Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

14 My Petrograd

Nikolaevsky station soared before my eyes, a city within a city, just as I’d left it ten months ago. Dirty and crowded, but a beautiful sight regardless. “Here it is, Iskra. This is where we’re from.” She gazed up at the rosettes on the smoky ceiling. Perhaps not as impressive as I’d hoped for her first introduction, but what did she know. The station hadn’t changed, though the people looked a little sicker than before, skinnier, and more resigned—as if they’d been waiting for centuries. Maybe they weren’t even traveling anymore. “Traveling” had perhaps become a permanent condition. Ten months ago, I’d left this station a girl delirious with love, on the brink of a great adventure. Now I had returned, the prodigal, sans swagger, sans lover, with an infant in her arms, the Izhevsk Committee’s pail over one arm, all my worldly goods in a little satchel. The Petrograd Soviet had not sent a welcoming committee. I kissed Iskra, checked her arm. “We’re home, milaya.”

Beggar children seemed to outnumber the passengers now, besieging them with their outstretched hands. A woman my own age, perhaps a young teacher, knelt to address two tiny children, holding something out in her hand, trying to coax them closer, the way you tamed animals. She’d almost lured them to her when a gang of them swooped in and hurried the little ones away.

I noted the Petrocommune shipping clerk stride past, determined to ignore the raft of orphans trailing behind him. Petrocommune—why hadn’t I thought of that? The state’s food distribution network. They would receive regular rations if anyone did, and all they could steal besides. I ran after him, trying to joggle Iskra and her poor arm as little as I could. “Hey! Comrade! Is there work in your office? I have my papers. How would I go about it?”

“Go to Smolny,” he said, not slowing his pace or turning his head to regard me. “Talk to Gogilevsky. Tell him Strumlin sent you. And God help you.” He cast a glance at me briefly. “That was an evil man.”

He knew. He knew! I wanted to thank him, but he had lost me in the crowd. Strumlin. Gogilevsky. That’s exactly what I would do. But today, I wanted to show Petrograd to Iskra. I was hungry for the statues, the red granite of its embankments. I wanted to show my daughter this empress of mirrors, its beauty and poetry, the reason I had dragged her all the way from Kambarka.

We emerged into the heat and glare of the afternoon, and I gazed across the great expanse of Znamenskaya Square. How quiet it was. Where had all the people gone? Here, where the Volynskys had once wheeled and slashed, where the soldiers had fired on the demonstrators in ’17, I could still hear the gunfire, smell the sulfur… where the student had bled in my arms, and died. But only a single cart traversed the enormous open space. Had everyone perished in some plague?

I touched a wall, warm from the sun. The stones were still pockmarked from those gun battles. He’s dead, Marina. Let’s go. Running with Varvara across the square, where we crouched with the other patrons behind the closed curtains of the restaurant, while braver people hauled the wounded away and left the dead.

Now people walked around me, as if I were a stone in a river, no one said anything as my tears flowed. I was no longer a girl whose appearance drew attention, just another weathered woman in a faded kerchief newly arrived from the country, holding an infant, weeping next to a wall. Where was everyone? Weeds grew in the roadbed in what had been the busiest square in Petrograd. Not a tram in sight, not an automobile, just a few ragged pedestrians, a bony horse pulling a two-wheeled cart. One of the buildings had fallen in, leaving a mark like a missing tooth in a familiar face. Seeing Znamenskaya Square like this was like greeting a father or a brother after a war—the battles had left their mark.

The passersby tended to their business, walking wherever they liked, even down the middle of Nevsky Prospect. I kept touching walls. How the city had changed. So many broken windows, street doors nailed shut with all kinds of junk. I knew every shop, the painted signs boasting luxury businesses that no longer existed. All those clerks and businessmen and women in the latest hats, restaurants and shops, dentists and doctors on the floors above. Vanished, leaving only Blok’s light blue vault untouched overhead. I caught my breath at a flash of seagulls, snik snak, across the canvas of the sky. Iskra gazed around her, bobbleheaded and astonished, her curls sweaty.

I paused at the corner of Liteiny Prospect, and pointed up to the curved windows at the top floor. “Mama’s friend Auntie Mina lives there.” I imagined her up there right now, in her father’s studio photographing some commissar’s girlfriend, her mother getting supper ready—no canteens for them. If Sofia Yakovlevna was still alive. I felt like a ghost. Perhaps in another time stream we were all still sixteen, sitting on the wide window seat up there and sharing a secret, Seryozha sewing a patch for a dress or in the darkroom with Solomon Moiseivich, Dunya in long plaits, Shusha banging away on that old piano. How angry would Mina still be? But who could resist Iskra Antonina Nikolaevna Shurova?

I imagined I smelled burning rubber from the February 1917 barricades. And the flower shop—from my dream of the little boy, who turned out to be this little apple! I would show Iskra Furshtatskaya Street. The broad parkway—I wondered what it would look like now, when there was grass growing even on Nevsky Prospect. I smiled to think what Basya would say if I showed up at the flat with my kerchief and bast shoes. I’m sure she’d love to see how the mighty had fallen. She’d probably give me some wretched hole of a room in our old servants’ wing, just so she could bask in my downfall.

But I had papers now. I was the proletarian Kuriakina. I wouldn’t have to submit myself to that humiliation.

Here was the Fontanka, its quiet looking-glass reflection. I held Iskra up so she could see the river, so gay after the long days on the train. Her eyes lingered on the shifting waters, the pastel buildings admiring themselves in the water—pistachio, peach, butterscotch. Iskra had never seen such marvels. She had only experienced earth and trees, fields and that eternal train. She gazed down into the water, exceptionally clear these days—no sewage to sully its surface, no oils from boats—no boats. No barges. It was the absence of human beings—the city was returning to its pristine state. No factory smoke smeared the crystalline air. I could see, upriver, the yellow glow from the Sheremetev Palace, and wondered if Akhmatova still lived there. Had she stayed, weathering the storm at anchor? Or had she returned to her childhood home in Tsarskoe Selo, or headed south in search of food? Thought I could not imagine her leaving, not after having written, I am not one of those…

The massive bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge still fought their sandaled grooms as it passed over the Fontanka. I knelt so Iskra could inspect the mermaids and seahorses of the bridge’s ironwork. Below us, the waters shot diamonds into our eyes. Metal and stone, water—these things at least hadn’t changed, nor did the passion of horses that could never be tamed, no matter how hard the grooms tried. We still flung ourselves to the ground and trampled our saner nature.

Farther on, Eliseev’s fine grocer’s still stood, with its art nouveau mirrors encased in grime, where once a refrigerated counter stocked every grade of caviar, where we bought our Pears soap and imported wine. Now it was a dingy ration point—Distribution Center No. 3—while across Nevsky, Catherine the Great rose on her bronze pediment, sheltering her courtiers in her bell-like skirts. The weeds sprung up like a field before the classical pillars of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the tree boughs tickled with yellow.

Iskra gazed at it all in green-eyed amazement. How could I have ever left her behind in the village? “See those arcades?” I pointed out Gostinny Dvor, its double rows of empty shops. “That’s where your grandmother shopped. And this is Nevsky Passazh.” The entryway to the luxury arcade boarded up. The perfumer, the milliner… Zimniye Nochi. Winter Nights. I’d had a Zimniye Nochi baby blanket from Orenburg, so warm and light it was like sleeping on a cloud. Iskra would never know a blanket like that. I brushed the soft hair from her forehead. Well, what difference did it make if she never had an Orenburg blanket and soap from Eliseev’s? She would have Petersburg.

We continued past the Singer Building, and Kazan Cathedral—site of my terrifying dream, the white wolf stalking me in the forest of its columns. A pang of fear shot through me. The Archangel would be stalking me here. If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods, his man Akim had once said. I would try, but these were my woods as well. And here was the Grand Hotel Europa, site of that last ridiculous lunch with my great-aunt before the February Revolution, a string quartet playing Bach while we ate our soup. It seemed like a century ago. Now a number of ragged children played under the hotel’s porte cochere. It must be some sort of school or orphanage now. The forecourt on Mikhailovskaya Street was cracked, no fine automobiles lined up there anymore, no carriages. I could only imagine what the hotel’s lobby looked like, that patrician dining room. Was this all that was left of Petrograd—soldiers and abandoned children? I kissed Iskra’s sweaty forehead. Don’t worry. We’re going to be all right.

We paused on the Kazansky Bridge over the Catherine Canal, and I pointed to the windows of that green-and-gold apartment, from which I’d once gazed out into the falling snow. “That’s where your papa and I made love the first time,” I whispered into her small ear. One of the best things about babies was that you could tell them all your secrets. I hummed “Mi Noche Triste” and danced with her in the empty street—the Argentine tango. Its rhythm, its balances, the changes of direction. She already liked to dance. I remembered how careful we’d been in those old days, not to start a child. It made me laugh—and now, the whole catastrophe!

I felt him here. I knew he could feel me too. In some abandoned palace or hotel in this city, Kolya was living his mysterious life. Maybe at the Astoria, pouring the last of the champagne into hoarded crystal. Or in some decayed flat with elegant old people. I knew he’d feel the change in the air, and sense that I’d come home. The city resonated with our love. I would find him. And then? But I was no seer. I would leave the future to itself.

At the top of Nevsky Prospect, the Admiralty flashed its golden salute, and across the river, the Peter and Paul Fortress returned it. The kino was still here, showing an old Kholodnaya film, the placards faded but the ticket window open. I was shocked, really, that such bourgeois trash would still be playing in the heart of revolutionary Petrograd. And yet, there were other songs than “The Internationale,” other moods. We were more than just units of work, representatives of class. The wily individual was more stubborn than the forces of history, and our needs, our desires, our deepest dreams, would always rear up and run crazily around our lives like a horse escaped from its stall. The soul knew no politics.

Palace Square lay vast and as empty as an old walnut shell, and silent as snipers, the statues on the roof of the Winter Palace scanned the horizon. The Alexander Column looked taller than ever in that empty circle of buildings, shooting up into the pale northern sky. Grass grew between the stones. I passed the Admiralty with its nautical bas-reliefs, its park overgrown, passed the Astoria, and St. Isaac’s Cathedral, along wide Senate Square. I wanted to touch the Neva, and see if Peter yet stood, commanding.

That much had not changed. The man who had created this dream in stone still pointed toward the river. Here I will build my city. His only true child. Peter, marvelous and cruel, who had built it from the swamp, leaving forty thousand dead. Their bones creaked under our feet. Now his dream belonged to the masses. Yet the Bronze Horseman remained. Without a soul left to follow, he kept his post, his great and terrible purpose locked in his implacable heart.

I strolled along the embankment, feasting on the distances and the gallop of the river, the sea air, wind fanning my face, sun-kissed gulls flitting over the water. Sea wind and Neva spray, the ensemble of eternal Petersburg’s classical facades and secret courtyards, shining canals. It was music, it was history, alive despite the silence, perhaps more than before, as now it was mine alone. Not a fishing boat, not even a rowboat, sullied the sparkling surface of the waters. I could feel the Allied blockade just beyond Kronstadt in the gulf. I could see no ships waiting for cargo at the great wharves. We were in quarantine, not from fear of disease but against the contagion of our ideas. I had not forgotten the gloomy news from the Germans on the train to Vyatka—the failure of the Soviets, the death of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet all that could change in a day. The English were backing away from the Whites. Then I remembered who had told me that.

Soldiers did worse on the field of battle, I told myself. In the world’s eyes, the Chekist was just someone who died, fell off a train. Iskra, will you judge me someday? I hoped her times would be much milder. I was not going to chastise myself for lack of feeling. Things happened to people in this world, they disappeared, they were arrested, they were packed off in work parties, conscripted, shoved into provisioning units, they died in childbirth. They got typhoid and typhus, they drank bad water and worse. The Chekist had had the bad luck to run into me. Which of us controls his own fate?

I held her upright, taking care not to hurt her arm, so she could better see the wide, whitecapped river, the university, the Sphinx. “She’s from Egypt, lisichka. Very old and very wise.” She always seemed to understand everything I said, waving her little fingers, exploring my kerchief, my collar. I chewed on her fingers. Sometimes I wanted to bite her. I could see why there were so many fairy tales about witches eating children, you really wanted to. I turned around so she could look over my shoulder and pointed to the Strelka, its two red Rostral Columns with green verdigris prows. “When I was a boy, I climbed way up there.”

How would she understand the strangeness of my life? She blinked her long coppery eyelashes and made squirrel sounds that turned me to jelly. What she had been through already.

I was sad that she would never know Petersburg as I’d known it, as my parents had known it, my grandparents.

On the other hand, she would never be subject to an imperial will, she’d have no idea what that meant—the entire country at the whim of one person, the aristocracy chewing up the wealth of the nation. She would not take her privileges at anyone’s expense. She would vote, make decisions without the interference of fathers and husbands and tsars. What were ice creams and drawing rooms, Orenburg blankets, compared to that? To her, our lives would be as archaic and unimaginable as that which gave birth to the Sphinx.

We just had to live through this time. She gazed into my face as into a tree, her trust absolute in this nineteen-year-old holding her. My Soviet girl. She would be so modern, the life she would live was unimaginable. How dare I be teary for Pears soap and the tango? I sighed. No matter how revolutionary I thought I’d become, my ideas, my beliefs, my very bones, had been marrowed in that old world. It would take another generation to breed these predilections out of us, do away with nostalgia and tangos—perhaps even passion itself.

Though I couldn’t imagine that a daughter of my blood and Kolya’s would manage to stay free of that curse.

She started to whimper and fret, and I felt my breasts let down their milk in plain view of Peter the Great. I took advantage of the city’s emptiness to nurse her up against its foundation rock. She wasn’t a fast nurser. She liked to finger my skin, my dress, her eyes closing in blissful reverie. I leaned back on the warm stone. I felt like I was living in a dream of Petrograd where all the people had disappeared.

The thing was to find Kolya, tell him that I was ready to reconsider my decision to leave him. Anyone else would call it quixotic, and perhaps it was. I hummed to Iskra as I nursed her. I thought she’d fallen asleep, but then felt the gurgle, and knew what was next—allowing me the strange experience of walking down the stone steps of the Neva to wash a baby’s diaper. What a poor example of Soviet hygiene! Like a peasant woman, I rubbed her laundry on the stones, draped the cloth to dry in the sun. It was heaven to sit on sun-warmed granite by the mother-river in the honeyed light. We slept for a while there, under Peter’s disapproving watch. Go! his pointing arm commanded—but he was bronze and I was flesh, and in this, flesh emerged triumphant.

Afterward, we walked down to the English Embankment, in search of a certain yellow mansion. It was smaller than I remembered it but its facade glowed like sun through a spoonful of syrup. I tried the street door—locked… but perhaps the service entrance off Galernaya Street, in the back, might be open. From that street, I easily found the courtyard—the big gate was showily padlocked, but the smaller one gave way. The yard was a filthy hole now, filled with all kinds of junk. No sign of black horses, as on that terrible morning when he left me. Go back to your poet. Those giant blacks that were in fact Arkady’s.

I tried the doors. It was like rapping on panels for a secret entrance. One door was locked, the second nailed shut, but I knew people got in there somehow. Success came in the form of a modest, almost invisible entry at one side of the yard, its wood weathered to silver. I slipped inside.

The cold darkness immediately wrapped us in its ghastly embrace, a zoolike smell. I hesitated a moment—Iskra heavy in her sling—and reached through the slit in my skirt for Kolya’s gun, held it against my leg. I was by no means the only one who’d found this door. As I wound my way through the decimated pantries and storage rooms, the stink assaulted me. Everywhere the tooth of wood scavengers had made its mark, gnawing away doors, cabinets, furniture. Light fingered the broken windows on the front landing, dust motes hung in its rays, as still as death. The marble of the grand staircase rose as pale as a nude in the gloom. How cold it had been that winter—even now, its chill was just this side of a grave. I ascended slowly, listening. Iskra talking to herself in her sling. Shhhh… I jiggled her.

Last year, the abandoned mansion had just felt empty, but now it seemed occupied by something that skittered in the corners of my eyes as I walked soundlessly, tiger-footed, through the dusky rooms of the bel étage. Shattered bits of upholstered furniture lay across the elegant parquet, or what was left of it—half had been pulled up, darkness gaping through from the next level. I had to be careful in the gloom not to take a misstep and break my leg.

Someone had harvested the frames from the couches and left the springs and wadding like so many slaughtered sheep.

Footsteps. I halted, listening with every hair on my body. Light footsteps running down a corridor. His name jumped to my lips—Kolya!—but I stopped myself from calling out. Those were not his feet. I wrapped my fingers around the revolver’s grip, slid off the safety. A sensible person would leave—a sensible person would not have entered this desolate place—but I’d long dreamed of this mansion, the perfect hideout, derelict as it was. I remembered the door, flush with the wall. I had to know if he was here. My hands were sweating despite the cold, sweat ran down my back into my homemade drawers. The baby bulky in her sling. I crept toward the small boudoir, that jewel, feeling the wall for the giveaway crack.

There it was again, the sound of running steps. Cats? I shuddered to think rats.

There. I had found it, not by sight but by touch, the seam in the wall, and pushed it open, this room where I’d spent those four mad days of grief, my passion blindly bounding, wounded and dripping blood like an arrow-shot deer.

The dirty windows permitted a dull light, the room smelled of smoke. Its yellow wallpaper had been charred black by fire, lit not in the fireplace but right on the floor against the plaster. The corners of the room were littered with civilization’s shards and refuse, a torn mattress heaped with rags. I was surprised to see the little chandelier yet hung from the ceiling, as well as a few of the paintings. Hadn’t anyone thought to sell them?

The rags moved. I practically shot my own foot off. Not rags but children. Huddled together in the corner like a clutch of hedgehogs, three children with gray matted hair and filthy faces the color of their rags, watching me. Listless, inhuman, their eyes the only clean parts of them. I heard running in the corridor, light feet fading away. “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, my heart somewhere in my neck. “How long have you been here? Are you alone?” They stared at me as if they’d been deafened by a blast.

Children living alone, burning things in this room, and there were probably more, but these, unlike their more able comrades, hadn’t the strength to run. Sick, feverish—these poor little beasts. They needed water, food, medicine—everything I didn’t have. I was raked by my own pure helplessness. I put the gun away. The children looked about seven or eight, maybe nine, hard to tell, their clothes so ragged, and they were so malnourished, it was impossible to even guess if they were boys or girls. “Are you hungry?” I said. “Food?” I put my fingers to my lips but they just stared.

I took the bread I had in my pockets and broke it into pieces, held it out to them. I would run low soon myself, but I was strong, and these children might not last the night. Varvara would say I’d be better off feeding their stronger companions, the ones who stood a chance. Yet I couldn’t bear to leave them with nothing. They just stared and stared—those glittering, feverish eyes. They didn’t even try to take the food. I didn’t want to get any closer to them, with their matted hair and grimy hands. Jesus kissed the lepers. He washed their feet. Scalps patchy from some kind of mange. But I couldn’t just throw chunks of bread at them like they were animals. I bent down and I pressed the pieces into their dirty, dry, hot hands. I couldn’t show how terrible I found them, disgusting and frightening and hopeless. “Eat, children,” I said in my most musical voice. “You need to eat now.”

They ate, slowly, mechanically, not even noticing, as if mesmerized by my appearance in their filthy dreams. One of them—a boy, I could tell now—crawled forward from the pile of rags and kissed the hem of my skirt. His shining eyes. What were they seeing?

He knelt and crossed himself. The other children followed suit.

It wasn’t me and Iskra they thought were standing before them, but a visitation of the Virgin and Child.

After the initial horror at their mistaken awe, I felt the urge to give them what they wanted, and if it was blasphemy, so be it. I who had nothing could at least give them that. I could only imagine what Genya would say about what I was about to do.

I made the Ionian sign of benediction over their scabby heads, right hand raised to radiate energy, the left below to collect it, and blessed them with all the somber grandeur I could manage. “Rest and grow strong, little ones,” I said, improvising Her lines. “I see you, day and night. I watch over you. I’m there when you sleep. I weep for your suffering, little lambs, my holy ones. I love you so… very much.” My throat closed. I didn’t know whether I could go on, it was such a disgraceful act. But they were children, and their loneliness must surely be as terrible as their hunger, their disease. “When you close your eyes, I’ll be there watching over you, even if you don’t see me. Don’t be afraid. God bless you and keep you.”

And then I had to go, to fly, before I started sobbing. Out in the dark corridor, I heard the scuffling of feet and the particular hush of held breath all around me. The other orphans, the stronger ones, were waiting for me to go. “Get them water, boiled if you can. And good luck to you all, children.”

15 Out in the Cold

I tried to remember the name of the man I was supposed to see at Petrocommune—Gogolinsky? Gogolevsky? I used to have a perfect memory, but after my visit to the yellow mansion my wits had fled. I barely noticed where I was walking. This was what had happened to our beautiful revolution—children living like animals in abandoned buildings. They rode between trains, begged at stations. I thought our purpose was to protect the weak from the strong, not create some desperate Darwinian culling of the herd. Oh, those quaint old-fashioned virtues of mine.

To our leaders, the spacemen, everything that made the revolution more secure was good in the absolute. If it strengthened the revolution, it was good, and if it weakened it, it was the enemy. I knew that’s what Varvara thought. But the truth was, the weak could only weaken things, taking strength from the strong. They couldn’t help to build a revolution. And yet, this was why the revolution had occurred. To help the weak. The strong would always take care of themselves, but what place in the great machine was there for ongoing suffering, for starving, abandoned children? Their pitiful lives too much of the present, this terrible moment, which was supposed to vanish. I knew one was supposed to lift one’s eyes to the glorious future, and not focus on present suffering, but what of these children? The unfortunate baggage of history. Were they to quietly starve to death, die in the walls like rats? Everything that struggled weakened the revolution. My own heartache, my tears weakened it.

I didn’t want to walk out to Smolny now. I wanted to go somewhere private with a door that locked, where I could sit down and cry. I wanted to wash and drink boiled water and nurse my baby and, yes, even show her off to someone who knew me. I wanted all these things as another might crave food or water. So instead of treating myself to Smolny’s bureaucratic charms, I found myself entering a familiar doorway, still open right onto the street. And here was the sign, KATZEV PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO. I touched its fingerprinty black glass, traced the letters.

The elevator had lost its function, its safety gates locked. As I climbed the stairs, Iskra—heavy in the home-woven sling—woke and started crying. I sat on the stairs to calm her. People scowled as they climbed past us—this bast-shod vagrant with her bundle and her screaming infant. Only when she was quiet did I begin to climb again. When I knocked on that door, she had to be at her best. They would be the first people who would care that this particular fireball had landed upon the earth.

I reached the door, the black paint, the nameplate. Rang the bell.

Heavy footsteps. Solomon Moiseivich! The door opened, but instead of her father’s warm, smiling face, it was Mina’s fiancé, Roman Ippolit, the medical student—the same bristly hair, arrogant jaw, his old self-satisfied air. So that was still going on. He took in the sight of me—my pail, my shoes, my baby with her sweaty hair, my satchel. “What do you want?” he asked rudely. Did he think I was a beggar? Thank God he didn’t recognize the boy assistant, Misha.

I tried for my most elegant tone. “Excuse me, but is Mina Solomonovna home? Or Sofia Yakovlevna?”

His eyes raced again, from my dusty kerchief to my redheaded baby, sheepskin, and satchel. What could such a creature possibly want from a modern Petrograd photographic studio? A baby picture? “Who wants to know?” He planted himself even more firmly in the doorway. He certainly hadn’t gained any manners in the time I’d been away.

“Tell her it’s Marina Makarova.”

“From the academy? Dmitry Makarov’s daughter?” Now he reinspected me, temples flexing, a portrait of Suspicion in a gallery of human venality. My God, he would have made a good maître d’.

“Actually, it’s Kuriakina now. I’m married.” I shifted my weight and spoke in a soft, educated voice, as feminine as I could muster, in fear that he would recall Misha. “Forgive me, but I’ve been traveling for some time. May I come in?”

He must have remembered a trace of manners from a few generations back. He let me in. The apartment was the same and yet not. Sparer. Things gone missing. The piano was where it had always been but the clock that had always sat upon it was gone. Also the carpet, and the collection of bric-a-brac on top of the bookcase. The Meissen figurines Sofia Yakovlevna had so loved had definitely lost a few comrades. The crystals on the chandelier were less plentiful. Well, who had not changed? I just wanted to sit in peace with Iskra, grateful not to be eight years old and lying on a filthy mattress dying of typhoid or influenza.

“Mina’s with a customer,” said Roman. “I’m Ippolit. Roman Osipovich.” He extended his hand.

“Good to meet you.” I hesitated, aware of my calloused, weathered hands, no longer the academy miss I’d once been, clasping his, which was soft and sweaty. I remembered all those dirty jokes he used to tell, all those awful stories he insisted on imparting to Misha. I fought the urge to wipe my hand on my skirt. He didn’t offer me a seat, so I stood as elegantly as I could—like a duchess, waiting for a courtier to pull out a chair. Now I was conscious of how dirty I was after the days of traveling, I could smell myself and Iskra, diapers and puke and the vague suspicion of blood. “Might I use the washroom?”

“Sure.” He pointed down the hallway. “Third door to the right.”

“Yes. I know,” I said.

I carried Iskra down to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and cleaned her properly. My God, they still had running water! Reveling in the privacy, I ran water into my bucket, cold but plentiful. And soap! I rinsed and scrubbed those diapers. Maybe later I could get someone to boil water for us. Iskra looked so small and clean and pretty, lying on the cloth on the white tiles, looking up at her mama, and the electric light.

I couldn’t get those children out of my mind. What a hell this life was for small things. Yet I couldn’t help but rejoice in the luxury as I laved my own face and hands, stripped down and washed my arms and armpits and the rest, already estimating the fortunes of the Katzev family in the months I’d been gone. They’d had to maintain enough people to keep the flat private, that was good news, everybody alive and well. If only Mina wasn’t too angry at me for leaving that day, maybe she’d see Iskra and relent. Who could resist such a beauty? And I could get work with my new papers, contribute to the household. Perhaps Sofia Yakovlevna would help me soften her up. She’d even liked Misha, and that was saying something.

I came out of the washroom with the newly fresh Iskra, and nearly collided with a tall Negro woman in a modern but unusual dress, wavy hair cinched in a cord like a Greek stele. “Izvenite, etot tualyet?” An American accent. She stumbled in her Russian. An American Negro in Petrograd—maybe I’d hit my head in the bathroom. Maybe I was still lying there. “Tualyet, da? Etot? Etot?”

“No, it’s the next one down,” I said in English, pointing to the correct door.

She burst into the most radiant smile, clutching my arm in gratitude. “Oh my God, you speak English. Wait there. Don’t leave, promise me you won’t leave?” Holding up her pink-palmed hand, like asking a dog to stay.

“I won’t,” I said.

I returned to the parlor with my pail and diapers, Iskra awake and looking at everything as if she’d never been indoors before. She gazed at the light coming in through the curved windows, the colors in the chandelier’s crystals. But I didn’t have time to share in her delight. A disapproving figure waited for me like a strict, humorless schoolmistress. Arms crossed, one toe raised, heel digging into the floor, as if she would like to crush me under it. I smiled, but Mina didn’t. It had been almost a year now, but my hopes that she wouldn’t still be angry were overly optimistic. “You look well, Mina.” Thin but not starving, her hair in a stylish bob, though I saw circles around her gray eyes behind her spectacles. And her shock—at seeing Iskra.

Roman grinning like a perfect fool.

“Don’t you have something to do?” she snapped.

He dropped his chin to conceal his smirk and went across the room, to the divan where Solomon Katzev used to sit between clients. He picked up a large medical book and pretended to study it.

Mina’s gaze moved from the baby to me and back again. Her hand went out timidly, to touch my child, the flaming hair, the soft flushed cheek. She extended her forefinger to Iskra’s tiny hand and my daughter clutched it. My old friend’s gray eyes were full of clouds. “It’s his, isn’t it? Oh my God, I can see him. It looks just like him.”

“Her name’s Iskra.”

“Is that what happened that night? You found him?”

He. She still thought of him that way. As I did. For us, there was just one he in this world, and no Roman or Genya could stand in his way. How could one man have captured so many? Petrograd must lie awash in our sisterhood, women who had felt this lash, this spell, this drawn knife of pleasure across our hearts. Who felt it still, whenever we thought—he. We could form our own sect of wounded nuns. Although I certainly knew him best, having shared his childhood, seen him behind the scenes of his traveling show—borne his child. Even I would never know him completely. The religion of Kolya Shurov was a mystery cult.

“How’s Sofia Yakovlevna?” I asked her.

“She’s well,” Mina said, still staring at the baby, who had her firmly by the finger.

Still alive. Thank God. “And Aunt Fanya? Uncle Aaron? Dunya?”

“Same as ever,” she said shortly. “Dunya’s seeing that painter, the blond one. Sasha.” She danced Iskra’s hand up and down, and the baby grinned wickedly, reached for her specs. I was happy for Dunya—someone should be lucky in love.

“And Shusha?” The youngest Katzev.

“School. She’s at Insurrection.” Mina laughed despite herself. Insurrection, the new incarnation of the Tagantsev Academy. “She wants to be a doctor someday.” Never taking her eyes off my child. “God help us all, right?”

Roman spoke up from his books. “Hey, aren’t you going to tell her about us? We’re engaged. Getting married as soon as I graduate medical school.”

“Congratulations,” I said, trying for enthusiasm, framing my reaction as it would be if I hadn’t already had a bellyful of Roman Ippolit. And trying to keep the extra smile out of it, the horselaugh I was also feeling. Who in the world would marry a jackass like Ippolit? I kissed Mina three times in the traditional blessing. Her eyes widened in unspoken sentences that her pale lips had to hold back. I noticed she’d stopped reddening them.

“How old is… Iskra?” Mina asked me.

“Almost three months. Want to hold her?” I passed her to Mina, who held her uncertainly, as if this small creature might explode. “Actually the midwife baptized her: Antonina. Antonina Gennadievna Kuriakina.” Not to rub salt in the wound.

Tcha… that exhalation of exasperation. She touched her fingertips to Iskra’s silky hair, the way you’d touch a rose. “Your mama’s crazy, you know. She’s nuts. Does Genya know about this?” She tilted her bobbed head toward the baby.

I sighed, hoping she would understand. “Most of it.”

She used to be so unaware, our Mina Katzeva, but she’d grown up a lot in the last years—as had we all. Now it was her turn for the horselaugh. “Can’t you ever do anything right? There’s always got to be some drama. It exhausts me just thinking about your life, the way you live it.”

I didn’t say, And if I was engaged to Roman Ippolit, I’d want to kill myself, so the feeling’s mutual.

The Negro woman sailed into the parlor like a ship under full sail, freshened and sparkling with energy. She pressed my hand, hers smooth and solid. I regretted my work-hardened paw. I could smell her perfume. She wore a green suit, red lipstick, so much color, I could hardly look directly at her. Who was this apparition? “You speak such wonderful English. I’m Aura Cady Sands.” Her hand was warm and long, almost as big as my own, full of electric energy. I could feel her feet through it, her solidity—she would not be one easily knocked over by life. “Forgive me, I don’t want to intrude, I was just leaving. But I’m desperate to meet people who speak English, and so well! What’s your name, honey?”

“Ma copine, Marina Dmitrievna Makarova,” Mina said.

“Kuriakina,” I quickly corrected her. “I’m married now. Just returned from the countryside.”

“I’m so glad to meet you, Marina Dmitrievna. So glad. Your country, La Russie! La Revolution! My God, what you people are doing here, it’s incredible. I had to come and see for myself. The energy—the will to change the world! Magnificent!” She was like a wind, and I a field of wheat bowing before it. “Oh, and aren’t you precious! Look at this hair, just like Mama’s!” She touched Iskra’s curls so gently. “And those eyes. She’s positively Irish. Can I hold her?”

Mina deposited her happily into the woman’s arms.

Aura Sands lowered her nose to the baby’s and began to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in the most astonishing voice perhaps I’d ever heard. A mezzo-soprano, I was guessing, or dramatic soprano, the rich, round tones. But she sang pianissimo, so she wouldn’t scare my redheaded, Irish-eyed Russian baby. One moment I was cutting rye with a midwife and her daughters, and the next I was listening to an African angel sing to my daughter’s Irish eyes. I began to cry. Iskra patted the woman’s face as she sang.

We could hear, down in the street, the short barks of an automobile’s claxon. “Oh, I must fly!” She nuzzled my daughter and put her back in my arms. “Come see me! I’m at the Astoria. I’d love to talk more. Everyone speaks French here but it sure would be nice to speak some good old English. And you…” She tickled Iskra, pressing a strong, manicured forefinger into the baby’s tiny chest. “You be nice to those men. You’re going to drive them insane!” The baby reached for her earring, gold, and I caught her just in time. What one could get on the street for just one of those earrings. “Merci, Mina Solomonovna, pour les belles photos.”

“But you haven’t seen them yet,” Mina said. Her French was all right, but it was a third language. She preferred German, the language of science.

“I’m sure they’ll be wonderful. I can always tell an artist.” She switched to English. “And you come see me, Marina Kuriakina. Please don’t let me down. Room 223, Astoria Hotel. Afternoons are good, I don’t wake up so early. We can have lunch. This is wonderful, what a lucky day!” She kissed me and the baby and left like a hurricane, blowing herself out the door.

