Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

1 Tikhvin

I WAS RISEN, risen from the dead. I had escaped the house of snow and lies, I had been spared.

An icy fog obscured the road the day I left Novinka on the back of the old man’s sledge piled with logs, heading for the market town Tikhvin. The countryside revealed itself in the foggy gaps, opening and closing like curtains. The load shifted dangerously underneath me, wooden runners jolting in the ruts. The old man smoked his pipe while I made plans that blew away like snowflakes, into the drifts and gone.

Five days we rode, stopping in villages, sleeping in straw, the child alive and moving within me. It was stubborn, like its mama. My celestial egg. Gathering strength for the jailbreak.

At last, we descended into Tikhvin, a crossroads for centuries, with its river and its railroad, the point of arrival and departure where I’d last left my one and faithless love. His tears had run, but I had not been moved. That vain girl, walking around with her eyes shut tight, thinking that life should be straight and good, that she could pick and choose, like plucking stones out of a handful of rice. But now I was five months along with his child unborn, and had learned that imperfection was part of the weave of the world. I would return to him if I could, and pick up the stitch I had dropped.

Tikhvin was a substantial town of some twenty thousand souls—a number I once thought negligible. Now it was dizzying. So many streets, people, houses, fences, and carts… The giant Uspensky Monastery loomed with its five-towered carillon, its ancient fortress walls, which had once protected the entire population from Swedish invaders. Now Russian soldiers held the town in their grip, hanging about on street corners in their greatcoats, with their rifles and grisly bayonets. A gang of recruits marched toward a barracks, accompanied by shouts and curses. This was the current reality, the sound of the year 1919, the crash and clang of war. Time was bringing me into its brazen dance, leading me by the hand.

After days of nothing more urgent than snowbound forest and the bony rump of the horse, Tikhvin’s sprawl and energy unnerved me, and the child recoiled inside me. Like a country simpleton, I marveled at every small sight—the town seemed a metropolis, a terrifying wonder. Every sound amplified, every movement a jolt. I flinched at a carter banging crates to the ground, startled at a shout from a doorway. Now I understood the peasant’s terror when he encountered mighty Petersburg for the first time—the din of Nikolaevsky station, the bustle on Nevsky Prospect.

As the sledge scraped along toward the station, I couldn’t help but read the signs and portents. I hadn’t spent months at Ionia, trapping and hunting, without learning to read the news in sticks and hairs and tracks in snow. All the signs were bad. I saw it in the lean, blue-tinged faces of the arrivals struggling up from the station. Two sallow, soot-eyed women in black coats and too-thin shoes dragged a heavy suitcase between them, loaded no doubt with silverware and bric-a-brac to trade with the peasants for food. He who trades on the free market trades on the freedom of the people. A grim-jawed, silent group of workers following them had to be a food-requisitioning brigade. They neither spoke nor joked—they knew their assignment: to relieve peasants of their grain without recompense so they could feed their own starving brothers. I could see them pulling into themselves, hardening for the job ahead. A number of workers traveling alone walked up the main road, collars raised, a self-provisioning holiday. Their faces told me everything. No food in the city, no help, no end in sight.

Behold, the station. The old man helped me down from my throne of logs, the horse snorted its clouds into the white air. The days of hard travel had taken their toll on my body, I moved like a woman of eighty. Pine pitch and splinters stuck to my sheepskin and squirrelskin gloves. I held on to my snowshoes and game bag, unable to adjust to the assault of so many people. Travelers pushed past me as if I were a turnstile.

I gazed up at the arches. Here was where I went wrong. Here was my chance to begin again.

I shoved my way through the station and out onto the platform, where a train stood steaming, stinking, its wheels terrifyingly outsized. After the timeless introversion of the countryside, the noise scoured my ears, the child’s jerking alarm took my breath, and I clutched my snowshoes to my breast. First- and second-class passengers paced the platform, stretching their legs and doing furtive business with the peasant women selling piroshky and roasted sunflower seeds, while third-class travelers huddled in the barn doors of the boxcars, not daring to leave the train, their wooden bunks rayed behind them like shelves in a poor shop. Everyone heading east, east, east, away from Petrograd, into the snowy countryside, toward the Urals, escaping the turmoil and starvation in the capital of Once-Had-Been. My determination wavered. It slipped, shattering against the train’s iron wheels.

Perhaps the boy I’d been—Misha, that cheeky lad—would have chanced it. He had his way of staying afloat, but I couldn’t conjure him now, not with the child on the way, my face gone round, my breasts past binding. I was a woman in full and there was no escaping it.

Wisdom does not consist of making the best choice among many. Wisdom is understanding when there is no choice and taking the step that must be taken, without complaints or sighs. Hoisting my small bag higher over my shoulder, I walked to the platform’s end and climbed down, strapped myself into my snowshoes, and followed the rails through the fog.

A switchman’s shack emerged from the milky white. I knocked at the poorly made door, the pearly gates of this sooty heaven, and swung it open without waiting for an invitation.

Inside, a blackened stove warmed the small hut—no better than a wooden crate—where four men seated on boxes played cards. The kettle boiled. Steam coated the one greasy window. But which was the switchman, the one in charge? Him, I decided—the bald one in spectacles, pencil behind ear. The other three, railwaymen: a pensioner—a little bantam cock—and two burly men, one missing an arm, his coat sleeve pinned up neatly. Firemen or mechanics, I thought, the one-armed man wounded in the line of duty, and still drawing rations. Oh, to be the boy Misha again! Misha would know how to talk to them. He would swear, tell a dirty joke. Eh, brothers! But trapped in this irrevocable female form, I had to appeal to mercy, if I could find it. I hated negotiating from weakness, but I could do it if I had to.

“Comrades. Forgive me.” I spoke quickly, holding my hands in the universal language of wheedling. “I don’t want to trouble you, but I don’t know where else to turn. My brother was a Vikzhel man, an assistant engineer. He said if I ever needed help, to turn to the railwaymen.” I rummaged in the sack and pulled out Misha’s papers, presented them to the switchman. “I lost my position, a cook in a boarding house. The woman’s daughter came home from Petrograd and took my place.”

The bald man peered at Misha’s documents. “Assistant engineer? It says he was fifteen years old.” He tried to hand them back to me but I shrank away. My fictional brother was Vikzhel, a union man. They took care of their own.

“He was a good boy.” I had no problem staining my face with tears. Poor Misha! “He gave me his pay. It kept us going. But he died, four weeks ago. Now I have nothing.”

The switchman held the papers awkwardly, he didn’t know what to do with them if I wouldn’t take them back. “So what do you want from us, little comrade? We can’t put you on as a fireman.”

The others chuckled. Oh, so funny. How I hated men who thought what a woman did was ridiculous, what a woman needed. I wished I could pull the gun from my pocket, show him who was ridiculous. But I had to bite my tongue. “I can shovel snow, keep the tracks clean,” I said, pushing on. “Cook, wash. Read. Look, I’m not asking for charity.” I drew myself up to my full height, trying to appear healthy and robust, not like a pregnant girl who’d been breathing her last calories through her metaphysical skin. “I can water trains. Clean the station.” That made them laugh—you were more likely to see a pig fly than a clean vokzal in Russia.

They exchanged glances as if they were passing cards. The old man pulled something from his pocket. “Here’s some chocolate, devushka. Take it. Don’t be shy.”

Now I felt bad that I’d wanted to shoot him. I took the chocolate and let it melt on my tongue like a consecration—dark and sweet, like a drug. Over the switchman’s shoulder, a calendar hung next to train schedules posted on nails. Its pages were roughly torn back to 28 Fevrail 1919. I counted the months on the roof of my mouth. March, April, May, June… The months had never felt so urgent. The burly man with one arm leaned back, hooked his cigarette in his mouth, and with the same hand, threw a card onto the little box that was their gaming table. “Maybe Raisa Filipovna could use her.”

The old fellow puffed out his cheeks, his eyes full of news. “That girl was already halfway out the door. Yulia. Bun in the oven, you ask me.” He cackled, oblivious of the insult he was offering.

The bald man flushed. Had he noticed my condition? “Pardon him, he’s our village idiot.”

“Who’s the idiot, you apparatchik.” The old fellow held up a bony fist. “Burzhui bastard.”

The two-armed man threw a one-eyed jack. “You playing or what?”

Bun in the oven. I wished now I had a ring. Still, I could legitimately present myself as a married woman. Between the chocolate and the chance at work, I was already feeling hopeful. I licked the last of the sweet from my lips. “Where can I find this Raisa Filipovna?”

“A big wooden house on Orlovsky Street,” said the one-armed man. “Number 8. Korsakova’s her name. Tell her about your brother. She has the heart of a kitten. Tell her Styopa sent you.”

“I knew the husband,” said the old man. “A shame. Tomasovich.”

Styopa threw a card. I admired the dexterity with which he used his single hand. “A good man. Eternal memory.”

The bald man glanced up at his calendar, and tore the last page off to reveal 1 Mart 1919, opened the stove door and threw February into the fire.

I set out for Korsakova’s. I didn’t know Tikhvin well, only the station and the monastery, and the one inn where we used to stay on our way to Maryino. Where we’d stayed the summer of 1917, between the revolutions, when my father had sent us into the country, and Seryozha to the cadets. I asked directions of a woman who walked with the assured step of one who knew where she was going and was in no hurry to get there, and following her instructions, I passed Sovietskaya Street, Karl Marx Street, Svobodnaya Square—Freedom Square—a snow-clotted commons. The revolution had certainly brought its passion for renaming to Tikhvin, best known for its icon of the Virgin, and as the birthplace of the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, whose house my artistic mother liked to point out as our carriage jounced through the dusty streets on the way out of town. Korsakova—I wondered if the woman was some relation.

I found her house on a snow-filled lane—sagging but not the worst on the street, a big two-story wooden structure with a long balcony looking out upon other houses across the street, equally run-down but not so large. I rang the bell, tested the door. It was locked. It had started to snow again, but if I could spend a night in a blizzard in a forest halfway between nowhere and never, I guess I could wait in the doorway of a Tikhvin boarding house until the landlady came home.

Removing my snowshoes and tipping them up against the dark shingles, I took out Genya’s little book and reread his poems, hearing his voice, that concatenation of basso and boyishness:

I wondered if he still felt the same way. If I hadn’t left with my delightful man that night, if I’d met Genya after his avant-garde play, I might be in Moscow right now, surrounded by poets, instead of starving, pregnant, and looking for work in Tikhvin. It was too depressing to consider. I closed the book, ate the sausage in my satchel, a bit of bread. The doorway arched over my head. I touched the rough shingles. Would I have my baby here? Would Korsakova take me in? And if she didn’t, then what? Death was no conjecture these days, no distant rumor. It was all around, just waiting for me to make a false step. I thought of the romantic idiot who had once strolled among the graves at Petersburg’s noble Alexander Nevsky Monastery, imagining my own beautiful, famous corpse. My funeral procession, the inconsolable thousands who would carry me, the great poet, on their shoulders to my final resting place.

But death wasn’t at all like that. It was my brother Seryozha, cut down halfway to manhood. It was the student shot dead before me by government troops at Znamenskaya Square. It was a boy-thief beaten to death by the mob, dying in Genya’s arms in his grubby apartment. And the astronomer’s son, in the cholera epidemic, shitting out his life in the grass. I thought of all my dead—Solomon Katzev, Andrei Krestovsky, Andrei Petrovin… Death was no velvet shadow. He was a worker in a cold brick factory, short on materials, churning out a tatty product—typhus, cholera, civil war. A robber, waiting in alleys and stairwells, a sign painter even now painting the blue faces of the Formers in the Tikhvin station and hovering around the reeking invalids of war. He was circling the rooftops at Maryino, where the Ionians were still inflowing in the back parlor with their shining doomed eyes.

Would this damned widow ever return? I clapped my hands together, stamped my feet as I watched more amateur speculators propelling their suitcases up the badly cleared street. How desperately we clung to life, each one of us. Where did we find the energy to carry on? I used to think the dead were hopeful for the living, like benevolent old ladies watching young people at a ball. Now I thought they just pitied us.

At last, a tall woman dressed in black turned up the unshoveled walk, a basket in her arms, already watching me with suspicion.

“Raisa Filipovna?” I called out. She raised skeptical eyebrows. “You don’t know me, but Styopa from the switching house sent me over.” Who should I be? Makarova? Shurova? “Kuriakina. Marina Dmitrievna.”

Korsakova hooked the basket over her arm, fished a key from her pocket, and unlocked the front door. “And how do you know Stepan Radulovich?”

“I don’t.” I vowed I would tell the truth when I could. “I went to the station this morning, looking for work. He told me to come up here.” She opened the door. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to follow her, or if she would slam it in my face. “They said you might need someone. That you lost your girl.”

She turned back to me then, a firm-faced, dark-haired woman about forty. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

Inside, her house was warm, simple, and clean. Hooks by the door, wood walls, a little cabinet, a braided rug on the floor of the sitting room so old you couldn’t see what color it had been. Clean, wide-planked pine floors, solid, worn furniture smelling of men—a bit sweet, a bit acrid, the strong scent of tobacco. A workingman’s boarding house. Badly printed woodcuts, peasant lubok style, a couple of silhouettes. She hung up her coat and hat, removed her boots, and slid her feet into felt slippers. I was careful to keep my coat folded in, so the gun would not reveal itself as I hung my coat and my fox hat and took off my boots. She gestured to a pair of worn felt slippers and I put them on.

A long, rough table dominated the dining hall, a table that had never seen a cloth in any era. There we sat on long benches and I told her my tale, as much as made sense. She gazed at me with keen, dark eyes while I spoke, as if judging the weight of a goose under its feathers. “When is the child due?” she asked bluntly.

Seeing she’d lost a girl to a sexual escapade, I was careful to explain about my husband, the poet Gennady Kuriakin, who had moved to Moscow last autumn.

She grimaced, as if she’d just bitten into something sour. “He left you in this condition?”

For some reason, I wanted to defend Genya, even in the course of this elaborate fabrication. “It wasn’t his fault. Really, he didn’t know. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to make him stay if he didn’t want to. He’s a very ethical person.”

She cocked one of her mobile eyebrows and shook her head wearily, as you would if someone told you they’d just bought a handful of magic beans. “Styopa said you might have a job.” I brought the subject around again. “Said your girl left. I’m a hard worker, and… the condition, well, it’ll be months before it’s a problem. I don’t need much. Just give me a chance.”

“The girl was my eldest daughter,” she said wearily. “Yulia. Well, you can’t keep them young. Eventually the wheat will spring from the earth.” Her gaze fell upon my weathered hands. “Why don’t you wear a ring?”

My ragged hands, the broken nails. I hadn’t had to cut them since I left Furshtatskaya Street, they just tore off. “We married at the district soviet,” I said. “When the Germans were attacking Petrograd. He was leaving in the morning. There was no time for rings.” Our Red wedding. I could only remember Oksana’s geraniums, the petals shedding like little drops of blood.

“Romantics…” The widow Korsakova smiled, and pushed a loose strand of hair back into the black topknot. “I’m glad that’s not dead.” She surprised me. I’d have thought the landlady of a place like this would be a hard-nosed kopek pincher, counting the linens. “Well, all right. I’ll give you a try. But remember, I run a quiet, respectable house. I hear the least breath of scandal, that you’re drinking, running around, you’re out in the street. Baby or no baby. Ponimaesh?”

I was in! It was all I could do not to leap and twirl down the hall as she led me to my room. Only her extreme sobriety discouraged it. We climbed the stairs, walked down a long creaking hall wallpapered in a pattern of tiny flowers the color of old teeth, then up a second, crooked back staircase to a small third floor. She showed me a room with two narrow beds. Cheerful half-curtains of printed calico softened the windows. “That was Yulia’s,” she said, pointing to the bed under the window. “And this is my younger one’s, Lizaveta. She’s at school now.”

After the disorder of the last years, the lunacy of Ionia, I wanted to kiss the hem of her skirt. Such peace. The good order of family life. Thank God for this plain, sensible Russian woman who was making a home for her daughters. Perhaps I would be like this in a few years, streaks of gray in my hair, calm and competent, able to keep other people alive.

She stood in the doorway in her black dress. There was something Akhmatovian about her, her height, her hair, her somber countenance. My savior, my saint. “I’m sorry about your brother,” she said. “We have to cling to each other very tightly these days.”

And so I took up residence at Raisa Filipovna Korsakova’s. After my duties in former lives—as the servant Marusya at Pulkovo Observatory, as Marina Ionian these last months—I well knew how to make myself useful, and oh, three lovely meals a day! The widow and I worked side by side as she instructed me on the niceties of the domestic arts. It didn’t bother me that she was on the taciturn side unless actively illustrating some task. I had learned to appreciate silence.

Eight railwaymen lived in the house, including one-armed Styopa, who watched me tenderly as I carried pots and passed food, even helped me clear the table. He whispered to me, “Come to me when the lights go out. Fourth door on the right.” I smiled, neither refusing nor accepting. But it made me happy. He was a kind soul, robust and not unattractive, his hair and moustache had some gray. His gray eyes accepted his fate with the simple courage I’d seen in the military hospitals in Petrograd. God knew it had been a long time since I’d had a man. But I would not push my good luck at finding this position. He watched me as I sewed buttons onto trousers and darned socks on a wooden egg.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I rarely had a spare moment. Korsakova ran the place like a German. Monday was laundry, Tuesday the floors, Wednesday the windows, Thursday the stairs, and so on. When I wasn’t scrubbing pine floors with lye soap or boiling acres of laundry, hanging hectares of heavy corduroys in the kitchen, making beds or roasting kasha or grinding oats or peeling potatoes, I was standing in miles of queues for bread and flour and fuel and matches, and Liza’s milk ration. Was I complaining? Not I. Our tenants’ Vikzhel rations were generous, first category. They even got fabric and galoshes—theoretically. I ate like a queen—at least a Soviet one.

This was my life. I had no friends besides thirteen-year-old Liza, Styopa Radulovich, and the other boarders. I avoided befriending the women in the queues. It was a gossipy town and they asked all kinds of pointed questions about Korsakova and Liza and the wayward Yulia. You couldn’t give women like that a toehold. Oh, the hours of listening to their chatter! Whose daughter was sleeping with soldiers behind the barracks for a piece of their Red Star rations. Whose daughter had been raped last Tuesday and left for dead. She never could identify the rapist. They wanted to know things about me, where I was from, did I have a sweetheart. It made me wonder why they didn’t join the Cheka if they liked interrogation so much.

So although I was lonely enough to howl, I kept to Liza and the guests.

Spring crept closer, then arrived, turning the world to mud. The unpaved roads transformed themselves into deep brown rivers. Icicles crashed from eaves of the wooden buildings, and now the poor city folk had to struggle ankle-deep in mud with their offerings, their patched clothes spattered with Tikhvin. Workers with their sad plunder, and out-and-out bagmen groaning under huge sacks of flour and potatoes, headed for the station, where they’d boldly load the bumpers between cars for the trip back to Petrograd. The air crackled with anxiety—anyone could be shot for speculation, and yet, no one could survive without it.

I put off registering my presence with the authorities. The more invisible my document-poor life, the better. But eventually, Korsakova too was visited by the local Chekists. Searching—for what, food, weapons, counterrevolution? Or more likely, just to harass the Vikzhel men. Trade unionists tended not to be Communists. Everyone was turned out of bed—the railwaymen, Raisa Filipovna. Every room had to be searched, even the little girlish one at the top of the stairs.

Luckily we heard them beating on the front door. I turned on the lamp. “Liza,” I whispered. “I need to hide something.”

She sat up, her innocent face eager for secrets, her hair all tangled above her braids, as fine as thistle floss. I reached under my mattress and showed her the bundle of cloth in which I’d wrapped the ugly hunk of metal that had taken Andrei’s life. “Is it a gun?” she whispered excitedly.

I could hear the men arguing downstairs now. Trade unionists and Bolsheviks made a volatile mixture. “I’m sorry, I was traveling. I didn’t think—” Strangely, I’d forgotten there was an outside world, with Chekists combing every corner for counterrevolution.

Liza jumped out of bed and knelt, scrabbling at the floorboards under her bed with her fingernails. She pulled up a board, grinning. I saw something pink in there—a blouse? And books! I’d forgotten, children were natural spies, they always had their secrets. I threw the gun in with them and she quickly replaced the plank.

We could hear furniture crashing on the second floor, men shouting. Liza rounded her eyes at me, her sharp little chin, her blankets up around her neck. “They’re coming.”

“Don’t worry, they’re not looking for schoolgirls.”

The search was messy and frightening. They finally reached the third floor, burst through our crooked door. Liza and I clung to each other as a flat-cheeked dullard with pale blue eyes searched our room, pulling the mattresses off the beds and the drawers from the chest, making a great racket as the men shouted on the floor below. I was as frightened as Liza, but trembling as I was, I noticed the search wasn’t as careful as Varvara’s would have been. He didn’t even look behind the lubok print of the Donkey, the Bear, and the Fox, or run his hands over the wallpaper, feeling for seams, let alone check for loose floorboards. I could have hidden half the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland in here and he would have missed them. They had no idea what they were looking for, just throwing their weight around to terrorize the populace.

They herded us down to the dining room and made everyone produce their papers, and thus I was found out. No labor book. No travel propusk, no registration with the housing committee. It was a problem for both me and the widow.

Styopa Radulovich in his nightshirt, his thick strong hairy legs. “Doesn’t the Cheka have anything better to do than harass housemaids?”

“Tell us why we shouldn’t arrest her right now,” said the Chekist in charge, a lean small man with one drooping eye. “And you too.” He turned his good eye on Styopa and the bantam and the mechanic Berkovin. “I don’t like the looks of any of you. You Vikzhel men are getting too big for your pants.”

“She’ll come tomorrow,” said Korsakova, deflecting the attention from her precious boarders. “I’ll make sure of it, Comrade. You have my word.” She was as white as white paint, there in her dark shawl and her nightgown.

“We know where you live,” said the lead man. “All of you.” They left with a great clattering on the bare wooden stairs, a crash as they knocked one of the prints down. The statement hung in the air long after they’d gone.

2 The New Soviet Woman

The Tikhvin Soviet was housed in a fine yellow building on Svobodnaya Square, a surprisingly elegant structure. Clearly Tikhvin had once been an important commercial center before its present decline. I languished there for most of the day, standing in long queues, leaning against the walls, my ankles and calves killing me. People coughed, they scratched surreptitiously. Would I be able to get papers as a proletarian this time? Marina Kuriakina? Allowing me a life of some kind or condemning me forever—no rations, my child permanently branded as a member of a counterrevolutionary class. Or would I simply be arrested, taken away to some Cheka cell? I couldn’t bear that again, not ever.

Dusk had gathered outside the windows by the time I received my permission, my propusk, to move to the desk at which I would receive my labor book. I didn’t complain—I just prayed I wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow. Propusk in hand, I approached the wooden desk of a humorless woman behind a typewriter and, more importantly, the tray bearing its array of precious rubber stamps. After standing all day, my legs felt like watermelons, my ankles like logs. There was only one chair and the woman was sitting in it. Her mouth was wide but pinched, it looked like her teeth hurt her.

Slowly, carefully, I answered her questions. Sticking to the truth in all the small details, lying only in the large ones.

Sweat poured off me in rivers, even in this unheated office. The woman worked in knitted gloves, coat and hat, the tips of her gloves cut off. In demeanor, I did my best to straddle the line between Bold Proletarian and Supplicant Peasant as I described the robbery on the train from Petrograd. A bourgeois bagman (describing Kolya in every specific) had made much of me, and then stolen everything—my papers, my money. I hadn’t even known it was gone until disembarking at Tikhvin, when I found a bag of small rocks and an old calendar instead of my belongings. To weep for this woman was no difficulty. Then I praised the widow Korsakova in quasi-religious tones, which I then “remembered” was un-Bolshevik. What a performance. Komissarzhevskaya herself would have called for an encore.

“And where is your husband now?” asked the woman, who looked like a raw-boned cow.

I shrugged. “Don’t know. He was leaving for Moscow last time I saw him. Looking for work in the Information Section. He has a friend there. He was going to send for me, but I waited and then got tired of it. Maybe he’s in the army now, who cares. Anyway, I thought, it’s a new world. I can go places too, can’t I?” Trying to breathe energy through my pores. The class-winnowing process had reached the provinces, and I had to consolidate my proletarian status. My mouth was dry, my hands shook. Three nights ago, I heard in the queues that the local Cheka had boldly arrested six monks from the Uspensky Monastery, suspecting them of being nobles in hiding. Was no one safe?

“What are you doing in Tikhvin?” Her watery eyes, that frizzy hair. Her mouth was a line, protecting bad teeth.

“My factory closed,” I said. “People said things were easier away from the city. Thought I’d give it a try. Though there’s nothing here either, just charwoman.” I craned my neck to see what she was typing, the way illiterate people did, in awe that someone could put one letter after another. “Not that I’m complaining. Work is work and the widow’s fair.”

“You didn’t come for speculation?”

Why else would anyone move to this godforsaken burg? I wanted to yell. But a certain story was called for here, and I had to tell it, keep the mournful look on my face like a beggar pretending to be blind. It was Kolya’s peasant wife all over again. “I wanted to try my luck. But it’s all the same. Nothing in the foundry. I got this job, good as any. Place to live… The Cheka came and threw some furniture around. She said I better come over and do the necessary.”

The woman was unimpressed, her wide mouth set. There was something bothering her about me. My palms sweated, my eye twitched, but I resisted swallowing or biting my lip. I had to win her over. How? She saw liars every day. It better be good. Not too baroque. Maybe she liked it here, maybe she was proud to be from Tikhvin. “Sometimes I think I should’ve gone to Moscow with my old man. But I don’t think Moscow’s any better, do you?”

Wrong. Her expression of tired suspicion turned to one of open-mouthed astonishment. Exactly the way one of Chekhov’s yearning sisters would have responded, had someone ventured such a ridiculous notion, preferring this railroad backwater to the capital of Soviet Russia. I saw. She had hoped for something better in life. She had yearned, dreamed, and ended up here, behind that typewriter, with her wide, sad mouth, and the power to refuse lying little cheats like myself entry into the working class.

“I’m not complaining,” I backtracked. “If only I’d never met that lying, thieving son of a whore—I hope he falls off the train. Men like that, they think they can just take what they want and leave you for dead.” She was nodding, ever so slightly. Now I saw how the land lay. All men are lying bastards. Okay, Comrade, I could sing that song. How Kolya would have enjoyed all this, he would have laughed himself sick. “And me in the family way—I mean, what kind of soul does a man like that have?” My belly fluttered. I had to pee. I put my hand on my belly for the extra sympathy. I couldn’t have knocked myself up just for proletarian papers, could I, Comrade?

Finally, I heard those musical sounds, the loveliest in the world, the sound of round blue stamps striking the pages of a brand-new labor book. One, two, three.

“Now you can register your housing,” she said, holding out the little pamphlet that meant a new life for me. “There are lectures for our Soviet mothers at the Women’s Club. They’re very educational. I hope you’ll come.”

“Oh, I will! Thank you, Comrade.”

Of course, I avoided the Women’s Club like typhus. I didn’t relish the prospect of running into Lyuda the new Communist or someone else who knew me as Marina Makarova, barynya, granddaughter of landowners. And I had plenty to do at the boarding house. Korsakova might be a good woman, but she wasn’t exactly kitten-hearted as advertised. Pregnant or not, I worked like a mule. Boiling sheets and tending to the single toilet we all shared—beyond execrable. But for me, the worst was beds. In the Republic of the Future, there will be no beds. We will sleep standing up, like horses. So many beds, heavy and awkward, mattresses that needed beating, frames that needed wiping. The widow was a crusader against lice, a veritable Chekist, Dzerzhinsky himself. It was downright heroic of her to even attempt to run a clean household, let alone succeed in keeping house and tenants free from insect incursion. But it was my back that did the lifting.

Making beds perpetually frustrated me. Sheets never lay flat for me the way they did for other women. It seemed a judgment on my womanliness that I could not make a bed that didn’t look like it had already been slept in. As a child, I’d often watched our maid Basya lay out a sheet with a simple snap of the wrist, making it float over the bed like a cloud, hovering for an instant before it settled perfectly. For me a sheet became a white dragon, twisting and bucking before coiling itself in a sullen heap. How I resented beds. What a waste of time, when they’d be ruined all over again in the morning. The entire category of housemaid was the most reactionary of professions. My back hurt, my hips and my legs.

Every morning before dawn, I joined the others, ready to measure out my next hours in three-foot intervals from the end of the queue to the blessed splintery counter of the bakery, each of us clearly the least valuable members of our households. Grandmothers, maiden aunts, teenaged daughters, cripples. We freed the able-bodied for worthier tasks. In some glittering Soviet future, you wouldn’t have to wait like this, you’d sign in on a sheet and go to work, come back to find your rations all wrapped and waiting for you.

But that was a dream born of useless hours, weight on one leg, then the other, trying to relieve aching hips and backs. Rations would always be too valuable to entrust to bakery workers, or really (considering my hunger) anyone besides a family member. You had to keep a sharp eye on every bite. Each gram of bread was the difference between queasy health and weak, shivering faintness. Give us this day our daily bread, and you hoped it didn’t have too much straw in it. Also our daily vobla, that little bony fish, if you could digest it. We had no fragile people living at Korsakova’s, only workmen with good rations. I shuddered to think of the old people, like the Pulkovo astronomers, or the chronically ill, like poor Solomon Katzev. The cereal cut into our guts. And there were no fat rations at all. I still had to go to the illegal market by the east wall of the monastery and trade for small bottles of oil from local peasants. If I were arrested, no one else would go to jail, no one else would be interrogated as a speculator. Only the least valuable member. Me. And who knew what would even be in those bottles—sunflower oil, hempseed, linseed, castor—a couple of times I’d sworn it was kerosene. In exchange, I offered bits and pieces of hardware the men brought home from the railroad—nails mostly, rivets, every worker managed to take a little something. A wonder there was a railway left to run, considering the pilferage, but the peasants didn’t want your money, they wanted hard goods—fabric, metal, anything manufactured. Such was the dearness of fats, you always wondered when you fried the potatoes, the bits of sausage, whether you’d poison everyone in the house. Once I was so hungry, I drank an inch of cod liver oil right in the street and struggled not to belch in front of the widow.

I stamped my feet in the queue and exhaled white breath, waiting for dawn, in boots that had been resoled by Bogdan Ionian, and tried to keep my legs from cramping. I wished I had a book to read. I wished it as much as you might wish for a nice steak with a pat of butter on top. Not a newspaper—Zinoviev thundering away—but a real book. A novel, a big fat one. Tolstoy. Or Dickens, I would die for Dickens. I’d read everything at Korsakova’s—the ragged Nat Pinkertons in Mikhail Gendelev’s room, and Berkovin’s copy of Gorky’s Luckless Pavel, all of which I’d “borrowed” several times. Perhaps Korsakova had something in her room, but I’d never been invited in. Aside from the men’s reading, I fed off Liza’s small threadbare cache of schoolbooks: an old biology text written about the time William Harvey cut up his first frog, a basic mathematics, a collection of Afanasyev’s folk tales illustrated by Bilibin, Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” and a book of morning and evening prayers, which I never saw her open. I impressed her by reciting the “Horseman” from beginning to end from memory as she followed along in the book. “I love you, Peter’s creature / I love your strong, terrifying gaze…” And better, I had a chance to examine the collection beneath the floorboards: a clandestine copy of The Tale of Warlord Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in a cheap clothbound edition, and a translation of Edgar Allan Poe by Balmont. No wonder Liza had trouble sleeping.

Now, in the cold half-light pushing toward dawn, I had nothing but my heartbeat and Pushkin to keep me company: I love you, Peter’s creature… But I wouldn’t be going back to Petrograd anytime soon. At long and blessed last, the sun rose, and in the morning light, like warming birds, the sound of women’s chatter began to fill the silence. Somebody was making eyes at someone’s husband. A commissar’s wife was taking French lessons. Somebody was pregnant again. Someone’s baby was sick. Someone’s daughter was running around with a mechanic. I didn’t know anything, and if I had, I wouldn’t share it with these old girls for love or money. Why hadn’t I gone abroad when I had the chance? I could be at Oxford now, studying English literature and publishing my poems.

Abroad. Was it still there, abroad? My nightly fantasies swirled around the sound. Not in three years when this war would certainly be over, the way Varvara and I had dreamed it, after the world revolution. But abroad as it always had been for us—everywhere that was not Russia. The place where people were educated and read new books and hadn’t had a reactionary monarchy sitting on their heads for three hundred years.

I saw myself at twenty-one at a café in New York, the bourgeois young lady, wearing a coat that was sometimes sable, sometimes gray chinchilla, eating a steak fried in butter. I imagined myself half naked in California, sunbathing on a rocky shore. Or in Buenos Aires, dancing a tango with Kolya Shurov, finally together the way we should always have been—not in a wagon scratching our fleas but in the great world. In my fantasy, how he begged my forgiveness, how he wept on his knees! And eventually, when I did forgive him, we would laugh to remember how we’d been peasants together, a world ago.

But I could not put the baby into that picture. With the baby, there should be a promenade by the sea—Yalta, or Nice. The Lido at Venice, why not? The baby—no, a child by then. Nicely dressed, a laughing boy, running after a ball, followed by a small, bright-eyed dog. A boy in a white sailor suit…

I groaned at my own bourgeois longings. What had happened to my revolutionary fervor? Equality and good conditions for all? Why not picture a bold and rugged boy, sticking up for his little comrades, skillful and useful and practical? But it was harder to picture than the Ligurian seashore. Why? Because I could not see the end of it, only this blasted queue, the eternal waiting, and I had to pee. I asked the woman behind me, a woman with a small girl, if she would hold my place.

What madness, I thought, squatting on the far side of the depot, teetering and struggling not to fall into the snow or wet myself. Flailing like a goose, I lost my balance and fell anyway. I cursed the world as I lurched to my feet, my derriere and skirt wet through. What kind of irresponsible God would give me a poor innocent baby to care for?

“Thanks,” I said to the woman when I finally came back into line, my clothes freezing to my backside. How somberly the woman’s child looked up at me, big-eyed and blue with cold, half-starved already. This was what I was bringing into the world. Not that rosy-faced boy in the sailor suit. Just another starveling. Someone who would never know a good meal, the thrill of a winter’s gallop in a sleigh nestled under a fur rug. No, he would attend a school much like Liza’s with its out-of-date textbooks, and potatoes cooked in castor oil. He would have cracked shoes and be inspected for lice. No Avdokia to take tender care of him. How I envied my mother, how I envied my younger self.

