But Varvara barely heard her. She was just getting started. “The Germans don’t have to pay anybody. Are you joking?” she shouted. “We’re losing the war all by ourselves!”
Behind her, a raw-boned baba with a mottled face leaned in. “I heard the grand dukes are sending all the gold to Germany—in coffins of dead prisoners of war. For when Germany wins the war.” I hadn’t heard this one yet. The rumors never ceased to amaze me.
The old Jew hater revved up again. “If only the tsar would come back from the front. He doesn’t know what’s happening here.”
“He doesn’t?” Varvara spat. “With police spies everywhere? Nothing happens in this country he doesn’t know about.”
With the mention of police spies, the women quickly dropped their gazes and clamped their lips together.
Suddenly, a woman shouted back to the queue from the bakery’s doorway. “They say there’s no more bread. They’re completely out.”
The women pressed closer. “Sure they are.” “Hoarders!” “Thieves!”
“They’ve still got food!” “Speculators!” “If we had a fat wallet, they’d find some!”
The women crowded forward as someone inside struggled vainly to lock the doors. The women beat on the metal, shouting, “We want bread!” “Hoarders!” “Scum!”
I thought that we should leave, too. Something was about to break. Women put their shoulders to the door, ten of them, twelve. They heaved against it—one, two, three—and finally burst into the shop. In a moment, they dragged the owner out, a tubby, bald man in an apron, bellowing and threatening, waving his meaty arms to try to free himself from the crowd of babushkas. “There’s nothing, I swear on my children’s heads! You can’t squeeze blood from a rock!”
“Yes, but you can squeeze our blood!” a woman cried out. “Speculator!” Someone hit him over the head with her handbag, and they began to claw at him. It was terrible. The poor man could hardly help it that he’d run out of bread. Others who’d rushed inside wrestled a big bag out into the doorway, tore it open, and began scooping flour into upturned skirts and aprons, into purses and hats. There was flour after all! There was flour—and sugar, too! Here were more women, more sacks, everything covered in flour. Women hunched over, scurrying away with their prizes. How stupid, how credulous I’d been for having believed the man when he said he had nothing, for having worried about him! For people like you, things appear by magic from under the counter, from a back room. I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting. He had been holding back flour for the rich, who could pay double, quadruple the price, just as Varvara had said. A speculator! In wartime!
The melee spread out as the infuriated women broke into other shops. “We want justice!” “We want bread!” Varvara was out of her mind with excitement, shouting, “Bread and justice!” I knew she thought of this as a righteous demonstration of legitimate anger. Maybe in the abstract I might have thought so, too, but right now it was becoming a dangerous mob. I pulled her into a doorway where we could watch without being arrested if the police started rounding people up. Varvara’s burning eyes memorized the scene. She trembled like a warhorse, thrilled and alert at the mayhem. I could feel how she itched to run out among them, breaking windows and flinging flour and dry goods into the arms of the crowd.
Constables soon arrived, sorely outnumbered. The women moved around them. One grabbed a woman and punched her. Right in the face! In broad daylight. I clapped my hand over my mouth and shrank back deeper into the doorway as other women surged to her defense, grabbing him, tearing at his uniform. He’d lost his hat. Another constable knocked a woman down, then kicked her again and again with his heavy boot. I was paralyzed. Could this be real? Could this be happening in my Petrograd? I clung to Varvara in the doorway. “We should go.”
“You go,” Varvara said, her eyes glittering. “This is history. We’re watching history.”
Then I heard the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobbles, and eight mounted Cossacks burst into view, plowing headlong into the crowd. The women screamed and scattered, running in all directions. The sound—hooves, and blows, and the cries of women…right here on Liteiny Prospect, where my mother bought flowers. This was the reason the people never protested, I realized, watching the Cossacks strike human flesh—unarmed women—with their cudgels. This was the reason people put up with so much. This was the whip at the end of the arm.
At last we fled, the two of us slipping around the corner into a courtyard, then into the courtyard behind that, unshoveled, an uneven rut of a path leading us through. I rarely went this far off the main boulevard. After a few courtyards, I didn’t even know where I was anymore. We came to a dead end in a tiny ten-by-ten courtyard, where a pasty-faced woman lounging in a doorway with a young girl drenched us in her laughter. Something hit a wall behind us. We didn’t turn to see what it was. We turned and scrambled back until we found an opening onto a quiet side street—no one running, a dog sniffing at a pile of snow, a horse pulling a wagon piled with rags.
