor, and we walked through the crowd, watching the revolutionary circus of holidaymakers, modernist constructions, agitprop players. “What a farce. I hope they like what they’re getting.” He finished his pie, brushed his coat off, and tipped his head toward the pillared entrance to the station. “Follow me.”
Happy as I was, the sudden realization that my life was completely in Kolya’s unpredictable hands whistled through me like a wind through a too-light jacket. I did not want to go back into that station.
“Cold feet?”
“Davai,” I said.
The darkness of the terminal after the morning light left me temporarily blinded. Suddenly I felt the sly inquiry of a pickpocket’s fingers. I twisted to catch sight of my assailant, a girl of around twelve, and made a half second’s contact with her blue eyes gazing back at me, round and hard as quartz. Then she stuck out her tongue, a little girl again, and laughed before diving back into the crowd. The orphans of the revolution, left behind by starving families or by cholera or typhus or just lost in the madness, wandered the streets in gangs. Sometimes the girls worked as prostitutes. The boys scraped together a living as thieves, lookouts, or second-story men, like my hooligan friends from the Rostral Column. The station was lousy with them—the very reason people had been so happy to employ me as a porter and watcher of luggage.
“Still have your bankroll, Misha?” Kolya asked.
“Call me Count Orlov.” But I did still have Mina’s Kodak tucked under my arm.
All around us was the unmistakable station smell of stale coal, discouragement, fear, electricity, and unwashed bodies. People sat on their bundles, watched for thieves, or else stared off longingly toward the end of the tracks from which they hoped help would come. Trains ran seldom now, and the soldiers took priority—the new Red Army, a million men under arms preparing to escort the World Revolution to the ball. What was in their heads, these anxious escapees—images of the south? Of food? The lands east of the Urals, where the Whites ruled? Some were heading to villages, others just hoping for a corner of a room in Moscow and a job sweeping a government office. I took out Mina’s camera and snapped a picture, then followed Kolya through the human reef, at once thanking God for the unbelievable good fortune of having found him again, and praying for the wits with which to withstand it.
We inched our way through the bundles and the unhappy pacers, and back into the light and air at the end of the platform. Kolya jumped down onto the tracks. Instinctively he held up his hand to steady my descent, but that wouldn’t do for Misha. I leaped down and followed his jaunty saunter out onto the cinders and into the vast train yards behind the station.
I had often seen these yards, of course, these rusted cars, but only from a train window. I’d always dismissed them as a mere unsightly jumble to be endured before the onset of green countryside. But as we crunched on foot through a wilderness of snaki
ng iron, cross ties and coal stations, signals and ruined trains, the tracks separating and coming together like a frozen quadrille, I realized it was a world unto itself. Huts for the signalmen, water towers. Kolya raised his hand to the workingmen. He was known here, or else he made it seem so. “All right, you’re my brother,” Kolya said. “Mikhail Bogdanovich Mikhailov. My mother’s second husband’s brat.”
“Brother.” I threw an arm around his broad shoulder in what I hoped was a comradely way. “I could eat you up,” I whispered in his ear.
“Eyes are everywhere,” he said.
I dropped my arm. “So, Brother Kolya, you have a plan?”
He picked up a rock and threw it, hitting the side of a train car with a satisfying clang. “Stick with me, Misha, we’ll go to the top of the Himalayas and have conferences with the Buddha himself.”
That I doubted. But for the first time, we would truly be together. Not just meetings after school, brief, passionate rendezvous. I would be with him when we awoke and when we went to sleep. I would know where he went, what he did, who he saw. He was mine now, this clever, impossible man, all of him, delight and danger and even mundanity, if there was any. We marched a mile or more down the sidings, and there, lurching and swaying like a lumbering pachyderm, a train grumbled toward us, heading for the station at such a rate that you could have jumped off and jumped back on again without having to catch your breath.