Now I was the servant. And mine would be a servant’s child, that most expendable of expendable human commodities. I smiled at the little girl, tried to get her to smile back. Suddenly it seemed of absolute importance to see if I could get that child to grin, or stick out her tongue. I touched my tongue to my nose, whistled like a dove through my hands, pretended to insert my finger to the first knuckle into my nose, but she just stared, drawing closer to her mother. I had to stop. There just wasn’t a smile in her. She was like a somber little woman, suspicious of my oversized child self and my antics. No childhood for these children of the revolution.

How selfish I was, to have this baby. So stubborn. What a romantic. Every bit as foolish as the foolish Yulia chasing her man to Tver.

At last, the line lurched on, the shop opened. After a time, I peered back at the shy little girl from between my fingers, like a mask. She clung to her mother’s hand, staring at my odd Ionian clothes. Had she never seen a clown before? She was what, four? Five? What had she known but hunger, the hunched, resigned shoulders of women in their kerchiefs and shawls, their bags and worn boots and patched coats. But these women had been young once, had laughed, had danced, had teased a handsome man. There had been joy in Tikhvin, once upon a time.

I took my notebook from my bag and began to write something about the wasted time of all of us women, “A Poem to the Queue.” The little girl with the somber face had inspired me. I was tired of the clumsy drabness of my own thoughts. Fun was rarer than peacocks. It made me laugh. Not a sound much heard in a morning bread queue. The old woman in front of me, fragile shouldered, in a heavy scarf, turned my way. “What are you writing, devushka?”

I shrugged. “Something I was thinking.”

“Something funny? Read it.” She nudged another woman, a broad-shouldered baba with a faint moustache. “Listen, she’s written a funny joke.”

“Well, let’s hear it,” said the bigger woman. The lines on her face were weathered hard, like ironed taffeta, I swear I could hear her face crinkle when she spoke. “God have mercy, I could use a laugh.”

“It’s not done yet,” I said. Tickled that someone would want to hear it, especially this crusty old girl.

“Go on.” She squinted to read the tiny scrawl.

I couldn’t resist. “A Poem to the Queue,” I began.

“Snothead,” the solid baba murmured good-naturedly.

They were listening, the two babas and the little girl’s mother.

Now they smiled, recognizing the official Bolshevik/Pravda tone, understanding it was a joke—a poem for them! More people turned to listen, a girl behind the woman with the child.

Outright chuckles. I held my finger up to my nose, and then pointed, discreetly, at each one, a village admonishment. Laughter was like water in this desert. The baba with the moustache murmured, “Why not? They’ve rationed everything else.” The woman with the child unconsciously stroked her long plaits.

Now they were laughing openly, the woman in the wool scarf clapped her mittened hands to her cheeks.

Now I had come to the end of the written poem, but was caught up in the joke and the rhythm of the thing. I kept going, making it up like Misha’s chastushki.

“Call it ‘My Varicose Veins,’” said the woman with the kerchief.

“‘My Aching Feet,’” said the little woman with the patched coat.

Oh, the beautiful, phlegmy music of their laughter! I hadn’t realized just how tired of creeping around like a kitchen mouse I was, scuttling across the floor ahead of the housewife’s broom. To touch for one moment these tired, hungry women, to lift their spirits, knowing we were not crazy, laughing together at the life we all found ourselves living, this ridiculous world that had us all by the throat.

A woman with two loaves had stopped to listen.

I thought it was very good, but my sisters suddenly faded back into the submissive postures of the queue, freezing like jonquils caught in a late frost.

“Who are you?” demanded the woman with the loaves. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“Just a joke, Alexandra Sergeevna,” said the woman behind me with the little girl. “She wrote a poem.”

The woman turned her flat-cheeked, gravel-eyed face to me. “A fine time to criticize our struggling Soviet system. Too bad about your petty-bourgeois dissatisfactions. This”—she waved at the queue, raising her voice like someone on a podium—“is no joking matter. We’re fighting for our lives here. Our soldiers are spilling blood that’s quite real. And we women are doing our part.”

Sober morning gray returned to the faces of my listeners. There was nothing the least bit funny about being alive in the bread queue on Ulitsa Truda, Labor Street, in early spring 1919. I had forgotten myself. The day when one could safely stand on a street corner and proclaim poems to workers was over.

“Who are you?” she demanded again.

“Kuriakina,” I replied. Did she need to see my labor book?

A woman in a felt hood said, “She’s the new girl over at Korsakova’s. She’s took the place of the daughter.”

The officious woman eyed me closely, as if memorizing me for a police report. I felt myself stiffening. I wanted to argue with her, defend my rights, my labor book securely in my pocket, but I’d grown cautious—something to do with my encounter with the Cheka, at Pulkovo, and in the cells at Gorokhovaya 2. With her self-righteousness, this puffed-up woman had to be a big local Bolshevik to dictate so freely to the others.

I shrugged. “Just a poem, Comrade. Having some fun. Making the time go faster.”

Having told me off and spoiled the moment, she settled herself importantly, like a hen who’d been disturbed. “I could report you. Stirring people up against the government.”

Oh God. “A little joke makes people feel less alone, Comrade,” I said.

“Alone?” The woman hoisting her bread under her arm. “Does this look like you’re alone?” She gestured to the queue, front to back.

“She’s pregnant, Alexandra Sergeevna,” said the woman with the little girl. “She’s been standing a long time.”

I touched my belly through my coat, wanting to hide him from this sour woman.

Her eyes narrowed, circled in black around the iris like a bull’s-eye. “Why haven’t we seen you at the Mothers’ Course? We have an excellent Women’s Club here. We’re not some benighted village, you know.”

Oh, the infernal Women’s Club! “I’m just so tired these days, Comrade,” I said. “I don’t sleep well.”

“We’re building socialism, devushka. We have to take our place, mothers and grandmothers, and not grumble in the breadlines. There’s a lecture tonight. ‘The Future of the Family.’ Seven o’clock. I want to see you there.” She turned and briskly walked off, having done her socialist duty. It looked like I would be attending the Women’s Club of Tikhvin after all.

The sun had come up, and the frost on the stones rose as mist into the sunlight. Although the sour woman had taken the steam out of the moment, a wisp of good cheer remained. I could smell it off the other women, just a hint of it, the way woodsmoke clings to your coat. The girl with the hollow eyes peeped out at me from behind her mother’s legs, still staring.

3 The Future of the Family

After the men’s dinner was cleared that night and my own portion consumed—devoured—I scrubbed the table, and Styopa helped me put the silverware back into the pantry. I would have liked to crawl upstairs to bed, but instead, I forced myself back into my coat and boots for the hike over to the old Duma building, the long yellow structure of the Tikhvin Soviet. What choice did I have? I had to live in this town, and now that I’d taken the risk of becoming known, I had to fork over my pound of flesh.

“You shouldn’t go alone,” said Styopa. “I’ll walk you. It’s dangerous out there.”

I looked over at Raisa Filipovna. “She’ll be fine,” she said. “Just be careful. And watch your tongue.” The thing I hated most. I clapped my fox hat onto my head.

I steeled myself as I approached the loitering soldiers under the one operating streetlight of the square, men who knew nothing about the New Soviet Woman, and were desperate for sex. “Hey, girl, come with me, I’ve got chocolate.” “I’ve got some dynamite and it’s about ready to explode.” The chocolate was tempting but the syphilis held me at bay. If I were Misha, I’d point out they would have their share of explosions when they faced Admiral Kolchak and the Whites. But if I were Misha, I would not have to listen to this at all. Our poor, rude, ignorant Red heroes. Half the women in town wished they were dead already. Korsakova had to collect Liza from school herself, or I had to do it, you couldn’t have a thirteen-year-old girl walking through a town like this by herself. I wished I’d said yes to Styopa Radulovich despite Korsakova’s disapproval. My pregnancy didn’t shield me—they would be happy to have me. We were coarsening like abused beasts, the whole country. We thought only of food, and sex, and sleep, of warmth and safety. No more morality, none of those burzhui niceties. I shut my ears and hurried toward the lit portal of the soviet like a small boat tacking toward a dock on a dark night.

A hand-lettered sign indicated ROOM 145, TIKHVIN SOVIET WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ WOMEN’S CLUB. LECTURE TONIGHT. Oh, were there any happier two words in the Russian language?

The Women’s Club occupied two cold rooms toward the end of the hall, past the printing press and a classroom in which a potato-shaped woman was wearily teaching people to read. Her adult students sat, fist to forehead, as if in pain with the passage of a new idea, like they were passing a kidney stone.

In the first room of the Women’s Club, a girl in a white scarf with a face like a pancake handed out tea with saccharine. A number of children played quietly under the eye of two other girls—too weak to make much of a racket. In the second room, fifty women assembled on benches and sills of the windows, some with babies in arms—an impressive turnout. The panes were frosted with their breath. The soviet clearly didn’t consider the Women’s Club worth sparing the firewood for. I saw the woman in the felted hood who had told the Bolshevik where I lived, and stayed away from her. The woman who’d had the little girl in the queue waved me over, opened a space on the bench for me.

“Get your maternity ration after,” she advised.

Well, that was something to look forward to.

The Bolshevik woman came out with an armload of papers, wearing her coat against the cold, a red kerchief on her head, self-consciously echoing the Communist poster on the wall behind her. She rose to the lectern, puffing up to a round of applause.

“The commissar’s wife. Alexandra Sergeevna,” the woman next to me whispered. Followed by a derisive exhale.

Sergeevna cleared her throat and opened a pamphlet. “Last time, we talked about the four categories of housework doomed to extinction. Does anyone remember what they were?”

I worried a loose tooth—lower left canine. There was no hope of finding a dentist—anyone with any medical training was doing surgery at the front. I’d told Korsakova about it, but she’d shrugged, saying a woman lost a tooth for every child, it was normal. How privileged I’d been, I hadn’t even understood the distance between my life and that of an ordinary woman. Now I would lose a tooth. Now I would truly become what I’d only been pretending to be, a nineteen-year-old proletarian on my way to becoming an old woman as the baby leached the precious calcium from my bones. I was being eaten alive. The Drops of Milk campaign would be a godsend. I shouldn’t have waited this long.

“Four categories of housework are doomed to extinction with the victory of Communism,” she read. “In the future, the Soviet working woman will be surrounded by the same ease, hygiene, and beauty as the rich once had under Capitalism. Instead of spending her free hours in a private kitchen and laundry, she will have public restaurants and communal kitchens, collective laundries and clothes-mending centers, at her disposal.” She received a polite, apple-polishing round of applause. “Questions?”

A woman perched on the windowsill raised her hand. She had strange shiny blue eyes that contrasted oddly with her drawn, hungry face. “How’ll they know whose clothes are whose if we all take ’em to the same place?”

Sergeevna frowned, blinked. It was not a question she’d expected, and clearly not one she welcomed. “I don’t understand.”

I actually felt sorry for this officious woman, trying to inspire these tired Fraus into envisioning a new socialist future, and having them worry about how they were going to reclaim their clothes at the nonexistent repair center. Women who had never taken their clothes to a laundry or a tailor, they couldn’t imagine such an exotic exchange.

“At the mending center,” the woman tried to explain. “How will they know whose are whose?”

The commissar’s wife let out an exasperated sigh. “They’ll fill out a ticket for you. And you’ll bring it when you pick up the clothes.”

“What if I lose the ticket?”

The speaker leaned on her stack of printed material and pointed to the poster behind her, a firm-faced Soviet matron before a series of upright shapes that could have been smokestacks and could have been rifles, the whole thing boldly titled FREE WOMEN BUILD SOCIALISM. “What’s the point in having a hundred women at home washing their own individual clothes, when five women could have a paying job working in that laundry? With rations and a crèche. Leaving ninety-five women free to contribute to society. Capitalism outmoded the family as a unit of production. Communism makes its domestic arrangements obsolete.”

But the words she was using were meaningless to them: unit of production, domestic arrangements. She was making sense, but not to this audience.

She opened a pamphlet, smoothed down the pages. “What of the mothers?” she read. She pointed to another poster behind her on the wall. CHILDREN ARE EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY. On it, two women, a peasant and a worker, stood with their children, a barn behind one, a factory behind the other.

“Society needs more workers and rejoices in the birth of your child,” she valiantly read on. “You don’t have to worry about its future. Your child will know neither hunger nor cold. Society will feed, bring up, and educate the child. The joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them. But the old type of family is withering away, not because it’s being forced out of existence but because it is no longer necessary. The task of raising children is passing into the hands of the collective.”

I tried to think of a country where people were free of the family. Of Father who leads and Mother who bows. Imagine that kind of freedom for women. Poor beaten Faina could leave her husband and make a life for herself.

“It used to be that you didn’t worry about my children, and I didn’t worry about yours,” she explained. “But in our socialist society, any child in need is everyone’s responsibility. Every mother’s welfare. No mother, married or single, will be left on her own to care for her children.”

The women shifted nervously, not completely ready to accept that they need not devote their lives to wiping children’s noses and washing their clothes, that it wasn’t the highest function of womanhood. A woman in a patched jacket stood. “I work over at the lumberyard, and I pay a third of my wages to a woman who watches my kids. When are we getting one of those kindergartens here, like you said last time?”

The commissar’s wife flushed, that someone noticed there was a difference between the dreams of the spacemen and the facts of life in the streets and squares of Tikhvin. “We’re not magicians, Comrade. I don’t have to tell you we’re in the middle of a civil war. We already give the children hot meals in school. Step by step. Any other questions?” She opened her book, clearly impatient to move on.

Another hand came up. “They say they’re going to take the children away from the mothers. Is that true? Who can better care for a child than its own mother?”

Sergeevna’s flat cheek flexed. “We’re not taking children from their mothers, Comrade. We’re offering the woman an opportunity to engage in the economic and political life of the socialist society. We don’t need a hundred women each cooking dinner and ministering to individual children. It’s economically regressive, when six women could free the rest for meaningful work.”

These women didn’t understand that the soviet was offering working-class women the labor arrangements that aristocrats had known for centuries. When was the last time an upper-class Russian woman raised her own children? Vera Borisovna certainly hadn’t. I would be the first woman in my family to attempt it—my useless, incompetent self. I remembered the mess I’d made at Faina’s, just trying to diaper her baby. We’d all been raised by governesses, tutors, and nannies, but it was a shocking, foreign idea among these peasants and workers, these provincial petite bourgeoisie. To release women from their position as family serfs, there had to be some way to care for the children. Nothing was going to change without it. I had been so ready to dislike this woman, but now I felt sorry for her. I couldn’t help but see what a hard job she had ahead of her, trying to get the benighted womenfolk of Tikhvin to understand that there was more to life than motherhood and wifedom and pregnancy every spring.

“Think of being able to go to work without worrying about your kids,” I blurted out. “Without paying half your earnings to some crazy old person who waters the milk. That’s what she’s talking about.”

The speaker almost toppled with gratitude that someone understood what she was trying to say. “Thank you, that’s exactly right.”

“But what if they beat my kid?” asked the woman perched on the windowsill. “He’s a brat but I wouldn’t want no stranger beating him.”

“Nobody’s going to beat your child, Comrade. Abusing children is reactionary. We must never beat our children. Any other questions?” She looked around desperately, hoping someone would ask a question about the woman’s place in future society.

“But what if they did?” insisted the woman. Now I recognized her, she was one of those busybodies in the queues who had wanted to know all about Korsakova’s daughter.

I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “Well, what if you beat your own child? Is that any better?” There must have been something I didn’t know about this woman, for the hall erupted in laughter.

“Well, it’s my kid, ain’t it?” she said defensively. More laughter followed.

“That’s the point, Comrade,” Sergeevna jumped in enthusiastically. “It’s not your child—that’s done. My child, your child, that’s the capitalist way—I take care of my children, make sure they have everything I can possibly give them, but to hell with your child, even if it’s starving, freezing, crying on the side of the road. My child, my property. What if my husband thinks of me that way? I can beat her, she’s my property, just like my horse.”

“I’d like to see him try,” whispered my seatmate. “I bet she rules that roost. I bet he has to sing for his supper.”

“In socialist society, we’ve gone beyond all that.” She pointed again to the poster, CHILDREN ARE EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY. “Our children belong to all of us. We all have a stake in the future of the working class. Socialism’s job is to lessen your burden, so you can make your contribution, knowing your child is properly cared for, not running around loose on the street or in the hands of whatever provision you can make. You are valuable to us, and so is your child.”

My seatmate whispered, “I wouldn’t give her a chicken to raise.”

“I don’t know. I could use the help,” I said.

She patted my arm. “Wait until you have the baby. Then you’ll see. Mothers aren’t going to give up their children without a fight.”

I couldn’t bear the stubborn stupidity of the woman. “But wouldn’t it be nice to know you could live your life without worrying, Oh, if I leave my man, what will I do with my children? You wouldn’t be such a slave.” Like a tethered cow.

“And maybe pigs will fly,” the woman told me. “And shit bacon.” Laughter all around us.

Sergeevna raised a hand to quell our un-Soviet mirth, and went on to read from another pamphlet, about a woman’s duty to have children to strengthen the working class. Clearly written by a man, for what woman ever decided to have children out of responsibility to the collective?

In response, I felt the baby flutter within me like a flag, deep inside my body. Just a flutter, like a butterfly or a rustle in the trees. The revolutionary words had stirred it. “It’s moving,” I whispered. The woman smiled. The baby was telling me that it was ready for this new world. Girl or boy, it would grow up into a very different world than any of us could imagine. A brave girl, maybe, a real firebrand.

At last it was over and we rose to return to our homes. Sergeevna stopped me at the door, shook my hand. “Thank you for coming. I so appreciate having someone who understands what we’re trying to do here.”

I shook her hand and pretended I’d rarely spent a more fascinating interlude after a twelve-hour workday. “Women in the future will have more to live for.”

She released my hand. She leaned toward me. “Perhaps you’ll help us, a poet like yourself. We could use some slogans. ‘Women, Take Care of Everyone’s Children,’ something like that. See if you can think of some. See you Friday.”

The idea that there would be a Friday, and slogans, and Sergeevna on a returning basis, turned me to stone. The clamminess of her hand. The tremulous smile with which she regarded me. I hated people who had plans for me, even if it was with the best intentions. I could see her Bolshevik wheels turning. Maybe I could be roped into teaching literacy classes, or saddled with babysitting duties. My back ached, my legs, I wanted Liza to rub them, and I had to pee like a typhoon. “Thank you, Comrade. I’ll see what I can do.”

“And don’t forget your maternity ration,” she added.

Lord knew I wouldn’t forget that.

4 Stepan Radulovich

After many advances and retreats, spring’s troops at last broke winter’s lines. Ice cracked in violent retorts on the Tikhvinka. It put everyone on edge, it sounded so much like gunfire. Admiral Kolchak, the head of the White Army, had emerged from his Siberian stronghold and smashed through the Urals. Kolchak was on his way. The railwaymen knew everything, what a relief to have access to the news again!

Styopa Radulovich and I lay in his bed in his single room at the end of the second-floor corridor—the room I’d begun to visit at the very end of my endless day. I had sworn I’d stay away from him, but had finally succumbed to the pleasure of a man’s body up against mine, his rich, loamy smell, his kindness. His easy silences. He reminded me I was still young, still desirable. I was already pregnant, he couldn’t do me any harm on that account, and I was lonely. He was modest in his sexual needs. It was wonderful just to have someone to talk to. When he wondered at the scarring on my back, the Archangel’s souvenir, I told him it was something I didn’t want to discuss, and he let it go.

After making love, knowing I liked it, he propped his map of Russia up against the blanket and traced the progress of the White advance for me with his one hand, scattering cigarette ash over the soft paper and the blanket like a weather report of light snow. It was better than any newspaper—especially now that only Bolshevik papers remained, where even defeats were presented as victories, or drumbeats to inspire further effort. But Vikzhel had the telegraph, they knew which trains carried troops and how many, where they were now and which way they headed.

I ran my finger along the eastern front, where Admiral Kolchak and his Siberian Cossacks had broken through the Urals. They’d just taken Ufa, the stronghold of Komuch, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly—my father’s people. But now it was just Kolchak, monarchy, and reaction. So much for liberalism. “Voted themselves out of office, and next day the Supreme Leader and his Cossacks marched in singing ‘God Save the Tsar,’” said Styopa. I traced the long jagged line to the west of the mountain range that separated Asia from Europe, the Kolchak front. Every day, the Whites moved twenty-five, thirty miles closer to the Volga. It wouldn’t be long until they took Samara and Kazan, on their way to Moscow.

I traced my finger down to the Denikin forces in the Don. Denikin’s troops, reaction and pogrom. And my brother Volodya, whatever he was doing now. “Will Kolchak and Denikin join up?”

“They’ll try,” he said.

I nested my head on his shoulder, the one without the arm. He was always careful to conceal the stump, wore a nightshirt, that sleeve neatly knotted. His smell was of machines, of oil and cinders. “We’re losing, aren’t we?”

Soviet Russia, what was left of it, a tenth of what had been. Red in the center, like a heart, in a sea of White.

“But they’ve got a weakness,” said Styopa, dropping ash on the map. “Sure, we’ve lost a lot of territory, but we’re fighting back-to-back. That’s the way you want to fight. Short supply lines. We can move men wherever we need them.” He sketched quick zigzags back and forth across the heart of Red Russia. “See? Kolchak’s got to send out all the way to Omsk for his laundry and shoe polish.” His finger traced a straight line six inches east of the Urals. “Easy to cut anywhere along the line.” The Trans-Siberian—always that train. My father saw its importance from the beginning. “The peasants are already rebelling behind the lines, in Irkutsk, and the Transbaikal.” He pointed to areas in the Far East, places so remote I couldn’t imagine them except in one of Ukashin’s tales about hidden monks and their ancient rites. “Those atamans out there are as crazy as bedbugs. Even the stupidest peasants are unrolling red banners. The Red Army doesn’t have to win, it just has to survive. The people will do the rest.”

He folded the map and put it on his little bedside table. Berkovin coughed in the next room, reminding us how thin the walls were. Styopa rested his coarse hand on the mound of my belly. I knew he liked the way it felt, hot, like rising bread. Sometimes it irritated me, to be enjoyed in such an animal way, sometimes it felt reassuring. We lay in the light of his kerosene lantern, watching his cigarette smoke rise in the spring-scented night. The house was so quiet I could hear the ticking of his watch. He burrowed his unshaven face into my neck. It must have felt good to him, but it left me with a rash. “Do you love me at all, lisichka?” My little fox, my redhead.

I sighed and sat up, straightening my nightdress—sewn by myself out of a torn sheet Korsakova had given me. I was reluctant to lie, though he clearly wanted me to say yes. I whispered. “I love being with you. Can that be enough?”

He smiled, a little sadly, pulled me in for another kiss.

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll try.” Poor Styopa, I thought as I left his room, closing the door so very gently, not to alert Berkovin. If only I could have warned him not to fall in love with me. But who ever listened to such a warning?

The night was full of snoring, one man so buzzily sonorous—Gendelev? Zhubin?—I could have hopped the whole length of the hall singing “La Marseillaise” and not have been heard. Yet still I crept down the hall in my felt slippers, skirting the noisier boards, thinking that this was how the world worked. How interchangeable we were. Lost your man? Well, here’s another, nothing wrong with him, and his one arm would keep him out of the army. Bozhe moi.

I inched up the creaking staircase to the third floor, where Korsakova slept in the room opposite ours, listening as I held my breath and lifted our door by the knob before swinging it open—fast—and slipping inside. Closing it—but not all the way—and placing a slipper behind it to keep it from swinging open again.

I’d certainly become pragmatic. How do you like that, Varvara? Pregnant with one man’s child, married to another, and sleeping with a man who got me a job in a boarding house—five arms between them. I shed my shawl and slipped into bed, Liza’s braids ribboned on the pillow opposite. I tried not to think about how crude I’d become. I’d once wanted to live in a poem, but this was the real world, without grandeur or heroics. I needed a gentle man to hold me, a kind man with a ration card who didn’t mind massaging my aching legs with his one strong hand.

Moonlight fell across my bed over the tops of the curtains. Although I was exhausted, the moon tugged at my blood. I wondered where Father was, now that Ufa had been taken. Was he dancing with his bright-haired mistress to “God Save the Tsar”? Were they together again? Was she passing information on their every move back to Moscow?

I thought about Siberia, the vast sweep of it. Beyond Omsk, Kolchak’s capital, lay the terrible lands commanded by the Cossack atamans. Styopa said they flayed prisoners alive, men and women. Disemboweled them. Tortured them in ways that made them no longer recognizable as humans. And through their territories laced the spider thread of the Trans-Siberian, which Papa’s Englishmen had coveted like a string of diamonds. Maybe my father was on that train right now, heading for China. He and his horrible woman. Though someday, when my soul was placed on the great scales, I knew that I would be called to account for naming her. And she, for her own perfidies.

Walking together in the long spring twilight up by the ponds, Styopa and I attempted to talk, get to know one another. He talked about the loss of his arm, his former work as a mechanic, his current job in the station yard maintaining signals. He was resigned about the loss. “Just one of those things, lisichka.” He talked about his family, all railway workers—father, a section boss on the Vologda line; his brothers and how they went fishing; his dear mama; a fragile girl he’d loved who’d died of a bad heart. The light lingered like a lover, reminding me of Kolya. Little feet, where are you now? The railwayman and I sat in the twilight where we could look back at the Uspensky Monastery with its massed cupolas and five bell towers like teeth of a comb, looking so much like that enchanted city under the lake. I waited to hear the bells from the tower, but they never rang anymore. The bell ringers were gone, the monks scattered, arrested, or hunkered down in the cloisters. The trees now covered by the mist of pale green.

I told Styopa I was married to a poet, who had left me for Moscow, that I was drifting, that he didn’t know we were having a child. I said that my father was a typesetter, that my mother was very religious, that they quarreled. “There really are poets nowadays?” he asked.

“That’s what I’m doing with the Women’s Club. ‘For children’s sake, your help they need, / Soviet mothers, learn to read!’”

“Hey, that’s good,” he said, his weathered face smiling, potato-nosed. A kind and honest face. “You think of poets as guys in tight pants talking about clouds.”

“All kinds of poets,” I said. “Some aren’t even guys.”

Draftees thickened the streets like flour in gravy. They marched in groups, their heads newly shaved, they looked like so many taste buds reaching out to lick the air. It tasted raw and smoky, the tang of mud, the bitterness of spring. Peasant boys mostly, in rough clothes and bast shoes, herded in from the countryside like sheep rounded up from scattered meadows. I thought of village vengeance, how the peasants offered up the families they liked the least, pointed them out as hoarders and kulaks—At least they left the family. Except Motka, they took him for the army. No wonder the Red troops melted away at the first sight of Kolchak.

I dropped off the slogans at the Women’s Club. Not exactly Blok, but it kept Sergeevna satisfied. I had to be careful with her—the appearance of reinforcements, anyone with a pulse, would be seen as water in the desert. As it was, she hinted that she would sponsor me for party membership, if I’d study and prepare. “Such a waste, a girl like you scrubbing pots.” But the idea of becoming a party member, signing my life over to the Cause, turned my blood to water. I agreed with much the Bolsheviks were trying to do, but I did not believe anymore. I had used up my stores of belief, my cupboards were bare. I could hope that the Bolsheviks would achieve what they set out to do, but my heart and soul remained my own. If only I could squeak through the cracks of all ideologies and loyalties and demands and dictates in this life, with a little beauty intact, a little poetry, it would be enough.

In no hurry to return for pre-dinner duties, I strolled under the unfurling lindens, enjoying the symphony of birdsong, when I heard a gang of new recruits being marched to the barracks. I automatically stepped out of their path. “Marina!” someone called. I glanced up. Amid the usual pale, desperate faces of the draftees, among their patchily shaven heads and homemade caps, a tall recruit was waving at me. His dark eyebrows met in the middle—Bogdan! And there was hatchet-throated Ilya Ionian, and sandy-haired Gleb—marching together in a group of maybe twenty conscripts. I ran after them. “Bogdan!” I didn’t care who saw me. He tried to run back to me but was stopped by a soldier’s rifle.

“Look at you!” he grinned. “We thought you’d gone back to Petrograd!”

I could see the blood near his ear where the shaving had nicked him. “No one’s going to Petrograd. Only leaving. How did they get you?” I was trotting alongside as the soldiers pressed them onward.

“The village turned us in.”

Yes, Lyuda had warned me. They’re not all that safe there at Maryino. It’s only a matter of time.

“They burned the house to the ground.”

A numbness came over me, dull and thick like a stifling quilt. A roaring in my ears. Maryino. The big dacha… my childhood and my mother’s. My grandparents, my brothers. That lost world. I thought it would survive—that someone would always live there, even if I could no longer return.

“They roughed up the girls,” Bogdan said. Meaning raped. Meaning beaten. But left alive.

“The Mother is safe,” Ilya added in his deep singer’s voice. “They got away. The Master. Magda.”

The smoke, I could smell it. Burned it to the ground.

“Of course they would,” I said. “Where did they go?”

Bogdan shrugged. That familiar gesture. Oh, for something familiar, I didn’t realize how I would miss it! “I don’t know. We woke up and they were gone.”

“They’d been planning it all along,” Gleb broke in. “Just like the Petrograd dacha. Left us there with our dicks in our hands.”

“And Avdokia?”

“The old lady too.” They’d taken her with them, and headed out, probably behind the Urals. How would she survive? She’d wanted to be buried in Russia, in the yard of the village church. I imagined my mother and Ukashin heading east now, into the madness of Siberia. And I would never see Avdokia again. I clung to Bogdan’s rough sleeve, letting my tears slide down my face. Maryino, all gone, the big logs, the deep porches. Why cry? When I’d gotten out by the skin of my teeth. Knowing I’d never see it again. But I still thought it would exist. I could go back, someday. But the world wasn’t made that way. It burned itself behind you.

“Enough,” the guard said, tearing my fingers from Bogdan’s sleeve. “He’ll be back someday, girlie, if he’s lucky.” He shoved Bogdan ahead with his rifle.

“What happened to Pasha?” I called after them. “And Katrina?”

“They got away,” my friend shouted back as Gleb lost himself among the other recruits. Katrina’s love for her Pasha had saved her. As Gleb’s would not have. Sweet Bogdan turned and waved once more. “See you back in Petrograd,” he yelled. “I’ll be dancing at the Mariinsky!”

“See you there,” I called after him, as they marched away down the avenue.

So there it was. The end of Ionia. Drafted, abandoned, defiled, the house burned, and the Family of the Future flung to the five dimensions.

I felt time, the iron thing, groaning. Bogdan, turning the corner, disappeared. That sublime dancer—in the army. Like harnessing a prize thoroughbred to a caisson. Why couldn’t there be a place in this world for someone not a soldier? The sweet, the gullible, the beautiful? Bogdan and Natalya, Andrei Petrovin, Seryozha. Only the Ukashins left standing, the Kolyas, the Arkadys, fanatics and criminals. I waved to the empty street, knowing we would never meet again in this life or the next. All of us disappearing into the tunnel of the terrible year, cloaked in thin sunlight.

5 Dom 13

May came in its robes of green, squeezing the darkness back. The baby wouldn’t let me sleep. I did nothing all day but pray for night, but now in the brief dark, in the narrow child’s cot across from sleeping Liza, I sweated and tossed. The only reality was this child, growing within me, my belly taking me hostage, commandeering me like troops on the move, requisitioning my reserves, billeting its soldiers within a body no longer my own, but collectivized. It was getting hard to breathe, I was exhausted all the time.

I imagined childbirth. They talked about it in the Mothers’ Course, but a woman is not a cow. What if I died? I was only nineteen. Who would mourn me? Styopa Radulovich. And the child, if it lived. I should write something for him, or her, try to explain myself. I thought of Pushkin, the crowds that gathered outside his house as he lay bleeding on his divan after the duel with D’Anthès. The immortal Keats, dying of consumption in Rome.

To have earned such a mourner as Shelley. The one-armed railwayman would write no elegies. What would remain of this unique sensibility that only I possessed, that would never come again? I crammed the pillow over my head, so Liza would not hear my weeping. What had become of my courage? I heard the lines from Tsvetaeva in my head:

She was only sixteen. I was three years older, and had done nothing with my life but make terrible mistakes.

The baby roiled at the most impossible time, at midnight, hungry, craving more of that sunflower oil I knew was in the cabinet downstairs. I tried to find a more comfortable position in the narrow bed, a bit of unsoaked sheet, and thought about Dom 13, Moskovskaya Street.

I had been delaying my return to Korsakova’s this afternoon—as usual—my bare feet enjoying the silky dust of the road, when I passed a sagging wooden house, not so very different from this one. In Petrograd they would have already pulled it down for firewood. I’d stopped to take a sip from the bottle of oil I’d just bought in the illegal market. I called it my tip, praying it wouldn’t be tainted with kerosene. Sunflower, thank God. I could feel the calories surge into my blood.

“You know about this house?” the old man on the porch called down to me. I quickly capped the oil. Couldn’t a person steal a sip of oil in peace? Was there always someone spying? “It’s a post house. To the penal colonies. The Decembrists stopped here in 1826.” His little cracked voice. “Fyodor Mikhailovich was here in 1849. On his way to exile in Siberia.”

I hated when old people talked like this, like they were there in 1849 and knew Fyodor Mikhailovich. “That’s a long time ago, Granddad.”

“Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. Russia’s greatest writer, you great ignorant redheaded cow.”

I touched the splintered shingles, silvered with age. Dostoyevsky had stayed here on his way to Siberia. Right here. Of course I knew the story, about how he’d been hauled before the firing squad at the Peter and Paul Fortress, only to be reprieved at the last minute and sent to Siberia. The tsar’s idea of a lesson.

“House 13, you’ve never heard of it?”

I stroked the shingles, pressed my lips to them. To think, in one of those sagging wooden rooms above me—maybe that one, with the broken window—had lain the greatest student of the mystery of man the world has ever known. Would ever know. I imagined him on the floor, his coat around him. Perhaps trembling with fever. On his way to Siberia, three thousand miles. Peshkom—on foot. I knew he wouldn’t have been alone, but I felt his loneliness.

