He stood, held my hands, pulled me into the room. Looked deep into my eyes, his blue ones, for once, not laughing. “She’s just an old friend. I swear.”
He unbuttoned my coat, hung it on the back of a chair, knelt and pulled off my galoshes, led me to the feast.
Persephone was doomed with only six pomegranate seeds, but I ate macaroons and drank sherry wine and devoured the feast I had come for—his flesh, the red-gold fur, making love in four different ways until we lay exhausted on the mattress.
We rested our heads on the heaped pillows, listening to the wind roar outside, shaking the windows. He opened the fortochka, chilling the room. I pulled up the eiderdown. Briefly I thought of Varvara, out there on Vasilievsky Island, standing before the gates of a factory, handing out those incendiary leaflets, and felt guilty for abandoning her. I ran my fingers through the hair on his chest, traced the line down to his navel, lower, to the leonine forest of him.
“And what were you going to do for her, your friend Valentina?”
“An export job,” he said, linking my fingers with his, biting them systematically at the knuckles. “She has some things she wants sent out of the country. Actually, your father should do the same. Time to close up the bank accounts, pack up the silver, convert cash to jewelry and art. Get it out to Sweden. England, even.”
They’re smuggling the gold out in coffins. “It’s really that bad? Did you tell Father?”
“Let’s just say he wasn’t amused. He practically called me a traitor.” I could see that had hurt Kolya. He was only trying to be helpful.
“Brave of you,” I said. To advise Dmitry Makarov to prepare to abandon Russia, especially now, when he was working around the clock, writing speeches, articles, meeting with the Kadet party? Foolhardy. The Kadets had been trying to persuade the emperor to accept a constitutional monarchy, ever since the death of Rasputin. But the tsar was unable to see that it was the only way to keep his crown while allowing the country to move forward. An absolute monarch, he felt that sharing power was as bad as abdication.
I examined our fingers entwined. Someday would we wear matching rings? “Every day, I think today’s the day that the revolution will come. But it doesn’t. The people just keep suffering. Striking, protesting—it keeps going on.”
He reached past me to the bedside table, fishing out a cigar from the ashtray, relighting it. “Watch the soldiers,” he said. “When the army goes over, then you’ll see your revolution. The monarchy will collapse like a thatched hut. I just don’t want to see your family trapped inside. You Makarovs mean a lot to me.”
He was starting to scare me. “What about your assets, Kolya? Are you taking them out? Or is that just for others?”
He pulled me to him, cradled my head in the hollow of his shoulder, kissed my temple, worked his hand into my hair. “I come from a long line of gamblers, milaya. The factory went under years ago. The estate was gone before I was born. My only assets in the world are the ones you like so well.”
Was Kolya poor? I hadn’t ever thought about how he supported himself. He couldn’t be flat broke, could he? He did all the things Volodya did—bought uniforms, dined in restaurants, went out carousing. But when I thought about it, I realized that he didn’t have an apartment. At university, he’d lived with Volodya. We took him on vacation with us. Did my parents know he was poor? They must. It was only I who had missed the clues. I, who thought I saw everything and complained that others were insensitive. I was as guilty as anyone. Poor Kolya!
“I tried talking to Vera Borisovna,” he continued. “She reassured me, ‘Russia is built on stone, Nikolasha, the stone of the Russian soul. Never forget that.’ But the thing about stone,” he said, stroking my bare thighs with his fingertips, “is that water seeps into the cracks. And when it freezes, the stone splits and crumbles to dust. Stone’s of no use in times like these. We need to be flexible, like the little birches trembling in a summer breeze.”
Honestly, I was shocked to hear him talk like this. In my family, we spoke of honor, of country, of duty. Of holding steadfast to certain virtues. “What kind of Russian are you, Nikolai Stepanovich?” I asked, only half in jest.
Kolya calmly gazed at the tip of his cigar. “I’m the citizen of a country of exactly one.” He reached for his ashtray, put it beside him in the bed. “Shurovistan. But you’re welcome to visit. I give you a lifetime visa.”