“Who in the devil was that?” I asked. Iskra was starting to fret. Hungry, or just missing the dark lady with the shiny earrings.

“A singer. As you no doubt guessed.”

“Famous?”

“Well, she’s at the Astoria… Yes, I’d say so.”

“I’ve never heard of her. I didn’t think Americans were so advanced.”

“Probably that’s why she left,” Mina said, as if I were missing the obvious. “I’m photographing her for Narkompros.” The Commissariat of Enlightenment.

I was happy just to be talking to her again, two old friends. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

She didn’t look happy about that, but I moved to the old window seat, in the great bay window from which we’d watched the revolution unfold. One of the upper panes still had its bullet hole from the shooting—the sniper on the roof—stuffed with wadded paper. Iskra immediately started fussing. I unbuttoned my dress behind her sling and discreetly latched her onto my breast. I usually liked to watch her nursing—her druggy happiness, it made me feel like I was the Goddess of All Things—but I didn’t think Mina would enjoy seeing me nursing Kolya’s offspring.

Outside, the sky was darkening, the pale blue becoming luminous over Nevsky’s ranks, the buildings shouldering inward. This city was made for twilight. I had missed this more than I had known. Mina joined me in the little nook where we’d sat so many times—half hidden away, our legs tucked up under our skirts—and shared our dreams, outrages, ambitions. Now she kept her feet firmly on the floor, her lips tight, trying not to hear the noisy smackings of Iskra under the cloth. “What are you doing here, Marina? What do you want?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I said, “You know, I saw the photographs, from the first anniversary.” I didn’t want to say, The ones I took. Roman was listening to our every word. “I saw them on the agit-train with Genya. Moscow’s using them in agitki—did you know? They even used the ones from the Rostral Columns.” Give me credit at least for that.

“I know what you’re doing,” she whispered nastily. “It’s not going to work.”

I thought girls were supposed to grow up to resemble their mothers, but she was nothing like round, cozy Sofia Yakovlevna.

“What am I doing?” I said innocently. “We’re just sitting here having a conversation.”

She sank back into the cushions, so that she was half hidden by the alcove’s striped curtain. We’d even unconsciously taken the same sides we always did, me on the right, her on the left. “I know you,” she whispered. “You want me to tell you how good those photos were. How important. How the studio came into a bit of favor for your having shot them. Which will lead to a request to hire you again, let you live here with…” She nodded at Iskra. “You think I’m stupid? I was always smarter than you. And you don’t intimidate me anymore.”

Oh no. She hadn’t forgiven me anything.

“You’ve got that kid, you need food, a place to live,” she hissed. “Well, the answer is no. No. We barely feed ourselves these days. You’ve got two husbands, let one of them support you.”

The light illuminated the front of Mina’s ash-blond hair, washing the front of her glasses so I couldn’t see those eyes I knew so well—their gray irises flecked with white, the white-tipped lashes. My two husbands… Why not three, or ten? Useless to me now, both of them. Out the window, the city was so heartbreakingly lovely, the regular pattern of window and stone, arches and caryatids. Below us, Nevsky Prospect was like a street in a diorama in a museum—small, perfect, and empty. Without its shops, I supposed no one had a reason to stroll, even in the warmth of early autumn. And here was my best friend in the world, so close I could reach out and touch her—except that she would have slapped me if I had. This was exactly where I’d wanted to be, and the only thing standing in my way was this angry woman who knew me too well, whom I’d taught to despise me. Surely there must be a shred of forgiveness somewhere in her stony heart, the daughter of the kindest people I’d ever met.

“Don’t you turn those big brown eyes on me,” she hissed. “Where are you when anybody else needs you? Gone, gone, gone. You’ve proven yourself to be a complete moral bankrupt. I pity that kid. Grow up, Marina. I had to. You can too.”

Grovel, that was my plan. I supposed it was time to implement it. “Just a few days, Mina. Until I find some work, get my rations, a housing assignment. I have an in at Petrocommune.”

“I’m supporting three old people, plus my sisters, plus—” She gestured with her head toward Roman. So he was living here too. “You have no idea what we’ve been through. We almost lost Shusha and my aunt and uncle to typhoid last winter. Dunya got arrested for stealing firewood. Boards off a fence. You can’t take wood. It all belongs to the state now, even if it’s just a goddamned fence. The bread—you can’t imagine. And now you show up like Katya the milkmaid, with a kid, thinking you’ll just give me that smile and I’ll forget everything?” Now she cast a disparaging look at the cloth covering my suckling child. “I’m not a man. It doesn’t work on me. I’m not going to let you stay.”

“Not even for a few days?” I said, low. “For God’s sake, Mina. Two days. That’s all I ask. I have a couple days of food. Just don’t make me sleep in the hall.”

“No, no, no. I know you. Two days’ll become three and then a week and then you’re in for the duration. You’re a leech. A tick.” She said it as if it were a scientific fact, pushing her specs up on her nose. “I won’t do it.”

I expected her to be angry with me for running away with Kolya instead of working her rounds of factory demonstrations and greetings, but not for her to out-and-out slander me. “You know that’s a lie. I’ve never taken one scrap of food from your mouth, or anybody else’s. I just finished harvesting the fields to pay off the midwife. Look!” I held out one tanned hand, so she could see the calluses, the muscle and sinew of my forearm. “Leech? Of all the horrible things. Call me what you like but I’m no parasite.”

“Unlike you, I can think a week or two ahead,” she said. “And that’s what’s going to happen. For instance, how are you going to work with that kid around your neck—for Petrocommune or anyone else? It can’t even hold its head up.”

“I’ll think of something,” I said. My peasant stubbornness was digging in.

She rubbed her forehead. I was giving her a headache. She tended to have them ever since she was little, and now that she was doing so much darkroom work it must have gotten worse. Well, good. That would serve her, calling me a leech.

“Well, let me finish nursing her—can I do that? Or does that make her a leech too?”

“Fine. But then clear out. I’ve got to finish those photos. Let yourself out. You know the way.”

She got up and left me there, alone with my empty evening. I sorted through ideas of where I could go, what I could do, like hands at cards, all of them unappealing. Roman pretended to be working at his medical books, but I could tell he was enjoying the show. “You must have really done something to irk her,” he said.

I sat nursing Iskra, thinking of my options. The Krestovsky apartment. The collective flat on Furshtatskaya. The Poverty Artel. I still had friends in Petrograd—but I was shaken by how angry Mina was. I never expected people to be angry with me. If she was so mad, what would Varvara be like, let alone a darker form in the shadows… No, tomorrow I would go to Smolny. I should have gone today. I would find something, Iskra around my neck or not. Hopefully a few of those crèches had been built. If not at the Petrograd Soviet, where?

As Iskra finished her meal, I calculated how much food I really had left. Enough for one more meal, maybe two. In my aristocratic largesse, feeding the orphans of Russia, I hadn’t kept enough for myself. Not thinking ahead, as usual. Such a chess player. I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand. I would stall as long as I could… Worse came to worst, I’d sleep in the hall and let them walk over me, shame Mina into giving way. Now I wished I’d taken that bath when I could. Maybe I’d go over to the Astoria and see what Aura Cady Sands had to offer. I could present myself—“Oh, you didn’t mean tonight?” I had to handle that one carefully. I didn’t want to appear too needy, too desperate, and scare her away.

The key turned in the lock, the door opened, and Dunya Katzeva stepped in. Dunya, so beautiful! All grown up, in a neat but worn dress printed with flowers. I pushed the curtain back and she shrieked and ran to embrace me. How good to see her, to embrace her with my one free arm, her fresh girl’s smell. Dunya, the opposite of Mina—warm where her sister was cold, happy where the elder was resentful. I put a good face on it all, as if Mina had said nothing. It wasn’t hard to put my sad mood aside. This was the homecoming I’d imagined. Dunya made a great fuss about the baby, her conversation full of sly innuendo for Roman’s sake about my hair having “grown out,” and how womanly I had become—since being Misha, yes, certainly. She was a regular Sovetskaya barynya now, a Soviet young lady, working at the Zubov Institute of Art History and spending time with Sasha Orlovsky, who was doing public projects now and teaching. “Wait till he sees you, he’ll go crazy. How’s Genya? Where’s Mina?”

“She’s in the darkroom,” I said. “She’s still mad. She says I have to clear out.”

“Well, forget that. You’re staying. Our tsarevna, she’s a very important person now,” Dunya said. “I’m surprised she didn’t make you take an appointment.”

“They had a fight,” Roman said. “Mina’s furious.”

Dunya sighed. “Mina’s always furious these days. Don’t pay any attention to her.”

I talked her into boiling some water for me and holding the baby while I had a bath. Ah! Alone in warm water, the dirt just rolled off my skin. I washed my hair, washed the train from me, the guilt, the blood, the miles, the orphans, the dust. I would have washed my dress too if I thought I’d be staying, but there was no way to know where I was sleeping tonight. I didn’t want to have to sleep in wet clothes if I was going to be in a doorway or a stairwell.

When I emerged, a new Marina, Shusha had returned from school. Her enthusiasm for my homecoming exceeded even Dunya’s. Taller, her face less babyish, her hair cropped, the skirt of her school uniform too short, she was as leggy as a young horse. She regaled me with the doings at Insurrection, where she’d been elected to her class committee, was also the chairman of the drama club and had won first prize for a poem she’d written. I made her recite it to me.

I especially liked that mouthy cannon, and the short last line. Shusha insisted on holding the baby, though after feeding, she always slept for a good hour or two, and was content in Dunya’s arms. Feeling herself changing hands, she just opened her eyes to slits and went back to sleep. Shusha loved the name Iskra. “I’m thinking of changing mine. Shoshanna’s so biblical.” She made a sour face.

“Shame on you. Our grandmother’s name,” Dunya chided.

“Yes, I’m the one who gets to stand naked before nasty old men. Nyet.” She sat down at the table, Iskra in her lap. “I was thinking Viktoria.”

“That’s not so revolutionary,” Dunya said.

“It’s the sound,” I explained. “K. Vik. The hard consonants, Te, and the drumroll of the errr.”

“Exactly. I’m sick of all those shhushes…” the young girl said. “Like walking in slippers, like you’re being careful not to wake anyone up. Speaking of.”

The aunt and uncle, Fanya and Aaron, emerged from the back hall. They must have been napping in their room. Aaron’s hair was a white cloud. Their smiles were warm, but they’d both lost teeth in the last year, and their hands trembled as they clasped mine and kissed me three times. They smelled musty as old pillows. Lucky to be alive after typhoid. A hard winter for the old people. I could understand Mina’s fears. But I wouldn’t be a drag on their household. I could work, I could add to their income, I could get rations, Drops of Milk. I could steal wood. They could use another able-bodied person around here.

We sat around the table, talking, laughing, Shusha holding Iskra. How I envied Mina in this. She still had a family. Educated people, soulful—a living, breathing organism. My family had not survived the stresses of the revolution. How was it that theirs had? The samovar boiled and Dunya made tea. She poured it out, a pale green. “Chinese?”

“Celery.”

Shusha added, “Exclusive to the Yellow Emperor.”

It was dark when Sofia Yakovlevna returned from the queues, a little frail, her sack heavy with provisions. She was thinner and more lined than last year, more bowed, but how happy she was to see me! She hurried to put her sack on the table and embrace me. She still smelled of chicken, though I couldn’t imagine they’d had a chicken in years. Such a warm welcome, and the shock when she saw Iskra in Shusha’s arms. “Yours? It can’t be! Oh, this precious child! Let me hold her. I must.” She immediately took her. “Sweet adorable thing!” As if Iskra were her own granddaughter. Asking her name, her age. “Iskra? Iskra? Like a box of matches? Akh, this revolution, it doesn’t know when to stop!” The baby just kept sleeping. “We’re so glad to have you back in Petrograd, dear. Both of you,” she addressed the baby. “Like old times. I wish Papa were here. Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I just got back today.”

“Is your mother still here? Up next to the Romanian ambassador?”

It was funny, that’s how she recalled our place on Furshtatskaya Street. Though Mina was invited hundreds of times to our house, our parents met only at school functions. “No. My mother’s gone—followed a mystic. Probably heading for Bukhara by now.” The rook, the labyrinth, the treasure.

“And your father?”

I sighed. “Off with Kolchak’s lot, I think.”

“Then you’ll stay here. I insist on it,” Mina’s mother said firmly. “Have some more tea, dear. I’ll get dinner on.” She put Iskra back into Shusha’s arms—“Watch her head, Shushochka”—and picked up the sack from the table.

In time, Mina reappeared through the black cloth curtains from the studio, saw me chatting with her sisters, my damp hair. “Are you still here? I thought I made myself clear.”

“I was just going when Dunya got home,” I said, “and I was chatting with everyone. Your mother invited me to stay.” I tried not to smirk.

“I don’t care what my mother says. Get out and take your brat with you!”

“What’s gotten into you?” said Aunt Fanya. “This is your best friend.”

“No,” she said. “That’s done.”

Sofia Yakovlevna appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands. “We’ll have dinner in ten minutes. Such as it is. Set the table, Shusha.”

Mina was boiling. “Mother, I made it very clear to Marina that we have no room for her here.”

You could hear the chairs squeak. Her mother stood in the doorway, towel in her hands, the same frizzy hair as Mina’s, only tucked back in a large chignon. “Why would you say such a thing? What’s wrong with you? She’s been gone for a year—”

“Let her own family take care of her,” Mina said.

The piercing unfairness of that.

“Why would you say such a thing, Minochka?” her mother said softly.

“Because I don’t want her here.” She was trembling with rage.

“What happened between you girls?” Her mother looked from her daughter to me and back. “You were always such good friends.” She tried to touch her daughter’s cheek but Mina swatted her away. Her face was gray-white with perceived injustice, yet she was unable to tell her mother what the trouble was. I’m in love with Kolya Shurov, and this is his baby. I can’t stand to look at her. Marina ran out on me, she took my man, took everything. She gets everything she wants, but she’s not getting this. No, she would be ashamed to admit it was jealousy. And though she was throwing me to the dogs, I could not bring myself to tear the skin off her shame.

“Let’s vote.” Shusha stood next to me. “How many people want Marina to stay? Show of hands.”

My heart in my throat. The hands went up. In my favor, Dunya, Shusha, Aunt Fanya, and Uncle Aaron. It was a majority, by anyone’s count.

“Stop it, Shusha.” Sofia Yakovlevna clapped her hand over her mouth, and turned away. “My God, what is happening to us?”

Roman stood up, as he would stand to give a speech in a student meeting. “I vote no. Think, Katzevs. You really want a baby in the apartment, crying at all hours? Stinking diapers on the stove? Some of us have to work. It’s just impractical. Less to eat, no sleep,” Roman said. “I say, Mina’s working her heart out, she should have the final say.”

Mina smiled at him gratefully.

“We all do our part, Roman Osipovich,” Sofia Yakovlevna said, stiff as a British dragoon, but I could hear the tears in her voice. “Each in his own way. That’s what a family is. When you have babies, you’ll see.”

“We won’t be having any,” said Roman. “Neither of us wants ’em.”

The older woman shook her head as if to clear water from her ears—a bit of news she had not heard, that they’d decided not to have children. Too many blows at once. She lowered herself into a chair and buried her head in her hands.

“All this is beside the point,” Mina said. “Who keeps a roof over all your heads? Me. Who left university to keep this family together? Me. And I’m saying I won’t have her living here. End of discussion!”

Dunya wiped up the spilled tea with her napkin. “Mina, you’re being a perfect beast. It’s like you’re not even a person anymore, you’re some kind of golem.”

“Mama sides with us, don’t you, Mama?” Shusha said, smoothing her mother’s hair. “Please don’t cry, Mama. She’s just being a donkey.”

I wanted to sink under the floor. The last decent family in Petrograd, and I had them at each other’s throats. “Listen, I’ll go. This is no good. Look. I’m leaving.” I took the baby from Shusha, snugged her into the sling.

But Mina wasn’t hearing anything except the blood pounding in her head. “Listen, big shots, you all want to take my place?” She leaned over the table to her sisters, white around the mouth with rage. “You think this is so easy, Shushochka? Fine, why don’t you quit school and you stay here all day? You take the photographs. You keep the studio running. You get in with Narkompros. You keep the film coming, and the chemicals, and coat the papers and develop the negatives and do the printing.” She was weeping. “And I’ll go to school and be in the drama club and write poetry about our brave Red soldiers.”

“How can you be so selfish?” Dunya said.

Mina was speechless for a moment, shaking her head. “No. No. That’s the living end. You can leave with her. Who needs you either?!”

This wonderful family, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. Why had I ever come here? Why had I started this?

Her mother looked so frail, as if the sound of her family’s quarrelling had sucked the flesh from her bones. I was ashamed I had brought such misery here. She shook her head wearily, gazing at the younger girls, and rose, putting her hand on Mina’s shoulder as she wiped her tears. “Whatever we think about this, your sister has given everything to keep a roof over our heads. More than all of us combined. She’s taken your father’s responsibilities on her own shoulders. And if she says no, it’s got to be no.” She looked me in the eye with such regret. “I’m sorry, Marina. But these are terrible times.”

A silence dropped over the assembly. Aunt Fanya and Uncle Aaron looked down at their hands, knowing that they were the ones who were the biggest burden. It was horrible. I wanted to protest, I can bring in rations. I can help in the darkroom. With someone to care for Iskra, I can work. But what was the point? It was over. This was what families did, this was how they survived. They tightened ranks, took care of their own. Much as the Bolsheviks wished to do away with these ties, they were the only ones left. I just wished I was part of it. They were kind, but my membership in their circle had just been a visitor’s pass. I was as much an orphan as any little beggar working a train station. When I’d taken off with Kolya that November night, I had gambled our friendship. Now I had to leave the casino, busted, my heart’s pockets turned inside out. I gathered up my bundle, my pail, my sheepskin, collected Iskra from Shusha, whose face streamed with tears. My baby slept on.

“Let us do something for you,” their mother said sorrowfully. “How can we make this easier?”

There was a part of myself that wanted to walk out a complete martyr, trailing my blood behind me, see if I could increase their shame. But what good would that do? Who cared about my pride now? I asked for a bottle of boiled water. I felt like some character in the Bible, being sent into the desert. Shusha ran to fetch a bottle, and Dunya poured the contents of the samovar into it. Their mother handed me a hunk of bread out of their meager rations, a slice of hard cheese, and a piece of herring, all wrapped in a page of Pravda.

I descended the stairs and emerged into the city, now dark. I would never have a reason to climb those stairs again. The thousand and one times I had gone up in that elevator, anticipating the sights and smells of their homey flat, the sweets her mother would have for us, the mysteries of her father’s studio, the sanctum of the darkroom. How kind they’d been to us. How they’d loved Seryozha. What would Solomon Katzev say if he’d been there today, and seen the choice that Mina had made? What she’d pulled in wax, that key—locking the door, barring her heart. I remembered the day we’d followed that lovely man down to the Neva to see the Aurora opposite the palace. I remembered the dresses Sofia Yakovlevna had sewn, her magic lantern, Vasilisa the Beautiful… I couldn’t stop seeing Mina’s face, the way her chin stuck out, the smallness of her bitter mouth. The book of the past had closed. There was nothing left but this—the book of the city itself.

16 The Astoria

I took a brave turn in the streets, but the ravaged revolutionary city was too unnervingly empty to spend a night in a doorway. I swallowed my pride and curled with my infant in a jog in the Katzevs’ hallway, still hoping against hope that Sofia Yakovlevna would creep out and usher me inside. I’d dreamed for so long about my return to Petrograd, but I hadn’t expected this.

“We’ll figure this out,” I promised Iskra, as she nestled inside my sheepskin. I ate some of their bread. It stuck in my throat. Maybe I would have been better off staying in Udmurtia, where there was still kindness, and work for my hands, room for a woman with a child. But who could tell good luck from bad now? You couldn’t know what might lead where. There was only fate, and this was mine tonight.

And I still had Aura Cady Sands hidden in my pocket, my ace in the hole.

I slept fitfully, and dreamed of a ship in heavy weather. I clung to the rail, trying to inch my way to my cabin, but I’d lost track of the baby. The ship spiraled in the churning brown water, the crew struggling to keep from capsizing, while the mad captain ordered it onward, into the storm. We were traveling right into its arms, debris flying through the air as I scrambled to my cabin, but where was my daughter? The ship lunged and heeled, taking on water, sluicing the corridor, coming under the doors. The cards I’d been playing flew off the desk. I didn’t want to drown on this ship, but the mad captain had bolted the doors.

Someone was shaking me. Mina? Had she changed her mind?

I opened my eyes, saw broad shoulders, a shaved face. “Clear off. This isn’t a boardinghouse. If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’ll call the domkom.”

It was still very early, the sun rising through mist. The beauty of the unfolding day stopped the breath in my chest. I had forgotten this, the light of Petrograd on the long straight Prospect, the unchanging forms of stone and iron, the mist hanging. Everywhere were the quiet faces I had craved—the benign visages of statues and friezes decorating windows, balconies, archways. They knew me, if no one else did. I imagined they pitied me as I passed by. I stopped to use the convenience of a courtyard off Kazanskaya Street, and drank some of the water Sofia Yakovlevna had packed for me. From there I made my way up to the sleeping Astoria, its sentries smoking by the door. But it was far too early to disturb the singer. I moved off into the haze like a light inside a paper lantern toward the red pillars and dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. I climbed to its granite porch and gazed out between the columns as through the legs of a giant, appreciating the rhythm of pillar and pediment across Senate Square like a stately music. Such beauty, everywhere I turned my eyes.

And there, gazing out at the Neva, stood Great Peter, and Pushkin’s words bubbled up within me:

At this hour the city was mine, mine and the urchins’, curled up against the walls, and a few sleepy streetwalkers’, heading home after a hard night’s work. I nursed Iskra and gazed out at the ensemble of buildings, the Senate, the Admiralty, the Horse Guards’ Manège, and waited for morning to properly age. The leaves on the trees of Horse Guards Boulevard were shedding in yellow pools. I had picked one up to show Iskra, now spun it around between my fingers, tickled her face with it as she nursed and I sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

A group of little boys gathered on the steps nearby, smoking vile makhorka cigarettes to staunch their hunger, and pretended not to listen to my song, as they moved closer, like tramps warming themselves at a fire on Haymarket Square. I shifted to “Fais Dodo, Colin” and “The Little Bell” and “In the Valley” to see if I could prolong the spell.

When I finished, I asked if they knew any songs, throwing the question in their general direction without looking at them. They were dikiye, wild, and like any hungry, wild pack, they could turn in a moment, throw rocks or swarm me for the food I might be carrying, my boots, or, God forbid, my coat. But right now, they were children, and I was the adult. A mother. Whose comfort and care and tenderness they yearned for.

One of them, a dirt-smeared urchin of about twelve with a brutally upturned nose, spoke up over his evil-smelling cigarette. “Patches knows some.”

Patches proved to be a painfully thin boy with bald spots in his bristly hair.

“Sing us a tune,” the older boy commanded, and kicked him.

Patches began to sing a song I had never heard:

“Pretty good, huh? And if they don’t fork over, he goes into this one,” said the chief.

The poor half-bald boy looked even more mournful and sang,

The song was wrenching, his voice high and true.

“It’s his scam,” said their chief. “On the trams.”

“Are there still trams?” I hadn’t seen one since I’d been here.

“Not many, but they’re crammed full. All the better pickin’ for us. Right, boys?” His friends nodded. “Didja just come inta town?”

They were like a pack of mangy dogs who somehow remembered human caring, human compassion.

“I just got back. I’m from here,” I said. I kept it vague in case any other of their brothers had been on a train that night on the Vologda-Petrograd line.

Iskra squealed and wanted to be played with. I tucked my breast away, let her grip my finger. “I love this place. I don’t have a place to put my head, but—” and I recited a bit more of “The Bronze Horseman”:

“What’s that?” asked their leader.

“It’s a poem. Something I heard once.” As if Pushkin’s masterpiece was just something I heard in a breadline. “You know the statue of the guy on Arts Square?”

“The guy checkin’ the weather,” said their leader, imitating Pushkin’s posture, palm upturned.

“Pigeons shit all over him,” said another boy, emboldened. The same age as the leader, he grinned through teeth already ruined.

“Yes, that guy,” I said. “It’s an old poem, just so you know.”

“Go ’head, say it,” said the leader. I was Patches, here for his entertainment. I hoped he wouldn’t kick me.

Iskra was squirming. She liked the morning. I stood up so I could rock her on my hip as I began to unfold for the orphans the tale of their own city’s mythology, a story they needed to know. Even if they were homeless, they were still citizens of St. Petersburg, and more so than most, as they slept on its stones.

“It’s about the great flood of 1824, right here, a hundred years ago,” I said. “But it starts in…”—what did they care about dates?—“with Peter the Great founding… this city. That Peter.” I pointed to the Falconet statue, the horse’s great haunches, rearing on its stone. “He’s called the Bronze Horseman.”

And I began:

My recitation was by no means perfect, but none of these urchins had ever heard of Pushkin, and oddly, their attention flattered me more than any silver ruble my Makarov grandmother could have bestowed. All the while, I kept a good watch on my coat and my bundle. And by God if they didn’t listen until the very end, until poor mad Evgeny had lost everything, city, love, home, chased to his death by that brazen statue come to life. And for a moment, we all sat together, and looked out toward the grand, treacherous monarch, and over his city, dramatic, tragic, deadly. Our city, mine and theirs, Iskra’s and Pushkin’s. We citizens along with every poet, every poor clerk and water carrier and nurse. Whatever the fate of this place, I would be part of it. I wouldn’t be mindlessly grazing in a field like a cow chewing its cud.

Later, the children melted into the morning, following their leader, off to steal and beg or whatever it was they did to get their daily bread. I still had hours to go before I could safely visit the singer. Now was the time a reasonable person would go and queue at the district soviet, take the next step in my official future. Find some sort of job, any job, and a corner in a collective apartment. I had come back of my own free will, hadn’t I? Nobody had forced me, I had no right to cry. I should have known Mina would hurt me if I gave her the chance. But the idea of Aura Cady Sands glittered before me like a lamp, a way back into the world. There were still giants here in Petersburg, the sons and daughters of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I would not miss the chance to bask in their light, pale moon that I was. It was worth another night in an unguarded hallway.

I chewed on more of the Katzevs’ bread and went for a stroll along the Admiralty Embankment. I wondered what was housed in the Winter Palace now. I remembered the orgy in the tsar’s wine cellars during October 1917—whole battalions lost down there, the confusion and gunfire in the halls, and how we stumbled into the room where the ministers had just been arrested. Genya’s excitement over Kerensky’s pen—I never asked if he still had it. The palace showed its neglect now, weeds growing everywhere, broken windows boarded up or not, the corner that had been bombarded by the Peter and Paul Fortress still unrepaired. Would it really have been so bad if we’d stopped with Kerensky and the Constituent Assembly? The Kadets, the Right SRs? Though it was counterrevolutionary to think it. Better for the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia—but I knew quite well the capitalists would have kept a tight hold on the reins of power, and the workers would still exist only for their labor, their needs disregarded. No, we needed this, a complete overturning of everything, even if we privileged classes suffered for our former greed and arrogance.

I squinted up at the Admiralty spire, surmounted by its golden ship as the mists cleared and the bright day sparkled on the river. I felt hopeful again. I would find a way of ingratiating myself with the singer, convince her she needed Marina Kuriakina as translator, guide, housemaid, friend. But I had to approach this songbird with care, to lay a snare without frightening her, having her fly away. Worst would be to appear indigent and at my wit’s end, throwing myself at her like a scabrous beggar with my sheepskin and my infant. No, I had to act as if I was just dropping in, that her friendship was all I sought, a pleasant half hour with a fascinating foreigner: Oh! I forgot my calling cards! I hoped she had more than one room, wondered how famous she was. Perhaps she knew Chaliapin, or Gorky.

Across the river on the rock where the city was founded rose the Peter and Paul Fortress, as grim and solid as ever. How many people from my past were now imprisoned behind its stout walls, locked in its dank and cramped cells? How many hostages against Yudenich’s attack had been imprisoned there, Denikin’s officers’ wives and children? A lone man walked across Palace Bridge. There were so few people, I could watch him all the way across.

At last, it seemed late enough for us to visit. Should I wear my kerchief as worker or peasant, or try to upgrade my appearance to displaced intelligent? I chose the last, pocketed my kerchief and smoothed my clean hair with my fingers. Chin up, I approached the hotel—dark and grand on St. Isaac’s Square. I’d come here as a child, whenever my mother’s cousin Tamara visited us from Paris. She carried a white Pomeranian with red-rimmed eyes, Rupert, and wore a coat of black monkey fur that was almost like feathers. I strode across the cobbles as if I had breakfast at the Astoria every day of my life. A heavily armed sentry stopped me before I even got close. “Propusk, Citizen.”

Citizen. I should have worn my kerchief. I showed him my labor book, and my propusk from the Izhevsk Committee. He shrugged and handed them back to me. “Where’s your propusk to enter the First House of the Soviet?”

The members of the soviet were ensconced at the Astoria Hotel? “But I was invited. To visit the singer Aura Cady Sands. Room 223. Call her, see for yourself.” The tightness in my gullet, the weight of the gun under my clothes, heavier than the moment before. If they caught me, they would assume I was another Fanya Kaplan, looking to assassinate Zinoviev or Radek or whoever was living here now.

“What, do I look like a desk clerk?” His face was rough, his little eyes stupid and willfully so. “No propusk, no entry.”

I started to feel tears come. Why didn’t she mention a propusk? I remembered going into Smolny itself without having to show so much as my labor book. “She told me to come this morning. She didn’t say anything about a propusk.”

“Well, what did you think, you could just walk in? Who are you? Nobody, anybody. Where do you think you are?” He was shouting at me now. “You could have been sent here by Yudenich. Kolchak. The Entente. You might have a bomb.”

This was going all wrong, the other sentry was becoming curious, what a nightmare. I watched my dreams crumple like a wad of cheap newsprint. “Maybe the baby’s got a bomb. She’s a regular counterrevolutionary.”

“Move along before I shoot you both,” he said.

I had no choice. I moved away.

So I made the journey out to Smolny, hauling Iskra and my bag, pail, sheepskin, aware of my dwindling supplies, but it was the same story as at the Astoria. No propusk, no appointment, no entry. When had that started? Since the assassinations, most likely. “What’s your business at Petrocommune? You have potatoes under that skirt?” He started poking my skirt with the barrel of his gun. To him I was just another baba from the provinces, there to beg or steal or God knew what. With that gun on me, I couldn’t stand a search. So much for the free wandering in and out as we had in the early days. No more democratic free-for-all. It burned, the way they dismissed me, as if I were a beggar.

“This is how you treat the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry?” I shouted for the benefit of all the others climbing the steps. “Propusk, propusk… You’re drowning us in bureaucracy!”

One of the soldiers shoved me, and I almost fell down the stairs, baby and all.

“Such a shame,” a man said, helping me up, handing me my pail, which had clattered to the ground. Jack and Jill went up the hill… Of course, Iskra was bawling by now.

So back I went to the labor exchange at the district soviet, squeezing us onto a tram, holding on with one hand. I chose the Second City district, out of allegiance to my days in the Poverty Artel. The last time I was here, I’d gotten married. Nothing but queues—to get housing, to get work, propuski for travel or blowing one’s nose. It looked like everyone still living in Petrograd had decided to cram into the Second City Soviet, coughing and weary and spitting on the floor. There were other districts to be sure—Liteiny had more job potential, but too many people knew me up there. Here I could say the Poverty Artel was my last address, not Furshtatskaya Street. Marina Kuriakina was plausible, though not without holes in her story. In any case, I didn’t want to run into anyone I’d known before Genya. He might have been the wrong man, but I was grateful that I could use his name and his all-important class category, proletarian. He did me that much of a favor. Without that, there would be little work and little housing for me and my child.

A painful wait. The fat-faced Communist bureaucrat behind the counter at the labor exchange glanced at the papers of the petitioners, her mouth in a frozen sneer, not even looking at their faces—mostly ragged Formers of varying ages—telling each in turn that there was nothing for them. “How are we supposed to live?” wailed one middle-aged woman, thin as paper. “Really, you’re trying to starve us out of existence.”

“What do I care if you starve or not?” she said. “Lousy burzhui. Why don’t you go sell your silver?”

“I’m an educated woman,” she continued. “I graduated from the Bestuzhev Institute. I could teach, I could be a clerk.”

“Move along,” said the fat-faced paper pusher.

“My husband’s ill,” the woman begged. “Please. Anything.”

“You’re holding up traffic.”

The woman didn’t even cover her face, just let the tears spill down as she left the office.

“Next!”

I reached out as the woman passed by me, and touched her arm. “You’ll find something,” I said.

She pressed my hand. “I’ve been coming here every day for two weeks. I don’t think we’re going to make it. My husband’s talking about killing himself. He can’t stand the humiliation.”

Yes, it was worse than the hunger.

A bald man wearing a jacket black with dirt, and no shirt cuffs under the sleeves, approached with his hat in his hand. “There has to be something,” he said. “I’m an editor. Anything. Proofreader, clerk.”

After him, another Former.

Then it was my turn. The apparatchitsa opened my labor book at the high counter. I felt like a child, peering over a table. “I read, I write, I’m not bad with numbers,” I said.

“The telephone exchange is looking for someone.”

Well, it was something. “Do they have a crèche?”

“A what?”

“A crèche. A baby nursery.”

“You’re joking.” She held up the chit. “Take it, or leave it, it’s all the same to me.”