I never knew Dostoyevsky had stopped here on his journey, that lonely road to Siberian mines and wastes. Levitan had painted it—the famous Vladimirka. It was a testament to his elegant taste that he had painted it empty. No prisoners in shackles, just an empty country road under a heavy sky, a distant church at its tragic vanishing point. Only the title intimated the suffering that road represented. Each posthouse on the long journey to the penal colonies in the east bore a number, each one day’s walk from the last. That road went through every Russian town, the road to exile and servitude.

And one of its Stations of the Cross was right here in Tikhvin, in a crumbling old wooden house on Moskovskaya Street.

Now moonlight glared in through the calico half-curtains, like the gaze of some goddess I’d somehow offended, determined to blow my ship farther and farther from my native shore, into this mundane exile. Dostoyevsky would understand me. Dostoyevsky, with his devils and desperate men. Raskolnikov too had turned at night like a chicken on a spit. Was I not a superfluous man? And whether he had become a monarchist and a reactionary or not, he spoke to our conflicted souls.

Across the gap between our little beds, Liza snored lightly—she had a slight cold. Gripping her old doll Ninochka tight, probably dreaming of the Warlord Dracula. Then in the morning, she’d throw Ninochka aside, ashamed to be caught clutching it. It made me smile—that odd age of shame. Perhaps I would have my child here in this very bed. Torn from my flesh, no Avdokia to rub my back, to pray, to tell me what to do. I could not stop thinking of those hospitals I’d visited, those ignorant nurses, no doctors at all.

All day, I could be brave, but sleepless in the silence of the house, I lost all courage. Kolya, think of me. I hoped my face haunted his nights. But I was sure he had forgotten me. He was no sentimentalist, only liked the flavor of love. Tried it on as he would try on a coat, and laugh at himself in the mirror.

The baby was hungry. Get me something! Bread, oil, there had to be something left unlocked.

I put my dress on, found the screwdriver the railwayman had lent me, and padded barefoot down the stairs, already guilty, slipping silently past the doors where men farted and snored, the air smelling of quiet grief and stale smoke, past Styopa’s little room as he dreamed of railway switches and fish.

On the first floor, I searched the dimness of the kitchen for something to swallow, quick, like a dog. A mouthful of bread—the baby was ravenous and would not be satisfied. Kolya’s greedy child. The cabinets were locked, the widow wouldn’t have been so careless not to lock up the larder. But it wasn’t hard to unscrew the hinges… Careful not to break the hasp, I lifted the small door away, slipped the bottle of oil out, and drank a hefty slug. Then another. Forced myself to rescrew the cabinet hinges. A perfect crime.

But I couldn’t force myself back to our little room at the top of the stairs—like a coffin. I sat at the men’s long table, my pale feet dirty, my ankles swollen like cudgels, my belly pressing high on my heart, which thumped like a woman beating a rug. I started to cry. For myself, for this lump of flesh, accidentally conceived. For this I’d given up my flame, this life. What of my grand destiny? What of my passion, my soul?

“Marina, what are you doing down here?” Korsakova in her nightdress and shawl, a candle in her hand. “Are you all right?”

I nodded, wiped my eyes, tried to look innocent, tried not to belch. Good-hearted Raisa Filipovna. How wretched of me to drink that oil. Would she notice? But no, she brought out a box of tea, lit the battered samovar, sat down at the scrubbed table. She looked like she’d slept no better than I had, her skin creased, her eyes grave. “I’ve been thinking, Marina. I’ve been thinking a lot, about the future. About the house, and Liza.”

“I can’t sleep either,” I said, the oil rumbling in my gullet. “As soon as I lie down, the baby starts jumping. I swear she’s going to be a dancer.”

Korsakova bit her lip. “Listen. Listen, Marina, and try not to take this the wrong way. But your coming here, it was a mistake.”

I blinked, trying to absorb what she was telling me. I’d grown stupid with my pregnancy. Panic clutched me. She knew I was stealing… oh God! “Was it something I did?” I tried. “I work hard, don’t I?”

She wouldn’t look at me, just wrapped her shawl tight around herself. “You’re a good worker. It’s not that.” Her softened jaw, the subtle lines around her lips seemed deeper now.

“What is it, then?” Please, God, I will never steal anything from her ever again, as long as I live!

“It’s impossible.” Now she looked up, and her eyes, so unlike her fun-loving daughter’s, like the sorrowing Virgin’s herself. “Try to understand. She’s such an impressionable girl, and she idolizes you. Ponimaesh?”

Liza? Was she talking about Liza? I knew I had done nothing wrong there. I encouraged Liza to love books, to recite Pushkin and Lermontov. I made her do her homework. What was troubling about that? That she had become more outspoken? More defiant? Oh, damn politics! What was I supposed to do, creep around on my knees, perfectly silent with my eyes trained on the ground? “They’re revolutionary times…”

Raisa Filipovna’s dark eyes looked so mournful. She ran her long hand against the lip of the well-scrubbed table. “Really, I don’t believe you’re married. I don’t think you even know whose baby it is.”

I tried to keep my mouth from falling open. Children are everyone’s responsibility. How to even begin to defend myself. “I am married, I swear! And anyway, this is Soviet Russia—it shouldn’t even make any difference.”

She massaged her knuckles, her wedding ring was far too big. She hadn’t had to sell it yet, though she’d been widowed for years. “Carrying on with Stepan Radulovich right in front of everybody, that does make a difference. Even in Soviet Russia. I can’t have that again. I can’t have it.” Her ring, she was twisting her wedding ring. The thing I didn’t have.

I tried to concentrate but it was like listening to voices when you swam underwater. Perplexing sounds from another element.

“She admires you. I hear your voice in hers. ‘Marina says. Marina says marriage is outdated. Marina says children belong to everyone. Marina says, Marina says.’ And you, sneaking down the hall at all hours of the night. You think we don’t know? You think we can’t hear you?”

The shame of it rose within me. Had they all been listening to me and Styopa make love? The whole house? No, it couldn’t be. She would have fired me weeks ago.

“I’ll give you a week to find a new position,” she said firmly.

The heart of a kitten. I could see by those bruised, sleepless eyes, she didn’t like doing this. But she would. She was a reactionary. The world was changing, and in her rigid, mother’s mind, she wanted it to stop. She didn’t understand it, and she was going to do what she could to keep it still.

I sat at the table, my mind an empty steppe. The Vladimirka stretched before me. Exile. The last thing I’d imagined—the Cossack army descending! Unsheathed bayonets flashing red gold in the lowering sun. Losing my place? This awful place? This narrow bed, these rough hands? These sleepless nights? My back, kinked with work, hips that groaned with stiff complaint, my aching knees, kneeling on these very boards? Losing all this? I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream, Take it, then! Who needs it? Your pots and floors and queues and rugs. Is it my fault Yulia was a slut? But I had no idea where I would go. I had no money, no friends. It was difficult enough to find a roof and a job to keep rations coming, but without friends… I thought of Styopa, up there snoring away. How would he like this kitten now?

What would Sergeevna say if I told her Raisa Filipovna had thrown me out? I could denounce Korsakova as counterrevolutionary. Look what she’s done to me, a poor pregnant girl with Bolshevik sympathies. A landlord, a bourgeois! But I could never do such a thing. Even I had lines I would not cross. She was just trying to protect her child in her idiotic way. It was true, Liza did listen to me, watch me, pepper me with questions, imitate my intonations, my expressions. “She’s a smart girl,” I argued. “I don’t think becoming a pregnant housemaid is part of her plan.”

“Keep your voice down,” she said.

My tears spilled out, confusion and shame. “Raisa Filipovna, please. I won’t deny it. I was lonely, and he was kind…” This poor widow, twisting her ring. Poor Korsakova, listening to us eke out our meager love. Did she envy me my puny pleasures? My one-armed railroad man? If I wasn’t pregnant, I’d walk out right now. I hated having to beg, and yet, what else could I do? “I’ll give him up. I didn’t realize… Please, give me another chance.” She looked so miserable. “I’ll tell him it’s over. You’ll never have cause to doubt me.” I’d earned my respect for the out-of-doors. I needed her more than I needed Styopa. More than I needed Sergeevna or Lenin himself. “Just two more months, I’ll have the baby and be out of your life forever.” Like a shot. Back to Petrograd or whatever was left of it. I’d find my faithless, worthless knight, someone who knew me, who understood my nature, who could even embrace it.

“No,” she said, stiffening her back, drawing her shawl around her. “It’s happening too fast. She’ll be lost by summer. The men already joke behind your back, call you Styopa’s barefoot bride. Liza’s old enough to understand.”

How could this be happening now? The ringing sound of my resistance to this was all I could hear. I wanted to scream, but instead I whispered, “The mother of a child, you wouldn’t really toss me into the street like so much garbage.”

She laughed, just one short bitter churt.

I imagined her, sitting up in bed, listening to me creep down the stairs, knowing that the railwayman and I would be making love as she held her book of morning and evening prayers. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had kissed her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me. Please. I’ll give him up. I’ll be a model citizen. I’ll set a better example.” In one last hopeless gesture, I threw myself at her feet, I grabbed her hands and kissed them. I felt like a character out of Dostoyevsky.

“Stop it. Get up.”

How had I not considered her terror that her remaining child would turn out like the other? When, of course, she would, eventually. All girls grew up. But this was my neck we were talking about. My baby.

“Please.” Wetting her hands with my tears. Everything was going against me. I was a gambler on a two-year losing streak. How in the world would I survive? Mother, Don’t Abandon Your Baby! Women everywhere making the same desperate choice.

She pulled her hands away from me. “I run a respectable house. I know that means nothing to you. Nothing means anything anymore. But it does to me.” Talking to her daughter as much as to me. Respectable. That relic. But everyone needed a line they would not cross.

“I promise. I won’t do anything to upset you.” I clutched her hem in my hands, twisting it, crumpling her gown. “You’ve been so good to me. I’m sorry I disappointed you. Your trust.”

“I have to think of my own family.” She rose, breaking my hold. Now she met my gaze. And I could see in her eyes, I was already becoming a stranger. She, next to whom I’d beaten rugs and ground grain, she who had told me the child would be a boy, was already tearing the thousands of silken threads that connected us. The second Fate, who bore the scissors, cut.

6 The Barefoot Bride

She’d given me a week. I had to think of something. I got up in the morning to stand in the bread queue, heavy-eyed, still not quite believing my time at Korsakova’s was over. What was I going to do? I could no longer work as a porter. Anything I did, my pregnancy would make me look like a whore. Who would hire me now but soldiers? When I got to the head of the queue, I asked if there was any work at the bakery, and they looked at me as if I were speaking Japanese. I returned to the boarding house, silently served breakfast, not being able to look anyone in the eye—especially Styopa. My God, Styopa’s barefoot bride. I blushed whenever I thought of it. I cleaned up, but would not talk to Korsakova, though she eyed me pleadingly. Understand. Well, I understood, but I didn’t have to like it.

After dinner, I asked Styopa to take a walk with me, down by the river. The late sun glazed the water, its polished surface erasing the monastery’s reflection, its cupolas and walls. I told him what had taken place in the night with the widow, that they all knew about us, what she had said to me. I had to look for a new position, but work was rarer than beefsteak. “All I can think of is joining the party and letting them ship me off somewhere.”

“Don’t cry,” he said, wiping at my cheek with his thumb. He took my hand in his, drew it to his lips and kissed it. “Let’s move in together. Find a little place. Hell, I should have thought of it sooner.” His eyes were shining. “I get good rations. You wouldn’t be the servant anymore, you’d be mistress of your own house. Put your feet up when you like it. You’d be a queen! What do you say? I’ve had it with the bachelor life. We’d get along fine.”

I wasn’t sure. It was true, we got along well. He was easygoing and kind. Lovable, even. It would be a safe haven. I could see no better option, no other options at all.

We found a place close to the station. A flat above what was once a tavern, abandoned now. And just as he said they would be, things were immediately easier. My chores were light—cleaning and cooking just for the two of us, making our single bed. I queued for bread, brought him his lunch down to the station in a bucket. I sat when I wanted, put my feet up. Like a queen, just as he’d said. And the privacy was truly glorious. I could sit for hours just watching the May clouds lick the blue sky. How delighted he was to come home in the evening simply to find me there, the place clean and orderly, clothes hanging on the line, a bath waiting in a tin tub, dinner scenting the air. I’d wash his hair and pour water over him as he told me what was going on in the war, where the troops were, what went on at the station that day. It didn’t take much to please him. I could make a life here with my railwayman. Styopa’s barefoot bride.

“You should divorce him,” he said, looking at me over the rim of the tub. “Divorce him and marry me. The kid’ll have my name. We could have other ones. I like kids.”

The doves cooed through the open window in the warm evening. He wanted me to really do this. Marry him, have his children, spend the rest of my life here in this railway town. I could. I was one false step away from losing my life here. I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “Let’s see how you like this one first,” I joked, stroking my belly. I was playing house with Styopa now, but marry? He really thought I would divorce Genya and marry him. That would be the natural course of events, settle down with him in Tikhvin and become Marina Radulovich. I cared for Styopa, he was dear, but I did not love him. I rolled him a cigarette with shaking hands, tore the paper, took another one and managed to get it rolled, and stuck it in his mouth below the thick moustache, lit it for him as he steadied my hand with his wet one.

“You think I’m not serious?” he said.

“I know you are.” I washed him with a sliver of soap. My heart squeezing itself into a walnut shell.

He came home a few days later with a serigraph of a mother and child. She was tying its shoelaces, and both their cheeks glowed a burnished red. He hung it over our bed. How he loved to look at it when he sat at the table drinking a glass of the samogon his friends brewed down at the machine shop. That picture! I could hardly bear to look at it, that awful poshlost, that treacle. A promise I never made to him. How it rebuked me. Now he wanted to know about my family, my past. I hated to lie to him, just begged him not to ask so many questions. A person had to have something of her own. We talked about his childhood, he talked about our future. What a good mother I would be, how smart my children would be, how handsome. Even minus an arm, he was the luckiest man in the world.

“I’m not that good a bet, Styopa,” I tried to tell him. But I couldn’t tell him why. That I was just biding my time, waiting to have the baby. That I really did care for him but would never love him as a man should be loved. Couldn’t we just go on as it was? It was sweet between us that spring, and I didn’t want to interrupt his delight in everything that had befallen him. He embraced what had been a relationship of convenience with the zeal of the believer. A new sun was rising on a new land, a new breeze blew through the greening trees.

In the evening, when the mosquitoes came out and the frogs chirped like a chorus of creaking doors, we walked up to the ponds to fish. We parked ourselves on boxes under the grieving boughs of the willow trees, and he baited his hook with his rod braced between his feet and knees. While he fished, I watched the reflection of the monastery hanging upside down in the green water. I kept waiting to hear the bells—but nothing ever broke the silence except the occasional splash of water, birdsong, sometimes the whistle of a train—people arriving or departing, their satchels heavy, bulging with foodstuffs, pockets tender with eggs and cheese. Tickets in hand, ready to brave the return to Petrograd with all its inherent dangers—confiscation, arrest.

I envied them. Just the sound of it: return to Petrograd.

What irony. Though I was living with a railroad man, I was the last person in Tikhvin who would ever climb onto a departing train now. Styopa would never help me leave, and he would thrash any of his friends if they so much as thought of helping me. Petrograd! I could taste it, the sea air, the big wide rush of the Neva, the sound of the gulls. Its wide paved streets, its three hundred bridges, I could feel their iron railings warm under my hands. The trees in the Summer Garden would be in leaf now, the statues unboxed. People who had read a book, who could talk about poetry, who cared about art. I craved it like a mineral missing from my diet.

“You should get that divorce,” he said on his box. “Before the baby comes.”

A splash, out on the pond. “Plenty of time,” I said, brushing a mosquito from my forehead. “It’s not due until July.”

He reeled in his line, cast again. “Don’t you want to?”

No, Styopa, I did not want to. I didn’t want to look at that picture for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to talk about the babies we would have together after this one. “It all seems pretty unreal,” I said. “I feel like I’m in a dream. The baby. Everything.”

He smiled. “It’ll be real soon enough, little fox. Soon enough.”

I lay in bed next to him, unearthly light flooding into the room through the uncurtained window. He snored next to me, low and regular. I tried to find a better position. Heartburn was eating me alive. I was sleepy during the day, but when I lay down for the night, no position would give me a second’s respite. The baby had taken my body hostage and now it was in control, pressing up on my heart and lungs, down on my bladder, crowding me physically as my railwayman was crowding me with his hot, solid body, the arm he liked to throw over me as he slept.

What had I done to myself? I could feel the ground eroding from beneath me, like a riverbank collapsing. I had nowhere to run to. I needed Styopa to keep a roof over my head, a place to have this child. I liked him, and that would be enough for most women. I would think of something. If I left him, he’d be all right. There were so many women alone right now, and so few men, one-armed or not, he would have no trouble replacing me. But what of the child? That idea sank away, leaving me with the reality that I had no better option than this. Sooner or later, I would divorce Genya, and become Marina Radulovich, and raise my little son here in Tikhvin. I had to give up on the idea of flight. He would fish with his father, he would catch frogs. Forget the books I wanted to read to him, the things I could teach him about dreaming. He would become a simple provincial boy, no better or worse than any other. It would be the end of the Makarovs and all our culture and pretensions.

And what of me? How many little Raduloviches would I bear before I had enough? Before I forgot who I was and where I came from? Would I end up in the river, a bloated provincial Ophelia?

Styopa threw his arm over me, drew me close to him. I fought him off, it was too hot, and I could hardly breathe as it was. This tenant, crowding me out of the collective apartment of my own body. Kolya’s precious child.

Much as I wanted to murder that man, what I would not give for a half hour with him. We wouldn’t even have to take off our clothes. If only Styopa would stop talking to me! His favorite topics could be listed on ten fingers. One, fishing. Two, ice-fishing. Three, fishing from a boat. Four, the legendary pike he had caught twice but never landed. Five, his sainted mother. Six, the war. Seven, drunken antics with his friends. Eight, the one time he went to Petrograd. Nine, his little brother Toma, who died of scarlet fever. Ten, our family to come. How much better it had been when we had talked only about sex and troop movements.

I got up and used the chamber pot, pulled a chair up to the window and sat with my shawl around me, gazing into the beautiful, weary, light-filled night. In the bed, Styopa stirred, then settled. Even his snoring fell into a pattern. To think that once I’d sworn off rooms. And here I was again. In truth, life was nothing but rooms. I had not been back to the Women’s Club since I’d come to live here, but I was tempted to return, just for the variety of it. This room, this waiting, the growing thing under my ribs, the incessant urination, the endless heartburn.

The sentimental mother and child across the room glowed in the unearthly light, rebuking me. If I ever burned this room down, I’d start with that picture.

7 Agitprop

June. Heat, green. I could not stay awake. I fell asleep on my feet in the middle of chopping a cucumber, my head drooping at dinner. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. If only I could sleep, and never wake up. At night, I had bad dreams. I dreamed Styopa was rowing me and the baby on the ponds, rowing around in circles with a single oar. I dreamed I had the baby but it was a kitten, and then a doll as big as my hand, a crude doll made of burlap.

I sat staring out the window one day, when I noticed people hurrying down the street, running toward the station. No one ever ran in this town. Had there been an explosion? A fire? Not just barefoot boys but kerchiefed women, and children, men in caps and leather aprons from the foundry. I rose heavily and thudded down the splintery stairs, out onto the road, dirt under my bare feet. “What’s going on?” I shouted.

“Lenin!” a man shouted.

Lenin? I doubted it, but just to be sure, I hurried along with the others, jouncing as fast as my swollen body would allow.

A woman called over her shoulder to a tiny boy standing in the middle of the road, his finger in his mouth. “Davai, Fedya!”

The station swarmed with people, more people than I’d ever seen in this town. And here was the reason. A great train steamed at the platform on red-painted wheels—a train the likes of which had never been seen in this dusty backwater or anywhere else. Boldly painted, car after car, with modern constructivist designs—strong silhouettes of arched-necked horses bearing cavalrymen, figures in black and white facing off red obtuse triangles and black circles. It bore the lettering, LITERARY-INSTRUCTIONAL TRAIN RED OCTOBER.

The last time I’d seen anything like it was in Palace Square on the first anniversary of the revolution—the same bold ardor, the same visionary energy. Now it had come to us. For the first time in months, I felt awake. Futurist designs blazoned every car. What a spectacle! Abstracted armies, bold Red soldiers with machine guns, workers with banners, or were they flames? Factories with smokestacks that might be cannons. The Guest from the Future had arrived, shaking our falling-apart town to life. Children raced around like gulls, clamored to be lifted up. The revolution had come to Tikhvin.

Ever more people crowded onto the platform to see the magical beast. They pushed and pulled like the sea. How had I forgotten this, the power, the vision, the possibilities of our time? Those endless dull meetings at the Women’s Club, the days sweeping out our tiny flat, cooking, cleaning. The revolution was not about the four categories of housework! This was the revolution—iron and thunder, the Future.

The doors flew open, and people in white blouses spilled out of the cars wearing thick belts like acrobats, men and women too. A man in a leather jacket stalked up and down the platform before the cars, examining our faces as if memorizing us. Soldiers sat on the rooftops of every car, their legs dangling, joking, calling down to the crowd. A man in a white blouse began walking on his hands. I wondered if someone would begin to juggle or eat fire. It was a circus—a Literary-Instructional circus on wheels. Exactly what Lunacharsky had meant when he talked about the Revolutionary Carnival. This elation, this moment of glorious non-Styopa! For a brief instant, I was free from guilt and expectations, that possessive arm, his eternal fish and plans for our matrimonial future.

I spotted Liza in the crowd of schoolgirls and boys, chattering excitedly, reading the slogans, admiring the figures on the sides of the cars—no way the widow could blame me for this. It struck me—these murals were the Soviet equivalent of the iconostasis. Instead of Christos, the oversized figure was a worker with his banner. The gathering forces representing the eternal fight between good and evil being conducted right now, raging between the Volga and the Urals.

A soldier with an accordion on the roof of a car struck up “Dubinushka,” Little Hammer, the old work song, and everybody knew the words: Ekh, dubinushka, ukh-nem! Ekh, zelyonaya sama poidyot. I joined in too—why not? I never felt myself more than simply a sojourner here, but as the strength of our voices grew, I felt proud to be among these people—citizens of Tikhvin. Russian citizens. Soviet people. We sang out to prove something to those soldiers on the carriage roofs. We too were the revolution. I even caught some of the railwaymen singing, despite how they felt about the Bolsheviks and their opposition to labor unions. I could imagine Styopa somewhere, singing under his breath. He too knew the feel of a hammer in his hand. The accident that kills the worker in the song, he had personally felt that blow.

The soldier on the roof didn’t waste any time but launched right into the next tune, “The Cliff on the Volga,” then some soldiers’ songs: “Ogonyok” and “Wait for Your Soldier.” And a new one most didn’t know, though the soldiers on the train and the soldiers in the crowd taught it to us:

We were hungry for inspiration, as much as for bread. I realized that we had all unconsciously accepted the inevitability of Kolchak’s arrival. Despite the best efforts of Pravda and the Tikhvin Soviet, we’d been steeling ourselves for defeat. This train was performing a miracle—breathing purpose back into our lungs.

Down the platform, a painted canvas bearing the slogan EVERYTHING FOR THE FRONT! and SOVIET PEOPLE’S THEATER rolled up, revealing a boxcar converted to a simple stage. We moved down the platform. I stood on tiptoe to see the play unfold. In swaggered Admiral Kolchak, in his customary white uniform covered with a fat tricolored ribbon, a medal as big as an ash can lid, and gold epaulettes a foot long, a bottle of champagne tucked under one arm. He was followed by three fat men in dress jackets and top hats. Each hat bore a flag—France, England, the United States. A fat priest with a long beard swung a censer as the Entente pulled money out of bags and crammed it in handfuls down Kolchak’s coat and into his cap as fast as they could.

“That’s right,” the man next to me said. “He’d fall apart in two seconds without the English.”

“Down with Kolchak!” people shouted.

Kolchak mounted a tall-backed chair, transformed into a throne. The Entente and his own generals were about to invest him with a tsar’s crown and ermine.

“The Supreme Ruler of all the Russias,” the assembled actors called out, and began to lower the crown amid the crowd’s boos and hisses, when a group of Red Army soldiers burst in.

“Urah!” the crowd shouted. The old man next to me on his toes, yelling in my ear.

The Entente stole away, leaving Kolchak and his White officers to battle the Red Army—identified by their familiar pointed felt caps with the red star, their bayonets fixed.

“Get them!” the schoolboys called out. “Kill them! Get the Whites!”

As the Red Army men advanced, Kolchak and his generals scrambled away, until, at the decisive moment, Kolchak slipped and fell on the scattered money, and knocked himself out on the floor. Great howls of laughter from the crowd. The generals went running, one of them smart enough to bend over and retrieve the champagne.

The few remaining White officers, also marked by giant epaulettes, attempted to protect their leader, but our Red soldiers easily overpowered them and ran them through. Finally, the Red Army men stood center stage, one with a foot planted on the pile of dead Whites, and broke into “The Red Army Is Strongest of All,” and now we knew the words. I wondered if Korsakova was here, if she could see Liza singing along. A different world’s being born, Raisa Filipovna. Her daughter would be part of it, and my son as well.

And then I saw him again, the boy in my dream, the brave little boy with whom I had run in the streets of Petrograd in the rain, hand in hand. His sensitive spirit, his courage. I felt him take my hand. There might be a future, for me, for him. And where was my courage, where had it vanished to?

The next agit-play illustrated the dangers of speculation and hoarding grain. Aptly chosen, as the town was a real hub for it. The set quickly converted into a factory, a few boxes and uprights nailed together, an old wheel, a shelf out of a wide board. Actors hammered on the bottom of a washtub and a big can to symbolize metalwork. Our brave workers in the city, weak with hunger. One hungry worker collapsed at the bench, while the others gathered around, pulled him up again.

Another, holding a hammer with a hand that honestly looked like it had never held so much as a can opener:

In the next scene, we saw who. A fat peasant family, their clothes stuffed with straw, ate away at a huge loaf of bread, bags of flour piled in the corner. The kulaks. I hated this black-and-white simplification. Of course the peasants were hoarding. It was inevitable. When people didn’t know what the future had in store, naturally they held back. When the detachments paid nothing, when the peasants couldn’t buy anything they needed, who could blame them for hoarding? But on the other hand, the workers were starving—that was true as well. Scarcity, setting city against country. How were they going to solve that with caricatures and antics?

A knock on the izba door—the speculator. Boos from the audience as he bought a huge bag of flour, and the conspirators drank a glass of vodka all around.

A second knock on the door. The Committee of Poor Peasants, in their rags. “Go away!” the fat peasant called out, as the family scrambled to hide the grain under the tablecloth. The committee threw their shoulders against the door as the peasants on the other side resisted them. Finally, they knocked the paper door down, as well as the wooden doorframe it hung from. All around me, people laughed and cheered.

A big peasant from the committee pushed to the fore. Beard or no beard, I would know him anywhere.

All around me, the crowd yelled to the big man, “It’s under the table!” “They’re hoarding, the kulaks!” “They sold it to the bagman!” “They had plenty enough for that rascal, didn’t they?”

How well my husband looked. Well fed and strong, grown up—so much less unformed than he’d been on another platform, before another train, when he’d fled to Moscow with that little mink Zina Ostrovskaya.

“Who gave you the land?” he boomed. “Who got rid of your master?”

I couldn’t believe he was here, just a few yards away, wearing that ridiculous beard. Planting himself across the stage like a tree. The kulak wife simpered, tried to distract him, arching her back, twirling her braid. She reminded me of Faina.

His rich voice rolled like a train.

“Watch him!” the crowd yelled. “Watch him, now!”

The short, tubby kulak husband began sneaking out with a bag of grain over his shoulder. Genya seized him under one arm and lifted him off the ground as his legs ran in the air. The crowd roared with laughter. The Red Army soldiers came in, and Genya and his peasants handed over the kulak and the grain, and then everyone sang “The Internationale,” arms resting on one another’s shoulders.

All the things this man meant to me. I took off my scarf. I was not afraid for him to see me—huge, cornered, having made every bad decision. I wasn’t the girl he’d met at the Cirque Moderne, but he wasn’t that boy either. Where was my art, my beauty, my love? I’d taken my choices all the way, and this is what it had come to—a barefoot bride about to have a baby in a railway town.

“Comrades,” Genya spoke to the crowd. “The revolution is in your hands. The army needs to be fed if they’re to protect you from the Whites. The workers can’t make guns, they can’t repair trains, if they’re starving. Everybody must pay his share. There’s no yours or mine now, only ours. Long live the Soviet Socialist Republic!”

The roar of the people. “Up with the Soviet!”

“Down with speculation! Food for the workers!”

Yes, people needed to be reminded that the land was only theirs by virtue of the revolution, and it could be lost as well as gained. If this agit-train couldn’t do it, I didn’t know what could.

Now people moved down the platform toward the doors of the People’s Kinotheater. I watched Genya edge his way up toward a car painted with a rising sun. I began to push my way toward it. But now I saw Styopa, scanning the crowd for me. Quickly, I tied my kerchief back on—peasant style, under the chin, hiding my face—and traced a half-circle around him, my eyes on the car into which the actors had retreated. Keeping my head down, I marched up to one of the carriage doors where three soldier-actors lounged, smoking. Or were they real soldiers?

Oh yes, I recognized that air of threat, the joking potential for violence.

“I have to see Gennady Yurievich,” I said, gripping the handhold, but a soldier pushed into my path, blocking my way.

“I bet you do, little mother. All the ladies want to meet him. He’s a regular Chaliapin.” His ugly face close to mine, leering.

“Tell him Marina is here.” My spine straightened, I had not made it this far to be wiped off like mud on one’s boots. But the soldier made no move, just leaned against the car like a man outside a tavern. “Go tell him! He’ll want to know.”

“Which Marina?” the soldier drawled. “Camp-follower Marina? Maybe that’s a bomb under there.” He tried to lift my skirt with his rifle. The others laughed as I slapped it down.

“Kuriakina,” I said sharply. “Quick! I don’t have much time.” My heart thudded like a perch in a bucket, my breath tight with what room the baby had left for my lungs. My heartburn flamed. Oh, hurry, Comrade Son of a Bitch! I glanced around for Styopa. Finally, the soldier with his knobby forehead retreated into the depths of the car. The others watched curiously.

A moment later, down the platform, Genya burst from the last door of the car like a man hurtled by an explosion. He shoved his way through the people who wanted him to stop and talk to them, fighting his way through to me, and then his arms were around me, lifting me into the air. He was crushing the baby.

“Stop, Genya!”

That’s when he realized something had grown between us. He put me down, backed away from me, and now he could see how it was. My belly, my ragged clothes, my bare feet, my hollow cheeks, the wear of sleepless nights.

He came back and embraced me tenderly, his head on top of mine. He remembered me. I was saved.

“Whose is it?” he whispered.

Oh God, not that. I was sick to death of lying. What did I do every day from sunup to bedtime? It made my very bones hurt. “It’s mine,” I said defiantly. “Please don’t ask me anything more.”

We gazed at one another. God, please give me another chance, I prayed. Could he see my desperation? I needed him. Help get me out of this place. I glanced behind me, searching for my benevolent dictator, my relentless Tikhvin husband. “Can we go inside?”

He hesitated just a moment, unsure, knowing from experience that I wasn’t to be trusted, and yet longing for me just the same. That hadn’t stopped. He led me by the hand into the carriage, past the skeptical soldiers, who now stepped back, tipping up the brims of their caps the better to see and wonder. Inside the car, actors changed clothes in the compartments, and soldiers loitered in the corridor. It smelled like powder and sweat and old boots. The tall blond woman who’d played the kulak wife sat in a compartment knitting. She stared at the way Genya was holding my hand.

“Everyone!” he shouted, his arm around me, holding me against his side like a newly emerged Eve. “This is my wife, Marina Dmitrievna Kuriakina. She’s coming with us!” Playing to the house. Same old Genya. He looked to me. “Right? You’re coming?”

My heart popped in my chest like a thin-skinned grape. Yes. Yes yes yes. “Give me fifteen minutes. I have to get a few things.” I’d worked too hard to get those papers. I would not leave them in that hot little room—my clothes, my gun.

“I’m coming,” he said. His face, familiar yet different. No longer any traces of boyishness. The broken nose, the hazel eyes. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not to sleep, not to take a shit. I’m going to be there for it all now.”

Together, we climbed the rickety stairs to the little room I shared with Styopa. I thought the staircase would collapse under our weight. Genya’s presence shrank the room to the size of a mousehole. Had I really diminished myself so much that I could even exist in such a place? This bed, these blankets, that cupboard, this table.

He peered at the serigraph above the table. “Nice,” he said. “Is it an early Kandinsky?”

“Malevich,” I said. I threw my few things into my old game bag, my labor book, my journals, fished out the gun from behind a loose board in the wall. I took my sheepskin and my boots and my fox-fur hat.

I stopped to press my head against Genya’s, forehead to bony forehead. “Tell me I’m not dreaming.”

He pulled me into him, his two big arms, his two hands. Crushing me, kissing me. He still smelled of himself, leaves and moss, and hay. “Just don’t wake up.”

I was shoving my swollen feet into my boots when the door banged back, and Styopa stood in the doorway. No, we weren’t dreaming, because Styopa wouldn’t be in it. Oh God. I had hoped to leave a note and be a hundred miles away before he found it. But here he was, big as life, looking like he’d walked into a wall. I felt myself shriveling like a snail you’d just poured salt on. I didn’t want to hurt him. He’d built up all his plans, his dreams, around me and my child. How cruel were the gods. The terrible bewilderment on his face. “I was just coming to get you.”

I knew how this would look—like I was running off with the first handsome Bolshevik who’d passed through town. But would the truth be worse? Would it make sense?

“Styopa, this is my husband. Gennady Kuriakin.”

He turned his gaze to Genya, and the bewilderment began to smolder. “The one who left you for Moscow? The one who abandoned you?”

“Wait just a minute, pal—” Genya said.

Before either of us could see what was coming, Styopa stepped in and punched Genya in the gut. He might only have one fist, but my God, it was an iron one. Genya doubled over, and as he came down, Styopa kneed him in the face. When he dropped, Styopa kicked him brutally.

