Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

28 Number, Please

CLACKCKCKCKALLLAAACCCKKK

clatterCHATTER

click click click clack

clack CLACK CrACKEtty CrACK

That furious hail, like a universe of pebbles bouncing down a galaxy of stairways, the frozen, echoing hall of the Petrograd Telephone Exchange. Hundreds of girls connecting thousands of calls on Bolshaya Morskaya Street.

Number, please. Number, please.

The telephone exchange needed nothing but my hands, ears, mouth. One more Soviet young lady.

Number, please.

That wall of sound, like a waterfall of kopek coins on a metal roof, as metal plug sought metal nest times ten thousand. Connecting whom to what, and why? In a city of frozen toilets and crumbling houses, rotten herring and carrying water from a pump up four stories, when right on Bolshaya Morskaya the carcass of a dead horse had lain since summer, bones picked clean, first by knives, then crows. The dogs were all dead.

But commissars talked to Smolny. They talked to their girlfriends. They talked to their wives. Narkompros was tracking down a trainload of fuel. Sometimes the girls listened in.

I dreamed of the sound, even at night, a steady rain of pebbles on an icy slab. To me it was astonishing that people still had working numbers and someone to call. The city making calls from beyond the grave, important appointments in this village of ghosts.

Girls listened in. Cheap theater. Hoping to hear something dirty.

Clacketty clack

Number, please.

The blessing of numbers. Of plugs in holes. I was lucky, I could not have returned to the orphanage. Could not bear living children, their terrible eyes, their fragile lives. I didn’t want to love anyone. I couldn’t hurt anyone here.

Number, please. I’ll connect you.

The great hall of technology was colder than a morgue. We wore our coats and hats. My headphones snugged under my fox-fur shapka, the mouthpiece on my chest under my dirty sheepskin coat. Some cut the tips off their gloves but I didn’t have a pair to ruin. Such was my life.

They never teach you that there will be life after death. That’s the worst part. That you will have to go on putting one foot in front of the other. Go to work. Sleep. Just the burden of carting the body around. Keeping it warm. Putting things in the mouth. A half-hearted attempt at staying clean. I gave it a try. You spent your meager calories walking to work to earn ration cards to stand in queues to buy the bread that let you walk to work.

I returned from my rifle nest to find families packed into the Shpalernaya flat’s two parlors, Golovin’s study, and the old lady’s boudoir. Collectivized. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everything had disappeared from my little room on the servant’s hall—linens, books, blankets, my one summer dress, my pail from Izhevsk. I had nothing. I stood in the hall and waited. “My daughter just died,” I said. “I’ve been out defending Petrograd. She died ten days ago.” The pail reappeared. Some sticks of wood. Blankets and books. The neighbors were cold and hungry, but not without shame.

But the days of aristocracy soon came to an end. The building’s old pipes groaned, shuddered, and burst. Now we descended the gap-toothed stairs to draw water from the pump, like everyone else, and shat in the second courtyard. The Ice Age had begun. It was like that all over the city—people took their trousers down right on the sidewalk, squatted. Men pissed off the side of a cart without even stopping, as one might urinate from a sailboat. It was a zoo with no keeper. We didn’t need one. There was no outside to run to.

And yet there were telephones.

In the canteen, I sat next to a girl I recognized from the Tagantsev Academy. We’d once shared a desk in Madame Buliova’s elocution class. Yelena Rumakhverina. She looked into my face and spoke to me as a stranger. I wasn’t even in disguise. I descended to the icy washroom and looked into my own eyes. The person in the mirror was not me. Not merely older, thinner, hollow-eyed, rough-haired, dogged by bad luck. Someone else. A hand not my own put on my headset, a mouth not my own spoke into the receiver amid the clatter of steel plugs against the rims of ten thousand steel sockets.

Number, please.

One of a thousand girls, each in her place, wearing the headset, connected by snaking cables that snapped back into the shelf—multiplied by hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

Home life was a hunt for food and fuel, the need to keep the body alive, conserve calories, warmth, maximize the little strength we had, we denizens of the new Ice Age. Ice froze in the pitchers overnight. We attacked fences, siding, anything wooden. I took surreptitious trips down to the wharves on the Neva to gouge out wood from Petrograd’s fine fleet of rotting barges. It was dangerous, counterrevolutionary—stealing wood from the People. A secret war waged each night between the soviet and the cold, hungry ants of its citizenry. Whole buildings tumbled, eviscerated. People chopped up scaffoldings around buildings under repair. They hacked up the balustrades and stair rails—every stairway became a death trap. I bought a child’s sled and, with Arkady’s hatchet, stole wood viciously, a small ravenous weasel hacking up an exposed wall, running off before arrest. There were too many of us to catch us all and I was by no means the slowest.

I did my living in dreams. I dreamed of trains, trying to get on, pushing and grappling only to be heaved off at the last moment, butted with rakes and brooms. I hung on the doors, clung to the roofs with bare hands, slid away on the turns. I rode inside cars so crowded they became a tank of flesh. There were dreams of suffocation, clawing for breath. There were dreams of riding on the tops of the cars, and being pushed off, or seeing the impossibly low tunnel coming at me. Or else I was back in the orphanage, losing my way in the corridors. The stairs were all wrong. I had to find Maxim before he did something bad. I dreamed I was back on Furshtatskaya Street in my mother’s last room. Bad men pounding on the door. Don’t open it, I always yelled. But my mother never listened, she always wanted to see who was there.

Yet my one prayer, to see Iskra again, was always withheld.

I dreamed of the telephone exchange. It wasn’t enough to work there all day, I also had to labor all night. The cords snarled, the plugs too big for the sockets. I hung up on Lenin. I dreamed of water filling the great hall, and operating the switchboard ankle-deep in water, knee-deep, water rising. The plugs were a million shrieking mouths. One night, bees flew in and out, and the holes dripped with honey.

In the rooms of the collectivized flat, people regularly sickened and died. Some died quietly, freezing to death, starving, others noisily, vomiting, groaning, crying out. Eventually you stopped pitying them. It was just part of life. Their loved ones carried the bodies out in rented coffins. I hated how I eyed those scarred boxes, estimating how long a coffin like that would burn—close to a week if you kept the flame small.

Yet unbelievably, we were winning the war. Gatchina fell, and Iamburg in the west. In the east, we rolled into Omsk, Kolchak’s capital. The Tula card had stood fast. But would victory come soon enough? Or would we all be dead by the time it came?

St. Basil’s Eve, the women of the flat cast the wax, huddled over a scarred kitchen table. A sun, a seal, a wedding ring… They offered to cast mine, but I refused. There was no point in predicting one lone person’s fate when the world itself was riding an out-of-control horse. And frankly, if the ship with sails came into the Neva this very night, I didn’t know if I would have the energy to climb aboard.

That night, I dreamed of a ship caught in the ice. The sound of its hull cracking, crushed in the growing pack ice. We’d set out too late and winter overtook us. We had to abandon the ship, move out on foot across the frozen waste. A group of city people, dressed in street clothes, arguing which way to go.

In February, amid the hunger and cold, death a part of daily life, I reached my twentieth birthday. No child, no husband, no friends, I was as hollow as a gourd, but still here. No one celebrated. I left work early to buy a slice of horsemeat—happy birthday to me.

It wasn’t yet dark. If it had been, I wouldn’t have seen him, walking up Bolshaya Morskaya Street. Tall and long legged, in a blue overcoat and gray hat. The poet of poets—Alexander Blok.

Your name—a bird in the mouth, Tsvetaeva wrote.

No one else seemed to notice him as he made his way along the gloom of a dim street—exactly his climate. He seemed haunted and worn, as though he’d lived through some terrible disease. Honestly, I had thought he was dead. A ghost among so many. I supposed I’d been thinking of Andrei, the intelligent.

“Alexander Alexandrovich!” I called out, astonished at my own boldness.

He turned. The snow sifted down over his shoulders, his hat of curly lamb. He squinted as he cast his glance around him, looking for someone he knew. But it was just me. My stony eyes suddenly found their tears.

“I have a premonition of you. The years in silence pass…” I recited.

“Dear girl,” he said.

Heartened, I continued:

“And as the image, solitary, I have that premonition of you again…”

We stood there on Bolshaya Morskaya near the corpse of the felled horse for a long moment. The snow fell between us, rubbing out his form like chalk. He came to me. Put his hand on my shoulder. His voice was very soft, his smile sad. He didn’t wear his own face anymore either.

“Are you a poet?” he asked, peering under my fox hat.

I was dreaming. I must have fallen asleep. I was talking to Blok next to a dead horse on Bolshaya Morskaya Street!

Was I a poet? I once had been. Though that was when I’d had a face. Not this blank automaton.

I nodded. It was easier to agree than to explain.

“Come, walk with me. I’m going to the House of Arts. I have a meeting in a few minutes.” He sighed and together we started off. “But tell me one of your poems.”

I recited:

My poem about my Cheka imprisonment, “Alice in the Year One.” He walked slower, nodding, laughing quietly at some of the lines as I kept pace at his elbow. I was not a short girl, but Blok towered over me.

He listened closely, bending his head not to miss my words, and when I was done, I saw that his face had darkened, covered with clouds. “Be careful who you tell that one to,” he said. “Write anything, but be careful of your audience. What’s your name, dear girl?”

“Makarova. Marina. Dmitrievna. Though it’s not what’s on my papers,” I confided.

“And where do you come from, Marina Dmitrievna?”

“From Petersburg,” I said.

He smiled. “And I as well.”

We knew what that meant. We were from Petersburg. Not Petrograd, this hungry, jargon-speaking town where you tore your firewood off a barge rotting in the river, but Petersburg, that state of mind. The chimes and bells, silver and lilac. Where there could still be beauty, and poetry, that lost world.

We came to Nevsky, and he turned right. I hesitated a moment, not knowing whether to continue to follow him like a stray dog or have a shred of dignity and bid him good night. I kept walking alongside him.

“Do you know what building this is?” he asked me. The three-story one on our right had high arched windows that extended all the way down from Bolshaya Morskaya to the Moika Canal.

“It’s the Eliseevs’ house.” The very name could flood any hungry Former with near pornographic associations. The Eliseevs had purveyed luxury foods to the upper stratum of the capital. I could see Mama in her big hat pointing to cases full of caviar, tins of Seville marmalade. The pyramids of pineapples! Horrible pungent cheeses, Chinese tea and French pâté, Papa’s English clotted cream. Surely the Eliseevs were no longer in Petrograd, fallen to selling horsemeat and frozen potatoes on surreptitious back stairs and in second courtyards.

“It’s the House of Arts,” said Blok. “Haven’t you heard of it?”

But I had heard nothing but the waterfall of the telephone exchange.

“You should come. We have readings and studios—Gumilev teaches one that’s very popular. Though I disagree with everything he does, you might enjoy the young people.”

Gumilev, the poet! Once married to Akhmatova.

“And Chukovsky’s teaching a translation studio—have you read his Whitman? I imagine you’d like it.”

“I sing the body electric,” I recited in my heavily accented English. “The armies of those I love engirt me.” Though the armies of those I loved were gone, slipped through my fingers and under Whitman’s grass.

People entered and exited the street door at 59 Moika Embankment, stopping to glance at Alexander Alexandrovich talking to this girl without a face. He shook my hand in its ragged mitten. “It was so good to meet you, Marina Dmitrievna. Come tomorrow night, won’t you? Bely is reading. One should never miss that opportunity. I hope we’ll speak again.”

A young woman held the door for him.

The gossips said Bely had once tried to take Blok’s wife from him. Such a close-knit mountaintop, our Olympus. “Thank you, Alexander Alexandrovich. I’ll be there,” I called out as he slipped inside the door to the House of Arts. “What time?”

“At five,” he said.

29 From Petersburg

I could feel the ice in my soul beginning to crack, as if he were the sun. I hope we’ll speak again. Nothing but death would keep me from showing up tomorrow night. Blok and I would speak, and he would save me, like a passing freighter plucking a drowning stoker from an icy sea.

I had given him my true name.

I slipped into a courtyard off Basseynaya Street where a furtive, flat-eyed man sold horsemeat at forty-five rubles a pound. I traded him a good Izhevsk brass rifle shell from the box I’d had the presence to forget to turn in when we returned our rifles. He examined it, weighed it in his hand, and sliced a chunk from a bloody package with a dirty knife, wrapped it in Pravda. I could smell the raw meat, half enticing, half nauseating, as I carried the dripping package home, its blood dotting the snow.

There was simply no way to keep meat private in a communal apartment. Or anything else for that matter. As the perfume of cooking meat filled the kitchen, I could hear the stomachs of my comrade tenants growl as they tried not to stare. The power of sizzling flesh was primal, magnetic.

A neighbor, Olga Viktorievna, followed the scent, sniffing like a bloodhound. “Our stove is smoking again, Marina Dmitrievna,” she wheedled. “Could you come fix it?” Saccharine sweet. A Red Army wife, she lived next to the kitchen with her children, and was a tremendous thief. Everyone knew it. You had to watch your food like a bank auditor. She spent her day gossiping with the wife of a Soviet clerk, whose child was wasting of some unknown disease.

“I’ll be there as soon as I’m done,” I said.

She eyed my dinner enviously.

I took my meal in my room, as everyone did—we beasts didn’t want to be watched while eating. I remembered when dining in public was considered a pleasant thing. Now we hid ourselves away. The pleasure was too intense, almost sexual, shrouded by guilt. My dining table was the nightstand, my chair the cot, my candelabra a smoky candle stuck in a dish. My window looked out onto a mean little courtyard. In the flats opposite, the curtains were drawn. You could only see strips of light in the inhabited ones.

But I had something to celebrate tonight beyond my entry into this world. A new entry, a rebirth. What had given me the nerve to call out to Alexander Alexandrovich? Like a ghost, he’d appeared from the destroyed city where I’d dwelled since Iskra’s death. Perhaps he was an apparition from another dimension, some impossible world up four rounds of the spiral, where I’d been granted a wish I’d not even expressed. How else to explain how he’d arrived at just that hour, and had spoken to me. Impossible, and yet—his verse welled up in my throat. And I’d recited my own poem, written when I’d still had a self, when I still could take joy in the mustering of words…

I chewed the tough horsemeat, savoring each atom. Oh, it was so good! Thank God I had sunflower oil, not castor or fish liver. The meat and fat raced through my bloodstream like trains through a city. When had I last felt even in the slightest bit lucky? I imagined a table full of silver and crystal. Why not—who could judge my counterrevolutionary thoughts? I wore black velvet gloves. A vase of roses rested on the table, dark red wine, and the tall poet with blue eyes lifted his glass to me! And I thought, like the woman in his poem, said to be Akhmatova: That one’s in love with me too.

Tonight I was twenty and the poet raised his glass to me—

The knock on the door. “Marina Dmitrievna?” That horrible wheedling sound.

“One minute!” I finished my luxurious repast, licked the plate as clean as a barynya’s pinafore. Then locked the door, slipped the key in my pocket, and went to help Olga with her stove.

Somehow I’d become resident bourgeoika doctor. It was just as well to have good relations with the neighbors—you never knew when you’d need their help. We had these temperamental stoves, but no one seemed able to make them work without smoking themselves half to death. With a soldering iron, I could have been king of this building. A bourgeoika is basically a tin box with a few lengths of pipe venting out the window, and required the gentlest adjustments to make it draw. Usually it was a case of the pipes being misaligned, so that smoke leaked out—people tended to dry their clothes there—or else the stuff being burned was too wet, or the owner had failed to heat the air in the chimney sufficiently, so a plug of cold air walled off the rising smoke.

Olga Viktorievna’s room was larger than mine, but crammed to impassability with beds, trunks, boxes, piles of rags, an indescribable puzzle of broken things. It smelled of vinegar. Her son and daughter looked at me as if they were drugged, as if I were a moving shadow on a wall. The boy, about thirteen, coughed, wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. Their little stove emitted clouds of gray smoke. I squatted before it, opened the door. Inside lay a half-burned book, the pages smoldering. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. The sight trampled the good feelings I’d gingerly assembled. This great book had survived almost a century only to be consumed for the worth of its paper.

I showed her, sadly, how to properly burn a book. “You can’t just throw it in there, you have to take the pages apart. Look.” I made small dense coals, rolling each individual page and then twisting a knot, wondering if Olga Viktorievna or one of her blank kids had burned my youthful poetry, had immolated Genya’s fiery verse. Someone had. This sad, hard little woman, like a knot herself. And I was not so naive as to think I would be above burning my books someday. Even people who knew their value were burning their libraries for heat. But it didn’t take away the sharpness of the sacrifice. The worst of it was that books burned quickly and gave little warmth. Their heat was all in the mind. No, I’m not Byron, I’m unknown, Lermontov wrote,

I went back to my room, my mood soured and my clothes stinking of smoke and the death of poetry. After securing the door behind me, I pulled out the nightstand’s drawer. Hidden behind it, wrapped in a folded vellum page, lay Arkady’s marafet. If this wasn’t the occasion, I didn’t know what would be better. I shook it onto the back of my hand, divided it with the tip of my knife. “An early start, an early end,” I toasted myself. And sniffed it up.

The first nostril burned, and then suffused me with a warmth that had nothing to do with fire. I inhaled the other. Suddenly I had to defecate, urgently, something that didn’t occur more than once a week. I was already in my coat and hat, took the scrap of paper—that picture of Saint Agatha—and in Anya’s mittens, went down the back stairs into the courtyard, where I relieved myself in the dark, politely ignoring others doing the same. We would pay the price come spring, when the water table rose, and cholera struck us down like ants.

But all that seemed so far away now. In this moment, I felt free. Shimmering with health and beauty, untouched by grief and the brittle cold. A strange sensation. These days you braced yourself whether indoors or out, as tight as a fist. Suddenly I could stand up straight, breathe deep the frosty air. No wonder the orphans liked their marafet. No wonder they froze to death wearing next to nothing, having failed to find shelter. Starving, buying cocaine instead of food. No wonder.

I walked out onto Shpalernaya Street, feeling light, feeling immortal. I wasn’t even sure people could see me, I was so beautiful. Perhaps I would look to them like a fish gazing up at the sun through water. Though no one was looking at me—who would be out tonight walking in the dark and snow? The street unrolled between elegant buildings, crisp and precise. All down the block one could discern the living apartments, dark between the silvery dead ones. I felt I could see through the walls to people curled in their beds, nose to tail like foxes, preparing to live through yet another cold night. Like bedbugs, we retired at seven. Bedbugs, that’s what we were now. But not me.

What freedom! To walk through the streets unchilled, alone, as snow drifted past the streetlights on Shpalernaya, globes like great South Sea pearls, heavy and far apart. I sing the body electric! I didn’t want to stand in the light, it was more beautiful to stand in the darkness and watch them burning in their crowns of snow. Like giants, like stars. I pictured them as Pushkin, and Lermontov—still smoky from the fire—as Blok and Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva dancing by campfire light, Tolstoy and Whitman keeping pace with one another, their hands behind their backs. They lit our darkness, and I was the only one who could walk among them.

The weight of Iskra’s death slid from my shoulders. It had been cracking my back in two. Iskra, just for this one night… I let the syllables rise like bubbles into the air. I pictured her eyes, fingers wrapped in mine, and for once it didn’t make me want to die. I recalled the soft, compact weight of her, her adorable limbs, her ginger curls, and yet the twisted blade of my grief remained in my hand. The snow fell with such tenderness, forgiving me.

Tomorrow I would pick up my burden—but tonight I was twenty. Tonight I was a poet. I’d met Blok. You’ll come, won’t you? I walked out to greet the great frozen Neva, ice covering its secret life where water still flowed and fish whispered into the darkness. The important thing was this—the life within the ice, the water flowing. I could feel it, Kitezh—the city inside the waters. I could hear its bells. I laughed out loud. I’d met Blok! That silver stag among cattle. Your name—a bird in the mouth… What fate had dropped him in my path, what undeserved charity? I had been silent for so long, crushed by the weight of Iskra’s death—what had inspired me to call out to him? Was it madness, or did he seem as grateful as I? Snow fell on my eyelashes, making stars of the streetlights. My breath a white cloud. How I loved this city, loved it still.

How long did I wander, touching the stones and railings? Only the dead accompanied me. Yet the city shimmered, alive, alive, this miracle at the edge of the world. Like legendary Kitezh, safe beneath the waters. I heard its bells tonight, I heard them! We who were from Petersburg knew how, we kept its melody sewn inside our skins. They rang in Blok’s smile and would never disappear. Even in death, we’d gather together with our poems in a circle and watch the buildings brush their hair in the mirror of the waters.

Tomorrow a thousand shivering Soviet citizens would rise and shovel fresh white from the walks, snow duty noted in their labor books. But tonight it was as sumptuous as ermine, like a clean white featherbed covering the sins of the city. All mine. The abandoned buildings silvered with frost. For a moment, freed from hunger and insensate to cold, I felt like an angel. I sing the bodiless, ecstatic. I had not known how heavy Iskra’s death had been until it slipped from my shoulders. Now I floated untethered along the stately streets, remembering carriages and duels, the echo of a waltz and harness bells.

Furshtatskaya Street. The most beautiful of all, with its parkway and netted streetlamps. I stood in the dark and gazed up at the flat in which I’d had parents, and brothers, lived all my young life. Most of our old building was already dead, but our flat remained dark, inhabited. I had hoped to show it to Iskra when the trees came into leaf again. Not to be. I understood in that moment that we were all prisoners of time—and I too had my fate awaiting.

I breathed out great plumes of white vapor and stamped like a horse, the cold was beginning to creep in, but I was not ready to go back. I wanted this night to go on and on. Perhaps we were still up there, the Makarovs. It was only dinnertime, nine o’clock at most, glasses chiming as we shared our daily triumphs and sorrows over the fragrant dishes, the white-clothed table, Seryozha imitating a schoolmaster, making fun of his pretentious gestures, Volodya as he’d been when he left for the war, a man—the clinking of his spurs, his dark glossy eyes, the rich moustache, his laughter. Mama, her skirts trailing behind her, playing Scarlatti. I in my room, preparing for bed in a pressed nightgown, combing my hair in the round mirror, taking from my shelf a volume of poems. What should I read tonight? Blok, of course! Those perfect rhymes, as effortless as snow. I imagined I might stay here in the freezing parkway until I became another statue, a Galatea in reverse. But Blok had reached down from a passing ship called life, called art, called memory, and offered me his hand.

30 59 Moika Embankment

Snow wet my hat, blew sharp flakes into my eyes. People lingered in my way, people walked into me. I shoved back, bristly as a hedgehog. The whole day had been like this, gritty and coarse. I felt feverish, but I didn’t want to be late for Bely’s reading. When I finally stood before the door at the corner of Nevsky and the Moika Canal, I grew suddenly shy. What if they didn’t let me in? I waited for at least three people to enter before I gathered the nerve, rehearsing my lines: Blok invited me. Alexander Alexandrovich said I should come.

I pushed open the anteroom door, and found a girl sitting behind a rickety table. “You’re here for Bely? Ten rubles.”

Admission, I hadn’t considered that. But of course, the writers had nothing, of course they would take up a donation. That was probably the point of the evening. Tolstoy would have had to sell his beard if he lived in Petrograd now. I handed over the ten rubles, the entire contents of my purse—made from a chair’s cushion, after I’d hacked up the rest into kindling.

Inside, the splendid hall was filling with people young and old, their faces familiar—not that I knew them, but their curiosity marked them, the light in their eyes. Intelligence. Tall windows framed the snowy vista outside, magical in the glow of streetlamps, and between them, where a painting had once hung—I could detect its ghost on the wall—stood the lectern. The view framed dark, boarded-up shops and ragged, huddled passersby, but it was easy to imagine what it had been—bright with signs, the chicest pedestrians, new automobiles, the Eliseevs sitting here enjoying an aperitif before the theater. I saw it. Otherworldly, when everyone in the room was gaunt and still wore their coats and hats in the unheated hall. All except for one tall man in a suit and white shirt with a high stiff collar. Without having to be told, I knew this was Gumilev, Akhmatova’s ex-husband.

No cringing for him, cold or no cold. He was as proud as an officer. I marveled at his cleanliness—his linen, his face. You had to admire his strength of will to shave in icy water, somehow wash that shirt. Gumilev was surrounded by young people, each one speaking, hoping for his approval. What I would give to be that young again, competing for the teacher’s attention. But I wouldn’t know how to do it anymore, idolize someone like that, hang on his every word. I’d grown as wary as a trap-wise fox.

I’d have thought Akhmatova would prefer someone ethereal, deep and full of music, more like Blok. His eyes are so serene, one could be lost in them… And where was he? I stood at the back of the crowd, watching for him as the audience found seats. I felt as I had that night at the Stray Dog, waiting to be thrown out. How could I possibly be here, watching my heroes at play? I recognized the poet Kuzmin with his heavy, sleepy eyes, and Khodasevich, tall and lanky, with round spectacles.

“Well, look what came in on the storm,” said a man to my right.

Standing next to me in a worn-out overcoat stood the ultimate anti-Gumilev. Long-nosed, badly shaven Anton Chernikov. Just when I thought my life was a series of rooms, where the doors slammed firmly shut behind me. But here he was, still sneering, this angular bony figure. Smoking his cheap makhorka. I would have hugged him if his expression—that permanent ironic scowl—hadn’t warned me off. He’d shaved his dark hair, as most men did now, and glowered like a convict. “Still living with your mother and that old baba?” His cigarette dangling from his lip. Tough guy. But I remembered those sweet days when he and my mother had labored together translating Apollinaire.

“I was in the countryside,” I said. I wanted to touch him but knew he would flinch. “You?”

He shrugged. “As you see.”

“Okno?” Our literary journal.

He shook his head. “No journals. No paper.”

“I had a baby,” I said, my eyes on the crowd, still coming in. “She died. In the fall.” A fact. The fact of my life. “Her name was Antonina.” I hadn’t even thought about the echo.

Anton confronted by human tragedy was always several levels out of his element. That hadn’t changed either. He scratched the back of his neck. He took off his cap and rubbed his head. “A baby. That’s rough,” he said. “Does Genya know?” Anton and Genya, inseparable.

“He knew I was pregnant.” More people passed before us, in various stages of starvation. But what faces! So clever, so awake. I was struck by a wave of pure love. I could die here, with these people, and die happy.

“He didn’t say anything. Not a word.”

We stood together, as awkward as children. “Did you ever publish the Apollinaire? Alcools?”

He brightened. “No, but I’m trying to get Gorky to take it for Universal Literature—have you heard about that? He’s publishing translations—but it’s all those old warhorses. Dee-kens, Shaks-peer. Gyu-go.” The eloquence of his sneer.

“You think the worker would rather have Alcools?” said an older woman standing with us, with wild gray hair and bright brown eyes. “You think that’s what he’s clamoring for after a hard day’s work? Gorky’s got to justify those titles.”

O Holy Theotokos, they were arguing about Apollinaire! I felt as giddy as a prisoner broken out of a dark police cell walking into the sunshine.

“Inna’s translating Gyu-go,” Anton said, and I understood he’d exaggerated Victor Hugo’s name on purpose, to tweak her.

“Jealous. It’ll keep me in work for years. Thank God for Universal Literature,” she said, her hand on my arm. “Gorky’s single-handedly saving the Russian intelligentsia, translation by translation. He’s gotten us rations and labor books. But he has to publish titles useful to the common people.”

“What about useful to me?” Anton said. “What about my needs?” I noticed the people around us eavesdropping. “Am I not also a worker?” Appealing to his audience. “A literary worker? A miner of verse? There’s more to literature than what the worker wants to read of an evening, you cow. Mayakovsky said there was literature for the consumer and literature for the producer. And the producer needs advanced literature. Otherwise, we’ll keep on cutting the same old shoes, year after year.”

“I could use a pair of shoes,” said the older woman. She studied me with her friendly dark eyes. “So who’s your friend, Chernikov? I didn’t know you had any.”

“Marina Makarova, this untidy female is Inna Gants.”

I’d heard of Inna Gants! She’d written short fiction, ghost stories, and a popular detective novel.

She took a hand from the pocket of her capacious sweater to shake mine. “I’m a neighbor. Third floor. When the moon is full, we hear the howling.” She pulled me closer, lowered her voice theatrically. “But no one has actually seen the transformation.”

“A bald exaggeration,” Anton said. “Only a slight growl. I keep it quiet.”

They were living here? All these writers? How could all this have been going on, and me know nothing of it? Because I’d been in the grave, that’s why. I hadn’t looked up from my shoes since Iskra’s death. “They rent rooms here?”

“Rent being a relative term,” said the older woman.

“Like bats, clinging to cliffs. And literature is our guano.” Anton obscured his head in a cloud of smoke.

“A pretty image,” Inna said. “But of course, you’re the poet.”

When was the last time I’d witnessed a witty conversation? I felt the fizzy intoxication of last night’s marafet rising in me again.

“And I will survive these frozen caves as I survived the Poverty Artel with the lot of you sleeping on my head.”

“You lived with Chernikov?” Inna Gants took a step back. “My God.”

“She’s Genya Kuriakin’s wife,” Anton said.

Now Inna’s expression changed, became less warm but more curious. She examined me as if we hadn’t just been chatting away like old friends, her silence an awkward contrast to her volubility a moment before. Clearly Genya did not feature as a universal favorite at the House of Arts.

I pretended a terrific interest in the beautifully carved plasterwork of the reception hall ceiling, the gilded mirrors still fitted to the paneling. “I’ve never been here before,” I said. “I met Blok on Bolshaya Morskaya and he invited me to come tonight.” Was I boasting, or justifying my presence?

“I just saw him,” Anton said, scanning the crowd. “There. Sans streetlamp and pharmacy.” The night, the street, the streetlamp, the pharmacy—one of my favorite Blok poems. Blok stood directly opposite us in the back of the room, hat in hand, blue coat slung across his shoulders. The famous curls shorn, no longer the masculine angel of my childhood, the face that had once made me debate whether it would be better to be a poet’s Beautiful Lady or the poet oneself. He was in deep conversation with a tall, stooped man with a broad moustache and the heavy-boned face of a peasant. It was Maxim Gorky, whom I recognized from the frontispiece of a collection my parents had had in their library. A long-time socialist, he was supposed to be personal friends with Lenin. I’d read his poem “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” when I was six, and wanted to be like the courageous Petrel, unafraid of any storm. So strange to see him talking to Blok—the proletarian realist and the symbolist stag of the Silver Age. The revolution certainly made strange bedfellows. The light from a dusty electrolier lay upon the proletarian writer badly, accentuating his rough skin, and hair that bristled in every direction without a parting. He was taller than I’d imagined, and almost as weary as Blok.

Around these giants, the buzz of the assembly increased its volume, the way people always grow excited in the presence of the famous—pretending they didn’t notice them. That had not changed with the revolution. A pretty, plump woman with wavy dark hair and a clever face stood at Gorky’s elbow. “That’s Gorky’s mistress,” whispered Inna Gants. “Moura Budberg. An Estonian baroness, they say. His secretary. Or was that translator? They say they’re all living together over on Kronverksky Prospect, the wife and the secretary, plus Khodasevich’s niece, two cousins from Rostov, and a Negro opera singer—so close they all have to turn over in bed as one.”

A Negro opera singer! She was still here? I glanced around to see if I’d missed her, but no, there was no such jewel in attendance. I didn’t know if my poor dry soul could absorb any more. And to think, if I had not left the telephone exchange early last night, sneaking out for horsemeat, I would have just gone on in my death-in-life, never knowing all this existed a few blocks away at 59 Moika Embankment.

“So when did you last see Genya?” The ash from Anton’s makhorka was now at full length. It was dizzying to watch. At least he wasn’t spitting sunflower seeds on the floor.

“Last summer,” I said. I took his cigarette, flicked the ash, and took an awful puff, stuck it back between his lips. “On an agit-train heading for Perm.”

“The Red October? You saw the Red October?” His smirk for a moment dropped into genuine surprise.

I thought again of that poem Genya had left for me before departing for the Urals, his supposed suicide note for his own soul. He never saw the infant who had borne his name. “He left me behind when I went into labor.” Was that unfair of me? I softened my tone. “The battle lines were changing. He had to move on. I assume he made it.”

“He’s back in Moscow.” Anton pulled me to him to make room for another man on my left, then realized what he had done—touched me—and quickly dropped my arm. “He’s got a new collection coming out.”

Inna Gants made a disgusted kh. “The rest of us are reciting in unheated halls, but Kuriakin gets a nice shiny collection.”

Yes, I could imagine if the government had any paper at all, they would make it available for Genya.

“I’m editing it for him, actually,” Anton said. “It’s called On the Red October.”

I had written nothing, and he had a new collection. Iskra had died and Genya’s star had rocketed into the heavens. Well, good for him.

“Come up to my belfry after the reading, I’ll show it to you,” Anton said.

Against the far wall, Blok spoke urgently to Gorky, who kept shaking his head. Perhaps he didn’t want to take Blok’s translation either. The plump mistress Moura said something amusing, breaking the tension between them. Then Gorky and the woman took their seats, while Blok remained standing against the wall near the door. I wished he would stay out of that draft, he looked like he would catch pneumonia if he didn’t have it already.

“I’m thinking of taking Gumilev’s studio class,” I said, watching a bald man swat the snow from his shoulders. “Blok thought I might like it.”

“You can’t work with Gumilev.” Anton was outraged. “He’s a monarchist. And a womanizer. Plus, he hates vers libre. Plus, he thinks he’s God.”

“Blok is God,” I said.

“No, Shklovsky is God,” said Anton.

“I think Gorky’s got the title locked,” Inna said.

I imagined the House of Arts must have ferocious politics. Like a cave in a snowstorm, all the animals had gathered here. I gazed around at faces I didn’t recognize but they all had that air of belonging to someone. Ah, the luxury to still have a face. Litso, Lichnost’. Personality, Identity. To be one recognizable thing, and continue to be that, put your name to it, your signature. Like Gumilev’s starched collar.

But maybe I was wrong about having no face. Anton had recognized me. I tucked my arm into his, and felt his shocked stiffness. But I was half in love with him tonight. Despite his tough pose, he knew me. And I’d introduced myself to Blok with my true name. Maybe this was the start of a restoration. I would pick up the shards, glue them together once more. I didn’t know how they would fit, but there must be some motif that would encompass all the half-truths, the eighth notes. I wanted to live in the whole house for a change, not just the legal nine square meters. I’d been pretending that it was safer, to take up the least possible room, but it wasn’t. It was dangerous in a very private way, like dry rot, like termites.

A cheerful blue-eyed man mounted the podium. He had the round bald head of an egg.

“That’s Shklovsky,” Anton whispered proudly. As if we’d come to the point of this whole excursion. “He lives here, right on my hall. We speak every day.”

The critic made a few announcements: about an upcoming lecture by Eikhenbaum about the Young Tolstoy, a Dobuzhinsky exhibition opening next week in the front gallery—Dobuzhinsky! He was still here?—and a reminder that the Poets’ Guild had moved to the Muruzi house. Then he introduced Bely.

Every cultured Russian had encountered Bely’s novel Petersburg in installments before the war. The risk of it, the intricate jokes, his portrayal of the city! The work delighted us as it had shocked others, the absurdity of its presentation of deadly serious issues—a bomb-throwing son assigned to assassinate his own father with a sardine-can bomb. It was hard to really know what Bely’s politics were. There was a big dose of Gogol—even I had tried a bit of fantastical prose under its influence.

And here was the man himself. All of them were here, in this icy heaven: Blok, Gorky, Gumilev, Bely. All that was missing was Akhmatova.

Bely was balder than his photographs, and what hair he had was white and uncut. But it was his eyes you remembered, their mad blue flame. Bely took the stage to applause that seemed faint compared to the thunder that had once met Genya when he alit from the Red October to address the agitprop crowds. But these lucky eighty or hundred souls weren’t just any crowd. They were the remaining intelligentsia of Petersburg. And, of course, most of us still wore our gloves.

Bely explained that his new work, Notes of an Eccentric, was a memoir, very direct and simple. He had repudiated skill and craft forever! I was sorely disappointed—that’s not what we’d loved about Bely. Had he surrendered so utterly to our spartan times? But when he began to read, I realized he either had been joking or really didn’t understand how strange his own language was, his native mode of thought. The made-up words, the cadences of imagistic prose. His skill, his craft, was his face. He could no more write without creating new language and sounds and strange encounters than breathe without lungs.

The phantasmagorical tale, this supposed memoir, was populated by dreams and doppelgangers, a gentleman in a bowler hat, a mysterious brunet spy. And of course, bureaucrats. The section he read concerned a train trip from Switzerland to London on the eve of the war. It felt like a novel, except its hero was no longer the hapless son of Petersburg carrying a sardine-can time bomb. Bely himself had become the bomb. I supposed that’s what he meant by memoir.

As he read, I had the strange sensation that the House of Arts was moving, that the whole building had swung out from its berth on the Moika Embankment and set out to sea. We were on a journey together, setting forth to some port as yet unknown, with Bely as our captain. He described the beginning of the war, and in his mind the war and his own inner conflicts had become fused. In fact, the war was the result of that internal turmoil. It reminded me of Andrei Ionian, who had believed that the civil war was a result of a struggle in the upper dimensions, manifesting itself here below. But this was an even stranger expression of the idea, more personal, more terrifying: “Explosions in me thus became explosions of the world; war crawled out of me—circled me.” This was true horror. His own contradictions had caused the war.

“They know everything, they know that I am not me, but the bearer of an enormous ‘I’ stuffed with the global crisis; I am a bomb, flying off to explode; and exploding, explode everything there is; this they would not allow, of course; to restrain us with hugs… They know that the nurseries were warm and bright: the baby in me lowered into the thunder of the world’s speech.”

Oh that beautiful thunder!

“I hear distinct whispering all around:—It’s—Him!” A momentous thing, to be so greeted into the world. What would it be to feel that you mattered so much? No ordinary human being, but a symbol, a mythic figure—It’s Her! That would never be me.

The crowd blended into one, following this astonishing invention, the language, the philosophical position. Blok, standing across the room, watched his old friend the way you’d watch a tightrope walker crossing an abyss—admiring and terrified. I could see, he loved him still. I was less worried for Bely than Blok. He seemed exhausted—so the opposite of his friend, whose blue eyes held the crackling intensity of a downed electrical line. Who dared to walk out onto thin air, supported only by the force of this language. Stroking his bald head, sweating, stammering, as if his words could even now explode the Eliseev parlor.

He moved into imagining his birth, birth as the soul falling into the Void, into the disgusting, robotic abyss of the body. No, I would not agree with him there. The body was no Void. I had seen the Void—and it lay on a sidewalk on Mikhailovskaya Street. It lived in the barrel of a Mauser pointed at your head, in the greased eyes of a provincial Chekist unbuttoning his pants. The Void coiled in a cellar’s bloody drain. And it hung between the fingers of a dangerous man simply playing with a string. Not in the waiting flesh of an infant body.

It was wonder I had seen in Iskra’s eyes, wonder at the things of this world. I tried to imagine it Bely’s way, entering this heavy, confused thing—incarnation—this peculiar fragment of spirit being shoehorned into the swollen fleshy form. But I found it repugnant. Certainly an infant might be frightened, but what of wonder? To me, all this revealed a generalized horror of life. No matter what had happened to me, I still pitched my tent on the side of the living. I had seen those green trees in Iskra’s eyes.