Varvara hugged me, twirling me off my feet, kissing my cheek, as if we’d just passed a school exam. “They’re not sitting still for it. Oh God, did you see?” I thought of the baker’s bloody face. The way the policeman kicked that woman. Had Varvara incited it all, ramping the women up about that ugly pamphlet? Her delight frightened me. People had been hurt! Why was she dancing around like a lunatic?
We found Mina sitting alone in the third row of the theater, eating Jordan almonds out of a twist of paper. “I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said, moving down in the row. Now she eyed us more closely. “What happened?”
“It was a riot,” Varvara said. “You should have stayed.”
I sat with my friends, facing the flickering screen, but I didn’t even notice Kholodnaya’s performance. I was still vibrating with the violence I had just seen—not a shooting in a detective kinofilm, but right in front of me, blood and flour and the music of smashing glass.
One didn’t have to get very far from Nevsky Prospect after all. The war was coming to us.
7 A Sleigh Waited
OUTSIDE THE TAGANTSEV ACADEMY, a sleigh waited. In the low passenger seat, a young officer sat with a rug across his lap, snow piling on his astrakhan cap and the shoulders of his steel-blue army greatcoat. We were accustomed to the sight of young officers waiting for senior girls. The horse stamped, the bells of its harness cheering the dull, powdery air. Small puffs of vapor rose from its dark nostrils. I froze in place on the steps. Varvara collided with me, and Mina dropped her book. This was not just any officer. That rosy, well-shaved face with its frosted-over moustache did its best to maintain its casual air and not burst out laughing.
I didn’t let myself run to him. I had waited enough—he could wait for me now. “What are you doing here?” I called from the steps.
He unhooked the bearskin rug. “Thought you might like to go for a spin. Join me in a cup of hot chocolate. A soldier’s dream of home.” The horse stamped in the cold. Who else would know it was my favorite color of horse—dappled gray with dark, intellectual eyes? The driver on his high seat dusted himself off. I could feel the girls behind me whispering. It would be all over school by tomorrow. Did you see Makarova with that officer? I had never inspired any gossip, it was about time I did. Let them talk about me for a change.
Varvara gave me a skeptical look: You’re not falling for that, are you? while Mina scrambled to pocket her spectacles, the better to be seen. The horse switched its tail. I could feel my ship tugging at the dock, impatient to move out to sea. Kolya Shurov was waiting to carry me off, as he promised he would. Was I one to shirk the call of adventure? I was not. I walked to the sleigh, let him take my book bag, settle me into the small seat. We decorously kissed cheeks—an old family friend—and I caught a whiff of his cologne, Floris Limes. He hooked the rug over us. “Davai, davai!” he shouted to the coachman up on the box. Let’s go! The broad-backed driver slapped the reins, and the sleigh lurched forward, breaking free from the ic
e.
How warm it was under the bearskin rug, the snow tickling our faces, the song of the runners. “I wrote to you constantly,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever respond?”
He put his arm around me, pressed close. The smell of him, I almost fainted.
“I wrote when I could. In wartime you have to know it’s hit or miss.” I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. But that letter from January didn’t get to me until April.
We trotted up the Fontanka, past the Ciniselli Circus and the Engineers’ Castle and across the end of the Summer Garden with its famous fence of gilt and iron. “On nights in bivouac, I imagined us just like this. This sleigh, this snow, this light.” He closed his eyes and recited, “O madman, tell me—when, where, how / Will you forget them, in what desert? / Ah little feet, where are you now?”
He was reciting Pushkin for me. I was witness to a Kolya I’d never seen before, a Kolya come a-wooing. It was intoxicating. He was trying to seduce me—an old family friend no more. I saw that he thought of himself as a Pushkin—romantic, spontaneous. He caught my indulgent smile and knew he’d been caught at it. He took off his glove, slipped his hand inside my muff. We intertwined fingers, our hands a new creation.