“But my baby, she’s only three months old,” I said, opening the cloth so the woman could see Iskra, asleep inside it like a peanut in a shell. “I can’t just leave her in the cloakroom.” Surely they had crèches somewhere in the capital! Peter’s great city, birthplace of the revolution, et cetera. “What am I supposed to do with her?”

“What’s anybody do?” the woman said, her mouth twisted and sour. “Look around your building. Or go to some mother’s home—what do I care? You want it or not? It’s all the same to me.” She held out the slip of paper.

I took the information, moved away. It was a good job. I was lucky, I told myself. Yet I remembered the chaos of our collectivized apartment on Furshtatskaya, could only imagine my child left in that milieu, with one of the mothers deputized to take care of her. Letting her cry, or shaking her, or watering the milk, or using it to feed her own children. I realized I had believed the propaganda. Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday.

I left the building with the chit in my hand and a heaviness in my stomach. I’d thought I could come back and find my way somehow. Stay with Mina, and find Kolya on the second day. Ah, the Lord would take care of holy fools. But why would he? He was letting everyone else die. It was twilight, too late for the telephone exchange, too late to look for housing. It would be another night in Mina’s hallway.

As I walked up Nevsky, I couldn’t stop thinking of the midwife Praskovia, and the village in the trees, the women preparing for winter, threshing the grain. A baby was no obstacle there. In the countryside, at least, there was room for women and children, the needs of an infant one of the many duties of a peasant wife. But I had wanted a civilized life and here it was. No place for the most elementary need—to care for one’s child. It was just one box inside of another. Now I had the possibility of employment, but in exchange I would have to leave my tiny baby with some distracted hausfrau, some half-witted crone. Everything in me screamed out in rebellion. I did not save her life to offer her to the carelessness of an arbitrary stranger.

I argued with myself. This happened every day. People worked, they left their babies with near strangers, the children lived. At least most of them. But my mother’s curse rang in my ears, and memories lingered of those hard-faced harridans, those beaten-down women. There was no one I’d met I would trust with a dog, let alone Iskra Antonina. No. Whatever I did, I would not be separated from her. There had to be another way. It was too late for me to become a Sovetskaya barynya at the telephone exchange, but surely there was another answer.

I passed the Former woman down by the Moika, just leaning on a lamppost, gazing down into the water. I’d never seen such sadness. Even my own paled by comparison. “Here,” I said, handing her the chit. “It’s for the telephone exchange.”

She looked at me as if waking from a dream, utterly confused, her worn, intelligent face.

“I don’t know if you can use it, but give it a try.”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “You’re not taking it?”

“I can’t leave my baby,” I said. I closed her hands around the slip of paper.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh God, thank you.” She began to weep in earnest, covering her mouth. “Sometimes I wish we could all just die. That the Cheka would come and put us out of our misery. I look at the horses that fall in the street and I feel just like that. And no amount of lashes will ever put me on my feet again. But my husband, I can’t let him see me—he’s in an even worse state. Frankly, I come looking for work just to get out of that room.” She took my hand and pressed it to her cheek.

17 Hotel Europa

A group of tattered boys loitered in the porte cochere of the Hotel Europa, smoking and watching my progress up Mikhailovskaya Street. It was six o’clock, the twilight smelling of water. I entered the vast lobby stinking of mold and old soup, sour cabbage. Who would have guessed how quickly a grand hotel could become as squalid as any Haymarket Square tenement? A few years ago, the lobby would have been filled with elegant women and polished men, bellhops squiring mountains of luggage. Now the chandeliers were dim and the unwashed mirrors reflected only ghostly forms of those long-ago guests. The moldings on the wooden pillars had been savagely broken, and the marble underfoot was so black that you would not suspect its former honeyed hue. Iskra was awake, taking it all in. Groups of children hovered by the pillars, watching. One of them said something, making the others snicker. A dark and dangerous place, a place you’d never permit a child to enter, but I was the stranger here, and they the tenants. An orphanage, a hotel for the abandoned.

An older woman in a white kerchief worked the front desk behind the amber marble top, now pitted and brown. I sighed in relief just to see a face over eighteen. As I waited for her to look up from the heap of papers she was sorting, I had the uncanny vision of myself tapping on a polished brass hotel-desk bell, a grande dame in hobble skirt and huge hat with a veil. Signing the register, the glossy pen in my soft kid glove with little pearl buttons, while behind me waited servants with my trunks and a maid holding the leash of a tall feathery dog.

“Excuse me, Comrade,” I said.

She still didn’t look up. “Infant Department. Second floor, to the back.”

It took me a moment to realize—she thought I was here to abandon Iskra! Assumed it! Was I so desperate-looking? Did it happen so often? “I’m not leaving her. I’m looking for a job.”

Now the woman lifted her gaze, sheaf of papers clutched in one hand, her pince-nez uncomfortably clamped to a long narrow nose. She took it off and rubbed the indentations. “Can you read? Know your letters?”

Certifying my rusticated appearance. “A, Be, Te, De, Er,” I rattled off as a joke. “Something like that?” But the expression on her face, weary and exasperated, told me she was the wrong person to joke with. “Sorry. Yes, I can read, write, alphabetize, do calculations, cook, and scrub up if necessary.”

“It won’t be up to me,” sniffed the woman. It occurred to me, there were some people made sour by life, and others who were sour and tired of life from their very birth. I wondered which one she was. “But there is a vacancy, lucky you. They’re taking applications.” She indicated the heaping piles of records. “Commissariat’s got a new idea. Wants the files redone. As if I didn’t have enough to do. There’s no one here right now to talk to you, but Matron’ll be back in the morning.” She scrutinized me more closely. A tall, rangy woman, she had at one point been beautiful, but life had proved brutally disappointing. “It’s night work, I’m afraid. We had someone, but she disappeared. After that, nothing but thieves or complete simpletons.”

Imagine, someone had walked away from this gloomy hole. I hoped the missing woman had found something better and not fallen afoul of dark forces. “Nights, days, doesn’t matter,” I said. “I just have to have the baby with me.”

“No family, no husband, is that it?” She smirked. You could see how she hoped that’s how it was. So that she could feel superior.

Well, fine. If it made her like me, gave her confidence to think she knew me, all the better. I would have trotted out my husband with the agit-train, but she seemed to so enjoy my sinful suffering, I didn’t want to disabuse her. Anyway, I was sick of that story. I shrugged and sighed. “They say, He who does not work, does not eat. So here I am.” It was in our labor books, even on the ration cards.

She considered me again—bundle, sheepskin, baby, pail, the architecture of my face, my rough hands. “Read this.” She handed me a piece of paper from the monstrous pile.

“Thank God.” She exhaled deeply. “You should see the illiterates who’ve been marching through here.” Now she looked upon me with a bit more enthusiasm. I handed her the page. It was a notice of transfer to another orphanage for Shushkin, Gavril. Age 4. Date of birth, 17 May 1915. Age four, and already the subject of such documentation. I could imagine Gavril, his dirty snot-nose, his rags. Lost and terrified. Transferred to a children’s home in Detskoe Selo, Children’s Village—once the elegant town of Tsarskoe Selo, Tsar’s Village, where Akhmatova had grown up and Pushkin had attended the lycée. Now orphanages.

The sharp-chinned woman continued filing papers. “A nice mess, eh? They want it all refiled on a new system—how that’s going to get any more of these little brats off the street, I can’t imagine, but nobody asked me. Look, give me a hand with this tonight, and I’ll put in a good word with Matron in the morning. I’ve been on since six a.m. and I’m ready to drop off this stool.” She glanced up at the clock in the old cashier’s booth—miracle, it was still working. “They’re feeding the animals now—if you don’t mind the noise, I’ll have them give you something to eat.” She lowered the grate with a bang, startling the boys in the lobby—purposely—and locked it. “Don’t leave anything you don’t want to lose,” she said. “There’s no private property anymore—in case you haven’t heard.”

Her name was Alla Denisovna, a blonde of forty with a long-legged stride—yes, she must have been quite the beauty twenty years ago. She led me through the blackened lobby, absent the potted palms and carpets, past languid gangs of boys with whom she exchanged a look of mutual loathing. “Hooligans.”

“Dried-up hag,” a boy called back at her.

“Bow legs,” another one chimed. “The wind’s whistling.”

“Degenerates.”

She led me down a wide corridor into what had once been the hotel tearoom. The wallpaper was faded and stained and the floral beams too dirty to distinguish their patterns. It had been a pretty room, an afternoon gathering place for the ladies, known for its dance floor and small orchestra. Now the floor was black with grime, and little emaciated bodies with shaved heads crowded around rough tables. Some had to stand. She hadn’t been joking about the noise. The din would deafen a railwayman. But Iskra didn’t seem at all worried. She was gazing about her with fascination.

“They feed them in shifts,” Alla shouted. “This is the last one.” There were seventy or so children here of youngish school age, all boys, crowded onto benches. They ate out of tin mugs, with spoons or their fingers. A group of red-cheeked women in stained white aprons and white nurse’s kerchiefs sat at a table of their own at one end of the deafening, airless room, smoking and jabbering away. They moved over to let us sit down.

“Hey, Polya.” Alla Denisovna called to one of them, a short-nosed peasant with the exposed nostrils of a skull. “This is my new assistant on front desk. I’ve got to get to the queues before the bread runs out. Give her something to eat, will you? She’s got to make it through the night, and feed the baby.”

The woman Polya brought me a dented cup of vobla soup, and a plate with kasha. Alla perched on the end of the bench, lit a cigarette and sat smoking, watching me eat, her leg bouncing up and down with impatience. A sullen girl about my age, her face coated with pancake makeup—makeup!—grumbled, “She’s not getting that job, you know. I got a friend up for it, and she’s in the party.”

“That cross-eyed tart from Tula?” laughed another woman, short and wide, with a beauty mark next to her surprisingly pretty mouth, like a star hanging from the moon. “I hope she doesn’t have to take the medical exam. I heard she’s the darling of the fleet.”

The women snickered.

“I’m sure Matron will make her own decisions,” said Alla Denisovna. She was at least fifteen years older than any of them, except for the peasant woman Polya, and clearly had no interest in being liked.

A scuffle broke out at one of the tables, a fury of fists. I was amazed to see that none of the women did anything about it. At another table, a boy wrestled a cup away from a smaller boy, who now just sat, silently weeping. “Did you see that?” I asked Alla. “He just grabbed the other kid’s food.”

“Degenerates,” she said. “Dog eat dog.”

With Iskra on my hip, I marched over to their table and twisted the stolen cup from the perpetrator. The shock on his face was worth a thousand words. “That’s not yours,” I said firmly, and I gave it back to the silent child, who wouldn’t look at me, but grabbed it and devoured what was left in the cup.

I rejoined the women. I tried not to accuse anyone, I wanted to work here, but my God, what a lot of apparatchiks.

“You think we’re heartless,” said the woman with the beautiful mouth. “But he’ll beat that sniveling runt up tonight when they go to bed. They have their own ways. Better to stay out of it. I was like you when I first came here. What went on here made me sick. Now I just live and let live.”

“Come on, Sister Charity.” Alla hooked her finger into the cord of my bundle, strapped over the shoulder opposite Iskra.

As she led me back to the Sisyphean mountain of paperwork, I wondered what kind of a hell I’d wandered into. There was little light in the hallway, children slipped along like shadows. I supposed I wouldn’t want orphans kept under lock and key like in a Dickens novel, and yet, should they really be allowed to prowl the orphanage at will, coming and going out the front door as they liked?

Alla led us back behind the door of the front desk, and locked me in. I didn’t blame her. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate for a minute otherwise. On the counter sat the monstrous pile of paper. “We’ve been keeping records by category. Children still at the center.” She touched one messy pile with the flat of her hand. “Children who’ve been transferred.” She gestured down the counter. “Children who’ve run off. And so on.”

And so on? A shiver went through me like a knife blade. And so on… It was an ocean of suffering, a galaxy, neatly captured in bland words on official paper. I held Iskra tighter.

“Now the Commissariat’s decided it wants us to file alphabetically, by last name of child.” She said the Commissariat in a disgusted tone, and indicated the wash of files, rising up against the grate protecting the desk from the shadowy lobby. “And who are we to question the Commissariat, eh? Well, as long as I get my rations, I don’t give a damn if it takes from now until Judgment Day. Oh, and we get our rations Thursdays, first and third of the month.” It was Saturday, the last week in September.

“They let that child steal the other one’s food,” I said. “They just watched it.”

She sighed, considering me with a certain measure of exasperated pity. “Are you still worrying about that?” A child screamed in the echoing lobby. She looked over at him as he burst into sniggers. “One week working here, I promise you, you won’t notice the hand in front of your face.” She shrugged. “Just paper and more paper. If they run—paper. When they’re transferred—paper. If they die, more paper.”

“Do you have children?” I asked her, looking into Iskra’s face. She was goggle-eyed in the strange place, not knowing where to point her nose.

Alla lost what little animation she’d had. She curled her lower lip. “Lost them. 1915. Scarlet fever.” She sighed. “Both in a single month.” Then she straightened her back, picked up her handbag. “So that’s it. See how far you get. And don’t let anyone back here no matter what. I’ll see you in the morning.” She took off her white nurse’s scarf and put on her hat.

“What if I have to use the toilet?” I remembered to ask.

“There’s a chamber pot in the broom closet. Boiled water in the pitcher. Breakfast at seven. Good luck.”

And so I began. I swore I wouldn’t read the files, simply alphabetize them. I set Iskra on the floor on my sheepskin, but she howled. I made a nest for her on the counter, so she could watch the children in the lobby. I tried not to read the files, but I couldn’t help seeing the ages on the forms, the fates of the children. Sent to a detsky dom was a common fate. They all seemed to be in the suburbs—Detskoe Selo, Kamenny Island, Narva. I hoped the children fared better there than at Orphanage No. 6.

The runaways were mostly older children. Or Disappeared. Or, if it was indicated they had living relatives, perhaps they’d gone home. What a look into the life of the second year of the revolution. Reading through this Everest of paperwork reminded me of the boxlike viewers Papa had bought us to look under the surface of our pond at Maryino, to see the tadpoles. Reading, I could peer into the heart of the city, what was going on beneath the surface of its empty streets. I avoided the end of the counter holding the so ons. Here were transfers. You had to hope for the best—boys, a few girls, and babies, so many, transferred to the Kamenny Island Orphanage No. 12. It must be an infant facility.

So many abandoned children. Orphaned in the waves of disease, or simply left behind, coming in from all over Russia, riding the trains into the former capital. What would become of them, with women like Alla and the pancake girl caring for them?

“Hey,” said a child’s voice through the grate of the front desk. “There’s something wrong with my tongue. Could you look at it?”

I glanced up. A girl about thirteen, skinny with stringy straw-colored hair, leaned on the desk, sticking her tongue out at me. She and her friend burst into giggles, joined arms, and skipped out the front doors of the lobby, into the night. Probably to find some men who could give them food or money or something else worth having. The disease rate among them must be terrific.

And so on.

Worse, when I saw those girls again, they’d brought their “dates” right into the orphanage, leading them through the lobby like grown prostitutes at railway hotels. How could this be allowed? Couldn’t the government find a single Red Guard to stand watch over an orphanage with hundreds of children? No wonder Alla had locked me in. The girl who’d stuck out her tongue had a particularly stupid-looking man about twenty-five in tow, with small but wide-set eyes and no chin. Her friend, with pimples like boils, led a soldier, a mean-looking blond, about nineteen.

I called out to the men from behind the locked grates. “Comrades, these are children. Have you no shame? No pity?”

“Have you no pity?” the girl mocked me. “Keep your pity to yourself, pitty-pat.”

Her man laughed and followed her up the stairs. I was glad Iskra had fallen asleep. Certain things even a baby should not have to see.

Late in the night, a group of boys, the ones who’d catcalled Denisovna, returned from their adventures to climb the wide marble stairs to their own floor, pushing and laughing. The place, I could see, was no better than a flophouse. Perhaps the younger children had some supervision, but these older ones… I wondered if the Commissariat knew what was going on here, or were they only worried about their record keeping.

I nursed Iskra, tried once again to tuck her under the desk out of sight, but she wouldn’t have it, started to howl, she wanted to see what was going on. For some reason, I didn’t want the children to see her. I feared their envy—like a peasant worrying about the Evil Eye, calling her child stupid and ugly. Now I understood the superstition. The danger didn’t spring from devils and sorcerers. It was the mean and envious you had to watch out for. It could be as simple as a child who was humiliated in front of his mates, or a girl who lost a trick because of you.

In the end, I could not help approaching and so on. I had to know. The records seemed banal, benign, until you assembled the picture behind the bland language.

Cause of death: Cholera. Typhus. Typhoid. Scarlet fever. Measles. Smallpox. Concussion. Contusion. Hematoma. Alcohol poisoning. Malnutrition. Pneumonia.

Sent to hospital.

Returned from hospital.

Death certificate.

The deaf, the blind, the crippled.

And the dates! Infants of a few months, or hours, abandoned,

admitted,

deceased.

I could not read anymore, I could not stop reading. I held my head back from the pages so that my tears wouldn’t make the ink run, wouldn’t blot out the names. I dried my eyes on the shoulder of my dress. Starving children, stronger ones taking their food so that they could grow stronger while the other ones died. Syphilis, gonorrhea. Parfentiev, Matvei. Age 9. Cocaine addiction, transferred to Orphanage No. 15. Drug addiction. Habitual degeneracy. Criminal activities. Juvenile detention. And so on.

When I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I found the suicides. Lapikov, Pyotr Ivanovich. Age 11. 17 July 1919. Cause of death: Fall from the roof. Just this summer. Mordukov, Nestor. Age 9. Cause of Death: Hanging. No investigation, no follow-up, no attempt to establish the circumstances, to find out who might have been responsible. Chuzhova, Anastasia. Age 13. Cause of Death: Drowning. Drowned herself in the Fontanka. No interviews with her friends, nor the attendants. I was loath to bury these files, the fate of these wretched souls, in among those alphabetically related, who’d had half a chance—the housed, the transferred. So many children, eaten alive by the cruelty of our times. With no visible effect upon its appetite. I was unable to shrug and say live and let live. And so on.

In the morning, Alla Denisovna returned to unlock the cage she had put me in. I went to eat with the children, this time slot set aside for the little ones, four- and five-year-olds, boys and some girls. Shunning the bland evil of the adults, I found a place at one of the children’s tables. “Mind if I sit here?” They all stared at me and Iskra. None said a word. All those faces, those little shaved heads, they were so small. I knew their stories before they were written. I ate the kasha, and although I was exhausted from the long night, I told them a story as they ate, about a cow from Novinka.

18 Shpalernaya Street

In the empty light of morning, I recognized the pale building on Shpalernaya Street, its majestic, ruined facade, brawny male caryatids holding up its balconies. I was terrified to be in this neighborhood again, across the street from the Tauride Palace, the neighborhood where I’d spent my days with Arkady von Princip. I kept my kerchief pulled over my hair, my head down over the baby’s sling. It made the scars on my back itch. And yet, this was where my trail of Kolya Shurov left off, in the flat with the ancient Golovins and Naryshkins. Although the building still maintained its stately facade to the street, from the courtyard it could have been any broken building in Petrograd, the yard weedy and silent. I didn’t worry that the old people would recognize me—I’d been Misha then, and today a bast-shoed peasant with a baby in arms. I climbed the toothless stairs to the bel étage, remembering the state in which I’d last climbed these flights with Kolya, our passion a glowing red bonfire popping and crackling and shooting sparks high up into the night. And one found its place, Kolya.

I located the door in the gloom, rang the bell. Listened. Yes, I heard it sound out. But no answer. Rang again. I couldn’t imagine all of those old people had gone out at once. No, they would take the streets two at a time, the others waiting anxiously for their safe return. Then I remembered the secret knock—the first five notes of “Ochi Chornye”—one, two, three… fourfive.

That did the trick. Here was the same white mouse, peering through the slit in the door, held close by its chain. “Who is it?” she hissed. She must have been hovering just behind it, terrified it was the Cheka coming to call, or a labor conscription from the district soviet. The old lady—what was her name? Elizaveta… Vladimirovna. She clutched her shawl around her throat as if I might try to strangle her.

I positioned Iskra out of sight of the narrow slit. I had to play my pieces judiciously. A good development, slow and correct. The piercing eyes scrutinized. “I’m looking for Elizaveta Vladimirovna. I’m Shurova, Marina Dmitrievna. Nikolai Stepanovich’s wife. I know this is terribly awkward, but I was hoping to find him here.”

I could hear someone in the apartment behind her, coughing. “You are no such thing,” she croaked.

“But I am, as unlikely as it might appear.”

“He would have told us himself.”

Joy surged through me like water up through the earth, emerging as a sweet spring. “He’s here? You’ve seen him?”

She smiled sourly, her pale blue eyes at the height of a child’s. “Of course he’s here,” she said. “I thought you were his wife. I might be old but I’m not feeble, young lady. You might know him, but you’re certainly not his wife. Good day.”

She started to swing the door closed, but I stuck my foot in the aperture. “Wait! Please. He told me to meet him here if I managed to come back to the city. Please.” I spoke quickly. I let a tremor come into my voice, which was not difficult, it had been a trying night. How lovely it felt to just let that tension flow out. I brought Iskra into view, kissed her sweet hair, let the old noblewoman see what the situation was. “He said I should speak to his dear friend Elizaveta Vladimirovna, that she would take care of everything. I’ve been trapped in the east, near Perm. It’s taken me a month to get here. Please, just tell him I’m here. Marina Dmitrievna.”

The lines in her brow softened. Her initial horror that I might be his slut weakened by the possibility that she’d misjudged the situation. “We have young ladies here. We’re decent people.”

Young ladies? I only remembered old people. But there might have been others… She was trying to protect them from my shame, as they used to say in Victorian novels. I’d had no sleep in thirty-six hours, the devil was tickling me, I almost broke into laughter. Imagine, in 1919 Petrograd, this old dame was worried about exposing noble young ladies to the coarser aspects of life! When they were probably shitting in the courtyard, and bathing over a basin. “Of course,” I said. “More important than ever.” Where had I picked that up from? I sounded like one of my mother’s friends, in a feather-bedecked hat, nodding over tea on one of her Thursday afternoons.

Finally, she made a decision and unlocked the chain, pulled me inside and locked it behind me. “I am Princess Elizaveta Vladimirovna Gruzinskaya. Please forgive my suspicions, child. The amount of criminality in this city is absolutely staggering. Staggering! So our Nikolai Stepanovich has been made an honest man, the rascal.” She gazed at my baby with an expression half shrewd, half wistful, but made no move to touch her. “Never said a word. Not one word!”

“For our protection,” I said. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Elizaveta Vladimirovna.” I took her tiny, brittle hand and, God help me, made a little curtsy. I was always a stylish curtsier, even with the baby in the sling and the gun strapped to my hip and the bundle and the boots. It was everything I could do not to laugh and give the whole thing away. I was light-headed from exhaustion. “This is his daughter, Antonina.” Bless Praskovia for having given her a traditional name. I didn’t have to invent that part.

“Please, come in, come in.” She kept looking over her shoulder at the baby in her sling as I followed the tiny old party into the parlor. “My goodness! Our own Nikolai Stepanovich… Why, I was just saying to him the other day, Nikolai Stepanovich, you should find a nice girl and settle down—really, though, thinking of one of our young ladies, but— Oh, here’s Emilia Ivanovna.”

The parlor was just as I’d left it, almost a year ago. The rich dark walls, the plush furniture, even shabbier now in daylight. It felt good that it had changed so little. It was chilly, but not too cold, a bit of fire in the bourgeoika, the card players with shawls around their shoulders, afghans on their laps, but now it was some semblance of breakfast, and the reading of newspapers. The same flabby old lady, the two old gents, as if they’d been preserved on a daguerreotype. “Viktor Sergeevich Golovin, Pavel Alexandrovich Naryshkin. May I present Marina Dmitrievna—Shurova. Our Nikolai Stepanovich’s bride!” She clasped her hands to her breast. “That little beast. What a secret to keep from us, eh? She’s just been a month coming in from the Urals, poor dear! Sit down, sit down. You must be exhausted. Aglaya! Aglaya!”

We went through the whole routine, as I was greeted by the old people. Emilia Ivanovna Golovina, a distant relative surely, and more desiccated than the last time—the folds of skin hung on her like drapes. And the two old men: her husband, Golovin, white side-whiskered, ramrod straight—I could imagine his chest emblazoned with medals given in service to the tsar—and Naryshkin, tall and stooped, streaks of white hair across this mottled dome, coat frayed at collar and cuffs, and yet, beautifully groomed for all that. The old gents actually stood and kissed my hand, properly, the symbolic kiss hovering in the air just above the wrist. The old people beamed with pleasure that one of their reactionary own had managed to wed and beget a child in the midst of the enemy’s camp. I wondered again how they had not managed to get themselves out of Russia back when the other nobility had fled. Had they seriously thought this would all “blow over”? Were they conspirators? I wondered how many more nests of the gentry like this still remained in revolutionary Petrograd.

I sat on one of the tufted settees under a gilded mirror and had the strangest feeling of being back at my own Golovin grandparents’ flat on the Moika Embankment. How had all this not yet been seized? A million questions sprung to mind that passion had blinded me to the last time I’d entered this flat. But mostly, I was interested in Kolya’s whereabouts. “So when did you see my husband last?”

“Oh, when was it?” Elizaveta the white mouse asked old Golovin. “July, I think, around the time Yudenich almost made it to liberate Petrograd… akh. He came this close.” She showed me about half an inch between thumb and clawed forefinger. “The English even sank two Red battleships. Did you hear about that? Sank them like bathtub toys, one after the other, half an hour apart.”

“When the English strike, they strike hard,” said Golovin. “Our Red masters should think about that.”

“It won’t be much longer,” said the white mouse. “That’s what dear Nikolai Stepanovich told us. To hold fast. So that’s what we do.”

That battle was back in July. Now it was almost October. When she’d said Kolya was here, I thought she meant now. But I supposed when you were older than the stones, a month, two months, six. What difference did it make to them? When these days you could live three different lives in as many months.

Aglaya served tea—real tea, with a little bit of hoarded sugar—in my honor. They all closed their eyes like cats, sipping, as did I, tasting it with pure pleasure, knowing that it had to have been Kolya’s doing. Without his intervention these old people would no doubt be eating the paint off the walls. Up to his old tricks. But that was beside the point. He had been here, that was the thing. I could almost smell his cigar, his Floris Limes. He would return. Hold fast…

A middle-aged man and woman joined us from the back of the flat. We were introduced. This was the Naryshkin daughter and her husband—Countess Ekaterina Pavlovna and Count Rudolf Platonovich Sobietsky. Ah, this was how the princess had managed to hang on to the flat—she’d brought in a platoon of friends. The comtesse was a tall gray-haired woman in a rusty black dress, with spectacles on a chain, and he a slighter man with elegant longish silver hair wearing a worn but neatly brushed suit. Sobietsky, seating himself on the settee opposite me, evaluated me with a smirk. “So you’re our little Kolya’s wife,” he said, one eyebrow arched in a gesture that must have slayed them at the balls. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”

“Why Rudolf Platonovich!” The white mouse gasped, mortally offended that he would think the same thing she had just accused me of ten minutes earlier.

“Excuse my husband, Marina Dmitrievna,” said the wife. She was as homely as a raw-boned horse, but a Naryshkin, so Sobietsky must have had a title but no money.

What a shrewd little peasant I’d become.

“Look at her,” said the husband. Yes, I could see myself here in their Alexander III parlor, my baby strapped onto me, my bundle, my sheepskin. “Could you really see him marrying her? What would be the advantage? Our man would never do anything that he couldn’t turn to advantage.”

Of course, he was talking about himself, not Kolya. Kolya was a red-blooded Russian man. He could act upon passion, he didn’t have toilet water in his veins like this inbred, aging Petersburg fop. He might have rutted with Faina, but it wasn’t because he couldn’t feel passion for a woman—the only advantage there was the obvious one.

“Whatever you might think of my appearance,” I said, trying for a haughtiness my mother once possessed in boatloads, though I was too exhausted to achieve just the right icy edge, “Nikolai Stepanovich is a man of many facets, and venality is not one of them.” Sipping my tea with a straight back, holding my saucer just so.

Sobietsky’s father-in-law chuckled. “Got you there, dear Count.”

But Sobietsky continued his scrutiny, unconvinced that a ragged urchin like myself would be wed to the Delightful Man. But I had to stay here, this is where he would return.

I tried to make conversation—they were eager to chat—but my head kept dropping, my eyes closing. My body cried out for sleep. On my lap, cradled in her sling, Iskra was already out cold, golden lashes against her soft cheeks, lips parted as she slept.

“So he’s nearby?” I asked. “He said he’d be back soon?”

“He’s a mysterious one, that husband of yours,” said old Naryshkin. “We think he might be in Pskov, in communication with the Northwestern Army.” Yudenich, that is. Estonia. It was all achingly familiar.

“But who knows…” Elizaveta Vladimirovna began, and stopped. They all looked guiltily at one another.

“Oh, it can’t be a secret, this is the man’s own wife,” he said.

“Anyway, it’s just a conjecture,” said Naryshkin.

“He’ll be along. He comes and goes,” said Pavel Alexandrovich. “He takes good care of us, that lad.” The old people nodded. “And as we’re speaking, I should say, I disagree heartily with our Rudolf Platonovich. If, as you say, son, he only wants to cultivate advantage, what would be the advantage in our acquaintance? Where’s the advantage of propping up a household of old museum pieces like ourselves? If he really wanted an advantage, he’d do better to turn us over to the Cheka.”

The white mouse crossed herself. “Don’t say that, Pavel Alexandrovich. Not even in fun. He never would do such a thing, never. That boy is a pillar of strength to us. What hasn’t he done for us? A godsend, I tell you, a saint!”

Count Rudolf and I shared a laugh at that one. There was no question that I knew Kolya intimately, whether or not we were legitimately wed.

“How long has it been since you last saw our Nikolai Stepanovich?” he asked me keenly.

I was too worn out to think up much of a story. “Just before the baby came. He had to return to Petrograd, some sort of emergency.”

They nodded. It seemed to mean something to them. Perhaps they believed him involved with Yudenich’s try at Petrograd, when the English sank those battleships. Oh, what a nest of counterrevolutionaries. I was exhausted. Would they ever stop talking and invite me to stay?

“I don’t like it. If I might speak frankly, the fellow’s a well-known smuggler, speculator, and counterfeiter,” said Platonovich, “not to mention opportunist, womanizer—pardon me, Madame—and scoundrel. He might have all of you hypnotized”—he pointed around the gloomy room—“but I must call a spade a spade.”

“He’s Stepan Shurov’s son,” said old Naryshkin, shuffling the cards. “A wild one, but ours.”

Nash, ours. Other languages had no cognate to the Russian nash. For us, ours were relatives, dear friends, one’s class, one’s race, one’s blood. The people we cared about, whose sins we always pardoned, and the hell with everyone else. And the Bolsheviks were as Russian as anyone—they had their own nash. With us or against us.

“No doubt. But still, I count my fingers every time I shake his hand,” said the count. “I’m talking about character, now, not politics.”

Although the man was probably right, no one likes to hear one’s lover disparaged by those who don’t love him—even if correctly assessed. He was our own nash, Iskra’s and mine. I set my teacup and saucer down on the gateleg table. “Whatever my husband’s activities and business affairs, you can rest assured he would not need your fingers.”

Old Naryshkin laughed. I imagined he had been quite something in his time. You could see traces of it still, in his sly laughter, his quick blue eyes.

I yawned as they chattered back and forth like so many parrots in a South American jungle, my head drooping, then jerking upright before I fell off the couch.

“Oh, but we’ve been keeping you awake. Forgive me, how neglectful of us!” At last, the white mouse recognized my situation. “And you’ve traveled so far. It’s just so rare that we have a chance to talk to a new person—one does have to be so careful nowadays, and we’ve lost so many…” The old people said nothing. Only the sound of the clock’s soft chime broke the silence. “Let’s not speak of that. Better days, da? Come, we have an empty room. Please do us the honor. It’s a pleasure to have you with us. No, don’t say no. I know you think we’re just so many old fools, but it would be lovely, really. Aglaya, Aglaya!”

The next thing I knew I was back in that same empty room next to the kitchen, Aglaya making up the bed, moving the familiar heaps of furniture. Here Kolya and I made love that last night in October. How we burned. Like two pieces of paper in a hot stove.

19 Night Shift

Thus, despite Sobietsky’s suspicion that I was what I actually was—an interloper, improvident, a libertine—I became part of the commune of intransigent reactionaries, the most likely spot in which to wait for Kolya’s return. Most importantly, I was awarded the job at Orphanage No. 6 over Pancake Makeup’s friend’s claims. In the daytime, I slept, queued, and cared for Iskra in the small room next to Aglaya’s. I did my best to skirt the parlor, mainly to avoid confrontations with the young ladies of the household, Darya and Anastasia Sobietskaya. Darya, a few years older, was tolerable, a tall, long-nosed girl, patient like her mother, inclined to melancholy—a real Chekhovian dreamer. She would surely have been married off by now had the Russian nobility not been residing in Paris this season. Instead, she gave piano lessons, and French, though it wasn’t in her nature to teach. She didn’t have the gift. She was nervous and overly solicitous, didn’t know how to correct someone who was paying her. “Très bien,” I overheard her telling a commissar’s well-fed girlfriend, who came for French twice a week. “Although, really, it’s trop without the p, not troppe.” She was the one I’d pegged for a potential babysitter.