And people were jumping, hundreds of people with sacks on their backs, struggling under the weight of bulging loads. Bagmen, the villains of Soviet propaganda, the rats in the food distribution system. Opportunists, profiteers taking advantage of the brutal hunger of Petrograd. It was they who were breaking the backs of the soviets, siphoning off much of the food that should have been coming into the Petrocommune warehouses for direct free distribution to the people. But it wasn’t so easy to judge them—there were regular people here, too, workers who’d had to leave their factories to go out into the countryside to forage. I even saw office workers with their suitcases. It didn’t matter if you had ration cards; there wasn’t always food to fulfill them. And this was why. The flip side of the Revolutionary Carnival was scarcity and the means, any means, to alleviate it. Everywhere you saw the signs, even printed on our ration cards: HE WHO STANDS FOR THE FREE MARKET OPPOSES THE FREEDOM OF THE PEOPLE.
Watching the bagmen disappearing into the wayside trees, I heard Arkady in my mind: Never underestimate the genius of crime. We find a way when there is no way.
And this was the world I was joining. This shadow world.
I knew this had been going on all along, but I’d never seen it so starkly—the sheer numbers. No one met anyone else’s eyes. Now I could understand what a flood this traffic represented—the Cheka could only stop the smallest part of it. The rest got through. But surely Kolya must have something better in mind—he hadn’t come all this way to introduce me to this hideous hand-to-mouth trade.
I waited for him to say something, but he just kept walking, his hands in his pockets. I could see why he hadn’t wanted me to come. If I hadn’t seen this, this murky world of speculation and profiteering he lived in, I’d have gone on thinking of him as the clever fellow, gone on delighting in his trickery. Was I ready for this?
Now smaller stationlets appeared, other platforms, other sights, signal posts and coaling stations. We arrived at a small wooden shack, some sort of train official’s. Kolya knocked on the Dutch door. A slight man in his forties opened the upper half. He sported a patchy beard and hair cut straight across his forehead, as though he’d done it in the mirror that morning. He saw us and paled.
“Comrade Vorchenko.” Kolya grinned. The man stepped back, clearly less than excited to see my fox, who nevertheless took the liberty of opening the lower door and walking in. I followed him. Kolya shut both doors and locked them.
“I knew it was going to be a bad day,” said the little man. “The moment I woke up. Who’s the puppy?”
“My kid brother.” Kolya pulled up a stool that sat under a counter by the closed door. “We find ourselves in need of a bit of Vikzhel help, Vorchik.”
Vikzhel, the railwaymen’s union. They were the masters of Russian transport and, since last October, the sole arbiter of the Russian rails. They’d been essential to the victories of February and October by keeping troops from entering the city and putting down the nascent revolutions. So this was Kolya’s secret: he was hooked into the railway network. My lover, my devil, lounged, easy, one leg on the ground, the other displaying the sole of a worn boot. Leave it to Kolya to know the secret doors of possibility in a world where nothing seemed possible. Vikzhel. Every other union was in trouble, the Bolsheviks draining them of their independent power. What did workers need unions for, Varvara said, if the whole country belonged to them already? Whenever there was a strike, the workers were accused of being declassed, their unions vilified. But the Bolsheviks could do nothing against Vikzhel. Nothing moved in the country without the railway union’s consent.
Of course. How else would Kolya have been able to move about the country so freely? Yet it obviously wasn’t out of friendship. The small man kept his distance and the lines on his face seemed deeper than when he’d first seen us. I hated that we represented trouble to someone. “It’s not so easy now,” he said. “As I’m sure you must have heard, this new Railway Cheka is applying a lot of pressure.”
Kolya’s smile disappeared. It was shocking, the speed at which his affable demeanor changed and the laughing blue eyes turned steely. This was a face I didn’t know, a hard man’s face. Then, as fast as it had left, the smile returned, and with it the likable, winning, persuasive Kolya. “Vorchenko, clearly your memory’s better than that. Haven’t I done Vikzhel a favor or two? A certain stationmaster specifically?”