Soon we entered the open Field of Mars, where he and Volodya had paraded with their regiment two years ago August before they’d shipped out to the front. “Faster!” he called to the driver. “Let’s fly!” And we sailed through the lilac shadows of the winter afternoon—the city powdering itself in snow like an old empress before her dressing table. We flew up Millionnaya Street, where Varvara’s father lived, and out onto Palace Square. “Around!” he called, and we circled the Alexander Column as though we were in a crazy chariot race, then left behind the red Winter Palace and the yellow General Staff Building and the Admiralty with its gilded steeple, to cross St. Isaac’s Square with the cathedral dome blurred in the falling snow and past the Bronze Horseman—Peter forever rearing, facing the river.
We slowed and turned southward, as did his hands under the rug, tracing my thick woolen stockings up to the long bloomers, inching above the garters, finding naked flesh. He was shameless. Such pleasure. I let my head rest on his arm, my eyes closing. Oh God, the moan that escaped me—I hoped the driver was discreet. When I opened my eyes, I saw the impish look on Kolya’s face as he undid the bow at the leg of my knickers. How far would he go? I tried to stop the progress of his hand, but it was like trying to stop the assault of an army. I felt the honey dripping from me—I had to admit that doing this in a sleigh right in public made it all the more exciting.
“Tell me you love me,” he said. “Tell me what was in those letters.” Cupping my bottom in his hand.
“You better stop,” I said.
“Why?” Kolya said. “Don’t you like it?”
There was no answering that. Onward we went, and I realized I must have seen couples do this a thousand times. What a child I was not to have noticed. I groaned again as he caressed the soft skin, my wet warmth, and I clung to him, to his heavy overcoat, to a bucking release that I’d only experienced in the slightest bit alone with my legs wrapped around my pillow. Who was shameless, after all?
“Driver, a left.” We turned onto the Catherine Canal Embankment. “Third door.”
“You said we were going for chocolate,” I sighed.
“I’ll make you some,” he said.
The sleigh pulled up in front of an apartment house near the Bank Bridge, where the griffins grinned with their golden wings, bridge cables in their teeth. “Whose house is this?”
“A friend.” He unhooked the rug on my side. “They’ve left it to me.”
I’d been by this building a thousand times. The windows looked haughty to me, judgmental, staring down at my wobbly-legged, flushed-face condition, my hat all askew.
People were walking by on the embankment. I wondered if anyone could tell what we were about to do. If anyone would recognize me. Kolya squeezed my shoulder. “Are you afraid? I can take you back if you want.” Bravery, in love as in art. No, there was no turning back. He would soon return to his unit, or something else would intrude. I knew this afternoon would never come again. He heaved himself out of the sleigh, took my arm. I noticed I was almost as tall as he was now. Had I grown in a year? I raised my fur collar against my burning cheeks as Kolya paid the driver. And it struck me in this moment what a timeless scene this was—the man paying the cab as the woman waited, half hidden in the collar of her coat. How many men, how many women had lived this exact moment? I felt so at one with them, through time. Now I was the woman, and he was the man. Our time and place, now.
Together we walked to the building’s front door and up a short flight of stairs. I would tell no one about this—not Varvara, not Mina. Part of being a woman would be to have just such secrets. He unlocked a door on the second floor. We hung our coats and hats in the entry. He removed his tall boots, and I my slushy overshoes. I threw my book bag in the corner. Inside, a warm sitting room awaited us, with small side chairs and a wide divan covered in olive velvet. Would it happen here? My heart pounded so hard I missed what he said. He repeated himself—“It’s too hot, don’t you think?”—and opened the fortochka in the tall casement window overlooking the Catherine Canal. The delicious coolness mixed with the heat was like a cold cloth in a fever. He bent over and touched my heavy coiled hair, breathed in the scent as if it were a flower. I offered my lips, but he only touched them with a finger, rolling the lower one down ever so slightly.
