We shucked off the rest of our clothes, which tangled and gripped us as if they didn’t want to allow the final frankness, but soon we achieved our undressing—admiring one another in flesh so long guessed at. Of course I had two brothers, so the male member was no mystery to me, but never had I seen one rampant, not in life. I had once stumbled on a book of Japanese pornography in the library of one of my mother’s arty friends. That shock, the giant hairy mollusks of the women and the stair banisters of the men. Kolya was, happily, neither outsize nor frightening but rather thick, in a nest of golden brown. I thought it would be hard to the touch, but it was velvet, like the inside of my arm, or a horse’s nose. Veined and soon moist. He pushed my hand away.
“Don’t you like it?”
He laughed, rolling his head, his eyes to the ceiling with my ignorance. “Yes, but a man can only take so much before he goes off.”
So much to know. We knelt on the bed, thigh to thigh, our kisses deep and hungry, while a kaleidoscope of sharp feelings tumbled within me: Would it hurt? Would it be the same after? Would he boast? Laugh at me? Ah, but I had waited my whole life for this pleasure, my bottom in his hands, the bright universe of his touch, this lively desirous body, the muscular flesh, the intensity of my own sensations as his fingers moved, guiding me in the tiniest tango, my body impulsively kicking and gripping as he talked to me as though I were a skittish horse. “You’re so passionate. I knew it would be like this. Don’t stop, I want to see you…” A warmth passed through me, so explosive he had to hold me up.
What is virginity? Is it innocence? Ignorance? Fear? Unripeness? I was his pear, dragging down the branch with all my ripeness. I wanted his teeth to burst my skin, his hot mouth to tear me apart. And yet he ate slowly, with exquisite attention.
There was no end to the surprises. I lay upon the hill of huge pillows, and watched him smooth the preservativ over himself. He traced me like an artist with his brush. While his fingers had been surprising, his sex felt enormous—would it really all fit? He pushed, then stopped and rubbed me gently. I didn’t care if it hurt, I wanted him. I pulled him down onto me. I wanted to feel his full weight on me, embrace the length of him, his chest flat against my breasts. Was I too small? It turned out I was equal to the task. A sensation not like anything in a book. Stretched beyond myself, intense, not wanting to stop, wanted him all inside me, not just his member but his whole body. Who needed flesh if it was going to keep me from merging with absolute sweetness? Now we rolled and switched places, me on him, urging him with my hips as I’d urge a horse from trot to canter. Then the darkness took me again, a sparkling wave from groin to head, and gasping, I sagged onto his chest like a drowned woman flung onto a beach.
Afterward, we lay together, his flagpole clad in the preservativ bright with my blood. He handed me a towel with which to clean myself, but I was too lazy. I wrapped my legs around it and lay there with my head on his shoulder, drunk with the smell of him and the slow ticking of my body unwinding. So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge. I dozed, inhaling him—the scent came from his armpits, that honey musk smell, and a muskier one from the nest down below. I fell asleep wrapped in my own hair.
He woke me sometime later. He’d lit the lamp, was passing a box of chocolates before my face like smelling salts. Swiss chocolate, a big red box. I took one, and it was all part of the afternoon, the chocolate melting in my mouth, the fragrant bed, the liquid between my legs, the reflection of us in the bare window. My hair was an explosion of tangled red. It looked like we’d fought a war on the white sheets, completely untucked from the striped mattress ticking, the puffy eiderdown crushed, everything soaked with our sweat.
“We have to go soon. Come on. I’ve drawn a bath for you.” He kissed the top of my head, got up, found his shirt on the floor, put it on.
It was almost six by the clock on the bedside table. If I missed dinner, my family would wonder what had happened to me. “I could call them, say I’m going to be late.”
“You don’t have to eat every chocolate in the box.” He squeezed my breast, slapped my bottom.
I took another chocolate, just for that. “Everybody always says that. But let’s stay here forever and eat every chocolate in the world.”