“Stop it!” I threw myself between him and poor bleeding Genya before he could kick him again. God, what a mess. “He’s my husband. Please, try to understand.”

“You whore! She said you were a whore. She told me to watch out for you!”

Genya was still writhing on the ground, trying to catch his breath. “You told him… I abandoned you?” he wheezed.

“We’re going to get married!” Styopa wept, a grown man. It was the most painful thing I ever saw. “Raise the kid, it’s all going to work out. And then this scum shows up and nothing ever happened? You big dumb shit. Why don’t you go back to Sovnarkom or wherever you came from and steal somebody else’s wife.” He got in another kick before I could stop it.

“Styopa.” I tried to pull him away from my wheezing husband. “We’re not getting married. It’s over.” Ah, how horrible, but how liberating, to tell the truth. I could hardly bear to see his face, still full of fury but now crumpling like an old paper bag. He had finally heard me. He stood with his one arm pressed to his eyes, shaking. I thought he might have a seizure. “I’m sorry. Please, try to understand—I never thought I’d see him again.”

“You filthy whore!” He was sobbing unabashedly now, his moustache sagging, his lashes dark with tears. Then he threw himself on me, kneeling, and clutched at my dress. “Don’t leave me. I’ll kill myself if you leave me.”

He was tearing my heart, I could feel it shredding, and yet, I could not stay. “You’re better off without me, and that’s the truth.” I wrested myself free from his grip, grabbed my sack and helped Genya, still retching from the blows, to his feet. Watching Styopa’s right hand clench and unclench. “I’ve got to go. Find another woman. You’ll regret it if I stay, you know you will. You’ll never forgive me.” Everyone regretted me sooner or later.

He wiped his tears on the back of his one arm. If only there was something I could do to lessen his suffering, but I didn’t know how to save him and save myself too. “Beat it, before I kill you both. You bitch. I should throw you under that fancy painted train. Damn you and Lenin too.”

And so we left him there, weeping in the steaming ruins of his life, another luckless soul dearly wishing his path had never crossed my own.

8 On the Red October

Ah! To be moving! The wind in my face, the rumble of ridden thunder, rocking me, shaking the dust from my feet. The speeches of the giant wheels declaiming the miles, fire and steel, hurtling me away from Tikhvin and all my compromises, Styopa’s heartbreak, floors and brooms and kitchens. I felt like all the clocks in the world had started again. At a time when any ratchety milk train creaking and screeching its way back to Petrograd would have been enough to fill my heart twelve times over, this was the Literary-Instructional Train Red October, a demon, a carnival, a smoke-belching volcano of the Modern. Soldiers from Tula and sailors from Kronstadt caught rides with us, heading for the front—the very sailors who had brought the Aurora up the Neva to train its guns on the palace, the vanguard of the revolution. We had hard-bitten Bolshevik politicals, we had actors and journalists. And everyone was enlivened with determination, even vision. Hope unfurled like a flag—now I remembered it. No longer was I sidelined in Tikhvin or Ionia or East Mudhole, Wretched Hut Oblast, I was back on the train of the revolution, from which I’d somehow fallen, hauled aboard by Genya’s strong hand. So many things had come between us, I thought as I slept tucked under his chin in his compartment, listening to the song of the rails, clickety-clack. Vera Borisovna, Kolya, my life’s nightmare turn, the months at Ionia, my tenure as the barefoot bride—yet somehow I had risen, again breathing the shocking air of the Future, like Persephone walking into the sunshine after her months in the underworld, blinking to find that color had returned to the earth. Lupine and cornflowers surrounded us as we raced through the fields of June. Again, there were sounds! Train music and meadowlarks, accordion and guitars, Genya reciting his verse, actors with their thrilling voices, the new songs the soldiers sang, bawdy chastushki and rousing anthems. How muffled Tikhvin had been, wrapped in cotton, my ears packed with straw.

Genya, my Genya, sweet. Pulling me aboard his life just as he had in 1917. And away we rode, hurtling across Russia toward the front, where the civil war raged. Was I afraid? I was more afraid of Styopa, of the Tikhvin Women’s Club, dirt of a stalled mediocrity filling my mouth, packing my nostrils, muddying my eyes, as I disappeared into the ground. Our sailors and soldiers gave me strength. Truthfully, we wouldn’t be the ones up against White bayonets unless the train itself was attacked. But a fight to the death would be a finer fate than moldering to the end of my days, eating my way in a circle around a peg in the ground. Racing across the green fields on the agit-train, I felt free. Like some crazy giantess, I could stand astride continents. I needn’t cut myself down to fit Styopa’s bedframe any longer.

As we made our way through the countryside, I eyed the sailors and soldiers smoking on the roofs of the cars, taking in the sun like seals, the sound of their easy laughter—protecting the Red October clearly a plum job. How I envied them riding up there in the fresh air like kings. Though there was plenty of room inside the train, many of them preferred it on top, for the view and probably the freedom from the eternal speechifying of the politicals, their dead earnestness, not to mention the artists with their theories and the actors rehearsing and squabbling, talk they said made their heads ache.

At one agit-stop, as the train prepared to leave, I could resist no longer. Making sure Genya wouldn’t see me—he’d grown so protective!—I grabbed the hot iron ladder and climbed, glad I was wearing my boots. Though bare feet would have given me a better grip, they would have burned. The baby unbalanced me, making even that little ascent a challenge. Where was Esmerelda the tightrope walker? One of the sailors, Slava, from the fortress island of Kronstadt, leaned over the edge and saw me. “What are you doing, little mother?”

“Need some air, Comrade,” I shouted up to him. “You can’t hoard the view, it belongs to everybody.”

“Don’t fall, then. We’re about to leave. Steady.” Strong arms and cheerful faces handed me along, across to the rooftop platform on which they sat, and they cleared a place for me.

As I took my place among our sailor escorts and the hitchhiking soldiers, I felt as I had when I’d climbed into the boat on the Rostral Column, that soar of spirits I never expected to feel again. The train jolted, and I shrieked and clutched Slava’s arm. The train was moving. “Hang on, little mother!” He grinned.

The smoke made me choke until we picked up good speed, then it thinned out, chased away by the wind pounding my face, howling in my ears. I quickly retied my scarf under my chin as the sailor held on to me. It was glorious, terrifying. The sound—the speed! I’d wanted to ride up here since I’d first seen them, and now I was on top of the world, clinging madly to the striped-shirted sailor. Ah, the rush, the sweep of the horizon, this enormous country headed into its future! I felt like I was riding time itself, the sun on my face, the freshness of the fields, the great green expanse of Russia in the blue bowl of her heavens.

And my husband down below, hard at work in the old dining car, writing, discussing a pamphlet with the printers, making plans with Marfa Yermilova, our grim-faced political officer, the oldest of them all and senior in command. But he might as easily have been writing a speech or rehearsing a new sketch with the Communal Theater of the Future. I knew I should be down there with him, helping in some way, proving I wasn’t just a drain on resources, Genya’s barefoot bride. But I craved the wind and the open air the way some craved wine or a lover’s touch.

Suddenly we were slowing—the hollow grinding of wheels, the pitch dropping, the shockingly loud whistle crying out into the blue day, smoke back in our faces. I held tight to Slava, a sailor far from the sea.

“Hurry up, brothers!” Slava called out to peasants, running toward us across their plowed fields, their green wheat, stumbling and scrambling to get word of the war, of the outside world. We were their newspaper, their telegraph, their harbinger of spring, dressed in the bright plumage of their wildest dreams. What a visitation we seemed to them, what an apparition. “Greetings from the revolution!” I shouted into the wind. We slowed but did not stop, while from the open doors of the press wagon two cars ahead, pamphlets flew out like birds escaping from fallen cages. “Down with Kolchak!” we shouted, shaking our fists. “We’ll win it yet! Good harvest!” And they waved back, clutching the white sheets in their hands. They grew smaller and smaller. One boy ran after the train, then stopped, watching us leave. I knew that heartache, watching the future leaving without you.

Now Genya’s head poked up at the top of the ladder—his tawny hair close-cropped under his cap, face dark with worry. Spotting me, big belly in my lap, sitting happily among the soldiers and sailors, his anxious expression fell away, replaced by a quick grin, heavy-boned, handsome face alight, and then the clouds returned. “What do you think you’re doing up here?” he shouted as he crawled up onto the roof. The sailors and soldiers shouted when they saw him, helping pull him along. They all wanted to touch him, thump him, steady him—a man just like them, and yet, possessed of this song, a bargeman-Keats, giving voice to things they had dreamed but never expressed. They treated him as they would a popular sergeant, and he could have been one, if you didn’t know him better. For all his talk about smashing this and beating that, I knew he couldn’t even kill a spider, let alone the bourgeoisie, Whites, or the kulaks whose blood he was clamoring for. His tenderness was our secret. “Are you crazy?” he shouted to me. “Don’t you have one atom of sense in your head?”

My father used to say the same thing. But Genya was the one climbing along the top of the train while it was still in motion. He cautiously settled next to me, steadied by the sailors, who moved over to make room for him.

“Would you let your woman ride on top of a train?” he accused Slava.

Slava shrugged. Generally, the civil war attitude was every man for himself. “You should be proud. A woman who isn’t afraid of her own shadow. It’ll be good for the kid.”

“Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” Genya was still upset. “I couldn’t find you. I thought we’d left you behind,” he shouted into the wind. “Olga said she’d seen you come up here.”

“It’s glorious!” I leaned against him, my face to the wind. “What are you doing up here? Don’t you have speeches to write?”

“I had to find you. I couldn’t wait.” He pulled off my scarf and let my hair blow wild, whipping his eyes. “Had to see that flag flying.”

I snatched my scarf back and with some difficulty got my hair back under it.

“You are the craziest woman I’ve ever met.” He crammed his cap tighter on his head, touched my cheek with his enormous hand, the other circling my round belly, as I sat back against him. “There’s nobody as crazy as you. Other people listen to me now, in case you haven’t noticed. But you still treat me like that kid back on Grivtsova Alley.”

And they did listen to him, asked him questions: Comrade, how should we word this? Comrade, news from the front. He was the one with the propusk from Lunacharsky himself, putting him in charge of the train’s theatrical-propaganda mission. The very idea that people thought him wise, that they turned to him, that they asked him things, not knowing who this was, made me laugh. A futurist poet, running a train during a civil war? It took some getting used to. But I thought of Varvara at Smolny, when I’d visited her to get help for my mother, how they’d pestered her for decisions, a nineteen-year-old girl. The revolution sped people along.

“You need to grow up,” he yelled. “And stop pulling stunts like this. I have to concentrate—I’ve got other things to do besides worry about you.” He pulled me against him, kissing me, his shaven face rough against my neck and cheek. “You’ve got to start thinking like a mother, and not some wild girl.”

I couldn’t believe what was coming out of his revolutionary mouth.

“What if you slipped? What if you fell?”

“Yes, Avdokia.” How boring. It was the worst thing about carrying a child, people were always telling me what to do. The merest stranger imagined he had the right to tell me how to live and when to breathe. As if I had become less adult for being a woman, a mother-to-be. “You’re more likely to fall than I am. Buivol!” Buffalo. “You’re an unstable character.”

We rode along, enjoying the sun and the wind and the roar, happy to be together again, as we always should have been. Then the wind shifted and gave us a face full of smoke and cinders, everyone covered their noses and mouths, coughing, eyes stinging, before it cleared out again. Ah, the song of it all, the train, the fields green, the tiny villages nestled against the forest way out in the distance. The engineer pulled the whistle, and though it deafened you, the villagers would hear the train, and see us, bright on the horizon, and know they hadn’t been left out here all alone, that the revolution hadn’t forgotten them. They too were part of the Future. That was our task, to move behind the front and remind the peasants they had to keep the Red Army fed, to support what was being done for them, and not turn on our troops, not weaken us from the rear.

I wondered when we would get to the front. Hard to know. We should have already been there, but we’d been sidelined again and again in favor of troop trains, or else our destination revised overnight due to a sabotaged bridge or track. In the end, what did it matter where we were or when we got there? “The villages are more important than the towns,” our commissar, Marfa Yermilova, inevitably reminded us. “The workers already know which side they’re on. Kolchak’s troops check the palms of prisoners, and hang the ones with calluses. It’s as good as a party card. But the villagers can go either way.”

At the moment, Kolchak and his general, Gaida, were being pushed back to the Urals. The revolution had them on the run, but the war moved like the waves, fronts were fluid, anything could happen on any day—the fleetness of cavalry, the surprise of local partisans. And you could never put aside the potential for pure peasant revolt against whoever’s troops were most recently marching through. A far cry from the trenches of the last war.

And now we were riding into the thick of it, as full of fire as the locomotive pulling us eastward. My heart crashed in perfect time with the heartbeat of the Red October. Me and Genya, together again, heading toward the battle zone, his chest supporting my back, which didn’t even ache anymore, not at the moment, the shaking of the train loosened all the knots.

“I’m so glad I found you,” he was saying in my ear. “And in that shithole. I hate those towns. They make me feel like I’m suffocating, just the look of them.”

He understood. He came from a town smaller than Tikhvin. People thought it was safe in little burgs like that, that they could escape the chaos of the cities, but it was so stifling, without any of the city’s expansive joy. Lock the doors and the windows, then peek out from the curtains… Korsakova, Sergeevna, all of them. I still couldn’t believe I’d escaped.

“The look on that guy’s face.” Genya laughed, nestling his cheek against my kerchief. “Don’t leave me, you whore!”

Poor Styopa. What a nightmare. I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at his misery. “He wanted me to divorce you,” I said over my shoulder. “He was quite a catch around there. Category 1 rations.” Marrying someone for his rations, what a world. How near I’d been to giving up. That was the real world, Genya, a match like that more common than love. This was the dream.

“You wouldn’t really have married him, would you?” Insecurity creeping into his voice.

So many choices I’d never thought I’d have to make in this life. “I was hoping something else would come along.”

“You wouldn’t have, though. Not in a million years.”

As if he really knew me, knew what I was capable of doing with my back against the wall. Who ever knew another person so well? Not even we ourselves. I’d been a half-dozen different people since the day he crushed that silver-framed icon on the floor of the Poverty Artel.

“Honestly, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“You’re Marina Makarova,” he said, kissing my cheek. “The girl I met at Wolf’s in the green coat with a white fur hat, dogged by her disapproving English governess.”

I blushed, hoping the sailor hadn’t heard. My labor book said proletarian. That day at Wolf’s bookstore with Miss Haddon-Finch… If anyone had told me on that day that in five years I would be pregnant and riding on the roof of the agit-train Red October, wedged between my poet husband and a Kronstadt sailor… You’re an adventurer, Arkady had once said. Was it true? That brave, thoughtless girl? It was a long way from that girl to this one, a long, winding road. And a long way to go.

All around us the soldiers were lounging, smoking, lying on their small packs, their guns tucked under their arms. They didn’t talk much, they sang or watched the horizon or slept on their rolled sheepskins. At night they made a fire away from the train, and I could hear their songs and laughter. Sometimes they went into a village for food and women. I hoped they paid for it, or at least didn’t attack anyone. But there was always that possibility. Even to us they always seemed a little dangerous, like a dog who was good when its master was around but you could never wholly trust on its own. Their faces were too similar to those I’d seen in the villages, to the ones who had taken Maryino, their cruelty as ready as their generosity.

Genya shouted in my ear over the roar of the wind. “I should never have abandoned you, that day at the station. I’ve had plenty of time to regret it.”

“I wish I’d gone with you.” With all my heart. I wanted to tell him something true, my big tender boy-man, something real. “I saw you after that. At the Miniature Theater. During First Anniversary.”

His hands clutched me and I found myself looking up into his wild face, his deep hazel-green eyes searching mine like a man studying an icon’s fabled tears, trying to decide if they were real. “You were there? Why didn’t you stay? I came to Petrograd to find you!”

Of course I couldn’t tell him why. “I got lost.” That was the truth.

“What do you mean lost? How far was it to the stage?”

“Farther than you can imagine,” I said. I hated being interrogated, hated it with the fury of someone without an alibi.

“Why are you being so mysterious? I hate mysteries!” He shook me like a man shaking sand from his boots. “Have you been planted on this earth to torment me?”

“Easy, brother,” said the sailor.

Would he hit me? Would he throw me from the train? “God, I hate mysteries!” he shouted again, and let me go.

The sailor glanced over, his pale blue eyes grinning. “Then you better forget about women, brother.” The other hitchhikers laughed. “Might as well give in and enjoy ’er, we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

Genya’s fit of temper seeped away. He was like that, his rages flared and subsided, but the ruddy tone of his face had drained to ashes. Well, perhaps that was what I was on earth for, to be the chaos in other people’s lives. Who can know what Fate has in store, the effect we’ll have on the lives of others, even the ones we love most dearly? Especially them. I took his great hand, pressed it to my cheek. It smelled of graphite and printer’s ink. “Look, for some reason we’ve found each other again. Let’s not quarrel.”

“I came to Petrograd to find you,” he said again. “And you were there, and you just left?”

I kissed his palm. I had to find something to distract him, like a mother substituting a toy for the sharp object in her child’s careless hands. “I saw you at the kino too. I went with Mina. You were a regular Fairbanks!” I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but I couldn’t help it. “Our Charlie.”

There it was, his bashful grin. “It was shit. A stupid stunt.”

“I was proud of you.”

He sighed. “But did you dream of me, Marina? Did you lie awake at night, groaning with thoughts of how you tormented me? I haven’t gone a day without thinking of you.” He crushed me to his breast, speaking fast in my ear. “I’ll love you forever, you know. No matter what. Kick me like a dog, I’ll come crawling back.”

I could see the sailor, his beret set back on his head, gazing up to heaven, as if praying God would come down and knock some sense into this poet.

“This is the girl,” Genya announced, “I’ve been waiting for all my life.” He struggled to stand in a sudden rush of passion. We grabbed on to him, men bracing his legs, another holding on to his belt as he sang out to the sun:

“Urah!” the soldiers shouted, the ones who could hear and the ones who couldn’t.

He threw his arms wide and the men struggled to keep their grip.

Only Genya could love like this, only he had enough heart for it. We held him there as he rode the rushing train, a Colossus reciting into the wind, superhuman, forgetting everything but his love, his greatest madness.

Finally, he lowered himself back down to the roof, flushed with triumph. “Now tell me you didn’t dream of me.”

I held him close, printing his rough woven Russian blouse and its button into my cheek. “Yes, you and all of this.”

“This?” He pressed my hand to his chest, I could feel the bones, the muscles through his shirt. He grinned—his thick, strong brow, his big jaw. “It’s not a dream.” He shook Slava’s shoulder. “Or else we’re all dreaming it. The whole world is dreaming us now.”

We lay on the lower bunk of our compartment after the train had stopped for the night. I missed the wind, the swaying of the train. We slept with the window down, batting at mosquitos that longed for our blood, our naked bodies fragrant from making love. At first, he’d been afraid of hurting the baby, but the baby liked it just fine. “Let me guess. You and Apollonia.” The blond actress.

“Why not?” he said. “I didn’t know that I’d ever see you again. Did you save yourself for me?”

“Of course.” It made him laugh, that wonderful deep sound. His hand on my belly. “I assure you, the conception was immaculate. Your girlfriend’s taking it pretty well, I have to say. She’s only spilled hot tea on me three times.” Apollonia regularly bumped into me in the canteen or in the corridor, especially if I was carrying something hot. Well, I couldn’t blame her for it. I could deal with her false smiles far better than Zina Ostrovskaya’s sharp-toothed attacks in the days of the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.

“She’ll be okay,” he said, reaching over me for a cup of tea on the floor, drinking, the liquid spilling down his chin. “You’re my wife. My very pregnant wife.” He tickled my belly with light fingers and the child writhed under his hand. Our child.

I snuggled back against him. Hot, but oh, such a pleasure. My body remembered him. Mine. “Whatever happened to Zina? Why isn’t she here? Did you finally kill her off?”

“You never liked her,” he said. “I couldn’t understand it. Too much alike, maybe.”

My turn to laugh. That jealous, spiteful little ferret? Was he even serious? “Idiot.” I tried his forearm with my teeth, it was salty and hard, like a gnarled tree root.

We could hear the actors in the next compartment, arguing about playing Sorin in The Seagull.

“Was it another woman who finally drove her off?”

He buried his nose in my neck. “Woman? Woman? How could I have replaced you with a single woman? I needed boatloads of women. Whole cities of them. Sometimes the flat looked like Nikolaevsky station.”

I wrapped his arms tighter around me. Finally, I was content. Though I still suffered from heartburn whenever I lay down, it was bliss to be here with a man who knew me, remembered me, loved me—my husband. To be together again, doing something purposeful, something exciting, with our future on the way in several dimensions. “How about Marfa Yermilova?” I teased him. “I sense something there.”

Our political commissar, with her drooping mouth and unimpressed eyes, her black cigarette holder. I stayed out of her way as much as I could. When I first came onto the train, she and Genya had argued. I heard them in the corridor. There’s no room here for fellow-travelers.

She’s not, she’s my wife. She’s reliable. I vouch for her.

But what if you have to choose? One day you may have to put the Red October into harm’s way. Which will you protect, the revolution or your pregnant wife?

I’m a Bolshevik. I know my duty, he responded. Don’t worry about me.

I hoped it would never come to a choice. In any case, the front was still far away, and we were here in each other’s arms in the half-light of a northern June midnight, growing together again, the baby dancing under his hand.

Jolting along in the hot afternoon in the train’s canteen car, the baby lay still, as he always did when something was going on. I could feel him in there, listening. He had finally dropped, lessening the pressure on my lungs but making me clumsy. I swayed like a sailor when I walked. I could no longer navigate the ladder to the roof of the train, the sailors wouldn’t help me anymore. They said Genya didn’t like it, and for once, I didn’t argue. I made myself useful, mostly by staying out of the way. Usually I ended up camped out in the canteen car where the journalists gathered to bang out their stories on typewriters or scribble their impressions in notebooks to be wired back to their respective newspapers. They came from Moscow and Petrograd, as far as Kiev and Warsaw. That day, the young reporter from Kiev was especially glum. He hunched over his typewriter, his head caged in his hands as if birds trapped inside his skull were trying to peck their way out.

The others ignored him, but I sat down next to him. “Matvei, you okay?”

He shook his head.

“It’s a pogrom,” said another journalist, Kostya, from Petrograd Pravda. “The Ukraine’s breaking out like smallpox.”

Pogrom. The random community violence against the Jews. And he was a Jew, Matvei Grossman. He must be worried about his family back home.

“Kiev’s a White shithole,” said Grigory something, a sharp-tongued man from Krasnaya Gazeta. He rolled a makhorka and lit it, preparing to fumigate us in the hot car. “What a sty.”

Matvei groaned, sighed. “It’s not just Kiev. It’s the whole Ukraine. Kiev, Kishinev, down to the smallest village. They’re throwing us to the wolves.” He drank from the battered metal cup at his elbow.

The train swayed, the tea swayed, the hot wind blew through the open windows but cooled nothing. Gradually the typing began again. A group from the propaganda car came in, not Genya but three of his writers, plus Marfa Yermilova and her deputy, Antyushin. Originally from a peasant family, the commissar exuded confidence and capacity. I knew she excelled at persuading peasants to support the Red cause. She was about forty, a brisk walker, a fast talker, authoritative, and brooked no resistance. “We just had an excellent meeting,” she announced, pouring herself tea from the samovar—no shortage of hot water on the Red October. “The local peasants seem solid.”

“They’ll turn on you without blinking,” said the reporter from Kiev.

“That’s why we’re here,” she said. “To make sure they don’t.”

Antyushin smirked. “Worried, Motka?”

“Have you seen a pogrom, Antyushka?” Matvei said, his defiant chin quivering. “I was in Kishinev in ’03, during the Easter pogrom. Our neighbors came still damp from the bishop’s blessing. There was one woman, Sara Iosifovna, they drove nails into her eyes, and watched her run around screaming. And when they got tired of that, they killed her by nailing them in the rest of the way.” In ’03, he was probably five. I wished I could hold him, but it was not done on the Red October. “They broke into our houses and threw us out the windows. They cut the glazier’s balls off—he was trying to protect some girls.”

“Yes, yes,” said Marfa Yermilova, interrupting him. “They’re violent and unpredictable. But they’ll feed us if they think it’s in their interests.”

“Moskovitz,” he said, looking down at his typewriter. “The glazier. They castrated him, then they trampled him to death.”

“Do you believe in what we’re doing, Comrade Grossman?” the commissar snapped.

“It’s our only hope,” he said.

“Remember that.”

I remembered the mob in Haymarket Square, the violence of the bread riot. Varvara scolding the woman in line over that hideous pamphlet—They’re dragging the Jews in front of you like a bullfighter’s cape. And now it was happening again—not just in one village but in hundreds of villages, even in big cities. We had to win this war—the thought of what losing would mean was too hideous to contemplate.

“Denikin’s whipping them up,” said Marfa Yermilova, perched on the corner of the table with her tin cup, holster strapped across her breast. “That’s how desperate he is, trying to catalyze peasant support by serving up rape and murder. It’s an ancient recipe.”

“So much for your noble Cossack,” said Antyushin.

“Swans,” said the man from Krasnaya Gazeta. “So poetic.”

I thought of Volodya in the Denikin army. Would he be part of a pogrom? I hoped he had deserted and joined the Red cause, or just slipped away across the border. Though I suspected he had not. I imagined he, like Father, had made some strange peace with his conscience. All for the noble cause. Like a frog in a pot of water, simmering slowly—it didn’t have a moment where it decided This is too hot. One adjusted and adjusted, bearing each new disgusting compromise until it was too late. I felt suddenly ill, but didn’t have the energy to get up. I wished someone would make me a cup of tea. I moved closer to the window, hot wind in my face.

“Wait till the Siberians come,” said Grigory. “They make Denikin’s atamans look like schoolchildren. When they took Omsk, they flogged people with iron rods until the flesh tore right from their bodies.”

The heat, this talk… and we were heading right for them, not to Denikin but to Kolchak and the Siberians. Suddenly I pictured my belly ripped open, the baby flung out onto the tracks. I had not really considered what would happen if the agit-train were taken. Would I be raped before I died, my head cut off? I felt a dark wave of nausea rise up, and then I was falling backward.

Matvei caught me. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have started. Could someone get her a cup of tea?”

Kostya brought me a cup, sweet with saccharine. But the talk of horrors continued: how Ataman Semyonov in the Transbaikal decorated the perimeter of his barbaric capital with hanged men and women like banners at a country fair. Freight cars of people were machine-gunned along the railway, buried in mass graves or not even buried, just left for the ravens. “Not even Bolsheviks,” said one of Genya’s sloganeers, Tudovkin. “Just peasants, anybody who gets in the way.”

Matvei was holding my hands. “Should I get Kuriakin?” he asked softly.

I shook my head, leaning against the half-open window, sipping sweet tea with its bitter undertone. There was a metaphor.

“They’ll live to regret it.” Marfa Yermilova’s sure voice rang out. “When they’ve got peasant revolt behind the lines, and us in front of them, they’ll understand that they dug their own graves.”

“Unless they get to us first,” Matvei said under his breath.

I had not been taking this seriously enough. It was up to us to make sure the Soviet Republic survived. Everyone, man, woman, child, sack of grain, scrap of fuel, and Soviet bullet, had to go into this. It was our job to reignite revolutionary hope in the hearts of workers and peasants, soldiers who could so easily desert if the war went badly. As I gazed out at the wide green land spread out under the blameless sky, lines of trees in the distance, the green of June, it was hard to imagine how badly the war might be going. How much misery this beautiful land had already absorbed, how much blood. Mongol and Slav, peasant and soldier. I couldn’t stop thinking about the pogroms—what cynicism, to buy the allegiance of peasants with the coin of unbridled violence, as if it were a tasty treat! Indulging hatreds as if it were a glorious and righteous thing. Did they really think it was? Or did they know it was evil in their hearts, and rejoice in being encouraged to evil? Still damp from the bishop’s blessing. There was certainly something perverse in human nature—and dangerous to believe it was not there.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Rech’, the Kadet newspaper, and my father and his friends, who were rationally deciding to use pogroms as an organizing tool. What happened to your English sense of fair play, Papa? Your John Stuart Mill? I knew what he would say. It’s terrible, but what else can we do? Once we’ve stopped the Bolshevik madness, we’ll find a way to put things to rights.

But you could not reclaim your soul once you’d sold it to the devil.

What was it in human beings that delighted in viciousness? Those crowds in the Ukraine that Easter, gripped by the miracle, their dazzled eyes falling on those who resisted salvation. Foreigners for hundreds of years, never accepted. Falling on them like wolves. Served up to distract from the master’s true ends. Don’t look at our failures! Look over there, those are the ones. The weak, the unprotected, the different.

But our side was capable of the same. I’d seen the Podharzhevskys digging in the snow. I’d been in the cells of the Cheka. Go ahead, we’ll look the other way. No, we’ll applaud you! Something inside us gloried in cruelty. Dostoyevsky would say this is why we needed Christ. But religion was its birthing place, and belief the rails it ran upon. What we needed was more pity and less belief. Wasn’t it Kolya who said that idealists were the most dangerous ones? Yes, but also dangerous were the ones who believed in nothing. I’d once believed human beings were intrinsically good. But now I knew, decency and goodness were things you had to fight for, cultivate and protect, precious crops you had to water and guard and feed and nourish, to absorb the soulless viciousness that also lay dormant within the human breast.

Genya and I stared out the window in the corridor at the thousands gathered on the platforms at Nizhny Novgorod, his arm around my neck. I had not yet visited such a big city with the Red October. I was aware of how we looked together, the strapping Soviet hero and me, the Red Madonna in my kerchief, our determined profiles. Like figures painted on a train. And how he loved this, waving from the window. And why shouldn’t they cheer? Nizhny was a Soviet citadel. The workingmen of this Volga metropolis knew very well what awaited them if they lost. Even as they cheered the Red October, I suspected there would be those here who could just as easily turn into a mob, become a pogrom. But we were here for a specific job, to solidify the populace for the revolution, not to fight a cosmic war against the forces of unreason.

There were cheers, but I felt their fear underneath, their desperation. An edge of panic, though the front was still far away. Could we reassure them? No, but that was not our purpose here. It was to steel them, anodize their fear into a reckless courage.

And then came the practiced readying of the train for the literary-theatrical agitprop show.

I stood in the crowd, watching Genya take center stage in the boxcar that was the Theater of the Future.

“Comrades!” he shouted.

He pointed at members of the crowd.

People glanced nervously around themselves, as if to say, Not me. I’m here.

“No!” they began to shout. “For shame!” Was it the crowd or our actors, wandering among them, stirring them up?

Now he opened his arms, as if to embrace them.

The roll of thunder shook the ground. People waved their caps, held up their babies as if to be blessed. How brave they were, with the front still five hundred miles to the east.

I made my way to the kino car, to prepare it for the screenings. Inside, the projectionist was readying himself for the rush after the speeches with his usual deep knee bends and great exhales, shaking out his legs as if he were about to run a race. He checked his films, while two soldiers and I straightened out benches, opened the windows, and pulled down the shades. I settled the first of the gramophone disks onto the turntable and went forward to use the privy in the next car one last time. Since the baby dropped, I was peeing a hundred times a day.

When we heard them sing “The Internationale,” we knew it was our turn. We opened the doors of the darkened carriage, signaling we were open for business. The soldiers got the people lined up and I helped them into the car—children and mothers, working girls and machinists, prostitutes and soldiers and peasants who might never have seen a kino before, packing them onto the benches. A woman had chickens in a basket. Should I make her leave them outside? No, she would just set them in the front with me. “There’s room for a few more,” I shouted. “Squeeze in a little there.” Just as Misha had done in a far different life, packing sitters onto benches for Mina’s camera, but without this enormous belly—it grounded me, it gave me a certain authority. Finally, we were at capacity. “No smoking, Comrades. Film can burn in a glass of water.” Amazing how many bodies we could squeeze into the train car, knee to rump all the way to the back. The lowered shades on the windows glowed golden as we shut the doors. I prayed no one would panic. Soon the air grew pungent with the stink of hot, unwashed people.

As the film flickered through the gate, I stayed close to the door, cranking the gramophone to accompany the showing of Day One of the Revolution. The first time I saw it, I’d been startled to find they’d used Solomon Katzev’s photographs of the Pavlovsky regiment marching behind their band in Palace Square, and the red flag flying over the Winter Palace. Near the end, a shot from the first anniversary left me speechless—a spectacular though somewhat blurry night shot of a hydroplane flying low over the lighted ships on the Neva. It never failed to give me a shock. My photograph had made it all the way from the prow on the Rostral Column to this steaming kino in Nizhny Novgorod.

Sweat dripped down between my shoulders and pooled into the waistband of my skirt, soaking my blouse. The air was as thick as felt. Yet I never got tired of seeing the people’s faces as they watched the films. Some watched dumbly, fascinated by the flickering display. But with others, you could see the cells of their brains putting connections together, realizing they were a part of this. They were watching their own story, major players in the drama that unfolded not only in front of them on our little screen but outside the doors of this railway car. It was they who were propelling history. Not the senseless violence of pogroms acted out of their own frustration and rage but forward movement, toward a better world. Just as Lunacharsky had hoped from his Revolutionary Carnival. Entertainment and enlightenment together could work to defuse mob rule and transform it into a citizenry. I found my script and read to them an excerpt from Lenin’s speech at the dedication of the Marx Memorial last October, and then we showed one last newsreel about the battle to preserve Soviet Russia—and had to open the doors. It took about seven minutes in all. No one fainted, no one burned to death. Only six more hours to go.

Outside on the platform, our sailors made speeches to local soldiers and played recordings of Trotsky and Bukharin on gramophones. Listening to that cacophony, I couldn’t help wondering whose gramophones those were. In what rooms had they sat, what waltzes and tangos had they played? What had become of Kolya’s gramophone, to which we’d danced the tango? Ah little feet, where are you now? It was probably performing hard service on a train platform just like this, the RCA dog with the cocked head… His Master’s Voice. How funny to think of his perplexity at hearing Trotsky’s rousing voice coming through His Master’s bell. All that was a century ago—no more tangos, only speeches and choruses of “The Red Army Is Strongest of All.” I felt tears upwelling, and shook myself. I was an agitator on the Red October, how dare I be nostalgic for such things. Only I’d gotten so sentimental lately. It must be the pregnancy.