I hadn’t even noticed the gramophone with its green bell until he went to it and, after cranking it vigorously, lowered the arm. Strains of the tango from New Year’s Eve emerged into the air. He held out his hands to me, he in his cavalry uniform, khaki tunic with gold buttons, blue breeches with their double red stripe, standing in his gray socks, perhaps knitted by one of my classmates. His cropped brown curls lay flat to his scalp, the moustache he sported nestled into the corners of his upturned mouth like twin commas, those clever blue eyes alight…
We began to dance. Not the relatively decorous tango of that New Year’s salon, but pressed together from breast to knee. I felt him hard against me, the full length of him. Now it was not the suggestion of lovemaking, but the thing itself. He pressed me back, our feet turning but deftly, never tangling. I surprised him with a tango kick. He laughed. Better watch me, Kolya. I could follow, but there were other sides to me as well, even as a sixteen-year-old virgin. The play of the gaze—the look away, then suddenly, nakedly, back. The very air leaned against us like a dog hoping to be petted.
“I knew it would be like this,” he whispered into my hair. “I could dance with you to the end of time. Remember how you danced Swan Lake?”
I was seven years old. I’d just seen the ballet, had to show everybody the white swan and the black. “I’m a glutton for attention.”
“You believed it—that’s what I loved. The way you threw yourself into it. I knew you were those swans. I saw how you would be someday. Glorious. I’ve been waiting for you, Marina.”
I had been waiting as well. All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk. And he knew me—he had always known this lay under school uniforms and children’s party clothes, inside the camisole with the blue ribbon. He knew me at six, had waited for me as a peasant waits for the pears to ripen in summertime, watching that tree all the time he goes about his hoeing and reaping. Now he would reap the rewards of his patience.
He pulled a tortoiseshell hairpin from my coif, then another. My hair started to fall, uncoiling heavily over my shoulders, the great mass of it, a Niagara of russet. I had never imagined inspiring the look on a man’s face that he beheld me with right now, the wonder with which he touched my thick locks, lifting them in his palms like a bouquet of roses. He hadn’t seen my hair down in years. He buried his face in it, his hands. It was going to be hopelessly tangled—I helped him tangle it more. It would be a nest for us,
like two thrushes in a thicket.
He unbuttoned my brown school dress, pushed it from my shoulders, let it fall to the floor, and traced my bared, lightly freckled shoulders with his fingertips. Touching the ribbon on the front of my slip, untying it, pulling it from me, kneeling before me. I stepped out of it and he pressed the fabric to his face. I thought I would faint with the pleasure. When had I ever seen anything so erotic? He ran his hands up my thick wool stockings, pressed his cheek against the plush of my Venus mount. I held him there, knew he could smell me through the cotton lisle. He rubbed his face, his head, like a cat in catnip. I wished I had worn newer underwear.
Suddenly he lifted me up and threw me over his shoulder—the Rape of the Sabines!—and carried me, laughing and shrieking, into the other room. He dropped me onto a white eiderdown with enormous pillows. The brass bedstead knocked on the wall. Outside, snow fell into the frozen canal, onto the griffins of the bridge, and beyond, softening the lit windows of the Assignation Bank Building. I felt sorry for those people bent over their ledgers. Poor everyone who wasn’t us.
Kolya sat on the edge of the bed, untied the bow of my corselette. Finally, fear came licking at me, as I perceived for a moment the seriousness of my position. I rolled away from him, sat up. “You won’t make me pregnant? I would die. I’d kill myself.”
He put his fingers across my lips. “I wouldn’t. I’m not some sweaty ignoramus. I never leave it to chance.” He reached into his tunic and pulled out small square packages, put them on the bedside table. Rezinky. Preservativy. I knew what they were, I’d seen them in my father’s drawer. “I’ll never hurt you, Marina, I promise you that.”
I got up and stood before him, suddenly serious—grave, even—and undid the buttons of my corselette, watching him as I opened them one by one. To hear him inhale as he saw my breasts, I knew they were beautiful. Not apple-round, like the Venus de Milo’s, but wide set and full at the sides. Now I unbuttoned his tunic, then his shirt, pulled it off. The intoxicating smell of him, warm honey and musk, rose from his chest. He was hairier than I had imagined, gold and curly. I ran my hands over him, the miracle. I pulled him to his feet so I could press my breasts against him. So many textures—the cropped hair, the shaved face, that curly moustache, the softness between his shoulder and chest, the nubs of nipples standing up now, yearning for mine. I brushed against them with my own.