The other one, Stassya, a student at the university—smaller and more feminine than Darya, clever and waspish like her father—took an instant dislike to me. I wondered if Kolya had made love to her, a smoldering, smoky-eyed blonde about my age, if she was the one the princess had in mind for his future wife. Perhaps she had thought so too. Or perhaps she hoped life would always be aesthetically lovely, without noise and the pressing needs of others. “I can’t breathe in here,” she told her parents, loudly enough to be overheard. “Why don’t you just bring in the yardman and his twelve screaming brats and have done with it.”

Of course, Iskra cried when she needed a change, or was hungry, but generally she was a good baby. I knew how lucky I was. I hung the diapers in my own room to avoid the smell that Stassya insisted was stinking up the house. I tried to make peace with her early in my stay, complimenting her on a hat that was clearly Parisian—though a little shabby, it still bore the mark of couture—as she arranged it in the hallway mirror.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said, tucking stray strands of her long hair into her simple coiffure. “Never speak to me. I don’t know you, I don’t want to know you.”

Still, I nursed the possibility that I might be able to leave Iskra with these people from time to time. I asked Alla Denisovna if she could requisition a baby bottle for me, and the next night, I found it waiting for me under the counter. At home, I boiled it for ten minutes, then heated some of my precious Drops of Milk ration, and took Iskra back into our room to practice with it. I thought it would be easy—of course my brilliant daughter would know what to do. It never occurred to me that she would rebel. It was as if she knew I was trying to cheat her out of her birthright, her beloved breast, as if she knew that I was planning to leave her—and she gazed at me with such despair. But it was dangerous to have her only able to feed from my body. We have to be prepared, Iskra—for everything. Her eyes welled. “Iskra, please, just a little. Try it, ma petite. For Mama?” I teased her mouth with the rubber teat, traced the little bow, squirted milk onto her lips, but she shoved it away and began to wail. I steeled my heart against her sorrow. “Don’t be a silly girl. It’s yummy!” I pretended to drink. “Mmmm,” but she was howling loud enough to be heard in San Francisco, or at least by the oldsters in the parlor, and certainly by the Sobietskys, who already hated us. I was weeping and then my milk let down. In the end, it was not Iskra who surrendered. And in truth, nursing her was bliss, the quiet, her dreamy eyes gazing up into mine, while she still hiccupped from her last fit, her tiny hand reaching up to touch my face. We just could not be separated, and that was that.

And even if I’d been successful, it wouldn’t have mattered. One afternoon I floated the suggestion to Darya of looking after Iskra for an hour. The elder sister turned as pale as her music sheets. “I wouldn’t know what to do with an infant. Please don’t ask.” I knew enough not to ask Stassya, who would rather have dropped her out the window, and I was too obligated to the old princess to ask her or the other card players. The countess Sobietskaya was far too busy helping the count with his memoir. I tried Aglaya but she shrank back as if the baby might explode. “Don’t I have enough to do with all of them and their fussing? What if she choked?”

Until Kolya showed up, it looked like it would be me and Iskra in our country of two in the servant’s room with the diapers hanging.

I liberated an old basket from the flat’s junk room, set Iskra up in it on the Europa’s famous marble counter, where, safe behind the cage, I addressed myself to the tidal wave of case files. Night after night, I moved grains of sand from one pile to the other. I had stopped reading the details, for the most part, except for the worst, the most heartbreaking. These I felt a duty to read, as if it somehow kept those children company, to witness what had become of them. Gonchalovsky, Efraim. Age 11. Drank shoe polish. Bitov, Sergei. Age 8. Hung himself in the janitor’s closet among the brooms. The result of the endless bullying, beatings, or simply haunted memories of being lost in a train station as parents pushed onto a train, or watching them die of typhus or cholera.

Bit by bit, the mountain melted as I filed the accursed children away into alphabetical ranks, taking their sorrows into my own heart. The cleaner the counter, the darker and more stained my soul. The latrine of revolution, Orphanage No. 6.

One night I arrived for work to discover another girl sitting behind the amber counter, reading Pravda on my newly cleaned desk. From the satisfied look on her flaccid face, I surmised that Pancake Makeup’s friend had finally found her way to my job. She pointed to the assignment board. There was my name, Kuriakina, written in a firm blocky hand, moved from Administrative to Infant Department. Well, I told myself as I climbed to the second-floor rear, carrying Iskra in her basket, how bad could it be? Babies I understood. They wouldn’t beat each other up, or bring men back to service under the noses of the others. They wouldn’t drink shoe polish or hang themselves in the janitor’s closet.

I found the room, spacious and reasonably clean, lit by kerosene lamps. The din was tremendous. Twenty babies, crying at once. They didn’t notice what a fine view they had onto Arts Square, where a crowd collected outside the Mikhailovsky Theater in anticipation of a concert. This had been one of the best suites, plaster grapes and angels on its coped ceiling, the fancy inlaid parquet. None but the best for our orphans. Strangely, none of the babies exhibited much gratitude for such luxury accommodations. Iskra joined the chorus of wails. A stolid-faced, broad-nosed woman with a creased brow in a nurse’s uniform was changing a baby. “I’m Nonna,” she said over her shoulder. “They said they were sending someone. About time. Is that your kid?”

I put Iskra over my shoulder, patted her, trying to quiet her, but she was already joining the collective, a good Soviet citizen. “I had to bring her, there’s nowhere to leave her.”

“There’s an empty crib if you want it,” she said, nodding toward the wall, a mesh cage on legs.

I didn’t want to put Iskra in a crib recently vacated by a baby who may have died of smallpox or cholera or God knew what. “That’s okay, I brought a basket.” I put the willow basket, which had once held Emilia Ivanovna’s balls of yarn, onto the floor near the stove—it was wonderfully warm—and tucked Iskra inside it. I hated to let her just cry. She wasn’t used to being treated so foully, but I had our bread to earn. I hung up my coat and put on an apron that hung from a hook, the white nurses’ kerchief.

The room smelled of milk, baby shit, and carbolic. “How can you stand it?” I shouted over the noise, then thought of Stassya Sobietskaya.

“Stand what?” Nonna replied, efficiently changing the diaper of one of her screaming charges.

In the Infant Department, we were on a three-hour rotation. Change, feed, sleep. She approached them with all the tenderness of a worker on an assembly line. I began at the far end. The first one had awful diaper rash. “What do I do about these sores?”

She shrugged. “Clean him up, best you can. We used to have fish oil but somebody stole it.” To cook with, no doubt. “Keep going, we gotta feed ’em too. Then it starts again.”

It was a night of poor, sad diapers, nothing like Iskra’s solid, compact masses. These were watery, greenish, diarrheic—that reminded me all too vividly of my cholera patients at Pulkovo Observatory. I kept washing my hands in the hot water we left on the stove, washed them until they were raw, trying to sanitize between each infant’s diaper change, as Nonna clucked and shook her head. I was only midway through my babies when my milk let down. Now I had to stop and nurse Iskra—terrified I would infect her with whatever was plaguing the orphan babies. I thought I was going to lose my mind with that screaming. I gave Iskra a quick feed—her eyes widened in outrage when I pulled her off me. The look in her eyes was precisely the sorrow of a lover who suddenly finds her man becoming cold and efficient with her. She screamed when I put her back in her basket. “Forgive me,” I kept saying. I shut my ears and returned to the diapers.

“Take these down to the laundry.” Nonna nodded at the great pile of them in the wheeled cart. “And bring us up some more water.” She began filling bottles from a pot of milk on the stove—this precious milk, how far had it come? I only prayed she’d washed adequately.

After we had them all changed and fed, we sat on the windowsill for a smoke. I could hear people in front of the Mikhailovsky at the interval, talking in the frosty air. “How can you do this? How can you bear it?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “They’ve got food, they’ve got blankets. More than what some of them’s got out there, da? You’ll get used to it. It’s these next ones do it to me.” She nodded toward another door. “Go in there if you want to stab yourself in the heart.”

I didn’t want to stab myself in the heart, but I was unable not to see for myself. I rose and pushed open the door. In the dim light of the nurse’s kerosene lamp—toddlers, in little corrals of cribs that had been lashed together, one against the other, to keep them from rattling, I supposed. Most were asleep, but several stood and rhythmically rocked, staring at me with big glassy eyes, like so many piglets in pens, or lay listlessly, looking through the peeling bars. Two to a pen, they pulled each other’s hair and sucked their fists. Turning to each other for a scrap of comfort. These tiny children had no idea how horrifying they were. Accusing me in their innocence—Why have you put us here? Do something. We need you.

Their abandonment made them absolutely terrifying. I could so easily see myself looking out through their staring eyes. If our infants survived our care, mine and Nonna’s, they would only end up here, staring and banging the crib. And the silence was worse than the screaming. At least our babies knew enough to howl. These children had already given up. I couldn’t stay in here another moment. Please, God, don’t assign me to toddlers. As it was, I would dream about them, vast rooms of abandoned, tiny, sentient creatures in metal pens, like a stockyard.

Late in the night, a timid woman entered the Infant Department, a bundle in her arms. We were in the middle of the second cycle, up to our elbows in baby shit, but I washed my hands and came to her. The bundle was crying, but weakly. The woman was a worker, not young, wearing a tattered skirt, a wet, felted scarf. Her long, thin face was nearly blue, her hands long and bony. “I can’t feed him,” she said softly, holding the baby in its poor blanket. She didn’t weep, she didn’t have enough liquid left in her. A dried-out shell of a woman, speaking in a monotone. “He’s a good baby, but I’m fed out.” She was missing several teeth, her lips serrated with lines. I had never seen real despair before, despair like that. “I got two older kids,” she said quietly. “I need to think of them.”

“Don’t you get the milk ration?” I asked.

“I have to think of the others,” she said in that same monotone, as if it were her last instruction in the world, as she held out the shredded gray blanket that contained the baby. “I give Auntie the milk. She takes a third of my pay. I have to work. But it’s not enough.” I took the infant from her. It was about three weeks old. It clearly wasn’t going to make it, blue faced and thin. She just couldn’t bear to see it die. I put it in an empty crib and took the woman in my arms. She didn’t embrace me back, didn’t weep, just rested her head on my shoulder, weary, weary of living, weary of trying to keep things alive.

After a week in the Infant Department, not one but two dead babies later, including the one the woman brought in—they just didn’t wake up for their shift, swaddled small and inert, like small sacks of oats—I came to work to find my name moved, transferred again—this time, Kuriakina, Girls 6–9.

I wept with relief.

In a small room on the third floor, with six bunk beds, two of which were unoccupied, ten little girls gathered in ragged shifts and shaved heads. For the first time, I wondered why there were so few girls, when the halls were full of boys. Was it that they were better beggars, and didn’t feel the need to seek the shelter of the orphanage? Or was it that their parents struggled harder not to abandon them, feeling that they wouldn’t be able to scratch a living on the street, while their sons could be turned out-of-doors with better chances of survival? Maybe they ran off less. Or worse. Someone else might be finding them before we did.

“I’m Comrade Marina,” I said, pulling a stool up to their little stove. They pressed in around me, trying to peer into the sling where my daughter was playing with her fingers. “This is Iskra.”

“Can we see her?” asked a small girl, dried snot all over her face.

“She’s so pretty,” said a tall girl.

“She’s ready for bed,” I lied. “We’re just going to put her in her basket now.” But she wouldn’t cooperate, started to cry as soon as I put her down, made me pick her up again.

A girl clung to my skirt, dangerously close to my concealed gun, looking up at me with such adoring eyes it was terrifying. “Comrade Marina… will you stay with us now?”

“All night.”

“You smell good. Comrade Zoya’s mean. She hits.”

They were all over me, patting me, hanging on to me. It frightened me how ravenous for affection they were. I hated to be cold, hold them at arm’s length, but I had to. They wanted so much—to touch my hair, my dress, my breasts, my legs, sit on my lap, get under my skirt. I had to watch Iskra like a pawnbroker. They loved her, but it all had an edge of hysteria. They demanded to hold her, fighting among themselves for the privilege. I didn’t trust their enthusiasm. They were frenetic and full of sudden tempers. One minute it was giggles and kisses, the next a fury of hair pulling and weeping. Hugging my legs, burrowing into my clothing. They would make wonderful pickpockets. I couldn’t allow myself to be mobbed. Yet they were only small children, and their desire for closeness was genuine. They were so unused to experiencing affection from adults. If I didn’t get control of them, I would be eaten alive.

That first night, out of my depth, I fell back on the classic announcement of bedtime.

“It is not,” said the tall girl, with a swagger.

They were so dirty. Didn’t anyone even try to keep them halfway clean? “We’ll have a wash first.” I made it sound like I was giving in. “Get a partner and line up.”

“We don’t have to.” The tall girl was going to be trouble, with her dark eyes, her stubble of dark hair, chin tilted up.

“Only if you want a story,” I said.

“What kind of story?” I could see her wavering, sensing a ruse.

“You’ll see,” I said.

“Alyona, quit.” Another girl, sharp nosed, grabbed her and pulled her into line. “There, Comrade.”

And with Iskra in the sling, we paraded down to the washroom, the two oldest girls carrying the pot of boiling water from the stove between them. It was dangerous, but carrying it myself and the baby was more so, and them carrying her was out of the question. In the dank tiled room, I mixed our hot water with cold from the tap and, with a bar of harsh brown soap, washed their faces and hands, getting to know them as I handled them, washing necks and ears, elbows and arms. I even used the corner of my apron to clean their teeth with boiled water. I inspected their heads for lice, caressing, careful of scabs. I felt like an English nanny, like I should have been wearing an enormous starched apron and white cap.

I made up a silly song for the procedure. “Give meeeeeee, those grubby little hands…”

Such a difference from the Infant Department. Less heartbreaking, and yet, I had a great deal to learn. What to do about pinching, tattling, the furious tears, the incessant stealing from one another? It was hardly a Dickensian regime—Orphanage No. 6 was a progressive Soviet institution and forbade any kind of coercion or physical punishment, withholding of food or isolation. One had to be clever to earn compliance—though most of the matrons just threw up their hands and allowed anarchy to reign.

I relied on the girls’ instinctive desire to be tended, even if there was nothing I could do for their hunger. Who didn’t want to be cared for? To be recognized as human and worthy of tenderness? Unlike many of the women on the late shift who spent their time in the staff room, I stayed in the dormitory all night, writing as they slept, soothing if they woke, changing wet sheets, feeding the stove, sometimes taking a sobbing child on my lap and singing “Fais Dodo…” Most of all, they loved their stories. Then they would forget to slap and pinch each other, and I could make demands. They had to be washed and in their beds, tucked in, if they wanted me to tell them the tale. If someone was acting up, no story. Ah, the might of the collective.

They wanted to hear about Iskra’s father. I made up stories about him, fantastic enough that even six-year-old Olya, who barely spoke, could understand they were stories, and we could change them if we liked. They loved that power, that I could change whole lives any time I wanted to. I turned Kolya into a mountain man, a hunter and tamer of horses, who could ride his shaggy pony standing straight up on its broad back. How a white witch once stole Iskra away and took her to live in the far, far mountains, and my adventures in trying to get her back. They lay in their cots and sucked their thumbs, imagining it all.

Girls 6–9 was exhausting but in a different way from Infant Department. Anything could happen in a split second. I had to be on my toes. Their emotional outbursts could be downright dangerous. I caught sight of normally placid Matya about to throw a pot of boiling water at Anoushka because of some slight I could barely understand. Adoration of Iskra could easily flip into envious harm. The girls themselves didn’t know what they would do next. They were riding their own tigers at all times.

The season deepened. Autumn turned to frost. Now the windows coated over in their miraculous patterns, and my girls shivered, two to a bed, Olya and Alyona, Mashka, scabby Shushka. Their gaunt blue faces, their runny noses. I dragged my stool up among their bunks and recited the verses I composed in the night for them—working in their names, which they adored, and also those of my coworkers, which made them laugh in bubbling skeins. I gazed at them with the eyes of someone leaving. Iskra, awake in her sling, recited along with me in her private language, which I had yet to translate.

One night, Comrade Tanya of the pancake makeup lingered in the doorway. She usually abandoned her own post with Girls 9–12 to pursue some sort of personal activity like stealing the children’s milk or smoking cigarettes with her Communist friend down in the lobby. But now she just waited, arms crossed, a sour look on her face. She still hadn’t forgiven me for being hired before her illiterate friend. She believed her party membership instantly awarded her the status of commissar, and sneered at us and our lowly status as mere “citizens.”

“I don’t know why you bother with this,” she interrupted me, mid-stanza. “Lalala, the dancing deer and the prancing mice. You’re not doing them any favors. Softening ’em up, telling your stupid stories, tucking ’em in nighty night.”

The girls stared at her with loathing, knowing they were being robbed of their poem. “Shut up,” our bold Alyona said. “What do you know?”

“I know you kids’re gonna have to fight for what you get when you go to the detsky dom.” The permanent children’s homes, to which they would be transferred after Orphanage No. 6. “There ain’t no magic deer and golden fishes there. Better get used to it here, or you’re gonna take it all the worse when the other brats are beatin’ you up and eatin’ your food. Trust me, you’re doin’ them no favors, Miss Wash Your Hands, Nighty Night.”

The girls swiveled with their big eyes to me, frightened and wanting me to defend them, to tell them this wasn’t their future. What kind of monster would say something like this in front of children? Scaring them about the detskie doma—when they were already afraid. What was the point of it?

“Isn’t it better to be warm for a while before you have to go out in the cold again?” I countered. “Or would you just rather stand in the cold because it’d be worse to have to leave a warm shelter to go back outside?” Two could play this game. I let my gaze run over my anxious charges, feisty Alyona and her poor cropped head, little baby Olya, fingers in mouth, leaning on Matya’s shoulder. “I say, grab a little warmth when you can. That’s a skill too.”

Tanya came the rest of the way into the room, and when she spoke, she was speaking in earnest. “Look, Marina, I know you think you’re doin’ ’em all a favor with your hugs and pretties, but seriously, now. Seriously. It doesn’t help ’em. These ain’t gonna be just regular kids, they’re orphans and they’re gonna have to tough it out, and they got a long way to go.”

I ran my eyes over my pitiful, scabby charges, human beings so desperate to be loved. “But they are regular kids. How can you take this one little scrap of childhood away from them?” I knew I shouldn’t be getting into a debate with her in front of them, but she was the one who had called me out—I needed the children to hear the other side. That I didn’t agree with her, that her point was not the only one.

“I seen kids who come from your soft homes in here, haven’t I? We all have. They’re the ones we have to fish out of the canals. I’m tellin’ you, you got to let ’em take their lumps, straight out. Harden ’em up for what’s ahead.”

I was probably holding her too tight, but Iskra started to cry, and then Mashka did, and Olya. Comrade Tanya left, tail twitching, happy she’d put a wet blanket over our shred of contentment. I had to quiet them all down, which I did by telling a silly story about Comrade Tanya sitting outside her house in the snow, and her neighbors asking why she didn’t come in, and she said it was because she’d have to come out the next day anyway—she would be colder if she went inside.

Once I got them to sleep, I nursed Iskra, looking down into her uptilted eyes, and hummed “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” I took care not to nurse her in front of the girls, not out of modesty but respecting the intensity of their yearning. I couldn’t help thinking about what Comrade Tanya had said. I knew most of the women here thought as she did. But how hard did a child have to be to live in this terrible life? I considered my time with them as a little vaccination against the hardship ahead. It was their childhood itself I was trying to rescue. My dimmed lantern barely illuminated their little shaved heads covered with knitted caps, two to a pillow. Even if for a few minutes a day, I wanted to give them something sweet to remember, a story at bedtime, the sense that someone was watching over you as you slept and noticed your tears, your snotty nose, your shivering. Would it really make their lives in the detsky dom harder when it was gone, or would it give them a little fire to carry inside them, to warm themselves in the long cold nights?

I tried to imagine the ache of having been well treated, and then thrown to the wolves. What if Tanya was right? Maybe living with wolves from the start would be better. Perhaps it was my bourgeois upbringing, wanting to give them a bit of that sweetness without considering its ramification. Was it harder having a childhood snatched from you, or never having one at all? I wanted them to have something to remember, Olya, Anoushka, little Mashka, during the years of nights to come, at least one poem they might recite to themselves under the snow.

Two days after my confrontation with Comrade Tanya, I was transferred to Boys 9–12, Room III.

Someone was making a point.

20 Chieftains and Untouchables

I now worked with Comrade Nadezhda of the beauty mark, in a big dormitory formed by breaking through a wall in a hotel suite, warmed by stoves at both ends. My new charges, Boys 9–12, needed no organizing; they’d already created their own organization, their own secretive culture, even their own lingo, which they used in front of adults—though to be sure, languages were my strong suit. Theirs was the law of the horde, and no mercy was in evidence, anywhere. I thought I understood about orphans from the little girls, but that had been a mere outpost of the country I’d entered. Now I’d arrived in its central districts. The boys had chieftains and chargés d’affaires, poets and traders, whipping boys and untouchables. Their brutal mistreatment of one another was the law, rarely contradicted by child or adult.

The first night, I caught Makar, a slight but furious boy, systematically kicking a bigger but meek one they called Cross-Eyes, in the clear space between the bunks. The bigger boy lay on the floor protecting his head cradled in his arms, gasping with each blow.

“Stop that!” I yanked Makar off by his collar.

He glowered at me with all the hatred his ten-year-old soul could muster, but said nothing.

“What’s the problem?”

“None of your business is what,” he said boldly.

I helped Cross-Eyes up. He bent to the side he’d been kicked on, wiped his eyes and his snotty nose on his sleeve. “Are you all right? What was going on here?”

He sniffled and shrugged. “We was just playing.” I examined the other boys who’d been watching it all, but not one spoke up for the victim, expressions so blank you could post a handbill. So. Nothing left to be done.

A minute later, a solemn boy with big dark eyes, Maxim, leaned over to examine Iskra in her basket. “He owes him money, see?” he said under his breath. “And can’t pay. So Cross-Eyes gives Makar ten kicks.” Then he walked away, as if he’d said nothing. Gives him ten kicks. In lieu of payment, the opportunity to kick him ten times. But payment for what? They had nothing.

I asked Nadezhda about it, after the boys were asleep.

“Best to turn a blind eye,” she said, turning a page of her newspaper. “They’ll do it their way in the end, believe me. Why work yourself up?” Natural self-government. It was enough to make Kropotkin renounce anarchism.

I soon learned that the central concern of Room III was gambling, and payment was extracted in all sorts of ways. You had to let them do it too. There was nothing else they cared about, and they had no toys or other games. They made their cards from pieces of cardboard, and woe to the boy caught cheating. When they lived on the streets, they had money, but in here, beatings were the rate of exchange. Or clothes. Sometimes a child suddenly had no shoes. Hair snatching was the most disgusting of their trade items—there were always a few boys who looked like they had the mange. It was all about cheating and debts.

And how they stole from one another! No child ever possessed anything of his own. There was one boy, Sosha, a sad-eyed blond who barely spoke and had no friends. He seemed impossibly lonely. I sewed him a little horse made of rags and brought it one night, gave it to him. He called it Dima and seized on it like a box of sweets, ran off to a corner to play. But in a few minutes he brought it back to me, pressed it into my apron pocket.

“No, Sosha, it’s for you.” I tried to give the little horse back to the boy, but he refused to take it.

“You keep him.” He gazed down at the little horse, and a tear rolled down his face. “They’ll take him away from me.” How little it took to make them happy, but how vulnerable that little was. He would rather not have the horse and have him, than have him and lose him.

The boys were wild and wary. Like the girls, they wanted to be near me, but unlike the girls, they didn’t dare touch me. It was as if I were a fire, they craved the closeness, but not the burn. I could understand that—people hated the besprizorniki, the parentless waifs. They pricked at adult consciences, and people didn’t respond well to guilt. The shame people felt to see these ragged urchins—skin blue in flashes under their terrible rags—was quickly translated into an armoring anger, as if it were the children’s own fault they were abandoned. Bad blood, people said, chasing them off as if they were rats. Assumed they were all thieves, which in truth, some were, but not all. They spit at them in the street, struck them with impunity. No wonder the children feared adults. They all hated going to school, which, in the progressive wisdom of the Commissariat, they attended with the local district children, where they were treated as if being an orphan were a bacillus.

It still surprised me how many of my charges were interested in Iskra, how tender they were to her, that a young boy would want to hold a baby, and although I was afraid of disease, I would allow it as a special privilege—after a boy had washed his hands and scrubbed the nails so that the blue-white of his skin would break your heart—I would let him have her basket on his bed, let him hold her hand and touch her soft cheek. “I love you,” I heard more than one of them whisper in her ear.

And they, too, liked their stories and verses. I made up little chastushki couplets to make them laugh while I washed their hands and faces and scrubbed their teeth, inspected for lice. They were coming to trust me, and I was beginning to understand their organization—who had to be left alone, who could be cajoled, who longed for attention, and who had to be approached like a wild animal, never looked at straight on. But the routine was a great leveler, and all but the most rebellious were happy to submit to it.

I began to tell them the story of the orphan Vanka Manka.

“He lived in a city under the sun and the stars,” I chanted as I walked between the rows of their beds, Iskra on my shoulder. “It was called Pashapashol, and it grew up rich and beautiful on the banks of a wide river that said its name all day long—Pashapashol, Pashapashol. The city looked into the mirror of its waters, smiling at its own beauty and goodness.

“The city was built on forty-eight islands, each island perched on a pillar of ice, and the ice itself was as clear as glass. Inside the pillars, bright fish lay suspended, orange and blue and red. And there lived the orphan Vanka Manka, and his sister, Snezhana, the snow child, whose freshness the sorcerer Shinshen craved for his own. One day, he bid his army of shadows to steal her away.”

I made it good and scary, night after night, with plenty of plunder and sword fights and untold riches, which they loved hearing me describe in detail, amid many interruptions.

One night I had Vanka Manka up on the rooftops, slipping between the chimney pots, looking for his stolen sister. Even Comrade Nadezhda was awake, listening, when the door to the Room III dormitory opened. In walked a big, wide, terrifying woman, solid, with a chin like an ironing board, and an unsmiling face. She looked like a Roman Caesar, Julius or Augustus. Matron. I could feel the same force emanating from this formidable woman as from the heavy writing that made my assignment on the board, that had seen fit to move me from Infant Department to Girls 6–9 and now to Room III. I’d been waving my hands in an extravagant gesture, describing Vanka Manka and the magical Book of Signs, when she’d come in. Was I about to be fired? Her face betrayed nothing but I sensed a heaviness that reeked disapproval. Was it Iskra, some other crime? Or—just perhaps—was Matron’s presence here purely a random occurrence? Then, in shuffled a group of serious-looking men and women in dark clothing who arrayed themselves inside the doorway.

Matron introduced Comrade Nadezhda and me to the group, but not them to us.

“You bring your baby with you?” a tiny woman asked in a ridiculously high voice straight from the Komedii theater.

“Yes, Comrade. I have no other place to leave her.”

“You can still perform your duties with one hand?” asked Matron.

“Yes, Matron. I have a basket for her when I need both hands.”

“Actually, I think it’s good,” said one of the men, a stooped one with a sensitive face. “It could be a humanizing influence. A bit of family atmosphere.” He obviously hadn’t heard the policy on the hardening of orphans.

“There should be a crèche,” said another woman comrade, young, brash. “When you think of it.”

“Do the children seem to have enough to eat?” an older, motherly woman asked me directly.

Perhaps this was an inspection of the orphanage, and not of me at all. I glanced at Matron for a clue as to how she wanted me to respond, but she gave no indication of preference. Of course there wasn’t enough to eat. What was I supposed to say? I knew there was tremendous pilferage by the staff—understandable, as nobody had food—but the children were always the losers. If I told them, though, my job would likely be over. But maybe they could do something. “No,” I said. “They could use more milk, and meat if you can find it.”

Matron blinked, once, slowly, and they all left. Was I in trouble? Would I arrive tomorrow night to discover my new assignment, Toddlers? Or, God help me, Girls 13–16? Or no assignment at all? I sat down by the stove, Iskra in my lap.

“Hey, what about Vanka Manka?” the room’s chieftain, Nikita, said from his choice bottom bunk near the stove, his arms under his head like a Mongol potentate. “He was on the rooftop.”

They were still waiting. The interruption of the adults meant nothing to them. The artist in me was pleased. It was an achievement indeed if you were able to capture the boys’ attention—to create a world in their heads so that even a thug like Nikita wanted to hear more.

“So Vanka Manka gazed through the window,” I began, walking Iskra as she grabbed at my mouth. “And there, on the table, was the Book of Signs, with its spine of silver and hasp of pearl, the magic symbols embedded in its cover. Here was the Eye of Horus, which could see across the world, and the Mandrake Root, that could change you into a tree or a hawk. The most wondrous book in the world.”

“How much is it worth?” asked Makar, the cardsharp.

I could see my favorite boy, Maxim, in the depths of his upper bunk, the light shining in his dark, dreaming eyes.

“Half a million,” I said. “The last time it was at auction, in the reign of Ivan the Terrible.” They didn’t know a thing about history, but anyone called Grozny must be someone special.

“So, is he going in?” Their chieftain closed the door on financial speculation.

“It was very slippery up there, and Vanka Manka felt the wing of a raven brush his cheek, and suddenly he started to fall.” I wondered how many of these boys had run along a rooftop themselves, broken in through a window, like those hoodlums that long-ago night on the Strelka. “And as he fell, he smelled the sickening sweet scent of hyacinths.”

They shuddered and their eyes grew brighter. Hyacinths, they knew, were Shinshen’s favorite flower. The Black Palace was surrounded by them, huge fields, all of the people he had bewitched and turned to flowers. If you walked through it, you could hear their sighs, their whispers, Alas, alas.

“And there he was—Shinshen.” Seven feet tall in his stockings, and his mad blue eyes could see in the dark, and his hair was made of spiderweb. “He had come to read the Book of Signs, and heard the clatter, but when he looked up, the boy was gone, already landing in a lilac bush in the courtyard below.”

I could see the younger boys fighting sleep as if it were a bear as they struggled to hear more of the story. It was time to say good night. They groaned, called me unfair, but I promised them I would tell them more tomorrow. After that, I went around and checked every boy, tugging up a thin blanket, patting a shaved head. I could give them very little but that small contact. I hoped it would help. Who didn’t need a human touch? It was true of babies, and of boys who thought they were beyond all tenderness. And of me as well, though that would have to wait until I found Kolya again.

I pulled Maxim’s blanket up around his neck. I wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but he was a special boy, so unlike the others, solemn and tender and observant. His eyes shone in the light of the kerosene lamp, huge and full of sorrow. “You know, there is someone like that,” he whispered.

“Like who?” I asked.

“Shinshen. He’s here, in Petrograd.” His lips were chapped. Maybe he was a little feverish. I felt his forehead. He seemed hot and clammy. “Kids work for him. He cuts their throats if they do anything wrong. The cops take their bodies away and nobody ever sees it.”

I stroked his cheek as if soothing him, but really, I’d have preferred to press it over his mouth. I glanced over at Iskra in her basket by the stove, playing with her hands. I could see them dancing above the lip. “Sounds like the kind of thing kids make up to scare each other with.”

He gazed at me with his waxy skin and the shiny darkness of his eyes in the low light. “But it’s real. I know kids who’ve seen them.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him. “But you’re safe here, with us, da?”

He sighed. His sad smile, the skeptical look in his eyes, told me that at ten years old he already knew better. Even after I finished checking on the rest of the boys, I could feel him watching, begging me to believe him. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t have to be convinced. I couldn’t tell him, Hush. Speak the devil’s name, and he’s sure to appear.

21 The Devil’s Name

Meanwhile, General Yudenich burst out from his position behind Lake Peipus, on the border between Estonia and Russia. Within the week, he had taken Luga, one hundred miles away. He led German Freikorps troops, the very ones the German leftists had described on the train, the ones that had crushed the Munich Soviet. We’d beaten the Germans back last winter, and here they were again, under the Whites. But this year was different—in the depopulated city, people were listless, depressed, there was no fervor of resistance as there had been against the Germans. No one flooded out to build trenches, no rallies were called, no speeches. Where was the government, where was Trotsky to inspire us? Rykov, Zinoviev?

Only in the Shpalernaya apartment did excitement bubble like a forest spring. The aristocrats reacted as if they’d received a gilt-edged invitation to the grand duke’s ball, delivered by footmen in livery. Oh, happy days! Oh, the talk of what they would do when the general arrived, the revenge they might take upon the Bolsheviks. While in the bread queues, the women stood silent, backs bent in defeat. They didn’t even bother exchanging rumors. “Who’s going to want us?” said one old man, attempting to joke. “Whoever gets us has to feed us. Lenin’s probably begging them right now, Nikolai Nikolaevich, please, Petrograd’s so beautiful this time of year.”

I held Iskra closer. I could have stayed in Izhevsk. Or done as their factory committee had requested and toured the revolutionary cities talking about the Red October. But no, like a dove, I was driven to return here. I couldn’t resist seeking my native soil, Petersburg with its mirrors and passages, the smell of water and the cries of gulls. The trees knew me here. My footfalls echoed the city’s eternal name.