Perhaps my brain had been blunted by all I’d been through these last months, but I had to apply the greatest concentration to follow Bely through the symbols and figures of his story, like translating from a language half learned—Hungarian, or Greek. I couldn’t be sure I understood him or the very opposite of what he’d intended. The shattered form, the tricks with language, the invented words. Was I fatally damaged? I had been more clever at fifteen. Anton was in his element, needless to say, standing next to his hero Shklovsky. Khodasevich tapped his foot in time to the rhythmic beats. I wove in and out of the story, returning when the images grew more concrete—the brunet man and terrorist bombs on the train, and a delicious series of scenes as Bely arrived in England. His humor as his alter ego scurried around to the various subdepartments of the English bureaucracy, trying to get stamps on his papers to declare he was

—In London

—In London

—In London

—In London

—In London.

The sweet music of stamps being pounded onto one’s documents was a sound that everyone in the audience could recognize. The man was a poet, more a poet in prose than a novelist. Certainly it was the strangest memoir one could image. Anton chewed on his cuticles, his arms folded in front of him, making comments under his breath. Moura Budberg whispered to a woman in a black coat and a hat with a broken feather, who became increasingly animated. Gorky scrawled something on a notepad.

Finally, Bely read a section describing his return to Russia, where he found that our very souls had been blown out of the tops of our heads with the explosion of war, leaving us so many empty grotesques. “Like a corpse—the only thing that remained as before: arms, an abdomen, I seemed to myself to be an abdomen irresponsibly propped up on legs: the rest—a chest, throat, brain—I felt just emptiness. I monstrously shot all this from the split darkness into the sky. ‘That’ was… a nonliving, dull, deaf abdomen of a body.

“And so—I saw that picture of myself multiplied into millions of darting bodies in greatcoats everywhere: deaf, dumb, abdomen bodies moved all over, shooting into space, like nuclei, their human I’s; these I’s flew out of the bodies; and the body, unloving and mindless, walked everywhere:—Has Russia not shot its ‘I’ into the great void? Did the shot of the world war not leave a totally dull ‘It’…?”

We’d been deafened by war, the war had shot us from our souls. Grief washed over me. Yes, we had not been killed—we lived on in a city of ruin and aftermath that was “nothing” and extended over the whole earth. People reduced to legs and stomachs. I looked for Blok across the room. Surely he was no abdomen on legs. How sad he looked. I saw, Blok felt this too. That he had shot his I out into the void, and what stood here was a shadow. Dying.

No, not dying—dead. Literally, I was looking at a dead man. All at once, I saw it. Oh God, please not Blok.

But I saw it as clearly as Bely had seen the brunet man on the train, as my mother had seen me in the forest. I saw that Blok had died. Hollowed out. I clapped my hand over my mouth. Carrying the weight of my own dead child was heavy enough, but to see Blok staggering under the weight of his own corpse, it was like watching a horse falling in the street, struggling to get up, but not having the strength. What terrible bravery dwelled in that tall gray figure! How horrible to still have to walk around in public, as if one hadn’t passed away. Didn’t anyone else see it?

I looked around at the others of his generation, Kuzmin, and Bely and Gorky. All of them, hanging on by a thread. Come back! Who can take your place? We were ants by comparison, Genya, Anton, me. Though there was still Mandelstam, I told myself. And Tsvetaeva, Pasternak in Moscow. Mayakovsky. Maybe this sniffly girl with the handkerchief would be the next Blok, or the young man with the broken nose.

I would not accept that our souls were gone forever. It could not be. If it was so, what would you call this, this House of Arts, and these intelligent, cultured people who’d come to listen to Bely in this freezing hall, who had stood for nearly two hours, listening to his shattered, difficult story? Had their souls blown out, leaving them only their stomachs on legs? No, they were fighting for their souls day after day, fighting for the soul of Russia as I’d once fought for Iskra in a village bathhouse.

At last the reading was done. I felt as though I’d run a marathon in a lightning storm. My head still buzzed. The heroic audience rose from their seats, or stretched in the back, lit cigarettes, and the hall rang out with their talk as they greeted one another and congratulated Bely, who seemed if anything more animated than when he began. Most of all, I wanted to talk to Blok, to tell him what he meant to me, tell him not to die.

But already a young woman was at his side, speaking quickly, animatedly. Blok was listening but with such weariness—he hadn’t the energy to fly from the leaden circle of her chatter. I stopped where I was. I didn’t want to approach him, one more person who wanted to bathe in the last glow, like light from a dead star. What need did he have of my pleasantries? He needed the very angels to come and take him home, to pick him up and wrap him in his broken wings, and lift him into a sky of immortal blue.

He looked up and saw me, where I stood halfway across the hall, and smiled at me. And death slipped away from his features, and he became himself again. Not quite dead, his smile seemed to say.

I found Anton in a hallway off the dining room where a number of young people had taken refuge. It was warmer there than the formal rooms, where the Eliseev servants were passing out cups of weak tea. Here were the other members of Anton’s literary circle, some who lived here, some who had come to hear Bely. The boxer, Tereshenko, I recognized, and Nikita Nikulin from our old days as the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.

I had to be at work tomorrow at nine, but I was shimmering, dazzled by the company, and could not imagine leaving to slog through the blizzard that was now hurling down snow out the windows. “I’d love to see that manuscript,” I said to Anton.

And I let him lead me deeper into the House of Arts.

31 The Towers of Ilium

What a vast beehive it was, a warren of art, an ark, an ocean liner. I would never be able to find my way out again. Anton opened his door, a narrow door someone had marked with the letter ZH in chalk—for Zhenshchiny, Women. Cold poured out as if he’d opened a sluice. He stumbled in and lit a lamp with the skritch of a match. The room proved cluttered, with a strange window that began at floor level and ended around chest height, where one could presumably sit cross-legged and gaze down Nevsky, were it not for the frost flowers blooming on the panes.

I smoothed out the blankets on the unmade bed as Anton fiddled with the lamp. Its wobbly flame cast its light on the mess of his table, the untidy piles of letters and manuscripts, books. Books—a good sign. They’d not yet been forced to burn them. Perhaps they received firewood from the House as well as their daily bread. It was cold enough in the room to see our breaths curl whitely into the air. Anton moved to the stove and attempted to light it, but these temperamental little goddesses didn’t favor brusque treatment, and the smoke of its disgust immediately began to spill into the room.

Sometimes I really did feel like a peasant, watching urbanites struggle against their sullen material objects. I squatted next to him. Shutting the bourgeoika door against further pollution, I rolled some paper nuggets from pages of an old “thick journal” he was using—Russkaya Mysl’. Russian Thought. A Chekhov story, alas. I didn’t have my hatchet but used one of the orphans’ penknives to peel a shard of wood from a rough plank that looked like it had been torn off a fence. The revolution’s forbidden fuel. I lit the end of the stick and shoved it up into the pipe to warm the freezing air. In a few minutes, the little goddess was happily humming.

“How do you do that?” Anton frowned, rubbing his badly shaved jaw like he had a toothache. He threw himself into the one chair. Always the good host.

“Witchcraft,” I said, dusting the soot from my hands. “I sold my soul to a man on a staircase.”

“Hope you got a good price,” said Anton. “I’m going to put you forward for membership immediately—no one can get these stoves to do anything but stink.”

“Nice to have something to offer. ‘She writes a certain incendiary line.’”

He laughed. “Yes, that was always your way. Leaving a swath of smoking rubble in your wake. Our own little Helen, toppling our towers of Ilium.” Was that how he saw me? The femme fatale? And what did he mean our? But he was digging through the papers on his little table.

“Here it is.” He handed me a stack of typewritten pages. On the Red October by Gennady Yurievich Kuriakin. Moscow, 1920. Government Press.

As I sat on the hard little bed, I saw he was nervous. Meeting my eyes by accident, he quickly busied himself with his books and papers. He’d seemed happy enough a moment ago. I took off my dirty mittens and blew onto my hands. The room was warming. I couldn’t see my breath anymore. I began to read.

It was a long poema about the journey of the Red October, pencil-marked in the margins in Anton’s small neat hand. I could hear Genya’s voice—of course he would write an epic. A train demanded it, one car linked to the next. Here were the sailors and the crowds and the stupefied peasants, the steppe nomads, the leather-clad commissars, Gaida and Kolchak out in the distance. Matvei the journalist, Yermilova, even Trotsky was there. Everyone made an appearance but a long-lost beloved found in Tikhvin living with a one-armed man, a woman pregnant with another man’s child. She who had to be put off the train in the middle of nowhere to give birth to her only child. “Funeral for Myself on the Tracks at Kambarka” didn’t make the cut.

It was strong, beautiful, and thunderous, immense and iron wheeled. What place could the fate of one confused woman and her infant have on a stage so grand? I’d left no trace. Gone was the man who wrote Who would have dreamed / I would / drop / my own heart / from the gallows / pull the rope myself. It was as if he had scraped off half of his face—the tender one, the lover, the boy who couldn’t bear the sight of cruelty. He’d erased that self, chopped him up and fed him into the boiler of the Red October. He’d cut out his own heart for his enormous beloved, Russia, as she rolled out before the train hurtling along the vast steel cables of its tracks.

I caught Anton watching me again, his intelligent hazel eyes, the pugnacious mouth. I wouldn’t cry. Life was as it was. And we would all be erased soon enough—except Genya. It was sad that he’d erased me, but I would do my own remembering. I would have to cut my mind into the stone of the world just as he had done, if I wanted to leave some trace.

“It’s good, but hard,” I said, handing the pages back. “When did he get so hard?” Anton the faithful, Anton the believer. “I miss the old Genya.”

I heard someone moving around on the other side of the wall, the scrape of a chair. I’m sure he or she was surprised to hear a woman in Anton’s cell. I examined his oddly shaped room, his piles of books and solitary bed, the one strange window. Perhaps it had once been a passage between two other rooms. On the walls, grease-pencil drawings had been applied directly to the plaster—cubo-futurist objects and portraits and letterforms. Yes, here was Anton scowling, and other people—Nikita Nikulin, the broken angles of his body; Galina Krestovskaya: hair, one eye, music. I recognized the style. “Is this Sasha’s? Do you still see him?” The handsome blond painter who was so in love with Dunya Katzeva.

“He was in the army for a while. Got wounded in the Ukraine. Also in the ass.” He was smiling, a Mona Lisa hint, and yet I saw it. “They shipped him home. He’s living down the hall. Shall we get him? He’s teaching at Svomas, living with that girl—the Katzev girl…”

Dunya! They were here! But I thought of that terrible day when Mina threw me out with my child in my arms. How could I face her? I didn’t want to have to tell her what had happened to my girl, that I had not kept her safe. “No, let them be. It’s good to see you, Anton. Really good.”

He seemed uneasy to be alone with me, without other people to throw between us. He shuffled nervously, touching his papers, leaning on the window, scratching at the frost flowers. He rubbed his cropped hair, as abashed as a small boy, and irritated at his own awkwardness as only Anton could be. He sat back down at his scarred table, edged in cigarette burns—desk, dressing stand, dining table all in one—his long legs crossed before him. Our feet almost touched. He fished through the papers, looking for something, putting some aside, collecting others. I wondered what he’d been doing for female companionship—still going to the whores? Or maybe Galina Krestovskaya had taken him up now that her husband had been shot. She might need some sort of anchor, and Anton had always appealed to her for some reason.

He read some poems aloud by people in his circle, some I knew, some I didn’t. Most had a strong element of the sound poetry he loved. Arseny Grodetsky was still around—I remembered him from our evenings at Galina’s, the sixteen-year-old radical who still lived at home with Mama. But such wonderful sounds. Ou ou ou, aya, kaya, kataya. There seemed to be room for everyone at the House of Arts. Perhaps even me.

We talked on, joyously, seriously, on an infinity of subjects, I felt as though I hadn’t spoken for years. We talked until it was far too late to try to get home, not in that snowstorm, and my head drooped like a dandelion. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I dreamed I was on the Red October, and I kept trying to jump off, but it was moving much too fast.

Eight inches of snow fell during the night, snow without blemish, calf deep as I left the House of Arts. A sleepy, mystic snowfall, it needed a Blok to sing it—a real prewar snow. It begged for a fast sleigh, a fat coachman, gray horses with dark noses and intellectual eyes. What I would have given for a sleigh ride—rushing behind a feathery-hoofed horse with bells on its harness, snow encasing my collar and dusting my hat, face tingling with pleasure.

Citizens on the day’s snow detail were emerging from the courtyards, preparing to take up their Soviet shovels.

Take your time, Comrades. Don’t be so quick to strip us of our ermine.

I practically waltzed down Bolshaya Morskaya to the telephone exchange, but forgot where the dead horse was and tripped over it. It sent me sprawling, face-first, hands outstretched, into the new snow. Like landing on a featherbed.

Entering the vast exchange, I let the monstrous, oceanic wave of noise pour over me like waves turning stones over on a thousand beaches. Last night, Anton had said that Blok stopped writing poetry after “The Scythians,” because there were no more sounds. He should come here, then—there was nothing but sound, clatter of metal on metal like a hailstorm. But no fine long Blokian ahs and ous and ohs—modern sounds were all consonants, cktcktkttkkkk… I thought that Arseny Grodetsky and his ous and ayas and kayas and katayas would enjoy a class trip to the telephone exchange.

How paltry and inhuman it seemed now, my refuge of these last dry months. I sat down at my station and donned the mouthpiece that rested on my chest, the headset, one of a chorus—Number, please. Number, please. The open mouths of the switchboard sockets—like souls frozen in hell, screaming in the Dantean symphony. Clamoring, all these people, hungry for connection.

“One moment, please. Sorry, yes. Number, please.”

Sonya, my switchboard stall mate, cast sidelong looks in my direction. “What’s wrong with you?”

We were supposed to be as much a part of the switchboard as the switches and sockets, with skins of steel, the wires our nerves and blood vessels, connecting the city through the strings of ourselves.

But the more I listened to the poetry of the telephone exchange, the worse my performance grew. I disconnected calls that were not yet ready to terminate, or forgot about them when the light signaled that the call had ended. I accidentally connected people who had never met—and laughed out loud at the mischief of my hands, capable of introducing perfect strangers. Well, there was too much disconnection in our city.

Sonya stared at me, walleyed. Why on earth could I be laughing? What could there possibly be to laugh at nowadays, in this kingdom of cold and hunger? I was not doing my job and I was laughing. I clearly must be drunk, or mad.

Yes, I was. Drunk to be back in the world where people knew things, had ideas. What didn’t we talk about last night in that odd little room? About sound, I recalled, and the elimination of the hard sign. About Notes of an Eccentric, and Blok’s “Retribution,” and the Red October. The sound of it—Genya on top of that train, the wind in his ears, all of Russia rolling out before him. The poem matched that scale, gigantic. It straddled the world, hurtling the times ahead like a giant relay from stop to stop. All uncertainty and loneliness left behind with the miles. In the end, I forgave him the absence of “Funeral for Myself.” That’s what happened in life. You held funerals for parts of yourself.

Number, please.

Anton had railed against the Gumilevs and Khodaseviches, sure they would dismiss Genya’s epic out of hand as mere agitprop. “They’re worried that he’ll show them up, that’s all. Genya doesn’t have time for their minuets.”

But I was from Petersburg as well as Petrograd and had time for minuets as well as locomotives. Was tenderness only a side dish? Perhaps it would return when this was all over, when the souls that had been shot from our heads had found us again.

Number, please.

I should write a poem about the switchboard: “Who’s to Say the Connection’s Wrong?” All these Soviet young ladies with wires coming out of their heads. I’d recited poems for Anton last night, but they were old, and so much had happened since then—the Five. Ionia. I had not written yet about my father. I had not written about Iskra, or the orphanage that was Russia.

“I wasn’t joking about your joining us,” Anton had said. “We need you. A woman writing stuff that’s not about love and Mama and the time a Red Guard smashed my doll. They need to hear you.” He rubbed his face, embarrassed to have let such a personal statement escape his lips. “You should be here, not working in some telephone exchange. Putting wires in holes when we’re making the literature of the future.”

“You just want someone to take care of your stove,” I teased him.

“You have that book. You’re Genya Kuriakin’s wife—”

“I haven’t seen him for a year.”

He’d rubbed his forehead, like a schoolboy over a mathematics problem. “But you’re still married, da? Everything is political. We can’t afford to be naive. Plus my recommendation, your publications in Okno… and Blok’s on the board. We’ll get Shklovsky, that’s three, surely there will be two more…”

Would they ever consider me as a member of that august league? Gumilev lived there, Shklovsky. Who was I? The biggest nobody.

The switchboard’s lights blazed, everybody with such important calls to make. Astoria to Smolny. Second City Soviet, a commissar looking for a lost load of fuel. Number, please. Number, please.

Evidently our group’s literary output had not vanished from the earth. Rooting in his boxes, Anton had produced miracles. A copy of Genya’s Red Horses. Also the first one, Chronicles of a Misspent Youth. Here was Anton’s finished Apollinaire, and eight issues of Okno. He still had his copy of Khlebnikov’s poems, hand-lettered by Guro. And, the most startling revelation—a little bound volume, the sky-blue cloth cover, my name on the spine. This Transparent Hour by M. D. Makarova.

The delicate pages, slightly edged in mold. I turned them with such tenderness, as if this was my very self, my youth. So outspoken! So fiery, so in love with the idea of greatness. One page had been turned in—a poem in imitation of Pushkin by way of Akhmatova, about a man walking through a field, still in love with a girl of his youth. How he regretted their separation! Wondering what had become of her, how she’d marked him forever.

And Anton had read and reread it.

Anton the futurist, the soulless beast, had carried this along with him all this time, this bit of retrograde romance. And here I’d always thought he considered women merely annoying, especially me—an unfortunate appendage of Genya’s. Yet how pleased he’d been to show it to me, despite his nonchalance, as if it were proof of something he could not say.

Our own little Helen.

I had to be careful. I wanted no more toppled towers, I had witnessed enough destruction.

32 The Golden Fleece

The temperature dropped down, down into the sarcophagus of negative numbers. Minus 30, minus 40, minus 50 degrees. On Shpalernaya Street, all the tenants dragged their mattresses into the front parlor, where we slept pressed together for warmth, pooling our wood, breathing each other’s breaths, sharing each other’s lice. When the wood was gone we tore up floorboards at the back of the apartment. A dying city eats itself alive the way a starving body consumes its own flesh. Every day, people died in the street, just dropped as they walked along, or fell in the queues. Nothing could be done.

Queuing was brutal. Like everybody else, I did it during the day when I was supposed to be working. Come nightfall, no one remained outdoors. No more evenings at the House of Arts. Only mandatory street-sweeping duty and a house-sentry shift could force me outside of this packed hellish room. I wished I still had a little of that confiscated marafet to steel myself for the horrific obligatory night shift stuck inside the dvornik’s shack, watching the gate, holding a rusty pistol I was sure dated from the Crimean War. I would never forget being forced to let the Cheka in to search in the building, and watching them drag a fellow tenant away after midnight, an older man, his wife trailing him in 30 degrees below zero, keening like a pietà.

Otherwise I sat on my mattress in the airless room with the other tenants, chockablock, wrapped in all my bedding and every shred of clothing I owned, even my boots, a brand-new notepad open on my knee and a shaved pencil in my hand. I worked in the wavering light of my small lamp, which I would not turn off until I was ready, no matter how the neighbors complained. I fixed their stoves, they could give me this much. I smoothed the page of my precious notebook, my prize.

I’d gone to the registrar to see if I could trade Wednesdays for Sundays, as Anton’s studio met on Wednesday afternoons. The registrar was an original employee left over from before the revolution. Most of them had refused to abet the Bolsheviks in any way, and struck—but there were a few old girls like this one for whom the telephone exchange was a sacred trust. This was her Temple, and she, loyal Vestal, would not leave it in its hour of need, no matter who ruled the city—the tsar, the Bolsheviks, the Germans, or Bannik the bathhouse devil. I couldn’t imagine what she had been like before the revolution, but her Soviet role had shriveled her into a bitter, brittle leaf blowing down the center of a vast, deserted square. Just opening the big work schedule book for me seemed a violation of its sanctity.

She gazed at me through her pince-nez, outraged that I would put my own needs before the needs of the exchange. In that, she fit in with the Bolshevik project perfectly. “You think this is all just for your convenience? That I can just switch Wednesday for Sunday at every girl’s whim? You lot take off whenever you like it anyway—there’s only half of you here on any one day, the rest are ghosts. But you all come to work when we hand out the ration cards, oh yes, you can count on that.”

It was the same with every workplace in Petrograd. We all had to eat. Too bad we couldn’t all live on self-pity and propriety like this old bag. “I need Wednesday afternoons.”

She glared at me. Who was I? Only an insect in this great swamp, a clicking cicada in the vast hall of the switchboard, the merest gnat. On and on she went, flatly refusing my request and heaping invective on every Soviet worker, every girl with a bit of a flush in her cheek. The old bat. I would take both, then, Wednesdays and Sundays. Some provisioned their bodies, I would provision my mind, and bureaucrats be damned. When she finally did turn away, I personally provisioned myself of the pad of paper lying unguarded by her telephone. It was the least she could do for literature.

Now, propped up with my pillow against the wall, covered with my featherbed and my sheepskin, my fox hat on my head, surrounded by my fellow coughers, farters, yammerers, shiverers, and snorers, and someone quietly weeping, I tested the ice of my imagination. Would it hold me? I felt the sharp tip of my pencil, which I’d shepherded since the orphanage, carefully shaving only so much from its precious lead. Lord knew when I’d ever get another.

An unholy scream shattered the normal quiet talk. The man in the next room had typhus. His wife was nursing him in his awful fever. “Leave me alone, Devil!”

A few of the neighbors shouted back, “Keep him quiet in there!” “Take him to the hospital already!” “Let the devil take him!”

You had to admire his wife’s determination—most of them packed their relatives off to the typhus hospital as fast as you’d turn a pancake. But she refused to move him, and we quarantined them in their own arctic room so as not to spread it to the rest of us. Typhus was a monster, and the epidemic had finally found its way into our flat. I was terrified. If I got typhus now, who would fight for me, nurse me, keep me from jumping out the window? We were all so close to death here, I could see its black veiled form walking among the mattresses. It was a terrible thing to say, but I was lucky that Iskra had died when you could still dig a grave. So many succumbing in the city now, you couldn’t get a burial. We ourselves had bodies stacked in an empty room—the daughter of this one, husband of that. There was no one to collect them. How much worse it would have been to have Iskra frozen in the next room. And yet people stood it. It was hideous how much a human being could get used to.

I took off my mitten, blew on my hand, rubbed it against my face and returned it to its sheath, concentrating my attention on that little stub of a pencil. I breathed through the pores of my skin as we used to do at Ionia—otherwise, the stench in the room was unbelievable. Old stale clothing, dirty hair, flatulence, the horrible tainted breath of people who cooked their dinners with linseed and cod liver oil, added to the smokiness of the little stove, which my neighbors had placed under my care. Oh, for a moment out of the fug and the horrible togetherness! But it was beyond unthinkable to attempt the outside air.

I would have gone out of my mind, except for this, the notebook, the pencil, the sounds alive in my head. Despite the cold, the deep nausea of hunger, and the higher nausea of half-rotten potatoes fried in cod liver oil, I was alive again, and poetry was like a reed I could breathe through, connecting me from this premature burial to the fresh outer air of my imaginative life. Meanwhile the man next door screamed and pleaded with his monsters. I imagined his wife, perhaps sick herself, mopping his brow. Perhaps they would both die. Sometimes being with someone was more terrible than being alone. At least if I died, no one would mourn me. It was cleaner that way, simpler. My exit would leave an unblemished surface on the waters.

The flickering of the lamps gave life to exhausted, anxious faces. A family installed closer to the door was arguing about the division of their rations. The father kept shorting one of the daughters. She shrieked and swore. “You’re trying to starve me. Why do you hate me?”

“Because you’re a noisy bitch,” someone shouted.

“Mind your own business!” she shouted back.

The one thing nobody could do, however much we wished it.

I lowered the flaps of my fox hat, and thought of that long-ago night on St. Basil’s Eve, the night we had cast the wax. Mina got the key, Varvara the broom, and I the sailing ship. I tried to remember sailing. The feeling of giddiness on a summer’s day. The freshness of the wind off the gulf, all heaven before us. Sailing in a little boat with the big boys, Kolya and Volodya in the sun, Kolya saying he was taking us to Spain. Seryozha left behind on shore with Avdokia and his paints and little easel. Oh, the speed of it, the sun on the water.

But I couldn’t write about that. Mama and the time a Red Guard smashed my doll.

All the foreign shores were out of reach now. All the sails furled. The world had retreated from us, behind the blockade, leaving us to stand or fall, indifferent to our fate. The sight of the empty Neva this silent autumn had filled me with melancholy. No freighters, no fishing boats, just ruined barges. The river had never glittered so, people could actually fish it again after the centuries of heavy shipping. This Petersburg, built for sailing, built for the world, dying alone.

To do what? Adventure, explore, buccaneer? Nothing was quite right. Come back to it.

What could be quieter than the Neva stripped of commerce, more naked, more neglected, more forgotten? The city was returning to that miserable Finnish marsh that Pushkin had described so well. Just another provincial outpost, crumbling away on this misty shore, this mausoleum of ice, this dead city where citizens crowded themselves into a single room like animals in a pen. Cave dwellers.

How does Petrograd lie dying?

Yes, I could do something with that.

Yes, let’s give ourselves that much.

My Blok—light blue, gull-winged.

My true homeland. Not Russia, not Red or White, not passports and propuski, but anywhere the mind could take you.

33 The Thaw

Like Yudenich, winter sounded retreat. Snow grudgingly gave way to the first rains, pelting the window of my little room, where I worked in the nest of my bed, rereading my poems. I already had them memorized, but I wanted to be sure, for tonight was my first public reading. Anton had managed to convince our elders that our group, the Squared Circle, was ready for a Living Almanac. These had taken the place of printed publications in this paperless year. Would I be able to make my words sing for strangers, as they sang for me in my head? Or would I just stare out at a crowd of stones? At least I would know if I belonged to the fraternity of poets, or whether I was simply fooling myself. I had been happy with my poems, but now that the reading approached, I was less sure.

Even if it was a disaster, it was still thrilling to see our fliers posted in windows and on fences, boldly drawn and lettered in cubo-futurist style by Sasha Orlovsky. The little cultural newspaper Literary Herald carried an advertisement. This was no mere salon reading. Living Almanacs were treated as publications and would be duly reviewed and criticized. I’d been working like a peasant in harvest time to finish the poems Anton had picked for my part of the offerings, cutting and replacing and adding and reordering. The audience would include the city’s best poets and literary figures—by no means supportive of our aims. Knives would be sharpened. We were known as having futurist sympathies. Anton was a protégé of Shklovsky’s, an avant-gardist and upstart. They would be out for blood—radicals and conservatives both.

I rose and tipped some water into my pail—you didn’t even have to break the ice anymore—when a smart knock came. It was Olga Viktorievna, that busybody. “Marina Dmitrievna, they’re here for your sanitation duty.”

Oh, it couldn’t be. Today? Of all days?

“They’re out in the hall, waiting for you.”

On the day of my grand debut, it seemed I would have to serve as part of a mandatory sanitation squad. I could have pretended I wasn’t here, taken the chance… but Olga Viktorievna was on the job, dedicated to being wherever she was not wanted, hoping to find an unguarded door. I locked my door firmly behind me and descended to the street.

The spring thaw had revealed all our sins. As the frost retreated, human waste tidily frozen all winter was beginning to melt in the apartments and courtyards. It was up to the sanitation squads to clean the rooms that had been used as latrines and remove the evidence from the courtyards before it washed into the groundwater, cursing us with cholera again. Much as I disliked this duty, I had seen what cholera could do. I wouldn’t want to see its effect on the capital of Once-Had-Been.

There were eight in my squad. We handed around cotton wool soaked in menthol to stuff up our nostrils and picked up our shovels. In our party were old bourgeoises who did nothing but complain, plus five real workers—two men and three women. We started with the top floor and worked down. One of the men became our crew leader. His name was Sinyakov, an old-style SR with nothing but abuse to heap on the Bolsheviks as we shoveled and carried the result in buckets down long flights of stairs to the wagon. We consoled ourselves that it wasn’t as bad as the first crew, who’d had to clean the courtyard in the rain. Nobody envied them—though the stairs made this a harder job. It made my heart sink to see the devastation the winter had wrought. The occupants avoided meeting our eyes, the shame of people who three years ago would not have thought themselves capable of such filth.

“What do they know about how to run a city? We knew how to run a city,” said the SR, “but they kicked us all out. That’s the thing about the Bolsheviks. Anybody who knows how to do anything—a bullet in the back of the head. They don’t care how it all falls apart, as long as they’re kings of the shit heap.”

What a day.

I preferred working with a housewife, Agnessa, who joked about the state of gastric health of the tenants as we scraped down the boards. “Look at this—my God, a wolfhound! I’m lucky if I shit once a fortnight.”

We went from apartment to apartment, knocking on doors, always the same—the tenants avoiding meeting our eyes, someone showing us down a hall to the next site of the terrible and the repulsive. Some were beyond help, they’d torn out the floorboards for firewood and then shit between floors. It would soon seep down into the next apartment, rendering those rooms uninhabitable as well. Some flats had only two livable rooms left. No flat was any better than ours and most were worse. At least ours didn’t have the water damage of the upper floors—not yet anyway. My throat and eyes stung with carbolic. I shoveled and scraped and carried and retched, and recited my poems to myself, imagining the audience, then trying not to imagine them.

I wondered if Blok would be there. He was the only one I really cared about. Terrifying, but essential. In a moment of madness, I had taken a flier to his home on Ofitserskaya, third floor, that window I’d once gazed upon as another might gaze upon a star. His name was still on a strip of paper over the doorbell. BLOK. I touched it for luck and rang.

His wife answered, a big, tall, academic-looking woman—it had to be she, Lyubov Mendeleeva, the daughter of the eminent scientist. A pretty hall, red-and-white-striped wallpaper. Was it still a private flat? She was taller than I’d imagined, with graying hair in a fringe. Was this woman really the inspiration for the Beautiful Lady? They had once all lived together in a shocking ménage, Bely and Blok and Lyubov and Soloviev… now she was just a rather stolid old woman. I had to remind myself, this would happen to us all. No matter how scandalous we had been, some young person would look at us and think, How conventional, how dull.

I’d pressed the flier into her hand. “I’m Makarova—” I pointed to my name. “I hope Alexander Alexandrovich will come. He was the one who introduced me to the House of Arts. He’s been so very kind…”

She took the flier, shaking her head. “You poets. Isn’t there a sane person in all of Petrograd?” Sighing, closing the door.

We worked all day in the sleety rain until the wagon was full, then turned in our shovels and had the domkom sign off on our labor books that we had accomplished our citizenly duty. Oh, for a real bath. I could only dream of the old bathhouse at Maryino, the oceans of hot water, the steam and fragrant branches. I had to make do with what was in the flat, carefully cleaning my boots with newspaper and water and ashes, then scrubbing myself in my pail with boiled water, but the reek of carbolic and human waste clung to me. Or maybe it was just my imagination. I dressed and stopped to comb my hair in the hall mirror. Olga Viktorievna squeezed out of her room, an obsequious smile on her awful face. “Date tonight? A boyfriend?”

I didn’t let anyone in the flat know about my other life. To them I was just the little scribbler, the Soviet young lady who spent an unusual amount of time in her room and could sometimes be heard talking to herself, who was so good with their stoves.

I swept my hair, cropped to the jaw, back off my face. Honest, straightforward. Comrade. Then tried it forward in waves. Prettier. More Soviet young lady than comrade. Who did I want to be for my first reading? I wished I were like Akhmatova. She knew how she wanted to look, the famous fringe, the long hair twisted up, the beads, the shawl. But who did I want to be? From now on, this was how people would know me—Marina Makarova.

So stupid to worry about such a thing. Still, a decision had to be made. Side part, a single wave. There it was. A scarf instead of the fox-fur hat… but I had only Klavdia’s tattered coat, or my peasant sheepskin. The coat. I could take it off as soon as I got there, showing my Ionian patchwork, or leave it on. All of my clothes were outlandish, but everyone had seen them before. We couldn’t all be Nikolai Gumilev.

A bite of dry herring, a drink of hot water with saccharine, then the dash down through the sad, wet streets—it was still light out, but far from gladdening. You could see every half-ruined building, every dead horse surfacing like a drowned body cast up by the sea.

Down at the House of Arts, light shone from the windows like a liner on a dark ocean. Inside, I quickly found the others in the little room to the side of the main hall with its gilded mirrors and bare floors, each preparing for what was to come. This night might clinch my acceptance into the House of Arts, maybe I’d secure housing. God, to be rid of Shpalernaya! I watched my comrades’ faces to see if they could smell me, the reek of carbolic and shit. This would not be an audience of tired workers coming out of a factory; this would be a gathering of educated, opinionated people judging us against the best. People would listen, they would remember.

In the anteroom, we prepared, each in our own way. Everyone responded differently to the pressure—Arseny Grodetsky, the eighteen-year-old futurist, was showing Anton a whole new set of poems he wanted to read instead of what he’d so carefully planned. Dmitry Tereshenko, with his sturdy build and beat-up boxer’s face, relaxed and joked with Nikita Nikulin, our senior member, perched on the back of a divan. Nikita had been in a terrible accident as a young man, he’d fallen from a tram, and his body was as cubist as his poetry, offering angles and asymmetrical forms that suggested nobility in the face of terrible suffering. And Oksana Linichuk, from our old Transrational Interlocutors circle, she who had brought flowers to my wedding, geraniums raining red petals onto the grimy floor. Still gray-eyed, frizzy-haired, she sat calmly on the worn cushions, legs crossed at the ankles, her notes neatly in her lap. Her poems were exact, calm, contained, and very clear, just like the poet. While Anton ran around like a cat watching six mouseholes.

Galina Krestovskaya came back to kiss us all and wish us good luck, showering her loveliness around herself like a scent around roses. She still wanted to write, took Anton’s abuse in his Wednesday afternoon studio, but what she was doing now had become clear at various House of Arts evenings when she’d bring her new lover, a commissar in finance and member of the Petrograd Soviet with a car of his own. Always politics, even among us.

I peered out from behind the folding doors to see a full house. Gumilev, Khodasevich, Kuzmin, and—yes! Blok! He came. But my God, he looked tired, standing by the door—most likely to make it easier to escape in case we were terrible. And here was Gorky, and, walking in on the arm of Moura Budberg like some great plumed bird, garbed in emerald green, the exotic figure of Aura Cady Sands. Did she know it was me? Did she remember the girl with the baby in Mina’s apartment? No, it was impossible. She must be simply taking in the offerings of the wet spring evening with the Gorky contingent.

Anton grasped my arm. “Ready?”

We walked in together, sat in the front in a semicircle on the little spindly formal chairs in the blue mirrored room. Friends and students from Anton’s studio had settled eagerly in the front rows, as it was our night. Here were Galina Krestovskaya, with her commissar, and behind them Gumilev leaned forward, saying something amusing, flirting with pretty Galina right under the nose of the soviet. What confidence! Kuzmin and kind round-nosed Chukovksy, who had translated Whitman into Russian. And Sasha Orlovsky, with a familiar dark-haired girl, braids crossed over her head—Dunya Katzeva.

Anton rose and introduced our group, the younger poets at the House of Arts, the Squared Circle, embracing an array of styles and ideas, so on and so on. He was nervous, he spoke too quickly…

We began with Nikita Nikulin, the grandson of the great poet Nekrasov—chosen as most likely to still our elders’ fears about the offerings of the younger generation and our worthiness of their consideration. Nikita read three poems in his cubist style. I liked the way he stacked his poems around a central spine of a syllable, as if twisting his way down a spiral staircase. It was more for the eye than the ear, but he paused after each iteration, making sure the reader descended the staircase with him. He was a good performer of his work, though his voice was on the nasal side. A man with a face like a monk took notes. The blue eye, the pointed nose with its long slot of nostril—it must be the critic Tomilin.

I thought Nikita did well. Then came our little bomb—Arseny. Ear to Nikita’s eye, explosive, a barrage of sound. He was the cannon. His poems were unfathomable, you had to just give yourself over to him, the sound of him, the energy. In the circle, Anton didn’t like us to talk about what poems meant. Only the recurrence of sounds, the structure, I learned a great deal from listening to him, though he never left meaning behind. I was the proletarian of the group, worried about emotional clarity. Arseny was our Red Rimbaud.

Oksana cut through the smoke, etching her precise visions: the cooling relationships between a husband and wife, the hopes of a young girl, a soldier home from the front—poems about the residents of her collective apartment. The critic stuck out his lower lip, he sucked his teeth. But many people sighed, nodding in recognition—finally, something they understood.

I was next. I wished Oksana would go on forever, that I could sit here watching the back of her blessed head, the halo around her light frizzy hair from the electrolier. I couldn’t look into the faces of the audience—the audience! Not people on the street corners hurtling to and from work who had to be captured by a simple clever line. Literary Petrograd. I had wanted this, I had wanted to be a part of this—I would have to show them that I belonged here. It was not politics. Politics could not get you a seat on Olympus. For that, you had to sing.

It was my turn. I walked to the little lectern behind which we declaimed. Here they all were, Eikhenbaum and Chukovsky, Zamyatin, Grin, Gumilev with his students, Kuzmin. Was my hair ridiculous? Should I have tried to be prettier? Or more serious? Breathe, don’t smile, don’t trip… Don’t rush!

Taking a breath, I recited the poem I had not wanted to write, had never wanted to write, but had to, if I were to keep on living:

I could feel my words move out into the room. The stoniness of the crowd. Free verse. Why couldn’t they hear, there was music even if there wasn’t the pattern they wanted? There was rhyme, just not where they were listening for it. But then, I saw my words enter the chests of a few—a woman here, a man there, Galina. Inna. Listen, I said, and they said, Tell us, then. Tell us how it was, make us shiver with your song.

They took me in, they rose, they fell. Even Blok looked less haunted, riding on the sound of my voice. I was so afraid people could no longer feel these things, that their souls were gone, that they’d had enough of death, I’d feared they were so hardened that you couldn’t vibrate them anymore with feeling and sound. But they were still able. Lift us up, their hearts whispered. Make us live. Even these poets, these artists of song. And I did.

I recited the other two poems Anton had chosen—“The Five,” and one about the telephone exchange, “Listen to Me,” where honey poured from the sockets, and it became a honeycomb full of bees. I recited, feeling them with me, like making love to them, whispering to them in the darkness, when I saw a familiar face appear at the back of the hall. Standing behind a broad-shouldered sailor, the sharp face and frizzy black hair of Varvara Razrushenskaya. I stumbled, recovered. Paused. There was no way to escape. I gathered my courage and finished strongly. If I was going to be arrested by my Chekist friend—lover, enemy—if I was going to be shot, I would go standing at full height and not cringing.

Then she was gone.

I sat down. I could hardly see for my confusion, my pride, my mortification, my shock at seeing Varvara again. The thing I should have considered and had not. Arkady was dead, Iskra—wasn’t it enough? I had taken a chance to use my real name on the fliers, thinking who but other poets would trouble to look in the literary papers? I tried to gauge the applause—polite? No. Genuine. And I had so enjoyed being myself—Makarova, not Kuriakina, but me. I had done nothing illegal. My crimes were personal. I was unable to listen to Dmitry Tereshenko, who followed me. My thoughts were thundering, cascading in my head.

Afterward, the old Eliseev servants, who had stayed on for the housing and the rations, handed around tea and even a few stale cookies. I was suddenly shy, as if these people had seen me in my torn underwear. I stood with Anton and Oksana, Inna Gants, the people I knew. I should go over and speak to Aura Cady Sands, but she was with Gorky—and I literally smelled like shit. Was it a success? Just to be here was a success, I told myself. To be among these people. I wasn’t torturing citizens for a living, interrogating them, imprisoning aristocratic old ladies and wizened peasants selling frozen potatoes. I was creating worlds.