Wind blasted the windows. I thought of the workers in this cold, the women queuing for bread. “Varvara says there’s going to be a general strike. Surely that can’t be ignored.”
“Oh, it will be. They’ll get double barrels for their trouble. The emperor won’t give an inch.”
“Not even a general strike? It’s been terrible. You haven’t been here, you don’t know.”
He crouched over me, playfully growling like a bear. “Not even a general strike.”
I fought not to let his proximity distract me. “They’re going to start rationing bread, Kolya! The people won’t stand for it.”
He bit my neck just above the shoulder, sending shoots of pleasure down into the soil of me. “You’re out of your depth, Marina,” he whispered in my ear. “Let the workers take care of themselves.”
I pushed him away. “What am I supposed to do, play Marie Antoinette in the sheepfold?”
He knelt, waving his pole at me. “Baaah.”
“They’re chaining them to the workbench. It’s illegal to complain. If you do, it’s to the front with you.”
He groaned and flopped into the eiderdown, which inflated around him like a cloud. “No! Right from the Tagantsev Academy to the front?” He was laughing at me. “Will they give you a chance to change clothes?”
I pinched his nipple, and he grabbed for my wrist. We struggled until he had me pinned on the mattress, damp and fragrant. He straddled me, his face hovering above mine. “So now you’re a radical? Do I address you as Comrade Marina?”
“Yes!” I tried to roll out from under him.
“So it’s the workers you love now, not Kolya and his rapier?” Which was already alive again.
“I’m serious, Kolya.” But my claim sounded ridiculous even to me, lying there wet with my arms pinned, Kolya rubbing himself against me.
He switched to holding my wrists above my head with one hand while he put on a fresh prophylactic with the other. “I can see how serious you are. I’m so impressed.”
I struggled to throw him off me. “Stop it! Listen to me. This is important.”
He groaned and rolled off me. “Is this what you want? My last night? Okay, here it is. All the emperor cares about is the war. Workers in Petrograd are starving? Nobody cares. As long as they produce, to hell with them. And if it takes chaining them to their benches, that’s what will happen.”
I felt desire’s sharp ebb. The shock of what he’d said propped me on one elbow. “That’s what you think? Are you really so indifferent? I thought you were a good man.”
He got his cigar lit, exhaled the fumes, a man of the world. “Good or bad, it’s what’s happening. Nobody’s asking me.”
I sat up, looking down into his face. “I’m asking you.”
“As long as his armies are supplied, the emperor will send the country to the devil. And my job in this mess is just to see that the army’s supplied.” He exhaled away from me.
“Well there’s a safe job. When men are losing their lives.” I didn’t know what I was arguing about now, only that I wanted to hurt him for being so callous about the fate of the people. Or was it to punish him for taking Valentina to the ballet? Or because he was leaving me again? “Maybe you’re speculating yourself, while Volodya’s fighting in the cold.”
His rosy face went hard then. He started collecting his clothes. “You want me to get my head blown off? You’re asking me what I think—I think this country’s as corrupt as old eggs and I’m just trying to survive it.” He found his underpants and got into them, buttoned his shirt. “Do you believe it’s a valiant thing
to die? I’ve seen this war. You haven’t. It’s a communal grave for valiant young men. And reluctant ones, and ignorant ones too. They all die the same. Where are my damn pants?”
I’d hurt him. I never knew I could do that. I’d thought he was impervious. “I’m sorry, Kolya, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It’s not what I think at all.” I had his pants and clung to them, I wouldn’t let him take them away.
“I won’t die for this country,” he said. “Not for God and not for you. If you’re a Bolshevik, you’ll at least understand that much.”