“I adore you, Marina,” he said, buttoning up his tunic. “But I’ve got some people I’m meeting in a few minutes. It’s why I’m in town. Not just to explore delectable young women.”
“What could be more important than that?” I wanted more. I wanted to take up residence in the nexus of pleasure called Kolya Shurov. “Take me with you.”
“It’s army business. I hardly think you’ll pass muster.”
Reluctant to move, yet knowing I must, I shuffled into the small bath perfumed with the fragrance of milled soap. I gingerly lowered myself into the water. It was just as well we had stopped when we did. My body probably couldn’t have stood another assault. I washed, wincing at the abrasions, dried myself off using the one bloodied towel in order not to shame the maids too much. The face before me in the mirror was bright, smudged, a little stunned. Who are you? I asked, touching my fat lips, gazing into my stupefied dark eyes. This is what a woman who has just made love looks like. The next room of the self.
“When will I see you again?” I asked, attempting to brush my tangled hair with the help of some borrowed brushes, my clothing mostly restored. Propriety was pure disguise.
“I’ll send you a message,” he said. “Wear a red ribbon in your green coat after school so the messenger will know you.”
Was Father looking at me strangely? Did Mother really not know? Couldn’t they smell him on me? Couldn’t they tell? I ate quickly and tried not to look at Seryozha. I was sure he’d noticed a change, if only because of the waves of happiness rising off me. Luckily Avdokia ate in the kitchen with the cook and Basya. My nanny was clairvoyant—she wouldn’t be fooled for an instant. I watched plain, good Miss Haddon-Finch debone her fish and wondered if she’d ever had such an afternoon. Or my parents, for that matter, seated at their two ends of the table. Had they ever been capable of such ardor? The shrieks, the groaning, the sweat, the torn-up bed. I doubted it. They didn’t even sleep in the same room.
Seryozha caught my eye, cocked his head. What? I smiled like the Mona Lisa—perhaps this was her secret. Father spoke of a conference with members of his political party, the liberal Kadets. Something about the tsar. “We’re offering the emperor a way out,” he said to Mother, spearing a piece of sturgeon and some potato on his fork. “Constitutional monarchy. He could preserve his crown, but he won’t see it that way…”
“Surely he will,” she replied.
I was usually quite interested in politics, especially after the bread riot—not to mention the rebuke from Marmelzadt and Varvara’s constant agitation—but tonight all I could think of was the feeling of my bare breasts pressed to Kolya’s chest, all the ways we explored our love in that white bed. I finished my meal as fast as I could, and excused myself. I would write a real aubade this time, an ode to those cropped curls, all the textures of him. I knew I would love hairy men for the rest of my life.
I sat at the vanity table in my salmon-pink bedroom, brushing my hair. It still smelled of him. Beneath the glass lay a picture of Kolya and Volodya taken in the south two years before, sitting on a rocky hillside. Such confident young officers in the pure hot sun. I was about to kiss his sweet face when Seryozha entered. He closed the door, stood behind me sternly, as if he were Father. “Who is it? Tell me.”
I coiled my hair back into its decorous coif, replaced the pins. There was no point in trying to conceal my love. I was too eager to talk about it. “It’s Kolya. He’s here on leave. He was waiting for me after school in a sleigh with a gray horse.”
My brother’s sternness softened, replaced by uncertainty, a flicker of plea
sure, then envy, and back to uncertainty. “Did you…?”
I nodded.
He came closer, crouched to look over my shoulder, eye to eye with me in the vanity mirror. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. He put his head on my shoulder and we stayed that way for a long time. When he stood, I saw he was weeping, though whether it was from losing me and childhood or envy, it was hard to say.