I didn’t see Blok—had he left? I probably should vanish too, before Varvara caught up to me. I knew she would still be furious—Did you think I would forget? I could sneak out through the interior courtyard on Bolshaya Morskaya Street. But I didn’t want to leave. This was my night. It might happen only once if I disappeared into the cells of the Cheka. People would think, Whatever happened to that poet, Makarova? I was someone. I would not vanish without a trace.

I began to move toward Aura Sands, my songbird, my hope, when Kuzmin joined us—fin de siècle sulfur rising from his slight figure. “A very interesting evening,” he said to us, slowly raising his heavy-lidded eyes, his hair combed up over his bald pate. “I’m especially looking forward to hearing more from you,” he said to me in particular, shaking my hand. His touch was light, moist, cold. “I don’t care for vers libre, but this was quite musical, very much like contemporary music, that horizontality—like Debussy, and Brahms. And I liked the odd rhymes, like little explosions.”

I was burning with joy. Kuzmin was a classicist if anybody was, but he was also a well-known musician. He’d understood my work musically—how generous of him! “Thank you, Mikhail Alexeevich.” Kuzmin! Another legend. He had lived with Olga Sudeikina, Akhmatova’s beautiful friend from the Stray Dog Café, and her husband—until Sudeikina found out he was having an affair with her husband! What a generation—like the Blok ménage. It made me happy to know that I wasn’t the only one with two husbands.

He took his handkerchief and pressed it to his nose. Did I stink? Oh God.

Terrifyingly, the tall, erect, correct figure of Gumilev approached. I shrank back into myself. He could crush me with a word. Before I knew what he was going to do, he took my hand and kissed it. If it reeked of carbolic and Shpalernaya shit, he gave no indication. His long thin hand was as dry as paper. “May I ask you, why did God create the Russian language with its potential for rhyme and meter, like no other language in the world, if not to create verse?”

Oh God, was Gumilev going to make me argue the case for free verse? I was no theorist. I left that to Anton. Gumilev was one of our greats. Also, he wouldn’t let go of my hand. He was standing embarrassingly close. “I have nothing against established poetic forms, Nikolai Stepanovich,” I said, trying to defend myself while stealthily attempting to recover my hand. “It’s just not what spoke to me when I was writing these poems.”

Not only did he not relinquish my hand, he tucked it under his arm and began walking away with me, leading me somewhere. Where? Away from Anton, most likely, who scowled after us. Away from my well-wishers. I had the feeling of being led to the headmistress’s office for some disciplinary offense. He guided me to some chairs under the gilded mirrors. The lights would be coming on down the street in Orphanage No. 6 now, the orphans settling in to dinner. And I was sitting with Nikolai Gumilev, in the anteroom of the hall where I’d just given a reading.

“They’re really not poems,” he said. “They’re just images set in rhythmic prose. Sometimes you’re just a fraction away from the lip of the pool, the very edge of poetry, but then you sidle away. It’s terrifically frustrating to listen to. Chernikov is doing you no favors, my dear.”

What an ugly man he was, walleyed, like a goldfish, but interesting, commanding. He had a clipped, military way of speaking. Yet he kept taking my hand, gazing at my mouth, my breasts in this old patched dress that had seen me through so much. Wasn’t he remarried to a beautiful doe-eyed woman who lived in this very house?

“You mustn’t waste your talent,” he said. “You had some wonderful lines tonight.” He stared out toward the others, milling and smoking and talking—or at least one eye looked in that direction, the other lingered on me. “‘Soft-lipped summer green. / And golden the fields / And the scythe’s ancient song.’”

He remembered my lines. Nikolai Gumilev. But he kept ogling me too, an interest that was by no means literary. “I’m glad you liked that.”

“But it’s still not poetry. Yet.” He held up a clean, bony finger. He leaned closer, this man at the very heart of literary Petrograd. “I could teach you to write poetry, Marina Dmitrievna. That first piece, your elegy—that should be an ode. Then people would remember it forever. They could recite it in their sleep. Have you ever recited a poem to save your life, Marina?”

I nodded.

“It wasn’t vers libre, was it?” He gazed at me from under his neat eyebrows. “What was it?”

I would not tell him it had been Pushkin, under the snow halfway to Alekhovshchina. Or the Tyutchev I recited to Dinamo that night in our sniper’s nest on Moskovsky Prospect. I said the thing I hoped would stop this conversation. “Whitman.”

“Whitman? Are you now an American? Are you writing in English? Do you have the blood of Shakespeare running through your veins?” he said decisively. “No, I suspect that Mayakovsky’s the stronger influence, and Chernikov. First see what our treasury has to offer. The Onegin sonnet. Alexandrines, iambic tetrameter, terza rima. Once you’re a master of prosody, write all the vers libre you like. Write in Chinese if you prefer. But learn to handle the palette you were born to, make its brushes dance for you. You must work with me. Chernikov can teach you nothing. I made Akhmatova, I made Mandelstam, and if you would put yourself in my hands, I would make you a poet.”

It was lucky I was sitting down. No wonder Blok had been hesitant about my attending Gumilev’s studio. I could not imagine anything less Blokian than his saying he’d made another poet. Like God, like Pygmalion. What arrogance! Yet… wasn’t that secretly what I had been hoping for? Someone to anoint me? To bring me in, to “make” me? No. Not anymore. This might work on the doting girls I’d seen following him around at the House of Arts, but I was too old for masters.

“Honestly, I could never put myself entirely in anybody’s hands, Nikolai Stepanovich.”

“Come, come. Every woman wants to put herself into someone’s hands, my dear.” The light from the electrolier fingered the side of his elongated head. He looked like he’d been extruded through a tube.

I could only imagine what Varvara would say to that. Me, I’d already known the Archangel, had seen Ukashin at work. I didn’t need a father, a master, or an elderly, overbearing lover, only colleagues and friends. I saw people eyeing us, but no one would approach me as long as the Maître had me to himself. And there was Blok! He had his coat on. He looked like he was leaving. I had to speak to him before he left. I rose and offered my hand to Gumilev, smiling coolly, just as my mother would have done to break a conversation with a wearisome guest. “Thank you. I’ll think about that ode.”

He rose as well, and I could see he was irritated that I’d eluded his little seduction—as a teacher and God knew what else. I hoped he wasn’t a vengeful man. I had enough enemies.

I located Blok in the foyer, putting on his galoshes. “Alexander Alexandrovich!” I had to catch my breath. “Remember me, from that day on Bolshaya Morskaya? Marina Makarova?”

He glanced up, those light blue eyes. “Yes, of course,” he said. His face was very still. He stood, picked up his briefcase and umbrella. “You didn’t work with Gumilev after all, did you?”

“No,” I said.

“Quite right. I so disagree with the man. Poets aren’t made,” he said. Softly but clearly. “They are. A poet can hear or he can’t. What’s important is listening. The sound, the harmony. Trust the sound. Not classes and critics.”

“Do you think I’m a poet, Alexander Alexandrovich?” I blurted it out. I knew how ridiculous it sounded, but I needed to know, once and for all, and Blok would not lie.

He stopped in the doorway and put his heavy briefcase down next to his galoshed foot, wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck. “A poet isn’t a person who writes in verse, Marina Makarova. A poet is a person who writes in verse because he hears verse—the harmony, the rhythm, the chimes and water. He takes the sounds he hears and makes them heard in the world.”

I could see why Blok didn’t teach poetry. He was a genius, and geniuses never knew how they did what they did. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t explain it to mere mortals. I just needed to know: Was I a poet at all? Or only someone who loved poetry, loved it so much she wanted to be one of the elect, prayed for the Muse to kiss her lips? I needed him to tell me, he who had for so long been the Muse’s favorite.

He put his hand gently on my arm. So light. Like a snowflake. “When I hear poetry—so-called poetry—for the most part, it’s so boring and unnecessary it makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t stop writing altogether. It makes me think that I really don’t even like poetry. That poetry is a worthless occupation. It makes me want to curse it from the rooftops. Tonight, when you read your poems, I felt that I do love poetry. That it’s not nonsense, that there’s joy there, the sound of leaves, skies, and weeping. I envied you those sounds. Really envied you.”

He didn’t take my hand, he didn’t kiss me three times, but it felt as if he had done both, and more.

“Write,” he said. “Write while you can.” And went out into the early spring rain.

I walked back into the gathering and found Aura Cady Sands coming my way, her dark skin and green dress so vivid in this wren-brown gathering that she looked like a bird of paradise. She was accompanied by Gorky and his mistress Moura Budberg and others in their party—a small neat man in his fifties, a tall boy with pale skin and dark hair, a grizzled man in his sixties. The mistress was the one to speak. “Marina Dmitrievna, may I introduce Alexei Maximovich Gorky?”

He was a warm and appealing man, tall, with a low, broad forehead and dished face, a good face, a muzhik’s face, short-nosed, his cropped hair not even gray—sporting his full shoe-brush moustache. Here was the man single-handedly keeping the Russian intelligentsia alive. The living link between our world and that of Gogol and Dostoyevsky. “Congratulations,” he said, shaking my hand with his right one, patting it with the other. “A fine debut. Marvelous work—substantive, emotional, wonderfully controlled. You make us feel your purpose while we soar on your song. How old are you, child?”

“Twenty, Alexei Maximovich.” Luckily, the mistress had introduced him or I wouldn’t have known how to address him, Maxim Gorky being a pseudonym and pseudonyms had no patronymic. I couldn’t just call him Gorky like a fireman on a locomotive. Eh, Gorky, pass me that jug.

“Twenty.” He chuckled—a bit ruefully. “Poets and mathematicians start so young, don’t they? A young poet is like a string of fireworks, exploding in the summer sky. We novelists are so shamefully slow, it takes us forever just to learn to put our pants on.”

Moura translated for Aura Cady Sands. The singer was dazzling. We all disappeared compared to this marvel. “We say that about our blues,” said the American in Russian—she had made progress since I had last seen her. “The blues takes a whole lifetime to sing.”

“May I introduce the famed American soprano Aura Cady Sands?” said Gorky’s mistress.

Sands praised my poem. “Very strong.” The compliment sweet to my ears. Though she could not have understood it, she heard its song.

I shook her firm, fleshy hand. “We’ve met before,” I said in English.

I had startled her. It was my face she didn’t recognize, my new face. “We have?”

“At the Katzev photography studio. Last fall.” It would be understandable if she didn’t remember. Sometimes an encounter can be hugely important to one person, even change his life, and yet make no mark on another’s. Just like love. “You invited me to visit you at the Astoria.”

Her smile widened. “Yes! With that adorable baby. Irish Eyes. How is she?”

Oh, she remembered Iskra. My eyes smarted. I had to tell her, before my throat closed entirely. “She died this winter. That’s what the poem was about.”

“Oh, baby… no.” She cupped my face in her hand. “This awful life.”

She wore L’Origan, the only person in Petrograd these days who wore a scent. Perhaps it was just a memory of fragrance on her clothing, but I wanted to stand next to her and breathe it in forever, listening to her rich voice. If only I had found her before it was too late, before I’d marched off to Orphanage No. 6. If only this moment had come in the fall. But I had to be grateful it was happening at all. She knew us. Moura was translating for Gorky now.

“So you’re a poet.” She brushed at my hair, tenderly. “Of course I couldn’t understand most of it, but the music! Glorious! Why didn’t you ever come see me?”

I didn’t want it to sound like I was blaming her. “You needed a propusk. I had no way to reach you.”

“Propuski,” she said, her mobile face contorting with disgust. “I never saw such a country for red tape.”

I laughed. “Yes, that’s our color. The Astoria’s the First House of the Soviet. They can’t let the riffraff wander about—some ragged, raving poet who might read free verse and bring down the government.” I didn’t want to clutch at her arm with my sad story, like a beggar.

Moura laughed and translated for the others.

“Well, I’m not there anymore,” Aura said. “I’m at Gorky’s and you must visit me. You won’t need a passport and twelve official stamps. You will come, won’t you? You must.” She turned to Moura. “Tell her she must.”

Moura Budberg seconded the invitation. Her English was plummy, British—even her Russian was accented. I wondered what her story was as she leaned toward Gorky. “She must come to visit, we’re going to adopt her—is that all right, Alexei Maximovich?”

“It would give me great pleasure.” A jolly man, a man who I could see liked bustle around him. I wished he would take care of that coungh. He was smoking too.

“Come, then. Sunday. At four?” said Moura. She told me the address—Kronverksky Prospect 23, flat number 5.

Aura kissed me on both cheeks. “I’m so glad we’ve found you at last.”

“I look forward to following your career,” said Gorky as they moved off. “I hope to see you on Sunday, if they haven’t killed me first.”

“Thank you, I’ll be there,” I called after them. If I wasn’t in a Cheka cell by then.

We continued celebrating up in Anton’s room, comparing notes, who had said what to whom, who had been there, whether Tomilin or Eikhenbaum would review us, Anton analyzing our performances, Arseny careening off the walls with the adrenaline of his own success. “We did it, we pulled it off! Did you see those stinkers, Gumilev et al.? Gnashing their teeth. Ha! Let them go off and knit their antimacassars.”

Tereshenko had found a little bit of vodka, God knows where—we passed around the perfume bottle he kept it in. We even persuaded Oksana to stay a few minutes. She and Petya Simkin, part of the Squared Circle, sat next to me on the crowded bed. How far we’d come since our days at the Krestovskys’. Everybody but Tereshenko had been there when we’d celebrated the end of the war—just before the White advance. “Just think,” I said, rosy on a few drops of alcohol, taking Oksana’s hand. “We will always be connected in people’s minds, ‘The Women of the Squared Circle.’ Someday we’ll be old ladies drinking tea with our cats in our laps, remembering that horrible Anton Chernikov.”

“Who made your fortunes,” Anton added.

“What a time this has been,” Oksana’s hand squeezing mine. “I already feel like I’m fifty, don’t you?”

“I still remember those geraniums,” I said. The ones she’d brought to my Red wedding. We would share each other’s futures and disgraces.

“It looks like Galina’s done well for herself.”

“Some cats always fall on their feet,” said Tereshenko, always happy to be nasty.

“I hate to go but I teach in the morning.” Oksana brushed her fair hair back from her amused gray eyes, stood. A philology student at Petrograd University, she was already teaching at the Third University, the Workers’ Faculty—Rabfak. Petya rose to accompany her—reluctantly. It was a wild walk back to Vasilievsky in the dark.

I watched them go with a twinge of envy. If my father hadn’t ruined my chances to enter the university, I too would be leaving now, getting ready to teach in the morning, instead of facing another day plugging cords into sockets at the infernal telephone exchange. But that was a horse dead for too many years, there were only a few scattered bones left to trip me.

More and more people crammed into Anton’s tiny, messy room, spilling out into the hall. Nikita sat down in Oksana’s seat, told me that Eikhenbaum was going to write up the evening. Such a heady time, I could hardly sit still, as bad as Arseny ricocheting off the walls. Was I not dreaming? And so what if Varvara knew I was in town? I’d face that when I had to. Surely she understood the poems, could see I had not survived unscarred. But would it be enough to pacify her? Pity was not her strong suit.

Here was big blond handsome Sasha, leaning over, kissing me. He always smelled of linseed oil and turps. “Look who’s here!”

From behind his broad back, holding his hand, was Dunya Katzeva.

“Marina,” she said.

I wanted to bolt, like a convict leaping from a train. Her brown hair in crisscrossed braids the way Mina used to wear it. She crouched down in front of me. “Marina, I didn’t know. Not until tonight.” Her face was pale, her dark eyes large and wet. “I’m so sorry. You don’t know, we had a huge fight after you left. I moved out.” She knelt on the floor, holding my hands. “Everyone hates her. Mama hardly speaks to her. It’s just her and that horrible Roman now. I kept thinking you’d come back, and we could make it right, but you never did. Forgive me, forgive me!”

Oh, why did she have to show up tonight? I just wanted to have my little scrap of pleasure that had nothing to do with losing my green-eyed baby.

“Was it typhus? Forgive me, it doesn’t matter…”

I would not cry in front of these people, please, God! Dunya, why are you doing this? I explained tersely the bare bones of what had happened.

She clutched at my hand, covered it with her tears. Did I have to comfort her? I could see Inna Gants eagerly watching this little drama from the corner of the room. The House of Arts was a fishbowl, as bad as the collective apartment on Shpalernaya Street. Living here must be like being on stage. I had to end this ghastly scene. She’d been wrong, I’d been wrong, we’d all been wrong, and not a scrap of it would bring Iskra back.

She gazed up at me from the floor with her big wet eyes… sweet and kind, she’d always been this way, even as a child… and there was no virtue in salting the wound. Suddenly I hated it here, all these people in the crowded, smoky room, everyone half performing. I wanted to get outside and breathe, be alone with my jumbled thoughts. “We were all idiots,” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder. I’d known her before she lost her first tooth. “None of us is a fortune-teller. I’m sorry, I have to go too, it’s a long walk and I work in the morning. Night, Comrades,” I called out to the poets.

“Sasha, we’re walking Marina home,” Dunya announced, rising from the dirty floor.

Anton glanced up from Arseny and his beloved Shklovsky. I was surprised he’d heard anything. “You can’t go, it’s still early.”

“It’s late,” I said, and kissed him three times. “Thanks for including me tonight.” For saving me, for bringing me in. He looked stricken to see me go, as if I were taking the party with me. “I’ll see you next Wednesday.” The others shouted their congratulations.

There was no shaking my escorts. But outside in the quiet hissing of the rain, I felt less oppressed by Dunya and her sorrow. After all, I loved her better than all the other people in that room put together. She was the only one with an umbrella, and none of us had galoshes—what an ill-prepared trio. Huddled together, splashing down the dark streets of Petrograd in our sad boots, like the fools we were. Now that I could see how it was with Dunya and Sasha, it softened my heart. Still together through everything. They had their mythology, kisses and misunderstandings, the old days when the Transrational Interlocutors had taken advantage of the Katzevs’ generosity, like stray cats being fed by the back fence. Dunya had had such a crush on the big painter, and Sasha unsure what to do about the love of such a young girl. The city map of their courtship. Well, something good had come of all that. Why shouldn’t life work out at least for some?

And me? I might always be alone, as my mother had foretold, but still there would be friendship. And my verses were becoming known. There was no longer Arkady to fear, and Varvara would do what she would. Whose fault was life? I didn’t know, only that I was glad for the companionship of these lovers and the freshness of the rain. We chatted the whole way back to Shpalernaya Street. And when I lay down to sleep, I was happy, safe for tonight in my little room, soothed by the whisper of rain on the window. I fell asleep smelling L’Origan, clutching my future in the palm of my hand.

34 The Flea

It was a clear, fresh April day, the wind driving the white clouds down toward the gulf against the blue silk of the sky. Blue reflected in a million puddles. The ice on the River Neva broke all at once. In two or three days it went from a white solid mass to violently cracking towers of slabs that heralded the onset of spring. I expected to see whales breaking through, leaping into the air, as I crossed the Troitsky Bridge over to the Petrograd side. The sun on my face, the shush and slap of the water, freed from the paralysis of ice. The wind tore at my hair. Fortunately my fur hat was non-aerodynamic. Someone else was not so lucky, her hat flew off her head—how joyous, a loose hat!—as if it were tired of its responsibilities and decided to take off for a new perspective.

I felt like I could fly, just like that, tumbling into the sky. I was going to tea at Maxim Gorky’s—Alexei Maximovich’s—in my patched woolen stockings and sheepskin coat. I laughed out loud. How alive the day was. New shoots on trees, plants coming up right in the middle of Palace Square, no horses to eat them—the restoration of Nature’s green after her long imprisonment in the halls of the Frost King. Then, miracle of miracles, I heard the tram coming—screeching and groaning, passengers hanging from its doors like clusters of grapes. I jumped onto the fender and rode, though truthfully I could have walked it faster.

As we shuddered and groaned, the Peter and Paul Fortress rose up on its small island in the Neva, the crown-shaped embankments, the very first structure that Peter the Great built here—a fortress, a cathedral, a mint, and a prison, all in one. Gorky had been jailed there after the 1905 Revolution. How strange that he would want to live so close by, have to pass it every day. I watched its great yellow-gray walls coming closer, the Dutch-style needle of its cathedral glinting gold, communing with its brother across the river at the Admiralty. I remembered the night it fired on the Winter Palace. Long the dungeon of the autocracy, its cells now held hostages and enemies of the revolution.

Swaying and clinging and trying to avoid being hit in the eye by the man to my left, whose elbow curved just above my face, I gazed back at the fortress, so familiar, so grim.

I still had not heard from Varvara. She wasn’t stupid. She had to know everything by now, where I lived, where I worked, that I was using Kuriakina on all my papers. It was more a matter of when than if. Well, it would come when it would come. I would not run from my fate. Write while you can, Blok had said. My life had started to take root and bloom, and I would enjoy these moments of springtime, no matter how short they might prove.

Now came the sweep of the Kronverksky Embankment with its trees, blue sky reflected in the bow-shaped canal behind the fortress—the way to the zoo, as every St. Petersburg child knew. But today I would not be seeing mere lions and elephants. Today was for opera singers and great authors. At Kronverksky Prospect, I swung down, stumbling a bit on the stones. I began to walk—not fast; no one liked an early guest—into the afternoon sunshine.

Kronverksky Prospect, 23, was a big five-story bourgeois building facing the park. I could smell the fresh grass, the new leaves—and could not help thinking, Iskra would have loved this park. This was my life from now on. I would always look at green and think of her. “Irish Eyes.” The building was in far better shape than any I’d seen in some time—the hall lights worked, the carpet lay intact, muffling the sound of my boots. The banister practically boasted its solidity. They even had a concierge, although all she wanted to know was where I was going. “Flat five. Madame Budberg invited me.” That seemed to be sufficient for the stolid dezhurnaya. I wished she was more rigorous—I could have been an assassin, I could have been anyone. For us, Alexei Maximovich was the most important man in Petrograd, far more important than Zinoviev, chairman of the Northern Commune, and anyone could walk in and shoot him at any time.

I ran up to the second floor, rang the doorbell of the flat opposite the staircase, heard the buzz resonate deep inside.

Aura herself answered the door. Today she was glorious in a sky-blue suit, her hair pinned in a simple chignon. She could have been wearing a robe and a diadem, so queenly did she appear. It was like Nefertiti landing on our cold Neva shores. “Marina, you made it at last.” She kissed me on both cheeks, à la française, her perfume tinting the air. “They’re all in the dining room.”

I followed her clicking heels and solid hips into the depths of the large private flat, decorated with heavy, old-fashioned furniture, plates, and dark paintings. The size of it! It just went on and on. I eagerly peered into every open doorway—a study, a sitting room… Alas, most of the doors were closed. A big old intelligentsia household. I could smell food. My stomach growled.

“You haven’t eaten, have you?” she asked.

You never had to ask whether someone had eaten. These days, one could eat a Petrograd dinner and then another one five minutes later, and one after that, and still have room for a feast.

We entered a large dining room in which a number of others were chatting, though no Gorky, no Moura. Were they not going to join us? Aura introduced me in her wobbly Russian. Evidently I was a completely beautiful writer. It was something I’d noticed about her—nothing was just okay. Everything was superlative, the most marvelous, beautiful, spectacular. Stupendous! No Russian could be so enthusiastic, even on marafet. She introduced Lajos something, the most marvelous Hungarian mathematician, and his son Tamás, and the poet Khodasevich’s darling niece Valentina, and a set of the sweetest visiting Gorky cousins, a man and a woman, and this most distinguished Eugene Harris from the British Trade Union delegation. I marveled at how many people Gorky could afford to feed.

Aura seated me between herself and Harris at the far corner of the table—a little enclave of English speakers among the Russians. The British comrade’s ears stuck out, his moustache was small and bristly. “So when will the revolution come to England, Comrade?” I said, half teasing.

He sighed. “Lenin asked me that when I was in Moscow. All I can say is that it’s heating up. But more like a Petrograd tram than the Zurich Express.”

“Lenin asked me too,” said Aura, settling into the seat next to mine, her arm across my chair. “‘When will we see red flags fly over Wall Street, Comrade Sands?’ I told him, ‘Vladimir Ilyich, if there’s a revolution in America, I’ll be the first one going back. But it’s the only way you’ll get me on that boat.’”

“Do you hate America so much?” I asked, thinking of our wonderful trip to New York, my father giving a talk at Columbia University. My nine-year-old impression was of terrifying skyscrapers, crowds, the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember dining with my mother’s brother Vadim and his glamorous lady friend, and especially her hat, more vertical than horizontal, pinned to the side of her dark hair. White straw, faced in black taffeta. The most elegant thing I ever saw.

“When your country’s against you, it’s not hate.” Aura’s lips curled inward. “It’s more of a love that’s been trampled. Like being rejected by your own mother. Like being turned out onto the street by your family.” She couldn’t know how familiar I was with that feeling. Yes, it wasn’t hate. It was pain. “I’m a Negro,” she said. “This doesn’t wash off.” She licked a finger and rubbed the back of her hand to stress the point. “I can sing at La Scala, dine at Maxim’s, I can have a million dollars in the bank, but I still can’t stay in a decent hotel in New York. Not only can I not sing at the Metropolitan Opera, I can’t appear onstage with a fourth-rate white tenor in a tenth-rate hall in a two-horse town anywhere in the U.S. of A. Tell me, how could a sane person live in a country like that?”

Yes, it must be enough to drive a person mad. “But you could live in France,” I said. “Drink aperitifs on the terrace at La Rotonde.” As I would love to be doing. “Why get involved in our problems?”

“Because I believe in the revolution,” she said, her golden-brown eyes flashing. “This is for all of us, not just you. So my father doesn’t have to step off the curb when a white man walks past. So the people who do the work are the ones who profit. Who wouldn’t want to be part of it? You’d have to be dead not to want to be here.”

For the first time in quite a while, I remembered the revolution as more than deprivation, suspicion, and terror. She made me remember the other side of it, what we’d already accomplished in only three years—and we were almost done with the civil war, the Whites had clearly lost. Maybe the West would soon recognize the fact of us and drop the blockade. A few years of peace to mend and feed ourselves, repair our factories and railroads, and we’d see what Communism really could do.

But I’d been ignoring Harris too long, and turned back to the trade unionist. “Are you the whole delegation?”

“Oh no, there’s a whole gang of us,” he said. “I just wanted to get away from the minders and do a little poking about on my own. Gorky’s been very accommodating. A great friend to the trade union movement.”

A servant in a white apron brought in a tureen of soup, placed it on the sideboard. Spices, meat, cabbage. Solyanka, my favorite. I had the nose of an animal these days. She left, and we passed around plates and cutlery, family style. She brought out a platter of piroshky, and we passed it from hand to hand as she doled out the soup with a keen eye to portions, everyone receiving a potato and one ladle of the precious liquid, bits of plump sausage floating. And crusty piroshky. I had not dreamed of such largesse.

Just as we began to tuck in, Gorky emerged through a door with Moura and another woman of middle age. “Please, sit over here.” Moura steered the woman past the Gorky cousins into the seat on Harris’s far side, facing me across the corner. Evidently the woman and Harris already knew each other. “Emma,” she introduced herself, smiling, holding out her small hand—uncalloused, with little sharp nails.

“This is the poet, Marina Makarova.” Gorky introduced me himself, in Russian, from the head of the table. I almost fell from my chair. Maxim Gorky knew me! It was like being known by Blok—not the same; Gorky was a good writer, while Blok was one whom the angels had chosen for their own. But Gorky was our greatest prose writer, and he ruled the life of intellectual Petrograd. If something happened to me, I would not disappear. He would remember the young poet—we had her to tea. “And this is Emma Goldman, American troublemaker.”

Goldman laughed. Her Russian was obviously excellent. “Somebody has to do it, Alexei Maximovich.”

Aura explained to us in English, “Emma came in on the Buford.”

I had no idea what that meant.

“You didn’t hear? People have been talking about it all winter,” said Aura, putting another piroshok on my plate. “In America, they decided to silence every leftist who wasn’t born there, threw them on an old rusty tub—the USS Buford—and sent them off to Petrograd.”

“I’m sure they hoped it would sink.” Under her tangled topknot, Emma Goldman had a soft, kind face and piercing hazel eyes. Something about her, the animation, the intensity, reminded me of the Left SRs I’d met during my imprisonment in Gorokhovaya 2. Who doesn’t love concrete? “Two thousand Americans, arrested without cause and deported without trial,” she said, taking a plate passed to her. “Well, at least I’ll see the revolution, I thought. Do something useful. But the Bolsheviks have stymied us at every turn. The Communists were all right, but the anarchists? Once they saw we weren’t going to pledge allegiance to Lenin, pfft.” She snapped her fingers. “Red tape, red tape, red tape. I thought something else was going to be red besides tape.”

All the Russian speakers laughed but Moura, at Gorky’s elbow, and Gorky himself.

“Emma and I first met in America in 1906,” said our host from the other end of the table, trying to lighten the mood. “Remember that trip, Emma?” I translated for Aura and Harris. “Quite the experience. I got two books out of it. Have you been in New York, Harris?”

“Twice,” said the Englishman in Russian.

“Monstrous place,” said Gorky. “The most interesting people in America were the Indians and the Negroes. The rest were as ignorant as mud. Completely caught up in the pursuit of Mammon. Like livestock raised to feed the great mouth of Capital. Such a scandal, when they discovered Maria Andreeva and I weren’t married!” He laughed merrily, which devolved into that heavy cough. “It made the front pages of all the daily papers. We were turned out of our hotel—and this wasn’t some little provincial capital; this was the Holy Babylon herself. Mark Twain refused to introduce me at a dinner held in my honor, I was thought to be such a scandal. Emma here had to come to my defense.”

I translated as best I could. When had all this happened? I must have been a child, unaware that the author of the “Stormy Petrel” was causing such an uproar.

“Imagine,” Emma drawled. “Me, coming to Gorky’s rescue. I only hope that you won’t have to return the favor before too long.”

“I hope not as well,” Gorky said. Not smiling now, and there was a warning in his face. I got the feeling that their meeting had not gone well.

Above a sideboard, in the red corner, a series of small icons gleamed. They confused me. Was Gorky a believer? Or had he just rescued them, as he’d rescued so much else in our times? The mirror over the sideboard reflected our images: glorious Aura; Emma Goldman, intense and messy; Harris; and this scrawny corpse—who was that? My pale face, my hair, it seemed darker, drabber than it used to be, my patchwork dress. I was so used to thinking of myself as possessing a hint of beauty. Always an unpleasant shock to see how vanished it was. What would Kolya think if he saw me now? Would he feel even a shred of his former ardor?

The hell with him. I may have lost my charm but I was gaining something far better—the right to sit at the table with Gorky and Aura Cady Sands and this Emma Goldman. To be someone. To have a face.

“We saw you last week at the House of Arts,” said the mathematician’s son, a young man with black longish hair and green eyes behind spectacles, his Russian clear but accented. “I liked the one about the telephone and the bees.” He switched to English for Aura. “The poem of the bees.”

“Do it for us—could you?” Aura asked. In that electric light, her skin shone like polished walnut. Though her profile was stern and fierce, her dazzling smile exuded ten thousand volts of joie de vivre.

I couldn’t think of anything more embarrassing. Like a drunk standing on the table and doing a clumsy dance amid the plates and glasses. “No, really, I can’t.”

“No, you must,” said Moura at Gorky’s elbow.

The Gorky cousins and Khodasevich’s niece concurred.

“It would be so kind of you,” Gorky said.

Well, it was Gorky’s table, Gorky’s solyanka. How could I refuse him? I took a sip of tea and decided against rising—it seemed too awful—and I began to recite in a soft, conversational voice, letting the rhythm, the chant of it rise, looking mostly at Gorky’s cousins, the Hungarian boy, and Khodasevich’s niece, and purposefully avoiding the scarecrow in the mirror. The way the girls at the switchboard became part of the machine, the signals whirring in our hair, the dream of bees, the honey. When I finished, a round of applause greeted me. I hoped I hadn’t seemed a fool, but the response appeared genuine and not merely the expression of relief that the clumsy child had performed her last pirouette without upsetting the glasses.

“Is that where you work, the telephone exchange?” Emma Goldman asked. “Do you have a union?”

“We have a committee,” I said.

She frowned. “Do you really think it’s the same thing? How do you redress grievances?”

“Through the committee, to the Commissariat,” I said.

“The Commissariat’s your boss. You should organize. You’ll need that union sooner or later.”

I thought of the Soviet young ladies, my fellow telephonists. A few were studying to become Communists—ironically the last ones interested in collective action on the shop floor. They were interested in currying favor from those above them and lording it over the rest. And most were Formers who wanted as little to do with the collective as possible. I told the American as much.

“This is what I worry about,” said Goldman in Russian to the British trade unionist, and to Gorky. “The way the party is taking over the unions. This so-called militarization of labor. I’ve visited factories where workers are literally chained to their machines. Soldiers with bayonets guarding factories against their own workers. In the so-called workers’ state.”

“Absenteeism is crippling industry,” said Gorky. “It’s an unenviable position, but we have to do something.”

I wished she wouldn’t fight with him, he was clearly not feeling well. Me, I just wanted to enjoy my solyanka and not listen to people argue. I wanted to talk more to Aura, find out what she was doing, where she was performing, what she thought of us. I wanted to talk to Gorky about the House of Arts. Or to the mathematician’s son, or the cousins, about Nizhny Novgorod. Khodasevich’s niece was a painter. I wanted to enjoy the life of these cultured people. But the politicals wouldn’t quit.

“I worry when they take us to tour factories, and we see plenty of fuel and materiel,” said Harris. “It doesn’t seem possible the country would be in such straits if what we are being shown is the true state of things.”

Emma leaned forward over her soup and gestured at the Englishman with her spoon. “Go to Putilov. No one would tell me a thing until they found out who I was—an American anarchist, not a Bolshevik flunky. Then I got an earful. They’re not getting their rations, and they’ve got soldiers breathing down their necks. One old man said there’s only two thousand working there now, and another five thousand watching them. We’ve all seen it. The Bolsheviks have created this monstrous bureaucracy that’s sitting on the backs of the worker. It’s slavery that wouldn’t be tolerated in a Ford plant. The workers would have struck months ago.”

What a firebrand this Emma Goldman was! To talk like this at Gorky’s table? I translated some of it for Aura. It might be true, but it was awfully insensitive to rail against the Bolsheviks, who were, after all, her hosts in Russia. Then I thought of myself in the days when I lived under my parents’ roof, the dinner conversations so much like this, where I would speak out just as heatedly against their bourgeois smugness, and I was ashamed of myself. How cowed we all were these days, myself included, how politically nervous. No Russian would speak out against the Bolsheviks so plainly without wondering when the axe would fall. Even Gumilev the monarchist stopped short of criticizing the Bolsheviks directly. I wondered what Emma Goldman’s status was here in Petrograd, what the Bolshevik policy on anarchism was these days. I wasn’t following politics so closely since I’d had Iskra. I only knew that the White threat had subsided, and I was writing, and that was enough.

Gorky’s face looked waxen as he rubbed it in the palm of his large hand.

“What do you think, Harris?” Goldman demanded. “What are they saying in trade union circles?”

“Well, it’s unfair to say what we in the West would or wouldn’t put up with, Comrade,” said Harris, leaning away from her on one elbow. “The situation here is so different. Think of what they’ve had to bear, and how long. I think the Bolsheviks are doing as well as they can with what they’ve got—”

She slapped the table. “The full Punch and Judy show,” she said.

“I’m not here to take in a show!” Now Harris was losing his temper. “I’ve talked to Shatov—”

They started quarrelling about Shatov, who I gathered had been some colleague of Goldman’s in America, now here working for the Bolsheviks, who’d “swallowed the Bolshevik line, hook and sinker,” as Goldman snorted contemptuously, while Harris argued that the labor situation here couldn’t be compared with that of England or America. “It’s a workers’ state,” he stated. “If strikes cripple the country, who pays the tab? The worker. It’s a much different situation.” They got into the militarization of labor and Trotsky’s call to overcome “trade union prejudices” in favor of labor armies.

The mathematician’s son whispered something to his father, who laughed and ruffled his son’s hair, kissed his temple. Khodasevich’s niece Valentina rounded her eyes at me. Good poem, she mouthed. Thanks, I mouthed back.

“You watch. The unions will be completely suppressed before long. Unnecessary in the workers’ dictatorship,” Goldman continued. “Already they’ve become adjuncts of the state. Unless their independence is secured, they’ll just be absorbed. What happened to the ‘disappearance of the state and centralized power’? The factories aren’t being run by the workers, the worker is no more than a gear now. All the shots are called by Moscow. And from what I can see, the trade unions are enabling them.”

Gorky looked so painfully tired. What a crossroads this household was, not only for literary Russia but politically as well. His was the only independent voice in the country—of course, everyone would be scrambling for his attention. I wished the wind could pick him up and blow him into the blue, like that escaped hat. He saw me gazing at him, and smiled. “Lenin thinks Trotsky goes too far, saying that the unions are no longer necessary,” he said finally, steepling his sensitive fingers. “The workers need to defend themselves against the state whenever necessary. Also to defend their state, when that’s necessary. But let’s ask someone of the younger generation. Marina Dmitrievna, what do you think of all this?”

Everyone was looking at me—to decide the fate of the Russian worker! I must have turned pale, because Aura patted my hand. Hers was solid and meaty, her nails unpolished like everyone else’s but well manicured, and she wore a large ring with an odd-shaped, unpolished green stone. “I think everyone’s looking forward to the end of the war,” I began. “So we can take a breath and repair and rebuild. Maybe the blockade will end by then.” Then I realized that, yes, I did have an opinion. I wasn’t as dead as all that. “During the White invasion, I worked on fortifications with women from Skorokhod, our shoe factory. They’d gone out on strike because they had no boots. I think the state is thinking on the big scale, and I suppose it has to… but the worker as an individual will be overlooked if he can’t strike and remind the state of his existence.”

“Well said,” said Goldman. Moura nodded her approval, and it was clear Gorky was relieved at the slight lessening of the militancy of the discussion.

Now Moura was able to turn the talk toward Aura Cady Sands, who had sat for so long with the Russian political talk swirling around her, to ask about her recent trip to Moscow. “You met Lenin in Moscow. What was your impression of him?”

“Well, you’d never guess he was the leader of all of Russia,” Aura said. “He’s very unassuming. Maybe he’d come by to sweep up or something. Yet—you look in his eyes, and oh. There’s that focus, that will, that plan. You know he’s very capable of ruling.”

“We met him too,” Goldman said, in English. “He told us there were no ideological anarchists in jail. Only bandits and Makhnoists. Madame Ravich was kind enough to help us get two of them—two little girls, fifteen and seventeen—out of that nonexistent jail last week.”

Clearly Moura had had enough of Goldman, and the anti-Bolshevik line of her conversation. She wanted Aura to talk. “Did you sing for him?”

“I sang Isolde,” said Aura. “He speaks German. I don’t think he liked it much—but he admitted he’s conservative in matters of art.” She sipped her tea. “I was surprised. You’d think revolutionaries would be revolutionaries of art as well as life.”

Moura translated for her end of the table.

“It’s just as well they’re not,” said Gorky, his amusement masked by his big moustache, but blooming in his eyes. “Preserving culture is a good project for the state. Let the artists be the ones to swing the axe.”

Valentina took the view that modernity required the base of rooted culture. “If we destroy culture for the sake of modernism, I mean really destroy it, there won’t be anything for the next generation to root themselves in. Nothing to react to, to advance or reject. You won’t have modern men, you’ll have ignorant ones who’ll think there’s never been anything worthwhile except for the few pitiful scraps they themselves have been able to assemble.” She sounded very much like her uncle. That must be quite a family. She made me want to talk more with Khodasevich when I saw him next.