People were watching me. It was important how we conducted ourselves. Women needed to learn how to be in this new world. They needed our example. I had thought that bigheaded at the time, when Sergeevna had said it, but here I noticed women eyeing me with frank curiosity. This mere girl, part of the Red October! And pregnant too. Anybody can certainly do anything now, can’t they? I had to straighten up, though the June heat was terrific. Strike the correct pose, neither humble nor arrogant, friendly, brave, efficient, compassionate, but tough-minded enough for war. Like the heroic woman on the side of the train, posed before the factories with her firm steady face. As though I expected someone to come paint me.

9 Izhevsk

We passed through great cities and little nowhere villages with their primitive stations and level crossings, women selling bread and milk as we moved up behind the lines. Now we were getting close to the battle, and saw the burned-out hamlets. Sometimes we could hear guns. We took on more and more soldiers heading back to their units. The summer raced on, the last few weeks of my pregnancy. Surely I could not get any bigger. All my bravery was gone. I was weary, feverish, irritable. No longer did I help out in the kino car, let alone yearn to ride on the roof of the carriage with the soldiers. It was as much as I could bear to simply lie in our compartment, sweating, lulled by the ta-tick-a-TICK, ta-tick-a-TICK, and the swaying of the car, listening to the actors in the next compartment arguing and playing cards. I nodded off, dreaming that the car was burning, everyone locked inside.

Genya came in from one of his meetings and sat down with me on my narrow bunk, wrung out a cloth in warmish water and put it on my head. He lay down beside me, squeezing me to the wall. He was too hot, and I was too big, we both were. “The 25th Rifle Division is closing in. Kolchak’s on the run,” he said, tucking a strand of my sweaty hair behind my ear. “They’re saying Trotsky’s going to start transferring troops toward Denikin if they succeed. Look, we’ve got a new poster!” He picked something off the floor, sat up, thank God, unrolled a sheet of paper. A single Red Army soldier in a giant red circle on the left, White officers hiding behind the Urals as if behind a theater curtain on the right. It was good, but I was too listless to join in his excitement and I had to pee again. When I returned from the WC, I crawled back into the bunk and fell asleep as he was telling me about the 25th Rifles. Ta-tick-a-TICK.

Our next stop was Izhevsk, a big armaments town, liberated from the Whites just three weeks previously. Representatives from their soviet met us at the station, as well as a good crowd of local Tatars and Udmurts, the latter a people I’d never seen before—so many redheads! I felt strangely at home, stylishly dressed in a new pair of bast shoes I’d bought from a peasant woman back in—what was it? Uva? Kilmezh? I could no longer fit my feet into my boots. Swollen, they looked like monstrous potatoes, my legs like peeled birch trunks. There was no difference between my ankle and my calf. Yet it was important to Genya that I join the others, to stand around endlessly in the summer sun, meeting the representatives of the various factory committees, listening to their speeches and our own. We staged our skits, showed our film—I no longer took responsibility for packing the car or reading the speech but instead found a scrap of shade to huddle into, after which we were hosted by the town soviet for tea and the little pastries made by the local women.

It was marvelous to be inside a building slightly cooler than the train. And we sat down—in chairs! I loved these people. They even treated us to a concert of women’s singing. The harmonies were angelic, all traditional songs and not, for once, “The Red Army Is Strongest of All.” And they made much of me, pregnant and redheaded. On the Red October they ignored me if not regarding me as an unnecessary payload, an embarrassment. But here I was the object of interest and attention. Shameful to say, I lapped it up. Most of all, I was grateful for those savory pies and chilled juices. They withheld nothing from us, they who had been so recently under the brutal White thumb.

After the refreshments, once more we traipsed into the sun as an old Bolshevik from their committee, his face still swollen and bruised from a beating, gave us the tour of the town. He made sure we heard about every moment of the occupation.

“They killed a thousand people, right here.” He pointed to gibbets still standing in the square, the poles at angles, cut ropes still attached. “They started with the committee, workers, Bolsheviks, but they got all the way down to students, even schoolkids.” The journalists took notes and asked questions, our photographer documented the massacre. I could feel the rope around my own neck, the prickly hemp, my hands tied behind my back. The baby lay like twenty pounds of cement in the bowl of my aching hips. “Then they decided it was taking too long to hang them all. Come,” he indicated, “I’ll show you.”

We set off for a long march through the town, following the old man and his comrades. It was a good-sized city, and it was so hot. Although the man limped from some kind of wound, he covered ground fast. A lake glittered green and blue, tantalizing, but we never got close to it. I found myself lagging farther and farther behind the main party. I could keep only Genya in view, a full head taller than the next tallest man. He glanced back every so often, smiled, shrugged, What can I do? Matvei Grossman dropped back to walk with me. We followed them to the great Izhevsk arms plant, the place still humming, unlike the bulk of the factories we’d seen in our travels. No labor desertion here.

Outside the munitions plant, the old Bolshevik pointed to a stone wall. “There. There are the workers of Izhevsk.” It was pocked with bullet holes, smeared with brown stains in the blistering sun. No one had to encourage the workers here to beat out rifles and machine guns, stuff shells with gunpowder. They worked double shifts, triple. Their committee, what was left of it, said they were producing five hundred rifles a day, whatever it would take to smash the Whites. Our soldiers were all offered ammunition as souvenirs, the nicest present of the day.

I felt worse as we headed back to the train, something about the food and the heat and the bloodstains, the gibbets. My legs would just not keep up. I had ferocious heartburn, my back and hips ached, and all I wanted to do was lie down. The bast shoes rubbed. I took them off and went barefoot on the hot stones. Now I felt the front—just three weeks ago, they had been right here. The wall, the bullet holes. How foolish I was to think that the Red October would be a means of escape.

I fought tears. I wouldn’t let them see me, hard-bitten Bolsheviks with a job to do. There would be no sympathy for Genya’s fellow-traveling wife. We were both so foolish, I saw it now. He should have refused me, but his defiant optimism had prevailed. He was no more practical than I. Sure they would all love me, sure I would fit in—believing in the image of himself, the giant in seven-league boots, heading for the Future as if into the rising sun. Loping ahead with politicals and the Izhevsk Committee, he had no idea whether I was still with them or had fallen into a ditch or been kidnapped by bandits.

Matvei and I brought up the rear. Aksakov, the train’s brakeman, gave me a hand up into the dining car. “The 25th Rifles have just taken Ufa,” he told us.

Ufa, the last major White center before the Urals. Now there was only Perm. The tide had turned. Admiral Kolchak was in retreat, back to his Siberian stronghold. The Red Heart of Russia had held. Saved by Chapaev and the 25th Rifles, that division was all anyone talked about these days. “But,” Aksakov added, “there’s fighting at Glazov. Gaida’s leading a counterattack.”

In the dining car, the others had already gathered at the map permanently affixed to the wall. A white tack at Glazov, to our northwest, and a red one, the 25th Rifles, at Ufa in the southeast. “The Whites’ll have to come back this way if they don’t want to be cut off,” Matvei said.

And here was our train, a piece of cardboard with a drawing of the locomotive, at Izhevsk, right between them. We were sandwiched between the two forces.

Genya and Marfa Yermilova, Antyushin, the sailors and soldiers, propagandists and journalists, smoked, argued, rubbed their faces, trying to anticipate the next step. Marfa Yermilova in her wooden-jawed voice, declared, “They’ve taken Ufa, that’s the main thing. It’s not the first time we’ve faced this.”

“But which way will the Whites head?” asked one of the propagandists. “Will they try to retake Izhevsk?”

We stared at the map as if it were a crystal ball.

“We should go straight to Glazov,” said Grigory from Krasnaya Gazeta. “See what’s happening.” Obviously he wanted to get as close to the action as he could, and damn the fate of the agit-train.

“Maybe we’ll send you ahead to reconnoiter.” The sailor, Slava, settled down in a chair turned backward, took out his cigarette makings. “I’ve got to think of all these duffers.” He waved at the rest of us. “This train’d be a catch for Gaida. Imagine those headlines back in Omsk. That’d be some agitprop.”

Everyone was waiting to see what Marfa Yermilova would say, but she hadn’t moved, she just kept looking at the map, weighing the possibilities.

Grigory said something about taking Slava up on his offer—though it was sheer braggadocio. They settled into the various chairs and benches, gazing up at the map as if the situation might change if they looked at it long enough, and began to discuss a course of action. Marfa Yermilova was right, it wasn’t the first time we had no idea where we were going. A bridge blown, a band of saboteurs, a town already in ruins. Sometimes we lost the telegraph completely.

“Ufa maybe?” said Kostya, more as a question. “We’d be right on the heels of the 25th.” The journalists were dying to see Chapaev in action, their heroic leader—there were already songs about him.

“We could,” Genya said, sitting on the table, one foot propped on the bench. “Do some agitprop, make sure the locals will feed the soldiers when the 5th Army gets there.” Another red tack.

“Perm was our destination,” said Antyushin. “Then across to Ekaterinburg if the 2nd gets that far.”

Behind the Urals. It frightened me, the point of no return. I waited as long as I could, but it didn’t look like they were going to reach an agreement anytime soon. My guess was that we’d end up sleeping on a siding here in Izhevsk. Whether it was Ufa or Glazov or Perm, I hoped Marfa Yermilova and Genya decided to stay away from the worst of it, that we would just go on bringing the Soviet message to peasants behind the lines and avoid being attacked by them. They looked on all of us, Red or White, as invaders. And I prayed that we wouldn’t cross the Urals.

Which will you protect, the revolution or your pregnant wife? I remembered Marfa Yermilova asking Genya.

Overcome with fatigue and the heat and my immensity, my roiling guts, I staggered down to our compartment, peed in a chamber pot, and lay down on the bottom bunk. I tried propping myself up, tried lying on my side. I wished I could have gone up to the top bunk, more air, but I could no more have climbed there than fly.

There was not a single position in which I could lie in comfort. A peasant woman in one of those towns had told me the heartburn meant the baby would be born with a full head of hair. A boy, she predicted, as had Korsakova. Iskra. It meant Spark. A revolutionary name for a child of the revolution. How Genya loved to talk to him, lying with his head in my lap and his ear pressed to my giant belly. He looked like a boy himself, making up poems, telling him how he would march through Moscow on his daddy’s shoulders. They would be so tall the domes would look like toadstools, so high that Iskra would have to duck so he wouldn’t bump his head on the clouds.

This was the way I liked Genya best—silly, tender Genya with all those sounds in his head. I wished he’d decide whether it was Ufa or Perm and come back here—though to do what? I didn’t know. I wished I had a woman friend on the train, but everyone was busy, and aside from Matvei, and Slava, I’d made no friends here. I knew I didn’t belong, try as I might to be useful. I was just dead weight—not journalist, or soldier, or actor, just an awkward body to step around. My loneliness and irritation blended together with the terrible buzz of the cicadas outside through the lowered window, so loud I could hear nothing else. Though I knew if I could hear, I wouldn’t want to. I knew what I was missing, actors in the next compartment arguing over Meyerhold or Ibsen, playing poker, squabbling over missing belongings, fast fornications, drunken arguments when someone got hold of a bit of local samogon, all the topics they pursued when out of earshot of the soldiers and the sober propagandists. That and the heat and my head and the heartburn all combined into one huge ball of misery.

I wadded my sheepskin together with Genya’s coat into a bolster and propped myself into a seated position that was halfway comfortable. I’d just begun to nod off when I woke, urgently sick, and vomited into the chamber pot. How sorry I felt for those little cabbage pies, they had been so good! Blubbering like an infant. Why hadn’t I realized how hard this was going to get? Normally I didn’t allow myself the indulgence of self-pity, but with no one around to notice that I wasn’t the stoic I pretended to be, I didn’t bother to stop myself. Damn Genya! Damn the Red October! I wished I’d never seen either one of them. Why didn’t I have more sense? Surely Genya must have known it was no place for a woman about to bear a child. Everyone hated me on this train, no one wanted me here. Couldn’t he have known it would be like this? How jealous everyone would be of him? Why couldn’t he have had a scrap of sense?

I always thought other people knew things, that was my weakness. Kolya, Genya, my father. And then I was brutally disappointed—over things I should have known myself.

Things I did know, and pushed aside.

I rinsed the chamber pot with water and threw the stinking contents out the window.

It was not just the pregnancy but the flu. My misery was complete. I didn’t bother even coming out of the car now when we stopped to deliver our Soviet message, our revolutionary passion play. I felt sick and peevish. The only one I wanted near me was Genya. I wanted him to recite poems for me, and rub my back, and tell me he loved me—and not bring me up to date on the progress of Chapaev and the 5th Army, Ufa and Perm, the gift of a whole goat someone gave us. He brought some in for me, but the smell of it—I made him take it outside. Everything smelled awful, my dirty hair, my own body. At one stop he tenderly washed my hair in hot water from the boiler. I wished I could have just crawled into it.

I lay in a thin nightdress in my bunk and dreamed one bad dream after another. I dreamed I was back at school—that the Whites were using it as a headquarters. They’d won the war, and now we would have to pay the price. They herded us all into the ballroom: Mina, and Lisa Podharzhevskaya, and Natalya Ionian, I didn’t know she’d gone there too. Magda Ionian was there, though not Varvara—strange. And they were searching all the girls. I knew it was me they were looking for. Magda had told them I was there, Magda the spy.

Then a woman, an old woman with blue eyes, beckoned me silently to a wall between the windows, where she opened a door, a hidden door. How could there be a door on the outside wall? But she popped it open and helped me through, closing it after me. It was dark, but I found a metal door, and stairs going down, dripping and wet, a maze of corridors with pipes running overhead. I got lost. Which way to Bolshaya Morskaya? The Whites were overhead, they knew I was here somewhere. If I kept going down, eventually there must be a door, an exit… except that water lapped the bottom stairs. The basement had flooded. Rats swam in it, trying to get away.

When I woke, the whole bench was wet, right down to the worn leather. My nightshirt soaked through, the sheet a soggy mess. I lay there for who knew how long, calling for help, but no one heard me. The train had stopped. They were probably out bringing the revolution to some village or visiting a site of outrage. I lay there weeping, sick, inert. No one was going to come. No Avdokia to change my wet nightie and remake my bed, wipe my face and arms with cold water.

Unsteadily, I rose and pulled on my dress—backward, it proved—and with what seemed extraordinary effort, gathered the clammy sheet and wet gown to bundle out into the corridor. Maybe I could wash or dry it somehow, or at least get it off my bunk. I don’t know who was doing the thinking. I had the idea I could go outside and hang them to dry—but I couldn’t exactly hang them from the line outside the kinotheater in the middle of a show. Yes, they were just starting, I could hear Genya declaiming. I stumbled toward the rear of the car, toward the toilets I hadn’t visited for days; I’d only gotten up to use the chamber pot and fallen back onto the berth. I focused on the door at the end of the corridor when suddenly I couldn’t see it anymore, I was falling, and the only thing I remembered thinking was At least I have the sheet.

When consciousness returned, I could not force myself to get up from the floor of the corridor. Now I knew—it was the baby coming. Wouldn’t someone help me? I didn’t know anything about childbirth, the wet and mysterious roots of life. Get up. If I didn’t, I might give birth right here in the corridor, lying on a wet sheet. I was afraid to stand, but afraid not to. What if I blacked out again? I called out, “Please. Someone.” I could hardly bear to hear my own voice, how weak it was. I could die here in the corridor, and no one would know until they finished their bloody agitka. Oh God, please let it go fast. But the light didn’t change. I couldn’t tell if I lay there for a minute or an hour.

Then voices. Matvei, leaning over me. And Genya was here, thank God. And Faina… no, Apollonia… They were still in their makeup. Genya apologized over and over. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t think—There’s always someone around.” He looked so terrified and guilty, I would have teased him except that the pain had returned, and shivers, and a flash of unbearable heat.

Genya lifted me up and carried me back into the compartment. Someone had wiped down the bench, put down a coverlet, scratchy but at least it was dry.

“Tell me what I should do,” my big boy-husband begged, kneeling on the dirty floor, his face on a level with mine, kissing my knuckles as if I were dead already, wetting them with his tears. “I feel so helpless.”

If it was not so ridiculous, I would have laughed. I was on fire, and my lower back ached like it was breaking. I was going to have a baby. What did he have to cry about? “My back,” I managed to say. “Rub my back.” He tried it, but the rubbing wasn’t doing anything, just irritating me. “With your hand, not your fingers. Lower. Yes, there.” He rubbed the base of my back with his big hands. He was strong enough to do what I wanted, but he didn’t understand, kept massaging instead of pressing, his hands too nervous to stay still. “Just press! With your fist!”

Something was wrong. Shouldn’t the pain be in my belly? Or down in my crotch?

“Are you having it now?” he asked. “Is this it?”

“How do I know?” I shouted. “I’ve never done this before.” Useless! And there wasn’t one damn woman on the train who’d been through this herself. The actresses, the Bolsheviks. All their useless faces crowding round the open door, looking at me like I was a two-headed calf. I felt like I should fart some pamphlets for them.

Matvei Grossman stuck his head in from the corridor. “They’ve gone for the midwife.”

Thank God someone had a thimbleful of common sense. “Where are we?” I asked. Somehow it suddenly seemed very important.

“Kambarka,” said Apollonia. She sat on the opposite compartment bench with her legs crossed, staring out the window, as if she could not bear even looking at me. I must be repulsive, my hair plastered to my head. I could see myself in her eyes, like a gargoyle, like a bloated carcass of a cow ripening in the sun, while she looked so pretty and cool. I could tell she was glad I was suffering. I’m sure she hoped I would die. Get your spell off me, devil. All of these people, gaping at me like I was a fish in a tank. My writhing, gasping self, this trembling mountain of flesh.

“It’s a very interesting town. It has an important ironworks,” said Antyushin.

I shivered, and then came another wave of fiery heat. “Get them out of here,” I roared to Genya. “Before I shoot them myself.”

He cleared them out for me. There was a soft knock at the open door. Slava, my friend, my lovely sailor, had brought a pot of tea, a glass, and a towel. “The midwife’ll be here soon, little comrade. Any minute. You’re going to be fine. Just keep on breathing.”

Always good advice. He handed Genya the water, and pressed something in my hand. A lump of sugar. Real sugar. I wondered how long he’d had that in his pocket. I popped it into my mouth and drank the tea, sucking the sweetness. My husband sat on the floor, not to crowd me on the bench, and never let go of my hand as we waited for salvation.

I rested between cramps, dozed and dreamed feverishly of fish, their unblinking eyes and gaping mouths. I knew I’d never be able to look at a fish again as long as I lived. Fish, and wet corridors—Gorokhovaya 2. And my mother with a veil like a coat of slime. But I finally remembered about breathing. I knew how to breathe—that’s all we’d done at Ionia. I breathed through my skin, long skeins of light, keeping a vision of a candle flame in my mind. I breathed and tried to keep the candle steady. I don’t know that it helped, but it kept me from screaming. Had any time passed at all? Where was that midwife?

Sometime later—was there still time?—the sun remained stalled in the white summer sky. It had not moved at all. Suddenly we heard arguing outside the train. Heavy boots, then the compartment door banged open. Genya rose and left me, closing the door behind him. My hands felt empty without his. “Genya?” I wanted to get up and find him, but I didn’t have the strength. I lay there bound up in my dress. How could I go through with this? I had to beg off. I’d been sick ever since Izhevsk. In fact I’d been sick most of this pregnancy, and now I would be expected to do something—not with my mind but with my body alone. The door slid back open and Genya came in, knelt at my bedside. He was biting his lip. There was something he didn’t want to tell me.

The midwife. There was no midwife. Oh God, I would have to give birth on this train with no one who knew anything more than some soldier who’d sewn up his buddy once at the front with the needle and thread he’d just used on his pants. “What?”

“There’s a problem,” Genya said, his forest eyes welling. The skin of his nostrils seemed very thin whenever he was upset. “He said the midwife wants you to come to the village. She won’t do it here. Thinks we’re devils. Typical religious morons. I say the hell with it. You can have the baby with us just as well as with her.”

“No!” I cried out. Oh please, could someone please help me, someone who knew his ass from a hole in the ground?

“She’s in the wagon outside,” said Genya’s girlfriend, Apollonia. She couldn’t wait to be rid of me.

“I can make her come in,” said Slava, lounging at the door. “It wouldn’t take much.”

Force some little old lady to attend me, with a gun to her head? “And if she refuses? You’d shoot her?”

“Why not?” He shrugged. “You can’t fight Soviet power.”

And leave a village without its midwife? Shoot her right there from the agit-train? Well, that would certainly change people’s minds about the Red cause. Another contraction drove my back into barbed wire. I didn’t want to give birth on this train. Better some old lady’s izba. “Take me to her.” I sat up, tried to rise, but my legs refused to hold me. I sank back down to the bench, but still upright, clutching Genya, shivering in the heat, sicker than I’d ever been in my life. “Take me.”

“The hell with these ignorant peasants,” Genya said, his jaw dangerously flexed. I knew that face, that mulish expression. He was getting his back up. “You know what it’ll be like—priests and icons, holy water. Who knows what they’ll do to you to punish you for being with us.”

I was willing to take my chances. “Genya, sometimes other people know something too. Now help me!”

Reluctantly, he helped me stand, then lifted me in his arms. The sailor led the way. Matvei and a sparsely bearded little muzhik waited by a bony horse attached to a cart. In the cart, a woman in a white kerchief sat stiffly next to one of our Red soldiers, a rifle casually at his side. She sat firm in her seat. If she was frightened, she gave no indication. She was a big woman, square shouldered, in a blue apron, her face pockmarked, wide boned, a rock of defiance. You could have ironed a shirt on her back, it was so broad and straight. She could have been fifty, she could have been ninety.

Genya sighed. “You’d really go with her?”

“Help me up.”

With one last baleful look, he lifted me up to the soldier, who settled me into the seat next to the midwife. Genya started to climb in after me.

“Nyet,” said the old woman, gesturing no with one wagging finger. “Not you.”

“I’m not letting her out of my sight,” he said.

“Not you,” she said again.

“This is my husband,” I tried to explain. I began to tremble again. I hadn’t been upright this long since Izhevsk. The blood surged in my head.

She put her hand on my forehead, a strong hand, cool and steady. I wanted her to leave it there forever. “You’re ill. A fever. How long?”

Just the sound of her calm, sure voice brought tears to my eyes, that hand, just like Avdokia’s. “A week, I think.”

“Has the water come?” I nodded. “How long ago?”

It was hard to say if it was five hours or fifteen. “Maybe noon.”

“And the suzheniya?” Contractions. “How far apart?” She was very abrupt, but I could see her knowledge struggling with her loathing of us, her deep-seated purpose to bring life into the world getting the upper hand.

“Twenty minutes, thirty. It’s my back.” I started to cry.

She was nodding coolly. She’d seen all of this before. I loved her already. “And when was your last confession?”

Suddenly Genya was there, grabbing the old lady’s blouse like he was going to punch her, yelling in her face with his mighty lungs, “What difference does that make? You old fool! Who cares? No—we’re not doing this. It’s insane. Marina—”

“A long time,” I told her.

“We should get started,” the old lady said.

“No. I forbid it. Marina, you can’t let her—”

The midwife raised her voice, it was clear, and hard. “Your wife is ill, she’s fevered, she’s already in danger. She’s been sick for a week. You call me insane? You people aren’t human, you’re animals.”

Grigory from Krasnaya Gazeta ran out of the train car. “Kuriakin, it’s good news. The 3rd Army has just taken Perm. The track’s open.”

I heard Marfa Yermilova’s voice, sharp. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

Other voices. Clamoring, all at once, like seagulls.

“Can you just give me a minute!” Genya roared, and knit his fingers atop his head, as if things were falling on it. “Just a minute!” He turned back to the old lady. “Anything happens to her, I swear, I’ll kill you.”

“If God wills it, so it shall be.”

He howled as if it were he, not I, who was experiencing the deep pain of labor. He grabbed his head like it was on fire. “That’s it,” he shouted at her, scrambling up into the wagon. “You go to your good Christian hell, all right? And take your piousness with you.” He was lifting me up. “I’m not leaving my wife with you.”

“Stop it, Genya!” I fought him like an animal, wrenching myself from his grip. “I need her. I can’t do this alone! Put me down!” I didn’t know where I got the energy, but I arched and twisted like a cat. He had to put me down or drop me.

He clutched his head like it was filling with demons. “What are you talking about? You’re not alone. Look! You have me, you have all of us!” And he waved his hand toward the comrades of our train, Matvei and Antyushin, Grigory, Dutkov the printer, Slava, Apollonia, Aksakov, Marfa Yermilova, Kostya from Pravda, an entire audience smoking, watching our drama. All his spacemen, his propagandists and theoreticians, actors. I’d give all of them for one old baba who could safely deliver my child. I didn’t care how many icons I’d have to kiss. Maybe I’d want to kiss them. I had stopped knowing who I was or what I wanted. I just wanted to get out of the sight of all these people staring at me and suffer my pain in peace and get this baby out.

“Your wife is very ill,” the midwife said to my panicked Genya, speaking slowly and clearly as if he were deaf, as if he would have to read the words on her lips. “She could die. I don’t think she will, but it’s in the hands of God. I can do more for her than you can, of that I’m sure.”

I could die. I don’t think I really believed it until she said it, right out loud. I was sick, but I didn’t realize how sick, and now the baby was coming. My terror rose into my throat like vomit. It coiled up my spine.

“I’ll kill you myself if you let her die,” he said, pointing at her, right at her upturned nose, as if he would stab her with the spear of his finger. “I swear to you. I’ll come back and burn your whole village.”

I went into a spasm of labor, and laid my head in her lap, clutching her apron. “Let’s go.”

The old lady held me, held me hard, pressing my back with her fist, right where it was breaking, splitting in two. I groaned loud enough for everyone on that train to hear. “Pray,” said the midwife. “Pray to Theotokos. Save me, Holy Mother of God.” After all my life with Avdokia, I knew that prayer like a song. I whispered it along with her: “O my All-Gracious Queen Theotokos, my hope who befriends orphans and intercedes for strangers, joy of those who sorrow, protectress of those offended…” And the words rushed over me like a stream. They soothed me. If I couldn’t have Avdokia here with me now, I had this solid peasant woman, and the prayer gave me some human sounds to utter. “Look upon my troubles and see my sorrow. Help me for I am weak. Guide me for I am wandering. For you know my offense. Resolve it as you will, for I have no other help than you, no other intercessor nor good comforter, only you. O Mother of God, may you keep and protect me, unto the ages of ages, Amen.”

“Amen,” I choked out. She held me and started over again, submerging me in the steady flow of those old words, like an ancient poem, firm in the center, prayed until the cramping left me. “Where’s Genya?” I gasped.

“He’s right there, by the train.”

I sat up and, yes, there he was, with the others, half listening to Marfa Yermilova, half turned from the cart, crushing his cap in his fist, trying not to look at me. Lot’s husband. Poor Genya couldn’t bear to see anyone suffer. I recalled the night we spent with the thief, in the little room on Grivtsova Alley.

But that boy had died.

The midwife took my hand. “Devushka, say goodbye now. As if it is your last day on earth.”

The shock, the fear of it, the reality, sank in the rest of the way. Death in childbirth. “You really think I’m going to die?” I whispered. My mouth was so dry.

“You have to submit, to whatever comes. Any holding back will make the birth harder. It is important, this farewell. It is the first of the unfastenings.”

Yes, I understood. For once, I had to submit, utterly. This was bigger than me, the war I was moving into, bigger than the train, bigger than the sun, it would blot out the sky. I struggled to sit upright, she propped me up. I took a deep breath. “Goodbye!” They all looked up. “Goodbye, Genya. Don’t forget me.”

I could see him struggling with himself, his shock as great as mine. I knew him. He could show his anger in front of his comrades, but not his tears. He knew that everything he did now would be remembered eternally. He had to act as heroic as the worker painted above him on the side of the train. Perhaps the train was the devil, after all. Which will you protect, the revolution or your pregnant wife? He was trembling like a horse, his eyes pleading. I forgive you.

“Now your parents,” the old woman told me. “Wherever they are. Your brothers and sisters, your friends.”

Was I dreaming this? “Goodbye, everyone.” Tears streamed down my face. “Goodbye…” Mama, Papa.

“Forgive them,” she commanded.

Mama? It won’t live. And Papa, with Arkady that night, playing right into his hands. “I can’t, I don’t know how.”

“Pray for guidance. Ask the Holy Mother to show you. Go on.”

Please, Holy Mother, help me to forgive them. Unbind me. I tried to remember when I had loved them most. Mama in her morning dress, arranging roses. Come help me, Marina. Brushing my hair with her soft ivory brush, rubbing my cheeks with a rose petal to make them rosy. Papa, letting me lace the links into his starched cuffs, teaching me to play chess on Sunday afternoons. Bringing the box home from the printers, my blue books, their gleaming gold leaf. Just the first of many, he’d said.

“I forgive you,” I whispered.

The comrades gathered around Genya, the politicals, the actors, side-glancing guiltily at him as he stood among them with his arms folded, his cap in his grip, under the rising sun of the Red October. His bright-painted train, his revolution. I forgave him. All of them. Kolya, Seryozha. Papa. Varvara, Genya. I could see the tears dripping down his sweet face.

Here was Slava, tucking my sheepskin roll next to me in the wagon, my boots and bast shoes, as if tucking my things into my grave. The sky was puffy with clouds. Goodbye, Genya. Goodbye.

The peasant slapped the reins and the sky began to move.

10 Angels and Devils

The dry rutted road stretched from horizon to horizon, my own Vladimirka. Though I sweated and shivered, dry mouthed, cramping, nauseated, I was grateful to be off the train and in the care of this straight-backed old woman. I lay across her knees as she rubbed my back. She wasn’t Avdokia, but far closer than a crowd of dumbfounded actors and slogan-spouting Bolsheviks, not one of whom was acquainted with the bare facts of life. Maybe I’d have this baby right here in the wagon. I just was glad to be moving, grateful for the rocking of the cart, the slight breeze, the silent peasant, the grunting wheeze of the horse. I felt safe, safer than on the bright train of the Future, which, disappearing, already seemed unreal.

The pains came and went, and the midwife murmured prayers and pressed my back, resting her broad hand on my belly. I slept when I could. I dreamed of my mother. She was wrapped in a blue veil, with Ukashin at her side. What appears to be a straight line is only part of the larger form. Yes. I’d forgotten. I was in this wagon feeling its rhythmic jolts, but also in the nursery with Avdokia, getting ready for bed. And still under the snow halfway to Alekhovshchina. And watching flakes falling into the Catherine Canal from a white bed, where Kolya smoked a cigar. I was the old woman at my side, and also the child struggling to emerge from my feverish body. Perhaps I was also standing on the Finland shore, breathing the briny air, looking out over a swamp, and saying, This is where I will build my city.

Sometime later—an hour? A year?—we entered a village, trees passing overhead, the cries of chickens and children. The cart stopped. The midwife spoke to someone. Would we get out here? I peered over the side. A little hard-baked village, a red cow, women at the well. She told the peasant to drive on.

I groaned. “This isn’t it?” We’d been driving so long.

“A little farther. Almost there.” She patted my back.

We creaked over the deep ruts out the other end of the village, back into the buzzing green, the jammy scent of hot pine, branches intertwined above us, insects whirring, until we finally pulled up before an izba nestled deep in the trees like a witch’s hut. This tumbledown izba, half choked in vines. What was next, hen’s legs? Baba Yaga? Hut, turn and face me. A young woman waited for us there. She wore the same face as the midwife, and a blue sarafan and white embroidered blouse. She helped steady me as I climbed from the cart. So this was where I would have my child, wherever this was… Zhili-buili, once upon a time… I’d been transported back to when tsars won their kingdoms through valor, and horses had wings and firebirds made promises.

The midwife handed my sheepskin and bundle to the young one. The silent peasant drove off. “This is my daughter,” the midwife said. The young one’s braid was blond, while the midwife’s was gray, and her cheeks were as round as peaches. Other than that, they were the same woman. I was seeing across time, from youth to age. There is no time, the Ionians said. It’s just your place on the spiral.

They led me, not to the izba but down a path overgrown with grass and starred with flowers, to a pond covered in duckweed. In a clearing stood a bathhouse. The baba, the woods, the bathhouse. I’d been brought through time to a Russia that existed before it even bore the name. I vomited into the grass, though I had little in my stomach, a sour thread.

At the threshold, another young woman waited, identical to the first, but wearing a red sarafan with a plain white blouse, her braid the same blond, her face the same moon. The bathhouse was crude and dark and I was afraid. I balked, fighting weakly, but the midwife and her daughters shoved me inside. A small wooden hut, the three of them tall and broad shouldered and buxom. Where would there be room for me? Candles lit the darkness, and the floor was strewn with straw and fragrant herbs—such a strong scent after the fresh air, very green, both bitter and sweet, artemisia and chamomile and mint, and it made me feel oddly less sick—a surprise. I hadn’t imagined myself feeling better even for a moment.

In the red corner, a lamp glowed before an icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos in her black robe, the Child nuzzling her cheek, her face steeped in pity. I glanced back at the daylight as they closed the door. Goodbye! The next time I saw the sun, I’d have a child in my arms… if I ever saw it again. So this would be my arena, my gladiator’s pit—this bench, this stool, this straw… I wondered how many women had come here for their children’s birth. How many had lived? How many had died? Had it been scrubbed since the last time?

They laid my sheepskin on the simple bench. The midwife bowed, crossed herself, and knelt in the herbs, as did the daughters. They pulled me down between them. Together we prayed for intercession, a swift delivery. I noticed a second icon next to the Vladimirskaya, a Theotokos I’d never seen—veilless in a red cloak, long red hair flowing freely over her shoulders. I’d never seen a redheaded Virgin. That had to be a good sign. My lips moved along in silent prayer, my teeth chattering with fever. O my All-Gracious Queen Theotokos, my hope who befriends orphans and intercedes for strangers, joy of those who sorrow…

Suddenly the pain returned, and I was falling. They grabbed me beneath my arms and hauled me to the bench, where I shivered and whined through a contraction like a sick dog, I was so tired, shaking. How could it be this cold in July? “My coat,” I whispered through my cracked lips. The blue daughter covered me with the sheepskin. Her kindness made me cry. For Mercy has a human heart / Pity, a human face… The hard bench was good to press my back upon. The midwife and the red daughter continued their prayers as the blue one pulled off her kerchief and took down her braid, and then her sister’s, and her mother’s. She unbuttoned my dress, checked me all over, chanting, “Untie, unloose the knots and chains, take your golden keys, O Theotokos, take your keys and unlock the fleshy gates, may the child come easily.” She took a rope with knots in it and held it over me, untied them one by one.