“We should be preparing, not sitting on our hands,” I said in the orphanage canteen before my shift, eating with the other caretakers. In the old tearoom the electric lights shone harshly on the women’s faces, each suffused with its own aura of expectation or dread. I let Iskra taste a little of the sweetened tea off my forefinger. “Why aren’t they mobilizing us? What’s wrong with the Petrograd Soviet? Are they so depressed that the capital moved?”

“They’re going to throw us to the dogs,” said Alla Denisovna, studying the glowing tip of her cigarette.

I would go to the district soviet and sign up for the defense myself if it weren’t for Iskra. But the weight of her, the fact of her here in my lap, happy to be with the women, free from her carrying cloth, reminded me that if anything happened to me, it would be second floor, in the back for my little redheaded jewel. I wouldn’t risk that, not for anything. Ironic—people thought mothers were the bearers of all virtue, when mothers were the most selfish, the most venal people on earth. Naturally bourgeois. We didn’t care what happened to anyone but our own flesh and blood. Children are everyone’s responsibility, in theory. But in practice? As a category, mothers were endemically counterrevolutionary. My love was reserved for one little baby, a candle barely flickering. And yet, we could not divorce our future from the future of the country. What of the revolution? What of the city? What of this hell of abandoned children, guarding their food from one another at their benches under the absurd, bucolic-painted ceiling of the Europa Tea Room. Their accumulated sorrows should weigh so much it should sink this city back into the Finnish mud.

Comrade Nadezhda and I put the boys to bed. At least half of them were missing. This was happening regularly, now that Yudenich had begun his march. They were too restless, preferring to be out prowling, listening to rumors, poking around corners. My story—Snezhana’s imprisonment in the magical palace of Shinshen—evidently paled in comparison to the story unfolding outside the orphanage walls. The boys wanted to talk about nothing but Yudenich, and why our Red troops kept falling back, and what would happen if the Whites took Petrograd. “Will they kill us?” asked Grisha, an outcast who ate his boogers if not closely watched. “Nikita says they’ll throw us out the windows.”

Stolid Nadezhda cleaned the corner of her lips with a fingernail, gazing at her pretty mouth in a little mirror. “Nobody’s going to kill besprizorniki. Who would bother?”

“If they gave us guns, we’d be the best guerrillas,” said Ilyusha, as I snugged the blanket around him. “We’re everywhere.”

“Comrade Tanya’s a Communist,” said Cross-Eyes. “She’s the one better watch out. They’ll be stringing ’em up.”

“One good thing about being orphans,” said Nazar from an upper bunk, “is that you can’t be an orphan twice.”

The rest trickled back after lights out in twos and threes, laying their coats on their blankets, bringing their boots to bed. I’d tried to discourage that practice but Maxim explained that in the detsky dom the staff took the orphans’ shoes away, so if they ran away they’d have to do it barefoot, even in the snow. It made me recall Comrade Tanya’s advice.

“I heard the soldiers talking,” said Makar, the cardsharp, sitting down on his bunk. Boys stirred around him. “They said this is the end. The Whites gonna take Petrograd by the end of the week and you might as well kiss your little asses goodbye.”

Squatting by the stove, warming his hands like a grown man, Nikita was not to be topped. “I have a friend who knows this guy in the Cheka. And he told my friend they’re gonna blow up the power plant and sink all the ships at Kronstadt so Yudenich doesn’t get ’em.”

Normally I’d think he was lying, but it sounded about right. A twelve-year-old wouldn’t think about blowing up the city’s power plant, let alone sinking the fleet. But no electricity? Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more grim. With a mixture of dread and admiration, I watched the late arrivals getting into bed with their dirty boots tucked under their arms. Such swagger, all that brave talk, at ten, twelve years old. What did life mean to them? Ilyusha was right, Lenin should arm them. They wouldn’t mind dying in a hail of clean, hot gunfire. There was manhood in that.

Iskra was restless, fretful. The temper of the city had infected her as well. I paced the floor, trying to soothe her and reassuring the boys as well as I could. “They won’t let them take Petrograd,” I said. “The Germans couldn’t do it last year, and these ones won’t either.” Big talk from a girl who couldn’t even quiet her baby. “We’ll fight them on Nevsky if we have to. You’ll see.”

The long shadows from the lamp licked the bunks, the bare floors, some of the smaller boys two to a bunk, the flotsam of revolution. And this was just a tiny slice of the millions of children set adrift in this starving, disease-riddled, army-cursed Russia of October 1919. The flame and its shadows jiddered across the silent rows of beds, each boy thinking his own gloomy or heroic thoughts.

Maxim’s bunk lay conspicuously empty. I was worried. It was unlike him to stay out wandering after everyone else had come in. I paced with Iskra on my shoulder, calming her, hoping to get her to fall asleep, sat for a while sewing rips in the boys’ laundry by lantern light until her fretfulness had me on my feet again. When he finally appeared after midnight, I wanted to embrace him and scold him all at once, but he marched up to me, and his face stopped the words in my mouth. It was white, as if carved in snow. “They found one, Comrade Marina. Come on.” Plucking my sleeve, his teeth audibly chattering. “Come see for yourself.”

“See what?” I said, resisting his urgency.

He sneezed, wiped his nose on his frozen hand. “I’ll show you. Hurry.” Pulling at me. “Before they get rid of him.”

“Who?” Oh God, oh Christ. “I can’t, I’m on duty. And what about Iskra…”

He glared at me. He could see my cowardice as plainly as if it were a yellow-dyed sheet. “Leave her with Hopeless.” Nadezhda, it meant hope. “It’s just across the street.” He was begging me to join him in his nightmares.

I saw no way to avoid it. I was the one who had called the devil out of the darkness with my stories. Maxim trusted me. I couldn’t pretend his fears were just the product of an overactive imagination, couldn’t leave him alone with his truth. I owed him this. So I snugged Iskra into her basket, ignoring her squalls, and planted her next to Comrade Nadezhda, who was reading a pamphlet, curling a lock of hair around her finger. “I’ll be right back.”

“Then I get a break. Fair’s fair.”

I threw on my sheepskin and hat and shawl, followed Maxim down through the dimly lit lobby, past the blind eye of the desk comrade and out into the night, my hand through the pocket in my sheepskin, touching the gun that I always brought with me, though I knew it was dangerous. If the boys ever found it, Nikita or Makar, someone was sure to get shot, and there would be one more death on my head. But I walked too often through these dark streets, home to Shpalernaya up by the Tauride Palace.

Nevsky lay wrapped in an ice fog. Scarf across my nose and mouth, my eyes in slits, I crossed the wide boulevard, pulled along by my determined charge. Shadows grew in the thin illumination of widely spaced streetlights. The statue of the great Catherine rose like a bell before the ghost of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater, and a cluster of dark figures huddled in the faint light of a streetlamp. Maxim shoved his way to the front, dragging me along. I clutched the gun. All around us ranged prostitutes and drunks and the elbow-high faces of the besprizorniki, frozen in postures of morbid curiosity as they gazed down at a form slumped against the statue’s base.

Someone lit a match, and in the flickering moment I saw the thing they were staring at. A small boy lolled against the base of the statue, legs spread like a discarded doll’s, legs ending in bare blue feet. But that was not what they were looking at. At the end of each arm, where hands should have been, a white patch of bone. A cigarette was lit, the flame died.

“What happened?” I asked, or thought I asked, though I could not be sure.

A boy took a drag on his chinar—as the kids called their foul butts collected off the streets and out of gutters—and replied out of the side of his mouth. “The Archangel.”

I was falling backward into the black void of a dream that I’d kept at bay for so long. The wolf, the colonnade… the rising waters. The hyacinths. He was here. Run, run, but there was no place to run. I was glad the light had gone out. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see my face, my terror. “Anybody know him?”

“It’s Eel. One of his crew,” said the smoker, glancing nervously toward Nevsky, then up in the other direction, toward Znamenskaya Square.

“Probably stole somethin’,” the boys ventured, shivering. “Maybe he didn’t want to do a job.” “Or ratted on him.” “Stupid runt.” “It’s a sign.” “He wants us to know.”

What was Arkady doing with the besprizorniki? Using them—as foot soldiers? As burglars? As anything he wanted. In a sober light, you had to admit, it made perfect sense. They were everywhere, and no one was protecting them. They could easily be swept into criminal life. They lived halfway in the world of myth already, and they had less morality than the most hardened criminal. “Let’s go,” I told Maxim. If Arkady was here, he would be excited to see this crowd trembling with fear and in awe of his audacity, leaving that child right out on Nevsky Prospect. I knew the man. Perhaps even now he stood among the pillars on the Alexandrinsky porch watching us, smiling that awful ghoul’s smile. I made sure my head was completely covered, the scarf leaving my face in shadow as I took Maxim away, his cold, small hand in mine, tight, as together we returned to the orphanage.

“What will they do with him?” he whispered.

He meant the orphan, what would they do with his body. “Bury him.”

He put his arm around my waist, leaned into me as if he could draw some of my warmth. “I told you so, didn’t I? I wasn’t making it up.”

I gave him a squeeze. This sweet, anxious, intelligent boy—how could I put a barrier between him and this horror? “We’ll be all right. Just stay away from those kids, okay? Don’t get mixed up in this.”

I could feel him out there. The wolf who was always hungry. I was afraid to even think of him. As I walked home with Iskra through the dark of early morning streets, I could feel him, circling out in the trees, slinking along doorways, watching. But how to stop thinking, how to keep him from my door? I could not stop seeing the way the dead boy had been leaned up against Catherine’s skirts, as if he’d sought refuge there, but too far below the notice of Mother Russia to be protected. I’d been so rattled when I returned that Nadezhda had offered me a sip of samogon from a perfume bottle in her purse. But I wouldn’t start drinking. I couldn’t afford that luxury. When I saw Arkady’s dead body, that’s when I would get good and drunk. I would sit on his grave and drink to his health. In the meantime, I would keep watch. I would rub evergreens along the windowsills.

In the queue the next morning, I took my place with the others, the sleeping Iskra warm and smelling faintly of gingerbread under my sheepskin. “Did you hear, they found a dead boy last night,” I said to the woman ahead of me. “Near the Catherine statue. An orphan boy.”

She shrugged. As if it had nothing to do with her. As if her own children weren’t one disaster away.

I wanted to upset her. I wanted to upset someone. “He had no hands,” I said. “They’d cut off his hands.”

She closed her face like a door. “Well, I didn’t do it.” And turned away.

Day had broken a dull, heavy gray by the time I arrived home. The worn cards lay on the table in the parlor, the air warm and smelling of old people. They would sleep for another few hours. I rescued my pail from our little room and drained the samovar, changed Iskra, lingering over her little legs. Her perfect hands made me weep. Her rubbery body, slight—the milky skin that summer would cover with freckles like my own. O blessed Mother, keep and protect her. Why did we have to live in such a world? I washed her laundry, nursed her, then fell into a black sleep curled around her in our narrow bed.

I was back at the Europa, larger, honeycombed with stairways and halls, passages I’d never seen, corridors and small doors within doors. I stumbled into a room that was Gruzinskaya’s parlor. I hadn’t realized the two were connected. But instead of the old nobles playing whist, a group of men had assembled to play American poker. And it was the conspirators from the dacha in the woods, the last time I’d seen the Archangel, the last time I’d seen Father, when he’d sent me to my death. Here was Karlinsky, and the spy Konstantin. Father wasn’t there, but his Englishman was… and Kolya! He’d been there all along. “One more hand,” he said. But he had no hands.

The sight of those stumps wouldn’t leave me. It took the pleasure out of playing “Magpie, magpie” with my baby, touching each of her tiny fingers, knowing how easily there could be none. Everywhere I saw dead blue eyes and hair of spiderweb, and his child army, an army of shadows. I choked on the suffocating helplessness of it all, the resurfacing of Arkady, coupled with the relentless approach of Yudenich and his Freikorps. I was mired, and could do nothing but sink deeper into the horror.

News of the murder spread through the dormitories of the orphanage like a bloodstain. The lie was given to the orphans’ swaggering and tough talk by their shouts in the night, tears and wet beds. I ended the Shinshen story—Vanka Manka found the egg of Shinshen’s soul inside the chest and cracked it open, exposing its rotten contents to the sun and killing the sorcerer once and for all. Quickly I moved to what I could remember of Treasure Island, Stevenson’s pirates and stowaways. These boys in their rough bunks, the dim light of the lanterns, became the crew of a great ship creaking its way through the night, each alone on his own voyage, together only for a time. Even Maxim would leave eventually. There was no way I could keep him with me, keep him safe. I just hoped it wouldn’t be soon.

Our limited time made the small triumphs more poignant. One evening in the canteen, after they’d devoured their meager dinner of fish soup and coarse bread, Maxim came to my chair and thrust a shabby notebook into my hands. “I wrote a poem. In school.” I could see him struggling not to smile. The other boys were watching our interaction, so I could not betray any favoritism or it would go the worse for him. But this was the first time I’d heard any of ours mention school with anything other than loathing. The older ones mostly skipped that dreaded institution in favor of the far more useful lessons of the street, while the younger ones feigned illness. Maxim opened the tattered book to a scrawl of pencil on the cheap newsprint page.

“Teacher said it wasn’t bad.” He shrugged, examining the torn top of his huge old boot, twelve sizes too big for him, he must have stolen them off a drunk. Such hope, such pride in his big, sensitive eyes. Wanting my praise and terrified of it, like a mother protecting her baby from the Evil Eye. Like Sosha, not wanting to lose his little horse. “I can sing it too. Want to hear?” He sang the poem in a minor key, a sweet, true voice.

And I could feel the tentacles of his love reaching through the shattered plates of my armor, searching out my heart.

Yudenich took Iamburg, less than eighty miles away. You could practically hear their boots on the road. The Petrograd Party seized the moment to announce a “Party Week”—special offer to the citizens of Petrograd to join the Bolshevik Party in this time of greatest danger. Comrade Tanya showed us the announcement in Pravda. “No questions asked!” she said. She was working on me and Comrade Nadezhda. “You wouldn’t need anyone to recommend you or even to study. It’s perfect for you burzhui, a time to prove your solidarity. There’ll never be a moment like this again. You’ll be sitting pretty, better rations, get the housing you want…”

Anyone joining now would certainly be proven in solidarity, that was a fact. But the offer also underscored the party’s desperation.

Walking home after my shift in the morning darkness, my bread under my arm, I kept my eyes down, my head and my baby wrapped in the disguise of a heavy scarf, and considered the offer to join the party. It would certainly make life easier for Iskra if I became eligible for other work… But these musings didn’t last long. I was too busy watching besprizorniki slinking along the house entryways, disappearing into dark arches like feral cats. Shinshen’s army of shadows. It was only when I was finally inside the building on Shpalernaya, climbing its toothless stairs, that I felt released from the weight of that ghostly presence, free to consider a warm wash and bed. I hitched Iskra over my shoulder and fished out my key, turned it in the lock.

But something was wrong. The key, rather than opening the door, dropped the lock into place.

It was unlike them—they always fully secured the door, even when the entire Assembly of Nobility was present.

I dropped the key into my pocket, switched Iskra to the other side—away from the pistol—and turned the knob. The door swung open freely. Something was terribly wrong. The firewood was piled high in the doorway as always. The flat was silent, as it always was in the early morning. The samovar stood by on the sideboard—cold to my touch. Discarded hands of whist lay on the green baize. The hair quivered on my neck.

I moved down the main hall, the pistol in my hand concealed in my coat. All the doors stood open. They were gone—the white mouse, old Naryshkin, the Golovins, the Sobietskys, the young ladies. I wandered through the rooms, trying to piece a picture together. The Sobietskys’ bedroom had been evacuated in a hurry, books scattered, the wardrobe open, the big manuscript, Count Sobietsky’s all-encompassing memoir, gone. Their messy dressing table, powder strewn. Signs of a struggle, or haste? Old Naryshkin’s room, as small as my own, neat and dignified, like a retired sea captain’s. The Golovins’, fussy with bibelots, a squeaky brass bed. I’d never entered any of these rooms. Here was the young ladies’ boudoir, the flocked wallpaper, the odd wooden beds of differing heights, their mismatched quilts piled high. The icon presided in the red corner, a Vladimirskaya. Forgotten in a hasty departure? Or was it arrest? By Stassya’s bed stood a framed pencil drawing of her in profile, no doubt done by some young admirer.

The likely possibility—the Cheka decided at last to end the rule of the nobility on Shpalernaya Street. Perhaps they’d vowed to do a little housecleaning before Yudenich arrived. Matvei on the Red October said that whenever an occupying army was forced to retreat, that’s when you’d see massacres. That’s when pogroms would come, or in our case, Red Terror. Did that mean the Bolsheviks were sure Yudenich was going to win? Were they getting ready to blow up the power plant and sink the ships at Kronstadt? I picked up Stassya Sobietskaya’s navy-blue hat with the soft plume and put it on my own head. Very nice, my red hair and the blue… Would she have left it behind? If it was a Cheka raid, they’d be back to clean out the inventory. I had no use for such a hat, and put it back.

Perhaps the families had fled. Maybe Kolya had come back and told them, Pack up, it’s your last chance, don’t take anything. Perhaps they were joining Yudenich, taking flight behind White lines, heading for Estonia, the best chance for escape. No matter how cold the Sobietskys had been to me, I hoped they weren’t sitting right now in a Cheka cell, waiting for their fate to descend. Gruzinskaya had taken me in, after all, which was more than Mina Katzeva had done. And old Naryshkin, ever polite, a truly noble man. I wouldn’t want to see him in that bloody cellar, or struck by the butt of a Red rifle.

If it had not been for Orphanage No. 6, I would have been here when the Cheka arrived. I might have been swept in with the pack, though I was registered independently with the domkom. I held my fingers hard on my temples, trying to suppress the panic.

I had no reason to stay in my cubbyhole while we waited for Yudenich. I chose to occupy the princess’s room with its needlepoint hangings and enormous Nicholas I wardrobe. When the house was collectivized—as it certainly would be—one could live quite comfortably inside her yawning armoire. I changed Iskra and washed her diaper in cold water, too tired to boil any. I stoked Elizaveta Vladimirovna’s bourgeoika and lay down with Iskra in the middle of the aristocratic bed that smelled of powdered wigs and quadrilles and medicinal drops. I wondered how many generations back you could go before you found a woman who had nursed a child here. We curled up in the dusty bedding like rats in a drawer under the gigantic eiderdown, and fell down the rabbit hole of a dreamless sleep.

22 A Night Journey

Now the orphanage was my sanctuary from the dark chaos of the city, while I feared returning to the empty flat, dreaded the echoing walk home in the stone prison of the streets. The flat seemed to accuse me when I entered. How did you avoid their fate? Guilty, I returned to my servant’s room. Just as well in case we had a return visit from the Cheka—this was the room to which I was registered with the domkom. And who was I? A stray cat, kitten at my side, shrinking at each noise, flinching at shadows.

The revolution was on the run. There was the sense of life on the edge of oblivion. I paced the boys’ dormitory between the double file of bunks, walking Iskra, jiggling her too energetically, and she bawled, upset by my stiffening hands. There was no soothing her. But I was grateful even for my thieving coworkers, for the boys and their excitement at the coming attack. I appreciated their information, what they could glean from the streets. True or not, they knew more than any adult around here, more than the newspapers, that was for sure.

Maxim’s bed was empty. I didn’t like it when he went out after supper. Nadezhda teased me about my little boyfriend, but he worried me. He should have been back by now, most likely with some bit of grotesque news. I wished he would stay inside, wrap himself in the thin blanket of my comfort, but he needed to hear the worst, set it at my feet like a spaniel I couldn’t keep home. The Archangel was selling marafet, a word I didn’t know.

Nikita had sniffed the back of his hand. “Kalinka,” he said. Snowball flower.

“They sell it to the soldiers,” Maxim explained, “so they don’t feel afraid.”

“The Cheka’s all on it,” Nikita added. He didn’t like being topped by the younger boy. “Makes it easy for them, when they pull your teeth out. They don’t care about anything. Where have you been, Grandma? Tahiti?” Teasing me with my Treasure Island.

How casually they took it, that the people who had power over our lives were insensate to suffering.

“I’ve taken it. A lot of us do,” said a new boy, Kostya, from a top bunk. He’d been wary of the orphanage’s matrons in our aprons and white kerchiefs but now saw others competing to impress me. “On the street, you get cold, and hungry. But you get some marafet, you don’t care.”

I wondered how many of my boys had used it. I’d read about the child addicts in those horrible files behind the amber desk. There were thousands of them. They had their own detsky dom. Marafet was cocaine. Stolen from the army, from the field hospitals of the war.

“The Archangel sells it—he sells girls too,” said Nikita. “Not for the night but outright, like a rug.”

“Let’s not talk about this before bed,” I kept telling them. “Try to get some sleep now.”

But tonight Maxim hadn’t returned. Nobody’d seen him. The baby finally fell asleep on my shoulder as I paced the quiet hall from stove to stove, listening to the boys gamble and talk. I could smell chinar. The last thing we needed was a fire in here. Then a girl I knew only by sight, a skinny one with a gap in her teeth, stuck her head around the doorway. She saw Nadezhda, then me. She waved me out into the hall, finger to her lips. I gently lowered Iskra into her basket and carried it over to Hopeless. “Back in a moment.” She nodded, not even looking up from the battered book she was reading.

In the dim corridor, the girl was dancing from foot to foot with terror, with panic. She clutched my hands. “It’s Maxim, he’s downstairs, you’ve got to come!” She flapped her hands with urgency, as if she were drying them.

“What is it? Is he all right?” But she was already running, and I flew after her, down the stairs to the gloomy lobby, the usual loitering boys, veered toward the porte cochere, and there he was, standing with a boy I didn’t know, not one of ours. Something was wrong with him. As I neared the entrance I saw he’d been beaten, a black eye, a split lip. He was terrified, his eyes white all the way around like a frightened horse’s. “What’s happened?” I said as I ran toward him.

Too late. They were all over me. Besprizorniki, six, eight of them. I screamed but nobody moved to help, not the dumbfounded Bolshevik behind the front desk, or the oldest boys observing quite coldly, watching these strange children pull me outside by my hair, my arms, dragging me out into the night. Maxim was the only one trying to stop them. He went wild, sobbing, screaming, jumping onto my assailants’ backs, trying to pry them away as I grabbed the doorjamb and clung to it. A big redheaded girl kicked my hands away. Then I was moving, out to Mikhailovskaya Street, where a running car waited. A Benz Söhne with a surrey top, another redheaded girl at the wheel.

Seeing that car, I fought like a cat, trying to reach the gun at my thigh, but there were too many of them. I was Gulliver in Lilliput. The first girl worked a rough burlap bag over my head and down around my arms, wrapping it with rope. If only I could get my arms free, I didn’t care if they were just little children, I’d kill them all. I kicked someone hard as they shoved me into the Benz. They snatched my boots off, tied my legs.

Now we were driving. The girl at the wheel turned a hard left onto Nevsky, and stepped on the gas. The icy wind filled the open car—it sliced through me like a scimitar.

I pleaded through the rough burlap. “I have money. Marafet. I’ll pay you. Whatever you like.”

Their laughter. “You got marafet?” “She’s got nothin’ but shitpants.” “Oh, look, your boyfriend’s following us.” The runts jeered and taunted. “Awww, ’e just fell down.” “Oww. Oh, ’es cryin’. Boo hoo…” “Slow down, Klavdia, let’s see if he can catch us.” “Come on, kid, run!”

Poor Maxim! I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. That this was his fault? That he had betrayed me? Ten years old, no matter how tough, was no match for the Antichrist.

I fought to work my hands free of the burlap, get these kids off me. But the crazy motion of the car sent me rolling. The girl at the wheel could barely keep it on the road. We swerved and I hit my head on the car door. She struck something—a curb?—throwing me off the seat onto the floor, the children landing on top of me, screaming with laughter. I roared and cursed. The last time I’d been in this car, little Gurin had been at the wheel. How had I ended up back here, when I had sworn I would fly fast and far? The bag smelled horribly of apples. I’d never eat an apple again.

“Still awake, Comrade?” The sharp point of a knife jabbed me in the shoulder, another in the ass. They laughed as I shrieked curses. Picturing Iskra, sleeping so sweetly in Room III, no idea that Mama was racing away from her, into the night. I knew I had to stay hard for this. At least Iskra was safe, and the farther we went from the Europa, the safer she’d be.

We were flying in a straight line, southeast toward Znamenskaya Square. I pushed down my panic and imagined us as a moving dot on the map of the city. I listened, feeling as hard as I could. Over the roar of the wind and the excited chatter of these infants, the big engine of the Benz Söhne, I reached out to feel the city, hold its design on the page of my mind. I knew its shape like that of my own body, streets crossing canals, bridges. Concentrate. But my teeth were chattering hard enough to break, fear and cold redoubling each other’s effects, impossible to know which was which.

A change in the sound—the echo of the car’s powerful engine dropped away for a moment. It must be the bridge. Anichkov. The Fontanka. I reached out with all my energy to feel the width of the river, the openness, and then, the echo returning. Still going east.

“So what’s he want with her anyway?”

“Shut your face is what.” A girl’s voice, commanding.

Now shouts. Harsh, low. Sentries? “Help!” I screamed from the floor of the car. “Shut up, bitch!” The kids kicked me in the head and the stomach as the driver sped on. Two shots rang out—the children shrieked and laughed and cursed in the floridly foul argot of the street. Put a bullet into us, a hail of them, the more the better, I prayed. But we careened forward, a crazed hilarity blazing through the quiet.

A different echo—vast. A big sweeping right-hand arc. Znamenskaya Square. Alexander III again. I imagined him looking out at this child-filled car racing through the Bolshevik night, and being glad he was already dead. I listened for the shrill of a train whistle, anything to confirm my guess. Please, O Holy Mother, make this not be happening. I swore I could taste cinders on the air, the smell of coal smoke.

I twisted on the car floor, desperate to get out of the sack. I’d forgotten nothing of my week in captivity on Tauride Street, I couldn’t survive another encounter like that, and this would be worse. Hadn’t the Kirghiz said as much? You should have flown fast and… Take care, little hawk. There are bigger hawks than you. Their wings will darken the sky. I couldn’t stop shivering. I knew I should be planning something, but all I could do was think how foolish I’d been to return to Petrograd like it was a game of hide-and-seek. With my redheaded baby, thinking I could avoid being caught… forgetting the depth of the danger. I shouldn’t have come back for all the Kolyas in heaven.

I tried to inch the sack up my body, to free my hands. Another series of kicks. “Forget it, shitbrains. Might as well relax.” A few more pricks and blows just to make sure I understood that I was completely in their power.

Different paving. Thrumming. I screamed, in case there was another roadblock. “Can’t you keep her quiet back there?” Hard little boots, kicking me in the back, head, and stomach. I put my arms around my head inside the burlap.

Rough paving. The crunch of tires. The car stopped. We hadn’t turned once since we left Mikhailovskaya. I was bruised from head to toe, my head ached, my breasts ached. This was the end of the road—it had to be the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where my family was buried in the grand Tikhvin Cemetery. Please, Dyedushka, Grandmère, help me! Yes, the Archangel liked a quiet, out-of-the-way spot to set up shop. And this one was cemetery-convenient. The monks must be gone now. Lots of room for his gang of murderous tots.

They hauled me out onto the pavement, dropping me like an old rug. I curled as much as I could not to hit my head. They hauled me to my feet, my soles clad only in stockings on the wet and freezing stone. Untying my legs so I could walk, they shoved me along with kicks and jabs from their knives, talking excitedly, calling me every name in the book, telling me how the Archangel would cut my nose off, my tits, and each of my fingers in turn. Then a creaky door swung open and I stumbled over some sort of threshold. Smooth stone, dry. Still icy, but interior. Another door. Stairs—wood, warmer through my stockings. One, two, three, four, five… Then forward. A wooden floor. Warmer now. A long hall. “Watch your step.” A bony little leg caught my shin and I found myself felled, wrenching my shoulder and bashing my nose on the floor. I swore I would kill that urchin. They laughed and mocked me. “Let me go, please oh please oh please,” “I’ll give you big money,” “I’ll give you marafet,” “I’ll let you fuck my sister,” “Let you fuck Lenin up the ass!” Oh, they were having a grand time. The bubbling laughter of children would never sound the same to me after this.

They dragged and pushed me, again, into a wall. The slam of a door. The dropped bolt.

I explored the space, reaching out inside my bag as much as I could. Small—a closet. They’d locked me in a goddamn closet. The stink of mops, yes. Silence. No footsteps, no whispers, no giggles. They were gone. Terror, wordless and ancient and as absolute as the distance between stars, descended on me now. If only I could reach the gun that I’d lugged around since Kambarka, but I was trapped in his spiderweb, the burlap sack my shroud. Out there, a giant arachnid waited to pull me in on its sticky threads. All that learning, all those aspirations, my hopes for Iskra—for nothing. I would never see my baby again. Oh God, oh God, she would grow up never knowing me, without even someone to tell her who I was and how I loved her. A Soviet orphan, if she was lucky enough to grow up at all. I had played this game like a sucker, a rube. And now I would die.

I couldn’t stop my tears.

I thought of Dostoyevsky in his room in Dom 13, on his long walk. I would walk to Siberia too, rather than face Arkady von Princip as a prisoner once more, his human toy. They would hold me down—like in my dream, where the people caught me with their little knives and skinned me in the courtyard, leaving me to walk around Petrograd with no skin. How would he start? With a deer, you hung it upside down, and started at the rear legs, pulled off its skin like a sweater.

Stop it.

I focused on Iskra, picturing her sleeping, snug in her basket next to Nadezhda. She would wake for her next feeding at two, and if I wasn’t there, they’d take her to the Infant Department, for Nonna to feed. Maybe Arkady’s shadows wouldn’t think to look there. And there she would remain, safe. I cursed myself for not teaching her to drink from a bottle, as if I’d always be there to feed her. Would she be stubborn? Would she go on refusing? Wanting what she wanted and only that? Like her mama, the strength of her personality would prove her undoing. Comrade Tanya, you were right, damn you. But she was healthy, she could go without eating for a day or two. If only they didn’t think to look for her there.

I thought of Akhmatova, her cool dignity, but she melded into the image of the dark Theotokos, the Virgin of Death. Have pity on me, a poor sinner. But I didn’t need pity. Dignity was beyond me. I just had to survive.

Suddenly I got the strongest image of Ukashin, as he’d been the day I shot the stag, the Master in his Mongolian robe and astrakhan hat, his energy flowing through his hand into my shoulder, filling me with it, steadying me. Those waves of heat flowing. I knew how to do this. I pulled my life force, or what was left of it, into a pinpoint, a red ball, and shot it through the artery of Nevsky Prospect, back to the Europa, back to the baby still sleeping in Room III, Boys 9–12. I’ll always love you, Iskra, whether I’m there or here or nowhere. You’ll never be alone.

But thoughts of death and pain kept flooding in. I was nineteen years old and had taken every wrong road, wasted my talent, burned every friend. Had given birth to a golden child, whose life I’d put in jeopardy just for wanting to return to this cursed place. Would I live to see her run after butterflies, hands reaching to the bright scraps of wing just out of range, the sun kissing her face, leaving its freckled traces? What would happen to her if I died tonight?

Concentrate. Concentrate on the now.

But Ukashin was a fake. Fakir, fraud, usurper.

But not completely.

No, not completely.

A dark, defeated part of myself wished I was already dead, so I wouldn’t have to live through these next hours. The good thing about being orphans is that you can’t be an orphan twice. But I had to live to return to Iskra. I would allow no other thought to come through. If I could just reach my gun, but these ropes, this bag! I twisted and yanked, rubbing my fingertips raw. My stockinged feet ached—the old frostbite had returned like burning flames. At the detsky dom, they take their boots away, so if they run, they have to run barefoot. And they did it too. Some of my own charges had done it. In the snow. They’d ridden under boxcars until they’d lost their hearing. They’d done what they had to, far younger than me, weak and malnourished, six, seven years old.

I wasn’t dead yet, I told myself. Nothing had yet happened to me but a few kicks and bruises. You’re battling shadows, Ukashin whispered. Concentrate. Breathe. I took big shuddering breaths, inbreathing energy through my skin, inflowing. Whether it was real or not, it calmed me enough to think about this bag, and the ropes that held it around my hips and waist. I thought of Volodya’s fat pony Carlyle, who took a big breath when you saddled him, so he could exhale later and loosen the girth, making the saddle slide sideways when you mounted—his idea of a joke. I wished I’d had the sense of that fat horse, but I hadn’t had the presence of mind.

I exhaled and twisted against the bag, hoping to loosen the ropes. I pushed upward, pulled my shoulders tightly together. After several minutes, I had enough room inside the sack to move my arms. I pushed with my elbows, centimeter by centimeter. I clawed the burlap until I found an imperfection, a little hole in the cloth, probably from one of the brats stabbing me. I stuck a finger through and started working on it. Two fingers, three! I got all four fingers through. It was old and rotten, and after a few tries, it gave way with a satisfying rip. I worked my arm out and went for the gun under my skirt in its makeshift holster.

Gone.

I sat back against the wall. Breathe. Of course it was gone. All those hands, they’d probably found it in the car. Ha ha. Handed it up to the girl in the front seat, the driver with her red hair. The joke was on me. All this time, carrying that thing around so long I hardly felt it. For just this day. So prepared. Just a joke. So like my life.

I tore the bag off and got my head and shoulders free. It was something anyway, to have that thing off my face, breathe the moldy air, untie the ropes. They’d been secured with a simple square knot. It was my own struggling that had tightened it so. I just had to push an end back through and it fell away.