It was a heady afternoon, and Aura promised me tickets to Aleko, the new Rachmaninoff opera she was singing with Chaliapin at the Mikhailovsky Theater on May Day. I recalled watching the crowds emerging from the Mikhailovsky through the windows of the Infant Department at Orphanage No. 6. It put a crimp in my pleasure, to think that Iskra had been alive then, howling with the others. I thought their fate was the worst it could get. How simple I had been. And how I had yearned to be in that intermission audience. “You sang there last fall.”

“Did you see me?” Her smile, her smooth gleaming cheeks.

“Oh, I didn’t go. I just thought it might be you.”

“Well, you’ll absolutely adore Aleko. Very modern. I play the gypsy, Zemfira. Chaliapin kills me in the end, of course—marvelous. The Russian hero claims to love me as a free woman, but in the end he is not liberated enough to live his ideals. So strong, so passionate!”

Aleko was Pushkin’s “The Gypsies.” I knew I would love it.

“The next time you visit, I’ll sing you some of it,” she said. “And you will come again, now that we’ve found you? Moura, she must come, yes?”

“Of course she must.” Moura smiled, a feline smile. She said something to Gorky.

“Anytime,” he said. “We’d be honored.”

“Do you believe in destiny, Marina?” Aura asked, gazing into my eyes with her own, large ones not a solid brown but flecked with gold. I wondered how old she was. Twenty-eight? Thirty? “When’s your birthday, honey?”

“February third.” What did that have to do with anything?

“That’s Aquarius. I love Aquarians! So avant-garde, so daring.”

Oh no. A spiritualist.

She patted my knee. “And your name is Marina. Appropriate, don’t you think? Do you believe in astrology?”

I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She wanted to include me in her life, wrap it around my shoulders like a cape. Cautiously, I responded, “I hope we have the power to shape our own destiny. If we have the courage to do so.” Though Iskra’s death hadn’t been shaped by me. There had been a black fate waiting for her. But I wanted to believe our will still mattered.

“What about Marx?” she teased. “Aren’t you a Marxist?”

I could hear the Hungarian mathematician eating his soup. The muddy truth—I did believe in fate, though I didn’t want to. I could not take the spaceman’s view of human life, it was capitulating to helplessness. “Economics shapes our lives, but what’s the virtue in fatalism? We should act as if we had free will, even if we don’t. A Negro American classical singer comes to Soviet Russia—that must have taken a fair bit of free will.” Emma was listening, as was Moura across the table. “Say that parts of life are predetermined—say that most of it is. There will always be areas in which our actions matter. And we’ll never know which ones they are. So I’d rather concentrate on that, whether I’m being compelled by destiny or history or economics.” That wasn’t very Marxist of me. “I can’t accept that I’m just an automaton run by blind forces.” An abdomen on legs. Yet, certainly, I was compelled by all sorts of forces. Freud’s as well as Marx’s.

“The individual can either help or hinder development,” said the British labor man, dabbing at his salt-and-pepper moustache. “But the control of the means of production drives history. You’re mad if you think you’re free. Here at least you’re in possession of the means. On the side of the working man, you’re making progress.”

“I’m with you, Marina Dmitrievna,” said Goldman. “You’re an anarchist, even if you don’t know it.”

Moura translating.

“Lajos, what does the mathematician think?” Gorky asked.

“No free will,” said the Hungarian. “The structure of the universe is discoverable, we’re born into it, and it works through us. What we think of as will is just another aspect of the predetermined structure.”

“So why teach anybody anything?” asked Valentina. “Either way we’re just enacting the predeterminancy.”

The Hungarian’s eyes smiled while the rest of his face remained mournful. “Intriguing, yes?”

I translated for Aura, who began talking about an idea she had for a school—for orphans. Orphans… I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You see them everywhere, the poor things, you know?” Oh, I did know, Aura. Alas. “I want to do something for them. Give them their voices. Teach singing. And dance! Languages. Music and theater arts. Maria Andreeva says she’ll help me once she’s done with the May Day spectacle. She’s head of the entire Theater Department now, you know. Right up there under Lunacharsky.” What a nest Aura had found her way into. Maria Andreeva wasn’t just Gorky’s wife but a power of her own. “Perhaps you’ll help me with it,” she said.

My throat closed. I was trying not to see orphans at all—their needy faces, their cunning, the horror of their lives. Write while you can. If she had asked me in the fall, I would have thought myself lifted right up to heaven. Now I felt myself dangling over an abyss. But what were the chances she’d actually get something like this done?

“All I can say is good luck,” Emma Goldman concurred. “Every time we’ve tried to get anything going here, they cheered us on to begin with, promising every ounce of help, but nothing ever comes of it. Hospital work, a rest home on the islands, labor exchange for the Buford refugees. Nothing comes to anything here, unless it’s Cheka business, and that’s on a different set of rails.”

“If Maria Andreeva says she’ll help, she will,” said Gorky, clearly irritated.

After a while, the party broke up. I thanked Gorky and he invited me to come back again, and soon.

“Tuesday evening, we’re having guests, you must come,” Moura told me, pointedly not inviting the anarchist.

Goldman and I walked out together. She was much shorter than I’d imagined. “You think me rude, don’t you?” she said as we descended the stairs.

“I think he was hoping for a little more fun at tea,” I said. “A break from the political threshing floor.”

She sighed. “I’m sure you’re right.” I held the door for her, let her out before me.

The sunset had gathered on Kronverksky. The smell of new grass lifted us up out of the gloom of the apartment, lifted us up into spring. I just wanted to stand on the sidewalk and breathe, breathe in the headiness of the conversation in the quiet of the canal and the trees, but Goldman was still worrying her argument, like a dog with a bone. “It makes me so mad,” she said. “Do you really think the Bolsheviks are going to loosen the reins once the Whites are defeated? This has all played right into their hands. They’ll keep coming up with enemies and emergencies, whatever it takes to deflect blame from themselves. You just watch.”

“I assume we all will,” I said, a little stiffly, not wanting to start her up again.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” she said, shoving me with her shoulder like a schoolgirl. “I’m not just some boor, trying to vex our Alexei Maximovich. The system needs fleas to keep it honest. Everyone’s being shackled by their dread and fear of reprisal. In the hospitals, the workplace. And it gets worse every day. We have to speak out. Never stop letting people know what you think. Once there’s silence, no one will want to be first to break it.”

A flea indeed. I prayed for her safety, that no one would squash such a flea. She’d given me much to think about. “Bonne chance, Emma Goldman.” I shook her hand, and prayed she would not be assassinated like Rosa Luxemburg. A woman like that had a calendar over her head and a target painted on her fiery breast.

35 A Visit

I stopped halfway across the Troitsky Bridge in the beautiful dusk, shadows blue against the silvery blue, pausing to glory in my new life. It was beginning again, dangerous and volatile, as heady as champagne. Gulls screamed overhead, fighting over something. That’s when I saw the unmistakable lanky form, my brunet, the Void in a leather jacket. There was no point in running. She knew where I was registered, where I worked. If she wanted to talk to me, she would. I prayed she would walk on, showing herself as a warning, as she had at the House of Arts. But there was no safe place—the shifting depth of the river was the only place she could not follow.

The figure grew larger on the long bridge, crossing from the Palace side. The wind tugged at her narrow skirt. The glossy leather of her jacket gave her an insect look, like the carapace of an ant, a slender black wasp.

If I jumped in, could I swim to shore? I was a strong swimmer, but the current was mighty, few people survived it. No, I would meet her, get it over with. I would walk away a free woman, or under arrest, but I would not play the mouse again. She kept coming, her stride confident, hands at her sides. I couldn’t see the square Mauser at her hip but knew it was there. I gazed west, toward Kronstadt and the open sea, a lick of gold still at the horizon.

At last, Varvara leaned on the railing of the bridge next to me. She looked older than she had when she’d rescued me from the Cheka prison at Gorokhovaya 2, stronger than she had in the flat I’d shared with her off the Fontanka, more severe, less kinetic. We said nothing, just watched the water pass under the bridge in the unfrozen center—green-black waves heading for the open gulf. Sheets of ice traveled past from time to time. How many desperate people had jumped from this bridge in the last few years? I avoided looking back at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the enormous silent fact of it.

“You’re back,” she said.

I nodded. Everything had caught up with me eventually—Arkady, and now Varvara.

“I heard your reading,” she said. “It sounded pretty good.” She leaned forward, her hands clasped, the Mauser at her hip. “Though I’m no critic.”

What was she after? Varvara couldn’t have cared less about echoes of sound or the movement of the human soul.

“I didn’t know you had a baby.” Gazing upriver, not meeting my eyes. “Was it Genya’s?”

Why should I help her? If she wanted information, she would have to ask the right questions.

“Shurov’s?”

Just beyond the rail, a gull hovered on the freshening wind. She put her hand on my arm, and I flinched.

“I’m not the enemy, Marina.”

I had used my own name, that was my mistake. My hubris. Ever my weakness. To feel confident that now I was safe. That’s how she’d found me. I could have used a pseudonym, created a new self for the next life. But I wanted to stand whole, with all my mistakes, to be everything I had ever been.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Daleko,” I said. Far away. I knew her, she would never forgive my having abandoned her for Kolya, for humiliating her. She had offered me her love, and I had left her.

“Von Princip’s dead,” she said. Pretending to be casual—ah, she was an operator, our young Chekist. She turned, resting her back against the railing, a silhouette against the western gold. “He was running a gang of orphans out of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. He was half eaten when we found him.”

The starving children… I could feel her black eyes, probing. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“Seems to be a theme, don’t you think?”

“What theme? Dinner?”

“Orphans,” she said.

“It’s our major industry,” I said. “Orphans and corpses. If only we could build tractors and rail stock so bountifully.”

The Kamennoostrovsky tram trundled slowly onto the bridge, groaning and screeching, the bell clanging, people hanging from the sides like bags off a donkey.

“Why did you come back?”

“The baby,” I said. “I didn’t want her growing up a hick.”

She turned her face to the wind. “I never understood the attraction of the countryside. Fresh air. Trees, fields! What’s so special about a bunch of trees?”

As we stood together in the lowering dusk, I waited for the axe to fall. I could see the edge glinting. I knew her better than anyone on earth.

“That was Emma Goldman you were talking to,” she said.

The flea. So that was it.

“You came from Gorky’s.”

Yes, an interrogation. I gazed downriver, toward the other bridges—Palace, Nikolaevsky. And Kronstadt, unseen on the horizon. West. Where one could breathe. “I was visiting a friend who’s staying with them.”

Her black cropped hair whirled in the sea breeze, flying up like a wing. “What was Goldman doing there?” she asked.

A man pushed a large bundle on an old bicycle past us, as if we were just a couple of girlfriends standing on a bridge, taking in the view. Or did he see her Mauser? “I don’t know,” I said. “I was there for tea. Probably wanted something from him. Most people do.”

“Any idea what?” She leaned toward me.

I shook my head.

“What did they talk about?” Not what did she talk about. I had to be careful. “The other guests.”

“Typical political things, trade unions, what Lenin said about art. I was visiting my friend, an opera singer. She came to my reading.”

“The American, Aura Sands.”

I once might have teased her about keyhole peeping, but I had seen her in her element, an interrogation room at Gorokhovaya 2. My mouth went dry. She was getting closer to her purpose and I waited with dread to see what it would be. She seemed compressed within herself, steely, her rangy shoulders braced, her thin hands spread beside her along the rail. The fingers seemed too delicate for what she did with them. I wanted to swallow, but I knew she would notice.

“How well do you know her?” Was this about Aura, being an American?

“We met at the reading, she invited me to visit.” I made no show of resisting. I imagined myself a clear pool, hiding nothing. I knew to resist her was like tugging at a rag when you played with a dog. If you wanted the dog to lose interest, you had to stop tugging.

We began to walk again, south along the wide bridge with its art deco stanchions for the tram wires, toward the Palace Embankment. The farther we got from the fortress, the better I liked it. I told myself if we made it as far as the Palace Embankment without incident, everything would be fine. She might still be hurt by my abandonment, but nothing would happen to me. But, oh Lord, if we turned back…

She took my arm, startling me. “This is me, remember?” Leaning in. She smelled sour, of dirty hair, and pencil shavings. “I know you. You remember exactly what they said. Who said what, and how they said it. You remember how many buttons Gorky had on his shirt and whether he cut himself shaving. Who do you think you’re talking to, some provincial strawhead?”

Yes, I knew who I was talking to. The girl who’d asked me to spy on my father in the days before October. Who had revealed all his secrets and tore my family apart. The young woman who’d pulled me out of a blood-soaked cellar at Gorokhovaya 2, who had released me, but only in exchange for more betrayal. I’d made love to her, and then left her without a word. “He had a waistcoat on,” I said. “Two buttons showing. He hadn’t cut himself.” The leather jacket. I could hear it, creaking.

“That’s better. And what did they talk about?”

“Varvara. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was leaving—”

Her sallow face darkened. She stopped, wrenching me around by the arm. “You think I give a damn about that? You think what happened with us, that’s what this is about? Do you think we matter in the least, our so-called feelings? The safety of the workers’ state, that’s what this is about.” She let me go with a tcha of disgust. “I don’t give a damn that you ran off with that speculator, that saboteur, and had your sordid little baby and that it died. I have counterrevolution up to my elbows and I want to know who was there.” Her eyes crackled like a frayed cord, sparking.

She could squash me like a fly. And yet, to say something like that about Iskra… “No,” I said.

“No?” She laughed out of sheer amazement. “You’re telling me no?”

Never say no to me. Well, no to him and no to her. “You can’t use me anymore,” I said. “I spied for you twice. I think I’ve done enough.”

Suddenly she was twisting my arm up behind me, like a cop. Right out in the open on the Troitsky Bridge. Forcing me onto the railing. “I say what’s enough,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

“You’re hurting me.” I said it as a matter of fact. I would not cry.

“I say what’s enough.” She leaned over and repeated it in my ear, as I tried to escape the pressure on my shoulder. “I could shoot you right here and no one would say a thing.”

“Do it,” I said, my vision fogged with tears. “Because I’m not going to inform for you. I’ve got nothing to lose anymore.”

“So you think,” she said, but she let me go.

Passersby, a woman with a child by the hand, a man carrying rations, two old ladies arm in arm, turned their gazes pointedly riverward, left and right, and I knew it was true. She could shoot me and nobody would say a thing. People would make a point of not remembering this encounter on the Troitsky Bridge. “I think you’re going to change your mind about that.”

I hunched my shoulder, rotated the arm. I didn’t like the crooked smile on her face, the air of withheld knowledge. I couldn’t tell if she was bluffing. She was a professional, she could make me think anything. But what did she know that I didn’t? What exactly could she hold over me now, when I had nothing? “I don’t think I will.”

“Come with me,” she said, and nodded back the way we had come. “I want to show you something.”

36 The Fortress

The fortress loomed ahead of us in the dusk. It was still daytime in London. In New York, people were bustling in the streets, reading the newspapers, the ships thick in their harbor. And in California, where Uncle Vadim slept, the sun had just come up. I would give anything to be there. “Am I under arrest?”

“Have you done anything wrong?” Varvara asked. As if the Cheka needed a reason.

We turned off the wide Troitsky onto St. John’s Bridge, then passed into the fortress, entering a dark weedy forecourt bounded in stone walls. It was terrifying to see the golden steeple of the Peter and Paul Cathedral so high above me, an angle at which I’d never seen it before. Like a sword threatening the peace of the evening sky. All the warmth and gaiety of the afternoon at Gorky’s had dissolved like wet tissue. I was glad I was wearing my sheepskin. It hadn’t been strictly necessary, but if I were imprisoned, I would be happy to have it.

Avoiding the puddles, we approached a stout and heavily guarded inner gate.

“It’s called St. Peter’s Gate,” Varvara told me as she swaggered up to the guard on duty. He looked like an ant in the arch of the enormous wall. The post was reinforced with a machine gun. St. Peter’s, but you’d be lucky to be refused entry. Varvara passed the guard her credentials. He made a telephone call. A raw patch of brick showed where they had torn down the imperial eagle over the gate, where red flags now flew. He came back and opened the second gate.

I would have given anything for a drink of water. My mouth had gone stone dry. But I refused to show her how frightened I was. The blue sky tinged with gold—it could be the last time I ever saw it. This horrible place was like a person you had known all your life, a frightening, powerful figure you recognized on sight, maybe even nodded to in the street, whose carriage or motorcar sometimes passed by you, but now the black door opened and he was beckoning you to go for a ride. “You want to tell me where you’re taking me?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Now we were in the inner court, pavement and water and big avenues of bare trees, eighteenth-century administrative buildings and barracks and those inescapable walls of stone. Before there was anything else in Petersburg, there had been this—a church, a barracks, and a prison. The crude basis of a state. Power in all its forms. Reluctantly, I followed Varvara past the Dutch-style cathedral of Peter and Paul with its spire, and a brick-and-stone building on the left. I needed time to gather my wits, to think of a plan. Some way to stop this. “Can we go into the church?” I asked.

“It’s closed,” she said. “What, have you become religious in your old age?”

“I’ve always wondered what it’s like inside.” Pretending I was merely sightseeing.

“You slay me, you really do. Do you even know where you are?”

I knew very well, as every Petersburg child did. Each alcove at the six corners of the wall had its own name. Behind us, the Menshikov and Peter the First Bastions. To the left, the Naryshkin Bastion, where the noon cannon used to sound across the Neva each day, the very cannon that had landed blows the night of the Bolshevik uprising, tearing chunks from the Winter Palace. And somewhere beyond the cathedral, the Troubetskoy Bastion, prison of the tsars, where the regime kept its most famous inmates. Here, Peter the Great had held his son, Tsarevich Alexei, invited him home like a prodigal son and had him beaten to death. Trotsky had done his time in the Troubetskoy Bastion, and the anarchist Kropotkin. Dostoyevsky spent eight months there before his mock execution changed the course of Russian literature.

“Do you want to see where we shot the four grand dukes?” she asked with a smirk.

Something else I’d missed. “No,” I said.

I didn’t dare breathe. The yellow-red stone was a nothing color in the gloom as we crossed the large yard. Varvara, long-strided in black leather, seemed as tall as the spire of the cathedral. We passed the Neva Gate, where the prisoners were brought by river, its classical pillars and lintel so at odds with its grim purpose. Our steps echoed on the cobbles, splashed in standing water. To our right, a detachment of soldiers marched. I could not pretend I was that brave girl she’d once known. “Varvara, tell me you’re not going to leave me here.”

She gave an arrogant snort. “Oh, you poor dear. Yes, you’ll sleep in your own bed tonight, with the storeroom on one side and the old Jews on the other.”

She knew everything. “Swear to me?”

Tch, she exhaled in disgust. “Have I ever lied to you? Ever?” She walked on faster. “That’s your specialty.”

It was true. Varvara didn’t lie. With her, it was what she neglected to tell you that you had to worry about. What she conveniently omitted, and then later dropped on your head like a slab of masonry.

We got to the end of the lane, and entered the last bastion.

Troubetskoy.

Again, she showed her papers. A Chekist in riding breeches and leather jacket, graying hair, a small tight mouth, clicked down the low-ceilinged hall, painted yellow to shoulder height and a dingy white above. Varvara took him aside. They were both looking at me, but speaking too quietly for me to hear.

I breathed as we breathed at Ionia. I stepped out of my body, stood alongside myself. I am not my body. My spirit is eternal. I have lived many times before, and will live many times again. Not that I believed it, but I took comfort in the idea, the ritual. I counted the lightbulbs in the ceiling. Seven. I heard voices, but the walls must be ten feet thick. It was cold and damp and smelled of the river. I would live through this day. I would live through it, and sleep in my own bed. Gorky had lived through this, Trotsky, Dostoyevsky—but I was shaking. The Cheka tortured people, knocked out their teeth, cut off their fingers and toes—they could get you to confess to anything. I kept seeing that drain in the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2, filled with blood.

Varvara and the elegant Chekist in his jodhpurs escorted me into an icy room furnished with a table and four chairs, two on each side, where Varvara searched me thoroughly, though not roughly, as my teeth knocked together in terror. Her mouth was set and she didn’t look into my eyes, which I kept on the portraits of Lenin, Zinoviev, and Dzerzhinsky on the yellowed walls. I thought of how many Lenins I’d seen since the revolution. Every office and canteen and bakery had one. Some were smiling and warm and grandfatherly, like in the Women’s Club of Tikhvin, others noble and intelligent, like the portrait in the main hall of the telephone exchange. But this one was severe and unflinching, the spaceman himself, flanked by the soulless vanity of our Petrograd boss and the thin, cruel, fanatical face of the Chekist, like a medieval inquisitor.

It gave me small comfort to note that my friend left me my labor book, but she did confiscate the three penknives I’d been carrying, which she pocketed without comment. “Comrade Mstinsky will take you from here. I’ll see you when you’re done.”

“Let’s go, sister,” Mstinsky said, shoving me in front of him.

We turned at the bottom of a set of narrow stairs. A good omen. Even in the Troubetskoy Bastion, up had to be better than down. The bristlecone of keys chained to his belt jangled with each step. His boots were fine, well polished. Did he get them with the jodhpurs, or had he commandeered them from a well-shod prisoner? Was he taking bribes? I tried to think of the boots, rather than where we were going. I could feel the weight of a hundred feet of heavy stone above us, pressing down on me, the narrowness of the staircase. The light was harsh, electric, bulbs in simple cages. There was not room for two people to walk abreast. It was stuffy and held that smell I recognized from Gorokhovaya 2. Fear. It smelled acrid and dirty and electrical.

A small landing, another door, metal this time, with great metal bands and studded hasps. Mstinsky knocked and the grate opened. A man with deeply set eyes and a prominent brow bone appeared.

“Number thirty-two,” said my Virgil.

The guard opened the door and Mstinsky walked me through. It swung shut behind us with a bang, and I found myself in a low-ceilinged hall, a wide brick arch dotted with bare light fixtures. Doors punctuated the hall on either side. The whole thing was terrifyingly medieval. So many doors, it could easily be a monastery, but for the fact that each door had a slit in it at waist level, and a peephole with a disk over it. The guard stopped before one door cut into the stone, swung the little cover open and peered in, nodded to my guide, and unlocked it. The door opened and Mstinsky shoved me inside. I heard the bolt run home.

There was a man in the cell, in torn trousers and a dirty singlet, a bloody bandage on his head covering one eye. He rose to his feet.

My father. Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov.

He looked nothing like he had the last time I’d seen him in that cabin in the snow, when he told his friends I was a Bolshevik spy. Now he was a starved, beaten prisoner—long, ragged beard, his feet bare on the cold stone. They were absolutely blue, with heavy uncut nails. He had no coat, no jacket, in this ice chest of a cell. His blanket lay crumpled on the bed, I imagine he’d been wearing it as a shawl but had dropped it when he stood. I noted—he had all ten toes.

“Marina.” His voice, a harsh whisper from between his cracked lips.

I took off my sheepskin and put it around his shoulders. I knew the warmth from my body would feel good to him. I didn’t know what else to do—hug him? Too much had transpired between us. It was unbearable. I sat on his bed. He came to me, limping, stiff, and favoring his right leg, gingerly lowering himself down. The bucket in the corner stank. I told myself I didn’t smell it, didn’t smell him. He smelled like the grave. I took his thin hand. It didn’t feel like his. It was an old man’s hand, nothing but bone. How many times I had held that hand, walking across the street with him, my whole hand wrapped around a single finger? Papa… I didn’t know where to begin. There was nowhere to get a foothold. He had been willing to suffer my death for his cause—and I had betrayed him to the Bolsheviks when still a schoolgirl. I had named his mistress to the Cheka. Seryozha was dead, and he had caused it. Maryino was gone. My mother, his wife—abandoned, now unrecognizable. His country was lost. His cause was over. He was a prisoner. Which of us had suffered more? We had both lost children. But I was free, and my country was in the future. I was young, an artist. I had work and friends. He had only a past.

And me.

He patted my hand, covered it with his own. He had terrible sores and bruises. “Marina.” His voice was a grated whisper, like a rusty hinge.

I let my tears fall. I was surprised to find that I didn’t hate him anymore. We’d both been caught in this terrible trap.

“Papa…”

He searched my face with brown eyes that were the same as mine, but haunted, uncertain, yellow with jaundice. “Are you really here?” He touched my cheek, so gently with his horny split fingernails. “Is this real?”

I nodded, making no attempt to conceal tears. I let them water his hand. His dear sweet hands.

“I dream of you. About that night—” he began, but I didn’t let him go on.

“It’s a long time ago. Don’t think about it.”

“No. It isn’t.” He shook his head, as if shaking the vagueness from it. He lifted my hand to his lips. He was weeping like an old woman. “I was a fool. Mad, vain… The things I’ve done… Forgive me.”

“Let’s not talk. Let’s just sit together.” I wished I could have brought him some cherry tobacco, a pipe. Maybe Gorky could help me. Maybe they would let me bring him food, some clothes…

He put my coat around the two of us, around both our shoulders, and we sat that way for the longest time. He kissed my hair. “Still red. Where did you get that red?” It’s what he always used to say. Where’d you get that red, Little Red Riding Hood?

I wanted to tell him about Iskra, but I couldn’t. One more tragedy—how would that help him now? “Guess what—I’m a poet now. I had a reading at the House of Arts. Blok was there. He said it made him like poetry again.” I heard my babbling. It sounded ridiculous. “What happened to your eye, Papa?”

He rested his head on my hair. “I’ve got another.” A joke. He could still joke.

“How did they catch you?”

“It was last summer. At Krasnaya Gorka.” The mouth of the Gulf of Finland. The British sank a Soviet battleship there before they were routed. “The sailors mutinied, Marina,” he whispered. “Your sailors. They came over to us. They’re sick of the Bolsheviks. The Reds are going to have their hands full soon.” He broke off in a fit of coughing, the coat sliding from his shoulders. I wrapped it around him again. “What I didn’t understand…”—he resumed his former voice—“was why they didn’t shoot me when they shot everybody else.” His brown eyes with their yellowed whites, reddened from lack of sleep. “Then your horrible friend came to call.”

I still remember the two of them, facing off in the parlor at Furshtatskaya Street when she told him I’d been spying for the Bolsheviks. And he sent me into the night, the gunfire and the storm. But he wasn’t the same, and neither was I.

I tried not to stare at the sores on his hands as he held the coat around him. “She said the only reason I was still alive was because of her friendship with you. Said she was keeping me alive in your honor.”

Could that be true? “I thought you’d gone east, after Kolchak fell.”

“I did. It was hideous there. Worse than anything the Bolsheviks could have done.” He drooped, gazing down at the floor, down at his toes, the long, yellow, broken nails. Next time I came, if I could, I’d bring scissors and cut them. He couldn’t have worn a pair of boots if he’d had them. “Do you ever see your mother?”

I had to stop looking at his feet. “She was out at Maryino.” How could he stand to be in this cell? You could reach out and touch both walls at the same time. Their surfaces oozed water. How was it he hadn’t gone mad? “She found a spiritual leader, a man named Ukashin. They turned Maryino into a commune. She thinks she’s Sophia, Mother of the World. But they’re gone. My guess is they headed for Persia.”

“When was that?”

“A year ago March.”

He rubbed his forehead, and I realized he was having trouble taking in so much information after sitting alone in this cell since Krasnaya Gorka. There was no way to note the passing of time—though I assumed they must turn off the lights at night. Or he could have noted the changing of shifts. He was not a stupid man. I wanted to say something that would be worthy of the occasion. Any second that door could open and end this precious visit. But all I could do was say, “Papa… I’m so sorry. About everything.”

He sighed and kissed my temple, his arm around me. “Are you still with… that boy? That big clodhopper?”

“He’s a famous poet now. We married in 1918. We’re separated, but I use his name for my papers. Kuriakina.” He nodded. It never would have occurred to him that marrying that big clodhopper might have been the only thing that saved his bourgeois daughter. “But I’m writing under my own name.”

“That’s how she found you.”

I nodded. “I got tired of being someone else.”

“What does she want from us?” he asked. “Your so-called friend.”

Of course, this wouldn’t come free of charge. She would extract her pound. The thick stone walls, the high window, the tiny cot. “She wants to know what’s going on inside Gorky’s flat. He’s befriended me. She wants to know who comes there, what they say. Foreigners visit him. I just met Emma Goldman.”

“Don’t do it,” he said. “She’ll hold it over your head forever. You know she will.”

“But maybe I can come see you. Help you.” I took his hand, but too hard—the pressure made him wince. I brought my head closer to his. I could smell him, unwashed, he who was always so fastidious. “I could bring you food. Maybe even medicine. Get you out of here—who knows?”

He looked at me so sadly, ran his palm over his stubbly hair. So much gray, and in his beard. “They’re not going to let me out, Marina. She’s only keeping me alive so she has something to hold over you. It’s all very clear to me now.” His wrists were so thin, I could see all the veins and sinews, bruises.

I didn’t want to argue about Varvara. I would deal with her in my own way. “Did you see Kolya? In his cloak-and-dagger for the English?”

“With the English,” he corrected me, and his hand came away from mine. “For Russia, Marina. Always for Russia. Kolya helped set up that meeting at Pulkovo.” That debacle in the woods. Conspiring to bankroll the Czech Legions against Red Russia.

We both heard something in the hall rattling and fell silent, waiting to see if it was the guard coming to fetch me, but the sound moved on.

“He’s established a reputation for a certain sort of business venture. Comings and goings, so to speak.”

Smuggling. “In the West? Finland? Estonia?”

He nodded.

That meant he came to Petrograd, or at least close enough. I had not been expecting to hear good news! So the fox was still trotting across the ice, doubling back on his tracks. The clever fox was yet at large. “Moving… livestock?” People.

“All sorts of… commodities. But it’s been a while—I haven’t spoken to anyone but your friend and Marley’s Ghost out there for a very long time.” He smiled and attempted a laugh. The saddest laugh I’d heard.

“Did she ask about him?”

Now he examined my face closely. He was never that observant before. He was someone for whom information generally went one way—from him to you. But experience had made him aware of other people. “Is that how it is? You and—?”

“We had a child. He doesn’t know.”

“Had?”

I nodded.

“God, this life.” Fingering the back of my hand, tracing the veins, then lacing his fingers into mine. “Yes, she asked about him. I said I’d seen him in Estonia, didn’t know his associates.” The trace of a smile, his old intelligence, keenness. Then his face grew bright. “Oh! And I heard from Volodya! He got a letter through before they closed the Estonian border. He’s in the Kuban with Denikin.”

That was a year ago. “It’s Wrangel now. Denikin’s out of the picture. They’ve evacuated to Odessa.”

The air left him in a rush. I shouldn’t have told him. “It’s almost over, then.”

“We’ve just been attacked by Poland. They’re marching on Kiev.”

“The Poles? What’s next, Brazilians? Hottentots?” He pressed the bandage to his eye, as if it was hurting him. “So tell me something else. You became a poet. Recite me a poem.” I recited “The Argonaut,” and “The Trees at Kambarka,” and “Alice in the Year One,” very quietly. He knew that concrete floor. After a while, we just sat together, holding hands, until Marley’s Ghost came to collect me.

He handed me my sheepskin, but I wouldn’t take it. “It’s spring. Anyway, I’m an important poet now, I can’t run around looking like the village shepherd.”

He kissed me three times, ceremonially, and held me as long as he could before the guard took me out, delivering me to Mstinsky in the hall, who returned me to Varvara.

We walked out in silence into a beautiful night, Venus rising over St. Peter’s Gate.

“Well?”

I thought about what I could ask in exchange for what she wanted me to do. “I have three conditions,” I said. “First, I want to see him every week.”

She nodded impatiently.

“Second, I want him to have food. Shoes, linen, soap. Paper, books.”

“It can be done,” she said.

“Third, he needs medical treatment. His feet. His eye. If I see him well taken care of, I’ll tell you about the goings on at the Gorky tea table.” I knew my father would be angry with me, but I had to try to help him. I could figure out what to do about Gorky later. Surely I could find some bits and pieces that wouldn’t be too incriminating. I was a tightrope walker, wasn’t I?

We walked in the dark back to St. Peter’s Gate, avoiding the puddles now shining with moonlight. Yet even in the quiet, I could still hear the sound of keys and slamming doors in the Troubetskoy Bastion. I shuddered. The evening had turned cold, and certainly Varvara would have noticed that I’d left without my coat. “Thank you,” I said. “For saving him.”

“I thought you’d appreciate it,” she said. “It’ll be like old times.”

No, it wouldn’t be. But I would let her think so.

37 The Spy

A couple of lovers, tattered, half-starved, passed us on the street, arm in arm, their heads pressed together. Soon it would be May, and June, the White Nights. But no romance for me. Only betrayal. It was at that moment I understood how completely the trap had snapped shut on me. Varvara walked me as far as Shpalernaya Street, offering to let me wear her Chekist’s leather coat. I was horrified at the idea of wearing such a thing, preferring to huddle against the wind as she enumerated the information she wanted about the Gorky milieu. His contacts with people from opposition parties. Anyone from the trade unions, anyone espousing anti-Bolshevik statements. Emma Goldman particularly.

“And keep an eye on Moura Budberg,” she said. “That one’s a British spy, I’ll give you twenty to one.” She wanted to know about visiting foreigners, foreign writers. “Even if you’ve heard of them. The Brits love to use their writers as spies. They’ve done it for a hundred years. I want to know who they meet, where they go. Make yourself useful. Foreigners need guides and translators. Especially a pretty girl, and a poet—”

“I already have a job.” Who had the time to play Mata Hari? It was hard enough to sneak out for Anton’s Wednesday poetry studio.

“Not anymore. You’re working for us now.”

O Holy Theotokos, help me, a poor sinner. “How will I get my rations?” Grasping at straws.

“They’ll keep you on the books at the telephone exchange. Or maybe old Gorky can cough up a job. We’ll think of something.”

And I had thought myself safe after Arkady’s death. I hadn’t realized who my true enemy was going to be. Varvara was building a case against Gorky—why? Because he was there, the only independent voice in Russia. The Bolsheviks couldn’t tolerate a man who was still respected, Lenin’s close friend, the one man in the country who was allowed to go his own way.

Having sold my soul, suddenly I found myself free. I woke in the mornings, and the day was mine. My rations prepaid, I was a ghost at the telephone exchange. Anyone not knowing the price would have envied me. But Father was in the Troubeskoy Bastion, and what I’d agreed to do was a filthy rag stuffed in my mouth. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t sleep. I paced, I stared out the window. A dim light glowed in the one window across the courtyard… Another soul lies restless there. / I will not put out my light. I could only imagine the horror my sixteen-year-old self would feel at the predicament I’d been put in.

The very idea that Varvara wanted me to be a rat in the walls at Gorky’s, listening at doors, riffling through his papers and Moura’s dressing table. I turned the problem around in my head like a nanny turning the facets of a thermometer, trying to get another reading, but I could see no other outcome. If I wanted to help my father, there was no way out, only ahead, into the next turn of the labyrinth.

I had the time to write, but all I heard was the roaring silence. Blok had stopped writing poetry after “The Scythians,” because there were no more sounds. This was what he meant. You couldn’t say anything real or true when there was an immense lie sucking up all the air. Instead, I turned to the streets of my beautiful, crumbling city, walking, hour after hour. Here was the garbage, the dead horses, the broken pavers, the sins of winter exposed in all their horror—as I might be exposed for the hideous thing I would soon become.

Everything around me—the familiar buildings with their pilasters and caryatids, the ice sheeting off the canals—seemed heavy, hiding malevolence, danger, and betrayal. The sky itself untrustworthy. No forgiveness, no hiding place. The flowing water just a good place to dump a body. Everyone I passed seemed to be watching me. I could feel the wolfpack moving silently through the trees. Only the vaulted sky was untouched by it. It would see our deaths with the same vast unconcern as it would see a scythe cutting through a bird’s nest hidden in the wheat. Each building stared defensively out at all the others. There could be a murder in every flat.

She’d planned this for a year. Narrowed the paths, hung the snares—while I was still in Udmurtia. Worse than mad Arkady and his drugged children, for this was cold calculation. Her love had turned to hatred, her joy was only the chess player’s joy, seeing her opponent beaten long before the fatal move. It was my fault, for thinking I could live out in the open like other people, and possess my own face. For thinking I had nothing to lose.

Thank you for saving him, I’d said to her. I cringed to remember it. And now I was to be a tool of the Cheka, to bring down Maxim Gorky, that heroic, generous soul. I clung to the idea that I could feed her garbage, but even as I grasped at that straw, I knew she would not be satisfied. She was clever and ambitious. And if I didn’t cooperate…

I lay on my narrow cot on the kitchen hall on Shpalernaya Street, watching the lit window across the yard, imagining him in his cell—Papa, I’m sorry. But what would you have me do? This old room might be small, but I could still open the window. I could go out into the street. But if I didn’t give her what she wanted, she would kill him, and I would be the one in the cell. Even thinking of it made me feel as if I were suffocating. Or she’d send me to a camp in the north, where I would starve to death or freeze. And I’d given my father my sheepskin…

At eight o’clock that Tuesday night, I presented myself at the Gorky flat, my woolen scarf wrapped about me like a shawl, Klavdia’s tattered jacket in place of my sheepskin, my fur hat back on my head. How happy Aura was to see me, hugging me, engulfing me in her strength and warmth. I drank in the golden spicy smell of her.

“What happened to your warm coat?” she asked.

“Stolen,” I said. Lies already streaming behind me.

“Poor kid,” she said, her big hand on my arm. “You can’t be without a coat. Wait, I’ll find you something.”

As she led me down the corridor, I was busy memorizing things, things I hadn’t paid attention to before. The number of doors on the corridor. The first door was open—the old front parlor, a room facing the street, where a commanding woman stood with a group of people around a table, going over notes and sketches. “Andreeva?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

Maria Andreeva’s office—the old parlor. “She still lives here? With Moura?”

Aura laughed, her laughter rich and full of music. What glorious teeth she had. Big and square and even. No one had such teeth in all of Petrograd, not even before the war. “They don’t step on each other’s toes as much as you’d think.” She led me toward the dining room, eight doors, four and four. “Andreeva’s the queen, she’s got her own life, her own assistant.” She arched an expressive eyebrow. “Moura organizes the cook, types Gorky’s letters, does the fussing. Andreeva’s not doing any of that. She’s got the May Day extravaganza to worry about, not what kind of soup we’re having for supper.”

At the L of the large flat, the dining room—the arena where the lions would be loosed and the Christians torn to pieces—was already full of people. I could feel my face hot with shame as they greeted me warmly. A girl called Molecule, a friend of the ménage. The artists Didi and Valentina. Moura’s greeting was cool, as if she already suspected me, but Gorky was pleased to see me. He seemed tired, overburdened, as if every care in the world lay on those stooped shoulders—it tore my heart to shreds.

“Somebody stole her coat,” Aura told him.

“Call me Akaky Akakievich,” I joked. Gogol’s pathetic hero in “The Overcoat.”

“We’ll find you one,” he said. “Moura?”

“Of course we will,” she purred, patting him on the shoulder.

There were some new faces at the table, the two publishing colleagues of Gorky’s from Universal Literature and a middle-aged man in rugged good health with a sharp narrow face and bushy eyebrows. He wore a broad beard like a man of the last century—the English playwright Clyde Emory. Spy? Even I knew who he was. I’d been taken to one of his plays in Drury Lane when we were living at Oxford. He was also a famous socialist, scandalous in England for supporting Irish nationhood and female suffrage. He sat next to Harris, the British union man. Anyone from the trade unions… They seemed to know each other. I wished I could tell my father that I was sitting here at a table with Clyde Emory! While spying for the Cheka. To meet great men only to betray them… My blood turned to vinegar as Gorky introduced me as “our most promising young poet.” I might have been, before Varvara stuffed clay down my throat.