My own high-pitched moans appalled me, but I couldn’t hold them back. I’d always thought of myself as a bold girl, but I’d just been naive. Another lost child in need of salvation. Now the two daughters pulled me up, the blue and the red, and walked me around the stool like a man in a prison yard, like a horse on a water wheel. I couldn’t imagine hurting this much. Not even Chekists could have invented such a torture. And women lived through this every day. Holy Theotokos, make it stop! I wanted to lie down so badly, just for a little while, but they wouldn’t let me. The midwife left me with these twin dolls, her younger selves. “Please don’t go,” I sobbed.

“I’ll be back for the birth.” She laughed and the door opened… Ah, light! Then it closed again, sealing me into the dark like the lid of a coffin.

Time slipped its track. The hut was a portal into the deep past. All my ideas, all my cleverness, my so-called personality made no difference here. The thing I was, a woman, a body, no more profound than a cow, a mare in foal, a bitch whelping under a porch. Whimpering, shivering. No thoughts, no mind. What good was all our revolutionary dumb show, pamphlets, agitki like so many children’s skits performed for parents and doting relatives? No manifesto was going to help me now. Holy Mother of God, surely the baby was coming soon, surely this couldn’t go on… “When is this going to stop?”

“What, you thought it just pops out like a pea from a pod?” My pretty keeper laughed. “You haven’t even started.”

I wept, sagged in their arms. I couldn’t go through with this. It was a mistake. I should have gone back to Petrograd, to the modern mothers’ home on Kamenny Island. I remembered how clean it was, the nurses, the revolutionary babies… “I can’t do this.”

“Well, who’s going to? We can’t do it for you,” said the woman in blue. Were they twins? Twin sorceresses in their sarafany and loosened hair and secret smiles? “You have to work if you want the baby to come.”

“I can’t. I’m too weak…”

“City girl,” the red one said. “You should have thought of that.”

“She’s sick. Mama’s gone to get you something,” said Mercy in blue.

“I have to lie down.” I saw flames shooting up over their heads. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity, a human face… Unlock, untie… They couldn’t hold me up forever, and finally laid me back on the wide, splintery bench. Hot and dark. I needed air. The scent of herbs was overwhelming—I’d smell it until my dying day, which could be soon… “I can’t breathe. Please, open the door.”

“It’s not done,” said the blue sister. Her cheeks were pink. Sweat dripped from her skin. “It’s not safe.”

“Just for a bit?” I begged. “I’ll walk, I promise.”

They opened the door. Blue sky! Cornflower blue, and a little breeze nodding the boughs. The trees peered in like shy children. The sisters took up handfuls of herbs from the floor and made vigorous crosses in the doorway, protecting me from some sort of devil, while I drank in fresh air in huge gulps. In a moment the red one slammed the door shut again, as if there were wild beasts that would smell my labor and come marauding. Was that it?

The only light came from the icon lamp and the candles and stray beams from between chinks in the log walls. But true to my word, I walked and walked, like some blind donkey. “Where’s the old woman?” Suddenly it was of vital importance that old woman was back in the room. “Where did she go?”

“She has other things to do,” the red daughter snapped, while her sister wiped my face. “She’ll be back. Don’t you trust us?” She cackled. Oh, she was a devil!

“Don’t scare her,” said the blue one. “She’s getting you some milk. For strength. So you can push.”

I tried to remember when I last ate. I’d been sick since Izhevsk… those cabbage pies… Though I recalled Genya trying to feed me. Bread, a bit of fish. Nothing stayed down. The next grip of pain doubled me over. One sister held me while the other put a knee in my back. They certainly knew their business, these storybook women.

After a year or two, the midwife returned in a flash of light and a gulp of blessed air before plunging us back into the thick, fuggy dark. She held a bowl to my lips, milk still warm from the cow… Were there still cows? I took a sip but it turned my stomach.

“Drink,” she urged me. “You heard him, that devil. Said he’d burn down the village.”

“He wouldn’t really,” I said between sips. Yes, I could feel strength passing into my body.

“Oh, you don’t think so?” the old woman said.

But maybe he would. I thought of how he had once crushed the poor Virgin of Tikhvin. He wouldn’t understand anything about this hut in the woods, the spells, the knots, the witch and her daughters blue and red. Outside, the sun must still be shining, the birds warbling their summer songs… for all the good it did me. Why wasn’t it night already? If I could just hang on until nightfall, I’d have made it through this terrible day and the baby would come. Theotokos, look upon my troubles…

The old woman shook me, holding the bowl. “More. You have to try.”

I drank a few more swallows before she let me sink onto the bench.

I dozed between pains. A terrible rustling came from the rafters. Angels, hundreds of them, hung from the ceiling above my head, upside down, with wings like leather. I could hear them rustling, trying to get closer. They stared down with big squidlike eyes, blinking, dumb, neither male nor female. No physical bodies, no sex, no idea what we humans suffered. All they could do was gape, trying to get a good view of my misery. I got on my hands and knees, forehead cradled on my arms, my tightening belly resting on my thighs, and endured like a cow. No mind, no self, my name was Woman, my name was Pain. The red daughter pressed my spine with her giant hands.

“I don’t want it anymore,” I whispered.

“Too late,” said the red sister.

It won’t live, my mother had said.

If the child was doomed, why even try? It would die and so would I, and we’d be buried in a field in Udmurtia and no one would ever find me. I doubted Genya would even return to the village, let alone burn it. I crouched there, on hands and knees, weeping. Couldn’t I just die? Did they have to make me live through it all the way?

“That’s enough,” said the midwife. “Get her up.”

They lifted me to my feet, tried to make me walk. “She can’t, Mama,” said the blue daughter, blue-eyed, with arms like a blacksmith’s. “It’s the fever. She’s burning up. She can’t stand.”

The old woman came to me, grabbed my chin. “You’re not getting away from me,” she said. Her eyes were very blue. Her upper lip was long, her nose was short, her gray hair fell like a waterfall. “Hear me?” She slapped me. “Wake up!” Her eyes burned into me. “You’re going to have this baby, Bolshevik. Now walk!” They hauled me and shoved me, shouted, praised, threatened. The old woman muttered prayers, incantations, made signs and symbols in the air. However much I begged them to leave me to die, they held me and pressed me, sponged me, and walked me round and round the birthing stool. “Take me outside. Just let me breathe. I can’t breathe!”

Finally, the old woman opened the door, making violent crosses with handfuls of herbs, as the daughters walked me as far as the threshold, where I gulped fresh air like cold, sweet spring water, as much as I could get until the witch slammed the door again. “Satisfied? There are dangers you can’t begin to understand. Spirits who would love to kill you and your child.” Pointing at me with her bony finger like a prosecutor. “You have to trust me. I’ve been through this a few times. I have six daughters, all born in this very bathhouse. All living.”

“I have a daughter too,” said the blue sister.

“And I have two,” said the red one.

The witch had daughters who had daughters who had daughters… all the daughters in the world, stretching before us like the mirrored hall at Versailles. It was nauseating. I sank to my knees in the herbs and straw, rocking my hard belly back and forth like a bell. We shall not hear those bells… No, we would not. Not those saintly chimes, only mournful gongs and the blatting of car horns. Or worse. The screams and cries of the damned.

The midwife stood, her hands on her broad knees. Oh no, was she giving up on me? I was really going to die. I clutched at her leg. “Don’t go! I’ll be good. I’ll walk. Please.”

“You’ll be fine. Give her the rest of that milk,” she told the red one. “And you drink it.” Pointing at my nose. She left me sobbing there on the dirt floor, in the straw. Like a beast in a stall.

“I have to go too,” said the blue one, patting my shoulder. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“No! You can’t…” They were abandoning me!

“Send Sonya,” the red one called over my collapsed form.

I lay curled in the straw, weeping and mumbling childhood prayers. O Holy Theotokos, save us for we have no other help than you. So this was what it was like to die. You begged for it. I went from sweating to shivering as the angels goggled overhead. I swore at them while the red sister helped me onto the bench, covered me with the sheepskin. I lay trembling so violently I had to hold on to the rough wood not to fall. I faded into sleep. And dreamed of the bathhouse spirit, Bannik, a disagreeable dwarf with a huge nose and chin, sniffing the air. Where is that baby… But it wasn’t here yet. He would have to wait.

I dozed between contractions, lay on the broad bench watching beads of light through the chinks in the door—a constellation of glowing, elongated ovals projected onto the straw, where they took on a life of their own. I knew they were visitors from other dimensions. If only I could speak to them. Their presence reminded me of Ionia, and all the training I’d had there. I remembered Natalya—breathe in chaos, breathe out light. I breathed and thought of her, attacked by soldiers… Did anyone escape this curse of the body? The body, the body… I counted the small lozenges of light like a rosary.

Sometime later—hours, days?—the door opened again. Not the midwife, but another daughter, younger still, her hair braided, wearing a rose sarafan with a white apron, carrying a pail. I was shaking so violently I thought my teeth would break. The woman in red spoke to the girl, took her braids down, untied what knots she could find on her, then left us alone, gone before I could gather the breath to beg her to stay. The rose girl could not have been more than sixteen. Oh God. She sponged my forehead nervously. I pushed her away, her clumsy touch. I wanted the midwife and her great-armed dolls, blue and red.

Time refused to move. Another wave—an enormous hand, crushing me, cracking my spine. The angels came closer but I snarled at them and cursed. “Stop looking at me!”

“Who?”

I kicked off the sheepskin. Who was this, lying in someone’s shift on the bare bones of a bench, in a stink of sweat, her skin on fire? “Is it night yet?” I asked. “Just tell me that much.”

“It’s July,” the girl said. “It won’t be night for hours.”

Night. Such a beautiful word. A big darkness, not this musty closed-in armpit, everything cool and quiet under the indifferent stars. The richness of night’s satin robes, not this straw-filled abattoir. Between the pains, I breathed and whispered the names of the stars in the Moving Group, Alioth, Mizar, Merak, Phad, Megrez, Alcor, as the girl stared at me and crossed herself. Did she think it was a spell? The stars, born together, moving together through great time and space. The birth of stars was something to hang on to as my tenders came and left. I could smell food on them, smoke… A world was taking place out there as I was dying. This was life’s bitter secret. While someone was being torn apart, dying of fever, flayed alive, the world continued. Icarus fell from the sky and the peasant went on plowing. Not even his ox looked up.

They always left one behind to watch me. One skeined wool, another tooled a bit of leather. The red one came back from dinner, stinking of garlic. Sometimes there were two and they marched me around, gossiping about village happenings. In between pains they asked me where I came from, how I’d gotten so far from home. I couldn’t remember. My saviors, my tormentors. While overhead, the angels gawked and rustled their leather wings.

My labor was becoming permanent. I had stopped trying, stopped crying. Every few minutes the pain woke me, pain going nowhere, doing nothing but killing me. Then I fell back into feverish sleep. I dreamed of horrible, pointless things, like pulling hair from the ground, hand over hand. Finding a rusted metal doll left behind in a fire. This was no child, it was a monster. It wasn’t even a birth, it was a sentence, like being tied to four horses and pulled to pieces. The angels rustled overhead, like theater patrons with their programs.

At last, the red woman opened the door and I saw darkness. Cool air. She said a prayer to the evening star. It was my last night on earth. This is how death came. Your child wouldn’t be born, you were too weak, it was the wrong time, the wrong place. If only I hadn’t caught this fever. If only I’d gone back to Petrograd where I belonged. She sponged me with water, poured the milk into me a thimbleful at a time.

No more light beads to count now, only the flicker of the candle. Pain spread out like a stain. I collected it in my mind, forced it back small. Not a country but a pool, not a pool but a puddle, not a puddle but a bowl, a teacup. But just when I’d gotten it small, it flooded out again, a stain, a tide, and my city drowned. The pain erased all that was not me. And then it erased me as well, so only Pain itself was left. And Time. Time my rope, my line across the flood. But these women had no clocks. And the sun once up would never set. I would not outlive this contest. Death was coming.

Kolya, think of me! Could he feel the end of what he’d started? If we were as connected as he’d always professed, could he feel this? Oh, he’d think he’d overeaten, tossing in his bed.

As my minder dozed, I sensed something in the corner opposite the red one. Not the angels. This was a new figure, a somber woman dressed in a black cloak, with sorrowful Byzantine eyes like the Vladimirskaya Theotokos. So gentle, so dear. No Child at her cheek, and her skin was made of gold. Have you come for me, sorrowful Mother? Have you come to take me, wrap me in your arms? Is it time? Pity me, for I am so tired. You, who birthed a child knowing it would die, you who labored, help me now.

She didn’t speak, but we stared for centuries. There was no time in hell.

I don’t ask for life, I prayed to the dark Virgin. Only for an end to this pointless ordeal. Gentle Virgin of Death, come. Give birth to my end, stop this unholy siege. I surrender. She was coming near, the gold of her hands and of her face. At long and dear last, the Virgin of Death approached to gather up her weak daughter, with eyes of sorrow, preparing to deliver her final blessing. Take me, Holy Mother, and give me rest…

But then the door opened, and sun splashed the aperture. Dawn, and with it the horrible midwife. She stepped between me and tender Death. No! But my savior, the Dark Virgin, retreated into the shadows. And this old woman blazed in the doorway, blazed like sun on Scythian armor. “How is she?”

The daughter shook her head.

“I was afraid of that. Go get your sister.” The old warrior lowered herself to the bench next to me, her hand on my brow, so ugly and mean compared with my golden Virgin. She wiped my face with cool water. “This has gone on long enough, don’t you think?” she said to me.

I would have laughed if I’d had an atom of life left in me.

She held out a glass with some tea. “This will make it go faster.” She propped me up, held the rim to my lips, helped me drink. Bitter. I drank it all. Anything that might kill me faster. She let me lie back down. “Sleep a little now.”

I dozed for a while, praying for the figure in black to return and fold me into her cloak of night, for this all to be over.

All at once, my body, this tormented forked thing, began to convulse, a pain such as I had not yet known, a pain that bowed me back like a bridge, and it—I—emitted a scream that should have brought the hut down in a pile around us.

The old woman laughed with diabolical pleasure. She really did hate me. How she loved my screaming. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” While my body seized again. Once again I was possessed by raging life, plunged into this battle. They flogged them with iron rods until the flesh fell from their bodies…

“Now you’re going to work, my girl.” No retreat without orders. “Scream all you want, Bolshevik.”

I twisted, I writhed in her arms, I tried to get away from her, but she was as strong as five men. My body split open like a great door pushing aside the rust of the ages, like the earth cracking open in a terrible quake. The sorrowful Mother of God, hovering in the shadows, disappeared, abandoning me to this hellish old crone. “Are you ready to have this baby?”

The pain was tearing me open the way a cook dismembers a chicken, and I emitted the high yelps of a half-killed beast. The midwife held me from behind on the bench, the blue daughter before me, massaging my legs. A bedspring of iron screwed its way through me. No, no, no…

“Oh yes,” grunted the old lady. “Say yes!”

But I could only howl.

The door opened, the bright morning like knives in my eyes. “Getting close?”

“Shut the door!” the midwife shouted as a giant burst of pain tore through me. “She screams like the devil. Pray, devushka! Mother of God, save us. Holy Mother, All-Preserving Queen…”

“It’s coming,” said the red daughter, kneeling.

“There you go, Bolshevik,” the witch gloated. “You thought you’d outfoxed us, didn’t you?”

I wept. “I can’t… I can’t!”

“It’s coming! The head! I see it! The hair. It’s a redhead!”

“Push!” commanded my tormentor. Sitting behind me, her arms under mine, bracing my back.

I didn’t care about the pain now. I didn’t care if I died. I didn’t care if I ripped my body loose from my body to trail behind me like a sheep torn open by a wolf. I leaned back against the old woman and turned myself inside out.

“Here it comes!”

“No, wait! Something’s wrong!” A hand on my thigh.

“Holy Mother of God, what now?” spat the witch. “Take her!” She handed me off to one of her moons. “Stop pushing, you. Stop it. Turn over.” She thrust me down on the straw, on my knees, my head in the red lap, fingers up inside me, digging—was she going to pull the child out of me like a goat? The flat of a hand on my back, the way you’d steady a horse. “I’ve got it! Yes, now.”

Suddenly, arms lifted me to the birthing stool, where I squatted as they held me, pushing my life out.

Blood slick, the twisted gleaming cord still attached.

A girl, alive.

Eyes open, as green as grass. Full head of hair.

Laughter welled inside me like a spring.

“Look, she’s looking at you.”

Staring at me in wonder. She wasn’t even crying! And how beautiful she was, my daughter! Eyes, upturned at the corners, just like his! Her mouth a little bow, her big cat’s eyes. What a beauty, krasavitsa. No redness, no swollenness, after all that. Nothing was as I’d imagined. It was uncanny the way she examined my face, with such surprise! So this is the world, she seemed to say. The air we breathed in her little lungs. “She’s not even crying.”

“Oh, she’ll be crying plenty,” said the midwife. “So much trouble for such a little nub.” She wiped her forehead on the back of her arm. “I’ve never worked harder in my life.”

They wrapped the cord in a piece of red embroidery thread and bit it off, wiped her, put her into my arms in a clean dish towel.

“I could have a kid like that in my sleep,” said the red daughter.

“Look at those eyes.”

My child, staring at me in wonder. As if I were the miracle.

“The shoulder got stuck,” explained the blue daughter.

“Never thought that’d be over. Is there tea?” said the red one, stretching, cracking her spine.

She weighed nothing in my arms, as light as a rabbit. My daughter! Suddenly she opened her tiny mouth and began to wail. Not a full-lunged baby’s scream, more a high creak like a cat’s cry. “No, no, please don’t cry, baby.” It pierced me, that tiny high needle of a sound. My child. My sweet disaster. What was I doing wrong? She was as hot as a biscuit. That little mouth, and the bright flame of red hair. Did she not like me? I was crying too.

“What’s her name, milaya?” said the blue daughter.

“Iskra.” My voice was sanded to a whisper. Spark.

“It just was the feast of Alexander and Antonina,” said the midwife, holding a cup to my lips. “How about Alexandra?”

The milk was sour now. I turned my face away. “No.”

Another round face swam into view, the red sister. “You can’t call a Bolshevik Alexandra.” It was the tsarina’s name.

The midwife crossed herself. “May God keep her.”

“Antonina, then,” said the blue one. “Look, Tonya, there’s titty.” And put her on my steaming, rock-hard breast. I struggled to stay awake. Her name was Iskra, not some saint they’d just pulled out of a bag! I thought I was shouting, but they couldn’t hear me at all.

“At least they can’t say we killed the girl,” I heard the midwife say. “Theotokos be praised.”

Her name is Iskra. But I was too tired to argue, I couldn’t stay awake. My red-haired baby, my Iskra, my Spark.

11 Iskra

We led our camels, our lop-eared goats, across the dry, hard red plains. Red dust in our hair, in our mouths. Loose shale slid and clacked underfoot on the paths, the sound of the camels’ bells purer than water. Our small band of Ionians—Ilya, Anna, Bogdan, Lilya. The skins of water shifted on the saddles, dry bread in our packs, dates. The sun ate up half the sky. Tam! There! The red sandstone walls of a great city loomed, blue domed, with massive iron gates, the Master’s walled citadel. I knew it instantly. In the center, the Tower, like a giant rook in chess. But he never said how small we’d feel standing before its gates in our rags and coating of red dust, the goats bleating, the sun pounding down like a fist. I couldn’t even reach the rope to pull the great bell. How long would they leave us to stand here? We beat on the doors, cried out, but our puny fists made no sound on the enormous gates, and there were no guards to hear us.

I saw a small door, hidden in the large one like a cupboard door—no handle, not even a keyhole. Yet it must open somehow. I began knocking on it in a secret pattern I remembered seeing in Ukashin’s papers in his kabinyet. It was the knight’s move—up two, one across. Untie, unloose the knots and chains… I whispered to it, and the door gave way, and cool air streamed out.

The way was too small for the camels. We’d have to leave them, and all our cargo but what we could carry. I slung a bag over my shoulder, filled it with the most precious things, bangles and little statues, but the others refused to leave the camels behind. Who cared about the camels? Didn’t they want to enter the city?

“Don’t go,” Anna wept. Ilya, angry, turned away.

We’d come all this way! I would not stay outside, even if I had to go in there alone. I left my companions behind and entered the red city.

It was a maze of alleys. Women in veils whispered to me as I passed, but I couldn’t understand them. They were telling me how to go, warnings, important things, but I had no time. I was late. The narrow streets turned and turned again, you couldn’t see more than a few houses at a time. Would I ever find my way?

Suddenly I found myself at the square, the heart of the city. Around the red Tower lay the largest bazaar in the world. Rugs, living pictures, exotic birds, perfumes, spices, fakirs and beggars and wonder-workers of every description. A fire-eater spat flames, a woman wore a cobra like a shawl. On a street of jewelers and coppersmiths, I found a stall selling enamelwork and knew this to be my destination.

Enameled trays, tables, basins large enough to lie down in crowded the dark coolness of the shop. A long-bearded merchant waited on a cushion, smoking a hookah, but he didn’t fool me. I knew the Master when I saw him. “What have you brought me?” he asked. I opened my satchel to show him my treasures, but it was empty. Everything had fallen out. All it contained was a thin stream of red dust.

“Look, she’s coming around.”

A clammy rag wiped my forehead, my neck, blue eyes peered, moon faces, yellow braids. A cup to my desert-parched lips. Church bells rang. Light through curtained windows. Where was my baby? “The baby!” I whispered through parched lips. My breasts on fire.

“She’s sleeping. Drink.” The cup again. Tea, some kind of potion. They began to sing… and sleep bore me away.

Crows calling. A priest dressed in black swung a censer. The sound of pure cold water. Oh God, I was dead. I hadn’t made it after all. Light spilled across its wide waxed floors. It all smelled of beeswax, and bees droned outside. Honey in the walls. The grandfather clock stood in the hall. It struck the hour.

As I stood in the doorway a girl came to my side. Graceful and slim, in a white nightgown, barefoot, her red hair braided in loops as they’d done in Pushkin’s day. Iskra! She was alive! But I’d missed her childhood. She was already fifteen. “This is all yours,” I said. Mother out in the garden in a white dress, walking among the Queen Anne’s lace. Maryino! Grandmère at the piano. I thought the house had burned, but here it was, and we were all here! On the lawn, Seryozha reclined in a lawn chair, his bright hair gold in the sun, in his white sailor’s suit. He was doing something with his hands. He turned them over and showed me.

Cat’s cradle.

I backed away and knocked over a lamp. The rug caught, the curtains. It lit her nightgown. Stop, Iskra! But she ran out through the yard, aflame, toward the woman in white.

“No, devushka. Shh…” The midwife.

I fought her off. There was something in her face. Lies painted her brow. “Where’s my baby? What did you do with her?”

“She wants the child.” Her daughters, the blue and the red.

“Where is she?” I was up on my feet, running around the small room. “Where have you put my baby? What have you done with her?”

“She was sick, milaya.”

“A tiny thing.”

I struggled against their big bodies, the hot arms they were wrapping me in.

“She wasn’t very strong.”

“We put her in the stove.”

“NO!” I shrieked and ran to the oven, still warm from the morning’s baking. I opened the door and there she was, like a loaf of fine white bread, wrapped in a bit of blue calico. Her eyes closed. I ripped the calico off her. She was even tinier than I remembered… The midwife and her witches tried to pull me away. I flung them across the room, tuned out their jabbering, the cawing of crows. I held the tiny limp body to my fevered throat, no bigger than a squirrel. Opened her mouth, breathed fire into her. Breathed and turned her over, pressing her with my hot palms. I became a bright ball of fire, hotter, hotter. Come, Iskra. Closer. I felt her hovering now, close, very close, a little tremor, like fast-beating wings.

“She’s gone, milaya. You have to stop.”

I roughly elbowed her aside, gathered every last inch of myself and hurled myself into my child the way Ukashin did when he wanted to get our attention, the way he’d taught me.

Felt a twitch. A flinch. As when a sleeper falls in his dream. Was it me or was it her? “You saw that,” I shouted at the witches. Blank moon faces.

Again, like a live star.

And she jerked. She trembled, she shook, her little arms shot out, her hands tensed into fists. A little cat’s cough, and then—her mouth opened, and out came a high thin cry. I gazed down into her outraged face growing red, pressed her to my aching breasts, and laughed the way the midwife had laughed when I said I couldn’t bear it anymore, and she told me she would not let me go. Iskra was mine. I’d scorch the earth for her, until Death himself gave her up.

They fell to their knees in the straw, praying. Thanking the Virgin. Touching me, touching the child. I nestled my crying baby’s head under my jaw. She smelled of sweet grass and, ever so slightly, of smoke.

12 Antonina

I woke to white curtains blowing in an open window carrying the songs of village women. Was this the hymn I’d heard? Then I realized—the baby! Where was my baby? I shot up to find myself no longer on a bench in the bathhouse but in a peasant izba, ancient and smelling strongly of medicinal herbs. My heart beat wildly until I saw the cradle hanging from the rafters before the stove, like in Faina’s hut. Wobbly-legged, I hauled myself up, my torn body burning, leaking, but she was alive, alive, snugged inside the tiny hammock. With those delicate features, so sweet, so perfect—the glossy eyelids, the ginger hair, the slight snore. She was snoring! The most miraculous snore the world has ever heard. They had her swaddled up tight in a dish towel—the flush of her cheeks, her moist curls—and her lips were moving. She was saying something in her sleep. Oh, if only I could hear what she was saying. She still remembered the other place, the world she had lived in before she came here. What are you dreaming, my love?

I put my hand on the big stove. Stone cold. But I knew I had saved her, snatched her from Death itself. The tiny aperture of her nostrils was enough to make me weep. I felt dizzy, I had to lie down now, but I needed my baby. Steeling myself for her shrieks, I scooped her up out of the cradle. So light in my arms. She protested, one short mewl, then settled. So warm, and smelling of bread.

Through the open windows, a breeze carried the scent of fields and the jamlike sweetness of the pines. The fight was over. I held my child and gingerly lay down on the bench. I thought of that empty sack, the emptiness of my being, but it wasn’t so. I had saved her. She was here. The izba’s ancient rough-planed logs reminded me of the midwife. Her shelves sagged with jars and crocks, herbs drying upside down. And on the breeze came that angelic song again… This must have been the choir I’d heard and thought it was church.

Iskra’s lips were moving. I turned my ear to her, seeing if I could overhear her secrets, but she gave up nothing. The wonder of her—her breath, her golden eyelashes, her bowed lips, her beating heart. I hadn’t known how ferociously I would love a child. I lay with her nestled in the curve of my body, wrapping myself around her. It was so hot, why did they wrap her like that? But I was afraid of waking her.

For the rest of our lives, this creature and I would know one another. It was almost impossible to take in the reality of that. First you were one, then you were two. Crazy, when I was no different from the woman they delivered to the midwife, carried off the train, fellow-traveler and nuisance. And now, mother. This body, with bursting breasts and torn loins, where was the I of me now? There is no you, the body said. Only me. This body, these breasts, my flaccid belly—hot, weeping, empty and full, it belonged more to Nature than to myself. You could say there was no me, ultimately, only this body, and its primal urge to make other bodies. Like the Cosmic Egg—first there was nothing, and then desire.

I had to pee. I needed to get up but wanted to stay here, watching her, smelling her hair. I wasn’t ready for time to begin, for things to start happening. Give me a moment to understand. She was frowning, making little sounds. I held my breath. Don’t wake up. Please, I’m not ready… She would see me buried. What if we didn’t like each other? What if she judged me, what if she saw everything that was wrong with me—the gaping abyss of my flaws? And of course she would—what daughter didn’t? She squeezed her eyes, wrinkled her nose. Her voice, like a creaking door. Don’t cry, Iskra. Please, God, I don’t know what to do with you.

She fell back to sleep.

Thank God. I could pull her back from Death itself but didn’t know what to do with a dirty diaper. I was terrified of her, and my terror made me laugh. This redheaded riddle. Kolya never wanted children, never wanted this permanent tie. Would he be furious? But Genya would love her, protect her. He was a man for the future. He had longed for a child to carry on his shoulders, and would help her touch the stars.

She was talking again. What was going through her newborn mind, that galaxy, what tides did she recall? What dreams could she have? Did she remember the Dark Virgin by an open door, the fallen lantern? That the witches had put her in the oven? I lay curled around her, like a nebula curled around its brightest star.

Thank God to be off the Red October, away from the pinched face of Yermilova and the glowering mien of Antyushin, the actors, the politicals, the crowds, and the soldiers and the talk of atrocities. I could imagine Genya, mad with worry. For the first time I wondered, how long had I been here? Were they still waiting for me? Or were they already thundering east through the Urals, bringing the word to the benighted? Genya the Agit-Evangelist.

I leaned over to drink from a jug. That creaky cat’s cry. Oh no—her face all crumpled and red! Shhhh. Such a little bundle wrapped up like that, her head popping out. Now she was awake and furious, shrieking. What was I to do with her? I patted her back but it didn’t help. What did she want? Diapers? Feeding? I started to cry too. I tried to put her on my big hard breast but she kept turning her head and screaming like I was trying to kill her. Please stop, Iskra. Oh please, baby, your stupid mama doesn’t know what to do. She already didn’t like me, this poor thing wrapped up like a little loaf. We both lay there weeping.

Finally, the midwife came in, smelling of hay, sweaty from labor. “Look who’s awake,” she beamed, washing her face and hands at the basin, drying them on a white towel. Her old face’s network of lines grew bolder with her smile.

“What’s wrong with her? She won’t stop.”

“She’s just hungry, milaya.”

She held the baby snug in the crook of her arm as I used the chamber pot, unsteady. I washed my hands and arms and face while she clucked at my daughter, quieting her. It should have been Avdokia. How I missed her! I imagined my own mother at my birth—had she felt this helplessness? But no, she had been through it before with Volodya. To think that I was even more ignorant than Vera Borisovna… But she’d had the luxury of the Furshtatskaya Street flat, not a peasant’s izba, doctors and nannies and relatives all around. Yet this izba was a good sight more comfortable than that breathless black nightmare of a bathhouse…

How alone and very far from home we were.

The midwife guided me back to the bench, my cunt on fire, plumped the pillow behind me, and helped the baby onto my enormous hot breast. Swollen, immense—my God, where had that come from? How could she get her mouth onto that? The midwife showed me how to coax her mouth open with a little milk on her lips, to hold the breast flat with a finger so I wouldn’t smother her. We sat watching her feed—an everyday miracle, nothing more mundane or astonishing. The air through the window cooling our damp faces.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“She came a fortnight ago Sunday. You were still screaming and raving the Sunday after that. What a week that was, the Lord be praised, we had to wrap you in sheets and douse you with water.” She touched her face. There was a bruise. Had I struck her? “Tomorrow comes Sunday again.”

Two weeks! And I didn’t even know where here was. Alone with my newborn, not a ruble in my pocket, not a soul who knew my name.

The big woman stroked my hair with her work-calloused hand, smelling of hay and sunshine. And where was the train?

“Any word from my husband?” Two weeks… he could be anywhere.

She nodded, rose, wiping her hands on her apron. “A soldier came. He brought you a letter. You’ve been so sick, we didn’t want to bother you.” Reached up into the red corner, and there, propped against the icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos, a wrinkled green envelope. She held it out to me, but I was afraid of dislodging Iskra. I had no idea whether she was even getting any milk, but she had stopped crying, so she must be getting something. “Open it for me,” I told her.

She tore it open with a big blunt forefinger and extracted the letter, handed it to me.

It was a poem. In Genya’s unmistakable hand. He lettered like a madman, cubo-futuristically.

I lay back on the pillow, looking into the trees, baby at my breast, the midwife pouring milk into a bowl. Long-haired birches streamed. So my Stenka Razin had once again thrown his Persian bride to the deep. Proving his loyalty to his brothers at the expense of his love. He was the tenderest of souls and yet, if vanity was at stake, he would walk into hell itself with his chin held high. I could imagine them watching him—Yermilova, Antyushin—reporting back to Moscow on what he’d done, their poet, their great-voiced embodiment of the Soviet dream. How pleased they must be with their Stenka. The train, vanishing over the Urals, red flags ablaze.

At least he remembered the frost on my lashes!

Genya, Great Rus. Throwing himself under the train—but only in verse. No Anna Karenina. She was a woman, caught as a woman, bearing the full brunt of it, not some full-throated giant in the prime of his life, able to stir the masses like thunder. That overgrown baby! Kolya would never have left me like this, in labor alone in a hut in the forest. He would at least have pressed papers into my hands, money, something I could use, some way to get home. While Genya spent the night writing a poem.

I gazed down at Iskra, nursing, and thought back to how I’d left her father on the platform in Tikhvin. Her mama was a fool indeed.

I had to get up, start thinking clearly. I motioned for the midwife, whose name was Praskovia. She took Iskra, helping me stand, firm arm under mine, as hard as wood. I noticed I was wearing a pretty linen shift that wasn’t mine, a dazzling white. I stood at the open doorway, admiring the trees, the birches’ long boughs streaming, and watched the old lady briskly change Iskra on the bench. Cleaning her, wiping, the new diaper, folding her back into the swaddling cloth. I would never be able to do this. Never. “Can we leave her free for a while?” I asked. Even my voice was unsteady.

“Free?”

“Unwrapped?”

“Babies like to be swaddled. It keeps them calm.” She said it in a way that invited no discussion. I wished Avdokia was here, she was easier to cajole. But where once I would have argued, now I simply watched her wrap Iskra smartly—like watching someone with clever hands make a bed.