Although the situation hadn’t changed much, at least I was free of that bag. I could think, move my arms. I felt around on the floor for something I could use, something sharp, but there were only mops and brooms. I stood and examined them for the one whose handle seemed heaviest. A mop. The splintered wood bit my palms, but I tried jabbing with it, feeling its weight. It was hardly a spear, but it was something. I would dash it into the face of the first human to walk through that door, child or Archangel. I would not hesitate.

I sat on my heels, resisting the urge to curl on the floor and sleep. I had to be ready. Where I’d dreaded the opening of that door, now I couldn’t wait—it was my one chance to fight my way free. I pushed all other thoughts aside—my child, my future. I was the hunter. Concentrated only on the door, the hall outside, the rooms on this floor, this wing of the great monastery. I felt my way out into the complex, room after room. A great silence. Either they’d killed the monks or the monks had fled. The place was empty like a derelict palace. Full and empty. Empty of monks but full of ghosts, the shadow world of orphans and criminals.

I practiced concentrating energy and radiating it—warming my feet, warming the room—and whether or not it really worked, I felt warmer and more confident. I’d brought my child back to life with that energy, when she lay like a stone in my arms. Now I would be a bogatyr at the crossroads, surrounded by skulls and ravens. I would be the Tsar-Maiden.

I felt them coming. Light feet, dragging, all out of step with one another. Disorganized. I felt them in their ragtag enthusiasm, their giggles, their brave whispers. The door was unbolted, dimness illuminated by lantern light. I uncoiled from my closet floor like a spring, leading with the mop handle. I caught one of the girls on the jaw. She staggered back, shocked, while the smaller boys made attempts to attack with their pocketknives. I jabbed the putrid mophead into their bluish faces, pushing them back, feeling like Gulliver. I swung the handle to clear a wider space around me, forcing them back toward the stairs, when the skinny girl with the sharp teeth of a ferret pointed my own gun at me.

Had they not had it, I would have made the stairs, could have run for it, I knew I could outrun these runts or beat them with the mop. I was the one who had brought the gun into the equation. I had stacked the balance against me. “Drop it,” she said.

I did as I was told.

“The Archangel wants to see you. Get going.”

Would she know enough to pull the safety off? I grabbed one of the children and twisted his arm, feeling like a monster as he started to shriek, but I would not be skinned alive as Arkady drank in my terror like milk. I had my own child waiting for me. I held the boy between me and the gun as I moved toward the stairs, the boy kicking me with his heels, clawing at my arm, swiping at me with his little knife. He turned it backward, the little shit, and stabbed me in the leg.

The girl fired.

The boy sagged against me. His blood was warm, soaking the front of my dress, my stockings. Hot, sticky. I was covered in it. I was holding a corpse. I dropped the boy, who had just been alive. Dead, because of me. A child about eight. Not so much younger than Maxim. “You shot Snotty!” another boy shouted.

The hot gun barrel pressed against my nose. The girl’s eyes were old and dry.

The blood spreading out on the floor, soaking my stockinged feet.

“He said not to let her get away. Come on, you.” She grabbed me and shoved me, stumbling, over the body, toward a thick door. “The Archangel’s waiting.”

23 The Sandman

They knocked at the wide oak panel. I could smell the child’s blood, clinging to my dress, still warm. Blood and death, and I had arrived in the heart of it. The murderous children opened the latch and shoved me in ahead. “We brought her, Gospodar.”

Gospodar. Lord. It was how we once addressed the tsar.

The cavernous room was lit by fire in an open hearth, and a tall candelabra dripping with fat candles. Incense, the smell of beeswax. An animal stink. They stood around me, anticipating reward, avid with the hope of my punishment.

He stepped into the trembling light, their Lord. Taller than ever, his spiderweb hair flowing over his shoulders, the long Scandinavian face glowing white in the gloom. The Baron Arkady von Princip. My captor, my lover, my nightmare. It was I who had called him out of the darkness. It seemed the everyday world was the dream, a rickety theater set, while beneath it ran a black river, this monstrous world of myth, which was the true world.

He’d fitted himself out in a black monk’s cassock secured by a wide belt, a heavy gold cross dangling over it. On the forefinger of his hand, a huge ring. Gospodar. His holiness, the Archangel.

“Klavdia shot Snotty,” blurted the dish-faced boy. “He’s dead.”

“It wasn’t my fault, Gospodar,” pleaded the ferret-faced girl. “She made me do it.”

“I told you she was dangerous.” A smile played about his wide mouth with its thin lips. He stretched out a bony bejeweled hand. The girl approached him with my pistol on her upturned palms, like an offering to a god. He took the gun, sniffed it—newly fired—hefted it, and then laid it carelessly on the table among the books and papers. Taunting me.

“Now leave us.” He dismissed them with a wave, as if clearing the air. His wine-colored slippers were worn out at the toes. I met his blue gaze, the white wolf that had been stalking me in my dreams all this time, waiting in the shadows of the column-forest. The Archangel isn’t himself… Was it true, Arkady? Perhaps, they said.

“What should we do about Snotty, Gospodar?” The second, stocky girl insisted. She would not forget her fallen brother.

“Take care of it,” he snapped. “And don’t disturb us.”

They quickly retreated, like courtiers not daring to turn their backs on their lord.

Once they were gone, he smiled his lipless smile. “Hello, Makarova. It’s been a long time.” That gravelly rasp I knew so well.

I should never have come back to this cursed city. It was his city, his labyrinth. And not with Iskra—God! What was happening to her back at the orphanage, my baby, my Spark? My mouth went dry, my throat, as if all the liquid in my body had turned to sand. He came closer, his hands tucked into his sleeves. What did he have in there, a knife? Garrote?

He circled me, examining me like a dealer to whom a piece of art had been returned, his mouth in its coquette’s moue—my blood-spattered stockings, my dress, my hair wild from my fight with the burlap bag. The air was thick and fatty, and my ribs throbbed where the kids had kicked me, the stab wounds from their little knives ripe with tetanus, I was sure. I swallowed, hoping not to vomit, hoping not to choke on the acid of my own fear.

“You’ve aged,” he said finally. “Another year or two, and no one will ever guess you’d been a beauty.”

I would be happy to have two years. Ecstatic! It was all I could do to strangle the whimper forcing itself into my throat, resist the urge to fall on my knees and beg for my life, clinging to his cassock’s skirts. I had forgotten the force of his physical presence. But I could not give way to hysteria. I had learned the hard way that a display of weakness brought out his cruelty, his lust to hurt you further. All I could feel was my shuddering breath, my heart seizing like a fist as he circled around me. The creak of his belt, the cross rasping the rough fabric of his cassock. His smell, wormwood and damp earth. Sweat trickled down my forehead, stinging my eyes, running down my neck into my collar. His face, peering into mine—marred by sores and dark spots. He didn’t look well. He breathed in my ear. “Eighteen months. Had you forgotten me?”

Yes, I had forgotten, pretending it was just a bad dream. Just a mistake. Imagining that it was over, that he had gone on to other things. It was I who had forgotten exactly who this man was. This was always here, waiting for me.

“You’ve been clever. Brushing your scent away like a little fox.” That rumbling voice I knew so well—low, gravelly, insistent, hypnotic. His hands inside his cloak. “Even when Shurov was here, I kept wondering—where was the girl? Sometimes I wondered if I’d killed you after all.”

Kolya had been here! Or was this just a ploy? You could never be sure with Arkady. Look down, look at nothing, think nothing. I was not here. I was in a different thread of time, where there is no Arkady von Princip.

“Why did you return, Makarova?” he said into my ear. “Had you heard that I was… incapacitated? That I was drooling, being fed kasha with a bib on my chest?”

“It was hardly my choice. Your brats dragged me here, remember?” Choking out the words, my bravery thin as air.

“You’re disappointing me.” He frowned. “Of course it was your choice. You’d hidden yourself away, like a little rabbit in a black velvet bag. And suddenly—out you pop. Walking around, brushing your hair, tucking in the kiddies. Why, if not to be found?”

I met his eyes. All pupil. No longer that piercing, clever gaze, no—a jittering, wild stare.

He reached out and ran his fingers through my disheveled hair. I shuddered at his touch. Sweat pooled in my armpits, the backs of my knees. He liked a room hot enough for orchids. The stab wound in my leg throbbed, the dead boy’s final act.

“But now you’re home.”

Alone with the minotaur, surrounded by bones, I stifled the cry that was exploding upward, it tore in my throat like a sharp-toothed rat.

He poured wine from a ceramic carafe, the liquid almost black as it splashed into the glass. That mocking smile as he held it out to me. “Blood of Christ?”

The relief to smell grape and not the earthy copper of blood as I lifted it to my lips. He’d probably broken into the monastery’s wine cellar. I drained it fast, hoping he wouldn’t see my hand shake. Too fast. A thin stream escaped and trickled down my chin. He took the vessel from me, and wiped my face with his finger. He lifted his own glass and drank. Now he opened a leather-covered book with his scabrous hand, hands that had always been so well kept but were now as mottled as his face, and his nails were long and dirty.

He smoothed the parchment pages. “So many centuries of human thought devoted to devils, revelations, wonders. Look at this.”

It was a book of martyrdoms. Saint Catherine on her wheel. Then, Saint Bartholomew, flayed alive. My nightmare. He stopped at the martyrdom of Saint Agatha, her breasts displayed before her on a tray, like pears in wine. My shivering increased. Would this be my fate? Parted from the breasts with which I’d fed my child? I found myself missing the old Arkady, a man merely running a gang of criminals. Not Gospodar in a cassock and cross.

“You have to appreciate the imagination,” he said, cocking his head to one side, considering the ways in which a human body could be harrowed. “I’m surprised the Cheka didn’t take these when they came for the rugs and the priests.”

He poured himself another glass. What I would have given for just a drink of water. Stop it. I had to listen now, I had to think. Find a way out of this room. I could twist that chain around his neck until his eyes popped out of his head. Knock the candles onto the table, ignite the papers, grab the gun…

He cleared off a spot among the books, the pistol seemingly forgotten. But I knew him. He had not forgotten it. I, who had once tried to cut his throat. And the scar on my palm was a daily reminder of my failure. From inside the breast of his cassock, he produced a squat metal tin, opened the lid. Inside, a powder, very white, like icing sugar.

“Know what this is, Makarova?”

“Cocaine. Marafet,” I said. “Stolen from operating rooms at the front.”

“From both sides. Red, White, it’s all the same.” He scooped up a pile with a long pinkie fingernail, set it on the back of his hand, divided the pile into two, then snuffed them up his long aristocratic nostrils, one, then the other. He tapped out more, held out his hand to me. I thought of our child addicts—whole detskie doma set aside for them. Orphans would do without food, without shelter, just to have this.

But I would not give myself over to him until I had to. He would have to win me inch by inch. I would not make it easy. I turned my head away.

He paused. I knew what he was thinking. Never say no to me.

But then he shrugged. A small victory. “It’s your loss.” He called over his shoulder, “Olimpia?”

A chain scraped against the parquet. My heart jolted upward as if it would leap from my mouth. What was there, a wolf on a chain? A bear?

To my astonishment, from the shadows emerged a naked girl, limbs glowing by reflected firelight, maybe fourteen years old, slight as a deer. Small breasts, pronounced ribs—and her hair was red. Like the other two girls. They all had red hair.

And I had hoped he’d forgotten me.

His eyes met mine over her head as he held out his hand for her. This was in tribute to me. In my honor.

She snuffed up what was offered, straightened, wiped her powdery nostrils. Her dark eyes glittered. And then I saw—she was covered with scars. An intricate web of lines and dots like an engraving on a ten-thousand-ruble note. My wounds were nothing compared to this. It must have taken him months. Did he numb her with cocaine? She kissed his hand—for what? Scarring her like that? Chaining her like a wild animal? For I saw, he had a leather collar on her neck, a chain through the loop. I sweated through my woolen dress, my hair was damp. I could smell my fear, like dirty metal, like the dankness in drains.

The girl pressed into him, half hiding. The Kirghiz had said the Archangel was not himself, but as he watched, seeing I fully appreciated his masterpiece, I knew that in fact he was very much himself. This had been in him all along.

The scarred girl peered out at me, a pale streak behind his black form. Olimpia. It meant something. Who was Olimpia? It itched, like a rash. Poor girl, he’d scarred even her face. She stared out at me through a forest of arabesques like a panther through jungle grass, her eyes dilated with the drug. Her blood-red hair merged with the scars as if to continue the pattern.

“Olimpia doesn’t speak,” he said, stroking her tangled hair. “The perfect confidante.”

Had he cut her? But once I too had been a silent girl after my time with this man. Sometimes words just fail. Sometimes what has happened to you is so terrible, your mind can’t hold it. Her chain told me she’d tried to escape, maybe more than once, before he put that collar on her. He’d never done that to me.

Then I remembered—Olimpia. The mechanical doll in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. You wound her up and she danced. The very symbol of captivity.

“And you’re the Sandman.” I had to resist him as long as I was able, before he did this to me. I had to show I knew him, was not intimidated. I still had a mind, a voice, a self. If only for a few more hours.

He smiled. That wide mouth, like a toad before swiping a fly. “You always were quick, Makarova. I never have to explain myself to you. You don’t know how I’ve missed you, really. You have no idea.”

It was something I could do for him that his children could not. He could talk to Olimpia and the others all he wanted, bathe in their adoration, but none of them could hope to understand him. They couldn’t satisfy his craving to be known. Ask me a question. An Olimpia couldn’t soothe his vanity, appreciate his wit. Not one of them could fathom his loneliness, to which their slavish, absolute devotion ironically sentenced him.

Olimpia whined. Had she seen that she, who had endured so much, was only a facsimile, and I the original, in whose image she’d been created? Yes, she had. And she was jealous. Ridiculous, and yet I could imagine myself after six months with him, chained and tormented, praised and petted, utterly dependent. You could come to something resembling love. Lost between hatred and gratitude, fear and admiration, erotic pleasure and humiliation—anything was possible. He could become the world for you. And what would you have without him?

But I gave him a taste of another mind at work. I could enter the loneliness of his labyrinth—at least partway. “So how long have you been the Orphan King?”

He ran his hand down her back, her hip—gazing at her with affection, as if it had been someone else who had cut her, chained her, kept her stinking.

“It was a gradual transition. The robbery business had grown out of date. All the rubies in the Peter and Paul Fortress might buy you a tin of marafet. Whereas a side of beef could buy you an army.” He sighed, returning to his hideous book.

“And your men?”

He shrugged. “A man learns one thing, and that’s what he wants to do until the day he falls into the grave.”

Had he killed his gang? I wouldn’t care if he had. All except for the Kirghiz. What had they done for me? Listened and joked while I was locked in that room on Tauride Street. Played cards. I hoped he’d killed them all. “Did they object to your new business? Cocaine, young girls?”

“You like the idea of gunfights and daring daylight robberies. You think drugs and young girls are beneath me. But drugs and young girls are the very staples of civilization.” He turned to the girl, squeezed her shoulder. “This is the rock upon which I will build my church. There’s an endless supply, and you can use what you can’t sell.” He grazed a line from her mouth with a long dirty fingernail. “And children are so loyal. It doesn’t matter what you do. They defend the brute father, the hysterical mother. Tell me, what do children want?”

I thought of my baby, sleeping peacefully in Room III, having no idea Mama was gone, Mama the Archangel’s prisoner, on her way to death or worse. “A family,” I said.

“No, no.” He brought his face close to mine, fire in his mad blue eyes, my small figure there in the reflection of the candles. “They want a lord. Someone into whose power they can give themselves absolutely. And I am the Lord of Lords. If I am on their side, what have they to fear from God or Man?”

He picked up the gun and tucked it into his belt. “Come. I want to hear everything. Tell me where you’ve been, who you’ve been fucking. Bring the wine.” The tin disappeared inside his cassock.

He picked up the candelabra and, impervious to the hot wax dripping over his skin, he carried the flame into the shadows. The gun winked at me in his belt. “You’re thinking again,” he said, not turning. “I advise against it. One step outside this room, my tots will fillet you like a salmon.”

I could already feel this girl’s collar coming around my own neck. He set the candelabra down on a low table. A broad divan swam from the darkness. It spewed stuffing as if from multiple stab wounds. He sat on it and patted the cushion next to him, but I’d shared one too many divans with the Archangel. I knew what it was to serve our Lord. I took a rush-bottomed chair, across from him.

“Oh, don’t be like that.” He pouted. “After all we’ve meant to each other…” He removed my gun from the belt and stuck it behind the cushions. Daring me to try to take it. Olimpia knelt right on top of it. Her arm around his neck. Get the gun, Olimpia! I could smell that divan—it stank of bodies, turned earth, sex, bad dreams. He must sleep there at night. Probably with the girl. Maybe with all of them, piled onto him like sled dogs.

He was humming. Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen. Death and the Maiden. His love song. Softly shall you sleep in my arms… as he poured another glass of black wine. “Give this to your new mistress, Olimpia.” It trembled in her hands. She would rather throw it in my face. “Nicely… You don’t want to displease her. She’s a very dangerous person.” He encouraged her with a nod, as you would coax a bashful three-year-old.

The girl came around and held out the glass, her dark eyes sullen with banked resentment. She stank like a beast. I remembered how lovingly he’d washed me in levkoi soap—my hand still on fire where he’d seared it on the stove. His soaping of my body, my ruined hand, the smell of dooryard stocks…

I drank. The goblet now in my scarred right hand. It was all starting again.

When I lifted my eyes, a sight cut across them, like the lash of a whip.

On the wall over the divan, lifelike in the flickering flames, hung a large icon, a life-sized crucifixion. And affixed to the Christ’s painted arms—the small hands of the orphan. Like purple flowers,with nails through the palms.

Was killing and dismembering of the orphan boy not enough? He had to do this? Yes, to remind his flock just how far he would go. In case anyone forgot. And he lived with it every day, as another man would grow plants on the windowsill.

“You like my painting?” the Antichrist asked. His eyes alight with fun. The Archangel is not himself… But he was. He’d only been restrained before, by the world, by the men he worked with. Now there was no one to stop him.

I was never going to get out of here alive.

He glanced up at the wall above him. “Do you find it too baroque? But Christians are literal, with their relics and stigmata. The body and the blood.”

On the wall alongside it hung a Vladimirskaya Theotokos clutching her child. Was that to be next? A real-life mother and child?

Iskra!

I must not think it. He could read my mind, and he must never know of that redheaded infant waiting for me back at Orphanage No. 6.

“Imagine how it feels to be a city’s nightmare,” he said in a voice that pressed onward, hypnotic, rumbling, drawing you forward. “The power of that. Like this story you’ve been telling. Shinshen—isn’t that his name? Shinshen the Immortal. Not original, but compelling.”

I felt a thousand knives pop open inside my skin, piercing me from the inside out. That cursed story. Why had I even begun to tell it? I had forgotten the power of words. They shaped the world. Naming, they called forth the thing you named. That story was the Ariadne thread that led him out of his labyrinth. He’d followed it through the streets and canals until he’d found me. I’d been telling Arkady a bedtime story every night—a tale starring himself. It had landed me here more surely than the train from Vyatka.

“You’ve only added to my legend.” He stretched his arm along the back of the divan under that horrible Christ, stroking the girl’s hair. “When I heard it, I knew you hadn’t forgotten me. However far you’d fled, Bukhara or Samarkand, you hadn’t been able to stop thinking about me, the Sandman. Shinshen the Immortal.”

And it was true. He lived in my brain, squatting there like a poisonous toad. So careless of me, to have thought he would have forgotten me. When perhaps my hands would become the Vladimirskaya Theotokos’s, and the Child—oh God. The Child…

“Ask me a question, Makarova.”

“Why would you do that?” I spluttered. “Kill that boy. Cut off his hands, and do that with them?” I pointed with my chin. “How can you sit there with that over your head and talk to me as if it’s nothing?”

He stroked Olimpia’s cheek, tracing a whorl from her nostril around her cheekbone. “What good is a lord unless he is terrifying? My children would have been disappointed if I’d simply given him a stern lecture—such as I’m sure your liberal papa would have done with your pathetic brother Sergei. That’s no way to run a kingdom.”

Had the girl seen it? Had she heard the screams? How could she twine herself around him that way, just under the hands of a murdered child, and kiss that repulsive mouth? Though some dark part of myself knew exactly how. Life had trapdoors, and once you fell, the water swirled in the opposite direction. Up was down, down was up. You came to accept the laws of your new universe, its boundaries exactly the shape of your lord. You submitted. I’d been halfway there myself when he’d made the mistake of taking me to the dacha that night. I’d always thought that was the worst night of my life, but it had been a moment of grace.

What a fool, to have come back here. To have thought the nightmare was over. When it was just waiting for me.

I would never be free of him. Not when we both were above ground. One of us had to die. I remembered when Varvara had said she would capture him and kill him for me. And I said I wanted to do it myself.

Now I had only Iskra to weep for me. Alas.

The fire crackled and spit into the black gloom. Its flickering light revealing the holes in the ceiling where the plaster had fallen through, the stains on the walls. Arkady’s sordid, tawdry magnificence. Yet he was all the more dangerous for being half lost in a dream. I felt the madness calling, like a guitar string that resonates to the one beside it. Persephone had eaten only six pomegranate seeds in hell, and I had eaten far weirder fruit than that.

The Archangel applied another helping of cocaine to his long nose. The girl came for her share, but he elbowed her aside and offered the next application to me. It gave the soldiers bravery, they said. But I didn’t trust it. I had to keep my wits about me. I would not end up on that chain. Or on that icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos with my child.

“You might as well,” he said, lifting his hand again. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

We’d see about that.

Olimpia whimpered, but he sniffed it himself and put the tin out of her reach on the low table. Sulking, she curled into herself at the far end of the divan, picking at the shredded upholstery arm over which her chain dangled.

“This is all your doing,” he said, wiping his nostrils. “After you, I saw what a bore my life was, squeezing the last ruble out of the city of Petrograd—what kind of a life was that? The luster was gone, the pleasure. You’d left me hungry for poetry. Look at this. Olimpia, show her.”

But she pretended she hadn’t heard him.

Never say no to me. He grabbed her by the chain, fast as a mongoose, swept her out of her seat and down onto her knees. Her eyes glittered tears of humiliation and rage, as she lifted her arm so I could more closely examine the lines, the whorls, and the dots of her flesh.

“Now, tell me that’s not beautiful.”

It was. Fine work done on a living canvas, no less monstrous than the tiny hands of Christ. He would do this and probably fuck her while the blood dried. If this was what he’d done to her, what did he have in store for me? I wasn’t going to wait to find out. I’d rather die all at once.

“When I gave you my poem—it was so crude. I regret it, I do…” Apologizing? For carving into my back like a cook scoring a ham? Like a boy gouging his name into a birch tree? Those letters I had to explain every time I removed my clothes, in every bathhouse, at the shore, with every lover. If I ever had another lover. Or saw the shore, or stepped again outside this room.

“After you left, I met a doctor in need of cash,” he said, licking his finger and rubbing it in the leftover powder, tracing his lips with it. “I bought his entire medical bag, quinine to forceps, including a perfect set of German steel scalpels. Straight blades and curved ones, some sharp on the inside and some on the outside. I could take out your gallbladder if I wanted to.” He smiled coyly.

A wave of hot nausea passed over me. I remembered dissecting a cat in biology class, or rather, Mina doing it. The pins, the glistening organs. Saint Agatha.

Olimpia crawled to him, her scored buttocks catching the light, like some big tailless cat. How long would it take to become Olimpia—destroyed mentally and physically, unselfconscious as a chimpanzee, incised intricately as a Byzantine plot? Even if she could escape, how would she live? She’d have to join a circus and display herself next to the lizard boy and the bearded lady. Or become a brothel’s specialty item, for the discerning client. She could run to some savage land, live among the Berbers…

I just prayed they’d had the sense to hide Iskra. That red hair, all of the orphans knew her. Would they know enough to put a cap on? Hide her among the babies of the Infant Ward?

“What are you thinking, Makarova?” The Baron’s fingers fluttered at his lips. “Plot, plot, plot. Remember the night you thought you could get the best of me? Your failed little rebellion. Let me see it.”

Other men might recall a sleigh ride, a certain small hotel. But our romantic reminiscences consisted of attempted escapes and strange sexual encounters deep in the labyrinth, upon heaps of bleaching bones.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He raised a snowy eyebrow. I could feel the collar around my neck. The candles oozed, drowning themselves in wax, guttering out one by one. I turned the palm out to him and held it so the candlelight illuminated the shiny surface of the burn.

“Come closer. My eyes aren’t what they’d once been…”

Said the blue-eyed wolf, “Granny, why are your eyes so big?”

He brushed the scar with his fingertips. My flesh tingled. He kissed the palm. The girl whimpered and tried to pull him away.

“Is the thing jealous? Here.” He took off an amethyst ring and pressed it into her hand. She put it on her forefinger, like a golf ball on a willow twig, and scuttled off to play with it. Over our heads, the crucified hands begged me, Do something! The air was making sparks in the darkness, and the smell of decay and chamber pots lingered under the fatty candles, and a cloying sweetness. The unmistakable smell—why had I not noticed it before?

On the windowsills, he was forcing hyacinths into bloom. Phallic columns rose from the cups. That pure life in this foul lair with the leaking roof and ruined plaster and hacked-up furniture. The flashing splinters of purple light distracted me, and the smell of the blooms—the thousands of humans Shinshen had enchanted, a field of sorrow. And if you walked through it, you could hear their whispers, Alas, alas.

The girl held the ring up to the firelight, her tangled red hair streaming onto her shoulders and down her back.

“So what happened to your men? Borya, Gurin.” Trying to remind him there was a time where he hadn’t decorated his walls with the relics of murdered orphans, when he’d still had some human qualities.

“Gone. Fled, departed. Auf Wiedersehen.” He held up his cross to the three directions.

Had they objected to working alongside children, thinking it beneath them to hang around barracks selling marafet and young girls? Or had they balked at his increasingly bizarre state of mind? Even the most evil of them could have recognized the madness of the object on the wall above his head.

“I prefer besprizorniki. They don’t haggle over percentages, they demand nothing but to serve me.” He watched the girl with the ring. “A sniff of cocaine from time to time and they’re as happy as rats in a wall. What could be better? The perfect operatives.” She burrowed her way under his arm. “People go out of their way not to notice them. Plus, if something happens to them, well…” He shrugged.

“Poor Snotty.”

He chuckled. “Yes, poor little waif.”

Were you listening, Olimpia? Did you understand you were as expendable as that boy? Just because Arkady fucked you and spent hours cutting you, didn’t mean you were any more valuable to him than any of the others.

But she was too busy playing with the big amethyst ring—holding it up to the light, trying it on her fingers, threading it into her hair.

The blood in my dress had crusted over in the heat. Snotty had never had a chance. I would have to account for that someday, among my many crimes. But today, I could be as savage as I needed to be to get back to my redheaded baby.

“Ask me something, Makarova. Something you’re just dying to know.” His arm resting on the girl’s shoulder.

I reached out and poured myself some wine. “Why did you let me go that night at the dacha?”

He pursed his mouth into that ridiculous moue, mocking the naiveté of my question. “To see what it felt like, of course.” He crossed his legs, balancing his worn slipper on the toe of his old sock. “I had already tasted the lord’s vengeance. I wanted to know how his mercy felt. What would it be to let you go, to give up something rare and beautiful. It pained me to see you fly across the frosted fields, disappearing in the moonlight. If you only knew what I gave up for you, my lovely, treacherous Makarova.”

He has not forgotten you.

The child’s hands pleaded with me. No! Don’t walk down that road!

Softly shall you sleep in my arms…

But how many roads were there? He’d narrowed them all. And that child couldn’t know what had transpired in that room on Tauride Street. He didn’t know what I knew about this man. Those weird moments of connection amid the outrages, the bizarre playfulness along with the pain, the sexual intensity along with the domination. Confessions, and not only mine. I saw a crack of light in the darkness.

But then my breasts tingled. And back at Orphanage No. 6, an infant was waking. My milk let down. Within moments, my dress was soaked. My body, wanting only to feed, to nurture, had betrayed me. And Iskra. I quickly sat back, away from the candlelight, hoping he could see only my silhouette. I crossed my arms to staunch the flow. I had to distract him, get him talking. “Did Akim tell you he saw me? On Kamenny Island?”

“Long afterward. That’s exactly what I meant. Men think first of themselves, even the loyal ones. Akim was too quiet. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch. Cassius has a lean and hungry look.”

Akim had salved and bandaged me, tended me like a mother, when this man had carved his poem into me. Yet the Kirgiz hadn’t sympathized with me overmuch. If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods. He could have freed me, but never did.

My bodice was drenched in milk. My poor ignorant body—all it knew was that it was time to feed the baby. It didn’t know what danger it put us in. And that girl sitting right where I’d seen him shove my pistol, oblivious at the chance of freedom.

“Why did you come back, Makarova? When you were warned not to return. You knew the price. And yet, here you are.”

I put my chips on noir. “I didn’t want to,” I said. “But it was eighteen months—I thought perhaps you might have forgiven me.” My treacherous Makarova. Yes, Baron, it was my specialty.

“Bored, I imagine. In whatever outpost you’d gone to ground. You’re a passionate woman, you’re like a fire in the snow. You didn’t belong out there in the straw with the hicks. So you took your chances. Knowing what you needed was a consort, a king. A lord.” He recited from the Greek. “Recognize it?”

“Homer?”

“He lifted her up into his golden chariot and bore her away lamenting.”

The abduction of Persephone by the Dark Lord. To be his consort in the Underworld.

Alas, alas.

The girl tried turning his face toward her, the way a child tries to get the mother’s attention, hands on his long gaunt cheeks, but he swatted her away. “Stop it, Olimpia. The grown-ups are talking now.” He poured more wine.

What I wanted was water, but didn’t dare draw any more attention to myself than I had to. I wanted him caught up in his words and to forget to look at me, let him be lost in a dream where we were king and queen, ruling the dark kingdom side by side as jaguars prowled and flowers wept.

“Tell me how you’ve missed me. Tell me about Shinshen. But first, why don’t you get out of that wet dress?”

24 Death and the Maiden

The reflection of candlelight in the black windows drew my desperate gaze. I could break one, climb out, jump. It was only the second floor. I could survive the fall, run home barefoot. The orphans did it, escaping the detsky dom. Find Iskra, and run. I’d have to get out of town, even if it meant on foot. But I hadn’t saved my girl from the Virgin of Death just to give her to the Archangel.

“Take it off. It’s all right. Don’t be shy, it’s just us.”

“I don’t want her watching,” I said, stalling for time.

“Olimpia likes to watch,” he said.

In other words, he liked Olimpia to watch him. I wondered how many women he’d brought here and made her watch him fuck them. Or maybe it was just his orphans. He came to where I sat on the rush-bottomed chair, pressed up behind me, lowered his voice, speaking in my ear. “I smelled it on you when you first came in. La maternité.” He ran his hands over my shoulders, my neck, sniffing me.

I was in danger of vomiting.

The girl hissed, her upper lip drawn back over her teeth. I swear she was growling. She was going to be worse than useless in any plan to escape. She would attack me herself if she could, so jealous was she of her place in this hell.

He unbuttoned my buttons one by one, patient even when they stuck. Tormenting the girl while indulging himself and terrifying me—what could be more delightful? Except to call in all his foot soldiers and let them watch too. “I’ve thought of your body so often in these long months.” His rumbling voice still held its erotic charge. “That scent, your hair. Are your nipples still pale? Are you wet, Makarova?”

He unlaced my camisole, woven by women I actually knew, and pulled it off over my head, freeing my breasts, hot, full, sticky, aching. I’d never missed a feeding before. He groaned. “No, they’re dark. Enormous.” He squeezed one, and the milk spurted out like a statue in an Italian fountain. He leaned over and licked me. “Sweet.” He lowered his face to my breast, and fed where Iskra’s sweet lips took their nourishment. To my shame, it felt good, the full breast releasing. My innocent body, my culpable soul. Feeling a desire, with Iskra in danger. Tears slid down my face, as I stretched my head back, the better to let the milk flow.

How long had he been watching me come and go at Orphanage No. 6? Like Hades watching Persephone picking flowers. Enjoying his power. All those nights I’d felt him there in the dark. I again prayed that Nonna had the sense to cover Iskra’s ginger hair. They could be looking for her right now. Perhaps he wanted a redheaded Holy Family to accompany his bizarre Christ. Don’t. Don’t think. There was no Iskra.

He pulled me to my feet, one arm around my waist—how strong he was, still. I could feel him inside the wool of his cassock, bumping against me as he caressed me. The girl crouched, bleating, trying to get his attention. Staring at me, my body big and earthy compared to her small, scarred self—a woman’s body, heavy boned, full grown, and his hands on me, the tentlike protuberance.

“It’s Shurov’s, isn’t it?” he murmured into my neck. “You wouldn’t have dropped a litter for just any Ivan.”

“No. It’s my husband’s.” He was still obsessed with Kolya. Even now.

“Kuriakin? That oversized baby?” He laughed. “No. I can’t imagine him packing the ammunition. No, it’s Shurov’s. The Circassian cavalier.” He knew that story too, the one I’d told the little girls about Iskra’s father. Maybe he knew when I’d gotten off the train. Maybe he lived in my head.

“So how did it feel? The alien presence inside your body. Sucking your lifeblood like a tumor. And then the birth—all those hands and feet? The enormous head.” He shivered, imagining the sordidness of my delivery. “Descending, tearing your flesh, squalling its way out. Was it terribly, horribly painful?”