The man blanched white as a mushroom. “Aren’t you tired of sucking the scum off the bottom of the world, Shurov? And now you’re dragging your kid brother into it? Very nice. Nice family business.” But all his fight seemed to have gone out of him and he sank into a chair behind a squat, ugly desk.
Dust motes floated in the light from the dirty window. I yearned to be out of this hut and in the freshness of the morning, but clearly Kolya was not leaving until he had extracted whatever concession he was pressing for. He brought his steepled fingers to his lips. “The thing about scum is that there’s always plenty of it.”
The man sighed.
“How soon can we get out of here?” Kolya asked.
The man listlessly flicked through a tattered log on the desk. “This one’s heading for Vilna. It’ll be out of here in about four hours. Say, fifteen hundred hours.”
“How about the Moscow train?”
“Half midnight. But security will be tight, a lot of bigwigs on it, going back to their big fat Bolshevik tit in the Kremlin after the parades. It’s up to you.”
“What else?” Kolya asked, looking at the raveling cuff of his corduroy jacket.
“Tomorrow morning there’s a milk run to Vologda. Four a.m.”
Vologda. Tikhvin was on that line.
“Track?” he asked casually.
“Eight. Nobody gives a damn about Vologda. Or take Vilna and be damned with you.”
I tried to look indifferent, picking at the raw wood that sided the stationmaster’s hut. But inside, my heart was thrashing about like a big fish in a small net. We were leaving Petrograd. And tonight—or in the small hours of the morning. I hardly heard the rest of their conversation. Kolya and I, leaving the rest of the world behind. Was the fish leaping with joy or terror—or something more primitive, an indistinguishable emotion that just thrashed with the electricity of change? I’d been waiting for this moment my whole life. What if I hadn’t accompanied him this morning, if I’d been a good girl and done what he asked? Would he have even told me he was leaving? Would he have feigned some excuse and jumped on the train by himself, not wanting me to see the true nature of his business?
I was ready to come with him
. What was left for me here? Mina, Varvara…Arkady. Yet I felt like a traitor. This was my Petersburg, my home. Vilna meant Poland and a run for the West. If we went west, we might never return. Vologda? Maybe he was trying to get to the Urals, to the White-controlled territories of Siberia. It terrified me that with Kolya I could well end up on the wrong side of this war. Why could no choice ever be clear and simple in life, just one single good thing without a shadow?
I watched him pull a packet from his magician’s coat and throw it onto the desk. “Here. Thought you’d like something better to smoke than back issues of Delo Naroda.”
Vorchenko didn’t find that particularly funny. The People’s Cause, the SR paper, had long been banned by the Bolsheviks. Vikzhel had supported the SRs. The stationmaster pulled out from the shag tobacco a fat roll of bills, pocketed the money, and stuck the tobacco into his pipe. Kolya reached out to light it, and I noticed how Vorchenko flinched, then flushed when he saw what it was—just a lighter made out of stolen pipe fittings, which were the biggest industry in Petrograd at the moment. Sheepish, he let Kolya light his pipe. We sat for a moment as the Vikzhel man puffed away, his former irritation giving way to a more resigned posture now that our business had been conducted.
“Fighting’s died down around Samara,” the man said.
“Komuch didn’t put up much of a fight.” My father’s friends, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly. Suddenly my big ears were open.
The man leaned back in his seat. “Now they’ve thrown their lot in with Kolchak. To hell with them.” Admiral Kolchak, with his tall fur hat and his Cossack coat, was the charismatic dictator of the Siberian Whites. So the moderate government at Samara, the last hope of the liberals, had come under the wing of the reactionary Siberian dictatorship. Varvara had said all along it would happen.
“What do they say about the Ukraine?” Kolya asked. Yes, the south, where so many of my classmates’ families had gone, and Kolya’s aristocrats were attempting to go, where there was food. The Germans were done—we’d heard that yesterday—so what would happen with their occupation of the Ukraine?