“Tell her she should come to England,” Emory said to Moura, while gazing at me with frank interest—not strictly literary. “We’ve got a crop of the most marvelous new poets.”

“Marina Dmitrievna speaks perfect English, Mr. Emory.” Moura gestured to me with her chin. Talk to him.

Those piercing blue eyes, the pale face with the red cheeks. A still-handsome man. “And do you read our English poets, Miss Markova?” he asked me.

“Ma-KAR-ova,” I corrected him. “Like a car. Yes, though we have been out of touch since the war.” Hearing my poor pronunciation. Vor. My father hated that. Ouar. “But what is happening in poetry now, Mr. Emory? Before, we read Yeats, and your imagists—Pound, Aldington. Rather like our Acmeists, Akhmatova and Mandelstam.”

“Pound and Aldington? Not Masefield and Gibson?”

Masefield and Gibson? Awful, sentimental poets who took working-class life as their subject matter. I tried to think of some diplomatic reply. “I think sentimentality about the working class is as bad as any other sentimentality.” Down the table, Moura was translating our conversation for Gorky. He smiled and sucked on the black holder of his cigarette. “For the English workingman, I prefer Hardy, or Lawrence.” I didn’t want to insult him, but God!

“You’re not one of those art for art’s sake types, are you? Now? Here in Soviet Russia?” Emory lowered those expressive eyebrows with their quizzical points. “It seems you have an aesthete at your table,” he said to Gorky.

Gorky stroked his great moustache, waiting to see how I would respond.

This was not the way the evening was supposed to play out. I thought I would be able to sit quietly and let the others reveal their opinions and secrets. Not be under the spotlight and cross-examined by this nettlesome Englishman. “I don’t think there’s ever purely art for art’s sake,” I said, and waited for Moura to translate for the Russian speakers. “I don’t think it exists. We always create in the real world. We speak of this world. Our art comes from somewhere. On the other hand, whatever audience you imagine, and whatever your intent, you still have to create art. You can’t falsify that.”

But then what did that say about me? This liar, this thief of lives, this spy who had been somehow tracked in on Aura’s shoe. What was I doing right now? Falsifying. In the worst way. Pretending I was a friend to these people. Pretending I cared about truth. Polluting everything.

Emory made a cage of his fingers, small and thin and sensitive, tapping their tips together. “Since the war, a whole new literature’s emerged. This Irishman, James Joyce, has changed everything. And Eliot—he’s one of Pound’s boys, remarkable, really remarkable. It’s a whole new world out there.”

So many writers I’d never heard of. Time had moved on in the world outside our borders—without us. “Unfortunately, we’ve been cut off—by the British blockade.”

Gorky was amused. Emory’s blue eyes glittered. Oh, he was a provocateur, and seemed to relish the provocative in others.

“That’s changing as we speak,” said the English writer. “That’s what I’m doing here. Investigating the current conditions. I’m planning a series of articles. People are very interested in Soviet Russia, Miss Ma-KAR-ova. Very interested indeed.” He was full of confidence. He reminded me of my father somehow. If this had been one of my parents’ soirees, he would be the man whose opinions mattered. Everyone stopped talking to listen when he spoke. “In the meantime, I’ve brought some books with me. I hope you might accept them as a bit of literary diplomacy.”

The cook brought in the soup and the maid the piroshky, clearly the only dishes she knew how to make. The cook spooned up the borscht—it smelled ravishing—while we handed round the bowls, passed the platter of pies. It was a grand soup. I didn’t begrudge the old girl’s lack of culinary variety.

I learned a number of things that night. The garrulous Englander spoke to the assembled company as if addressing a hall, working his eyebrows like oars. His mother had been a singer. His father was Irish, Aura explained, which was like being a Negro in America. During the war, Emory had been jailed for his pacifist views. How rightly proud he was of himself, I thought, to have been so strong, so determined, to have stood up against even his nation’s patriotic fervor. He would never have informed for the Cheka. Nor would Gorky, or the British trade union man, or even Aura Cady Sands. Moura was the only one at the table capable of understanding my predicament, if Varvara’s suspicions about her were even partially true. Yes, there was something about her—that wariness of someone who had been forced into things not to her liking, a cat on ice.

Gorky looked exhausted. What on earth had they been talking about in his office off the dining room? Was it his publishing partners who made him look like that, or Mr. Emory, or something else entirely? He smoked and coughed and even suggested he might leave Russia, go to Switzerland or Italy for a rest. “Vladimir Ilyich is urging me. But I think he just wants to be rid of me.” Oh, you don’t know, Alexei Maximovich. Someone certainly wants it. I translated for Emory and the British labor man.

“Well, perhaps it’s something to consider,” said Moura. “They all think that he has inexhaustible powers—Alexei Maximovich, I need ration cards. A pair of boots, a winter coat.” Was that a subtle jab? “A job. My mother’s in jail, my husband, my son. Talk to Vladimir Ilyich, he’ll listen to you.” How much did she know?

“They don’t realize, sometimes it’s worse for them if I intervene,” Gorky said. “I’m no sorcerer. I’m not even much of a politician.” He held out his glass to his publishing partner, Grzhebin, a sturdy fellow with broad shoulders and round spectacles—he looked like a stevedore who’d been to university. Grzhebin refilled Gorky’s glass with wine that had somehow appeared at the table—maybe Clyde Emory had supplied it.

“Zinoviev wants to sink us. That’s the plain fact,” said Grzhebin. “He personally closed our paper.” Novaya Zhizn, Gorky’s newspaper, shuttered during the Terror after the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin. “We were no opposition, unless you call simply having the gall to speak up opposition.”

As I began to translate, Moura sent me out a telegraphed message with a glance and slight shake of her head. Don’t. I caught the words in my mouth. But the pale, lively girl called Molecule, studying medicine at the university, a distant family relation from Nizhny, tried to explain. Luckily, her English was abominable. “Zinoviev, he don’t like how friendship close with Alexei Maximovich to Vladimir Ilyich? Like little boy, Papa like brother better.”

“Abel and Cain,” said Emory.

“Yes, he want only one close to Ilyich. Poison to his mind.” She gave up and continued in Russian, and I let it go. It was clear Moura didn’t want this discussed at the table, but Gorky kept nodding, Yes, it’s the truth, sad to say. Looking at the burning tip of his cigarette. “He’s trying to poison Vladimir Ilyich’s mind against us,” Molecule went on. “He even dared order a Cheka search. In Gorky’s own apartment! They were here for hours, went through his papers, my medical books. Moura’s room was a disaster. Purposely humiliating him. Of course, they found nothing. They knew they wouldn’t. Zinoviev’s just trying to harass him.”

“Oh, we don’t know that it’s… the person of whom you speak,” Moura said. The name that should not be spoken.

But Gorky had clearly had enough of the person of whom you speak. Whatever had happened in the office before supper had lifted his normal reticence about revealing his personal opinions on such matters. “It’s a campaign, I have to say. Against the intelligentsia as a whole and me in particular. For example”—he leaned forward on the table, his hand wrapped around his wine glass, his cigarette curling smoke into the borscht-fragrant air, eyes fixed on Emory—“last winter I campaigned to get warm clothing for the scholars. You can’t believe how cold it was, and no firewood. It’s forbidden to cut it oneself. Here we’re surrounded by forest and we’re freezing!” He nodded for Moura to translate. “Well, after much negotiation—you can imagine, you’ve been here long enough—I win a firewood distribution for the scholars, and warm clothing.” He waited for Moura to catch up. “Then, just as we had everything cleared and on its way—at the last moment, our friend had it all commandeered. Diverted, redistributed. Just to spite me. He’d rather fling it on the railroad tracks than let it go to anyone on whose behalf I’ve appealed.”

Now I understood the gray face, the exhaustion. He was being foiled at every attempt to respond to the needs of desperate people who had no one to turn to. He was one man fighting for the intellectual sector Zinoviev had long ago proclaimed should be annihilated. I heard it so often at the House of Arts: We’ll ask Gorky. Gorky can get it. Gorky can do it.

“People come to me day and night, asking for my help. It breaks my heart. They think I’m a sorcerer, that I can make one phone call and prison gates swing wide. Galoshes fall from the sky. I do my best, but frankly, I think it goes the worse for them when my name appears on their papers. That son of a whore goes out of his way to foul it up.”

Moura stood up, ostensibly to speak to the maid, but obviously to avoid having to convey such damning thoughts to the foreigners.

Gorky turned to me. His color was up. “I’ve known Emory a long time. No need to mince words.” I translated succinctly, taking a bit of the bitterness from his speech as he continued. “I think our friends in the Extraordinary Commission go out of their way to bury people I’ve tried to help. And now Vladimir Ilyich keeps suggesting I go abroad—for my health.” He said it with a heavy layer of irony.

It wasn’t a bad idea, though. He was coughing wetly, and he smoked like a stove with a bad flue. Clearly he wasn’t well. He shouldn’t be drinking. “It would certainly simplify his life,” he said. He tossed down the contents of his glass and held it out again to Grzhebin. “I’m his conscience. He knows me, knows I’ve been there from the start. It gives me the right to speak. With me gone, all he’ll have is that little dictator of the Northern Commune. A sorry day when he picked that weakling to head the region. Well, I’m not about to give him a clear field, sitting in a deck chair in Zurich while he plays out his ambitions over the bodies of the Russian intelligentsia.” He drew on his cigarette, flicked ash toward the ashtray, though it fell short, dusting the tabletop.

I translated, wishing that he would keep his thoughts to himself. For his own sake.

He leaned forward again, pressing his fist to his temple. “If you had been here last November, you’d understand. When the Whites attacked Petrograd, a city of a million souls under his command, our friend lay curled on his couch at Smolny like a Victorian missy. Everyone knows it. He’d already surrendered. People were in a panic. If Trotsky hadn’t arrived, we’d have been hanged from the tram wires on the Troitsky Bridge. Our friend is brave when the road is open and the footing’s fair, but God forbid there’s a whiff of danger, the man’s utterly paralyzed.”

There it was. What I could give Varvara. Gorky’s verbal attack on the most powerful man in Petrograd. If what Molecule said was true, Zinoviev was using the Cheka to torment Gorky and perhaps worse. To convey what Gorky said in private could be essential ammunition for the Zinoviev camp, building their case against him. I was starting to see the larger game being played—not just the one Varvara set for me but the one being played against Gorky, the greater game.

I stayed late, later than I’d planned, drank some vodka someone had hidden away, and heard much too much about things I should never know anything about. Gorky and Moura finally retired, but the younger people, and Clyde Emory, stayed up. Records were produced, a gramophone, and we danced, a regular party! I danced with Emory—the tango. He was a surprisingly good dancer, and I could forget that Varvara was probably waiting for me on Kronverksky, ready to leap on me the moment I walked outside. As long as I stayed, everyone would be safe. So I stayed, later and later, playing charades. Aura sang a number of Russian songs she’d learned, including “Oh, Moroz, Moroz!”—a famous drinking song. She got it perfectly, just the right loping pace. Emory—Call me Clyde—sat with his arm casually across the back of my chair. “I could use a translator,” he said. “I’m hopeless. And I need to see the real Red Russia, not just the model factories and Potemkin villages. Will you do that for me?”

Foreigners need guides and translators… the walls closing in. “I suppose it’s possible.”

Eventually, the party broke up. It couldn’t last forever. Emory kept trying to kiss me, lure me into his room with promises of the poet Eliot. Was I also to whore myself to the English, was that next? Aura noticed my hesitation, the reluctance with which I wrapped my shawl around Klavdia’s shredded jacket. “You’re not leaving! Lord, it’s two in the morning. Absolutely not. There’s a divan in my room. One mugging’s enough, don’t you think?”

She didn’t have to convince me.

38 Gorky

I woke up very early, Aura still sound asleep in the dark across the squarish room that smelled of her clothes, her perfume, the menthol she sprayed on her throat. A crack of dim light showed between heavy drapes. I was beyond exhausted, but my dreams would not let me rest. No way to know the time. Could Varvara still be standing down there, waiting to descend upon me like an owl on a mouse? If she was, I hoped she was cold and miserable. She would have to wait a little longer to crunch my bones and vomit my remains, a clump of fur and teeth.

I’d been dreaming of an abandoned factory, the floor full of water that lay in stinking puddles between the rotting boards. I was waiting for a guide to get me out of there, out of the city, with other people who were gathering there too, but we were afraid to speak to one another, all hiding in the shadows. Then someone tried the doors and found we were locked inside. It was a trap. There were no guides. We had been lured there to die.

I lay on the divan, and couldn’t help thinking that if I died now, I wouldn’t have to go through with this. It would be a relief. Who would care about someone like me? Why didn’t I just jump out that window? She couldn’t hold that against Father. Perhaps she would be ashamed of what she’d driven me to and leave him alone. I went to the window, heavy velvet drapes cutting the light for our opera singer. No early riser, she wore a silk mask over her eyes. I peered through the slit. Out on Kronverksky, the sun was just straggling up, the Troitsky Bridge looked newly polished with its tram stantions, from which we would have hung… The river shone like a new bride.

I heard a toilet flush. Clearly someone else was up. I dressed and stole down the corridor toward the dining room. The samovar was hot, and the door to Gorky’s office lay open. I could see him at his desk—just him, no Moura. I knocked quietly and he looked up. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Can I talk to you, Alexei Maximovich?”

Although he carried the fate of every intellectual in Petrograd on his shoulders, he smiled and waved me in. “Close the door.”

I did, took a great breath, and sat down in one of the chairs facing his desk, my hands shaking so violently I had to sit on them. He was writing something, a letter, maybe a new short story. What was I going to do? I did not know how to proceed past this moment. “I want to tell you about myself,” I began. “May I?”

His face brightened, and he leaned back in his chair, a man who clearly loved to hear someone’s story. “Yes, please do. You’re a bit of a mystery around here, you know. No one can figure you out.”

I told him everything. Who we were. Who my father had been. What had happened to us. Varvara, Kolya, Genya, my mother, my brothers. Arkady, Pulkovo, and Gorokhovaya 2. My wanderings in the countryside, the death of Iskra. And the meeting on the bridge. What I’d found in the cell at the Peter and Paul Fortress. My deal with the devil. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t ask questions, didn’t say a word. But his pleasure at hearing my story faded as I spoke, when he began to see the shape of things, the great storm gathering.

I didn’t know how it would feel to finally unburden myself as I’d never been able to do. I held nothing back, didn’t try to paint myself a victim or a hero. I was exposed, without a skin, like Arkady’s book of saints. “I’m in the trap and don’t know how to gnaw my leg free. I’ve seen foxes do it. Tell me how. You know I’d rather die than inform on you.”

He sighed, shook his head. “It’s a terrible time.”

“I just don’t know what to do.” I lifted my ugly, teary, snotty face. “I know her. She’s not going to let me feed her a bunch of straw. But I can’t be a tool. Hurt other people, send them into the trap. I’m going mad.”

He rose and went out. Was he going to wake Moura? I waited, without hope, grateful that there was finally someone to whom I could confess. I felt shaky, emptied, like finally vomiting after being nauseated all night, and ashamed of seeing it in a puddle on a figured rug right in the middle of Gorky’s study, in the middle of his heroic life.

He shuffled back to his office, tea glasses in hand, and shut the door with his heel. He wore a pair of old felt slippers. They made such a homey sound, the soft scuffle. He sat at his desk, rubbed his face in one downward gesture, lit another cigarette, sipped his tea, nodded toward the other glass. “What have you told her already? Only about Emma Goldman?”

I picked up the tea, held it between my hands. “She said I needed to make friends with Goldman. She’s interested in knowing more about the movements and plans of the anarchists. Also she wants me to get close to the foreigners—tell her where they go, who they see. She’s sure they’re all spies.”

He coughed deep and wet into a large handkerchief.

“It’s Zinoviev, isn’t it?” I said. “Behind all this.”

He leaned back in his chair, which groaned with his weight, the hand holding the cigarette shading his eyes. “I would never have said all that. But someone I know, a commissar and an old friend, was recently arrested. A completely trumped-up charge. I was trying to get him out, but they’d already shot him. Before they heard from Moscow. He was to be released, but they shot him first.” He sighed, a long shuddering breath.

I sat as meekly as a prisoner with her head in the cradle of the guillotine.

He got up and turned to the window, opened the drapes onto a shining new day. “I have terrible insomnia,” he said. “I can’t sleep past dawn.” He gazed down at the park, the greening trees. “It used to be I could hear animals at the zoo from here. But they’re all gone. The deer, the camels, the elephants. Do you like animals, Marina Dmitrievna?”

Who didn’t like animals? But there were none left, not even rats. Only the birds that children tried to trap and sell.

Still gazing down at the park, hearing the cries of animals long dead. “I’ve been a Bolshevik since 1903. I turned over my earnings from my writings to fund their operations. But they’re like a child who grows up so differently than you’d imagined. So headstrong, so violent. But good. Basically good. Right now, I’m just trying to neutralize some of their worst aspects.”

His eyes followed something down below, someone passing by in the park perhaps. Light filled his tired face. The study smelled of stale cigarettes. “I’ll tell you a secret—I don’t like reality all that much. We artists, we want to dream a new world into being. But someone has to protect this—it’s the only way advances can ever happen. Enlightenment, culture. Science. Man—as he is—will continue to wreak chaos. I have no illusions about the masses.” He touched the old velvet drapes with a loving hand. “Blok despises the intelligentsia, as only a real intelligent can. Me, I worship them. I joined them only by the skin of my teeth. Alexander Alexandrovich doesn’t know how the village respects the schoolmaster. A literate man’s a magician to them. Only enlightened men will produce an enlightened world. Not the dictatorship of the proletariat. The transformation of the proletariat into men.”

That was the reason for Universal Literature, and the House of Arts, the House of Scholars. Why he woke up before dawn, to smoke and worry in this room.

He opened the fortochka, stood breathing in the freshness of the morning. After a time, he tore himself from the scene of the awakening city and sank back down into his big worn chair. “So now you find your leg in a trap.” He took a pencil in his broad hand, turned it end over end, thoughtfully, like a baton. “It might make you feel better if I tell you you’re probably not the first person who has taken notes at my dinner table for the sake of our friends at Cheka headquarters. You’re just the first to have confessed it.”

I felt the house shift under us, the fragility of what he had built here. “Tell me what I should do.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “But as a writer, I can help you consider the various ways the story could go.” He sat back in his big chair, as if thinking of a novel’s plot. “What happens, for example, if you go ahead with the plan and tell your friend everything you heard last night?”

I knew that answer immediately. “My father will be fed and clothed, and receive medical care. And the authorities will be more sure you are in opposition to them.”

“And what happens to you?”

A question not so easily answered. I gazed into his kind, snub-nosed face, the pale eyes. “I get to live.”

“Go further.”

I thought of the next room of the nightmare. “She’ll want more.”

“Exactly. You’ll dig yourself in deeper. You’ll have to put yourself in a false position with everyone and everything, knowing you’re a fraud. A dangerous fraud. It leaves you alone, except for your friend.” The house was so silent, I could hear the tick of the clock on the bookcase behind me. “She took away your job. You’ll depend more and more on her. There’s no escape.”

Claustrophobia descended. I had hoped he could see a way out, not confirm what I already knew.

“Either you’ll find a way to rationalize it or you’ll take your own life. And your father’s still in prison.” His face, so sad, so gentle. “I’ve been in that cell, I know what I’m talking about. I don’t say this cavalierly. In these times, the scarcest commodity is not bread but courage. The way you’ve described him, it seems that your father is a courageous man, a man of principle. You might not like his principles, but he chose his path. The question is, what are you going to do with your own life? Where are your principles?”

My principles. Did anybody have the luxury of principles these days? But Gorky had been in that cell, maybe the same one my father now occupied. Gorky’s principles were no luxury. We all depended upon them to shield us from the roaring furnace of Bolshevik power. What were my principles? Not Genya’s, with his perfect faith in the future, his poems about blood and fire, the Red Dawn. Certainly not Varvara’s and the other spacemen’s: the forcible perfection of mankind through ideology, regimentation, and terror. What then?

I knew that I believed in more than just saving my own skin, myself and my family’s. I was not Mina—I could not slam the door in the face of a friend. There was Gorky, there was the House of Arts, all those scholars and artists. There was the truth. I was no Kolya, just seeing what he could get away with, no sense of how his choices reverberated in the world around him. I was uncomfortably stretched between many realities, but if a poet had no compulsion toward truth, he should go drive a tram.

“And if I decide not to go along, then what?”

Gorky screwed another cigarette into the black holder. “It would be a very grave thing.” He lit it and sank back into the chair again. Into himself. His voice was very low. “Your father goes to his fate. Which I imagine he is prepared to do.” He met my gaze. “He told you so himself. He doesn’t want you to cooperate. He knows what that means. Imagine his agony if he discovered you’d become a tool of the Cheka because of him. Of all the terrible reversals of fortune. The very thing he falsely accused you of that night, in that snowy cabin, becomes true because of him.”

Of course. I had only felt such pity for him in his wretched condition. That cell. Torture and cold. I hadn’t thought of that other agony, the moral one.

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Was I a moral person? Or was this a ridiculous time to think of morality? It must not be or I would have blithely run to Varvara with my newfound treasure, and the hell with Gorky.

“So what do I do? Try to find my way to Finland?”

Gorky examined the burning tip of his cigarette. “You go and live your life. And wait for the knock on the door. It might come, it might not. Write your poetry, give your readings. I can talk to Korney Chukovsky about a translation job for you at Universal Literature. Maybe you teach poetry, a literacy class. It’s no small thing to teach a man to read. You have courage. You’ll live in the sunshine, though you might pay for it with your life.”

I tried to force air into my lungs. “But what if she has me arrested? What if she has me shot?”

“You go to prison. You go to the camp. But you won’t have fed the monster. You won’t have become a puppet. What is this life, Marina? We don’t live forever. We’re here to use our time, not simply exist.”

“Just… live my life?” That was not something I’d considered. Walk out of here and say no, and continue.

“Look at Gumilev,” Gorky said. “Much as I despise the man, you have to admit, he doesn’t bow his head. He doesn’t stuff his mouth with dirt. He lives like a man. And if necessary, he’ll die like a man. His courage gives courage to others. You should study him.”

I heard a door close. The house was awakening. I would have to leave soon. Suddenly I was filled with terror again. As if nothing had been decided. It was still up to me. It was still in my hands.

He smiled and came around the desk. He put his hands on my shoulders. “And if anything happens, you know I’ll do what I can,” he said. “The important thing is to live honestly and leave something behind. Not to disappear without a trace. How brave are you, Marina?”

I didn’t know. But I had a feeling I would soon find out.

39 This Transparent Hour

No one loitered outside the house on Kronverksky in the early morning light. Walking toward the Neva in slow, measured steps, wearing Aura’s green coat, I felt as exposed as Andromeda on her rock. The grim fortress loomed on my right, its gold spire a lance, cruelly gleaming. The river ran fresh and swift, dotted with whitecaps and floes of ice. I could smell salt on the air. If only there was a ship, its white sails filling… Behind those cold stone walls, my father would be just waking up, or perhaps he didn’t sleep and had been up all night. He’d hear the clang of doors, a shift change. Light would filter into his small window, illuminating the narrow cell’s grim solitude. They would bring him food, maybe allow him to shave, surprising him with a basin of hot water, a change of clothes. I hoped he enjoyed the privilege of these last hours, these last few pleasures, before Varvara learned that I would not ransom him. Most likely, he would be too brokenhearted to enjoy them anyway, if he knew that they’d come at the cost of my moral freedom.

Yet I knew too that he had been glad to find I was alive, that his outcry hadn’t put a bullet into my skull that night in the woods at Pulkovo. Oh, those few precious minutes when we’d sat side by side, when he’d held my hand, together at last. When the fine treatment stopped, he would know I had not betrayed him. Would he be happy, though it would mean his death? I would live with the decision of this morning for the rest of my life.

White gulls sailed upriver in the light blue morning, flicking wings bright in the stillness, shrieking their plaintive calls. Could he see them through his tiny window, sunlight on white wings, could he hear their windswept cries? I stepped onto the Troitsky Bridge, that immense span, the end just a point, vanishing. The tram stanchions like so many gibbets. Beneath, the clean flow of icy water, inexorably seeking the sea. A figure in black stood at the opposite end. How brave are you, Marina? I didn’t slow down or speed up, just kept walking, step after step, toward my fate, as the river flowed toward the Gulf of Finland.

Halfway across, our paths met. “You spent the night,” Varvara said. Her black eyes sparkled with excitement.

My old friend, who used to clash with schoolmistresses. Who had brought me to the Stray Dog Café that night, made me walk down those stairs. In Petrograd, you go down into heaven… The nights I had slept with her in her sagging bed on Rubinshteyna, her face in my nape, her arms around me. If I hadn’t known her, I might be in England now, with all my family, studying at Oxford. If I hadn’t known her, I might already be dead. Our braided fates, mine and hers, twisted and bloody.

“Well?” she prompted me, blowing on her hands, rubbing them.

I forced myself to look at her, shook my head.

The excitement drained, the smile died. “Don’t tell me you’re backing out. Out of some misguided liberal conscience, after all this time?”

I let her examine my face, feature by feature. “I can’t do it.”

“You can’t.” Small angry patches of red appeared on her sallow cheeks. “That wasn’t the tune you were singing the other night. You couldn’t thank me enough. Now, suddenly, you can’t? What if I just throw him into the Neva, is that all right? Tie his hands and feet and throw him in? I could make you watch.”

“Varvara.” I reached out for her, an old reflex, and she flinched as if I would burn her. “In your world, it’s everything for the cause. That’s not my world.”

She laughed, and then snatched a fistful of my hair, making me bend back my head, baring my throat, my eyes watering. “Where do you think you’re living, Marina? It’s everybody’s world now,” she hissed in my ear. “Everybody’s a part of it, even weaselly little poets like you. Don’t try to be a hero.”

I didn’t try to free myself. “I’ve done enough,” I said, though my tears were flowing. “I sat up in a sniper’s nest the week I buried my baby. I’ve written slogans, filled sandbags. I was on the Red October. What more do I have to do to prove my loyalty?”

“Give me what I want. That’s what we need, not your bourgeois adventurism—riding the Red October like a parade float. You think I’ll give you a pass, because we… used to know each other?” Because of my feelings for you. “You think you don’t live in this world?” She yanked my hair. “You think for a second I’ll spare him? I’ll turn him on a spit, all Petrograd will hear the screaming.” Her face, narrow and sharp chinned, glittered like a bayonet. She turned to glare at a man who dared glance in our direction. He stumbled as if from a blow, immediately turned his gaze to the river. She finally let go. Her hands opened and closed with frustration, her face burning with humiliation that she couldn’t control me as she wanted to.

She stood gripping the rail of the bridge, gazing downriver toward Kronstadt, as if there was an answer there. Somehow I had made an unthinkable move—sacrificing the king. She could pretend to be as cold-blooded a spaceman as she liked, all theory and ideology and black leather, but this was not about ideology. This was the dark cave of what she didn’t know about herself. Her hatred of her father, her mother, her class, families, men, tenderness, anyone who had ever rejected her, judged her, belittled her. Those early years had forged her as proud and savage as Achilles.

I turned away and continued walking toward the Palace Embankment. What would she do, shoot me in the back?

“Marina!” she barked.

Overhead, the gulls screamed, wheeling. Lost, like me, like her, like all of us. My back itched as I waited for a bullet to pierce me like a letter on a spindle. I walked past the third tram stanchion without a shot. Then the second. I could feel her fury like a house burning. The heat of it singed the back of my hair. She could never stand losing. I knew I would pay, if not today, two days from now or next month or next year.

But for now, I walked across the Troitsky Bridge, and down the Swan Canal, along the Field of Mars, a lonely procession of one.

40 The Spacemen

I sat cross-legged on my bed, the window open to the warming day, translating The Valley of the Moon by Jack London. How good to have something to do besides chew on my own raw nerves. It came through Anton, the same afternoon I’d refused Varvara her devil’s due. A note inside from Korney Chukovsky said: I’ve heard your English is good. Universal Literature is publishing all of London’s work. See what you can do with this. KC. I knew it was Gorky’s apology. If it met with Chukovsky’s satisfaction I would get more translation work. It would be a way out from under Varvara’s thumb. I’d returned to the telephone exchange for my ration cards and received them. They must not have been informed of my defection. But if I persisted, I knew my rations would stop. Chukovsky was giving me a lifeline. Clearly news of my misfortune had spread among the upper echelons of the house. I wondered who else knew about me.

The Valley of the Moon was a story of love and proletarian struggle. A laundress, specializing in fancy starch, meets her young man, a teamster, at a village dance in rural California, and in the midst of labor unrest, they decide to go find their own land and grow their own Paradise. It wasn’t Shakespeare, God knows, but the simple language was vivid—sizzle, swinging, whitewashed, a tremor of money loss—and I was happy to be in Jack London’s world of agrarian California instead of 1920 Petrograd with my father in the Troubetskoy Bastion. But I would need to locate an English dictionary soon.

A soft knock on the door.

“Who is it?”

No answer. I set my book down and went to see who it was. Someone had left a small package, brown paper bound up with twine. I untied it. The oily paper unfolded by itself.

Inside lay an ear, crusted with blood.

Mole on the outside rim. The breath froze in my lungs.

She had done this.

The ear like a lotus, like a lily. So you can hear the screams across the Neva.

I folded the ear back into the paper and put it in the pocket of my summer dress. I had to get out of here. I put on my boots and Aura’s coat and locked my room. Outside, I was barely aware of where I wandered. I bumped into a woman carrying a cuckoo clock. Suddenly I was on the Field of Mars. A brisk wind swept the empty space. The Field of Mars, where I had watched Volodya’s regiment disappear into the sun. Grass shivered between the stones. I remembered my father’s tears. Papa, tell me what you want me to do.

I heard his voice so clear in my head, Don’t fall for the trap. It will never stop.

I was trying to be brave—but what might be next? His thumbs? His eyes, his hands? Would he be nailed to a crucifix? I could hear him begging me not to succumb.

How brave are you, Marina?

I tried to breathe, and pictured the Five in their precincts on the hill. I thought about the universe, how vast it was, how old. From the point of view of the stars, how little any of this mattered. A boy had died in the grass of cholera. A man’s ear was cut off. A girl might slide into the river from the Troitsky Bridge and it was all the same.

I walked up to the Neva and watched the river flow, sparkling and swift, waiting for me to join it. Are you sure you want to refuse us? I imagined the drop, the water closing over my head, the deep cold, my breath leaving, water coming in. The fortress across the river stood waiting. Are you going to submit now? said the fortress. We’ll never let you go. You will be nothing. There will be no pity for either of you.

In the river’s depths, Varvara could not follow me. I would have peace among the fishes, and the spires of drowned cathedrals. Without guilt, suffering, or responsibility.

But in the end, I did not climb the parapet, did not offer myself to the young queen, grown mad and staring into windows, her purple raiment in tatters. I had not done it when I held Iskra’s broken body in my arms, which had been a far greater shock, a far purer sorrow. If I had not done it then, I would not do it now. Just go about your business, he had said. If I died today they would kill my father anyway. Then there would be nothing left of either of us. The important thing was to live, not long perhaps, but as honestly as one could, and leave something behind. Not to disappear and let the waters erase us from the story of time.

I took out the package with his ear, and let it fall between my fingers into the water, where it could listen to the chimes.

I stayed away from Gorky’s flat on Kronverksky. I didn’t blame him for what had befallen me, but I didn’t want to see him, his broad pocked face, his drooping moustache. The sight of him would be a painful reminder that I’d chosen to protect him, and everything he did, at the price of my father’s suffering.

Alexei Maximovich pitied me, but he could not carry my burden. There would be no solace in his company.

On May Day, that traditional day of proletarian celebration, Molecule came to my room to fetch me for Andreeva’s theatrical spectacular, The Mystery of Liberated Labor, which had been in the works for almost a year.

“He sent me to collect you,” she said. Her kind eyes studied my tiny room, all the papers spread out. “We miss you.” Gorky once again extending his hand. I was in no mood for celebration, but what other family did I have? If I stayed it would not help my father grow another ear. Jack London’s young idealists could wait. Molecule broke into a smile when I pulled on my boots and donned Aura’s green coat. She held out my red kerchief, which I had knotted to my bedframe. That too? I sighed and tied it carelessly around my unbrushed hair.

The Gorky contingent had gathered on the bleachers set aside for the elite on the Palace Embankment. What irony, on a workers’ holiday to be seated among commissars and their families in comfort, separated from the sea of Petrograd’s gaunt, hungry workers filling the riverfront in anticipation of the performance. Maria Andreeva sat up front next to Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment, whose Scottie-dog looks I recognized from the first anniversary of the revolution. The day I left with Kolya, and soured my relationship with Mina, the day I fled Varvara. And here was Ravich, Varvara’s heroine, and Zinoviev shaking hands and pretending he wasn’t playing his treacherous game with Gorky, chatting just a few steps away. I felt an urge to protect Gorky, even now, with my father’s ear listening from the bottom of the river, and him bleeding, right there, in the Peter and Paul Fortress. I didn’t know how long I could sit here and pretend to have a good time.

Molecule and I sat with Aura and Clyde Emory, Aura the brightest thing on the embankment in a yellow suit and red turban. My American friend flung her arms around me, kissing me, tucked my windswept hair inside my kerchief. “Marina, honey, where have you been? You just disappeared. Have you been ill?”

“A little cold, I think.” We took our seats on a bleacher bench, and Molecule squeezed my hand. I suspected she’d been informed as to what I was enduring, and I was grateful for it. Out on the Strelka in the middle of the Neva, a giant assembly of tiny human beings moved into position. The Mystery of Liberated Labor was about to begin.

“I’m singing Zemfira tonight,” Aura said under her breath. “Chaliapin’s singing too. You have to come. Clyde’ll bring you, won’t you, baby?”

“It would be my pleasure,” said the Englishman, his untamed eyebrows shading his bright blue eyes.

Aura took my hand in her warm one. Who was I to say no to her? I was wearing her coat.

Now the play began. Thousands of actors swarmed the Strelka, and from this distance, I could see they represented the toiling masses. Slaves being whipped by overseers, peasants at the plow. You had to give it to Andreeva, it was a vast, astonishing tableau. The actors moved through their paces like an army on maneuvers. Lunacharsky, in the front row, beamed as if the performance was the finest thing he’d ever seen. Clyde Emory took a few notes in a small book he kept in his breast pocket. The extravaganza unfolded beneath the Rostral Columns, from which I’d watched the first anniversary naval parade with two hooligans. I couldn’t help comparing the genuine joy of that day to this lumbering spectacle. Though I tried to keep in mind that it represented work for thousands of actors, artists, designers, writers and directors, carpenters and painters and dancers, how could I keep my anger to myself? It was a bloated piece of collective absurdity, a stilted, simplistic tableau that wasn’t so much performed as occupied. No scrap of dialogue could possibly carry across the river to the packed embankments, so the whole thing depended on shouted choruses, with music and drums. Witnessing the movement of all that humanity was like watching ants building a dam. First, moaning slaves toiled about the base of the Stock Exchange. Then the gentry and clerics and demimonde arrived to ascend its broad steps to the “Paradise” of its neoclassical porch, where they commenced the requisite feasting and showered themselves in coins.

As the hours dragged on, the history of the proletarian struggle was illustrated, epoch by epoch—billed the Pageant of Labor. Subsequent waves of uprisings showed the downtrodden assaulting the stairs—you could tell them apart by their costumes and banners, the music. Spartacus: short togas. Stenka Razin: Cossack dress. Pugachov: serfs. Jacobins: red, white, and blue, “La Marseillaise” reaching us over the water. Aura burst into applause each time they attempted to rush Paradise, and groaned when they were forced back. Emory scribbled and sketched. I thought of my father, having to hear all this through his one ear.

As we endured the extravaganza out in the river, the actual workers around us shifted, squinted, sullen—women standing on swollen legs and aching feet. It made me suspect this was an obligatory appearance, like a food brigade or sanitation detail. They probably would have preferred the day off. So this was what Lunacharsky’s Revolutionary Carnival had come to—another aspect of forced labor. Death by theatricals.

Out on the point of the Strelka, real soldiers and real sailors were playing soldiers and sailors in this extravaganza, their guns real guns, and probably loaded. It suited the literality of our times, the death of poetry. What would come next? Would a play’s villains actually have to be slain onstage, run through with bayonets? Would we enact the execution of Marie Antoinette with a real guillotine? What happened to the imagination? There was no fun here, no wordplay, nothing clever, nothing stirring to the soul. It was all too big—vast and elephantine and as earnest as a piece of agricultural machinery. As art, Genya’s little play at the Miniature Theater had done it so much better, and he’d said it all with a handful of actors and some scaffolding.

I tried to keep a pleasant look on my face, tried not to groan, or yawn, or weep, while time stalled and the revolts continued, and the Peter and Paul Fortress waited on the far side of the Troitsky Bridge, the ultimate literalism. At some point, Emory passed me a flask, tapping it against my knee. I gratefully took sips and concentrated on the meditative flow of the river.

At last, the final onslaught. With a thunder of drums and the Red Army songs, led by actual Kronstadt sailors, the masses finally stormed Paradise. Even I stood and applauded.

But then a new configuration of actors assembled on the Strelka, dressed in bright clothing. Oh, I’d forgotten. We must have the Utopia to come. My bitterness knew no bounds. “Let’s get out of here,” whispered Clyde Emory, shifting on the bench for the hundredth time. But it was impossible, we were jammed in too tightly and our departure would reflect poorly on Gorky. We remained through a choral Dance of All Nations, the soldiers and sailors laying down their arms and picking up hammers and scythes, and the Mounting of the Tree of Freedom.

At last, the mass singing of “The Internationale” marked our own freedom. The sound reverberated from our side to the crowds on Vasilievsky Island. I thought of the millions who’d sung this song, what we had given, what we had lost. It was plain to see that the People’s Revolution had become a prisoner of the state. I felt like my heart was being cut from my chest and held aloft before being eaten, still pumping blood.

“Quite the spectacle,” said Emory, helping me to my feet. I could barely feel them. “Sure there’s not time for a fourth act?”

We edged down toward the crowd around Maria Andreeva where she was accepting bouquets and congratulations, Gorky shaking hands, embracing friends. Poor Gorky, he must know this Brobdingnagian event was an utter disgrace. Our eyes met. He smiled, sadly, but appeared relieved that I was still free and among the living. Moura, standing faithfully on his right, followed his gaze, and sent me a brief nod. They knew—it did make me feel better. Aura stood out in the crowd like a sunflower in a field of poppies as she made her way to Andreeva. “Remember, tonight at eight,” she called back.

“I’ll be there.” Then to Emory, under my breath, “Get me out of here.”

The streets were impassible for a good long time. Emory did his best to be amusing, though the effort of smiling was too much for me. “You’re being awfully mysterious today…” He reached to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “The inscrutable Miss Makarova. Come to the Astoria, I’ll buy you some tea.”

We pushed our way along the embankment. Why shouldn’t I have tea with the Englishman? Maybe I could pump him about his trade union connections or what he thought of Zinoviev. I would be happy to report on him. The worst they could do to him was kick him out. I was halfway to laughter and half to tears. He was talking about Shaw when we were interrupted by shouts from a gang of sailors. “Kuriakina!” I heard. “Hey! Comrade Marina!” A sailor was lifting his rifle over his head—Slava from the Red October! Slava, who’d pulled me onto the train’s roof when I asked, who’d cared for me better than my own husband had. I could still see him, lowering my things into the wagon as I went off with the midwife. His grinning, weathered face brought it all back. “Slava!” I waved.