But I didn’t understand. Heroism was a very real value in our house. Patriotism. Volodya was at the front, absolutely ready to die for ideals, for country, and this was what was admirable about him, although perhaps all wrong—his unquestioning valor. Kolya’s relativism, his pessimism—I didn’t know what to think. Logically he was right, but there was something upsetting about a man without loyalty, without an idea of honor. I wept. I was only sixteen, and I loved him ferociously. How could I ruin our last hours together trying to figure it out? What I wanted was his love, his body, his smile, his scent, his weight. I threw his pants under the bed, held my arms out to him. “Sorry, sorry…” Holding him, rocking him. Kolya, my fox, generous, clever man. He was not evil, not an abstract symbol of indifference to suffering. Who didn’t have contradictions?
And I more than he, as it turned out.
9 Do Not Awaken My Memories
HE RETURNED TO HIS regiment, leaving me as sad and useless as a single glove. People, once lively, now flattened to puppets, mouths opening and closing unconvincingly. My ears were stuffed with wax, my eyes smeared with grease. I couldn’t find a place to put myself. I eyed every cripple and dwarf. I put away my green coat. I could barely brush my hair. Our fight left a stone in my breast. How could I have accused him of such crimes on our very last afternoon?
In front of the school, everyone stopped to wrap scarves tighter around their necks and draw them up around their mouths and noses. Varvara and Mina had been doing their best to cheer me up, each in her opposite way—Mina by letting me talk about him endlessly, commiserating, wanting to hear every detail, and Varvara by jeering at my lovelorn fog. “Yes, yes, he’s gone. The world doesn’t revolve around Kolya Shurov’s sky-blue eyes.”
“She’s heartbroken,” Mina said, drawing me close. “Leave her alone.”
Varvara hoisted her schoolbag on her shoulder. “Come with me,” she said. “Talk to some people worse off than you.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Mina said. “You’ll get yourself arrested. Anyway, it’s got to be ten below. Let’s get some hot chocolate.”
“Come on, Marina.” Varvara twined her arm through mine. “Let’s make ourselves useful. You’ll feel better. Remember when you went to the hospitals? We need you. You need to see what’s going on. Mina, you coming?”
“I’m getting chocolate. Marina, it’s dangerous up there.”
But maybe the danger would help wake me up out of my funk. I let Varvara trundle me onto a tram going north across the Liteiny Bridge into a grim working-class neighborhood on the Vyborg side of the Neva. Vyborg, where the big factories were, with the workers’ tenements crouching in their shadows. We got off and walked past the Finland Station and into the backstreets within clear view of the Crosses—Kresty Prison—and the Arsenal plant. It summed up everything—the elegant palace side of the river could have been a thousand miles away. We entered a gloomy courtyard. I was glad just to be out of the wind. But then I saw the women, ragged, blue-faced, queuing up for a single water pump. The ice, their wet shoes. It was a disgrace.
Varvara helped them pump, for which they were grateful, and got them talking. The stories made me shiver with pity. Nobody cares, said Kolya. Husbands at the front, sick children, food shortages, no fuel. Horrific tales of the granny in the building who took care of the babies of the working women when they were at the factories. “She waters down the milk and keeps the money herself,” a youngish woman told us, her eyes black with weariness. “I’d go to work, too—my old man’s not well—but I can’t leave the kids with an old witch like that. You might as well put them out on the river.”
I let Varvara ask them questions—not name, district, region but rather about their lives—while I pumped their water, the cold biting my hands as my gloves grew wet. At least I had galoshes. She talked to them about the militarization of labor, about socialism, about the war. Mostly they were worried about bread rationing. “They say it’ll be just a pound per person,” said a woman with anxious eyes and sunken cheeks, a soldier’s wife. “My husband’s fighting for what? A pound of bread a day? How are we supposed to live?”
I pumped her water and let my sorrow over Kolya spill into sympathy for this wretched woman. I was no good at agitating, but I could do this, stand in the icy dark courtyard of a tenement under the walls of the Arsenal and listen to half-starved women complain about bread. Their misery had to end. My problems with Kolya seemed laughable compared with trying to keep a tenement warm, the rent paid—some families didn’t even have the whole flat to themselves, just a corner of it.
Two days later, we returned to stand at the gates of the Belhausen knitwear factory. Varvara pulled a sheaf of leaflets from her school satchel.