“It’s Nature, Arkady. We’re all in her hands. Even you.”

He stopped kissing me, pulled away. The look on his face, one of disgust. As if I’d shat in the wine. “Nature? That giant sow with hairless piglets burrowing in at its bristly teats, squealing and rooting? I despise her. If there’s death, I want to do the killing. If there’s pain, I want to inflict it.” He grimaced, showing his yellow teeth. “Nature, the termite queen. White and blind, enormous, the abdomen extended, eating, living, ejaculating offspring. I won’t be used by that.”

How he loathed what he could not control—the animal self, over which he had no say.

He was now pacing the room, agitated, distracted. I had to keep him talking. Yes, yes, the terrible termite queen… “But Nature uses you with every heartbeat. Your cells divide, living and dying without your permission.”

“I won’t be used by her! My will is my own, my pleasure—my own. Not like you, spawning, gushing fluids.” He stopped at the table to look at his horrible book.

“Our pleasure exists because Nature uses us.” I began to inch toward the couch. “Time moves on, and we can’t do a thing about it.” How fast would I have to be to reach that pistol? Would the girl side with me or with him? Would she cry out, warn him?

“What can we do? There’s the Roman solution, of course.” He turned the page, glanced up, and caught me in a half crouch, moving toward the cushion. The next moment, he was beside me.

Instead of the gun, I picked up the tin of marafet, sat down in the seat he’d abandoned. “I think I’d like to try it after all.”

Makes it easy for them, when they pull your teeth out. They don’t care about anything. That’s what I needed. Not to care about anything but putting a wrench in the inevitable.

“You’ll like it. Everyone does.” He seated himself next to me, took the tin from me and scooped out some of the powder with his nail, depositing it onto the back of his hand, dividing it in two. I lowered my head and sniffed as they had done.

It burned. And a bitter taste descended the back of my throat. Then numbness. I glanced up. So? Was this it? He lifted his hand, indicated I still had more to ingest. I took the other one, which burned even worse, making my eyes water. But suddenly the room brightened. Darkness that had seemed impenetrable now showed me its secrets. It seemed less sordid, and facing this way, I no longer had to look at the terrible Christ. My heart churned, missing beats.

“There, that’s not so bad,” he said. Like a nanny, having given you your castor oil.

But this was more than not bad. I felt my alertness expand, my terror stepped back to give it more room. The air shimmered. My headache vanished, the stab wound, my bruised ribs where the children had kicked me. No wonder the orphans liked this—no wonder. You stepped aside from all the damage to body and spirit. I felt reckless and savage. The room around me illuminated as if lights had been turned on—the fire, reflections off the bookcase doors, the mirror, the jewels.

The girl tugged his arm—she wanted more—but he brushed her off. When she became more insistent, he cuffed her, shoved her. “I’m talking to Makarova now.”

The girl coiled, drawing her knees up to her breasts, keening. Yes, Olimpia, this is your master. This is your lord. I’m taking your place and he’s going to put you out with the cat.

The drug plashed inside my brain like a snowball crashing against a window. All hail Queen Persephone.

I wondered when they had last slept.

Arkady snaked his long arm around my waist and drew me to him, bending me back in his embrace, biting me, gripping my haunches, licking my hot leaking breasts, and I was amazed how it felt. I wanted him in my own disgusting way. He aroused me. I could see the termite queen, fat and blind and working her monstrous jaws below the earth, expelling her thousands of nymphs, so pale they were transparent. It was a sexual image. I found it grotesquely compelling.

“Tell me how you couldn’t stay away,” he growled in my ear. He was stroking himself under his cassock. “Tell me I’m the only one who was ever enough for you. That’s why you’re here. You don’t have to be embarrassed about it. The others couldn’t satisfy you. Eunuchs, imbeciles, that preening poppet Shurov.” That gravelly voice, urgent—he was talking to me and to himself. He grabbed my hand and wrapped it around his member, that monstrosity, and worked it up and down. I remembered it all, but my fear stood to one side and let this crazy desire well up. “I terrify you, but who else can give you this? Who knows you like I do? I know you’ve missed me. I forgive you. You can’t imagine how many people have waited for my forgiveness in vain. But I give it to you, my bride, my queen.”

The girl on her knees flashed her teeth from behind the forest of her scars like a monkey in a Rousseau painting. Like a William Blake tiger. I was taking her place. Yes, he was mine, Olimpia, he always had been. I had returned to take my seat on the black throne. Maybe I could drive her mad, and she would light the drapes on fire.

“Tell me no one excites you the way I do,” he said. “Tell me what you were doing in Samarkand or Arkhangelsk, waiting for me.”

“I was here the whole time,” I said. “Watching you. I stalked you through the streets—did you sense it was me? I wanted you, but I was afraid, so I watched. You felt me, didn’t you? When you fucked her, you imagined it was me. You never wanted to fuck children. You were waiting for me to return to you. Remember how we’d made love? Like gods. You don’t need this girl. Tell her to go away.”

The girl whined and leapt between us, trying to separate us, grabbing for his cock. He took her by the collar. “See this?” he said to her, her chain doubled in his fist, his face twisted with desire. “This is a woman. This is your queen. Apologize!”

She spat in my face.

He slapped her backhanded, flung her into the corner of the divan—her mouth a mute square, her eyes brimming alive with wounded fury.

“I thought I could never love a woman.” He was groaning, stroking himself while running his hand over my body, my thighs, my buttocks. “I thought all women were disgusting bags of fluids, tears, monthly blood, milk—but look, I don’t find you repulsive. There’s no one like you…” His voice, that compulsive rumble, that obsessive flood. He shoved me back onto the divan, fumbling his cassock aside. His organ rose whitely from its root. He held himself out so I could admire it. “I remember that night, your flesh so inspired me, I wrote you my love letter.” His blue eyes black with the drug and his own desire, the darkness of the world coalesced in them. “Let me see your pussy. Let me smell your flowers.”

I was two people now, Iskra’s mother and this thing, Arkady’s black queen. Both at the same time. No one was watching, no one was keeping score except our audience of one. And then he was on me, in me, and I was glad for the cocaine, which both urged me on and let me step away, to watch myself, out where it was crisp and clear and horror could not reach me.

“Tell me how you’ve waited for me… how you dreamed of me. Makarova, there’s no one like you…”

As he thrust into me, I plunged my hand into the cushions. There was nothing behind them but loose stuffing. It was all a joke. A cosmic joke. Queen Persephone, the queen of this filthy prison, this freakish dungeon. With Hades, her Dark Lord, plowing her fields.

A sound rose above Arkady’s groans, a sound like the wind keening. Behind him, she stood, holding my pistol in both hands. She was not so far gone as all that. She was terrifying, magnificent. Pointing it at us. Was this how I would die, killed by this tormented girl? If it would be so, I was ready to stop this nighmare. But Arkady looked up, panting, following my gaze. Disengaging, his organ springing free as he moved toward her. “Put that down, Olimpia.”

In that moment, I saw. The last human part of her remembered the tortures she’d suffered at his hands, the abasement. She laughed or growled, baring her teeth.

“Obey me!”

She fired.

The bullet caught him in the chest. His mouth opened in surprise. And he toppled onto me. I shoved him away and he fell on the table, overturning it, and from there to the floor, where he lay gasping, the blood bubbling from the wound, spreading black under him. She fired again, squeaking, like a rabbit’s scream, but there was nothing left in the cylinder. The gun had told its six lives.

His gaze flew from her to me, above him on the couch. “Makarova…” He gestured for me to come closer. His erection, I noted, still rose from his monk’s skirts, as if word of his shooting hadn’t arrived yet. He reached out for me. “Marina…” Why was he still alive? Would I have to kill him myself, the way I’d once killed animals still alive in their traps?

“I thought you said… Shinshen… was immortal.” And he laughed, coughing up blood, turning his head to breathe. A last joke.

Banging, shouts in the hall.

Don’t hesitate.

“Alas,” I said.

And stepped down onto his neck, cracking it under my heel.

25 The Annunciation

Crows cawed, pecking through the tatters of the night. A thick, icy fog had settled on the monastery during the night, and rising out of the whiteness, I could see the vague outlines of Holy Trinity, featureless and abandoned, and the Church of the Annunciation.

The Annunciation… The Archangel Gabriel came to the Virgin with the prospect of the divine, but he was also the Angel of Death. Yet the Archangel had died and I had lived. I was free. I was on my way.

Here was the Benz Söhne, parked halfway up on the curb. I’d taken my boots back from Klavdia, and her coat, but hadn’t thought about the car. My pockets jingled, heavy with the boys’ pocketknives, though my skin still lay on my body, intact. And someone was waiting for me. Someone precious.

I had lived. I was going home.

I passed under the arch and through the broken gates, turning onto Nevsky Prospect. How bright it seemed in the milk-white mist. The sights of early morning began to appear and their ordinariness moved me. I’d been locked in the no-time of Arkady von Princip, the halls of the Dark Lord, only to find myself returned like Orpheus to the Soviet dawn: orphans selling newspapers, people leaving for work, lighting cigarettes, rubbing their eyes. Fortunate humans, who’d never seen a crucifix adorned with real hands, or a girl etched like an illustration in a book of woodcuts. I had cut her collar, but she only went to him and knelt in his blood, washing herself in it, covering her face and limbs as he gazed up into nothingness. Shinshen the immortal had met his soul, and died.

How beautiful everything was to me. A skinny horse and driver emerged from the fog, rattling by me, clippity clop. A man pushed a baby pram full of firewood. A boy called out, “Yudenich takes Gatchina! Pravda’s got it, four kopeks, right here! Lines to Moscow still free! Petrograd holds firm!” There was still a world, where news went on and armies marched and mothers took children to school. And soon that would be me, taking Iskra in her little pinafore, a bow in her fox-red hair. I didn’t care anymore if Kolya came home. This was the important thing—these people, queuing at a bakery. People in leather jackets and old overcoats crowding into a government office. Soldiers loitering outside their Red Army club. It was all still going on. I had a job, a place on this earth, and a child waiting for me. Here was the train station, that cathedral of hope and despair, millions on the move, train-deafened orphans… But my child wouldn’t be among them. Not her, the flower of my life, my tiny sun.

I hurried onward. Above me, the horses of the Anichkov Bridge reared and struggled with their grooms—never free, never subdued. The human condition. I sped past the old roller rink where I’d once skated with Volodya and Seryozha, now a movie theater, and past the Hercules club, still closed at this hour, and Mina’s building at Liteiny, where she’d locked her heart against me. I did not feel that grief now. It was nothing to me, compared with rejoining Iskra. I redoubled my pace, a stitch in my side, but grateful I didn’t have to run barefoot, as many an orphan had done before me.

I rushed past Alexandrinsky Square and its terrible statue of Empress Catherine atop her bell. Never again would the Archangel haunt the dreams of the city’s orphans. They’d have only the cold to fear, hunger and ordinary death. No monsters or myths.

Now the Europa’s huge blocky form took shape—its roofline, the dark facade. I began to run, my boots flapping on my feet. Strange, a crowd had gathered on the corner. There was never a crowd in Petrograd now. But people stood shoulder to shoulder, their backs in overcoats, their breath like steam from a manhole. “What’s going on?”

“A jumper.” “Some kid.” “They do this all the time.”

My mouth went dry. I pushed my way through the onlookers. The matrons were all here: Nadezhda. Alla. Polya. Tanya. Who was tending the children? They turned to me, their expressions equal parts horror and guilt. The way they tried to catch at my arms. Now I was fighting my way to the front. “Marina.” “Marina, don’t.” “It’s nobody’s fault.”

Clusters of children. Cross-Eyes, tearful. “He kept saying I didn’t mean to.” Nikita was wearing my sheepskin. “We thought you was dead.” Makar, hollow eyed. “He’s been cryin’ all night.”

I didn’t mean to.

A jumper.

Oh God.

Maxim.

The solid bulk of Matron blocked my way. Her firm grip on my arm. “Don’t. The ambulance is on its way—”

I broke from her and shoved into the center of the crowd. Two policemen stood over a body.

Patched pants,

the too-large boots.

the son of my dreams.

He thought he had betrayed me, that he had killed me.

I wrestled myself clear, knelt at his side.

And then, I saw.

Tight in his arms,

in the curl of his body,

a smaller form.

Her face

beneath his chin

Their blood interlaced.

Why

Did he think he was saving her?

So she would not be

orphaned

like him?

I released her from his arms.

Held her close.

Someone wrapped my sheepskin around my shoulders.

Her blood leaked

onto the pavers

but no flowers bloomed.

As if in sleep

long-lashed eyes

the bow of lips

the tiny hands

Oh Maxim…

couldn’t you have waited?

The panic

in his ten-year-old mind

Iskra!

that perfection

Iskra!

the wheel broken.

Iskra!

my spark.

my little fox

Was this the way our tale ended?

The ambulance came. Men lifted Maxim onto a stretcher, carried him to the wagon. I didn’t want to leave him alone, but he was too big—how could I carry them both? I kissed his dear face, watered it in my tears as I held Iskra bleeding to my chest. His poor face—even in death, so worried. Where do they bury the orphans?

They tried to pry Iskra away from me. I bit the man’s thick hand. They would not take her. May lightning strike and thunder roar, and the world drown in my tears. Arms reached, hands clutched. “You’re making it worse.” “Come, let them do their jobs.” “She’s gone now, Marina.”

“No!” They could not have her. “She’s not an orphan!” She would not go into the ground where the orphans go, their arms small comfort around each other’s necks.

The ambulance men tried to talk sense. “You’ve got to give her to us, devushka.” “We can’t stay here all day.” They had other bodies to gather, other deaths to reap.

“She can’t be alone, she’s only a baby. I’ll bury her myself! Please, I have a plot. For the love of God!”

They gazed at each other, at Matron. I backed up into the fog, let its nothingness slide closed behind me.

Once, death had been just a rumor, romantic, veiled in poems. Now it had a name, a color, a weight. Her body was as light as a rabbit’s. I sat on the steps at Gostinny Dvor, in the empty arcade, my child wrapped in a kerchief someone had handed me. The Fates had waited for this moment to take the single thing I could not bear to lose. My baby, the broken weight of her, her blood seeping into the soft sheepskin. Where such life had been—nothing.

I sat there gasping, as if I’d swum a great distance, as if the air had thinned, there was no oxygen left. Iskra, my love, my heart.

Buildings appeared and disappeared as I wandered, eyeless, with my daughter in my arms. Stopped finally on the Chernyshevsky Bridge, wrapped in fog. The water below flowed green-black, gelid with coming ice. Once I’d stood right here with Genya, gazing out on a moonlight-painted expanse in dead winter, the Germans on their way. So many futures written on this river’s empty page. And now I saw nothing.

I could part the waters today. Green-black

down

down

down

Yes, this was the day. The day of all deaths. But how to put her down to climb the balustrade? I could not put her down, and I couldn’t climb it holding her, and I would not drop her in alone. I just stood, holding her, my empty lungs, my broken life.

A man stepped out of the fog to smoke a cigarette. He eyed me as if he knew what I had in mind.

I moved on, wrapping the fog around myself.

Foot after leaden foot, I drifted. Perhaps I would wander the fog forever with my dead infant in my arms, haunting the city, listening for the chimes of lost cathedrals. Heavy carts trundled into view and vanished. Factories. Barracks. Poor people, speaking softly. Soldiers.

Which god had I slighted? Had I forgotten a burnt offering? Neglected to paint my doorpost with the blood of the lamb? What kind of a cursed thing was I?

Iskra.

Of all the mothers to have been born to.

You, a perfect child, otherwise.

I recognized the canal—I had marched here once, dug trenches. How could the earth bear so much weeping? How was it that there was still dry land?

I asked a faceless man, “The Novodevichy Cemetery, is it far?”

“Keep on straight, little mother.”

Her tiny body, tinier than I could imagine, she had seemed so much bigger in life. She who had been more alive than anyone. The wonder in her eyes, her baby laughter. The way she’d grab my lips, blow bubbles. Where did you go, Iskra?

From the depths of the white, church bells rang dolefully. My legs, heavy as anchors, followed the sound of their chimes to Novodevichy Convent. They still had a bell ringer.

I stood in the back of the church with my baby in my arms, my dead baby, dumbly watching the candles burning in their stand. But it was too late for intercession, Iskra Antonina needed only the earth now, Mother Blackearth, the roots, the darkness. A coffin was being carried out of the chapel. A family walked behind. I followed them into the old cemetery. I had no one to walk with me. I wished Kolya had seen her, I wished he were here. But what difference did it make in the end whether you mourned together or alone? In death, you’re always alone.

The family stopped at a grave new-opened, a lone priest. The gravediggers took off their caps. Small candles were lit. I listened out of sight. The family had to lower the casket themselves.

Vechnaya pamyat’

Vechnaya pamyat’

Vechnaya pamyat’

Eternal memory…

Standing in the frosty whiteness, I was grateful she’d been born in summertime, that she’d seen trees and green fields, and the pure Blokian blue of the sky. I would find a place to bury her where the boughs would overarch her in summer, deep in Mother Blackearth, who does not need our pleas or flattery, who knows what’s needed without being asked.

I wandered the unkempt graveyard, and found a four-sided plinth near a bank of shrubs under some big bare trees. It would be easy to spot in the spring—if there was ever a spring. I set her on the frosted leaves in her blood-seeped blanket and began to dig, hacking at the heavy clay with Arkady’s hatchet. But in the end, I could not dig a hole deep enough. I sat like a child with a shovel at the shore, and wept.

The shock on the gravediggers’ faces when I emerged from the fog told me what I looked like, with the bloody sheepskin and Iskra in my arms. “Please,” I begged. “Help us.”

It took them just a few minutes. I tried to snip a piece of her hair with a penknife, but my trembling fingers couldn’t make the cut. I’d never cut her hair before. It was so shiny, so fine. I could not do the smallest thing. The shorter man mercifully took the knife from me and quickly cut off a small ginger lock, rolled it into a piece of newspaper he was using for cigarettes, folded the ends.

I laid her in the grave myself. Tucked her in at the breast of the earth.

Good night, Iskra.

good night, sweet girl.

Mama will come as soon as she can.

We sang, “Vechnaya pamyat’.”

Or they did.

I gave each man a penknife in payment.

How was it I did not go mad?

How long must I go on?

The strong must suffer everything.

Madness would be a blessing.

I wished I were stone.

If I were stone

I could make of myself a headstone.

The sun had gone out. I lay curled on her grave, smelling the new-turned earth, seeing those hands dancing over the edge of the basket by the fire. The button nose, her impish eyes, her smile, her swoon as she suckled… my arms so empty, my breasts so full. I would stay here and die like a dog, I would howl from loneliness, I would stay until it crushed me. I took the gun out from Klavdia’s coat pocket under my sheepskin. Each cylinder, empty. Empty. Just when I needed the release.

I had worried about all the wrong things.

So much fate coiled in those round metal nests. If just one chamber had been occupied, I could put an end to this unbearable tale. A caesura, midsentence.

“I worried about something like this.” The short gravedigger standing above me. His good kind face, a wide moustache like Maxim Gorky’s. He took the gun from me, that useless thing. “Come with me. I’ll take you to my wife. She’ll give you some tea. It’s not far.” His hand as rough as shoe leather as he pulled me to my feet. He smelled of earth. Blessed silent Mother.

A rutted little road. The gravedigger’s ground-floor room. His tiny wife at the stove, boiling cabbage soup, a somber little woman in a patched apron, hair like ashes. A thin-faced child tugged at her apron. So there was a child. That’s why he was being so kind. A child, thin, but not in the ground. The wife said nothing. The gravedigger dragged a stool to the table. “The girl just buried her baby. She was gonna shoot herself.” He put my gun on the table. The woman crossed herself. “It’s a sin,” she admonished me. The child gazed at me with flat gray eyes. But what about God’s sin against me? Letting Maxim jump off the roof with my Iskra? Why don’t you ask me if I forgive God?

She put a crust of bread before me. I could only imagine what a gravedigger made. “Keep the gun,” I said. “You can sell it.” She exchanged a glance with her husband, who nodded. She took it and put it high up in the red corner. No Chekists would come to visit this hovel. I gnawed the bread. She lit the samovar for tea. My ignorant breasts yearned for my baby. They didn’t understand there would be no baby, ever again. We drank the carrot tea in silence.

“I still have milk,” I whispered. “I could feed your son.”

She lifted him onto my lap. I opened my coat, my dress, held my breast out to him. At first he shrank from it, but she pinched it expertly, and the milk came squirting out onto his lips. He tasted and drank greedily. He had teeth. I never saw Iskra’s first tooth cut that smooth gum. Her child was hurting me—my nipple still sore from the Archangel—but I didn’t pull away. A small blessing—Iskra never did have to drink from the breast he had touched.

“Was it your first baby?” the gray woman asked.

I nodded.

She sat next to me, stroked her child’s curls. “This is my third. God took the others.”

God took them. How simply she said it. As if God had reached into a fruit bowl and selected a juicy apple. If I believed in God so completely, there would be nothing to do but submit. A mysterious God who gives and takes for his own reasons, far too deep for mortals to understand. But I didn’t live in that universe. I lived in a universe of chaos and sudden catastrophe.

“You’ll have to stop the milk,” she said.

Standing on the bench, she took a bundle of dried herbs from a beam she was too short to reach, though I would have been able to unhook the bundle without even straining. She gave it to me, a powdery silver-leafed plant. “It’s sage,” she said. “Chew on it or make a tea, until the milk stops. If you get lumps, rub them with your fingertips. Like this.” She illustrated with her fingertips, little circles. “You’re young. There will be others.”

“No. No more.”

The gravedigger was cleaning his nails with his new penknife. “You have a husband?”

I nodded. My two husbands. Neither of whom had seen their daughter, the perfection of her, the force of her personality. Nor would they ever.

“You’ll have more children, then. A houseful of them.”

No. No house. No houseful. No children. I shook my head, dripping tears into the child’s hair, like raindrops.

“You have so much love in you still,” the wife said, her hand on my shoulder. “Look, you love my son. God has filled your heart with love. How could you go on without someone to give it to?”

I had no idea.

After a while, she took him off me. He stood, gazing at us both. He was so short, standing there, like a tiny man in his cut-down clothes. Iskra never got a chance to stand. Not even crawl.

The wife made sage tea for me. After I was done, she embraced me, kissed me three times. “Go home.” She patted my hand, which still bore my daughter’s blood. “Live, and God bless you. Make a confession. Tell Theotokos of your sorrows. Only the Virgin can console you.”

I passed a church by the Obvodny Canal, a narrow little church with a single eave over the door, and obediently, hopelessly, I entered. Inside, a couple of old women lit candles. The icon of the Virgin gazed out of her frame with her son on her lap, so helpless. His death foretold before his birth. As Iskra’s had been. I kissed the icon, made the sign of the cross, lit a stub of candle. A priest watched me, but I had confessed enough. Now you know, said the Virgin. I was not consoled.

26 The Petrograd Card

It seems we are tied to life by bureaucracy. My papers were too precious to abandon. Even with feet like pilings in the shore, I was forced to return to Orphanage No. 6 and recover my bag, my labor book, my ration cards. So awful to understand that I would still have to eat, and sleep somewhere, and continue to draw breath. I kept my eyes averted as I walked past the place… and entered the amber foyer. I shut my ears to the children’s clamor. I saw nothing. Alla Denisovna rose from behind her overfull desk. “Marina—” But I walked right past her, down the hall, past the clattering typewriters, into Matron’s office. No one stopped me. I was terrifying—like a Gorgon, I would turn their flesh to stone.

Matron was writing something at her desk, a heavy woman with a heavy glance and a heavy job to do. “Close the door,” she said, not looking up. “They brought me your things.” My bag was there, Iskra’s basket. My hat and gloves.

She examined me with a cool brown gaze. “Do you want to tell me what went on here last night?”

It was only last night? I was as mute as Olimpia. My breath froze in my throat. If I spoke, a monster would come out, something murderous with a thousand razor-sharp teeth. My breath tasted of sage and earth.

“All right,” she said, folding her thick hands. “What do you want to do? Do you want to come back to work?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to see human beings ever again. I wanted to put screws into metal, sew shoes. I wanted a job in a telephone exchange.

“Do you have anyone you can stay with, friends or family?” The empty apartment on Shpalernaya yawned like a tomb. I shook my head again, staring at my feet, the worn toes of my boots—a surprise to see them on my feet. I thought of Maxim’s oversized ones. Had anyone saved them? “You’ll come stay with me, then.” She lowered her eyes to her paperwork. It had been decided. “Just for a few days. Until all this settles out.”

People came and went, ignoring me as I lay on the bench in the corner of Matron’s office, my face to the wall. They talked about evacuating the orphanage. Worried about the food supply. I wrapped myself around my grief, pressing it to my aching womb. I thought I would raise my child like a little gift in a ginger-colored box, to present to her bright-eyed father. Not realizing how I would love her, how important she would become to me. Bigger than life. Each eyelash weighed more on the scale of my heart than this whole building. The arrogance, thinking I could just wheel into Petrograd as I had Izhevsk and Tikhvin. I didn’t know yet if she was left- or right-handed. Whether she liked to paint, or sing. She’d never have a first kiss, a first love. No doggies, no skating, no picture books in bed. No summer days swimming in a river under the trees.

It won’t live, Mother had said.

That curse. She was right, but certain news you should keep to yourself.

I lay on the bench, staring at the same crack in the green wall that looked like Italy. I picked at it. This room, green walls to six feet, then the white of old teeth. The smell of the children’s dinner cooking. My breasts ached. Time to feed the baby, they said. Time to feed a baby that didn’t exist. My breasts were so ignorant, so hopeful. I could go upstairs and feed the infants, but instead I chewed sage leaves. I was a mother no more. The taste of my milk would be as bitter as wormwood, all my grief distilled.

I ate dinner in the canteen with Matron, and nobody spoke to us. Then I followed her home through the dark sleety streets to a good-sized room on nearby Millionnaya Street. All her own, nicer than most. There were books in cabinets, a diploma from the Bestuzhev Institute for Women. Photographs of broad-jawed, broad-shouldered ancestors. Intelligenty. She didn’t try to talk to me. She didn’t tell me she was sorry. She just handed me tea and read the papers. I lay on the divan and followed the fancy molding around the ceiling, oak leaves and acorns—around and around.

What do you call a child without a mother? An orphan.

What do you call a mother without a child? A mother.

The next day, Matron let me stay in her flat alone. “You won’t do anything to yourself?” she asked. “I’m trusting you.” Her normally impassive face was even heavier. I lay on the divan and watched light move across the room, which faced south. A warm light, kindly as it touched the walls, fingered the books, whitened the glass of the photographs, traveling all day, and then disappearing into the blue of dusk. It was dark when Matron came home again and turned on the lamps. There was a hunk of bread for me, a piece of hard sausage, but I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t care if I never ate again.

The next day the same.

After that, I returned to the orphanage with her, ate in the canteen, my mouth making the right movements, but things catching in my throat. Matron deposited her bulk between me and the others, to give me some privacy. I could feel my coworkers wanting to deliver kind words, regrets, but there was no reason to talk, nothing they could say would make any difference. The children were staring, I could feel their eyes burning into my skin. I didn’t want to love them anymore, my boys, my girls. People died too easily in this world. They had been there. When she was alive. When he jumped. Any of them could have stopped it.

At night, we walked the few blocks home in the freezing rain, careful not to twist an ankle where missing street pavers filled with water, passersby shuffling along listlessly. The White advance was coming. Any moment now. Yudenich was in Gatchina, he was in Tsarskoe Selo, a half day’s walk away. And nobody was doing anything about it. We had given up. We were just waiting for someone to end it. Someone handed me a pamphlet and disappeared into the dark.

I crumpled it, threw it into the street. The end was coming, and no one had the energy to lift a hand to save himself. Exhausted, apathetic, despairing. Waiting for death.

I wondered if this pamphlet was from my father’s group, planning for the arrival of the Whites. In a different time stream, he would have seen Iskra, his brilliant granddaughter, Iskra Antonina Nikolaevna Gennadievna Shurova Kuriakina. Would he have dangled his gold Breguet for her baby hands to reach for, let her hear the hour’s chime? His wedding present from the woman who was once my mother. Where were they now? Alive or dead? The watch I imagined lay now in the pocket of some English diplomat. The little chime, exchanged for the White cause.

In her sweater, which she wore like a cape, knees covered with a knitted shawl, Matron read the newspapers. The progress of Yudenich, the retreat of the Red forces. Poor Petrograd, this cursed city. Cursed from its birth, born alive over the bones of forty thousand. Now about to be crushed. As my child was crushed. The party had jumped off a building with the city in its arms.

Would I prefer that it had never been built? Would I prefer that Iskra had never been born, so I wouldn’t love her? So I wouldn’t have to mourn her?

One morning something had changed. People walked urgently—they’d stopped dragging their feet. They carried shovels and picks. During breakfast at the canteen, forcing kasha down my throat, which fought the groats—my morning contest—a short, grim-faced woman, one of the typists of the day shift, marched up to Matron. “We’ve called a meeting,” she said. “The orphanage committee’s waiting for you.”

We followed her to the office, Matron walking briskly but unhurriedly, rolling stiffly like an old sailor. And I trailed behind, no one. A shadow, a smudge on the wall.

In the large room, the workers’ representatives had gathered. Kitchen staff, laundry, maintenance, administrative, matrons. My coworkers, that collection of shirkers, bureaucrats, absentees, and petty thieves all talking at once. Nobody noticed me on the bench in the corner. Comrade Tanya rapped on Matron’s desk with her knuckles. “I’ve just been at the district soviet,” she called out as the others quieted. Her normally made-up face was pale and shone with an unfamiliar fervor. “I want to report to you—Comrade Trotsky has returned to Petrograd. He’s going to lead the defense of the city.”

Trotsky was here. Comrade Trotsky, who’d turned the tide of the war. I turned over to listen.

“As the elected representative for Orphanage No. 6, I’ve been asked to read Comrade Trotsky’s words.” Tanya opened a folded pamphlet, cleared her throat, and began to read in her halting voice: “Petrograd, wounded but still strong, is in danger. Comrades, we took too much from you. Now we are trying, with feverish in-ten-sity, to give back…” Her singsong voice, the stumbling mispronunciations, nothing like his force, his energy. But it didn’t matter. I knew what he sounded like, had heard him speak at the Cirque Moderne. And now he had returned, to save us.

“If Petrograd were to be taken… Soviet power would still stand. But in the last few days, when the fall of Petrograd began to seem a real possibility… an electric shock ran through the country… and all said, ‘No!’”

He’d come to shake us from our torpor.

Tanya described the Red successes in the east, chasing Kolchak, the battles for Tambov and Kozlov. “There may be retreats and advances in this struggle, but there is one retreat, Comrades, which we will never permit ourselves, and that is a retreat eastwards from Petrograd.”

I surprised myself by sitting up.

“We are at present going through a critical period on the Petrograd front. The new re-in-force-ments have not yet been con-cen-tra-ted and de-ployed… Every day and hour now has co-los-sal im-por-tance for you. On other fronts we could withdraw weak-ened di-vi-sions fifteen or twenty versts to the rear and re-form them… but here, on the Petrograd front, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of withdrawing.”

Fifteen or twenty versts—they’d have to withdraw to Finland.

“We realize, of course, that they will not take Petrograd. A city of a million people cannot be carried off in the clutches of a gang of a few thousand men. But they can inflict damage, cause cruel loss of blood.”

I remembered Izhevsk. The gibbets standing in the square, ropes still attached, where the Whites had killed a thousand people just three weeks prior to our arrival. I could still see that bloody wall outside the munitions plant. How sick I’d been… my enormous belly. The beginning of my labor. Iskra and I, we had never been apart from this war, not really.

“We will not hide from the broad masses of the people the dangers, the blunders and me-na-ces, that lie in wait for us. Our Petrograd card, which is in-fin-ite-ly dear and important to us, is in danger of being covered. We must defend ourselves not only along the nearby line of Detskoe Selo but here, in the very heart of Petrograd.”

Petrograd like an ace in the green baize center of the gaming table. How I’d struggled to bring her here, so she could grow up a Petersburger. Was I a fool? Should I have jumped into a hole and pulled a lid over us? Would she have been safe then? I was too exhausted to think of it. We lived inside a war. There were no safe corners, not in Kambarka or at Smolny itself.

“Comrades, those who are perhaps pre-par-ing to de-scend on Petrograd in a night raid, so as to cut the throats of sleeping workers, their wives and children, must know that… Petrograd is already working fev-er-ish-ly… to make of its districts a series of im-preg-na-ble forts…”

Now I understood this morning’s shovels. There might be graves, but first there would be trenches.

“This is a huge la-by-rinth of a city, which covers a hundred square versts, a city with a million in-ha-bi-tants, in whose hands there are mighty means of defense…”

The cotton that had stuffed my ears since Iskra’s death had loosened, and I saw his strategy. He was going to use what he had—streets, canals, buildings, and people. Petrograd itself.

“Comrades, in these days, these hours, you must mobilize for internal defense. Everyone who is not capable of, or cannot be taken away for, par-ti-ci-pa-tion in ex-ter-nal defense… working women—wives and mothers able to wield rifles, revolvers, and hand grenades no less well than men—will defend in the streets, squares, and buildings of Petrograd, the future of the working class of Russia and of the world.”