“I’m an actor now!” he shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Did you see me?”

He had been in The Mystery of Liberated Labor. What would happen to the actors in this new world—would they have to become soldiers? Yet it made me happy to see how proud he was, glad that all surprises weren’t pure horror. “I’m Uncle Vanya! Kronshtadtsky MacBet.” So full of life. He radiated energy and good health—they fed the fleet well. He fought his way through the crowd, hopping and plowing through the workers the way a bather breaks the waves at the seaside. Emory scowled, jealous that I was more interested in this chance meeting with a sailor than in his analysis of contemporary British theater.

“Kuriakina, you look great!” Slava reached me at last, grabbing my arm, looking down at my belly. “Where’s the baby?”

A needle in the heart. I’d maintained my demeanor up to now, but my nerves were as thin as Bible pages. I shook my head.

“Oh, poor kid.” He patted my shoulder as if I were a big dog. “But you’re still here. Better days, eh? Where’s Kuriakin? Who’s this clown?” He gestured with a big thumb toward Clyde Emory.

“Englishman. A writer. Genya and I aren’t together anymore. Look, it’s good to see you.” I thought of that girl, bright on the roof of the Red October, roaring into the future, rotund with hope. And now, lost on my own Sargasso Sea. “Who’s guarding Kronstadt if you’re all here, Uncle Vanya?”

“We’re going back tonight—I’m on the Petropavlovsk. Come out for a visit!” he shouted as his group bore him off, a man caught in a tide. “I’ll let you fire the cannon!” And then he was gone. I stared after him as one stares at a ship as it vanishes over the horizon.

That night, Emory and I went to see Aura in Rachmaninoff’s Aleko—the adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Gypsies,” the poem that had once saved my life, letting me climb, hand over hand, out of despair the night I was buried alive under the snow. I hadn’t heard Chaliapin in years, but he was in great voice, his expressive basso the perfect foil for Aura’s rich mezzo. The staging was simple, a few stools and a wagon, the costumes slapdash, the musicians’ formal suits ragged with age, their faces gaunt, but with those voices, these artists at the height of their powers, this Aleko could have been staged in a cowshed and still rivaled La Scala. In the anonymous dark, I wept unabashedly. Oh, the luxury of that! For my family, for myself, for beauty, for the ruin of everything. But they couldn’t kill this music. Not tsars, not Bolsheviks, not Varvara, not the rampant mediocrity of The Mystery of Liberated Labor.

Emory’s tweedy arm came around me, an attempt to console me perhaps, or the first sortie in a seduction. I pretended to search in my bag for a handkerchief, and managed to shrug him off. I didn’t want to be soothed or handled, I just wanted to weep in peace.

Tonight, the old gypsy’s lines after Aleko slayed Zemfira and her new lover seemed a direct rebuke of our Bolshevik masters. Was I the only one who noticed? No, I was far from the only one sneaking glances at Zinoviev, seated with his family, stone-faced and pale in the darkened theater. The political context of Pushkin’s verse resonated across the years:

And the last line hung in the air

echoing my own emptiness as the curtain slowly fell.

As we filtered out through the foyer, I saw Varvara, leaning against the doorway. Nonchalant, as if she were just waiting for someone. I could have hung back, I could have hunted for Gorky or someone else to hide behind. But I didn’t. I chose the other door, but I didn’t crouch, I didn’t run. I took one look at her and she at me. She was giving me a last chance. Change your mind? said her naked stare. Ready to play the game?

I didn’t lower my face like a woman walking into a storm. I stared at her over Emory’s shoulder. He saw her too. “Friend of yours?”

“No,” I said. And we walked out into the waning rays of a very long day.

41 Music, When Soft Voices Die

The White Nights came upon us. The barely setting sun skimmed the horizon, sank, and then popped up immediately like a restless child refusing bed. A fuss in the corridor of the flat roused me from a pit of awful dreams. It couldn’t have been later than five or six in the morning, yet voices could be clearly heard. I threw a shawl over my nightdress and cracked the door. Other neighbors peered out from their own rooms. “What’s happening?” whispered Tatiana Glebovna, the clerk’s wife across the hall, the edge of her scarf stuffed in her mouth. As the voices grew louder, tenants slipped out of their rooms in their nightshirts and robes to see what the trouble was. I could see Olga Viktorievna waiting to see who would leave his room unattended, and locked my door behind me.

The noise was coming from the front rooms, murmurs and cries. By the entry door, a crowd of tenants had gathered. Russakova was holding her children. “Somebody dumped a body out there.”

“Rang the bell and left it,” said the postman, Vrachkov. “I was just on my way to work.”

I clawed my way through the crush out to the stairway landing, and knelt. My father lay on his side on the filthy floor—bearded, barefoot, hair streaked with gray. There was a clean bandage around his head covering the wound where his ear had been. I wished I could faint, but my body remained stubbornly attached to this waking nightmare. Denied even the mercy of unconsciousness.

I took his hand in mine, pressed it to my forehead. Cold, stiff. People hovered nervously in the doorway. It was clear to them that this was a dangerous death, an official death, the death of a person one should not admit knowing. Such a death had a way of attaching to the living. Yes, stay away, I thought, and the devil take you.

Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov. Famed jurist, author, member of the Provisional Government, liberal counterrevolutionary. This was how it ended, on this broken tile, a stair landing in a broken building in a city that had lost its name, in a country that had lost its soul. His poor face, the chestnut hair frosted white. The last of his kind. Every hope for Russia was embodied here, in this broken body, this discarded bundle. Misguided, foolish, and faithful. Papa… Even now I’d half believed Varvara might relent, her fury spent, that she might have been satisfied with the mutilation. But she’d waited, holding the blow until it could be delivered with maximum cruelty.

Why did they say inhuman when they talked about monstrous acts? When cruelty was every bit as human as mercy, this human instinct for revenge, hatred, envy. The hot, smoky taste of power.

His beard had been trimmed and his feet were clean. She must have believed I would relent eventually. Believed I would come bearing betrayal like a great leaking basket of heads to lay at her feet. My hand pressed to my face as if to erase my mouth. She’d kept her side of the bargain—got him a doctor, cleaned him and fed him. He had a new eye patch instead of that dirty bandage. How angry she must have been that I had refused her deal. “Papa,” I whispered into the bandage. Pressed my forehead to his stiff, cold hand again, watering the knuckles. To be so erased from this world, wiped out like a badly cleaned chalkboard. And so it ended—a man of courage and energy, his biography closed with murder. Never again the downward tilt of his chin when he prepared to say something weighty, which could also be contradicted by the laughter in his eyes. Eyes I would never see again, rich brown, with little lines at the corners and underneath etched deeply now. He and he alone had made me. Everything I was, and did, and thought, I could trace to him. Why did we have to be at war, Papa? What had cursed us so, to be born at this time, what evil fate had decided that our paths would be separated, and what furies came together to make them cross again?

“I got the morgue. The cart’s coming,” said the Communist from the Sobietskys’ room who could never get his stove to draw. He always sent his wife to fetch me. A kindness, as it was clear this was a dubious death, full of meaning. The tenants got tired of the show and went back into the flat to prepare their meager breakfasts and ready themselves for the day, feed their babies, draw water, get laundry started. But I stayed where I was on the floor next to my father. Like a dog on a grave, I would not be moved.

I examined him tenderly, lifting his head, ever so gently. Blood on the floor. He had been shot, a small bullet wound to the base of the skull. So, they’d made him kneel. No exit wound. Had she done this herself? Made him kneel in the basement or in the yard. You did this, I could hear her saying. No. I had just refused to stop it.

Eventually, men arrived with a stretcher. They brought a coffin they’d rent me for one hundred rubles. Was it the same cart that had come for Maxim, for Iskra? I wished I could pick him up and bear him away as I had my daughter, but he was too big to shoulder and there was no fog in which to vanish with him. It was a bright May morning. And he was not mine the way Iskra was, not mine alone. He belonged to this city and it would be an insult to bury him anonymously. He deserved his name, his rightful place. He had given everything he had for his Russia, his idea of it. He deserved to be buried amid the illustrious dead.

“Take him to Tikhvin Cemetery.”

The carter gazed at me skeptically under eyebrows like black caterpillars. Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery was for Petersburg notables. He didn’t budge, folding his arms across his chest. His partner, with the stretcher, waited patiently for our negotiations to complete themselves. “Who’s gonna pay for it?”

“You’ll get your money, Comrade.” Capitalist vampire. “It’s the Makarov plot. I’ll show you where.”

A doctor on the second floor had a working telephone, the only one in the building still in service. His wife hated the tenants continually asking to use it, but they were bourgeois and vulnerable to complaints, and as this was an emergency, I pushed myself on her. “Number, please?” the girl on the line asked. I had the uncanny experience of speaking to myself. My father was murdered and I was speaking to myself. I gave her the number. When she put me through, Moura answered. “Marina?” I didn’t identify myself, just asked for Gorky, my voice as flat as an overcast day. When he came on the line, I said, “He’s dead. They dumped him in the hallway. The carters are here. I’ll need to pay them, and the gravediggers. We’ll be at Tikhvin Cemetery.”

A pause. “Courage, my dear. I’ll meet you there.”

We stood at the Makarov graveside, just me and Alexei Maximovich under the new green of the ancient trees. We watched the laborers down in the friable earth, making the deep furrow for planting my bitter crop. Thank God Gorky made no move toward conversation as we watched them dig. It was a beautiful, tender day. A breeze rippled the boughs overhead as the shovels bit the damp earth. All around us waited my silent family, Makarov grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, babies dead in infancy. Alexei 1841–1842, aged nine months. Tamara, one and a half years. But no Iskra. No Antonina Nikolaevna Shurova, July–October 1919. But now they would be together on the other side, all my loves, Papa and Seryozha and Iskra. And someday I would join them, perhaps very soon. Perhaps today.

A flight of swallows darted and wheeled as the gravediggers took my father out of the rented coffin. I kissed him, let them lower him into the grave. In the absence of a priest, I recited the Shelley poem he’d loved most:

He’d given me everything, and I had given him this, a miserable Bolshevik death. I could not bring myself to weep, for him or myself, or the tender leaves that too must die.

42 The ABC of Communism

When I returned from the monastery, Russakova, whose large family occupied the front salon, handed me a bulky package, my name on the brown paper. She averted her eyes. I could only imagine who had brought it. The tenants watched me as I carried it through the flat under my arm. I knew what they were thinking. It won’t be long before that room comes open. Maybe our Masha… Safely locked away, I tore the brown paper open. The same paper that wrapped our bread rations, and the ear. Inside, rolled leather side out, rested my sheepskin. She’d sent it back, a gesture of what? Regret? Pity? A coup de grâce? I sat down on my bed and pressed my face to the leather, the wool, to see if I could smell him. Maybe, I thought, maybe… There was blood on the collar. They’d shot him in it. I unrolled the coat and out fell a pair of slippers and Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism. I threw the latter across the room. It hit the baseboard with a satisfying thwack, losing a few pages from its cheap binding.

Curled on my side under the sheepskin from which I could imagine I smelled cherry tobacco, I shivered, clutching the slippers he had worn. She’d given him slippers. Rocking myself, I tried to remember what Gorky had said—that my abandonment of him had let him know I had not abandoned him. But compared to these slippers… Look, she was saying. I kept all my promises. You let him die, you asked for it.

A conversation was taking place just outside my door. An argument in lowered voices. A rap. Not commanding. Muted, apologetic. “Marina Dmitrievna? It’s Korbatinsky.” The domkom. I hauled myself out of bed, opened the door.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve been informed that your room…” He twisted, he chewed on the ends of his moustache. The house committee must have decided—no, there hadn’t been time for a meeting. He’d been informed. “A couple is coming in… You understand? It’s not my doing…”

I was to be removed. First she’d taken my job, now it was my lodging, for which I was legitimately registered. “How long do I have?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Really, I argued with them…” His eyes pleaded for understanding.

I closed the door and locked it, sat on my bed. Even this little room, where I had lived with my baby, was to be denied me. I looked at the pipe that stretched across the ceiling. How hard was it to hang oneself? How long would it take to die? It was what she wanted. To force me to take my own life, the thing she didn’t have the nerve to do. In the corner sat the broken book, The ABC of Communism. I picked it up. Perhaps they had given it to him as an attempt at reeducation, or just to torment him. It was divided into neat sections and subsections like an algebra book: “Capitalism Leads to Revolution,” “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” “Communism and Education,” “The Organization of Industry,” “Subdivision 5: The Scientific Character of Our Program,” “…the marvelous leniency of the workers’ courts in comparison with the executioners of bourgeois justice…” A catechism, a handbook for spacemen who could not see the difference between words and reality. Once I might have read this and thought, Yes, yes, of course. This is how it is. This is what must be done. How reasonable, how self-evident.

I tore out the first page, used it to light the lamp. I held it until it burned my fingers, dropped it into the ashtray. Then one by one, I tore the pages out and lit them, letting them burn. I renounce thee, I renounce thee. All the spaceman theories, the little tables of declining production, Bukharin’s theories of agriculture. I renounce thee. No more spacemen. No more bibles. No more ideologies, no more programs. No more pointing to cruelty and calling it justice. I believed no more in this bastard, this Smerdyakov our revolution had become. I would believe only in pity and compassion, poetry and weakness, and the truth as I saw it through my own two eyes.

Then I packed up my few things in my carpetbag, my books, my knives, my hatchet, then rolled my winter clothes, the sheepskin, my blanket, up into my bedsheet, tied it in twine. I stuffed The Valley of the Moon and my translation into my Izhevsk pail.

There was still one place in Russia where a human being might be allowed to stand. And I went there.

43 House of Arts

Anton took one look at my face and asked no questions. I set my things down, the bundle on the bed, the bag and pail on the floor. “I buried my father today,” I said. “It was a rented coffin. They dumped him in the grave and took it for the next guest.”

“You can have the bed if you want,” he said.

He accepted my presence as one accepts rain.

The Valley of the Moon stalled midtranslation. I couldn’t imagine a circumstance under which that book would be worth the paper it was printed on. I lay on Anton’s bed under my sheepskin, listening to him write—he was lecturing on formalism—reading sections to me, pacing the small room. Poems circled in my head… Music, when soft voices die… and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King:

Days passed, bright without notice. Anton slept on the floor and brought me food, ate what I did not. Who reverenced his conscience as his king… Conscience was no meadow, pierced with shining streams and ripe with birdsong. It was a trench-filled battleground strung with wire, an iron mountain against a starless sky. Conscience was the hardest master of them all. There was no rest, no congratulations, only a long march from dawn to dawn.

One afternoon he came in, excited despite his attempt at casual nonchalance. He tossed a letter onto the bed. “You’re in. Chukovsky, Gorky, Blok, Shklovsky, all signed for you. And guess who the fifth was? Gumilev. Can you believe it?”

Five signatures, officially admitting me to the House of Arts. How kind of our elders to have taken such pity on this wretched flotsam. They knew the price of conscience in today’s market. I was by no means their equal. Nevertheless they’d offered me shelter, a place to root in the gale of my life.

As a member of Dom Iskusstv—the House of Arts, which the inhabitants simply called Disk in revolutionary preference for acronyms in all things—I was entitled to receive a scholar’s rations and a room if one turned up. The most important part: I was officially in residence. I had a place in this world. I could hear the music of official stamps. And I received my first assignment, to teach a women’s poetry circle down at the Skorokhod factory. “They want a woman,” said Ksenya Alexandrovna, a sort of house secretary who handled such requests. She held out a ticket between her fingers.

“I’ve never taught poetry,” I admitted, nevertheless taking the ticket. I was afraid. I didn’t want to leave the house on the Moika Embankment. The only safety was here.

Her kind, young face. “Perfect. You’ll learn together. Don’t count on much in the way of extra rations. They’re as poor as gravediggers down there.”

I sat at the table in Anton’s room, turning over the ticket. Who was I to teach anyone? I was afraid to even look people in the eye these days. I could feel the demons circling my head like smoke. “Blok doesn’t think poetry can be taught.” I sipped my carrot-peel tea.

“He means you can’t teach sheep to be lions,” Anton said, paring a pencil with a penknife, letting the shavings drop where they would, table, floor, manuscripts. “But of course you can teach poetry, at least enough so these shoe women will know it when it hits them in the face. And if it’s a disaster, so what? You have to go outside eventually.”

And I thought I was the one who hated walls.

What a great, ugly place it was, Skorokhod, where all those women I’d dug with made their living. Down on the Obvodny Canal in the ugliness and stink, the heat of summer making it worse, chemicals pouring straight into the water. The factory was cavernous, half empty, the bulk of its workers gone—drafted, dead, or out scouring the countryside for a bit of grain. It took me a while, hunting through the dusty rooms, the silent tables, the assembly lines, to find the committee room, where twelve women waited for a poet to show them some beauty, to pull back the curtain on Poetry, catch her naked in the bath. Twelve ragged women. But no Anya. I supposed she had better things to think about.

They had no books, so I recited for them—Pushkin, Tyutchev, Tsvetaeva. Taught them the essentials, the simple rhymes and meters. We clapped hands to beat out the metric feet. They knew few poems but scores of songs. “Songs are poems set to music,” I explained, “and poems are songs without music.” And taught them the balladic form, abab.

This committee room, surrounded by chain-link, was the true revolution. Not the bloody, airless cells of the Cheka, not The Mystery of Liberated Labor. These women, these human skeletons with hands like leather, their own boots in shreds, for the first time discovering the flexibility of their own language. I set them to write a poem about shoes, or the factory, but most couldn’t do much with it. I feared the class would be a dead loss—when a black-haired girl with pale blue eyes brought a shoe to life, delighting us all with its tongue flapping saucy talk at a male supervisor.

After that, the chains fell. Though few could emulate the girl’s humor—the women mostly wrote poems about roses and Grandma’s sweet smile, poems homesick for distant villages, for Mama’s weaving, for husbands lost to the war. Babies and drunks. And love of all kinds: young love, unrequited love, a meaningful glance at a factory dance. Girls drowned themselves in the Obvodny Canal or drank solvents for love. Solvents—I hadn’t thought of that. They wrote about youth, and growing older. And paid me with precious bread from their own children’s mouths. I loved them all, even the barely literate ones who could only rhyme June and moon. Maybe them most of all. There was no need to defend literature here. I had only to earn my bread and give them the feeling of belonging to the world, of creating something that had never existed before—and maybe a glimpse of something within themselves.

A few weeks later, I picked up a second class at the Vikzhel club. Vikzhel—what a tangled past we had. An experienced poet, Vasily Sabitov, had been teaching them but he’d recently quit, unable to teach those idiots. They liked simple ballads, chastushki, a good laugh and a churning rhythm, and I let them stick to it. Poems about trains and parodies of officialese. Their clubroom was tucked into the ground floor of a house off Znamenskaya Square near the Nikolaevsky station. They paid with a whole pound of bread, and promised coal in the winter.

“Little comrade, what’s another rhyme for zhit’ besides pit’?” To live, to drink.

“How about kurit’?” To smoke a cigarette.

I was surprised how attached I became to them—my shoe ladies, my railwaymen. And I fell in love with that moment of magic, when a poem was born into those humble hands. With them I had no expectations, anything they produced was a God-given miracle. There was no way to disappoint me unless someone’s seat was empty—gone on a food detachment, or ill, or just mysteriously vanished. I rejoiced that there were still humans who wanted to learn something more soulful than The ABC of Communism.

And I resumed work on The Valley of the Moon. Work, the great solace.

Though I still jumped when anyone knocked on the door.

My students’ pleasure in the word brought back my own, and I began to craft new poems in our stuffy, hot little room. I wrote one about the Vladimirka, the bitter lane that crossed all of Russia, the long road to Siberia. I took the point of view of a Decembrist wife following her husband into exile, walking the five thousand miles behind the convicted men. These days a poem like that could be read ambiguously, for who was the tsar and who the convict?

A bang on our door. We both leaped out of our chairs, Anton spilling carrot tea over his lecture. “It’s open, you idiot!” he shouted, mopping up pale gold tea with the tail of his shirt.

The door opened slowly, and in the passage stood Gumilev. Very straight, very cool, and clearly offended at being so rudely addressed. “Marina Dmitrievna, may I speak to you a moment?” He considered our room with his fishy gaze, taking in our domestic arrangement. I could see him making assumptions. There was only one bed. Though what I did with Anton was none of his business, I was grateful to him for being the fifth signatory necessary for acceptance into the house. He pushed the door open farther—and gestured that he wanted to speak to me in the hall. What could he want of me that couldn’t be said in front of Anton?

I joined him in the hallway. He was erect and correct, parted and shaved, wearing a clean shirt, brushed jacket, and tie—but he stood too close for my liking. “It’s the sailors’ club on the Admiralty Embankment. Thursday evening.” He was holding out a ticket. “I would do it myself, but I’m at the Poets’ Guild.” His night holding court at our sister organization. He was doing me a favor—the fleet received category 1 rations, and Anton and I needed every scrap of bread we could forage. Yet why me, and not someone more established? Because he felt sorry for me? Because he wanted me to join his circle? I felt I was jumping the queue.

His walleye stared up the hall, the other fixed me with purpose, flicking the ticket. “A bit of advice—these won’t be your factory women. Don’t let them lead you around by the nose. You have to let them know you’re boss, or they’ll wipe the decks with you. No chastushki or nursery rhymes. They’re bright boys. Put them through their paces.”

I tried to imagine why I’d been singled out for such an honor, why he trusted me to represent the House of Arts there, but I could understand nothing. “I’ll do my best, Nikolai Stepanovich. Thank you.” Nikolai Stepanovich, just like Kolya. But could two men be any less like one another? I didn’t think so.

Early evening but still bright as noon in July, the wide Neva lay fresh and empty. Boats clattered gently against the wharf of the Admiralty Embankment. In the clubhouse on the shore, thirty men, the pride of the Red Fleet, well fed, impatient, awaited me in their classroom, their caps printed with the names of their ships across the bands. I felt like a rusty old scow pulling up among white-sailed yachts. The weight of their stares brought blood to my face. This underfed scrap of a girl with dark circles staining her eyes, her ragged dress, this was what the House of Arts decided to send them? What an insult! They could break me in two. It reminded me of Gorky’s famed story “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl.”

The protests began. “Where’s Gumilev?” “We sent for a real poet, not a schoolgirl.” “Though if you want a date, stick around.” What a handsome breed they were, as pampered as racehorses, the proud Red heart of this red, red land, aware of their power and my powerlessness. I decided to decline the blindfold, the last cigarette.

I stood at the head of their clubroom and, using all the rhetorical tricks I’d learned at the House of Arts, all the experience of street-corner readings and Genya’s spellbinding recitations on the Red October, gave them three of my own poems: “The Oxen of the Sun,” the old seaman in his bed; “The Trees at Kambarka,” for Iskra; and the new one, “Vladimirka,” which no one had heard yet. They’d either toss me out into the Admiralty Canal or accept me as I was. Be careful… I heard Blok’s warning. But I was through being careful. Courage was the tenor of the day.

By the time I’d finished the third poem—and the road bore no more trace of us than the sky—there were no more catcalls. I might have been twenty, skinny and ragged, but I was a poet and they were just sailors. Was this what Gumilev wanted to give me? Restoring a bit of myself to myself?

They took a simple vote, show of hands, whether to keep me or throw me back to the sea, and it was done. We negotiated in Soviet fashion, as the students told me what and how they wanted to be taught. Each week I would read a few poems, which they would discuss, me pointing out nuances they might not have caught. Then they’d read in a circle, the way poets do, and discuss their work.

While it was hard to find even scratch paper and stubs of pencils for the Skorokhod women, all of the sailors came with notebooks and pens, and books of poetry they had of their own. I pushed them. I took them through binary meters and ternary meters, the five-foot trochaic line, Pushkin’s iambic tetrameter—the Onegin stanza, with examples. I showed them Blok’s accentual verse. Their poems were full of sea and sky, foreign lands, great storms and guns and brotherhood under the smokestacks. The women they’d left and their own weeping mothers, the winds of the revolution. Realistic deaths—so many deaths. They admired Mayakovsky and Gumilev—strange bedfellows—and, surprisingly, me.

They didn’t care about: Tyutchev, Lermontov, Akhmatova. They wanted only the most modern with

One evening I sent greetings to Slava through a sailor from the Petropavlovsk. “Tell him Kuriakina hopes his acting goes well.”

“Kuriakina? As in Gennady Kuriakin?” They all knew his poetry, had already memorized verses from On the Red October. How impressed they were that we were married, that I had ridden on the agit-train. Now I was not just Marina Makarova, the scarecrow poet, but Kuriakina. The name drenched me with a glamour I hadn’t had before. “Why aren’t you with him?” they asked, imagining some awful betrayal. “Did he dump you?”

Glamour is best maintained by silence.

After classes, my students insisted on walking me back from the Admiralty Canal along the sparkling Neva in the twilight of ten p.m., a brace of handsome young men, white blouses glowing in a night bright enough to read the names of their ships on their hatbands. Their precious bread was tucked into my carpetbag, as well as a new notebook, courtesy of the Red Navy. Each time we passed the yellow mansion on the English Embankment, I recalled Kolya, and how he’d left me there. I could still sense our ghosts watching from an upper window. Wondering at the girl walking with all these beautiful men. Petrograd, Petersburg, city and dream, past and present folded together, into each other, like a map.

The men talked at once, trying to entertain me. Oh, the battles they’d fought, the Whites they’d killed, shipwrecks and snowstorms and fifty-foot seas. None of them willing to let any of the others have more of a chance with me, they laughed at each other’s exaggerations and disputed the facts. One in particular could have easily been at home among the Argonauts, with his blue-green Aegean eyes and blond cropped hair. Another boy, a sensitive one with liquid brown eyes, was like a seafaring Maxim. But they were killers all. I had to remember that. Killers. I’d seen them with their machine guns on the agit-train. They had fought against Yudenich and the English, against Gaida and Wrangel, against the Poles. They might have been the ones to capture my father. They were without guilt. They still believed in the ABCs.

The evening smelled of the sea, or maybe it was they who did. Light glowed from them, as if they were the source of it, like certain fish. I admired their confidence, the depth when they laughed, their guiltlessness and pride—while I still walked on nails, glancing over my shoulder. No demons whispered into their ears. They sauntered with a rolling sailor’s walk, as if still on deck. While I could see shadows scurrying around us, the whispery rustle of disaster in the blue passageways. But nothing could touch the gods of the Soviet Fleet.

I lay on my sheepskin by the odd window that came down to meet the floor, looking out. Nevsky Prospect was still illuminated by the milky midnight of summer and stirred with its secret life. I could see it all from here. The scene resembled the way I’d always imagined death: that strange half-light, a starless Blokian shadow world. Down in the street, a girl and a man kissed in a boarded-up doorway they had no idea was once the entry to Pushkin’s Literary Café, where the poets of his day would gather and trade gossip and insults, and challenge one another to duels. The Stray Dog had been that for the last generation. And now, in our impoverished time, it was the House of Arts.

Ghosts, I thought, watching the figures pass. We were all ghosts, sowing our ectoplasm, creating shimmering memories with which we too would haunt the world.

We would die and drift along the streets of our youth, this whole city was nothing but a necropolis. I thanked God for Anton, just across the room in his bed, which I’d relinquished for the month of July. “You asleep?”

I heard the bedsprings creak. “Yes,” he said. “You?”

Down in the street, a woman and a man turned the corner, she in white, he in black. Who in the world wore white now? How could you resist wiping your hands on her?

I returned to the young people in the doorway. I remembered desire like that, my lips throbbing, my breasts reaching, my thighs. But my blood had jelled in my veins, I was as sexless as a piece of waterlogged wood, a mourner sewn into her shroud. “Anton, do you ever think you’re going to start screaming and never stop?”

He lit a cigarette, the scratch, the flare. “People think I’m crazy as it is,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “When I’m just sensitive.”

I laughed. When I was younger I couldn’t have imagined how I would come to appreciate Anton. “So sensitive. But it’s getting to be a problem. I’m afraid to sit in lectures. The other night when Dobuzhinsky was talking about contemporary Petrograd art, I thought I was going to start screaming.” I traced along the window the curb, the Police Bridge, the cupola of the Dutch church.

“I think we’re all about there,” he said. “It’s a good start for something. I’m about to scream…”

“Inside the sweltering hall…”

“A straitened silence stains us all… But you should go ahead and scream if you like. It won’t bother me.”

“I feel like a character in Bely’s book.”

“Everyone feels like that,” he said.

“Not Gumilev.” In his clean white shirt, the picture of self-restraint.

“Especially Gumilev,” Anton said. “If anybody was sitting on a scream the size of Russia, it’s Nikolai Stepanovich. His scream would blow down St. Isaac’s. The statues would take wing like sparrows.”

It made me feel better to think of Gumilev screaming, fists tight to his sides like an enraged five-year-old. I thought of Blok:

The weight we were living under, we humans. I had to let go of that scream somehow.

44 Zapad

By summer’s end my nerves were failing. I was given a room of my own in the House of Arts, on a newly opened corridor they called the Monkey House, though I still crept back at night to the safety of Anton’s room. Things had started moving along the edges of my vision, like a cat brushing your leg. The feeling was like the night terrors of children, but this was worse—it could occur in the flat banal light of noon. My classes gave me some relief, the Skorokhod women, the sailors. But I found myself panic-stricken at the least convenient times. During a student reading at the Poets’ Guild. In the canteen at the House of Arts, having a glass of tea with Inna Gants. During a recital at the House of the People, near the Gorky apartment, to which I had been invited by Molecule. Just as Aura lifted that glorious voice into “Un Bel Dí Vedremo”—the fear descended. I felt like my mother before Red Terror. Something awful was about to happen and I had to get out before it did—the ceiling falling, fire breaking out—or I would start screaming. I climbed over scores of people to walk outside the old wooden theater. I stood trembling in the autumn afternoon, smoking—hanging on to a cigarette like it was a railing, my new habit—until I calmed enough to return to the hall.

I remained standing in the back in case another spell overcame me, and I wept for this impossible loveliness and for myself at the end of my rope. For I was clearly going mad. Before too long, I too would be one of those poor creatures wandering around Petrograd, arguing with invisible entities, shrinking from devils, spitting and crossing myself.

Soon they emerged from the hall, the whole Gorky entourage—Molecule and Didi and Valentina, Moura and Gorky and their friends, even Maria Andreeva and her assistant. We walked together the short two blocks under the white sky of early autumn. Moura joined me, took my arm. “Are you all right, dear?” I nodded, afraid to speak, afraid it would happen again. Crows cawed in the trees. A relief to enter their homey apartment, solid as it always was. I prayed that the devils pursuing me wouldn’t find me here.

I ate the little meat pies, but they tasted like dust to me. Aura entered to applause a half hour later, holding a bouquet of monstrous yellow chrysanthemums, accepting everyone’s congratulations and praise. I was afraid to go to her, afraid I would burst out weeping or babbling nonsense and be forever after remembered that way. But she saw me, exhausted and tremulous by the windows, and came to me, pulling me aside. She led me down to her room.

Another shock. Big trunks stood open in the center of the room, and clothes were strewn on the bed and the armchair, over the silk screen.

She was leaving. For the West. Na zapad. In five days. Leaving Russia for good. West—that word, sweeter than honey on the tongue. The world was emptying out, and I would be left alone. “You can’t do this,” I said. The shaking had started again.

“I can’t stand another winter, baby.” She sat down on the edge of her bed and kicked off her shoes. “It’s just not what I thought it would be.”

I sat next to her.

“I thought I’d be free, you know? But it’s like I’m a prisoner here. You understand me, don’t you?”

More than she could ever know. But a real prisoner can’t just decide to leave, throw a few things in a suitcase, and be off. “The war will be over soon,” I said, taking her big hand, the rough-cut stone in the big ring. My fingers looked like birch twigs twined with hers. “Everyone says so. They say it’ll get better then.” But I didn’t believe it. I drank in the warmth of her sensuous perfume. The war with Poland was dragging to a close. The last battles with Wrangel in the Crimea. Maybe the revolution would finally prove itself, at last unfold its luminous wings.

But Aura wasn’t waiting. She’d secured her permissions. She glanced at the piles of clothes on the bed, the nightgowns, the dresses. She could leave, and I couldn’t. “Will you go to Finland?”

“I’ll drive to Estonia, then take the ship to Stockholm.” In Sweden she would give some concerts before making her way to Berlin, Prague. “Paris by Christmas.” The war was over, but not for us. She stroked my cheek. “You always said I should go to Paris.”

Christmas in Paris. We sat on her bed, holding hands as I fought for my equilibrium, fought for a smile. She gazed into my eyes—I could see the flecks of gold, flecks of green, like a forest floor. “If you ever come west…” she began, but let it trail off. Now she was crying. We both knew I wasn’t coming west. She was going to leave and I would be trapped, my foot caught in the snare of my country. She straightened the collar of my dress. Her hands were big and dry. “You won’t always be here. Look me up. I’m never hard to find.”

“Do me one favor,” I said.

“Just name it,” she said.

My last hope, a message in a bottle thrown into the sea. Into the West. But how to address it, and to whom? I could ask Moura. She was Estonian, but I thought she’d discourage it. If you were trying to contact a White speculator and saboteur, smuggler and traitor, said to be working out of Estonia, how would you go about finding him? Where would you look? She was kind, but first and foremost protective of Gorky. She already didn’t trust the extra measure of peril I represented, I didn’t think she would do anything to advance my cause. Whereas I believed in this woman, Aura Cady Sands, a woman who had renounced her own country in search of freedom. I knew she would do what she could. “Could you get something into the newspaper at Reval for me? The biggest one they have.”

“You know I will. There’s some paper over there in my desk.”

I pushed aside perfumes and knickknacks, dishes with jewelry, and composed my note as she went back to the party. After working a while, I got this:

I sat at the desk, looking at the clothes she’d already packed, gowns and day dresses, crammed in every which way. In Paris she would have a maid for such things. In Paris, there would be flowers and hairdressers, rooms with heat and a private bath. I should be ashamed to envy such trivial things. I lived in the most modern country in the world, didn’t I? This broken wreck of a land, this prison, this torment. Clyde Emory was already gone, returned to England to print his analysis of the triumphs of Bolshevism, the Buddhalike wisdom of Vladimir Ilyich. I’d seen him off at the docks. How startling it had been to see a ship there, flying a foreign flag.

You’ll always have a friend in me, Emory had said, and kissed me on the lips. I stood on the wharfside as he carried his suitcase up the plank, and wondered how long always might be.

I came out to the parlor, handed Aura the page. “Put it in the Lost and Found section. Or in Missing Persons.” Or perhaps I was the one who was lost. I was the missing person.

She folded the poem into her bosom. “What if they ask me what it says? Or if there’s no Russian paper?”

“They’ve been Russian for five hundred years,” I said. But she was right. With independence, who knew about national feeling. Kolya didn’t speak German, and neither of us had a scrap of Estonian. Even if they printed it, I imagined there would be rafts of spies sniffing around Reval. Well, good luck to anyone tracing me through Aura. I returned to her room and wrote it out again in French, just in case. It wasn’t half bad.

“It’s the baby’s daddy, isn’t it?” she said from the doorway. “You think he’s in Reval.”

“It’s possible.”

“Want me to stay on, try to find him?”

I embraced her. The woman who had opened her throat and spilled out that gold onto the vast stage of the House of the People. One of the few who had known Iskra. “If he doesn’t contact you, leave a Paris address. He doesn’t speak much English but his French is perfect.”

She gave me a wool dress, books, underwear, a pair of her boots. I put the boots on then and there. They were too big, but, like a heart, better too big than too small.

On the way home, I paused on the Troitsky Bridge, my arms full of undeserved gifts, gazing out at the ruffled mirror of the Neva, watching the gulls skim the empty river. Imagining sails here again, smokestacks. Barges laden with grain. That vanished maritime world. Oh, for a Finnish skiff with a single sail like the ones Uncle Vadim once piloted around the islands with us, even Seryozha and Tulku on board, landing us somewhere for a picnic, a bit of a swim. Papa usually stayed in the city, but one time, he was the one sailing the boat, in shirtsleeves rolled up, his pipe clamped between his teeth. Mama laughing. I leaned on the rail, pressed my face into the bundle of clothes, smelling Aura, and let myself weep.

Gazing west under the blank eye of heaven—how lonely it was. The empty palaces, the silent river, all that was left of Peter’s great dream. Like our lives, crumbling facades with God knows what festering rubbish curled inside. I wanted to sail away with her so badly I could taste it, soar toward that gleaming horizon. Zapad. Beautiful and melancholy, as the end of summer always is in the north. The tides pulled at me, reaching right into my blood. The moon, as faint as chalk, had risen, barely visible in the east. Was this the winter I would go mad for good, locked away in my head, jabbering about monsters and demons? I had a terrible feeling of something unseen on its way, as horses sense a coming storm.

The morning Aura was to leave for Reval, I hurried to the Kronverksky apartment, terrified I’d miss her, carrying a package wrapped in Pravda. I could see the big Lessner motorcar waiting in front of the building, men already loading her trunks onto its roof. By noon she would have crossed over, she’d be on the other side, unreachable. The entire Gorky ménage had come down to see her off with flowers and promises to write. I embraced her and thrust my burden into her hands. “Could you mail this for me, when you get to Sweden?” A manuscript, tied with twine. I’d been translating it myself for the last five days. I’d written the address on top of the first page, Mr. Clyde Emory, 29 Fitzroy Square. My poems, in English. In case I perished this winter, or went completely mad, something should remain. Something had to.

I stood with the others as the big sedan pulled away. Aura leaned from the window in her gray traveling outfit, gray hat, waving a white handkerchief. I could still see the handkerchief as the car turned the corner and headed across the Troitsky Bridge.

45 On the Embankment

Autumn washed summer away, replacing warmth and dust with rain and the dankness of drains. The worst time of year, even worse than winter, the sky like a weeping wound. For the first time I could see no future. Just dread. Like waking up and finding the windowpanes painted over. It was a world drawn in watered ink and charcoal dust, where shadow people lived shadow lives in the sooty dampness, ate and slept, made their shadow love. I moved in a city under the city, through catacombs invisible to the naked eye.

Zapad. If only I could flee this melancholy place, to where the sun still shone. I imagined Kolya in Reval, sitting in a café, reading my message, Kolya, come—it’s so close… But why would he return? It would never be anything but this, struggle, poverty, and the implacable, leather-clad arm. A jungle of propuski and queues and iron nights. My Skorokhod students grumbled about labor militarization. Henceforth, Trotsky vowed, the workforce would be run like the army. They would shoot deserters, people absent without leave. The dictatorship of the proletariat was rapidly dropping its prepositional phrase. How could one breathe? Where was our revolution, how had we lost it just as we were winning, the end almost in sight?

I could hardly bear to teach, to stand before my students’ trusting eyes and read their little poems—for what? Meaning drained from everything, no matter how hard I tried to stop the flow. It was like sugar dissolving in the rain. Was poetry merely a toy to distract the starving? Everything felt so heavy, I could hardly stand up.

I rose early one morning after a night of grim wakefulness—Anton still in a dead sleep, wedged against the wall. I dressed in the sheepskin in which my father had been murdered, a woolen scarf over my hat, and walked in the rain down to the roiling Neva. I followed the river past the Admiralty and St. Isaac’s, past the yellow mansion on the English Embankment. Children materialized out of the gloom, following me at a distance. Or maybe they weren’t children at all, only ghosts, wet and forsaken. Child ghosts. More huddled on the porch of the Stock Exchange. The Mystery of Liberated Labor.