SISTER WORKERS! FIGHT SLAVERY AT THE WORKBENCH! SUPPORT THE PETROGRAD WORKERS COMMITTEE!
The flyer was illustrated by a simple graphic woodcut of workers—women and men marching shoulder to shoulder as a frightened owner tumbled away. For the literate, a more detailed argument accompanied it below. The wind shuffled the flyers in Varvara’s gloved hand.
But the members of the Workers’ Committee had all been arrested. It had been in the papers. Where had these flyers come from? Who gave them to her?
“Better you not know,” she said mysteriously, trying to impress me with her radicalism. “That way if we’re arrested, you can’t tell them anything.”
“We’re not going to be arrested,” I said. “Varvara, tell me. I can’t be arrested. My father will crucify me.” If talking to the women in the courtyards was suspicious, leafleting factories was flat-out illegal. I’d be expelled a semester short of graduation. I’d never see the university.
“Do you want to help these women or not? Look—stand over there.” She pointed to a streetlamp around twenty feet away, ducking her head against the wind. “If you see cops, start singing. Put those voice lessons to work.”
The cold reached everywhere—inside my scarf, inside my nose, freezing the hairs. This was insane. The light was already fading. I had no idea where I was—in front of some factory in Vyborg on a rough, uncleared lane. I would have left, but I feared losing my way in a dangerous slum. “What do you want me to sing?”
“How about ‘Do Not Awaken My Memories’?”
A song about a seduced and abandoned girl. “Very funny.”
But I thought of those women at the pump, their blue faces, their ragged clothes, and Kolya’s callous statements, and took my place under the streetlamp to keep watch, my eyes stinging in the cold, my nerves thinner than a violin E string. At five o’clock, a whistle blew, signaling the shift change. Women began to file out of the factory through the big gates. Varvara stood at the gate, holding out a leaflet. Some eyed her and shouldered past, while others were too beaten down even to look. But several accepted Varvara’s pamphlet. Each time felt like a triumph. One woman took half the stack and put them under her coat, scurrying away into the dark, reminding me that other women took far bigger risks than we did.
The city was on the boil. Strikes and bigger strikes, on the Vyborg side, on Vasilievsky, on the Okhta side, and in the south at the big plants—Putilov, Nobel, Arsenal. There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss. Yet Mother insisted on a party. “I can’t,” I told Father. “It seems so hard-hearted. When people have so little.”<
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“I know,” he said. “You’re a good girl. But we still have to live our lives. We can’t go about in horsehair and ashes. Leave this to the politicians. You should have your party.”
“It makes me sick,” I said.
He stroked my hair, smiled. “How many times will you turn seventeen? Enjoy it. The country will still be here to worry about the day after.”
I felt like an absolute fool, standing among well-dressed schoolchildren with my hair done up like a fancy cake, eating Vaula’s “larks”—crispy pastries that looked like small birds—and talking about a skating party in the Tauride Gardens. This was no longer me. I’d had my first love affair. I’d waited in the cold at the Belhausen factory gate, braving arrest, agitating on the Vyborg side. Right now, soldiers’ wives were freezing in their corners, their children were drinking watered-down milk, workers were being forced to labor despite horrendous conditions, bread was being rationed. What was I doing playing children’s games and drinking hot chocolate? Mina stayed with me, trying to make me laugh, while my hapless brother fended off the forays of flirtatious girls. Varvara ate four pastries and got into an argument with Sasha Trigorsky. I missed Kolya like fire. Did he even remember my birthday? Although it shouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t know who I was, didn’t know what to feel. It took everything I had not to throw a tantrum, as if I were seven and not seventeen.
Afterward, in my bedroom, I felt just like the wind blowing from all four directions, every possible emotion, one minute coldly furious, weeping the next. I wrote a poem.
After the cake
The chocolate and the lemonade
The children return to the sleighs
To kisses and Mama and supper.
A girl turned seventeen
The coldest day of the year.
Birds fell frozen from the sky.
A man at the front counted his cards.
All men are gamblers, he said.
She entered the world like a mole.