I could not stop thinking about sex. I imagined everyone naked—Vaula, the dvornik, people in the street. I imagined them making love and tried to decide which ones were still virgins. My new eyes caught couples who had clearly just made love saying goodbye at cabs and couples on street corners preparing for an assignation. Their energy set them apart, brightness bursting from them like little colorful suns. I imagined who would be prim and who would be passionate. I felt my way into the lives of old couples strolling along, fires dampened but still slightly warm. The ugliest sight: couples who had not made love for years. You could see it by how they walked together. No affectionate touch. No tango. How could they bear it, linked to a person for whose body you didn’t yearn? No one escaped my scrutiny—bourgeois men and women, my own father and mother. The unemployed, my teachers, people in the shops.
How loathsome suddenly became the routine of schoolgirl life. Geometry, French, Russian literature, English. Voice lesson with Herr Dietrich, dancing class with M. Dornais. It seemed like a joke. Although I enjoyed being handled by those nervous boys in dancing class as much as I ever did. Perhaps more. I felt them so keenly now, the hands on my skin, a glance to my bosom. I imagined undressing Danya Bolechevsky, pimply but receptive, and Sasha Trigorsky—his erect carriage, what else might be erect? Men in the streets, at Wolf’s bookstore—no one escaped my lascivious scrutiny.
Every day I wore a red ribbon through the buttonhole of my green coat no matter how bitter the cold: twelve degrees below zero. It had been a terrible winter, but I was a furnace. I emerged through the school gates in a fever, head held high, so the ribbon would be visible. Walking down to Mina’s apartment, or to Konditerskaya Sever on Nevsky for chocolate, I waited for his summons. Who would it be today? He liked to use the most outlandish people he could find, it was part of the surprise. Would it be the cripple dragging himself along on a sledge? The freezing newsboy? The man with a great red birthmark? I stopped on the Anichkov Bridge, where the four bronze statues of horse tamers struggled with their mounts—two of them were very much in danger of being trampled. And I wondered who I was in this drama—horse or a groom? Straining at the bridle or trying not to be trampled as I attempted to turn that great passion to my own purposes? Everything seemed like a metaphor these days. I was wide open to the world, waiting for the one who would stop me and hand me a small white envelope. At last, a Nevsky prostitute approached and handed me an envelope with a red seal. I tore it open—his paper, the finest, from Michelet’s. Just like Pushkin’s.
Today is impossible. I’m devastated. I can’t stop thinking of you, Marina. I see you everywhere. Think of me with you right now. Tomorrow, I promise.
Underneath the words, a little drawing—a nude girl dancing with a bushy-tailed fox. I had to laugh, though the message wounded me. How could he not be as eager as I to spend every moment in bed? Still, when we did meet, my anger would be quickly absorbed in the unfolding desire. Our passion took more weight and dimension each day, like a fast-growing young bear.
One night, our family attended the ballet—with our parents’ friends the Gromitskys. It was Karsavina in Les millions d’Arléquin. Both Seryozha and I had been besotted with her, ever since that night at the Stray Dog. “I wish we could have The Firebird,” Mother complained to Madame Gromitsky. “It’s not right that the French should get all our moderns.” The Mariinsky Theater, under imperial patronage, had to follow imperial taste, and thus far the tsar only endorsed the classics. Even the Harlequin was a stretch. Balletomanes like Mother resented the fact that the Parisians were able to delight in the bright creations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—productions never staged in Russia.
Karsavina, I decided, had definitely torn some bedsheets.
In the interval, Seryozha and I remained in our seats. I hated breaking the lingering trance and Seryozha was finishing some sketches. Now Mother exclaimed, “Oh look, it’s Kolya. What a pretty girl—Kolya!”
My lover was coming up the aisle escorting a beautiful woman in a low-necked black gown, his hand on her back. I wanted to vomit. As they approached, I held my hand over my eyes as if to cut the glare of the lights. Where could I hide myself? Go away, Kolya! How could he? So much for the fox and the girl. Was this what he was doing instead of meeting with me? If I hadn’t been caught in the row, I would have run away weeping. Shamelessly he approached, broke out in a grin. Now he was greeting my parents, introducing this creature, Valentina somebody. I tried not to look, but how could I not? It was like an overturned cart, an auto wreck. And the beast winked at me! As if we were in collusion. As if this were all a great joke! As if I were so sophisticated that I would know it was still the two of us and not give a thought to the exquisite woman he stood next to. “Are you enjoying the ballet, Marina Dmitrievna?” he asked me.