I stepped outside—would she stop me? Was there yet some new prohibition I was violating? Some Bannik I was insulting? But the old woman seemed to have relinquished her prohibition on the out-of-doors, and I planted myself on a rough bench, facing the trees. She brought me the neatly wrapped package of my child. Did you really put her in the stove? I wanted to ask. Iskra gazed up at me, entranced, or perhaps it was just the sun-dappled light overhead. I felt suddenly like a fraud, bankrupt—what did I have to give this trusting creature but the lostness of myself? My sack was empty. Red dust.

The midwife sat down next to me, her big work-roughened hands splayed on her knees. We stayed like that a good long while, just listening to the songs from the fields and the wind in the trees. There was something she wanted to say, she was turning it around in her mind’s hands, trying to find the right place to begin. She plucked at her apron, and tucked the swaddling cloth around Iskra once again, when it was perfectly tight. “What do you think you’ll do now?” she asked finally.

Iskra was wondering the same thing, her clever moss-green eyes, so much like his merry blue ones. Was it that the old woman wanted me to leave? After all, I’d been lying here almost two weeks, raving, hitting her, sleeping in her hut, eating her food—yes, I must have been eating, I wasn’t particularly hungry. They had their crops to get in. Was she telling me it was time to move on? Fear and regret ran down my head and shoulders like cold water. I wasn’t ready to go, I could hardly stand. I had no plan. “Head home, I guess,” I said.

“And where is that, devushka?” Her face, not unkind.

“Petrograd,” I said.

She sighed, gazing up into the trees. “And how will you go so far, with that tiny morsel?”

It was a good question. How would I navigate the crowded, wretched stations, the waiting, the hellish rush for the trains? I remembered well the day Kolya and I watched that tide of humanity fight its way onto the carriages at Nikolaevsky station. Could I do that alone, with a newborn in my arms, no help, no friends, no food—no money? I kissed Iskra’s tiny face, her body all bundled up like a cigar, head popped out the top like the bulb of a lollipop.

“There’s a woman,” the midwife spoke slowly, I could see the cautious lines of her mouth. “Here in the village. I told her about you, about the child.”

A strange buzzing in my ears. The wind rustled the birches, the pines nodded sadly.

“A good woman,” she said, gently touching my arm. “Her husband’s too old for the draft. The baby would be safe with them, dear. It’s not Petrograd, but she’d have a good life.” She sighed, the weathered crevasses in her skin as deep as canyons. She’d seen her share of the trouble that human beings could find themselves in.

Leave Iskra—was that what she was saying? Walk away from my redheaded baby? She smiled, but her eyes were sadder than ashes. She wasn’t asking me to abandon my baby, she was simply pointing out my position, trying to save me and the child both, just as she had in the bathhouse. Trying to say that Iskra would have a chance here. A chance to grow up. A chance to be taken care of by someone who knew something about babies, the type of woman who would never find herself in my situation. This wasn’t meanness, I told myself, just pure earthy practicality.

I saw myself as I must seem to her, a headstrong girl, unfortunate, luckless. No money, no people. Planning to drag a newborn child across a vast continent in wartime, taking filthy, crowded, disease-ridden trains to a future that was at best uncertain—and that would most surely involve cold and deprivation in a dangerous city, at a dangerous time. I forced myself to imagine earning my fare and my food begging in railway stations. Perhaps displaying my baby’s hideous diaper rash for a few kopeks. Or begging in villages from those who had little themselves. Praskovia’s sorrowful expression told me: When she dies this time, you will have to bury her yourself, with your own hands, in a field.

But when I looked down at Iskra, mesmerized by the shifting coins of light, I couldn’t imagine leaving her. The midwife thought it for the best, Iskra raised by a good Christian woman like herself or one of her daughters—round-faced, upright, clean women. She must think, What could be better than growing up sturdy and healthy in green fields, swimming in the river, cutting rye into shocks to dry in the sun, singing in harmony with women she’d grown up with, spinning the flax? The regular calendar of Saints’ Days and feasts. Surely that was better than the hardship of life in the city with its inedible food and unheated rooms and poor clothes, typhus and cholera.

But I had visited izbas full of sick children, huts where women sat meekly at the foot of the table while their ignorant husbands intoned their vile, reactionary views. Demanding service and threatening beatings.

Could I imagine my daughter thinking that horned Jews killed the cattle, frightened of devils in the butter churn, monsters in the forest? Kolya’s child and mine, growing up without Pushkin or Lermontov, The Wind in the Willows, Les Malheurs de Sophie, unaware there was a Europe, or that the moon only reflected the light of the sun, that the earth rotated around the sun and not vice versa. She would grow old and die barely conscious of the outside world—like the countless millions who had died before us. A short, brutish life in a small, dreary place, waiting for Easter and signing her name with an X. Don’t have children.

Yet I had to look hard at the reality I’d be subjecting her to. She could very well starve, as could I. She might die of a fever she’d pick up in traveling, or in Petrograd itself. I might die, leave her orphaned. She might not live long enough to read her first book. The midwife was offering me the possibility of a stable life for her. This tiny thing, red-faced and sweating, so bound in those swaddling clothes.

I couldn’t stand it anymore, and loosed her from the cloths, let her arms and her chest and legs feel the breeze, I kissed those arms, that narrow chest. Our blood, mine and Kolya’s—now there was a clever, volatile mix! She gazed up at me with those eyes, and I knew no round-faced Olya or Alya was going to be up to that. With a little luck, I would make some kind of life for her.

“I think we’ll take our chances,” I said. “But thank the woman for me.”

I felt Avdokia somewhere, sighing, exactly as this woman was sighing right now.

The midwife pushed down on her thighs and stood up, heavily. “Well, that’s that. May God have mercy on you both. At least she’s been baptized, that’s a comfort.”

“What?!” I didn’t want to shout, but it just came out. The baby startled and started to creak.

“Wrap her up, I told you. The arms—she’s used to being held tight inside you.” She took the swaddling cloth and laid it on the bench.

“You baptized her? While I was sick?”

“Well, we didn’t know if the baby was going to make it, milaya. So I baptized her myself. Then the priest came—don’t you remember?”

The incense, the priest—that was real.

“Put her head there,” she instructed, pointing to the head of the cloth. I did it. “Yes, we named her Antonina. I hope you like it. It’s a good name. You can call her Tonya, or Nina, or Inna.”

She’d baptized the baby herself while I’d been raving. Of all the things to worry about. I looked down into Iskra’s face, those eyes, Kolya’s mischief already showing there, and my own stubbornness. Already, a child with aliases. Antonina Gennadievna Kuriakina. I kissed her. Iskra. Tonya. Inna. Nina. “She needs to be bigger to travel,” I said. “But I won’t take your bread for free. I’ll work for my keep.”

She laughed out heartily, standing over me. “You’ve never held a scythe in your life. I bet you’ve never even used a broom, from the looks of you.”

Did I really look so useless? “I’ve dug ditches, I’ve built fortifications, I’ve cleared snow. Everyone works in the Soviet Republic.”

“You’re a good girl,” she said, patting my shoulder. “You rest, I’ll think about it.” She went back out to the fields, chuckling, leaving me and Iskra outside the izba watching the clouds float across the patches of blue.

Wildflowers bloomed in the long grass. The wind in the birches, their haymaking song on the air. I’d been abandoned, and yet right at this moment, it was enough to be here. It was warm and peaceful under the blue bowl of heaven. I fed my daughter, steering the other massive breast into her small mouth the way the midwife had instructed. I would figure out how to get home when the time came. Meanwhile, Iskra nursed and gazed up at the sky, the clouds chasing one another, a blue it rarely got in Petrograd. A real Maryino sky.

She fell asleep in my arms, wet lipped, drooling. I tucked my breast back into the white slip and rocked her, humming along with the singing. Iskra, Tonya. Nina. Inna. So trusting. I was her mother now, I had to make the decisions. I would pay these women back, and once she got stronger, we would go back to Petrograd. She might not have ballet lessons or sweetmeats from Eliseev’s, we might live in a tiny room somewhere, but we would walk down the granite embankments of the Neva and read Pushkin and I would teach her the Argentine tango, let her climb the trees of the Tauride Gardens, look at pictures in the galleries of the Hermitage. And see if we could find a certain clever fox.

13 Chess

I worked in the fields, my birth-emptied body compacting into something I could count on again, while Iskra grew red-cheeked and flirty-eyed. I had never worked so hard in my life. Being Korsakova’s servant was nothing compared to this, not even digging trenches during the German assault. Swinging a scythe, cutting rye with a sickle, binding grain into sheaves with reed grass and standing them up in the fields to dry. I fell asleep as soon as we stopped for a rest, in the shade of a tree or just under a wagon. The village was glad of my help. Their men had all been taken by the Whites when they’d come through in the spring. I learned what it was to work so hard you didn’t think at all. We sang those beautiful songs in order to work at the same pace, as one, and keep our minds off the labor. Nothing I’d ever done in my nineteen years on earth had prepared me for the difficulty of peasant life. I stopped to nurse Iskra under the trees and went right back to the scythe, leaving her under the wagon. We both grew tanned and freckled and strong.

Late one hot day, a cloud of dust made the midwife and her daughters stop in mid-swing. All the women fell silent. I didn’t know what was happening, but several women dropped their tools and ran for the forest. “Grab the baby,” Praskovia shouted, and then she too ran off toward her hut in the woods. I picked Iskra up from under the wagon, and the next thing I knew, a unit of Red cavalry was among us—seven hard, dirty men on small, dirty horses, faces lined with grime and sweat, squinting against the light, here to search for grain, for hoarding, for kulakism and possible antigovernment sympathies.

The women were pale with fear as the izbas and barns were searched. The enemy had been here, had taken their husbands and helped themselves to the grain—it could be construed as supporting the White cause. I stood absolutely still, Iskra in my arms, with Praskovia’s daughters, Lilina and Masha and Roza, watching Red soldiers rip through their izbas. “You have guns, baba? Guns? Gold?” and I thought of my gun, hidden at Praskovia’s, under the steps. Would they find it? Would they consider her a White partisan?

Soldiers emerged from sheds with bags of grain on their shoulders. I saw exactly how the revolution must seem from the peasant’s point of view. It was the hardest work anywhere, except maybe rowing a slave galley, just to grow these bags of precious oats and rye—no help from the government, no help from the city—and now grim, brutal soldiers appeared from nowhere, demanding their livelihood and offering nothing at all in return, except the possibility of not being shot. We kept our eyes on those rifles with the long bayonets. I knew they would stab us before they shot us, to save ammunition.

The commander demanded to see the headman. An old muzhik with a beard halfway down his chest came forward, hat in hand. “You already came through here once,” he squeaked. “We need to eat too. We need seed for next year’s crop!”

“I have men who need to eat tonight, Grandpa,” said the commander through tight lips. He was a tall man, around thirty, with flat blue eyes like pieces of broken china. “Everything’s for the army. Didn’t you hear the order?”

Meanwhile, we watched as soldiers moved in and out of the houses. A woman shrieked when she saw her black-and-white cow being led away. “No! Please don’t take her!” She ran to the soldier, clutching at him, begging. He shoved her down into the dirt.

“She has four children,” broad-shouldered Lilina shouted out to the field commander. “They need the milk!”

But he barked at us to be quiet. She’d get a receipt, there was nothing we could do. Did we want our soldier-brothers to go hungry? Tears streamed down the woman’s face seeing the bony rump of her cow behind the soldier, the sway of her udder. I knew the other women were thinking of their own cows, hidden in the forest, wondering when they would lose them. It was a terrible loss. The woman’s children pressed close around her like scared chickens as the soldiers loaded the bags over the pommels of their saddles, their short, nervous horses sidestepping. Eight, nine, ten poods—the village’s lifeblood.

Suddenly we heard a scream from one of the izbas. A woman’s howl—and this had nothing to do with requisitioning in the strict sense of the word. More painful than the grain or the cow. This was one of our women—Galya, pretty, round-faced, the mother of a two-year-old. “Stop him!” I shouted to the commander, Iskra on my hip. “Is this how you represent the Soviet Republic to a Red village? This is your idea of agitprop?”

The hot, irritated commander swiped the sweat from his forehead and squinted at me over his requisitioning book. Those dead eyes. “Who the devil are you?”

“Marina Kuriakina. From the agit-train Red October.” I held Iskra tighter. I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. “With the Propaganda Section—here to educate these people about the revolution.” The woman’s screams filled the hot, insect-laden air.

He gazed at me closely, baby wound in cloth on my hip, wondering, I was sure, who this tanned freckled peasant woman was, lecturing him about the revolution. I lifted my chin and gazed back, imagining Varvara. Imagining Yermilova. “Where is your commissar, Comrade?”

It was a step too far. He unholstered his Mauser and pointed it at my forehead. “Right here,” he said. “You and the kid want an introduction?”

My whole body went cold with shock. But I kept staring back. Now that I’d started this, I had to keep going—you had to meet a dangerous man eye to eye. Would he really shoot us right in front of the whole village? Oh God, those china-blue eyes said he would do it and never think of it again. That moment probably lasted a second, but I would remember it the rest of my life—the breeze in Iskra’s hair, the color of his eyes, the absolute silence of the other women. Another shriek from the izba. The unwashed commander lifted and fired his gun into the air. All the soldiers ran out of the huts, their rifles in hand, including the one trying to pull up his pants.

“Ride out,” he said. He got onto his horse. He stared right into my eyes, touched the brim of his cap with the Mauser. “Send my greetings to the Red October.” They swirled away like devils in the dust.

August, September. The oats and the golden rye had been cut and stacked. The sun set earlier each day. It was high time I was on my way. I sewed pockets into my skirts, into my sheepskin, pockets inside and out, I had to leave my hands free for the scramble onto the trains. The women from the village stuffed my pockets with food for the trip, carefully chosen food that I could carry myself. They cut cheese into pieces and wrapped them in waxed cloth, gave me dried apricots and cherries, boiled eggs, sausage, dried fish, and bread. I wept to see what they were sacrificing for me. The best they had. I knew I wouldn’t see food like this again for a long time. If I’d been alone, I might have carried a pood of grain or potatoes, self-provisioning. But the baby would make it physically impossible. Ironic—half of Russia was self-provisioning, and I, coming from fat Udmurtia, could bring nothing at all. Roza gave me a long cloth she’d woven herself from their own flax, and I tied it into a sling for Iskra, experimenting with different wrappings to keep her secure, even nurse her in it. I could smell the chill of autumn in the air, the grain drying. Soon they would be able to replace what had been taken. It was time to head home.

I was a peasant now, my arms as hard as wood, and Iskra no longer had that compressed newborn face. She was quick and lively, full of ideas and comments, if only I could understand. How the women petted and clucked over us, giving me food and diaper cloths and wagonloads of advice, worrying that I was about to leave the small known world to venture impossibly far. To them, Petrograd was like saying America.

The sturdy midwife and her daughters Lilina and Masha traveled in the wagon with me, driven by the same silent peasant, back to Kambarka, where I’d left the train. Praskovia had saved my gun during the search, hid it in the bathhouse with the icons. I decided the safest place for it was under my skirt near my hip—I could hardly wear my sheepskin in weather so hot. I carefully slit the skirt on the seam so I could reach in if I had to, beneath my apron. She’d risked a great deal hiding it for me. Her cousin was a fisherman on the Kama River, I would go halfway by boat, then cross in a wagon. Sad as parting was, I yearned to be off. I was ready. I would fight my way onto those lice-ridden trains. We kissed many times as they put me on the boat.

The Kama was a beautiful broad river, in places as wide as the Neva, and if I stayed ahead of the smokestack, the air was bright and scented river green. I sat on a box with Iskra in my lap as they spent the day fishing around Sarapul, grilled up a midday meal. The fresh fish melted in my mouth. We reached a small townlet at just about dusk, where the cousins of the fisherman took me in and fed me, and I boiled water and washed Iskra’s diapers as well as I could, spreading them out on the line, hoping they’d be dry by morning.

The fisherman’s wife insulted the baby as much as she could, protecting her from the Evil Eye, extra servings of abuse because she was so beautiful, so extraordinary, like a splash of sunshine in a cave. I was used to it by now. She said things like “She sure is a puny thing.” “Hardly worth the milk.” She talked about her own little son that way too, a round-eyed, well-behaved child. “Him? That idiot? Who’d want a miserable child like that?” Looking around, as if someone was listening. Layers of superstition, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into some rustic devil.

The next day, there was much argument about who would take me to Izhevsk—the honor finally went to a man with a debt he said was owed to him, a welder in the metalworks plant. We got into the cart and he brought a full load of potatoes and grain for sale to the self-provisioners at the station, to make a day of it. As we drove along, looking like a good peasant family—father, mother, redheaded child—I considered my options after Izhevsk. I could go back on the more major southern train line, through Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, or Moscow—there was more traffic that way. But the chaos of the stations, the crowds—the roadblocks. Because of the self-provisioners, the trains would stop constantly for searches. On the other hand, there was the northern route, through Vyatka and Vologda, the line I’d taken with Kolya last fall. Cherepovets. Babayevo. Podborovye. Tikhvin.

His dear face. How he’d wept at Cherepovets. On his knees, begging my forgiveness. It wasn’t an act. What a vain girl I’d been. I didn’t even know who that girl was now. I was a woman with a child, and life had become something far clearer, something more serious. You didn’t play little games of hard feelings just because your vanity was wounded. I saw now the price of sending love to the gallows, pulling the trapdoor. I wasn’t Genya. I was flesh and blood, and there was nothing as bloodless as an idea. I forgave Kolya his passion. At least it was passion—he was a flesh-and-blood man. He might make love to another woman, but he’d never give me up for an idea. He lived in this world, not the one of the spacemen. I would go back to Petrograd. It was where I belonged. I would show him his daughter, and let the cards fall where they may. Would he be cold? I knew that he could be hard as well. But whatever it was that fate held in store, I would find out.

The peasant next to me in the wagon sniffed the hot air. “Izhevsk. Can’t you smell it?”

I could—the rubbery stink of the factories, turning out Red rifles and bayonets that could point any which way. I only hoped they still remembered me there.

They did remember. At the soviet, they beamed at the baby, laved praise on the Red October and on Genya in particular. The bustling redheaded president of the local soviet personally oversaw the drawing up of my propusk to return to Petrograd. I warmed to the respect in the apparatchik’s yellow-brown eyes when he heard the magic word—Petrograd. Whereas, to the women of Praskovia’s village, it was the land of fairy-tale tsars and paved streets, at the Izhevsk City Soviet, Petrograd meant something quite different. It was the cradle of revolution. It was the Aurora, the storming of the Winter Palace. Though Iskra was crying and had pooped her diaper, the clerk still afforded me a full measure of Bolshevik approval.

Again I was brought to the munitions factory, where I met with their committee and gave an impromptu lecture on the further work of the Red October, and the situation in the villages—their bravery at bringing in a crop despite the absence of their men and so on—and was given an item that was more precious than rubies, a metal pail. Anything metal was highly prized, and with this pail, I might boil water, wash the baby’s clothes. I wanted to go straight to the train station, talk to the men and find out the situation on the rails, but one could not rush this kind of diplomacy. I ate with them in the factory canteen, and accepted a place for the night with the chairman of the committee, who spent the whole time talking about my husband, the Future of Russia, and read aloud to me at length from Genya’s second book of poems, Red Horses. Oh Great Rus.

It was only on the third day that I was able to conduct myself to the Izhevsk station and present myself to the stationmaster, accompanied by two members of the committee. The tension between the Bolsheviks and the railroadmen was alive and well, even here—I saw it in the way they enjoyed instructing the stationmaster on what he should do with me, their interference doing more harm than good. The stationmaster bristled from the hair in his ears to his gray moustache in the small office decorated with the familiar calendars, timetables, and portrait of Lenin. My escorts urged me to go south to Kazan, and meet the comrades there in another factory, then to Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl… If it were up to them, I wouldn’t be home until New Year’s. And the train to Kazan was due to arrive soon, just a few minutes. What luck! I kept hoping they would leave me alone, but it looked like they were going to accompany me right onto the train.

“What about Vyatka?” I said. “The Vologda line?”

“The English are up there,” said the committee woman, in her skirt of rags and patches. “We heard they made it down as far as Velsk.”

I continued to speak directly to the stationmaster. “What do you think, Comrade? What’s the word up there? I’d like to take the fastest route, the fewest stops.” I didn’t want to say the fewest roadblocks and searches—he might think me a speculator, with a pood of flour hidden in my skirt.

He smoothed his moustache and then ruffled it up again. “The Vologda line’s faster. You might sit awhile in Vyatka, but up there you’d only have to worry about bandits. I wouldn’t worry about the English.” He shot a contemptuous look at the committee woman.

“Our comrades in Nizhny could use a good speaker,” said the man from the committee in his worn leather cap. “An agitator from Petrograd? From the Red October! The wife of Gennady Kuriakin? It would be a great honor.”

I nodded, pretending I was considering it, then sighed. “I have to get back. Orders.” Oh, how important I must be! “Another train’s being assembled. For the Denikin front.” Wherever that was these days. I hoisted the baby on my hip, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to lug an infant around the agitprop circuit in the middle of a civil war. “What time’s Vyatka?”

I waited for the evening train north, nursed Iskra, and ate a little of the bread hidden in my skirt. I glanced up to discover a boy and a girl, no older than four or five, standing before me, dressed in ragged shirts and nothing else—no shoes, no trousers, their hair clotted with dirt and lice. They stood quietly, gazing not at me but at the baby at my breast. Saying nothing, not begging, just looking at her, tied to me in the flaxen cloth. The naked longing in their dirty, drawn faces was so far beyond hunger I couldn’t bear it. I offered them bread and one of our eggs. They snatched the food out of my hands and ran away to eat it like dogs. Mothers, Don’t Abandon Your Children! Where did they come from? Left behind while the families clambered onto trains? More likely orphaned. So many children everywhere in the Izhevsk station, begging, plying the crowd. People shooed them away like pigeons.

What would become of Russia? I really wondered. It had been uplifting to ride the Red October, yet every day we passed through stations like this, full of hungry, lost children, solemn, awestruck. Children, despite their terrifying, scavenging lives, crowding into our kino car, wanting to see something miraculous—a visit from a dragon or sorcerer in the midst of their unspeakable misery. A group of urchins threaded its way through the crowd, magpie eyes watching for any unattended package, any crust of bread they could snatch from a hand. What would become of them all? Starvation. Typhus. Surely some would live, and what then? Criminals, bandits, prostitutes—if they hadn’t already passed that milepost. Soldiers, if they lived long enough.

How dare I feel frightened about making this trip alone! I was privileged just to be an adult. To have an education, a story to tell, some wits about me. Even fatherless Iskra was enviable, my breast in her mouth.

Finally, toward the end of the long northern day, the Vyatka-bound train jarred and shivered into the station. Iskra wailed with the noise, metal on metal—didn’t they have grease anymore? A mixed train of twelve cars, both passenger and freight, of varying decades, it was already packed, people sprawling on the roofs, hanging out the windows as more tried to push on, but the blessed stationmaster put me on the train himself, shoehorning me into a tattered first-class compartment with curtains. My compartment-mates seemed resigned—some sort of intelligentsia by the looks of them, three men and a woman. They moved their belongings around to make room for one more. If they were looking for food, they were traveling the wrong way. There would be nothing to eat in the north but wood.

A journey that should have taken two hours took nearly ten, despite my calculations. The train kept stopping, shunted and searched. I got to know my fellow passengers rather well. They were German Marxists, old-fashioned Social Democrats coming from Ufa. My German was not as good as my English, but it wasn’t so bad, and one of the men spoke passable Russian, so we talked about the fate of the German revolution, and the imminent proletarian revolution in the West. The Russian speaker, a long-nosed man in steel eyeglasses and shapeless jacket named Blau, said that the German socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been executed back in January. The Spartacist revolt had been crushed. “Ebert called on the Freikorps to do the dirty work. That so-called socialist.” Ebert, the president of the Weimar Republic. But who were the Freikorps?

“Right-wing paramilitary,” he said.

Working for a Social Democrat?

“So-called. He was afraid of a Soviet replacing him. The Freikorps also crushed the Munich Soviet. Did you hear about that?”

I shook my head, wiped tears from my eyes. I’d heard on the Red October that a Bavarian Soviet had been declared in April. And by September, it was gone.

Blau leaned forward, his bony hands clasped together between his knees like a penitent in a Lutheran church. “Thirty thousand Freikorps, with enough armaments to retake France. The soviet was no match for them.”

“And the Kiel sailors? Bremen? The Ruhr?” This was our hope, that these workers’ strongholds would come to Russia’s aid.

Blau shook his head. Gone.

I sat back in my seat, knocked down by the news. Why hadn’t we heard this on the agit-train? No one had told us that the revolution was finished in the West.

“There’s still agitation in Turin and Milan,” said the woman. “But Poland’s gone, Romania—”

“Hungary?”

Four heads shook in unison. “Also the Slovak Republic—the Czechs took it in July.”

My head swam with the news. It had been so long since I knew anything of the outside world. I propped Iskra in the crook of my arm, fussed with her hair, trying to take in the enormity of these reversals. “What about America? The miners. The steelworkers. Seattle’s general strike.” On the Red October, we’d drunk in these stories—strikes and struggle worldwide. The textile plants of France and the mines of Wales, the factories of Glasgow and the steel mills of America, the world was rising up all around us. And we’d been sharing this information as fact to crowds in the thousands. Everything that Moscow had been radioing us. All dissolving like a pretty frost.

The German with the knobby face and heavy brow presented his view. “You have to understand the frenzy in France and England to revenge themselves on Germany. Their socialists are either jumping on the cart or warring among themselves how best to use the knout of your Soviet Revolution to win concessions from their own governments.”

“And America?”

He grimaced. “As long as the worker in America can buy bread to feed his family, we’re not going to see socialist revolution there. We were the closest in Germany, but our timing was off. Comrade Liebknecht said it was too soon, and sadly, our socialists were too willing to settle for what we could get. Now it’s over, at least for a while. You Russians, you’re going to have to go it alone until we catch up with you.”

My mouth filled with dust. No world revolution. No workers of the West coming to rescue us, no flood of industrial goods, no help. We were alone. The only Red Republic in the world. We had been lying to the people all this time. Because horses have to be fed, where men can live on the hope of it. All those discussions with Varvara, how the revolution may have begun in Russia, the least industrialized nation in Europe, but we would be the spark, and Europe would catch fire. Without world revolution, what did we have? What were we going to do?

We’d been abandoned by the world’s proletariat like children in a train station.

I looked down at the baby in my lap, loosened from her cloth, gazing up at me with those green eyes as if I were the eighth wonder of the world, Hera of the mountainous breast. Then she closed her eyes, her face went red, and I realized I had more immediate problems than world revolution. The poor Germans! The foul diaper had to be removed and the baby cleaned in sight of all, which I accomplished with foreseeable clumsiness. They were so kind, holding their gaze out the window, now full of twilight. But what to do with the remains? The stink was unbearable. Of course, it couldn’t be one of the compact variety.

The German SD woman, Lise, volunteered to hold Iskra—Danke!—while I went out in the corridor and tried to address the problem. I would have liked to just throw it out the window and been done with it, but I couldn’t afford to lose any diapers. It might be years before I could get more.

I waded through the passengers clogging the passageway, hanging from the windows, smoking and spitting sunflower shells on the floor, until I found a family, the woman with an infant in arms. “What do I do with dirty ones?” Holding up Iskra’s little present.

She shrugged. “Put it away until the next station,” she said.

Not likely. I waited my turn at the unspeakable convenience, where I knocked the remains as well as I could out of the offending linen, poured water from the tap into my bucket, rinsed and dumped it down the hole—you could see the tracks down below—rinsed and dumped again. In the end, it wasn’t too bad—stained, but when it dried, it might be useable, and in any case, wouldn’t make everyone ill. Halfway through the operation, someone began banging on the toilet door. I hurried to finish, and the moment I opened it, a heavyset man pushed past me, I could hear him vomiting. There was a samovar with boiling water. I threw a little of it into the bucket for good luck, rinsed, burning my fingers, wrung out the cloth and threw the water out the window, hoping it wouldn’t spray the people in the next car, before I inched back through the shuddering train to our compartment.

Now Iskra was on the lap of the quiet German. Both were all smiles, she was reaching for his cap. “Eine was für kleine Miezekatzekatze? Ich habe meine Frau in den Monaten nicht gesehen.” He sighed. “Meine Kinder. Zhena moya. Deti.”

“You are lucky to be raising her now, in a Soviet society,” Lise said over the noise of the car. “Women are going to benefit from this revolution like no women in the history of the world. If only we could accomplish what you have accomplished here.” I nodded. It made me proud, but also anxious. I certainly hoped that the Petrograd Soviet had made some inroads into building those crèches and kindergartens by the time I got home. I was going to need them.

The train rattled and screeched and jarred its way through the night.

In Vyatka, we said auf wiedersehen to the German comrades. They were taking another train, zigzagging their way to Moscow. I was sorry to see them go. I brought my pail to the engineer, who filled it with boiling water straight from the engine. I gave Iskra’s diapers a real wash—God bless the factory committee and their gift of a simple pail. Now I felt bad for being so irritated at their enthusiasm. I laid the cloths in the sun at the end of the platform, weighing them down with rocks, and got talking with the railwaymen, broad-faced workers in grimy overalls, as they serviced the train and loaded wood and insulted the railroad Cheka climbing aboard to search for contraband. Iskra’s charm won them all. Funny, I’d only imagined her presence in terms of difficulty. I hadn’t realized how everyone would fall in love with my redheaded baby. They invited me to join them for lunch, where, over a meal of soup and cucumbers, I repaid their generosity with stories about the Red October and having the baby and working in the fields—making a pretty tale of it. That was me, the Scheherazade of the Russian rails.

Back in the switching house, I noticed a chessboard on one of the shelves by the stove. “Who plays shakhmaty?”

I spent the rest of the afternoon playing chess with members of the Vyatka rail crew. I beat the first two, and then excused myself to nurse Iskra, covering her with the long cloth that was also her hammock. I’d bet one of my packages of cheese against three bread cards, and then the bread cards against a lighter, and walked away with all of them. “Where’d you learn to play like that, devushka?” the foreman asked, smoking a pipe, still staring at the board in disbelief, as if the pieces had moved by themselves.

Those snowy evenings playing chess with my father. I was not particularly gifted, but I was the only one in the family interested in playing. I so wanted him to think I was intelligent, that I was worthy of his time. The hours we spent in his study, him cleaning his pipe and tapping it out, all those little gestures, the smell, the closeness, his brown eyes, the neatly trimmed beard, his dimples. We would play the famous games, Marshall v. Chigorin, Rubinstein v. Lasker, starting with the endgames, stopping, discussing. Papa’s professorial voice, explaining, until I came to feel in my very bones the power of rooks controlling overlapping rows, the surprise of the knights, the versatile queen. He scolded me on my predilection for lightning strikes and odd impulsive moves early in the game, proving to me again and again how methodical development of one’s back row and pawn defenses would win out against startling aggression or whimsy, which soon fell apart for lack of correct placement of lesser men. But in the end, neither one of us had played a very good defensive game, had we, Papa?

I remember how angry Varvara was when we first played and I beat her, not once but every time. She considered me flighty, and yet, who ended up pinned to the edge of the board, or isolated in the center? She hadn’t had the advantage of growing up with such a father, a man who worshipped cool intellect and living within the rules. In the end, however, she had won on a much larger chessboard. My father couldn’t anticipate what life would deal out in the streets and courtyards of his country, that abiding by the rules would never win against a player who might turn over the board and pull out a Mauser, stick it to your forehead.

The heat lessened with the brief but blessed northern night, and by the time my train trundled into the Vyatka station at three in the morning, I’d won a small pair of scissors, a fountain pen, and a watch that didn’t work. I left them a poem:

They introduced me to the engineer and the conductor. “But don’t play chess with her,” the foreman warned. “You’ll end up without your shoes and a month of rations.”

There were no first- or second-class carriages on this train, just third class and miles of boxcars brimming with people. Iskra and I were lucky beyond lucky that the conductor got us into third class at all. It was utterly packed, but at least it was designed for human transportation, with windows and berths. The heat was still awful, but once we got going, I imagined there would be a breeze to cut the ripe stew of unwashed, sweating bodies. I followed him down the teeming central aisle of the uncompartmented car, Iskra sweating against me, picking our way through passengers sitting on their packages and sleeping leaning on one another’s shoulders. On either side of the aisle rose three layers of facing berths filled with luckier people who could sleep stretched at full length, heads toward the open windows.

He stopped at a set of berths about a third of the way down and rousted a sleeping boy out of the top berth, up by the ceiling, lifting him down and unceremoniously shoving him in with his mother on the second tier. “Sorry, kid, we got company.”

The mother, startled from sleep and half naked in the heat, raked me with her stink-eyes. “Who’s this, your whore?”

“How’d you like to spend a couple days on the platform and cool off, eh citizen?” He turned to me. “She give you any lip, you let me know, I’ll throw ’er off. Good luck, Comrade.”

“Oh, and a baby too.” She sighed, glottally, ekh, and irritably pulled her ugly son over to her on the narrow bunk. “This is already the worst trip I’ve ever taken. Now God has to make sure it’s the worst I’ll ever take.”

I eyed the thin, hard padding of the eye-level bunk—greasy, cloth-covered, about half an inch thick, up where it was hottest—and wondered how many people had slept on it in the last weeks and months. Fleas at best, lice at worst. I brushed it off as well as I could and put my bundle up there, spread out my sheepskin to lie on. At least it was summer. They said typhus was a winter disease. I couldn’t afford to get sick now—Iskra would have little chance of surviving anything we might catch on this train. I unbound her from the sling and put her up in the berth closest to the wall, and climbed up myself, apologizing as I stepped on the lower and then the middle berth. I lay down, loosening my clothes. How I hated to have to lie down on that bunk, but what choice did we have? Sleep sitting up for a week? I was lucky. I’d been lucky the whole way. Iskra was my luck. I could be in a boxcar. I could be lying on the floor with my infant.

“You’d better keep that baby quiet,” the woman below me hissed.

“Or what?” I said, turning over to face the window.