I stood in the driving rain under a red pillar, by the statues of river gods, the column’s prows overhead full of water. Unbelievable that I’d once climbed this. These days I could barely lift my knees. I leaned against the railing, watching the watery tons arrive. I was so tired.

Once I’d strolled these banks with Genya, and he’d given me Saturn as a wedding ring. But the Cirque Moderne was closed now. No more discussions, no more arguing deep into the night, the excitement of those days. Now it was all gone, everyone leaving, or dead, or transparent with hunger. Ink running down a page. Say goodbye…

Beyond the point of the Strelka, the rivers massively converged in a surge of gray waters. I could barely see the blurry outline of the mansion from here, yellow gray in the rain. I walked down the little circular road right to the water’s edge. The river’s current sucked at me. I felt its desire. I moved along the very point, thinking, What if I just fell in? What if my foot just slipped? How fast would I sink and be carried out to Kronstadt, out to the West? To the West, at last. The relief to stop struggling and give myself over to the power of the tides. I had reached the end of my faith.

The water mesmerized me, liquid ton on ton. Leave this place, this time. Perhaps we returned, perhaps we didn’t. Perhaps I would find the city under the waves. On and on the river came and opened its terrible mouth. I tried to recall what Gorky had said that morning when I told him my shameful story, confessed the awful choice I’d been handed. And he told me why it was important to live. But I couldn’t remember…

God separated the land and the waters but the rain erased the line, and now I couldn’t tell my tears from the rain, the rain from the river. West, with all the great river’s rushing might. It felt inevitable, the pull of the water, the slant of the ground, this was what everything had been leading to from that night we’d read our fortunes in the wax. And here my story would end. It was as if the divine bard had wearied of it. It wasn’t death I wanted, stately and plumed, it was only death’s forgetting. There was nothing I knew that I would not want to unknow. Iskra’s unconscionable death. Father’s body, crumpled in the hall on Shpalernaya Street. Seryozha’s senseless passing. My own mother’s curse.

What had Gorky said? I tried to remember but the river was too loud, water streamed down my face, soaked my scarf, my sheepskin so full of water I would sink without stones. Once I could see the future, but now I saw no way out of a present that would just go on and on.

How brave are you?

The water swirled over the curbing. Just one more step…

The question is, what are you going to do with your own life? Where are your principles?

My father was dead, that was where my principles went. My revolution was dead. My brother was dead, my daughter was dead.

I came closer again, trying the freezing water with my boot’s toe. The sudden shock of the cold and the power of the river forced me to take a step back.

But life was unbearable. I couldn’t stand one more hour of it. How long would it take to drown, a minute or two?

Unbearable?

You can’t live one more hour? A half hour?

But then there would be another, and another after that. And there I’d be, back chained to the rock of existence. I was ready now.

Marina! Someone called my name. Was it the storm, the river? The devils in my head?

If I could only forget. Forget burying my baby. Erase the picture of her on the pavement in Maxim’s arms. If I died, I would never again see an ear wrapped in brown paper. I would not have to know what became of all our beautiful dreams.

If you die, who will remember?

I stepped down into the river. Water immediately filled my boots. The swiftness threatened to pull me out into the current. It was deathly cold. I cried out and struggled back without thinking.

Marina!

Who was calling me? Mother? At this late date? “Mama?”

Reaching across space and time, was she seeing me from wherever she was, as she’d seen me in the forest that night on the way to Alekhovshchina? “She died, Mama. Just like you said she would. Papa’s dead too.”

You must remember.

And I wept, my hand clapped against my mouth. Iskra in her basket, her hands dancing above the edge, moving to her own music. What would happen to Iskra if I took that memory into the Neva with me? And Papa as he’d been when I was small, taking my hand, tying my skates. The way he’d looked that St. Basil’s Eve, standing next to my pile of books?

Perhaps I was brave enough to live another hour. Perhaps I did not need to die. I backed away from the water. Tomorrow was a buoy bell, so quiet, but I could hear it, and I let it guide me away from the river, off the Strelka, onto the Petrograd side.

The maid let me in, her soft wrinkled face a haven, a lighthouse. The hall smelled reassuringly of Gorky, cabbage and cigarettes. The woman helped me shed my wet sheepskin and scarf, my soaked boots, and put me into a pair of oversized felt slippers. The clock in the hall chimed noon. I stared at it as if I’d never seen one before. Everything resonated with significance. The hidden had become visible. Signs were everywhere. The maid, the guardian of the entry, led the way, deep, deep inside to the beating heart of the flat. My teeth chattered violently, I tried to stop them, clamping my jaws together in the effort, but to no avail. I could hear the clatter of the typewriter. The maid knocked, opened the door. “It’s Marina Dmitrievna,” she whispered and backed away.

Inside, Gorky and Moura were companionably at work, as they were every day—Gorky at his desk, the inevitable cigarette in its black holder between his fingers, Moura typing at a little side table. Before them lay petitions for imprisoned intelligenty, correspondence with writers all over the world, maybe a new book or play. The room was hot and close, the electric lamps were lit. Water wept down the windowpanes.

“Marina,” he said, standing, reaching out his hands to me, I could tell he was alarmed to see me standing there, teeth chattering, as wet and sordid as a canal rat. His hands, so large around mine, warm. I wept just to see him, as real as a bale of hay, tall and stooped with that snub nose and enormous moustache, the rumpled wool suit. Like seeing land after a shipwreck, a streetlamp on a dark night.

Moura cast me a penetrating look as she handed me a folded blanket draped over the back of a chair. I wrapped it around my shoulders, tried to keep my teeth from breaking. “Please, sit down,” Gorky said. “We were about to take a break.” I caught the glance he exchanged with Moura. Like an old couple—she understood him perfectly. Without saying anything, she stood and stacked her pages, placing them on top of the typewriter. She put a finger on Gorky’s desk. “Don’t forget you have an appointment at Smolny, quarter after one.” Her accented Russian. She always addressed him as vy, the formal way, as my own grandparents once had done. But to her credit she didn’t sneer or frown at my soggy appearance or my interruption of their workday. A small nod and a smile let me know her departure wasn’t from unfriendliness. She closed the door behind her.

“Please, sit down.”

But I could not sit. Still shivering, I went to the window where I could gaze down into the park and the bare treetops, half erased by the rain. It struck me that this was how the world would look just before it drowned. Someday the river would rise and cover the treetops. Shouldn’t we be building an ark? Find animals that had not been eaten and put them on board? Who among us would be righteous enough to be saved? Not I. Gorky, certainly. Blok. Akhmatova. And where was she now? Out there in the rain? Dead? Had she left? Na zapad? Nobody talked about her anymore, except to say she was over, that the personal was out of step with the times. I never saw her at the House of Arts, or the Poets’ Guild. “Whatever happened to Akhmatova? Is she still here?”

Gorky glanced up from his writing, laughed softly. “You came here in this storm to ask after Anna Andreevna?” He flicked ash toward his ashtray.

“You never hear about her. Did she die?”

“She’s still here,” he said, resting his face on his hand, his green eyes watching me. He saw everything. “Larisa Reisner was over there the other day. They were completely out of food. She brought a bag of rice—which our Akhmatova promptly gave to the neighbors.” Larisa Reisner, a leading Bolshevik, married to the commissar of the Baltic Fleet, ironically called Raskolnikov. For some reason it surprised me that she knew Akhmatova. I thought the poet had refused to have anything to do with the revolution. But perhaps even Akhmatova had her Varvara—though evidently a less vindictive one than mine.

“She’s not writing anymore. Her new husband doesn’t like her poetry. He’s forbidden it, evidently.”

A husband forbidding the High Priestess her throne? My Akhmatova would never allow anyone to stop her writing. “She permits that?”

“Why women put up with men, I have no idea,” he chuckled. “He’s not even attractive, though he’s a forceful personality, let’s say. Shileiko. Translated the Gilgamesh into Russian.” He studied me, smoothing his big moustache. “Our Anna Andreeva is a great poet, but if you ask me she’s a martyr looking for a cross. You’d think there would be enough to choose from, she wouldn’t have to go out and find this particular one.” The skritching of his pen. “At least Gumilev understood her.”

He loved three things… “He once told me he made her as a poet.”

Gorky snorted. “What makes you think of Anna Andreeva?”

Down in the little park across from Gorky’s building, I watched a man alone walking among the bare trees, his hands in his pockets. I wished he had a dog. A black dog, who could run around sniffing. He looked so terribly alone. “It makes you think of her poem, ‘The dark road twisted / the rain was drizzling / someone asked / to walk with me a little way.’” The weight of time seemed so heavy, so thick with the dead. “I have this awful feeling that something terrible’s about to happen. It’s like that all the time.” I was shaking again, my teeth clattering like a child’s tin windup toy. And what exactly did I think Gorky could do about it? But here I was laying my burdens on his shoulders like everybody else did. When he was just a writer. Just a friend.

He put his pen down and came away from the desk, put his arm around my shoulder, the plaid blanket wrapped about me. “Sit down for a moment.” He led me to the old leather armchair in the corner. A miracle, nobody had yet cut it up for shoes. He settled me there, pulled Moura’s stenographer’s chair out from her little table and sat down before me, knee to knee, his dear pockmarked face, his clear eyes. “Tell me, what are you afraid of, Marina? Hasn’t the worst already happened?”

“Maybe being the one left behind is worse. I was standing on the Strelka just now, looking down into the water. I just wanted to slip and fall in.”

He sighed, crossed his long legs, bumping my knees. “I once tried to shoot myself, did you know that? When I was nineteen. I’d been denied admission to university. And my grandmother had died. The one who raised me, the only one who’d been good to me. Of course, I botched it, shot myself in the lung. The despair you’re feeling is not unfamiliar to me.”

Gorky had felt this. I should not have been surprised. He’d been through more in his long life than any ten men. He had written an entire book just about his childhood. “Is it ever going to get any better?” I asked through my chattering teeth. “I can’t see the future anymore. I’m afraid that it’s just going to be like this from now on, only worse.”

“You can see the future?” he joked.

“Once I could.” I wiped at my tears.

“You mean your own future?” He wasn’t joking anymore. “Or ours?”

“Both,” I whispered. I didn’t dare say it out loud. I could feel the awful panic rising, just speaking of it. “What if this is all for nothing? What if we’re all riding in the dark, toward a cliff?”

“You’re not crazy to be afraid,” he said. “Anybody in his right mind would be.”

I was shocked. Gorky, who’d been a Bolshevik since the beginning. Gorky, who basically funded the party in the early days on the sales of his work. Yet, he’d never been one to put his head in the sand. I’d read his stories—he told the bitter truth. Gorky—the name he’d chosen for himself—meant bitter. “You thought this would be easy?” he said. “That revolution would be something that happened, like a great earthquake, or a lightning storm? And then the clouds would clear and the sun would come out?” He patted his pockets, looking for something. “And now you see what it is. A dangerous beast. An opportunistic leadership riding the vengeance of the underclass—disorganized, dangerously ideological.”

How could he be so supportive of the revolution if he felt that way?

He touched my blanket-clad arm. “Have I shocked you?”

“But you’re a Bolshevik…”

“I’m a writer first. We must see things clearly, and never lie to ourselves about what we see.”

I thought so too. I’d thought so since Grivtsova Alley.

He leaned over his desk to extract a fresh handkerchief from the drawer, handed it to me. He plucked his smoldering cigarette from the ashtray. “Think of the work you’re doing. You’re teaching at the shoe factory, aren’t you?”

I wiped my face with the clean cloth. The heat of the room was causing my dress to steam, but my teeth stopped chattering so badly.

He leaned forward, speaking calmingly, the way you talked to a panicked dog. “It’s mostly women, isn’t it? Can you picture your students?”

It wasn’t hard to do. Young women’s faces already lined, teeth falling out—they covered their mouths with their hands when they laughed. Older women, their nails split from the work. Their swollen ankles. I thought of the way they shuffled into my class after work—like cabmen covered with snow, shaking themselves off and coming to life over food and drink.

“Imagine them five years ago. In the same factory.” Smoke wreathed his head, wove its patterns into the lamp’s light. Water beaded on the windows, trickled down like tears. “Imagine going in and telling them that in the year 1920, they’d be studying poetry. That they’d have a workers’ committee, a voice in the shoe factory. That there would be no more owner, no landlord, no tsar.” He rose and opened the fortochka, gazing out. “Imagine telling them that in five years they’d have won themselves domestic rights. Birth control. Free housing. That they’d be taken seriously by the courts, and their children could attend university. What do you think they would have told you?”

“That I was dreaming.” Even now I could see their pride, a little bewilderment even, that all this had changed in so short a time.

“It’s easy to forget that when the bread runs out. When there’s no firewood and they forbid you to cut it yourself.” He sat back down into his worn desk chair, leaned back, launching into a coughing fit. Rumor had it that he had tuberculosis, but it was that damaged lung. “The revolution’s not an event, Marina. It’s a creature. A young, proud boy, say, who fights with everyone, breaking the windows, shoving his father, realizing his strength. He thinks he knows everything. But he knows nothing, and it’s up to us—me and you, the artists, the scholars—to humanize him before he breaks up the house. So something good can come of all that raw energy.”

“You think poetry can do that?”

He smiled. “Think about your women at the shoe factory. Like flowers, drinking you in. The mere fact of you is some kind of proof to them.”

I thought of the way one of my women might close a book and give the cover an affectionate pat—my gesture, my father’s gesture when he had finished reading. And the way they laughed and clapped their hands when someone wrote a good line, an apt metaphor. I had touched their lives. I, me, this nothing.

“For them, you are the future.” He leaned forward, his cigarette in its black holder sending up a wending plume of smoke. “You remind them that there will be a time when they’ll write poetry and speak proper Russian and notice the color of the sky. We need that more than bread now. You’re the emissary from the future.”

The plants on the windowsill peered out from the steamy panes, but there would be little light for them today. I unwrapped my blanket, finally warm enough.

“Rousseau once said, ‘Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.’” He flicked his ashes toward the ashtray, a dented brass bowl with a monkey on the rim. “I’m convinced it’s just the opposite. I think natural man is a terrified brute.” He took another draw and crushed it out. “Have you ever seen a pogrom, Marina?”

I had not but had heard plenty about its terrors from Matvei on the Red October.

“I saw one in Nizhny when I was a young man, and it’s something you never forget. It’s why art is my religion. Science. Knowledge. I have no illusions about the common man, because I am the common man and it’s repulsive what he’s capable of. I want him to get a glimpse of what it would be like to be fully human. What you do with those shoe factory women, that’s the most important thing. We can’t have you trying to fall into the Neva.”

“But there’s got to be more than just being useful,” I said. “What becomes of us—you and me—our art? They keep saying Akhmatova’s dead, with her mourning and her lovers. We’re all supposed to write about drumbeats and bayonets now, Onward brothers! I don’t mind being useful, but is that the poet’s only job?” The debate had raged from the Krestovsky apartment in 1918 to the halls of the House of Arts and all its detractors. The question of whether the personal had any place in a revolution.

“Mourning and lovers are as important as bayonets,” Gorky said. “More so, because they’re human and universal. We don’t need more bayonets. Getting people to listen, to think, to feel something, that’s where the work is. I’ll tell you something. The poetry of Anna Andreevna will never disappear. Whatever trash Mayakovsky and your husband, forgive me for saying so, espouse, all of their drumbeats will not supplant one tear, the petal of one Akhmatovian rose.” He screwed another cigarette into the black holder and lit it with a match—skritch—from the match stand, coughed.

As he spoke, I felt the panic ebbing. Maybe he was right. Maybe I still had a place in the world, a reason for being. I wished I’d known him in the months after Iskra died. He had somehow given me a moment of sanity, or at least shared his with me, like sharing a warm coat on a cold night.

“Don’t lose heart, Marina Dmitrievna. If you lose heart, all is lost. We don’t need any more revolutionaries, we’ve had our revolution. Now we need human beings. The river will wait. It will always be there if you change your mind.”

I wanted to stay here forever, but I could hear lunch being prepared, and I couldn’t very well lie under Gorky’s desk like a dog and have him feed me by hand like Ukashin did his pets. I had to preserve this feeling of carrying something essential, and learn it like a poem, condensed and easily memorized, to recite in the dead of night when the ghosts came thick and fast.

I forced myself to rise. My hands no longer trembled, my clothes were drying. I was ready to face the rain and the city, bearing this precious gift like a basket of eggs. “Thank you.” I shook his big hand.

“And be careful on the embankments,” he said.

46 The Argonaut

It took the great Neva a long time to put itself to sleep. I stayed off its wide bridges and away from its icy embankments, kept to the interior streets and peaceful canals hardening, filling with the white breath of winter. I wrote, taught my dwindling classes, and no longer ran from the phantoms sidling after me along the streets, lingering in doorways of broken facades, moving past empty windows. The ghosts were more at home in the city than the living—why shouldn’t they walk as freely? I no longer startled if something moved in the corner of my eye with the liquid motion of a cat. Perhaps it wasn’t madness but simple starvation. If it weren’t for the bread my students gave me, I wouldn’t have the strength to walk as far as the bakery to redeem my own ration cards. Up ahead on the Moika Embankment, I spied a little girl, about four, in a hand-knitted cap and green coat. Not in line but obviously with someone—she couldn’t be alone, could she? That green coat… Hadn’t I had a coat like that? She gazed at me directly, her green eyes…

Iskra!

But then a woman got in the way, and when she’d passed, the girl had vanished.

People walked past me on the pavement as if I were a lamppost. Just another hungry citizen, holding her pitiful quarter pound of bread, gazing at nothing. The ghosts were on parade. I’d seen Avdokia this week, even spied Arkady ducking into the loggia at Gostinny Dvor. It made a certain sense, the dead were the permanent residents. The empty houses gawped with their busted eyes. Perhaps they would come to life once this endless war was over, their windows reglazed, their floors rebuilt, their plumbing restored to working order. I liked to picture that. Furniture carried in, the rugs we’d cut into shoes replaced. On the other hand, perhaps the city would empty out completely and sail on in legend, into the mist, leaving behind only the swamp from which it came.

My Red Fleet escort flotilla had thinned somewhat over the autumn, the men drifting off in search of likelier objects for romance. There was no end of available women in the hungry city. But one sailor stood out among the others. A bit of a troublemaker, blond and wiry, in his early twenties. I’d dubbed him the Argonaut. Everything about him spoke of warmer climes and white sails. At rest, his face wore a quizzical look, his sandy eyebrows curling over his narrow blue-green Aegean eyes in a permanent squint, but he broke into a quick smile if anything interesting was going on, flashing his good white teeth. As he did now, when I asked him to walk me home.

“You have a home?” he teased. “I thought you slept on the wing, like a gull.”

We walked from the Pryazhka wharf past spooky, deserted New Holland—Peter the Great’s brick shipyards. I took his arm. I could feel his muscles through his heavy coat. Who could blame me for craving the touch of the living? He was so animated and lively in his wool coat and sailor’s cap. I was used to the writers’ melancholia. His sailor’s good cheer and physical ease were a balm. His blond cropped hair was coarse and dense—I wondered if it would curl if it were longer. His name was Pasha Kislov.

I could well imagine him on the Argo, having just killed the oxen of the sun… Pasha wouldn’t have cared which gods he’d offended. Pashol, the men called him. I’d accidentally given him that nickname. It meant He went. I’d come back from a break one night and noticed his empty chair, asked the men where he’d gone. Pashol, they’d said, and then realized how funny they’d been, after which he was baptized.

We meandered along, talking lightly about rations, poets, conditions in the city. I talked about the knitting artel, and the telephone exchange. He grabbed the metalwork of a lamppost and pulled himself up, like a boy showing off. He jumped onto one of the granite posts on the Moika Embankment, and posed like a cupid, and then flipped himself into the air, landing on his feet, making me laugh. Why hadn’t we met long ago, when I still had that kind of energy? I would have walked atop the balustrade and performed ronds de jambe, pirouettes.

Standing before the door of the House of Arts, with its fancy plasterwork and fanlight, he grew suddenly shy. His eyes were a question mark. What am I doing here? Do you really want me? This was unexpected. He was normally the brashest one of an entitled lot, full of confidence in his role in the national destiny. For my part, I didn’t know what the others would think of me bringing a sailor home. But I knew enough about the world to know that such things were best done with elegant confidence.

There were a few stares as we moved through the gallery, past buzzing participants leaving Chukovsky’s translation studio. I met no one’s eye, but looked past them, as normal as could be. And who wouldn’t stare, seeing the wiry beauty of my Argonaut? Surely not Inna Gants, whom we met coming down the stairs from Anton’s floor. She practically missed her step. Alla Tvorcheskaya, a painter on my hall, looked at him carefully from boots to cap. Pasha was touchingly intimidated. He tucked himself behind me, as if my starveling self in sheepskin coat and fox hat could conceal the pride of the Red Navy.

Seeing the decaying halls through his eyes lent them a glamour I’d forgotten—the mystery of all those doors, the brotherhood of literature—though the double line of close-set rooms must have seemed very familiar, like a third-class ocean liner. My room, narrow and tall, with its touches of ornate plasterwork at the ceiling, my cobbled-together bourgeoika, the nudes on the walls, a red scarf on a hook. It all must’ve seemed very strange to a military man. Feminine. He picked up my hairbrush, he touched my books. I started a fire, feeding the stove as one fed a sick child, trying to tempt it.

“And you all live here together?” he asked. “Gumilev? And Blok?” He’d taken off his cap but he couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the rest of himself.

“Blok lives near your club. But Gumilev lives upstairs, in the Eliseevs’ personal bathroom. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

“He lives in a bathroom?”

“With his wife, of course.”

He’d assumed we lived in monarchial splendor. I hated to disabuse him of the notion. But our splendor lay not in the lavishness of our surroundings but in the company we kept.

“Sit down,” I said, indicating the bed. There was that or the desk with its one chair. Gingerly, he sat on the sagging springs, as if afraid he would break it. He kept spinning his cap. Although I was only twenty, I felt like the elder—his teacher, and a poet. His nervousness gave me confidence.

I set some water on the boil for carrot tea. The room seemed less frosty with two of us in it. When I glanced across Bolshaya Morskaya at the house opposite, a man’s face appeared in the window, just for a moment—a tall man with a stoop, and white hair. He seemed to be saying something, but what? A message from the future? Go back. I wished I had curtains, but there were none, the last tenant had used them—for a new skirt most likely, or a shirt, or to pad an old jacket. Who had cloth to spare? Soon the panes would frost over and I wouldn’t have to see out at all.

Voices traveled from the hall and the other rooms, just the normal sounds of the building. My left-hand neighbor, Shafranskaya, was talking to someone in her famous reading voice, and old Petrovsky on the other side coughed up a lung.

“Are you still married to Kuriakin?” he asked, flipping his cap in his calloused hands. He tossed it up, tried to catch it on his head and failed.

Talking about Genya could lead nowhere good. I wasn’t going to display the tattered rags of my life like some saint’s relics. “Listen. I like you, Pasha, don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “But don’t ask me anything, all right? Let’s just be together.”

“Never?” He raised his bushy eyebrows and his forehead wrinkled.

“No,” I said. “Tell me something about yourself instead.” I dumped carrot scraps into the hot water, set out two cups.

Around and around went the flat sailor’s cap. Was he regretting having come? “What do you want to know? About girls? The old folks at home? The war?”

“God no. Tell me about the sea.”

He gave a startled half laugh, the sound of someone who can’t quite believe something unfamiliar but pleasant was being done to him. I doffed my fur hat, plumped it on the desk like a cat, combed out my hair with my fingers in a scrap of mirror. It was still too cold to take off my coat. He watched me primp, fascinated, as if he’d never seen a girl comb her hair before. “How did you get to be a sailor?” I asked.

“Well”—the hat must be getting dizzy by now—“I come from a village near Yaroslavl, Mologa it’s called. My father was a bargeman. I dropped out of school to work on the boats. It’s a big port—not big like this, but a big one.”

“I’ve only been to Nizhny.”

“The Volga’s beautiful but it’s not the sea. Anyway, when the war came, I joined the navy. I told them I was eighteen, but I barely shaved.” He rubbed his fingers over his square chin. Few of the sailors grew beards, unlike most of the men in Petrograd. “Nobody cared. I took the training. A lot of the boys had never been on a boat before. I was posted to the Petropavlovsk. We were part of the insurrection.” He glanced over at me to see if I was impressed. His eyes, turquoise in a bright light, seemed more gray in my sad, cold room.

No, not so sad. Not with Pasha in it. “I think a lot about the sea.” I poured water into a small metal teapot with the carrot shavings, moving the manuscript of The Valley of the Moon to one side. “We have our origins there,” I said. “And it lives on in us, like blood. The smell sometimes makes me cry, I want it so badly.” I stopped, avoiding the topic of sailing, and my brothers, which would require mentioning a lieutenant in the White Army, perhaps even a captain by now, and a cadet dead by the Kremlin wall. No brothers. No fathers. No mothers. No past. Only now, these few living moments.

“I’ve sailed my whole life,” he said, elbows on his muscular legs. “Out at Kronstadt, of course it’s all battleships and gunboats. But we’ve got a basin of schooners, they teach everybody to sail under canvas—canvas, that’s what I like. No engine, no noise, no stink. Maybe this spring I’ll take you out. Would you like that?”

“I would.” I would like it better than chocolate, or silk stockings, or jewels. I handed him his cup of chipped porcelain, filled my own, made of tin.

I waited to see what came next, half expecting him to throw himself onto me like a beast. But he was surprisingly talkative. Maybe he’d had a woman more recently than I’d imagined, his desire wasn’t as urgent as I’d supposed. “It’s fantastic. Out there, all by yourself, the ropes in your hands. Don’t you ever feel there’s just too many people?”

I could smell the ocean spray on him, the salt air, seaweed. I ran my hand through his short wooly hair. “I wish we were there now.”

“Winter’s the worst.” He picked up my foot and pulled my boot off. “Everything’s all locked down, there’s nothing to do but polish brass.” He removed the other one. “I hear they’re going to send us to work in the factories, now that the war’s ending. The Labor Army.” He snorted, massaging my feet. His hands were strong and felt good. “That’s not going to sit too well with the boys. It may be fine for the army, but not for us.”

I lowered my feet, put my fingertips to his lips to quiet him, raised my mouth to his. He tasted of tobacco and hemp. All of us, Peter’s children. Our blood was salty and turned with the tides. I kissed his rough cheek, and the wave of desire rose. The tide turned. I pressed my mouth to his, and sat on his lap. My body reminded me there was more to flesh than simply the hollowness of one’s gut and one’s sore bloated feet and standing in queues and wolfing down inedible scraps of food, all of the indignities of slow starvation. My body sparked and ignited like a neglected brush pile, like an abandoned house.

I unbuttoned the bodice of my dress, pulled it off over my head. I knew how dirty and unkempt I was. You got one bath a month in the Eliseev bathroom downstairs. I took off my slip and my underpants—though it was freezing, I wanted to let him see me before we made love. My body altered by childbirth, the white marks, my breasts larger and lower than they had been. I was a bit ashamed—sailors were cleaner than poets now, but Pashol didn’t seem to notice or care. I couldn’t wait to see his skin—oh, so white! He pulled off his shirt and struggled to loosen his pants in the cold. Lean—but not starving, just hard and flat muscled like a coil of rope. Like a big cat that could take you by the neck and kill you with a shake if it wanted to, but it didn’t want to.

He took handfuls of my hair, ran his fingers through it, smelled it, I was sorry it was so dirty. He felt the scars on my back, and his blue eyes glanced at me with their intelligent wryness, his forehead wrinkling into a series of parallel breakers. But true to his promise, he asked me no questions. Our bodies were not even bodies, the body was simply the tinder, the precious wood, and the fire we raised sought more fire. I flamed with his touch. His hands were rough but brushed me lightly—teasing, in no hurry.

I don’t know how long we made love. Until I was too sore to go on. And how we laughed. God knows what Shafranskaya and Petrovsky thought. I’d been as quiet as a nun since I’d moved in—surely they couldn’t have expected that to last. I tried to keep my voice down, but it was such a joy to shout, and I had always been noisy in bed. I tried to stifle my cries, planting a hand over my mouth. But sometimes I was not quick enough. I imagined a sea as green-blue as his eyes, with blue and white villages on islands breaking straight upward on craggy islands blazing in the sun. I heard the sails crack overhead, the halyard clanging against the mast, felt the bed unmooring.

Afterward, he brought out a bar of chocolate and shared it with me. “You have to keep up your strength,” he said.

I dragged my quilt up over us, and we lay, my head on his outstretched arm, dancing my hands above us in their own joyous semaphore. I should write an aubade. How long had it been? I felt beautiful again, desirable, young. And if I became pregnant? It was unlikely. I had not bled since Iskra was born. A child from Pashol would smell of tang and brine and foreign lands. It would have those eyes.

But there would be no child.

We slept a little, the stove went out. I yawned and stretched. He sat up. “I have to go.”

I watched him clothe that whiplike body. Oh the Gods… I couldn’t wait to hear the gossip tomorrow. My presence already an anomaly, the only girl among the younger poets living here in my own right. Would they kick me out? Oh, I’d worry about that if it happened. Tonight I was alive again—I’d recovered part of myself. I felt like a pirate on the deck of a ship, knife in my teeth, face to the wind. I wouldn’t give this resurrection up for all the disapproving fogeys in Petrograd. Even literary ones.

Man does not live by vobla alone.

47 The Guest

Something must have shown of my pleasure. People scented it like a perfume. Colors seemed brighter, I laughed more, felt warmer, even in cold rooms. I took more care to wash and launder my underthings, even when it required staying in my room until two pairs of bloomers had dried. Or going without on occasion—a bit naughty, to stand in the drafty hall talking to Anton or Khodasevich with the December wind blowing up my skirt. Men attempted to be charming. They wanted to stand close—Tereshenko, Nikita, and even Shklovsky—to warm themselves at my hearth. Guests wanted to meet me. I could feel myself returning to life, thanks to my sailor.

The House of Arts assembled a dinner for the English writer H. G. Wells when he came to visit that winter. Such a flurry! I knew his works well—my father had been a devoted fan. An important leftist in England, Wells knew Gorky from before the war, he was staying with them on Kronverksky Prospect. None of the younger members were invited to this dinner, only those in the inner circle. So we hung about in the salon, hoping to catch a look at the great man. We watched our elders arrive and enter the icebox of the dining room in their coats and gloves, all but Gumilev, who wore a dinner jacket and a flower in his lapel—which would keep as if in a florist’s refrigerator. Talk about fortitude! There was a smattering of applause, and Gumilev bowed, ironically.

Now the Gorky party arrived, Moura leading Wells through the public rooms, introducing him to the uninvited. A well-fed man with drooping eyebrows, he seemed personable, and Moura clearly thought so too. She was in her glory, animated, plump, laughing, laying on the charm. Wasn’t Gorky jealous? I watched Alexei Maximovich across the room talking with Kuzmin, seemingly indifferent to his mistress’s flirtation with the foreigner. Didn’t he notice the way she bared her white throat as she laughed? The way she leaned in, taking his arm. But perhaps it was part of a wider plan to get something out of him. Who knew what was going on behind the scenes? Inna Gants said that Wells was quite the womanizer, had children by any number of women, but it was hard to picture this portly, avuncular fellow as a figure of romance.

Moura saw me and said something to the author, pointing me out. They came right over. “Marina Dmitrievna Makarova, this is Herbert Wells. He wanted to meet you.” He shook my hand. His eyes were a transparent green, like sea glass, and his touch was warm and he smelled like leather. His smile endeared. Yes, perhaps there was something to the rumor at that.

“How lovely to meet you, Miss Makarova. I’ve been looking forward to this—but hadn’t expected such a lovely young lady. I might have known.” He put his other hand on top of our joined ones. There was something to him. Like Kolya. Yes, I recognized that warmth, the intimacy, the charm. “I believe I knew your father. Dmitry Makarov—the lawyer, yes?” Moura’s face went white, as I imagined my own did. “Knew him in London. Brilliant man. Could talk about anything. How is he these days?” Moura shot me a look of alarm.

“He passed away,” I said. “This summer.” My throat closed. I didn’t trust myself to say more. I composed my face as if his death were a solemn but not dangerous event, as if it had been from some sort of disease. Which it was, of course. Not typhus, but a virulent strain of retribution.

“So sorry to hear.” Patting my hand. “He was devilishly witty too. A wonderful man. My condolences.” I nodded, as Moura exhaled. What did she think I would do? Discuss my father’s political murder in the salon of the House of Arts?

“Marina Dmitrievna is one of our most promising young poets,” she said.

An understanding smile from the Englishman. Oh, another Charming Man. I could tell he would be a fountain of trouble for the next unfortunate woman. “Well, I happen to be carrying a letter for you, Miss Makarova. From London.” He patted his pockets, handed it to me. Marina Makarova, House of Arts, Petrograd. But Moura was already tugging him away. “I’d love to hear more,” he said over his shoulder. “Maybe afterward, if there’s time.” And she led him toward the icy dining room, where the long table had been set with the Eliseev china. We’d all had a peek, a sight enough to stop all our mouths. They went in, and the doors closed.

I tore open the envelope, glanced down at the signature. It was from Clyde Emory.

Dearest Marina, it began. I hope this winter is finding you well. I worry—the news about Russia is grim. I cannot bear the thought of you cold and hungry. I sent some things with Wells. I hope they will make your winter a little more bearable. I hate to think of you suffering.

A package? Hallelujah! Food rations had been cut again, worse than they’d ever been—half a pound of bread a day for the intelligentsia, and the bakeries regularly ran out. Without my students, I would have already boiled my sheepskin and eaten it. I was half out-of-body, and no longer had the trick of inflowing that Ukashin had taught. I skimmed the rest of the letter, typewritten and single-spaced. He had pressed so hard, the o’s had punched through.

I want you to know that I’ve submitted one of your poems to Clarion and they want more. I’ve sent another two to The Dial. I don’t necessarily think they’ll publish, but they should know you. Send more stuff via H. G.

They were publishing one of my poems? I wondered which one. Clarion was at Cambridge University, showcasing new poets like Amy Lowell and H.D. Emory had left me copies of the journal in his attempts to court me.

So my poems had arrived in the West. That message in a bottle I’d sent with Aura had found landfall. No news from Kolya, but instead—this. Life never gave you the thing you asked for, but sometimes something else. Like Pasha, and Clarion.

Please don’t fall in love with anyone until I can come again. I should have put you in a suitcase and taken you as cargo. Will you forgive me? Just enough of a joke to cover his dignity, in case I chose to be offended.

I see fox fur on women everywhere here, and the hairdressers are mad for henna. It’s enough to drive a fellow bonkers. I bought a recording of Aleko. It fills me with memories.

Then, he returned to the impersonal. Write to me, tell me how things are. As if one could get that news past the censors. The situation in England is galvanizing in support of Soviet Russia. The British longshoremen won’t allow arms to be sent to the enemies of Russia’s people. The workers are with you. And I, most of all.

Your servant, Clyde.

Thank God, not love. I could hardly still my racing heartbeat. I was going to be published in the West.

“Borscht,” Alla Tvorcheskaya hissed, spying on the supper through a gap in the dining room doors.

We uninvited guests crowded the hallway, trying not to drool as she whispered descriptions of the courses emerging from the kitchen, borne by the ancient Eliseev servants, who thought little of the writers and artists but preferred to stay on at the House of Arts rather than try their luck in the city at large. The repast was the finest we could offer—borscht, blini, fish in aspic, stuffed cabbage with meat—probably horsemeat. Not so impressive, compared to what that pudgy Wells probably ate for an average Thursday lunch, but the best we’d seen in years. Anton, standing behind me, craned his neck, trying to read the letter over my shoulder. “An English admirer?” he asked, a sarcastic edge to his voice.

“Someone I met at Gorky’s.” I quickly folded it away. “It’s nothing.”

“Then why are you hiding it?”

“Why are you reading over my shoulder?”

“Shh!” We were irritating the eavesdroppers.

Evidently things started to get ugly over the fish course. Some of our more intransigent anti-Bolsheviks were harassing Wells over his political sympathies. We could hear far better than we could see, and they made no attempt to keep their voices down, growing louder and angrier as they piled on: “Kid-glove treatment.” “Potemkin villages, that’s all they are.” “You’ve got to ditch your minders.” “Don’t believe a thing.” We couldn’t hear Wells, he spoke too reasonably, but the others were unmistakable.

Here was Shklovsky. I recognized his voice, clear, wry, cutting socialist Wells for being “an unwitting toady for British capitalism.” Anton laughed out loud, and ruined the cigarette he was rolling. I could only cringe, imagining how mortified Gorky must be at this disgraceful performance. He was always embarrassed by bad manners. And Gumilev, in his dinner jacket, attempting to show some elegance to our foreign guest—Nikolai Stepanovich would be rigid with shame.

“Poliatnikov is taking his jacket off,” said Alla, peering through a crack in the door. A resident gadfly. The others crowded around. “Are they going to fight?”

“He’s showing Wells his shirt. It’s pretty bad, just collar and cuffs. Well, what makes him so different? Nikolai Stepanovich looks ready to explode.” Gumilev.

We heard his response clearly: “Parlez pour vous!” Speak for yourself!

What a horror show. The others were as thrilled as children when someone else behaves badly. But I felt shame, and pity for Wells, who’d come to do his best, to listen and learn.

I retreated to the hall to read Emory’s letter again.

“You’re missing the fun.” Tereshenko braced his arm against the wall next to my head. “Don’t you want to see the coup de grâce? See Gumilev punch out Poliatnikov?”

“Wells isn’t stupid, he doesn’t need to be shown our laundry.”

“Bourgeois,” he said. “He deserves it, looking at us like worms under a microscope. Telling us what to do. Like he knows what’s best for Russia. He should have stayed in England and just sent his money.” He was standing too close to me, as he often did, trying to push himself on me. He was attractive enough, with his boxer’s build, funny in a rough way. And a good poet. But I didn’t need another lover.

“Parlez pour vous,” I said, and ducked out from under his arm.

The dinner broke up in disorder. People were yelling. Gorky and Moura left grim faced, steering Wells out from the House. There was no chance to speak further, or inquire about my package. Damn Poliatnikov! I imagined what it could have been, a sweater? Tinned salmon? I’d have to go to the Kronverksky apartment to collect it. The poets continued to argue long after their victim had left, with pro- and anti-Wells factions hurling abuse at one another. Anton was as happy as a bear in honey, reveling in the controversy. He didn’t give a damn about Wells, or the Soviet’s image in the world. He just liked to see people fighting.

I pulled him aside, into an alcove off the salon—I didn’t want the others to overhear, for who was I to be published when Akhmatova was silent, when Blok no longer heard the sounds of life? “Anton, I’m being published in England. I sent my poems off with Aura Sands, and she gave them to Clyde Emory—”

He snorted. “That mediocrity.”

“Listen to me! He sent them to an English magazine, and they took one.” I shook him by the shoulder. “Be happy for me.”

“Which magazine?” He needed to sniff around it, see if it met with his approval.

“Clarion.”

He shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“It’s out of Cambridge. Emory showed me a copy. It’s very good.”

“Sounds like a schoolboy rag.”

He was trying to take the wind out of my sails, so I could be as sour as him. “Schoolboys grow up,” I snapped. “If you weren’t so pigheaded you’d see that you might get a translation yourself. We could send it through Wells.”

“Clyde Emory’s not going to do anything for me.” Anton scowled. “Are you really that dense? He’s not in love with me. He doesn’t want to get in my pants. Or Arseny’s, or Oksana’s.”