The nerve! “I was,” I said.
He leaned past Seryozha and pressed a note into my hand, rolled my fist around it. A page torn from the program. Tomorrow at 4. Without fail. And a drawing of a fox in jail, its nose sticking out from the bars, tears dripping from its eyes.
8 No Gentleman
ON THE STEPS OF the school, Varvara showed us a pamphlet from her schoolbag, glancing around to see that no one was looking over our shoulders.
WHY IS YOUR HUSBAND AT THE FRONT? TO FIGHT THE TSAR’S WAR! WHY IS THERE NO FOOD IN THE CITY? IT’S DISAPPEARING INTO THE WAR! THE TSAR’S ON HIS WAY OUT. REMEMBER BLOODY SUNDAY. WE’LL FINISH WHAT WE STARTED. BREAD FOR ALL! EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL. DOWN WITH THE WAR.
“You’re going to end up in prison,” Mina said.
“They say you’re not a real revolutionary until you’ve served time,” she retorted.
It was 3:30. “I have to go. Kolya’s waiting for me,” I said. Already my eyes ached in the vicious cold, my lashes coated with ice. How could Varvara even think of standing around in this weather handing out leaflets?
“Yes, run to your lover. Go on,” Varvara sneered, wrapping her scarf around her head and neck. “When people ask where you were in January 1917, what are you going to say—I spent it in bed with Kolya Shurov?”
But there would always be more textile factories, more miserable women. I was flopping, drowning in air after Kolya’s appearance at the Mariinsky. I needed his apology, an explanation, reassurances that I was still the one.
He answered the door in the apartment on the Catherine Canal. Food and flowers crowded the table in the sitting room behind him, but I remained rooted in the entryway, my overshoes leaving a puddle on the parquet. He tried to take my coat, but I shrugged him off. I was not letting him touch me until I got a straight answer. If I let him get close, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my fury. “Just tell me one thing. Are you sleeping with her?”
“Who?”
Such innocence. “Just don’t.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” He returned to the divan, to the table spread with the feast, as I remained in the anteroom. “At least have a glass of wine before you cut my head off,” he said, seating himself. “And these macaroons are divine.”
Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds in hell and was doomed the moment they slid down her throat. “Tell me now.”
“Take off your coat. You’re making me sweat.”
It was terribly hot in there, it was true. But I didn’t dare. I had to resist, keep anger alive, get to the truth. “What am I to you, Kolya? Am I another name in the roll call of seducible schoolgirls? Is it me in the afternoon and Valentina in the evening and Katerina before breakfast?”
He sighed and rubbed his face with one hand.
“Is she better than
me? More exciting, a woman of the world?”
He laughed. “No one’s better than you, and that’s the truth,” he said. “Valya’s—just someone I know. I’m doing some work for her. I didn’t sleep with her, I promise.”
“Do go on,” I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.
“She wants to get some things out of the country. That’s all, I swear to you.” He laid his hand over his lying heart.
“I saw you. I saw how you touched her. You have slept with her.”
“A long time ago. She was Volodya’s girl. We were just doing some business, I swear to you. She wanted an escort to the ballet, and I figured, what’s the harm? I can’t exactly take you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Imagine your parents. Your father. I don’t want him putting two and two together too soon…God. But listen, I have something to tell you—I didn’t want it to be like this, but I’ve been recalled. I’m leaving tonight.”
My anger ebbed with this blow. He couldn’t leave now. I needed time to sort out this Valentina thing, to forgive him. But there wouldn’t be time. And the truth was that I ached for him. My arms ached, my breasts, my body was a mass of frustration and yearning. “Swear, Kolya. Swear you didn’t sleep with her. I’ll never forgive you if you’re lying.”