Glances caromed off the faces of the staff—the red-faced laundress, the sour typist. Nadezhda, in her white apron and kerchief. Matron herself, as square and firm as a fieldstone. And me, my useless, childless, hollowed-out self.

“Last night we proved that when the alarm has been sounded, the proletariat of Petrograd is able to respond… and if circumstances require this, it will remain at the ready tonight and tomorrow night, in double and even treble strength…”

Could I put my grief aside for two days, to protect my native city, this precious scrap of stone and water? Would Iskra want me to lie on a bench and turn my face to the wall? Was that why I had called her Iskra? It would dishonor her to do nothing but weep and wait for the bayonets.

“In these gloomy, cold, hungry, anxious October days of bad autumn weather, Petrograd is showing us once again a ma-jes-tic picture of élan, self-confidence, en-thu-si-asm and heroism. The city, which has suffered so much, which has so often been sub-jec-ted to dangers… is still what it was, the torchbearer of the revolution. And, backed by the combined forces of the whole country, we shall surrender this Petrograd to no one.”

I didn’t wait for the meeting to break up. I put on my coat and gloves and, before the committee had even discussed the defense, I was out the door. I knew where I was heading. Yudenich would not drive his tanks over my daughter’s grave.

27 Vintovka

A crowd of gray-faced workers gathered in the sleet outside the Moskovsky District Soviet. I joined a group of women who said they were from the shoe factory Skorokhod. A comrade directed us to a supply center on the Obvodny Canal, where they handed out shovels and burlap sandbags. Our crew leader, a woman with a short, sturdy nose and slightly crossed eyes under thick brows like a man, grabbed my arm. “Who are you? Are you Skorokhod? I never saw you before.”

I wrenched my arm away. Who was I? An unanswerable question. But I had no time for philosophy. “I’m a matron at Orphanage No. 6, up on Nevsky.”

“So what are you doing down here?” She squinted nastily. What, did she think I was a White spy, down here to steal sandbags for Yudenich? That I would leak the location of the shoe factory?

“This is where Yudenich is coming,” I said. “And this is where we should stop him. Not wait until he checks into the Astoria.”

A woman to my left laughed out loud. The crew boss shot her a frosty look, shoved my arm away as if it were a dead thing, and went off to stick her nose into somebody else’s business. “Don’t mind Elizaveta,” the woman said. Her blue eyes bulged slightly under her brown woolen scarf. “She’s always like that. Constipated. Though with that bread, who isn’t?” The snow was starting to stick to her scarf and shoulders. “I like that shapka.” She pointed to my fox-fur hat. “Did you kill it yourself?”

She was a witty one. Alive, at least compared to me. “As a matter of fact.”

“Vot fashion plate.” She used the English.

Our crew was assigned to the power plant on the south bank of the Obvodny Canal. They’re gonna blow the power plant… Iskra had been alive when Nikita said it.

Iskra. I tucked her into a pocket under my heart with the ginger lock of her hair and thought of my hands, my shovel. Shoulder to shoulder, women and men from the southern factories dug and filled sandbags. The Skorokhod woman and I made a good team, same height, same energy level. We dug the half-frozen earth, and then one shoveled while the other held the bag open. Soon we were both covered in dirt, I could feel the fine particles coating my face, dirt in my eyes and nose and teeth, my snot black with it. I didn’t care that the raw wood of the spade’s handle blistered my gloveless hands, and that the cold made it hard to grip anything. I warmed my hands under my armpits, grateful for the work, grateful for the heaviness and the sweatiness of it. It was a drug against grief.

My partner’s name was Anya. She sewed boot uppers. The workers in her factory were hoping for a bonus ration of a pair of boots per family—they’d gone on strike over it earlier in the year, she told me. “We’re the shoemaker’s children, it’s ridiculous. How do they expect you to sew boots month after month when your own are falling apart?” We kept up a good rhythm as she talked, digging and filling and carrying the bag slung between us crabwise over the rough stones to where men tossed them with a grunt to the top of the growing wall. Other men caught them and ranged them into place. Each bag had to weigh at least sixty pounds. How light my baby had been by comparison. Yet the absence of her was heavier than this whole fortification.

We toiled all day, until the light began to fade. I knew they would blow this plant up rather than let it fall into the hands of the Whites, just as we’d done with Napoleon—but it would leave us to fight in the dark and the snow.

Coordinating our work was an old agitator from the soviet, a white-haired codger in overcoat and cap, red face and white moustache. “Look at our Soviet women! Worth a hundred bourgeoises in silk stockings!” he called out whenever we brought a fresh bag.

“Yeah, I’d rather have a hundred silk stockings than a shovel and a bag of dirt,” Anya called back.

The old man had Krasnaya Gazeta folded in his hands. He alternately read it and used it as a baton. “The paper says the Whites have already declared victory! They’re already popping champagne corks in London, telling everybody that Petrograd’s laid down and died. Well, Comrades, look around. They better drink that champagne quick ’cause that’s all they’re gonna get!”

“That’s the truth, brother.”

Our next delivery found him reading about a White conspiracy that had just been uncovered in the city. “Just waitin’ for the moment old Yudenich walks in. Keeping records on all the Bolsheviks and trade unionists—so they can finger us when their friends show up. Paid for by the English. Well, I hope they’ll like it in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Hope they’ll be nice and comfy.”

The English? Was Father’s group involved? Or just another rumor?

I liked working with Anya. She and I labored at a slow, steady pace all day long, while some of the other women started too fast, stopped, started again, and wearied as the day wore on. But working those weeks in the village, the round-the-clock harvest, had taught me to watch my back, let gravity do much of the work, use the weight of the shovel and the swing of the bag. There wasn’t much I could do about my hands—I had lost my gloves, and they were a mess of blisters and cuts. But I was grateful for the work—I didn’t think about Iskra for whole minutes at a time.

Round-faced Anya gazed at me pityingly. “You can borrow my gloves. We can share.” But I embraced the pain as punishment. I didn’t deserve anyone’s sacrifice.

Past us, rumbling over the Obvodny Canal, moving south, flowed lines of our troops, newly reconfigured, purged of unsound elements—infantry with their bayonets and bandoliers, cavalrymen. “Oooh look, it’s the Bashkirs,” said Anya. Leather-faced men from central Asia on their little shaggy horses. The revolution had turned the country over, shook it like marbles in a box. I could imagine these fierce riders from the steppe with falcons on their wrists. Some even wore skullcaps in the sleet. “Trotsky told the Finns he’d send ’em over if they kept supporting the Whites,” she said, watching them ride. “I heard they’re tearing up the town, beating the whores.”

Trucks roared by, crammed with sailors. Handsome and hearty, they called out to us. “Hi, darling! Wait up for me, I’ll be home by midnight!” One of the sailors was a big blond like Slava from the agit-train. How kind he’d been when I was having Iskra, when everyone else was so useless. He’d remembered my sheepskin… Let me ride on top of the train, pregnant as I was. I wondered if he’d come home. All these men, streaming out to meet Yudenich somewhere between here and Gatchina—many would not return. “Good luck, brothers!” Anya shouted back. “Keep your shoes tied!”

What would they find when they entered the towns of the White advance? Hangings, mass executions? I thought of the steel spine of Trotsky’s armored train. The old agitator said that when Trotsky heard a division was dissolving before the Whites, he grabbed a horse and rode out himself, turned the troops back to the fight. “Drivin’ ’em like cattle. Just like he said he was going to.”

By three in the afternoon, we’d enclosed the power plant in a sandbag fortress nine feet high, just in time for the arrival of a detachment of Red cadets looking pale and heartbreakingly young, armed with bayonets and two machine guns. Tender, afraid, and afraid of looking afraid—that bravado, each some mother’s son, someone’s precious jewel, the light of someone’s heart. Each could be snuffed out like a candle.

When it became apparent I had nowhere else to go, Anya invited me home with her, to a second-story room in a house on a muddy, snow-dusted lane near Skorokhod, where she lived with her mother and three children. Children, everywhere. I couldn’t stand to look at them. They looked like accidents waiting to happen. Her husband was in the army, like all the husbands except mine. She and I shared our defense rations with her mother and the children, accompanied by tea and saccharine. The ration provided was heartier than expected. Perhaps supplies were getting through from Moscow—for some reason Yudenich hadn’t cut the railway line. Was Vikzhel up to its clever tricks?

Anya’s mother made a great fuss over my torn hands, cleaning and bandaging them. She gave me a pair of old mittens she had clearly knitted herself. I didn’t want to take them, they could well be her only pair, but she insisted. “If the Whites get through, what good will gloves be to me?” After our small supper, the mother bustled about, packing for evacuation. Soon the family would move up inside the ring of fortified canals. Anya’s older sister lived in Kolomna, by the wharves, near where I’d once mooned under Blok’s windows. And once delivered a package for Arkady.

“Come with us,” Anya said. “You don’t take up much room.”

But I would stay down here as long as I could.

Everyone was anxious, we jumped at noises in the street, a bit of gunfire. “When do you think they’ll get here?” her mother asked. “Will they come tonight? That’s what the papers are saying. And they’ll slit our throats in our sleep.”

The boys played at shooting out the window.

I sipped tea. My breasts were hard and hot, I chewed the last stems of sage and hoped for relief. I could nurse one of the boys, but then I would just keep producing more milk. I had to get past this—the readiness to nourish someone who was no longer able to be fed. The body was such an idiot. The way it bravely persisted. It didn’t know she was gone. I didn’t tell Anya about Iskra. I washed my face and hands in cold water—they had no soap—and crawled into bed with the two older boys. I fell into sleep like a cut pine.

For three days we labored along the Obvodny Canal, the first ring of defense, sandbagging the bridges, the only approach to the city from the south. In certain places we rolled sections of giant pipe from the water system, taller than our heads, into place, barring passage over the bridges. Hair-raising, twenty women on a section, everyone knowing that if one of these pipes rolled back on us, it would smash us flat like bits of butter under a rolling pin. In most places, though, we filled sandbags sewn that very night in the district artels. Men with sledgehammers broke up paving, and we filled barrows with rubble, made waist-high piles of it across the streets, shoving bits of siding onto it, fences, broken carts, barbed wire, anything we could get our hands on. Three days we worked in the wet falling snow, shoveling, carrying the bags, which grew heavier by the hour, and every minute I blessed Anya’s mother for the mittens. Three nights running, I slept with her boys and dreamed of dirt. Sometimes I was burying Iskra. Other times, digging her up. Or looking for her in the graveyard. I had to move her, the Whites were coming, but I couldn’t find the monument. One night I dug a ditch six feet down, a trap for the Whites, only to be buried myself in a collapsing wall of mud.

On the fourth day, the fighting was so close we could hear the guns. We finished the last barricade, and as dusk fell, they told us that if we knew people living north of Obvodny, to go there now. Anya and I kissed one another goodbye. “Come with us,” she said, holding my hands in their ragged wool mitts. But the district soviet was looking for volunteers to man rifle outposts, and it sounded like something I could do.

Four of us followed a leather-clad girl through the dusk and wet falling snow to a building at Moskovsky Prospect and Detskoselsky Prospect, a middling kind of building that had had a pharmacy on the ground floor, a tailor, and a bakery, but now all were empty. My comrades—a dark-eyed man with sallow skin, a bandy-legged codger, and a woman factory worker a few years my senior—and I struggled under the weight of small sandbags we’d been given while the girl from the soviet shouldered a long burlap sack and led us up a rickety, banister-robbed staircase, opening the door of a modest room on the top floor. Two windows overlooked the intersection. About twelve feet square, board flooring, peeling pink wallpaper. It still had its flowered curtains, its tables and chairs, a child’s iron cot. Requisitioned, and recently. Where had the family gone? The girl comrade just shrugged.

She showed us how to pile the sandbags onto the windowsills, creating squared openings through which we could fire. The girl explained the tactic. “See, there’s a barricade up ahead on Moskovsky. So your White tanks, your White cavalry, they see the barricade and turn up here, thinking they can get around it—and then we give it to ’em. POW. Look, there’s another installation across the street.” She waved, and we saw a white hand in a third-story window wave back.

From her sack, like a magician, she produced a dazzling array of grenades, boxes of shells, two rifles and two revolvers, a package tied in string, bottles of water, and piled them on the scarred table like gifts at Christmastime. The sour metallic scent of guns was becoming familiar. The rifles looked new—I wondered why they weren’t up at the front. The revolvers, on the other hand, were old and dirty, their grips worn—I doubted they would even work when the time came. Now I wished I hadn’t given mine to the gravedigger. It would have been better. At least I knew it worked.

I picked up one of the rifles, and both men stared in surprise—as if I’d sat at the head of the table in a peasant izba. Just plunked myself down in the master’s seat. I ignored their reactionary disapproval. “Show me how to load it,” I said to the comrade.

The girl cocked the bolt, slid it back, clicked five shells into the magazine, locked the bolt back down again, and rammed it into place. “That’s loaded.” She handed it to me. “If it jams, empty it—and make sure the one in the barrel comes out too. Then go ahead and reload.”

The ammunition boxes were marked IZHEVSK.

The solemn, dark-eyed man picked out the other rifle, and the woman in her patched coat and the old man had to settle for revolvers, the old man sulky with wounded pride. The girl showed the woman how to handle her gun, where the safety was, how to cock the hammer, suggesting she use both hands, resting her forearms on the sandbags to shoot, so the recoil wouldn’t spoil the shot. “It won’t be long now.” The girl put her own rifle over her shoulder. “No one’s going to leave, not till it’s over, understand?” She gazed into each of our faces. “Anybody leaves, shoot him. I’m serious. No runnin’ down to the drugstore. The rest of you, assume he’s on his way to tell the Whites where we’ve set our traps.”

We peered uneasily at one another. Would I be able to shoot that old man if he decided to go home? That patched-coated woman? I’m sure they were thinking the same of me. Which of us might be a White spy. I was the most likely candidate—from the wrong district, no family, no story. My diction too mannered. “Reinforcements are on their way, but Yudenich may get here first. I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after. Good luck.”

We sat around the scarred table on the cheap rickety chairs. Night fell quickly. We started a fire in the little stove. We could hear the shelling outside, it sounded louder now, maybe because we were high up and facing south, or perhaps it was just the quiet of the evening. “They’re already at Pulkovo,” said the old man, lines like seams in his weathered face. “They’re fighting on the heights. They could be here in three hours.” He looked into our eyes craftily, as if scaring us made him more important. “And they got tanks, those sons of whores. To a tank, what’s a barricade? They can crawl right over those piles of sticks and stones like kids over a stile.”

That’s all we needed, a defeatist in our ranks. Why had he bothered to come, then? He should have stayed in his rocking chair and waited for the Whites with a plate of cookies. So they’d made it to Pulkovo. I wondered how my Ancients were—my stargazers, those Five precious heads. I prayed they’d been allowed to return to the observatory, that they’d found a safe spot to ride this out as the war was fought around them. How many lives ago was that? The astronomer’s son, buried in his grave up there in the shadow of the observatory. Had the grass grown over it? So many graves now, so many ghosts, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into one. There were more dead than living in Petrograd now. I prayed for the safety of those snowy heads. Let them pursue the stars in peace. But nobody would be left in peace, and the observatory was high ground, it would be a coveted artillery position.

“Tikhonov,” said the old man to the dark-eyed one, holding his hand out. “Skorokhod.”

“Slansky,” said the dark-eyed man. “Dinamo.” The electronics plant. They shook hands.

“I’m Irina. Chizhova,” said the woman in the tattered coat, her hair in a worker’s scarf, her large gray eyes. “From the tanning factory.”

“Kuriakina,” I said, unbolting the rifle. “Orphanage No. 6.” Pulled out the shells, loaded them again.

They began to chat, politely at first, then more intimately, as people do in a queue, exploring the packages, which proved to be rations of bread and salt herring. They wondered how long it would last us, how many tanks the Whites had. They discussed the rumors that Zinoviev and the Bolshevik big shots had already packed up when Trotsky arrived. All the heads nodding like wooden toys. More rumors—someone’s sister knew someone somewhere who worked in one of the commissariats… so on and so on. The same talk that took place in every canteen and queue, at every kitchen table in Petrograd. The old man had to urinate. It was a problem. Chizhova solved it with a pitcher that we christened the latrine, and stuck in the next room. We’d worry about disposal later.

I carried my chair over to the window, where I could see down into the intersection and along Moskovsky Prospect toward the cemetery, the Moscow Gate, and Yudenich. I was just glad I had somewhere to be, something useful to do, and living, breathing bodies around me. Now that I was no longer carrying sandbags, my body felt as stiff as a woman’s of eighty, and I had nothing to keep my mind off my dead redheaded girl, my sweet green-eyed baby, and my own powerlessness in the face of the cruelest fate, the worst cards turning over on the green baize of my life.

Yet some part of me still couldn’t fully take in what had happened, that she was really gone. It remained as stupid as a mule. As loyal as a dog that sits at the door after the master is buried, waiting for him to come out in the morning. I didn’t believe in her death. Even though I had buried her myself, even though a paper containing her curls weighed down my heart, a part of me could not accept that it was forever. I felt wrong. Without her in my arms, I was too light. I had too much time. She’d always been with me, right on me—in her cloth, or in my lap. It was like losing an arm. Digging, filling sandbags, with Anya in her small crowded flat, there had been something to keep my mind occupied, but now, staring down into the dark street, it hit me like a blizzard—No, a blizzard was too dense, too absorbing, it obscured vision. This was the opposite, a great shock of consciousness. I could hardly bear to sit in this chair. To listen to their chatter.

Flashes of gunfire twinkled through the big flakes of wet autumn snow—they were close. I could feel Petrograd holding its breath. Our fate, the fate of a city, was being decided. Wagered on a round of cards. I stared down the empty boulevard. The building across the way, on Detskoselsky, was dark except for a scattering of windows lit behind curtains. I listened to my comrades the way one listens to birds, their voices filling the air with basic sounds—hello, hello hello, I’m here I’m here. Danger, danger, pretty bird, come love me. Humans tell stories about themselves, where they’re from, what they do in their work, what they’re doing here instead of home with their families. Everyone has some sort of story. Each human being walks around with an epic poem of himself, just waiting to stand up after dinner and recite it, poor bards that we are. Something about humans, we want to be known. We think we’re a story: beginning, middle, and end—and this is how it ended up. But of course, our stories have no sense, no rhythm, no meaning—an unfolded fan made more sense than a human life. In any case, I didn’t want to tell my story. It was as bitter as uncured olives.

The old man, Tikhonov, was with the union at Skorokhod, and one of the founders of the factory committee. “I’ll be the first they line up against the wall,” he said proudly.

Dinamo—Slansky—built radios, he was studying to become an engineer. He’d joined the party just last year, a real go-getter.

“Why aren’t you in the army, a fine young man like yourself?” Tikhonov asked, thinking he was so clever, like a prosecutor.

Dinamo turned around and pulled up his jacket, his shirt. Terrible scars boiled the skin, like a wet cloth that had been balled up and left to dry that way in the sun. “Took it in the back on the Dvina,” he said. “My kidneys are shot. I can’t march for shit. But people need radios, the trains and the troops.”

Chizhova was Petrograd born and bred, her mother a laundress, her father a tanner. She had a boyfriend in the army, Vitya. “I know he’s gonna come back and talk about all the battles he’s won and where he went, and what am I going to say for myself? That I stayed home and dyed leather? That that was my civil war? At least now I can say I did something.”

“What about you?” Tikhonov called over from the table. “Comrade Rifle. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“You can see the shooting from Pulkovo,” I said.

“I mean who are you? Come on, be friendly. We’re going to be here for a while, we might as well get to know each other.” He tipped his chair back, folded his hands behind his head.

I told my story, plain as boiled water. “My baby died in an accident, nine days ago. She’s buried down there at Novodevichy Convent.” My lungs hurt, from all the dirt I’d breathed. I lifted the rifle to my shoulder, sighted down Moskovsky. “I don’t give a damn what happens to me, so I thought I’d do the revolution some good. That’s my story. Like it?”

They looked like people in a painting, sitting at that table, the flickering candlelight caressing their faces. Their eyes averted. Yes, I could feel them recoiling, the way you recoil from someone with smallpox, cholera. How they leaned away. No one wanted to be around a bad-luck person. Someone who didn’t want to live. Especially with a rifle.

“How horrible. In the middle of all this,” said Chizhova. “Such a shame.”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Tikhonov. “I didn’t know.”

“No time to even mourn,” chimed in Dinamo. “Tough luck.”

“Where’s your family?” Chizhova asked, her gray eyes big with pity.

I shook my head. “No family.” I wouldn’t cry. Not in front of these people. When it was all over, maybe then, when I could seal myself into a room by myself, maybe then I could. I went back to staring out the window, into the empty street. So empty, so strange, that broad boulevard in the sifting snow. Waiting for the end.

They started up chattering again, trying to air the dread that lapped at the baseboards of the room with its bit of plasterwork and its empty child’s cot. The guns from Pulkovo sounded like thunder. I tried counting between the flash and the rumble, but it was too fast. At one point, I noticed, the men got up from the table and quietly carried the child’s cot into the other room. Nice of them. Kindness and death all mixed together.

We slept in rotation, two awake and two down, on the commissar system—someone to keep watch and someone else to keep that person watching. Dinamo and I took the first watch. He had a pencil and notebook, he was sketching something. I gazed out at the curtain of falling snow. Iskra never lived to see her first snowfall. Not even that long. Summer and autumn were all she ever knew. What if she were right here, just on the other side, like Ukashin thought. Would she still be a baby, just a baby, floating, drifting, alone? Or would she have returned to that undifferentiated consciousness? Would she understand? But really, what was there to understand? The accident that life on earth was? Not fate. Just a random hand of cards. We stumbled in and we stumbled out, like a drunk opening doors in a strange apartment.

Tonight, or tomorrow, I would put my own death to some purpose.

I kept thinking of Maxim. His agony, his guilt. I hoped maybe they were together, keeping each other company. I wondered if you were met by those who’d gone before, or were accompanied by those you died with. I looked around the room. I would not want to die with these people. Especially Tikhonov.

I shouldn’t have taken that job at the orphanage. It gave me the false sense that I could handle Iskra alone. I shouldn’t have left Mina’s building. I should have slept in the hall outside their door until I shamed them into taking me in. Like a beggar exposing her wounds. But I’d been too proud, wanted to go my own way. So proud. Damn Mina for her own stiff-necked certitudes—and yet, it hadn’t been she who had turned our friendship to vinegar. I’d ruined it myself, not once but twice.

I thought again of that note someone had pressed into my hand on Millionnaya Street. It was astonishing to me that after two years of Cheka searching and spying, there was still White conspiracy in Petrograd. The Cheka cells were packed with supposed conspirators—just ordinary people—and yet, at the hour of the White advance, suddenly a real counterrevolutionary organization had sprung to life like an animated doll. Who would have believed it? Even now I would have been skeptical, but for that pamphlet.

And Papa? Perhaps he’d sneaked off to England after this summer’s attack. But I doubted it. He was more like me than I would have been able to see before. Stubborn to the end. No, he would be printing pamphlets and slipping messages to the front. Or sitting in a Cheka cell himself—beaten, bloody, bearded as he’d been that night. Disguised as a worker, but unable to disguise his air of superiority and absolute confidence in his own cause. I remembered what they’d said about defeated armies being the most brutal. The Cheka would shoot everyone in their cells when the Whites arrived, right before we blew up the bridges and the power plants. Yet, even now, I didn’t want him dead.

I wish he’d seen her. But we were a nation of orphans, childless parents, parentless children. Civil war had cut the thread. There was no then. Then was outlawed for people like me. I hadn’t realized how important the past would be, family, those connections. I’d thought nothing of breaking them myself. And now it was a dead end. There were no family jokes I would pass down to her—how her Uncle Volodya had once sprinkled pepper into our dyedushka’s mouth on the porch at Maryino when he was enjoying his after-lunch nap, and he chased him around the yard trying to hit him with his cane. The time Grandmère bought a white marten scarf complete with head and eyes, and Tulku would not stop barking at her. Iskra never got to ride the rocking horse in the nursery on Furshtatskaya Street, never held Avdokia’s soft, gnarled hand, never played with the hand-painted Columbine and Harlequin in Seryozha’s little theater. She didn’t know our favorite childhood game—Cossacks and Robbers. She hadn’t shared her own dyedushka’s English butterscotch, ordered all the way from London. She’d never heard our love story, mine and Kolya’s, how we kissed in the coatroom on St. Basil’s Eve, or that he smelled of honey and cigars and Floris limes. She’d never smelled white lilacs in December. She never saw December.

“You okay, Vintovka?” Dinamo whispered from the other window, not to wake the others. Vintovka, rifle. He was my commissar.

I nodded, swiped at my telltale tears.

“Scared?”

“Not of dying,” I said.

He laid his rifle across his knees. “What does scare you?” he said.

“Living.” It made my eyes sting.

He swallowed. I could see the Adam’s apple jump in his throat under the black, unshaven chin. “Can I tell you something?”

I braced to hear what he might have waited until now to confess. I hoped it was not anything sexual.

“When I was lying out in that field on the Dvina, dying like a piece of meat”—he felt in his pockets, produced a bag of tobacco—“all I wanted was for a moment to live like a man. My comrades to bury me with a few words, knowing who I was. I didn’t mind dying, I just didn’t want to die like a dog.” He rolled a cigarette in a bit of Pravda.

“In those days, there was a third enemy—wolves. Whole nations of wolves, starving for game. They started attacking the men in the trenches, both sides the same to them. Sometimes we’d declare a cease-fire to beat them back. They felt like darkness itself, closing in.” He smoked, turning away from me, lifting the curtain to see down the street, the falling snow was thickening. “We were afraid of everything. The wolves. Gas. We had no masks, we had nothing. With gas, you don’t feel anything until it starts to burn, it burns your eyes away, your lungs.” The snow drifting down, the smoke drifting up.

I could imagine him, wounded. I could smell the dirt, the mud, feel those wolves prowling. “So they got you out?”

“Yeah. I was in the hospital a year. Do you know what those places were like?”

All those brave men, groaning, sweating, in their unchanged bandages. Talk about dying like a dog. I nodded.

“I lay in that bed for a year. With those pigs of nurses, changing the bandages every three days if you were lucky. No morphine, not even water sometimes. No piece of it that wasn’t hell. You know what I dreamed of?”

I couldn’t imagine. Murder? Lakes? Women?

“I wanted a moment, just one moment, that wasn’t about the flesh. No bodies, no screaming, no eating, no clawing for this and that. All I wanted was a moment to be a man. You know? A human being. Something with a little dignity, something that didn’t stink, that didn’t hurt. Just to have a thought, one simple thought. Like, where does electricity come from?”

He was wounded in a bed in some hideous military hospital, and that’s what he wanted to think about. Electricity.

“Crazy, I know. But I was a good student back in school, if you can believe it. But who asks a poor boy, son of a muzhik, You want to go into the Engineers, Mitya? No. I left home at fourteen to go to work. Up at the Nobel factory. Then the war came. Who cares what Mitya Slansky wants? Into the infantry with him.” His bitterness, the hollowness of his eyes, his cheeks.

“Let me tell you, Vintovka, lying in that bed, I decided I was going to be a man. I wouldn’t wait until I’d healed, I might die instead, but meantime, I would try to be a man. I forced myself—Think thoughts, Mitya. How does a plant drink the sun? What does a fish think about, under the ice? I thought about people on other planets, and if we went there, would they look like people to us? We might walk right by them, thinking they were rocks. Like the bourgeoisie used to walk past us.”

In the street, a single man was walking through the falling snow, down the center of Moskovsky Prospect. Where was he going? To report to the Whites? Was he mad? I sighted my rifle on him. Then I saw the sled. Now I understood—he was going to the barricade to pull firewood off it. Didn’t he know there were snipers up in these buildings, that we’d turned Petrograd into a fortress?

“I thought about people from long ago,” Dinamo was saying, the smoke coiling over his head like a halo. “Egyptians. Greeks. Or Africans. Are they like us, do they think like us, or are there ways of being a man that are so different from us—maybe better too?”

I lowered my rifle. I was a merciful god. Dinamo’s eyes burned in the light of the flickering candle. He wanted a question that had nothing to do with the belly, or the nerves, but that came from the soul of a man, doing the one thing a man could do. Think, wonder. “Then the revolution happened, and it was like Easter, remember?”

“Everybody kissed each other in the street.” How happy we were then, everyone alive, the country all together.

“The whole country, dreaming of being treated as human beings. Of living like men.” He brought his chair closer to mine. His brown eyes, his long nose in his narrow face—in this light he looked like a tormented monk, something El Greco might have painted, Zurbarán.

“And yet, as things went along, it was still the same old thing, wasn’t it? The boss, the owners, the generals, the war. The Constituent Assembly, run by the lawyers and the landlords. No, we said. We want the soviet! We want to make our own decisions. We’re sick of living like dogs, eating the scraps from the table!”

The old man on the divan startled awake. “The devil take you,” he grumbled. “People are trying to sleep here!”

“Go back to sleep, old man,” I said. “Yudenich isn’t here yet.”

Dinamo rubbed his face in his hand. He looked a little abashed, but still, he had to keep talking. The steady flood of words—had he never shared this with anyone before? “So, here we are,” he said, keeping his voice down. “We have our soviet, we have our revolution, we’re our own masters, and what has changed? What has changed? It’s still the same. Meat.”

“Or no meat,” I said.

“Rations, production—this is all a dog’s life. Is this our fate on earth? Food, work, have a little fun, back to work?”

“I thought you were a Communist,” I said. “You sound like a Christian.”

“Not God and incense and holy holy holy, kiss the picture, and all that. But something. I mean, we need to improve material conditions, but that’s not what we’re talking about either. We’re talking about, where is there for a man to go in this world? In this world. That’s what scares me. That there’s material conditions and nothing else.” His face was like a Greek saint’s, hollow-eyed from his sufferings. How alone he was, in that chair, only five feet from me. How alone we all were in our mortal terror.

I recited from Tyutchev:

“What is that?” Dinamo asked.

“A poem,” I said.

“Is there more?” he asked.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “The hour of wordless longing… That’s just the kind of thing I meant. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. But you, you don’t think I’m crazy, do you? Did you make that up?”

“No. It’s Tyutchev. A poet. He’s buried in Novodevichy, right down the road.”

“What’s it called? Say it again.” I did, and he wrote it into his engineer’s notebook.

“It’s called ‘Twilight.’”

Tyutchev, cooling my burning brain. Yes, let me lose myself.

Dinamo’s dark eyes shone, a secular monk’s, burning, burning. “I wish I knew some poems. I’ve just got a few chastushki.”

Ukashin used to say that the soul was earth and spirit violently intermingled. That’s what Dinamo was like. Of course he was tired of earth, earth, earth, material conditions, rations, meetings—while God and angels were no substance, worse than our thin fish soup. Soul was what he was after, robust, nourishing. That’s what fed a man. Not spirit—pure, eternal, cold, and vaporous. Soul was a different matter. You couldn’t have soul without earth and spirit, mixed together uneasily, muddied, restless, animated. Soul was never pure, that was its very nature. That’s why my mother was soulless, why she could say, It won’t live. She saw, but soullessly. Purely, remorselessly. And the Bolsheviks, the spacemen, that same purity. That refusal to tolerate the muddiness. Only a soulful man could suffer in this certain way, like Dinamo here. To even recognize this hunger. That was a man.

“Do you know any more?”

And I did. I recited Baratynsky’s poem:

How a great poet could reach out with words, across the years, and take you in his arms, some unknown reader, whether it be a weary matron in her soiled apron or a grown man with a rifle on the Dvina. He would hold you close, lift you up, comfort you as only another human could.

I understood Dinamo’s dilemma. We wanted food for the people, justice for the people, freedom for the people, but then what? Material conditions. The body, the flesh. Sex, food, warmth. Essential, but for what purpose? So that we could live as human beings. So we could feed our own souls. Not just for better and more.

I gazed down into the sifting snow in the street lit by a single streetlamp, and realized I had devalued too quickly my time at Ionia, thrown it out on the trash heap of my short and wasted life. Perhaps Ukashin had been a fake, but some of his teachings came back to me now. It was not any future hell that bothered me but the way through this one. Oh, Iskra, my sweet one. What had become of that little flame? Had she a soul yet? Or only the depths she drilled into mine? What were those green eyes that had looked up into the trees and marked their motion, that had gazed into my face as a thirsty man gazes into a spring?

After two days, our vigil was over. No gun battle ever erupted on Moskovsky Prospect. The Whites had been pushed off Pulkovo Heights, and the Red troops were on the offensive, just as Trotsky had said would happen. The girl from the soviet came and took back our guns. We were free to go. It was the one thing I hadn’t been ready for, that I would not die in this room. I shook Dinamo’s hand.

“Could I see you again?” he asked. “You could teach me some more poetry.”

I saw the look in his eyes. Like Genya’s. Like the one-armed man’s. I could take him up and put him down, and he would never recover from the blow. For once, I spared his lonely heart. “I’ve got no address.”

He tore a page from his notebook and wrote his own on it. “If you ever want to… it’s just around the corner. I’m usually home Tuesday and Thursday nights…” He handed me the shred of paper. “I’ll remember you, Vintovka. ‘And on this earth / My presence is a friend to someone’…”

I put the paper in my sheepskin pocket. We both knew I wouldn’t use it. I would have to find that tiny light inside myself, that bit of humanity, and walk a dark stretch of unknown miles with it cupped in my hands. If I wasn’t careful, the least wind would blow me out.