“Well, thank you for that,” I said. Of course it was why he was doing it, but not the only reason. “If something’s not your idea, it can’t possibly be any good.” Just when I’d thought he was my friend, my best friend. “Damn you. Just—leave me alone.”

Tereshenko was still hovering, so I took him by the arm and pulled him away with me, leaving Anton to stew in his bitterness and envy. The boxer and I sat on the stairs of the Monkey Hall and drank sweet plum wine from a flask—he’d bought it from some old woman on Sadovaya Street. We got drunk immediately. He was rougher than he needed to be, grabbing me, our teeth clinking together. I couldn’t stop thinking how different he was from Pasha. Ironic, that he was the poet and Pasha the sailor. I had considered taking him back to my room for a moment, but I really didn’t want Tereshenko, I only wanted Anton to stop being such a shithead. The burly poet was angry when I sent him away, but I owed him nothing. I was going to be published in Clarion and I didn’t give a damn what anybody thought.

48 Moscow

The winter twilight already fading at four o’clock, my breath billowing in great white clouds, I hurried along past desolate New Holland, rushing to make my class on the Admiralty docks. I couldn’t wait to see Pasha, tell him about Clarion. I ducked into the warmth of the sailors’ clubhouse, the welcome light. The men were already waiting in the second-floor classroom, but where was the compact, sinewy form that always sat four seats down on the left? Others were missing as well, but I saw only that one vanished form.

“They got summoned back yesterday,” said Barsky, Pasha’s friend. “Return to base.” He shrugged and passed me a note. “It was bound to happen.”

The handwriting was simple, regular and childlike.

I didn’t remember getting through the class, what I taught, what they wrote. That week was a blur. I taught at Skorokhod and Vikzhel, stood in queues, ate my scholar’s ration of bread which was by now mostly sawdust, studded with little rocks. I sat before the frost-fingered window that looked out onto Bolshaya Morskaya. No more would Pasha escort me home, or surprise me by waiting in the House canteen playing cards with Kuzmin—who naturally adored him, having a penchant for sailors. No more would I lie in his embrace, as alive as waves. But he’d healed something inside me—not quite my heart, but that life that had been swirling down the drain. He’d managed to plug the leak. I should be grateful instead of resentful and bereft.

Tonight, the electricity was off again, I wrote by kerosene lamplight. Outside, snow sifted past the lighted gape of the window across the street, where someone else was squandering their lamp oil. I’d had a dream. A man was pouring blackbirds into an intricate chain-driven machine with swinging compartments like the cars of a Ferris wheel, climbing and falling. Men came carrying bushel baskets of blackbirds, and the worker fed them into the hoppers. Don’t! I begged the feeder, an ordinary worker, potato-nosed in a corduroy cap. All these blackbirds, killing them for what? He wouldn’t listen. He fed the blackbirds in, and the machine froze them, one to a compartment. All those blackbirds, each in its block of pink ice. Then someone came and took the blocks to the shore, where the sun melted them. And to my amazement, the birds thawed and came back to life, walking around on the grass with their black bead eyes.

That good as new was off. Tsvetaeva wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with it. But how to capture the horror, then the surprise of the resurrection. And who was the workman feeding the machine? The Muse? God? I could see his baggy corduroys, his bulbish nose, his cap. He was more accurate than they, but that might bring the figure into too much prominence. You might begin to think more of him than of the terrible feeding. And I hated good as new, but what to replace it with…

A rap on the door interrupted my struggle.

Tereshenko. He’d begun to drop by late at night. News must have gotten around that Pasha was out of the picture. I waited for him to go away—what a pest. But he kept on knocking. The venerable Shafranskaya was deaf enough, but Petrovsky on the other side was ill. Irritated, I threw down my pen and unlocked the door, a voyage of a single step.

To my surprise, waiting in the doorway wasn’t the pugnacious Tereshenko but Anton Chernikov in all his tall and awkward angularity, unshaven and haggard, his overcoat draped around his shoulders like Oscar Wilde. What was he doing down here visiting such a mediocrity whose poems were going to be published in a schoolboy rag? “Stove still not working?”

He stared at me as if it was I who had interrupted him. What did he want now? Though I was still irritated, I stepped aside and let him in. He’d never been down here in the Monkey House before. He gazed at Sasha’s sketches pinned to the walls, my boots by my sagging bed, the desk cluttered with papers. The lamp, the window, the small pile of damp firewood on the grimy parquet. What was he looking for, Apollinaire?

He picked up my poem, began to read it. “Garbage,” he pronounced. He sat in my desk chair and bent over the page, pulling a pencil from his pocket, and began circling and crossing out, adding words. “I can’t believe they’re publishing you. They must have assumed something was lost in translation. At least use hard instead of solid,” he said. “The abstraction undercuts.” His brow knotted as if ropes were being tied, painfully, behind his forehead. “And cut some of these blackbirds. Poor birds—Christ, you want to write for the women’s section of Pravda? Frozen chunks thaw is all you need.”

What on earth was he so agitated about? “Is this what you came to tell me?”

He kept reading, flicking the pencil against his teeth. “Squawking good as new? Unbelievable.” He circled good as new. He could always see what wasn’t working, but I wasn’t ready for him to critique my newborn.

“Why are you trying to strangle my poem?” I tried to take it from him but he pushed my hand away.

“Because it’s crap. Who is this they anyway?”

“It’s a first draft. I was just trying to get at the feeling—”

He threw the notebook on the floor. “Get the language, get it on the page. Who cares about feelings? Do something interesting with the line.”

I snatched up my notebook and pressed it to my chest. I had not been prepared for an assault. Now I wished it had been Tereshenko. “Why are you being such a govnyuk?” Shithead. “Is this what you came to talk about, my poem?”

He looked around at everything but me, as if indeed he’d forgotten what he’d come for. With a shuddering sigh, like a man throwing himself into a well, he said to the calendar, “I thought you might like to know. I’m moving to Moscow.”

That stopped me cold. Had he lost his mind? Anton hated Moscow. He hated everything about it, its antiquity, its forty times forty churches, its housewifery. He examined the dusty plasterwork on the ceiling. “I’ve applied for my travel propusk. Glavlit can damn well pay for the ticket.” The administration for literary affairs. “Petrograd’s over. It’s done for. You can’t take a breath for all the old farts here—Gumilev and so on. It’s getting to be that I don’t dare light a match, the place might explode for all the loose gas.” He took out his makhorka, and a piece of what looked like a letter, and began to roll himself a cigarette, messily, spilling tobacco.

“What are you talking about? Are you crazy?” I said.

He tore the paper trying to roll it, tried again, snorting with frustration, his hands shaking. I could feel the scent of electrical smoke, like a burning cord, coming off him as he struggled. I would have helped him but was afraid he might strike me.

“This place is dying—don’t you feel it? We’re clinging to the shreds of our culture. In Moscow, things are coming to life again. There are poets’ cafés, a real scene.”

What did Anton care about cafés and scenes? “What about the Squared Circle? What about your studio?” Was this about my being published in Clarion? Was he that envious?

“I’m sick of it all. We’re just parading around to ourselves here, telling ourselves that we matter. But we don’t. We’re dead. This whole place is one walking mausoleum.” He couldn’t get that cigarette rolled, just kept crushing half-made ones and scattering tobacco everywhere.

It was insane. He loved it here at the House of Arts, as much as Anton was capable of happiness. He had his own literary studio. His hero, Shklovsky, lived right down the hall—he saw him five times a day! There were twenty people he could talk to about the things that mattered to him. Was this Genya’s doing, denigrating Petrograd? Mayakovsky’s? Anton was pale and sweating. Maybe he had a fever. Typhus. I’d never seen him in such a state. He was the one who looked down on the rest of us for our dramas and passions.

Finally, he got that cigarette rolled, put it in his mouth, and turned to me. His mouth twitched, his hazel eyes were full of tears. He tried to light his hard-won cigarette, but he broke the match, then a second.

I took the box from him and lit it for him. “What is it, Anton? Is it Genya? The studio? Is someone pressuring you?”

He turned away, filling the room with smoke. He laughed, wild, almost a sob. “You really don’t know.”

“How could I?” I made the mistake of putting my hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” he roared. I moved away as if from a hot stove. Then he groaned, leaning with both elbows on the desk, grabbing his dark messy hair, rocking back and forth like a religious hysteric.

I sat on the bed behind him. Something terrible was happening, and I wanted to soothe him like a child, but he seemed so beside himself I was afraid to try. “Anton, just tell me. Give me a hint.”

He shook his head. “I have to get out of here. Tomorrow. I’m going to Moscow. Or Vladivostok—or Peru! I don’t give a damn! I’m going to ship out on the first rotten scow that’ll take me.”

Anton Chernikov, man of the sea. If he was in any other mood I might have teased him about it. But this was no time for a joke.

He bent over, gasping, choking. “Don’t you see? You’ve ruined my life.” He smacked his forehead on the table, was about to do it again, but I put my hand over his forehead. He struggled, shaking me free of him. “Ruined it! I can’t stand it anymore!” His tear-stained face was unrecognizable. “First it’s the sailor—all right, I understand. I’m sure he’s very good at knots. But Tereshenko? His knuckles drag on the ground! How could you? You whore! You look right through me. Just like that. Like I’m a hat rack. I am not a hat rack! I AM NOT A HAT RACK!” he roared, his eyes so full of suffering I could barely look at him. “Am I just a place to hang your coat? A useful bit of furniture?”

His explosion was so unexpected, words abandoned me. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with shadow. I thought of the months I’d slept in his room, and he never once tried to touch me, kiss me, watch me undress, nothing. I thought back to the night I came to hear Bely. Our own little Helen. Oh no. Exactly as if he were a hat rack.

My one friend in the world, my comrade, my editor. How awful. What a disaster. I could hear Petrovsky coughing through the wall. Love was a cosmic eagle, raking us with talons and beak as we lay helpless in our chains.

He started laughing, the most painful laughter, as if it was tearing his throat. “No. The idea is abominable to you. Repellent. Look at you! You can’t help me. Nobody can help me. I’m a joke, a clown!”

Petrovsky banged on the wall with his cane.

I knelt next to my suffering friend. “No, you’re not a joke. Look at my face. Am I laughing?”

He wept, tears streaming down his lean stubbled cheeks. “You don’t think of me as a man. I’m just the fellow who reads your poems. Just answer me one thing, though. Why Tereshenko? For God’s sake, why him and not me?”

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I drew him to me and held him, his head against my shoulder. He didn’t fight me. I rocked him like a child as he sobbed. Why him and not me?—a question man has asked since love began. “I never slept with Tereshenko. Is that what you want to know?” Anton was a difficult man, cutting and angular, ironic, biting, desperate. But he wasn’t a hat rack. “I do what I want. But I’m not a whore.”

“I’m sorry… I didn’t mean it.” Rubbing his face into my coat, drying his tears. “I was never going to say anything, I swear. I just can’t stand it anymore. It was one thing when you were with Genya, or when it was just you. But—Tereshenko is telling people you’re his girl. It’s too much.”

I sat back. We were knee to knee. I cupped his cheek in my palm, and kissed his wet eyes, wiped his tears with my thumb. Those hazel eyes, the rumpled black hair, the sharp nose red from weeping, the petulant mouth, the argumentative chin. All those contradictions. “You want me so badly? Just as I am?”

He nodded, the downward U of his mouth quivering.

“There will always be other men.”

“I don’t care.”

Maybe this was what I really feared, being loved so completely by someone I cared for, someone made vulnerable by his love. Genya had the party, he had his ideals, he was handsome and well liked. He had somewhere to go with his pain. If I’d been made of sterner stuff, I would let Anton go to Moscow and be rid of me. Or have him right now, cruelly, hot enough to burn, as Arkady had once burned my hand on the stove. But I did love him in my way. And cared how he felt, and what happened to him. I would be bereft if he left for Moscow or Peru. His presence was like the good steady bass of an orchestra, or maybe the bassoons—the music of my life would sound paltry and thin without him. That too was love. Perhaps a greater love than passion.

I kept thinking of the blocks of ice where the blackbirds froze, and how they somehow came out alive. “I’m willing to try,” I said.

“Maybe you’ll fall in love with me,” he whispered, his face pressed to mine. “Stranger things have happened.”

He wasn’t much of a lover. He came very quickly. I supposed he’d spent too much time with prostitutes to even notice my lack of satisfaction. There was a lot I would have to teach him if we were to go on. “I never thought this would happen,” he told me afterward, stroking my hair. “Really, I just came to say goodbye.”

What an odd creature to have come for shelter in my arms. I’d known him so long—I’d seen his displays of peevishness, rage, his sulks, the moments of high wit and even thoughtfulness, but never had I seen him in such a naked state of desire. It made other things so clear. How he’d argued with Genya the night he threw my mother and me out into the storm. The way we’d been before Genya returned. Why he’d been so uneasy with me at the Poverty Artel whenever we were alone—he was at his best with a third person in the room. I recalled his outrage when I returned from the yellow mansion to the Poverty Artel—the more you hurt us, the sweeter we sing. Us. I should have heard him better.

“Remember when I first came to the flat?” I said. “I thought you hated me. You couldn’t have been nastier.”

His pale face, his burning eyes. “You were like a sunset. Everything suddenly looked shabby by comparison, and I saw my life as it was, moldy as an unaired closet.” He touched my face tentatively, tracing my profile with the tip of a finger—forehead, nose, lip, lower lip, chin, the length of my throat. “The room was too small with you in it, I had to go out in the hall. I had to go somewhere to get away from your happiness.” He lay gazing at me as if I were an unfamiliar poem, his head propped on his hand. “Of course I was nasty. Who wouldn’t be?”

Perhaps we would save each other, Anton and I. Stranger things had happened.

49 Masquerade

Despite the absence of firewood, the breath-pluming cold, the thinness of our rations, the desperate state of our clothes and our shoes—or perhaps because of it—the House of Arts came alive that winter with lectures, talks, demonstrations, exhibitions, theatricals, concerts, something happening every night, and if not with us, then at the House of Scholars, or the Poets’ Guild, or the IZO, the Department of Visual Arts. In the midst of this excitement, Mayakovsky arrived from Moscow.

“It’s because Chukovsky told him you had a billiard table,” said Oksana during our literary circle.

“What do you have against billiards?” Anton said.

The poet, staying in the House library, took pleasure in being difficult, jabbing the members for their politics, joking that in Moscow we were known as the House of Slime. He saw us as a nest of bourgeois aesthetes and backsliders, accused us of not having fully embraced the revolution. Yet he couldn’t completely dismiss us either, not with Shklovsky living here, and Anton Chernikov, as futurist as anyone in Moscow. Yet I saw too that Mayakovsky still wanted the approval of his peers here, while at the same time belittling them. A more complex man than he appeared. Anton spent much time with him, and therefore, so did I.

We gathered one December afternoon in the library of the House, surrounded by those red-painted bookcases dotted sparsely with books, to hear him read from his new long poema, 150 Million. He seemed nervous, loud and aggressive, glancing over at his girlfriend, the elegant Lilya Brik, for reassurance or disapproval, it was hard to tell which.

I couldn’t help but examine her, the famous muse. The night I’d heard him read “A Cloud in Trousers” at the Stray Dog Café, I had wondered what kind of woman would be capable of withstanding such a volcano. Brik was rather cool, very modern looking, with red hair and dark, savage eyes. She and Mayakovsky and her husband, Osip Brik, the critic, all lived together à trois, and had for years. As I watched her, listening, I wondered if we too would be remembered for our romantic geometry. Genya and Anton and me. Was this where we would be in ten years, in the hall of mirrors called love? Still be in the same room, stepping on each other’s shoes? Or would there be a fourth and a fifth in the crystal formation of love, sex, politics, boredom, and other unnamable ties? This red room, the glass bookcase, Anton by my side, the afternoon light the only warmth. We junior members arranged ourselves against the walls, Anton on my left, the hyperkinetic Arseny Grodetsky on my right, bouncing on his toes with the excitement of standing in the presence of the glowering genius.

The poema began leadenly. It was Mayakovsky’s most thunderous mode, heroic without a scrap of levity. Most absurdly, it claimed to be anonymous. Though who else would write:

As if that voice could belong to anyone else. The first selection was sheer bombast, but the mood lightened in the second. Mayakovsky in the end could not resist his own laughter, couldn’t help it even in propaganda. His urge to tip over into comedic hyperbole was deeply a part of him. Here he’d portrayed a mythic battle between an electrified Woodrow Wilson as a top-hatted giant of Chicago, and the colossal, Neva-armed peasant Ivan with his 150,000,000 heads wading across the Atlantic to meet him—the folk gigantism was irresistible. Well, it was never the job of propaganda to tell the truth, to discern and make exceptions. Propaganda was a peasant lubok print—its outlines bold, its colors crude, and cheap to make.

But I found myself missing the other Mayakovsky, the cloud in trousers. I knew he was there somewhere. I could only hope that other poet would reassert himself someday. The civil war was over—the forces of Denikin had finally evacuated from the Crimea, Wrangel defeated. This kind of broad caricature would soon be a museum piece.

I wondered mostly at the relationship between Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik. I saw him watching her as she flirted with the Petrograd poets, and her watching him watching her. You torment us, so we sing all the sweeter.

The next night the tables were turned, and we read for Vladimir Vladimirovich. Ballads were the order of the day. Gumilev read “The Lost Tram,” which I thought was the best thing he’d ever written. Zamyatin and his group read short prose pieces. But most of the elders—Khodasevich and Blok and Kuzmin—declined to read, so it was up to us, the younger members of the House, to shine. Anton recited one of his own and one from Genya’s new collection. I’d been tempted to do “Alice in the Year One”—as defiant as any Mayakovsky poem—but instead, I did “The Trees at Kambarka.”

Mayakovsky sat with his arm draped around Lilya Brik’s chair, his face heavy as always with the potential for storms, like a line of thunderheads. I couldn’t tell if he understood it was a message for him. That our lives weren’t lived on the plane of 150 Million. A reminder to remember the human scale.

Anton came to me in the crush afterward. “He wants to meet you.” A little nervous, but also proud, he led me over to Mayakovsky, who was drinking tea with Shklovsky and Kuzmin, Lilya and, yes, her husband, Osip. Anton introduced me as one of the Squared Circle, and I noticed that he didn’t mention my connection with Genya, whom Mayakovsky knew in Moscow. We had our own relationship now.

Mayakovsky took my hand in his enormous paw and gazed at me with depth and understanding. Then I knew he still had his man’s heart in there among the 150 million heads and Neva-long arms. His soulfulness, alas, was something my new lover could never know. Anton stood with us, stiff and aggressive as a tall, skinny cock, pleased that Mayakovsky had recognized one of his protégés, but not much liking the way the poet was still holding my hand. It was Lilya Brik who waltzed him away from me, flashing a smile—You still have much to learn about men, little fox. I would never know as much as that woman, not if I lived seven lifetimes.

I wrote a poem for Mayakovsky that night, just for him, and managed to slip it into his pocket before he left for Moscow.

Gorky had missed Mayakovsky’s visit. I wondered if it had been intentional, to avoid any more embarrassing brawls like the one during Wells’s stay. Universal Literature was his main concern. But he appeared one evening at the House of Arts before a lecture by Zamyatin, to give us all a report on developments in Moscow. From the gossip, we knew that Narkompros—the Commissariat of Enlightenment—was being reorganized, and why, and by whom. It wasn’t good news.

Gorky spoke about his ongoing battle to defend his institutions—Universal Literature, the House of Arts, and the House of Scholars—against the “elements of the Left” who wanted to take over the future of Russian literature. He looked terrible, smoking and coughing and drumming the lectern with his restless fingers, stroking his drooping moustache.

“Russian literature has always been judged by its politics,” he said to the crowd. “It’s the reason we’ve endured such terrible work and are enduring it now. Literature should be judged only by literary standards.” A spontaneous round of applause. This was also a criticism of Mayakovsky. “Insistence on political conformity will be a disaster for literature and for the development of the Russian proletariat as well. These days, we hear that a writer must be a Communist, first and foremost. If he is, then he must be good. If not, he must be bad. That’s no standard for literature. Why must it be that only the panderers, the Smerdyakovs, are being encouraged today?”

It was dangerous stuff, to attack the programmatic Left, the Proletcult faction—the organization calling for proletarian art, created by proletarians to the exclusion of all else—in a public venue. But I still remembered what Alexei Maximovich had told me when my father was in the Peter and Paul Fortress. All you could do when you were in a trap was continue on as honestly as you could and let the blow fall if it would. Moura shifted nervously beside me. Gumilev sat with his legs crossed elegantly, nodding, whispering to the pretty student next to him. I wondered if there was anyone here from Krasnaya Gazeta, taking this down. Or perhaps one of Zinoviev’s spies. The blockade had at last been lifted, but now it was the House of Arts under siege, we could feel it. Every mention of us in the popular press included slurs like snobbism and elitist—pointedly ignoring all we were doing for the city, the public events we offered, the classes we taught, the open evenings like this.

Everything that kept a roof over our heads was in danger. I approached Moura afterward. “How did Moscow go?”

“Lenin’s begging him to leave,” she said, “for his health’s sake. But there’s more than one kind of health, as you well know.” Think of your father, she didn’t have to say. Lenin wanted to protect Gorky from political typhus. Yes, I well knew the consequences of having the revolution turn on you. But Gorky, leaving? Everything he had achieved would crumble without him. He was the only one who had Lenin’s ear.

“Will he go?” I watched him talking to Zamyatin and Chukovsky. He looked grim. My skin prickled, my throat felt as if someone had gripped it in one hand. How fast would the Bolsheviks close us down and throw the writers into the street? My last home in the world. “He’s not considering it, is he?” Just knowing Gorky was in the world was an anchor I could not imagine living without.

“I don’t know. His health really is awful. Look at him.”

He leaned against the wall, sweating, his breathing labored.

“You haven’t met my friend Anton.” I waved him over, but he clung to the far wall like a barnacle. His pride was so convoluted, he would not even deign to meet Gorky, who had saved my life, my soul, put a roof over all our heads. He considered it kowtowing. Love had done nothing to disentangle his twisted heart. He was just Anton with a wound, it hurt him no matter what I did.

In January our rations were cut again. The writers went out all day, scrambling for food. I stood in line at the Petro-Soviet with Korney Chukovsky to try to get a saw to cut firewood for the House. The city was allowing the destruction of another fifty houses for wood. Soon Petrograd would be nothing but rubble. “I’ve heard the House of Scholars has gloves. Do you think I have any chance of getting over there before they’re gone?” he asked me. “My wife’s gloves are in tatters.” His own were out at the thumb.

Thus was literature produced in the winter of 1921.

The elders—Kuzmin and Blok, Gants and Shklovsky, Gorky, Gumilev and Zamyatin, Chukovsky and so on—met again and again, trying to find a solution to the ongoing political threat to the House. You could feel the tension in the hallways. I kept my head down, taught my classes, collected my mouse-sized rations at the House of Scholars and tried to bring the The Valley of the Moon to a close. If the House of Arts died, where would I go? How would I live?

Yet despite the grim conditions—cold and malnutrition, worse among the old people, who were dying before our eyes—there was also great camaraderie, a defiant gaiety that winter. Masked balls were the craze—most of the arts organizations threw one, giving us a moment to step outside fear and shabbiness to ascend into an imaginary world of our own delight. It reminded me of the Ionians and the Great Feast of the Golden Egg.

What would we wear? dominated conversations the week beforehand—a shallow concern, but better than worrying about the fate of the House. I took Anton to Gorky’s to select costumes from Maria Andreeva’s extensive theatrical wardrobe. Moura and Valentina Khodasevich were there, and Anton grudgingly allowed himself to be introduced. Moura’s eyes flashed in amusement. So this is your new lover? Is he always like this? I nodded. She didn’t even understand—this was him on good behavior.

We thumbed through the rack of wizards and princesses, clowns and devils, and I assembled an outfit from a kokoshnik crown with blond braids attached, a gypsy skirt and jacket with bells, a pair of red ballet slippers that nearly fit. After much cajoling by Valentina and me, Anton eventually accepted a false beard with a curled moustache, a crown of thorns, an eye patch, and a long Spanish cape. “I’m Western literature,” he said. “A half-blind courtier with a Christ complex, wrapped in darkness.”

The House of Arts ball, though sparse in food and heat, was a success in every way. It was a less formal affair than some, as it was sponsored by the younger members—our leaders had weightier problems on their minds. It wasn’t as elegant as the one at the Zubov Institute, but we had the old Eliseev lackeys in their wigs and white gloves to hand out the pastries and sausage rolls, the saccharine tea. We opened the ballroom, and poets from all over the city came, young people and artists in their constructivist costumes. Sasha painted all our faces cubo-futuristically. I had a large letter M over one eye, and Anton a red square set at an angle under his eye patch.

The men outnumbered the women, and I had no shortage of partners for dancing. I danced with everyone but Anton, who held up the wall, scowling, as if it were all beneath him. I danced with translators and poets, scholars and painters, studio students, the old and the young, even Bely, dressed as a holy fool in rags. He was a very jazzy foxtrotter. Who would have guessed? It’s Him! I kept thinking, making myself laugh, and ignored Anton’s glare whenever I happened to look in his direction. What did he think, I’d hold up the wall with him all night?

I found myself having a glass of tea with Bely—Bely! Telling him of Ukashin and Ionia. I was giddy enough to make light of it, and I knew he would be interested—when a tall Harlequin joined us, embracing the fool. It was Blok. As Harlequin! What could be more appropriate? Bely turned to introduce me, but he had forgotten my name. “Have you met our… Columbine?”

If Bely had forgotten my name, Blok had not. “So good to see you again, Marina Dmitrievna.” He shook my hand as the band struck up a waltz. “Would you care to dance?” I turned to Bely but he gestured, Go on. I may have been mistaken, but I thought I saw a smile exchanged between the old friends. As Bely had once courted Blok’s wife… We moved onto the dance floor as if heralded by trumpets, my hand on his forearm—both of us the product of childhood dancing lessons. I’m from Petersburg…

If I ever had grandchildren, I would tell them that on the evening of January 23, 1921, I danced with both Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok. Yes, me. Your old babushka, milaya…

It was exquisite to move in his arms. His touch was light, and he possessed a perfect sense of rhythm and motion—just as you would expect from his poetry. He towered over me, yet unlike many tall men, he knew exactly where all his limbs were at any moment. The absurd complement of musicians—oboe, guitar, piano, and accordion—somehow pulled together in unexpected harmony. Everything around Blok was like that. “I’ve heard excellent reports about your factory class,” he said, swirling me around, as natural as breathing. “They say your students love you. What is it that you do with them?”

I felt drunk, though I had imbibed nothing stronger than roasted oat tea. Blok had heard about me! I knew that Blok didn’t believe poetry could be taught, so his curiosity was thrilling. “I try to imagine what it would be like to be a gluer,” I said, flying in his arms. “Doing the same thing all day. I ask myself, what would I look forward to at the end of my shift? I’d want to enjoy myself, surprise myself. Use my mind instead of just my hands.” I thought of Dinamo, of his longing to be more than the flesh.

“But is it poetry?”

“Mostly not.” I thought of my women, their leathery stained hands, their toothaches, their worries. Not waltzing with Blok tonight. “One of the Skorokhod women is fairly talented. But that’s not the point. It’s something that doesn’t require ration cards, a propusk. It makes them value themselves more.”

How bewildered he looked. For him, for us, poetry was vital, its seriousness absolute. The idea of poetry for the untalented simply for the pleasure of making it was nothing short of blasphemy. Like a musician watching you use a flute to pound a nail. Then, a tiny smile formed on his wide mouth. “You must be a remarkable teacher. Look, even I understand you. Maybe I’ll take your class.”

It was ludicrous, and lovely. “It’s Tuesday afternoons. The committee room at Skorokhod. On the Obvodny Canal.”

He laughed. “You just might see me there.”

Magical Blok. How lucky I was to have crossed his path on the street near the telephone exchange. He’d given me my life back—no, not my life. A new life. He bowed when we were done, the reflex of a lifetime’s habit. I imagined the scent of his genius clung to my hands as he returned me to Anton. A smell of raw silk and geraniums.

I was in the clouds, standing with bearded Anton and round-faced Nikolai Chukovsky, the translator’s son, bravely dressed in lederhosen in the unheated ballroom, and Valentina Khodasevich as a playing-card queen, as they discussed the season’s offerings, Anton’s ideas for the Squared Circle, when we were joined by a slight, intense man of about thirty, dark haired, with a high forehead and deep, clever dark eyes. It was the poet Osip Mandelstam. He’d just moved to the House of Arts. And the weather changed in our little group, a slight realignment of atoms, like air before a lightning storm. How strange it must be to have people know so much about you, while you know nothing of them. To have this effect on people everywhere you go. Of course I’d read his collection, Stone. I was dying to talk to him about it. I also knew he’d been Tsvetaeva’s lover before the revolution, and tried not to scrutinize him. He wore an open shirt and a jabot made of a napkin under a burgundy bathrobe that looked like he’d borrowed it from Gumilev—who else at the House of Arts would own such a thing? “And who are you supposed to be?” I asked. Flirting—yes, I was.

“I was trying for Schiller,” he said, striking a pose. He recited, “Lebe mit deinem Jahrhundert…” The German sounded like music from his lips. I could see Anton roll his one visible eye.

“Live with your century,” I said, “but don’t be its… something…” German was my worst language, but I remembered this much from German class.

“Live with your century, but don’t be its creature,” he said. “Give your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise.” And he was taking Schiller’s advice to heart, this little man with his curling hair and elfin ears and receding hairline, who looked nothing like Schiller and yet was his very incarnation. Mandelstam, who had written, Brothers, let us celebrate liberty’s twilight, / The great and gloomy year…

“Dance?” he asked, offering me his hand. I would not look at Anton as I let him lead me away but caught a glimpse of my self-mortifying lover burning holes in the back of Mandelstam’s precious head. This was the man about whom Tsvetaeva had said, Where does this tenderness come from? / And what shall I do with it, young / sly singer, just passing by? / Your lashes are—longer than anyone’s.

And they were.

We stepped out into a polka, a brisk gallop. “I’ve seen you before,” I said over the music. “But you wouldn’t remember.”

“I remember everything,” he said. His eyes were as bright as a blackbird’s.

“It was in 1915, at the Stray Dog Café. You were with Akhmatova and Kuzmin.”

He laughed, scrutinized me again. Such a merry soul, a surprise after reading his poetry. He was shorter than I but sure of himself, not in an arrogant way but simply knowing what he knew, knowing his value. I liked the way he led me, securely, his steps as nimble as his mind. “And where were you, in your pram?”

“With my brother and my girlfriends… We hid behind the coats. I was trying to get a look at Akhmatova.”

“The cult of Anna the Great.” He took me galloping, my cottony braids whirling about my shoulders. “Come to think of it, I do remember something like that. Schoolgirls. But I don’t remember the plaits.” He nodded toward the yellow yarn skeins attached to my crown.

“You don’t remember any such thing.” Flirting with him quite baldly. As we whirled, I could feel Anton’s one-eyed glare, accusing me, tugging at me. God, what did he want me to do, join a nunnery? I had told him who I was. This was my life, and I would do as I pleased. Pushkin said that a poet’s freedom was accountable to no man.

“I remember you quite well. Big dark eyes under a fringe of chestnut red. Like the future, peering out from the coats of the past. You had a tall friend, a brunette, and a plump blonde. And a beautiful boy who spent the whole time drawing.”

“My brother Seryozha.”

Mandelstam smiled, triumphant. “And a very young Gennady Kuriakin, dying for a chance to impress us.”

I was a little afraid of him. He wasn’t just brilliant, he was uncanny. “Do you know him?” I asked warily.

“We’ve met a few times. The golden mouthpiece of the Left. I believe he’s nipping at Mayakovsky’s heels. He should be careful. He’s a decent poet, but someone should tell him, once you’ve sold your soul to the devil, he never lets you have it back.”

The maniacal orchestra sped up by degrees, the wheezing accordion, the sinister oboe. “By the way, I appreciated your poem, ‘The Trees at Kambarka.’ Always a relief to hear a single voice and not a hundred and fifty million. I don’t even want to hear fifty, speaking quietly.” He danced me past Anton, an unkind thing to do, before he swept me away again. “So you’re with Chernikov. How did that happen?” The glance he gave me was a mixture of amusement and puzzlement. “He’s staring at us right now. Hoping I’ll trip over my own feet.”

“We lived together for a while in 1917. The Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now. Genya Kuriakin, and Anton and me. Zina Ostrovskaya, Gigo Gelashvili, some others.” Should I tell him about my husband? Some mischief was afoot tonight. I bit my tongue.

“Sounds like fun,” he said. “Look, there’s Gumilev.” He turned me so I could see. “Some people don’t even try to live in this century.”

It beat all the rest. Gumilev made his grand entrance in a tuxedo he’d somehow managed to preserve, and snow-white linen, as if it were 1910. I could only imagine the hours of labor it must have taken him to wash and iron that shirt, clean and mend and press the formal suit. And on his arm came one of his students in a bare-shouldered gown of blue satin that someone must have lent her. Given that the only heat in the ballroom was in our minds, it was a triumph of will.

The polka ended, the orchestra took a break. Mandelstam kissed my hand—not at all properly, on the knuckles. And left me to join some friends. “Don’t leave without me,” he said over his shoulder. “And don’t hide behind the coats.”

I chatted with Sasha and Dunya, dressed in elaborate papier-mâché masks, he a cubo-futurist Janus, she the moon in its phases. We were joined by others from the Squared Circle—Oksana and Petya, Nikita and Arseny. I didn’t listen very hard, my heart still romping from my dance with Osip Emilevich. Anton joined us a few minutes later, scowling, refusing to look at me. He was mounting a boycott, smoking fiendishly, and I could smell the scorched hair of his fake moustache. “I hate these things,” he snarled. “Yackety yack. As if music drained the human mind of the least function.” He drank off his tea in a gulp. “What’s the point of dancing, I ask you? This strange pointless movement, using up valuable calories and turning sensible people into idiots. I wonder how it came into being. Maybe someone stepped on a coal.”

When the musicians returned from their break, they struck up a tango. It cut me. The tango was Kolya, the music of that first night, St. Basil’s Eve… and the song of that lost afternoon on the Catherine Canal. The olive and gold apartment, my hairpins falling, snowflakes twirling above the ice on the canal like little fish in a reef. I didn’t want to dance it with anyone else. I wandered away to stand by myself at a frozen window, where I scratched a circle with my thumbnail. The music went on and on. God, would they never stop? Kolya, where are you? Loving somebody else. Making love. Oh, this was crazy—hadn’t I just danced with Osip Mandelstam? And Blok and Bely? Would he always be there, the music in the very back of my mind? “Mi Noche Triste”?

Mandelstam found me there, my forehead to the glass. He’d brought me some tea, and I shoved Kolya back into the box where he lived, down deep in the waters of my silent self, and turned to the pleasure of the moment, talking to the poet with the long eyelashes. We spoke about Akhmatova, who he said was writing again, and Tsvetaeva… I had to ask very gingerly, I didn’t know him well, didn’t know how he would react if I mentioned her, I only knew the poems in which they’d said their farewells. “Do you see her anymore?”

“No,” he said. “Not for a long time.” He dusted something off my face, showed it to me. An eyelash on the tip of his finger. I made a wish, the one I always made—inspiration. And blew it away.

We talked about Clyde Emory, about whom Osip was in agreement with Anton—that mediocrity—talked about the poet H.D., and her Greek verses so much like ones Osip Emilevich would write if he were a woman. We both liked her. And this new writer Eliot whose book Emory had sent along with the dozen tins of sardines in oil and ten of sweetened condensed milk that I’d finally collected from Moura. I’d stuffed myself on them both.

Mandelstam was dying to see the Eliot, and I was dying to see more of Mandelstam. So we slipped away from the party together.

Did I think of Anton? Yes, I did, but Mandelstam stirred me in a way not even Pasha had. He made me feel alive, not just as a woman but as a poet. Someone like him could see you entire. I felt exciting and smart and real. His bright eyes, his lashes longer than anyone’s. I was dying to ask more about that other Marina. What was it like to enter a relationship with someone so incandescent? Why did you abandon her after such an affair?

“She feeds you to her fire,” he said. “She prefers to burn on the page. I didn’t wait until she’d eaten me.”

We sat on my sagging bed and I showed him Prufrock and Other Observations by T. S. Eliot. He kicked off his shoes and lay down, his hands folded on his chest under the ruffled jabot. “Read it to me,” he said, and closed his eyes. I began to read the first poem to him, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” doing my best with the Italian epigraph, which, to my astonishment, Osip Emilevich recited without even looking. “It’s Dante. The Comedy. Don’t be so impressed, or we won’t be able to be friends.”

I read the poem through, slowly, finding the cadence of the English, and Mandelstam listened with his eyelids fluttering, his long lashes against his cheeks. When I got to the end—wake us, and we drown—I let the sound drift and fade. “Read it again,” he said.

Some of the stanzas he now recited along with me. His English pronunciation better than mine. He was already memorizing it.

I read it two more times, until it had settled into our bones. Then I wanted to make love. “Let us go, then, you and I,” I said, removing my crown and braids.

Osip Emilevich had had innumerable women, and I was sure every one of them found him as delightful as I. He was playful and passionate, understood the music of love. I hadn’t had a lover like that since Kolya. And I had the strangest sensation I was also Tsvetaeva, as if I kissed him with her lips, held him with her arms.

Afterward, we lay together in my narrow bed and he asked if I would recite some of my own poems. He liked the new one about blackbirds—it had become much better. I’d never forgive Anton for being such a shit about it. Osip liked them all, had some interesting critiques. He recited portions of a new poem of his for me: “Who can know this word called separation / What kind of parting the coming days mean…” Sometime during the recitation, I heard footsteps in the hall, but no knock on the door, only the sound of their retreat. I felt a pang of guilt, but I was tired of guilt. I would never have another night like this. Whatever happened in life, this would be mine forever.

The day the slanderous poem appeared in Krasnaya Gazeta, Gorky was still in Moscow. A nasty little ditty penned by an unnamed poet, Browning No. 215,745—an obvious reference to 150 Million. It was called “The Masquerade on the Garbage Dump.” A little joke. Pomoika, the garbage dump, was also po Moike, along the Moika—a reference to the location of the House of Arts.

And so he characterized our ragged masque. Whoever the poet was, he had clearly waited until Gorky was gone, retaliating for that Smerdyakov remark Gorky had made about the ultra-Left poets. Once again, we were cast as the last sanctuary of the bourgeoisie, holding our fancy soiree at the expense of the masses, as if we were Marie Antoinette’s courtiers. Just because some of us had clean hair. We were hardly well fed—even the slandering poet had cast us as dining on rations instead of market beef. Any commissar’s girlfriend or Soviet young lady ate better than we did. Our ball was one of any number of amateur theatricals occurring all over the city—though the people who read Krasnaya Gazeta would hardly be expected to know that. Who could have penned this? Who would have it out for us like that? The poets analyzed the work, trying to detect the Judas. The poem was a little too good. It had to be one of the Proletcultists, perhaps even Mayakovsky himself.

Anton was as worried as anyone. Though he had little guilt in the fiddling-while-Rome-burned category, he knew the charge went deeper. As a formalist—someone who valued form above content—his glass house was more exposed than most. To his credit, he never once mentioned my night with Mandelstam, or how he had suffered. He felt such shame about his love for me, such anguish that he needed something from another person, and had it and yet not. He hated and loved me both. And the more he loved, the more he hated. The closer he got to what he wanted, the more sharply he felt what he could never have.