The woman proved to be a loud-mouthed, irritable harridan traveling with her husband and child from Perm to Petrograd, her husband a spets—specialist—in the chemical industry. She harped on me hour after hour, and when I returned from washing Iskra’s diapers (no offer to hold her, that was for sure) her kid was back lying in my bunk. He climbed down only under duress. Iskra and I spent most of our time lying in the berth up by the ceiling, sweating and watching the trees pass at almost walking speed as the train shuddered down the track. The middle bunk folded up, and everyone else sat on the bottom one, but there was only room for three people. I didn’t mind, I didn’t need to socialize. I slept and fed Iskra and assembled my plan for Petrograd. First, I would go down to the English Embankment and see if Kolya had returned. Then I would try Krestovskaya’s—that was a good-sized apartment, if the actress had been able to keep it after her husband was shot during Red Terror.

I could try Mina if it got desperate. Her mother, Sofia Yakovlevna, had always liked me and she had no idea that Misha and I were the same person—but Mina would be furious at my abandonment of her. Genya’s friend Anton Chernikov was a possibility… he might still have the Poverty Artel. There were still places I could go. And Iskra could see her city. I brushed her damp hair from her face—we were both sweated through—and dried her with the cloth, took the diaper off her in hopes of letting the sweat evaporate. I knew when to expect diaper usage. I hummed to her some of the work songs I had learned in the long hours of harvest.

It was a long way from Vyatka to Vologda, and this train stopped at every little town—Kotelnich, Svecha, Shabalino—and even in between, halting with an unearthly screech and shudder in the middle of nowhere. Another local roadblock, another search. Rough local militiamen in clothes that looked like they’d come off dead people would mount the train and search the cars. I figured it was safer to keep my gun on me, up near my waist behind the baby. Uncomfortable, but they would pat you down everywhere, it was an added bonus of the job.

They searched the cars, demanded everybody’s papers, though it was clear the man looking at mine, dirt caked on his fingers and in the lines on his face, could not read them. He found my food, but no surplus, just enough for the journey, and he returned my little packets and began harassing other people. Out the windows, I could see the boxcar passengers herded out into the sunlight, smoking, blinking like moles. Some of them seemed quite ill and lay in the shade of trees, unable to stand. It reminded me to thank the great forces for my berth and my spets’s family, irritating as they were. None of them were ill and neither were the men on the other side, two from Petrocommune and a talkative blue-eyed man who told everyone he was an agronomist from Ekaterinburg, though I noticed none of the searchers had searched him, or his berth, or his valise, which he kept under it. In case his hearty confidence and ruddy good health—when we were all suspicious and exhausted—didn’t give it away. A Cheka spy. Well, at least he wasn’t ill. I would take the woman and her smirking boy, who spit sunflower shells on the floor that we all had to walk on, even the Chekist—me with an illegal pistol digging into my ribs under my skirt—as long as they weren’t feverish or scratching with lice. Watching a pale, shaky boxcar woman sitting out the search under a tree with a baby at her breast, her dull eyes staring at nothing at all, I knew my luck was still holding.

The so-called agronomist took out a case and began assembling a cunning little chess set on his knee. “Does anyone play?”

He beat both the Petrocommune men, one in a shameful seven moves, narrating the game the whole time: Bishop to queen’s knight four. Queen takes pawn and checkmate. “You,” he said to the spets sitting opposite him. From where I lay in the top bunk, I could just see his shoes next to his wife’s heeled ones, and the boy’s sandals. “How about it? This tedium’s driving me crazy.”

“I can’t say I ever learned,” said the spets.

“He doesn’t do anything,” confided the wife, leaning forward. I could see the black roots of her blond hair. “Just plays with his chemicals. He doesn’t even know how to swim. Isn’t that right, Ivan Danilovich?”

Her husband said nothing. What a coward. Married to that loathsome woman. I wanted to plug my ears with wax.

“Amazing he knew how to get a kid,” said the thick-lipped “agronomist,” sitting with his knees wide apart, crowding his seatmates. “Sure it’s his?”

She preened at his attention, touching her hair. “You could teach my Yasha. He’s a very bright boy.”

I could imagine the smirk on that little brat’s face. I saw another reason children shouldn’t be praised—that was one the Evil Eye could take any time.

“Do I look like a schoolteacher?” said the bull-necked Chekist. “Someone. Anyone. Hey, you up there, Red, with the baby. I know you’re listening. Can you play? Give you half a sausage.”

Play the Chekist? “Win or lose?”

“Oh, a hard bargainer! Why not? I’ll beat you with one hand tied behind my back. Girl chess players. No concentration.”

We’d see about that. “But there’s no room for me to sit.”

“Make room. You, go up there.” He held out his chubby paws. “Hand me the baby.”

I hated lowering Iskra into those fat hands. I could only imagine how many lives they had ended. But I did it, handed her to him, then gingerly negotiated the climb down from the bunk, hoping my gun wouldn’t clunk against my fellow passengers’ heads. I settled next to the spets on the bottom bunk as the boy clambered up into mine.

Unlike the Vikzhel men, the heavy-jowled Chekist proved a considerable adversary. Good development of pieces, castle on the queen’s side. He made no mistakes. But I would change his opinion of girl chess players. The set was tiny, with little pegs that fit into holes in the board so we could hand it back and forth without losing any of the pieces. The way he narrated his moves, like a man playing to a crowd, was odd and intended to rattle his opponent: Knight to bishop three. Bishop to rook four.

“How’s the harvest looking?” I wanted to throw him too. “Will there be enough rye to plant for next year?” When all he probably knew about rye was cutting it—and not only rye.

“Oh, let’s not talk about rye,” he said. “A dull subject, even to me.”

Naturally. We were silent for a while, jolting and jarring on the untended track, gazing at the board. “How was it in Ekaterinburg?” I said. “Are the Whites still there?”

“Liberated, July 14, 2nd Red Army. And not a moment too soon. They must have shot twenty thousand workers. Even hosted a pogrom on the way out. I didn’t think there were that many Jews in Ekaterinburg.” He pursed his fat lips. “Pawn to queen four.” He sat back, satisfied. “That’s how you can tell when the Whites are losing—follow the trail of dismembered Jews.”

I shuddered. It had happened on July 14. Iskra had been a week old. I stared down at the tiny board. Twenty thousand. The very same troops who had massacred so many in Izhevsk just a short few weeks before we’d arrived had gone on to ravage Ekaterinburg. Exactly where the Red October had been heading. The same White Army that had taken the men from Praskovia’s village. Perhaps their husbands and sons had been among the pogromists—who could tell? I was learning one thing, people could go straight from church to hammering nails into a woman’s eyes. Nothing would surprise me again.

I took the agronomist’s pawn. Though it opened my queen to attack, I would take his as well. Something needed to happen. “So where are they now?”

“Tukhachevsky took Chelyabinsk at the end of July—5th Red Army. They’re across the Tobol now. Omsk by October. You heard it here first.” He touched his queen, but didn’t pick it up. “The English will abandon them soon—they’re starting to see their White angels aren’t so spotless. You should see the local whores—dolled up in English woolens. The corruption would make you Petrocommune fellows weep.” The men at his side were dozing. “The Whites are supplying our armies with half our weapons and food. Trotsky’s sending them roses. Kolchak keeps his hands clean, makes a big thing of it, but everyone else is up to their eyeballs. The peasants are raising armies in the east, all on their own.” Just as Yermilova said would happen. He moved the queen after all. “Queen takes pawn.”

Iskra woke and started to cry. “She’s hungry,” I said. “Excuse me, I have to feed her. Can we finish later?”

“Feed her, I don’t care,” said the man, grinning. Those horrible lips, moistening each other.

I jiggled her on my knee. “She can wait.”

“Babies shouldn’t go hungry. Don’t mind us.”

But I did mind. Normally I wouldn’t, but this man was far too interested in seeing me feed my baby for my taste. He gave me the shivers. But what was I to do? In compromise, I reached up over the heads of the spets couple into my bunk for Iskra’s cloth—a bit of modesty—only to find the boy reading my notebook, one leg crossed over the other, like a man reading a newspaper. He’d gone through my sack—my meager belongings, that brat! I would have slapped him but I didn’t want his mother to get involved. Instead, I took hold of the hand that held my notebook, and squeezed it. Staring him in the eye, daring him to cry out. I’d gotten plenty strong this summer working the fields, I could have broken that grubby paw, but when I saw the tears in his eyes, I let him go, pulled the notebook out of his hands and stuck everything back in the sack, knotted it and pulled my cloth out from under him.

“Play chess,” the Chekist called out.

“Right there.” I sat back down, put the cloth over my shoulder and undid my dress, put Iskra to the breast.

It was a long game. Torture, with Iskra slurping and smacking under the cloth, drawing the attention of the already too attentive Chekist, while I continued trying to play. He ended up winning, but I made him work for it. No more rude comments about “girl players.” As soon as we had finished, he gave me my half sausage, and set the board up again for another game.

The days passed. I learned about the Petrocommune men. One had been a shipping clerk at Eliseev’s specialty grocery in old Petersburg, the other had worked for the government in the timber industry. I lay in my bunk, playing with Iskra, and gazing at the passing trees outside the window. I wrote a poem about chess, a city of chess pieces, the chess game of our times. I recited Akhmatova aloud to her, and Blok, and Mandelstam—bathing us both in their verbal coolness. The spets woman was complaining about Perm, talking about her sister who lived in Kiev, on and on, I decided to cut a corner from a diaper to stuff into my ears. But when I rummaged in my sack—no scissors. The scissors I’d won from the Vikzhel men. There was no doubt as to what had happened to them.

“Yasha?” I asked, leaning over the side of the bunk. “You didn’t happen to see a pair of scissors, did you? Brass, about four inches long?”

He turned his innocent face up to me from the lower berth where he sat with his parents, the father reading, the mother knitting. The boy was holding the skein of yarn.

“No, he hasn’t been using your filthy scissors,” the mother said. “What are you insinuating? Are you calling my boy a thief?”

Ah, the smile on the brat’s face hidden behind his mother told me everything.

“He got into my things. I was wondering if he’d developed a fondness for them.”

Her homely face, red-cheeked and sweaty in the heat. “You tramp. You railway slut. Sitting up there with your disgusting bastard. How dare you call my son a thief!”

“Talya, please,” her husband said.

She brushed him off like a moth that had landed on her shoulder, and stood, bringing her face up to mine. “Say it again and I’ll smack you.”

“Your brat took my scissors,” I said.

She reached out and slapped my face. The sting of her hand, her ring on my cheek. The Petrocommune men didn’t know where to put their eyes, they were embarrassed for both of us.

The Cheka man smoked his cigarette, enjoying the show.

“Don’t you speak of my son, you whore, you cheap trash. Women like you shouldn’t be put in with decent people. If anyone should be thrown off the train it should be you.” Her breath was hideous. Bad dental care, poor food, the whole place would ignite on the fumes if there were a spark. “Apologize to us this instant.”

“Ask him if he didn’t go through my things when he was up here the other day. Reading my notes, pawing through my belongings.”

I could see the part in her hair as she leaned over her son, making her mooing sounds. “Yasha. You didn’t do any such thing, did you, sweetheart?”

“No, Mama.” But the smirk returned as soon as her back was turned. That little criminal was splitting a gut at this.

“Good, that’s a good lad.” The Chekist reached across and squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “Good lad.”

What game was he playing? This man disliked little Yasha. He’d made that clear with the suggestion that he teach him chess. But perhaps he recognized himself in the boy—the liar, the sneak—traits that might end up making a good Chekist. “Never tell them anything. If they want those scissors, they can bloody well search for them, and good luck—right, kid?”

Now the boy wasn’t smirking.

“I beg your pardon?” said the mother.

“He’s got ’em, all right.” Inhaling his cigarette, then examining its lit tip. “Innocent people, see, they get this moment of shock. A moment where they don’t even understand that someone’s accusing them of something. It takes a second to get it—oh, I’m being accused of, say, taking some scissors.” I could see the part of the mother’s hair, where the dye stopped and her roots began, and the Cheka man, his legs set wide, crowding the shipping clerk, whom he’d turned to address. “Then they start yelling. You can’t fake that kind of outrage. I didn’t take them! I wouldn’t touch your lousy scissors. I didn’t even know you had any, and if I did, I wouldn’t have touched them. Where a guilty person starts defending himself right away: How dare you! They get all puffed up. They overdefend, they attack, they spread it out—Who are you, some railway whore, and We are good law-abiding people! The innocent person sticks to the facts. The guilty go for pride and honor. And the born thief says nothing. He waits for confusion to rule and slips out when he has a chance. Good for you, kid. If this was the street, this would be your chance to inch for the door and make a run for it.” The Cheka man stood. He held out his hand. “Davai.” Give it.

“I didn’t take them,” the kid said softly, retreating deeper into the berth.

His interrogator reached in, as fast as a snake, and dragged the kid out of his lair by the arm, shoved him to the floor. “I don’t think your dad beats you enough. That’s half the problem right there.” He unbuckled his pants and started to pull his belt out.

The woman grabbed the man’s shoulder, clutching the cloth. “Don’t you touch my son!” He shrugged her off. The force threw her back against the window.

On his knees on the filthy floor, the boy scrambled into his mother’s sewing basket and came out with the small brass scissors. I hated that kid but still—the sight of him on his knees holding the scissors out made me ill, the fear in his face, the whimpering of his mother. The man ignored the boy, rebuckled his pants. Did he beat his own children with that belt? Had his father beaten him that way? “Give them back to the girl. Say sorry.”

Yasha handed them up to me, the tears in his terrified eyes were real. “Sorry,” he whispered.

I nodded. He was sorry, that was clear.

The mother ruined the moment by grabbing him and slapping him herself. “How dare you steal, and then hide it in my basket! What will people think of us?”

He sulked the rest of the day, which was fine with me. Even the mother was wonderfully subdued, apologetic. She offered to share some of their food with me. “Raising children now, in this climate. You’ll see. Everything’s upside down.” The thick-lipped Chekist kept me under close surveillance, nodding at me meaningfully.

I took Iskra for a little walk on the platform at Vologda. Though it was still hot, you could feel autumn in the bright air, the birches turning yellow inside the deep green pines.

Alas, we had work to do. No time for poetry. I handed my pail up to the assistant engineer and asked him to drain off some boiling water for me. I amazed myself, this new mother-person I’d become, worried about disease and rashes and illness, sanitation and linens, a real German housewife. How my father would enjoy this if he could see me now, how Kolya would laugh. Yet I was proud of those clean nappies.

It was a big station, full of exhausted, overdressed Russians with bundles, children, and Komi women selling food. Passengers didn’t dare go far, but took turns leaving the train, walking the platform, not to lose their spaces. “Go, go,” said the spets woman, her name was Natalya Romanovna. “You do take good care of that baby. Honestly, I’m surprised. When I saw you, I thought, Oh no, and a baby too. It’ll just cry the whole time, and stink to high heaven. But you do a real good job.”

As I washed diapers at the end of the platform, leaning over the red feathers of Iskra’s hair, I inquired of a loitering mechanic, “So what do you hear about the English?”

“A few sorties up around Onega, but the trains have been getting through,” the mechanic said. “The Americans are gone, now it’s just the English.”

“We’ll be done by spring,” said the Cheka-agronomist. He’d developed a nasty habit of creeping up on me. Whenever I turned around, there he was, this stocky, lecherous, thick-necked man who now saw himself as my personal savior. “Denikin’s the one to beat. He’s closing on Tula. He could be in Moscow in six weeks if they don’t sell all the guns to us first.”

“Yudenich’s still there, in Estonia,” the mechanic said. “Waiting for his chance. I wouldn’t count my chickens yet, brother.”

“If the English had given half a hand to Yudenich, Petrograd would be gone already,” said the fat man. “That should tell you something. They don’t trust him any more than anyone else does.” He put his hand on my shoulder in a false gesture of reassurance. He just liked to touch me whenever he could, see if he could get a look down my dress.

I snapped the diapers to get as much water out of them as I could, and laid them in the sun, away from my admirer.

He leaned over to where I was squatting, his shadow shading me. “You’re avoiding me, Marina Dmitrievna.” I cringed. How could he know my name? From the visit from the railway Cheka? I never used my patronymic on the train.

“I’m just trying to get these diapers done.”

“Leave them. Let’s go have some samogon with some friends of mine. They say it’s good for the milk. Makes it flow like a fountain.”

The last thing I wanted to do was to go drinking with this man, or meet his friends. I certainly didn’t want him thinking about my milk flowing like a fountain. It made me ill to think that he had given such consideration to the condition of my milk. “No, I think I’ll live instead,” I said. “It’s all poison.”

He brushed his hand against my shoulder, the tips of his fingers. I shuddered despite myself. “Suit yourself,” he said.

The full moon filled the windows of the rocking train. Everyone was asleep, including the Chekist, out cold on the bottom bunk opposite after his party in Vologda, snoring even louder than the train. I recognized everyone’s night sounds now—the Petrocommune man from Eliseev’s with his whistling snore across from me, and below him, the timber man, who was a tremendous farter. We knew each other all too well. The rising moon was like a small child trying to peer above a table, enormous and white, round-faced.

All I could think of was being back in Kolya’s embrace. This same moon was peering in at him, somewhere up ahead. Dream of me, Kolya. Feel me. I’m on my way. I breathed, and projected myself into the astral, and flew out across the miles, Iskra in the crook of my arm, west to Petrograd, following the train lines. We dipped over the canals and the vast shining Neva, peeked into windows, looking for him. We landed on a windowsill—Kolya at a desk, the lamp lit, the window open, he was smoking a cigarette, writing a letter. To whom? He looked tired. I didn’t like to see him like that. I wanted to rub my palms over his forehead and erase those lines. They didn’t suit him. I’m coming, my dear.

I needed to urinate, but dreaded the long march to the filthy toilet. Next to me, Iskra lay, her tiny upturned nose, the bow of her mouth. What could she be dreaming? I hated to wake her, but I would not leave her here alone. At least at this time of night, there might not be a queue. I clambered down, trying not to step on the woman and her son, and the husband below, then lifted the baby’s sleeping weight out of the berth and snugged her into the cloth. I had about two seconds to quiet her between her awakening and the first shriek. I was getting pretty good at this. Then we began our awkward, jolting, swaying stumble through the crowded car, stepping across people sleeping on the floor with their bags and packages. They slept pretty well considering the clanging and rattling of the unmaintained train and my misplaced steps. God, what a stink. Gas and bad teeth and unwashed bodies worse than any zoo. The longing face of the moon followed me down the car.

I used the unspeakable hole at the back of the train, holding my breath until I could open the door again.

There in the narrow corridor, waiting for me, loomed the Chekist’s fat face. He pushed me back into the WC, shut the door. In this stinking hole, he was on me, crushing me to the wall next to the toilet, smashing Iskra between us to plant a repulsive, boozy kiss on my lips, clawing at my dress, popping the buttons from its bodice. His disgusting hands grabbed my bare breast. I screamed, but who could hear me in this coffin over the grinding of metal on metal, the clangor of the train? He clapped his hand around my throat, cutting my wind, and with the other, unbuckled his famous belt. I heard it hit the floor as his pants dropped, God, he was going to rape me right here in the crapper with my daughter tied onto me. She was screaming now that she had the room.

Perhaps wanting a better grip on my body, he reached into the cloth and grabbed her. He was trying to pull her out by her arm! Oh God, her screams. I had no thought but to stop him, stop him from hurting my baby. I reached through the slit in my skirt and pulled out the gun, pressed it deep into his chest. Do you know what this is, Mr. Cheka? Without hesitating, I fired.

The impact slammed him back against the door. He slid down, but there was no room to fall, he sagged onto me. I tried to open the door, but he was in the way. The baby screamed and screamed. He was holding his chest, blood bubbling out of his mouth. I had to stay out of the blood. I climbed onto the surround of the toilet, so he could fall against the wood. I put the gun back in my pocket—searing hot against my belly—and pushed open the door into the narrow corridor.

It was full of people. I could see their staring eyes in the moonlight. Boys. Orphans, traveling for free huddled in the filthy corridor. Gaping at me. “Help me open that door,” I ordered over Iskra’s screaming. “Quick.”

A boy reached over and pulled open the rear carriage door. His eyes gleamed with respect in the moonlight.

The sound of the train, the couplings, the fresh air, twice as loud now. I could no longer hear Iskra’s shrieks, or the man’s chest-shot gurgle, or smell the odor of offal and blood. All I knew was that I had to get rid of this Chekist or they’d come looking for his murderer. I pulled him out of the toilet on the blood-slick floor—my God, he was still alive, wheezing. The blood made the floor slick. “Help me,” I begged of them. “I can’t let them find him here.” First they pulled off his boots and went through his pockets. They took his clothes except for the bloodstained shirt, stripped him fast as one would skin a rabbit. Then they helped me pull him out onto the platform between the cars—the platform, too, was full of beggar children, riding out here in the dark and the wind and the scream of the metal. The bigger boys were the ones who shoved the Chekist out into the rushing darkness, onto the tracks. We stood on the platform among the smaller children, as his naked body disappeared in the moonlight. He was gone. Ten yards, twenty yards. The moon our only witness.

The baby wailed. I came back inside the car, and stood panting, staring at what had to be blood on the floor. Was it on my hands? On the boys? They didn’t look too bad. They showed me their hands. We stood outside the stinking hole, listening, waiting to see if anyone would come. You really couldn’t see the blood, the floor was so dirty, no one would notice it. I had to bet on it.

The moon leered through the window, a dangerous witness. I tried to soothe Iskra, but she would not be consoled. “What’s wrong with her?” one of the boys asked, a tall, tough-looking one with dark eyes.

I sat down, took her from the cloth and had a good look. There was something wrong with her arm. Limp. It was lower than the other. The bastard! My head was on fire. I wanted to scream, to become hysterical, but there was no time. My innocent child. This was my fault. It was up to me, there was nobody else. The moon waited, the train shuddered and groaned.

“He pulled the shoulder out,” the boy said. “You gotta pop it back in, mamenka.” He gestured, a fist into a cupped palm.

“I don’t know how,” I said, fighting hysteria.

“I do. Here, give ’er to me,” said the boy. He looked about fifteen, scabby and mangy. Though my life rested in his hands, I didn’t want to give my baby to him. There was no way to know when he’d last washed his hands, what diseases he might carry. But I did it. He sat on the floor and I handed him to her. “So, here’s what you do,” he said as he settled my poor screaming baby between his bony thighs. “You hold her arm still.” He showed me, pressing Iskra’s tiny upper arm against her rubbery baby body, as she shrieked and writhed. “Now ya gotta lift the bottom part up.” He raised Iskra’s forearm. The shrieks!

“Gently, please.” Sweat and tears stung my eyes. “Gently…” Oh God, please let this be over soon, please help Iskra. She’d been through so much already. “It’s going to be all right, kitty-cat. Just another minute. We’re going to fix you right up.” Hoping I wasn’t lying.

“Now you just gotta feel around for where it pops in.” He secured his tongue in the corner of his mouth and lowered the forearm and moved it across her body, holding the upper arm tight, completely resistant to her piercing shrieks. Then he rotated it outward, the arm at a ninety-degree angle, feeling, listening with his fingers like a safecracker. “Vot.” There. She gave one last body-shaking scream—and stopped.

The boy grinned shyly, as if it were nothing, but I could tell he was bursting with pride as he handed her back to me. I held her against my breast, rocking her, begging her to forgive me, thanking him, thanking all of them, and whatever sloppy God was watching and not watching. I wrapped her cloth around her shoulders so she couldn’t move her arm, and turned to lift my skirt to remove half the food I was carrying, and pressed into dirty hands—cheese, chunks of bread. “Forget you saw any of this.”

“Saw what?” the boy said, already eating. “You think any of us talks to the Cheka? That’s nuts.”

“Good luck, boys. Thank you.”

“Good luck, mamenka.” Once we’d regained our composure, I carried Iskra back through the crowded car, quietly, quietly, as Ukashin had taught us to do. I’m a shadow, I’m a figure in your dreams. I’m a ghost, I’m nothing. I’m smoke. I’m no one. Anyone who saw me would recognize me, the girl with the baby. My shoes were sticky with blood. I could feel the tack against the rubber of the floor. Was I covered with it? The cloth, my dress?

Finally, I knew I was back in my little enclave when I recognized the whistle of the shipping clerk. I lifted Iskra onto my bunk, and clambered up, quick as a monkey, careful as a thief. How long had I been gone? Twenty minutes? An hour? Once in my place by the ceiling, I quickly cut a strip from one of the diapers—with the scissors my victim had saved for me!—and made a brace for her, tying it gently across the arm. Oh, oh, I know, I know. Please don’t start screaming again. I carefully bandaged her arm and collarbone and swaddled her up tight, then put her to my overflowing breast like a fountain, and lay as quietly as I could, through the thunder of my heart. Someone was dead because of me. And I would do it again. Anyone in this life who wanted to hurt my child would find me as cold-blooded a killer as any Chekist.

I dozed a bit toward morning. In my dreams, I was back at Furshtatskaya Street, tending chickens in a locked room, caring for them among the embroidered chairs and the polished parquet. The next thing I knew, people were talking. I peeked over the side and saw that they’d already put up the middle bunks. I’d been sleeping so heavily I hadn’t noticed. Natalya Romanovna was combing her hair. The man from Eliseev’s washed his hands and face with a little boiled water poured onto his handkerchief.

“He was stinking drunk last night,” said the woman, working out a snarl in her hair. “It was awful. He pinched me when I was getting ready for bed.”

They were talking about the Chekist. I pretended to awaken, yawning.

“Maybe he’s gone to the toilet,” said the spets.

“Maybe he found someone to play chess with in another car,” said the timber man, whom he’d beaten in seven moves and never played with again.

“Well, good riddance,” said the wife. “A very unpleasant man.”

The boy said nothing as he stood at the window, ostensibly looking out at the fresh sunlit morning, but he kept stealing looks at me over his shoulder. Had he seen me get up, and the agronomist follow me? I wouldn’t know until we were searched again, until the railroad Cheka walked between the rows of bunks, until we showed our papers and answered their questions. Would he blurt it out, betray me for revenge? I had to get rid of the gun. Maybe Mama Natalya’s sewing basket? That would be a rude surprise. The man’s valise was still under his bunk. Surely they would find it, open it, and ask whose it was, what had become of him. The railroad Cheka would notice any blood. I looked down at my dress, with the torn buttons. It was dark with a pattern of cherries, but the baby’s white cloth was spattered in red. I turned it, refolded it so the blood went to the inside. My boots had a line of blood at the sole, I could disguise it if I stepped in some water. I drank from a cup the timber man passed across to me, and saved a bit to wash my own hands and face.

I spent the rest of the day worrying about the gun, and the children, the people who had seen me. Should I throw it down the toilet? Give it to the boys still riding the rear of the car? They could sell it and get something to eat. Each search increased my chances of being caught, and a girl with a gun nowadays would be considered a potential Fanya Kaplan, Lenin’s would-be murderer. Who was I traveling to Petrograd to assassinate? I had been raped before, I might not have shot him even to prevent him from fucking me—but he’d hurt Iskra. If he had gotten her out of the cloth, he would have thrown her on the floor, even down the toilet onto the tracks. But now it was he who was on the tracks somewhere to the east of us, where he belonged. Give up this gun? Going to Petrograd, which by all accounts had become an even more dangerous place than it had been when I left it? Where Arkady and people like him still walked the streets? Even if I had to suffer an agony of suspense each time we were searched, I would not give it up. I’d never be able to replace it.

The Chekist never did come back, and no one gave a damn. The spets’s family were able to spread out, the boy had a bunk to himself again. It didn’t keep him from staring at me at odd moments, though. I sensed he knew something, but I couldn’t ask. Every hour that passed, every mile we were farther away from that stretch of track, I felt less terrified. And now the familiar stations began to appear. Cherepovets. Babayevo. Tikhvin.

Tikhvin! I dared not get out to walk, in case my one-armed mechanic was at the station. I thought of Avdokia—how I wished she were here. I ached for her gnarled hands, her pity, her love. But I had to go on alone. Could not retreat to the infantilism of bourgeois motherhood. Theotokos, have mercy on us all.

When I went back to the toilet, the children I had seen that night were gone, replaced by new orphans, who stared at me with the same hunger I was used to seeing. The others must have gotten off, deciding to try their luck at other stations.

One more day. My fellow passengers gathered up their bundles, straightened their clothes. I had sewn up my dress with a borrowed needle and thread, fashioning some elegant new buttons out of the hem—cut, rolled, and sewn. Again, the lessons of Ionia had not been lost on me.

As we approached the city—city of my heart, my arteries sluicing under its bridges, Petersburg!—the train slowed to a walking pace, that brutal grinding of metal against ungreased metal. From the window, I could see not only bagmen but ordinary citizens jumping off not in twos or threes but by the scores—falling, rolling, scrambling to their feet and disappearing into the shaggy woods on the outskirts of the city, dragging their bags and suitcases of illegal foodstuffs. Hundreds of people from a single train. Self-provisioning. I had a moment of doubt. If the food situation was so bad… But I had made my decision. I stood, hanging onto the open window, holding Iskra and waiting for the first sign of Petrograd to appear. Yes—there! The Admiralty needle, far off in the distance, just a wink of gold catching the autumn sun, just a stitch between sky and earth. The spets’s wife and the Eliseev man cried out as well.

“We’re home,” I whispered to Iskra, kissing her hair. She needed a bath, and her arm was still tender, but she was alive. We were both alive—and going home. I blubbered, letting my tears wet her hair. Somewhere in this maze of a city, Kolya lived. I felt him out there somewhere, making deals, living his subterranean life. I have your daughter, Kolya. Can you feel us coming? I imagined him stopping in the middle of whatever he was doing—midsentence, in an office, or a courtyard, as the image of me crossed his mind. While hundreds of miles to the east, a naked man lay on a train track with a bullet in his chest. And in some small railroad town, a boy with brown eyes remembered the redheaded baby he had saved, and her mother’s tears.

Before we were able to leave the car, the railroad Cheka arrived. Too late to jump off the train now. We sat on the berths while a sharp-faced man in leather examined our papers. He was quite literate, too bad for me. “Why is your residence in Tikhvin but your propusk from the Izhevsk Soviet?” I had to explain the Red October, the baby, the agricultural work. I showed him Iskra’s baptismal certificate—he sneered at that bit of backsliding. I shrugged. “Peasants.” I showed him my hands, the calluses from working the crops, though I didn’t explain the scar on my right palm, courtesy of the Archangel. I had, however, replaced my bloodstained boots with my woven bast shoes. My eyeballs burned with the effort of not looking at the agronomist’s valise nestled under the bunk across from us, wishing it would disappear. Unfortunately, the Chekist had eyes in his head. He lifted it out.

The generalized sense of anxiety heightened, a twang, like the tightening of a string, as if everyone had been guilty of doing away with him, or was afraid they would be accused of it.

“Whose is this?” he asked.

I should have thrown it out the window, but that would have been too obvious.

“There was a man here,” said the shipping clerk from Eliseev’s. “He disappeared, after Vologda.”

The hatchet-faced Chekist tried to open the bag. Locked. The boy was staring at me. I glanced back as if it was of no interest to me whatsoever, but I could feel sweat trickle down my neck and under my arms. Iskra was sweating too, her red hair plastered to her skull. I kissed her, swayed her a bit in her bloodstained sling. It was airless and hot in the car without the train movement. I sent Yasha the telepathic message: Nobody beat you, you got your own bunk—do you really want to make trouble? You don’t know how far this might go.

“An agronomist, didn’t he say, Talya?” said the spets. “From Ekaterinburg. Though he didn’t seem like any agronomist I’d ever met.”

“A very unpleasant man,” his wife chimed in.

I waited. Iskra’s good arm came up, playing with my nose, my lip. Her other in its sling. What would happen to her if the Cheka arrested me? Please, God, get us through this. I hoped I looked like a sad-eyed redheaded Theotokos. Who would suspect a Virgin and Child of murder? I felt the weight of the gun against my belly. Please let him not search too closely. Had anyone, of all these hundreds, mentioned the shot in the night, the recognizable figure of a woman with a child skulking through the car? I could only depend upon the way people minded their own business these days. Why should they help the Cheka?

“Mal’chik, what do you know about this man with the suitcase?” the Chekist asked the boy.

I let my eyes rest on the timber man, who was pressing his abdomen with his fingertips, something not working in his bowels, and steeled myself in anticipation of the spets’s son spilling his guts. “He was fat. And he snored,” the boy began in an overearnest voice. “He wore a big metal buckle, like a sheriff.” He pronounced it sharif. A Zane Grey fan. Yes, the belt would have caught his attention. It was riding the rails somewhere, around the waist of a Vologda orphan. “He played chess. He had a little tiny set and he beat everyone. He didn’t want to teach me.” The screwed-up face as the little liar thought of other facts about the man he could share. “He was from Ekaterinburg. Talked about the war. He knew a lot about it.”

“What did he say about the war?” the Chekist asked.

The mother was making eyes at him. Be quiet! The boy paused. “He knew a lot,” he continued. “He said the English were going to abandon the Whites. That they didn’t trust Yudenich or he’d have Petrograd already. I think he was a spy. An English spy.”

The Chekist was clearly disappointed in the boy’s information. “Anybody else know anything about this man?”

“He just disappeared,” said the timber man, his breath sour with indigestion. “After we’d left Vologda. I thought he’d passed out, but I guess not.”

“He came on the train stinking drunk,” added the spets’s wife.

“The English were in Vologda,” said the shipping clerk. “Maybe he joined them.”

“And left his bag?” The sober, thin-faced Chekist clearly didn’t like the bag. That’s what was troubling him.

The shipping clerk scratched his head. It made me want to scratch.

“Maybe he wandered off at one of the stations and missed the train,” I said, not to be left out of the general guessing. Thinking about the dead man’s advice, what makes the guilty look guilty. If the innocent were putting in their comments, I needed to join them. Not be the one visibly inching for the door.

“Or maybe it was supposed to be picked up by someone else, like in Pinkerton,” said Yasha. “His contact.” Supporting the spy theory. But the way he looked at me, I knew he knew. He was doing this for me.

The Chekist spat on the floor of the train. Where someone would have to sit later. “The simplest explanation,” said the timber man, “is that he went for a smoke and fell off. He was in pretty bad shape.”

“Well, tough luck for him.” The Chekist tucked the case under his arm, and moved on through the car.

In a few minutes, they unlocked the doors, and we spilled out onto the platform at the Nikolaevsky station. I loved every member of this sweating, shoving crowd, the high arched roof covered in soot and fluttering with pigeons, the patched but decidedly urban clothing, the begging orphans. I loved it all. We were back among the living. We were home.